Perhaps it is the coming of this kind of death which we are experiencing in America today because we have not regraded life as a task which the national community must address.

Walter Brueggemann wrote that sentence I took as a title forty years ago.  What he based it in was written more than 2500 years ago.   If I hadn't chosen that sentence from the part of his book, The Bible Makes Sense I started to go through this week, I'd have chosen the end of this one which is so resonant with Trumpian-Republican rule:

The kings of Israel, prototypes of those who forgot the task of life,  turn out to be the agents of death, i.e., the cause of the unrelatedness that leads to disintegration. 

Think about that during the coverage of the shut-down vote, especially as it relates to insuring sick children and those who were covered by DACA.   Not to mention the Republican billionaire bonanza they passed last month.


Life Is A Task

The Bible regards life/death as a two-sided issue.  And the two sides must be kept in careful tension with each other.  On the one hand, life is a task.  It is a work which is assigned to a community and which the community must intentionally undertake.   If the community quits on the task,  the community disintegrates and there will be death.  Perhaps it is the coming of this kind of death which we are experiencing in America today because we have not regraded life as a task which the national community must address.  The prophets of Israel in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. were most articulate about such a situation.  The Israelites in that period were secure and complacent and took everything for granted.  Not unlike ourselves, they presumed upon the pride and affluence they saw everywhere.  They concluded that it would never end and was eternally guaranteed.  It is the prophets who announce to the community of meaning and destiny that life never just happens.  It requires sustained, disciplined effort to enhance and continually reform the community.  The kings of Israel, prototypes of those who forgot the task of life,  turn out to be the agents of death, i.e., the cause of the unrelatedness that leads to disintegration. 

The prophet Amos issued such a call to life as a task:

Seek me and live . . . 
Seek the LORD and live . . . 
Seek good, and not evil . . . 
Hate evil, and love good . . . 
establish justice in the gate (Amos 5:4-15).

The task of securing life means to turn away from all other loyalties except to the LORD, the God of the Bible.  It requires sharing his vision and rejecting every other vision of what community can be.  Concretely it means to seek “good” which is the well-being for all members of the community, and to establish justice; that is, to care for the weak and powerless, to give sustenance to the helpless.  It means to orient and reorganize public institutions so that the weak and powerless are not excluded as unqualified.  These are the tasks of life in ancient Israel and in every community.  Isaiah echoes the task in a series of imperatives:

Wash yourselves;
make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, 
learn to do good;
seek justice, 
correct oppression;
defend the fatherless, 
plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:16-17).

When these tasks are not embraced, death surely comes (cf. Amos 5:1-2).

I will have more to say on this but in the meantime I will call your attention to this essay from the Canadian blog "azlewis," Martin Luther King Jr., the Prophet Amos, and the Vietnam War.

It's so well said that I'll just repost this excerpt:

Though both King and Amos have international concerns, their main focus is domestic poverty and issues that distract from its alleviation. Amos rails against the cult in its collusion with the state and other powerful people. Those who are wealthy enough to own two houses (3:15) seem to care nothing for justice in the streets. (4:1; 5:12) In his book of woes in chapter 6, he describes in detail extreme wealth and how God will send the wealthy into exile first. Complicit in the affluent of Israel are the religious leaders who are so corrupt that they will not hear the words of God when they do come through Amos. (7:13) The cult is obviously meaningless to the people since they wait for the ceremonies to cease in order to do more business and exploit the poor to their own gain. Amos quotes God as saying that God hates the religious festivals and will not even accept their offerings. The cult ceases its usefulness and that is the impetus for one of the biblical phrases King quotes the most in his career and the line that King uses to conclude his speech: “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (5:23-24)

Though the ostensible subject of King’s speech is the injustice of the War in Vietnam, note that the title is “Beyond Vietnam.” The war, he claims, is merely a symptom of a larger problem and when he lists his reasons for “bringing Vietnam into the field of [his] moral vision,” his first is that the funds going toward the war distract from the programs that went towards the “rehabilitation of [America’s] poor.” Meanwhile the government sent the children of the poor to fight and die in the war itself.

Geesh, do I wish I hadn't wasted so much time reading the sterile, pointless, fruitless secular left most of my life.  I regret that time wasted almost as much as I do watching TV.