A Sublime Madness in the Soul (2/1/15)

A Sublime Madness in the Soul

John Shuck

Southminster Presbyterian Church

February 1, 2015

In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men [and women] who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones.  The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of [hu]mankind can achieve perfect justice.  It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul.  Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and “spiritual wickedness in high places.”  The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms.  It must therefore be brought under the control of reason.  One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man Immoral Society

Mark 3:20-21 (Scholars’ Version)              

Then he goes home, and once again a crowd gathers, so they couldn’t even have a meal.  When his relatives heard about it, they came to take him away.  (You see, they thought he was out of his mind.)

Near the time when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he was asked by a reporter who his favorite philosopher was.   The reporter in recounting this conversation was taken aback by the president’s answer.  Obama took the question seriously.  He said that his favorite philosopher was Reinhold Niebuhr and then he went on to summarize Niebuhr’s thought.    I was impressed.   How cool to have a president who has a favorite philosopher and can wax eloquently about him. 

Niebuhr was a major figure in the mid part of last century.  He pastored in Detroit in the early part of the century during Henry Ford’s heyday.   Later he taught theology and ethics at Union Theological Seminary.   He started a magazine called Christianity and Crisis that urged the United States to get involved in World War II long before Pearl Harbor.  He moved from Christian Pacifism to Christian Realism.

The quote in the bulletin is from a book he wrote in the 1930s called Moral Man and Immoral Society.  He argued that the individual is capable of moral choices and hard ethical decisions that can go against one’s personal interests, but institutions and societies cannot.   They are like “the Bank” in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.   In the brilliant section where the tenants lose their land to the banks the bank men come bearing the bad news.    

The owners of the land came onto the land, or more often a spokesman for the owners came….if a bank or finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time….

You see, a bank or a company…those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die….the bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size…we have to do it. We don’t like to do it. But the monster’s sick. Something’s happened to the monster….

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours….

We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

That is John Steinbeck putting in the form of a novel what Niebuhr was saying in Moral Man, Immoral Society.   Once we hand over ethics to societies, governments, institutions, corporations, or this thing we simply call “the economy”, we lose our souls, our dignity, and our morality.   We end up with mantras and beliefs.  

The economy must grow.  

Even it seems, if the planet burns.   That is what Niebuhr and Steinbech were writing about.

Niebuhr concludes Moral Man Immoral Society with a fascinating paragraph.   In this final paragraph of his scholarly book he calls individuals, you and me, to the task of redemption, that is to save humanity, and reading it today, to save our planet.   He says the only way to do this is to give ourselves over to a “sublime madness of the soul.”  This is the final paragraph of his book, Moral Man, Immoral Society:

In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men [and women] who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones.  The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of [hu]mankind can achieve perfect justice.  It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul.  Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and “spiritual wickedness in high places.”  The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms.  It must therefore be brought under the control of reason.  One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.

That paragraph goes back and forth.   Society is immoral but to save it we must operate with the illusion that perfect justice can be achieved.  Only that illusion will give us the energy and hope to move society even a little bit.  Of course this illusion is dangerous because it brings forth the crazies and the fanatics so it needs to be tempered by reason.  But as he concludes:

One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.

Generating that sublime madness in the soul is the work of the church, I think.  That is true for all religious people or people of conscience.  Religion is at its best when it articulates valuable illusions. 

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

Sublime madness.  You can’t sit at lunch counters and allow yourself and your friends to be beaten over the head and not fight back without generating a sublime madness of the soul.   You can’t do the work, day in, day out trying to get the vote or in our present day trying to work for peace in communities between people and police, without the hope and the dream that one day our nation will be transformed into an “oasis of freedom and justice.”  

Reason and realism aren’t enough to change the world even a little bit.  We need reason to temper our fanaticisms but it cannot provide the drive needed to battle with the “spiritual wickedness in high places” to use Niebuhr’s words.   

You have to be a little crazy. A little "cra cra" as my daughter says.

One of the great blessings of being a minister is that I get to meet people who are sublimely mad. 

Sister Paula Gonzales is a woman religious, a sister of Charity in Ohio.  She is in her 80s and she has degrees in biology and she speaks whenever invited and at times when not invited.  And wherever she goes she generates a sublime madness in the soul.   It is catching.  She talks to youth, to older people, to anyone about the hope she has for a world whose energy needs are met solely by renewable resources.  She is called the Solar Nun and says the solution to our problems comes up once every morning.   

Niebuhr might call that a valuable illusion.    It won’t take long for reasonable people  to come up with many reasons why that won’t work.  If you are anything like me, it can be pretty depressing and hopeless when are confronted with the reality of climate change, peak oil and all of that.   But then again, the illusion, the dream, the hope that we can be 100% sustainable does generate in me a bit of madness, perhaps just enough madness to keep hope alive and to try to do my part. 

We have a tradition of maddening individuals.  St. Francis of Assisi for one.  He gave away all of his possessions and preached naked to the birds.  Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.   

In the 13^th century, when the institution of the church was responsible for ethics, reasonable people thought the thing to do was to start Crusades to go war against the Muslims.    St. Francis was sublimely mad enough to be an individual.

In 1219, in the midst of the Fifth Crusade, St. Francis crossed enemy lines to have a consultation with the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Kamil.   Francis opposed warfare and he thought he could bring peace by converting the sultan to Christianity.  That didn’t happen, but what did happen is more profound.  Francis was changed by the encounter and he came away with revolutionary ideas of how Christians could live in peace with Muslims.   A book that recounts this story is The Saint and the Sultan:  The Crusades, Ilsam, and Francis of Assisi’sMission of Peace by Paul Moses. 

The founder of our tradition, Jesus of Nazareth, generated a sublime madness of the soul.  His radical teachings and his healing outside the bounds of acceptable channels caused the authorities to say he was demon-possessed.   And according to this interesting verse that only occurs in the gospel of Mark, even his relatives wanted to take him away because they thought he was out of his mind. 

Perhaps they were right.  He was generating a sublime madness of the soul.   He believed that we and our enemies could be transformed by compassion and love as he illustrated in his parable of the Good Enemy, that we know as the Good Samaritan. 

He was an inspiration to Ghandi and Martin Luther King and St. Francis of Assisi and many others for non-violent resistance to evil. 

Turn the other cheek. 

Go the second mile. 

Give the coat off your back. 

He believed that wonderful things could happen from small beginnings, a little leaven in the loaf, a seed that planted in good soil yields a hundred fold and more. 

He believed that in our world of suffering and pain, one could and should always make room for joy, like the woman who finds her lost coin, the shepherd who finds his lost sheep, and the father who embraces his lost sons.   They all throw parties. 

He believed in human dignity for the least of these.  

Congratulations, you poor! 

You are the light of the world.

You are the salt of the earth.  

What madness in those phrases told to oppressed peasants.    

He knew the sober realities of the kingdoms, the empires of this world.  Empires whose rulers believed that peace comes through violence.   He was executed on the cross bars of that empire because he believed (and he lived his belief) that peace comes through justice.   

But, and this is the creativity of our tradition:  His madness lives on.   Whatever resurrection means and it can mean different things to different people, it at least means to me that what Jesus lived and died for is worth living and dying for. 

As we celebrate the sacrament of communion, I gain strength for the journey by participating with friends around a common table in the spirit of Jesus, who was and is sublimely mad.

Let us feast.

Amen.