Eddie has been interested in learning more about current events so every evening we listen to the news from a variety of sources. We talk about current events. I explain the history. Sometimes we research the history together.
Over the past few weeks, we've been listening to a very well done podcast from the Economist called "Scam Inc" which is a multi-part investigative report on a very sophisticated scam industry that has grown up throughout parts of Asia. The signature scams are called "pig butchering scams" where scammers invest hours a day for months building an online relationship with someone, romantic or platonic, and eventually finds a way to gets thousands or sometimes millions of dollars or of them. Victims lose everything but also are deeply suffer violated trust after pouring their hearts into these relationships.
But the evil is deeper. The scammers on the other end are often themselves victims of human trafficking. People who were looking for honest work and then kidnapped and forced into industrial tech parks where they must work as scammers.
The series highlights the complexity and simplicity of human nature. We are wired for trust and connection but also driven by a sense of adventure and greed. We can take incremental steps that lead us down rabbit holes - both a victims and as perpetrators.
I grew up with this sense that humans used to be primal. Prone to war and greed and violence. But we, in the modern era, are civilized and beyond this. Our rational thinking and education, our rule of law, democracy and freedoms of speech and religion have ushered in a new period of human history where we've set aside our proclivity to violence and greed and picked up a greater moral code than our ancestors had. But we have not. Somethings are different in modern times, but human nature is not one of them.
As part of Lent, I've picked up a hefty 2 tome history of Christianity from Jesus to the modern day. I'm still very early in it reading about the earliest church. Those founded by the apostles and Paul and of the early persecution of Christians. The author does a good job of presenting the materials from the eyes of people at the time. The politics of the Jews in the time of Jesus. The politics and laws and religion and structure of Rome. The various philosophical traditions that were popular that the time.
In reading it, I've been transported back in time and an struck by how people at the time of Christ might have felt about the era they lived in. There was a modernity ushered in by the Roman empire that felt like a break from human history. There was education and ideas circulating. There was peace and politics. There were factions and fighting. But in those days, as these days, humans were in a new modern era. There was civilization and technology and intellectual advancements with each generation that may have made them feel as I grew up feeling, unique and special in their own era.
Reading these times of the early church, felt like reading the news with Eddie. There are things now that rhyme with things then. In fact, all the history that I've been studying with the boys this year - the guilded age, the spread of Helenism, the Russian revolution, the conquests of ghengis khan, the writings of Marx -- all the classic things covered in US and world history - there are pieces connect to the world we live in now and there are themes and rhymes with issues we face today.
This strengthens me in some ways. The wisdom and spiritual practices developed and honed over decades are still relevant. We are not so modern, so far removed from our ancestors, that the faith, the wisdom and the spiritual practices that sustained them are still essential, still life giving if we allow ourselves to be humble enough to learn from those who went before us.
Lent itself, the practice of fasting. This is spiritual wisdom passed down to us. I think fasting is something that does not come intuitively. In a world of suffering, why choose to voluntarily reduce comfort? Why choose simplicity? Why choose to lean in the mystery of an unseen God?
In fact, I learned from my book that Roman persecuted Christians by labeling them as atheists because they were devoted to an unseen, unknowable God as opposed to the emperor or the pantheon or Greek or Roman gods who had temples everywhere and who permeated every aspect of public life. Christians often withdrew from mainstream culture because the invisible God they followed was so different from those who dominated cultural life. It was a movement that was very progressive in its time and yet adherents were willing to die for these beliefs.
Early Christians were also persecuted as heretics, a false Jewish sect that proclaimed the Messiah had come. Mainline religious leaders at the time disagreed with the apostles assessment of Jesus as the promised Messiah and were worried about mass adoption of these new ideas. Even worse, they feared that God would punish them for being unfaithful to scripture, following a false prophets and abandoning the law.
And people of the time wrestled with with crisis of faith. Did God come and die and rise again? Had Jesus ushered in the messianic age and if so, what did that mean for Isreal, for humanity? Were all people now included in the promises of the one true God handed to Abraham?
But in this wrestling God was at work. God moved along the apostles and in the early church. The Spirit fell upon early theologians (and later ones) who wrestled with these questions and wrote the gospels, the letters, and various books that built the foundation of this new faith.
God is still at work. Mysteriously. We are bound by time and place and cultural context. We have bias of all the things we were taught and the ways in which our parents experienced the world that they handed down to us as children. We have bias grown from the ways which we experience the world and the unfolding of history and technology and civilization in our own lifetime. With all our limitations, it is hard to grasp that infinite, unknowable nature of God.
Yet, we see traces.
Written in history.
Written in our practices and in our seeking.
Written in our very own stories and in the stories around us.
I am not enough of a theologian to put into words the mystery of God that I catch glimpses of in all my seeking. But I somehow can feel a story of man and God written across the ages. A struggle to live with human nature - both sinner and saint, a struggle to wrestle with big questions of life and death, suffering and comfort, good and evil. Gentleness and violence.
Many have set out to understand these things, to know the nature of man, to understand and pin down the nature of God.
They have given us the gift of their work as we pick up the question and continue.
I am strengthened in my conviction to live as a person of faith.
God was with those scared disciples in the confusion following the resurrection. God has been with us across the ages as we have sought to understand and make sense of our world, ourselves, where we came from and where we are going.
And God is with me now in this moment.
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