Focus

Sometimes fiction gets something so very right that you wish it was real life.  That is the case with a scene from the HBO drama The Newsroom. You have probably seen it posted and re-posted, but I want you to watch it again with a little bit of the lead up, watch as a man is caught in the middle of two arguing idealogues, watch as he tries to flippantly avoid stepping out on the limb of speaking the truth, then listen as he finally voices his frustration (it's an HBO show so it's got some profanity, you have been warned): 

 

Several of the points that fly by in that little rant are worth noting.  First, why do liberals lose? They do you know.  I think we saw that in this past election, as the Obama era encouraged us to "go high" we all sort of expected that there was no way a sideshow like Donald Trump could derail the Clinton machine.  We failed to notice that his populist formula had already stopped the Bush dynasty and the various and sundry other nominees that the GOP had trotted out against him. It was precisely the sort of clueless arrogance that the right uses to convince large voting blocks that they are better off without the mamby-pamby nattering of the elites, even if they are the ones who represent things like health care, labor unions, education, social services and all sorts of things that decidedly benefit the poor and working classes.
I think it's a correlative reality to Lyndon Johnson's observation that, "If you can convince the lowest white man that he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him some one to look down on and he'll empty his pockets for you."  If you can convince enough people that Hillary and the Democrats look down their noses at the "forgotten Americans" they will vote for and support a man who clearly and truly represents the very class of robber barons that used to run the world.
The thing is, I don't know if any of how this has played out was deliberately following a script or a plan.  After all, this is not a fictional story, no matter how much it seems that way, and how much I wish it was. This article considers the possibility that perhaps Steve Bannon and Trump's people have a little more up their sleeve than we might imagine. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but the brief history of democracy has shown us that the sort of machinations described in that article are, in actual fact, a rather real threat.  Populism has proven to be a gateway to the rise of dictators.  The framers of our Constitution understood this fairly well, and in their landed, elitist mindset they built in checks and balances to prevent the undue accumulation of power in one set of hands.
We allow ourselves to get distracted by Trump's greed: his tax returns (or lack thereof), his refusal to divest of his business interests, the way that everything he does seems to be part and parcel of his deal making.
We allow ourselves to get distracted by emotional issues like abortion, immigration, health care, and any number of other issues that can really raise our blood pressure (on both sides of the argument).
We may be blind to the reality that Trump is really after power, maybe even more power than he has already won.
DJT is a walking, talking, tweeting distraction, and if there's one thing I know from all those years of watching MacGyver, it's that a distraction is really powerful tool.  Also, divide and conquer is a pretty successful strategy.
Right now, we are divided, we are distracted. The rest of the world is terrified of what might happen if an empire as powerful as ours actually comes crumbling down.  Beware of pleas for unity that call for acceptance of tyranny. Beware of dog-whistle issues that are designed to play you like a harp from hell.  Keep your eyes open and remember always that we are at our best when we set our sights on lofty and high-minded goals: like peace, equality, justice and liberty.  Don't give up so easily on those things for selfish reasons or in despair, that is the two pronged attack of the despot and the tyrant: convince people that you're going to save them and convince them that they are doomed if they don't take your help.  Honestly isn't that what you've heard coming from Trump recently?
Don't get distracted, focus, keep your eyes open.

They Are Who We Thought They Were

A couple of years ago, Dennis Green, the then head coach of the Arizona Cardinals spouted a rant that now lives in infamy, along with Jim Mora's famous "playoffs?" speech.  His Cardinals had just gotten a solid whuppin from the Chicago Bears.  The Bears, as I remember it, were near the top of the heap that year, but they had recently had a few stumbles, all of which got well in a hurry when they took the field against the Cardinals.  A reporter asked Green what went wrong.  Green proceeded to lose his temper rather badly and kept repeating: "They are who we though they were." By which he meant: they're one of the best teams in the league and they flat out beat us, but he was too angry to put it that dispassionately. It is generally a bad idea to assume that people, football teams or nation states are going to suddenly break form and become something they're not.  It can happen, but if you're preparing for a contest don't bank on it.
As it turns out Donald Trump is pretty much who I thought he was, but still I am troubled that it has gotten this bad this fast.  Week two: people being detained at airports, protests in the streets, alternative facts; in short ominous drum beats.  But I'm not going to just lob grenades at what I consider to be an obvious (very likely unconstitutional) over-reach of presidential authority or over-react to what the executive order that some have called a Muslim-ban.  I'm going to step back from that position and take it precisely as Trump intends: a move to protect our nation from those who would do us harm.
I have a lot of problems with the actual implementation of this measure, but I'm not going to go into any of the moral, ethical or theological reasons I have for despising the very premise of this executive order.  I am going to simply point out this article from the Washington Post.  If you're going to argue with me that the Post or the NY Times are typical liberally biased media outlets, I will ask you to distinguish between what is contained in the editorial and opinion sections (clearly delineated in most cases) and what is actual reporting.  This is not an opinion piece, this is reporting about the mindset of actual terrorist organizations, not speculation as to what they might think, but rather interpreting their positive joy at something that our President thought was a hard line crackdown: "new policies validate their claim that the United States is at war with Islam," and "President Trumps executive order would persuade American Muslims to side with extremists."  Our printed media may be the last bastion of actual vetted reporting, they do make mistakes, they do over-react from time to time, but with so much clearly illegitimate (I won't say fake) news stories floating around out there I have come to distrust anything that doesn't at least have some sort of journalistic credibility.
The headline of the article linked above is: Jihadist groups hail Trump's travel ban as a victory. There is no alternative fact to it, the people we consider to be our greatest enemy in the "war on terror," are tickled pink by the travel restrictions imposed by the executive order.  That ought to give us pause.  They're not mad about it, they think it plays right into their hands.  I have mentioned in this blog before about the rather quixotic methodology of trying to combat an enemy whose biggest beef with you is that you are a tyrannical empire that wants to oppress the followers of their god, by acting like a more tyrannical empire who wants to oppress the followers of their god.  It is like a bully punching the kid who just called him a bully in the face for calling him a bully.
This is not, in any way, sympathizing with Islamic extremists, in fact the point I'm making here is that perhaps we ought to try a strategy that doesn't involve doing exactly the kind of things they want us to do. Like when your crazy uncle dares you to pull his finger, don't do it kid!
Our desired narrative is that America is the land of the free, a diverse nation where all are given a shot at the American dream.  Watch this and try not to feel abashed by what is going on right now.  The narrative that ISIS and Al Quaida are selling is that America is a godless, imperialist power bent on world domination and the corruption of the noble followers of Allah with their western decadence.  When we bomb them, invade them, give the people they are trying to win to their cause no other recourse but to believe we are exactly what the extremists say we are...
You judge for yourself.
I would much rather see our nation live up to its potential and hold dearly to the ideals of justice, liberty and equality under the law.  I feel morally and ethically compelled as a follower of Christ to do so, however I understand that not everyone shares those convictions and I am way past assuming that we are anything like a Christian nation. But look you don't have to listen to Jesus, just pay attention to the corny schoolhouse rock video.  Isn't that what we want to be?
It's what I want to be. I'm pretty sure it is what most of us, Progressive and Conservative alike, want it to be.  We all need to ask ourselves some hard questions about why it's not working out like that right now.

The Man Who Sold the World

Oh no, not me, I never lost control,

You're face to face, with the man who sold the world.

-David Bowie

I had my first introduction to the dilemmas facing our increasingly global civilization in seminary, from a stout little man with a thick Latino accent, Gonzalo Castillo-Cardenas.  He was a teacher of a Senior course that was part of our required curriculum: Christianity and World Cultures.  The word globalization rolled off of his tongue in a way that is still memorable, heavy, cheeky pronunciation of the b and a rolling of z.  At the time, I was not at all familiar with the complexity of the issue. It had seemed to me, for most of my life, a forgone conclusion that the world was getting more and more interconnected and the dawning of the internet only seemed to be speeding that process up.

I had been sort of blissfully unaware that globalization was not, in fact, an entirely good thing, nor were it's processes always leading humanity forward into a Roddenberry-esque, post-economic future.  Prior to taking that class, I sort of assumed that a global awareness was a good thing, all humanity blending together and moving past the tribal, national and sectarian violence of our past, how could it go wrong?

Well, actually in a lot of really horrible ways when you finally got around to it. The virtual and actual slavery of people in developing countries, human trafficking, environmental catastrophes, strife and terrorism.  I began to pay attention to the labels on my clothes, even though as a seminary student I didn't exactly have a choice in the purchase of the cheapest things I could find, I at least tried to be aware of the human cost of that "made in China" label.  And it's not just stuff that affects the poor folk on the other side of the globe, that same shift in manufacturing to places where labor is dirt cheap has also impoverished a wide swath of America as well.  The chickens of that particular fact have come home to roost in the election of the terrible tangerine.  A combination of technology and shifting production overseas has left a dearth of the sort of working class hero jobs that drove our post WWII economy, that's no secret. What might be less obvious is that it has also driven rising levels of resentment towards foreigners, which is qualitatively different than the sort of broad brush bigotry that it often looks like on the outside.

I think that's important to understand as we wrestle with the current situation. Some have said we ought to just call white nationalism what it really is: racism, but let's be clear nationalism is a different thing.  Nationalism is really what Trump managed to weaponize in this election.  His constant message has been: we're seen as weak, we're losing, we're getting taken advantage of by China and Mexico.  That message has legs; because even if parts of it are demonstrably false, it feels true to the rust belt and middle America.  Pair it with the way that the Democratic Party pretty much sold out the poor and the working classes at several crucial junctures during the Clinton administration, the way the "establishment" of the DNC and their Superdelegates were seen to shaft Bernie Sanders (a left leaning populist) and how the message of the outgoing Obama administration was "Go High" (read the road of the elite political class) and I guess Trump really isn't that much of a shock.

Nationalism and populism can be dangerous though, on several fronts. First of all, xenophobia and racism, which are inherent in the sentiments that outsiders are a threat, lead to thinking and acting in anger and hatred, which are not ever going to make the world a better place.  Second of all, globalization is a real thing, and quite frankly, it's not going to stop whether we like it or not. I admit it, if you are used to occupying a place of privilege, it is unsettling to feel your place being pulled down towards a level field of play, it does feel like you're losing ground.

The simple reality is though, that we are not ever going to go back to the way it was, thus we need to learn to deal with the way it is. I am somewhat hopeful that the age of Empires is passing away, but it will not go quietly into the long night. Our last President, while not nearly progressive enough in some ways, did actually model a rather important vision for our place in the global era: we must come to see ourselves as citizens of the world, rather than a superpower.  The trouble is we are still armed like a superpower, we still live with the expectations of a superpower (our own and those of others). The danger is that we are the old Alpha male, trying to lead the pack the way Alphas always do, except now our challengers are not just one up and comer.  Russia, ISIS, even China, none of these "enemies," are necessarily trying to take our place at the head of the pack, they are more or less looking to bring us down a peg or maybe even put us out of their misery. They seem to be asserting their claim to their own packs and would rather have us not sticking our nose in their business.

Nobody except us really wants to rule the world, probably because they apprehend the absurdity of trying to dominate global culture.  It's hard enough to keep your own yard in order. Thus nationalism's current face tends towards isolationism and looking out for "America First," a slogan with a troubling history to say the least. Putin's actions in Ukraine and Syria are essentially aimed at securing a Russian sphere of influence in Europe.  China's sensitivity about Taiwan and Hong Kong, even their tolerance of a megalomaniac in North Korea (the enemy they know), are also governed by their desire for some sense of security within their sphere.  The United States is the only nation that currently stretches it's sphere of influence pretty much all over the world, and we probably can't expect to keep it up much longer.

Trump has pulled us out of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement and has spoken against other such pacts (i.e. NAFTA).  This is one of the areas where he might even be right.  It's hard to say whether NAFTA was a success or a failure, in most objective assessments it was neither. The consensus on TPP is that, if it was implemented, it would almost certainly be a disaster for the simple reason that we cannot honestly compete with China on a level field, they drastically outnumber us and are not hindered by anything as inefficient as democracy.

However, when you apply the same nationalist values to things like NATO or the United Nations, the result is nowhere near clear.  These international relationships are not just about the economy stupid. They are about being good citizens of the world and decent neighbors who stick together in troubled times.  Can they be messy? Sure. Are things always balanced and equitable? No, we sometimes have to carry more of the load than seems fair, and maybe that does need to change, but it needs to change with us as a participant in the change, not as bitter quitters.

The world is a big, beautiful, complicated place; it is too complex for us to think we can control it.  We need to learn to be a part of it.

I Have Questions

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

- The Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment 1

This may be much ado about nothing, but over the weekend I have seen a lot of troubling shots fired in our public dialogue, which is admittedly probably a bit more fraught with angst than usual.  I would like to remind all of my friends and neighbors that "peaceable assembly" is one of those high ranking rights that gets put in the Bill of Rights pretty much immediately.  Religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly, redress of grievances, right there in A1.  Why so important?  Well because those were the things that monarchs and dictators often did not allow.  Furthermore, they are all things that people can tend to overlook in terms of oppression until it's really too late.

Let's face it, if the government were to crack down on, oh, I don't know, Islam, a lot of Christians and Jews might be inclined to sort of let that one slide, after all some of those people are terrorists.  If the government were to deny the right of free speech to the KKK or Westboro Baptist Church, many non-bigoted people might be inclined to even applaud the crack down on hate speech.  If Neo-Nazis are not allowed to march, if a propaganda spouting newspaper is shut down, if petitions are blocked by security (that actually happened last week, funny how few people noticed). The thing is though, the Constitution, if it has any significance to the wider world beyond these United States of America, is that it guarantees these rights to all people (I know it has taken us a while to really hash out what "all people" really implies).  That is perhaps the only solid foundation for any claim of American exceptionalism: we give these rights to the people, even if they cause trouble for us, even if they hinder us from some grand destiny, even if they hold us back from using our considerable power.

As a progressive person I still value the Constitution and its protections of the "inalienable rights" of human beings.  As a Christian, I admire our codification of rules that are designed to protect the "least of these" from the predatory instincts of the wealthy and the powerful.  I also appreciate that, while motivations may be different for people of conservative disposition or non Christian ethical perspectives, we could agree and find common ground on the founding principles of human rights and dignity.

Which is why I'm a bit puzzled this Monday morning about a few of the events of the weekend.  I have seen people, whom I know to be intelligent and thoughtful people, ranting about the protests that took place over the weekend.  I'm not talking about the burning and breaking riots that happened on Friday, those are not by any standards "peaceable assembly." I'm talking about the astonishing event of Saturday, the women's march, which took place here in DC and also around the world.  There was no violence, there was no disorderly conduct, I'm not aware of anyone being arrested or looting.  What I saw was a whole lot of women (and men) wearing pink hats and carrying signs expressing various sentiments of discontent and protest.  They didn't exactly have a unifying theme, they weren't exactly clear about why they were marching, because, as far as I can tell, out of the millions that participated there were millions of reasons for doing so.

I thought, as a whole, if you are an American and you appreciate our Constitution and our hallowed freedoms, you would appreciate what took place on Saturday, whether you agree with the purpose or not. Instead, what I heard via social media, are any number of challenges to the protests, some quite lengthy, some quite terse, all of which amount to the same thing: "you should just sit down and shut up."

I admit, since I agree with the sentiments of the marchers, it is easy for me to appreciate the beauty and power of what took place on Saturday.  I also admit that I may have had some less than savory opinions about the Tea Party Patriots doing similar things 7 years ago, but ultimately we need to understand that "destroying" (I believe is the overused clickbait word) your opposition is not the way our democracy is supposed to work. I am not telling you to stop voicing your opinions, that would be utter hypocrisy, I am rather raising a question to those of you who seem so angry about the pink hat crowd: Why are you mad? Is it because they disagree with you? Is it because they are upset about who the President is?

I'm sort of all out of outrage for the moment, but I'm really trying to settle in and find out what kind of action we the people need to take to actually make our union more perfect.  I find the hostility to the press, and peaceable assemblies sort of troubling, like road to fascism troubling.  I'm hoping that the next four years go substantially better than the last three days, I really am.

Can You Dig It?

Politics is eating my soul, so I'm done talking about it here.  I'm not going to mention the twisted apricot of prevarication that is about to be inaugurated next week unless he happens to tangentially relate to something I find interesting or important beyond the sphere of the latest bureaucratic kerfuffle.  But there is something that has been dragged into the political discussion recently that actually has broader ramifications for our culture, and that is the concept of "fake news."
This phenomenon exists on both sides of the aisle, and thus is a non-partisan burr in the saddle of our public discourse.  I would be okay if we let Breitbart and Mother Jones battle it out in the Thunderdome and then executed the survivor, because their stank is becoming toxic and it's polluting the honest commentary and news that we actually need to make sense of the chaos that is our body politic at the moment.
Fake news may seem like a new thing, but actually it's not really.  We've all seen the tabloids at the supermarket check-out right?  Well the reason those things are there is because someone, actually probably a lot of someones, maybe someones who won't admit to being someones, actually buy them.  They want to read about Kim Kardashian's cellulite and the fact that Elvis works in a 7-11 in Mississippi, oh and let's not forget Bat-boy. There are enough people out there who buy those things to keep the tabloids in business while actual newspapers have to scramble to figure out how to compete in the age of the interweb. There is a distinctively American phenomenon that I think reflects the reality that we are confronting at the moment, and it is actually fun to talk about, I will leave filling in the somewhat disturbing implications of this to you the reader.
That phenomenon is the world of professional wrestling.  I'm not talking about this:

Because unless one of those guys is your son, that stuff is boring

I'm talking about this:

Yeeeah, Brother.

Aka, Wrasslin'. 

Now, when I was a kid, I watched these dudes do their thing on Saturday morning, after cartoons, it just seemed like a logical extension for a 10 year old boy, ridiculous men doing ridiculous and seemingly violent things, but no one ever seemed to get really hurt.  It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys.  The good guys were honorable and never cheated (unless they had been cheated against many times and the deck was really stacked against them).  Authority was either A.) clueless (the darn ref never saw anything) or B.) nefarious and corrupt (for some reason Vince McMahon would let Bobby Heenan or Fred Blassy actually run the shows, what was he thinking).  It was all about working class hero type fantasies being played out by mesomorphs in spandex. The "prizes" were gaudy gold belts and the companionship of beautiful women, what else is there right?

When you're a little kid, you love to root for the good guys, called "babyfaces" or just "faces," even though you are years away from actually knowing that sort of industry insider language.  And you root against the Heels, who are often the epitome of the things you hate: bullies, snobs, cheaters. As you grow up you learn that the most interesting characters are not necessarily either the Faces or the Heels, but the guys who tiptoe the line a little, like Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ric Flair, they could sort of go either way depending on what the script called for.

The critical inflection points in the world of wrasslin' were those moments when a Face went Heel, or vice versa.  The guys who were tweeners like Piper and Flair could really pull this off almost any time, and so they tended to be critical to plots, even if they weren't actually doing much wrasslin'. If you watched it back in those days, you will remember that Piper's Pit, Rowdy Roddy's "talk show," segment was the absolute highlight of many an hour of wrasslin'. It was where good guys got ambushed by bad guys and often where the bad guys got their evil outed to the world.

As you grow up, you start to get a sense for how these things go and you start to develop an interest in a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on.  You take a bit of pride in knowing how scripts are going to unfold, and there is nothing more exciting than a "shoot," a match or an encounter that goes off script, because that happens, or it used to.  When I was in college, my roommates and I watched wrasslin with that sort of eye, looking for the clues about what was going on.  This was during a pretty exciting era for the wrasslin world, there was a major competition in the real world between WCW and the WWE  for the TV ratings and market share.  There was a little indy operation called ECW that operated in a bingo hall in South Philly who basically made a living by giving the more grown up (but not necessarily more mature) wrasslin fan what they wanted: more sex, blood and chaos.  It was in this era that Vince McMahon, almost by accident stumbled upon an important reality: rule breaking was becoming popular.  The way I remember it, Stone Cold Steve Austin was the first one to really snap the chain.  He was bad, but he was not bad in a conniving, cowardly way, like most of the really good Heels, think Bobby Heenan, who is sort of what you would get if Draco Malfoy developed a serious IHOP addiction.  He was a "manager" and not at all capable of physically intimidating anyone, he relied on his thugs and he ran away and sniveled whenever things got rough.  Steve Austin started out as a flunky for Ted Debiase who was a well devised Heel whose gimmick was being rich (perfect bad guy for the wrasslin audience, most of whom were decidedly working class), but Austin flipped on that whole scene and started to make himself what seemed like an actual menace to society, drinking beer in the ring, pushing the boundaries of what language you were allowed to use on TV.

He went "over" like you wouldn't believe.  "Over," is what they call it when the fans start rooting for a wrassler.  Stone Cold was popular with the naive Face crowd, with the more cynical Heel crowd, and with the fans like us who liked to be in the know about stuff.  Pretty soon, others started to follow the pattern Hunter Hearst Helmsley (Triple-H) followed a similar pattern, moving from a snooty, rich Heel, to a cerebral puppet master (The Game).  Dwayne Johnson went from being the worst Face ever Rocky Maivea, to perhaps one of the best characters of all time: The Rock.  To college age fans, this seemed like a great thing, until you went to a couple of live shows and sat in the midst of an audience who clearly wasn't appreciating the nuance and the story-telling art of what was going on.

It might seem funny to pick up a National Enquirer and read the ridiculous stuff in those pages as a sort of laugh at the absurdity of it all, but it gets less funny when you realize that there are people out there, grown up people, who work at jobs, and drive cars and vote in elections, who actually believe that stuff.

It got a little less funny the first time I saw an 8 year old kid with a Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt that read "I Just Whooped Your ASS." If I had said that when I was 8, my mom would have whooped my ass.  This kid's parents actually bought him that shirt.  I don't think I appreciated at the time that this C-change that was happening in the wrasslin' world was actually a ruination.  When I was a kid, Hulk Hogan told us to say our prayers and eat our vitamins before he went out and ripped his T-shirt off and proceeded to do justice to the evildoer.  Sure, that wore a little thin by the time I was 18 or so, but I had grown into an understanding of the underlying truth of the business, it was all just storytelling and melodrama.

These days I can't really watch wrasslin' none of the characters really make much sense, anyone that matters has taken up residence in that gray area.  They're all trying to be Roddy Piper and Stone Cold Steve Austin and that's not a good thing, because it muddies the plots, and let's face it, the story has always been the thing.

Fake news has muddied the plot to the point where he-who-must-not-be-named can accuse a reporter from a fairly well established network or newspaper of being the very same thing as Buzzfeed.  If I can bring myself to look at this with the level of detachment that I used to have while watching Monday Night Raw, this might be entertaining, but this is happening in a world where healthcare and fighting in wars are at stake.  This is not about whether the Macho Man can win the Intercontinental Title and get back Miss Elizabeth.

I just can't detach from it enough, so I'm done.  I'm raising the people's eyebrow at everything I read, and everything I hear, and I'm watching out for someone about smack us with a steel chair.

If you smell what the Rock is cooking.

The Road Is How

I'm going to start off this morning with about as Pentecostal a statement as you are ever likely to hear from a Presbyterian: the Holy Spirit did a great thing last night.  For almost two years I have been meeting with a group of local pastors to pray once a month.  These men are not my usual church tribe, they are Baptist, Wesleyan, Nazarene and a few of indeterminate denominational affiliation.  Most of the group are church planters at different stages of development, the youngest having just launched his church in September of 2016.
There have been many times in the development of this little group that I have had to have the mainline log removed from my eye.  I have talked before about how great diversity is, usually with regard to race or culture or being inclusive of LGBTQ people.  But over the past year I have learned that perhaps diversity must also be celebrated outside of the liberal barbie dream house.  For instance if you want to truly cross boundaries between white and black churches you're going to have to deal with the fact that many, many black churches and churchgoers, skew a bit more conservative and maybe even fundamentalist than those of us who hold up Martin Luther King Jr. as a saint of diversity would like to imagine.  The truth of the matter is, I'm not sure how MLK would have dealt with the inclusion of LGBT people in the church.  Would his civil rights ethic overcome the traditions of his southern culture, his baptist hermeneutic, his 1950 mindset?  I don't know.  History didn't give us the chance to find out.
Last night, a group of different pastors led our congregations together to experience what much maligned American Christianity could look like.  There are times, even as I serve a congregation that is alive and kicking, that I am perhaps too ready to put a toe tag on American Christianity and pronounce it DOA.  I need to stop that. What we did last night was put our egos to the side, there was no featured preacher, there was a blended group of musicians from different churches, there was no offering for a cause, no agenda other than to offer ourselves to God in prayer and praise.
In all honesty, none of us really knew what was going to happen, or how it was going to go, but all of us, from our different quarters came to it with hope and faith and not much else. Our preparation was long, but also very cursory, the script for the evening was only an outline, a few scripture passages read, and some songs sung, and the people of God praying together.
We didn't have to agree on doctrine, or politics, or much of anything except Christ.  The theme for the night, in true 21st century fashion had a hashtag label: #bettertogether.  The idea is that the identity of the church is much more than the individual congregations that are it's most common expression.  A problem for all of our churches is the tendency to become too inward focused, it is a trap that afflicts churches from their very inception.  Even a church that has only been officially launched for a few months has to consciously think about keeping their focus out into the community rather than dwelling on their first flourishing steps.  With time, churches lose this consciousness and focus and settle into routines, then it becomes their guiding purpose to perpetuate those routines and the "feel" of their church.
For you GSPC folks reading this, don't worry, I'm not about to try and make you Pentecostal, we're going to stay nice and Presbyterian, because that is our part of the Body of Christ.  But for those of you that attended the #bettertogether event last night, I hope you saw that something different was going on, and it wasn't just a product of being louder than you're used to, it was a function of a bunch of people stepping off of their home turf, coming out of their tombs and opening their hearts to the movement of the Holy Spirit.
Honestly, that should be something that happens in every worship service, no matter what the style or the tradition.  The thing that was different last night was not what happened up front with the leaders.  We purposefully put our egos on hold and forewent introductions and such, each of us consciously stayed in our lane.  We simply trusted that God would speak and move in open hearts, and that is what happened.
Glimpses of this kind of church, whether it was a pilgrim's mass in Spain or an ecumenical event in Waldorf, are moments that restore my hope in what the church can be. I guess I need the occasional dramatic slap up side the head to see the church as it is and as it should be. It's a dose of excitement, but I needed to be reminded that what happened last night is actually possible in some form any time hearts open in prayer and worship.

And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

Your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

-Joel 2: 28

Our Only Home

The Earth is the Lord's and all that is in it,

The world and those who live in it;

For he has founded it on the seas,

And established it on the rivers.

-Psalm 24: 1

This is not about politics, this is about breathing.  This is not about partisan squabbling, this is about the water that comprises 70% of our bodies.  Once upon a time, I set myself towards earning a degree in Environmental Resource Management.  I succeeded in at least getting the piece of paper that says so.  I was not a particularly good student, or particularly dedicated to the field.  I had not yet discovered the connection with the Creator that truly drove whatever notions of environmental stewardship at the heart of my pursuit.

My education in this field was broad by design.  In the early 1990's the brains of the Penn State College of Agriculture knew that much of the work that needed to be done vis-a-vis sustainable use and ecological protection was going to be an on the job sort of learning.  So the ERM program was designed to give its graduates a sort of broad spectrum of science knowledge without actually getting bogged down in any of the technical stuff that would have been the stock and trade of say an environmental engineer.

Contrary to what you might imagine, this sort of education did not make me a "tree-hugger." A lot of what I learned was related to sustainable use and impact mitigation.  It was not about preserving pristine wilderness for the spotted owls, it was more about making it so that human beings had clean drinking water, healthy air and good quality soil.  Somewhere in there I picked up the idea that pollution wasn't just bad for polar bears, it was also bad for people. Even before the scientific consensus had crystallized to the extent that it has now, it was pretty well accepted that climate change was a real thing and a real threat to human society, even if the worst case scenarios didn't materialize we were still altering our planet in probably irreversible ways, the consequences of this action, even if they were unknown, had the potential for global catastrophe.

It's been 20 years since I graduated with that degree, and I have spent the bulk of that time dealing with theological, spiritual and ecclesiastical challenges of stewardship, but recently I have noticed that there is probably a much greater connection between my undergraduate training and the work of my eventual vocation. Environmental degradation has always been a primary factor in the occurrence of famine and disease outbreaks, you know the things that periodically smack us in the face and remind us that nature can still kill us whenever she wants to.  Poor soil conservation practices have continued despite the dire lessons of the dust bowl, dying coral reefs and the growing dead zone in the Chesapeake Bay.  We have polluted the rivers of fresh water that are very much like arteries of human civilization, we have overused just about every resource imaginable and burned fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow.

The thing is, and this is what I lose sleep over, we have irreparably damaged the world of tomorrow, the one we will give to our children and our descendants.  In my Preacher life I often teach about how important the Hebrew word nahala is to understanding the narratives in the book of Genesis.  Nahala means something like "birthright" or "inheritance." It is the thing that you pass down to future generations.  You have a responsibility to be a good steward of nahala, you must not disgrace the legacy of your forefathers, and you must add to the good foundation and pass that on to your children.  The stewardship of the nahala is a divine mandate, God chooses Abram, a man whose nahala is about to be dissipated and lost because he has no children.  God's promise to Abram, who becomes Abraham is a new inheritance and a new promise: he will be the father/ancestor of many nations.  The nahala that God gave to Abraham was going to extend farther than any family or tribal heritage could possibly go.

As Paul points out in Romans 4, this promise is still at work in the world because of Jesus, the descendant of Abraham. In fact, from a Christian perspective, the covenant is now wide open, global in scope and eternal in scale.  How is it then that we can blindly follow such a destructive path concerning the resources that we all need?  As much as I endorse small scale efforts like driving less, recycling, composting, gardening and such, many of the problems of environmental degradation are global in scale and therefore fall into the domain of politics and diplomacy.  And the flaws of our current political situation are on flagrant display in Flint Michigan, and around the world.  Occasionally the good guys win, or at least forestall defeat, as has happened at Standing Rock, but there are many issues of air quality, climate change, marine ecology and deforestation that must have some element of global political cooperation.

As one of my ERM teachers quipped back in the day, "We need to stop saying save the earth, the earth will be just fine, we may not be able to live here anymore, but the planet itself isn't going anywhere." Our nahala is that thin and fragile ecosystem made up of air, water and soil that provides the basics for all that we need to stay alive. It's very complex and beautiful, but we don't entirely know the limits of how much abuse it can take, and that should make us all humble. No matter what your faith tradition, even if you don't really have one, remember that you are not the owner of this world, only one of its caretakers, how well you do that is your actual legacy, the only legacy that really matters. Protecting that should not be a partisan issue, the fact that it has become such is perhaps the most dangerous sin of our age.