Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

I recently attended two very different conferences, back to back.  The first featured Dr. Walter Brueggemann, a prolific and well-known Bible scholar, as guest lecturer at our church.  The second was the annual conference for the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) in San Diego.  These conferences were two sides of the same coin for me.  One identified the problem; the other imagined a new answer.   

Brueggemann focused on Isaiah in his workshop.  The weave of prophetic tradition that forms the Book of Isaiah reflects on the fate of Jerusalem in roughly 700-500 BCE.  Jerusalem was symbol for the national Israel.  The prophet Isaiah ben Amoz (“first Isaiah”) warned Jerusalem against aligning with Babylon, the dominant military industrial complex of the time.  Jerusalem’s leadership could choose strengthen the societal fabric by caring for the poor and disadvantaged, or pour resources into military assets and tribute for foreign rulers.   

The prophet Isaiah says “it’s time to withdraw your attachments to the Babylonian definition of reality,” according to Brueggemann.  It’s time to imagine a completely different reality.  Then Brueggemann said something that made us wiggle in our seats: We are now babylon.  The U.S. is the last superpower.  We are, metaphorically, modern babylon.   

As he spoke, I thought about Babylon (big B) and babylon (little b).  After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US built a heli-pad on ancient Babylonian ruins, damaging part of the remaining Ishtar gate of Babilu (Akkadian, “Gate of gods”).   

In 2006, I saw a piece of the Ishtar gate (built ca. 575 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II) at the Louvre.  Even as I had marveled at a splendid glazed lion from the Ishtar gate, backed with bricks of sea-glass greens and blues, the pavement of ancient Babylon in Iraq was being crushed by the military might of Halliburton and the new babylon.  Biblical scholars would call this a “symbolic action report,” a prophetic act designed to send a message.  

In the midst of war and utter destruction, the poetry of Isaiah 11:6 imagines a new vision of peace.  “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” (NRSV)  The imagined future subverts images of predator/prey and conqueror/conquered. Instead, there is a peaceable kingdom where the innocent are no longer victimized. 

In the workshop, Brueggemann pushed further.  If we want peace as imagined by the many voices of Isaiah, we must understand what is at stake. Disarmament and peace depends on a lower standard of living among the “haves.”   The problem is oil.  Brueggemann said, “Peace will require we use less oil.  This is a high price to pay for peace, but until then, we will have to use muscle to keep our own access to oil.” 

This is the hard task:  to connect what we consume in our peace-loving, everyday lives with what we’re willing to subsidize and sacrifice, in order to have the fossil fuels that are the foundation of our economy.  Isaiah asks, “Will the real Babylon please stand up?”  Dang—it’s me.  Time to withdraw my attachment to a Babylonian definition of reality. 

Brueggeman writes, “Do not deliver us from the clashing poems which are your word to us.”

The Louvre currently has an exhibit called Babylon.  It is co-sponsored by the British Museum, which issued a report in 2005 regarding recent damage to ancient Babylonian archaeological sites.