The Song Remains the Same

 “When God wants to judge a nation, He gives them wicked rulers” - John Calvin

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. An obscenely wealthy, immoral, merciless and arrogant ruler who believes he answers to no one, can do whatever he wants, and that every idea he has is a great one, decides he wants to seize control of foreign lands and their resources in the name of national security.

What seemed like the incoherent ramblings of a senile old man at worst, or an intentionally provocative joke at best a year ago, stopped being funny this week when the President of the United States ordered the capture of the President of Venezuela and declared “We will run the country” followed by Stephen Miller, top aide to the President, saying in a CNN interview:

“The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There’s no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you’re asking, of a military operation. Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland…We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

Pardon me if I’m not impressed by the attempt at bravado — that comes off more like a child saying what he thinks a true strong man would say — but I’ve heard this one before. Many times actually, and I know how this song ends because it was part of the soundtrack of my youth where I listened to Metallica shout at the end of the song “One” off their album …And Justice For All:  

Darkness, imprisoning me

All that I see, absolute horror…

Taken my soul, left me with life in Hell.

 This song always ends in war, poverty, mass bloodshed, and the suffering of the innocent. In the meantime I think we would all do well to adopt the wisdom of Cornel West, “I’m not surprised by evil or paralyzed by despair.”

The first time I heard this tired old song and dance wasn’t from Metallica, but from the bible and the lips of Lamech as he delivered what has to be history’s first verse of gangster rap:

“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
 listen to me, you wives of Lamech.
I have killed a man who attacked me,
    a young man who wounded me. If someone who kills Cain is punished seven times,
 then the one who kills me will be punished seventy-seven times!”

Later it would be covered by an Egyptian Pharaoh who, driven by a xenophobic hatred of foreign immigrants, trumpeted to anyone who would listen, “‘Look, the people of Israel now outnumber us and are stronger than we are. We must make a plan to keep them from growing even more. If we don’t, and if war breaks out, they will join our enemies and fight against us. Then they will escape from the country.’ So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves. They appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labor. They forced them to build the cities...and made their lives bitter.” When confronted and called out for his crimes by a man of God, Pharaoh boasted, “Who is God that I should obey His voice?” 

Still later would come the Assyrian kings who taunted, “Don’t think, ‘The Lord will rescue us!’ Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria?  What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power? So what makes you think that the Lord can rescue Jerusalem from me?” 

Once Babylon overthrew the Assyrian Empire the proud Nebuchadnezzar boasted, “Look at this, Babylon the great! And I built it all by myself, a royal palace adequate to display my honor and glory!” Next would come the Persians, the Greeks, the Syrians, and ultimately the Romans with their Caesars obsessed with putting their faces and names on everything from coins to casinos….errr…coliseums. 

What did they all have in common? Insatiable greed, unbounded arrogance, unrestrained violence, and a complete lack of regard for any of the things God loves: righteousness, justice, mercy, forgiveness, humility and honesty. Their stock and trade was using superior military force, not for self defense, but for conquering and then exploiting foreign nations, all in the name of the “good” of the empire. To borrow from Brian Zahnd:

“God loves nations but is opposed to all empires. Empires trample upon justice. Thus the prophetic critique in scripture of Egypt, Babylon, and Rome. This critique also applies to their modern successors. Empires are rich powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. What empires claim for themselves is what God has promised to his Son.”

I swear, listening to soundbites of politicians in the present makes me wonder if they read the bible and think Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome are the heroes of the story. If cable news existed in first century Jerusalem, the sycophants of the Herodians, Pharisee’s and Pilate would parrot seriously what Kris Kristofferson sang satirically:

So thank your lucky stars you got protection

Walk the line and never mind the cost

Don't wonder who them lawmen were protecting

When they nailed the savior to the cross

'Cause the law is for protection of the people

Rules are rules and any fool can see

We don't need no riddle speaking prophet

Scaring decent folks like you and me, no siree

One by one those violent men and the empires they founded, ran up against a force before whom “Every knee shall bow.” Lamech didn’t conquer nations but he did conquer women and collected them like property, while boasting of his violence and self importance, only to have his legacy end in the Flood. Pharaoh learned who God was and why he should listen to Him, but not before destroying his nation, the economy, his family, the military, and his life. The Assyrian king Sennacherib suffered a humiliating defeat while attempting to seize Jerusalem and then “one day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword.” No sooner did Nebuchadnezzar reach the pinnacle of his power than he was told “You are no longer ruler of this kingdom. You will be driven from human society. You will live in the fields with the wild animals, and you will eat grass like a cow…until you learn that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of the world.” Alexander the Great would be dead before his 33rd birthday, Caesar would be murdered by his own administration at the behest of his best friend Brutus, and eventually his entire empire would surrender to the very people it was seeking to destroy — without the persecuted ever raising a fist.

America was supposed to be different. Her early settlers had learned from the mistakes of their ancestors and were determined not to repeat the sins of their fathers. American was supposed to be different, but that didn’t last very long. Soon came the attempts to eradicate the native populations, the enslavement of foreign peoples for the purpose of building the nation physically and building the economic engine to drive it. As populations grew, the need for more room and resources grew with it, so they annexed Texas, which inevitably lead to a war with Mexicans who were driven south, where an imaginary and arbitrary border was established to keep them out of “our country”. Like a broken record, Texas was successfully stolen from the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors who — in the name of the Spanish Empire — took it from indigenous peoples three hundred years earlier. In oceans and empires, there’s always a bigger fish. 

And all of it was sanctioned by God, well to hear them tell it at least. They called it “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny was the 19th-century belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand its territory across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Rather than being washed in the blood, they baptized their bloodshed and declared it holy and God’s will. The words of 19th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher seem appropriate here when he defined heresy as, "that which preserves the appearance of Christianity, and yet contradicts its essence"

There were three basic tenets behind the concept of Manifest Destiny:

* The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States.

* The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life".

* The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission.

Later generations rightly and shamefully wagged their fingers at men who took what didn’t belong to them — Napoleon, Hitler, et al — all the while ignoring the fact that the tail that wags our dog has a few fleas of its own: Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East. While our generation rightly points its finger at the Putins of the world, there are three pointing back at us: Greenland, Venezuela, Canada. Like the exhaustingly repetitive lyrics of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” — same song, different verse. Led Zeppelin said it best, “The song remains the same.” While the news of the day should be shocking to us all, the biggest mistake the current generation is making is in thinking that the new normal is abnormal. It seems that each generation of Americans must be reminded of what we have been, and are still, an empire by any other name…

If you’re ready to sing a different tune, maybe a few of us can get together and form a choir and then we can sing a new song. A parody of the tired old song sung by empire after empire ad nauseam. Graham Joseph Hill has written a solid first verse, “Every empire tells a story of scarcity to justify its violence and accumulation. The people of God are called to tell a different story, one of abundance flowing from a generous Creator who provides enough for all.”