Watchman in the Wilderness

“Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

Deuteronomy 5:16 (New International Version)

As a preface to what I want to write about, I’ll start with a little bit of personal experience.

Like most people, my experience with the poor and downtrodden, particularly the homeless is a bit checkered. When Nancy and I lived in New Jersey, for example, my duties with FedEx would often take me into New York City. From where we lived, the best way to get there was either by bus or train. I usually took a bus that would go directly from Parsippany, where we lived, to the Port Authority bus terminal on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. Back in the late eighties and early nineties that trip was quite an adventure. Any time I’d get to the main terminal I was greeted, so to speak, by hordes of homeless men and women panhandling, the smell of urine and rotting human feces wafting through the air, and cops wandering from storefront to storefront rousting the homeless out of what always appeared to be their assigned spots on the floor. This first few times I encountered them I felt sympathetic, but after after several encounters the ordeal started to wear thin and I became like the average New Yorker. I would either step over or around them, muttering under my breath, “Get a job, will you!” I wasn’t always that cold-hearted, Years before I’d had my own brief encounter with homelessness. I was going through a very painful divorce and I was completely out of resources. I had absolutely nothing but a beat up old Ford and a job in downtown Kansas City that provided me with enough money for gas, child support, alimony, and barely enough food to last from payday to payday. One night, in the dead of a bitterly cold winter, I found myself on Pershing Avenue between the main Post Office and the Riss Building, where I worked. At about midnight I crawled into the back seat and laid down. For me, this was going to be the end of the road. I tried to sleep, but I was crying so hard I couldn’t. I felt a wave of cynicism and grief sweep over me. “So this is it, Lord,” I prayed. The cynicism and grief morphed in to plans. “If only I had a bottle of sneaky Pete to drown my sorrows.” “Maybe I could mug some little old lady in the street come morning.” Somehow I managed to fall asleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but there was a sudden sound of knocking on my car window. I looked out and saw a cop. He motioned for me to roll down my window. I complied. “You okay, buddy?” he asked. “Are you sleepin’ off a bender?” The only response I offered was “I’m okay, I’ll be alright.” He knew things weren’t alright and he pressed me. “You got any family or friends that may be worried about you?” “Do you have a place to stay?” “I’d really like to help you.” It’s strange. His offer of help troubled me more than it comforted me. I wondered if he was going to take me into the jail to sit around with other homeless people and derelicts. That was something I did not want, so I told him I did have a place to stay and I’d drive over there was soon as he was done with me. I’m not sure if he believed me, but he did let me go. I spent the rest of the night driving around, from downtown Kansas City, Missouri, across the Lewis and Clark Viaduct and back. Morning finally came and I made my way to work, looking disheveled and defeated.

That was one of the lowest points in my life. Thankfully, God had mercy on me and I found a place to start living with a young friend from the church I was attending. 

There’s not a lot more to say about that encounter. It was painful and, yet, somehow providential. I learned that the things we sometimes think we see clearly aren’t nearly as clear as we think they are. 

This brings me to what I really want to write about.

I had a brief encounter a few mornings ago on my home from a bi-weekly Parkinson’s therapy group. I had stopped at Sam’s Club to fill up the gas tank and to get some paper towels. On my way out to the street I noticed a woman sitting in the island near the traffic light. She was panhandling. She was holding up a crude cardboard sign that had the word “Help” printed on it. I stopped, rolled down my window, and asked her to come over to my car. As soon as she got close enough I could see that she appeared to be in her early forties. She was short, a bit dumpy in appearance, and had a matronly look. She was wearing thick glasses. My original intent in stopping was to give her five dollars and be on my way, but my curiosity got the better of me. “Are you alright?” I asked her. As soon as she opened her mouth to answer I could see that two of her front teeth were missing. She half-smiled through the gap in her teeth and responded – “I’m just a bit down on my luck, that’s all. I’m gonna’ be alright.”

“Are you homeless?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “But I’m really okay. I start a job on Monday and I’m gonna’ get myself on my feet.”

I tried wrapping my mind around what I was seeing and I was having great difficulty. “How can things like this happen?” I started asking myself. Then the words just came out. “Oh, mother, mother, don’t you have any family who can help you?” I pleaded. “Not really,” she responded meekly. “I do have a son, but he’s too busy now in college.” 

I wanted to ask what “too busy” meant, but I found myself getting angry. How could a son, whose mother is homeless, be too busy to take care of his mother who was living in desperate straits. It just wouldn’t compute.

I gave her the five dollars I’d taken out of my wallet earlier, said a brief payer for her, and went on my way.

Could I have done more? I’m sure I could have, but I felt I’d tried my best. I’ll leave it at that.

I started writing again so that, as a Christian, I could make occasional statements about the things that I see in a culture that appears to have lost its moorings. What I encountered this morning was a perfect example of that untethering.

Early on in the Old Testament, God gave Moses, the man who had led the “children” of Israel out of the bondage of Egypt to the land he had promised to give them.In addition to the land, God also outlined his expectations for his liberated people.. Those expectations came inscribed on stone tablets.  We know them as the Ten Commandments. Each of those commandments was supremely important, but the one I want to focus on in this essay is the fourth commandment. “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you.” That would be more than enough, but this commandment is the only one that has explicit seeds of blessing planted in it. “So that you may live long and that it will go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

I suppose one could ask what it means to honor one’s mother and father. How should a person do that? Could that homeless woman’s son make the argument that by going to college he was honoring her desire for him to succeed in life? After all,  doesn’t any parent want their children to succeed in life? Could it have been that this woman hadn’t been a good parent? Possibly. Were there grievances that had caused a rupture between son and mother so deep they couldn’t be healed? Again, that might be possible.

With each question raised, however, there came an objection from heaven. There is no escape clause in the fourth commandment. It simply says we are to honor our mothers and fathers. We are commanded to honor them even if they haven’t been the best parents. We are to honor them even if it means we might have to sacrifice some of our goals and dreams to act on their behalf. There’s no line of demarcation, nothing that says we can honor them up to a certain point and abandon them when things get trying or difficult.

These are strange and difficult times in America. Our economy is booming. Our 401K’s are exploding. Yet, there are legions of us living on the streets. Are they all just down on their luck? Are they all worthless vagabonds? That’s not a question I can answer.

My mind keeps going back to that woman. She didn’t look like a vagabond, nor did she looked like the type of woman who would abuse her child. She simply looked desperate.

I find myself wondering how often we find excuses so that we can avoid doing what God expects of us. 

There’s an encounter between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day recorded in  the seventh chapter of Mark’s gospel. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+7&version=NIV The story begins with the religious leaders chiding Jesus and his disciples for not ritually washing their hands before they ate. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what they wanted. Jesus was furious and he let them have it. The full response follows:

“Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”  And he continued, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe[c] your own traditions!  For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’[e] 11 But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)—  then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”

What Jesus was referring to in this passage was Jewish tradition called “Corban.” It was a tradition that allowed someone to set aside assets that would/should be used to take care of a parent and use those assets instead to avoid their responsibility. They brazenly called it a “gift to God.”

I’ve given thought to that woman since our encounter, I wonder what the modern day equivalent of Corban might me. “I’ve got to go to college.” “I’ve got a career and a life ahead of me to consider.” “She and I didn’t get along. Honestly, she drove me up the wall.” “The money is needed as part of the church building program.”

You can fill in the blanks from this point on. I’m done. I’ve said that I’ve said and that’s that.

This is what the Lord says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;ask for the ancient paths,ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.”

• Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

A few days ago, I read an essay from Rod Dreher’s “The American Conservative” titled “You Cannot Imagine the Worst.” 

The inspirational seed for the essay came from some e-mail correspondence between Dreher and a scientist who lived a good part of his early life in a Soviet-bloc country. The scientist was responding to a question Dreher was pondering out loud about whether, given the current anti-religious climate in the United States, persecution of religious believers was going to increase to intolerable levels. Dreher wasn’t sure that the threat to religious liberty was that dire. Like most Americans, he holds a firm belief in the idea that our Constitution and its First Amendment would protect us if things ever got out of hand.

The scientist, who is now a United States citizen, responded to Dreher in very stark terms:

“I think that you, and most of Americans, deeply misunderstand human nature; what it really is capable of. That’s what I loved about Americans. Unbounded and unfounded optimism, always willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. No longer. I see pent-up hatred all around me. People are looking for an outlet to vent it. Both sides. Myself included.”

He concluded his response to Dreher with a warning:

“I think that you cannot imagine the worst because it looks so normal outside. One can be hauled to the gallows even when it’s sunny and warm. It’s hard to explain but when I look out and it’s all beautiful I always think about what it is trying to hide, what’s in store.”

I now find myself asking the question – Are we Christians, pariticularly socially Conservative Christians, going to face increasing persecution in the not too distant future?

There’s a part of me that says that something like this could never happen in America. We have Constituional protections and, morever, we are a civilized people. We would never do something so abohorrent to such treasured American principles. We also place high value on societal peace and harmony. Yet, as much as I would like to believe the best of us, our own history warns us that we are not always as noble as we’d like to think we are.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln, who was only 28 years old at the time, spoke to a group called “The Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illiinois. The title of his address was in part a statement and in part an encoded question of sorts – “The perpetuation of our political institutions.”

Today, the address has come down to us with the simple title “The Lyceum Address.”

Lincoln began his remarks by reminding his audience of the providential history that had formed us a nation – “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.”

How, then, should such a nation preserve those highly prized freedoms? What is such a nation’s “task of gratitude” to those who bestowed those gifts and what is such a nation’s responsibility to posterity? How do we preserve them? At this point, Lincoln did not mince words. They were stark, foreboding words, but they had the ring of truth that still sounds with clarity and truth today, almost two hudred years after they were spoken:

“How then shall we perform it?–At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Lincoln, like most Americans, was an optimist at heart. He believe in the nobility of our national charter. He believed in the nobility of the American people. But, knowing he would be remiss in his duty, he spoke the following ominous words of warning:

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.”

Less than twenty-five years after Lincoln addressed those gathered at the Lyceum, America, the land that had been so blessed, was at war with itself.

Today, we in America find ourselves at another crossroad. We are the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. We are the most powerful nation in the world. Our culture is omnipresent. Everyone in the world, it seems, wants to be like us. We can travel the world; we can communicate with electronic devices that give us access to information that no civilization has ever had. 

Yet, as it was in Lincoln’s time, there are ominous signs on the horizon. I’m seventy-seven years old now. I’ve seen America in good times and bad. I’ve lived through the sixties, the Vietnam War, the racial divisions. I’ve lived through them and learned through experience that we Americans were somehow willing to find our way through these times, to solve what seemed to be intractable problems, to compromise, to dig our way out of deep holes in our society. But, there’s something very different about our current divisions. The hate is becoming increasingly bitter. The political divisions are becoming deeper. The chasm between those who profess faith, particularly Conservative Christianity, and those who are openly hostile to that faith is widening. 

In the light of Lincoln’s 1838 warning, I find myself asking what things might look like in the United States in the next twenty-five years. Have our political, social, and religious divides become so deep that there’s no turning back? Is a wave of Chrisitian persecution looming here in the United States. Is national suicide on our horizon?

“Such ideas are preposterous,” you say. We’re Americans. We’re civilized. We would never destroy ourseleves. We would nver persecutre anyone who disagrees with us poltically or religiously. 

That, I contend, is an exercise in self-deception. As much as we think we’d never stoop to such levels, history, expecially the history of the twentieth century, stands as a powerful witness against us.

A few years ago, I read Elie Wiesel’s “All Rivers Run to the Sea.” It’s as moving as any biographical work I’ve ever read. Wiesel was born in the small village of Sighet, Romania in the late 1920’s. In the 1930’s he undertook religious studies at a yeshiva near his hometown. Life seemed to hold great promise for Elie. In 1940, things changed dramatically. Hungary annexed the village of Sighet. Elie and his family were forced to live in Jewish ghettos. Within four years, things got immeasaurably worse. Hungary made a political agreement with Nazi Germany that allowed the Nazis to deport Jews living in Sighet to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The results were as predictable as they were tragic. By 1945, almost all of Elie’s family had been murdered. Only Elie and his two older sisters were liberated.

Some in Sighet saw the tragic events on the horizon even before they happened. There was a man in Sighet that everyone knew as “Moishe the Beadle (a minor religious official).” Some called him “Moishe the Madman.” He kept trying to tell his fellow villagers that the German soldiers who occupied Sighet in 1944 weren’t there for some noble purpose. The people didn’t believe him at first. The Germans were often seen handing out chocolate to the children. Any time Moishe would plead with them that people were being taken away, never to return,  they would respond, “These are the people who have given us Goethe and Schiller. They would never harm us.”

How tragically wrong they were. How prophetic were Moishe’s warnings.

Years after he was liberated, Wiesel wrote about those tragic years. Like any reasonable person, he asked how somethng like this could happen. How could one of the most civilized nations on the planet have stooped to such barbarity? Was it just a few cohorts of uncivilized barbarians who were responsible for all the evil?  Elie argued otherwise, noting the following: “I believe it was Jean Améry who noted that the first to bow to the oppressor’s system and to adopt its doctrines and methods were the intellectuals.” 

While many refused to bow to the evil and preferred death at the hands of the nazis, far too many intellectuals, those who had positions of prestiege and power in society, became inteimately involved in the evil. Wiesel framed his observation in the form of a question:

“On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant.”

Hate isn’t the exclusive purview of the uneducated and unsophisticated. The well educated, intellectuals, and society’s elite citizens are every bit as capable of great evil as any other setment of society. In fact, they can be even more dangerous. First, the evil promoted by such groups develops compelling ideologies to butresss their hate. Second, they almost always hold powerful places in our social structures. They’re leader, movers, and shakers. Hence, they have the power to implement their ideologies. Third, they have clever ways of masking their hate. Ther agenda is always shrouded in the lie that they want what is best for every citizen.  Fourth, and I believe most important, there is a visceral hatred of Christianity, particularly Conservative Christianity, at the heart of their agenda.

While I can’t see twenty-five years into the future, I can sound the warning. We Americans aren’t immune to such evil. Societies every bit as civilzed as ours have done monstrous things. Germans have done it. Russians have done it. The Chinese and the Japanese have, as well as Cambodians, Syrians, Iranians. The list of shame seems endless.

Of course it can happen here in the United States. We can pretend it’s not possible, but that would be an exercise in self-deception. Jesus himself said “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” (John 15:18 – New International Version)

In seeing all of these unfold, I feel the need to sound the alarm, to act, so to speak, as a watchman in what has become a national wlderness. 

The warning signs are there. The national atmosphere is filled with hate and rage. If we continue along this disastrous path, it will explode. We will, as Lincoln feared, commit national suicide.

“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”

Revelation 20:11-15 (New International Version)

The grisly spectacle is finally over. After what seemed to be an eternity of interrogation and accusations, Brett Kavanaugh has finally been sworn in as the ninth associate Justice to our current Supreme Court. Continue reading “The Great Judge and the Final Judgement”