Give up Nihilism For Lent

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In the face of hopelessness, is there only strength and weakness? Are values and virtue not worth standing for? Vince closes our effort to give up “giving up” (for Lent) with some encouragements beyond our modern pulls toward nihilism. (Art by Morgan Sorensen @see_machine)

SPEAKER NOTES

Give up Nihilism for Lent

Context

• On Palm Sunday, we begin Holy Week — the final days of the church calendar’s season of Lent looking to Good Friday this week and then Easter Sunday, when we mark Jesus’ death and resurrection.
• Playing with the tradition of “giving up things for Lent”, our tradition at BLC the last few years has been giving up unhelpful beliefs - But not returning to them, as we would chocolate.
• This year, our focus has been giving up the hidden beliefs underneath our lives that leave us feeling like our only option is to give up - Some of these hidden beliefs have a religious nature to them - All of them though are general Western culture or American beliefs (unexamined assumptions about how life or the world works)

Ecclesiastes

• The saying from Latin American Liberation theologies we’ve been going back to is: - “We don’t just read the Bible, we let the Bible read us.” - Maybe the value of having a sacred text is not always for the past to teach us, it’s for the past to reveal us to ourselves! - In our progress-obsessed modern world, we may scoff at previous eras, but what do they say about those who don’t know their history? — they are doomed to… repeat it! - So letting the Bible read us is how we’ve been uncovering the hidden beliefs of today we want to encourage giving up.
• Specifically, using the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes. - One of the Wisdom writings of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. - A surprisingly modern feeling text, - In that it centers on deconstruction of conventional wisdom - We love deconstruction in the 21st century!
• Today, one last selection. Let’s read from chapters 8 and 9 — 8:16 - 9:3

When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, how one’s eyes see sleep neither day nor night, then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out.

All this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hate one does not know. Everything that confronts them is [meaningless], since the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice. As are the good, so are the sinners; those who swear are like those who shun an oath.

This is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover, the hearts of humans are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

• This is a peek into the threat of succumbing to a next level of meaninglessness — beyond just hopelessness.
• The word we use today is nihilism, from the Latin root for “nothing” — belief in nothing.
• Nihilism is… - Not only feeling hopeless - It is being sanded down even more than that. - It is giving up on your values as a result of feeling hopelessness. - It is the belief that “maybe there is only strength and weakness, because I don’t believe in anything anymore” — it’s all survival of the most dominant; - There is no higher morality or virtue or values, because in the end everyone meets the same fate of death — that’s what particularly seems to push the writer of Ecclesiastes over toward nihilism.
• What about us? How do we know these feelings today in the Modern world?

Social theorists suggest several features of life in the 21st century that feed nihilism.

• For one, social acceleration — we’ve talked about this many times before at BLC: the paradox that technological advancement promises to give us more time for enjoying “the good life” because it can do our work faster, but in reality it just leaves us feeling like we have less time for anything, like “the good life” is always in the future (never now), so “just keep the top spinning”, faster and faster, keep accelerating, and trust in the good future that never actually arrives. That feeds nihilism. - But then, also because of all this technological advancement, we have more access to information than any people in human history, and so many of us become increasingly aware that “just keeping the top spinning” is not only an empty promise about a “future good life”; it’s exploitative and extractive and contributing to war and violence all over the world — it’s all just the latest re-branding of oppression.
• And so another feature of modern life is this constant mismatch of high volume of information about the systemic problems of the world but low personal agency to opt out of those systems. - We see more than we ever have. But we can’t do anything to separate ourselves from it. We feel trapped in a movie we don’t like. - This can have a deadening effect on our psychology. It’s all too much. We feel hopeless, like we’ve been sanded all the way down, to the point that we believe in nothing, - to the point that not a small number of young people today report that they feel like it would be wrong or immoral to have children if this is the world they’d be brought into, - We resignedly conclude “maybe there is only strength; there’s no point in fighting it; higher values or higher callings amount to nothing”

Nihilism can feel so difficult to resist. But (here’s my message today in a sentence) — we can resist it.

Jesus (takeaway 1)

• Let’s look at what we can learn from Jesus and the Jesus tradition on this.
• If Nihilism is where hopelessness breeds today, the breeding ground of hopelessness in Jesus’ first century Mediterranean world was the Brutality of the Roman Empire
• Against that backdrop, compelled by an encounter with Jesus and Jesus’ nonviolent resistance — even unto execution — the Apostle Paul, in his letter 1 Corinthians, says: - “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom” - “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” - Paul is committed to the idea that the most powerful force in all of life... - is love, as shown by Jesus (the “foolishness” and “weakness” of God), - NOT dominating strength, as shown by the brutality of the Roman empire (human “wisdom” and “strength”). - He is committed to that value of love, to not compromising on it, and, the incredibly attractive thing about Paul is, no hopelessness of his day can seem to break that in him.
• We talked a couple weeks ago about the cultural matrix behind the New Testament of the Bible. - If we want to read properly the Gospels of Jesus and the letters of Paul and the other writings that make up the New Testament, we have to understand their cultural matrix. - We have to understand the hopelessness they’re up against. - The Rule of Rome vs the Rule of God - Caesar’s supposed-peace through violent victory or Jesus’ actual-peace through distributive justice - Is the goal victory? Or justice? - Is THE divine attribute brute force? dominant power? - Or is THE divine attribute love? - As the Palm Sunday story asks: does God’s king, welcomed with palms, arrive on a Warhorse or on a Peace Donkey?
• New Testament Scholar John Dominic Crossan puts Paul’s commitment to his values this way: - The glory of the human race is NOT strength and war (as the Romans believed), but Sabbath rest and justice - Crossan loves this term “Sabbath rest” — he refers to the Genesis Creation account, - Explaining that when “God rests on the seventh day, and calls it holy”, - It indicates that the crowning achievement of creation is Sabbath — when all rest in the just distribution of God’s abundance - Not humanity as the crowning achievement of creation, which is what is traditionally taught in churches - But, if we go back to the text, it’s the Sabbath that is set apart as holy! - Crossan jokes that, according to the Creation story, humanity actually are “the work of a late Friday afternoon, when everyone knows is no one’s best work!” - In the stream of that Genesis legacy, Paul, in the face of hopelessness, writes with unwavering commitment… - “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom” - “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength”
• From Paul’s commitment to his values in spite of the hopelessness of 1st century Brutality, I think we can draw strength to commit to our values in spite of the hopelessness of 21st century Nihilism.
• Here’s Paul’s encouragement from Romans 12:1-2

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

• The way I read that for us today is: - To live a life that believes in something not nothing, that testifies to love being the most powerful force in the universe means sacrifice.
• I want to share a bit about my experience of this - I don’t think I pull punches when I talk with people about the state of the world… - Part of being a pastor is I sometimes get really honest responses from people over coffee about how they’re doing, what is keeping them up at night. And it’s very important to me to never give trite advice to people. - Honestly, I’ve realized, through the grapevine, that some people have left this church, because sometimes I unsettle people in ways they weren’t even thinking about until I brought it up. My sermons can tend to start off with some version of “let me describe with more clarity than you ever thought you wanted all the reasons to despair” - Obviously I don’t stay there… but yeah, I can understand that I am a little too intense for some people’s taste. - But at the same time, I think it is fair to say that anyone who knows me can tell that I — from a deep, gut place inside me — refuse hopelessness and nihilism. - I refuse to let the overwhelming realities of our day bury me. - When I feel angry, THIS is where I direct that anger so I can move it through me healthily, and not just end up trapping it inside me where it tears me up from the inside - I direct the anger toward refusing nihilism and refusing hopelessness and refusing to accept visions for the world that are less worthy than Sabbath Justice — all resting in the just distribution of God’s abundance. - Paul is absolutely right — It takes sacrifice to hold to this vision that moves me. - I sacrifice my personal temptations and fantasies toward revenge and rage. - I have them, like everyone does. - But I try to choose not to act on them. - And, maybe more significantly, I sacrifice social acceptance from those for whom my vision is too values focused, and therefore not results-oriented enough. - I get that there is a very legitimate pull toward “win by any means necessary” or “maybe a benevolent dictator is the way to go” when your opponents don’t care about the rules or the norms, and that it can sound naive to cling to values. I get it. I really do. - But that, right there, is, I think, the pull of nihilism in our day - not just a feeling that life is meaningless, - but a conclusion that therefore it is not worth it to hold to values, - because there is only strength and weakness. - And I just don’t believe that. - Jesus is too compelling to me. - Call me naive. Call me soft. Call my beliefs “pie in the sky”. - But if you give me the choice between sacrificing my value on love being the most powerful force in life, or sacrificing social acceptance, it is hard and causes me some angst, but I’m sacrificing social acceptance every day of the week. - I can’t choose nihilism. I can’t believe there is only strength and weakness. I’ve experienced too much of God, too much of an alternative force of love in the world that we can call the Holy Spirit. - I wonder if you also have any experiences that stay with you in the same beautiful way? - So I try my best to accept the sacrifice that comes with belief in that.

Pastoral Ending (takeaway 2)

• So that’s the first half of my encouragement to the end of Giving up Nihilism for Lent — Take courage for the sacrifice necessary.
• But here’s the other half… I’ve actually only read us the first part of today’s Ecclesiastes passage.
• I wanted to save the second part for the end here, because, similar to the passage we looked at last week, it has in it another one of the very few bits of wisdom that doesn’t get deconstructed or a hole poked in it, so it stands out:

Eccles 9:4-12

But whoever is joined with all the living has hope (!), for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun.

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the [partner] whom you love all the days of your [meaningless] life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful, but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate one’s time. Like fish taken in a cruel net or like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.

• This has the same “life and death are impossible to understand” conclusion as the more nihilistic sounding first part we read,
• BUT, in this case, there was Hope!
• It feels like it’s coming from resilience, not anxiety — - a courageous commitment to life in spite of meaninglessness, - rather than a despairing succumbing to meaninglessness.
• Did you feel that in the text?
• We can make that choice too!
• Find joy, best you can — this is another one of the very few bits of conventional wisdom that the writer of Ecclesiastes does not poke a hole in.
• We must do this, how else are we to get on?
• And so I leave us with this pendulum swing between - Take courage for the sacrifice necessary - Find joy, best you can
• If we are to give up Nihilism, it will take both. - You will need to take courage when you are called naive for clinging to belief in love and value and virtue, rather than burning those at the altar of “there is only strength” - You will need a regular diet of joy to sustain you and nourish you and give you glimpses of that Sabbath rest.
• If that sounds to you, as it does to me, like a life worth living in the face of hopelessness, well you’ve got a community behind you. You’re not doing this alone.

Prayer