Good Friday, April 22, 2011

Matthew 28:1-10

Leveraging Collective Wisdom Out of the Grave

At the popular ted talks – you'll find a collection of inspirational presentations by people from a wide variety of disciplines and experiences. In one of those presentations John Hunter talks about the “World Peace Game” - a global simulation he has developed over many years in which his 4th graders negotiate the decisions of their “countries” with the objective of acheiving some measure of world peace. Powerful stuff. Check it out here.

With a multi-tiered plexiglass playing space and an intricate set of rules, Hunter lets his kids loose to work their way through the labyrinthine precincts of global politics, military allocations, economics, climatic changes, resource allocations, etc., in order to come to some collective wisdom that will result in a more peaceful world where all the nations are better off at the end of the game. John Hunter keeps the clock as the students in roles of prime ministers, cabinet members, citizens, scientists – and even one designated sabateur – make the decisions. In his talk Hunter shares some of the rather astounding decisions his students have made. He believes that the collective wisdom of the 4th graders can achieve a good that is better than any answer that he as a teacher could provide – or that the generations who have formed the world as we know it have in fact provided. His hope is that the collective wisdom displayed by these children in the game will be leveraged into the life that they lead in the actual world. His hope is my prayer – our prayer.

But what is this leverage? “Leverage” itself has been pried from its older usage to indicate the practice of borrowing money on the bet of making it back with a profit. Sort of like the older “finangling” but with a more euphemistic ring. In the original meaning, one uses a bar on a pivot to move something too heavy to lift directly. You see how the financial metaphor works. Tricky, especially when the weight of the move is too heavy or too unsteady for the bar or the pivot to bear. Something breaks and somebody gets hurt. Leveraging world peace? Very tricky indeed. We have seen collective wisdoms come and go. Sometimes you get scientific discoveries. Sometimes genocide. The western Enlightenment placed its bets on the first option: get people to work hard enough and know enough if you catch them young enough and they will be good enough. This modern thing called the “realized self” will flourish in a community of other true selves in order to make a better world. It's the ideology behind most of the graduation speeches we'll be hearing in the next few weeks.

The tomb in which they placed Jesus is, among other things, the crypt of collective wisdom. It is the limit that breaks the pivot of Roman leverage in a world where empires must die. Where good intentions, sabotaged by compelling, albeit disingenuous, social gestures, crumble from the inside. Where judicial systems that crucify under the pretext of doctored evidence engender the revolutions that are their own demise. Nietzsche maintained that the will to power leads to a pointless nothing. But to us it leads to the tomb, which, if it is nothing, it is at least God's nothing. And that is the setting for what happened to Jesus.

The resurrection is not leverage. Not a continuation. Not another try to get it right. Not another “game day” on the game board of human existence. There are no realized selves coming out of that tomb. There is Jesus, departed, and soon to be met on the open road. The light of God's angel causes the unfortunate guards to become as dead people, for the old world that they are guarding is essentially dead.

Resurrection is not just more life. It is a new life that comes with a great death that is not to be grieved. The sabateur is shown to be the fool that he is. Which is why I love the 4th graders in John Hunter's schoolroom. And why I cherish the dream the teacher harbors, whatever his personal foundations for that dream may be. In the resurrection of the just, nothing is lost that was worthy of the dreamers of peace – we can discern the imago dei etched in the eager faces stretched over the game board. They are a trust. A promise, yes. But a promise that only God can keep.

© 2011 Andy Gay