Judgement Time...

The vote wasn't even close as the Massachusetts Legislature decided in overwhelming fashion to deny its citizens the right to vote on the issue of homosexual marriage, an issue forced into play by the decision of a simple majority of its Supreme Court. In effect four people, I believe, decided for all that the historic rules of marriage and family need not apply anymore and no one has the right or authority to question their wisdom.

Much could be written about judges ruling as autocrats and legislators without the courage to stand in their way. The idea that a group of judges has the right to demand a legislature make laws in conformity to their wishes is deeply repulsive to the American understanding of government. We are slowly being ruled by juntas of people in robes who dismiss the rest of us great unwashed with words and ideas that make sense only in the air tight realms of power. The cost of this is already high and one day may be unbearable. It may well be the Massachusetts Supreme Court has already fired the first shot in the next American Civil War. God forbid.

But a larger issue is emerging.

Rev. Jerry Falwell was roundly critiqued for declaring the events of 9/11 as a kind of judgement from God. But in his thoughts there was a grain of truth. It's risky to say with prophetic certainty that God is acting in these times with a specific intent to judge. The great prophets of old most often experienced a direct and profound call from God and proved this call by the fulfilment of their words in the events of history to bolster their claims. I don't have this and I know of no one else who does.

But this is true. There is a kind of judgement from God that comes not as some specific action of God directly involving Himself in human affairs but in the simple allowance of the consequences of human actions upon those who take them. Over and over again the texts of the Scripture define what is good and right and holy and what can happen when boundaries are crossed. Whether God directly acts or not humans pushing and crossing over those lines take risks to themselves which they must account for if they choose to ignore the holy in favor of the profane.

Could it be possible the sad state of our culture, its diseases and dilemmas, it fractures and fissures, its darknesses and struggles is directly related to the simple consequences of our own selfishness, our own choosing to ignore the wisdom of history, the elevation of our pleasure above common sense and the assertion of our will in the face of the Divine? Perhaps. Will God set fire to Boston for the defiance of its authorities and their complete irreverence? Probably not. But every time humans as individuals or as societies assert themselves against that which is holy they become coarse, ill, pathological, and in time crush themselves under the weight of their own acts.

Perhaps this is happening even now and every headline we read, the pain we're feeling, the perplexity with which we see the world, the small nagging part inside of us that says something is deeply wrong, all of it speaks to the weight of our own sins beginning to swallow us and the truth that the mill of God grinds slow but exceedingly fine.