One of the standard books on the sociology of religion is called The Sacred Canopy by Peter Berger. Largely following Durkheim, Berger makes the claim that “religion is a social construct.” In one way I accept that definition. There is no need to exclude God from the process of a certain kind of socialization. Berger today is himself a Christian and might say something similar.
Another concept that he discusses is the concept of “anomie,” or lawlessness. We generally live in a situation where the world is ordered and “lawful” or “nomic.” In this world everything makes sense based upon the social system we have given it. The world is lawful and comfortable. In this world religion can serve to legitimate this social structure. However, there are times when something cataclysmic happens in an individual or communal life that throws one part of the system out of whack and the order that was once perceived to exist is lost; this is anomie (lawlessness).
In a state of anomie everything seems meaningless. One no longer sees value in the same things and struggles to find meaning where it had been lost. A large part of our lives are an attempt to find “nomie” out of “a-nomie.”
Reflecting on Palm Sunday, particularly in Luke 19, I started thinking about expectations and the order that everyone lived by. The disciples ushering in Jesus had expected Jesus to set-up a messianic kingdom through a revolution in Jerusalem. Their religio-political expectations caused them to see religion legitimating their view of how the world should be structured. The religious leaders (and the Gentile authorities) legitimated their authority on their own religious constructions and thus saw Jesus as the enemy.
As Jesus approaches death, we see that even the people turn on him. He didn’t meet their expectations. He didn’t fit into the way they understood the world or the messiah. One imagines the dejection of the disciples at the crucifixion of Jesus and the anomie and sense of meaningless and hopelessness this might have caused. They expected this man to set up a kingdom, and he is killed as a political criminal.
Yet this crisis in the world for the disciples ultimately gives the world new meaning in the resurrection. The world is completely renewed and has a new structure and lawfullness. But it is no longer based upon the false expectations of Palm Sunday (this is not to say that Jesus isn’t political or a king, just that what this means has to be reconsidered). They did not know the things that would bring them peace.
This Palm Sunday and for the rest of Holy Week, my prayer is that my false expectation will be torn down and that my nomie might be restructured, even cataclysmically, to God’s order. Even moreso, the personal upheaval and anomie that weighs heavy upon me might be an open space for the things that bring peace to create a new order of God’s shalom in my heart and in every community I exist in.
I long to know God’s peace in the midst of seeming meaninglessness.
So this week I am not offering an original song but a version of the prayer of St Francis. I laugh a little bit cause I mess it up, but I like hiccups in simple recordings like this.
Much Peace,
Tim
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