Antidisestablishmentarianism

Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (an excellent book), and of the article in the current Harpers' Magazine, is on "Democracy Now!" as I type. Hedges' father, as he says, was a Presbyterian minister, and he himself holds an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. He is making an excellent argument that the "Dominionists" (who, apparently, take their name from the King James version of Genesis 2, where humanity is told to "take dominion" over all the earth) are a political, not a religious, movement.

The Rev. Joseph Phelps, pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, (and a graduate of Southern Theological Seminary, in the '70's), which church held a "counter" "Justice Sunday" service which 1000 people or so attended, is also on, and he gives me use for a word I learned in elementary school. As Rev. Phelps points out, the founders of this country were "disestablishmentarians." That is, they were against creating an "established" church.

Moehler told "Justice Sunday" that they were calling on people "merely to be moral, we want them to be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Because we don't just need instruction, we need salvation." He tied that sentiment directly to the federal judiciary, whom he said held control over much of what is important to this nation. Not satisfied, he makes clear, to control the administrative and legislative branches of government, he was exhorting people of a similar mind to seek control over the judiciary branch, as well. It is not unreasonable, to pick up on a point from the previous point, to call such language intolerant, or to focus on the issue of tolerance. What Lewis Lapham said, in that quote, was: "we err on the side of folly if we continue to grant the boon of tolerance to people who mean to do us harm in the conviction that they receive from Genesis the command ‘to take dominion over the Earth,’ to build the Kingdom of God, to create the Christian nation. The proposition is as murderous as it is absurd ...” What Mr. Lapham is complaining about there is not the activities of a Martin Luther King, Jr., or even necessarily the political candidacy of a Pat Robertson. Mr. Robertson sought political power, and Dr. King sought to change the injustice of American society. What Mr. Lapham identifies is not the error of trying to bring the kingdom of God to earth (we can have a fine theological argument, in fact, on precisely what that kingdom of God is: whether it is imminent or present, to come, coming, or already come). The concern voiced by Mr. Lapham is for "people who mean to do us harm," and do so "in the conviction that they receive from Genesis the command...to create the Christian nation." What these people seek is not merely political power, but absolute control; and an absolute control based on absolute religious beliefs.

When Albert Mohler says the line isn't drawn at morality, but at salvation, he means a very particular, very narrow theological position, one shared by a tiny segment of the world religion of Christianity. Mr. Hedges writes from his experience at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, and he makes it clear that the issue for the supporters of "Justice Sunday" is not the filibuster, or the appointment of a few bad judges, but winning a battle of good over evil. Whether that battle even has any theological validity is another question; whether we are called to fight it, and win it, on God's behalf, is the question before us. That is another issue, as Reinhold Niebuhr argued in Moral Man and Immoral Society, that I may take up for myself, but I cannot impose it on society at large. What we are seeing, in fact, is the last gasp of "Christendom," but we should not prolong its death throes by quibbling over distinctions about "tolerance."

This is not a Christian nation, and should not be. If Christ ever intended to rule as a temporal leader, then his death was indeed a failure. There can be no other way to understand it. As Rev. Phelps says, Rev. Mohler and his allies want to rewrite American history. They are antidestablishmentarians. They seek the establishment of a "Christian nation." And one of the crucial questions will be: whose Christianity? That of Benedict XVI? Of the Jesus Seminar? Of Shelby Spong, Jerry Falwell, Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox? Which kingdom of God do we establish? The basiliea tou theou of Luke? Or the basiliea ton ouranon of Matthew? Or do we follow John's gospel, where Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world? Do we build the Civitate Dei of Augustine? Do we adhere to the natural law of Aquinas, or do we teach our children that the law of America is based on Mosaic law, as one man said this morning in a story on NPR?

As Mr. Hedges points out, the group behind "Justice Sunday" is not promoting the personal salvation of an evangelist like Billy Graham. They are using that theological position as a sword, a political tool, to gain political power. I can respect, while I reject, the position of a believer that my salvation depends on accepting his or her version of religious doctrine. What I cannot respect, and must reject, is anyone seeking to use religious doctrine as an excuse to take political power, and to wield it over me and my family in the absolute sense so clearly intended by this group.

The End of American Days?

Louisville, Kentucky was the home of "Justice Sunday" a few weeks ago. It is also the home of a friend of mine, a fellow pastor, who sent me this article from the Louisville Eccentric Observer (look for John Yarmuth's column, "The End of American Days"). Lest you think all of Louisville agreed with "Just-Us Sunday," or that all the complaining is confined to the blogosphere, Mr. Yarmuth's concluding paragraphs:

The culture war is misnamed, because it understates what is at stake. Our society is engaged in a death struggle for the preservation of individual freedom, and everyone will be drafted. You cannot remain neutral, because if you’re not with them, you’re the enemy. The old adage holds that your freedom ends at my nose. It doesn’t make a matzo ball’s difference to me, as a Jewish American, what anyone believes until those beliefs restrict my personal liberty, and the †’ ambitions extend way past my nose. They involve my eyes, my ears, what I do with my body and the fate of my soul. They want to control what I can watch and hear, what my descendants can learn and whom they can love. In short, they have utter contempt for the American spirit.

As Lewis Lapham wrote in Harper’s, “The delusional is no longer marginal, and we err on the side of folly if we continue to grant the boon of tolerance to people who mean to do us harm in the conviction that they receive from Genesis the command ‘to take dominion over the Earth,’ to build the Kingdom of God, to create the Christian nation. The proposition is as murderous as it is absurd ...”

It's worth noting, too, that the Rev. Albert Mohler of Louisville Theological Seminary was the only clergy to speak at that "service." And Seminary Presidents seldom represent any one in any congregation. This is not at all, in other words, a "grassroots movement."

But the Harpers' article mentioned in the column is undoubtedly worth reading. And something other than a "it can't happen to us" attitude is going to have to be cultivated, and among more than the denizens and audience of the blogosphere.

Tena's Question

Which then causes me to wonder if I'm just being all too human (what else would I be?) in hoping that I would find acceptance from my creator as opposed to anger. Which in turn makes me wonder if I'm just turning the whole thing back on myself, instead of moving outward, away from my ego.

This never stops, does it?

No, it doesn't stop, actually. Annie Dillard tells the story of Israel in the wilderness, when Moses goes up on the mountain to talk to God. The theophany of God's presence: the thunder, the lightning, the wind, the sheer noise of it, terrifies the people, and they go into their tents. When Moses comes down and asks what they are doing, they tell him they are afraid, and that they've decided Moses should talk to God alone, because the presence of God so near to them is overwhelming. They don't all want to be in touch with God; they'd rather Moses did it. It isn't that God is angry; it is that they are scared.

She ends her essay this way:

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world. Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: the hum is the silence....

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing. Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 255

Perhaps the exhortation to prayer is still too far to ask you to go. But the clear direction is to go toward the "world," and to go fearlessly. The more you engage others, the less you engage only yourself. The more you see good in others, the less you see only what you like about yourself. The more you ask these questions, and ask them of someone not yourself, the more you empty yourself, and wait. Julian of Norwich, it turns out, was right. All things shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

This is why there has always been, and will always have to be, a "church." Only in the community do we know that we are not pursuing the shadows of our own eyes. Only in the community, do we get the personal voice of the Psalms. Only in the community do we get beyond ourselves, but more wholly become ourselves. Only in community, whatever shape or form or the facts of it are, do we quit our tents. And then the question of prayer, and prayer without ceasing, becomes two simpler questions: What is prayer? and what is not?

Are these things right or wrong?

I've read this poem to two classes in two days. I tend to read poetry when I'm trying to teach it; perhaps hoping that the poem itself will do all the work. In both classes, someone was sniggered at the public mention (in a classroom!) of one word.

See if you can figure out which one.

What does it say about our culture, that this poem doesn't provoke us as much as the Anglo-Saxon language?

THE COLONEL, by Carolyn Forché

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

May 1978

Psalm 12

Help us, Lord,
for no one stays loyal,
the faithful have vanished.
People lie to each other,
no one speaks from the heart.
May the Lord silence
the smooth tongue
and boasting lips that say:
"Our words will triumph!
With weapons like these
who can master us?"

Then the Lord speaks out:
"I will act now,
for the poor are broken
and the needy groan.
When they call out,
I will protect them."

The Lord's word is pure,
like silver from the furnace,
seven times refined.

Lord, keep your promise,
always protect your own.
Guard them from this age
when wickedness abounds
and evil is prized above all.

God is weaving

As I look around in my conference of the United Methodist Church, I do see many pastors who are lauded as exemplary managers-growers of churches, makers of disciples, payers of full apportionments. I also see many pastors who are lauded for their challenging and inspiring preaching, their dedication to outreach and their willingness to go to the margins, their respect for biblical scholarship and their assumption that tradition must stand on its merits and relevance. Fortunately for one just entering the ministry, there are pastors in whom these traits intersect in some degree or other, and they tend to be available for mentoring.

Strength in one area should not exclude at least competency in the other. The church requires both types, but my own preference, and, I suspect, my skillset, lies in the second category. I admit my bias before I go on to state that I believe the future and relevance of the mission of the church lies more in the hands of those who are concerned less with managing and maintaining the vehicle for proclaiming the message of God than with grappling with the challenge inherent in the message of God.

Struggle is certainly one aspect of our relationship with God. To approach our sacred texts with honesty and openness is to know oneself as one of those stiff-necked people, stubbornly determined to find in God what we find in ourselves. It is to attempt to live a life that seems at time to defy the instinct for survival.

Yet, there is also a sense in which we cooperate with God. For example, creation can be thought of as a process rather than an event. If creation is a one off happening, then we and everything in it can only be seen as the result. However, to understand God’s creative activity as incorporating us and responding to our existence requires our participation. And it is our task as those who would be a part of God’s creation to see our actions and our relationships with God and with each other as an integral part of God’s activities. Consider this:

God is crying.
The tapestry of creation
That she wove with such joy
Is mutilated, torn,
Made into pieces,
Its beauty torn apart with violence.
God is crying.
But see!
She is gathering the pieces
To weave something new.
She collects the pieces from hard work;
The aim: to defend
The initiative for peace,
The protests against injustice,
Everything that seems
Small and weak;
Words and deeds given
As sacrifice
In hope,
In belief,
In love.
And see!
She is weaving them together
With the golden threads of joy
To a new tapestry:
A creation richer, more beautiful
Than the old!
God is weaving,
Patient, persistent,
With a smile
That is shimmering like a rainbow
Over her face, striped with tears.
And she invites us
Not only to continue
To give her our works
And our suffering pieces-
But even more-
To sit beside her
At the loom of Jubilee
And weave
Together with her
The tapestry of a New Creation.
-M. Rienstra, translated by Yvonne Dahlin

There are a few obvious flashpoints in this piece from the foundation of traditional, patriarchal, Christianity of God as “wholly other,” omnipotent, omniscient, and, above all, masculine. Would I preach from this perspective? Oh yes. I would because it adds another layer of meaning to our struggle with God, and perhaps our understanding of God.

If we are God’s “good creation,” made in God’s image, then God too must be creative and imaginative enough to see “results,” as mere beginnings and our struggles with God and with each other as the warp and woof of something new. This could be uncomfortable to a stiff-necked people who like clear boundaries, security in right belief and actions, and “results.” I would hope so, anyway, for in the ensuing struggle is potentiality for new creation. Perhaps the new creation will be readily apparent when we fully recognize ourselves as both God’s good creation and God’s co-creators.

At Stone-Two-Birds

Robert - I have a question that is completely off topic. The creation story has always fundamentally bothered me. If God created man in his image, but told him not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that means man was created without conscience. Does that mean God is without conscience?

And where it really bothers me is why knowledge of good and evil, which I kind of take as sentience, in my own way of seeing this, would be denied man. Because without it, we wouldn't be human.

Where have I gone wrong in this?
Tena

This allows me to kill two birds with one stone, because of what happened to me yesterday.

My brother-in-law, a marvelous fellow who is the soul of kindness and generosity, returned to church several years ago and "discovered" Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar and such like readings of scripture, and became enamored of it. He loves to engage me in long discussions of the exegesis of texts, and being the kind of "all or nothing" person that he is, he reads widely in the "new" scholarship that's available. So this past weekend he had to be away from a Sunday School class he leads at one of the bigger (and Methodist, FWIW) churches in town, and asked me to come over and cover for him.

Which may or may not have been a good idea; we'll see. Having little time to prepare anything "new" (and no real inclination to get off my intellectual butt and do so), I picked up the basics of my thinking on hospitality, and ended up talking about Luke 7:36-50, knowing it would be controversial but expecting it would provoke the kind of questions and discussion he said his class was known for. He usually, he said, just tossed out "a piece of meat" and let them go at it. So I tossed out my meat, and stood back.

But what I tossed, instead, was a flash grenade. They all sat gaping eyed and, figuratively, at least, slack-jawed. After all, I was dressed like a pastor ("Roman" collar, no tie; haven't worn one in years), and talked like a religiously trained person. But what I said......

Which brings me around to Tena's question. Where has she gone wrong? Nowhere, actually. The error is in the church, if anywhere. Hard to blame the "congregation members" when the church itself is fuzzy to obtuse on the concepts.

This is a vexed problem, in one sense. "Israel" means "struggles with God," and my Old Testament professor used to warn us against letting God off too lightly. It seems reasonable, of course, that we would not struggle with God, merely with our understanding of what God is, or requires, or demands, and who we accomodate it. It isn't quite that simple, however; in fact, it isn't that simple by half.

But in this limited space, responding to this question, it has to be almost that simple. Take that advice, not to let God off the hook too lightly, as a starting point, or something to bear in mind. Then move forward. Move forward by first reading the opening chapters of Genesis and noting that, like the Gospels of Mark and Luke, we have two very different origin stories here. In the first. God creates the heavens and the earth, divides the water from the land, brings forth plants and then animals, and finally makes man in God's image. "Male and female God created them," in fact. That's where the "created in God's image" language comes from.

Now, go to Chapter 2. God "speaks" creation into existence (not really, but let's not belabor the theological point now) in Genesis 1, and humankind is part of that process. In Genesis 2, God actually forms Adam from the dust ("Adam" means, in Hebrew, roughly "red earth"), and later makes Eve as Adam's companion, from one of Adam's ribs. And while God pronounces all of creation, without boundary or limit, "good" in Genesis 1, God sets a few ground rules in Genesis 2, and even seems to have established a bounded Garden from which Adam and Eve can be excluded. Just so Creation seems divided between "good" and "not good." Genesis 1 is about the boundlessness of God; Genesis 2 is about the boundaries that pervade creation.

That's one observation, that shows how much dichotomy there is between the two stories. And the second is the more vexing, if it is coupled with a soteriology that requires the damnation of the human race because of the temptation of two people. In our post-Romantic individualist culture that seems particularly harsh, especially in a society that stratifies itself according to a caste system as vicious and unyielding as any Indian or aristocratic model (part of what I did wrong yesterday morning was to present prostitutes as people first, and reformed or even grateful converts, second), we don't like to think that any one else can decide our fate for us (although, of course, it happens all the time, and we accept it). But in a culture where identity rests, not in the individual but in the community, the "family," this problem doesn't present itself at all.

But is Genesis 2 really about damnation and perdition and punishment? Or can it be read as an explanation for our imagination? After all, it is easy to imagine an easier life than we have known, and to retroject that imagination onto the people who lived before us. We have an amazing capacity to see the complexity of our lives, but to imagine that the lives of others are simple by comparison, and in simplicity, probably happier and easier. The Garden of Eden answers that need; to see our past as one from which we have declined, and to which we should aspire to return. It's the same root as Arthur's Camelot, and the Once and Future King. It's not the only root of human nature, but it is the one most influential in Western thought. The Garden and the reason we don't live there anymore, is meant more as an explanation of our present circumstances, and why we can "remember" (or imagine) an easier life, but can't attain it. Onto that ideal is built the Augustinian perception that "our hearts are restless until they rest in thee," and then graft onto that an apocalyptic desire for justice and retribution, and before long you have sinners in the hands of an angry God. And it seems that God set this whole business in motion without or consultation or a chance for our participation, except as failures. And it seems God has no conscience.

And it is an easier lesson to sell, to tell the people that their lives are hard because of the original error of two people, and that it won't get any better until they accept that they need a Lord and Savior, and that there is a representative of that Lord and Savior who will figure it all out for them. Or at least give them the guidance they want in settling these big questions into small answers that are conveniently arranged around the lives they want to lead, anyway. We understand justice and punishment and retribution, especially if we set out to build our lives on them, and it feeds the self-worth of the individual to set them against both the world and below God in a constant tension that keeps them humble and haughty in nearly equal measure. We like, in other words, clear boundaries. We want to know what is good, and what is evil, and how to distinguish the two. In that Genesis 2 is right: we want the god-like power of ultimate knowledge. But having acquired it, we find out too late it doesn't make us happy, either. We find out, in fact, that we should have spent a bit more time thinking about what that: "And it was good," might really mean.

But it doesn't set up a boundary, and we like our boundaries. If our God truly came to earth as human, and truly welcomed prostitutes without making them go through a purification ritual of some kind first, without requiring they make some kind of down payment as a sign of good faith before they could join the party, then it means all the boundaries are down, and that God's ways are truly not our ways.

And that while it is good, we'll have to spend a little more time thinking about what "good" is. Which is not so much a curse, as a responsibility. And if we don't take up that responsibility, the consequence is not so much a curse for eternity, as it is damnation in the here and now. God offers us life "into the ages," in the koine Greek of the New Testament, not after the ages are over. God offers it, but do we take it? That's the question. And what does God offer? We can't let God off the hook so easily. Like Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, we have to wrestle with the angel to get the blessing. But the blessing is, in part, our sentience, our knowledge of good and evil. After all, how can we know it is good, if we don't know what bad is?

But is God responsible for this state of affairs, or are we? Or is it a shared responsibility? I'm not quite sure I know what hook God gets hung on, but I'm willing to keep God on there, if only by wrestling with the messenger. Now whether that is even publicly comfortable, as my experience yesterday confirmed for me again (it isn't!), or even the accepted (and therefore "proper") basis for ministry (the other "issue" in this matter); well, we'll have to see.

(p.s. this is a classic case of running out of time rather than having found what I wanted to say. Somebody make sure I come back to this; I want to go at Tena's final question again, when I have the chance.)

Two Stoned Birds, Part Deux

What does one have to do with the other? Tena's question and my experience in a Sunday school class, how exactly are they related?

The church.

During the class, one of the questions was whether a group of pastors would agree with my interpretation of the scriptures. I had to confess that was very unlikely. After the class, my sister in law, a dear and delightful woman, told me I was certainly a college professor (she enjoyed the class; this was a compliment). That, however, was what many critics of my ministry had told me, in my last year at my last church: that I belonged in a classroom, not a pulpit. Why? Because I had the temperament of a professor, not a pastor? I don't think so. I think because of what I teach.

My interpretation of the last 14 verses of Luke 7 might well be idiosyncratic and even indefensible, but it would barely raise eyebrows among Biblical scholars and scriptural theologians. It wouldn't even interest systematic theologians, I suspect. It is not, in other words, controversial. Certainly not the fire-bombing of a Shelby Spong, or the radical reimagination of God of Matthew Fox or even the feminist promoters of "goddess" images and ideas. Indeed, even feminist readings of scripture are more controversial than my small effort.

But among the laity, pastors are, by and large, not supposed to say such things. Just as they are trained, by experience or inclination, not to delve too deeply into the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, and what both mean for Christian soteriology. Most pastors, in fact, are neither Biblical scholars nor theologians, and so seldom stray far from what they first learned in Sunday school. It is not too much to say the system is self-perpetuating, and the most "successful" pastors (i.e., those with the largest and wealthiest churches, which is the usual "measure"), are the least interested in theology, be it Biblical or systematic: they are interested in management, and in Dale Carnegie-style "winning friends and influencing people."

When I finally realized that Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World was about Jesus, not a successful Willy Loman, I finally understood that.

Has the church run its course in this matter? It's too apocryphal to say so, but it is certainly running out its length of rope, and will soon hang itself. The "third-world" churches are not our model for any number of reasons, not the least of which involves the different cultures. It is colonialism all over again to imagine the African churches will "save" the European ones. I am convinced, in fact, that the survival of the church in this post-Enlightenment, post modern age, will require taking the bull by the horns, not finding ways to argue that the bull isn't there. The stories of the Bible are stories of struggling with God. We are more comfortable with a pocket-sized Jesus, a Jesus covered with the ash and debris of two centuries of tradition and familiarity. Removing the stains and soot and varnish and seeing something like the original colors again (Jesus was funny? Jesus really hung out with prostitutes?) is disturbing, but it is also necessary. This particular version of Christendom has had its run. It was over in the 19th century, but like the Roman empire, its reach is so vast that the collapse will take a long time to finish, and a longer time to register.

And it is time, despite the danger it creates to pastors as paid professionals, and the discomfort it brings to church members who want their Sunday mornings to be as predictable as their work weeks, if not more so, to reintroduce the living God to people. Because that God is there anyway, and anxious at least to let Tena, and others, into the conversation.

At the end of an "X-Files" episode that I remember now only for this closing, Dana Scully is talking to her priest about what has happened that hour, and he's telling her that perhaps God is always talking to us. This doesn't comfort her; in fact, she says, it distubs her even more. "Why?," the priest asks. "Becuase that means God is talking, but no one is listening," she answers. That can be, but should not be, an indictment of the church.

(and yes, I purposely placed these so this comes up below the first post; easier to read them in order)

So Far Away from Home....

I'm away from my resources at home (i.e., my Bibles), and I'm supposed to teach a Sunday School class on a topic of my choosing at week's end (or beginning, whichever you prefer), so I'm mulling over the topic of hospitality, and I come across this article by Jack Hiatte (via a link to a link to a link to a link; ain't the Internets wonderful?), which includes this passage that sets me thinking:

Here is a quote from Jesus that you almost never hear: "What do you think?" It's right there in the Bible. Jesus asks this question all the time.

One parable Jesus taught was this one, from Matthew: "What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' And he answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, 'I go, sir,' but did not go." Jesus' disciples all strenuously raised their hands. They knew the answer! The first son was the most virtuous!

Whereupon Jesus (whose sense of humor is underrated) replied: "Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you."

Since I don't have my Bibles handy, I can't tell you where in Matthew this parable occurs, but that doesn't really matter. What caught my eye was the treatment of it (Jesus has a sense of humor?! Well, of course he does!), and that final statement: "The tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you."

Maybe I should explain that "tax collectors" in 1st century Palestine worked for the Romans, which made them "traitors" to their people. Prostitutes, of course, are shunned by everyone except their clients. And how does this connect to hospitality?

Well, I'm going to be teaching from Luke 7:36-50, the anointing story. The woman who "anoints" Jesus doesn't anoint him, actually; not the way a king or honored guest would be anointed. She performs what can only be described as an erotic act, because that's the way it was used in Greek literature: she washes Jesus feet with her tears (her own moisture), and dries them with her hair (something usually bound and kept hidden; and again, a very intimate gesture). The euphemism of "feet" for genitalia is not to be overlooked in the symbolism of the act, either. This is almost a symbolic act of oral sex; which Jesus turns into an act of hospitality (he tells his host: "You provided no water to wash my feet, but she has washed them with her tears."). He goes on to tell her, who has shown no faith at all: "Your faith has saved you. Go in peace."

Well, perhaps she has shown 'faith.' She has acted hospitably, in Jesus' interpretation, toward God. Or another human being, which amounts to the same thing.

But how is the kingdom of heaven like that? That's the point of the parables, of course. Not to lay down prescriptions, but to provoke discernment, new ways of seeing, openness of heart. As Mr. Hiatt points out, nobody ever clamors for the posting of the Beatitudes. He has his answer as to why that is, but perhaps we should simply be asking: why not? Why not the Beatitudes from Luke, and in a newer, clearer translation, such as the "Scholar's Version" crafted by the Jesus Seminar? The word "blessed" in that translation is replaced with one they argue is more accurate and true to the original Greek: "Congratulations!" Try it, and see if it doesn't make a difference.

"Congratulations, you poor! Congratulations, you hungry! Congratulations, you who are mourning!"

And Luke, of course, includes the curses, the "woes" in most translations. But let's be more honest about those, too: "Damn you rich! Damn you who are full! Damn you who laugh now!"

Any wonder we don't see those posted in prominent public places? And questions as to which are more important to us? Any answers as to what those Beatitudes really mean?

What do you think?

"Nuklear physics ain't so new, and it ain't so clear."--Howland Owl

We need Walt Kelly again. We miss him more than we realize. Perhaps he could help us make sense of the current political situation, since he lived through the McCarthy Era, beginning to end.

History is a hard thing to hold onto. I was too young for McCarthy, but I understood "the Bomb," which brought nuclear physics into everyday conversation, even if we weren't so clear on what it was. My daughter, almost 13 now, has no memory of "the Bomb" at all, and can't imagine a world under that Sword of Damocles. How to tell her?

But those who don't know history seem doomed to repeat it; or perhaps Marx was right, and history repeats itself, coming once as tragedy, the second time as farce. Now we are seeing the farce; but this time, the energy is aimed, not at the imagined enemies "across the water," or at shadows under the bed, or the creatures of our own nightmares, but at what Josh Marshall has aptly described as "the soft tissue of the law."

It was in law school that I realized what a fragile structure the law really is. It is backed only by the agreement of those bound by it. Police officers follow the law because they accept its dictates. Bailiffs in court obey the judge because they accept the system of justice as a whole. Politicians and public officials are bound by court rulings on the Constitutionality of laws, or the interpretation of statues, because they accept the system as a whole. It is all part of an agreement to behave in a certain way, not unlike the rules of etiquette. The only thing that really keeps the structure in place and the wheels turning, is our agreement that it should be done this way and that, at the end of the day, we accept the consequences for objecting to that process. "Civil disobedience" is civil precisely because it accepts responsibility for defying the system at its most fundamental level, the level of just authority. Criminals violate the system at that level but are punished, and so the system maintains its authority. But who watches the watchers?

The "nuclear option" in the Senate is not that the filibuster rule will be suspended for the nomination of judges; it is the way the suspension will take place. A "super majority" of 67 votes is needed under current Senate rules to suspend the filibuster. But who enforces those Senate rules? The Senate itself. The "nuclear option" is not the suspension of the filibuster; it is the idea that a simple majority of 51 can suspend that rule, because that's the way the Bush Administration wants it. It is no more and no less than the idea that judges should be put on the bench to enforce the rule of law by abrogating the very agreement that is the foundation of the rule of law. That's the "option," and that's why it's "nuclear." It poisons the system at its very roots.

Richard Nixon is our standard for Presidential malfeasance and criminality; but even Nixon feared the anesthetic of sunlight and exposure. Even Nixon knew that the full weight of society, as expressed in the enforcement of its laws, would be used against him. Bush seems to have no such fear, and no such understanding. And what he wants, is to undo the justice system and the constitutional system and the governmental system, all in the name of "justice" and "the Constitution" and "governance." Which would be supremely ironic, if it weren't dangerously farcical. History comes once as tragedy, the second time as farce. This time, it's coming as black comedy; the darkest, the most cynical and pessimistic possible. This time it comes attacking our governmental system, proclaiming in virtuous tones that we are not virtuous, arguing as a governement of laws, not of men, that we should in fact be a government of men, not of laws.

And the only question left is: will it be permitted? The polls do not support it, but there is good reason to wonder if the polls matter anymore. There is more than sufficient reason to be suspicious about electronic voting devices. There is more than sufficient reason to wonder how deep the rot goes, how extensive the desire for power runs, how corrupted and polluted the system already is. It is no longer paranoia to wonder: is this the end of the line, or the tip of a very dirty iceberg?

This kind of abuse of power ain't so new either; and the extent of its reach, ain't so clear.

Context is everything

I received the lectionary texts for this Sunday morning from my church, and had the reading from Peter on my mind when I had a chance to post this morning. However, the lectionary text I found on-line was different from the one that had set me thinking, and while I was reading one text, I was thinking about the other, which set up some cognitive dissonance I couldn't quite resolve, try as I might. Now I see why. Here is the text I had in mind:

1 Peter 3:8-18

All of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called--that you might inherit a blessing. For "Those who desire life and desire to see good days, let them keep their tongues from evil and their lips from speaking deceit; let them turn away from evil and do good; let them seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil." Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.

Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

Now there's a different kettle of fish, and the emphasis where I was trying to place it this morning: unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. And repaying evil, with a blessing. Which I think speaks clearly to the question of exclusion.

Why do we ever exclude anyone, except to repay them for "evil"? Either for what they have done already, or what we expect them to do, because we expect some bad, some defiling thing, from them? And how should we repay that, except with a blessing? "Now who will you harm if you are eager to do what is good?" Who, indeed? And where are we allowed to draw the line, and say: "This I cannot do, because even though it is a good, it is not a good I can do?" After all, the story of Abraham is exactly the opposite: Abraham, following the word of God, means to slay Isaac. Following God's word is good, but the result is not. And Jacob cheats Esau, and yet it is Jacob who wrestles with the angel (another good? or bad?) and wins the blessing, though it is the most mixed blessing of all (he earns a new name, Israel, which means "struggles with God"). So God makes good come of evil, or at least of not good, and yet are we ever allowed to decide what is good, and not good? Or are we only to seek the good, and do that always, and take our chance that it is evil?

Which doesn't quite answer either, does it? Except seeking good, is seeking peace; seeking peace and pursuing it. And while excluding people from the circle may seem the pursuit of peace, it is clearly just the opposite.

I prefer the tone of Peter's letter, and of Isaiah, and the Psalm:

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the LORD has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it. (Isaiah 41:17-20)

Psalm 148:7-14

7 Praise the LORD from the earth,
you sea-monsters and all deeps;

8 Fire and hail, snow and fog,
tempestuous wind, doing his will;

9 Mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars;

10 Wild beasts and all cattle,
creeping things and winged birds;

11 Kings of the earth and all peoples,
princes and all rulers of the world;

12 Young men and maidens,
old and young together.

13 Let them praise the Name of the LORD,
for his Name only is exalted, his splendor is over earth and heaven.

14 He has raised up strength for his people and praise for all his loyal servants,
the children of Israel, a people who are near him. Hallelujah!

Holy, holy, holy

1 Peter 3:13-22
3:13 Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?

3:14 But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated,

3:15 but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you;

3:16 yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.

3:17 For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil.

3:18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit,

3:19 in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison,

3:20 who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.

3:21 And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you--not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,

3:22 who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

Holiness has always been a vexing problem for Christianity. "Stand away from me, for I am holier than thou," Isaiah commands, and ever since some have taken that as the necessary statement of holiness: that one can be holier than another, and so contaminated by the presence of the unholy. Ironically, the gospels all tell us this was precisely the problem Jesus presented. As Simon the Pharisee says when Jesus allows the prostitute to wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair (an explicitly sexual act in 1st century Palestine, something that would earn at least an "R" rating and a condemnation from the FCC if it were to be broadcast on television and understood as it was intended): "If this were truly a holy man, he would know what kind of woman this is who is touching him." And he wouldn't let himself be touched, because to be touched by the unholy is to become defiled and unholy yourself. Jesus even tells a parable about it, one that starts out as a joke about the priest and the Levite and the man left for dead by the robbers. To touch him would make the priest and the Levite "unclean," and yet the Samaritan is, to the poor Jew dying in the ditch, unclean, too. Holiness has always been a vexing problem for Christianity.

And so, this morning, via Athenae, we have this about the Pope and those who are fit, or unfit, to be admitted to the holy sacrament of communion:

The bishop [St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke] and new pope share the same views on many moral and theological issues. For instance, in June, when U.S. bishops released a statement saying lawmakers who consistently supported abortion rights or euthanasia were "cooperating in evil," and could be denied holy Communion - very much Burke's take on the topic - Ratzinger said the statement was "very much in harmony" with his view.

Archbishop Burke, the article notes, is likely to become "the premiere cardinal in America," which prompts Athenae to respond with her inimitable directness and insight:

Just what that town needs, another person navel-gazing and bloviating about easy bubble-gum issues, doling out Pop Church every Sunday, and ignoring as hard as he can the wars being waged by those on the right side of whatever the church's pet issue will be that day.

Holiness is supposed to be a matter of purity, and of honoring the source of purity. The "holy of Holies" in the Temple at Jerusalem was the place where God was wholly present, and to enter that place while unclean was to risk certain annihilation: not from God's wrath, but because, rather like matter and anti-matter in science fiction stories. holiness and uncleanness simply cannot exist together in the same place. The former annihilates the latter. Indeed, the priest who went into the inner sanctum of the Temple did so on only one day a year, and then with a rope tied to his ankle. Should God actually turn God's countenance upon the unfortunate priest, he would be struck dead just from God's holiness (and his necessarily mortal unholiness), and they would have to drag the corpse out.

Jesus supposedly did away with all of that, and showed that God was concerned most with the least and the humblest and even the most unfaithful (the story of the anoininting in Luke puts the lie to any sense of boundaries placed upon God's love and acceptance of those we like to call "God's children.")

The words from 1 Peter don't refute intolerance, and don't even seem to argue expressly for tolerance. But they make an argument based fundmentally on trust, and on the ultimate responsibility of God. It is easy to read those words and justify barring someone from the sacraments, or from the holy presence of God. It is easy to justify what we do in the name of "suffering for good." But even the evangelicals can do that much. The difference is, Peter is telling us to let God take the responsibility, and we need only be responsible to God for our confession.

"Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated." All exercises of power, are ultimately exercised from fear. To not act is to risk pollution, defilement, error. But what error do we fear? Not keeping the Sabbath? "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Letting the wrong people come to the table? Ironically, Jesus ends the visit of the prostitute with the words of dismissal that give the Mass its name. First he tells her: "Your faith has saved you." (but what faith? A pornographic act is a sign of faith in God?). And then he tells her: "Go in peace." But the blessing Jesus will not withhold, we have to withhold? And we do it, claiming we are doing what is good?

"...but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord." The same Christ who said: "Let the children come to me." The beggars, the orphans, the urchins, the useless mouths that had to be fed until they were old enough to work for the family, the ones who had no real woth in society until they became adults. The same Jesus who said: "Come to me, all of you." The same one who hung out with whores and sinners and tax collectors and beggars and women and anyone who wasn't holy, or special, or even particularly faithful. The same one who didn't seem much interested in our notions of boundaries; and who certainly wasn't ever afraid of doing good by including someone in that the religious authorities said should be left out.

This pleases me

I love the challenge of boiling down any type of complicated sentiment into something short enough to paste on the bumper of your car.

Today-the human condition:

"Over 25% of human genes are the same as those of a banana"

carryabigsticker

Why yes, I am easily amused.

God just left-please leave a message

So, I’m skimming through a little essay by Robert Scharlemann on God as Not-Other: Nicholas of Cusa’s De li Non Aliud, because once you get started down that slippery slope of epistemology, ontology and dualism, its damned hard to get out. And, since I enjoy elegant logical arguments, I’m liking the discussion of definition and being, presented in the form of question-answer, used to such clarifying extent in Aquinas’ Summa. For example:

1) Discourse or reason is definition. But why is it called definition? [side note: this follows an extended discussion positing that to know something is to know what it is, and therefore, being is understood through defining] 2) It gets the name “definition” from the act of defining, which defines all things. What defines it in turn? 3) It defines itself, because it does not exclude anything (it excludes nothing). But what is it? 4) It is nothing else than (non aliud quam) what-is-defined (definitium) But what is the defined? 5) The defined is nothing else than nothing else (non aliud quam non aliud). But what is nothing else? 6) Nothing else is nothing else than nothing else (non aliud est non aliud quam non aliud).

The Undefined Definer.

Try this: Can you think or say the word “I” without understanding its meaning as your-self, your being? Cogito ergo sum, which has been understood to mean “I am a thinking thing.,” can perhaps be better translated “Thinking ‘I,’ I am.” Or as, Scharlemann muses: “To forget being [in the translation of Descartes] amounts, in this case, to overlooking that there is at least one word with respect to which one cannot separate essence and existence-the very word “I” is what brings into being the reality of selfhood or self- consciousness. In actual fact, the “I” is then beyond form and nonform, beyond existence and essence, because, strictly speaking, one cannot ascertain what it is without simultaneously ascertaining that it is and, furthermore, one cannot, strictly speaking, say “what” it is but only where and when it is.”

I love this. It reminds me of the Uncertainty Principle. And, of course, leads me to speculate on the “being” of God that is constrained by our use of language to attempt to define God at all. Nicholas winds up defining God as “Not other is not other than not other,” as every “other,” is defined by the “not other” (i.e.: a tree is not other than a tree). First principle, anyone? Very important for a thirteenth century academic, it demonstrates that the pure possibility of definition is Trinitarian in structure, no less.

But just try writing a hymn to the glory of the “Not other.” Doesn’t really sing, does it? I plowed through this essay, only to find my favorite part in the very last footnote on the very last page:

The God of which one thinks, to whom one prays, upon whom one calls, and in whose name one acts or speaks is, then always God-past (just as the self of which I think is a self-past, not the active “I”). Or, to put it more dramatically, the God of metaphysics and religion is always the God who has (just) gone. But the intention of the thought, prayer, adjuration, and invocation is to recall the one who was there when the name was really understood as it was spoken or thought and to expect that one to come again the next time. They are activities of the mean-time, between God-past and God-to-come.

Let us praise God, who is not here, unless we recognize that God is not here, in which case, God is here for us, but not as defined.

Or, maybe I’ll just come into God’s presence with gladness, trusting that God is as here as God was here and God will be here. Even if I can’t wrap my mind around God’s being, by seeking God with my being, I will know God when I know that God knows me. Just don’t ask me how I know…

This says it all.

I actually have a friend who attended Southern in Louisville. He left just before this crowd Mohler speaks for, took over.

If I don't manage to post anything else to day, this will be sufficient. On "Justice Sunday," this is what R. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, had to say:

"We are not asking for persons merely to be moral," Mohler said. "We want them to be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ."

This is, by Mr. Mohler's lights, actually sound theology. Morals are human, the invention of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and the like. Believers in Christ cannot err.

Lord help us all.

Who let the dogs out?

Link please work.link

This was buried pretty deep, but I’m almost surprised in today’s climate, that it made it in at all. The money quote, for me, is in bold.

…ideologues on the right have now set their sights on religion, and specifically Christianity, as the means to promote their political agenda. And as the promoters of tomorrow's "Justice Sunday" national telecast have demonstrated, there is no depth to which they won't sink in their campaign to seize the country….
To suggest Democrats are out to get "people of faith" is despicable demagoguery that the truly faithful ought to rise up and reject.
But will that occur in American pulpits tomorrow? The Christian right counts on the religiously timid to keep their mouths shut. So why not exploit religion for their own ends? They will if we let them.
And that's just it. Americans of faith -- and those lacking one -- ought to vigorously resist attempts by power-hungry zealots to impose their religious views on the nation. That means standing up to them at every turn.
It means challenging them when they say of Americans who support a woman's right to choose; the right of two adults to enter into a loving, committed, state-sanctioned, monogamous relationship; the right to pursue science in support of life; the right of the aggrieved to launch aggressive assaults against racism, sexism and homophobia, that they are not legitimate members of the flock. Where do those on the religious right get off thinking they have the right to decide who is in and who is out? Who appointed them sole promoters and defenders of the faith? What makes them think they are more holy and righteous than the rest of us?
They are not now and never will be the final arbiters of Christian beliefs and values. They warrant as much deference as religious leaders as do members of the Ku Klux Klan, who also marched under the cross.

May I please just say that Christians, as a group comprising all denominations who claim that name (regardless of my personal opinion as to their Christianity), are the least persecuted group in America. These spokespersons are not persecuted for being Christians. They are rejected and scorned for being hateful demagogues who project there own issues onto the rest of the world and who live in abject fear of a God of their own creation. There. I said it.
May I also get on my high horse for a moment to amend that statement? In their vision of a theocracy, there is no room for anyone’s God except theirs. Period. Make no mistake-you will only be a Christian if they say you are. Those of us who reject that vision of God as Christians have a dog in this fight. Those of us who reject that vision of God as followers of other faiths and spiritual paths have a dog in this fight. Those of us who reject any vision of God at all have a dog in this fight.
As a person called to the ordained ministry, I am beginning to understand my responsibility to release the hounds.

Biography is History

Well, if this is right, then, unfortunately, so was I.

For all Pope Benedict XVI's decades as a Vatican insider, it may have been the crucible of a university town swept by student radicalism in the late 1960's that definitively shaped the man who now leads the Roman Catholic Church.

During his Bavarian childhood under the Nazis, Joseph Ratzinger became convinced that the moral authority based in Catholic teachings was the sole reliable bulwark against human barbarism, according to friends, associates, and his biographer, John L. Allen Jr.

But while his deep reading and thinking in theology, philosophy, and history were fundamental to development as a theologian, it was the protests of student radicals at Tübingen University - in which he saw an echo of the Nazi totalitarianism he loathed - that seem to have pushed him definitively toward deep conservatism and insistence on unquestioned obedience to the authority of Rome.

....
When he arrived at Tübingen in southern Germany in 1966, he was widely viewed as a church reformer, a man who wanted to open the church up to dialogue with others in the world.

But in his autobiography, he shows that the Vatican Council also alerted him to what he deemed dangerous liberalizing tendencies from inside the church and to the danger that reform, if not tightly controlled by a guiding authority, can quickly go awry.

"Very clearly, resentment was growing against Rome and against the Curia, which appeared to be the real enemy of everything that was new and progressive," he writes. Academic "specialists," he complains, were encouraging the bishops to accept dubious assumptions. One of these assumptions was "the idea of an ecclesial sovereignty of the people in which the people itself determined what it wants to understand by church." The idea of the "church from below," which led to liberation theology, was being born and, as he puts it, "I became deeply troubled."

.....
He had been recruited by none other than the liberal Swiss theologian Hans Küng, the very man who became, and remains, one of his chief political and theological rivals. The experience of the student revolt seemed to confirm every suspicion that Father Ratzinger already nurtured about liberalizing tendencies and the hidden germ of totalitarianism lurking within revolutionary movements.

"Unfortunately," not because I am a Catholic, or even because I'll be more influenced by the decisions of Pope Benedict XVI than by those of James Dobson. But it proves that William Faulkner was right, and that what he said doesn't just apply to the American South:

"The past isn't over. It isn't even past."

Is That All There Is?

John Lienhard makes an excellent point here, one idea that prompts two others:

The 20th century has given me much, but it's taken as much away. I'd wondered just what [Jack] Thompson is conserving. Now I know. Book repairs are only the vehicle. What he really preserves is the one thing without which old books, and much more, will die off. He's conserving the very arts by which we lived our lives -- until just this century.

Two other thoughts, in two very different directions.

First, technology has certainly taken away as much as it has given. Or perhaps I should be more accurate: we have abandoned a great deal of true value, in pursuit of our shiny new toys. Traditions should be honored not just because they are traditional, not because "we've always done it this way," but because they were a source of life and value to countless generations. We have let technology abstract us from the material world, and called that an improvement on Platonic dualism. But we've misread Plato. Socrates, not unlike the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels, enjoyed eating and drinking and companionship. These things did not get in the way of his recollection (the way off the wheel of reincarnation), but in fact led to it. This world we once knew so intimately was not entirely at odds with us, and struggling with it and using the materials of it, taught us a great deal about our limitations, and the reach of our abilities. It's romanticizing to say it made us better persons; but it's over simplifying to say that all technological changes have only been for the better. We have, as Mr. Lienhard notes here, cut ourselves off from much knowledge and relationship that is good and true and worthwhile. Now, sadly, all we can seem to do is preserve it; we cannot even imagine living it, again. And this applies to spiritual existence as much as material. Once the two were not nearly so easily separated as they are for us today, and that separation is yet another loss.

That's one, this is the other. Technology has given us what seem like god-like powers, so much so that we don't even consider the source of what comes to us, the provenance or origin of the goods we enjoy, consume, use up, toss out, waste and heedlessly destroy. We think we have the power of creation, but we create nothing. We reshape raw materials, and that is all. Ink made from oak gall and linseed oil is a reshaping, too, but using materials that replenish themselves. Our technology has cut us off from the sources of our consumption, the raw materials, and now we imagine they appear from factories or warehouses or internet sites, with no connection to the material plane at all, except when they are in our hands. But we create nothing; we simply use and re-locate and manipulate what is already here.

Consider water: in Texas, one of the largest underground lakes in the world stretches from San Antonio, south of Austin, to West Texas, hundreds of miles away. Both farmers in West Texas, and homeowners in San Antonio, drink from the same source. And while we have the technology to raise thirsty grass in city plots, in Texas or Arizona or Southern California, or to raise thirsty crops in arid conditions, we don't have the technology to do one crucial thing: we can't create water. The Edwards Aquifer is drying up because of this simple reality. Yet we turn a tap, open a spigot, water gushes out: and do we ever think about where it comes from? The supply seems endless, and the water hose in the back yard seems to create it, so why wonder? Why not just enjoy?

But, as Ray Bradbury said once, it is good to wonder. He meant in a different way, and about the splendor of creation. Well, that's a starting point, too. Perhaps it is time to wonder. If our powers were truly god-like, wouldn't we have the power of creation, too? And since we don't, since everything we do, from our ideas to our language to our homes and cars and food and drink, have to come from some source first: shouldn't we stop and think about that source, consider where what is most precious to us came from, and what responsibility that imposes? Consumption, after all, is not about responsibility at all: it's simply about gratification. Is that all there is?

Ecclesia-A work in progress

(This is lengthy, and I appologize. I'd link, but it was sent to me as an e-mail, and I'm not sure how to do that. My snips were an attempt to shorten the post a little-the entire text is available upon request)
Personal Reflections on My Belief about Homosexuality
Willis (Bill) Breckbill
I love the Mennonite Church. For the past forty-six years I have served as pastor, conference minister and on numerous boards and committees. I want the Mennonite church to be faithful to its call to love people as God loves them.
My deep concern is that the Mennonite Church is failing to express God's love
My deep concern is that the Mennonite Church is failing to express God's love to a minority group of people-people who discover that, through no choice of their own, they have a homosexual orientation. Many of them have been baptized into the Mennonite Church, many have attended our high schools and colleges, yet they are often marginalized. Some are asked by pastors or elders to leave their home congregation. Some parents who wish to support their son or daughter are restricted in what they are permitted to do in the church.
Let me make my position clear. Some persons who connect with a "gay life-style" (see glossary) do engage in destructive behaviors. Some heterosexual people also engage in destructive behaviors. I do not approve of such destructive behaviors. I refer to believing persons who are committed to following Jesus in discipleship and who want to be a part of the church. Many of them live among us, a number of whom I know personally.
It is my firm belief that these persons need to be included in the church. They have much to offer and the church is the poorer for excluding them. For the church system to make them second class persons is a breach of justice. What follows is a brief reflection on my life of faith and how I came to this understanding.
During my ministry I have seen the Mennonite church wrestle with a number of issues. One issue was clothing. Clothes were a defining factor for separation from the world. Men wore dark, plain suits and women wore cape dresses, the prayer veiling and were not permitted to cut their hair. Those who did not abide by the rules were disciplined by being refused communion. Many families left the Mennonite Church because of its stringent rules. Another issue was our relation to Afro-Americans. During the 1960s, while serving as pastor of the First Mennonite Church, Canton, Ohio, I was confronted with my own prejudices toward the "blacks," as they were identified then. The community in which the church building was located was about fifty percent African-American. My stereotypes of blacks, and my phobias concerning them, needed to be challenged and changed. The Mennonite Church also faced the issue of divorce and remarriage. Many meetings and study groups worked at understanding God's grace in this issue that was very threatening to the unity of the church. Now little is said about this issue and people who are divorced and remarried serve in leadership roles. As a denomination we also struggled with each other regarding the inclusion of women in leadership roles. There is still residue from this conflict, which in some areas remains unresolved.
Our current struggle regarding the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the Mennonite church has dynamics similar to these previous struggles, and behaviors in relation to the issue have been similar. I remember persons who had a strong Christian witness but who, due to other convictions about clothes, were excluded from leadership roles. They often left the church. I remember a ministerial colleague, pastor of an urban church where Afro-American Christians freely participated, who felt marginalized by the church. I remember women who demonstrated outstanding gifts for ministry who had to be quiet if they wanted to remain in the church. Now we are facing the issue of whether or not to include those who confess Christ but are gay or lesbian. Currently, in most places, those who confess Christ and who experience same-sex attraction and wish to live honestly with that orientation are judged, maligned and marginalized. Many leave. Not only are gays and lesbians ostracized; those who take a position of support for them also risk loss of rapport and of not having their gifts used in the church.
-snip-
When I look at the life of Jesus and how he included those on the margins and those who were outcasts in society and the religious community, I am convinced that he would invite lesbians and gay men of our society to join him. I know of no passage where Jesus refused to show his love and grace. His greatest words of judgment were toward religious leaders who by their religious rules kept people out. The Bible, for me, is a story of God's forming a people to demonstrate the character of God. Many texts in both the Old and New Testament make clear that the Good News of God's love is for all people. I do not know how to show God's love to people and at the same time refuse to associate with them. I need to invite, include, and interact so that I can understand them and in some way share God's love with them. I am the first to acknowledge that I fall short of this ideal. It is my conviction that God's grace is "unrationed," as our recently departed brother, Atlee Beechy, declared in his "Confession of a Peacemaker."
-snip-
Today the church faces the question of including gays and lesbians. Certain texts are cited, in my mind often misused, to reinforce a stereotype that excludes gays and lesbians. We establish guidelines to protect ourselves from sexual minorities as if they were dangerous; we fear that they will pollute us. So, to save us from our fears, we find ways to keep them at a distance. Homophobia is rampant even though often denied. Someone has said, "We develop laws and guidelines to protect us from the hard work of love." In my mind the problem is not that there are gays and lesbians. They are not the problem. The problem is the church's refusal to extend grace and open arms to receive them. Remember the scripture, "Perfect love casts out fear."

When we look at our human family we readily observe great variety and diversity. We are tall and short, dark and light. We have blue eyes and brown eyes, blonde hair and black. We are left handed and right handed. Some people have artistic minds, some mechanical, some mathematical, some poetic. Some view things from a practical point of view while others are more theoretical. Today we talk about academic intelligence and emotional intelligence. No matter what areas of our life we examine we observe diversity. Why would we expect the area of sexuality to be either purely male or female? From general observations we notice that characteristics often attributed to men are seen in women and vice versa. This does not make these folks good or bad, only different from each other. The same-sex attraction of gays and lesbians is easy to understand amidst this diversity. Neither are these folks good or bad or emotionally sick because of their sexual orientation. They reflect part of the diversity of the human family.
I believe that gays and lesbians have an orientation that is different from heterosexuals. They do not choose to be homosexual. Something innate in their being causes them to be attracted sexually to the same gender. Many studies have been done on this subject, and the movement, as I read the material, is toward recognition of this reality. This causes me to ask, "How can we express God's grace to those with a homosexual orientation?" Some people think that they should be "cured" of their "perversion." Some believe that God can change persons from being homosexual to being heterosexual, but the scene is not convincing. There are many, many stories of persons who declared themselves changed but later recognized that nothing had changed. These persons often come to a place of peace when they accept themselves as being gay or lesbian and experience God's accepting grace.
There is a tendency to perceive all gays and lesbians as perverted and sinful. My experience is otherwise. Some of the most compassionate people I know are gay or lesbian. This is not only my observation, but also that of others. A woman whose husband died in a tragic accident experienced more care from a gay nephew than from other members in the family system. A woman minister friend experienced a gay man standing by her in the difficult times of losing her brother and later her father. Are these the kind of people we want to keep out of the church?
For human beings, intimate relationships are nurturing and fulfilling. Some people are not privileged to experience this and that makes me sad. I wish for all people a relationship that is mutually supportive, encouraging and life-giving. Not all heterosexual people enjoy this ideal, but they are not denied the privilege of trying to achieve it. I see no reason for me to determine that same-sex partnerships should be denied gays and lesbians. I observe these partnerships to be mutually supportive, encouraging and life-giving. If this is their experience, I have no need to call it bad or evil.
Where do we go from here in our Mennonite Church? Considering my view, I have the following suggestions:
1. We need to find ways to talk with each other. The issue of receiving gays and lesbians, either practicing or celibate, into church is the problem. The problem is not gay and lesbian people. The problem is not that we disagree but that we attack one another. Unfortunately the report and recommendations of a Listening Committee duly appointed by both the General Conference and the Mennonite Church in 1990 was not given proper attention and implementation. (See Booklet #2) The committee's findings and recommendations were given to the leadership of both denominations in 1993, but they decided not to release it to the church or to implement the recommendations. So we remain in a deadlock. The Purdue and Saskatoon Statements recommend that we dialogue about the issue. We have not had real dialogue. The process seems to be to avoid or defer. When will we have a structure for talking freely without fear of recrimination? Surely this should happen in a believers church where we maintain that God's will is found by giving and receiving counsel, and studying the Word, all under the guidance of the Spirit.
2. We need to extend God's grace of acceptance to all who believe. As Christians we continue to fail on many fronts. The lists in the Bible of behaviors that displease God include greed, gossip, lust, adultery, strife, jealousy, envy, drunkenness and others. None of us is free from all of these behaviors. But when I look at my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, I also see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These, Paul says, are fruit of the Spirit. Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount, that by the fruit you will know the good and bad tree. I want to accept those who come to God by faith and show evidence of good fruit.
3. We need to remove the category of "disciplined congregation" and enjoy the participation of each other in the search for wholeness. Most of the congregations that are currently under discipline are congregations that have studied this issue using the resources available to them. They studied the Word, were open to counsel, and felt led to receive gays and lesbians into their fellowship. It seems strange to me that members of congregations that have spent little or no time studying the issue want conferences to discipline those who have. We should be willing to bless each other even though we find ourselves with different understandings on this issue, for none of us has come to fullness of truth on the topic.
4. We need to credential those who honestly seek to be faithful to the call of God on their lives, even though there is a difference in understanding and conviction. If discerning God's will in the life of the church is an ongoing process, we need all the light that we can get. We included many people in the process of welcoming women into church leadership. We spent much time together processing whether divorced and remarried persons could retain membership in the church. I fail to understand why in our present situation some refuse to offer support to receive gays and lesbians into the church, to extend to them the privilege of serving. Is this an attempt to keep the church pure? Is it a matter of control? Is it homophobia? What is the motivational element behind exclusion?
5. We should train persons to understand the gay/lesbian orientation so that with grace and care they can counsel young people who may have questions about their sexuality. To help youth sort out orientation for themselves before they come to the place where they think marriage will "fix" things, only to discover it does not, would be an exercise of Christian grace and nurture. Many people get hurt when such help is not provided. Possibly some who think that they might be gay or lesbian are not. They need safe places to go, where they can talk freely about their sexual attractions without fear of judgment or recrimination. Counsel could be given regarding how to relate to parents, family and church. Counsel could be given regarding same-sex partnership.
In conclusion, the church should be a place of grace and acceptance. I do not see the inclusion of gays and lesbians as being "easy on sin" but rather as a way to express God's grace and acceptance. As I share my views here, I know there are many who take a different view. I am ready to be in conversation with those who differ with me.
-snip-
Community happens when we are open with one another and to God's Spirit.

Let us now praise Paul Krugman

He is doing more with his piece of punditry "real estate" than anyone in America right now:

So we've created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don't reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions. It's perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.

And the costs go beyond wasted money.

First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends up paying the bills.

Second, Americans without insurance eventually receive medical care - but the operative word is "eventually." According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as the insured to postpone seeking care, fail to get needed care, leave prescriptions unfilled or skip recommended treatment. And many end up disabled - or die - because of these delays.

Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.

Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.

When the only thing people really understand is money, when the only value in society is cost, when the only balance on the scales is cash, it takes an economist to put the argument in terms society will actually understand.

We are no more a "Christian" nation than we are a "compassionate" one. Randy Newman was right: it's money that matters in the USA. If we won't change our hearts, maybe we'll at least follow our pocketbooks.

But there are walls that keep us all divided;
We fence each other in with hate and war.
Fear is the bricks and mortar of our prison,
Our pride of self, the prison coat we wear.

Hymn blogging

Your love, O God, is broad like beach and meadow,
Wide as the wind, and our eternal home.
You leave us free to seek you or reject you,
And give us room to answer “yes” or “no.”

We long for freedom where our truest being
Is given hope and courage to unfold.
We seek in freedom space and scope for dreaming,
And look for ground, where trees and plants can grow

But there are walls that keep us all divided;
We fence each other in with hate and war.
Fear is the bricks and mortar of our prison,
Our pride of self, the prison coat we wear.

O judge us, Lord, and in your judgment free us,
And set our feet in freedom’s open space;
Take us as far as your compassion wanders
Among the children of the human race.

Anders Fronstenson 1968 (trans. Fred Kaan 1972)

The United Methodist Hymnal helpfully divides its hymns into sections by theme. This little number, “Your Love, O God,” is to be found in the section “God’s Nature.” My first impression was that, aside from the first verse, the subject is our nature, not God’s.

Since I was musing on RMJ’s post concerning doing and being during choir, rather than paying attention to the dynamics and key signature as I should have been (mea culpa), this hymn for Sunday grabbed my attention and never let go.

What if is about being? RMJ asks. In this summer of love hymn, we seek freedom to find our truest being. God, being the vague, hands off wideness that God is, supports this by freeing us to find our way, always in God’s love. But we must live and “be” with each other, and, as the third stanza reiterates, that’s not easy because our nature is to fear.

Is our “truest being” to fear? I doubt it. My inclination is to say that fear is representative of our natures, not our being. But what distinguishes our “being” from our “nature.” Or is there even a distinction? I have to ask what is “being” and does it just exist, or does it manifest? And if it manifests, can we know it as our “being,” and how do we know?

RMJ is right, ontology and epistemology overlap like ferrets napping on the sofa. Where does one begin and the other end? I ask the same question about theology and praxis. Ideally, they shouldn’t be seen as discrete units.

For example, this is a hymn about the human condition and the role God plays in letting us experience it and lifting us out of it. From our experience of God, we come to some conclusions about the nature of God, albeit some rather vague ones. It takes a stab at theology. Good enough.

But in a worship service, this hymn plays a role. Specifically, it acts, in this case, as an opening hymn- to set the mood and theme. If planned with intentionality, and good pastors plan every aspect of a worship service with intentionality, it links in some way with the scripture and the sermon, as well as with any other liturgy that might be occurring, such as communion or a baptism. An opening hymn provides a background from which to experience a service. It sets a context, not in a restrictive way, but in a thematic way. Sometimes it connects a great deal with the main message of a service, sometimes only in a general way. The point, however, isn’t to set up a framework on which to hang every aspect of worship (although some pastors do this), but to provide a multitude of means by which the individual members of the congregation can experience the “Good News.”

Worship is undoubtedly praxis. Liturgy comes from the Greek composite word, leitourgia (laos-people, ergo-to do, to work) originally meaning a public duty undertaken by a citizen. In the Jewish religious context it came to refer to temple ritual publicly performed by a priest. In the later Christian tradition, it came to mean an act of public worship which in which a group participated. In other words, Compline was liturgy, the Rosary was not.

Yet, in the acting of the people in worship, there is always the presumption that the people are being acted upon as well. The method in the worship planning madness is to attempt to provide an outlet in which a person’s being is touched by the presence of God. Perhaps that means conveying a new understanding or comprehension of God in an epistemological sense. Maybe it brings you to a place where your "being" is redefined by God's presence in an ontological way. If that is accomplished through traditional ritual, so be it. If that occurs in the course of a brilliant sermon delivered by yours truly, well good on you. If a hymn or prayer brings you to a new place of wonder and joy, excellent. You have worked and been worked on. Theology in praxis, theology through praxis, theology as the foundation of praxis. There doesn't need to be an either/or.

I'm sure there is much more to be said about this.

Christian Ethics 101

From FeralLiberal at First Draft comes an excellent suggestion. Now if we just had the funds of George Soros to back it up:

"I am sick and tired of (them saying) they somehow have a better understanding of Christianity, of the Judeo-Christian ethic, of values."--John Kerry

I'd like to see a series of billboards across the country with a large picture of the hooded prisoner from Abu-Graib and a caption below it that states:

'Whatever you have done to the least of these my bretheren, you have done it to me.'

Imagine how many "Christians" would be outraged at the suggestion that Muslims and Iraqis be treated as children of God.

It would be worth the outrage it would generate.

Either/Or?

Western thought is divided, indeed almost chopped into tiny pieces, by dualisms.

The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge. In launching this attack on the underlying assumptions of all other ethics, Christian ethics stands so completely alone that it becomes questionable whether there is any purpose in speaking of Christian ethics at all. But if one does so notwithstanding, that can only mean that Christian ethics claims to discuss the origin of the whole problem of ethics, and thus professes to be a critique of all ethics simply as ethics.

Already in the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil Christian ethics discerns a falling away from the origin. Man at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity. of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with this origin. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, tr. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan 1965), p. 17.

The Platonic assumptions behind this analysis are obvious: our very origin begins in duality, in being split off from our origins, and needing to find our way back to them. This is the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation: that what was right is now wrong, that what was once possessed in joy is now lost in sorrow, and that the only way to recovery is by overcoming despair through reconciliation. On the concept of such dualism, in Western Christian traditions, hang all the law and the prophets and the problems and the hope of humankind. From the beginning, our souls move away from God, and seek constantly only to return to God. Asserted Augustine, perhaps the greatest of the Christian Platonists: "Our hearts are restless 'til they rest in thee." But you will find absolutely no support for this dualism, or this restlessness of heart, in Scriptures.

It's a question of "biblical theology," of returning to origins (with still the assumption that "origins" are pure and only in journeying in a circle to we know the place we started from), and ironically, a discipline that arises in part from the insistence on sola scriptura of Christian fundamentalists. If we are indeed to follow sola scriptura, then we must be scrupulously honest about what scripture says. And Scripture never identifies a soul that is restless until it rests in God. Indeed, scripture never identifies an individual qua individual at all.*

What scripture identifies is people, living wholly and completely as people. Abraham hears the voice of God and obeys without questioning, which is awesome and, in the old sense of the word, awful; but still Abraham worries as he travels from kingdom to kingdom, and passes off Sarah as his sister, not his wife, on three occasions. And Jacob cheats his brother Esau of the elder's birthright, but gives Israel both its blessing and its name. Or Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus is not prompted by the "restlessness" of his heart; if anything, Paul's encounter with the living God makes him restless for the rest of his days. It is indeed a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

So if we examine it honestly, scripture has very little indeed to say about "soul," or about dualities, or about restlessness. None of the gospels, even the profoundly Hellenistic Gospel according to John, present anything like a thesis that humanity has been separated from God and Jesus the Christ is the only hope of reconciliation. Indeed, according to the Hebrew prophets, the Messiah was supposed to make Israel itself a light to the nations (nation to nation, not individual to world; Christianity never presumed a world stage that would be the apotheosis of any one person) and show the nations to the true "way of life." If that way was exclusionary, it was only the exclusion of radical monotheism, and the exclusion of "false gods" from the life of the children of Abraham, the people of the covenant with God, the covenant renewed in Egypt when the Israelites followed Moses into the wilderness.

Dualism, in fact, doesn't enter into the discussion of a radical monotheism. "If we accept good from God, shall we not accept evil?", asks Job, in one of the toughest questions posed in scripture. But the question Job's wife has asked is equally harsh to modern ears. She, too, understands that there is only one source of all things, and those things include life: "Why do you still hold fast to your integrity?" she asks. "Curse God and die!" One, of course, would lead to the other. God is the source of life; to deny God, is to deny life. To profess any other god but God, is to deny life. There is no dualism, no double source, no essential cleavage to which we must ultimately return. To be cut off from God, is to die. It's as fundamental and absolute as turning off a light switch: no power, no life. And the source of life is singular, not dual, and needs no duality and reconciliation to complete it.

Truth, of course, is a victim of dualism. But in our Hellenistic thinking there must be two sides to every question, even if there can be only one truth. Which renders truth a victim of dualism. Even as truth is only known in the struggles between opposing forces; even as Aquinas recognizes that we cannot know what God is, only what God is not (a negative theology that tries to avoid Hellenistic divisions into more fundamental fundamentals), we are caught trying still to hold onto a unitary truth. And even Plato understood that truth must be singular, must stand apart, pure and unchanging, if it is to be truth at all. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, all that is outside truth, is error, whose modern name is "relativism."

On Monday morning, the cardinals attended the traditional Mass for the election of a pope at St. Peter's, where Ratzinger gave a stinging homily against the West's creeping "dictatorship of relativism." Those who hold firmly to belief in God and moral absolutes, he said, are accused of fundamentalism, while the only socially acceptable attitude seems to be that everything is relative and nothing is clearly right or wrong.

In effect, it laid out the philosophy behind Ratzinger's two decades of work as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

So the options come back to merely an either/or: one is on the side of truth, or one is a relativist. The irony that this division itself requires an either/or, even as it condemns the false "either/or" in favor of the unity of "truth," should not be overlooked. The irony is that it is the introduction of the either/or that caused the problem in the first place: either stay with God, or be separated from God, is the interpretation of Genesis 2 behind Bonhoeffer's opening ethical analysis. And so only another either/or, the either/or of salvation presumptively stated in John 3:16, can affect the repair. But was the cleavage ever there to begin with?

The first Creation story of Genesis says that all creation is good and blessed by God, and from that story stems the fundamental law to honor the sabbath and keep it holy. The second creation story explains why humankind can imagine paradise, but not live in it. But neither is either an historical event or even a foundational tale. They are instructive; but they are not binding. They are, indeed, not a necessity at all. They are a confession: a confession of humankind's relationship to the Creator. A relationship that is not divided by the story of Genesis 2, but merely explained.

Which means Paul is not offering healing when he says nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ; he is explaining. He is explaining how close to God all humankind is and can know itself to be, and if there is a dualism, it is that the world will not accept that proximity, that the world will not seek its comfort and rest in that powerless challenge to its power. But power is ultimately powerlessness, and powerlessness ultimately the victor over power, not by exertion but by endurance, not by persistance but by permanence. There is no essential division in the world, no fundamental dualism, a fissure, a split, a chasm between God and creation. That fissure alone is the illusion, fostered by the world, which thinks it finds security in power.

Is it any accident that as this is written, the radio is reporting in detail on the life, and untimely death, of Marla Ruzicka? Or is it true that there are no accidents?


*Which is admittedly another matter altogether. The most personal of the scriptures are the Psalms, but these can be read as personal devotions just as readily as they are read as the voice of the nation of Israel. One interpretation cannot privilege another without a solid foundation, and that foundation is built almost entirely on conjectural sand.