Monday, December 24, 2007

Christmas In The New Jerusalem

The Book of Revelation and I do not get along very well, theologically. Too much of it is devoted to depicting all the horrible things that are in store for people who do not pass muster with the Heavenly Authorities. In its gloating over others' soon to come punishments, hope gets swallowed up in terror, judgment crowds out love, and new creation almost vanishes from sight. That narratives like these might be read aloud in worship services, especially those with our grandchildren in attendance, should be appalling to contemplate.

Scattered through this mostly dreadful book, however, are images not of a world coming to its supposedly deserved end at the hands of a fed up God, but of a world as it should be, as it was meant to be, and as it will be, at the hands of an infinitely loving One. My favorite is the image of a coming holy city, within whose gates God will "have his dwelling with (human)kind." Death, grief, weeping, and pain will be no more, for the old order will have passed away. ( 21:2-4) There is a New Jerusalem to come, we are told, on earth and not just in heaven, whose center is God and peace, justice, and love its everlastingly sounding harmonies.

This is a truly breathtaking image, but one that seems out of place with almost everything that surrounds it in the book. The holy city it depicts is hard to appreciate in the context of a plan of salvation built around a final tallying up of accounts and a separating of the righteous from the unrighteousness for all eternity, accompanied by a wholesale obliterating of the earth in the here and now. Worse still, all of this is to happen long before God's already promised work of reconciling and transforming all of humankind remains unfinished. How can divinely wrought destruction on a cosmic scale, and perhaps even of the cosmos itself, possibly be thought of as anything but a failure on God's part, and on Christ's, to fulfill the central promise of The Book of Revelation, that all things are being made new? That the final destruction is just about to begin (evidently, we are supposed to keep on believing this, the passage of time to the contrary notwithstanding) makes God appear to be unfaithful to his own purposes and commitments.

A more sensible way of looking at humanity's future --- sensibly biblical, that is --- is to begin with the obvious fact that there is still a lot of work to be done on the part of our Creator to bring to pass what he had in mind "in the beginning" for all of us. Most probably, it occurred to him well before the morning and evening of the sixth day that the human race he was about to create might, in spite of his best intentions, become mired in mistrust that the created order would have enough in it to go around. And that its members might become consumed by fear and suspicion of others' schemes to grab more than their fair share of things. And that they might wind up making a life out of devious plotting on their own, driven by a finely tuned sense of entitlement, to cop all the provisions for themselves first. That the Creator, having stared these discouraging alternative scenarios squarely in the face, went ahead and finished his sixth day of work anyway, should tell us that he had already figured out how he was going to deal with them, and that his plan would be successful.

The plan? To keep working on us, lovingly, to bring about a change of heart that eventually will let fear and suspiciousness be overcome by gratitude, competition and aggression by sharing, and narcissism by self-sacrifice. This is the kind of plan that is going to require a lot of time to complete, much, much more time --- maybe the whole five billion years or so that earth has left before the sun fizzles out --- than a lot of rightous people apparently are willing to give it. For them, the rest of us have already had time enough to mend our ways, and God should simply quit taking his own sweet time about exacting his price for our not doing so. Basically, he should cut his losses quickly, salvage the few good souls that still remain in the world, set everyone else to genocidal conflict, and move on to alternative universes in which things might go better.

Evidently, though, the Creator has something else in mind. For one thing, a vulnerable baby, whom he trusted to become the kind of human being in whom the true holy city, New Jerusalem, would forever dwell, and through whom it can dwell in everyone. Life and light to all he brings, even now.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Muhammad Bears

Does anybody know whether the Chicago Bears have any of those free #87 jerseys left?

Now hold on, fellow Cowboys fans, and let me explain. The jersey offer to which I am referring showed up last month alongside the story on a media website about the Bears' 38-20 victory over the New York Giants. Recent events have drawn me back into that story a little, for reasons other than the help the win gave the Cowboys in their pursuit of a now safely locked up division title.

It is now worth pondering who got a lot of praise, high praise in fact, for the Bears' win that day. Number 87 on the squad is a twice-elected Pro-Bowler who caught seven passes against the Giants, for over 100 yards and a touchdown. His name is Muhain Muhammad. Replicas of his jersey that were offered for free carried on their fronts the number 87 and just the name "Muhammad." Just that name. On a football jersey.

About the time that all this was coming out of Chicago, a British teacher, Gillian Gibbons, who was teaching seven-year-olds in Khartoum, Sudan, had thrust upon her another playful use of the name Muhammad, this time in connection with a teddy bear brought to class by one of her students. Class members, apparently under the influence of the popularity of a schoolmate who bore the name, wanted to call the bear Muhammad, too. Ms. Gibbons went along with their choice, and then found out, too late, that this would become a big no-no in at least certain quarters of Muslim society. There, you can sire a thoroughly rotten son and still call him Muhammad, but you cannot make invidious comparisons between the Prophet and any of the other animals in the world, even pretend ones.

Ms. Gibbons barely escaped a brutal lashing and an extended imprisonment in Sudan for what was deemed her crime of "inciting religious hatred." The Sudanese Foreign Ministry referred to Ms. Gibbon's act as misconduct against the Islamic faith. (Say what?) Sudanese clerics condemned it as part of a Western plot against Islam in general. (Say what, what?) Even the Muslim Council of Britain, otherwise very positively disposed to Ms. Gibbons, would come to call her classroom action a "mistake." (Aw, come on now.)

We can only hope that while Ms. Gibbons is enjoying a much deserved rest back in England, there is at least one Sudanese seven-year-old who can still cuddle her teddy bear with the wrong name and not worry about somehow putting a rip in the fabric of the cosmos for doing so. But we can be sure that there is one sweaty football player still being allowed to enjoy his highly praised name's being run through washing machines all over Chicago Beardom by those fortunate enough to be able to wear their own #87 jerseys without impunity. And that there will be other bearers of the name Muhammad, bad as well as good, all over the world for all the time to come.

The more I read about The Prophet of Islam, the easier it is for me to like him, and to get really ticked off at so many of his followers who fail to appreciate the sublime quality of his humanness, and who substitute their own humorlessness, ill-temperedness, and viciousness for it. The child-loving Muhammad I have come to know would have immediately gotten beyond whatever negativities his culture attached to real live bears, and cherished any child's treasuring her pretend bear's bearing his name. Just as the business-savvy Muhammad would have appreciated both the commercial and the human value of rewarding one of his real-life name-bearers with a little more than the normal fifteen-minute allotment of worldly fame.

I wonder what has happened to the Christian presence at Ms. Gibbon's school in Khartoum. It was originally founded by Christians groups, but now has an enrollment that is 90% Muslim. And that is fine. But what isn't fine is the continuing attacks on Christians by Muslim extremists for speaking of Jesus and God in the same breath, in contrast to the "purer" faith of Islam that extols the humanity and not the divinity of its own Prophet. It makes no sense to honor Muhammad's humanity and then permit no physical representations of him, ostensibly because his perfection is that of the unrepresentable Allah Himself. And while we are on this subject, I have a really big problem with protecting The Prophet from being pulled into the world of physical representations, while affixing his very name to as many Muslim offspring as a family unit will permit.

Where better place to have aired out issues like this than at Unity High, Khartoum, rather than in a courtroom presided over by a besieged, even if wise, judge? In our dreams, perhaps.