December 16, 2012 | 8:00 a.m. | Third Sunday of Advent

The Beginning of the End

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 10:1–4, 14–18
Luke 3:7–18

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

Luke 3:7 (NRSV)

We are grateful that with you it is
               never “more or less,”
               “perhaps,” or
               “maybe.”
With you it is never “yes and no,”
               but always “yes” –clear, direct,
               unambiguous, trustworthy.
We thank you for your “yes”
come flesh among us.

Walter Brueggemann
Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

For the past several evenings, my husband has had his nose in a book that I have been wanting to get my hands on. It is Nate Silver’s newly published book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t. Nate Silver, you may know, is a statistician who writes the New York Times political blog called FiveThirtyEight.com. While I don’t keep up with that blog, I have heard and read interviews with him by radio and print journalists during the recent presidential campaign and election cycle. Because of his accuracy in predicting the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine.

Surprisingly the main theme of his book is this: we think we are better at prediction than we really are. For whatever reason, we are overly smug, and as a result we take a prejudicial view toward evidence, seeing what we want to see rather than looking at what is really there. Smugness prejudices our predictions.

To make his point, Nate Silver draws on a distinction between hedgehogs and foxes, which British historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin made famous in an essay about the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” In that essay Berlin borrowed from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, who in the seventh century B.C. wrote, “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t, p. 53). According to the distinction, hedgehogs believe in big ideas—ideas about principles that govern the world and that undergird virtually every interaction in society. In contrast to hedgehogs, foxes approach the world by taking a multitude of approaches and tend to be more tolerant of nuance, complexity, and conflicting perspectives. Foxes, according to Silver, are better at forecasting than hedgehogs, because foxes rely more on observation than they do on theory.

Some have classified Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as hedgehogs, with their single big ideas—for Marx, that history is driven by class conflict, and for Freud, that repressed ideas in the unconscious mind explain much of human behavior (p. 53). Some might classify anyone who would apply a distinction between hedgehogs and foxes to people as complex as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to be themselves hedgehogs. Some might attribute hedgehog status to prophets.

There is no doubt that prophets in the Bible had big ideas—ideas about God, humanity, and the end of the world. As Nate Silver cautions, predictions based on big ideas most often don’t come to pass. This was certainly the position that NASA took last week, when NASA released a video debunking an interpretation of the Mayan calendar that predicted that the world would end this past Friday.

Should we conclude that prophets make lousy predictors and therefore aren’t worth our time? Should we turn a deaf ear to John the Baptist when he exhorts the crowd, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance”?

It seems that there were many who listened to John the Baptist and took to heart what he said. In fact, everywhere he went, even out in the wilderness, crowds gathered to hear him, and in response to his preaching, they asked him, “What then should we do?” Was their readiness to repent, to change their ways, a result of gullibility? Were they simply followers of a hedgehog?

It’s not that simple. A person can have a big idea and not be ideological. A person can have a big idea and still be open-minded, self-critical, and empirical. Like foxes and unlike hedgehogs, God’s prophets in the biblical tradition of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and John the Baptist rely on observation. They keep their eyes out for signs, not confirmations. Like foxes and unlike hedgehogs, prophets wait with an open mind.

Unlike both foxes and hedgehogs, however, prophets wait open-endedly. While the purpose of prediction is to achieve a desired outcome or at least to avoid a disastrous end, the purpose of prophecy is to urge people to be faithful to, to trust in, God no matter the outcome. In an essay called “Waiting for God,” Catholic priest Henri Nouwen writes:

Waiting is open-ended. Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for something concrete, for something that we wish to have. Much of our waiting is filled with wishes: “I wish that I would have a job. I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.” We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes. For this reason, a lot of our waiting is not open-ended. Instead, our waiting is a way of controlling the future. We want the future to go in a very specific direction. . . . That is why we have such a hard time waiting: we want to do the things that will make the desired events take place. (Henri Nouwen, “Waiting for God,” pp. 32–33)

Prophecy is not an attempt to control the future. It doesn’t assume that we can plan better to achieve a desired outcome or even to avoid a disastrous end. It involves waiting with such trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond anything we could ever imagine or predict, and it is this trust that makes waiting open to all possibilities—even possibilities that defy probability.

As difficult as it is to wait when we have particular outcomes for which we wish, it is nearly impossible to wait when we are scared. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because fear drives us to flee, not to wait, and if we cannot flee, fear drives us to fight. That fear leads to a fight-or-flight reaction that is built into human nature. In his book Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, psychologist Michael McCullough argues that not only forgiveness but also vengeance is a human instinct that evolves in relation to the environment, or context, in which we live. Because we are sensitive to the contexts in which we live, it should be no surprise that “when people live in places where crime and disorder are high, where policing is poor, where governments are weak, and where life is dangerous, they will tend to use revenge as a problem-solving strategy” (Michael McCullough, Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, p. 227). People who live in a world of fear are more likely to react with aggression, hostility, and violence. The more fearful we are, the harder waiting becomes.

Father Gregory Boyle, who for years ministered to gang members in Los Angeles, tells a story about the knee-jerk reaction of retaliation that immediately follows any incident of gang violence. “In my earliest years,” he writes,

when gang violence had me burying more young people than old folks, I would often isolate the kid who had just viewed his dead homeboy in the casket. Maybe he’s off by himself, crying and avoiding his buddies. I figure perhaps I can speak a word to jostle him from his entrenched vow to seek revenge. Perhaps this is the vulnerable moment, a window cracked open to me. I would almost always say something like, “I never want to see you lying in a coffin at sixteen” or whatever his age is. When I first did this, I always expected the same response: “Yeah—that makes two of us. I don’t want to die.” What was initially startling grew predictable as I buried more kids. For this vulnerable one would always say the same thing, with little variation: “Why not? You gotta die sometime” (Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, p. 90).

Father Boyle went on to say, “This is the language of the despondent, for whom . . . hope . . . is entirely foreign” (p. 90). In the absence of any hope and in the presence of so much fear, there is little chance that waiting would be considered a viable option.

In the face of fear, the common instinct is to flee. Even John suspected that many in the crowd had come to him to be baptized in an attempt to escape God’s judgment, as if that were possible. Calling them a “brood of vipers,” he asked them, “who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Then there were others, he suspected, who, unlike those who were fearful, were feeling smug—smug in their knowledge that they were descendents of Abraham, as though that would protect them from God’s judgment.

To all, John the Baptist preached that there would be no escape, no exception, from God’s judgment. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Despite the universal end that John painted with his prophecy, he considered his prophecy to be good news—good because it was news about God’s promised Messiah, someone greater than he or the world could imagine. And as the people were filled with a sense of hopeful expectation, even to the point of wondering whether John himself was the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “One who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” “While I baptize you with water, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” In the tradition of the biblical prophets, John could only say that the one who is coming is greater than he or his listeners could imagine and that if we trust rather than fear and if we wait rather than flee, God’s promise will be fulfilled. Every time we choose not to seek revenge; every time we share with someone who has less; every time those in power choose not to take advantage of their authority; every time self-interest does not govern our actions, God’s promise is being fulfilled. Waiting with John for the one who will come, we have so much to do and so much reason for hope.