And all of you have seen the dance

RMJ:
I find myself, as I attend a United Church of Christ weekly, increasingly gentle in my lack of belief. I have little patience for the directly Christian part of the service, but have yet, in a year or two of attendance, to hear them speak of the larger world, science, the universe, and man's obligation to his fellow man in a manner with which I can't agree. I find myself, much to my surprise, wondering if they'd baptise me on the basis of my beliefs. Would Jesus welcome someone who, while not sure of His resurrection, would follow His command to help fellow man?

There's the last Narnia book, where the Christ-like Aslan welcomes a virtuous non-believer, saying, anything good you've done you've done for me, no matter in whose name you've done it...
ProfWombat

To look at this from another point of view.

My first year in Texas as a pastor, I was invited to participate in a weekend retreat to discuss new breakthroughs in genetics, and to craft a resolution which would be proposed to the UCC General Synod as a response.

The attendees were a mixture of laypeople and pastors. We divided into groups to attack certain assigned topics that would go into a proposed resolution: it s to be a mixture of theology and science, and I chose to work on the portion more directly theological, where God was directly mentioned and addressed.

The weekend culminated in a discussion meant to merge these disparate parts together into a whole. As the discussion around the table wore on, it became obvious to me that the language about God was being slighted in favor of a basically secular resolution that genetic studies were "good," and the UCC, if it approved the resolution, was "for" them. This seemed like both weak tea to me, and a poor statement from a Christian church; certainly a weak resolution to come out of a weekend retreat at a church camp called and held under the auspices of a Christian denomination.

And I made the mistake of saying so.

I still remember the pained look on the face of one of my pastoral colleagues, who may have been sympathetic, but who clearly wanted me to be able to take back my words, and simply to shut up. I had, in no uncertain terms, laid a bit of a turd in the punch bowl of the discussion, and no one wanted to fish it out. There was a pained silence following the airing of my complaint, which in substance was that this resolution, coming from a church, needed to be a bit more theological, and a bit less about how good science was.

Finally, a layperson spoke up; a doctor. He started slow, but built up steam. He disagreed with me, but more than that, he resented how science was constantly being bashed by the church, and he wouldn't be a party to any resolution that continued that dishonorable tradition. That, in toto, was the response to my statement: any expansion of the language about God and God's involvement in creation, was to be taken as 'science bashing,' and such "bashing" was not to be countenanced. There was, in other words, an ultimate truth, and it had to be respected. The rest of the room, especially the pastors, tacitly agreed, and no more was said about it.

The resolution, by the way, was not approved by General Synod; but that was more a matter of politics, than of content.

"They will trample on the grass...."

Continuing the conversation:

For the older churches it is the forgiveness of sins, a mystical participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus, re-birth, and entry into the community of the church.

For more modern communions, like the Baptists, it is an ordinance signifying obedience, but little else, a sign of the more important prior personal embrace of Jesus as Lord.
...
In speaking of baptism, it is certainly appropriate to phrase the question in terms of "Am I acceptable to Jesus?" But it is just important, for a Christian, to ask the converse, "Is Jesus acceptable to me?" "Do I take seriously his claims, and the claims of the God to whom he points?"

In so many of these discussions the focus is upon the question, "What is the least I can do, become, believe?" It is a legitimate question, one of outside boundaries, perhaps, but what do we think of an employee always asking "What's the least I must do to keep from being fired?" or a husband asking, "What's the least I must do to prevent a divorce?" or a father asking "What's the least I must do to keep my children from being taken away from me?" The record of the gospels would seem to indicate that that is not how God looked upon his relationship to us.--Rick Allen

Three stories:

In seminary, we engaged in "field work" which usually involved serving a church, or church-related activity (like day care, where I served before serving a church as a student pastor, and then serving a church as its' only pastor, still a student). This also involved meetings in assigned groups, to discuss our ministry, to analyze what was done and why, and to uphold and challenge each other. One student, a solo pastor at a small church, brought the story of a baptism. He had been asked to baptize an infant by someone whose parents were members of his church. His church council backed the request, but he had misgivings. In good Reformed tradition, he understood baptism as, among other things, membership in the church, but "church" meant, in UCC polity, the local congregation, the autonomous unit. It did not mean the larger church, of which the congregation was merely a part, an appendage. He was not comfortable with the request, but neither was he comfortable with crossing his church council on this issue.

When I was a student pastor myself, my license permitted me to administer the sacraments (in good Reformed tradition, there are only two: baptism and communion) only at the church where I served. As we used to joke, the Holy Spirit was bound to that place, and left us when we drove away, returning to us only when we walked through the doors. This became an issue because I had a member dying of cancer. Well, he wasn't a member; his wife and family were. And a few days before he died, she called me to her house, not far from the church, to ask me to baptize her husband.

He couldn't remember being baptized as an infant (when we usually "do" baptisms), and while his mother was alive, she was suffering from the late stages of Alzheimer's, so her memory was unreliable. His wife wanted to be sure; and she wanted me to do it. But it had to be done in their bedroom, as he was too ill to move.

Adult baptism requires the answering of questions; questions he was unable to answer, as between the cancer and the drugs to relieve his pain, he was nearly comatose. I baptized him anyway, using a bowl from the kitchen, water from the kitchen sink, and his wife and two children as witnesses. And in his bedroom, not at the church, where the Holy Spirit was authorized to be with me.

My last pastorate was at an old church, in both age of membership and age of church. It reached it's 150th Anniversary my first year there, and still had the 3rd chapel, built in the 1860's, as a worship space (indeed, they had worshipped there until the 1960's, when they built a space large enough to hold 300, although by their 150th anniversary they were down to 70 on Sunday morning again). Being an old church in both senses, some members were descendants of the "founding families," and of course took that status very seriously. There were also few children to baptize, and so baptisms were rare.

It was my preference, in a congregational polity, to baptize in the worship service, among the congregation. However, one of the "descendents" (who would, within a few months of this baptism, be instrumental in my removal from the pulpit) wanted me to baptize her grandchildren in the "historic chapel," as they called it. It was a space barely large enough to hold the families, much less the congregation. And only one of the three grandchildren attended that church; the other two didn't live in the city, one didn't even live in the state.

Baptism is taken, by the laity, to be at least a rite of membership, an entry into the church rolls. But it is also a mere ritual, something done to children, but with no particular meaning. The baptism in "The Godfather," where Michael Corleone becomes "godfather" in fact, is a perfect example. Even as he renounces the works of Satan, people are being killed on his orders; and he doesn't blink at the contradiction. This baptism was purely for the grandmother: for her sense of identity, and connection to the buildings of that church, and what those buildings represented to her and her ideas of her family, even her self-worth. Even the ritual itself meant nothing to her, except as a photo opportunity. It was the nearest thing to baptism as a marriage ceremony (which is not a religious ceremony at all in most Protestant circles anymore) that I ever came, or ever want to come to again. It wasn't even, in my mind, a baptism; but she had the tacit backing of the Church Council, who wouldn't have understood my objections anyway. And one quickly decides whether you entered the ministry to fight for your opinions, or to bend to the will of God. And then you spend the rest of your time trying to discern when the will of God, and your will, coincide, and why. And so we end up speaking of our congregations as "baptized heathens."

What is baptism for? Interestingly, I'm reading Harvey Cox's When Jesus Came to Harvard, (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and this is what he says about the baptism of Jesus:

After the brief mention of his visiting the Temple with his parents at the age of twelve, Jesus reappears only when he joins a highly suspect movement led by a shabby wilderness rabble-rouser named John the Baptist. John's followers were all harshly critical of the religious leadership at the Jerusalem Temple, and John had seized on an ancient Jewish purification ritual of submersion in water, which is still used by Orthodox Jews today, and adapted it for his own purposes. To be baptized by John was an act of protest against the religious establishment. But the religious establishment was the vehicle by which the Romans ruled their disorderly province, so it should not be surprising that King Herod had John beheaded. Cox, p. 94

As Sweeney Todd said: "But that was many years ago, I doubt that anyone would know."

To speak of many things

Well, this is disturbing.

There's a certain amount of hyperbole involved in Mr. Brant's musings ("President Jeb Bush....President Condoleeza Rice"), but the thrust seems sound, and echoes something I have been consideringm in connection with the continuing attempts to define the Abramoff scandal.

The GOP currently controls the executive, the legislative, and, effectively, the judicial branches of government. However, what it does not control, as U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and Judge Michael Luttig, and today the Supreme Court, have shown, is the Law.

I think they would like to remedy that. And they see Sam Alito as the key to that remedy.

If Alito's more bizarre notions of Presidential power could be made law by ruling of the Supreme Court, then Alito's aversions during the hearings that the President is "not above the law" would remain true, but be completely pointless. Because, per Judge Alito's writings, the President is the law. Signing statements and extraordinary powers where the court "lacks expertise" (and that is a basis upon which the court declines to intrude on such issues as the declaring of enemy combatants in wartime) would become code-words for: the President cannot violate the law, because the President determines the law.

Remember, the Court has to defer to the Executive branch to no small degree, as that is the branch which carries out court orders, right down to the bailiff in the courtroom. The degree of deference, however, should never include subjugation. But that could be, effectively, Judge Alito's position. And if the Executive, which is the military and the police power of the government, decides it is also legislature and judiciary, then we have a Constitutional crisis even a child can understand.

There are clues to the way the court is leaning on this issue, in the opinion in Gonzales v. Oregon handed down today.

In his opinion on Tuesday, Gonzales v. Oregon, No. 04-623, Justice Kennedy emphasized, with evident disapproval, the unilateral nature of Mr. Ashcroft's action, taken "without consulting Oregon or apparently anyone outside his department." The attorney general's rule was not entitled to the deference the court usually gave to interpretations of governing statutes by executive branch officials, he said, because Congress had not given the attorney general the authority he was invoking.

"The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design," Justice Kennedy said.

The short version: the DOJ cannot read into the statute powers that are not there, and the attorney general lacks the power to declare criminal what the Congress did not declare criminal. Substitute "Executive" for attorney general there, and "legislature" for Congress, and you begin to see the drift of the Court.

In his opinion, Justice Kennedy said that Mr. Ashcroft was claiming the "extraordinary authority" to declare as criminal actions that Congress had not designated as crimes, and that he was seeking "a radical shift of authority from the states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality."

But Congress had no such intent in passing the Controlled Substances Act, Justice Kennedy said. "The structure and operation of the C.S.A. presume and rely upon a functioning medical profession regulated under the states' police powers," he said, adding that "Oregon's regime is an example of the state regulation of medical practice that the C.S.A. presupposes."

Not also the vote was 6-3, with Roberts joining the dissent of Scalia and Thomas. Is there any doubt that vote could easily have been 5-4 with Alito on the bench?

There is another reason to be disturbed by Alito's nomination; a reason just as valid, but much harder to quantify. The counter-argument usually runs like this (from a comment earlier this week at Eschaton):

If judges start making legal exceptions because we don't like the fact that a law or legal principle leads to strip-searching 10 year-olds or [insert objectionable outcome here], then we stop having notice of what the law actually is--we only find it out after we've acted when a judge lets us know what comports with his definition of this amorphous, unwritten goal of "justice".

If the law were that simplistic and mechanical without the intervention of judges, we'd have done away with them years ago.

There are questions of justice involved in any case before a court, issues of equity (a recognized arena of law and of jurisprudence and, yes, judgment), and judges are expected to be women and men of judgment, perception, wisdom, and insight. We prefer people with experience in both life and law on the bench, not because they finally learn all the applicable law and its preferred application with a few years experience, but because they have experienced life. If judgment weren't required, if wisdom weren't needed, we would simply send our top law school graduates from commencement straight to the bench and be done with the matter.

One of the worst problems with the Supreme Court is how isolating it is. Many years ago the Court decided lawyers (and, by extension, other professionals) could legally advertise, despite professional ethics rules that banned the practice. The Court truly imagined that "ambulance chasers" would not take to the airwaves like so many rabid dogs.

And the Justices were shocked at what they unleashed. Just as many were over the reaction to Bush v. Gore, another case where the "law" (well, even the law wasn't applied there) should have yielded to a great deal more wisdom

Our best legal opinions (Holmes, Learned Hand, Cardozo) reflect not just a trained legal mind, but a wise human mind. That is what we honor.

Alito is the closest thing to a legal computer I've yet seen. Anxious to avoid any of the mistakes Bork made by being honest, the stripped himself of all humanity. He argued to the Committee that the majority opinion in the "strip search" case he dissented from would mean that drug dealers would simply use 10 year old girls as "mules," and that was his concern in his dissent. The issue, of course, was the reach of the warrant, a reach he would have gladly extended with no thought to the human consequences under that set of facts.

That's not legal wisdom. It's human blindness. The same blindness which may lead him to willingly and blandly turn over as much governmental power to one man, as that one man is willing to take on.

Brant mentions the internment of the Japanese in World War II. Some think Earl Warren sought to atone for his responsibility for that illegal and unconstitutional act, with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and several other landmark rulings which severely restricted the power and reach of government, at all levels. Alito, on the other hand, along with Thomas and Scalia and Robertson, seems to think the government cannot have too much power, as long as it is the "right kind" of power. (Scalia's dissent rests on the repugnance of suicide, not on the law.) Will the Supreme Court save us from the man elected to office? That may well depend on who is on the Supreme Court when the case is presented.

"When all your lives were free"

Continuing the conversation that started here, and drifted here.

To this post at Street Prophets, I posted this response:

I must admit I've thought, more than once, that the proper answer to that question is: "Get crucified."

Not because it was the sought after goal, but because it was the only option left to the world when you lived as much like Jesus as possible, did as much like Jesus as you could do. If you keep pushing the limits of God in the world, the world will push back.

The passage from Thomas Mikelson made me think of that all over again, in a new way. It had been a bit of snark, my disgust with the glibness of the sentiment.

Now I have to reconsider my subconscious, and what kind of trouble it tries to lead me into.

It 's a question of boundaries. No less so than this question:

RMJ:
I find myself, as I attend a United Church of Christ weekly, increasingly gentle in my lack of belief. I have little patience for the directly Christian part of the service, but have yet, in a year or two of attendance, to hear them speak of the larger world, science, the universe, and man's obligation to his fellow man in a manner with which I can't agree. I find myself, much to my surprise, wondering if they'd baptise me on the basis of my beliefs. Would Jesus welcome someone who, while not sure of His resurrection, would follow His command to help fellow man?

There's the last Narnia book, where the Christ-like Aslan welcomes a virtuous non-believer, saying, anything good you've done you've done for me, no matter in whose name you've done it...
ProfWombat

Very different kinds of boundaries, to be sure. But, in the end, the same set of boundaries.

When do we go beyond what God requires? And how do we know? What does the Lord require of you? And what does the rest of the world have to say about it?

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

April 4, 1967, Riverside Church.

Any part of it. All of it. Remember today that Dr. King was about much more than "I have a dream." Remember how truly radical (to the root) he was. Do not let him become a national plaster saint.

Remember.

(Audio excerpts and links to full speeches available here.)

Έπιφάναι τοϊς έν σκότει

What follows are notes from a lecture I gave this morning. I was asked a month ago to teach the class, and came up with this idea of the "songs" behind the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke. The basic idea revolved around the idea of occupation: of Israel as an occupied country under Rome, and Babylon, but even before the Exile, under God. Occupation is sort of the defining principle of Israel, in the scriptures. I wouldn't press that insight to a point of ultimate concern, but it opens a few doors and allows a few interesting insights.

Which spilled out of me over the course of a few hours last night, when I finally sat down to prepare for this lecture. The results of those hours follow, virtually unchanged. The entire experience made me realize I've been spending too much time concerned with matters about which I can do nothing (will the Senate confirm Alito? Should they? Will people "buy" another war in the Middle East? are they that stupid?), and too little time on matters close to my heart.

This may not be the proper corrective for this blog, but I thought the ideas were, at least, interesting.

Israel as a country occupied by God.

God is, of course, the “creator” of Israel, in confession as well as reality. The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah (!) present the image of a God who forces compliance which, although its goal is good, is in tension with the will of the people, by being in tension with the will of the prophet. This is a necessary tension, but it is a tension, nonetheless. That tension reaches a breaking point with the Exile, the defining event of Israel’s history that supercedes even the Exodus in the psyche of the nation. Then Israel, having rejected occupation by God as intolerable, is made vulnerable to occupation by a human power; an occupation from which it never really recovers.

And it is from that occupation, that Exile and return, that Israel begins to hope to receive the Messiah. And it is the connection to that history that the Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke speak, and to which they reach out. And that connection, as the Christmas story has primarily been connected to generations throughout time, is made through songs.

Matthew:

The gospel of Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus Christ; which is not his last name, but his title. It is the family tree of the Anointed One, the Messiah; and that fact alone recalls immediately the genealogies that the Exile made necessary, as families returning from Babylon and around the area tried to decide, a generation later, who was the child of who, who was a descendant of one of the tribes, who was another of the children of Abraham. And so Matthew beings: “The genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” And this itinerant peasant from Nazareth is immediately identified with the father of nations, and the greatest king of the nation of Israel. And we are immediately reminded of the Exile, of the first occupation of Israel, in the time of the second occupation of Israel, and after the second fall of Jerusalem, and the second diaspora of Abraham’s descendants.

This is a story told during yet another occupation. Once again, the nation is occupied by foreigners, even as it struggles to remain occupied by God. And so the great break point in the genealogy is the deportation to Babylon, and then the time after that: fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Exile; fourteen from the Exile to the Messiah. God still occupies Israel, and always will.

But occupation brings a sense of oppression, a sense of danger. Joseph is engaged to Mary, but to his shame she is pregnant. Only when he learns in a dream that this is to fulfill prophecy does he decide he can relax, and accept this pregnant woman as his wife. And when the child is born, Joseph names the child Joshua, Jesus in the koine Greek of the gospels, which means “Yahweh is salvation.”

Occupation brings not only the sense of oppression, but true oppression. The birth of the Messiah is not an event that can happen quietly. When God came to Moses on the mountain there was theophany: thunder and lightning and clouds. When God came to Elijah there was a wind, and then an earthquake, and then fire: God was in none of those things, but nature could not be quiet when God was present. And so Creation must announce the birth of Messiah, but who will read the signs? Magi; magicians; men of wisdom and learning from another land; for truly, as Jesus would later say, a prophet is not honored in his own country. And surely his own people will not know him first. So comes the epiphany.

And straight from scripture it comes: for here is the amazing thing. Does knowledge come from revelation, or does it come from discovery? Do we learn what is most important for us to know, what is of “ultimate concern,” or is it revealed to us? Matthew and the Hebrew people would say that it is revealed, and would point to the story of Abraham, of Joshua, of Samuel and David and the call of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, of Amos and Hosea and even Jonah, as their proof. We do not seek God so much as God seeks us, and we do not know what is most important to know so much as God reveals it to us: if we will listen; if we will see; if we will learn.

And so the Magi come just as expected. But why do we know to expect it? Because Psalm 72 has told us it will happen. Not in the simple sense of prophecy, “as it is written:” but in the complex sense of a revelation, an enactment of what the Psalmist said would happen as a sign of God’s favor and the righteousness of the king to whom God gives God’s judgment.

[Psalm 72]

There is much in that Psalm that repays study in light of the nativity stories, and the gospel stories. There is much that is connected to the ministry of Jesus, and to the songs of Luke’s nativity tale. But I want to pay attention to the kings who come bringing presents.

We call them “kings” because of this Psalm, even if we don’t know the connection between Matthew and Psalm 72. That isn’t what Matthew calls them: he calls them “magi.” He calls them “astrologers.” The Psalmist says the kings of foreign countries will come and offer gifts, the kings of Tarshish and Sheba and Seba. But Matthew lives under oppression, and any mention of foreign kings and any naming of nations is dangerous, so his “magi” come only from the East, from outside the Empire, and they are not kings, but wise men, men of deep knowledge. And they come with gifts, to fall down before the child, and serve him.

But Matthew lives under oppression, and the immediate sponsor of that oppression is Herod; Herod who serves the occupiers, and like them fears any challenge to his power. Herod, who with all of Jerusalem is disturbed to hear the news of this birth. Disturbed precisely because the Psalmists words were true: this king will have the Lord’s justice, and will deliver the needy and the poor and those who cry. No wonder Herod and all Jerusalem are disturbed: the end of their time has been announced, and they have just heard of it. The time of their oppression is at an end.

And how is this revealed to him? By strangers coming to ask for information he doesn’t have, who bring the information with them that he needs and open his eyes to what the Scriptures say, but to which he hasn’t listened. And so he sends the Magi to Bethlehem, to find the child. And now the revelation of the Scripture, and the revelation of Creation, and the revelation of God, come all three together. An angel speaks directly to Joseph, and later to the Magi; the star that rises new in the heavens is the first clue for the Magi; and the Scripture that make sense of all of this for Matthew’s audience, reveal the last connections for the Magi between their curiosity, and their goal. Guided by their knowledge of nature, playing their part according to the psalm, they need scripture to complete the picture.

And the last song of Matthew is another snatch of scripture, this time from Jeremiah, from the heart of the Exile itself. Rachel weeps for the exile of the northern kingdom in Jeremiah, and Matthew cuts off the hope of recovery, the response of the Lord to “keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears,” for “they shall come back from the land of the enemy, ther eis hope for your future.” But does he leave that part of the poem, the song, the song of lament, out of his story of Messiah? Or does he incorporate it by reference, as he incorporates by reference to Psalm 72 the last line of that psalm: “The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.” Ended? Why? Because they have been fulfilled. Because Messiah has come and the prayers of David son of Jesse have been fulfilled in the incarnation of the Christ who is also son of Abraham, son of David. And because the psalm itself portends, in Matthew’s gospel, and ending, almost an eschaton, a close to history. Because the psalm does not say what gifts the kings will bring from Sheba and Seba, but Matthew does: they bring gold, the precious element fit for a king, and frankincense and myrrh; strange perfumes for a child, but appropriate to prepare a corpse for burial. These gifts point already to the end, the crucifixion. We who are born mortal are born to die, and while this child is Messiah, this child is also mortal.

Just as the innocents slaughtered by Herod were mortal. But where Matthew cuts the story short with his quote from Jeremiah, he invites the rest of the story in tacitly, sotto voce, beneath the wailing of the mothers for their sons. He reminds them, reminds us all, that the terrible price of oppression, the terrible power of the oppressors, cannot be denied, cannot be overlooked or passed by easily: but neither is it the last word. That last word is God’s, and that word of hope will be heard in the gospel that follows this nativity story.

Luke:

So then we jump to Luke, since we are following songs and scriptures and sources of revelation. Luke presents us with four songs, fitting for a Christmas story, and Luke’s is our favorite Christmas story: we fit the details of Matthew’s in around it, in our most common tellings. Our nativity scenes include shepherds and magi, a star and and angel, and always the iconic manger. Where Matthew implies concern for the poor and the powerless, Luke makes it concrete: Jesus is so poor and so powerless that even his birthplace is the result of oppression, of an order from the oppressor that his family go to their ancestral home. But here the oppressor, as ignorant as Herod of what God plans to do, has already done, will do in days to come, is made to play a necessary role in the story, is forced despite his intentions, to arrange the pieces so that God’s will is made clear to all who will see, to all who will listen.

But God’s will is obscure, even to the priests who serve God in the temple. Luke opens his story with Zechariah, a man of priestly line who should know his story of Abraham better, because although God made the promise to Abraham five times before it was fulfilled, but Abraham never doubted, and never asked for anything more than a sign once. Zechariah, on the other hand, wonders how the news of a child to be born to his wife Elizabeth is even possible. And for that he is silenced. Luke works in reverse to follow the story of the scriptures: God speaks first to a man, one who is to father the forerunner of Messiah, and then God speaks to the mother of Messiah. But where Zechariah is clumsy, Mary is subtle and wise in her humility.

And yet it is only after Elizabeth speaks to Mary that Mary sings her hymn of praise to God for what God has promised. It is only when her story is confirmed by her cousin, by another and older woman, that the younger woman rejoices in what God has done for her. And then she sings the most revolutionary song in the Gospels, one that echoes, but goes far beyond, the song of Hanna in 1 Samuel:

[1 Samuel 2:1-10]

[Luke 1:46-55]

It is the first of Luke’s four songs, and it is no accident that this song sings of apocalypse and eschaton and revelation. Hannah sings because the Lord has lifted her oppression: because her place in society was to be a mother, and that joy had been denied her, until the Lord saw fit to allow it. Sarah laughs when God tells Abraham she will have a son within the year. Elizabeth gives thanks that God has removed her dishonor. Position and society and expectation oppress as much as governments and tyrants, and God removes the oppression of all of them. God removes oppression and suppression, and how should we respond except to sing?

Hannah sings of reversal, of strong men distraught, the weak made strong, the hungry fed while the full beg for a crust of bread, and childless mothers bear seven children while the mother of children languishes. Just so Mary sings of the reversal of oppression, but oppression of the people, not of the society. God will level; God will reverse. The valleys will be filled, and the mountains lowered, so that all will see the glory of God.

And as soon as Zechariah fulfills the word of the Lord as spoken by the angel, he can speak again, and he sings. We call that one the Benedictus, because the Latin version begins: “Benedictus Dominus, Deus Israel.” Mary’s song praises what God will do; Zechariah’s song praises what God has done. Together they tie up the strands of history, past and future, and make them one moving knot through the present, but all of time connected through that knot, through the moving present. Ironically, Zechariah’s song also does one more thing, in a way Luke never could have foreseen or intended. It ends with the one use of the word “epiphany” in all the Gospels.

The word means “revelation,” but it also means “light, illumination.” Epiphanai, sings Zechariah: Epiphanai tois en skotei kai skia thanatou kathamenois: light to those in darkness and in death’s shadow. Epiphanai: light, to show us the way. And so the Christmas stories connect again, through music.

There are two final songs in Luke, both short and simple: the gloria of the angels, a doxology, a praise to God and good news to humankind; and the nunc dimmitus, “now allow,” of Simeon, the song of the acceptance of death because history has been fulfilled, the expectation of Israel is over, the Exile is indeed now ended. One is the expected theophany of the birth of Messiah: Luke puts it in the mouths of heavenly messengers, but to draw shepherds, not magi, to witness the birth, because it is for them. And because the words “peace among those God favors” apply directly to the shepherds. It is for them this messiah has come. The reversal sung by Mary has already started. This news does not come first to the wise or the powerful, but to the outlaws, the shepherds, up late and with nothing else to do. As Mary sang, and Hanna before her, and the Psalmist, these are the ones favored by God, the poor and the oppressed to whom God listens. And again, their oppression is lifted, because they are the first invitees into the kingdom this new-born will grow up to proclaim.

Conclusion:

So these songs set the themes of the gospel stories. The Psalm and the lament of Jeremiah set the framework of Matthew’s nativity, and set it inside the story of the revelation already told by the Jewish people to themselves, already recorded and revered in their scriptures. Luke, the Gentile, speaks to a Gentile community of ostensibly Jewish matters, so the witness of scripture is not as strong a pull on him. But he, too, needs scripture to anchor his story, to give it context. Scripture, and songs, because the truth is revealed in dreams, and sung in inspiration. The Benedidictus and the Magnificat bookend the kerygma of the kingdom, the proclamation of the change that is coming, a change that will comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The Gloria is sung to those whom God favors, and it is not those we would expect; and the Nunc Dimmitus, much like Matthew’s gifts from the Magi, presents the eschaton, the end that awaits this family and this baby.

Unconnected with Matthew, still the stories are connected, and connected to the gospels they precede. They set the tone and themes for each gospel’s version of the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth: a story of a peasant born under oppression; oppression both social and economic, and political. Each of those sources of oppression and repression are challenged in the nativity stories, and shown to be undone by God’s hand, by God’s action in history. Both encompass, from the beginning, outsiders, which means people like us, and people still not like us. So both stories offer us challenges, today.

And if there is a lesson for us today, it is that oppression and suppression take many forms, and many of them are imposed on us not just by governments, but by groups, by societies and communities. Matthew’s community was occupied by evil rulers; Luke’s community was dominated and defined by the Roman Empire. Like them, we are always struggling against what holds us, and always looking for liberation. But the question both these gospels present to us, from the very beginning of their stories, is: in what form does our liberation come, and is it what we are looking for? Are we always ready to recognize our epiphany?

That all my priests have passed

I was having a discussion with a friend at the bookstore last night, recounting some of the more frightening encounters with people I'd had in pastoral minstry. And then this morning, I looked into Athenae's thread about Battlestar Galactica, and I found this:

And that's why I rebelled so strongly when Starbuck said they were safer with her than without her. While I understand a hundred percent why Starbuck would say that, that's who Starbuck is as well, it's also why Starbuck shouldn't be in charge. As long as she's only getting herself killed, it's all fun and games and crazy-ass stunts. When you're making decisions for others you don't have the luxury of those kinds of personal quests and private desires. Cain didn't get that, Starbuck doesn't get that. Adama does.

Which is why in the end I think he backed down. Shoot Cain and make her a martyr, prolong the state of crisis, keep everybody hopped up. Come to some kind of amicable solution, even if it's an amicable solution that takes the shape of Cain being dishonorably discharged for ordering the torture of prisoner of war, and you can begin the horrible, horrible process of everyday living.

A.

I left a note that I would steal that last line from her. And I mean to.

This touches on precisely why I've liked the show (when I watch it; TV scheduling has dropped out of my daily routine). I saw the episodes when Adama lay dying (an assassination attempt) and his second in command had to take over, and did so rather clumsily, at best.

That reminded me entirely of small-church ministry. You have no idea what being "in charge" is, and how much responsibility you have (and how little power or authority), until you step into a position of leadership., where the whole position (as a friend of mine in ministry said), is seeing the whole picture, especially when no one else will, or can.

It certainly isn't about strutting around like a bantam rooster (a la 'W'), and it isn't about giving orders and insisting they be followed because you have to be "tough" (as Adama's 2nd did).

It's about the horrible, horrible process of everyday living and being wholly responsible for it.

Which may move us along toward an answer to the question: "What is church for?"

But it is not, I fear, a very good answer.

Which is a religious (and theological) discussion in itself.

Ahistory Lessons

Returning to the question of history:

Monday, December 8, was Franklin Roosevelt's day.

On the bridge leading to the Lincoln Memorial a single machine gun had been mounted. Outside the State Department and the White House were guards wearing tin hats. These little flourishes of the capital at war would have appeared pathetic to anybody who had lived more than a day with Europe's war or seen anything of the uneasy peace of the years that preceded it. But they were awesome signs to the ordinary American civilian that the debates of the Interventionists and the Isolationists had gone into history. For a decade before the war begin, even as late as the summer of 1940, it was the common experience to drive across the continent and never see a soldier. You had to go out of your way in Texas or Kansas and look at an old fort from the Indian wars to realize that the American people had had since 1865 no great cause to translate belligerent pride into the ubiquitous symbols (in their own country) of uniforms, chevrons, and campaign ribbons. The silence crowd at the Capitol, watching its breath smoke up the winter sunlight, was a curious as any other crowd to recognize arriving celebrities. But a European would remark how often people nudged their neighbors to watch a sentry go by. They watched the clockwork pacing of these few guards with a mild wonder, for it is a literal fact that few if any of them had ever seen a fixed bayonet. Seeing Americans stop to examine a soldier in drab Army overcoat and tin hat, it was not difficult to believe that when the German armies poured into Poland, the standing army of the United States was the size of the standing army of Sweden.

--Alistair Cooke, The American Home Front 1941-1942 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006).

In the edition of Slaughterhouse Five I read in high school, Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in the preface that he'd learned in civics class that the great distinction of America was that, unlike European nations, it had no standing army. That struck me, a child of the Cold War, as an amazing fact.

It's hard to read this passage from Alastair Cooke's forthcoming book, and not read the entire history of America in the 20th century, down to the present moment, in it. Or to realize the dangers of not learning from history.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. It gives others power over you.

Never let reality get in the way of a good scare campaign.

Received this as an e-mail this morning.

As you know – the pledge of allegiance is currently under attack at the Supreme Court level and in many courts across the nation. Standing on the sideline is sometimes not what best serves our children or our values.

PETITION TO REINSTATE PLEDGE TO THE FLAG IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Agree or Delete: Instructions to sign are at the bottom.

PETITION FOR PRESIDENT BUSH

PETITION TO REINSTATE PLEDGE TO THE FLAG IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS:

Now, the first problem with this is, this came from a retired school administrator, who, as a teacher, should know better. This is basic civics. This question is back before the 9th Circuit. A lower court has abided by the previous 9th Circuit ruling, and held that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, makes its required use in public schools a violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment.

One court. Not "many courts across the nation." And it hasn't even reached the 9th Circuit again, much less the Supreme Court. And even if it does, this is a legal matter, not an executive one.

There is nothing for President Bush to do.

And then there's the secondary issue (and, again, I would expect a school administrator to understand this): President Bush is not in charge of the public schools. He is not the Supervisor of Schools par excellence, the final arbiter of what all schools can or cannot do. The President of the United States has never had that power, and never will. Nor is the POTUS the final arbiter of what government, in any of its branches or manifestations, can do. He does not control the Federal Government, and does not control state or local governments.

The problem with this petition is not that the Pledge of Allegiance is under attack in our schools. The problem is how woefully ignorant the graduates of our schools apparently are.

Or think we are.

(Note: this is the entire text of the e-mail, aside from a string of names and the admonition to forward this or it will "die". There is no substance to it at all. It is, in short, the most idiotic kind of spam. And proof that fear is the mind-killer. And that the larger problem is how alienated we all feel, from our government and from each other; and, apparently, from reality.)

And who will write love songs for you....?

I've been wanting to post an intelligent response to this comment ever since it was made, but I'm beginning to doubt my ability to do that.

In either case, a change of heart can only come after a period of reflection and self-awareness. But I wonder if there is a "middle way" between the two approaches. If we reflect on our brokenness and express a will to change, does God perhaps meet us halfway?

What is the role of a church in this?

geor3ge

So this will be as close as I can get.

I've been asking a variation of this question since seminary. Is church a place of spiritual seekers? Or a "club," a gathering of like-minded persons, or more likely loosely associated (if not related, as tends to be the culture of old E&R churches, which are more extended family than not) persons who are pursuing a similar end: a tolerable place to do what they've always done, without paying much in the way of dues, until they are duly carried out feet first in a ceremony worthy of their passing?

In other words: Christians? or baptized heathens?

That already puts the matter too starkly. Clearly a church is not a monastery, not a "religious community" in the sense of a committed body of "religious" (nuns, monks, oblates). But what is it, then?

There are, I think, two answers: the episcopal, and the congregational. Or, more to the point, the Catholic/Orthodox, and the Protestant.

Pastordan noted this article, from the Washington Post. It presents, it seems to me, a sharp contrast between the religious cultures. I have a hard time imagining any Protestant denomination reacting this way to the death of even a significant church leader:

The elaborate funeral Mass and memorial service unfolded over nearly 10 hours at Debre Selam Kidist Mariam Church, an Ethiopian Orthodox congregation that worships in a converted parking garage on Buchanan Street NW in 16th Street Heights.

Men and women -- many wearing traditional, gauzy robes over Western-style attire -- wept as clerics chanted the liturgy, sang hymns and recited eulogies in praise of the man whom many consider the father of Orthodox Christianity in the Ethiopian diaspora.

"He was the one who really started this church. He would come here from New York and give us service," recalled Sergout Workue, the church secretary, who immigrated to the United States 28 years ago.

And I think the difference is in the culture. Where the more formally episcopal churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Episcopalian) tend to carry their culture with them (even the Protestant Episcopal church carries on many Anglican traditions, such as parish schools), Protestant churches tend to be much more a product of their culture. Seen that way, the "mega-church" that preaches the gospel of wealth is not an aberration or a decline of the authority of the "mainline" church: it is the logical progression of Protestantism.

Which reflects, of course, its decline.

It isn't, in other words, a matter of "devolved power structure" or of a wrong turn somewhere in recent denominational history. This is the inevitability of hitching one's wagon to the dominant culture, rather than to an ecclesiastical culture. Catholicism dominated Europe, but "Rome" always built and ruled the cities. Even Augustine only compared the "City of God" to a human one; it was Calvin who tried to operate the two as one realm. And ever since then, Protestantism has, in one way or another, imagined itself to be that "shining city on the hill." Or certainly to be coming closer and closer to it, if only the right laws could be passed, the right people forced into or out of the right neighborhoods.

I can see I'll have trouble defending this thesis, and that may indicate its paucity of support or validity. But Protestantism was always about the kingdom of God being available in the right structuring of the whole community; it was always a bit more temporal than eternal, a bit more concerned with "progress" and "improvement" than with living in and among and alongside the "clouds of witness."

And I think that may prove to be its undoing. Because, more and more, I find the question "What is church for?" a peculiarly Protestant one. And more and more I find that, unless I can answer that question apart from a dependency on the dominant secular culture, I can't answer it at all. More and more I find the answer depends on whether the church serves God, or whether it serves the culture and the people. Because the dominant Protestant model of church is of church as spiritual "filling station," where I come to get "charged up" to face the next week. But that is church that prepares me to live in the world, as it is.

How can that church teach me to change that world, or call others away from that world? And if I call them away, where do we go?

Noted only for the irony

Will The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops be considered "religious leaders," like Pat Robertson and Dr. James Dobson?

Or will this story sink beneath our wisdom like a stone?

(with acknowledgements, again, to Holden)

Woodsman, spare that law!

Sir Thomas More: There's no law against that.

William Roper : God's law!

Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.

William Roper: While you talk, he's gone!

Sir Thomas More: Go he should, if he were the Devil, until he broke the law.

William Roper: Now you give the Devil benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes, what would you do?

William Roper: Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil? Yes. I'd cut down every law in England to do that.

Sir Thomas More: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you...where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast...Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down...and you're just the man to do it...do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then?

Yes. I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.

--Robert Bolt, "A Man for All Seasons". I'd say it was a cliche, but then I saw this at First Draft:

The Bush administration took the unusual step yesterday of asking the Supreme Court to call off a landmark confrontation over the legality of military trials for terrorism suspects, arguing that a law enacted last month eliminates the court's ability to consider the issue.

In a 23-page brief, U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement said the justices should throw out an appeal by Yemeni national Salim Hamdan, an alleged driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, because a new statute governing the treatment of U.S. detainees "removes the court's jurisdiction to hear this action."

Sen. Patrick Leahy tried to get Judge Alito to agree with former Chief Justice Rehnquist, that Congress lacked the power to remove the Court's First Amendment jurisdiction. Judge Alito did so reluctantly. Now I understand better what Sen. Leahy was driving at.

The Administration also wants to ignore the legislative history, and, reminiscent of precisely what upset the FISA judges, they want to blatantly mispresent the situation to the Court:

"Congress made clear that the federal courts no longer have jurisdiction over actions filed on behalf of Guantanamo detainees," [U.S. Solicitor General] Clement wrote [in a brief to the Court].

Levin, in a statement issued yesterday, said that "the Justice Department is in error. Far from deciding that the relevant statutory language applies to pending cases, Congress specifically considered and rejected language that would have stripped the courts of jurisdiction in cases that they had before them."
...
Burt Neuborne, a New York University law professor who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the Hamdan case, said the government's brief ignores the fact that if Hamdan's case is dismissed, he and other detainees will have no avenue to challenge the legality of Bush's power to detain enemy combatants and create military trials.

"The government's basic argument is: You can't hear it now, but you can hear it later," Neuborne said. "What they don't say is that the other route doesn't let Hamdan raise the question of the president's authority in these cases. . . . They're not telling the Supreme Court the real consequences of their motion."

This also explains why there is some consideration to giving Congress a separate advocate before the Courts, especially is the "Unitary Presidency" theory becomes established as a new tradition of governance.

Habeas corpus is the most basic of our legal principles. It is, as no less an authority than the Supreme Court has noted (in Harris v. Nelson, 394 U.S. 286, 290-91 (1969) ), "the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action." As the Court observed in McCleskey: "[t]he writ of habeas corpus is one of the centerpieces of our liberties." McCleskey v. Zant, 499 US 467 (1991) And it's purpose is entirely, and fundamentally, to resolve a question of Constitutional law:

The predominant inquiry on habeas is a legal one: whether the "petitioner's custody simpliciter" is valid as measured by the Constitution. Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 730 (1991).

In brief, it doesn't get more fundamental than habeas corpus; and now the Bush Administration wants to remove it, entirely for their convenience. AS I said at First Draft: "If Congress can remove the Court's jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus appeals, it can essentially gut the court system entirely. There is no right more fundamental to our legal traditions and system than habeas corpus."

We have reached the point where they would cut down every law in America to get at the Devil. Will the Supreme Court permit this? Well, with Samuel Alito on the bench, the risk of that seems to be more real than it might have been. Equally frightening is that this Administration will not back down one inch from its extreme legal positions. The Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to hearings. In 2006, those same detainees are still on hunger strikes to protest their incarceration, and are being treated in brutal and inhumane ways, in violation of international law as well as U.S. law. And yet that treatment continues.

As Robert Bolt understood, in avid pursuit of the Devil, we catch him. And the Devil ends up being whoever has the power.

And the law is no longer available to defend us, or to adjudicate the question.

Here Come Da Judge!

The Alito hearings are stirring my atrophied legal muscles. And it occurs to me that the concept of "unconstitutional," one linked inextricably now to the phrase "liberal activist judges," deserves a little more attention.

"Unconstitutional" does not mean the court imposes its will on the people, the Congress, or the President. "Unconstitutional" is not an extension of will at all; and that may be where the problem lies. "Unconstitutional" does not extend the will of the court out into the world; it only restricts the power of the government to act. It does exactly what it says it does: it declares that the government does not have the power to take an action.

The Constitution alone, under our system of government, gives government the power to act. It has been interpreted, at least until Alberto Gonzalez and Samuel Alito, as a restriction on power. Those powers not specifically enumerated have been held, largely, not to have been granted. And when such powers are found, as in the famous "penumbral rights" Justice Douglas found in Griswold, and Justice Blackmun relied on in Roe, they exist as rights of the individual, and such rights are always a restriction on the power of government to act, especially if such action is in interference with those rights.

So the government does not have the power to establish separate but equal schools, based on racial distinctions. It does not have the power to arrest a criminal suspect without giving that suspect notice of his basic constitutional rights in the criminal justice system, or access to an attorney. Government cannot restrict the sale of contraceptives, or wholly restrict access to abortion.

A decision that a statute or act of a governmental authority is unconstitutional, is a restriction of power, not an extension of it. The court's power is wholly negative in this field, not positive. It can only restrict the government's authority to act. Not even its ability, because if the executive (which enforces the law) chooses to ignore the directive of the court, the court has no power to enforce its ruling. It has no control over the purse, no army or navy or even police force at its disposal. All the actions of control are with the Executive or Legislative branches. The court can only declare what those branches cannot do.

"Liberal" is usually associated with an extension of power, with the extension of governmental involvement in the public or private sphere. But these are, properly, the realm of the Legislature, which can authorize spending, support certain actions, make positive efforts to do what it sees fit as authorized under the system established by the Constitution. The limitation on that power is the very "conservative" power of judicial review; the power of the courts to say "No."

So, for example, I can write a restrictive covenant into my title deed, seeking to restrict the sale of my real property from certain classes of people in perpetuity. The Courts, however, cannot enforce that covenant, for such enforcement has been ruled unconstitutional. That is a restriction on governmental power. In Bush v. Gore, however, the Supreme Court went beyond declaring that the Florida Supreme Court was restricted in the application of its power over the parties in that case, and declared the victor of the election in question. That was, in fact, a "liberal" use of the court's power, if by "liberal" we mean an extension of the government's power in new and unprecedented ways.

The ironies raised by these issues will provide further discussions. Not least is the irony of how this connects us to Reinhold Niebuhr and Pat Robertson.

BTW: I think Sen. Biden is right: these hearings have become a farce. Time to return to the "historical practice:" take the nominee to the floor, and debate his statements, without all this bafflegab about what he or she can't comment on, can't remember, or simply can't say.

And Sidney Blumenthal has a cogent examination of Judge Alito's judicial philosophy.

[and now I will stop piling up posts for awhile, and allow the comments to develop]

"I just wonder when we're going to 'start taking sin seriously again.' "

This, as pastordan points out, is the crux of the issue. At one time "evangelicals" especially were mostly concerned with sin. It would be a fair criticism to say they took it too seriously.

But having set it aside, they turn now to either the Gospel of Wealth (Joel Osteen's church website proclaim him: "... a proven leader for this generation - a generation that believes all things are possible!"), or the gospel of power:

"We were able to hold off Michael Moore and the folks in Hollywood, and most of the national media, and George Soros and the Kennedy crowd that fought so fiercely against the election of George Bush," former Moral Majority chairman Jerry Falwell told about 600 people gathered in the Greater Exodus Baptist Church [which received more than $1.6 million in Faith-Based Initiatives handouts] here.

Pat Robertson, after all, wasn't worried about salvation when he declared Ariel Sharon's stroke a sign of God's judgment; nor when he condemned Dover, Pennsylvania, or Disney World in Florida.

Pastordan refers to Reinhold Niebuhr's first important work, Moral Man and Immoral Society. The book has its flaws, but it was written in part in response to the doctrine of the Social Gospel, an idea that started with Walter Rauschenbusch ( a Baptist, by the way) and the same concerns for industrialized society that Niebuhr expressed (and had; he was the pastor of an E&R church in Detroit in the late 20's and early 30's). But Rauschenbusch and his followers placed the burden for bringing the Kingdom of God on society itself. The end sounds familiar enough: government, the rights of labor, and socialist ideas. "The Church as an transformational institution would stand up for those who had no voice and provide for those who could not do enough to help their own families."

The problem was, as Niebuhr understood, that societies had to take care of themselves. They could not put their existence at risk in order to care for the weakest and the poorest. In this his analysis was more purely American than he could know, since modern Europe managed the transformation far better than America, and without the Church as a necessary "transformational institution." But, as sociologists Emerson and Smith wrote, paraphrasing Niebuhr's central insight:

At the individual level, selfishness is usually considered negative, but at the group level, it is considered moral and just. Indeed, at the group level, it is not called selfishness, but morality, service, sacrifice, or loyalty. Although we are selfish if we always look out for our own individual needs first it is considered wrong and immoral if we do not consider the needs of our family first, ahead of other families. We house our families first, and only if we can spare extra do we help house other families. To do otherwise is considered immoral or, at a minimum, a sad case of misplaced priorities.

As Niebuhr says (and pastordan quotes):

For this reason, relations between groups are always mainly political rather than ethical or moral. As Niebuhr says, "They will always be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses atleast as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group.

And so the Social Gospel fails, being built upon the sandy foundations of human endeavour and human institutions. And Niebuhr made this analysis in part by taking sin seriously.

Which may be what the Pope was doing the other day:

With Michelangelo's dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment as a backdrop, Benedict attacked the "thing-infliction of mankind", suggesting that people had become little more than objects to be traded, picked up and discarded at will.

He singled out ancient Rome's Colosseum amphitheatre and the gardens of the
emperor Nero, where Christians were once martyred, as a "real perversion of joy
and a perversion of the sense of life."

"The anti-culture of death was a love of lies and of deceit. It was an abuse of the body as a commodity and as a product. Even in our times there is this culture and we must say 'No' to it," he said.

It was the first time since he became pope that Benedict has ignored the prepared text of his homily, sent to the media beforehand, and instead spoken at length off the cuff.

NPR reported that teen depression is a major problem in this country. A problem, like other problems, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and some members of the Senate Judiciary committe would attribute to the actions of the Supreme Court, if not the entire Federal government. Which attribution, curiously and perversely enough, run on the same assumptions as the Social Gospel, and are subject to Niebuhr's analysis: that our fundamental problems are political, and the solutions lie with government.

But, as pastordan (again!) points out this morning, that, too, can be precisely the problem:

The reigning conservative ideologues in the White House and on Capitol Hill believe, with apparent sincerity, that the path to economic and social progress for all is to reward--"incentivize"--the rich and to liberate private business from the wealth-destroying fetters of regulation. When these become the highest purposes of public policy, and when the ameliorative functions of government are held in contempt, then a single thread ties together upper-income tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental and safety protections, the shredding of the social safety net, the peopling of regulatory agencies with cronies hostile to their purposes, and, finally, outright corruption. If government is seen as a whore, why not treat her as one? All that remains is to fleece the johns and divide the take.

Niebuhr understood the fundamental problem was in our hearts, not in our systems. We cannot build a system which will cleanse our hearts for us, or do good for us in spite of our lesser intentions. That idea is the "magical" one that critics accuse religion of: that something outside of ourselves will save us from our failings, that some power will exert our will but filter it to do only the good, and not allow the bad, even if that power is nothing more than our best intentions.

Niebuhr, ultimately, did not offer an apologia for the way things were. He assessed with clear eyes why institutional efforts would not bring about the desired change. We have to start with our hearts.

Which returns us to the question of when, and how, to take sin seriously again.

"Should I lead? Should I follow? Won't you say, 'Come with Me?' "

Coming back to this topic:

RMJ,
To what extent do you think this hunt for "leaders"--faces for the movement--a function of discomfort with the largely devolved power structure of low-church Protestantism? (Sorry, ducking, but you know what I mean.) You want to find the head of the Catholic Church or the Episcipal Church, you look it up and find them. It's my understanding that contemporary evangelical Christianity is simply not organized that way. Or do I have that wrong?
NYMary

There is a lot of insight here, that I've considered myself as I move from a congregationally based polity to an episcopalian polity. And I've decided a great deal of this has to do with culture, and with what I've called here, before, "Christendom."

My reference for that term has come largely from Soren Kierkegaard's Attack Upon 'Christendom,' an "attack" most Americans misunderstand because we have no experience with a state church, as the Danish church was in the mid 19th century. In Europe church and state provided the culture into which individuals were born and in which they grew up. The same culture prevailed when the Puritans left England and established governments in the "New World." That culture finally started to fall under the twin pressures of the Enligthenment and the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, and no one rejoiced in it more loudly than the Baptists, who had been persecuted in England for their refusal to "pledge allegiance" to the Church of England, and so the state for which it stood, which prompted, understandably, no small amount of suspicion about them and other "non-conformists."

Now consider the situation today. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest gathering of Baptists in the world, claiming a membership of 16 million, split a few years ago over the issue of authority. Baptists were famously congregational in polity. Each church affiliated with the Convention sent "travelers" to a meeting of all the congregations, but that meeting was never permitted to speak for the congregations. The United Church of Christ, being a merger of the episcopalian Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Church, follows a similar practice at its biannual General Synod. In the UCC, General Synod speaks for: General Synod. The local church is, by the Constitution of the UCC, autonomous and can agree with Synod's resolutions, or reject them outright. Much the same practice held for the Southern Baptist Convention, until it was decided that it should not hold.

It was, in short, a question of leadership, a question of who speaks for the Southern Baptist Convention. This lead to a split in the Convention, with a number of churches in Texas reportedly leaving the SBC, and with the SBC trying twice to exert control over Baylor University in Waco, attempts that failed largely because Baylor's charter pre-dated the SBC by several decades. "Herding cats" was the non-Texan way of describing trying to get Baptists to follow a single leader, until some in the SBC decided a leader was precisely what most Baptists needed.

Why did this happen? I think one reason is cultural. As Christendom, a sort of cultural assumption in America that we are all Christian, that despite our differences we all go to church on Sunday morning, began to dissolve in the face of reality, the cultural underpinnings that held churches together began to dissolve, too. Now, there are several ironies here, all related to the basic ahistorical nature of American culture.

1) Church attendance was never very high in American history. I don't have the statistics readily at hand, but at the time of the American Revolution I think roughly 20% of the colonists attended a church regularly, and the number never really went up much beyond that. The cantankerous, non-church going father of "Spencer's Mountain" (by the same guy who wrote "The Waltons") was a typical, not a-typical, American.

2) World War II changed all that. Literally. Sociologists and church leaders agree that church attendance spiked after World War II, for a complex series of reasons. Baby boomers like your host grew up in that "boom," and took it for the norm. It wasn't; it was the aberration.

3) A third sign of the aberration of WWII: American flags in church. I used to have a photograph of the "historic chapel" of the church I last pastored. The chapel was built in the mid-19th century, a clapboard structure that was used for worship until the 1960's, when a large stone sanctuary was built to house the 300+ members who poured into the area as employees of oil companies came to Houston and settled on what was then the outskirts of town (and is now a densely urban area with no sign of the farms that were here as late as the 1960's). The picture showed the chapel adorned for Easter Sunday. Notably missing from the adornments is an American flag.

The sanctuary had one, however, and every Scout Sunday the service was opened with a pledge of allegiance to that flag, as it was brought in by a processional, much as the cross is processed in every Sunday morning in the Episcopal church I now attend. A German pastor visited my church, and asked about that flag. She was my age, and so grew up after Nazi Germany, but still the overt sign of nationalism in a house of worship made her very uncomfortable. And hers was a church supported by the German church tax. She and I saw that flag as a symbol of nationalism, but her host on her tour, a veteran of WWII, saw it as a memorial to those who had died in that war, and subsequent wars.

I don't think any American saw the flag as that kind of symbol before WWII.

Anecdotal evidence at best, of course, but I think it is true that, before Pearl Harbor, America was still a collection of states which looked upon Washington, D.C. as a necessary evil, and called upon it only when disaster overwhelmed the states (as when Herbert Hoover helped Louisiana recover from the flood of 1929). The assault on Hawaii, however, was an assault on the nation, and thereafter the disparate states had to think of themselves as one country. It was a question of leadership.

Since World War II we have thought of ourselves, more and more, as a federal nation first, a collection of states, second. But simultaneous with that, we thought of ourselves as largely white and Protestant Christian. And yet it has become clearer and clearer that, even as the political identity gains strength, the cultural identity diminishes. We are not largely "white," and we are not largely Christian; Protestant, or otherwise.

The assumption that we were all alike, in other words, held the Protestant churches together. Most congregation members by my childhood were hard pressed to identify the significant differences between Presbyterians and Methodists and Congregationalists, or the different flavors of Baptist. Lutherans and Episcopalians were distinctive if only for their basically liturgical worship, which most Protestants would have understood as "Catholic." Those denominations which once gave their communities identity lost that importance, especially as the denominations became less episcopal in structure (moving from Methodist to Presbyterian to Baptist). But what held those less structured denominations together was a common culture, a set of assumptions that everyone lived by.

Until they didn't, anymore.

Church is no longer reserved to Sunday morning at 11 a.m. Church is no longer held automatically on Sunday, even when Sunday is Christmas Day. Church services are no longer held in quasi-Gothic structures, with hardwood pews and music provided only by pipe organs, and pastors wearing robes and standing behind pulpits, and even every pastor preaching a variation on the doctrine of sin. People no longer even need go to church, or be a member of a church, to consider themselves Christian. Indeed, Sunday is no longer a sacrosanct day upon which all stores must be closed, all forms of entertainment forced to "rest" on "our" Sabbath (which was never on Saturday).

Without the culture acknowledging the leadership of the church in such matters, and without church being an important part of one's social life, even in small towns (where it helps, but hardly has the effect it once did), the church faces a serious question its own existence, its own leadership. And so the church finds itself in the situation Antonio Gramsci described:

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears."

An "Open Mind" Gathers No Controversy

The press reports today are all about how "well" Samuel Alito handled the questions put to him yesterday. Maybe that has to do with the quality of the questions. Although this is clearly a public hearing, and is being broadcast, and therefore Senators are more inclined to bombast and pontification than to seriously questioning the witness, we are entitled to expect serious answers to questions about legal issues from the nominee.

Some of the questions yesterday centered on Youngstown v. Sawyer, and the issue of the "inherent" ("penumbral," when discussing the Roe v. Wade right to privacy; "tacit" when discussing such powers in the law, the preferred term of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist) powers of the President. Judge Alito gave an answer that was very clearly no answer at all, leaving open the question of how he sees that issue, and how far "outside" or how much "within" the mainstream of judicial opinion he is.

The correct answer is this one, provided by Professor Lawrence Tribe:

Any such characterization would be hard to take seriously with respect to unchecked warrantless wiretapping. As the Supreme Court famously held in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), an emergency presidential takeover for a limited time of certain critical publicly held corporations like Bethlehem Steele Co. and the United States Steele Co., in order to avert the threat that would be posed to our national security by a stoppage of the steel production needed for weapons and other materials essential to the ongoing Korean War, falls outside that tiny category of congressionally illimitable executive acts and is indeed unconstitutional unless affirmatively authorized by Congress. If that is so, then certainly an unchecked presidential program of secretly recording the conversations of perhaps thousands of innocent private citizens in the United States in hopes of gathering intelligence potentially useful for the ongoing war on a global terrorist network not only falls outside that category but misses it by a mile.

The only escape from that conclusion would be to hold that inherent and illimitable presidential power to abridge individual liberty and erode personal privacy categorically exceeds presidential power to displace temporarily the corporate managers of entirely impersonal business property, without confiscating, transferring, or otherwise touching the property's ultimate ownership by the holders of its shares. But our Constitution embodies no such perverse system of priorities.

The presidential power at issue in this case is therefore subject to the control of Congress. And that Congress has indeed forbidden this exercise of power is clear. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 unambiguously limits warrantless domestic electronic surveillance, even in a congressionally declared war, to the first 15 days of that war; criminalizes any such electronic surveillance not authorized by statute; and expressly establishes FISA and two chapters of the federal criminal code, governing wiretaps for intelligence purposes and for criminal investigation, respectively, as the "exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted." 50 U.S.C. §§ 1811, 1809, 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(f).

"Questions of law" are those questions upon which reasonable minds will not differ. That is not a standard which means everyone must agree upon what the law is when applied to any particular set of facts; but neither is it a standard which permits the kind of legal analysis of Presidential power which Judge Alito has committed to paper and made in speeches in the past.

Nor is it too much to ask for an analysis of a point of law from a candidate for the Supreme Court. Another legal scholar might disagree with Professor Tribe's analysis, but this is a clear, cogent analysis of the law, and leaves no ambiguity on a subject upon which there should be no ambiguity. The settled constitutional principle, after all, is that the Constitution is a check on the power of the government, not a general provision of power to be expanded upon as necessary. It is the final word on governmental authority, not the first word, and so it has been interpreted, even in Brown v. Board of Education, even in Roe v. Wade.

But that's not the answer Judge Alito gave yesterday. And that's where the arguments over law revolve today: not over how the power of government is to be checked, but over how it is to be wielded, and extended.

Alito's profession of an "open mind" is precisely this kind of reasoning: an open mind to new theories of law unsupported by Constitutional doctrine, and completely contrary to the notion of the Constitution as a check on governmental power. His "open mind" would, instead, extend the power of government in ways unknown in the history of this country under this Constitution.

N.B.--Dick Durbin understands this. As I type, he is questioning Alito about Brown v. Board of Education and Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark cases for "judicial activism," and yet an inviolable decision (both examples of "super precedent, even "super duper precedent". While we have now tacitly accepted segregated schools again [and so we really just pay lip service to Brown], who among us would stand for a state ban on contraceptives again?) And yet Alito refuses, as Roberts did (per Durbin), to declare Roe v. Wade "the settled law of the land." There's a reason for that. He has an "open mind."

History Lesson

The stories we like to tell ourselves about history, are about men and women taking responsibility for their actions, and for our present (their future). In Texas, we like to "Remember the Alamo!"

The problem is that institutions are set up precisely to allow individuals to avoid responsibility. And they do it so effectively (they serve their masters well), that we can only find responsibility enacted, by selectively looking into the past.

Usually:

Wars are won when the people, government and army work together for a common cause in which they genuinely believe. Whereas the people may be initially uncertain about military intervention, politicians will often be the strongest advocates - blinded by the imperatives of their political views. It will invariably be military commanders who are most cautious about using force - for they understand better than most the consequences of engaging in war.

Although in a true democracy they must remain subordinate to their political masters, they have a clear responsibility to point out when political strategies are flawed or inadequately resourced. Since they might also have to ask their soldiers to sacrifice their lives, they must be assured that a war is just, legal and the last resort available. Yet three years ago this country was somehow led by the prime minister into war in Iraq where few, if any, of these requirements were met.

Most importantly a clear justification for the war in Iraq was never sufficiently made by Tony Blair - for the intelligence he presented was always embarrassingly patchy and inconsistent. What is more, his unequivocal statement to the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be used within 45 minutes was made without being properly validated - for it was decided in Washington and London to launch the invasion of Iraq early, on the basis of the flimsy evidence available. This was done without asking the UN weapons inspectors, who were actually on the ground in Iraq, to investigate this allegation. Ultimately, as the inspectors suspected and as we now all know, it turned out that there were no such weapons. Britain had been led into war on false pretences. It was a war that was to unleash untold suffering on the Iraqi people and cause grave damage to the west's prospects in the wider war against global terror.

Nevertheless, today the prime minister seeks to persuade the world that the war was justifiable because Saddam Hussein was toppled and there now exists in Iraq a slender hope of democracy. The Iraqi elections are a creditable achievement by the coalition forces. But it must be remembered that a general election was previously held in Iraq in 1956, and within two years the country had fallen under military rule. Without adequate security and the necessary democratic institutions in place, there are absolutely no long-term guarantees that democracy will endure.

Before the invasion, regime change was never cited as a reason for going to war. Indeed, Mr Blair insisted that regime change was not, nor ever could be, a reason for going to war. Had such a justification been fully debated in parliament, it is exceedingly unlikely that the necessary political support would have been forthcoming. It was the apparent need to defend ourselves against a dire threat - so vividly described by Mr Blair in the Commons - that finally won the political argument.

During the build-up to war and since, most of the electorate of this country have consistently opposed the decision to invade. People have seen their political wishes ignored for reasons now proved false. But there has been no attempt in parliament to call Mr Blair personally to account for what has transpired to be a blunder of enormous strategic significance. It should come as no surprise therefore that so many of this country's voters have turned their backs on a democratic system they feel has so little credibility and is so unresponsive.

One obvious way of re-engaging these disaffected voters would be for parliament to accept that it wrongly supported the war - but only because it believed what Mr Blair told them. Now it is clear that parliament was misled by Mr Blair, either wittingly or unwittingly, parliament should also call on him for a full explanation as to why he went to war. It is not a sufficient excuse for Mr Blair to say that he acted in good faith and that his decisions were based on the intelligence he had been given. For it is the clear responsibility of people in his position to test intelligence. No intelligence can ever be taken at face value. Indeed it is negligent so to do.

Sir Michael's analysis is clear and concise, and based solely on what cannot be disputed: responsibility lies with those who decided the U.S. and Britain must invade Iraq. Nothing the people of those two democracies was told about that invasion has turned out to be true. Congress and Parliament are ultimately responsible for such decisions, and now must shoulder that responsibility and look to the leaders who led the cry for battle, and ask why they should be allowed to lead any further.

I used to think the major political difference between Britain and America was that the Prime Minister could only be removed by a vote of no confidence, while the President could only be removed from office by impeachment.

Now we know the difference between the two countries. The British have General Sir Michael Rose.

We have Colin Powell.

The Business of American Religion is Business--Calvin Coolidge

Admittedly I am wandering into Metacomments territory here, but this entry at the CBSblog is related to a discussion that started here, and it makes some interesting points.

First, Bob Schieffer says:

"I think we have to be very careful about quoting Robertson, because I'm not sure who he represents anymore," he said. "His comments have gone beyond interesting and into bizarre." The "Evening News," he points out, has not covered Robertson's recent comments.

But unfortunately, no one else picks up on the issue: just who does Pat Robertson speak for? And why did anyone ever decide he spoke for anyone except Pat Robertson? Even Schieffer falls for the error that media presence = representation:

So who does he think is a better representative of evangelicals? Jim Wallis, who Schieffer calls "very compelling." (It's worth noting that many consider Wallis to be left-leaning, unlike most evangelical leaders.)And then it sort of goes downhill from there:

Michael Bass, the executive producer of the "Early Show," also gave me his take on the issue. "We would only try to book Pat Robertson when he's a newsmaker and we want to interview him to ask him about it," he says. "Otherwise he would not be a choice for us because there are other people who speak for many more people."

And Pat Robertson speaks for people because he has a TV audience?

Bass says two of his favorite voices when it comes to religion are Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life," and Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church. He also mentions Billy Graham, who these days is rarely available for interviews, and his son Franklin. "They're worthy of the following they've inspired," he says.

Now, I can't quite argue about Billy Graham; but Joel Osteen would only speak for Lakewood Church; which is a big church, but if it is associated with a denomination, it's not obvious from its website. They do claim to reach 200 million households, though.) Rick Warren is a best-selling author; as is Osteen, for that matter. So I guess that makes them "leaders." But again, of who? TV watchers and buyers of books?

Getting still closer to the nut of the matter:

Gal Beckerman, who wrote a piece asking why journalists don’t “get” religion for Columbia Journalism Review, says figures like Robertson and Jerry Falwell are overcovered. "They have the most bombastic thing to say. It's like anything else – you go to the guys who give you the best quotations," he says. "They make for good TV. It's unfortunate." (Bass, for his part, says Falwell "has been a guest several times and we like him.")

Beckerman says that the media's reporting on Robertson's extreme comments "does evangelicals a disservice." Other, more representative evangelical leaders, he says, are more likely to "give nuanced answers – and from a media perspective that makes them less interesting."

This isn't, ultimately, just a religious issue, says Schieffer. It's rooted in larger questions about the way the media functions. "One of the problems we have in TV is that we too often go to the first person who has something to say – and that's often the person we should be paying the least attention to," he says. "We go out and find the people who are on the most extreme sides and let them scream at each other."

Media outlets don't just want the most incendiary quote, however. They also want a familiar face. That's why, Sullivan argues, Robertson and Falwell continue to get significant coverage. "As for Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, their heyday was twenty years ago; the only reason they're still booked as talking heads is that most producers don't know these two men no longer have any power," she writes. Sullivan says that Ted Haggard, Warren, Brian McLaren, Osteen, Rod Parsley, and Franklin Graham, among others, are religious leaders who should be featured as evangelical voices of today.

I guess it's a question of what power you're talking about, since Robertson has a pretty good sinecure (thanks to NYMary for that link). There is business power, and then there is leadership power, apparently.

But I'm still left wondering why any of the people Sullivan lists should be considered "leaders" of public opinion among evangelicals. Especially since the anointing of such a person tends to be a tautological one: "they" are leaders of "that group" because we said so, which gives "them" a "leadership position," because the media all says so.

And round and round it goes.

Epiphany

January 6th; the "twelfth" day of Christmas. Observed by most churches (I suspect), yesterday.

"Epiphany" comes from the Greek word "epiphaneia," which my Bauer (Greek lexicon) translates as "appearance", with the intransitive verb form "to show." Interestingly, the English word was so associated with the church that as recently as some 20 years ago the OED entry for the word still gave a first definition as the festival on January 6th, commemorating the visit of the Magi, and the second definition "A manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being."

So it has almost always been a "religious" word in English.

Interestingly, too, the Greek word ("epiphaneia") only appears in the letters of the New Testament, and once in the Gospels: in Luke 1:79.

"To shine on those sitting in darkness, in the shadow of death, to guide our feet to the way of peace."

The last "verse" of the song of Zechariah, the "Benedictus."

One can make a lot of idle speculation of all of this. Epiphany is actually at the heart of Christianity, and causes the constant friction Christianity has had with Greek rationalism ab initio. Greek epistemology, via Aristotle, was based on the idea that knowledge was "discovered" from the natural world (so for centuries those we now call "scientists" were referred to as "natural philosophers"). Plato's epistemology is often considered to be different, but the difference is really only in type, not in kind. For Socrates knowledge came, not from the "illusory" world, but from the "real" soul, and the memories recovered there via the instruments of the illusory world. Either way, though, the most important knowledge is "discovered" by the activity of the subject.

Hebraic epistemology, on the other hand, and such as it was, centered on revelation, on the revealing of knowledge from the source of all things: the Creator.

This is not a mere academic concern. Much has been made of late about Paul's writings, and how they are less valid than the Gospels because Paul never knew Jesus (neither did the Gospel writers, most likely), and mentions little about the life of Jesus, and nothing about his teachings, but claims authority based on his "revelation."

"for surely you have already heard of the commission of God's grace that was given me for you, and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words..." --Ephesians 3:2-3.

Revelation, for many in Paul's audience, was grounds enough for a claim to authority, one that would then be tested against the "proven" revelation of the Scriptures. To his Gentile audience, Paul would then appeal to a different kind of knowledge; but this brings us to Matthew, and the story of the Magi.

The story itself is really quite simple. A lot of traditions have grown up around it, to the point we are convinced Matthew mentions three wise men (he only mentions three gifts), and that the star "led" them to the stall (that's Luke, by the way) in Bethlehem, all the way from "the East." In fact, it's the traditions around Matthew that have led to speculations about whether the star was a nova (Johannes Kepler's theory), a comet (Halley's?); or even a planetary conjuuction. Which shows, in part, the pervasiveness of Greek epistemology. Or maybe it's just a "human tendency." But, as Yeats asked, how can you know the dancer from the dance?

Back to Matthew: First, the star doesn't move until the end of the story. What the Magi report to Herod is that they have seen the new king's star "at its rising," and have come to pay him homage. A bit of Greek epistemology, I think, intruding into Matthew's Jewish world. Nature reveals a truth Herod's scholars have missed, until it is pointed out to them. But the Magi don't know everything, and have to rely on the Holy Scriptures for final directions. It is only then that the star "moves" and guides them until it stands still over the spot where the child lay. Which may simply mean, again, it brought them at night (a powerfully metaphorical scene, that; the light shining in darkness.) Why do I insist on the distinction? Because Matthew tells us Herod ordered the death of all males 2 years old and younger, based on what the Magi had told him. So "lay" doesn't mean an infant unable to sit up.

So what is the Epiphany? Traditionally, it is the revealing of Jesus to the Gentiles. Perhaps there is even a bit of unintended bias involved in it, as most of the early church "fathers" were primarily Greek in their epistemology, and sympathetic to a story that gave them an opportunity to "see" the Christchild in signs available to those without knowledge of the Scriptures, but also signs that required them to come to the Scriptures for full understanding. Certainly Augustine and Aquinas would find that a comforting tale.

But it is also the crucial story for Christians, a much more important story than simply the chance to wear coloured robes and lead a camel through the church (which my church did yesterday, and I'm glad they did it. They were glad, also, for the first time, that the floor was tile, not carpet.) It is the story of how we know what we know, and where our knowledge truly comes from. It is not a story with an answer, however. As T.S. Eliot intuited, it is a story that only points in a direction.

A story worthy of more meditation and consideration than we are wont to give it.