Say no!

This Sunday is the last service in our series based on Mahatma Gandhi's Seven Blunders of the World. The last blunder is “Politics without Principle.” Allow me to share a personal memory. Although it is distant in time, space, culture and political system, I believe it is relevant.
    Just days after I submitted my application to seminary in 1984, I was picked up from my high school class by two secret policemen for interrogation. Soon I realized that they were not after dissuading me from following my call. They wanted to turn me into their informer, someone whom they could assign to spying on my future fellow seminarians, teachers, and later on, my future colleagues in ministry, and even active lay leaders of the church...
    I was not at all interested or frightened enough to become their spy, and so they tried all different tricks, they were sweet and they were nasty, they promised things and hinted at some blurred dark threats (fuzzy threats are always more “effective”), they tried to trick me and they tried to blackmail me. And all that time in my mind I sang to myself that old yet aptly appropriate spiritual/blues “Say no to the Devil, SAY NO!”
    Thankfully, after several more unpleasant interrogations, they gave up. I was about 18 at that time, but I heard the call to be a pastor and not a snitch. Those were my first early, direct, practical lessons on keeping my integrity. Soon afterwards I read with appreciation and understanding a theoretical essay “The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel. The essay analyzed an abusive totalitarian system of morally corrupted and morally corrupting power. And he outlined strategies of new, non-political politics rooted in what he so nicely called “Life in Truth.”
    We do not live any longer in the bipolar world of the late 70s and early 80s. Strangely, as the world became more complicated, the borderline between right and wrong grew more blurred and less certain; “living in truth” is not any easier. Yet, whenever I get disgusted with politics, or feel betrayed by politicians, or feel powerless in making this world a little better place (quite often recently), I remember that the power of the powerless is real and it always starts at the ground level, with me, with us, with my and our integrity, with us living in truth.

And here is a snapshot from my personal Samizdat copy of The Power of the Powerless in Czech. It was typed by several of my friends in the 80s using carbon paper and making 15 copies at a time. This is a part from the end of the essay, Havel quotes Martin Heidegger and writes about a need for new form of “existential revolution” and expresses his hope in moral reconstruction of the post-industrialized society. After he, almost miraculously, became the Czech president, he tried and failed to make this dream a reality.
I still think that this need for moral, existential transformation of politics and social life is still present, even more so now at the beginning of XXI. century than in the last quarter of the XX. century.

Divine Shopping List

Would you like to see a three thousand year old religious shopping list? In translation it looks something like this:

• A ewe as a noble offering,
• a dove as a noble offering,
• a ewe as a noble offering.
• Kidneys and liver of a bull and a ram for El.
• A cow for Divine-ones,
• Thukamuns and Shanims - a ewe,
• Reshef - a ewe as a holocaust and a peace offering.
• Two ewes for Divine-one,
• a bull and a ram for Divine-ones,
• a cow for Divine-ones. Baal - a ram,
• Athtart - a ram,
• Thhukamuns and Shanims - a ram,
• Anat - a ram,
• Reshef - a ram.... 

And I would not bother you any longer; this particular cuneiform tablet with a list of sacrifices continues on and on. And there are many such lists known from all over the Ancient Near East. When I worked on my dissertation my wife jokingly called them divine shopping lists. I admit that very few people can get excited about texts like this. But all of us can learn something interesting and important from them about the origins and nature of our own religion.
    These ancient temple sacrifices were not only religious rituals, they also played an important social function. Hardly anyone can imagine that the gods of Ugarit (in this particular polytheistic example) or YHWH in Jerusalem with similar feasts, could possibly consume all that meat even if they were helped by all the temple priests and clergy. In a Mediterranean climate and without refrigeration those mountains of meat had to be consumed fast. Social hierarchy certainly governed the customs of who got what, but the meat was widely distributed and shared with the entire population of the city, the rich and the poor. In short, religious feasts played important nutritional function for the entire society.
    Ancient worship was not any individualistic religious experience or a form of spiritual entertainment. Worship meant sacrifices and thus sharing food. It was ordered by God and supervised by priests and customs. Those long lists of sacrifices were in fact divine shopping lists providing food for everyone and especially for the poor. Sacrifices meant society-wide sharing - now think how far we got with our spiritualized, individualized religions! And that is why Mahatma Gandhi listed worship without sacrifice as one of the seven blunders of the world. Come this Sunday to seek how we can again reconnect our worship and our lives with true sacrifices, care for others and move our faith beyond spiritual entertainment.

And here below is the original shopping list in Photography, drawing, transliteration and translation and few words of explanation. 

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      This is actually the very first cuneiform tablet discovered at the tell Rash Shamra (Ugarit) on Tuesday, May 14, 1929. At the time of discovery it was the first cuneiform text of any nature in the Levant and both its cuneiform script and language were then unknown. The tablet is now referred to as RS 1-001 or KTU 1.39.
      The text is of a technical, religious-administrative nature and very difficult to categorize further. Some scholars interpret it as ritual instructions for an unknown feast, while others see it as a record of actual sacrifices. Linguists, anthropologists, theologians, and scholars of ancient religions learn from these technical texts the vocabulary of sacrifices, orthography of divinities, their geographic distribution, and attempt to discern the everyday(real) form of religious practice, which could be quite different from the form preserved in myths and other literary texts. (The religious text of Christianity is the Bible, but thankfully our Sunday worship is quite different from anything described as worship in the Bible.)

Bad Theology of Creationism

I believe in God because of Evolution.
I can be a joyful person of faith only because of Charles Darwin and his scientific theory.
Creationism in any of its guises is not only bad science, but it is even more, dismally bad theology - strange and spooky superstition. Let me explain.
 

      These rocks are fossilised corals called Zaphrentis (scientifically Homalophyllum ungula). I picked up these rocks from the ground at the Louisville Theological Seminary in Spring 2000 when I lived and worked there for the PCUSA Denominational Headquarters. Devonian Limestone is full of these common corals and contains many more spectacular fossils.
     Now, Creationists claim (in one way or another) that God created all the sedimentary rocks by inserting into them these fossils and other ossified remains, with a clear intention to form an illusion of evolution. In order to preserve their literalistic understanding of the Bible these fundamentalists unwittingly created and started to worship a divine monster known in theology and philosophy as Deus Deceptor - The God Deceiver. According creationists, God created and maintains a complex illusion only to deceive curious humans and to test the blind faith of fundamentalist followers. I can hardly imagine a theology which could be more wrong. I do not believe and do not want to believe in the Evil Demon (Which is an alternative name for Deus Deceptor).
     In our series of Sundays dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi's Seven Blunders of the World, this time we concentrate on Education without Character. Come this Sunday to embrace Education WITH Character, come to celebrate Evolution, come to celebrate a happy and curious faith, come to worship a God who is not a malevolent, insecure, capricious deceiver, but a loving, caring, mature parent, who desires to be our partner on the path of liberty.

          
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And for those who read this far:
    The problem of creationism does not consist only in fossil records. Fundamentalist creationism has a similar problem with paleo-magnetic geological records which are important for understanding the continental drift and plate tectonics. Rocks in different parts of the world would have to be created with intentionally shifted magnetic polarization to give the illusion of moving continents. 

     In a similar way all radioactive isotope decay datings of rocks would have to be intentionally staged but also fiendishly synchronised and matched in their deception - different isotopes would have to be intentionally and deceptively mixed and titrated in different rock formations to create an illusion of geological ages.

     Astrophysics would create even bigger problems - beams of light (streams of photons) would have to be created as already in flight to compensate for more than 13 billion light years of flight, not to mention deceptively mimicking gravitational lenses etc. 
   It would be almost impossible to match the fundamentalist’s five thousand-year-old universe with the observed physical world even for an omnipotent and omniscient deity. In the end it would be easier to do away with all the material world as one great illusion created by a deceptive deity and declare it just a feverish illusion.

     And as mentioned earlier, Deus Deceptor - the God Deceiver is a known philosophical entity. The best known is probably the famous Cartesian thought experiment which allowed René Descartes to arrive at even more famous “Cogito ergo Sum” (I think therefore I exist) and thus overcome radical doubt and establish Cartesian realism.
     Interestingly, uptight and dim-witted by their religious zelotry Dutch Calvinists of the early XVII century did not recognise Rene Descartes’ line of logical argument as a thought experiment and accused him of blasphemy for venerating the Evil Demon. (It would be like accusing Erwin Schrödinger for killing cats!) 
    Their modern heirs, similarly vicious and uptight fundamentalists, switched sides. Now they themselves assume and worship Deus Deceptor to preserve any semblance of infallibility of their King James Bibles. What an amusing and fair historical irony!

Commerce and Morality in the Manhattan Gospel of Henry Rutgers

As many of you know, our church continues a long-deferred and desperately needed reconstruction of our buildings. In these winter months the work shifted to our basement. There, under the old oil tank, we made a new epochal discovery, we found another part of the long-lost Manhattan Gospel of Henry Rutgers. I am presenting the first draft translation from the New-Testament NewYorkish (Ancient English spoken around Verdi Square and The Ansonia landmark), here is the text:

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    One day Jesus’ disciples were again arguing about economy, politics and the morals of forgiveness. Sternly righteous James just quoted with his raised finger Mahatma Gandhi’s “Commerce without Morality.” Judas started to laugh, and guileless John kept asking what it was  all about. At that moment Jesus lowered with disgust The PalisadeStreet Journal he was paging through and told them this story:
    “Once upon a time there was this very clever banker. He did not run any petty savings bank - I told you, he was very clever. He was a director in an investment bank, trading in securities (buying and selling other peoples’ debts and mortgages) and he was making tons of money. Then he got even more clever - he started to churn out and deal in derivatives (selling what he did not have and buying what he did not want). He made even more money and was very important and very loud.
    Then, one night, he and all his friends did not have for the buyers what they had already sold them and themselves were left with what no one wanted to buy. He and all his pals ran to the head of government begging for bailout money, explaining that their businesses were too important to fail. And indeed they received hundreds and hundreds of billions in government money and not a single one of these guys ended in debtor’s prison.
    Yet, as soon as they returned to their banks, they started to collect outstanding loans of small debtors, evicting an unemployed man and his family from their home, confiscating the car of a single mom with three kids, forcing a widow into bankruptcy because she could not pay the medical bills of her late husband. In short, they ruined livelihoods and families of thousands, even millions.”
    And then Jesus added, “You see, for centuries and even until now it has been claimed by all-important "Reverends" and theologians of many different stripes that my original parable (preserved in Matthew 18:23-35  The parable of the unforgiving servant) was utterly unrealistic, fable-like, exaggerated, and that it must be interpreted metaphorically, theologically and spiritually. Well, what do you think now? Isn’t it time, to start thinking again about how God would want us to order our lives? 

GMO and my Religion

There is hardly a more ridiculed single biblical verse than Leviticus 19:19.
    It forbids the interbreeding of different kinds of animals - but people have always done it and so did ancient Israelites when they kept their mules.
    It forbids sowing fields and gardens with different seeds and plants - we do it all the time and so did ancient Israelites when, for instance, they trained their famous grapevines on fig-trees.
    And finally it forbids wearing clothes made of a mixture of different fibers - we do it all the time and ancient Israelites certainly made such fabrics when they wove together linen tassels and wool on the fringes of their clothes.
    So what is going on here? Some fundamentalists labor hard to preserve any semblance of Biblical inerrancy, while anti-fundamentalists and atheists gleefully point out this anachronistic nonsense.
    I find both approaches unsatisfactory and, frankly, sad. I am convinced that proper biblical as well as anthropological exegesis of this verse can open for us new and important insights. 

   This Sunday we will continue our series on Mahatma Gandhi’s Blunders of the World and talk about Science without Humanity. I am convinced that this strange Old Testament verse can become for us the living and current Word of God, a divine spiritual instrument to teach us how to be humane, why and how to be part of the fabric of life, how to broaden and deepen the network of our relationships, how to relate to one another and to nature with understanding, respect, and love. Come to ask “Why faith seeks NON GMO.” 

And here I continue with one of the reasons why I personally consider GMO being problematic technique.
    It is a little troublesome but important story about our relationship to the natural world around us and why I personally think we need to challenge the thoughtless acceptance of GMO technology on the most elemental, moral or religious level.
    A parishioner in one of my previous churches happened to be an University Professor of biology. One day she shared with me her scientific experiments in the field of genetic modifications of cultural plants. I do not remember exactly what the plant was but I think her laboratory experimented with one of the cereals. They were attempting to insert into this plant some kind of a foreign gene, most likely something "useful" like being resistant to poisonous herbicides or perhaps to add the ability to fluoresce in dark ;-). 

   This new foreign gene was implanted, I believe, by using a virus. But they did not have, or did not care about having, much control over the exact location of these implants. In the blind manner of trial and error they implanted hundreds of seeds. In many seeds their newly inserted gene interrupted an important genetic sequence, in some other seeds it displaced some other essential genes of that plant. 

   The results were eye opening - rows and rows of differently mutilated seedlings in hydroponic dishes. Many seeds did not grow at all. Some lucky seeds grew into plants but had strangely shaped leaves, some plants grew hardly any roots, some other seedlings looked like a strange knots of leaves and roots mangled all together (roots growing off the leaves and leaves growing among roots), and some seeds germinated but just to form some amorphous greenish blobs of slime. I could hardly stand that look. (I am not a biologist but this is what I saw or at least what I thought I saw.) 

     You might say that I have a way too thin skin, but I could not accept that amount of artificial, unnecessary, manmade suffering, be it caused "only" to plants. This laboratory stage is seldom shown and hardly ever known. And this is just the first step in production of a Genetically Modified Crop. Many more steps are needed, with similar pain or risks not only to the targeted plant, but also to surrounding plants, insects, animals, in short, to the entire environment, including farmers and society at large. I am not against science, but observing this experiment I experienced the visceral moral revulsion against science which is profit-driven and this inhumane.
    Now you know one of the reasons why Genetically Modified Organisms are against my religion (*see below). And, please, consider joining good endeavour of:

* Powerful and moneyed GMO companies are suing their opponents up and down, left and right, but to my best knowledge their lawyers are toothless against this kind of religious arguments. It is somehow tongue-in-cheek, I know, but I stay by it, GMO is against my religion!

What cannot be bought

A wedge from an apple on a slice of bread. This simplest of fares reminds me of my most delicious lunches. I shared them with my maternal grandfather while tending to his beloved orchard. He attempted to initiate me into the mysteries of orcharding, caring for trees, even the miracles of grafting. I was too young to really learn anything. But it did instill in me a great respect for trees and for the craft of orchard-tending. Yet, best memory for me was our lunches: bread and apples and two-three grains of salt which made this simple meal burst into fireworks of flavors.
    Since that time I have eaten some exquisite, expensive and exotic meals. During my study in Edinburgh, I represented my Czech denomination at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and was invited by His Grace, Lord High Commissioner, to the Royal Banquet in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. I have also eaten in Michelin-grade restaurants as well as in some exotic eateries around the world, but no gastronomic experience could get even close to this simple slice of bread with few slices of apple and grains of salt which we ate together in the orchard.
    I am certain you share some similar experiences, if not gastronomical, then in some other aspects of your lives. As we continue investigating Mahatma Gandhi’s Seven  Blunders of the World, this Sunday we will ponder “Pleasure without Conscience.” And we will again try to approach our theme from the positive angle, searching together for what establishes genuine pleasure, and how heaven-ordained it is that pure pleasure is often very simple and cannot be bought.

Deadly Sins

“What is your definition of sin?” I was asked while being examined by the room full of church officers of the New York City Presbytery before being allowed to joining this presbytery.
    I told them the story of my previous upstate New York home. I served a church in Binghamton, but we lived in a nearby city called Endicott. It had been a cradle of a famous and powerful computer company. Most of the first American computers were made right there. Before soldering their circuit boards, they needed to be degreased. The firm was a recipient of generous military and government contracts and thus could afford only the “best” and strongest solvents and did not need to reuse them. Solvents were dumped to the ground around the factory, a practice which continued for decades. Then the town children started to get sick with otherwise rare cancers. A study was done, and a cluster of serious illnesses was discovered even among adults. The company kept these first studies secret and quietly attempted to camouflage some of their poisonous tracks in a vain hope that the problem would go away. It did not. Eventually the ugly truth came out. But by that time, the company had moved all their business away from Endicott. They are all but gone from there, leaving behind an underground toxic plume, a large ecological and environmental disaster. Thankfully local activists and New York State laws forced them to shoulder at least some of the clean-up cost.
    But why am I telling you this long story? Because this is what modern industrial large-scale sin looks like. It often starts with the arrogance of wealth and power, it is fueled by negligence and disrespect for the environment and people. It is prolonged by conspiracy to hide disastrous consequences and by the avoidance of taking responsibility. It finally leads to serious harm to the innocent and is very difficult to clean up or at least mitigate. Our modern pollution is unfortunately quite a fitting modern parable of any sin large and small; it can persist underground for long periods of time, has serious harmful consequences, more often than not for those who did not cause it.
    This Sunday opens a series of sermons inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins (also known as Seven Blunders of the World) first published in 1925. (We will depart from this theme only for few special days like MLK or Evolution Sunday) but this Sunday we start with the first Blunder of the World - “Wealth without Work” and we will also ask “Why is it that manual work heals?” In hope we can also find some antidotes.