I was never a snake person anyways, but the copperhead that slithered out of the tree roots as my teenage self hung in the hammock pretty much sealed the deal. I do not like snakes. Yes, snake-loving folks have encouraged me to hold their baby boa, and no, it did not change my mind. I can appreciate the role of a cobra in the ecosystem without wanting to cuddle up with it.
For me, it is snakes. For a close friend, it is bears. No Paddington, no Pooh, just teeth and terror.
That friend would not love today’s text. Or maybe that friend would love today’s text, after all, it acts as confirmation of their worst fears.
The text does not actually say that the two bears ate all forty-two children. Even the hungriest bear might have a hard time getting down twenty kids. This isn’t exactly Joey Chestnut at Coney Island shoveling in the hot dogs. But still, mangled or mauled, the two most common English translations, is bad enough. I mean, it is just possible that the punishment did not fit the crime. And if it did, that is some serious instant karma.
Karma is, of course, a loan word, one borrowed from Sanskrit and the rich cultural and religious diversity of the Indian subcontinent. It is precisely because of that rich cultural and religious diversity that it is hard to pin down a single academic definition of karma, never mind the ways the word is used and misused in popular culture. But if forced to settle on a working definition, we might say that karma is the law of cause and effect as applied to the moral, ethical, and spiritual realm. In other words, what you do has consequences, you reap what you sow.
It is a nice idea, that doing what is good brings rewards, that doing what is wrong brings misery.
Of course, first we have the problem of who interprets what constitutes good and what constitutes evil. The Taliban and American Evangelicals define what is good in radically different ways than we do. Good Germans found biblical warrant and confirmation in the words of Martin Luther for obeying the Third Reich, while we celebrate those who resisted the Nazis.
We have an affinity for uppity types that pursue a good that transcends our imperfect human systems, whether they are acting up and fighting AIDS, sitting at a “whites only” lunch counter, or attempting to cast a ballot over the objections of men. Here at the Park Church, in keeping with our Congregational and United Church of Christ tradition, we do this because we follow an uppity type who challenged religious leaders, business interests, and the power of the empire, who flipped tables and died on a cross.
But let’s assume there is some sort of universal concept of good, at the very least the “golden rule,” and maybe even as expansive as Buddhist concepts of compassion and Christian concepts of sacrificial love. We’d still come up against a very real problem. Karma is a failure, at least in the short-run.
The ancient Hebrews wrestled with this problem. Their theology was based on the idea that if they kept their covenant with Yahweh, they would be rewarded in this life, both individually and as a people. The thing is, bad things kept happening. They responded by blaming the victims. When the northern kingdom of Israel fell, it was their own fault. Clearly they had done what was wrong, things like Ahab marrying a non-Hebrew, and so karma worked just fine. When the southern kingdom fell, it was because of bad kings and idolatry. We see this sort of thing today, when the poor are blamed for their poverty.
Who knew that gaslighting was three thousand years old?
Sometime after the Exile but before Jesus, ancient Hebrew theologians decided on another answer, because, as Rabbi Harold Kushner noted in the title of his 1981 bestseller, bad things do happen to good people. Sometimes in life, the bear eats the wrong kid. So those ancient Hebrew thinkers decided that if good behavior was not rewarded in this life, if evil was not punished in this life, then there must be another life where everyone would get their due. If the cultures and religions of the Indian subcontinent saw this as happening through reincarnation, Ancient Near Eastern belief saw this as happening in what would eventually develop to be heaven and hell.
Now, I’m not saying there is no heaven and no hell. Those are ideas, beliefs really, that we can wrestle with on other Sunday. I’m just describing how this calculus of morality we are assigning the loan-word karma developed in our own religious trajectory.
But even assuming this heaven and hell thing is real, we come back to the problem of human interpretation. I admit that I am no authority on the divine, but I’d bet anything that a jihadi in a suicide vest is not going to get seven virgins in paradise.
And again, even with some imaginary perfect definition of right and wrong that transcends the politics of patriarchy and power, karma is a failure, at least in the timeframe of the single human lifetime. Bad things still happen to good people, and rapists and racists live long lives, and while we might argue that they can’t be truly happy, better to be miserable in a billionaire’s mansion than miserable in a prison cell.
Further complicating this entire moral framework is the karmic idea that the reason you do something matters as much as the actual action itself. If you are only doing what is right because you get something out of it, it does not meet either the Buddhist or Christian notions of selflessness and compassion, the two traditions with which I am most familiar.
Jesus is pretty vocal about those who obey the Law but miss the spirit of the Law, reminds us that even vile people take care of their own. In fact, Jesus insists that doing what is right will often lead to suffering rather than reward. Jesus seems to say “don’t do it because you get something out of it.”
It is, quite frankly, a theological and moral mess, and you may well be thinking that this would be a good time for those two she-bears to show up. Rather a good mauling than this chaos of failed karma and super-human expectations.
In the end, I am not interested in the calculus of karma. I believe that what could broadly described as “the good” is the natural order of the universe. There is something instead of nothing. That something is statistically absurd. The universe should not exist. Life, self aware life, upright primates with opposable thumbs? Laughable! But here we are. Our very cells are the result of cooperation. Entanglement and expansion are the natural order. Miracle is. Miracle is and love and grief and sacrifice and creativity and cooperation are.
We do not need heaven and hell and karmic rebirth as a slug. We are wired for good. Evil, such as we define it, is unnatural. It is a bug in the system. We fulfill our destiny through joy, through, as the great gay poet declared in his gospel of “O Me! O Life!,” contributing our verse to the powerful play. We fulfill our destiny when we are, as he wrote in another poem, untamed and sounding our “barbaric yawp” over the rooftops of the world.
We are good as makers and dancers and cooks and explorers. We are good when we see the good and swim in its ocean, for this is our wave, this moment, and it will crash on the beach, another wave just behind, but this is ours.
And those bears? They are beautiful in their own way and part of the mysterious machinery of things. And apparently, really hungry. And there are all of those tasty children.
Another great poet wrote of the freshness deep down thing. It is holy. It is tugging at you. It is now.
Amen.