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In my previous post, I introduced what will become my dissertation topic: culture, education, and how we frame the sacred. In this post, I’d like to continue that conversation by reflecting on just how the sacred is both healthy and sick. One of my friends and colleagues, Ben N., in addressing the issue of a healthy and sick society, made this observation: our city, Oklahoma City, seems, in just about every way that an observant Martian might acknowledge what we hold as sacred, to be a healthy, vibrant city on the rise. We have new skyscrapers dotting our landscape, new schools being built, plans to extend the city from Core-to-Shore, a big league professional sports team, recession-proof industries, and our commercials boast that “Oklahoma City is alive and well.”
In other words, the sacred is winning, and winning big. And yet, as my friend routinely points out, we are also a city full of children abandoned, abused, and neglected, filling up foster care centers as fast as we can build them. We incarcerate more women per capita in this city than just about anywhere else on the globe. We are the crossroads for the billion-dollar sex slave industry. And we consistently rank near the bottom in education. It certainly seems that, in the ways in which we live out our sacred practices, we have achieved the world we want. And yet there seems to be a disconnect between what we claim we want and what we work to achieve. We tend to accomplish the things that we value. We should celebrate innovation and growth, but not at the expense of basic human dignity for the most marginalized amongst us. We should welcome new job creation and excitement in a city on the rise, but not at the cost of our common humanity. When what we hold as sacred is reflected in our bottom lines and prime-time television rather than in a shared sense of human flourishing, we need to re-evaluate what we mean by “alive and well”.
This, by the way, is what grieved the prophet Isaiah under the reign of King Jeroboam II. In a world where the markets teemed with life, commerce thrived, the temples were full and the land brought prosperity, wealth, and power to the many, Isaiah saw through the clutter and the crowd to address the sickness in the very institutions that made the widows, the orphans and the outcasts–the people Yahweh’s followers were called to defend.
Isaiah saw a people loaded with guilt; a brood of evildoers whose children were given to corruption (Isaiah 1:4); rulers who were rebels and companions of thieves who loved bribes and refused to defend the cause of the fatherless and the widow (1:23). He saw that the plunder of the poor existed in the rich houses of the elders and leaders (3:14), and the women walked around with expensive finery while the poor were crushed (3:15-16). Against such inequalities and lack of justice, his words rang out with a bitter fire:“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” (Isaiah 10:1-2).
Isaiah was not an outsider throwing barbs at the opposition; rather, like most true prophets, he was an insider, a lone figure who at first fled from his task. Isaiah spoke words of critique not from a position of moral superiority, but from a position of grief. Isaiah longed for the day when nations “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks;” when “nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). His distress came in watching a city once full of justice venerate those who command power and become a people ready to kill and die at the call of kings. Isaiah’s vision was of an end to war, violence, and the numbed silence that locked in both the powerful and the oppressed into vicious, morally corrupt cycles. He longed for the day when the oppressed and oppressor lay down their arms; when the wolf could lay down with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6).
Isaiah knew that, for Israel, the sacred was no longer sacred and what had been claimed as sacred no longer existed. The faithful city had become a harlot (1:21), selling its morality and mission for the allure of prosperity and the pretense of safety. Redeeming the sacred once more become Isaiah’s deep longing, and for this, Isaiah (much like my friend Ben), was willing to give his life.
What I hope to do in my work is to couple this idea of the sacred with the prophetic critique that calls us to account for the ways in which we fail the most vulnerable in our city. If our culture is to promote a vision of health and wellness, it must do so for every citizen, not just those who stand to benefit from its riches. We cannot claim to be alive and well while so many zip codes in our cities continue to breed generational poverty, lifetime illiteracy, offer attractive entres into a life of crime and pipelines to prisons, and ingrain habits of identity and lifestyle that perpetuate brokenness, barrenness, hopelessness and an overwhelming sense of malaise and despair.
We must dare to do the difficult, costly, sacrificial work of redeeming the sacred.
A few thoughts arose in me as I read through this.
1.) You spoke of Isaiah being “a lone figure”. To make a real difference it takes people willing to stand up as a loner. A person that wants to make real change in culture for the benefit of the Kingdom, they cannot have any regard for what benefit they will receive for their stance. It takes a person who sees their true value lying only in God. This person cannot have an attitude that allows them to be swayed by the masses. Most people follow the crowd, because it is way easier. It is hard to be a loner. We all want to have people love us and tell us how good we are, but when a person feels the call to tackle an issue that goes against the popular opinion of the day they have to be willing to stand alone in the storm with only God on their side. So, I believe this is why we don’t see more people out truly trying to make a difference in the problems we all see and talk about. It is a deep scary body of water to jump into.
2.) “His distress came in watching a city once full of justice venerate those who command power and become a people ready to kill and die at the call of kings.” Does this statement describe where the US is now? Proverbs 14:26 says, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.” Have we transformed from a nation that was founded for religious freedom into a nation that only cares about our own personal situations, regardless of the consequences it has on the whole? Not that the early US citizens were perfect examples of the Christian walk, but they had a sense what had been sacrificed in order for them to worship God. Just as the early Christians had the real life sense that this no name from Galilee had died so they could be free. The early Americans knew their ancestors had sacrificed a great deal for them to be able to be free of oppression. We seem to have lost this tradition. It could be argued that the US held this understanding, by in large, until the counterculture of the 1960’s developed. Since that time the religious landscape in the US has changed dramatically. (That is a different subject though) My question is, has the US lost its religious identity, and replaced it with a success, money, power, self-centered identity? The follow up to that question is, did the US have a better social well-being before or after this transition happened?
3.) We can sit and talk about these issues all day, but the most telling question of this whole topic is, what are we doing to change the injustices we see? We can blame culture, the church, or a number of other things, but what are we doing to make a difference in the topics we banter back and forth?
1. That’s right! Philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard all spoke of the danger of the crowd in shaping morality. Too few people want to stand out. That’s why even most of the Biblical prophets ran away at first (think of Jonah!). It’s a dangerous, deadly thing to critique one’s own culture (think Jesus and the early apostles). And yet, that is exactly what brings change. This is an excellent point!
2. “Have we transformed from a nation that was founded for religious freedom into a nation that only cares about our own personal situations, regardless of the consequences it has on the whole?” I would say yes. It’s hard to prove otherwise.
“My question is, has the US lost its religious identity, and replaced it with a success, money, power, self-centered identity?” Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. “The follow up to that question is, did the US have a better social well-being before or after this transition happened?” I would argue before. Remember, our focus on the individual is pretty modern. And there are many factors contributing to this. The rise of the Industrian Revolution, where jobs went from families to nondescript factories; urban sprawl, where communities were uprooted to bring in new business; the 60’s movement you reference, etc. If one goes back to the ancient Greeks, the focus was on the polis, the community. In fact, in Greek, the word for individual (an obscenity in their culture) is idiot.
3. My hope is that, by raising awareness to this issue, we do move people to action. If we think things are great because we have commercials that proclaim Oklahoma is “alive and well” we may overlook, ignore, or be blind to the ways in which we are not.
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