Growing Together

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"Let both grow together until the harvest..."

-- Matthew 13:30

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), one of the more distinguished associate justices of the US Supreme Court, on which he served for 30 years (1902-1932), was found upon his death at the age of 94 to have had two faded and bloodstained uniforms of the 20th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers hanging in his closet. A note pinned to one of them read: “These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood.” (Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, NY, 2001, p. 437). Louis Menand, in his elegant and instructive book, The Metaphysical Club, writes, “The war was the central experience of his life, and he kept its memory alive. Every year he drank a glass of wine in observance of the anniversary of the battle of Antietam, where he had been shot in the neck and left, briefly behind enemy lines, for dead. But Holmes hated the war…he was wounded three times in all...Many of his friends were killed in battle, some of them in front of his eyes. Those glasses of wine were toasts to pain…He had gone off to fight because of his moral beliefs, which he held with singular fervor. The war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs. It impressed on his mind, in the most graphic and indelible way, a certain idea about the limits of ideas” (pp3-4).

I need only remind you that Wendell Holmes Jr. was one of the Boston intellectuals who set the method and tone of American educational, legal and philosophic thought from the Civil War in the 1860’s to the Cold War in the 1950’s, the method that was generally known as Pragmatism and a tone that was practical, process-oriented and problem-solving rather than theoretical, outcome-oriented and goal-achieving. It was conditioned by the fact that good people differ about what the goal should be, and those differences often lead to fruitless conflict. It highlighted the virtues of tolerance and pluralism. The horror of the mutual slaughter of 650,000 compatriots for the sake of ideas, even ideas as noble as the abolition of slavery, deeply affected Wendell Holmes, and William James, Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce, and later, in Chicago, John Dewey and Jane Addams.

This list of names is a “who’s who” of the founders of American modernity. Alas, this wonderful tradition of pragmatic common sense and gentle respect for the opinions of all crashed and burned against the ideological icebergs of the Cold War, a frigid world of true believers, prancing patriots, Red baiters, and know-it-alls (Remember Fred Schwarz’s “Christian Crusade against Communism,” whose motto was “Kill a Commie for Christ”?). And now, after the Cold War, what do we have? I leave that to you to answer. I personally see a slash and burn politics of suffocating hypocrisy and personal destruction; a fire sale of the remnants of a once noble democracy that has fallen into the hands of corporate crooks, political cronies and venal lobbyists? Going cheap, only slightly soiled!

Last Sunday I appealed to you to take up the moral challenge of the ethnic cleansing now carried on by the Jews against the Arabs of Israel/Palestine, and the connivance of our government, both the legislative and executive branches, in that evident injustice. I am glad to be checked by the gospel reading for today, in case I have become the kind of person who might advocate the death of others for my idea, in case I have become a fanatic. Fanaticism is the extreme pathology of life according to great ideas, the conviction that my idea is so important that its implementation warrants the transgression of any and all moral constraints, the kind of attitude on the part of the 19^th century Abolitionists that brought about the Civil War, and shattered the faith of the American intellectual elite in the worth of big ideas.

Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds growing together until the harvest is a teaching against fanatics. It says simply that in this world there is no idea that a person might use to separate the good from the evil because the two are always woven together in ways that defeat our efforts to unravel them. Jesus says that there is no idea worth killing for, although it might be necessary to die, as he did, for this very idea that there is no idea worth killing for. Jesus says that we should be patient, humble, and trust in God, speak truth to power, but never resorting to violence. Jesus offers not the big idea, not the penetrating insight nor the true theory, Jesus offers the Kingdom of God, and that is beyond the reach of theories and ideas; only childlike faith lays hold of the Kingdom.

Alas, it is impossible entirely to avoid using violence if one is to take responsibility for this world. Situations of emergency arise, like WWII, when it is the lesser of evils to fight than to allow the monster to thrive; but the crushing of the monster does not make us perfectly virtuous, only relatively so. And in the quotidian of non-emergency, the way of Jesus is not to demand perfection but to let the wheat and the weeds grow together and seek as much humility and goodness as the circumstances will allow; and never to play God by condemning others.

Let’s see how the approach Jesus teaches in this parable might work in taking up the moral challenge of the ethnic cleansing we discussed last week. We set aside any idea we might have of how things ought to turn out in the end, any grand goal or ultimate solution – whether two states, or one secular state in which citizenship does not depend on religious or ethnic identity, or one purely Jewish state from which all non-Jews have been cleansed – and we solve the problem at hand. What is it? The impression the Arabs have that the Jews are using the settlements to drive them off their ancestral land. Because of this impression they launch terror attacks against Jewish civilians, and the IDF retaliates with draconian ferocity. (The casualties on Arab side are more than double those on the Jewish side). How shall we solve this problem? What should we do? I do not have an answer but I would begin by fixing the point that we should not let a great idea and final goal dominate our deciding, but solve the problems piecemeal as they present themselves, and I would invite you to a discussion.  

This is the anti-fanatical approach. Fanatics fight for the one great goal or idea, the pure Jewish state, the pure German state, the pure Muslim state, the pure state of workers and peasants. The fanatic believes that his big idea is so big that it warrants any conceivable measure to realize it, from the murder of thousands in Manhattan to the murder of thousands on the West bank and in Israel. The Bible does not have a word for fanatic; it calls this kind of attitude and behavior “idolatry.” Ironically, idolatry, having gods other than the one and only true God, is the highest crime and misdemeanor in Western religions. All three today have significant constituencies of fanatics hell bent on idolatry. They idolize land, they idolize the ethnic group, they idolize the Holy Book, and they idolize the violence of zealotry and martyrdom.

The American pragmatic tradition holds that there are no big ideas to idolize but that the consensus of honest, rational people that emerges from debate and discussion is the biggest idea we could ever have or ever need. The process whereby people interact to solve problems forms the community and that process and that community is the truth, not some separate idea known by geniuses and imposed upon the masses. For that reason I have asked you as members of this community to study, discuss and seek for a consensus about the Jew/Arab conflict and our role in it. The Holy Spirit will guide this process within the church and lead to the growing together and building up of the Body of Christ in this place. Do you care, or are you too busy?

I refer you now to the epigram I quoted at the beginning of this sermon. Menand writes that Wendell Holmes jr. lost not only his abolitionist beliefs, but also his belief in beliefs. Holmes renounced the idolatry of noble ideas. The beliefs in question were inner-worldly idealisms, big ideas like the abolition of the slaves, not the belief in God. Although the Civil War in fact made Holmes an atheist, that was an idiosyncratic not a necessary conclusion, because belief in God and the Kingdom of God is not at all like belief in a big idea. While the latter is essentially idolatrous, treating something human and inner-worldly as if it were divine and non-worldly, belief in God takes us beyond this world to the really real over which we have no control and can do nothing to realize or retard. The “lightning of his terrible swift sword” is not the 20^th Massachusetts Regiment, and His judgment is not the victory of Union arms, it’s something far more profound and mysterious than that. We glimpse it not in obvious victory but in the apparent defeat of the Cross, by which the foolishness of God confounds the wisdom of the brave and the free.

The religious fanatics today, of which all three Western religions have a full complement, who murder, maim, intimidate and expel in the service of their big ideas, are like the pagans who sacrificed their children to Moloch, the flesh-eating idol of ancient Israel’s nightmare. Perhaps the greatest outbreak of pagan fanaticism is the one prohibited by Jesus in this parable, the stepping out to judge the world by setting up my big idea in the place of God and judging who shall live and where, who shall die and when, in terms of my idea. Those who agree with it live and those who disagree die or are chased away.

Now I have put forward some quite definite ideas, and some stiff criticism. Why does that not make me a fanatic? Because I would never under non-emergency conditions use violence to make my ideas prevail, relying on the force of argument alone, because I am open to changing my mind when I encounter new facts or a more convincing interpretation, and because I am willing to respect you even when I think your ideas are wrong; and finally, most importantly because I consider all the ideas I have put forward as essentially unimportant in comparison with the only thing that interests me, the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. In this attitude I believe I stand in the best moral tradition of America, and on the teaching of Jesus, although they are emphatically not the same thing, the one dealing with this world and the other far more importantly with the Kingdom of God.

I accept Jesus’ strict instruction not usurp the divine prerogative to be the judge of the world. All I want to be is a servant of the divine love, to speak the truth in love, to seek to set aside all ideas great and small that might impede the divine love, that is, to grow together with those of all who will engage me in conversation about the moral demands that love lays on us today. This is a different sense of growing together than the parable, indeed, it is a pun on the parable; nevertheless it is apt to our purpose. We can grow together as a beloved community if we take the risk of talking together about what the divine love may be demanding of us in the face of the travesty of the name of God by our fanatics. In this way we leave their judgment to God while we seek to combat, contain and rectify the frightful impact of their zeal, and to grow together in the service of the divine love, also called the Kingdom of God.