The New Baptism

Sarah Palin raised the collective blood pressure of American Christians this weekend when she brazenly defended the use of torture in a terrorized world:

“Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists.” 

Many have expressed outrage at the sentiment, although the ultra-conservative talk-radio wünderkinder were quick to defend her remarks in their own mindless way.

For me, she offers a harrowing look not only into a possible geopolitical nightmare (a Sarah Palin presidency, which I am grateful is never likely to happen) but into a network of beliefs that already animate American public life and its odd relationship with Christian faith.

Palin's remarks force the question in its most blunt way:  if Americans should be reviled by what Joe Carter at thegospelcoalition.org calls the assimilation of "one of the means of God's grace to an act of torture," how is it possible that they should not be reviled by torture itself? 

How can it be okay to perform an act whose comparison with baptism is repulsive, especially upon a person Christians hope one day to baptize? 

William Cavanagh's Torture and Eucharist argues convincingly that within the Christian sacramental rites an act of formation occurs that allows to reimagine the world, our place and the place of others in it, and the God in whom all of these subsist.  Our enemies are those whom God has condescended to make his friends; we ourselves are enemies before God whom God has graciously reconciled to Himself. 

Baptism puts to death the enmity that we have with God and raises us to life as friends of God and one another.  The prospect that a baptized person could ever point a weapon at another person is a fierce moral contradiction, never to be celebrated even if it were necessary.  That the threat of terrorism has ever necessitated that a person be tortured seems doubtful to me (in large part because I have real doubts about whether it actually delivers the goods); but even if I'm wrong about that, torture is at best only a measure of the dreadful consequence of the failure of politics in the modern world.  In that failure, the torturers are not unimplicated.  

I do not deny the necessity of lethal force in the case of terrorism.  Nor do I deny that at times it is not possible to be just in our actions to prevent the innocent from suffering at the hands of terrible people.  But evil people do not arise in vacuums; nor are our judgments about that evil immune from deception and self-interest.  The libido dominandi afflicts us as much as those we name our enemies.  Politics is not always possible, but sometimes we are the problem.  American military operations kill innocent people; this is an indisputable fact.  We are bound to protect the innocent, even though we cannot always be sure who the guilty are.  In this complexity, baptism stands as the hope of a future judgment that will end the agony of our enslavement to our and others' sin.  Baptism proclaims reconciliation as the destiny of the world and the sinfulness attending every combat action.  Baptism heralds a coming kingdom in which things receive their right names.  It announces a peace before which the armament of the world will one day be exposed and powerless.  And it summons us to ongoing repentance as the mode of that kingdom's engagement with the kingdoms of this world.

Terrorism is the modern geopolitical evangelism; torture is its corresponding sacrament.  The irony of Palin's remarks is that they are not the slightest bit exaggerative in the world she inhabits.  That she could claim that world as Christian testifies to thee failure of Christian witness to our enmity with God and to God's gracious love to those whom we call our enemies.  Her remarks are a summons to repentance for a world we have failed to bring to God:  "We were with child, we writhed in labor, but we gave birth to wind. We have not brought salvation to the earth, and the people of the world have not come to life" (Is. 26:18).

Raised for Wonder: The Plague of Hail

"So that you may know...."  The drama of the plagues sequence in Exodus is the Lord's revelation to Pharaoh of what he quite obviously doesn't want to know.  לַיהוָ֖ה הָאָֽרֶץ:  the earth belongs to the Lord.  The temptation for human beings is to take that which God has entrusted to them (Gen. 1:26) and treat it as though they had been its makers.  The plague of hail is a mercy to Pharaoh to remind him of his place within the earth, as of it and not over it.  Fit stewardship requires solidarity rather than separation.  And humans are not equipped to "rule" those among whom they refuse to live.  The leaders of the Gentiles lord it over them, but it is not to be so among you.

Shelter: yes. Separation, no.  We are properly over
the earth when we remember that we are of it.
"Remember O man, that thou art dust..."

The earth has been given to human beings, for food, for use, and for shelter.  But we too often forget that the first and most important role of creation is to be a divine gift—to draw us into relationship with a God who gives.  Creation is an invitatio into gratitude.  But the desire to master the earth, to use the earth to shield us from any contact with the earth, has a drastic effect on the way we read the world.  Hence the OT prophetic critique of cities and the cultural decay that takes place in them.  Chronic separation from the earth might make us, eventually, deaf to the heavens and the earth as they declare the glory of God.  And if God has to turn up the volume, that is a frightening reminder that the earth and its maker are perpetually "wild" to us.

In The Lion's World, Rowan Williams notes that the first and most important thing to notice about Aslan is that he is an animal.  The experience of seeing an animal in charge, an animal of such fear-inducing power, is a proper analogue for discovering a God whose relationship to us is as the wholly other.  And this is never more cleary demonstrated than when we attempt to resist our createdness.   The Abolition of Man picks up a similar thread:  "Man's conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be nature's conquest of man...all nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals.  We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.  What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us forever."  God brings Pharaoh and us, by a severe compassion, back to the earth from which we have so eagerly alienated ourselves.  And in a paradox of divine judgment, Pharaoh is offered a restoration to his original vocation, to be the strange being of and over the earth.  Thus, when God says to Pharaoh, "I have raised you up to show my wonders," he alerts Pharaoh to the reality that he is earth and as such is bound to declaration of God's glory.  To be human is to have one's own existence given and taken away; insofar as we live, we are raised for God's wonder, willingly or no.  All our attempted mastery over nature has not prevented this.  To resist God is to find oneself fulfilling the human vocation by God in an ironic way.  We are called into being by God; whether or not this is good news depends on our turn of mind, and it is just such a repentance (metanoia) to which the king is invited.

Used to Having Things

The rich man walks away from Jesus, so Matthew's narrative voice tells us, "in grief" (lypoumenos).  Most translations then relate the man's grief causally to his having a great many possessions.  The relation of that statement to the the preceding one, however, is an interpretive judgment.  There is no conjunction linking the statement specifically to the statement immediately before it.  Indeed, it is probably not likely that the man walks away thinking, "I have so many possessions.  How can I do what the Teacher tells me."

I suspect rather that he leaves the scene exasperated with the hardness of this teacher and his extreme point of view.  There's nothing at all rational about what is being said here.  "Sell everything you have."  This is no exhortation to charity; the man is being told to assume a position of total destitution.  (Incidentally, this verse stands as a pretty strong witness against the idea that Matthew's Jesus is a "spiritualized" version of the more "social" gospel found in Luke).  The man knows as well as we do that a person who gives a way everything they have will sleep outside, will starve, will suffer and die.  Who is equal to such a devastating yoke?

Just here is where the asyndetic conclusion of 19:22 speaks most loudly.  Ēn gar echōn ktēmata polla:  he was used to having a lot of things.  Matthew describes this man in terms of a long-standing situation, so that the statement may indeed supply a cause not merely for the man's walking away but for the whole affair.  That is, he asks Jesus these questions in the first place because he is used to having possessions.  He responds the way he does because he is used to having possessions.  And he walks away in grief, whatever his own understanding of the reason for his frustration, because he is used to having things.  This is Matthew's etic assessment of the man and what blinds him to a reality that Jesus makes expicit in v. 29

The grief of the man, then, is a wealth-induced failure of imagination.  The call to leave everything to follow Jesus is the call to join Jesus in the midst of the new assembly, to live without defense or pretense with those who then become our honest brothers and sisters.  It is communion, not poverty per se, to which Jesus calls the man, a becoming poor for others, who then become the riches of our lives.  Not only that, but the riches of the various members of the community are meant then to become the inheritance of every member in it; they will be heirs everything on the one condition that they possess nothing.  They will be at home in the home of others, welcomed at the tables of others, in a community to whom everyone gives what he has.  The man's goods will belong to him exactly insofar as they belong to everyone else with him.  He will not starve but feast on the feasting of others.  This is the possibility to which Jesus welcomes those who follow him and to which those who see the stuff of the world as possessions—mine or someone else's—are blind.

The whole Gospel of Matthew is an invitation to follow Jesus into poverty for others, a poverty that lays hold of a greater treasure, a poverty of spirit:  this under the conviction that the God who raises the dead will make more than enough of whatever is offered to him.  We are invited to consider that in opening our hands we might receive a blessing that never runs out (zōēn aiōnion klēronomēsei).  Thus, Matthew's often-maligned reminder that the poor will always be among us is, again, not a legitimization of ignorance but rather a presentation of them as brothers and sisters for the haves of the world, those who are poor enough to have only money.

Poem: Westminster Abbey

*I'd like to thank this poem's first publisher, Dan Schneider, who has published it on the fantastic Cosmoetica.com.  I highly recommend both the site and Dan's own poetry to be found there.  I reproduce it here after putting some work into it, because I have never really been happy with it's first form.  I want to acknowledge my gratitude to him not only for publishing this in its first form, but also for writing what in my opinion is the best corpus of poetry I know of.

”know your feelings were already felt

before this cathedral became your world"

                                    --Dan Schneider, “Refrain of the RCA Building”

Westminster Abbey

This is no cathedral, merely a haunt for sinners,

Where they have cast their stones

Together, to form a heaven that held

Angels themselves, fast into architecture.

Is this hour the recline of God?  Some say

He rests in the transept of elements

Upon an exhaled prayer; others that no

Amount of silver mints a value worth                                                   

The pillars of a faith peasants began.                                                   

"Silver and gold I do not have, but such"                                                    

It was said, "as I have..."  Not to silver

Was it given to heal on heaven's high

Spires, towered in time turned back,

But to a boulder rolled off of the grave

Bearing the miracle behind.

Then is an abbey not miraculous, if                                           A Prayer Exhaled Is

Visible?  A body's a heavy dust,                                     

Gravel awaiting the wind,

                                                                                    Heavy with hands, offered to candelight,

                                                                                    Which cores me in this holy cavity.

                                                                                    And I assume this collar, not by weight

                                                                                    Of worth to wear it, nor to deny

                                                                                    How planets fall from a star's bright dress;

                                                                                    Rather to handle a past not made in my

                                                                                    Image.  It glows in the groove of the cross

                                                                                    Hung round my neck, where fire claims this room

                                                                                    I have mined for other meanings.  And the dross,                                                   

Is this not wondrous?  What if it were
Breathed upon?  What if                                              

England were cast into speech, its tenses                                                        

Woven in one said verb, wreathed in the vow

The dust is destined for and cannot escape?

Westminster, cloister of its own memory, more dead

Than living in its fray.  What future could purchase a past                                

Like this, and who be its pardon?

Here all will be pardoned, when the young stone falls

On perished arches, and rings the verdict

Buried beneath these bells, and beckons

The past to account for what was done with it—

                                                                                    Melts into a candle, all but consumed

                                                                                    By the cross and its fire, and seared

                                                                                    In the quarry of a torch-lit tomb,

                                   

                                                                                    This chancel, where secrets that never escaped my years

                                                                                    May lie, without knowledge or fear, of the small hell

                                                                                    In a candle, though men should fear.

                                                                                    Tremble, my soul, in its show and tell.

                                                                                    Gather and confess thy sins.  Return

                                                                                    'Til all is repented, each hidden sin bewailed,

                                                                                    Not one bloody word untold. Now and then be burned 

                                                                                    Out of me, until I fall in the midst of the burning,

                                                                                    Exnihilate, extinguished in the burn.

                                     

The past that never extinguishes, but carves                                           

Itself in tablets stretched high in the testament

Limestone fills with the frailty of its art,

Reaching at God by a means so much

Like kneeling.  Or if not, like Babel, the tongue

Fissured in the feint to flirt with godhead.

But this abbey is not for talking in. 

It is for pardon:  for the permission to

Elide in the already

Said, fixing a prayer in the wet mortar

Of one’s own tongue, the remembered English

Habit of harboring critique

In its own tale—as if a word could embody

What comes after it and ferry it

Pastward.

    It only remains to do

What must be done, what has been done, and is

Not done easily:  to trace the sentence etched in

This rock, and mark the martyrs fixed to its walls                                  

As they speak.  There appears Oscar, San Romero,

Rid of the cartridge that cored him, calling

Birds to sift the supper of his hand,

Bitter only to those who do not taste,                           

And invisible, but for the blood on the stone.               

Does it bleed then, the future into the past thought       

Settled, swaddled, made particular, like dust,

Always is?  Does it animate?  God knows

Time's whole conversion as if it were the fall

Of a sparrow's feather, or a single

Stone off the vastness of this construction,

So when Romero calls the birds, it is not simply                                   

A tremor in the towers turned out.

                                                                                    Your songs ring the chamber of my believing.

                                                                                    I call them, but they breathe the wind

                                                                                    Through old towers. They luminesce in the wings

                                                                                    This fire raises upward, with my hands

                                                                                    Ahold of a stone, drawn up in candles' fire

                                                                                    defining their silhouette:  perhaps my hands,                 

                                                                                    so near invisible, framed in fire, where

                                                                                    All is transformed into fragrant bread, and a bird

                                                                                    Conceives in wine and smoke:  rumor of prayer. 

The rumor of wings accrues in the ear of believing:

The words pecked out of his hand will allay

The cracked rhyme, of his world and his day.

So called birds return to their making

Home in the hand of a saint.  And again—                                         

That is the habit of the particular,                                                         

That pretense to permanence.  The abbey endures

Not only to witness the apathy

Wrung out of such beautiful

Fashioning; but to breathe in the whence of these towers,

Raised earth, dirt sculpted, miraculous and seen

To be so.  Wondrous, how the dead have endured

In the etching of them, and how this breath

Has thrilled their witness into the living                                                

Speech. And how they are bound to utterance

No vision catches all of.  Were they without

Sin, who cast enormity past that

Which thought promises, forth in sequential   

Defining?  These annotations—

Do they read in the body

Of England’s endurance?  A tower is

A tower; the breath that fills it names it,

The breath of a prayer exhaled, O Lord,

Refashioned in this writerly purview                                                    

Which is not stone; how then can it rise to you?