You can be in more than one place at the same time. Well, okay, to be fair, you cannot be physically located in more than one place at the same time, at least not if you are intact, but you can be cognitively in more than one place, culturally in more than one place. We often find ourselves in the overlapping kingdoms of the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern ways of thinking, where science and story co-exist. We live in a universe that is at one and the same time Newtonian and Quantum which is completely impossible and completely true. Jesus tells us that we are here and that at the very same time we can opt-in to the Kingdom of God, and most of us could sure use a bit more of the latter. Not only do our spiritual, social, and physical worlds refuse to be constrained to a neat set of binaries, they don’t even seem to want to stay on a single axis. Multidimensional weirdness and entanglement are the rule, not the exception, in this glorious insane creation.
The Freudian subconscious and Jungian archetype both co-exist with the science of neurochemistry, all manufactured ways of understanding the ways we manufacture understanding. Dreams mean something or don’t mean something or predict the future or are simply cognitive static, and maybe all of these things are true. Some people dream the same thing again and again, and some dreams, like flying dreams, seem to be almost universal.
I have had a few flying, though to be honest, for years my most common dream was of handstands and walking on my hands, which I think might be weird. Even worse, I am neither athletic nor gymnastic. In fact, I am a klutz, and couldn’t do a handstand if my life depended on it. If flying dreams represent, if you believe dreams represent anything, a desire for freedom, what in the world does an upside down dream mean?
Just as flying dreams seem to be almost universal, so too are some of our phobias. The fear of enclosure, suffocation, and constriction appears to be on that list of almost universal fears, Fortunato meeting a wretched end in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.†Luke Skywalker’s “New Hope†could have come to a crushing end in an intergalactic space compactor, or you might be crushed by the moving walls of a Temple of Doom. One website lists twenty four films with “the walls are moving in†scenes, and I know some are missing. Even Dirk Gently, holistic detective and part of the heroic team in one of the late Douglas Adams’ lesser known works, nearly meets his end, along with his assistant Todd, as the walls move in.
I’ve been thinking about anger and walls and getting smaller and smaller and crushed a lot this week, about the ways that it feels to me that it is not just the rage of others that compacts us into tighter and tighter balls of fury, but that it is often our own anger that crushes, a black hole making everything smaller and smaller, intense and dark.
I’ve been thinking about anger and walls not only because of our present situation, but also because of that faced by the Hebrew people in today’s reading, in the history that is in focus during our current sermon series on the prophets sometimes called “minor.†The anger of Nahum, today’s prophet, may be many things, but it is not minor. He has a big rage. His rage is huge.
In fact, this text is so thoroughly unpleasant that it is never on the reading schedule for worship, not in the Revised Common Lectionary, not in the Narrative Lectionary. Christianity prefers to pretend it isn’t there. It isn’t the only text we neglect. We generally skip over the stories of rape and infanticide, as well as page after page of construction plans and 613 laws that drive a toxic nit-picking legalism. But this small book of Nahum gets skipped entirely.
Nahum is hate mail to Assyria, and particularly to the capital of Assyria, Nineveh. That ancient city, across the Tigris river from modern-day Mosul, has been in the news in recent years, as the Islamic State seized the region and destroyed ancient artifacts, artifacts older than today’s text. Bible-reading types are most likely to think of Nineveh in relation to that reluctant prophet, Jonah, who does not want to go there, and ends up in a giant fish, not, alas, the whale of our childhood bible stories.
But given the importance Assyria plays in ancient history, in the history of Israel and Judah, we need to move beyond Jonah, to the biblical books of 1st and 2nd Kings, to prophetic works like first Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, the last two covered earlier in this series, and Lord help us, even to the Book of the Prophet Nahum, a name which simply means “comforted.â€
Assyria is the nation that invaded and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel, depopulating the region as part of the ethnic cleansing policy used throughout their empire of blood and conquest. Submit as a vassal, or be utterly destroyed, and being a vassal was not the sort of benevolent mutuality we learned about from Medieval history. It was crushing. Assyria was so powerful and so brutal that their control extended from the Caspian to the Nile. They destroyed the Egyptian capital of Thebes in 663 BCE, an event described in gruesome detail in Nahum. Assyria’s cruelty even extended to children, who became victims of ambition and prejudice.
As so often happens in scripture, the prophet wants a country to be punished for things other prophets tell us were done as divine punishment, Assyria as God’s agent in punishing the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom for failing in both justice and religious fidelity. Remember Amos? Don’t ask for logic. It isn’t logical. How can God be telling Assyria to destroy Israel, then punish Assyria for destroying Israel? The ancients were looking for meaning in events that seemed inexplicable, and not everyone came up with the same explanation. Today we can look at geo-political factors like surplus crops, cultural traits like nationalism, but in the end, people are wildcards and our explanations are guesswork.
Of course Nahum is wrong, fails in one of the classic tests of prophecy. Israel is not restored, at least not as a political entity, the Northern Kingdom. What is left of Israel is those refugees who assimilated in Judah. But Nahum is right that Assyria is destroyed. Nineveh would fall as vassal states rebelled, as Babylon grew dominant over the region, but that, the rise of Babylon as a competitor to Assyria, turned out not to be such a good thing for Judah.
And here is this text filled with rage.
City of bloodshed, utterly deceitful, full of booty— no end to the plunder! The crack of whip and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end— they stumble over the bodies!
This is the future the prophet has in mind for Nineveh, for Assyria. This doesn’t represent the God we wish to worship. It does not represent the sort of human we want to be. We see what happens to people who are filled with rage and vengeance. None of us wants to be bathed in that bile.
And yet, for all of our talk about a loving God, about grace and forgiveness, we still sometimes find ourselves trafficking in rage, carrying it like a heavy burden, wielding it like a flamethrower. And the walls move in, the weight and gravity grow, and we get smaller and smaller.
Dr. Atul Gawande, the Harvard surgeon and healthcare revolutionary in the news this week as he was named CEO of a highly touted cost-cutting initiative, famously championed checklists as a way to reduce surgical error and improve outcomes. I’d like to suggest that we each develop rage checklists of our own, a series of questions and actions when we feel it well up inside of us.
The first question when we feel rage is to determine whether the thing that is making us mad is real. This week, one of my sisters shared a graphic that floats around periodically about non-profits to avoid and those you should support. It was meant to draw outrage, lists the insane benefits some non-profit CEOs supposedly receive, one driving a Rolls Royce, and to redirect support almost exclusively to veterans organizations. It looked wrong the minute I saw it, and it took me about 90 seconds to debunk it. For goodness sake people, have we learned nothing with Russian troll farms spreading false news? If you use the interwebs and are not already familiar with Snopes, become familiar with it.
The Blood Libel has fueled raging antisemitism in Europe since at least 1144, when Thomas of Monmouth wrote of the ritual sacrifice of Christian children by Jews. Today’s blood libel, the supposed immigration crisis, is about as true, for immigrants are not stealing jobs Americans want or are qualified to do. When it comes to manufacturing jobs, we see the real culprits uncomfortably in the mirror every morning, for our 401Ks contain the companies that shipped jobs to countries with no protections for workers and the planet, and we do not want to pay the real cost of the consumer goods that fill our homes.
Last week’s Sunday New York Times included a powerful story about an ornithologist who became the victim of ill-informed rage, who left the job at the American Museum of Natural History that he had dreamed of all his life to protect that institution from the torches and pitchforks of the mob.
So assuming we are willing to be thinking creatures, we check to make sure the source of our rage is real. If the answer is no, our flowchart comes to an end. You might need an outlet for the adrenaline, but there should be no new rage.
The second question might be: is this thing that is making me angry worth my rage? Because all too often, it isn’t. I say this as someone who loves a good literary, film, or television series, but it is not the end of the world if your favorite character got killed off. As far as I can tell, road rage is almost always stupid. In reality, the slow vehicle or the car that blocked your exit is probably going to have all of a few seconds impact on your schedule, and unless you are an ambulance, wherever you are going probably isn’t that important, certainly not important enough to risk lives. The Washington Post reported this week on another of the all-too-frequent parental brawls at a children’s sporting event, this time a 12-and-under softball tournament in Tennessee. We hear constantly of online video game players getting angry and “swatting†an opponent, making a false police report that mobilizes a SWAT team, recently leading to a death. It is a video game, people!
Nobody can fight over silly stuff quite like a PTA or a church. We rarely ask the relevant question: What does this have to do with education? What does this have to do with the Great Commandment and the Great Commission? What does this have to do with God?
We can probably eliminate a whole lot of our rage just on these two steps, is it real and is it worth it… But let’s imagine that your rage is real and it really is something worthy of your anger. The third question might be: Can this rage be used productively? When the source of our rage is a wound to our ego, the answer here is often no, for in our anger we often do more damage to ourselves than we do to others, and in any case, damage is damage. The violent destruction of Nineveh did nothing to make the Hebrews safer, so if Nahum’s prophecy precipitated a divine act, it was a pretty terrible plan!
You might be tempted to answer no to the possibility of productive rage, because you feel powerless in the situation. Powerlessness does happen. Planes fly into buildings, tyrants march the innocent off to armed camps. Cells mutate and metastasize. But for all that is not in our control, I believe we are seldom powerless, even if the best we can do is to pray. For while most of us do not believe in a God that arbitrarily hands out cures, in our world, our entangled world, we must believe that pouring our spiritual energy into the system has an effect, a butterfly and a hurricane.
You are rarely powerless, but you must use your rage wisely for it to be productive, and sometimes the payoff takes a long time, and the rage must be sustained, and it is impossible to sustain rage for the long-term, for it is crushing, the walls are moving in, and things grow dark. That rage, the rage that can be used productively but that will require time, it must be converted from rage to passion, not hatred of what is but love of what might be, not negation but possibility. Nahum’s rage in meaningless without a vision of restoration, without a goal. The rage at the moneychangers in the Temple is worthless without Jesus’ passion, the announcement that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that we are more than these fleshy bodies, and that love is more important than judgment, judgment, the source of so much of our rage. If the problem is real, if it is really worth it, if your rage turned into passion is going to require some time but is totally worth it, then you need a vision, you need a plan, which goes back to our lists, to being organized, to having goals. Far too many rage and scream and criticize everything, sabotaging anything that is not their idea, but offering no vision, no plan. They destroy. They do not create.
And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, you really are powerless. Long-term, short-term, passion and planning, and you just can’t do anything, and all the prayers in the world can’t make you feel better. Sometimes life just feels unfair, evil and death triumph for the day, grief comes unexpected and overwhelming. It happens. Still, that rage is a black hole and the walls are moving in. You must find somewhere to put it. And as LeBron James painfully learned during the recent NBA championship series, hitting something is not the answer. Only you know where you can move that energy, chopping firewood, paint on a canvas, words on a page. May our outlets be creative, not destructive, vision not vengeance.
Or maybe none of this works for you. Maybe checklists and facts aren’t your thing. Facts don’t seem to be a thing for a lot of people these days.
Nahum has seen destructive rage, the burning wreckage of Thebes and the smell of burning flesh and he wants more rage, more destruction.
We have seen destructive rage, carnage in Charlottesville and the wail of sirens, the injured, mourners, and we just want the rage and destruction to stop.
We live in a world where rage is manufactured, where no tariff can slow it down as it is sent across the border. We live in an age of imagined threats, where victims are called villains and villains claim to be victims. We live in an age where there are real reasons to be angry. All of these things are true.
And Assyria will be replaced by Babylon will be replaced by Persia will be replaced on and on.
And the story continues.
And God is still God. And love is still love. And the Kingdom of God is coming, and it is also already here.
May we live and act in that kingdom.