Sermon: The Irony of our Highest Ideals

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The Irony of our Highest Ideals

By Charles rush

February 22, 2004

wife teaches in the public school system for one of the larger cities in Northern New Jersey, in one of the poorest school districts. Since she teaches little children, they regularly have parties and many of them are the same as suburban parties, like the Valentine's party that they recently had. But some of them are unique to our poor areas. Several of her kids have father's that are in jail and this is very important to the kids. So from time to time, when one of the father's is about to get out of jail, they have a little celebration to welcome home Dad from the big house. I don't think any of my children ever went to a 'get out of jail free' party.

That may be changing. Someone this week e-mailed me saying, 'Name the other $25 million dollar a year New Yorker in pin stripes besides A-Rod… The answer is 'Martha Stewart… shortly.' Martha is not the only financial success that will shortly be cooling their heels in the Big House… Andrew Fastow, Dennis Kozlowski, Jeffery Skilling, Kenneth Lay… they may all have celebrations for them a few years from now when their children celebrate 'get out of jail'… Come to think of it, maybe there is not as much difference between the upper classes and the poorest classes after all.

But sometimes you see these kids. They are born into a family that is poor, but poor is not exactly the problem. The parents are on drugs… then off… then back on. They don't have regular income and occasionally when the money runs out and the drugs become the monkey on the back of one of them, screaming matches and fights break out with the coarsest of language and venom. Their father recedes into the back ground of their life, popping in occasionally, but not living there, not providing serious economic support, or emotional support and no spiritual or educational leadership. Discipline is erratic and exaggerated because one parent has too much on them and their whole life lacks even balance and calm. So the kids yo-yo between next to no supervision and over controlled screaming.

Most of the time, these very same problems pervade other parts of the extended family, so that there are no wider resources to help out when the parents are a weak link in the domestic chain.

You get a higher incidence of learning disabilities, a higher incidence of Attention Deficit disorder in families that understand the dynamics less than the average family and are less able to address them even if they do. They are less likely to ask the school system for help and the school system has fewer resources to do anything about it even if they do. Classes get more students acting out and simply managing crowd control takes up the lion share of a teachers ability by the time they are in 4th grade. They see more violence, they are more likely to become tough before they have outgrown childhood, they are expose to a wider range of lovelessness.

Before they have ever outgrown childhood, they have already malformed to the point that they will spend a life time of therapy to overcome and redeem what has been mal-adjusted before they even realized what had happened to them. And most of the time, they won't even realize that there is anything wrong with them for the next decade because that is just the way they were raised and pretty much the way their friends were raised and it won't consciously occur to them to think that there is anything wrong… not with their Mom, Dad… Sure they are difficult but… you know… 'she's my mutter'. And the point is not our parents, of course. It is the whole range of social forces that converge on our nation, our community, our neighborhood, our family that make us what we are. Wider than that, as Carlyle Marney used to say, "We've been warped into our particular off-center sworl by 50,000 generations of genetic wheeling and dealing."

That is the profundity of the Christian concept of Original Sin. It is the realistic observation about the human condition that we have issues before we are even conscious of what they are and our whole life is a quest for redemption, for healing. Our life is more about recovery than it is freedom. And the great 'social contract' theorists- Locke and Rousseau- were profoundly wrong that each new generation is like a tabla rasa a clean slate just waiting to be properly inscribed. The crooked in us is not made straight as easily as that metaphor implies and the social milieu into which we are born infects us more deeply, indirectly, subtley, and it is far more complex. That is not to say that solid families and solid education is not helpful. Of course it is, but even with them, it is not enough for us to transcend or escape the human condition we are born into.

No question, there have been some stupid interpretations of Original Sin in the history of theology- some really stupid interpretations that have been hurtful. I don't have time to go into to them today. But there have been a few people that have seen the importance of the way that wider social movements structure all of us in ways that we can't entirely escape and that is why it is so important to pay attention to them.

Aristotle used to say that we can only be as virtuous as the society into which we were born. He did not mean that we can't transcend our social world. We can, but not nearly as much as we think we can and the vast majority of us do not.

The prophets in the bible-, Amos, Jeremiah, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah- pointed out this fact with regularity. They would look at the social injustice that followed from Babylon letting loose an uncontrolled military campaign in the ancient Near East. They could have written about the legion of individual atrocities that they witnessed- the rape, torture, wanton violence, theft and destruction. But they didn't. Instead, they focused on the larger social issues themselves that gave individual atrocities license. Scholars have pointed out that perhaps they were more attuned to this disposition in Israel precisely because they were small, surrounded by the World powers of the day, and they felt the consequences of power and their dramatic impact as people who lived on the fringe.

The prophet Amos that we read this morning is unimpressed with the grand processions of the wealthy kingdoms around him. He is unimpressed with the religious priests that develop elaborate liturgical rituals designed to ensure God's blessing upon these military conquests because they give rise to injustice and oppression. He has God say, "I despise your solemn feasts and your finely adorned assemblies… I do not need your sacrifices… but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream." I'm glad to hear that the Almighty is not pleased with religiosity for it's own sake. It is a sobering reminder to all us Minister's that the final test of our liturgy is not how clever it is, not how emotionally moving or beautiful that the music is, but how we conduct our lives the other 6 days and 23 hours of the week.

Of course, we who are privileged to exercise power, do not directly experience the results of our actions and tend to not worry as bluntly as Amos about the morality of our actions on any level. We don't think it is such a big deal because, of course, to us it is not.

And we as Americans have find it doubly difficult to interiorize the criticism from the edges of history because of our noble history and the noble ideals of our constitution. We started off the innocent nation and thought of ourselves that way, right up to the Civil War. Even after our loss of innocence, we continued to think of ourselves as the exception. In the words of Woodrow Wilson, we would fight World War 1 to make the world safe for democracy. Europeans could not do this. We had that unspoken exceptionalism validated after World War 2. We were able to stop the Germans and the Japenese, two countries who had every intention of conquering the entire world and eradicating or enslaving everyone other than themselves. And we had that implicit exceptionalism vindicated at the end of the Cold War in a way that is still difficult to articulate a decade later. Our economy is more efficient, our political system more stable, our ideals for human rights are really something of a model that we believe should be, will be, common sense for every culture in the near future. We, and pretty much only we, use our military in the service of these higher ideals. And we are more convinced than ever that we have an important mission to the rest of civilization in this regard.

Indeed, it is impressive as anyone who has seen video footage of our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan can attest. What character. What restraint. They are so articulate with the noble mission they pursue. Great young men and women.

Reinhold Niebuhr once said that 'No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint.'[1] He used to say that from the point of view of those of us that actually exercise power, the way to interpret this is through irony.

I thought of Niebuhr listening to David Kay give his testimony before Congress and reading through the report myself later. I think we are pretty close to being able to definitively say that we were just wrong about the actual threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the world. Even the talk show host Bill O'Reilly said recently, bluntly, 'we aren't going to find any weapons of mass destruction.' Mr. O'Reilly was very outspoken, very public about the importance of finding these weapons, very sure we would at the outset of the war. It is tough for him to make this conclusion and there is some possibility that buried evil might find it's way to the surface of the sand, but sober people think that is pretty remote.

Mr. Kay says that we did have a terrible intelligence failure. More than that, the administration took many of the qualifying adjectives out of the intelligence they did have as they assembled their case for armed intervention. But if they had not, and if they had not had such an articulate spokesman like Secretary of State Colin Powell, it is doubtful we would have ever been able to mobilize the support of the American people or Congress to engage in this war.

One week after Mr. Kay released his paper, on the other side of the world, the nuclear scientist from Pakistan that was in charge of developing their bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted that he had sold technology to Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and other countries, and that there was indeed a developed and developing black market for these and other weapons of mass destruction. He went on to say that the whole system had been dramatically interrupted by the invasion of Iraq which helped explain why Libya, whose leader Mommar Gadafi, only a year ago ridiculed all the other countries at the conference for the Arab league for not standing up to the Americans, suddenly did a 180 degree about face and stopped production and would like to reopen trade with us.

It is deeply ironic. The danger we hoped to stop did not exist but we likely stopped other dangers we weren't really aware were as dangerous as they were. Our very success underscores, illustrates, and exposes our final limits.

Thomas Friedman at the New York Times may be right that when we look back on this in history, the weapons of mass destruction won't matter at all. That what will be remembered is we set in motion one stable democracy that opened long repressed voices for serious reform throughout the Arab world that will lead to a Renaissance in the Middle East.

I certainly hope history is so kind. Personally, I hope that Baghdad University becomes one of the great centers of learning again. There are over 40 ancient cities unexcavated in Iraq and I would love to go there with Cal Robertson and see the dig underway.

But our situation ought to remind us of a line from the Psalms about God. It says, thinking of our virtue and pretensions to virtue that we cannot quite live up to, it says that God… 'sits in the heavens and laughs' (Ps. 2:4). This is the God who informs us that 'my ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts.'

"God laughs because 'people imagine a vain thing'. The scripture assures us that on one level God's laughter is derisive, having the sting of judgment upon our vanities in it. But, [it is also likely that God's] laughter is truly ironic. Then it would symbolize mercy as well as judgment. For whenever judgment defines the limits of human striving it creates the possibility of a humble acceptance of those limits. And within that humility mercy and peace find a lodging place."[2]

None of us are directly responsible for these ironies and all of us are indirectly responsible. As we turn our thoughts towards this season of Lent, let us together read the signs of the times and directly face our limits as well as our virtues that the substance of our collective life might mature, that we might together do the things that make for peace. Amen.

[1] Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner's, 1952), p. 62.

[2] Ibid. p. 63,64.