Isaiah 23: The Lenses through Which We Look

Should one decide that there is little in Isaiah's "oracles against the nations" to be translated into a twenty-first century life, that conclusion would be understandable. Aside from placing these writings in a historical context, some biblical scholars don't seem to know what to do with them either, and they don't all agree on the historical context. Isaiah 23 is the last specific pronouncement against a foreign power, however, before the book of Isaiah turns to focus more on the nation of Judah. After this passage, Yahweh's destruction is reported as being global, and his devotion to humanity is focused specifically on Jerusalem (which is profoundly problematic, but we'll wait to delve into that).

Isaiah 23 contains commentary on the cities of Tyre and Sidon, both situated in present-day Lebanon, about 40 miles apart. These cities were located in a coastal area along the Mediterranean that was important for commerce, so every major empire that came along found value in claiming them. Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks, Crusaders -- whoever was in power at the time controlled Tyre and Sidon. Now, the cities are more Muslim than the United States is Christian, so one might draw some interesting conclusions if one puts stock in the prophecy, "Her merchandise and her wages will be dedicated to the Lord; ...her merchandise will supply abundant food and fine clothing for those who live in the presence of the Lord."

It's interesting to note that people throughout history have read the words of their scriptures and interpreted them however they saw fit, and people frequently criticize interpretations and perspectives that differ from their own, even when there is not necessarily greater support for one view over the other. We often hold our own perspectives in rather high esteem. Authors can only write from their own perspective, though, and the authors of Isaiah reveal some things about their perspective. Historically, it would have been unsurprising for a growing empire to take control of Tyre and Sidon, and Assyria controlled not only Tyre and Sidon, but also Babylon for a time (which could have been the land of the Chaldeans referred to in verse 13). 

The coastal cities were too useful to simply be destroyed, however. Isaiah 23 suggests that the cities will be like prostitutes, which is an interesting pre-Capitalist view toward international trade. An honest look at "free" economy in the twenty-first century might warrant the same criticism, that people are made to prostitute themselves to those who hold the power. For the authors of this passage, Yahweh is eventually going to make use of and benefit from the prostitute Tyre. Try convincing your preacher to speak about that on Sunday morning. Interestingly, the authors throw in a reference to a folk song in verse 16, which might make one wonder how many other poetic turns of phrase in scripture are taken from unacknowledged vernacular entertainment of the day. Perhaps even more interesting is that Sanchuniathon, a Phoenecian historian, seems to have cast Sidon as a daughter of gods and the originator of melodic singing. Could this mythology have influenced the authors of this oracle?

We can't know the complete cultural or historical perspective that influenced the writing of Isaiah 23 (or any other bit of scripture). What we can see clearly is that the authors began with a particular understanding of the world and interpreted events through that lens. For the writers of Isaiah, the clear assumption is that Yahweh is in control, that their god is powerful enough to orchestrate events on a global scale, and that human actions prompt divine response. If a nation or a city is besieged, Yahweh is interpreted as the commander of the attacking forces if they win, and he is interpreted as the protector of the defending community if the attackers withdraw. In order to preserve their view of the divine, they cast a vision of the future in which all people understand the power and righteousness of their god -- in which everyone sees the world as they do.

Human beings have adopted a strange stance with regard to our beliefs. We think that other people agreeing with us somehow legitimizes our beliefs. If others see the world as we do, then our perspective must be accurate, right? Not necessarily. Yet, when our beliefs are challenged by people who disagree with us, we don't reconsider our beliefs; we don't think, "Hmmm, maybe I was wrong about this. Let me consider this other perspective carefully." Instead, we often become belligerent, insisting that other people see things as we do. We are often just afraid of being wrong about what we believe; we won't allow our perspective of reality to grow into something new. 

So, we interpret everything through a particular lens, to the point that we are often willing to dismiss or ignore those things that do not fit cleanly with our perspective. The argument of Isaiah seems to go something like: Yahweh is in control of everything. Thus, every military action is approved by him, and he uses military forces to jealously punish people who worship other gods. Thus, when our own communities are overrun by foreign powers, Yahweh is ultimately behind it. Thus, rather than looking at political or military weaknesses, we should figure out why Yahweh would want this to happen to us and fix that problem. Then, we will have success against foreign military forces, because Yahweh will protect us.

Some people today look through a similar lens, making some assumptions before considering any facts. Just as the authors of Isaiah made some assumptions about their god before interpreting events around them, many people today assume first of all that their beliefs about the world are accurate, then they look at the world and fit what they see into their assumptions. We could go into the multitude of problems that arise from the assumption that God is in control, but it might be more constructive to consider starting from a different set of assumptions. We will always have beliefs that create a lens through which we see the world, but we could embrace the possibility that our lens grows and develops as we encounter the world. In other words, we could start with the assumption that we don't know everything. When we claim that God is in control, we pretend to know something that we can't know. There is no way to grow from that perspective. The only option is to force our experience into a particular box -- and to discard or ignore whatever doesn't fit in that box. A bit of honesty about the limits of human knowledge would suggest that we can grow in our perspective. That's one really useful assumption to make: We don't yet know all that we could know.

Here's another assumption we might make, another lens through which we might choose to see the world: Human hands can solve human problems. When we recognize that our current reality doesn't match our hopes for the world, we have an opportunity to create a better world. We aren't necessarily in charge of military decisions or international politics, but when we acknowledge that human beings make those decisions, and not an omniscient supernatural, we look through a lens of human responsibility. Once we are able to acknowledge that human beings are responsible for their decisions, we can be empowered in our own lives to be personally responsible for the things we do get to decide. If a supernatural is in control of everything that will happen in the world, there isn't much for human beings to do except sit back and watch. When we accept our own role in creating a better world, we might catch a glimpse of the kind of world we most want to live in.

Through what lens are you looking? Is there room for that perspective to grow? Does your lens empower and inspire you to live toward a best possible version of yourself? To contribute somehow to a better world? How you look at the world determines how you are in the world, and you have some choice in the lens you look through.

Imagine All the People Living Life in Peace

While I had hoped to continue with the Passion story as it is told in the gospel of Mark this week, I have (of my own volition) bitten off just as much as I can possibly chew this spring. Thus, just to keep the momentum going and to stay in the habit of posting something weekly, here is a short essay I wrote for a global religions course in response to an article promoting a greater appreciation for religious pluralism. 

It is perhaps dishonest to speak about "Christianity" or "Islam" and perhaps even "Judaism" as cohesive specific belief systems. The plural "Christianities" or "Islams" may be more appropriate representations of reality. There are some Christians, for instance, who are very intolerant of anything that smacks of pluralism and who base their understanding of doctrine more on fear than hope. Christianity, as they see it, is very exclusivist. There are other Christians who would be eagerly on board with a pluralistic, universalist view of people and religion. I regularly engage with people on both sides of that spectrum and many points in between. 

With such scattered identities within religious traditions, it's difficult to imagine religious people from exclusivist iterations of those traditions finding value in interfaith dialogue of any kind. We discussed in our chavruta call the arrogance of some expressions of religion that prohibit meaningful engagement with anything that seems like Other. We also discussed the matter of religious privilege. In America, being Christian is a position of privilege, but it is never addressed in the same way that privilege of ethnicity, gender, or sexuality is addressed.

Thinking in terms of privilege, religious people are in a historical and cultural context, yet often wish to distance themselves from those contexts. People who claim the label of a particular religion must acknowledge the harm done by others with that religious identity if there is to be any hope of entering into others' universes peacefully. Twenty-first century people who claim to desire to enter into the mental and spiritual universe of another, yet dismiss the influence of religion in terms of injustice, oppression, terrorism, and genocide cannot be taken seriously. Even though a particular expression of a religious tradition is against any harmful practice, these traditions exist as parts of historical and cultural trajectories.

Thus, while it is possible to "imagine all the people living life in peace," it is easier to imagine that happening in the absence of religion than it is to imagine religious fundamentalism promoting peaceful coexistence. Perhaps the greatest hope would be for the pluralistic-minded religious people to increase in number and the fundamentalist religious people to die out (of natural causes, of course), rather than hoping for an end to any particular religious tradition. A sort of evolution of religious ideology rather than an extinction level event. This hasn't happened with racism as of yet, so this may be a long shot at best.

In any cultural change, there are innovators and early adopters, then there are the early and late majorities, and last there are the laggards. In terms of technology, early adopters already have their Google glasses and laggards are still using their land-line telephone exclusively. In terms of religious pluralism, we are perhaps in the phase of transitioning within a majority view. In the American South, is sometimes seems as though pluralism is still something of an innovation, but globally I'm not sure where things stand. The point is that there will be laggards -- people who cling to their religious exclusivism until they die or until they are forced along with an irresistible cultural tide.  

It's both challenging and easy for me to enter into the mental and spiritual universes of the Christians with whom I have seminary classes. Easy, because I am familiar with the language game, having grown up in the church, and because I enter into such engagements with an eye toward common ground. With more liberal Christians (who are usually much more open to pluralism), that common ground is often very easy to find. We can use one another's language and trust that we understand one another's meaning.

This is still a challenge for me, because I feel like an outsider to the Christian language game now. I understand the concepts, but I have rejected the idea that human beings are broken and in need of salvation from an external deity in favor of a more Humanist paradigm. Even though I can understand deeply and be close friends with Christians, I am not a Christian. They are no longer my tribe, and their language is no longer my language. Moreover, I was hurt by that tribe once upon a time, and those scars still inform my opinion of Christianities to some extent.

All that considered, I am optimistic enough to believe that the concept of God can evolve. People used to believe that supernaturals were responsible for weather events and cosmological events like the fantastic and beautiful lunar eclipse some of us had the opportunity to witness this week. Most people know better now. They better understand scientific explanations for their world and can still be filled with wonder without being filled with dread that their supernatural is trying to send them a message that they don't quite understand. The cultural role of gods has shifted. 

I would suggest that the only god that an individual can worship is a god that the individual can understand. Even monotheistic religions do not really worship a single god; every worshiper brings to the table personal ideas about the object of worship. Thus, the concept of God changes subtly with every believer and evolves as a result of cultural evolutions. For some time, I sought different language to use in the place of the word "God," settling on "deepest, most noble self." Recently, I began to reclaim the word "God" for the sake of convenience, acknowledging that "God" is a word that people use to speak about a part of themselves. So, personally, as I continue to grow in connection to myself and others, God evolves I suppose.

Mr Lennon dreamed that there might be "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too." My dream, only slightly less ambitious, would simply be that people recognize that human beings invented their gods and their religions. They did so for very good reasons, and although those useful tools have sometimes been used as weapons, there is a place for religious practice in human culture. Perhaps it would be emotionally traumatic for some people to admit that the object of their worship was something they invented rather than the other way around, but I have confidence that -- in community -- people can adjust to the idea. This awareness could certainly contribute to a more pluralistic curiosity. After all, it is intriguing and enlightening to step into other mental and spiritual universes, and recognition that religion is a human invention can deflate some of the fear around exposure to Other. I honestly trust that people can still make use of religious ideas and practices while recognizing their own role in imagining their gods, but I doubt that many people in my lifetime will be ready for that shift.

Isaiah 13-14: Beyond Provincial Depictions of Divinity

The next segment of Isaiah contains many proclamations against the enemies of Judah, as well as some brief comments about what the kingdom of Judah can expect. Some of the "predictions" are so vague that one cannot really assess whether they were made before or after some historical event, and some of what the author of Isaiah predicts clearly never actually transpired. Based on this, then, it may be that these proclamations amount to wishful thinking expressed during a time of turmoil, rather than (as much of biblical prophecy is) "predictions" written down after the facts are known. For now, we will concentrate on a lengthy proclamation against Babylon and its king, with a hopeful prediction about Judah inserted in the middle, and two short proclamations against Assyria and Philistia.

These proclamations are supposedly sourced by Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian version of God, who is unchanging (based at least on Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17). So, what of God's character is revealed in these proclamations? To begin with, Yahweh is going to send a multitude of warriors from distant nations to execute his anger and destroy the world. A day of judgment is announced, at which time every person will experience physical and emotional anguish. The entire earth will be destroyed and every person who has ever missed the mark will be destroyed along with it. The stars, including the sun, will stop shining (and the moon will stop "shedding its light" too, but we won't go into the science of that). In order to punish people whose lives are characterized by wickedness, tyranny, and arrogance, Yahweh is going to destroy everything through a divinely commissioned army. This army of God will slaughter infants (who have had no opportunity to be wicked, tyrannical, or arrogant) in front of their parents, plunder the houses of the conquered, and rape the women they encounter. Suddenly, it seems that God was overly enthusiastic when he said he would destroy everything, because it turns out he was just talking about Babylon. But when God's army is through killing men, slaughtering babies, raping women, and plundering the houses of Babylon, the place won't be fit for human life ever again: "It will never be inhabited or lived in for all generations" (Is 13:20). We're talking about the modern-day country of Iraq, just to be clear. Surely, it's not considered a popular place by a lot of people, but it's still teeming with human life.

Despite destroying everything (or just Babylon) with his immoral army, Yahweh will spare Judah. The people of Israel will settle comfortably back in their own land, and people from other nations (who somehow escaped the total destruction) will flock to Israel to be slaves. Indeed, Israel will own the other nations as slaves. Instead of behaving any differently from the people who oppressed them, the people of Judah will take their oppressors captive and rule over them. That is, whatever is left of them once the army of God sweeps through slaughtering babies, raping women, and destroying every man alive. This never happened, of course. Yet, does this sound like any sort of god invoked in the twenty-first century? Unfortunately, in some peoples' minds, this isn't far from the totalitarian deities many people still envision choosing sides in war, promoting violent solutions to international problems, and justifying collateral damage in the name of power or prosperity.

If there is any doubt about the sort of deity depicted in these proclamations, Isaiah continues with Babylon's king. The king of Babylon is taunted, primarily because he will eventually die and is thus as weak as any other human being. It's odd how a person can say, "You are no better than us," in a way that sounds so similar to, "We are better than you!" Predicting that an imperialist nation will be overthrown is not a risky prediction. Such has ever been the case, and it will likely happen again, even though people now build empires a little bit differently than they did thousands of years ago. Notice that the king of Babylon goes unnamed in this proclamation. This is either because there was no way to know which king of Babylon would eventually be overthrown, or because the author of Isaiah was attempting to rob the ruler of immortality by refusing to record his name. The name of the Babylonian king overthrown by Cyrus was Nabonidus, incidentally. I mention this because, if the authors of Isaiah had recorded the ruler's name, and if this portion of Isaiah could be reliably dated to a time prior to Nabonidus' rule, then this would perhaps be a more convincing prophecy. As it is, the author(s) of Isaiah simply indicate that all of the disgraced ruler's sons should be executed--not because of their own wickedness, tyranny, or arrogance, but because of who their father was.

This, then, is the kind of god Isaiah promotes: a god who commands the slaughter of infants (provided they are not Israelite infants), a god who demands the execution of people based on the actions of their parents, a god who condones rape and humiliation of women (provided they are not Israelite women), and a god who approves of slavery (provided the slaves come from nations other than Israel). Obviously, the people of Judah had reason to hate the Babylonians who conquered them and took them into captivity, as they had historical reasons to hate the Philistines. It would have been natural for a human representative of Judah to curse Judah's enemies and make hopeful predictions about Judah's future. If one wishes to be biblically sound in one's depiction of Yahweh, though, then this Yahweh is a localized, nationalist shill for Judah, not a monolithic deity for all people in all places and times. Yahweh clearly wishes brutal harm upon nations who are behaving as Judah is given permission to behave, the only difference being that Yahweh likes Judah. This is not congruent with the idea of a supernatural being who supposedly created the universe and cares about everything in it. Moreover, the proclamations are false on a number of accounts, which either means that the Israelite god lied or was mistaken, or that the Bible is not a reliable source of information. Most likely, there was no supernatural entity involved in the proclamations at all, and the human being(s) who wrote these passages was a bit off base (historically and morally), as emotionally-based human predictions often tend to be.

Biblical proclamations like these in Isaiah are obviously based on subjective personal preferences rather than objective data. Surely, some people have a feeling that continuing along the same trajectory is eventually going to be harmful or beneficial, and they just can't articulate why they think things will have a particular result. That does not amount to divine insight from some external supernatural source. The more we learn about human psychology and physiology, the more we can accurately predict what people will do in various situations; that doesn't mean that an action was foreordained or destined. It means that people are prone toward some patterns of behavior that can be scientifically analyzed. The authors of Isaiah weren't performing any sort of scientific, objective analysis, though. They were simply writing down what made sense to them and what they hoped would happen. Their recognition that empires get overthrown was strongly colored by their emotional reaction that they would enthusiastically gloat when this particular empire was overthrown. Of course, they couldn't have known that the conquerors would be any more pleasant than their current oppressors, which may suggest that the whole thing was written after Cyrus the Great swept through Babylon.

It has been said before, and it bears repeating: the problem with claiming to know what God is going to do is that such a claim is completely unfalsifiable. Of course, any "prediction" made after the fact is immediately dismissible. "I knew God would send an army to overthrow this empire," is a rather shallow statement once the army has done its slaughtering, raping, and pillaging. Even then, one would be hard pressed to demonstrate that the army showed up because of a summons from God rather than out of very human motivations. The armies that overthrew Nabonidus certainly weren't worshipers of Yahweh, and there's no evidence that they ever converted. Cyrus the Great was a respecter of various religions, and he mentioned gratitude toward the Babylonian gods specifically. Yet, nowhere do we have evidence that Cyrus acknowledged Yahweh. Announcing ahead of time that God is going to send an army to overthrow an empire is perhaps a more risky prediction, but once again, a person has no way of demonstrating that the impending army has any connection to the desires of a supernatural being. Unfalsifiable assertions are dangerous because they give people the impression that they have knowledge when what they actually have is hope. Hope is not knowledge.

We might hope that we are more important than other people. We might hope that we benefit and other people suffer. The authors of Isaiah seemed to have these kinds of hopes. We might even have the ability to make an educated guess about how to manage things so that we actually do benefit while other people suffer. What we do not have--what no person has ever had--is compelling objective evidence that a supernatural caused things to work out a particular way, or even wanted things to work out a particular way. When we assume that we have supernatural justification for our actions, we get into some dangerous territory. We might ignore the actual objective data available to us in favor of our subjective hopes and wishes.

The objective data that we have about systems of human interaction and the influence that people have on other human beings suggests that no person is actually more important than anyone else. No person deserves to benefit from the suffering of others. Morality--discerning what is right and what is wrong--is not based on identity or caste or income or title. If slaughtering an infant is immoral, it's immoral for everyone, no matter the circumstances or the cultural identity of the infant. If rape is immoral, it's immoral for everyone, no matter the circumstances or the cultural identity of the victim. If oppression and slavery are immoral, they are immoral for everyone, no matter the circumstances or the cultural identity of the oppressors and subjugators. Our own personal hatred does not justify immoral behavior against people who seem like Other--it doesn't even justify condoning or ignoring someone else's immoral behavior against people who seem like Other to us. The slanted ethnocentricity of biblical morality as depicted in Isaiah is simply unjustifiable.

I have proposed elsewhere that we locate divinity within rather than without--that many of the characteristics we ascribe to divinity are actually human characteristics. The problem is that sometimes the characteristics that are ascribed to a supernatural represent the very worst of human behavior. Surely, whenever a person believes that some communication with a supernatural has occurred, that person has only connected inwardly in an unfamiliar or unexpected way. Unfortunately, sometimes that inward connection is shallow. We get that we hate our circumstances and the people we blame for creating those circumstances, but we don't get that our hatred harms us more than it harms anyone else. The Babylonians weren't overthrown because the Israelites hated them or because a provincial god hated them. The Babylonians were overthrown because of human desire for power (which is largely rooted in fear), but that desire had nothing to do with the Israelite exiles. If we want to understand ourselves well, grow in emotional maturity, and be the best versions of ourselves possible, we have to reach a little beyond shallow comfort or imagined collusion with beings who don't exist.

What can we do then? If there is no external divine being and no supernaturals, we have only what we can know on which to confidently base our beliefs. We can hope for anything we like, but we are only justified in believing that which has objective evidence to back it up. Some people say that there is no objective truth, which is a polite way of never having to say that another person is wrong and a convenient way of never having to change what one believes in the face of evidence. Claiming that all truth is subjective is cowardly and dishonest. We are capable of better than that. We can know some things about the universe, about our world, about human beings, and about ourselves. More than ever before, we have access to an abundance of empirical evidence about reality. We may not always like what the evidence suggests, but if we try to base our lives on refusals of what actually is, where are the boundaries to that subjectivity? There are certainly some things about which the most honest answer must be, "I don't know." Problems arise when people decide to fill in those gaps by pretending to know something that they don't. Again, this is simply dishonest.

We can reach deeper within ourselves. We can be courageous in the face of new data that could warrant a change in our beliefs. We can examine what we believe and what we fear, and we can weigh our beliefs and fears against what we can know of objective truth. We can refuse to accept laziness and irresponsibility as excuses for not engaging in self-examination. We can be more emotionally mature in dismantling irrational fears and recognizing what we actually want. We are capable of growing into the best versions of ourselves possible, and we can transform the lives of countless others as a result. This is not a supernatural aim and it requires no divine endorsement. It is simply what is possible for willing, reasoning human beings. The question is: are you willing to be the best version of yourself possible?

Mark 6:1-29: How Our Opinions of Other People Inform Our Actions (maybe more than they should)

In the beginning of Mark 6, Jesus returns to his hometown (which interestingly remains unnamed in the gospel of Mark) and people are not altogether enthusiastic about what he has to say. This is where we find the well-known quote, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own town." After that disappointing episode, Jesus sends his disciples out and tells them not to waste their time with people who won't listen. They are to shake the dust off their shoes and move on. This was a bit of an insult in the time, as if to say, "There is nothing here worth taking with me, not even the dirt." Next, we read a bit of a flashback regarding the circumstances under which Herod had John the Baptist beheaded. Essentially, he was seduced by his daughter (or step-daughter) into doing something he didn't particularly want to do. In these three stories, we find some interesting lessons about how we see other people, and how we choose whether to give other people power over us.

It's rather obvious why a prophet would have trouble in his hometown, among people who saw the individual grow up, get into trouble as a teenager, work a trade, and eventually abandon being a productive member of society to be an itinerant preacher, and a preacher unaffiliated with the state church at that. We make rather quick judgments about people, and the impressions we have of the people we know stick over time. It is as if we have taken a snapshot of an individual at a particular point in time, and whenever we interact with that individual, we rely on our snapshot rather than the current reality of who that person is. We don't always notice when people grow and change, because we have a rigid impression that becomes ingrained very quickly. It takes a bit of effort to see a person as they are and recognize every step of growth and progress they make in their lives. We don't necessarily want to understand people very deeply; we think we already do understand what a person is about based on the snapshot we keep in our mind.

Thus, when a person tries to kick an old habit or develop a new discipline, it's often the people who have known that person for a long time that present the greatest challenges. Maybe we don't actually want people to change all that much. When people change, it suggests that our reality is unstable--that we can't rely on things to remain as we expect them to be. Whatever the reason, we often have a difficult time hearing unexpected things from people who are most familiar to us. The reverse is also true: The people who have known us the longest are likely to have the hardest time hearing unexpected things from us. This does not mean that we should never change. Responsible, aware people will always be growing in some way, and growth necessarily translates as change at some level. Part of growth involves not basing our self-worth on other people's opinions, but rather on deeper, honest self-assessment based on an intentional set of guiding principles.

This is why the disciples were told to shake the dust off of their shoes and move on. There is often nothing to be gained by arguing one's point of view with someone who simply cannot hear what you have to say. An individual's inability to listen, however, reflects more about them than about you. The disciples would have done well to listen respectfully in addition to hearably presenting the truth as they saw it, but at the end of the day, if someone wasn't interested in the disciples' perspective, there was little value in sticking around.

It would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from that story, however. Some relationships are worth a bit of extra effort. Sometimes a person needs to see reliable, dependable behavior that reflects deeper convictions over time before becoming open enough to hear truth spoken clearly. Most of us can afford to give people multiple chances, otherwise we are relying on a snapshot of a person that may be inaccurate and obsolete as soon as we have filed it away. The important part is not that we write people off or dismiss those who disagree with us. The important part is that we do not base our deep guiding principles on whether other people agree with or accept us. People can ask some incredible questions that help us to sharpen and refine the principles on which we most want to base our actions, and they can challenge us in positive ways even if they don't agree with us. So, the goal is to be very clear with oneself so that one can connect with other people without placing demands on them or making assumptions about them.

Herod is an example of what happens when we do otherwise. By the biblical account, Herod was not a very secure individual. In fact, he was quite emotionally immature, often making decisions based on fear rather than on a grounded set of principles. When Herodias' daughter (named Salome in some other accounts) dances for Herod and his guests, he promises to grant her anything she desires. Even though he is intrigued by John the Baptist, he has the prophet executed because he was unwilling to tell the girl, "No." It is easy to imagine that Herod was experiencing a significant amount of anxiety in that moment, and in the many moments that followed. There are probably many things he feared would happen if he did not honor his promise. He sacrificed his own self-governance and abdicated personal responsibility instead of standing by a set of intentional principles.

We are capable of doing better than Herod, and in some ways, we may be in a position to do better than Jesus and the disciples. Jesus and his disciples did not keep visiting places over and over again and giving people second, third, or eleventh chances, and it is possible for a person with well-defined guiding principles to model a different way of being over and over again with the same individual or group. The goal, after all, is not to convince other people how they ought to live, but rather to fully inhabit our own lives -- to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be. This does not require anyone else's approval; it just requires our own willingness to grow. As we become more clear about who we want to be in the world, we will likely conflict with the snapshots that other people have of us. As we create the lives we most want, we are also likely to find that some of our own snapshots are outdated and inaccurate. We don't need to be afraid of seeing reality as it is. In fact, being honest about current reality is the only way to move forward into a vision of something better.

So, from this first portion of Mark 6 we learn not to base our self-image on the opinions of others, but to develop a set of deep guiding principles that will lead us toward the lives we most want to create. We learn that giving power to other people can lead us to make decisions that go against what we actually want to create in the world. And we learn that we cannot control other people's reactions to us; we can only control our own beliefs and actions. People have inherent value, but people's opinions are sometimes based on fears and falsehood rather than a deep sense of truth, beauty, and creativity. So, are your actions lining up with your guiding principles? How are you allowing other people to determine your sense of value? In what ways are you playing small because you fear what other people will say or think? What would it look like if you pushed past that fear and inhabited yourself more authentically?

2 Kings 5-7: Leprosy, Cannibalism, and Faith

More stories about Elisha fill the next few chapters of 2 Kings. The book of Chronicles does not duplicate these legends, since Elisha was apparently running around Israel and her neighboring countries, Aram and Ammon, and the Chronicler(s) were primarily concerned with goings on in Judah. There is no telling when these stories actually originated, but if they are to be placed in a historical context, they must coincide with the reigns of Ben-Hadad I and Ben-Hadad II, kings of Aram Damascus between 885 and 842 BCE. If these stories are intended to occur historically after the death of Ahab, then they must be placed after 853 BCE, since in that year a coalition of eleven armies (including Ahab’s), fought against the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in the battle of Qarqar under the leadership of Ben-Hadad II. Being legendary in nature, the stories may have originated in later Judaic culture. The stories in these chapters include the tale of Naaman being cured of leprosy, a short legend about a floating axe head, a story about Elisha befuddling an army, and the tale of an Aramean siege that caused a famine so serious that Israelites turned to cannibalism.

Making an axe head float on the water is a charming little story, obviously meant to demonstrate that certain special people, through the power given to them by Yahweh, could create supernatural effects. The story of Elisha blinding, misleading, and restoring sight to the Aramean army is along a similar vein, although the merciful act of throwing a feast for them before sending them scampering home is a nice touch. Along with the other stories in this collection, it conveys the message that violent retaliation is not the only way to deal with those who mean harm. Of course, the value of this perspective becomes questionable when the Arameans later lay siege to Samaria and women are so desperate that they start cooking their own children to survive. Still, by the end of the story, the most unexpected people—namely, four lepers—bring news of salvation to the city, and the guard who doubted Elisha’s prophetic word was killed in the stampede of people rushing to claim whatever provisions the Arameans left behind in their camp.

Of all of these stories, the legend of Naaman’s healing is probably the one most often heard in Christian churches; it just preaches a bit more easily than the whole cannibalism thing. There are many lessons one can glean from this tale. Regarding the nature of Yahweh, this story suggests that he cares about more than just the Israelites, and that he is more concerned with the condition of one’s heart than with elaborate ceremonies. Regarding the nature of people, we might relate to Naaman in our unwillingness to create the lives and world we most want because it seems too simple. We might relate to the Israelite king who interpreted a sincere request for healing as a potential trap or an excuse to incite violence. We might relate to Gehazi, Elisha’s greedy sidekick, in realizing that we are sometimes anxious about what we will get from our dealings with other people that we lose sight of a bigger picture. Gehazi gets punished either for his greediness or for lying to Elisha, but despite the curse that his leprosy would cling to Gehazi and his descendants forever, the king of Israel is chatting with him by 2 Kings 8:1–6, so it must not have been too severe.

One valuable aspect of folklore is that it explains something, perhaps why a certain lineage has lighter skin than other folks or perhaps how political allegiances or animosities developed. Understanding what explanation was initially intended by a story is not always easy, and we more often than not interpret our own messages and lessons without having any real certainty that we have tapped into the original intent of the story. Thus, it serves our understanding to identify the characters with which we most associate ourselves, and we also benefit from challenging ourselves to identify with the other characters as well. When we judge the king of Israel in the story of Naaman for being faithless, suspicious, callous, or whatever else we think of his response to the letter from Aram, we forget that we are sometimes prone to reactivity. From time to time, we hear or read a piece of news and become immediately stricken with anxiety. The story of Naaman teaches us that we don’t have to solve every problem all by ourselves, and that we fail to consider our options creatively when we give ourselves over to anxiety. When we judge the cannibal woman who has eaten her own son, we forget that we are sometimes persuaded by others to do things we would not normally consider doing, that our own desperation and fear can cause us to compromise on values that we believe in deeply, or that our desire for fairness sometimes blinds us to the dissonances between our own actions and beliefs. While most of us have not ever cooked and eaten our own children, we have probably overlooked our own anxiety-driven behavior in order to demand that someone else sacrifice what we have sacrificed, even though our own sacrifice was unnecessary and perhaps even unhealthy.

Still, these are folktales, and the characters in these stories are not real people. We can extrapolate lessons to whatever extent we like, but there is nothing about these folktales that makes them more credible vessels for truth than any other legends. If we are careless readers, we could interpret some strange lessons from the stories of ancient people, as we have seen with other Old Testament tales. While we might see a new perspective in a folktale if we are open to it, the truth of how we can best represent our most noble selves in the world is already at work within us. We experience anxiety and fear and hatred and desperation when we act in a way that is incongruent with what we already know about the kind of people we most want to be. Stories serve as reminders for things we already know, but sometimes forget when we become wrapped up in irrational fear. We don’t want to get so desperate that we consume our own children. We don’t want to be so rigid in our thinking that we resist our own healing. We don’t want to be so caught up in greed that we cause suffering for ourselves and the people around us. When we see these lessons reinforced in stories, it resonates with something we already believe about ourselves and helps us stay oriented in a meaningful direction.

Here’s something to consider, though: We haven’t stopped telling stories. I’m not just thinking of television and film or the anxiety-driven inventions of political activists keeping their respective teams riled up. We tell stories about people on the roads with us, people shopping in stores with us, people working with us. Our minds create a story about everyone we see. More often than not, those stories are ways for us to compare ourselves with other people, and we wind up either judging ourselves as worthy or worthless based on how we measure up to the stories we tell about other people. Just as we subconsciously select which characters to identify with in folktales, we selectively compare ourselves to what we believe about other people in real life, too. And just as we learn something by empathizing with a broader range of characters in a folktale, we learn something by empathizing with the real people rather than using what we invent about them as measuring sticks for ourselves. We are all of equal value, after all.

Although it’s easy to use comparison as a basis to see how we measure up, our value is not based on comparison with anyone else. In fact, our value is not even based on how well we are living by our own standards. Human beings have value, and that value cannot be increased or decreased by anything we do. We can, however live in alignment with our deepest beliefs—our deepest creativity and nobility. This is, in essence, what is meant by "living a life of faith". When we become aggressive or desperate or anxious or overwhelmed, we have replaced faith with fear. Our deepest truths become neglected in favor of lies about ourselves, other people, or life in general.

In folktales of the ancient Israelites, faith was directed outward toward an entity that they believed controlled all of reality, as we’ve discussed along the way. Many people today still express faith in these ancient terms, looking toward something outside of themselves as a source of hope, truth, or justice. Faith does not have to be oriented outward, however. The assertion that human beings have innate value is a statement of faith. Assuming an inner reserve of creativity and nobility is a position of faith. Whatever our statements of faith may be, we will find ways to support our beliefs in life; we will see evidence of what we want to believe. When our actions line up with our deep statements of faith, we gain a sense of being grounded, at peace, in alignment. When our actions are dissonant to what we claim to believe, we experience anxiety, frustration, and desperation. The challenge is to distinguish between those beliefs that are statements of deep faith and those which are based on irrational fears.

Since our beliefs directly inform our actions, we can examine our actions and see our beliefs. If our actions reflect anxiety and fear, if our actions demonstrate a sense of desperation or aggression, then the beliefs that inform those actions are most likely irrational lies that work against a deep sense of faith. If our actions reflect things like acceptance of ourselves and others, calm integrity, or joyfulness, then the beliefs that inform those actions are perhaps closer to our underlying statements of faith. When we nurture beliefs based in lies, we get lives that are anxious, fearful, and desperate. When we nurture beliefs based in truth, we get lives that are connected, deeply satisfying, and inspiring. We nurture beliefs, in part, by committing ourselves intentionally to actions that reflect the beliefs we want to nurture. The more we act in accord with our deepest statements of faith, the more we will immunize ourselves against the irrational fear and anxiety that occasionally threatens that faith.

Stories like those in 2 Kings are intended in part to reinforce a cultural sense of faith. Our own culture is different from ancient Israelite culture. In a sense we define ourselves by many different subcultures, but in another sense those subcultures are becoming more and more global. Our beliefs and actions affect more than just our own lives—none of us lives in total isolation. Thus, whether we act on irrational fears or deep faith makes a difference. It matters how we decide to see ourselves, other people, and the world we all share. So, what do your actions reflect? Are your guiding beliefs leading you toward anxiety and fear? Or is your deepest, most noble self being drawn forward consistently in acts of faith?

Summarizing Joshua and Judges: The Israelites' Downward Spiral Does Not Need to Be Reflected in Our Lives

Beginning with looking at the very first chapters of Genesis through a new lens, this recontextualization of the biblical narrative has been based on the foundation that all people are capable of recognizing and living out a deep truth, beauty, and creativity within them.  This deep self lies beneath the fears and beliefs we accumulate throughout our lives and is the very character of the divine.  If we choose to do so, we can see that divine character all around us, that undeniable truth, deep beauty, and fearless inspiration being present in all of nature and in every other people, however hidden or prominently exhibited.

As the biblical narrative continued, it became a tale of how people paid more attention to Fear than to their own divine natures.  Fear led people to do some horrible things to themselves and to other people, and those actions sometimes had far-reaching consequences.  Even though the Old Testament narrative is not historical fact, we can clearly relate to the truths it reflects about human nature.  We sometimes do regrettable things because we give irrational fears too much power in our lives.

Moses attempted to create a society focused outward, toward an externalized deity, with a prescribed set of laws, beliefs, and behaviors designed to connect people to the divine and to one another.  Many other cultures also strove to quantify the divine in some external way, even as many cultures strive to do today.  Stepping out of the narrative of the ancient Israelites as it is presented in the Bible, the religious laws and regulations in the Old Testament were actually created over a long period of time and written back into a pseudo-historical context in an effort to provide a strong spiritual foundation for a specific society.  These went beyond merely specifying punishments for the kinds of moral issues on which nearly every society agrees.  These laws and regulations were, in a certain sense, an attempt to define the divine in a meaningful way.

When Moses died, Joshua took his mantle of leadership, and various judges followed him in the recorded history of the Israelites.  The story told in Joshua and Judges is a downward spiral of a culture falling prey to its own fears and losing its sense of identity.  Their propensity to see their joys and sorrows as manifestations of divine approval or rejection robbed them of personal responsibility, and the tendency to place the character of the divine somewhere outside of themselves left them spiritually vulnerable and immature.  In short, the social experiment is showing some weaknesses, but the hardships to come for the Israelites will give them reasons to cling to their culture with grim determination.

We are not a part of the ancient Israelite worldview.  We do not have the same cultural or geographical background as the ancient Israelites.  We are more knowledgeable in every field than they were, as we should be after a few thousand years of development.  We have choices about what we believe, and in the Western world, we can largely make those choices without fear of death.  Whatever beliefs you choose about the divine, hopefully those beliefs give you a reason to confront your irrational fears and make decisions based on a deeper truth.  Whether you prefer one religion or another, or no religion at all, the bottom line is that we are connected to one another and to the world around us.  Our actions matter.  The ancient Israelites understood this, even as they wrestled with their cultural identity.  It is not beyond us today to recognize our need for connection to the world, to one another, and to ourselves.  It is not beyond us today to put aside irrational fear and take personal responsibility for our actions and our beliefs.  To call upon a word that is overused and often abused, it is not beyond us today to love, deeply and sincerely, ourselves and the people with whom we share this existence.

Judges 4-5: Wisdom and Strength Are Gender-Neutral

The surprising plot twist in the story of Ehud was that a southpaw can be heroic.  In the story of Israel's next judge, Deborah, the unexpected lesson is that women can be heroic, too.  At least on the surface.  The story is just as bloody as other tales of Israelite warfare, but this time it's a woman directing the Jewish army and a woman who kills the enemy general when he flees.  The efforts of two women, Deborah and Jael, effectively end the oppression from the Canaanites and grant Israel forty years of peace.  Even in the modern world, this story may seem impressive for all the wrong reasons.

Obviously, the writers of the book of Judges had a bit of an ulterior motive in recording tales about unlikely heroes.  It shouldn't be surprising when a left-handed person accomplishes something great or when a woman displays wisdom or strength.  Human beings are capable.  Even though different people are skilled in different specific areas, this has nothing to do with gender.  When the Israelites told the story of Deborah, they were addressing this truth in a way, but the fact that there are so few women prophets and heroes in the biblical narrative demonstrates how limited a foothold that truth found in Israelite culture.  Even today, thousands of years later, we are still debating whether women have opportunities and rewards equal to men in our society.

Sometimes when a woman CEO or a woman scientist or a woman artist does something noteworthy, the fact that it was a woman accomplishing something impressive is often given more weight than the accomplishment itself.  Thousands of years after Deborah is said to have sat beneath a palm tree settling Israel's disputes, there is some doubt in Western culture as to whether women are as capable as men.  It's understandable on a certain level.  The primary religion of our culture has an image of God as an old white man whose physical incarnation was a male who was surrounded by other males.  Women were there in the story, too, but there were no female disciples of Jesus.  The church structure of the Christian church has historically placed power in the hands of men and treated woman as inferior, and it has used an ancient fable about a woman giving in to a talking snake's temptation as justification for viewing women as weaker than men.  Never mind that the same book which holds that old folktale also demonstrates the strength and wisdom of women.  After centuries upon centuries of social, political, and religious systems built around the concept that men are leaders and women are supporters, it's no wonder that we still have not settled for once and all in the minds of everyone that women and men have equal value.

As with so many things, the reason comes down to fear and habit.  We don't always dig down into our automatic assumptions, especially when our thoughts seem to match the views of a larger population, but any assumption that one group of people is inherently inferior to another group of people is usually based on irrational fear.  That fear becomes habitual over generations, so that we accept things as normal without ever assessing whether those habits are based in truth.  Perhaps our minds also create some early beliefs when we're figuring out the differences between boys and girls, hearing stories and watching movies in which princesses are consistently helpless and in need of rescuing by dashing, capable princes -- the kind of stories that reinforce stereotypes of previous generations so that a new generation doesn't need to be told that women are inferior.  Somehow their brains just put the connections together without any adult having to say out loud the real moral of so many stories.  Because saying out loud that men are more capable than women -- than men deserve more respect, money, permission, or power just because they were born with the right genitalia -- seems a bit far-fetched.

I'm not sure what all of the fears are that are wrapped up in this cultural perception of inequality.  I could say, as others have, that the men in charge of the early church were afraid of the local wise women who handled the problems of a community without the need for recognizing the authority of organized religion.  That fear seems reasonable and powerful.  It doesn't make sense for the large numbers of people today who have bought into the idea that women (or people from other cultures, or people with less money, or people with more money) are somehow inferior human beings.  Only you can look at your beliefs honestly and evaluate them against the truth of human value.  Your beliefs about other people, and your beliefs about yourself, can be based on fear or they can be based in truth.  You may have to dig down a bit to track a belief to its source.  Some of these ideas have been with us for a very long time.

The book of Judges prompts us to evaluate our beliefs -- our assumptions about other people and about human value.  The truth is that different people do have different strengths and skill sets, but these strengths and skill sets are not based on gender, skin color, finances, or culture.  Even though personal strengths and skills may differ, every person has equal value as a human being.  This doesn't mean every person is equally capable of doing any given task.  It means that our value is not a function of what tasks we can perform.  Every person has value.  That is the starting point.  When we embrace the belief that every person we meet holds within them deep and undeniable truth, beauty, and creativity -- and when we are able to look in the mirror and acknowledge those qualities in ourselves -- maybe the differences we notice will matter less and our irrational fears will give way to a practice of seeing more clearly what connects us all.

Joshua 22-24: Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve

Cultural ideals and values change over time, even within a cohesive culture.  As Joshua reaches the end of his life, he gathers the Israelites one last time to reaffirm their faith and to reinforce their adherence to an insular mono-cultural religion.  Of course, the Israelites in the story agree, especially given the choices Joshua rhetorically offers.  There are lots of choices when it comes to faith and belief, however, and not all of them are mutually exclusive, either-or decisions.

Now, obviously, we are skimming past some passages in the book of Joshua.  For instance, we blew right past the beginning of Joshua 10.  Although we can find spiritual value in any story, it didn't seem particularly important to discuss God responding to Joshua's prayer for the sun to stop moving in the sky to give the Israelites an upper hand in battle.  It's one of those scenes that makes for great storytelling but cannot be taken as factual truth by anyone who understands basic physical laws.  As bizarre as it seems, in modern civilized society, there are people who will fight tooth-and-nail to defend the concept that their god can break physical laws if he wants to, even though no one has ever reliably and verifiably documented such a thing.  If it can just be a nice story that the Israelites told their children, then it's harmless.

We also don't need to spend a great deal of time on Joshua 22, in which a group of Israelite soldiers returns home after years of war and sets up a big altar.  The rest of the Israelites, accustomed to battle and bloodshed, march over there -- ready for war -- to find out what this altar is all about.  It's a testament to how our minds work.  When we are convinced that opposition and threats are all around us, we will see enemies to fight everywhere, even in the faces of those close to us.  The Israelites are portrayed as a pretty bloodthirsty people in this book.  This chapter demonstrates how their single-mindedness about conquering the Other threatened to damage their own society when they ran out of Others to conquer.  In the end, they worked it out, and everything was fine because they were willing to listen to one another -- a practice worth emulating in our personal conflicts.

In chapters 23-24, Joshua tells first the leaders and then the whole assembly of Israel that God will continue to good things for them if they continue to be obedient, and that God will do evil things to them if they are disobedient.  This is very telling.  There is no concept of a devil yet in Israelite culture, there is only their god and other people's gods.  Other people's gods were obviously inferior, and their god was mighty and awesome.  To that end, the Israelite god was capable of doing good or doing evil.  According to Joshua.  I'm not just making this up.  The God of the Old Testament, at least up until this point, is capable of doing good or evil. 

Is this the modern Christian definition of the divine character?  Probably not in most people's minds.  During a period of captivity, the Jews learned all about an Opposer, and this "Satan" became a part of their mythology.  It's convenient to split that capacity for evil away from a god that people are supposed to be able to love and trust.  It's hard to completely love or trust someone who has blatantly threatened to obliterate you from the face of the planet if you do something wrong.  This perception of God softened and changed over time because people needed something different than the Infallible Supernatural Military Leader and Imposer of Order.  People needed something a bit less volatile to believe in.

But this idea still exists, this God who is equally capable of doing great good or doing great evil.  It's in the Bible, after all.  It even leads to debates about the definitions of good and evil.  It's evil for a dictator to commit genocide just because he doesn't like what a group of people is doing, but some people could persuade themselves to think of it as righteous, justified, even good if God were to do exactly the same thing.  It's one of the primary reasons that religion and morality have become strange bedfellows.  If any act becomes good (righteous, justified, "right") if God is behind it, then God has become amoral -- beyond morality itself.  Any definition of good that doesn't contain an exclusion clause for God would seem to create problems for the god some Christians believe in.

Yet, the modern Christian view of God has evolved away from the idea that God is capable of both good and evil.  If God approves of something, in their thinking, then it must be good, because God is incapable of evil.  This is much like Nixon saying, "When the president does it, that means that it's not illegal."  In Joshua's time, there was no ethical confusion.  According to the story, their god had done some pretty impressive things when he liked what they were doing, and he had done some pretty horrible things when he didn't like what they were doing.  He had proven himself mightier than the gods of all the people the Israelites conquered, to the point of providing for the Israelites the security of homes they didn't build and the abundance of vineyards and orchards they didn't plant.  The story-book version of the Israelite god is not someone to whom you can easily say No. 

Which brings us to Joshua's last inspirational speech.  He leads the Israelites in a reaffirmation of their communal faith.  And if they weren't willing to devote themselves to the god that provided so much and threatened so effectively, he commanded them to choose what other deity they were going to serve, the gods of their forefathers or the gods of the surrounding cultures.  Not much of a choice.  It's the kind of tactic that strategic parents use: "Would you like to clean your room, or would you like for me to take away your video game privileges for a week?"  You can defy the logical choice, but there's a cost.

What if there were other choices, though?  As far as people or ideals to serve, there are many more choices than what Joshua mentioned in his ritualized reaffirmation ceremony.  Some people serve the ideals of patriotism, some people serve money, some people serve their children, some people serve nature, some people serve a particular corporation, some people serve aesthetic beauty, and more.  Some people serve more than one thing in a meaningful way.  It's worth knowing what you serve, but it isn't necessarily an either-or decision. 

It isn't enough to say, "I serve myself," because that's what everyone does when it comes down to it.  Did the Israelites have a better choice for self-preservation than to agree with Joshua?  It wouldn't have been really self-serving to provoke the wrath of their god.  It also isn't enough to say, "I serve God."  Which one?  The biblical God?  There is no such thing.  The biblical depiction of God is an inconsistent patchwork that evolved over time as a culture developed.  Which version of the biblical God do you serve?  Whatever your answer is, you will be defining the divine character based as much on personal beliefs as on biblical depictions.  What matters to you about the character of God is based on what matters to you personally.

Joshua's admonition still has some value.  You don't have to choose "this day;" there's no pressure.  It's worth a little thought, though.  What or whom do you serve?  It may be more than one thing.  What does it mean to serve?  Does it mean mindless obedience?  Does it mean fear of consequences?  Or does it mean heartfelt devotion mixed with autonomy?  Do you bring your full self into service, or do you shut down part of who you are in order to serve?  Are you trying to serve something that really doesn't matter to you, just because someone said you should?  If it didn't matter what other people thought of you, what or whom would you serve?

As for me, I will serve my divine self -- the insight, beauty, and creativity at the core of who I am.  Through that deep self, I am awed and inspired by the world around me.  Through that deep self, I can trust in my ability to find satisfying solutions to the challenges I face.  Through that deep self, I can see the divine character of other people more clearly, and I can think of them and treat them in a way that honors them, that reflects a respect for their capability, even when they are not fully embracing that capability themselves.  Through serving my divine self, I can be honest about what matters to me and make clear decisions that contribute to a fulfilling life.  And from that deep self I can boldly connect with other people and share life with them.

That service is not easy.  I believe things about myself that are not true.  I believe lies about other people and about the networks and systems we create.  I make decisions out of irrational fear from time to time.  I serve my self imperfectly.  Just like everyone else.  I also forgive myself from that deep well and continue serving, and that brings me delight and satisfaction.

We all serve something.  Know what you serve.