Real Change News | Rev. Rich Lang: Like oily birds

June 23, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 26

Rev. Rich Lang

Rev. Rich Lang: Like oily birds

by: Rev. Rich Lang

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I’ve been wondering whether or not we are capable of comprehending the will of God in our culture. Biblically speaking there are sacred stories told that speak of God withdrawing from the scene, and certainly within the individual spiritual journey of the soul, even Mother Teresa talked about “dark nights” and occasions of feeling abandoned and deserted by an absent God.

For believers, we affirm that the power of love and affection, of compassion and kindness, the striving for justice and the kind of peace that produces reconciliation and mutual forgiveness – the kind of peace that is inclusive of the least and even of one’s enemy – we believers affirm that this form of power is God’s activity in the world. So my question is: is God still alive and active in our current culture of corruption?

And our culture is corrupted. We’re in bad shape. We’re in trouble. Like the Gulf plague, the more you look the worse it gets.

It isn’t just the compromises of Obama, or the capitulation of both parties to corporate interests, or the financial swindles of the banksters. It isn’t just the leftover horrors of the Bush administration, or the systematic deregulation of business, or the buying off of public offices, the militarization of our police forces, the entrenched brutality of our prison system, the papers-please mentality of border states, the increase of government and military surveillance.

It isn’t just the continued madness of building global military bases or the $1 trillion poured into our crusade through Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It isn’t just the rise in mortality rates, the lowering of our standard of living, the enormous gap between the filthy rich and dirt poor. It isn’t just the apathy and bewilderment and frozen “deer in the headlights paralysis” of the American public, nor the gutting of unions, nor the irrelevancy of the environmental movement and the invisibility of the peace movement. It isn’t just the hardened hearts of neighborhoods against services and shelters for the poor. It’s the whole damned system of selfishness, deceit, treachery, and bloodlust.

Like gulls in oily water, we are all soiled and in need of care and protection. No one of us is immune to the dying of American idealism, or the decaying of our core value of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

It seems that we are living in a time of confusion and always-impending tragedy. We yearn for a Gandhi or a King or the advent of a movement to shake off our slumber and give us hope. But what if we are living in a time before the “movements,” a time before the heroes, a time the Bible refers to as the absence of God’s Word, when everyone does what is right in their own eyes, resulting in violence and the withering of hope?

Repentance anyone?

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