Baruch 5:1-9
Occasionally, a sequel is better than the original, as was the case with “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.” “I’ll be back, baby.”
Occasionally.
Horror films seem quite good at milking the franchise, and there are the epic multi-film adaptations of literary classics, but even they can go wildly wrong, like “The Hobbit” film franchise that turned a 300 page novel into what felt like 300 hours of film.
If critics are to be believed, the recently released “Gladiator II” has jumped the shark, in the Fonzi on the motorcycle sort of way. The film is apparently a mess, complete with CGI sharks.
The original Ridley Scott film, from the turn-of-the-century, was widely regarded as a masterpiece. That film begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 C.E., traditionally used by historians as a marker for the end of the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. This was a period of two centuries that began with the rise of Augustus, and was marked with relative peace, prosperity, and colonial expansion.
About that…
There were countless wars and conflicts during the Pax Romana.
If a town in the colonies could not pay the backbreaking Roman taxes, it might be burned to the ground, the inhabitants enslaved. If a slave rebelled, he or she would be crucified, as would be anyone else who was troublesome or inconvenient.
Crucifixion was far from a one-off, nor was it the relatively quick affair we find in the gospels. Romans were creative in their brutality, using a variety of methods and configurations in crucifixion: upside down, crossbar, no crossbar, X. Death could take hours or days, and though it has been commonly believed that asphyxiation was the primary cause of death, this notion has been challenged.
Especially important was the fact that bodies were not removed for burial. The entire point of crucifixion was deterrence. The wails of the dying and the decomposing corpses drove home the point that this could happen to you if you caused trouble.
It was peaceful, alright. Peaceful like Auschwitz.
This is the sort of peace the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calls a “negative” peace in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he describes as the absence of tension, not the presence of justice.
King wrote his letter in response to “A Call for Unity,” a gaslighting epistle by seven white clergy people and a rabbi critical of direct action for civil rights. King’s letter not only introduced the concept of “negative peace” as the opposite of justice, but also gave us the now famous quote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Gaslighting in the guise of calls for unity didn’t go away with the Rev. King’s epistle.
But in this time of global chaos and collapsing democracy, I want to zoom in, down to our level, because we can protest what is happening in hell holes like Gaza or Texas, but there is a limit to what we can do about it, and it is clear that decades of promoting selfishness has worked, for most Americans don’t care about justice half a world away or even half a block away unless it impacts their own property value. In a nation of sociopaths, it is our role to offer an alternative, and that alternative has to be real, “practical” as described by the Rev. Beecher and our Words of Welcome.
The Book of Baruch is a bit like Gladiator II, a long-delayed and not particularly good sequel. The historic Baruch was the secretary to the prophet Jeremiah, and tradition tells us that the two men were among the Jews who escaped to Egypt during the Babylonian conquest.
The authors of the Book of Baruch re-imagine him as being among the captives in Babylon, and steal passages and ideas from older works that are in the biblical canon. In our reading, we’ve got a divinely-ordered highway department leveling the ground so that Israel, meaning the Jewish people, can walk safely. This is borrowed from the more familiar passage, Isaiah 40:3, which is referenced in the gospels, though in Isaiah it is God who will travel on the highway, constructed from Babylon to Jerusalem, returning to a restored Temple.
And though a conversation about peace, justice, and highways could easily turn to the construction of highways through black neighborhoods or highways used to reinforced historic redlining of black neighborhoods, as is the case here with our deadly Clemens Center Parkway, I’d like to focus on that image of leveling the ground, because that is something we can work with in our present time, and echos a sentiment we also find in the letters of Paul.
Our goal is human thriving. Thriving people have the capacity for compassion and creativity, which in turn allows them to serve those who are not thriving, because all of us struggle at times. But how do we define thriving?
Here, we draw on not only religious belief, the human construction of meaning in the face of mystery, but also on philosophy, another form of human meaning-making, and on science, including soft sciences like psychology. And I’d offer something like a simplified version of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Human thriving cannot occur if basic biological needs are not met. We love our neighbor when we feed our neighbor, but also when we make sure our neighbor can feed themselves, which means soup kitchens and community gardens and advocacy for good jobs with decent pay and human dignity. It means identifying food deserts and housing shortages and the lack of lifesaving reproductive care for so many women in America. It means fighting systemic bias in all forms and saying “not on my watch” when it comes to racial and gender privilege. It means rejecting tribalism of all kinds, and sectarian violence here and abroad.
Every day we are doing the work of practical Christianity, we are doing the work to which Baruch calls us, to which Isaiah 40:3 calls us, making the uneven ground level and the rough places smooth, not for God as some abstract uberhuman to travel, not for one chosen people or tribe to travel, but for all people as a reflection of the God who is with us every single day. We may reject the anthropomorphic god made in our own image while embracing the idea that every human is holy and more than a little mysterious.
Once our basic physical needs are met, we move to our social needs. Kipling’s Mowgli in the jungle isn’t real and Ted Kaczynski in his Montana cabin wasn’t sane.
We are human in relationship to other humans and in our engagement in the human story, whether that is on the scale of families or on the scale of civilizations.
And if things are not messy enough just trying to make sure folks have healthy food, safe drinking water, and appropriate shelter, just try to get people to treat one another with kindness, to not put people in boxes based on social constructs of gender, the pernicious social construct of race, or even religious beliefs that tell some people they are less, less capable of self-determination, less in the image of the holy, for we refuse to sanctify patriarchy.
We love our neighbor when we level the playing field, or in biblical language the valleys and mountains, rejecting white Christian nationalism, the subject of a pastoral letter from the United Church of Christ this week, when we celebrate those who fall in traditional constructs of gender and those who move beyond those constructs. Diversity, equality, and inclusion have become dirty words to some, but in rejecting these virtues, they reject Jesus.
We love our neighbor when we are accessible, when we support New York’s new “Clean Slate” law, when we see our neighbor in a ditch of despair, fallen off the highway completely, and we go down in the ditch like the Samaritan, lifting them out, and if they are not able to leave the ditch, sitting with them until help arrives.
And once we have attended to the physical and the relational, we must clear the way for spiritual and creative thriving, for we are meant to be more than watery and electrified meat sacks. We are called to love and to create, to soar with a symphony and dance to Doja Cat and weep at the end of a sappy Hallmark Christmas movie when the girl gets the boy or the boy gets the boy or maybe no one gets anyone but the town bookstore is saved. We do sometimes get things out of order, but creativity, the arts, spirituality, these things matter, are essential to human thriving, for our God, mysterious and beyond, is seen in her creation, in an evolutionary process that produces birdsong and roses and you, our creativity, our love, our thriving a reflection of the holy deep down things.
And lest we should forget, there is transcendence and spirituality in the sciences as well, in any job done well, in craft and in service, in that first cup of good coffee and a morning bun still warm from the oven, in that part of town that is accessible because the highway department filled in those low places potholes, for that too is love.
Peace on earth… not just the end of hostilities, though may God help the people of the Middle East, of Sudan and Haiti and Ukraine… but the peace in which the kid on the Southside is thriving, where no elder is lonely, where every day is a work of art and a celebration of service to life on this miraculous planet. Amen.