Grounded in this World

Anton DeWet

Psalm 8 and Reading from “The Worldliness of Christianity” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If you have ever put together a puzzle, you will know the frustration of building the puzzle and discovering that one or more pieces are missing. Its as though the entire work you have gone through is unfinished. There is really nothing you can do with this puzzle other than break it up and throw it back into the box as it will always be spoiled by that missing piece or two.

The world we live in is somewhat like a puzzle. It is made up of millions of tiny particles that form the picture we are a part of. Every particle has a place in that world. And every particle has many sub-particles. Beginning with the atom, and ending with the biggest mass of rock, or the entire universe, everything has a place.

And we are part of that total puzzle. We play a part in this entire diversity which is really a completed unity.

For far too long the Christian religion has encouraged us to think of humanity as separate and unequal. We have been viewed as the crown of creation and thus, elevated from the rest of creation. Ultimately, we are taught in the conservative school of theology, our ultimate function comes to fruition not in this world, but in the next. In other words, its not about this life…its about the next one.

Osama Bin Laden promises his followers that it is OK to give your life away in this world by strapping a bomb to your chest because by this “gift” you enter the door to the next world—and then he adds; “where a bunch of virgins await you,” so we are enticed to focus on a reality to come in stead of the one at hand.

You know the story of the suicide bomber who opens his eyes as he enters the next world and in stead of a bunch of beautiful, lusting maidens awaiting him he finds himself looking up at a bunch of menacing men standing closer to him.

Asking where his 70 virgins are the biggest guy in the group sneers at him:

“The word is Virginians, mate, not virgins!”

This fixation on the afterlife, how fascinating it may be, can mislead us to believe that our real experience begins only after our life on earth because we have coupled it to eternity. And yes, life on earth seems inconsequential if you look at it that way. There is no comparison between 80 or 90 years compared to eternity.

But if we shift our focus from this world to another we diminish our entire human experience to a kind of necessary irritation or a mere hiccup in our eternal cycle of existence.

This form of Christianity has been at the heart of a way of thinking that led people of faith to believe that slavery is a necessary evil that can be rationalized by stating that it is only a small part of our human experience, to be replaced with the greater glory of a perfect afterlife where God will make all things right again.

This was the theology explained to me as a child when I questioned Apartheid, namely, that its not a perfect system, but its what God has given us and eventually, when we die, we will all live in the perfect place where all will be equal.

In other words, if we do not value our place in this world and in this life we tend to believe that its simply a question of maintaining the status quo until we die when all will be perfect. This paralyzes us into a fatalistic inaction in this world.

Why bother when it will soon be over?

Why struggle when the real life begins after death?

Why care if this is so temporary?

I believe it is time to question these lasting assertions and these religious concepts or run the risk of continuing the free fall of destruction we bring upon ourselves whether it is the natural world we destroy through our applied technologies to serve unbridled greed or our mutual destructive behavior when it comes to competing for the resources of this world and the space that is rapidly shrinking as our populations spiral out of control.

What we need is to be reintroduced to the poets and prophets who spoke of the beauty of this life; the miraculous wonder of our world; and who made the case for families and communities and societies to find each other’s needs to be as compelling as their own and to adjust one’s life accordingly.

Psalm 8, which we recited in the beginning speaks of the magnificence of creation and that includes human life, animal life and the vast expanses of the stars and the heavenly bodies.

We need to fall in love with this world and this life before considering the potential of another. We have fallen out of love with ourselves and each other and we have become alienated from the natural world which mothers us.

Our ideologies and religious traditions divide us into opposing camps where we posture and threaten and give in to primal instincts worthy of Neanderthal man. I was watching a political conversation on television the other evening and thought to myself how childish and small minded the conversation was as people jockeyed for a place to impress. They looked like a bunch of peacocks who had lost their tail feathers—pathetic and frantic; angry and divided.

Is there not a better way for us to live our lives? Is this really the best we can do with this amazing gift of life we have received?

I was watching a program on crime when the journalist interviewed famous ex cons, now elderly, and reviewed their cases and the one vicious looking man declared in the end that he had no regrets for his life of crime; that he had enjoyed it and misses it; and that his only regret was getting caught. These men had apparently served their time and they were all getting on in years and I was wondering whether there was some retirement center, probably here in Florida somewhere, where ex-cons could retire? Imagine the sign to its entrance:

The Big House Retirement Village, lock-picking classes on Wednesdays at the clubhouse.

What we need is a new dream. We need a new generation of poets and prophets to speak truth to us in new songs. We have lost the rhythm and words to God’s song that has been sung from the beginning of time. A song that lifts us from a place of destruction and alienation to a place of cooperative creation.

We need to rebuild our ideas about God’s world and our place in it. There are too many discarded pieces of the puzzle that has left us disfigured as a whole. We have to imagine our faith anew. We need to question our own values and adjust our lives to accommodate the world in which we live.

We need to understand our own value as individual and we need to see ourselves within the context of the entire cosmic reality. The balance of our reality has become warped and damaged, and we are the part of this picture that has the gift of awareness. We can correct the picture. We can begin to build, together, to fulfill the puzzle’s potential.

Psalm 8 reminds us that we carry within us the genes of near-gods. “Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden’s dawn light. (The Message)

How can we not step up to the plate and embrace this world and our calling to excel in our humanity…and to embrace our challenge to be a harmonizing reality in this world?!

Dietrich Boenhoffer was a brilliant academic and theology was his passion. But when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi’s came to power he became one of the very few voices in the churches of Germany who stood up to this demonic form of nationalism. He could easily have escaped the danger of the pre WWII Germany and would probably have received multiple offers from seminaries across the world to teach. But he chose to stay and confront the monster that was rising in Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Boenhoffer attacked Hitler on a radio broadcast in which he suggested that Hitler was not the Fuhrer, the Leader, but the Verfuhrer, the Mis-leader or Seducer. He was cut off mid sentence at some point in the program. It is said of Boenhoffer that…

“…he raised the first and virtually lone voice for church resistance to Hitler’s persecution of Jews when he declared that the church must not simply “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.”[1]

Where the balance of this world is jeopardized we are called to step in and create a counter balance or this jeopardy will threaten our entire puzzle and it will begin to fall apart.

Faith in God, however you may wish to define God, can only be true faith if it leads to wholeness. Everything less than that is either idolatry or superstition; the one more misleading and ultimately destructive than the other.

Dear Friends of God, let’s look at ourselves. What is there in our lives that may be causing the sacred puzzle of our being to be distorted? Is it fear of losing some position of privilege or comfort? Is it fear of change? Is it complacency? Is it some prior painful experience that holds us back from making the leap of faith? Is it stubbornness?

Why are we obsessed with an afterlife that none—absolutely no-one, can explain, but upon which we bet the entire house? We’ll be jerks in this world and somehow things will be OK in the next? Is that ultimate hope of reprieve what keeps us molded into a life of hard, uncompromising habits of selfishness and self serving actions at times?

Imagine with the poets and prophets of all times, a world where we work to bring the puzzle into focus. Where we recognize the interaction of all reality, whether the passages of the planets or the seasons of our lives. Imagine with me a world where we turn away from our evolutionary induced need to control to finding a place of harmonious collaboration.

Can we not learn to love better?—to forgive more generously?—to offer others a share of our accumulated stuff which they may need?—to relearn the love for the natural world with its cycles of life and its gift of sustenance?

O God, you granted us this world and we have raped her in our quest for profit and dominance. We are so obsessed with being number one that we will sacrifice the health of others, the potential of others, even the livelihood of others.

Let’s dream new dreams for our lives…that which is left of it. Let’s become caretakers of the earth and let’s become healers of the broken. Let’s relearn our place in this beautiful world and celebrate this gift. Let’s imagine the earth as a gentle mother and love her accordingly. Let’s look at each other with kind eyes and see the beauty in each person. The wonder in those with wrinkled hands and the potential in our children with their wondrous minds absorbing our actions and words. Love is a wonderful thing! So let’s make a point of sharing it every day with those who are closest to us but also with the stranger who asks for a hand out…and more challenging, by imagining our enemy to also be God’s friend.

Let go of those obsessions with material things that bring us no hope and fleeting excitement.

And where it matters, let’s stand together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the one to “jam the spoke of the wheel” even though it appeared futile at that moment. For that he paid with his life when the Nazis put him to death but his act became one of many others, some being yours for those who served to end that tyranny in Europe at that time. Ultimately the dark evil of Nazism was defeated and the restoration of millions of broken lives could begin again.

So you and I are called today to stand up and become one of the many voices—of the many hands outstretched—of the many minds focused upon—the many legs to carry—the many eyes to see, the many brains to calculate, how we contribute to the wellness of the whole. We are God’s reality in this world. Let us go be it. And let us remain grounded in this world. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer