"Cynicism is also a kind of faith"

EZ 2:2-5

Today two quotes are warring in my head for primacy.  One is brand new, I just read it today, and the other has been on the wall of my classroom for most of my career as a teacher.

The new one is from an article much smarter than it's title:

And cynicism is also a kind of faith: the faith that nothing can change, that those institutions are corrupt beyond all accountability, immune to intimidation or appeal.         - Tim Kreider

 And with that quote, I finally understand what I pondered about the first reading from Ezekiel on this Sunday in July I'm anticipating so far in advance.  Why someone would see clearly that a prophet is in their midst but still do nothing.

Because our faith in God CAN be trumped by our unacknowledged faith in our own powerlessness.  In the inevitability of the world's institutions.  Even by their rightness.  Of our own smallness.  Ordinary citizens of Nineveh, believing their city would be destroyed but knowing that their own repentance would do almost nothing to stop it.  The terror of being one of the 10 good people in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Or even being Lot, arguing God down from 50 to 10 out of fear that there weren't enough good men out there to turn the tide.  Even his cynicism was stronger than his faith in God.

It certainly is the false idol of our modern world and seemingly the ancient world as well.  How long have we worshipped this false idol?  Since the cavemen days when it was audacious to believe that tribes didn't have to slaughter one another for the best hunting pastures?  When individual hunters and gatherers looked around and knew, just KNEW, that there might be a better way but there was no way they could do anything about it?

But God, in Ezekiel, calls this kind of thinking "rebellious people".  Rebelling against God, rebelling against His faith in us.  Rebelling against his commands to change the world and make it better and stop doing all of this stupid nonsense.  Rebelling against hope and love and basic human decency in the name of cynicism. 

Just think of that.

The people terrified of change -- those are the rebels in God's eyes.

Whereas, the people who listen to Mosca Mye are the faithful followers:

"The heart of being a radical isn't knowing all the right books.  It's not about kings over the sea or the Parliament in the capital.  It's...looking at the world around you and seeing all the things that make you sick to your stomach with anger.  The things there's no use getting upset about because it's just the way the world always has been and always will be.  Then it means getting good and angry about it anyway and kickin' up a hurricane.  Because nothing is writ across the sky to say the world must be this way.  A tree can grow two hundred years and look like it'll last a thousand more, but when lighting comes at last, it burns, Mr. Appleton." -- Frances Hardinge

We think of people like THAT as "rebellious people."  But that's how God thinks of the cynics worshipping their false god of inevitability and helplessness. 

The rewards of that worship are an easing of guilt, a comfortable sloth, but the tithe of that false god is steep indeed.