The Economy: Greed, Idolatry, and Human Sacrifice

This is a thought experiment, inspired by the open discussion of human sacrifice for the sake of the Stock Market that has been going on in United States society recently. I’ve always held that our society is best understood in the context of human sacrifice (including child sacrifice – see Sandy Hook) rather than anything more ‘modern.’ It’s been chilling, and in a way vindicating, to have this just come out in the open during the pandemic. Republican leaders look directly into the camera and say, in essence, “We must commit human sacrifice so that the Economy will bless us.”

It is the most Aztec I have ever felt.

Right now we literally live in Gehenna – as in, Ge Hinnom, the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem where tradition says people practiced child sacrifice to Molech. It’s where our early images of Hell come from.

Murica.

My congregation rolls their eyes, or argues, when I describe how our economy is founded on idolatry and human sacrifice, but now I feel like the burden of proof is on anyone who ever claims otherwise.

— Douglas Underhill is trying 🏳️‍🌈✝🎲🦈💻💯 (@robosnake) March 25, 2020

I sketched out a rough table that might show what I’m talking about. Let’s see…

Time period	Sacrificial Victims	High Priests	Holy Warriors	Blessings	Divine Form
1500s-1800s	Native American nations	…Priests, unfortunately	Conquistadores, US Cavalry	Gold, land	Manifest Destiy
1600s-1800s	Africans	Slave-owners, congressmen	Slave-catchers, KKK, lynch gangs	Labor, Southern wealth	Peculiar Institution
1800s-Present	Workers	Industrialists	Union-busters, cops	Profits increase while wages do not	Prosperity
1900s-Present	Farm-workers		ICE, border militias	Cheap, plentiful food	Donald Trump
Present	Elders, vulnerable people	GOP, Evangelicals	Spring Breakers, Evangelicals	A return to ‘normal’	The economy
1800s-Present	Everyone	Climate change deniers, fossil fuel industry	Conservative politicians, YouTubers	Our inhumane civilization	Our inhumane civilization

 

Baptism in the Age of COVID-19

I just had someone run a question past me, as a pastor, and it got me thinking. At a time when an increasing number of us are quarantined or sheltering in place, and all of us are being told to stay at home by healthcare professionals, how should we handle a baptism? I can think of some immediate options:

1. Don’t. There isn’t a hurry to baptize, unless the person is imminently dying and requests it, in which case, consult with a chaplain to learn the usual procedure, or check with your own tradition.
2. Perform a baptism with minimal people present and strict contact protocols – masks, gloves, washing before and after, using a throw-away gown instead of a robe if possible, on and on. And in doing so, basically, risk everyone involved, but risk them as little as possible.
3. The one I’m thinking through now: baptism at a distance.

Baptism at a Distance

What are the key elements of baptism, generally speaking? I would say they are the following:

• Consent
• Water
• Some form of the Matthew 28:19, trinitarian formula
• And ideally, the person is being baptized into a community of practice

Now, this differs somewhat from the “official” stance of the PCUSA, and if I were baptizing someone in our church building, certainly as part of a worship service, I would studiously adhere to our denominational standards. I’m talking about someone asking about a baptism at a distance because, in part, they are reasonably afraid of someone in their immediate family dying in the next year or so and don’t want to feel that regret.

There’s an advantage that we don’t have to have holy water, since if I had to bless water and then send it to the family, there’s a danger of contamination there from me to them. They can handle the water on their end and I can handle the words on my end.

Whatever a person’s tradition thinks of baptism at a distance, we are all going to have to give it some thought. It will be 14 months until there is a vaccine, and months after that until enough people have recovered from COVID-19 or gotten the vaccine for us to approach “herd immunity” and be able to be close to each other again. 18 months is a common estimate I am reading consistently. For those 18 months, all of us, churches included, will have to rethink the way we remain in community. This is an especially challenging time for the church, because church is unable to do what we do best – build in-person community and connection. Practice shared rituals that orient us in time and space and punctuate the meaning we make of our lives. Instead we have to pretend we are YouTubers and Zoom conference organizers and limp along.

But during those 18 months, will we not baptize at all? Will we risk close contact to baptize in the traditional way? Or will we have to come up with something else? What do you think?

Thanos: The Apocalypse of Unprocessed Grief

Thanos’s Core Grief

From the very beginning, Thanos’s plan seemed ridiculous to me. It was a significant hurdle for me to get over to get into the story of Avengers: Infinity War. Ultimately I did, of course, because it’s an amazing movie, and you have to get over logical problems to enjoy any superhero movie. I thought, OK, fine. They can’t just have Thanos want to kill trillions to impress Death, so I guess this is another reason. Balance in the universe. Whatever. Still a great movie.

Something struck me, though, when on Vormir Thanos said this: “I have ignored my destiny once. I will not do it again, even for you,” right before he murders his child for power. Then, it sealed the deal when Thanos explains what happened to Titan to Doctor Strange. His half-genocidal plan wasn’t listened to, and then somehow having a lack of food completely destroyed his planet and…killed everyone there? Ruined gravity? Again, don’t look too closely.

What struck me was that Thanos’s irrational plan was a lot like a lot of our irrational actions – it was rooted in unaddressed grief.

Thanos’s Grandiose, Idiotic Plan

Thanos’s plan is stupid. It’s the kind of stupid that is very human – he is fully able to rationalize it, but is unable to realize how irrational it actually is. Significant time is given, in Infinity War, to rationalizing Thanos’s plan. Apparently murdering half of the poeple on Gamora’s homeworld turned it into a paradise where everything is great. (I take this to be Thanos deluding himself, but it’s presented as a fact) After all, he’s been doing this to planets for what seems to be years. He has a whole system – the Maw even has a monologue.

In Endgame, we see a much more accurate depiction of the aftermath of such a horrific act. A whole planet, traumatized. That’s what Thanos’s plan does – it spreads trauma throughout the universe, multiplies his grief by Infinity. Thanos’s most human attribute is that he is so able to rationalize what he is doing, despite the pointless suffering it inflicts on others, and the fact that his grand plan will solve precisely zero of the problems he says he wants to solve.

Thanos Inflicting His Grief on the Universe

Thanos, driven by his own grief, is trapped in a cycle of inflicting grief on everyone around him. Whether it is his tortured “children” like Gamora or Nebula, or…every living thing in the universe.

“Hurt people hurt people”, and because Thanos refuses to have his hurt end with him, he ends up inflicting that hurt on everyone around him one way or another – mostly through genocide and torture, since he’s a supervillain, but in all of his relationships, in all of his plans, this hurt will be reiterated. On a smaller scale, this is something anyone could fall into, Mad Titan or no. Whatever hurt we don’t deal with on our own, we export. What we don’t come to terms with, we inflict on others, intentionally or not.

As a way to solve problems and achieve cosmic balance, Thanos’s plan is terrible. But as a very human character inflicting his pain on others, Thanos isn’t even unusual.

Don’t Be Thanos

I’m not an expert on grief – find a therapist. Talk to people you trust. Just commit to processing your own grief. Figure out the cycles that repeat in your life and change them. I’m saying as a geek who thinks that we can look to Thanos as an emblematic example of how, in Jung’s words,

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Or, in Thanos’s case, “I am inevitable.” He’s right, but not for the cosmic reasons he thinks. He’s inevitable because he is failing to take responsibility for himself, and ends up inevitably inflicting his grief on everyone else.

This Christmas, Baby Jesus Is Being Raped In A U.S. Concentration Camp

Matthew 2:13-23

¹³ Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ Then Joseph^[a] got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

Mathew 25:31-33;41-46

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³ and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 

⁴¹ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; ⁴² for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Let’s Be Clear

This Christmas, Jesus is being raped in a United States concentration camp. His parents came to the Untied States’ southern border, seeking asylum as protected by US and international law. They were captured, their child taken from them, and they were locked in cages in separate concentration camps. Presently in that concentration camp, held in cages with 15,000 other children taken from their parents, Jesus is being sexually abused by concentration camp staff. Mary and Joseph, panicked and sobbing and despairing of ever seeing their child again, are locked in cages a thousand miles away. There is no plan to release them, and there is no plan to reunite them with their traumatized son. He was taken as a baby, and does not speak English, and there are no careful records being kept, so it is unlikely he will ever see his parents again.

This. Is. Who. We. Are. Now.

If you take the Bible seriously, then this is the conclusion you must come to. Why? For the first reason, which is that the Holy Family fled to Egypt seeking asylum when their lives were in danger, and for the second reason, which is that Jesus says very clearly that how we treat the least among us is how we treat him. There are complex interpretive challenges when reading the Bible, but this is not one of them. This one is simple.

As I write this, filled with rage and disgust that has grown beyond words, I find that I have nothing else to say.

Merry Christmas.

Prayer (Goodbye Zu-zu)

Tonight our hamster died, so I decided to tell a story about prayer.

When we first got our hamster, Zu-zu, my daughter was so excited. She was 6 at the time (now 7) and was just enamored with this little creature. We had seen her at the pet store that afternoon and gotten her on an impulse, as we tend to do. We go to the pet store because it cheers us up, and is something we can do for free, but sometimes we come home with a creature.

Not long after, Zu-zu escaped her cage in my daughter’s room right around bedtime (Zu-zu turned out to be an elite escape artist). We went through the entire upstairs part of our house, but to no avail – the hamster was nowhere to be found. My daughter was really upset at the loss of her new pet. Eventually, hours after bedtime, she fell asleep, still tearful. I felt a lot of sympathy, and also had my own situation to feel bad about – I had stood up two wonderful women from my church with whom I had a lunch date.

I tried all I could think of to contact the two of them and apologize, and try to find a way to make amends, but they weren’t responding. I felt miserable about it because these were two genuinely good people whom I had just failed. They were the kind of people who would be really hurt by this kind of thing, as well.

That night, upset on my daughter’s behalf, and on my own behalf, I prayed. Now, I have a well-documented ambivalence with regard to prayer. Suffering from depression and anxiety, I’d been told many times that I could just pray these things away. They were all in my mind, after all. If it wasn’t working, it was because I was a failure – not faithful enough, secretly evil, too full of doubt, whatever. And working in a hospital as a chaplain, I had seen plenty of good people pray and still suffer for no discernible moral or theological reason. Balance that with the many stories of answered prayers I’ve heard as a pastor and a Christian in general, as well as the painful stories of unanswered prayers.

But, anyway, I prayed. I prayed that we would find Zu-zu, and that my two friends from church would forgive me. I didn’t know what else to do, and even I pray when I’m desperate.

That night, my daughter had a dream. She woke my spouse and I up to tell us about it. In her dream, she found Zu-zu in her room, standing on her hind legs and cleaning her face and smiling at her. So I thought, OK. I went into her room, looked around for a while by the light of my cellphone, and there was Zu-zu, standing on her hind legs, cleaning her face with her little paws.

The next day, my two friends let me know that they forgave me, and we made new lunch plans.

Prayer is weird and doesn’t make any sense. When put to a rigorous test, it tends to fail, yet billions of people believe in its efficacy. I wrote a whole book about not praying, but there it is. I prayed, and that’s what happened.

I remember the flood of thankfulness that I felt, the wonder that things had turned out OK after all. And my 6 year old having a predictive dream about finding her hamster – that was genuinely weird. Yes, sure, she could have just seen her hamster while half-asleep, thought she dreamed what she had, and told us about it. The hamster was in the dark and behind a dresser, but sure. That’s what could have happened. And my two friends might have just chosen that day to let me know that they forgave me. Just a coincidence.

Prayer is like that. It’s frustrating.

Goodbye Zu-zu.