Conspiracy theories, fake news, and midrash: What I learned from freshman Religion

In 2004, I was enrolled in a Religion 101 course with Dr. Murray Haar at Augustana College. It was my first religion course of any kind and the first time I ever read the Bible with even an ounce of criticism. I was surrounded by other freshmen, most of whom were not Religion majors, being exposed to ideas few of us had ever considered. The lion's share of us were Christians; Dr. Haar was Jewish. This is probably one of those classes that a certain category of faith leaders warn you about--the kind that could cause a person to question their faith.

Yet, I discovered something different from Dr. Haar's class. One of the ideas we learned about was the concept of midrash, which is the study and interpretation of ancient Hebrew scripture. That may sound boring, but it was really more like wrestling with the Bible in the same way that Jacob wrestled with God--caring enough to never let go. There is a long and rich history of playing with scripture in the Jewish tradition, and you can read this today in the Talmudic literature if you seek it out. But we weren't just supposed to read midrash, we would be doing midrash of our own! If nothing else, this showed that Dr. Haar had a deep tolerance for bad interpretations, because, let me tell you, I know we did some truly poor midrash.

Enter our first midrash assignment in November of 2004. For some reason, I ended up with the story of the rape of Dinah from Genesis 34. I don't know if I chose that scripture (if so, I was an idiot) or if it was assigned. Either way, I could hardly have ended up with a trickier story to interpret. Not only did I know next-to-nothing about Genesis or the Jewish tradition, I also knew next-to-nothing about sexual violence or, frankly, women. What followed was predictable: I wrote something embarrassingly bad.

I won't explain what I said, except to say that I still have the original and I can barely read it. It was that bad. Mercifully, I did one wise thing that changed everything: I had someone else read it. Naomi was an academic tutor for our dorm, who read papers for dumb freshmen like me, and in this case, she pulled no punches. She graciously pointed out not just the interpretive flaws but, more importantly, the assumptions I was making about women and violence. In response, I did one last wise thing: I listened to her. Dr. Haar never got the original paper; in fact, what he got was a paper lacking any of the original claims. The midrash I turned in was still bad in the way that freshmen papers are bad, but it set me on a course that made all the difference--all because I let somebody in to reveal my glaring blind spots.

I thought about this paper today as I saw another in a long line of conspiracy theories come across my social media feed. I suspect this jarred my memory of the Dinah midrash because I recognized the same kind of assumptions undergirding those "fake news" articles. People who post these claims often say something like, "This is interesting," or "I don't know if this is true but worth thinking about." I can imagine thinking something similar about my Dinah midrash. My interpretation was interesting, but it was also wrong and damaging. It was worth thinking about, but only to understand why it must be rejected.

Unfortunately, I see the opposite reaction from so many who share these ideas. When confronted with the factual inaccuracies in their posts, they too often say something like "Well, who can really know what is true?" I get it: it's embarrassing to be wrong. It's easy to say, "I didn't really believe it. I was just posting it because I found it interesting." But we know the truth: You found it interesting because you wanted to believe it. In fact, maybe you wanted to believe it because it was interesting. I certainly wanted to believe my interpretation of the rape of Dinah, because it demonstrated I was clever enough to see beyond the scripture. That would be interesting! That it was also damaging wasn't really my concern; after all, I wasn't trying to be damaging--I was only after the truth, and who knew what that may be?

One of the bits of wisdom that Dr. Haar often said was that "you need the community to tell you when you're crazy." I believe this is the breakdown we are seeing in this conspiracy-driven landscape. We surround ourselves with like-thinking people who agree with whatever we post, people who coo, "Ooohh, that's interesting!" right back at us. Then, when others are critical, we feel emboldened by the support of those first like-thinkers who reinforced our initial beliefs. Soon it doesn't matter what is true, because the initial idea is still interesting.

I thank God I found Naomi first--that I didn't send the midrash to somebody who would also have found my interpretation interesting. If I had been emboldened to believe whatever I was writing was correct, then I may have been emboldened enough to think that any criticism leveled by Dr. Haar would have been elitist--and what did he know anyway? It's a very slippery slope, which is why I'm so thankful I ended up where I did.

I've never thanked Naomi for this before, though we are still in touch thanks to the wonder of that very same social media that so easily leads us astray. This gives me a good deal of hope, actually--hope that we can be better. I share this today in the hope that you can find the same kind of honest critique. It is a tremendous blessing for somebody to care enough to tell you that you are wrong.

Bad theology and the book of Job

Job 7:11-21

In preaching Job, especially these passages today, I think it’s incredibly important to point out that Job’s friend, Eliphaz, doesn’t understand God at all. It’s one of these challenges reading the Bible out of context when we pick up a chapter and read someone like Eliphaz saying, “Isn't your religion the source of your confidence; the integrity of your conduct, the source of your hope? Think! What innocent person has ever perished?” and it’s real tempting to think, “Well, that must be biblical wisdom!” The problem being that Eliphaz is simply wrong and Job, God, and the reader all know it.

            Job’s friends probably mean well. That might be me putting on my 8^th commandment hat and believing the best of them, but I’ll try it out here at least. Let’s say that Job’s friends actually believe that they are helping him; that Job has some terrible, secret sin that is the reason God took everything from him—never mind that we already know from the story that this isn’t true. If we can put the best light on Eliphaz, we might believe that his understanding of God is just as likely as Job’s. After all, none of us really have met God and been able to interrogate the divine about these matters of theology. Karma makes logical sense; so does an eye for an eye.

            But this story should demonstrate pretty clearly that all theology is not the same, and all of us do theology, whether we think we do or not. If you say, “God is love” then your understanding of what that means is theology; it is using a particular scripture to explain God’s relationship to us. Likewise, if you quote from John and say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and none come to the Father through me,” claiming that Christianity is the only faith that holds water in light of this verse, you are doing theology. Some theology is good; some is bad; much is unclear.

Racism, a pandemic, and the island of Job

Job 1

This week we begin five weeks on the book of Job. Five weeks on the story of a man who had an incredible series of calamities hit him all at once. It might feel a bit like 2020.

But before we see ourselves in Job too clearly—and before we make ourselves out to be blameless as Job was—we should be clear from the start that Job failed miserably at understanding God. For one thing, Job clearly felt that when tragedy strikes it is God who takes away. It’s that oft-quoted verse that I just read (1:21), “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised,” but the story itself reveals that this isn’t true.

It’s probably the most famous verse in all of Job, but 1:21 is clearly a failure of Job to do good theology. God didn’t take anything away from Job; Satan did. I mean God did allow Satan to test him—with conditions—so you could blame God, I suppose, and that is supposedly what Satan is testing, but God didn’t take away anything in this story. Furthermore, the idea that God gave Job what he had is not supported here either. This is one of those tricky sticking points of theology where the question of why some people have material blessings and some do not is not easily answered, and the implied answer about blessings following faithfulness can be extremely damaging and is most often simply a lie. In the real world, the poor are often more faithful than the rich. The moment we use our blessings to prop up ourselves as more faithful is the moment we have jumped the boat.

If you find it easy to place yourself in Job’s shoes, perhaps it’s because he represents the fears of those who have much. If you have a lot, you know a lot can be taken from you. Boy, are those fears poignant right now! As we struggle with an uncertain economy and our nation struggles to come to terms with our complicity in systemic racism, whose causes are so deeply embedded in our history that we hardly know where to start, it becomes easy to ascribe everything that happens to God—the good and the bad. Yet, God’s handiwork is not revealed in Job’s disasters. God has yet to play a role in the story. It’s coming! Oh boy, is God going to take a role in this story, but it’s not yet. God cries with Job; God does not rob Job of his loved ones.

After all, our faith is a faith about taking up our crosses. God doesn’t need to send crosses for us to bear; the world gives them to us! Racism is not something God created; it just happens. Poverty, disease—they happen ultimately because of sin—but God’s role lies further ahead.

We know this is true of God because Job had everything and he was faithful—blameless, the scripture says—but the mark of a God-follower is not how good we are to earn blessings but how we respond when it’s taken away—and it’s not that God is testing us; the world provides plenty of tests without God deciding it’s time to throw another lightning bolt from heaven. Through the next several weeks we will watch the rollercoaster that is Job’s response to tragedy. He begins down an impossible pathway of theological gymnastics to explain what happened to him, because as much as he resists his friends who argue he must have done something wrong, nevertheless Job continues to view the world as if God gives and takes away, and, ultimately, Job cannot get away from viewing wealth as evidence of doing something right. He can’t get past it.

In many ways, Job never stops to realize he is nothing special; that everything he has is a gift not because he is faithful but because God is. He never pauses to consider how the stacked deck benefited him to achieve what he did—just like we rarely pause to consider our own stacked deck. Thankfully, most of us haven’t lost everything, and we may still consider our own privileges more carefully right now.

We aren’t Job, but there are some things we can learn from Job’s story. One thing I take away from Job immediately is that there is no playbook for grief and no hierarchy of grief either. Job has quite a lot and loses everything; other folks start out with little and they, too, may lose everything, and both experience grief profoundly. All the possessions can be replaced, we imagine, but his sons and daughters cannot. When you lose loved ones, nothing else matters.

I think that’s actually a great place to begin, whether you are looking to understand Job, or a pandemic, or the effects of racism. When you lose something you can’t replace, nothing else matters. For too many in our nation, they have lost their dignity and their humanity and their lives because of their skin color. That cannot be replaced, and it is their grief they carry day by day.

The power of story

1 Corinthians 15

Four years ago, when this scripture last popped up in the lectionary, I preached a sermon on Harry Potter since a verse of this scripture reading is quoted in the final book in the Harry Potter series. In 2020, with everything going on in the world, I feel pretty much like doing that again. But rather than talking about my own journey in coming to see the Harry Potter story as a reflection of the Gospel-story, which might mean something to some of you but probably means nothing to many of you, I thought it would be more useful to talk about why these themes from 1 Corinthians are so powerful both for the Gospels and in stories in general.

The line that appears on the gravestone of Harry Potter’s parents in Godric’s Hollow is 1 Corinthians 15:26, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” For Harry (and, I think, for many of the rest of us), this is a bit of a confusing verse. We know that death is bad, and we understand the importance of death being defeated, but we might wonder: Hasn’t that part happened already? Wasn’t that the point of the cross? And if that part has happened already, then shouldn’t we view death more like a necessary rite of passage—certainly not as an enemy? Harry questions this too, because in his world, the bad guys are the ones trying to conquer death. The villain, Voldemort, has a name that literally means “flees from death,” and he surrounds himself with folks he calls Death Eaters. The good guys, by contrast, understand that death is but the next great adventure (Dumbledore).

So, it’s all very confusing. It’s much like our own tenuous relationship with death. As a Christian, we might well wonder how we are supposed to feel about this thing that seems to have all the power, and, yet, our faith says something different. “Death, where is your sting?” says the scripture.

Well, if we’re being honest, the sting is that death ends the only life we know. That is a very real sting. Even more broadly, death is not just physical deaths. At this moment, we are experiencing the death of expectations, the death of plans, the death of normal, even the death of hopes and dreams. The sting of death is that things are just not right.

I have found that when the world is upside-down, the best cure is a good story. However, I say this not as a means of escape. Too often, we treat stories as if they are either unreal or distant from our lives, especially when we are reading fiction. I believe this is a mistake. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

Love in a time of division

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

            We most often read this at weddings for couples who are quite obviously in love. When it’s read that way, it feels like sappy wisdom, like a toast at a wedding. Perhaps that’s what Paul is doing in this scripture, we might imagine—writing for lovers. But that’s not the truth at all.

            The church in Corinth was a community of believers that have forgotten how to love one another. They were a community torn by disagreement and strife. It’s a theme lifted up chapter after chapter. Paul isn’t preaching to the choir; he is telling them to get their ducks in a row, because they don’t look like a loving community of believers. He’s reminding them what it looks like to love.

            We need to be reminded how to love one another. It’s about being honest with our hopes and fears and dreams, being honest about all the ways we are grieving right now, and all the emotions we are feeling. Love is also remembering that we are all in different boats at the moment. Some folks are financially secure but physically vulnerable; others are financially vulnerable but physically secure; others are both or neither. Love considers the place of the other.

            The last couple weeks I’ve talked some about meaning-making in light of the pandemic, especially that one of our great weaknesses in this moment is that we don’t know how to wrap our heads around this one. When we find ourselves confronted with meaninglessness, it is all the easier to fail to see the humanity in others. We need to feel secure first; then we can consider loving others.

Still, we need to love.

            Love is the greatest—even greater than faith and hope—because love is both for right now and for eternity. It is not faith that once realized is no longer needed, and it is not a future hope that is always elusive; it is available to us in this moment. But this also means that love is the easiest to lack, because there is counter-evidence to living a life full of love everywhere you look. There are people to disagree with, people who just don’t get it, and other people who seem to get it but, worst of all, willingly choose to treat us with disdain nonetheless.

            Love persists through these things, because it is the ultimate; it is not dependent on anything, not even agreement. Loving someone is not weakness; it is not letting others off the hook. Love is the strength to understand the actions of another come from a place that we will never completely understand. Love is believing that even though I don’t get you, nonetheless you are a beloved child of God. You don’t need to like other people to love the humanity in them, and you don’t need to hang out with them on weekends.

            At the end of the day, loving people is a reflection of God’s love for us—love we don’t deserve. Which is great! Because most people don’t deserve our love either. We are truly all in it together, because none of us are good enough to earn love.

            We need to remember these days that most people are doing what they are doing out of love. Those who would like to see everything stay closed are operating out of love for the most vulnerable. Those who would like to see everything reopened are operating out of love for businesses, workers, and their families. Both are incomplete pictures; both are also necessary pictures. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to love one another. We’re just in different boats.

            I had a professor in undergrad who used to often say, “Think that you might be wrong.” I have found this to be good advice for important moments. In situations like these, we tend to dig in to positions. We become certain when we should be the opposite. We should realize that the problems facing us as a society are so big and varied that we can’t possibly hope to wrap our heads around them, so we should approach the problems humbly. The more serious the difficulties, the more cautious we should be to assume we are right. This might feel backwards, but it is important, because the moment we presume that others are out for the worst for us, then we will have divided ourselves in a way that is not easily reconciled. We need to admit that we don’t know.

            Uncertainty is the fertile ground for love. We are all just human beings who don’t know. That’s doesn’t feel comforting, of course. It’s much easier to believe in miracle cures and simple narratives to make sense of things. And it’s not to say that there aren’t those who will use uncertainty for malice—they will. All I’m saying is that there is power in staying united even especially in our uncertainty. Love requires vulnerability.

            It is hard to love, like most great things. I don’t want to love people who don’t get it; most of all, I don’t want to love myself, who also doesn’t get it. I am not in love with the situation. I often don’t know what to do with myself. I start doing one thing, forget what I was doing, and two hours later I’ve accomplished nothing. This is life right now. Our inability to process things is not a sign of a lack of love. Instead, we should be reminded that God loves us for the scatterbrained people that we are. That we can’t wrap our heads around the vastness of it all is simply a reminder that we are human and therefore in need of love.

            So, it’s funny, but Paul writing to the church in Corinth about love may be much more applicable in this moment than it is for weddings in saner times. We need to be reminded of what unites us—our humanity. We are people who don’t get it, who won’t get it, and who will let one another down, but we are also capable of loving one another and of remembering we are children of God, full of grace we don’t deserve.

            So, let’s work on remembering that together.

United in our Humanity, United in Christ

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

In his essay, Health is Membership, Wendell Berry talks about a hospital scene involving his brother, John, who had a heart attack with his wife, Carol, at his bedside along with a nurse tending to his care. Sitting in the ICU, Carol was distraught, as you might imagine. Berry recounts the scene like this: “Wanting to reassure her, the nurse said, ‘Nothing is happening to him that doesn't happen to everybody.’ And Carol replied, ‘I'm not everybody's wife.’”

            What Carol is articulating is the pesky scandal of the particular, which reminds us that generalities don’t work in the face of the specific, singular pains we feel. One of our immense trials with Covid-19 is this tension between what is happening to “everybody” and what is happening to those nearest and dearest to us. It’s little comfort if relatively few die if one of those relatively few is the one I love, but it all can feel like a roll of the dice. Some people—most people—will come out unscathed and say, “That wasn’t so bad!” while others will not come out at all.

            I’m a bit of statistics junkie, and there are a lot of statistics out there. There is also a lot of meaning-making around those statistics. We are meaning-making creatures, who are trying to make sense of a new and foreign reality. So, we latch on to stories that make sense to us, since everything is so new and the statistics can show pretty much anything. We need some coherence in our lives right now, so it’s only natural to believe whatever helps us get through.

            1 Corinthians begins by reminding us of the dangers of being split into rival groups in a time of crisis. We are united not by the vagaries of our suspicions about systems; we are united not by our political leanings; we are united not by our beliefs in what we should be doing for the economy or for health care. We are united in Christ. Full stop. And if your next thought is “Yeah, but…” then you are human, because we accept that promise of Christian unity as some kind of platitude when it is, in fact, that thing that matters. The scandal of the particular is that Jesus Christ died and rose, which makes the Christian faith not a set of axioms which can be interpreted in light of whatever stories we tell ourselves and whatever made-up theories we believe. Christians are united not in principles but in a person.

            This scandal of particularity plays itself out most dramatically in how we make decisions. Do we consider the numbers? Do we consider the big picture? Somebody should, we imagine, but what is the Christian’s role in the big picture? A few weeks ago, I had somebody lecture me on the value of a human being—that the definition of “value” was how much a person contributed to the economy. In this way, we reduce people to machines and we make decisions about economies based on that big picture that cannot concern itself with particulars. After all, particulars are what make people emotional, as if all of our emotions are signs of weakness.

            The big picture is important to keep in mind, but we are still singular people. And the Christian community (what we typically call the church) is this backwards group that believes that you leave the 99 sheep behind who are well and good to go looking for the one that is missing. The Christian community believes in seeking out those whose value is least according to the economic models, and instead we value them most highly of all. To me, that means that the church is always opposed to large-scale economic modeling. We are always fighting against the tides that reduce human beings to statistics. But it’s hard when we aren’t united.

Trusting in the right story

Acts 17:1-9

A long time ago, not long after Jesus died and was raised, there were these two guys named Paul and Silas. You may recognize their names because they have become part of a story that we have in the form of the New Testament, but in those days, they were just two men with their own story to share with people. However, their story did not square with the story that the people knew and understood. The peoples’ story involved a conquering king restoring the Promised Land to Israel and the defeat of the occupying powers. This was the story around which God’s Chosen People had formed their identity for hundreds of years. It was a story that was not so easily abandoned on the testimony of just two guys named Paul and Silas.

            I want to pause here, so that we might consider, “What are our stories?” What are the things we presume to know? And how do we know them?

            You see, these people already had identities when Paul and Silas showed up. Some of them were Greeks, some of them were Jews, all had their identities rooted in a certain culture and way of life. Paul and Silas came with a hard ask, “Give up your identities, because they are not ultimate. Your identity is in Jesus.”

            For those of us who are born Christian and who are brought into the faith by parents who had us baptized apart from our choosing, this is a foreign story. Our story has always been rooted in Christ. However, in our daily lives, we are barraged by other stories that claim our allegiance. In which stories do you put your trust? And why?

            I believe these are important questions to consider today, because there are countless stories out there. Especially when it comes to new and developing situations, the world is ripe for stories that serve the purpose of the storyteller. And it’s not as easy as seeing through the fake news, or whatever you want to call it, because your own deeply engrained story may also be flawed.

            The question is where to put our trust. What is the story that is worth it all?