Daily Reading & Meditation
Monday (4/20): "Unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God"
Scripture: John 3:1-8
1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicode'mus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him." 3 Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." 4 Nicode'mus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" 5 Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, `You must be born anew.' 8 The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit."
Meditation: Do you nourish your faith with regular reading and prayerful reflection of the word of God? Nicodemus was hungry for God's word and became a closet disciple of Jesus. He sought Jesus out, though surreptitiously in the dead of the night. Why? Nicodemus was a "leader of the Jews", "a teacher of Israel" (John 3:10), and a member of the religious party most opposed to the teaching of Jesus. In fact, John’s gospel account states that it was Nicodemus' own group, the Pharisees, which intimidated the authorities against confessing Jesus (John 12:42).Instead he engaged him in a seemingly unrelated topic of conversation. Jesus said that rebirth was necessary to enter the kingdom of God. Of course, Nicodemus the Pharisee had already found religion, so he thought that Jesus must have referred to physical rebirth. No, Jesus responded, someone who is reborn spiritually knows the experience as surely as one who has been refreshed by an invisible breeze. How can a respected rabbi among the Jews not know this? And that is precisely the point. Nicodemus is the first of what we might loosely call the official clergy with whom Jesus has personal engagement. The Gospel portrays Nicodemus as a defender of Jesus' right to a fair trial (John 7:-51). Nicodemus also helped to bury Jesus with honor. Nicodemus did not understand the new birth which Jesus spoke of until after the resurrection.
What does it mean to be reborn? The new birth Jesus speaks of is a spiritual birth to new life and relationship with God as his sons and daughters. This new birth is made possible when one is baptized into Christ and receives the gift of the Holy Spirit. God wants to renew all his people in the gift of new life in his Holy Spirit. This new life brings us into God's kingdom or heavenly rule. What is God's kingdom? God's kingdom is that society in which God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. To be reborn is to enter that society in which God is honored and obeyed, to live as his son or daughter, and to enter into possession of that life which comes from God himself, a never-ending life of love, peace, joy, and freedom from sin and the fear of death. Do you know the joy and freedom of new life in Jesus Christ?
"Lord Jesus Christ, you offer us a new birth in the Holy Spirit. Renew in me the gift of faith and new life in your Holy Spirit. Help me to draw near to you and to believe in your life-giving word. May your kingdom come and may your will be done in my life today and always."
Psalm 2:1-9
1 Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and his anointed, saying,
3 "Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us."
4 He who sits in the heavens laughs; the LORD has them in derision.
5 Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying,
6 "I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill."
7 I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my son, today I have begotten you.
8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."
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(c) 2009 Don Schwager
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Every Name in Every Nation
Holocaust Remembrance Day
For Sunday April 26, 2009
Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year B)
Acts 3:12–19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1–7
Luke 24:36b–48
Raphael Lemkin.
Armenia. Auschwitz. Cambodia. Kurdish Iraq. Bosnia. Rwanda. Srebrenica. Kosovo. And now Darfur. Thanks to a person who died fifty years ago this year, and who has been all but forgotten to history (see below), this week the world pauses to consider man's inhumanity to man. The readings this week explain why, of all people, Christians should be leaders in this vigil.
After his resurrection, Jesus told his followers to spread his message "to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:48; cf. Matthew 28:19). In his parallel passage, Mark renders the universal scope more emphatic by writing "to all the world [and] to all creation" (Mark 16:15). Similarly, in Luke's sequel to his gospel, Jesus told his timid followers, "you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8).
In the lectionary this week, Peter concludes his sermon by proclaiming that in Jesus "all peoples on earth will be blessed" by God (Acts 3:25 = Genesis 22:18, 26:4), which global promise was first made to Abraham 4,000 years ago (Genesis 12:3). The story of Jesus, says Luke, anticipates the "restoration of all things" (Acts 3:21). God remembers every name in every nation.
Two radical corollaries follow from this robustly global vision — the decentralization of your geography and the reorientation of your politics.
First, Christians are geographic, cultural, national and ethnic egalitarians; for them there is no geographic center of the world, but only a constellation of points equidistant from the heart of God. Proclaiming that God lavishly loves all the world, each person, and every place, the Gospel does not privilege any country as exceptional. No one can say they are forgotten, and no one can claim special favor.
Much has been written about American exceptionalism. In terms of economic, political, military, scientific and cultural dominance, America is unrivaled, and in that sense "exceptional" (although there is no reason to think that will last forever). But from a theological or Christian point of view, America is no more "exceptional" in God's eyes than any other country. While allowing for a natural and wholesome love, even pride, in your own country ("there's no place like home"), geo-political egalitarianism subverts the claim of absolute allegiance to any one nation. The claims of the gospel are absolute and unconditional; the claims of the nation and state are relative and conditional.
Second, because of this, Christian global vision asks that we care as much about any and every country and its people as we do our own. Christians grieve the deaths of Iraqis as much as Americans. We lament the tragedy of the Iranian and Pakistani earthquakes as much as Hurricane Katrina. This implies that our politics become reoriented, non-aligned, and unpredictable by normal canons. No state or political party, says Garry Wills, can indulge in the self-sacrifice that Jesus demands when he asks his followers to place the interests of others ahead of our own.
This week the world commemorates the genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust by observing Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1951, Israel's parliament designated the 27th day of Nissan as Holocaust Day, a day to remember the Jews who perished and those who heroically resisted. In 1959, the parliament designated Holocaust Day as formal law. Since 1989, the Knesset, in cooperation with Yad Vashem — The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, performs a ceremony called "Everyone Has a Name" in which the names of all of the Holocaust victims are read aloud.
The term “genocide” has a specific history. The word was coined by the eccentric and brilliant Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who almost single-handedly thrust the issue of genocide onto the world stage. On October 16, 1950, after seventeen years of Lemkin’s tireless labor, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was finally ratified by the United Nations. The United States signed thirty-six years later on February 11, 1986, after ninety-seven nations had already ratified the convention.
When Lemkin died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine on August 28, 1959, he was penniless. Before he died he broadened the notion of genocide beyond the extermination of six million Jews. "Lemkin had nearly completed a magisterial analysis of a long list of historical cases and themes of genocide, which remains unpublished." He expanded genocide to include "the attempted destruction not only of ethnic and religious groups but of political ones, and [thought] that the term should also encompass systematic cultural destruction" (Kiernan).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
No person or people is immune from the horrors of holocaust, either as a perpetrator or a dissenter. Solzhenitsyn once observed in his Gulag Archipelago that it would be nice if we could neatly divide the world between the insidiously evil and the obviously good. Instead, he wrote, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” A Holocaust survivor once told me that he didn't believe in the "collective guilt" of an entire people.
There can be good "bad" people. A Holocaust survivor once described to me how a young Nazi guard secretly gave him a sandwich, and as he did, tears streamed down the soldier's cheeks. Conversely, there can be bad "good" people. In his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, John Conroy says that we tend to caricature torturers as sadistic monsters. But “there is ample evidence that most torturers are normal people, that most of us could be the barbarians of our dreams as easily as we could be the victim.” Consider the following example from Christian history.
The Spaniards came to America for gold and glory, but they also came for God, to spread the Gospel. In a letter to Pope Alexander VI, February 1502, Columbus wrote of his goal in the new world: “I hope in Our Lord to be able to propagate His holy name and His Gospel throughout the universe.” The natives they encountered were deemed pagan and subhuman, as their cannibalism and human sacrifices surely "proved." Oviedo, a 16th-century conquistador and historian of the five volume work Natural History of the West Indies, describes the solution to the problem of Indians who did not want to convert:
God is going to destroy them soon. . . . Satan has now been expelled from the Island [Hispaniola]; his influence has disappeared now that most of the Indians are dead. . . . Who can deny that the use of gunpowder against pagans is the burning of incense to our Lord?
The results of these evangelistic efforts? Tzvetan Todorov estimates that the Spanish conquest of the Americas killed 70 million people by murder, maltreatment such as slavery, and disease — about 90% of the population. These "good" Christians construed the wholesale genocide of "bad" Native Americans as wholehearted piety.
Genocides don't have to happen. We are not destined to slaughter our neighbor. But when we reduce people to a singular identity (Jew! Gay!), it feeds a sense of fatalism, resignation, and a sense of inevitability about violence. Simplistic labels partition people and civilizations into binary oppositions. They ignore the plural ways that people understand themselves, and obscure what Amartya Sen calls our "diverse diversities." In particular, Sen objects to the "clash of civilizations" thesis made popular by Samuel Huntington. No, we should never concede that civilizations have to clash.
Sen argues against identity violence caused by the illusion of destiny in three ways. First, he appeals to our common humanity; everyone laughs at weddings, cries at funerals, and worries about their children. More important than any of our external differences, even though these are powerful and important, is our shared humanity. Everyone has a name, a name known and loved by God. Every one of us, Paul affirmed, is "God's off-spring" (Acts 17:29).
Second, all people enjoy plural identities. To understand a person one must consider factors of civilization, religion, nationality, class, community, culture, gender, profession, language, politics, morals, family of origin, skin color, and a multitude of other markers. Plus, these diverse differences within a single individual depend on one's social context, whether the trait is durable over time, relevant, a factor of constraint or free choice, and so on. People are complex; we shouldn't reduce them to a single trait.
Elie Wiesel.
Finally, Sen urges us to transcend the illusion of destiny and identity violence by "reasoned choice." Instead of living as if some irrational fate destines us to slaughter others who are different, a person needs to make a rational choice about what relative importance to attach to any single trait. Although Sen never explains why rational people succumb to the irrational violence of identity, instead of choosing enlightened self-interest, economic incentives, and geo-political peace, he reminds us of the obvious: "We can do better."
I pray to move to the place described by the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf in his book Exclusion and Embrace: “The theme of divine self-donation for the enemies and their reception into the eternal communion of God. . . . As God does not abandon the godless to their evil but gives the divine self for them in order to receive them into divine communion through atonement, so also should we — whoever our enemies and whoever we may be.” Thus the embrace beyond exclusion — “the will to give ourselves to others and to ‘welcome’ them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity.”
For further reflection
* Consider the words of the German pastor Martin Niemoeller (1892–1984), who protested Hitler's anti-semitic measures in person to the fuehrer, was eventually arrested, then imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau (1937–1945). He once confessed, "It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. He is not even the enemy of His enemies."
* Consider the poem ascribed to Niemoeller (although its different versions and exact origins are debated), First They Came. The poem describes the passivity of German intellectuals as the Nazis purged group after group of targeted people.
First they came for the Communists,
- but I was not a communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists,
- but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews,
- but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
And for further reading see below. Except for the books by Wiesel and Todorov, all of the following are reviewed in the book and film review pages of JwJ.
* Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families; Stories From Rwanda (1998).
* Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell; America and the Age of Genocide (2002).
* Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence; The Illusion of Destiny (2006).
* Brian Steidle, The Devil Came on Horseback; Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur (2007).
* Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Meaning of the Other (1984).
* Elie Wiesel, Night.
* Watch the films Forgiving Dr. Mengele; Paper Clips (about a school project to collect one paper clip for every victim of the Holocaust); and Promises(about Israeli and Palestinian children).
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Image credits: (1) P.O.V. at pbs.org; (2) Shelf Life by Laura T. Ryan; and (3) MedalOfFreedom.org.Sphere: Related Content
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