Abstract
Disorientation as Prelude to Faith
Theodore Roethke’s musings ‘in a dark time, the eye begins to see’ begins a profound poetic insight that psychological disorientation is often requisite for the soul’s emergent clarity. Today’s lectionary texts issue from various expressions of theological disorientation, promising the same wrestling and clarity to the reader who will sit in the ambiguity of text.
It is important for the church to remember that monotheism, the belief in the existence of a single God, was not the foundational religious experience of Israel. Rather, Israel is to be understood in its pre-exilic period as monolatrous at its Deuteronomistic best, choosing to worship a single deity exclusively while admitting the existence of other deities worshiped by foreigners as well as the less than Yahwistic in Israel. Besides sharing cross-cultural correspondence, believing in the existence of other divine powers provided cogent explanations for chaos and evil. Disaster on earth reflected conflict in the heavens. For many, worship looked a lot like modern political lobbying; figure out where the power the supplicant needed was, do nothing to offend that power, and then lavish upon/worship that power in order to gain access, protection, and blessing. Though ancient worship was experiential and mysterious, it was at its foundation a transaction that bordered on manipulative.
Genesis 28:10–19a fits all of these early assumptions about Yahweh, the other gods, and the ability to access them for blessing and protection according to a shared ancient Near-Eastern perspective. By dream Jacob discovers a holy vortex, a meeting of heaven and earth, marks it with a pillar and names it Beth-el, the temple of God. The heavenly beings that Jacob sees are members of the divine counsel, perhaps the gods of the Canaanites. Like hitting Texas crude in one’s backyard, this discovery brings anticipated blessings for divine access and all that such entails. At the same time, surprisingly and without any worship, Jacob receives a profoundly disorienting message, ‘know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you’ (28:15). This god is not to be accessed only at divine portal, but promises ongoing relationship! Admittedly, most of this is missed on Jacob for he responds by limiting God to specific local, ‘surely the
Common religious expectations were thoroughly deconstructed in Israel’s exilic period. In the midst of much needed oracle of salvation, Second Isaiah voices the unanticipated, frankly unimaginable, ‘…besides me there is no god…is there any god besides me? There is no other rock, I know not one’ (44:6, 8). Intellectually, this is fully fledged monotheism. Emotionally, it is further disorientating and confusing. If there is no other god, how was it that the Babylonians were able to conquer Jerusalem and destroy the temple of Yahweh? Many among the captive assumed that it was because the Babylonian pantheon was bigger, better, stronger, and ascendant. Most easily converted to Babylonian worship. It was, after all, apparently superior from a transactional standpoint. The Babylonian gods delivered the security of a domineering nation; they rendered the Neo-Babylonian empire Babylon ‘great-again’. In the very midst of this orienting confidence, Second Isaiah brings the message of disorienting salvation. None of the old assumptions hold. Not one assumption is real. There is no other god. The path of true salvation is not to be found primarily in the power of rescue but in the journey of relationship.
In the embrace of monotheism, the faithful community let go of simplistic understandings of dark and light, of success and failure, of sin and suffering. Second Isaiah drills down deep through the disorienting proclamation ‘there is no one besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things’ (45:7). Both good and bad come from the one Yahweh. If one expects the Deity to only shower blessing when worshipped ‘correctly’, one’s theological world is shattered by this statement. Like all of human relationships that embrace the yin and yang of what it means to be complex beings, so does one’s relationship with God.
This is clearly the case in Romans where Paul, likely in prison and facing execution, speaks of disorientation and hope, ‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…for in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience’ (8:18, 24). Hope emerges out of the darkness of suffering disorientation. No power is at work other than God, ‘for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (8:20–21). This hope is a far cry from transactional worship to attain blessing and avoid pain. It is monotheistically whole in its embrace of suffering and hope, the dark and the light, in the wholeness and completeness of God.
The same perspective is found in the teachings of Jesus. The parable of weeds, unique to Matthew’s gospel, disorients the reader by asserting that the kingdom of heaven is impure. It contains wheat and weeds, at least until the time of the harvest (13:24–30). Like other passages in the teachings of Jesus, an enemy stands in contrast with the farmer setting a binary type-scene between good and bad, pure and impure. However, the type-scene constructed is then deconstructed when the farmer tells his servants to not remove the weeds but to let them grow together. The church is wise to focus on the inclusive impurity of this passage over and against the binary type-scene that is deconstructed. Although disorienting, is it monothesitically consistent to understand the church to be both wheat and weeds.
In their historical contexts as well as their canonical locations, these passages are powerfully salvific. A word of caution is in order. In a numbing comfortableness with these texts, it is easy to miss their initial disorientation and import one’s own common transactional and purity-based religiosity. These lectionary texts first disorient the reader from the normal cultural expectations and, in so doing, open up the new, the unexpected, the journey with the real, relational God. If one allows oneself this initial disorientation, in the words of Roethke, ‘the mind enters itself, and God the mind, and one is One, free in the tearing wind’.