Luke 5:1-11
Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13
Somewhere between the 24/7 Law and Order Channel and the Extreme Basement Swimming Pool Rehab Channel, you’ll find a set of cable channels showing television series from decades ago, things like The Loveboat, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Daniel Boone. I admit to having indulged in that trough of nostalgia, though not without trepidation. The depictions can be jarring, shocking really given our increased sensitivity to misogyny and sexual harassment, to homophobia, to systemic racism and demeaning depictions of minority populations. In fact, no network, however obscure and located in the highest numbered cable channels, would show a program with a performer in black-face, yet they regularly feature Euro-American actors portraying Asians, yellow-face if you will, and still very much a problem today. Red-face, white actors portraying Native Americans, was once common, and those programs are still judged as acceptable for re-broadcast. Rick Vallin, a European immigrant and character actor, appeared in more than 150 films and shows, many Westerns, and regularly in red-face, from 1942’s “Perils of the Royal Mounted†to two separate appearances on the Lone Ranger, first as the not-particularly menacingly-named Blue Feather, then a couple years later with the much more frightening moniker Crazy Wolf.
For many of us, our understanding of Native American culture was shaped by these Hollywood depictions, by the red-face actors on Daniel Boone, by the nightmare of the violent savage. If we are lucky, these misrepresentations were challenged by historic accounts of the Native American genocide at the hands of European settlers, by books like “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee†by the late Dee Brown, though these too prove problematic. Even if we rejected the worst stereotypes, we were subjected to romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans in children’s literature, to the crying chief in the anti-litter campaign of decades gone by, to the “we use every part of the bison†trope. We have this idea that the First Peoples were these little clusters of hunters and gatherers without advanced civilization, one moment scalping everyone in sight, the next communing with nature and dancing in fields with a grizzly.
The idea that the continent was mostly empty before European explorers arrived was the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery, since renounced by our United Church of Christ, which in turn justified the land grab and destruction that would follow. If hardly anyone, at least anyone civilized, is on the land, why not just take it? If we can make the other two-dimensional, less-than-human, than we need not do them justice.
But even if we strip away the pernicious myths about Native Americans, we are still completely wrong-headed when it comes to their presence in this hemisphere. The Americas were not sparsely populated. Scientists now believe that there were as many as sixty million indigenous people living here before 1492. Columbus did not discover anything, he simply opened the door for new diseases and slaughter. By the time English settlers arrived in Jamestown, more than a century after Columbus, ninety percent of the indigenous population in the Americas had died, civilizations had collapsed, and massive amounts of cultivated agricultural land had been lost to fast-growing forests, so much so, that Alexander Koch and colleagues recently published a scientific paper that blames the depopulation of the Americas and subsequent mass re-forestation for the Little Ice Age that occurred starting in the 16th century, for that new growth forest captured enough carbon dioxide to cause climate change.
Let me say that again. Mass reforestation in the Americas five centuries ago caused global cooling that impacted Europe. This was human-caused climate change even before industrialization and the mass burning of fossil fuels. That’s science, not politics.
But the question for me isn’t about whether humans can and do cause climate change, even if that is a subject about which I care very much. The question for me is what I think I know versus what is true.
What we see or think we see, what we hear or think we hear, creates our reality, but we can misperceive even those things we have experienced directly, and all bets are off when our reality comes from our own wetware, from our memory, and from the collective wetware of culture and interpretation. From the Emperor’s New Clothes to Russian Trolls on Facebook, we humans have a terrible track record when it comes to seeing and hearing correctly. All too often we turn on those who would call us out of our delusions, pillorying neither the tailor nor the king, but targeting instead the boy who named our complicity, not the self-righteous, legalistic, and compromised, but instead ready to kill the carpenter’s son who dares to calls us out of our sin, as we saw last week. Scapegoating is in our nature, and the cross reveals it for the lie that it always is.
The psalmist would rail against idolaters, pointing out that the idols they create might have eyes, but they cannot see. Jeremiah would cry “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear,†taking the critique of dumb idols and applying it to an unfaithful people. Mark would pick up this theme in the 8th chapter, where Jesus says “Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?†Clearly there is a difference between the physical act of seeing or hearing, light and sound waves, and understanding what we see or hear.
Our sisters and brothers in the Buddhist tradition make “right view†the first step on the Eightfold Noble Path, though right view for them goes beyond physical vision, as it does for us, is about more than visual stimuli. Right view in Buddhism means right understanding or perception of the way the world is, for Buddhists a wheel of suffering from which they seek liberation. While this can feel grim, there is plenty in our own Calvinist heritage that is equally bleak. Buddhist sutras about right view, classics like the PrajñÄpÄramitÄhá¹›daya or Heart Sutra, are actually quite hopeful and call followers to an open spirit. They remind us of the ways we inter-exist with all that is, challenging Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike to compassion and selflessness.
We might wonder if right vision is at work on Isaiah with his hallucinatory images of heaven, six-winged angels and God on the throne. Don’t let the word Lord, used in most translations, fool you. The son of Amoz is speaking about Yahweh, who is understood as sovereign lord over the Hebrew people, is understood as sovereign over the nations of the world, ethnÄ“ if you remember the critical word in 1st Corinthians two weeks ago, and indeed is sovereign over of a host of other gods and divine beings if the Hebrew texts are to be taken at face value. The word Lord in Hebrew scripture is not associated with Jesus.
Isaiah’s vision, while surreal, is still better than the heavenly vision in Ezekiel’s call, where the beings only have four wings, but alas, each have four faces.
Whether we buy into the court of heaven as a sort of hallucinatory freak-show or understand that Isaiah and Ezekiel were both interpreting an experience of the divine into the symbols and language of their own age and caulture, the simple fact is that the task of both prophets, indeed of all prophets, includes opening the eyes, ears, and hearts of the people to what was real, to what was true, even if that truth was cosmic in scale and counter-intuitive from a human perspective. It is no coincidence that Jesus opens the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, physical healing mirroring spiritual healing, that his message is one of constantly calling the people of God to what he perceives as real, the in-breaking of the kingdom, why so much of his language is about light and finding what is lost, what is hidden. The tragedy of the gospel is how often even his closest followers fail to see him for who he really is, to truly hear what he is saying, that they only approach the truth of his being when he performs miracles or signs like the amazing catch at Genneserat.
But we don’t want to see. We prefer scapegoats, and the lies are our lies. Some give us comfort, and some are so big and pervasive that we cannot imagine any other reality, lies like the notion that only greed can drive innovation, that speculation regulates markets, that healthcare can ever be a free market commodity, never mind the ridiculous lies used to justify hatred and othering, from the blood libel and antisemitism to the myth of men in dresses lurking in the restrooms of North Carolina and Marine barracks in Kabul.
Seeing, really seeing, can be terrifying, whether it is six-winged or four-faced heavenly being or just a naked emperor. Seeing what is real might force us to act, or at the very least to speak, might make us confess our sins like Simon Peter on bended knee, might be a live coal on our lips, driving us to heated speech.
But Isaiah’s tong touched lips would speak God’s word into the world. The tradition that followed him would teach us about the Suffering Servant who would redeem us. Simon Peter might see his own sin, but he followed, saw people healed, heard about the kingdom of God, a God who loved like a parent, saw the worst of humanity as the fearful and the powerful conspired to crush Jesus, but also saw the power of holy love to get up out of the grave, to defeat death itself.
Seeing, really seeing, shattering our illusions, is terrifying because we are finite, we are fragile, and to really see all that surrounds us can be at odds with our sense of a contained self. But our faith tells us that our self is more than the sum of electro-chemical processes, so we need not be afraid. It tells us that we are part of something bigger, a body of Christ as Paul reminds us, part of a living story that has been told generation after generation as people have encountered the mysterious divine, seen and heard what was beyond human knowing, experienced what seemed impossible, from heavenly creatures to miraculous healing to triumph over evil and love that never ends. And those things still happen today. Love and justice still win, though not always as fast as we prefer.
Seeing, really seeing, hearing, really hearing, will give us new data, challenge and change us, but if what we are seeing and hearing is true, it will make us better. We can choose to live in a world of shallow caricature, as hateful and hurtful as black-face, as red-face, as yellow-face, or we can go deep, know and love. We can move past our fear, past the lies we tell ourselves in our fear, and truly see, that God is good. The creation is filled with original blessing. We are called to catch people that they might know that this is the day the Lord has made, this very day, and it is good, and all of God’s creatures are good. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God, truth and light and source of all. Amen.