Being Easter People in a Death-as-Usual Culture
April 29, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Deuteronomy 30:15-20; John 21:1-19
Almost two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people, and then himself, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In the days that have followed, first the factual accounts were pieced together, then newscasters, psychologists, and all of us have tried to piece together some kind of understanding of this violence. As I spoke with one of our members, a day or two later, I commented on the phrase New York Times reporter Alessandra Stanley had used in describing the news coverage, when she wrote: “Hours before the death toll was certain or the identity of the gunman was known, television was already in an oft-practiced gear: senseless death-as-usual.” I mentioned to our member how struck I was by that phrase, and his response also made an impression on me – he said, “Yes, and that was only 33 people. There have been over 3,000 U.S. deaths in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands Iraqi deaths.” And sure enough, the next day there were news reports of another 171 people killed in Iraq bombings. As this member continued in our conversation, “Killing is what we do.” I think we have to acknowledge that this is true.
I have hesitated to discuss the Iraq war from the pulpit, because some people consider it a political issue. By now it is clear that it is a moral issue not a political issue, on many grounds. It is hard to understand the words of Jesus to pray for our enemies and turn the other cheek as leaving room for a military initiative – while the peace ethic of Jesus is hard to live out, so is much of the way Jesus calls us. In addition to the loss of life, which is significant, we also need to recognize the choices in spending and future debt that this war has created. Further, the United States military has been treated unconscionably badly by its own government – it was sent with inadequate equipment to do a job that did not have international or popular support; the volunteer soldiers have had their terms of service involuntarily extended, and the medical care has been appallingly bad for the over 24,000 soldiers who have been injured. Finally the cost to the Iraqi culture and people is unbearable – an international team of epidemiologists reported in a study supervised by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal the Lancet that the number of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war is 655,000, each of these lives as precious to God as American lives. These are moral, not political, issues. How to negotiate an end to our involvement is a political issue, how to guarantee appropriate care for our veterans is a political issue, whether to demand accountability from those who knowingly lied during the decision to wage war is a political issue – but for many reasons, the war is a moral issue.
The deadly dimensions of our culture are not limited to warfare and violent acts. As I studied recent writings on farming preparing for Earth Day last Sunday, I became discouraged because even as we produce food, we do so by dealing death – death to animals, death to the environment, and death to those who are still hungry.
Yesterday, I watched a short version of the film Crude Impact, which discusses the dependence of our culture on fossil fuels and realized that in a very basic way, our entire economy rests on death. Oil is the product of time and pressure on dying organisms. It took hundreds of millions of years, scientists estimate, to develop the world’s oil stores, and we have used about 50% of it in the last 150 years. This, by the way, is the peak oil concept in a nutshell. We do need to recognize that a tremendous amount of the technology that was developed using fossil fuels, does lead to actual life-giving improvements: think CAT scan, think neo-natal care, think sanitation using heat, think about the beauty, the liveliness and thoughtfulness in film at its best, think about music available in recorded form, think about the time-savings in computers – I am no Luddite. I appreciate the technology that fossil fuels has made possible. But I also realize that we need to move beyond them.
Shifting gears, as I considered, however, the news stories of the past few weeks, I do have to recognize that while some of our entertainment is thoughtful and life-promoting, an awful lot of our entertainment is negative, hateful, idiotic or more than one of these at once – appealing to the basest instincts of people, and seeking the lowest common denominator in our culture. Putting aside for the moment whether or not Don Imus should have been fired for his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, there is no question that his comments were both racially and sexually hostile, and beyond that, they were not even clever. Culturally, we don’t even always ask that our entertainers be interesting – it is sometimes enough for them to be nasty. It is death-dealing entertainment.
On an individual level, alcohol abuse has become an essential part of celebrations in many families and communities. Last week a young man died in our community, and the coroner attributed his death to over-drinking – by all accounts he was a nice, intelligent, good man, from a church-going family. It could have been any of our kids – the culture says that kids will be kids and that part of being a kid is getting really drunk from time to time. I don’t think I’m a prude, and people who know me well know that the only reason I’ve never had a margarita is that I like beer, but I don’t think it says much for us, our relationships, our culture, or our zest for living if what the best and brightest of us most want to do to enjoy relaxation or each other is drink until we pass out.
ABC’s Primetime did a report on cheating 3 years ago, in which they cited a 2002 study which found the 74% of high school students admitted to cheating on an exam in the prior year. But it’s not confined to high school – plagiarism has long been a problem on college campuses. And to demonstrate just how low we can go, the cover story on the current issue of The Christian Century is on sermon stealing. Jesus said that the truth will set us free – apparently, we’re not ready for freedom. Choosing honesty is part of choosing life.
So when I say that this is a death-as-usual culture, I don’t only mean the war or the tragedy at Virginia Tech, but I mean them, too. And since the death-as-usual culture is so pervasive in terms of the values of our political arena, our corporate environment, and our entertainment, what does it mean to us to be Easter people – part of a faith which proclaims resurrection, whether you believe that literally or metaphorically and as we gather here at Frame, there are some of us from each perspective – what does it mean to believe in new life, and how do we live as life-affirming people, for whom choosing life is not a slogan related to the abortion debate but about developing an ethic that seeks wholeness for every single person regardless of whether they live in our family, our neighborhood, our community, our nation or someplace else?
In the film, Crude Impact, Dr. William Rees of the University of British Columbia says, “We have got to convince people that given current trends, we are headed for disaster, that’s the bad news. This new knowledge gives us the possibility of acting in ways that create for a brilliant future for all of us….so we need as environmentalists, as economists, as good citizens to discern that a brighter future that comes from making change.” He states that, “…environmentalists have sold sustainability wrong – sold it as sacrifice. Nothing sells if people think they will be worse off.” His is the hopeful view that as we address the issues of sustainability, global warming and the post-peak oil world, a better future will be brighter in many ways, and is indeed possible. And I have seen the same hopeful notes elsewhere – Bill McKibben’s book, Deep Economy is subtitled The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and it turns out that building communities that value relationships, that acknowledge the inherent health of interdependence, that shun hyper-individualism, building such communities is the key to our future. These communities are not only healthy socially, but are vibrant places with strong diverse local economies as well. These kinds of communities are places where people like Cho Seung-Hui are less likely to get lost. This kind of violent massacre is a peculiarly American invention – surely, we can do and be better.
Life-giving, interdependent community is the tradition of classic Christian orthodoxy. Our faith at its best is all about community – the concept of Trinity is one of a divine community that is God: a God for whom relationship is identity. God is love, says Jesus, and love is relational. Our faith is not an individual affair – it is a faith that is practiced in communities and by communities. “Love one another as I have loved you,” said Jesus.
Now clearly, moving to a community-based rather than individual-based ethic, and a locally-based rather than globally-based economy will mean dramatic changes. But we need to remember, as Diana Butler Bass wrote in the book Christianity for the Rest of Us which the Session is studying: Christianity is all about change, and Jesus asked change from everyone he met. We should recognize that change is an essential part of what we are called to, especially as resurrection people in a death-as-usual culture. But change is hard. Someone emailed me this week and asked, “Isn’t there a middle ground?”
This morning’s Gospel story should be reassuring to us. Remember, before Jesus was arrested, he had told Peter that he would deny Jesus three times, and despite his protests upon being told that, it was exactly what happened. Peter, the one who seemed most confident in following Jesus, denied even knowing him, three times.
The story we read today comes later, after the resurrection, and after the miraculous catch of fish, Jesus and the disciples are relaxing together sharing breakfast – so much of the ministry of Jesus came in sharing meals, after all. And Jesus asked Peter, three times, “Do you love me, Peter?” And Peter responded, “Yes, I love you.” And Jesus tells him, “Feed my lambs…tend my sheep….feed my sheep….” And I think we should find this reassuring, because although Peter wasn’t living up to his own expectations, and likely felt terribly remorseful over his having denied Jesus as Jesus was facing death, Jesus was moving forward, and accepting Peter as he was. In the Greek, there are several words for love, and two different words are used in this paragraph. Agape means loving as God loves, a self-sacrificing total love. Phileo means a deep, brotherly love. Jesus asks Peter, do you agape me? Do you love me like God loves? And Peter says, Lord, I phileo you…I love you like a brother. And Jesus says, feed my lambs. And Jesus asks again, do you agape me? And Peter says, yes, you know that I phileo you. And Jesus says, tend my sheep. And finally Jesus says, Peter, do you phileo me? And Peter says, Lord, you know everything, you know I phileo you. And Jesus says Feed my sheep…and finally, follow me. We know that Jesus asks us to give up our lives and follow him, but many of us struggle with this – I believe that Jesus truly calls us to life-changing discipleship, to total commitment, to give up everything to follow him. But I also believe he is willing to grow us into that if we give what we are able to give. Follow me, he says.
Change is hard, and most of us find it unimaginable to change as much as we think Jesus expects or the current environmental crisis demands. And yet, there is good news and that is that as Kavita Ramdas, President of the Global Fund for Women said, “It sounds often like the scale of the problems is so huge, and I think what I love is that the level at which you can intervene really is one village, one community, one home, one family, at a time. It makes a difference.” Our small changes matter – choosing life starts with the small changes. If every household in the U.S. changed only ONE lightbulb to fluorescent, it would eliminate ten billion pounds of CO2 a year, the equivalent of getting 10,000 cars off the road. We may not be able to do all we think we should do, but we must begin, and beginning matters. It matters to the earth, it matters to our hearts, and it’s enough for God to work with. Follow Jesus – choose loving words, instead of cheap laughs or anger; choose to bike instead of drive; choose to recycle; choose honesty and courage instead of the quick, easy win; choose to spend time with others, choose to care; choose hope instead of despair; choose life.
The passage that Jack read, where Moses tells the people of Israel that death and life being set before us, and he urges us to choose life? It is preceded by an important passage as we consider our ability to make changes, to choose life, to be resurrection people in this death-as-usual culture. Before we are told to choose life, we are assured by these words: Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
We can do this. We must do this. We start where we can and from the beginnings, God makes transformation, in us and through us. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Deuteronomy 30:15-20; John 21:1-19
Almost two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people, and then himself, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In the days that have followed, first the factual accounts were pieced together, then newscasters, psychologists, and all of us have tried to piece together some kind of understanding of this violence. As I spoke with one of our members, a day or two later, I commented on the phrase New York Times reporter Alessandra Stanley had used in describing the news coverage, when she wrote: “Hours before the death toll was certain or the identity of the gunman was known, television was already in an oft-practiced gear: senseless death-as-usual.” I mentioned to our member how struck I was by that phrase, and his response also made an impression on me – he said, “Yes, and that was only 33 people. There have been over 3,000 U.S. deaths in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands Iraqi deaths.” And sure enough, the next day there were news reports of another 171 people killed in Iraq bombings. As this member continued in our conversation, “Killing is what we do.” I think we have to acknowledge that this is true.
I have hesitated to discuss the Iraq war from the pulpit, because some people consider it a political issue. By now it is clear that it is a moral issue not a political issue, on many grounds. It is hard to understand the words of Jesus to pray for our enemies and turn the other cheek as leaving room for a military initiative – while the peace ethic of Jesus is hard to live out, so is much of the way Jesus calls us. In addition to the loss of life, which is significant, we also need to recognize the choices in spending and future debt that this war has created. Further, the United States military has been treated unconscionably badly by its own government – it was sent with inadequate equipment to do a job that did not have international or popular support; the volunteer soldiers have had their terms of service involuntarily extended, and the medical care has been appallingly bad for the over 24,000 soldiers who have been injured. Finally the cost to the Iraqi culture and people is unbearable – an international team of epidemiologists reported in a study supervised by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal the Lancet that the number of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war is 655,000, each of these lives as precious to God as American lives. These are moral, not political, issues. How to negotiate an end to our involvement is a political issue, how to guarantee appropriate care for our veterans is a political issue, whether to demand accountability from those who knowingly lied during the decision to wage war is a political issue – but for many reasons, the war is a moral issue.
The deadly dimensions of our culture are not limited to warfare and violent acts. As I studied recent writings on farming preparing for Earth Day last Sunday, I became discouraged because even as we produce food, we do so by dealing death – death to animals, death to the environment, and death to those who are still hungry.
Yesterday, I watched a short version of the film Crude Impact, which discusses the dependence of our culture on fossil fuels and realized that in a very basic way, our entire economy rests on death. Oil is the product of time and pressure on dying organisms. It took hundreds of millions of years, scientists estimate, to develop the world’s oil stores, and we have used about 50% of it in the last 150 years. This, by the way, is the peak oil concept in a nutshell. We do need to recognize that a tremendous amount of the technology that was developed using fossil fuels, does lead to actual life-giving improvements: think CAT scan, think neo-natal care, think sanitation using heat, think about the beauty, the liveliness and thoughtfulness in film at its best, think about music available in recorded form, think about the time-savings in computers – I am no Luddite. I appreciate the technology that fossil fuels has made possible. But I also realize that we need to move beyond them.
Shifting gears, as I considered, however, the news stories of the past few weeks, I do have to recognize that while some of our entertainment is thoughtful and life-promoting, an awful lot of our entertainment is negative, hateful, idiotic or more than one of these at once – appealing to the basest instincts of people, and seeking the lowest common denominator in our culture. Putting aside for the moment whether or not Don Imus should have been fired for his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, there is no question that his comments were both racially and sexually hostile, and beyond that, they were not even clever. Culturally, we don’t even always ask that our entertainers be interesting – it is sometimes enough for them to be nasty. It is death-dealing entertainment.
On an individual level, alcohol abuse has become an essential part of celebrations in many families and communities. Last week a young man died in our community, and the coroner attributed his death to over-drinking – by all accounts he was a nice, intelligent, good man, from a church-going family. It could have been any of our kids – the culture says that kids will be kids and that part of being a kid is getting really drunk from time to time. I don’t think I’m a prude, and people who know me well know that the only reason I’ve never had a margarita is that I like beer, but I don’t think it says much for us, our relationships, our culture, or our zest for living if what the best and brightest of us most want to do to enjoy relaxation or each other is drink until we pass out.
ABC’s Primetime did a report on cheating 3 years ago, in which they cited a 2002 study which found the 74% of high school students admitted to cheating on an exam in the prior year. But it’s not confined to high school – plagiarism has long been a problem on college campuses. And to demonstrate just how low we can go, the cover story on the current issue of The Christian Century is on sermon stealing. Jesus said that the truth will set us free – apparently, we’re not ready for freedom. Choosing honesty is part of choosing life.
So when I say that this is a death-as-usual culture, I don’t only mean the war or the tragedy at Virginia Tech, but I mean them, too. And since the death-as-usual culture is so pervasive in terms of the values of our political arena, our corporate environment, and our entertainment, what does it mean to us to be Easter people – part of a faith which proclaims resurrection, whether you believe that literally or metaphorically and as we gather here at Frame, there are some of us from each perspective – what does it mean to believe in new life, and how do we live as life-affirming people, for whom choosing life is not a slogan related to the abortion debate but about developing an ethic that seeks wholeness for every single person regardless of whether they live in our family, our neighborhood, our community, our nation or someplace else?
In the film, Crude Impact, Dr. William Rees of the University of British Columbia says, “We have got to convince people that given current trends, we are headed for disaster, that’s the bad news. This new knowledge gives us the possibility of acting in ways that create for a brilliant future for all of us….so we need as environmentalists, as economists, as good citizens to discern that a brighter future that comes from making change.” He states that, “…environmentalists have sold sustainability wrong – sold it as sacrifice. Nothing sells if people think they will be worse off.” His is the hopeful view that as we address the issues of sustainability, global warming and the post-peak oil world, a better future will be brighter in many ways, and is indeed possible. And I have seen the same hopeful notes elsewhere – Bill McKibben’s book, Deep Economy is subtitled The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and it turns out that building communities that value relationships, that acknowledge the inherent health of interdependence, that shun hyper-individualism, building such communities is the key to our future. These communities are not only healthy socially, but are vibrant places with strong diverse local economies as well. These kinds of communities are places where people like Cho Seung-Hui are less likely to get lost. This kind of violent massacre is a peculiarly American invention – surely, we can do and be better.
Life-giving, interdependent community is the tradition of classic Christian orthodoxy. Our faith at its best is all about community – the concept of Trinity is one of a divine community that is God: a God for whom relationship is identity. God is love, says Jesus, and love is relational. Our faith is not an individual affair – it is a faith that is practiced in communities and by communities. “Love one another as I have loved you,” said Jesus.
Now clearly, moving to a community-based rather than individual-based ethic, and a locally-based rather than globally-based economy will mean dramatic changes. But we need to remember, as Diana Butler Bass wrote in the book Christianity for the Rest of Us which the Session is studying: Christianity is all about change, and Jesus asked change from everyone he met. We should recognize that change is an essential part of what we are called to, especially as resurrection people in a death-as-usual culture. But change is hard. Someone emailed me this week and asked, “Isn’t there a middle ground?”
This morning’s Gospel story should be reassuring to us. Remember, before Jesus was arrested, he had told Peter that he would deny Jesus three times, and despite his protests upon being told that, it was exactly what happened. Peter, the one who seemed most confident in following Jesus, denied even knowing him, three times.
The story we read today comes later, after the resurrection, and after the miraculous catch of fish, Jesus and the disciples are relaxing together sharing breakfast – so much of the ministry of Jesus came in sharing meals, after all. And Jesus asked Peter, three times, “Do you love me, Peter?” And Peter responded, “Yes, I love you.” And Jesus tells him, “Feed my lambs…tend my sheep….feed my sheep….” And I think we should find this reassuring, because although Peter wasn’t living up to his own expectations, and likely felt terribly remorseful over his having denied Jesus as Jesus was facing death, Jesus was moving forward, and accepting Peter as he was. In the Greek, there are several words for love, and two different words are used in this paragraph. Agape means loving as God loves, a self-sacrificing total love. Phileo means a deep, brotherly love. Jesus asks Peter, do you agape me? Do you love me like God loves? And Peter says, Lord, I phileo you…I love you like a brother. And Jesus says, feed my lambs. And Jesus asks again, do you agape me? And Peter says, yes, you know that I phileo you. And Jesus says, tend my sheep. And finally Jesus says, Peter, do you phileo me? And Peter says, Lord, you know everything, you know I phileo you. And Jesus says Feed my sheep…and finally, follow me. We know that Jesus asks us to give up our lives and follow him, but many of us struggle with this – I believe that Jesus truly calls us to life-changing discipleship, to total commitment, to give up everything to follow him. But I also believe he is willing to grow us into that if we give what we are able to give. Follow me, he says.
Change is hard, and most of us find it unimaginable to change as much as we think Jesus expects or the current environmental crisis demands. And yet, there is good news and that is that as Kavita Ramdas, President of the Global Fund for Women said, “It sounds often like the scale of the problems is so huge, and I think what I love is that the level at which you can intervene really is one village, one community, one home, one family, at a time. It makes a difference.” Our small changes matter – choosing life starts with the small changes. If every household in the U.S. changed only ONE lightbulb to fluorescent, it would eliminate ten billion pounds of CO2 a year, the equivalent of getting 10,000 cars off the road. We may not be able to do all we think we should do, but we must begin, and beginning matters. It matters to the earth, it matters to our hearts, and it’s enough for God to work with. Follow Jesus – choose loving words, instead of cheap laughs or anger; choose to bike instead of drive; choose to recycle; choose honesty and courage instead of the quick, easy win; choose to spend time with others, choose to care; choose hope instead of despair; choose life.
The passage that Jack read, where Moses tells the people of Israel that death and life being set before us, and he urges us to choose life? It is preceded by an important passage as we consider our ability to make changes, to choose life, to be resurrection people in this death-as-usual culture. Before we are told to choose life, we are assured by these words: Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
We can do this. We must do this. We start where we can and from the beginnings, God makes transformation, in us and through us. Amen.