Text: Haggai 2:1-5

Speaker: Joel Call

“Theology has failed us.” This is how theologian, Marika Rose, Senior Lecturer at Dublin City College, begins her book A Theology Q/ Failure. We occupy a time in history of perpetual crisis in which theology seems to work against the aims of peace and justice. As recently as yesterday, US bombs continue to fall on Iran despite negotiations for peace. U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, author of American Crusade, tattooed with Christian insignia including both a Jerusalem Cross and a Chi Rho, recently quoted the Bible at a Pentagon briefing. A couple months ago, Christian pastors gathered in the Oval Office to pray for Trump as he led the US into war. Billionaire Peter Thiel —friend of Jeffrey Epstein, fan of JRR Tolkien, and founder of Palantir — continues to tour his theology of the end times, according to which we are invited to view Greta Thunberg as the avatar of the antichrist. Theology is wielded today both by Christian Zionists and by the state of Israel, arguing that the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians is both necessary and morally justified. Gaza and the West Bank lay in ruins.

Theology has failed. Amidst our state of permanent crisis, we stand in the rubble of the destruction of the past. Far from keeping us from the worst of our human capacities, theology has actually been used to further justify and sustain the violence and devastation of our world.

The theme of this year’s Central District Conference annual gathering was Rise up! Take courage! We convened in Harrisonburg, Virginia to reflect on a year’s worth of experiences. Where might wisdom be calling our group of Anabaptists? Where might the Spirit lead? I wonder how can we hope to Rise up! and Take courage! when our very tool, the very instrument with whic we seek to alleviate suffering has seemed to inflict it?

Like us, the Israelites in our passage today stand in the rubble and the failures, the destruction of the past. Babylon conquered Israel, then Persians conquered Babylon. Regime change has allowed Israelites, who desire, to return to Jerusalem. Once exiled from this place once called home, they returned to confront the destruction of their holiest of holies, the temple. The once-thriving city has fallen from grace. Not only are they confronted with the failure and destruction of their former nation, they’re dealing with insufficient harvests and drought. But the Word of the Lord comes to Haggai saying it’s time to rebuild the Lord’s house, the temple. How could they ever build a temple that rivaled the wealth, the luxury, the beauty of the original? How could a new reality that exceeds the old ever come from the rubble and destruction of the old? They’re stuck asking similar questions we find ourselves asking today: Where did it all go wrong? What do we need to do in order to fix all this? What failed and how can we prevent that from happening again?

Theologian Marika Rose analyzes church history and observes a tendency in theologians of trying to find the turning point, the moment it all went wrong. Some identify the advent of Protestantism and its neglect of sacramentality and community in favor of a theology of word and individual salvation that first caused it to stumble. The turning point could lie a little further back, in the fatal invention of race and the translation of the Great Commission into European colonialism. Maybe we should blame Constantine even further back, and the church’s capitulation to the temptations of power and Empire, or, the nefarious influence of Greek philosophical thought on theology. It’s tempting to go back a little further in time to consider the persistent thickheadedness of Jesus’ disciples: their faithlessness, their obtuseness, their blundering and stumbling. We could also talk about the disasters of Abraham’s descendants:

their adultew (literal and metaphorical), their genocides, their sins of hospitality, of obedience.

In this quest for a turning point, Rose identifies this tendency in theology to find a moment of innocence, back before everything went wrong. Maybe if we discover the primordial failure, we can set things to rights, and achieve a good theology, a good church, a more just world. Against this, Rose claims that:

“Failure is best understood neither as a falling awayfrom an original goodness or as a disordering of theology ‘s inherent orientation towards a particular telos but [thatfailure is best understood] as inherent and constitutive. There is no escape from failure. But there are good theological reasons to understandfailure not as a fall away from some primordial success, some original wholeness, but as in fact the constituting condition of our being. The question we should be asking is not how to stop failing but, rather, how to relate to failure.

We are failing beings. It’s not a hiccup. In this view, there’s no primordial failure to fix, because it’s this failure, this incompleteness all the way down. There’s only the question of how to relate to it.

Rose turns to the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who offers a typology of four discourses. Think of these as four different ways of relating to incompleteness and failure: the discourse of the Master, the university, the hysteric, and the analyst’s discourse. l) The first of these, the Master’s discourse, “is the discourse of unquestionable authority, of strong leaders and traditional values. It says that the solution to what ails us is a reaffirmation of authority biblical, encyclical, or political.” The Master’s discourse believes that the solution to failure is to re-establish proper order, and its willing to wield violence in order to do so. Taking Christian theology as an example, the problem this discourse runs into is the reality of incompleteness and division. There is no one way to practice Christianity. No matter how hard we try to impose authority on the world, it will always escape our grasp.

• The university discourse’s solution to the problem of failure is to produce and multiply knowledge. It is the pursuit of ever more information in the belief that once knowledge is complete it will be possible to attain perfect efficiency, total control, and absolute certainty. This is the discourse of the “neutral expert,” the schoolteacher, the bureaucrat, and the management consultant, saying “if we just write another report, create another policy or procedure, conduct more research, run more training sessions and track and share more data, then we will arrive at a resolution.” While knowledge and education are indispensable collective goods, unfortunately the university discourse can’t seem to account for the fact that human beings are not led purely by objective facts.
• Next we have the hysteric’s discourse, the discourse of protest, of the refusal of the existing narrative or the present order of things. For Lacan, this is a moment with transformative potential. The hysteric relates to failure by insisting on the failure of the system within which she is positioned. This is the work of critique, but critique can be a trap. The hysteric recognizes that there is something wrong with the way that things are, but has not yet given up on the fantasy of wholeness. Rose points out how the very act of critique, of protest, can itself be a form of investment in the institution of the subject of critique. In other words, critique, although perhaps necessary, can be a way of sustaining our relationship to the things we criticize.
• The route out of this bind, Lacan suggests, is the final of the four discourses: the analyst’s discourse. It is only here for Lacan, that we truly confront the reality of failure: the impossibility of mastering ourselves or those around us. The task of the analyst is not to control, not to produce endless knowledge, not to protest, but to open a space in which the other may come face to face with failure. We might think of this in terms of queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s argument for “a theology which aims to scandalise, that is, to be a stone on the road to force us to stop, fall down, while pausing in their pain and thinking during the pause.”

As delegates and pastors and conference leadership arrived at CDC annual gathering this past June, we were invited to stop, to pause, and to consider the suffering of Palestinians, and the collective failure the destruction of Gaza represents in our world. There is no correcting this wrong. But this year there was a resolution up for discernment titled “Response to Ongoing Suffering in Palestine.” Conference Minister Doug LuginbÍll pointed out that this was the first resolution presented for discernment at CDC Annual Meeting in his ten years in the role, the first resolution in 10 years that “invites our congregations and members/attenders to take action on an issue of conference-wide concern.”

The Resolution’s language was carefully considered and word-smithed over during the lengthy and active Saturday morning delegate session, in which it came up for a vote and was ultimately affirmed unanimously. I’ll read just one paragraph for us here:

“Asfòllowers (fJesus, ourfaith convicts us to speak the truth as [o what is happening to the Palestinian people, both on the West Bank and in Gaza. We echo thefìndingsfrom many scholars and human rights groups, including Palestinian and Israeli groups, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. All reports from Gaza and the West Bank indicate that Israel has not upheld its obligations under the so-called ‘ceasefire ‘ and continues to destroy Palestinian life and property. Recognizing this truth, and our complicity, we commit to divesting ourselves financially from the U.S. -backed Israeli genocide and theologicallyfrom Christian Zionism.

The document goes on to identify some actionable ways of divesting financially from

U.S.-backed violence and theologically from Christian Zionism, and I strongly encourage everyone to read the whole two-and-a-half page document on Central District Conference’s website.

Documents like this Resolution come only from taking the time, and opening the space to come face to face with failure, with destruction and horror and obscenity. To understand Christian identity according to the logic of the analyst’s discourse is to understand it not as a commitment to a particular set of answers, a particular vision of harmony, but precisely as the commitment to a particular problem, the problem of what it means to be faithful to Christ.

There is an irony in Haggai’s prophecy: some scholars interpret his prophecy as a failure, since rebuilding the temple did not result in restoring Israel’s former prosperity, nor did the splendor of the temple exceed its former, pre-exilic wealth. Others would point to a more metaphorical fulfillment in Christ, or eschatological fulfillment in the kingdom to come. Even in failure: fulfillment. We may not have access to what came before, but we have access to the tools and materials to build.

Rise up! Take courage! May we be emboldened to fail better. My hope and prayer is that we seriously consider the divestments called for in the “Response to Ongoing Suffering in

Palestine” Resolution as a congregation. May we speak up at times we need to speak.

May we have eyes to see Christ not as the answer to all the world’s questions, but posing better questions to the world’s answers.

May we have the courage to fail at walking in the way of Christ, and to keep trying.