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We in the United States are now the New Rome, the Empire, living gloriously and well The One Hundred and Eighty Fifth
Commencement
May 21, 2004 By Daniel C. Maguire
My next keynoter is Robert Heilbroner, and he invites us to look behind the veils of our respectability and see that there is a barbarism hidden beneath the superficial amenities of life. In a similar vein, Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish theologian, cited, "The secret obscenity, the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference." I turn next to Mahatma Gandhi who was asked one time, "What do you think of Western Civilization?" And he replied, "That would be a great idea!" My next keynoter is Bernadette Devlin, an Irish representative to the British Parliament. She was asked in New York on a television show, "There are 40 million Irish Americans in this country, do you think they understand Irish politics?" And she replied with a twinkle, "Oh my Lord no, they don't even understand American politics." My next keynoter is Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn said, "One third of our military budget would provide water and sanitation facilities for the billion people worldwide who have none. Let us be a more modest nation. The modest nations of the world don't face the threat of terrorism. Let us pull back from being a military superpower and become a humanitarian superpower. Then we, and everyone else will be more secure." Our final keynoter is my son Danny who died at age ten of a disease known as Hunter's Syndrome, he was profoundly retarded. I remember the day I took him to visit the beautiful lagoon off Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. I had been driving past it every day going to school, usually thinking serious thoughts, but not looking. I took Danny there one day; he looked and saw the beautiful mallard ducks and birds of every kind and he grabbed my leg and shouted , "Daddy, look!" I see that as Danny's valedictory address to the world, the plea he left to us who are more retarded than he. We don't look. We don't look at this generous earth that has been given to us, an earth that we are progressively wrecking. We don't look at the hungry of the world. So I am asking you graduates to harken to Danny's gentle mandate, and let's look, even when it hurts. Let us look, first of all, at the nation that you have chosen as your workplace and mission field. And then let us look, with hope, at the biblical resources you have to handle and face and serve this nation. You see, I believe that nations, like persons, have dominant personality types. For example, if you have a neighbor and this neighbor is a nice enough sort of fellow to you, moving your garbage bins when you are not around and things like that. But you also know that he had broken his wife's jaw twice and was fired from work for fighting. You realize the dominant personality, whatever redemptive things may also be there, is violent. Well, nations also have dominant personalities. So let's move toward seeing what the dominant personality type of this nation is, this nation so awash in self-praise, and idolatrous, unbiblical flag waving. Let us use some comparisons to see first of all what this nation is not. We'll begin with this one. A colleague of mine, Geling Shang mentioned at a meeting that in the People's Republic of China they have started to put free condoms in motel drawers. When he said that, I kept a straight face and said, "We don't do that, we put Bibles there." I continued, "It's our theory that if a couple come there to have sex and see the Bible, they will read that instead." He kept a straight face and said, "Have you any data?" I said, "We do indeed. We have the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies in the Western world, we do." So obviously you couldn't put condoms next to the shampoo and hand cream in motel drawers in this puritanical theocratic nation, however realistic it might be So are we like China? No, no, we're not like that. Let's go to Sweden. Sweden lives in a dangerous part of town, much more threatening than where we live. Sweden has not been in a war for 200 years. Their military establishment is entirely based on purely defensive weaponry that could threaten no one. Clearly, we're not like that. Let us go to Costa Rica. In 1948 they decided (and they're living in a tough neighborhood) they didn't need an army, just a police force. And they have done quite well for sixty years without it. Clearly, we're not like that Let's go back to Sweden where law requires every corporation to give eighteen months of paid parental leave upon the birth of a baby, a leave that can be pro-rated over the first eight years of the child's life. We're certainly not like that. Let us go to France, that nation that was so friendly to us in the past, telling us not to cross the world and invade Vietnam; that it would be a quagmire costing us much in life and fortune. Then again, they told us not to invade Iraq, that it too would be a quagmire costing us great life and fortune. Friendly advice, unheeded. France provides free childcare for all toilet-trained children. And we are definitely not like that. In fact, in the United States, childcare workers receive .09 cents an hour less than parking lot attendants. In France also, single mothers get government subsidies for the first three years of the child's life. We're not like that. Let us go to Denmark where there's free dental care for all children until the age of 18. It's during those years you either get a healthy mouth, the gateway to all of your health systems, or it never happens. Again, we're not like that. They have universal health care in all of the Scandinavian countries. Everything is free unless you can afford a co-pay and it only takes 6.5% of their gross domestic product whereas as we spend 14% and leave 40-some million uncovered. So we're not like those Scandinavian countries. European countries guarantee four to six weeks of vacation for all persons, mandated by law. They are very family-friendly, and we're not like that. And finally, a United Nations survey of 152 nations found the United States was only one of six with no national policy of paid maternity leave. So we're not like that 146 nations who have mandatory, paid maternal leave. Our self-praise, to put it mildly, is premature and self-serving and thoughtless. So what must we do? What we must do is an examination of conscience. An essential part of every ministry to obey the call of Jeremiah 3:12: "acknowledge your guilt." When you are the most powerful nation on the planet it's even more important that we do not shy away from self-critique or bury ourselves in self-congratulation, ignoring the biblical mandate to examine our consciences. So, what are we? Let's look at us. Well, the first thing we are is rich. For example, I could check into the Sheraton yesterday and take water out of the tap and realize it wouldn't kill me. Most of the people in the world don't have safe water. . They say if a pure glass of water were the cure for AIDS, most of the people on the planet would not have access to it. When we go into our food markets, the counters are overflowing. For Bible-readers, that ought to sound an alert. We are rich, and what does the Bible say? "Woe to you rich." "Rich" in the Bible means secure. If you know today that on this date next year, you are confident you'll be able to have supper, then in Bible terms you are rich. Such security is rare in the history of humanity, and we have it. The biblical psychological insight is that economic security has a tendency to make your conscience cold, so cold and impenetrable that it becomes easier "to get a camel through the eye of a needle" than to get you to feel the pain of God's poor throughout the planet. And there is more. On top of everything else, we're an empire. And that fact also, if you're a Bible reader, should get your attention immediately. Jesus was crucified by an empire. With all deference to Mel Gibson, He was not killed so that his suffering would expiate for our sins, a very bad piece of theology that would turn God into a sadistic monster who would feel he had to torture his son to death in order to make up for sins of other people. No, Jesus was crucified as a rebel against empire. He was part of the rebellious communities of Judea and Galilee where crucifixion was the regular Roman penalty for rebellion. Their crops were stolen. Tribute to Caesar meant your grain was taken from your barn, your animals were taken away from you by Caesar so that the people in the empire could live gloriously and well. We in the United States are really now the New Rome, the Empire, living gloriously and well. We are not in Jesus territory, Judea and Galilee, which were raped by Imperial Rome. Jesus fought the likes of us, and when you do that, the lesson is, you get crucified. Is it unfair to call the United States an empire? What an empire does is that it uses its military and economic power to control weaker peoples for its own interests. Let's take a look at what we are up to. Right now, today, we have 800 military installations around the world. We have major bases in 50 different nations, and if they won't let us in, we tell them we'll boycott them right out of our market and so they do let us in. And Americans just take that for granted. How would we feel if Indonesia opened a naval station in Florida? Or Russia an air station in Michigan? Wouldn't we say, "What in the world is this all about?" Yet we do this as though it were our birthright given us by God. Since 1945 we have overturned 25 governments but would take a very dim view of it if any government or any people tried to overturn ours. What we are doing is what empires do., convinced as all empires are that might makes right. The poignant words of Deuteronomy cry out to us, words put into the mouth of God: "I have set before you life, and I have set before you death. And I have begged you to choose life for the sake of your children." And let us turn also to the Gospel which says, "Where your treasure is, there your heart follows." In other words, show me your national budget and I will tell you what you are, I will tell you what you truly treasure and I'll tell you where your heart really is. Let us look at the military budget and think of what we are doing. You won't hear about this in the presidential debates, from either side, because the military budget is our sacred idol. We are spending $31 million an hour, 24-hours a day on military power, $10 thousand dollars a second. Even people who were in the Reagan administration said after the collapse of the Soviet Union that we could get by with half of that amount. I'll give one example of our profligate and sinful military madness. Let me tell you about the Kitty Hawk. The Kitty Hawk is a carrier. Is it impressive? Oh, my! It's almost three football fields long, twenty stories high, has six thousand people on board, 70 airplanes, and it is not lonely. It has in its entourage two submarines, three frigates, a couple of destroyers, a massive group of people. What a stupendous display of kill power! How many of these carrier battle groups do we have? Thirteen. How many does the entire rest of the world have? Zero. That's almost like having the greatest team in the world and no opponents. It's embarrassing. But what criminal waste! Suppose we decided to dare do without one of these carrier battle groups. What could we do with that money that would point it toward life and not toward death? I'll give some examples. We could double the salaries of all of the elementary and high school teachers, the perennial orphans of our national conscience. If we could then get rid of a few more of these behemoths and we could take that money and buy some munitions from the military. They have munitions to spare. And what we will do is, we will use those munitions to blow up every inferior school building in the United States of America. We'll have contests. The girl that writes the best essay gets to push that handle down and watch the building crumble; and in its place we'll build something beautiful, something worthy of our children. Why with a mere $40 billion dollars a year-what it costs to wage war for five months in Iraq, we could finance all public college and university education, making it all free to qualified students. A G.I Bill of Rights for all citizens. Totally free. (For every dollar spent on the G.I. Bill after World War Ii, the government got a return of almost seven dollars!) We were supposedly made in the image and likeness of God, but what images are we following? Not the image of God, not the image of peace. We could take another few million dollars an hour from military uselessness and change our trains. American trains cannot even stay on the track, which is where you want to be if you're a train. And when they're on a track they don't go anywhere, they are so slow. You have to go to Europe, to Japan to see a real train. We invented, in fact, the magnetic levitation train. We invented the technology, the Japanese perfected it and they tested it going at 320 miles an hour. (I actually think that's too fast. You couldn't even see the cows. You'll say, "Was that a cow? No, I think it was Chicago.") We could then take more of those wasted military dollars and end hunger and thirst on the earth. That would fight terrorism. People don't crash airplanes and send suicide bombers after a nation bent on ending illiteracy, hunger, and thirst. Jeremiah 23 might have been talking to the American Empire when he said: "Their course is evil and their might is not right" That language applies to any empire and we are an empire placing our trust in weaponry and not in the compassion that builds peace. And there is another thing about the American character I must add here. Our imperial thrust has a very distinctly religious tone which makes it the business of religious and theological people. Our nation dares to believe that we were established by God. I'll give you one example. There was a man named George S. Phillips in Ohio, shortly after the Civil War--not that long ago-who wrote a book called . The American Republic and Human Liberty Foreshadowed in Scripture. In other words, the Bible was written to announce the coming of the United States of America! Phillips said God's Old Testament promise to found a nation fully obedient to Him was fulfilled when He [God] established the United States! Phillips was a remarkably imaginative exegete, the likes of which you graduates have not seen in your Bible courses.. He said that in the scripture, Isaiah and Daniel clearly foretold the day and the hour of the Declaration of Independence! Isaiah predicted also the Boston Tea Party and even the coming of Chinese immigrants to California! (which he probably didn't like at all). Phillips roared on to this conclusion. He said the United States is to fill the earth, so to occupy the place of government in the world, as to leave room for no other government! Was Phillips a kook. No. He was mainstream. In fact, he has been criticized for his lack of originality and his plagiarism. These thoughts were not heretical to the American tradition. They are still there, though today in different language. We no longer speak like Warren Harding did when he said that The United States must go forth into the world like Jesus Christ, not confining ourselves to the Holy Land, ( in his view, the United States), but spreading our gospel all over the world. We don't talk that way now. Now the code name for our religious mission is "democracy," the code name is "freedom." But the real name is "empire." I want to tell you graduates that there is an illness waiting for you outside in your ministry. And an illness that I hope you will be able to cure with your teaching, preaching, writing, and ministry. This illness is known as, from this day forward, ICS: Imperial Comfort Syndrome. When you are living in an extremely advantaged imperial situation as we are in the United States, we become very comfortable. This particular illness does not result in fever or in cold chills. It's symptoms are tepidity and a dull, crippling kind of depression. It causes such things as this: in our last elections two years ago, 6o% of eligible American voters didn't even show up. That is precisely ICS: Imperial Comfort Syndrome. For the diagnosis of it, I would take you to Revelations 3:15. The author puts these words into the mouth of God. Listen to them. "I know all your ways. You are neither hot nor cold. How I wish you were either hot or cold. But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth... Hear, you who have ears to hear, what the Spirit says to the churches." So what hope do I bring to you and to our graduates, to myself? I go to the scriptures, I go to the Bible. And I go directly to the prophets, the prophets of Israel and of early Christianity. Remember the prophets were not people who purveyed information. They didn't come with flowcharts and sheets of data. Their mission was a revolution in affect. What they were trying to do, and it's your mission, and it's your ministry, they were trying to turn hearts of stone into hearts of feeling flesh. They were trying to make us red hot, not lukewarm, red hot in our passion for justice. So let me touch on just a few things that are part of that infinitely rich, prophetic tradition because your ministries will be prophetic or you will merely be engaged in dispensing analgesics. The first and most powerful concept in scripture, I believe, is the Hebrew Tsedaqah, usually terribly translated "righteousness," better translated "justice." But it's almost too rich a word for anything we have in English. You will sometimes see in the New York Times a Jewish woman dies. "Eleanor Silverstein died, her life was marked by Tsedaqah." There is no higher compliment in the Jewish community. And what is Tsedaqah? I found out its strength one time when I traveled from New York to Washington on a train with an old Rabbi who was just a charming, delightful person. We had a wonderful conversation about all the goods and evils of the earth. And as I left, I said, "Sir, you have in your heart the true Tsedaqah." And he winced. And I wondered about that wince...what's that about? And I realized the more I studied Tsedaqah that what I said to him was, "Sir, you have beating in your chest the heart of God." And he said, "Too much, too much." That's the power of the word. Tsedaqah is a demanding concept and challenge. It has a double bias built into it. It's very biased in favor of the poor. Our God, says Judith, is a God of the poor, the desperate, the hopeless, and the sick. What strange credentials for a respectable God! And it has a next bias against the rich, against the comfortable. So what Tsedaqah says is take Deuteronomy 15:4 seriously, it's our mandate: "There shall be no poor among you." The good news is that there is a payload. Scripture is very practical. Isaiah 32:17, the payload says that if you plant Tsedaqah you will finally have Shalom, peace. You won't get it any other way. Symbols tell the tale. Tsedaqah in Amos 5:23 is compared to a roaring mountain stream. I never knew what that meant until I was out speaking to Lutheran pastors one time in Colorado. I went up the mountain one day, and as you go up the mountain, you begin to hear one of those streams, copiously fed by the glaciers above and the snows of the winter. And as you get close, it's scary, and you hear this roar and thunder as you get very close, you see the spumes spashing up against rocks, tons of water that will eventually defeat every one of those rocks. And as you get right beside it, you back off. One day during that week in Colorado, one of the Lutheran pastors was trying to take a picture of his wife on a bridge over this torrent and he slipped and fell in. Fortunately he was thrown against a flat rock and enough of us were there to get ropes on him or he would have stayed there for the rest of his short life. So what is this biblical notion of justice as a roaring mountain torrent? We in the United States have a rather bland image of justice as a blindfolded lady. A realist might ask.: What is a lady in a sexist society to be doing, running around blindfolded and then hoping that those scales will balance perfectly? Amos would smile and say, "That will never do, that's much too naive." So let's look at Amos's symbol of biblical justice. First of all, it's water, and water gives life. That's a great start. But it's water with a mission, and the mission is to sweep away all the obstacles to peace, and all the causes of poverty on planet earth. That's the power of Tsedaqah, sweeping up everything it touches, even Lutheran pastors. Its life-giving goal is the end of poverty and the reign of Shalom upon the earth. My second message from the prophets that I commend to you is tears. Tears. If your ministry produces no tears, you have failed. Tears, after all, are very Christic. In that beautiful text, Jesus looked at the city, and he wept, heartbroken over the fact that we do not know the things that make for peace.. Jeremiah said unless your eyes run with tears you will come to a terrible ruin. I was amazed, as a young Catholic boy, when I saw on the back of a missal a prayer for the gift of tears. And it said, "Oh God, strike into the duritiam, the hardness of my heart and bring forth a saving flood of tears." And as a little boy, I thought, "Who wants tears, when you grow up you don't have them anymore, especially if you are a man?" And that precisely is the problem. If you are without tears, it is a tragedy. You are not Christic. You are not Christian. Jesus wept. He looked at that city and said, "If only you knew the things that make for your peace, but you don't." And he broke down sobbing. Let us update that text. Let us have Jesus say, "America, America, if only you knew the things that make for your peace, if only you could see that the answer is not in your weaponry. If only I could, like a mother hen, wrap my wings around you, wings of justice and peace and compassion, if you could use your great talent and wealth to work to end world hunger, world thirst, world illiteracy, no one would hate you, you would know Shalom." That's the promise of Isaiah 32:17. Then you could burn those chariots in a holy fire and you would be secure. The next lesson from the prophets is the virtue of anger. Anger has a bad name with us, but I would recommend for all of your churches a quote from St. John Chrysostom, who put it this way, he said "Whoever is not angry when there is cause for anger, sins." Thomas Aquinas was fascinated with that text. Thomas looked at scripture, and he thought, "Those prophets, including Jesus, were angry." When Jesus tore into the temple and knocked over tables and everything else, he was, to say the least, angry. Prophetic language, often intemperate, pulses with anger. These people were mad. And Thomas concluded, therefore, anger is obviously a virtue. But then when he looked in the list of virtues in the entire Christian world, he said, "This virtue .manet innominata. This virtue remains unnamed. And why is anger a virtue? Thomas said, quia respicit bonum justitiae, because it looks to the good of justice. And if you can be un-angry in the presence of atrocious, cruel injustice, in the presence of racism, militarism, sexism, heterosexism...if none of this stirs you to anger, you love justice too little. Next the prophets call us to courage, something they had in spades. They needed it. History is splattered with prophetic blood. Isaiah was sawed in half, Jeremiah stoned to death, Jesus crucified, Martin Luther King shot. Courage is the hallmark of prophcey. And finally in this prophetic listing, I come to laughter. You'll say, "Where did you find laughter among the prophets? They were not comedians." There was laughter there. Remember the story of Jesus coming in on Palm Sunday, a story which we totally misunderstood? . Going in on an old donkey that they had to borrow and having the people saying "This is our king." What a ridiculous scene. That was spoofery and rich irony worthy of Michael Moore. And this spoofery was mocking Caesar. And the people knew it. And Caesar knew it. And you don't mock Caesar, or Caesar crucifies you. And he did. Laughter is essential or our prophecy will simply burn out. Chesterton, the English writer, put it this way. He said that if you want to be serious, be serious about your necktie. But in really important matters, like death, sex and religion, there will be mirth or there will be madness. After all, in the biblical view, ecstasy is our destiny, and laughter is a sweet and essential form of ecstasy. Next, I will quote my mother, whom we all called Cassie. (What kind of an Irishman would I be if I didn't quote my mother!) Cassie is the source of much of whatever wisdom I have, she with her four years of schooling and a life full of learning. One of her philosophies was this: in any human endeavor, whether it's a parish, a school, a business, or professional office, where there is no fun the situation corrodes, it deteriorates, it dehumanizes. I visited one time when she was in her nineties. My priest brother Joe was taking care of her, and I came to relieve him so he could go on vacation. I had just come from a theological conference, and I was excited. I began telling my brother Joe about that impressive speakers who were there, what this was said, what that one said, etc. Cassie sat there on the couch listening to the two of us emoting about the conference. And after ten minutes the indicting question came from the couch, "Was there fun at that conference?" In Cassie's view, if there was no fun, it was hopeless. And here I am twenty-five years later, and I haven't the slightest idea what the conference was about, but I'm still quoting Cassie and commending her wisdom to you.. And very, very finally I turn to my favorite poem (with commentary) which makes the same point Cassie made and the same point Chesterton made: The Fiddler of Dooney. The Fiddler begins. When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
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Bangor
Theological Seminary
I
would like to begin with a certain number of
keynoters and tone setters. The first is John
Dewey, the philosopher. John Dewey posed a
question that was almost too simple to ask.
He said, "What would you think of a United
States senator who right before a big vote
called his personal broker and asked how this
vote would affect his personal portfolio and
the senator then voted accordingly?" So
Dewey said, "What about the morals of
that Senator?" And we all know the answer.
He or she is totally corrupt. But then he moved
one step further and said, "Any citizen
who votes for the same reason is equally corrupt
because voting is an act of citizenship, a
commitment to the common good, not an act of
personal acquisition." What does that
say about our society which only seems to ask
if they personally were better off four years
ago As Robert Bellah said, "The term 'private
citizen' is an oxymoron. Voting is a communitarian
act of social justice, not an exercise in greed.
My second keynoter is Gerd Theissen the scripture
scholar. He said we should give up the search
for the missing link between apes and true
humanity. Give that up, he said. We are the
missing link. This could not be true humanity.
True humanity could not live comfortably and
sleep well when 1.3 billion persons are in
hunger on planet earth, 70% of them, interestingly,
women.