Being-a-Writer

I find Jean-Paul Sartre to be horribly mistaken about the problem of mauvaise foi (bad faith). Not completely mistaken, of course, as I have said in times past how I find his notion of “bad faith” – bad faith being, as simply put as possible, the way the self lies to the self about who it is in order to become who it thinks it ought to become – to hold up with man’s general inability to live authentically, nor mistaken in a philosophical way, given the ways in which the ontology presented in Being and Nothingness is so meticulously put-together that it seems difficult, to me, to surpass or reject.

But maybe I speak not just as a reader of Sartre but also a reader of Frantz Fanon, who himself seems to also have a problem regarding bad faith – that is, that as a black man in “not-that-racist” (re: racist) France, Fanon found his overdetermination coming from without rather than simply from within. Is it bad faith if one is not who the World say is? I will leave that one for the readers and interpreters and interlocutors of Black Skin, White Masks to decide.

For me, however, I find a different struggle with the idea of bad faith. Sartre’s bad faith functions as a problem that entraps us within certain modes of being. The most famous example, of course, is the waiter who is playing at being-a-waiter. His essential being, of course, is not as a waiter, but when he dons his clothing and waits tables he assumes the character and nature – even the being – of a waiter. This, Sartre would assert to us, is not the waiter as he really is nor is it the waiter as he ought to be. The waiter is likely being-a-waiter in order to fulfill some other purpose in his life (probably paying the bills). But, as Sartre often remarks, he has radical freedom to be what he wants to be. He could doff his waiter-ing garb and thrust his plates upon the faces of the café’s patrons and then off and become… something else.

Yet, deep within my soul, I find in myself the reality of being-a-writer. I have not donned any writerly-garb in order to become a writer. Nor have I really written anything suitably worthwhile to become a writer. I enrolled in a graduate program that improved my writing, no doubt, and that allowed me to become the sort of reader who is able to begin tackling Being and Nothingness, amidst others. But when I say that I am a writer, I mean something more essentialist rather than existential. I am not describing something that is definable or describable through external sources of knowledge and knowing. Rather, I am actually describing something more like the framework of my soul. As a Christian, I call this something a little more like “Calling” or “Vocation” or “Purpose.” There’s an Image that I have been made in – the Image of the Logos Himself – and that Image imprints upon my very being something of a distinct personal character.

No doubt, and I see proof for this too, I often live out of some kind of bad faith. I do not think that Sartre’s observation is wrong; I think that bad faith is the sort of relationship with freedom that mankind has under the domain of sin. I would even go further and assert that Sartre’s radically-free subject is always-already a subject of some kind of bad faith. Here I’d follow Louis Althusser in his description of the subject of ideology, but I would, using my fancy Christian language, replaced ideology with the true power that undergirds this bad faith: that is, Idolatry.

Bad faith for me, however, manifests in my incessant struggle to write. While Sartre’s waiter is playing at being-a-waiter and lying to himself that his internal nature is truly a waiter, when he is not, my true being of being-a-writer (that is, being-a-writer-in-itself, rather than for-itself) is constantly doffed in my life for the sake of other ‘beings.’ I will, for a short time yet, be-a-lab-manager, or be-a-Chicagoan. Maybe too I wrestle against the seductive ontological claim that calls itself ‘being-not-a-writer.’ This is the most devastating ontology.

I find it hard to be me, that is, Ian-who-is-a-writer. Part of it has to do with the stunning amount of inauthentic and haphazard writing that exists out there these days, both in journalistic and in academic circles. And do not get me started on “Christian writing,” because it’s a crapshoot nine out of ten times.

Here I am faced with a stunning reversal of Sartre’s bad faith: I cannot be what I really am, and instead I continually struggle with the becoming of what I really am. I am not becoming that which I wish to be or that which I radically choose to be. To risk sounding deterministic, I am becoming what I was already and am, but I am not that being right now.

This, to me, is the greatest difficulty.

For the Conservative Christian Dissenter. A Letter.

I want to give a hearty shout-out to those conservative Christian friends of mine who, seeing the temptation for power have rejected it, hearing the loud voice have stopped their ears from it, and being surrounded by the whispers of those who "call evil good and good evil" have said "No, that is not the way" to them.

It is easy for a liberal to reject and not support a person like Trump. I don't applaud my liberal friends for their courage, necessarily. And principled moderates (like me) are simply disgusted by bad debaters and charismatic passion without substance. I don't applaud them either.

I applaud those conservative Christians who, standing on their Bibles, leaning into their Scriptures, think that there is a point where you can no longer espouse "conservative values" without espousing them with your lifestyle; those who think that it is not enough for a candidate to mime the right words and say the right things, rather it is necessary for a candidate to behave in a manner befitting the office.

Your reasons for rejecting this man are diverse - for some of you, he's an affront to true conservatism (c'mon y'all: here's big government in just a different way); for some of you, he's just simply disgusting. But I suspect that at least one common thread links my conservative Christian friends who reject this man alongside my liberal and moderate Christians friends who do the same.

That is: we are citizens of another nation. We are not here for petty political squabbles. We are here to bring salt and light to the world. And my conservative Christian friends who are rejecting Trump are doing so also because they love God's Church, and they see the kind of damage that Trumpism can do to our mission.

This is not some abstract, theological premise, folks. I don't get on a soapbox to expostulate to you or preach to you. I do it because I love God's people and I love God's mission, and I think that nothing hurts our mission more than when we find ourselves in league with those who are the antithesis of our values. It is simply enough, for me, that I see a man who is the distinct apposite of Jesus' Beatitudes. That is enough for me to say "Nope. I cannot support him. Nope. I cannot sign off on his values. Nope. If that's what 'conservative' means, then please take me off your list."

And my sense is that, more than not, my conservative Christian friends who have rejected Trump and his ways are doing so because of their deeply-held, Bible-centered beliefs about what is Good, what is Evil, what is Just, and what is Lawless.


I want you to know that I am encouraged by you. I want to you know, too, that those around you see. Your moderate and liberal friends who do not follow Jesus (yet), will see your stand, and they will say "Ah, maybe there's more to this Jesus person that a political claim." Or, "Maybe Jesus isn't interested in hatred like I think he is." Your stand, declaring "This man is not representative of what I believe" is what the Bible calls "salt and light." You refuse to let your salt become unsalty, to let yourself be sullied by 'the cares of the world.' That is a courageous thing.

I set these words out here not because I want to make a political claim. This is not politics. If it were politics, then I wouldn't have posted anything at all over the past year on this topic. This is about theological courage, it is about standing up for what you believe in, it's about not backing down when peer pressure and social movements want to take you where do you not want to go. Your congregations and communities, unfortunately, are being ravaged by an ideological force that is foreign to the Gospel - that good, sweet, pure Gospel that you received and held onto and clung to. Do not let go of that Gospel, because it is life, it is grace, and it is peace.

Do not be conformed to the pattern of the world, my friend. And I am encouraged to see that you are already standing against "the pattern of the world." Know that there is spiritual warfare all about with this Trumpism thing. It is a real ideological force, and that means that it is a real spiritual force. Dig into that Bible, spend time in prayer, lean into your brothers and sisters whom you love, gather as the ekklesia, take and imbibe the Sacrament, and worship the Lord. These things will encourage you and strengthen you against the powers of Nero.


And you know, and I know, that we are, too, called to pray for our leaders, just as (I hope) we prayed for our past leaders - irregardless of ideological or spiritual bent. So do that also. Let us not stop praying for Trump. But let us be careful how we pray. In days past I would hear leaders (ones who are now convinced of Trump's faith) say "We must pray for the conversion of Obama." Brothers and sisters, let's be real: that is letting our politics invade our private place of prayer. Do not let politics invade your place of prayer. Do not pray "That righteous man" or "That wicked man." Pray, as Paul commands us, "for the emperor," for kings, for all those who are in authority.

Continue to bear the light, my conservative brother and sister. Continue to shine God's good Gospel to those who do not know Him. Reject anything that comes from fear and hate, because those things wish not just to make you miserable and into a political scoundrel, but because those things wish to destroy your witness before men. Remember that it is the Gospel you must hold up for the salvation of many, not political ideas or political claims. No conservatism, no liberalism, no moderatism, no centrism, and no libertarianism has the powers to save a man's soul. Only the Gospel can do that. So be committed to evangelism and to the proclamation of the Gospel.

And continue, as you are doing, holding the standard of Scripture against a leader that some of our Christian voices will not hold the standard to. This is not judgmental nor is it 'whiney.' It is what it means to live our lives based on the Word of God. Hold that Scripture with firmness and with authority, with confidence and with boldness, and with bold, crazy, courageous, and evangelistic love. Lean into the Holy Spirit, and He will take you into Truth, rather than into the nonsense that some espouse to be Truth.


As to your relationships - those that have broken and distressed because of your stance - lean into Grace. But more importantly, remember that letting your light shine is also, let your fruit bear witness of the work of the power of God's love in you. It is more provocative that a person full of love bear strong spiritual fruit versus a person who is full of worldly hate, than all of the words and conversations and provocations in the world. Be the Gospel witness that you have been called, pre-ordained, anointed, and set apart to be, and your Trumpist neighbor, if they be saved, will see. Maybe even repent. Maybe even open their own hearts and learn what it means to love the lost, to seek salvation for the poor, to feed the hungry, to care for the widow and the orphan.

This is a hard thing to live, but when one lives their lives in accordance with the Gospel it is not only Good News to the lost, but it is Good News to the found who have confused themselves with the ways of the world.

So, Go! and be Good News. And thank you for staying and standing True to the Word you have received.

On Inarticulate Critique

I encountered a problematic gesture today. It was on a FB group that I frequent and, most of the days, enjoy. The post was a typical kind of communication within a certain conservative Christian demographic – that is, the “disdain and disbelief” sort of post. I could probably write a large amount regarding the nature of the Christian “disdain and disbelief” post, since it appears to be the majority of the sort of communications that social-media-engaged-self-identifying-as-Christian people do. You know this sort of post, if you do any social media at all: “Can you believe this?” or “How long until that?”

The question at the heart of this particular “disdain and disbelief” post was:

So, how long do you think it'll be before you can choose more than two genders in a create-a-character mode?

The implied feeling of this post is meant to confer a particular "doom-and-gloom" response to the “rampant liberalism” and the “siege against Christian morality standards.” (Or insert your own fun phrases inside of those quotation marks.) The question isn’t actually a question; it’s a statement that says, instead, “The culture is increasingly becoming secularized; I bet we’re going to encounter this secularization in the multiplicity of genders in our character-creation screens. How annoying and bothersome that they are imposing their beliefs on us.” This is a perfect example of a "disdain and disbelief" post.

There is a deep problem with this “disdain and disbelief” post. Rather than seeking to understand the claims of the LGBTQ community regarding gender, this Christian person has thought that he already understands their claims. But gender theorists would claim that gender is “performative,” meaning that it is something that a person acts in accordance with. This is like when Jean-Paul Sartre says in Being and Nothingness that the waiter is just “performing” at “being-a-waiter,” when, in reality, he would not have to “be a waiter” if he were already – in essence – a waiter. (This is part of a description of what Sartre calls “bad faith.”) In gender theory, particularly that of Judith Butler, the case is made that there is no “essential” feminine or masculine and that a person is a “male” or a “female” or "other," with respect to gender, based on how they disclose themselves to the world around. The claim is that gender is a performance, whilst biological sex is a physical trait.

Yet, is not a video game avatar already a performance act? If someone were to play, say, Skyrim, they could play as a male or a female, and they can pursue romantic relationships with male or female partners (within the confines that have been programmed into the game). Skyrim does not need a “third gender” or “intersex” parts in the character creator – a player can make their character look like they want them to look like. In short: no gender theory academic would suggest that video games need the very thing that this Christian disdained.

Now, let me be clear: I do not buy the popular claims that the queer academic world and gender theorists makes regarding gender. It seems to me, often, that they are simply replacing one set of performative modes of life with another set of performative modes of life, without giving a case for why those performative modes or the experienced ‘freedom’ that accompanies those modes are “better.” While I understand their reticence against Platonic "femininity" and "masculinity," it seems to me that they do not call their existential gender claims to any suitable universal authority, something which is problematic. I also find there to be an implicit benefit to capitalism tied up within the modern queer discussions on gender, something that, if I were to make a case following the notion of ‘intersectionality,’ would be deeply problematic to the LGBTQ community itself. These critiques would be another essay if I were to delve into them.

The problem is not that Christians should not critique gender theories – we ought to, since we have resources to describe sexuality in a more thorough and complex manner than secular gender theories have – but that when we critique we should critique in a manner consistent with the claims that are being made. It is useless to moan about gender theory by wondering aloud if Elder Scrolls VI or the next Mass Effect game might have multi-gender character creation options; no one in gender studies would even think about requesting that because they view gender as performative in the first place.

A Christian critique of gender would need to begin with our admission of unbiblical gender standards that we have set upon men and women ourselves first, and then an honest discussion, treating the Scriptures consistently, of what human sexuality and human sexual difference implies for our day-to-day existences. This doesn’t mean that we need to arrive at the Platonic conclusion of “feminine essences” or “masculine essences,” nor do we need to arrive at the conclusions of John Piper, questioning whether women should be policemen or not; but we will likely conclude something different than the anti-essentialist claims made by, say, Judith Butler. (And, again, there is another line of critique one could follow that involves the problem of radical individuality under a democratic-capitalist state.)

My point here is not actually about gender theories at all. The bigger point is that Christians – and Christian theologians and Christian apologists – often do not understand those who they critique in the first place. It is easier to say, for instance, that Friedrich Nietzsche is just wrong when he says “God is dead” than to admit that his claim is right, given its political-social context, and not actually reflective of a theological assertion in the first place (re: he's talking about modernity). The more atheistic claim that ought to be refuted is the one by Ludwig Feuerbach regarding man projecting himself onto God. (By the by, I just heard a great argument the other day against Feuerbach’s claim from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.)

Inarticulate critique – critique that is ignorant of the argument’s claims and grounds as well as critique that is poorly communicated – does not advance the Christian Gospel. If anything it makes the caricatures against the Christian Gospel true; it makes it easier to describe your given Christian Church as just another gathering-place for not-quite-the-Westboro-Baptist-Church types of folks.

Another example could be the way that modern Christian apologists use the terms “subjective” and “objective” to mean “opinion” and “fact” respectively, when the terms refer more accurately to modes of discourse, the discourse of language and the discourse of science, to put it really briefly. No wonder the atheist philosophers cannot take the Christians seriously – all-too-often, our Christian thinkers speak words they do not actually understand. It should be of no surprise that the words of our apologists are incommunicable with the liberal academia.

The Christian scholars who understand this problem – folks like Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Miroslav Volf, Charles Taylor, and I’ll include Tim Keller, even though he’s not an academic – are well-received when they debate and discuss their ideas in the public square. I saw a great discussion between Tim Keller and several liberal thinkers who thought of him as particularly wise, even though they disagreed, something that we cannot say regarding that debacle between Ken Ham and Bill Nye.

Inarticulate critique damages our witness because it shows that we are not willing to listen to those with whom we disagree in order to understand them before we challenge their ideas. It is not that we ought not challenge. The Christian faith makes specific claims about very contentious topics. But it is necessary that we understand the claims that are being made so that when we challenge them we can challenge in an articulate manner. Articulate critique, engaged critique, understands the stakes of a claim and challenges it from within its own system. This is part of what makes Jesus so incredible. Holding up a denarius He says: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.” To the Sadducees, He says “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God is the God of the living not of the dead.” To the man trying to justify himself, Jesus points to a good Samaritan. Jesus understands the stakes of the claims He’s being asked to make; and, instead of dismissing those arguments forthright, He jumps into the midst of the theology and philosophy underneath the argument and makes a radical claim.

That is the sort of apologetic work that we ought to do as God’s people, rather than making inarticulate claims and remarks that aren’t even representative of the claims of our opponents.

Kent Reflections XII: A Squirrel at the University of Chicago

XII. Kent Laboratory, October 5^th, 2016:

I watched a squirrel this afternoon. It was wandering around on the quad of the University of Chicago. It didn’t care much for the life of the mind, nor for the politics of the administrators; it was not worried about campuswide consolidation and liquidation of assets and funds, as though this institution were a business, nor did it care for the gentrification of the South Side. It was just a squirrel.

There is something nice in being just a squirrel. One can ignore the world around you and just focus on that satisfying little nut. Chew chew chew. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. Nut nut nut. He was afraid of a police officer, so he climbed up in a tree and gnawed his nut there. The police officer, of course, didn’t notice the little squirrel. Squirrels, after all, never face racial profiling. They are just squirrels.

I admire this little squirrel, but not for its solipsism. I admire its naturalness. How it stays natural on the quad of the University of Chicago is a little bit of amazement to me. After all, here we are in the central South Side of one of the largest cities in the country, full of concrete jungles and wastelands, full of the blasted carcasses of lost families and the hollowed-out souls of minds trapped by capitalism… and here, in this little once-upon-a-woods, the remnants of pre-Chicagoite forestland, the dream of the past lakeside, a little squirrel continues on being a squirrel, as though none of that matters. He’s quite persistent.

The trees, too, they show a persistence that amazes me. Some of them in South Kenwood and Hyde Park fly high above the rooftops of apartment buildings and condominiums, with a devil-may-care attitude saying, “We are tall, we are strong, and we can destroy you if we must.” Come a little rain, come a little thunder, and maybe they will. “At the very least,” they testify, “we will outlast you. We will outlast your manly wisdom, your supercessing teleologies, your capitalistic masterpieces, your cavernous parking garages, your systemic oppressions.”

That seems very fine to me. They are defiant, those trees. And it makes sense: there is a root of defiance in Hyde Park, albiet smothered at time by the smell of freshmen. It wafts over from Medici’s and Valois, with a hint of deephistory bound up in it. It fertilizes those roots, and the fruit is somewhere here.

I admire that defiance. Yet I am neither tree nor squirrel. I do not, in that sense, live in the future already. The always-already now is at my door, not the not-yet end of Paul’s eschatology. The natural realm sees what is in light of what has been and what will be, but I see what is in the dark of what is. Defiance, then, for me, must be more than perseverence or continuation, it must be… defiance. And that defiance must be abnormal, else it will not be taken into account.

Defiance, for a squirrel or a tree, is to be. But defiance, for a man, is to act.

Aeolus and the Epistemology of “Fake News”

There’s a scene in Ulysses in which we get a taste of early 1900’s newspaper culture. Leopold Bloom, one of the two protagonists of Ulysses, works here and is in charge of the advertisement end of the business. As is typical of James Joyce’s masterpiece the chapter is modeled after a scene from Homer’s Odyssey, this being the episode in which Odysseus looses the bag of the winds. The winds of Odysseus, wild and untamed, manifest in Bloom’s news-office as the clitter-clack of the typing and printing press, the setting and re-setting of the fonts and characters, and the boisterous bustling about of the men who work in the news-office, discussing politics, newspaper chatter, and the Roman Empire.

It should be to no one’s surprise that the political commentary of the newspaper office of Ulysses is so familiar to us, despite its distance in time. The media is a mass swirling of noises and winds, voices and churnings, ideas and non-ideas. Political commentary and social commentary are interwined and bantered about by old Latin professors and stodgy newspaper editors, and their discussion feels very disconnected from the Dublin that Bloom perceives as he wanders about the city and sees as it really is. If we pay attention to it, the newspaper office in the fictional Dublin of 1904 isn’t too different than the real “newspaper office” of our modern mass media.

While the media of our day is wrestling with itself as to the definition of “fake news,” and while the American public are particular dissatisfied with the American media system, there is an assumption governing our present discussions: that is, that the media ever existed as a legitimate source of truth. Across the political spectrum – and I speak from the views of my politically-diverse friends – there is more than just a significant distrust in “the news”; there is an incredible disgust with the untrustworthiness of that news. This reaches far deeper than the “shock” that both conservatives and liberals had upon the revelation that the Democratic National Convention had contrived against Bernie Sanders using their connections with the media powers-that-be (we all knew this anyways, right?). The voters of the Right and the Left, at the ground / local level, feel that the media do not understand their stakes and their interests, and that they only cater to their own needs. This disgusts these voters.

But what Joyce understood better than us is how the media is a money-making scheme. It is driven by advertisements, printing designs, and newspaper sales. One can only walk into our modern bookstores to get a sense of which printed matter sells and which does not: how big is the harlequin romance section? how big is the philosophy section? and, my big question, where in that bookstore would you find a copy of Cicero’s Republic?

The real question at the heart of the present “fake news crisis” – the one that the social forces of Facebook and CNN are taking very seriously – is not “What qualifies as fake or true news?” but “Why are we so surprised that the news is fake?” This is like if you met a middle-aged man who loved WWE wrestling as a child, and he was shocked when you tell him that it was all a show and a form of entertainment. The confession of ages past has been that the newspapers are not a reliable source of knowledge.

Or, to put it in a more pressing manner, newspapers (re: today, mass media) have no epistemological foundations. This is not to say that the whole journalistic enterprise is a celebration of falsehood, of course; we have always had our good journalists and our solid sources. But it is to make clear that the tacit assumption implied by many that the media is implicitly beholden to the truth is plainly unfounded. In our society, as in Joyce’s, the news is beholden to its advertisers, and what sells is what gets written. It should not be surprising that in our society, with its relativism on the Right and on the Left, that what sells is the vastly untrue and the incredibly biased.

But what makes the phenomenon of “fake news” emerge then? Are they simply a demonstration of our epistemological relativity, of the triumph of postmodernity, of the politically-contrived upsurge in unreliable and untrustworthy information? All these claims fall short, because they imply a newness to “fake news” that is deceptive and unconscious of the news media’s history. The news has always been epistemologically empty.

Instead, I would suggest that the phenomenon of “fake news” is really a symptom of the growing presence of the news media themselves. By manifesting on our devices, at our workspaces, in our home lives, the news media aim to increase their revenue through the constant bombardment of advertisement and continual presence. This has always been their goal, of course, albeit unconscious for some medias and unintentional for others. The news media, for both liberals and conservatives, have constituted themselves as mediators of truth not by making truth-claims but by becoming a religious presence. To read the news is the secular society’s form of piety and prayer, and it is the advent of technologies of presence – namely the smartphone – that enables the news media to have a shocking level of epistemological valence, despite its historic untrustworthiness.

To frame this in a different language: it is not agnosticism or atheism that are the new religions of our modern secular culture. Rather, it is the ever-present news that has become our religion, and, thus, our expected source of knowledge and truth. We are not surprised that men are deceiving us; we are appalled that our gods are deceiving us. Or, to return to Aeolus, we are appalled that the bag of winds blows in every direction, as though staking our lives upon the wind was wise in the first place.

The Reality of Evil (Matthew 2:13-23)

Originally delivered 01/01/17 at Church of the Shepherd and edited for clarity in the online medium.

Matthew 2:13-23

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,  “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: 

“A voice was heard in Ramah,    weeping and loud lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children;    she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” 

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Sermon

Good morning, Church of the Shepherd, and Happy New Year! I hope that you were able to enjoy some rest and maybe even some time with loved ones over the Christmas break. I know that Hannah, Teddy, and I enjoyed our rest.

Given that we have now entered into a new year, I thought it might be good for us to reflect a little on the year that has just passed. Based on the memes swirling around the internet, one could say that 2016 has been widely considered one of those “terrible years,” whatever that means. Often this is some sort of reference to the loss of Harambe the gorilla, or it is a reference to the various celebrities who have died this year, as some sort of kitschy-unserious that people are “mourning” the deaths of people we honestly don’t really know and honestly don’t really really care about, at least in the way one would need to care in order to really mourn.

For others who say that 2016 was a “terrible year,” some people are deeply concerned about the various political situations happening in the West, which includes a wide variety and complexity of political and cultural events that constitute, for some, a deep “terrible-ness.” What it seems that these folks are doing by labeling the year this way is something kind of like our doctrine of substitutionary atonement, in that they are imputing all of the evils of 2016 onto a number so they can be redeemed of it. That doesn’t seem to me particularly successful; after all, those political changes are still going to happen come 2017.

In the midst of these more negative versions of “that terrible year 2016,” though, Hannah and I have a really different set of experiences. For one, we (together) finished that MA program at the University. For another, we had a baby. For a third, we’ve finally begun putting the pieces of the puzzle of calling that God has handed us together into something coherent. For us, at least, 2016 was not a terrible year. In certain ways, it’s been a joyous and refreshing one.

All these experiences of 2016 aside, however, I do think that if we were look at the world as a whole and look at the various events from January of last year through yesterday, we will surely find more than enough reasons to rightly call 2016 a “terrible year.” If nothing else – if we ignore human rights abuses in North Korea, or sex slavery across the globe, and etc. – I think that the devastation that is Aleppo and the rest of Syria should give us reason to describe 2016 as “terrible.” If there has been anything that has moved our souls toward despair, challenged our faith and filled us with doubt, made us weep and cry, this year, it has surely been the videos, the photos, and the tweets emerging from those who have been and are trapped in the city of Aleppo. In the midst of this horror, our souls might have difficulty coming in prayer to the Lord of Heaven; after all, if He has not intervened through prayer already, why should He do so toward us? The cry of the human heart when confronted with such suffering and such evil is often “Where is God?”

We are in a new situation when confronted with the problem of evil in these days, just like those who lived in the 1960’s experienced evil in a new manner with the broadcasting of the fighting in the Vietnam War. For us, we have the ability to see the direct impact of evil upon the everyday Syrian person, as they upload videos and images directly from their phones to the internet, and we, on our phones, see and experience immediately their fear, their terror, their sorrows. We experience, vicariously, direct and unveiled evil perpetrated by human beings on each other.

When confronted with the reality of evil, as Christians we have the temptation to waive it, to say, “Ah, but all this shall be made well” in order to avoid the discomfort of it. We all do this in many ways – on the conservative end of the Church, believers faced with the real suffering of black brothers and sisters will waive it by saying “All lives matter.” On the liberal end of the Church, believers faced with the real suffering of the unborn will waive it by saying “Abortion is a civil right.” On both ends of the Church, believers faced with the real suffering of Aleppo recently waived it and said “Thank God Christmas is coming soon, so I can think about better and more positive things.” And while it is true – and a very central truth – that all the evils of this world shall be triumphed over and that all the wrongs shall be made right – Christ won all this on the Cross –still, in our time, now, before His return, there is real evil affecting real people right now.

We cannot afford to waive evil, to make light of its impact, to ignore its presence in our world. We cannot afford to turn our eyes away from it because it is too much for us to bear. It is for this reason that we will turn to the passage we heard earlier. This story is one that directly follows the Christmas story, and it is one in which the reality of evil makes a real impact in the little town of Bethlehem. In this passage we will wrestle with the presence of real evil in the middle of the escape-to-Egypt narrative and what it means that in the midst of God’s plan to save His people, something absolutely horrible happens. With that said, let us pray.

            Oh Lord. God of Heaven and of Earth. Come.

            Oh Lord. Spirit of the Most High. Come.

            Oh Lord. Jesus the Suffering Servant. Come.

            Have mercy on us.

In our passage this morning, we have two different stories that coincide. One story, focusing on the Holy Family, follows Joseph as he receives a message from God to leave Bethlehem and go to Egypt and then to return following the death of Herod the Great. In the other story, we see Herod’s response to the Wise Men’s disobedience. In the section immediately before this one, we learn that the Wise Men had gone to Herod originally to inform him about the star and the child who would be king, not realizing that Herod would find this unwelcome news. Afterwards, they are directed by God, after leaving their gifts for the child, to leave in another direction and not return to see Herod. Herod, of course, eventually figures out that these Wise Men avoided him on their way back east, and in rage he kills the children of Bethlehem in order to rid himself of this new ‘king of the Jews.’

I want to draw our attention to the structure of this story, because I think that it is significant for how we are to read it. Matthew uses a Greek rhetorical structure called a “chiasm” in which the central point of a story is the one in-between two or more parallel structures. The chiasm in this passage is a simple A-B-A structure, where the “A” parts are the story of the Holy Family going to and leaving Egypt – highlighted by the repeated words of the angel “Rise, take the child and his mother…” – and the “B” part is Herod responding to the message of the Wise Men in the middle. What Matthew’s audience would have known upon hearing this story, then, is that the most importance piece of information here is the part in which Herod slaughters the children of Bethlehem. That is what Matthew, in using this rhetorical structure, is drawing our attention to.

Yet I do not think that this is how we often think regarding this passage. It is surprisingly easy to overlook it or to read this story in some unengaged fashion: “Ah, Joseph flees to Egypt, Joseph returns from Egypt, and during that time Herod kills some children.” Let us remind ourselves what is happening here: a man who has been given the title “king” by the Roman government, whose concern should be for the welfare of his people, hears that the prophesied king – the Messiah – has been born in Bethlehem. This ought to be good news. But he is so concerned for his continued lineage and power, his title given him by Rome, that he murders every child under the age of two in that village and the surrounding area. In our day and age, this would be like if a Democratic state representative who was afraid about not being elected in the next cycle decided to murder all the Republican voters in Woodlawn. To us, this is clearly ridiculous: how could a Republican in Woodlawn pose a threat to a Democrat running for office in Chicago? Why does he feel the need to murder these people?

Here is a man who loves his power and his position of power so much that he is willing to kill an entire village’s worth of babies and children in order to know that he has killed the one who is prophesied to take his place. Not only that, but get this! this is a man who believes prophecy enough to think that the Wise Men’s words are true and that this child-king truly is a threat to his power, and yet who also believes that he can intercept and prevent God’s plan through senseless violence. This is a man whose greatest achievement of his day was the expansion of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and yet this is a man who in the land of Judah repeats the very same evil of the ancient Pharaoh from the Book of Exodus, an act that the Jews identified as one of the chief representations of the work of Satan. In an ironic turn of events, Joseph and his family must flee to the land of Pharaoh to escape the Pharaonic evil that exists in the land of God’s people. All is not well, here.

What are our expectations when we hear a story like this one? Or when a preacher begins to exposit this sort of story? Like I mentioned in the intro, I think that our usual response to this sort of evil is to waive it, to placate, to turn our eyes away from thinking about the pure evil that this story brings to our attention. Even biblical commentators tend to go about this way, leading to some focusing on the typological aspects – this happened so that Jesus could be called a “prophet like Moses,” this happened so that Jesus could be sent to Egypt, etc. etc. Our tendency, when faced with this sort of evil, is to attempt to reason with it, to make sense of it, to rationalize it.

Yet Matthew’s commentary on this event does not give us hope for this sort of interpretation, like we would desire. There is no “but it was all-right because you know that babies go to heaven,” or “it all turned for the good.” No, this story records an absolutely unnecessary evil. Herod the Great will die in his own due time with no repayment for these crimes, no rebuke from the Roman authorities, no justice. Matthew doesn’t even help us out with what possible justice might look like for Herod. Wouldn’t it have been nice, if he had added those verses from Isaiah and Ezekiel describing the devil in hell? You might not even believe in hell, and yet the thought of Herod the Great, the murderer of babies, being tormented in hell – if we’re honest with ourselves – is a satisfying thought, to say the least.

What Matthew does add to the narrative, however, is a little quote from the book of Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Mt. 2:18)

There is no “starry-eyed” optimism in this word of prophecy. Rachel, the archetype and representative of the mothers of Israel, is weeping and weeping and weeping, and she refuses to be comforted. Matthew does not tell us whether she should be comforted or whether she will be comforted. Strangely enough, Matthew doesn’t even tell us anything more regarding the massacre of the innocents. He narrates it in the midst of the Christ-going-to-Egypt story, tags it with this prophecy, and then he leaves it, never mentioning it again.

What is the significance, then, of the deaths of a village worth of children at the hands of a greedy, power-hungry political figure in light of the overarching Gospel narrative? Why does Matthew take the time to share with us this bit of story, link it to OT prophecy, and tie it in with the broader narrative of Christ’s journey to and back from Egypt? Why include it at all? What is the Holy Spirit communicating to us here?

I wonder if the best way to deal with this passage is for us to consider another Gospel passage, this time from the Gospel of John, the one in which Jesus Himself weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. In John 11 we have already seen that Jesus knows that Lazarus is going to die, and He knows also that He bring Lazarus back from the dead. Jesus makes this explicit in 11:4. Yet still, when Jesus arrives on the scene, and He sees the weeping Mary and all the gathered mourners, the Scripture reads “He was deeply moved in His Spirit and greatly troubled.” Jesus asks, “Where have you laid him?” The mourners point the way, and we hear that incredible and well-known verse in John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”

In the verses that follow, we hear the attempts of the Jews around him to make theological sense of this weeping. Some say “See how He loved him!” but others say “Could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” Famously, of course, Jesus then raises Lazarus from the dead.

But what should we make of Jesus weeping? And in a similar vein, what should we make of this Jeremiah prophecy “Rachel weeping for her children,” refusing to be comforted? In the middle of Jesus’ exile from the land of Judah, the personified “Rachel” weeps and refuses to be comforted; at the very beginning of Jesus’ triumphal procession to Jerusalem, Jesus Himself weeps. Jesus who holds the power over death, Jesus who will raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus who gives value and dignity to human death by promising us entrance into His Kingdom, this Jesus is the God who weeps over the death of man.

This tells us that the reality of evil is not insignificant in the eyes of the Lord. We suffer in our culture of avoiding judgment and being nice from a lack of seeing how seriously God takes the work of evil in our midst. And then for those who do take it seriously, all-too-often they take it seriously in a manner that is inconsistent with God’s nature – you know, that typical hellfire-and-brimstone sort of person. In our culture, we either think that God is permissive and okay-with-everything and He’s just chill, or that God is wrathful, indignant, and angry. But Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus tells us something different about God.

And Matthew’s Spirit-inspired inclusion of the massacre of the innocents tells us something too. God sees the reality of evil. He sees it every day. He does not need Twitter or Facebook or The New York Times to see the evil done both in the plain light of day and in secret, on the streets of Aleppo or in darker alleys of Chicago. He does not need National Geographic reporters or CNN to see the ways that people do wicked things for the sake of their own greed and power. He does not need a stethoscope to hear the condition of our hearts, wherein we do the same things – to be sure, on a smaller scale – when we advance our own greed and power at the expense of others in our own contexts.

There’s this beautiful but horrifying song by Sufjan Stevens on the Illinois album about the mass-murderer John Wayne Gacy, Jr., who resided somewhere on the North Side of the city. After recounting in song the narrative of this man, who murdered 33 people, wrestling with the question that Sufjan found repeated over and over again in his research “What was it that made this man this way?”, Sufjan sings – and this is a chilling line – “And on my best behavior I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.”

What is the significance, then, of the massacre of the innocents? What does it mean for us? Why should we hear this story? Why does Matthew present it to us? I am going to posit that this story has two things to tell us:

The First, is that the presence of real evil here in the early parts of Matthew sets the stage for the work that Jesus is going to do. Herod has done something truly, incredibly terrible, and we should be disgusted. But we should not be surprised. This is the “normal” mode of life here on planet Earth, the reality of evil is our reality. You and I do not kill babies, but we hold within us the same greed and power-hungry-ness that results, in the long run, in the real deaths of real people. This “normal” life, one in which death and destruction dominate our newsfeeds and televisions, is the one that Jesus came to declare war upon. Matthew shares with us through this narrative an image of who the real enemy is, and, in so doing, he tells us what is at stake for Jesus to come incarnate to the earth. Jesus’ mission is to eliminate death itself.

But the Second point, and I think this is just as important if not more, is that the reality of evil is to be lamented. The personification of Rachel is not wrong in weeping and refusing to be comforted. What is actually wrong is how hardened we have allowed ourselves to become toward real suffering and real pain. After all, Jesus, again, knowing well His power and His triumph, weeps over real suffering and real pain. He weeps over the way that Death has entered into Lazarus and his family’s lives. So I think that Matthew has described the narrative in this way so that we might pay attention to something that is worth lamenting. It is worthwhile to weep over children who are being slaughtered for the sake of a man’s power.

In fact, I would add, it would have been wrong if nobody had lamented these children, right? The weeping of Rachel, of the mothers of Bethlehem, does not make the real evil right – it doesn’t correct the wrong done – but it identifies the dead children as having value and purpose, and says, of their sudden deaths, “This is not right.” Lament does not make wrong things right, but it does grant dignity to those who have been wronged. To weep and weep for the children of Bethlehem is to say to the world “This is not right, this is not as it should be. There must be a better world than this.” Or, to put it the way Dr. Soong-Chan Rah does: “Lament is important truth telling.”

It is not enough for us to confess, in a blasé manner, that there is something wrong with the world and that the reality of evil is our reality, we must also participate in God’s lament for that reality. Matthew tells us of the death of children not just to set up the stakes of Christ’s work on earth, but also so we, alongside Rachel, can lament those who would have otherwise been unheard, unremembered, buried in the sea of atrocities that have occurred in our reality of evil since. When we lament, we join God in His emotional plea for our world to be reconciled to Him. We join with saying with God “This is not right.”

Lament, as I’ve said in the past, is not something that we do very well in the American church, so my challenge for us this morning is a very specific, small challenge. That challenge is something like this: When you hear / listen / watch / experience the reality of evil, as we so often do in our day and time, do not turn away from it or waive it off. Instead, respond with lamentation in prayer.

In some of these situations we can be the people who bring life to a world of death – such as when you pass a person in need of cash to catch a bus – but that is not always true. A lot of the time, you’ll be experiencing the reality of evil at a large distance, through the T.V., through your phone, through the internet, and maybe there isn’t anything you can do. But resist the temptation of fatalism that says “I cannot do anything, why should I pay attention?” My challenge to you is to mourn the evils that you see, cry and weep for them – or if you find crying and weeping hard like I do, pray for them – instead of passing on them. Be willing to open your heart to the pain of others, to feel their fears and concerns and pains.

This is not an easy thing to do, especially given the busyness of a community of people in Chicago. I recommend a practice like breath prayer for learning how to lament well in the midst of your busyness (and if you don’t know what breath prayer is, please ask me after service). But it is my sense that the practice of lament is only going to be increasingly important for us as a people as we move further into the age of social media.

You might ask: What are the benefits of lament? There’s another sermon hiding in that question. For today, all I will say is this: Jesus, the Living One, the Firstborn from the Dead, lamented a man whom He knew He would raise to life. He cries over human death and suffering, and I believe He welcomes us into joining Him in that lament.