My Gog and Magog Blog
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2008
There’s still the OG, GOG & MAGOG BLOG to write someday. But this one will do for now-jlh
This is not a war story. It’s about George Bush and Al Qaeda, Iraq and America, Israelis and Palestinians; it’s about the Shechinah God’s glory in exile, how a Jew wrote about the Shoah, and how you and I deal with evil in our own heart.
But all the conflicts of Gog and Magog arise out of those evil forces which have not been overcome in the conflict against the Gogs and Magogs who dwell in human hearts.
-Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), p. 284.
Martin Buber’s novel For the Sake of Heaven, alternately titled Gog and Magog, is set during the Napoleonic wars. In understated narrative it relates the conflict between two Hasidic rabbis, the Seer and the Yehudi. It causes me to reflect on conflict in my personal history.
Conflict ministry ain’t what it’s cracked up to be
During my pastorates I lived on a first-name basis with conflict. At the denominational level, I finished three years of graduate study in Hebrew and Old Testament at Southern Seminary in 1979, the year conservatives announced a 10 year plan to gain control the Southern Baptist Convention by winning the presidency each year. The president appoints trustees of boards and agencies. In 10 years conservatives replaced trustees representing a broad constituency with those who represented only fundamentalists. Depending on your viewpoint, you call this the SBC controversy or takeover or conservative resurgence.
I only went once to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting-in Dallas in 1985. That year, a massive 45,000 messengers attended. The fifth year of the takeover, moderates at last had realized what they were losing and mounted a challenge. Dr. Charles Stanley, pastor, First Baptist Church, Atlanta, presided. On Tuesday morning the crucial vote for president occurred. At 6:00 a.m. thousands of messengers jammed the halls of the Tarrant County Convention Center, waiting more than two hours for the doors to open.
Someone began to sing. Amazing Grace, What a Friend We Have in Jesus. For two hours thousands of voices filled the building with sweet harmony. But, once the doors opened, from the moderates’ viewpoint at least, hardball politics governed the meeting. Of course, conservatives report events much differently.
My wife Sandy and I met Hollie and Janell Atkinson from Texas and sat with them through a Convention totally controlled by conservatives. We wept. We never went to another annual Convention meeting.
Escape to Virginia, bastion of liberty
In 1989, the year conservatives completed this plan, my family and I had moved to Virginia, the state widely regarded among Baptist moderates as least likely to fall to fundamentalist control. For 10 years I pastored a small congregation near Richmond. The controversy raged on at the state level of the denomination. Blow-by-blow descriptions absorbed many pastors meetings: what the fundies did, what the liberals did, what the fundies did back, what the liberals did back. After a year or two, I stopped going.
The controversy was personal. My family were Baptists the way people are Catholics or Jews. It’s engraved in my DNA. I was a Ph.D. candidate at Babylon the mother of harlots, Southern Seminary in Louisville. The year the SBC banned ordination of women, my wife Sandy was ordained at St. Matthews Baptist Church, where her uncle had pastored, her father was married, and her grandparents were baptized. (Her uncle refused to attend.) I wrote curriculum for the Baptist Sunday School Board. The man who installed the modem lines connecting my computer with the BSSB warned me against writing liberal lessons!
Unless you’ve had surgery without anesthesia, you can’t comprehend the pain. One aged matriarch described it as “an unending funeral.” But most ordinary Baptists didn’t know or care what the brouhaha was all about.
Conservatives used to invite liberals to become Methodists or Presbyterians or other liberals.
Exit to Babylon
In the film Places in the Heart, Mose, a black itinerant, teaches a widow woman how to bring in a crop of cotton, in fact the prize-winning first bale. When the KKK shows up, a blind man identifies them by voice and stops a lynching. The widow returns from a dance to find Mose about to leave. “I best be gettin’ along , ma’am, before they come back,” he says. “Guess I got a little more attached to this place than I thought.”
Baptist preachers used to joke: “if the Convention ever splits, I’m going with the Annuity Board.” Some years ago, I transferred 30 years of retirement savings from the Annuity Board. But the joke puts its finger on what really fueled the SBC Armageddon: who owns the billions and billions of dollars worth of assets-the schools, the seminaries, the boards and agencies. My mother and dad gave sacrificially to SBC causes for a lifetime; they considered it giving to the Lord. How could I let people whom I viscerally despise steal what my family helped to build?
I realized that my folks gave to the Lord. The SBC assets belong to the Lord, not to conservatives, not to liberals, not to me. The Lord can do as the Lord pleases with them.
As X-rated as it gets
In the novel the Seer viewed the Yehudi as his enemy. The Yehudi had a vision of a woman swathed in the black veil with bare feet. Apparently, for a Hasidic rabbi, that’s as X-rated as it gets!
The woman spoke: “I am weary unto death, for ye have hunted me down. I am sick unto death, for ye have tormented me. I am shamed, for ye have denied me. Ye are the tyrant, who keeps me in exile.
“When ye are hostile to each other, ye hunt me down. When ye plot evil against each other, ye torment me. When ye slander each other, ye deny me. Each of you exiles his comrades and so together ye exile me.”
[The woman raises her veil and asks:] “When shall I find rest? When may I go home?”
(p. 229)
In returning and rest
Spoiler: The Yehudi gave his life for the Seer and for the woman, the Shechinah in exile. I won’t pin it down with an exact quote, but Buber believed that each of us can redeem evil by teshubah (from the root shuv, often rendered repent), by returning, by using the evil impulse the yetzer ha-ra for good.
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Isaiah 30:15 (NRSV)
Buber’s story of two rabbis, far more alike than they are different, challenges me to find the evil impulse within me; and to deny that within which divides the world into people of God versus Gog and Magog.
Tags: Buber, conflict, SBC takeover