Saturday Night Theologian
16 November 2003

1 Samuel 1:4-20

On July 6, 1935, Lhamo Dhondup was born in the small village of Takster in Tibet, near the Chinese border. Named for the protector deity of Tibet, the boy's name echoed his parents' fervent prayer for their region, which had suffered under many years of drought. Lhamo was the thirteenth child born to his devout Buddhist parents, though not all had survived infancy. When he was three years old, travelers came to the village posing as servants. They met the boy, tested him, and declared him to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the last of whom had died in 1933. After a brief period of training in a local monastery, the traveling priests took the boy with them to Lhasa, more than one thousand miles away, where he was officially installed as spiritual leader of Tibet in 1940. His parents were certainly proud that their son had been recognized as the reincarnation of a great spiritual leader, but surely it was not easy to surrender him to the care of others, particularly when they learned that he would live so far away. Perhaps Hannah experienced some of the same feelings as Dekyi and Choekyong Tsering, Lhamo's parents. She had endured ridicule for her barrenness in a culture that primarily valued women for their ability to bear children. Her fervent pleas to God had been mistaken by Eli the priest as the ramblings of a drunkard. Nevertheless, she had persevered, and God had answered her prayers. But at what cost? "If you'll only give me a son," she prayed, "I'll devote him to you." That meant bringing him to the sanctuary in Shiloh when he was still young and leaving him in the care of the priest. Was it faith or desperation that made Hannah pledge her son to the service of God? When her son was born, did she wish that she hadn't made such a pledge? Whatever her original motivation, Hannah was apparently a woman of strong convictions. The narrative doesn't indicate that anyone else knew about her secret pledge to God--not her husband, not Eli--but she willingly fulfilled her vow when the time came. Could we do the same with our own children? Are we willing to let them go to explore God's plans for their lives, or do we try to manipulate them into doing what we think is best (which usually involves staying close to home)? Only a person with the strongest commitment to God could willingly do what Hannah did, or what the parents of the Dalai Lama did. There is one interesting addendum to this passage. In verse 20, Hannah names her son Samuel, because, the Bible says, "I have asked him of the Lord." The only problem with this statement is that the name Samuel means "God has heard," so Hannah should have said, "God has heard my prayer." The name associated with the phrase "I have asked him of the Lord" is none other than Saul, the first king of Israel. Perhaps an earlier version of this story had the mother of Saul making a vow and devoting her son to serve God. If so, that story has almost entirely disappeared from tradition. How many people make tremendous sacrifices to serve the Lord and yet are forgotten, or almost forgotten? Hannah's name is widely known among Jews and Christians. The mother of Saul is forgotten. For every Hannah there must be hundreds of women and men who sacrificed their own happiness for the sake of the kingdom of God. Those spiritual martyrs, both remembered and forgotten, are worthy of our praise.

1 Samuel 2:1-10

Sargon of Akkad, Hattusilis of Hatti, Akhenaten of Egypt, Hammurabi of Ur, Darius of Persia, Alexander of Macedonia, Augustus of Rome, Smoke-Jaguar of Mexico, Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire, Zhu Yvanzhang of China, Saladin of the Ottoman Empire--all ruled great empires, many lasting hundreds or even thousands of years. Despite their military might, their wise rulers, and their enormous wealth, all these empires perished. Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian Empire, like Lenin's Soviet Union, only lasted about seventy years. Hitler's Third Reich, the empire destined to last a thousand years, fell after a mere twelve. Security today is no guarantee of survival tomorrow. Those who are oppressed today can hope for a better tomorrow. The Song of Hannah is a favorite of Jews and Christians throughout the ages. When the author of the gospel of Luke considered the words to attribute to Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she learned that she had miraculously conceived a son, he patterned her song--called the Magnificat from its first word in Latin--after Hannah's. Luke, whose gospel focuses special attention on Jesus' ministry to the poor, could look for no better model than Hannah's song. For Hannah, Yahweh was a God who reversed the fortunes of the powerful and raised up the poor from the dust. Far from favoring the rich and powerful, God favored those least able to care for themselves and most in need of a savior. But after the poor have been exalted, what then? In a Wizard of Id cartoon, Robbing Hood delivers a bag of gold he has taken from the rich to some peasants he meets in the forest. As one peasant exults over his good fortune, he wonders aloud if the masked man will ever return. The other one says to him, "He'll be back. Now we're rich!" Those who were oppressed in the past but have now become oppressors, beware! The God described by Hannah is one who desires a world of justice. God does not believe in an inherited aristocracy or a permanent underclass. We in the industrialized West often think of ourselves as somehow deserving of the riches we have been given. Maybe our culture is superior, or our work ethic is better, or our God is stronger (cf. the words of General Boykin, "I knew that my God was a real God and that his [referring to a Muslim] was an idol"). We can't even imagine ourselves, as a society, on the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, much less looking down the barrel of a gun bigger than the one we now have, but it could happen. What's more, it will happen. Maybe not this year, but maybe next year, or in twelve years, or seventy, or a couple of hundred. No nation, no culture, stays on top forever, so while we are on top, we have to remember what Jesus taught us, to treat others as we would want to be treated. The day is coming when the poor will be exalted and the rich humbled.

Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25

Buddhism and Jainism arose as reform movements within Hinduism, just as Christianity arose as a reform movement within Judaism. Those of us who belong to religious traditions that are reforms of another tend to think of the religion from which our ancestors separated as inferior to our own tradition. However, what we often forget is that religions are reformed frequently to greater and lesser extents over the course of history. Just as Christianity was emerging and beginning to see itself as a religion separate from Judaism, Judaism itself was undergoing a major internal reformation (internal in the sense that it retained the name "Judaism," while Christianity abandoned it). Another example of a religion remaking itself is within Christianity, where the Protestant Reformation was followed closely in time by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Catholics underwent another major reformation in the 1960s, after the documents of Vatican II were published. Some Christians today, most notably former bishop John Shelby Spong, are calling for a new Christian Reformation. The author of Hebrews definitely sees Christianity as something new. Though he sees continuity with Judaism, he stresses the difference that he believes Jesus Christ has brought about, combining doctrines of Judaism with the Platonic Theory of Forms to portray Jesus as the perfect high priest who has offered the perfect sacrifice once for all time and established Jeremiah's new covenant. What if modern Christians don't accept Plato's Theory of Forms as an accurate description of the cosmos? Do we therefore need to reject Hebrews' depiction of Christ? Or if we take a sociological rather than efficacious view of the value of sacrifices for Jews in ancient times, are the images of sacrifice thereby negated? No on both counts. Christians' understanding of God and religion will always be shaped by the philosophical and scientific theories of the day--if they aren't, they will cease to speak to modern society. I think Spong is right: Christianity does need a reformation. But I also think he's wrong in advocating that we discard some of the traditional symbols of the faith, such as the creed. Even if we accept a concept of God that is "beyond theism," in his words, there will still be value in the ancient symbols of the faith, as long as we understand that they are symbols, not statements of fact. Jesus said that people can approach God directly, as the author of Hebrews notes, so he offered his followers a new and living way. But the way won't remain new and living if we don't thoughtfully and prayerfully adapt it to the world we live in right now. Those who advocate returning to a Christianity of the first century are wrong if they mean that we should adopt the specific viewpoints of first century Christians, but they are right if they mean that, like those first Christians, we should take our beloved symbols and traditions and reinterpret them in the light of our understanding of the life and teachings of Jesus for the modern world. Only then will we have a message that the world is interested in hearing.

Mark 13:1-8

What will the earth look like in a million years? I can imagine what it will look like in a hundred years, and with some effort, even a thousand years, but I find it very hard to think of the world a million years from now. In particular, I wonder if people will still be around. Many species of animals have gone extinct over the course of time, but no species has ever been the primary cause of its own demise. However, that's exactly where the human race is headed, if we don't stop the insanity. There was an article Thursday in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled "Arming Outer Space." It described Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the leading advocate of putting both additional surveillance equipment and weapons in space. "Space," says the Strategic Master Plan of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, "is the ultimate high ground of military operations." Aside from being an obvious violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibited the militarization of space, putting weapons in space will take humanity one step closer to species suicide. Mark 13, along with the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke, have been called the Little Apocalypse, because Jesus discusses with his disciples the signs related to the end of the age. After a reference to the dismantling of Herod's temple, Jesus speaks of numerous natural disasters that will precede the end. Most notably, he talks about many "wars and rumors of wars" that will occur throughout history and will presage the end. In his book The Unconquerable World, Jonathan Schell sketches a history of ideas about war in modern times. World War I ushered in the concept of total war, in which wars were no longer fought to achieve political objectives but rather to annihilate the enemy's ability to wage war. War became an end in itself. The war, sparked by a political assassination in Serbia, dragged in countries from all over the world, because they were tied to one another by treaty. They fought not because they had anything to gain politically or strategically but because they were afraid that if they didn't fight, no one would be there to help if they were ever attacked. World War II brought with it for the first time the possibility that the whole of humanity could be destroyed by nuclear weapons. Combined with the idea of total war, which had now taken hold on a global scale, the annihilation of the human race was a real possibility. Wars and rumors of wars can no longer be ignored, for each new war carries with it the hidden threat of global disaster, that is, "the end." There are even some who claim the name of Christ who seem to long for the final conflagration, believing that it will inaugurate the millennial reign. They may be right, but the millennial reign that comes after the devastation of the planet by a nuclear holocaust will be that described by Zephaniah, not Revelation: "The day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness" (Zephaniah 1:15). Those of us who recognize that Jesus came as the Prince of Peace, not the God of War, must do all we can to stop the militarization of space and to roll back the arms race that is threatening to start up again. America must begin to unilaterally disarm of nuclear weapons and destroy its arsenals of chemical and biological weapons. If we do, the world will follow us. Then much of the money that we spend on weaponry can be spent instead on schools, health care, and food, both at home and abroad. The end is not yet, but we will hasten its approach by supporting foolish, short-sighted policies that are antithetical to the essence of Christianity. Will humans still inhabit the planet in a million years? Not if we don't radically change the direction we're heading right now!