When the Academy Award nominees were announced this week, Keisha Castle-Hughes received a nomination for best actress in a leading role for her portrayal of Pai in Whale Rider. Keisha is the youngest person ever to receive that honor. Even more astounding is the fact that this was her very first role in a movie. In the movie, Pai is born into a family of Maori chiefs; the only problem is that she's a girl, and chiefs are always men. Nevertheless, she is determined to learn what it means to be a chief, and over the course of the movie she wins the admiration of her town and of the person she admires most, her grandfather. Although she is young, she understands her people's need for a common purpose better than anyone else. In many ways, she is a prophet to her people. Jeremiah was young when he had his first encounter with God. He resisted that call, because he believed that his youth and inexperience disqualified him from service. Age neither qualifies nor disqualifies a person from serving God. The Bible is full of instances of God using the very young and the very old to achieve the divine purpose. Certainly experience is a valuable commodity, but the divine compulsion is equally important, if not more so. Those of us who are adults frequently look down our noses at the young, dismissing their critiques of our message and our culture. The examples of both Jeremiah and Pai remind us that the young sometimes have a more acute understanding of God and God's will than more senior members of a community. Perhaps the reason is that young people tend to be more tuned into the present, while the older we get, the more likely we are to live in the past. If so, we need to remember the words of Jesus: "God is not a God of the dead, but of the living." When young people talk, we need to listen especially carefully to see if God is speaking through them. It's very possible that that's exactly what's happening.
According to paleoanthropologists, modern human beings first entered the continent of Europe about 35,000 years ago. Within a couple of thousand years they had spread throughout Europe, seeing such natural wonders as the Alps for the first time. As the millennia passed, features of the land changed. The great ice sheet that covered much of the continent melted, flora and fauna adapted to their new surroundings or became extinct, and humans moved further north. A little over 5,000 years ago a lone hunter traversing the Alps froze to death, and his body was discovered in 1991 by hikers. His clothes show the extent to which humans have changed over time, yet to the hikers, to Otzi the Ice Man, and to the earliest humans in Europe, the Alps looked pretty much the same. When the psalmist describes God as a rock of refuge, perhaps he had in mind a particularly striking mountain in the land of Israel. As wars raged and empires rose and fell, the mountain stayed the same, just as God stays the same. The world today is changing faster than ever before. Technologies that are commonplace today--the World Wide Web, cell phones, DVDs, laptop computers--were not available thirty years ago. Whereas the typical American man often worked in one job for his entire career a few decades ago, men and women today change jobs--and even careers--several times during their working lives. In the midst of all this change, where can we find stability? The simple answer is God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That's partially right, but also partially wrong. Our understanding of God certainly changes over time, and it's right that it should. Our spiritual forebears held ideas of God that we today reject, such as the necessity of women being subordinate to men, the legitimacy of slavery, the divine right of kings, or God as male rather than female. We can't confuse our understanding of God with the reality of God. It is that reality that is our rock and refuge, not our conceptualization of God. It is appropriate for God's children to question the conceptual constructs of our predecessors, or even of our younger selves. Doing so reminds us that all who seek God will not have the same ideas about God. However, we can all cling with certainty to the idea that God is our refuge, a rock that never changes. In a maddeningly evolving world, there's comfort in that thought.
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.These words from Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address offer a picture of a humble commander-in-chief. Poised on the brink of a certain victory, Lincoln does not gloat over his triumph, but pledges charity--love--for those on both sides of the great conflict of the American Civil War. He understood the value of loving one's enemies, not demonizing them, because he knew that the reunited nation would consist of both northerners and southerners, and they would have to work together to bring about a just and lasting peace. Lincoln's example was not followed by the victors of World War I, who exacted an enormous toll on the German people whom they had defeated. The result was another, deadlier world war only twenty years later. After the Second World War, in contrast, the allies helped to rebuild Germany and Japan, and today both countries remain strong allies of the U.S., Britain, France, and--since the end of the Cold War--Russia. President Bush says that we are engaged today in a war on terror, but his words--and the words of many others from both political parties--are often harsh and unbending. Our enemies form an "Axis of Evil," they are "cowards," "killers," and, worst of all, "terrorists," a word that is now used of so many disparate groups of people that it ceases to have much meaning, other than "people that we hate." How far the rhetoric of most of our political leaders, as well as many religious leaders, is from the thoughtful, charitable words of Abraham Lincoln. It is important to remember that Lincoln was no pacifist. He sent troops into battle, and he expected results from his generals. Nevertheless, he also understood the meaning of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, which speaks of the importance of love. Loving those who love us is easy; loving those who hate us and want to kill us is hard. It's much easier to hate them and want to kill them, too. But if that's our attitude, how do we differ from those we call terrorists? The answer, of course, is that we're no different. Yes, our methods are somewhat different: they use suicide bombers, we drop bombs from the sky. They sometimes kill civilians, but so do we. They kill us two or three or maybe ten at a time, we kill them ten or twenty or fifty at a time. It's all killing, and it's all contrary the message that Paul proclaims in the love chapter. As Christians, it is our duty to tell our religious and political leaders to find a way other than war to deal with our enemies. As those who wield great military and economic power, we can afford to deal charitably with those with whom we are at war. After all, we can all see how dealing harshly with them is working.
"Physician, heal yourself!" No, this is not advice for presidential contender Howard Dean (though it could be!) but a proverb that Jesus said that the residents of Nazareth were muttering among themselves concerning him. People seem to have a love-hate relationship with their fellow citizens. On the one hand, voters can often be counted on to vote for a "favorite son" (or daughter) candidate. On the other hand, people often don't want to hear the advice of those who are close at hand. Do you know what the definition of an expert is? Someone from out of town. I remember an occasion in a former job where a couple of bigwigs asked the advice of their staff concerning a particular technology matter. The staff replied with sound advice, but the executives weren't convinced, so they decided to fly outside consultants in to address the issue. The consultants met for two days, discussed the issues with executives and staff, and talked among themselves for several hours. The results? You guessed it: they agreed completely with the advice that the staff had originally given! One could argue that the primary problem with this scenario is that we don't trust those we know to give good advice. That may be, but I think an equally important issue is that we're far too gullible in accepting the word of outside experts (so-called). Don't get me wrong; it's often important to get the advice of outside consultants, especially when they have expertise that local people don't have. However, we need to be cautious about accepting the word of people with whom we have no long-term relationship as gospel truth. Whether advice comes from those close to us or from outsiders, we need to learn to make critical judgments on our own. Why are many fundamentalist churches with authoritarian leaders growing? Because too many people are happy to be told what to believe, because it relieves them of having to think for themselves. As progressive Christians, we need to resist the temptation to do the same from our own perspective. The people to whom we minister need to hear our advice, but they also need to learn how to exercise their own critical thinking skills to evaluate the advice that we offer in the light of their own context and understanding. We should be open to prophets who arise from our midst, as well as those from other places. At the same time, we must feel free to use our best judgment concerning the advice we hear from others. Sometimes we'll make the wrong decisions, but we'll do so as free moral agents, doing our best to follow our understanding of God.