Now, I know Blue Hill, George Stevens Academy, and even this church, all have a real and personal connection to the blockchain and cryptocurrency, but I have to confess, I don’t really understand it. I mean, I was in the tech industry before I became a pastor, so the idea of the blockchain as a distributed technology makes sense, the economics behind cryptocurrencies, not so much. Traditional currencies like the dollar or the euro are no more than an agreed system of value and exchange, backed up originally by hard assets, and these days, at least in the case of the US dollar, by the “full faith and credit†of the United States. This is why economists panic when politicians hold that “full faith and credit†hostage, extracting political ransom to preserve the life of our economy. The dollar represents some measure of human labor and talent, some tract of land, some quantity of pork bellies.
But there is nothing that backs up cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The whole idea is to be out of the control of governments, making it easier to move money while avoiding the watchful eyey of the IRS, the DEA, and anti-terrorism units, but that hiddenness also means there are no bailouts and no regulators preventing fraud. There is the constant danger of hackers, North Korean mostly, who have made off with billions. One corrupt regime, that of the Venezuelan despot Nicolas Maduro, has tried to sell the world on the petro, backed up, in theory, by the petroleum assets of that nation. It is as much of a sham as his Bolivarian paradise Venezuelans are fleeing by the thousands.
The value of every cryptocurrency is driven by speculation, with millions in imaginary value disappearing into the ether just this year, maybe appropriate since ethereum is another of those cryptocurrencies. Though there seems to be a new one almost every week, so I can’t quite keep up. Rather than the hip cyber geek I once was, I’m beginning to feel like a cranky old Luddite.
While you or a loved one might have made or lost some money speculating on cryptocurrency, most of us don’t really give it much thought. Maybe we should.
Just ask residents of upstate New York. Once a thriving manufacturing center, the region has been economically decimated as US companies take advantage of countries where corruption, a disregard for human life, and even less regard for the environment, keeps labor costs low. Countless heavy manufacturing facilities in America sit empty. Because manufacturing took a lot of electricity, the area around towns like Messina and Plattsburgh traditionally had cheap power, no longer needed by empty plants. This cheap electricity has recently begun to attract cryptocurrency miners. Rather than digging for treasure or building something, these firms use massive computer farms to solve puzzles that create blocks on the blockchain and receive cryptocurrency in exchange. The server farms, while bringing no measurable employment to the region, suck up so much electricity, that during last winter’s cold snap, local utilities had to purchase additional power at a premium on the open market, driving up electric bills in a place where electric heat is the norm and many people are unemployed, out of the workforce. The result was a double whammy for those already struggling economically, more electricity used because of the severe cold, and that electricity costing way more than usual.
Upstate New York is also the home of the Onondaga Longhouse Six Nations Reserve, recent recipients of 18th century wampum belts repatriated by the National Museum of the American Indian. Wampum, carved from whelk and clam shells, served as currency for the Native Americans of the northeast. They were used for trade. They were woven into belts in a language all of their own to record treaties and important events, like the Two Row Wampum Treaty of 1613 between the Iroquois and the Dutch. In some tribes, a particular string of wampum would serve as a badge of office, passed from one chief or clan mother to the next. In that they held value and data, they were a sort of ancient blockchain.
The colonies initially established exchange rates for wampum in their trading with Native Americans. The dark shells were rarer, so worth more than the white pieces. Each piece was manufactured by the women of the coastal tribes by hand with stone tools… cut, drilled, polished. It was labor intensive, insuring that wampum had value. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for a Dutch colonist to figure out that he could cheat the system and use steel tools to mass produce wampum, and the rest, so they say, is exploitation and colonization in a nutshell, or whelk shell as the case may be. The counterfeit wampum wrecked the trading economy, not just between the white colonizer and the people of the land, but also between First Nation tribes.
You may not be able to buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk with bitcoin or wampum, but as the repatriated Iroquois Wampum remind us, these ancient belts still play a ceremonial role in Native American culture, still serve as the tribal record of important treaties. So it was that Adrian Jacobs, keeper of the circle at the United Church of Canada’s Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre in Manitoba, brought wampum belts to that denomination’s General Council in July. He defined the relationships recorded in the belts as “not a rights-based agreement, but a responsibility.â€
The starting point of any conversation about rights and responsibilities, for the two always go hand-in-hand, is revealing. In the context of an authoritarian system like the medieval Roman church or King George’s colony in the Americas, it is logical to start from the point of individual rights to push back against authoritarianism. In the case of a hyper-individualized society like the consumer states of America, where the rights of some individuals are always considered sacred, responsibility might be the righteous place to start.
Responsibility, vulnerability, and legalism all come into play in today’s gospel reading, one that is uncomfortable for many contemporary Christians. The question about divorce was meant to draw Jesus into a dispute within the Pharisaic movement, between followers of Hillel and those of Shammai, two key figures in the development of what we now know as Rabbinic Literature and the Oral Torah. Biblical scholars also acknowledge a second context, for the story in the current form attributed to Mark was written when Gentiles were already joining the movement. The gospel authors have Jesus say “if she divorces her husband,†something that was impossible under the Mosaic Law. In the end, we have what feels like an actual teaching of Jesus, one that would have been extraordinary in his context, and a retelling that applies that core teaching to a later situation, that of a growing Gentile Christianity.
In the cultural and religious context of First Century Judaism, that is to say in the location of the actual teaching and healing ministry of Jesus, only the man could initiate a divorce, and he needed little if any justification. She displeased him. He didn’t like her cooking. It was enough to give her a certain writ and it was done. She was cast off.
Jesus avoids taking sides between Shammai and Hillel, is not interested in legalism, in fact despises a nit-picking legalism throughout his ministry. He moves beyond the question of the legality of divorce in Torah, which he describes as a concession to human weakness, and appeals not to Mosaic Law, but to Genesis, to Creation, to God’s intent. In the eyes of the divine, marriage is forever, whether or not human law has allowed for divorce. Jesus does not forbid the human act of divorce. What he does do, and this is the part that would have shocked both the followers of Shammai and the followers of Hillel, is declare that divorce does not end the commitment of the man to the woman, nor that of the woman to the man, so that if either remarries, they commit adultery.
We could try to read this as a justice issue, after all, the Hebrew Scriptures and the teachings of Jesus emphasize care for the vulnerable, particularly widows and children. It was a patriarchal society. Few women appear in scripture, and the majority of them exist purely for the purpose of giving birth to a male: Samson, Samuel, John the Baptizer, Jesus.
Levirate marriage passed a widow on to a brother purely for the purpose of preserving the male lineage and the land rights that went with it, leading to the horrific story of Tamar in Genesis.
Women and children were vulnerable enough in that gruesome and violent age, without these religious men arguing over exactly how easy it should be for a man to throw off his wife. They want to know what is legal. Jesus tells them what is right. And as we are reminded all too often, there is oft a gaping chasm between what is legal and what is right.
Those questioning Jesus seek convenience. Jesus speaks of commitment.
This is right, for the entirety of the Judeo-Christian trajectory is about commitment. Some, particularly those toxic teachers of patriarchy and legalism, might try to say that the whole of our story is about obedience. But they’d be wrong. The story, part history and part myth, is one of God calling people into committed relationship who had done nothing to earn God’s commitment. It is the story of God’s willingness to stick with that commitment even when the Hebrew people were disobedient. The judging God that orders genocide and strikes dead those who dare reach out to steady the Ark of the Covenant is re-imagined by Jesus as a loving parent, and while a loving parent might chastise and scold, they do not abandon the child.
Jesus asked those who would follow him, who would hear the good news of the kingdom, to make a commitment. While God did all the heavy lifting in the relationship, it was going to cost you something to be on the Way of Jesus. It was going to take work, service, humility, your treasure and your life, for those who would give all would receive all, and those who would lose their life would save it.
There was nothing about following Jesus that was namby-pamby or easy. If God was all-in for us, then we needed to be all-in for God. It was not an easy thing that Jesus demanded, as he taught on a hillside, on a plain, beside a well, around the table on that final night. But he promised that the Spirit would be with us.
Commitment is a mighty hard spiritual practice. Augustine of Hippo would become famous in a time when the entire church was wrestling with what to do with those who had broken their commitment, had walked away. And while God’s grace covers much, and while the gospel demands that we forgive seventy times seven, there were practical matters about how to be with one another after trust was lost, after relationships were damaged.
And there still is. Or maybe I should say there is beginning to be again.
Early Christianity was an opt-in high-commitment exercise. Then it got power and became corrupt, and being a Christian was not daring, required no commitment. It was just something you did, something you were born into. The Protestant Reformation was an opt-in high-commitment exercise. It wasn’t some obscure debate among theologians behind closed doors, though that happened too. People died! The Pilgrims were not brave explorers seeking to form a new nation. They were religious refugees risking it all to live their faith. They had no idea what dangers they would face when they arrived in this land, already populated, with a thriving wampum economy.
Then Pilgrims and Puritans became Congregationalists, were successful, had power. Protestantism in America was no longer opt-in, but born in, was no longer high-commitment. Today, Christianity is in most cases a feel-good no-cost club, and at worst, a mockery of all that Christ stood for, a cult of race and power.
Following the gospel takes work and being in relationship takes work, whether it is the sort of marriage Jesus imagines when he speaks to the quarrelsome Pharisees or the rough and tumble of that group gathered around him, those women and men he would call out of the world, into a new relationship with God. There is no way to be a Christian without being in community. Jesus gives us no other model, and love of our sisters and brothers and of our God is the gospel. Love is the gospel, and it is hard. Commitment may be the hardest spiritual practice. It is easy to love God, for God does not leave the toilet seat up, to love Jesus, for Jesus does not bog down a committee meeting. It is easy to be committed in the abstract, and oh so hard to do in the flesh. Forget the sexual temptation that obsesses Paul and Augustine and countless others. The greatest temptation is to just walk away.
You cannot counterfeit a committed relationship, a covenant to use the language of our faith. They cannot be mass produced. They are labor intensive. Like a belt of wampum, our relationships tell stories. Like the block chain, each bit adds to the next.
May we, when we approach our life together, remember the words of Adrain Jacobs, “not a rights-based agreement, but a responsibility.â€
Amen.