Political Faith

A few days ago, I received a discount coupon from a vendor for use in their store. I’d not asked for this coupon, mind you, and was surprised to discover that it offered me a rather large discount on a future purchase – one I’d not intended to make, but now might. Such is the lure of a bargain! And it came from a bookstore, for Pete’s sake; they knew my weakness, no doubt because they are compiling a computerized record of my monetary sins of commission with each new transaction I’ve made there over recent years.

For some reason, I decided to read the fine print only to discover what I already knew: that the exclusions would take a long paragraph to enumerate, since it was invalid for “all electronics,” periodicals, gift cards, and even comics. (All of these must have a smaller profit margin than the standard book purchase.) But then, at the very bottom, came a curious piece of information: “Cash value: .01 cent. Not redeemable for cash.”

What was I to make of this, that something could have cash value, if admittedly of a negligible amount, and yet not be “redeemable”? What could have a stated cash value but be at the same time irredeemable for cash? It all seemed like a twisted logic which my small mind could not manage to decipher; numbering the angels dancing on the head of a pin made much more sense.

But perhaps that is the very point of it: that in the marketplace, something could have a value but not be redeemable for that value. This monetary fallacy seems a clear enough indictment of the current economy, since much that has some stated financial value may not be redeemable “for cash.” One thinks of the perilous housing market, or the rising mountain of national debt we are creating in order to fund (among other good things) the violent madness of war – all based on assumed values for which there may be no immediate or even foreseeable return of cash.

Anything theological here, I wondered? Is it plausible that God is in the business of making things that have a value – if, in this case, an admittedly unnoticeable one – which, however, are not finally redeemable? Perhaps this is an absurd analogy, and one that finally collapses under the weight of trivial comparison. But it did provoke me to think about redemption, and wonder if our inability to imagine it coming to some “other” – our enemies? those who threaten to hurt us, or have already done so? – has more to do with our own deficit of holy imagination than with the one we claim to be the giver of all life.

Perhaps we cannot imagine, in theoretical terms, putting a value (however small) on life and then claiming that it is not redeemable. Our toleration of “death row,” looking away from this administration’s public sanctioning of torture under the ruse of calling it “alternate methods of interrogation,” our building of walls to keep future immigrants out: these tolerations, at least, give the lie to such a presumption.

And, perhaps, such incongruities should encourage us to resist, as an act of faith in this all-redeeming God, such measures – if, that is, we trust the “minority report” in scripture and in the church’s tradition, one that will not give way to the louder (majority) voice calling for vengeance, punishment, and even annihilation for the “enemy” (see Deut. 20. 17 ff. – and, for Canaanites, read in the updated parlance: Palestinians). “You have heard that it was said. . ., but I say to you”: yes, faith is this unavoidably political, or it is not faith in the God of Jesus but in some other deity (the god of national security, executive privilege, or convenient greed).

The choice is ours: we can choose to succumb to the market madness, accept the violence undergirding the global commodity exchange, and support – in action or inaction, by sins of commission or omission – the revoking of even the stated value for those who have little enough to begin with, at least, in our eyes. Or we can choose to stand with Jesus and the prophets, with Julian and the mystics, and, yes, with Martin King and the activists, and remember the moral and political obligation for the vulnerable among us that calls us to love our neighbors with the same love we have for ourselves. One Love, in this one world.

Can we live in such a way that, with Jesus, we presume the redeemable value of every human being –friends and enemies alike, gifted as all are by the one God with life? And bearing, as we hear in The Text, nothing less than the divine image itself? And, if so, what else can we do but commit ourselves, in and beyond our churches, to incarnating this One Love rooted in Jesus’ vision of a new empire (“basileia”) – which is to come on earth as it apparently already is in heaven?

Faith is just this political, as is the question of redemption – which is to say, it has to do with how we relate to the real lives of all created in God’s image, enemy and friend alike. And, last I checked, there were no exemptions stated in The Book.

Mark S. Burrows
Professor of the History of Christianity and
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church

"Thy Kingdom come . . .on earth"

“. . . as it is in heaven”:  it is strange that so little is said, these days, about heaven, a theme that lies at the heart of the prayer we call “The Lord’s.”  At least, this seems to be so among the mainline churches, remaining a staple of the religious vocabulary in the fundamentalist churches as the meek counterpoint to the strongly leveraged threats of hell.  But in our sort of churches, heaven rarely makes an appearance, aside from the occasional hymn, the creeds if we are in places that voice these, and the wandering diet of the lectionary readings.  Despite such mentionings, heaven is a theme seldom heard from the pulpits, swept into the silent margins of the generally unspoken.

But there is something in the human imagination that refuses this silence, and poets among us seem not to have noticed our dis-ease.  They continue to think and write about heaven – along with those other boundaries where words fail and the imagination must finally rise to do its work.

So it is in one of Czeslaw Milosz’s poems, “How It Should Be in Heaven,” included in a marvelous collection entitled Unattainable Earth (1986).  It begins with a bold claim:

            How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there.
            By its river.  Listening to its birds.
            In its season:  in summer, shortly after sunrise.
            I would get up and run to my thousand works
            And the garden was superterrestrial, owned by imagination...

The poem goes on, enticingly, but this first sounding of what it means to create our lives through the lure of imagination should not go unnoticed – and not least in the pulpit, since it is one of the hungers that brings many of us back week by week into the silent, waiting pews – avid to hear a word that lifts us from the unimagined ordinary, one that might lure us to abandon the flat and merely managed world.

A century earlier, Emily Dickinson envisioned redemption as a life of dwelling “in Possibility,”

            A fairer House than Prose –
            More numerous of Windows –
            Superior – for Doors –

and went on to speak of the poet’s vocation as one of

            . . . spreading wide [her] narrow Hands
            To gather paradise.

Indeed, heaven is a steady theme in her verse, which often yields to such “possibility” against the rational arguments against.  We hear her working this out in a poem which begins with a question:

            Which is best?  Heaven –
            Or only Heaven to come
            With that old Codicil of Doubt?

By which she means, in the first line, the “heaven” already edging into our lives, an epiphany of the possible for those with “eyes to see” what is already among us and not defer to what may (or may not) be beyond death’s margin.  Is this simply the confused wonderings of a housebound recluse who rarely strayed in her latter years into the public view but kept to her room and the enclosure of her garden?  She goes on:

            . . . I cannot help esteem

            The “Bird within the Hand”
            Superior to the one
            The “Bush” may yield me
            Or may not –
            Too late to choose again.

Or, again:

            Who has not found the Heaven – below –
            Will fail of it above –
            For Angels rent the House next our’s,
            Wherever we remove –

And, in another:

            Heaven is so far of the Mind
            That were the Mind dissolved –
            The site – of it – by Architect
            Could not again be proved –

            ‘Tis vast – as our Capacity –
            As fair – as our idea –
            To Him of adequate desire
            No further ‘tis, than here.

She seems to be saying, with the allurement of art’s invitation:  don’t wait to choose until it is too late.  Seize this day, in all its yet unrevealed ordinariness.  Look around, and especially at what lies close to hand.  Choose to inhabit your life by paying particular attention to what you can see of beauty, mercy, goodness – and offer this as a gift for others.  The alternative may not be hell exactly, but it may well be experienced as an indifference to the possibilities of change and growth, for us and for others, and result in a lethargy no longer capable of living into or out of a larger imagination.

For us her readers “of adequate desire,” there is still time, she is saying.  It is not too late to inhabit our lives as if it they were vessels of the sacred, as if we could like the children live from enchantment precisely in the midst of the ordinary.  How might we live in “Possibility”?  By opening ourselves to wonder in the face of the terrible burden of our own inhumanity; by refusing to be silent in the face of fear; by finding the courage to keep pointing to life against the forces of death.

Our “capacity” is what lies in question, not some metaphysical geography we can neither locate nor finally prove.  Heaven is still for us an imaginable world in our midst, at least for all who know – as the Belle of Amherst put it in one of her exquisite two-liners – that

            Not “Revelation” – ‘tis – that waits,
            But our unfurnished eyes –

Where are we to look for heaven, then, but “on earth”?  The poets keep telling us this, in echo to Jesus’ words and ways.  And perhaps what the Nazarene calls the kingdom of heaven may be just like this, here and now, a reality “owned by the imagination,” one which is ours to choose (or not).  Given the alternative, even if “the site of it” cannot be proved, I’d say living as if it is already among us is worth the wager.  For as Milosz puts it,

                                    . . . how could the mind
            Stop its hunt, if from the Infinite
            It takes enchantment, avidity, promise?


            Mark S. Burrows
            Professor of the History of Christianity and
            Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church