Work, Work, Work

One of the things you sign up for when you enter the ranks of professional clergy is that you are forever and permanently going to be a part of the working/middle class.  That's if you're lucky.  Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar to the side, pastoral ministry is not the path to fame and fortune, in fact I think defining what Mega-church pastors do as pastoral ministry is like referring to Walmart as "a family owned retail chain," it may be (sort of) accurate, but it also mocks the truth.
Pastoral ministry in a medium sized church (200-400 members) will put you in a position to own a home, a couple of modest vehicles and live with all or most of the modern amenities.  It is by no means a life of privation, but you probably aren't going to get the vacation homes, or the grown up "toys," you most likely are going to always have one or two "big" ideas (big meaning a cost of >$2000) that aren't going to get done right away (right now that is getting our fireplace fixed), and you're probably also going to have some sort of debt which must be managed. You will read articles upon articles by savvy financial types who give you all sorts of clever advice about "wealth management" and sort of sadly shake your head, knowing that you're probably not doing what you should in the long term, but you're doing the best you can.
Rather than bumming out about this, I understand that it is a place of solidarity with the vast majority of my fellow Americans.  I'm not going to get into talking about specific politicians today, but rather about an idea that I have heard put forth by far too many of them, Red and Blue alike.  That idea is that hard work leads to inevitable success, and by success they mean wealth, and in the scheme of the American dream getting rich is akin to the promised land.  When I hear a politician laud this dream to his or her adoring supporters, it makes me want to smash whatever is nearest to me.  It makes me increasingly angry because it is a false dream, it is an empty hope, and many of the false prophets of prosperity have a hand in rigging the system to keep it that way.
I have done a few different sorts of work in my day.  I have worked in retail, I have worked in production as a machine operator, I have worked in a skilled trade, I have been a Salsa Cowboy (creative marketing), I have worked in a scientific and regulatory consulting company, I have worked in a mail room and a library, as a painter and as a cleaner, and I have been a pastor of churches of varied sizes and cultural locations.  All of those jobs had their own challenges, and their own rewards, and the key to each one of them, if you do them well, is hard work.
You might notice a common thread among those jobs (most of which were part time/summer type employment), is that they are jobs that don't lead to getting rich, no matter how hard you work or how good you are at them.
I am in a boat (but more like a rowboat than a yacht) with school teachers and public servants, with carpenters, electricians, plumbers.  I am educated (Master's degree), and I work at doing my job to the best of my ability, and I'm never going to get rich. I understand this, and I have chosen to pursue a vocation that, by nature is not about just making money. And of course there is always the truth that life is not fair, I get it, but please don't try to sell me the mythology that millionaires and billionaires deserve what they have.  They do not. Nobody "deserves" that much of the pie, no matter what they do.  A CEO in an office may work hard, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they don't work any harder in a day than a stone mason or a welder.  A TV news anchor may get up at 2:00 AM and go to work in the dark, but so do bakers and delivery drivers. Oh and certainly let's not forget the fact that we pay people hundreds of millions of dollars to hit things with sticks and act out the silliest of melodramas.
Most of the world works hard, but not everyone gets rich. As Bill Maher said, "If hard work equaled success, this country would be run by Mexicans with leaf blowers."  One of the interesting observations that you can make by watching Downton Abbey is to see the way that class differences used to function in England at the end of the Victorian Era. The servants did all the work and the nobles made all the decisions.  In that era both classes seemed to accept that it was the way of things, and it was only the advance of "modern" thinking that started people questioning whether or not it was right.
And certainly, management is a necessary function as well. Knowledge and expertise are skills to be put to work, as is being able to manage and lead people, putting together a plan and a team.  Yes, these things are valuable and people should be able to make a living doing those things too.  My question is, do they deserve to make three times what the person who teaches their children to read makes for managing a classroom of first graders and teaching them the ABC's?  I think not.  Should doctors get paid well for their knowledge and their healing skills? Certainly but why do they get to drive a Mercedes Benz to work when the nurses who execute their orders and clean up all the blood and mess can barely afford a second hand Toyota?
These are the faces of income inequality in this country.  Don't believe that poor people are poor because they're lazy, it's a vicious lie.  Don't believe that rich people are virtuous, it's a dangerous assumption.  And both lies you will run into rather frequently in the so called "discourse" that is taking place in our nation right now.
I believe in vocation.  I believe in finding a place where your ability meets the needs of your community, and I believe the best of all possible worlds is a world where everyone is free to follow that model, rather than following the money.  It's an ideal to be sure, but as such it seems a much better benchmark to follow than "greed is good," or "show me the money."

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

As usual, Richard Rohr has said some things I needed to hear. Negativity has been wearing me out.  Seriously, I've gotten to the point where the NY Times op-ed page is like Valium.  But I think I might be slightly addicted, because I can't look away from the Trump-Cruz-Rubio circus, or the Mitch, Turtleman, McConnell intentionally announcing that the GOP majority is going to deliberately and stubbornly refuse to do their job, or even, lest you think I'm picking on the Red side, the Hilary-Bernie contest slowly wringing the life out of a hopeful populist movement that for a minute actually had me really excited about politics for the first time since I read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail about the 1972 George McGovern campaign. Yeah, that happened before I was born, so I just had to read about it and think, why can't we have someone like that now?  Well, Bernie is now, but signs are pointing to the hard cold reality of challenging the establishment: mostly you lose.  McGovern did too, to Richard M. Nixon, and I'm just really hoping that this is not history repeating itself, because let's face HRC very well could be Nixon in a skirt, and all of the Republican possibilities make Nixon look like a paragon of virtue (shady recording and petty burglary are probably low on the list of malfeasance for Trump and Cruz).
See? Less than a paragraph in and I'm in a freaking quagmire of negativity, and feeling like I have taken Barack Obama sorely for granted.
So here, I need to examine myself.  What is it that bothers me so much about this?  I know for a fact that the President is an office that is largely symbolic, with a very limited ability to force changes through an unwilling legislative branch or a gatekeeping judiciary.  If my boy Bernie did get himself in, it would not mean that we instantly flashed back to the Roosevelt years.  He would still have to deal with Turtleman and his flunkies, and let's face it, while I agree with Bernie's principals about wealth inequality and economics in general, I know there is no magic bullet that's going to slay the dragon of human greed, and one man, even the President, can fix this mess alone.
What really gets me upset though is that it all seems so hopeless, in other words I feel like it is utterly beyond my control.  And I don't like that feeling.  It's way too familiar.  Growing up in the 1980's in America, as part of the low-ish middle class, I felt like I didn't have too many choices: go to school, go to college (hopefully without accumulating crushing debt), get a job that wasn't too terrible, and settle in to life.  It wasn't very glamorous, but glamorous seemed more or less impossible, or at least too difficult.  Now as an adult entering middle age, having been blessed to find an actual vocation, I maybe have picked up some delusions of grandeur: that maybe more than just shuffling along the mortal coil is a possibility.
But I need to check myself, and particularly I need to check myself against the only standard that I really can check myself: Jesus.  Did he get upset about politics? No, not really, and let's face it, Herod and Pilate were pretty bad dudes.  Maybe he didn't rail against secular authorities because he was, as Howard Thurman says, "a man with his back against the wall," and he knew how that confrontation was going to go (as it eventually did).  But the more I read the Scriptures the more I'm convinced that it was more a matter of understanding that they didn't matter, even when they could kill the body.  He chose, instead, to take on the religious authorities, who had played the system and tried to put God into service for their own ends and their own glory.  That is idolatry, and that needs to be challenged wherever we find it: church, politics and in our own hearts.  I increasingly mistrust candidates who use their faith as a political tool.
This is not an excuse for Christians to disengage from the political process, but it is an important corrective to our frantic and often decidedly negative political positions.  We do have a voice.  Democracy itself is a metahistorical trend.  As Dr. King said, "the arc of history is long and bends towards justice."  The fact that we haven't perfected it yet probably should not surprise anyone.
I am frustrated by the process because I want us to transcend self interest, fear and hatred, but I just don't know if we can do it.  I am constantly challenged to try and follow Jesus through this mess, because I know he would not avoid it, but I am also aware that he would not try to take the reigns, because his kingdom is not of this world.  That is my hope, and maybe the only thing that keeps me sane.

On Progress

I want to be careful here, but there's something that needs said, and I'm going to try and stay in my lane, check my privilege and all that sort of thing.  When it comes to the issue of race in this country we have a problem. People all sort of disagree as to what the problem is, and maybe there is no single right answer that truly defines it.  I'm going to talk mostly from my white perspective, because that's all I'm really qualified to do.  But before I get to that I would like to put a quote from Chris Rock before you, because it feels pretty fresh to me, and hopeful maybe:

The advantage my children have is that they are encountering the nicest white people America has ever produced.  Let's hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Now on the one hand, I'm aware that this is the optimistic opinion of a black man who has done very well for himself in the entertainment industry and thus now occupies a privileged place in society.  But I would like to think that actually what he says is true, we are much better about the race issue than we were fifty years ago, and leaps and bounds better than we were 150 years ago.  That doesn't mean we're done growing though, and it doesn't mean everything is okay.
It does point out, rightly I think, that what improvement we have seen in this regard was largely due to the willingness of those with the power (white people) to let go of the power they once held unconditionally and inescapably over black people.  Did we do this willingly? Did we do this gracefully?  Did we do this completely?  No, no and no, which means we are human beings and certainly a work in progress.
Chris Rock and Barack Obama exist in a world that would have been unimaginable to someone in 1950, white or black.  It is my hope that Rock's kids, the Obama girls, my nieces and nephews, and my own kids will live in a world that is even better still.  For that to happen, I think, a new frontier will need to be crossed, and it doesn't so much have to do with race as with class.  See among the educated and the elite of the world, the dominant pathos is that equality has become normalized.  If you have money, you are equal, regardless of your race.  If you achieve at a high level you are equal.  There would be no outcry about an interracial couple among lawyers and doctors and college professors.  In the society of the polite and powerful, the struggle against racism is about knocking off a few remaining ugly warts, dealing with un-examined privilege, rooting out tacit stereotypes and prejudice.  It's mostly genteel, intellectual stuff like engaging in constructive listening, open dialogue and working towards a more mutual understanding.  At this level, most of the white participants can claim to be "colorblind," due to their friendly rapport with the black people that occupy this segment of society.  In fairness, I think we can honestly say that there is good work being done here.
But out on the street I'm afraid it is not so rosy.  Among the largely segregated populations of poor and lower middle class, animosity and fear still rule.  Let's be honest here too, it is an equal opportunity oppressor.  Black folk are afraid of the police (and they have some reason).  Police are afraid of the restless and crime-riddled population of which they have only the most tenuous control.  Poor whites are angry, resentful and hyper-sensitive about even discussing racism.  It's all "politically correct" nonsense.  Their experience of "interracial dialogue" is mostly being told what they're allowed to say and allowed to think. They can't keep track of whether it's okay to say black or whether they should be still saying African American, and they honestly don't understand why it's such a big deal.  There is a vague feeling that white people are being marginalized, which is true, but it's more economic than racial.
In this sphere, people see riots, assaults on police and other white folk, even the Beyonce halftime show as an assault on the last little toehold they have on the glorious days of the old republic. Here the decision to ban the Rebel flag is taken personally, and they dislike the elite every bit as much as they dislike the "takers." We have indeed produced many "nicer white people," but fear and hatred still hold on tight in some quarters. And mostly their grip is strengthened by feelings of marginalization and persecution (whether real or imagined).
It very well might be the case that the only way to win the last battle for equality is to start seriously waging the fight against poverty and class inequity.  I know that seems dangerous and difficult, but how else are we going to grow?

Revenge on the Nerds

Thanks to John Hughes kids who grew up in the 1980's have adopted a rather interesting piece of mythology: Nerd power.  Read his filmography and you find numerous entries where the social caste system of American adolescents was raked over the coals. The messages of a lot of these movies was pretty clear: some day you and the popular kids will be on equal ground, and then your inherent intelligence and sensitivity will bloom like a flower.  And to a certain extent that is true, the popularity contests really don't last much longer than high school, but never assume that human nature undergoes any sort of fundamental change.
There are still bullies. There are still many ways in you always sort of remain that kid you were in high school, for better and for worse.  There are still moments as adults where you run into this:

That, for those of you who don't know is a character called Ogre, a member of the jock fraternity in the movie Revenge of the Nerds.  The movie revolves around a bunch of stereotypical nerds, thick glasses, pocket protectors, obnoxious laughs, social awkwardness and above average intelligence.  It is two hours of brain melting burlesque comedy, I don't recommend it, if you really want to experience the 1980s nerd phenomenon, Mr. Hughes is a much better way to go.  The basic gist is that Nerds can rise up and challenge the popular and the powerful, they can use their wits and their inherent character to win the day.  It's generally a nice fiction.

But fiction it is, because the reality is that popularity and winning are still highly valued in our society.  Evidenced by the rise of the political fortunes of one Donald J. Trump.  Politicians on the national level have been, for a long time, nerds.  Not all of them, but enough of them to justify calling it a trend.  And we the voters are like Molly Ringwald, torn between a really good-hearted nerd, and the dashing popular captain of the football team.  In my lifetime, we have seen Nixon (nerd, albeit of the sinister sort), give way to Ford (football player at Michigan), give way to Carter (Nuclear engineer, down home Sunday School teacher), give way to Ronald Raygun (nuff said), give way to George H.W. Bush (not gone do it, no sir, don't like broccoli), give way to Bill (slick Willy) Clinton, give way to George W. Bush (baseball party guy, but still I think awkward enough to be a Nerd), now Barack Obama (who I think is a sort of cool-ish nerd).  Obama definitely has the smarts to fit the bill, and he's got the tone of voice for sure, but he is the sort of suave, cool, confident fellow who can manage to court both Michelle Obama and the American people, despite those ears.

There has been a teeter totter of nerds and jocks going back a long way (even the famously macho Teddy Roosevelt, was a sickly kid who, until he took to taming badgers and riding moose, would certainly have been considered a nerd).

And this bolsters us with the idea that you can rise up and become great no matter what lunch table you sat at in High School.  I've got bad news for you though nerds, the popular kids and the bullies are still around.  No matter how well you think you're doing Bernie Sanders, Hilary is still the homecoming queen of the party and she's got all those superdelegates in her pocket.  No matter how much people like you Marco, The Donald, and Chris Christie are still going to be able to shove you into a locker, and they don't give a hoot if you are the captain of the debate team.  You're probably also going to have to deal with sociopathic people from your own set, like Ted Cruz (definitely on the Nixon side of the nerd continuum).

Unfortunately for all of us, politics remains largely a popularity contest.  I don't actually want to know how true this is.  I would love to think that, like in those movies, Molly Ringwald is going to see who the real hero is, but the more Trump hangs around, the more I'm afraid it's going to be this guy:

And let's face it we're in for a show down between that and this:

And that kind of makes me feel:

Identity Crisis

Last week Donald Trump called the Pope a pawn, and the Pope in turn questioned Trump's self-proclaimed Christianity. It was one of those moments where the world of social media just about blew up from the rapid fire commentary and back and forth.  Trump, of course immediately called it "disgraceful" for someone to question another person's faith, and to tell you the truth, on the surface, he had a point.  We should probably think twice about judging others, in fact, I think Jesus said something about that, and about another man's servant, you could go along and cherry pick all sorts of scripture that would probably lead you to side with the Donald on this one.
Except for the fact that this is Pope Francis, a man whose judgment and faith I am growing to trust more and more day by day (even as a Protestant).  Except for the fact that the Pope was not actually questioning the validity or sincerity of Trump's affirmation of faith, he was actually questioning his practice of said faith.  Here is the Pope's actual quote (translated to English of course):

A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel."

The term that everyone focused on is "not a Christian."  That is, in the minds of most people, the judgment, and the error of the Pope's statement.  What I have been rolling around in my brain for the last few days are the many ways in which it may be much more necessary for us to say precisely that, about great many things.  But I am afraid.  I am afraid because when it comes to defining the word Christian, you are going to run into resistance from those whose definitions you challenge in the process of clarifying your own definition.  Furthermore, you are going to have difficulty finding a harmonious place to park your Jesus following wagon. Neither the progressive nor the conservative side has a space that will fit, but they both think they do, and they will gladly label you a heretic or an apostate if you try and nuance something they feel is central.
This is just evidence of the pilgrim nature of following Jesus in this world.  The Pope is a rather good example for me to use (much better than Trump), because the Pope is in many ways a really good example of living a Christ-like life, he is kind, caring, and humble.  He has expressed concern and solidarity with the poor and suffering, he has washed feet (even controversial feet), he has consistently expressed his commitment to social and economic justice, he has taken small steps to open the fortress of the Roman Catholic Church to the rest of us.  Yet, I would like him to go even further to address the unequal treatment of both women and LGBTQ people in the Church. I would like him to address the tragic connection between reproductive choice and poverty, and how the official RC prohibition on birth control plays into that.  I do not expect him to single-handedly solve all of our problems though, and so I am glad to take what he is able to give, and I would hope for the same grace.
None of us are perfect disciples, but I think that that realization is crucial to actually being a disciple.  What troubles me most about Trump, and the more blatantly religious folk like Ted Cruz, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham is the utter lack of humility and any self awareness that they might be wrong, or that they actually might need to learn a little bit more from Jesus.
I get why they don't like it when the Pope calls them out on a thing like immigration or caring for the poor, even if Scripture and a long history of Christian ethics would both tell them they'r wrong. It is troubling to have your faith assumptions challenged, sometimes it can utterly break you and leave you feeling as though you have lost faith altogether, but God never leaves you in pieces.  The Spirit who breathes life into us can make the dry bones live.
"The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." (Psalm 51: 17)  What will keep you from being a disciple of Jesus Christ, therefore a Christian in the only truly acceptable definition, is a refusal to be broken.  The building of walls is part and parcel of a desire to be invulnerable, and true Jesus following is about being vulnerable, about letting people in, regardless of the risk.  I have no problem with A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, but if we actually believe that then it should inspire us to stop trying to build the fortress for ourselves.
I think the future of the church depends on Christians actually remembering to follow Jesus, even and especially when his example troubles our assumptions about life.  The more I think about it, the more I feel like the Pope was speaking to the Donald as a pastor should.  He wasn't, at least in my opinion, casting him out of the kingdom, he was simply challenging him to consider the way that his own, angry, narrow way of understanding the world is hurting him and those who are influenced by his fearful rhetoric.  Because fear is not the Gospel, because the Gospel is the Good News that God is with us in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. If that is true, and the Scripture is reliable, we can believe that God is love, and if God is love we should also trust that love casts out fear.

10 Questions

There is just so much going on in the world today: a presidential election, a supreme court nomination, wars and rumors of wars, you know the list.  Normally, I pick a thing and pontificate about what I think, but I am accumulating a list of things that actually ring more like questions in my heart and mind.  Maybe you have similar questions, maybe you have information that I don't have.  I don't really expect answers, but I would welcome discussion.

1. If we are really so concerned about money (I mean the government, deficit, balanced budgets etc.) why don't we ever at least consider the idea that maybe we don't need to spend so much on the machinery and mechanisms of war?
2. Related question: why do we attack the social safety net to save a few pennies (relatively) but spend billions of dollars on an experimental fighter plane, submarine or warship?
3. In a nation founded on principles of freedom and equality, why do people on all sides insist on trying to bend the functions of government in their favor, rather than insisting on neutrality and serving the common good?
4. In a nation founded on principles of freedom and equality, why are race and class still such divisive and damaging realities?
5. In a nation of educated and thoughtful people, why can't we clearly confess and own the reality that race and class are still such divisive and damaging realities?
6. Why do we act like the Cold War is still the paradigm of global politics?
7. Why do we listen to people who tell us what cannot be done, rather than following people who lead us into what might be done?
8. If partisan rancor is so terribly repugnant to everyone, why don't we just stop it?
9. Why does everything have to be about money?
10. Are we ever going to really value human life?

Some of these are more specific than others, but these are all questions that I bring to bear on my thinking about what I really want for and from the future of our country.  These are questions that point me in the direction of seeking positive answers rather than criticizing any particular politician or ideology (though honestly they don't lead me to really trust any of them).

Thank you for considering my questions.

Watch Carefully

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away over the weekend.  In the wake of his passing, there are two noteworthy things.  First the good, to read about the friendship between Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the two political polar extremes on the current SCOTUS.  Ginsburg is about as liberal as you can get, and Scalia about as conservative, but they actually liked each other.  They voluntarily spent time together, and Ginsburg referred to Scalia as her "best buddy."  According to the narrative being adopted by most of our society, this is not supposed to happen.  We are supposed to divide up into teams of the like minded and hunker down to win the fight.  Ginsburg noted that when she would write a document for the court and Scalia would write a dissent, the dissent and the dialogue would make her better, it would free the writing of "applesauce and arglebargle," because he could be counted on to call her on it.  I can't help but marvel at the fact that such a relationship managed to exist at the center of our most contentious and polarized system.  It calls to mind G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, and Lincoln and Douglas.
And it makes me despair all the more about what is revving up in other quarters.  Liberal types are not always doing a great job at containing their glee at the fact that Scalia has passed.  He was, after all, the conservative bell cow of the court.  Agree with him or not, he was a force of nature on the right, I often got the feeling that Justice Thomas was simply going along for a ride on the Scalia train, when it came to dissents and voicing the conservative opinions.  Roberts and Alito, seem to be candles in the wind compared to the stalwart conservatism of Scalia, it will be interesting to see the court dynamic without him.
Which leads to the latest nightmare faced by the Republican side of the aisle: Obama gets to pick Scalia's replacement.  I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for them (not really).  Now, on top of having to deal with a Democrat that produced a recovering economy, a functional Affordable Care Act, and a Democratic party that's got a new pulse, they have to figure out a way of blocking Obama's inevitable nomination without seeming like a bunch of spoiled crybabies throwing a tantrum.  Majority Leader McConnell has already promised just such a petulant and borderline treasonous display.  Some people have mentioned the Thurmond rule that said Presidents in the final year of their term shall not nominate SC justices, but there is next to zero constitutional reason for Obama to abide by such a pronouncement, which was essentially just a statement made by notorious racist Strom Thurmond in order to block the promotion of Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice, during the segregation disputations. (Funny how racism seems to keep rearing it's head)
The fact of the matter is that, given the state of political affairs, the Republican establishment ought to sort of thank their lucky stars that this task falls to Obama.  He is probably going to pick a reasonable, moderate candidate, because Obama (all slander to the side) is a reasonable, moderate President. This fact seems to get lost amidst all the hullabaloo.  The Supreme Court, despite all ravings to the contrary, is one of the more stable and least activist institutions of our government.  It behooves our nation to have solid representation from a variety of perspectives and locations on the political spectrum (see above about Scalia and RBG).  It would not serve our nation well to have a Court packed with liberals or conservatives.  Replacing Scalia with a moderate would not destroy the balance.  In fact, it would probably cement the identity of the Roberts court as a decidedly middle of the road bunch. (Need I remind everyone about the checks and balances)
The only way the Republican Congress can effectively block an Obama nomination, is to actively resist doing their constitutional duty to provide a nominee with a fair and timely confirmation process.  You can be pretty sure that Obama is not going to trot out a Democratic/liberal version of Robert Bork or even a Clarence Thomas for this one, because Obama is nothing if not shrewd and diligent when it comes to stuff like this. My guess would be this is the moment where the Republican power structure has to decide whether to actually act as sane governors of our nations or, in perhaps the most undeniable display yet, prove to the American people that they are engaging in Against Obama politics.
That, my fellow voters, is not a good standard by which to run a country, unless you're trying to run it straight into the ground.

Apples to Apples?

When I lived in Plumville there was this little hardware store next to the post office, it was run by a family who lived in a house next door to the hardware store.  It was packed to the rafters with tools and paint and well, hardware.  When you went in, you didn't really browse, in fact you didn't really move around that much at all, it was sort of like a closet with stuff hanging all over.  You told the proprietor what you wanted, they got it for you, told you how much it was and you paid for it.  It was pretty straightforward.  Honestly, they had most things that you would need and would order things for you if they didn't.  After a couple of visits to the hardware store, as someone who has become thoroughly accustomed to the age of giant box stores like WalMart, Lowes, Best Buy and Home Depot, I kind of fell in love with that little store.
Eventually, the store closed, like so many other local businesses in small rural towns have.  The folks wanted to retire, and they couldn't find anyone who wanted to take over the business.  Honestly it was a hard sell, you were never going to get rich, you were going to be limited by how much stuff you could fit into that little store, and how many hours you could spend there finding nuts and bolts for local people working on a project or farmers fixing something around the farm.  The town actually mourned a little bit for that store, as they did for the little mom and pop diner across the road that also became the victim of retirement.
The thing is, there just didn't seem to be any way to keep them going.  They weren't really competitive with the big guys and, no matter how much love they got from their people, there just weren't enough people.  Numbers never lie, and that is the sad and crushing reality of the world we live in.
These days there are little buds of something happening though.  Buy local movements, micro agriculture, micro finance, micro breweries (praise God from whom all blessings flow).  People will sometimes go out of their way to support a small independent retailer rather than Wal-Mart, which is probably cheaper and probably more convenient, because they value the smallness and they want to support the local economy.  I love going to Farmer's Markets in the summer time and getting really good produce, rather than to the big chain grocery stores.  But these things are just blips on the radar, and will probably always remain merely luxuries for those who are privileged enough to access that way of consuming.
I don't have much hope that our economic reality will ever change back to the way it was, and given that those in the retail industry, large or small, are 100% beholden to consumer preferences and market forces, I don't know if there is anything to be done other than protect what will always be a small and flickering flame.
Now church is a different story, maybe, I hope.  Admittedly, churches have bit and swallowed some very problematic ideas over the past fifty years or so.  We run things with a highly business oriented mind, and often the success or failure of our congregations is determined by whether or not we do some rather un-spiritual things well: budget, advertise, maintain "customer" satisfaction, and grow our market share.  Some churches have done it well, and are not shy about telling you how it "ought" to be done.  Others have had more trouble, and I'm tempted to think that perhaps we are caught in a wicked snare of very much the same design as the one that captured our beloved little hardware store, namely consumerism.
Consumerism is more than just an idea, it is an ideology that tell us that we need to buy a little bit more, or find something a little bit better. Consumerism does not look at the broken things on the floor and go about figuring out how to fix things, it rather wants to find new things to replace the old.  Consumerists does not look at something like a church (or a hardware store) as a relationship to be entered into, but as a thing that can and should meet their needs.
One of the things that I observed in our little hardware store was that it was the kind of place you would go if you needed to fix something that was broken, but rather not the sort of place you would go to buy a whole new thing.  For instance, do you need a spark plug or a replacement blade for your lawnmower?  They probably have that.  Do you want a bigger, better lawnmower? Maybe not, or they might not have the selection or the price range you were looking for.  They didn't try to market lumber or masonry raw materials, they didn't sell in bulk, they just did what they did, and there was/is value in that.
Whenever I run into a little place like that, I always catch myself thinking, "wow they just don't do it like this much anymore."  And to be honest I think that's a little sad.  I wonder if, fifty years from now, people will think the same thing about churches.  I wonder if we're not already a ways down that road.  I wonder if there is anything we can do to turn and repent.

So What's with the Ashes Anyway?

Home is where one starts from.  As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

of dead and living.

-T.S. Eliot, East Coker

It is a bit of an odd thing for Presbyterians to observe Ash Wednesday.  In fact, if you expand your historical perspective on Christianity to include more than about the last 50 years, you might notice that it's downright out of order.  Most people didn't really grow up with it, and it has had to be re-introduced into the yearly patterns of life.  On this Ash Wednesday, I'm going to engage in a bit of speculation as to why it's been making a comeback in many "reformed" churches, and why that's a good thing.

First, you probably need to know why it was dropped in the first place, and the simple answer is: the Reformation.  The birth pangs of protestant forms of faith involved, to varying extents a repudiation of all things Roman Catholic.  Sometimes protestants rejected an idea just because the Catholics really liked it, and many of the celebrations and disciplines of Lent fell into this category: Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, not eating meat on Friday, and so on.  We came up with good theological explanations for why we rejected these things, but it's a little suspicious which came first the rejection or the rationale.

For a long time after the divorce, the estranged members of the Body of Christ tended to persecute one another, and the animosity grew, because we had largely forgotten how serious Jesus was about forgiveness and reconciliation, and because, frankly, there was turf to be fought over.  Lutherans and those in the Anglican Stream, sort of wanted to hold on to the trappings of Catholicism while getting to make their own calls about how they behaved and how they divided up the loot, so they held on to the Ashes, and there was no shortage of bluster and claims to the superiority of one practice over another.

It took every bit of five centuries for the church to start to collapse back in on itself enough so that we realized that there is more that holds us together than divides us.  Though I'm sure you will still find some reformed curmudgeons who go on and on about Popish nonsense and grace alone.  But for me, and for many like me, the old rituals began to seem, well, more necessary.  Don't get me wrong, Ash Wednesday is still not a yuge (go Bernie!) deal in the Presbyterian Church, I will have a handful of people come listen to me try to explain the mystery of how contemplating our own mortality actually is a good and necessary thing to do.

And that mystery is at the heart of why the Ashes are making a comeback.  We live in a world that denies death and despises the maturation of life, at least partially because we fear death.  Growing old is unpleasant; our bodies break down more frequently, in some cases our minds do as well.  The passage of time brings both joy and sorrow, as Eliot said, "the pattern more complicated of dead and living."

I sense this complication as I prepare to confront this mystery.  This year, I found a Mennonite liturgy, which I shamelessly purloined for working pieces, including Eliot's East Coker. I have to reach outside of my own tradition and heritage for meaningful Ash Wednesday things, because everything in my own is essentially pirated from the Episcopalians or Lutherans anyway.

But this, in and of itself is a good move to have to make.  I can't begin to estimate how much value the practice of Pilgrimage has been to me, and that was something the Reformers dismissed as papist superstition, if not outright sorcery as well.  But, as I have mentioned before, one of my favorite phrases out of my own tradition is the Latin: Reformata, semper reformanda, Reformed, always being reformed.  Just as the Reformers reached back to the Patristic age of Augustine to "undo" the excesses of medieval Catholicism, maybe we now reach back to the heart of some of those practices that were once denounced.  Maybe we reach outside of our own backyard to find some new treasures.

Home is where we start from, but not where we stay.  We come from ashes, we live, we love, we worship, we complicate our patterns, and we are simplified and return home.

The repetition of rituals and yearly patterns helps us to note how we are changing, it gives us a background against which to move.  It helps us see where we have come from and note the distance we have traveled.

That little smudge on the forehead can do an awful lot.

Two Masters

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.

-Matthew 6: 24

Maybe it was because I was ambivalent about the game, since I couldn't really even pick a team to root against.  Maybe it's because of the current political drama. Maybe it's because I'm not exactly a financial genius, or even a good budget keeper.  Maybe it's because I have basically felt besieged by materialism and consumerism for years, all the while fully participating in said "isms," like a junkie.

Whatever the reason or reasons, watching the Superbowl, it struck me that the actual football game was just a marginally necessary accessory to what is otherwise a rather perfect storm of conspicuous consumption.  It is a field day for advertisers, and many people admittedly watch the game for the commercials.  Here's the whole picture: gangs of men who get paid ridiculous amounts of money to play a game, which in turn makes the owners of the teams inordinately wealthy, engage in 60 minutes of violent conflict involving an oblong leather ball, punctuated by the best (and most expensive) advertising you can imagine, broken in the middle by a mini rock concert that trots out a mixture of musical celebrities tailored to give a little something to everyone (hip hop, pop, alt rock) with elaborate and often bizarre choreography, which produces a mild hypnotic that causes one to absorb the corporate sponsorship uncritically, so that you barely even notice that everything is a shill for something.

It's not really a joke to say that football has become a religion, but actually pro sports in general are simply small temple cults of the larger religion: materialism.  I am a worshiper, I am a junkie of the consumption of things.  This is, I confess, in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the first commandment: "Have no other gods before me." I am idolatrous, and I am addicted to it.

The best and only really successful way of dealing with addictions is to work the twelve steps.  So here are the twelve steps written for those who would like to break the addiction of money and stuff:

1. We admit that we are powerless over our greed, and that our greed has become unmanageable.
2. We believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.
3. We agree to turn our lives over to the care of God (as we understood God, in my case Jesus).
4. We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves (this might take a minute when it comes to materialism).
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and another human being the extent and nature of our absorption with money, wealth and things, and ways in which that has become damaging to ourselves and others.
6. We are ready to actually have God replace our desire for dollars and stuff... wait hold on a minute, we're only at step six, and this is already getting really hard, perhaps even unworkable.  I'm starting to feel kind of intimidated by this process.  I think I just started writing about the Superbowl and now I'm into some really uncomfortable territory...  deep breath... press on.
7. We humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.
8. We make a list of all those our selfishness and greed have harmed and became willing to make amends to them all... Okay, this is just not going to fly, I'm far too enmeshed in an unjust economic system.  I wear too many things that were probably produced by workers earning substandard wages.  For that matter I'm guilty of taking advantage of the people who work at Wal-Mart and McDonalds for less than a living wage.  I don't even come close to compensating for the external costs of my energy intensive, carbon-heavy industrial lifestyle.

I think I just derailed my own twelve step program, and made it into a seven step program (step 8 being where it became impracticable), but it might yet prove to be a worthwhile exercise, if for no other reason than pointing me to the reality that this is not just about me.  Materialism is not an individual sin, it is a cultural flaw.  I can't think of too many places in the Bible where God gets super mad at one dude, it's when the whole society goes off after Baal or Moloch, or when whole cities like Sodom and Gomorrah act wickedly and defy the rules of hospitality and generosity, that stuff gets real.  For step 8 to take place in any meaningful sense, we are going to have to reckon with steps one through 7 on a societal level, which is no small undertaking.

Short of becoming a hermit or a vagabond, I'm probably not going to be able to break free of the systemic hold of materialism, the best I can hope to do is mitigate it's effects on my own soul and by extension the society of which I am a part.

In the fictional world of Star Trek, there is a point at which humanity realizes that their future lies beyond economic realities.  That in order to advance past a certain point their society is going to need to get beyond the need for profits and wealth.  It comes when they finally make contact with intelligent life from other planets (specifically Vulcans). There is a collective, but not entirely simple, realization that the universe is impossibly big, and there is enough... of everything for everyone.

Fiction, to be sure, but don't most of our greatest visions start out as dreams?

And So It Begins

The Iowa Caucuses are in the books, and things are no more clear this morning than they have been up until now.  Ted Cruz won the Republican side with a rousing 4% margin over the Donald, who was in a virtual tie for second with Marco Rubio.  Only the pundits were surprised by any of this, given the fact that Trump has pretty much been giving Iowa the old Jersey salute for the past month, and Cruz has been campaigning there with furious intensity.
Bernie Sanders proved that he is a legitimate contender by coming in only 0.3% behind Hilary Clinton, and that is what really matters to me, because I'm beginning to get the feeling that this election has the potential to be an important moment in our history.  I really want Bernie to win, but I am becoming convinced that he doesn't need to win to push us as a nation in the right direction.  His insistence that income inequality and the concentration of wealth at the top of the food chain is the great evil that we must combat through our politics, is shaping the Democratic debate.
It strikes me as a little bit odd that he doesn't have a Republican counterpart.  Cruz was talking about the support he felt from the grassroots conservatives, which to me conjures up an image of the working class of the midwest.  Also, Cruz's victory came amidst a record turnout in overall participation at the Caucus, which might indicate that he is able to mobilize the masses to something more than hooting and hollering at a rally (Trump).
Now, let me be clear, Cruz creeps me out for reasons that have little to do with his political agenda, but his ultra-right wing politics strike me as delusional, more so than Bernie Sanders' would if I put myself on the other side of the aisle (which as a recovering conservative, I think I can still do).  Cruz himself used the term "failed liberalism" to describe the past seven years under Obama.  Now you probably know that I do not agree with that assessment of Obama's legacy.  If anything, my critique of Obama is that he needed to be more forcefully radical than he was, but his tenure has seen the economy steady and begin to recover from the mess that deregulation, and several wars caused. Of course conservative folk tend to want to ignore this progress, or frame it in a way that would indicated that it was despite Obama's "failed liberalism" rather than give him any credit for it.
I understand our political system well enough to know that the President doesn't actually have as much power as people want to ascribe to that office, and the fact that an economy rises or falls is dependent on large forces and complicated factors, of which the executive branch is only marginally effective in either supporting or contravening.  It's sort of like the way humans herd large animals, you nudge them and try to get them to follow the course you want them to follow.  If there is chaos, i.e. a stampede, like the housing bubble, or the crash of 1929, no matter who you are, you had best get out of the way, and get ready to clean up the mess.
In all observable recent instances, deregulation leads to a stampede of some sort or another.  Businesses need to be regulated, capitalism must be tempered or else it becomes dangerous and toxic.  That's not communist propaganda, that is cold hard fact.  Greed is a high ranking sin in pretty much every religion I can think of for a reason (oddly enough except for some perversions of Christianity, but that's for another day).  The difference between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders is simply the level of regulation that they think is necessary, Cruz thinks nearly none is necessary, Sanders thinks quite a bit is necessary.  The evidence of this need is income inequality and the disappearing middle class.  I heard Cruz say this morning that his policies are focused on "living within your means," however, I see some major structural impediments to "living within your means" if your means are within the range that defines the middle class, by most accounts, this is getting more difficult.  One of the most telling, but not the only indicator of this is the way that wages have not kept pace with inflation (sorry for all the statistics).
Conservative policies tend to anathematize the very things that enabled the American middle class to grow and thrive in the wake of World War II:

1.  Labor Unions: which gave employees the power to stand up to powerful economic forces. And yes, unions do make it more expensive for businesses in terms of operating costs, but do you want to make the rich richer or sustain the "grassroots?"  And yes, unions have and can become corrupt and bureaucratic, but do you throw the baby out with the bathwater?
2. Social Security: including the social safety net of welfare and unemployment and food assistance, etc. The sort of safety net that tries to ensure that people do not fall through the cracks and end up in abject poverty.  This is hard work, and it is always in need of improvement, but that doesn't make it wrong.
3. Public Education: the best way to improve society over the long haul is to educate it's members.  The changes that have taken place in the world over the past 50 years have changed our educational needs, but the system has remained rooted in an old model.  An undergraduate degree is the modern equivalent of a high school education from 1950.  Couple the increasing cost of "higher" education with the decline of manufacturing and trade work and you have a witches brew that poisons the middle class.  In addition, manufacturing and trade work increasingly require higher levels of training and intelligence, which can and is fostered through education.
4. Healthcare (single payer option): Bernie has pointed out that while his plan for a single payer healthcare system would indeed be expensive in terms of tax dollars, it would be offset by the removal of what amounts to a rather large expense, both to individuals who must self-insure and businesses who provide insurance programs to their employees.  This is not technically socialized medicine, the government does not own hospitals or the means of providing care, they essentially become the one who pays the bills, giving them massive bargaining power in keeping the cost of services down and the quality of care up.  Medicare already exists and functions this way.  Again, this is something that would be in constant need of innovation and refining, but because it's a difficult challenge doesn't mean that the status quo is okay.

These are the things I'm paying attention to as this circus gets rolling.  Oh yeah, and I don't want any more wars. I'm so tired of wars. I'm not voting for anyone who starts saber rattling or warmongering.  Actually that might be the biggest deal breaker in all of this.