"A Moral Apocalypse" Dr. Roger Ray June 17, 2018
When the Last Tree Is
Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize
That You Cannot Eat Money - modern Native American saying
I was in high school when I decided to read the Bible from
cover to cover. I suppose that is not a surprising thing to hear a minister say,
but it really wasn’t all that noble. There were no video games, no computers,
no internet, and the TV only had two channels. Reading the Bible was, like, a
really exciting option in Glasgow, KY in 1972. I know that I have told you
before that the zip code in my hometown was literally “e-i-e-i-o.” The primary
difference between Glasgow, KY and a cup of yogurt is that there is an active
living culture in a cup of yogurt. Can you feel me?
So, I’m reading the Bible every day, the dull parts took
longer and most of it had no apparent application to my life so it was mostly
like pouring water on a rock, but it just so happened that in 1973, when I was
a newly licensed driver, when my siblings were already gone, my parents decided
to go on vacation and let me stay home alone. It was the first time that I had
the house to myself.
That week also happened to fall when I was just about to
finish reading the Bible. In a quiet and dark house in rural Kentucky, I opened
the book of Revelation and very nearly scared myself into become a 16-year-old
bed wetter.
As cavalier as I may be about it now, in those days, the
Bible was handed to me as being the word of God, if not inerrant, it was at
least more accurate than the phone book and nothing in it could be taken as
having been wrong. A lot of it didn’t make sense and most of it seemed like
history that was totally irrelevant, but this last book of the Bible purported
to be telling the future and it was a very bleak future for all but a very very
few lucky people.
It was obviously highly symbolic and
it repeated itself endlessly in cycles of horrors but what was clear was that
the four horsemen of the apocalypse represented horrible ways in which most of
the people of the world would suffer death through disease, starvation,
warfare, or foreign occupation.
I read this at a time when we were still doing Civil Defense
drills, teaching us how to live in a basement for years, waiting for the
radiation from a nuclear war to subside enough to allow us to venture back
outside. The Watergate hearings were starting and we were still fighting in
Vietnam. At least a part of my lizard brain was willing to fall simultaneously
into the fear and thrill of believing that God would soon be entering human
history in a violent, bloody, and decisive way. It seemed real enough to me and
a lot of other people during that “Late Great Planet Earth” period of history.
By the time I got into Bible classes in college and grad
school, it became evident that the Revelation was just one of the pieces of
first century apocalyptic literature that was willing to give up any hope that
the world could be redeemed from the mess it was in during the expansion of the
Roman empire.
The Essenes, who authored most of what we call the “Dead Sea
Scrolls,” and fragmentary bits of other books of the period, often reacted to
the violent occupation of Rome in a religious way, assuming that the world as
we have known it was winding down to inevitable death, and whatever salvation
they could hope for would come in the form of divine intervention and
deliverance into a new and different world, made all the more enjoyable by the
reassurance that the Romans and all other rival nations would spend the rest of
eternity burning in hell after having suffered a torturous death on earth.
Happy times!
But I didn’t really appreciate the power of apocalyptic
literature until I first visited rural South and Central America. I was lecturing
in a school for lay preachers in the mountains of Ecuador, a tedious day of
waiting for my every sentence to be translated, first, into Spanish, and then
into the indigenous language of most of the preachers in the room, Quichua. It
was evening when we started the question – answer time.
The Quichua are typically quite short in stature. They live
hard lives trying to farm on mountain sides in a country that is their ancient
homeland but where they are treated as third class citizens… the fair skinned
descendants of Spain who typically hold all of the government positions and own
most of the businesses are the upper class. The mix blood “mestizos” are second
class, and the Quichua, from whom the land was taken, are regarded as being
something slightly less than human.
They have national health care in Ecuador but if a Quichua
Indian shows up at a hospital, they are either turned away or made to lie in
the hallways.
It is a racial divide that has existed for hundreds of years.
And so the first question an indigenous preacher wanted to ask me was about
signs of the coming apocalypse, which my translators begged me not to answer
out of fear that it would launch a debate that would end in a fight.
At the time I assumed that my hosts were steering me away
from the topic that interested these native preachers the most because their
beliefs were based on a kind of sadly childish reading of scripture but
eventually I came to understand that it was more than that. The horror of an
apocalypse is based on the perspective from when you see it. In their world,
the Four Horsemen were not coming for the Quichua, they were coming for the
white people.
For people who have been under the thumb of foreign
occupation and racial apartheid for 400 years, an apocalypse is not something
to dread. . . it is something to hope for. They were nice to me but it became
clear that the whore of Babylon mentioned in Revelation was not, for them,
ancient Rome, it was me and people who looked like me who had taken control of
their rivers, their coasts, their good farm land. Who treated them like slaves
whom they could impoverish and work to an early death while never even becoming
aware of their suffering. The preacher who asked me to talk about signs of the
coming apocalypse was, through a circum
locution, checking to see if I was aware that I was about to be burned in
hell.
You see, an apocalypse is a moral
thing. It isn’t arbitrary, not even in the minds of 1st century
religious obsessives. An apocalypse is caused by a moral failure, a collapse of
decency, sanity, compassion, and intelligence. The Bible tends to describe
things through a lens that German scholars dubbed, “Heilsgeschichte,” . . . which
is kind of fun for seminary students to say . . . it means “salvation history”
or “history told from the perspective of a religious interpretation.”
For we progressives whose
theology does not lead us to interpret historical events as the invisible hand
of God making things happen, an apocalypse is a catastrophy caused by the moral
failing of society. Think about the current crisis on our southern border. We
have hundreds of young children being taken from their parents and put into
detention in dog cages . . . but this is not a crisis caused by a hurricane, it
wasn’t a tornado, an earthquake, a wild fire, or a volcano. This is a 
crisis caused by the moral
failing of government. . . it is policy gone mad.
It could be stopped by a 51% vote of our legislature but you
can’t muster a 51% vote because,
well, because, there are political and financial issues at stake… there is also
the conservative base of voters who have been manipulated for years by tall
tales of fears of immigrants and you can’t go all weak in the knees about a
couple of thousand crying babies. . .
You see, what makes moral decision making difficult is because there is
always someone who is deriving some profit, some benefit, from the immorality.
Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard
Sessions, tells us that taking these babies from their mommas is the law and
the Bible tells us to obey the law. He is backed up by the White House press
secretary, Sarah Huckabee, who says that what they are doing is just what the
Bible tells us to do.
Now, I’m just a dumb country preacher, but I’m pretty sure
that is not what the Bible says. I
remember, shoot, I was just in High School, but I remember it says in
Deuteronomy 10 9 You
shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
And it says in Exodus 23 9 You shall not oppress a
resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land
of Egypt.
Even in Leviticus 19 33 When an alien resides with you in your land,
you shall not oppress the alien. 34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as
the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were
aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
I would even quote Matthew 19 where
Jesus says, “suffer the little children
to come unto me,” but that would be a bit heavy handed wouldn’t, Mr.
Sessions, and you don’t want me to open up a whole can of Jesus WhoopAss on you
do you?
Sessions and Huckabee, you don’t
fool me. I’m a southern Christian and I’ve been wiping your kind of religious
hypocrisy off of the soles of my boots since I was a little boy. Sessions, or
Trump, could stop this immediately but instead there are now 50 children being
taken from their parents every day. That means there will be two more while we
are in here this morning.
Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell
could stop it in a matter of days… but we already know that they don’t care
about this sort of thing. This is a crisis of our own creation. We could stop
it at any time we decided to do what is right rather than what is profitable or
expedient.
God does not intervene in human
history. I know that not many ministers will tell you the truth about that
fact. The Bible is written through the lens of heilsgeschichte but we don’t talk that way now.
You already know that the
universe itself is morally neutral, chaotic, unpredictable. God has no hands
but our hands, no feet but our feet, no eyes, no ears, but ours and if this
moral apocalypse is to be stopped, it is we who will do it because it is we who
started it.
Folks, let’s get real honest
about the partisan divide in our nation and in the world. It isn’t about the
power scramble between Republicans and Democrats. It isn’t “red states” against
“blue states.” It isn’t the conservative or labor parties in England or even
the Shia’ and Sunni divisions in the Middle East. The real struggle, the real
partisan divide is and always has been between the haves and the have nots. The
haves inevitably control the government and the police and the have nots are
trying to feed the kids and stay out of prison.
As our country has transitioned away from democracy towards oligarchy,
there are a handful of very wealthy families who are pulling the strings of
government through political donations. It is a good investment for them. It is
not secret why they do what they do. For example, casino magnate, Sheldon
Adelson, who is
estimated to be worth more than $33 billion has donated about $200 million to
Republican candidates in recent years. If you have $33 billion, then donating
$200 million will not mean that you are going to have to clip pizza coupons to
make ends meet. But rich people rarely give money away for no reason.
Their donations are really investments. For example, he
expects his bought and paid for politicians to keep on-line gambling illegal so
that people will continue to come and lose money in his casinos. And that
appears to be working out for him. He is also very concerned about American
support for Israel, primarily in the form of military aid but also in such
symbolic victories as getting the American embassy moved to Jerusalem. His $200
million in donations has bought him billions of dollars in American tax income
being spent on his pet causes, which, as you can see, is a pretty good deal.
I don’t want to keep you here all day
but to just say the words, “the Koch brothers,”
brings up a whole oligarchy driven apocalypse all its own. Again, an apocalypse
looks different depending upon where you are standing when you see it coming at
you.
They are an aristocratic family. They
donate to support the arts in New York, they give to hospitals and medical research.
Among oligarchs, they enjoy a good reputation. However, their money comes from
fossil fuels. They inherited a fortune
from their father who made a lot of his money building refineries for Hitler.
He even brought back a very ardent Nazi woman to be their nanny. She, however,
abandoned the family when France fell to the Nazis in 1940 because she wanted
to go and help the Fuhrer to build the new Nazi world order.
This isn’t just mudslinging political jargon, these are
frightening facts about the people who call the shots in our political world.
Charles and David Koch, who blackmailed their oldest brother out of the family
business with threats of exposing his sexual orientation, have sought to
monetize the earth in a way that allows them to keep making money off of oil
and coal while they kill the planet we live on.
They have invested in voter repression, fake science, they
have tried to control the media and the government to keep climate science from
tightening their purse strings in a thousand ways but let me just mention one
before I wrap up:
Koch brothers picked up an aspiring business partner from
their hometown in , Wichita, KS. They made Mike Pompeo, a wealthy man. Then they
backed him financially to elect him to congress in 2010. They even installed a
Koch lobbyist to run his congressional office, making him, literally, the
congressman from Koch. Pompeo went on to become the director of the CIA and now
of the State Dept. where he can control foreign policy in a way that serves oil
and gas interests for the Koch brothers. He is one of the actually
intelligent members of the Trump administration who uses Trump like a puppet to
run the government in a way that benefits the Koch empire’s business interests.
They were worth $80 billion when Trump went into office but
they made another $12 billion in his first year in office and the future is
looking pretty bright for them . . . well, if by future, you mean their
financial bottom line over the next few years. They are making profits but, as the
modern Native American proverb says:
When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the
Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream
Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money
But, again, an apocalypse is always judged from where you sit
when it comes.
Before they decided to buy the government through political
donations, in 1980, David Koch made a run as the Vice-Presidential candidate on
the Libertarian ticket. I will not take the time to give you any commentary on
this, I just want to quote, verbatim, what David’s platform said at that time:
For the sake of time, let me sum up some of the rest: they
want to end compulsory Social Security, the postal service, corporate taxes and
all capital gains taxes, and any criminal prosecution of tax evasion. They want
to do away with minimum wage laws, public schools, income or property taxes.
They want to close down the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation, the Food and
Drug administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and they want all
Rail Roads to revert to private ownership and all usury laws should be revoked.
And it will come as no surprise to you that they want to end all welfare
programs and services for children, because, they say, such government programs
are: paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient.
God will not send the four horsemen
of the Apocalypse to earth to bring history to an end. But the Koch brothers
might. They will bring about an apocalypse of income disparity with the
crushing poverty that necessarily follows it. They will spoil the earth, making
it uninhabitable, especially for the vulnerable poor, while they gouge the
earth and foul the air and water for profit. They will transfer all power into
the hands of a few, restricting healthcare and education to the masses in order
to keep them frightened and compliant.
This is not titillating religious myth intended to scare
children and empower the church. This is a real political movement that has the
power of the economy and the government behind it and the only thing that will
stop it from happening is if the masses become informed, organized, and
motivated to choose morality over money.
