Just As We Are
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
September 23, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 45:9-13; 18-19
Romans 9:19-26

“But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’”

I opened my diminutive New York Times this last Tuesday and was taken with a headline that suggested a confluence rather than a conflagration might be in the offing between science and religion, thereby making Israel’s plaintive question in Second Isaiah, a question repeated by Paul in the ninth of Romans, more than moot. The headline in the Science Times read: “Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?” If so, I was about to wonder anew, why have we been made like this?

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has come to believe that morality can be understood by way of social evolution. We have been made like this for the purpose of our survival as a species. From his research in India and his wide-ranging reading of social anthropology, he has concluded that we were made to respond to the world around us with two separate but intertwined moral systems: one is ancient and based on a pre-linguistic sort of intuition; the other, what Haidt identified as moral judgment, is modern and developed as people began to articulate why something was right or wrong.

When these two moral systems work together, says Haidt, it is the job of the modern system to come up with convincing explanations for our intuitive, emotion-laden sense of things. The front page headlines of this week from Jena, Louisiana bring to mind the intuition that separates races and the convincing explanation some find in the language of scripture that leads to lynching still. The same, I believe, could be said of our intuitive, emotion-laden sense of things that condemns homosexuality and the five verses that some cite to articulate right from wrong eternally. Then there was the intuitive cohesiveness of the Aryan race articulated by National Socialism and tragically underwritten by a misreading of Romans that led six million to the gas chambers.

Haidt hypothesizes that this intuitive system rests on five evolved moral principles; the later moral judgments that explain them he then traces to religion and politics. Thus the ancient intuition of loyalty to the in-group is later articulated in the judgment that a society must be “vigilant in punishing slackers, freeloaders, traitors and anyone whose actions undermine the group’s cohesiveness.” The intuition identified as purity and sanctity leads later to a linguistic restraint of excess and common rituals that bind people together. Intuitively, respect for authority underwrites the modern deference “for those above you in social rank and offers protection to those below you.” The less evident intuition given recent front page headlines is an intuition that would have us do no physical harm which forms the foundation of laws that “protect others, especially your own kin and those who are vulnerable.” And finally, says Haidt, human beings intuitively have evolved to be creatures that do as you would have done to you, a principle of reciprocal treatment which is the moral foundation of every society.

Then as if to second Haidt’s hypothesis, a similar article appeared in this month’s Atlantic, exploring the evolutionary basis for generosity or, as the title tags it, “The Selfless Gene.” Here an evolutionary biologist named William Donald Hamilton, who hailed from the same little village of Downe where Charles Darwin lived, is said to have “offered the first rigorous explanation of how generosity can evolve and under what circumstances it is likely to emerge.” In sum, he said, “genes that promote the altruistic act will spread if the benefit that the act bestows is high enough, and the genetic relationship between the altruist and the beneficiary is close enough, to outweigh the act’s cost to the altruist.”

The article goes on to suggest that “Extreme altruists …leave no descendants: They are too busy helping others. So at first blush, a gene that promotes extreme altruism should quickly vanish from a population.” Yet even Darwin hypothesized concerning societies of people who were closely related that “unified, caring groups [were] better able to triumph over their more disunited rivals,” thereby leaving more descendants. Two hypotheses then follow that again underline Haidt’s conclusions from the social sciences: first, that conformity evolved as a trait in these groups, “an ability to fit in with a group and adopt its norms and customs” (intuition); and second “that enforcement of those norms and customs could have been essential for group cohesion and harmony” (the so-called language of moral judgment)such that those “who could not conform or who were disruptive would have weakened the group; any group that failed to drive out such people, or kill them, would have been more likely to be overwhelmed in battle.”

Again and at first blush, both Haidt and Hamilton would seem to be answering the plaintive cry of Israel in exile from the perspective of social science and evolutionary biology: Why have we been made this way? From the beginning we were made with a moral intuition or an altruistic gene in order to promote the survival of kith and kin. Theologically what follows is a kind of mechanistic deism, a God who placed in our biological beginnings a natural inclination toward generosity, reciprocity, purity, loyalty…among our own! So what also seems also to follow is a propensity to kill the prophets and stone those sent by the living God to set world events not within the purview of our genes or our judgments, but within the pathos and promise of God’s purposes in human history.

Put bluntly, prophetic speech has never been dared in order to articulate and underwrite our intuition about group loyalty or ritual purity or hierarchical relationships or even to come up with convincing arguments for our paltry intuition about reciprocal justice and generosity. Rather the prophet saw the power of the God who “made the earth and created humankind upon it” revealed in catastrophe as well as victory, in exile as well as exodus, in rejection as well as faithfulness. The prophetic word was, therefore, a counter-intuitive word guaranteed to trouble the merely human instincts of justice and fairness and mercy…a counter-intuitive cry meant to confound the confidence of those who would sit in moral judgment over a non-conforming minority. In fact, writes Abraham Heschel, the prophets were “some of the most disturbing people who ever lived” because they had “a breathless impatience with injustice,” a sensitivity to evil so deep as to be called hysterical in polite society, an indignation as vast as God’s anger.

Then into Israel’s darkest hour walked Second Isaiah. “It is with a feeling of relief that we come at last to this fortieth chapter of Isaiah,” writes one commentator a few years after the end of the Second World War:
    For thirty-nine chapters there is nothing but distress and sin and judgment and severity….Rarely has history seen more concentrated misery than was to be found among these captives….mingled in this land of the hopeless…hanging their harps on the willows by the river. Mothers had been separated from their children, and husbands from their wives. When they sat down to think of the past, they must often have shuddered at the memory of the terrible siege, of the loved ones dead on the field of battle, of the children who perished miserably on the march to Babylon, and of the homes forever destroyed. It is one thing for us to read about the misery caused by the cruelty of the ruthless conqueror centuries ago; it is quite another thing to be oneself the person whose loved one has had his eyes put out by the mocking soldiery of a heathen power.…Had they thought to offer resistance to their persecutor, they would have been powerless. The greatest empire of the day had them in its grasp like a lion holding its prey beneath its paw….And they were hopeless. What had become of the ancient promise…? All the promises were broken.

Here among these words, there is more than a little sense that the exile prefigured the Shoah save for one critical difference: in our time, with few exceptions, the prophets have fallen silent and we have been left with biologists and social scientists to interpret us to ourselves; whereas among a people in the utter despair of exile, Second Isaiah spoke an impudent word of hope. It was a word no less counterintuitive than the relentless judgments of his predecessor against Judah save that in exile, where hopelessness suited the facts, Second Isaiah brought to public expression a hope whose only ground was God.

Such hope, grounded in God’s freedom and mercy rather than in, say, our biological destiny, refuses to conform, refuses “to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion,” says Walter Brueggemann of Second Isaiah, “and one does that only at great political and existential risk.” I can think of no voices in our public life, at the moment, up to that risk! “On the other hand,” says Brueggemann, “hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments (a present taken with endless warfare and economic disparity and racial inequality and ethnic hatred) is now called into question….I am not talking,” he goes on, “about optimism or development or evolutionary advances but rather about promises made by one who stands distant from us and over against us but remarkably for us.”

Therefore to the question of why we were made like this, the prophet speaks, in the first place, of the freedom of God. “Thus says the Holy one of Israel, and its maker: Will you question me about my children or command me concerning the work of my hands?” God will not be bound by our moral intuition because the new thing God is forever up to will blow our narrow minds and menace our small hearts! Certainly because this is a real relationship, we may and will question God; likely because God’s ways are not our ways, God’s answer through the prophets will leave our enlightened hypotheses forgotten in the dust.

In the second place, to the question of why we were made this way, the prophet tells of the God who deals with us “not on the basis of what we are but on the basis of what God is” [Paul Achtemeier]: God is a God of mercy who both chooses to be in relationship with us and chooses, in Annie Dillard’s words, not to blow our dancing bear act to smithereens. Hence it may be interesting to note that we have a gene which, under perfect conditions, may cause us to act generously; nevertheless our genetic make-up is as irrelevant, according to Paul, as is Israel’s descent from Abraham when it comes to God’s dealings with God’s creatures. The only factor to be considered is God’s mercy, enlarged in Jesus Christ, to include us.

Then finally to the question of why we were made this way, the prophet points toward One in whose flesh the reason we were made thus will finally be revealed. Says Second Isaiah, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He was the One our intuition crucified and, counter-intuitively, the One God raised from the dead. To his birth, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer before he was hanged, we are summoned with the shepherds to come “just as we are” even as, at his resurrection, we behold the human beings we are destined to become as creatures determined not by genes nor by human judgment but by God’s grace: “Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”

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