“Whore of Babylon & the Seven-headed Beast” – 19th Century Russian engraving.

Who Is the Whore of Babylon?

A typical interpretation when reading the Book of Revelation is John’s attempt to answer the interminable question: How exactly will God, once and for all, set things right?  When will the “sorrow and weeping be no more,” and the “tear wiped from every eye?”  After reinterpreting over and over again the imminent end that has been repeatedly put on indefinite hold, it merely begs the question, why the postponement?

When Revelation is instead understood to be political commentary spun in the form of a fantastic allegorical tale that can be reinterpreted and applied again and again in each succeeding age, the usefulness of this bizarre book may have more to do with asking some different questions.

First, who is the Whore of Babylon in our day and age, and all  she represents? For John, exiled on the island of Patmos because of Roman persecution of early believers, it was the Empire.   But two biblical scholars, Wes Howard Brook and Anthony Gwyther, have suggested more generically that the “whore of Babylon” represents God’s judgment on “all human attempts to displace God from the center of reality in favor of human power arrangements.”  So what is that for us?

Writer/preacher Robin Meyer’s is convinced our whore is greed; and if so, perhaps we have all have seduced. Such a case can be easily prosecuted.

If that sounds like a political opinion, consider it is also a central motif in the entire biblical narrative. It also lies at the heart of the gospel message, and the best of what the Christian faith tradition may still have to offer us.

Perhaps the seduction has existed ever since Christianity became an established religion subservient to the Empire, instead of a movement and way of life once shown us by the peasant rabbi from Nazareth who saved his harshest judgments  – call it political rhetoric, if you will — for church and state.

How can we be so easily seduced? And have the words and life of the Galilean sage been lost to our better selves; even from the time John had his nightmarish vision to our own succumbing today? You can read more about these ideas  Here.

“Tree of Life,” from the Stoclet Frieze, Brussels
artist: Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. … And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,… Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’ Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life … On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more.  (Rev.21-22)

The last book of the Bible, that bizarre and nightmarish Book of Revelation, is often found to be most popular among those religious nut jobs who are constantly interpreting the universal themes found in the battle of good and evil as signs of some certain apocalyptic end time; and differentiating the tribes of those who will be saved from those who will be lost, left behind and damned. Okay, everyone is entitled to their own religious and political points of view, right?

However, given the obvious fact such end-time predictions have been re-scheduled over and over again for nearly two thousand years (so far), we might better consider those recurrent, universal themes to be found in this allegorical tale; and look with fresh eyes and see Revelation as more about this world of ours that continues to self-implode upon itself over and over again. And, because we are inescapably political beings, it’s all about religion and politics.

How might we be open to being encountered in another, revelatory view of the polis in which we all inextricably dwell?  This introduces a two-part commentary based in part on Elaine Pagel’s newest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation; and in light of the latest terrorist attacks in Boston, unending bombings elsewhere, and general global violence among our tribal warring factions in such desperate need for a fruitful “tree of life for the healing of the nations.”  Here.

“Crucifixon”, contemporary Indian artist F.N.Souza

It has often been said you can’t get to Easter morning and an empty tomb except by way of Good Friday and the cross of crucifixion.  But since boyhood, the standard line – as best I could figure it out – was that whatever was bad for Jesus, was good for us. And then a few days later — as it turned out — it was good for Jesus too; since obviously you can’t get yourself raised to new life unless you’ve first died. Bummer.

 However, that last part at least has become a truism for me in my own life thus far. The number of times a little part of me has died along the way has always subsequently been met by a new lease on life; and, most importantly, not of my own making. There’s that, as well as the gift of knowing through personal experience that losing something of one’s life has led to gain elsewhere.

Most of us who have made it to middle age, and then pressed on towards our own ultimate demise, have done so with a certain knowing and appreciation that eventually – one way or another — life is all about recovery; usually, that is, recovery from whatever has preceded it that left unchecked would stop us in our tracks. Sometimes one is so utterly changed, some would call it transformation.  But even with the certain knowledge of my own mortal imperfections and feet of clay, the eyes of my imagination can still glimpse what one might at least call a hint of that other word, resurrection.

As a preacher’s son wandering my own early paths of unknowing, I could only wonder about the non-sense of a story that was referred to as the “Passion” for some strange reason. So the innocent, good and righteous sacrificial savior suffers a horrific death so we wouldn’t have to do so ourselves?  Still makes no sense. Never did, never will.

The carved wooden crucifix that hung on the wall of my father’s study where he would write his sermons was far more illustrative to me than any orthodox doctrine he would subsequently pound out from the pulpit. With eyes transfixed on the woodworkers craft, I was always fascinated by that twisted torso, the pegged feet, the outstretched arms, and the head hung in utter subjugation with a spiked crown of thorns that inexorably expresses the human capacity we all have for cruelty and human violence.

In contrast, I have always found most objectionable the most common depictions of the crucifixion in two millennia of artwork where a thorny crown gets replaced with a golden halo, and the bloody and tattered loincloth is replaced with the royal robes one would be more likely to see worn by those earthly monarchs and pompous clerics Jesus was so apt to criticize.

If Jesus died for anything, he laid down his life like most social prophets and martyrs as a complete and utter refutation and relinquishment of any such vestiges of earthly kingdoms. Whatever the subsequent followers of the donkey king would retrospectively make of him, he was regarded by the powers that be as nothing more than a nuisance. As more than one biblical scholar has pointed out, the real significance of Jesus’ crucifixion lay in the fact that anyone subsequently noticed and cared about the execution of a nobody.  But it is the way of a nobody, not a somebody, that has so often altered the way of an otherwise weary world.

It was just such a modern day Via Dolorosa which I recently observed here.

Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” (John 11:44)

From Little Gidding, The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

Avowed atheist Susan Jacoby recently created a dust up with a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Review entitled, “The Blessings of Atheism.” She wrote in response to all the god-talk that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Newtown massacre; where much of the attempts at consoling the bereaved stirred up, once again, the unanswerable questions or inadequate answers to human suffering and death so often peddled around in popular religious belief.

So too, not long ago author and “non-believer,” Christopher Hitchen’s posthumously published his little book Mortality; recounting his rambling thoughts on his own imminent demise; after a terminal diagnosis left him a sufficient number of days to find himself “deported from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”

But what, or where to, after that?  What if this really is all there is?

It seems there has always been the human hankering to imagine all kinds of fanciful notions, in our attempts to recapitulate our mortal existence into something more than it is.  Many religious traditions, including centuries of “mainline” orthodox Christianity, employ great mythic stories to describe a life subsumed into something greater than we can either know, or grasp, except by “faith.” Heaven knows, some folks try to better themselves, merely in the hope of a remote possibility there something more, after our death, which is a certainty. But in the end, is it all dust and ashes? And is that OK?

This is the liturgical time of year when many in the Christian tradition undergo a seasonal pilgrimage in which the faithful are reminded at the onset we mortals are nothing more than dust. And so we will one day return to that from whence we came.  Then the traditional forty days end with the perennial re-enactment of a passion play commemorating the mortal demise of the one whom Christians even these many centuries later would profess to follow.

Many do so in the hope of some kind of immortality for themselves in some indecipherable form or other; attributing to Jesus a “resurrection” that means the same thing to them as god-like immortality; while others of us may find such imaginings to be not only reasonably implausible, but of less importance than what we take to be of greater significance and meaning in this faith tradition.

Otherwise, the vainglorious hope of immortality can become so enshrouded in our mortal fears that we become – like Lazarus in his early grave – so wrapped up in death that we fail to truly acknowledge and appreciate the gift of our mortality for what it is; nothing more, nor less.

With the certain assurance then that we are but dust and ash, we can ask ourselves if the gift of our mortality is not only enough, but more than enough?  And if so, as the psalmist says, how then shall we “number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom?” (Psalm 90:12). Read the full commentary here

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1. [Note: A pdf version of this latest commentary to print/read is here. The preceding commentary on the "epiphany" with regard to gun violence, entitled "In the Winter of Our Discontent," follows these remarks below. ]

The author with his Christmas gift, circa 1956

When I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child, and acted like a child.  I played cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers. I had a cap pistol, a Fanner Fifty with real leather holster, and a lever-action, single shot Daisy BB gun. My father never hunted, nor took me hunting; and we had no firearms in our household. That was my experience growing up.

Admittedly, it was a very different than that of others I’ve known, respected, and for whom I have genuine affection. My friend Bob grew up in inner-city Detroit, where personal safety was an understandable concern, if not necessity. Jeff grew up in the rough and tumble rural West of Montana, where his most prized family heirlooms are the guns he inherited from his father. While I can understand and appreciate those very different experiences, the pressing issue of gun violence that grips our common life remains a shared responsibility for the common good.

As a boy, my fascination with guns did not follow me into adulthood.  As a teen growing up and registering for the military draft in 1966, the American war in Southeast Asia was a stark reality. It was also the era when the devastating firepower of the M16 (AR-15) in the hands of an Army grunt left an indelible impression on many combatants, returning vets and those of us who opposed the war.  I never carried a gun, or served in the military. Instead, I went to seminary. And, in many subsequent years of ministry I have only dealt with peripheral and potential gun violence.

I began my adult profession as a young cleric serving on the staff of a large, posh parish in an extremely safe and affluent suburban community; where it was the custom immediately following the blessing of the alms at the altar to have an armed security guard then accompany the ushers mid-service from the sanctuary to the church office across a quiet residential dead-end street. The ushers were excused from the remainder of the worship hour so they could tally the take.

Upon my arrival I voiced my surprise and objection with the church leadership, posing the possible scenario of an aged, pistol-wielding private security guard blasting away a would-be thief on the steps of the church. They reluctantly agreed it might reflect poorly on a house of prayer. But when the request was made of the wanna-be cop to serve without his sidearm he quit in protest. We do love our guns.

I went on to lead another parish for two-dozen years, where some local notoriety had preceded me. Years before my arrival the local police had confronted a transient on the church premises early one Sunday morning; and, when allegedly threatened, shot him dead. For decades afterward the larger community knew us as that church where someone was killed.

Then there was the parishioner who gave his wife a warning shot one night with a bullet hole in their bedroom wall when accused of infidelity.

Soon after another female parishioner came to me who was frightened by her spouse’s violent temper, and mentioned he kept a pistol in their bedside table.  I ordered her to retrieve it and bring it to me, which she did. I locked it up in my desk drawer of the church office, until the husband came and demanded its return.  The wife later left him, taking the children with her. My last dealing with him was officiating over his funeral a few years later when, in his despondency, he committed suicide.

I would occasionally rail about the proliferation of all the guns in our society with which we collectively seemed so enthralled; but I knew I was a minority voice among my flock. I considered it a minor triumph when one of the pillars of the parish decided he no longer wanted the handgun he owned in his house. He brought it to me, and together we destroyed it.

The lack of reasonable restrictions we have when it comes to guns is rooted in their obvious appeal; leading to their preponderance in staggering numbers in a culture that allows utter unreasonableness to pose under the guise of “protection of freedom” and individual rights.  Whatever interpretation one brings to the inherent vagueness of those twenty-seven words in the Second Amendment with regards to one’s right to bear arms, it is helpful to remember they are not carved in stone. That’s why it is called an amendment.

And like it or not, it may also be helpful to acknowledge the fact the avid sportsman, the inner-city gangbanger, the illegal trafficker on the black market, the law-abiding gun owner, and the lucrative gun and ammo industry share one thing in common. They love their guns.  That’s why we will not simply legislate our way out of this one through reasonable debate, a half-baked compromise, or a better argument.

The comic Eddie Izzard has the sober one-liner: “Guns don’t kill people. But I think they help, don’t you?” Blaming the lack of stronger mental health policies where funding has been systematically slashed, or obscenely violent video games, or Hollywood blockbusters that pander to the gratuitous allure of blood and gore is – in the end — all a smokescreen that attempts to obscure the obvious. We love our guns, and what they represent.

We love the cheap, readily available and disproportionate amount of personal power guns offer in the hands of everyone and anyone who wants it, for whatever reason. If one doubts that, just consider: The anticipated uphill battle to ban assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines that might simply pose a reloading inconvenience to the next mass shooter and merely reduce – not eliminate – the casualty count is ludicrous in and of itself.

To the usual rebuttal stricter gun controls will not stop the crazed among us from obtaining their Bushmaster, their bullet-proof vests and ammunition stockpiles, I say it is a hollow, fallacious argument. But furthermore, I don’t care. We have erred so long on the side of doing nothing, might it not be time to err instead on the side of doing something; regardless of its possible ineffectiveness?

We have erred so long on the side of doing nothing, might it not be time to err instead on the side of doing something; regardless of its possible ineffectiveness?

As a society that claims to be civilized — but so distinctly different from our neighbors to the north, or the vast majority of so-called first-world nations, for instance — we are not. They regard us as barbaric, and they are right.  But instead of a self-reflective examination as to why that is undeniably so, there is such a run on gun shows by fear-driven consumers to stockpile weapons and ammo, local police departments are having trouble keeping their firearms loaded and ready.

I write these comments on the one-month anniversary of the Newtown massacre, and a few days after Vice-President Biden convened the presidential commission on gun violence; attempting to engage all the presumed “stakeholders” in the renewed debate over gun control. Whether we have reached a tipping point with regard to the American public’s will to curtail our infatuation with guns remains to be seen.

The President has weighed in, even before his commission’s findings are released, stating, “If there’s a step we can take to save even one child we should take it.”  But the ever-popular polls suggest the obvious step that could be undertaken will not prove persuasive. Too many minds will remain unchanged. Too many of us love our guns that much.

In his opening remarks at the beginning of those commission’s hearings recently, Joe Biden refused to let us forget the carnage that horrified a nation only a month ago; wrought by a fellow American with a legally- owned and licensed assault weapon.  Three times Biden repeated the word “riddled” to describe the stacked bodies of the Newtown first-graders; as if to indelibly stir the conscience of our nation’s citizenry with a single image that should not only haunt us, but strengthen our resolve.  For all of us who have heard the long-standing arguments and endless debate should know by now, one cannot change another’s mind until there is first a change of heart.

For all of us who have heard the long-standing arguments and endless debate should know by now, one cannot change another’s mind until there is first a change of heart.

In this society, it appears we still love our unrestricted right to own and carry a gun more than life itself.  Bluntly put, we love our guns more than we love our children.

© 2013 by John William Bennison, Rel.D. All rights reserved.

This article should only be used or reproduced with proper credit.

See also the commentaries, “Unarmed and Dangerous,” and “Sword Fights: A Gospel of Non-violence in a Violent World.” To read more commentaries by John Bennison, from the perspective of a progressive Christian, go to http://wordsnways.com

Unidentified icon: Madonna and Child; and the Crucified Christ

A Christmas Requiem for Sandy Hook

In July, 1933, singer-songwriter John Jacob Niles found himself in the small Appalachian town of Murphy, North Carolina. He came across a gathering of evangelicals who’d been run out of town by the local police.  He watched as a young girl, whose name was Annie Morgan, stepped up the edge of a small platform attached to a vehicle. As he would later recollect in his autobiography:

As she sang, repeating the line over and over, additional lines of a verse and the fragments of an extended melody came to Niles.

Later, Niles would add the two additional stanzas, to become the familiar American Christmas carol. But at the heart of the rather mournful and haunting tune the puzzling question remains. Why — despite popular Christianity’s doctrinaire explanations — was a Galilean peasant child’s fate sealed even before he drew his first breath? Was the only reason for the birth of Mary and Joseph’s child — God’s greatest gift and blessing to them — simply so he could die a miserable death; and somehow thereby make up for all the wretchedness in folks like you and me?

Apparently, it wasn’t sufficiently miraculous for two millennia of believing Christians that a deity would so gracefully manifest a way of life in one who would dwell among us with the wisdom and compassion of all we would subsequently deem to call divine and became a living light to this ornery, dark and shabby world?

And what was Jesus’ consolation? That he is was not only the sacrificial Lamb of God, but is God’s “son,” and somehow even God “himself?”  But if that is so, then isn’t he not only the very incarnation of God, but the abdication of all those absolutes (those “omni-everythings”) we like to attribute to God, as well?  After all, “if he’d wanted for any wee thing,” as the song goes, “he surely could have had it,” if he was the king.

And, if he were to come again, bearing the likeness of God, would he really come merely to judge this sorry world; simply to determine who would supposedly inherit the next? Or instead, bearing the light and likeness of God, is it up to us to instead hear his voice, follow where he has already led us, and transform the only world there is?

Like little Annie Morgan, I wonder as I wander, about such nonsense. And, given the recent events at Sandy Hook that can’t help but muffle the merriment of the Christmas season, I wonder if we might do well to re-think the harsher realities of the original Christmas tale that has been retold again this season with such a stark and sober reckoning.

I wonder if we ought to reconsider another way to the manger, and rethink what kind of Christmas we ought to not only eagerly expect, pray and hope for most especially this year; but be as midwives to its birthing, as well?

It’s about time.  [You can read a full Commentary on this topic here.]

A Precarious Reflection for the Thanksgiving Holiday, 2012

Above: “Seaside with the Sermon of Christ” – Bruegel, late 17th century. Note what looks like “Pilgrim” dress!

British comic Eddie Izzard once quipped this one-liner about how the pilgrim’s story all began: “They set off from Plymouth, and landed in Plymouth! How lucky is that?”

But as we all learned in grade school, the rock upon which the pilgrims landed and subsequently named Plymouth turned out to be a mixed blessing.  The first Thanksgiving was anything but bucolic, and our pastures of plenty have seen both good times and bad ever since.

If this year’s record drought that devastated crops, followed by ravaging floods that washed away entire seaside communities wasn’t bad enough, one of the most contentious issues remains unresolved; namely, the federal deficit / budget crisis, the battle over new revenues (taxes) and a looming “fiscal cliff.”

The day after the presidential election, the Speaker of the House of Representatives alluded to scripture in a speech meant to re-establish his political party’s position on such matters:

“In the New Testament, a parable is told of two men,” he reflected.  “One built his house on sand; the other built his house on rock. The foundation of our country’s economy – the rock of our economy – has always been small businesses in the private sector.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “rock” to which that little scriptural illustration was referring was Jesus’ ethical teachings; based on an unconventional and (as it turned out) unpopular form of radical egalitarianism.

It concludes that section from Matthew’s gospel commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount. And, that particular “rock” had little to do with keeping one’s fiscal house in order, taxes to Caesar, the entrepreneurial spirit, or the free enterprise system.

That bedrock of Jesus’ teaching did however have implications as to how we might order our lives in society; in closer alignment with what those scriptures depict as something more akin to what the divine had in mind. As well as how we ought to treat one another, without vacuous pretence or self-embellishment.

As we reflect on this quintessential American holiday we call Thanksgiving, we might ask what resemblance Plymouth Rock might bear to bedrock Christianity, as we levitate precariously over the cliff of our own devising.

You can read more here.