Unsettling Dialogue (part 2)

If a consumer begins to think and act in consideration of his responsibilities, 

then he vastly increases his capacities as a person.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

We like to talk a lot about our rights. We have constitutional amendments that we define as the Bill of Rights.  There are organizations and groups that are devoted to defending the rights of certain groups of people, or certain rights of all people.  We sometimes argue about what is and is not a right, and consensus on that subject is by no means easy to come by.  Mr. Wendell lifts up a rather important counterbalance to rights: responsibility.  I hear a lot about people claiming their rights, as citizens, as parents, as consumers, but mostly what you see with regard to responsibility is rather the opposite.

There is a good reason for this: 

It may be that when one hands one's responsibilities to an organization, one becomes by that divestiture irresponsible.  It may be that responsibility is intransigently a personal matter - that a responsibility can be fulfilled or failed, but cannot be got rid of.

Groups and communities can help you with your rights, inalienable and otherwise, but with regard to living up to your responsibilities, you are by definition on your own.  This is a bugaboo of modern politics: people confuse rights and responsibilities and do not adequately recognize the intricate and intimate connection of the two.  When people complain that their rights have been violated, one of the exploitative responses is to point out that they somehow failed their responsibility.  We see this rather brutally played out in the criminal justice system where incarceration rates are abysmally out of balance with regard to black folks.  When you point out that injustice, an inevitable response is, well "they" are criminals, meaning people who have broken faith with the laws and responsibilities of citizenship. The drastic failure of responsibility in criminal behavior is the excuse for many people to never examine the systemic inequality that leads to a statistically observable injustice. Politicians of a certain bent will say that anyone who points to the flaw is "soft" or "weak on crime," but in doing so they are failing their responsibility as public servants, which is to provide for the common good. The common good, in my mind would mean a just society from bottom to top. Injustice at any level compromises the common good. Inversely, if a criminal blames the system for his bad behavior, he is also failing his responsibility to be a law abiding citizen.  The web of responsibility is complicated, the idea of rights is simple by comparison, so it's easier to shout about.
Many people would rather relinquish their rights than assume full responsibility, we would rather be safe than free.  Those who covet power are not ashamed to exploit this weakness, and Berry points out that this is not just a slogan of revolutionaries and dissidents, it applies to our habits as consumers:

People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is "attractively packaged." The advertising industry is founded upon this principle.

Have we become a people that could be described that way?  I think so, more than I would like to admit personally.  Consumption can absolutely be a drug used to numb the anxiety of existence. When I buy something I want I feel good, when I buy something I have convinced myself I need, I feel even better.  I can be convinced by politicians that if I vote for them they will do the things I agree with and want for my country, even though they have been proven liars for far too long.  I think that we even apply a consumer mindset to our spiritual lives and worshiping communities.  Churches have, all too often used the tools of advertising and the exploitative mindset to take power away from people and put it in the hands of a hierarchy or a cult of personality.  It does not serve us well in the long run, because Christ, our center was in fact a paradigm of responsibility, not just for himself, but for other people.  He revealed the moral rules of the law to be founded upon a broader, communal standard: "love one another."
The exploitative consumer is incapable of loving anything other than their own appetites.  Love is reduced to lust, industriousness and ingenuity are reduced to greed, noble ambition is reduced to power grabbing.  What is the way out?

What has not been often said, because it did not need to be said until fairly recent times, is that the responsible consumer must also be in some way a producer. Out of his own resources and skills, he must be equal to some of his own needs.

This is, I think, why I feel so good after I go out and cut up a dead tree and split the logs for firewood, rather than just going down to the store and buying a bundle of firewood for $5.  The fire feels warmer, I swear it does.  This is why I feel proud any time I can take something old and fix it or, re-purpose some bit of junk I have laying around.  This is why I am sort of in love with the idea of hunting, even if I'm a bit troubled by killing, the idea of providing something to eat from the wild and connecting with the food chain.  It's why I like to garden, even if I put way more money (and time) into it than it's actually worth.  It's why I bother with a compost bin where I slowly try and create good humus from peels and grounds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fairly inveterate consumer. I have not grasped my own responsibility firm enough to go off the grid and live as a hunter gatherer.  I still use Amazon.com as a drug to break me out of a funk.  That's why I'm calling this a dialogue, because it's not one sided, it goes back and forth between what I would like to be and what I am.

Unsettling Dialogue

If you have read this thing for a while, you know that I am a fan of Wendell Berry.  I like his poetry best, I think it rises to the level of prophetic speech at times.  I enjoy reading about the fictional denizens of Port William in books like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow.  It is his non-fiction, in the form of books and essays of cultural and (I think) spiritual critique that let you see the clear thought and bracing wisdom behind the poems and the stories.  I had a doctor's appointment today and my doc is notoriously behind schedule so I brought a book, which just happened to be Berry's Unsettling of America.  I like to bring books I've already read to waiting places, because I can absorb the distractions better if I kind of know what I'm reading already.
Unsettling was first published in 1977, and Berry, in the preface says that time is the enemy of a critique such as the one he was putting out there.  The world of agriculture (which is the subject of the book at least on the surface) was in flux and he was trying to see larger trends that might prove to be timely.  What he actually managed to capture in much of the book is a rather timeless analysis of human culture.  Sure some of his more nitty gritty criticisms of certain policies and practices and the occasional person are a little out-dated, but the premise that what afflicts our most basic industry (the production of food) is really a canary in a coal mine for larger cultural issues, was spot on, and I would say prophetic.
I talk about this book a lot, some of you may have heard me extolling its virtues, but as I waited for my medical specialist to tell me what the various numbers revealed by blood tests and such mean for my overall health, I was reminded again of how prescient Mr. Berry actually was by the following paragraph, remember first published 40 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was President.  Berry was working on a different way of seeing the differences between people and even within individual psyches, other than liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, capitalist/communist.  He did not break entirely out of the mindset of dualism, but he did offer one of the better dichotomous classifications I have read recently: Exploitative versus Nurturing.  We all have a little of both in us and some people are more dominated by one or the other, but the two attitudes are clearly at odds with one another, and in this case it is fairly clear to see that one is more prone to immorality than the other.  Anyway here's what he says about the exploitive (sic) mindset:

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer.  And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided as we are - both against each other and within ourselves.  Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship (the craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need and do not want for more than it is worth) Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.  In business it sells sham and frustration as luxury and satisfaction.  The "constantly expanding market" first opened in the New World by fur traders is still expanding - no longer so much by expansions of territory or population, but by the calculated outdating, outmoding, and degradation of goods by the hysterical self-dissatisfaction of consumers that is indigenous to an exploitative economy.

I almost dropped my book.  This has been going on for my entire life, in fact, Berry makes the argument that it is not some sort of late modern mutation, but rather a fundamental characteristic of the American (New World) mindset. We now have politicians who are primarily salesmen and the Clintonian maxim that "it's the economy stupid," has become canonical to the point where we don't even flinch when new and more draconian forms of exploitation show their faces.
As we speak, we have a salesman/conman (depending on your opinion) for President, people are drooling over $1000 iPhones that they really don't need, and up the road in D.C. they are working on a tax plan that is going to achieve the exploiter's wet dream of corporate tax cuts at the expense of regular people, at the expense of exploding the national debt (which for 8 years of the Obama Presidency was like the black plague, but which now seems like just the cost of doing business).
Tell me how a Kentucky farmer saw this so clearly when I was three years old.  Why didn't anyone listen to him?
That's enough for now, my doc told me my blood pressure was high, so I need to relax.  But I'm going to come back with more Unsettling, it's just too important to stop there.

Pressing Questions

You abandon the commandments of God and hold to human traditions.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 7:8

Misery loves company, or so the saying goes.  I'm not so sure that I'm glad to hear about other religions being in the same boat as American Christianity at the moment, but there was this in the New York Times today.  For all you TL;DR people out there, it talks about how conservative, religious Muslims, having finally obtained power in Turkey after years of oppression, are now worse than their secular predecessors in terms of corruption and immoral use of power.  I have to say I found myself transposing what he was talking about to Christianity and America a little too easily.  The question of the headline is "Does Religion Make People Moral?"  And I have to tell you that until fairly recently I would have said that it definitely does, but lately I'm not so sure.

The decidedly moral questions that we must answer as a society: how do we create a just system of governance? How do we participate in a truly equitable economy? How do we protect those who are vulnerable in our midst? Are in many cases being answered immorally by self-identified religious people.  I'm not talking about differences of opinion here either, you could argue (and many do) that a corporate tax cut will create economic growth and a rising tide lifts all boats.  You could also argue (as I happen to believe) that supply side/trickle down economics is a failed doctrine that has led us to a place where it is demonstrably more difficult for successive generations to achieve upward mobility.  Neither one of these positions is necessarily morally right, but the fact that people go hungry and homeless, while others have more than they could ever need is a moral failing of our society.  You could argue about who is worse: Bill Clinton or Roy Moore, but the fact that our society has protected sexual predators based on utilitarian principles is a moral failure.

Religion, as the article points out, does not seem to create a morality that is immune to the corrupting influence of power.  And while trickle down economics is a crock, the trickle down effect of immorality is no joke. People who were notably and righteously aghast at Billy Clinton diddling an intern less than half his age, say outright that Roy Moore doing the same thing to a sixteen year old girl is somehow different, because it happened way back, because he will help appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, because he will hold on to the GOP majority in the Senate, because he will "Stand for God," yeah I'm calling shenanigans on that last one, but the other ones are pretty thin as well. The immorality of the people at the top seeps down to pollute and stain the people at the bottom, money seems to flow up hill in our world, but crap still rolls down hill.

Donald J. Trump's megalomania convinces a bunch of church-going grandmas who live by a code that says name-calling and bragging are bad manners, end up voting for a man who has made name calling and bragging into a personal brand. Why? Because he is on "their side," whatever that happens to mean.  It reminds me of how much I hated Terrell Owens until he played for the Eagles (that didn't end well and it's a possibility that Trump might go out the same way).

The really sad thing is that, while the people who have been claiming the moral high ground for quite some time have been revealed as a brood of vipers, there really isn't anyone with the credibility to take their place.  Democrats? Yeah, not so much, thanks Franken and Conyers.  We might have been able to actually put Clinton in the past if it wasn't for your handsy ways. Is it the church? Probably not, as the article in the Times makes clear, religious people aren't actually much more moral than anyone else when you dangle power in front of them.

As with a lot of things, this is a systemic failure, and thus it is hard to even figure out how to fix. We have been letting our moral structure erode for an awful long time. Besides that, I think it is spurious to think that we can simply reconstruct the "good old days" and end up with a truly moral society.  Remember that a lot of the things that are symptoms of our moral decay: greed, licentiousness, hubris, have been around for a really long time.  We needed advancements in women's rights to see how pervasive sexual harassment had become.  We needed the aristocracy to collapse and a sense of equality to arise before we could come to any sense that perhaps the benefits of society should be shared more evenly (work in progress).  We needed a sense of human dignity to arise before we could even realistically raise questions about prejudice and racism.

Moral codes must adapt to these sorts of changes.  It was, once upon a time, morally acceptable to own slaves, it no longer is.  Maybe in the future exploitation of the poor and working class will be seen with the same derision.  It would seem that maybe these powerful men who have taken liberties with women thought that such behavior was morally acceptable, they are finding that assumption to be a mistake.

It's hard to say if our moral codes will ever advance to the point where we can move beyond the greed and consumption of capitalism (communism does not seem to have worked out).  It's hard to see how we will ever be moral enough to resist the corruption of power.  Maybe the moral crisis of the moment will eventually lead to growth of some sort (I'm hopeful because that is generally how growth happens in a spiritual sense).

The distinction that Aykol makes between self-education and self glorification is a useful one in this regard, because I do feel that my Christian faith has shaped my moral awareness, but I had to move past a place where it made me feel like a privileged member of an in group and towards a place where it challenged me to take up my cross and follow.  I believe that religion has within it the raw materials for moral formation, but those things are not always put together in a way that leads to growth.

It occurs to me that power is perhaps the most destructive force to moral formation.  I have mentioned power and corruption several times in the course of this blog, and I know that it's not a new connection.  But I see in American Christianity at the moment, the same thing that has reared it's ugly head throughout history.  The desire to be in charge is antithetical to submission to God's will.  You cannot serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and Mammon, you cannot serve Christ and your own ego.  Serving the masters of greed, pride, power and violence will necessarily lead into immoral behavior and ultimately to destruction.  My feeling is that if your religion doesn't lead to morality, you're probably doing it wrong, and that appears to be true across the spectrum of faith traditions.  We're more alike than we want to admit.

Helter Skelter

When you get to the bottom you go back to the top of the slide,

then you stop, and you turn, and you go for a ride,

Then you get to the bottom and you see me again.

-Helter Skelter, The Beatles

Charlie Manson is dead.  He was 83 years old and had been in prison since before I was born. He is the face of evil personified to a lot of people, and yet also an object of morbid fascination. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, examines the world that Manson essentially embodies: celebrity killers, antiheroes and the ultimate flaw of postmodernity.  In the movie, fictional psychopath Mickey Knox is asked by an interviewer about other serial killers and mass murderers, none of which he has much respect for, until you get to Manson, at the mention of Manson, Mickey is impressed and refers to him as "The King," in the same sort of way that rock and rollers might reverence Elvis Aaron Presley.

I'm not exactly sure what it is about Manson that attracts our collective curiosity.  I mean, there are far more terrifying people out there, most of the serial killers that gained some kind of notoriety were objectively more terrifying.  Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, all sorts of men who killed for killing's sake. But Manson had this vision, and he was able to twist others into doing his bidding.  He was able to combine the skills of a Pimp, a cult leader and an apocalyptic preacher all into one deadly package.

If it sounds like I admire Charles Manson, I certainly do not. His obituary reads like a litany of all the ways our society can fail horribly.  He was born into a bad situation, he grew up in a disconnected and brutal world where he never had the basic security that most of us take for granted.  When you read even a sketch of his life story, it's easy to see why he became a psychopath.  What I find interesting about Manson is how well he reflects the dysfunction of postmodern America, he is essentially an incarnation of everything that can go wrong with us.

His life story is a tale of marginalization and brutalization.  He was a criminal before he formed "The Family," and it wasn't by accident that he called his little cult "The Family."  It would seem that he never had much of a family in the real world, his childhood was a train wreck, his marriages ended in divorce. The conventional way of being a family totally failed for him, so why not try something different.  Let's get the young, disenfranchised youth of suburbia and offer them something that seems like it has meaning.  Let's give them a worldview that has a purpose, even if that purpose is askew and not at all connected with reality.  It doesn't need to be, it just needs to be something that makes them feel important and included.

Let's wrap up our little vision in stuff that people already find cool, like Beatles lyrics and random stuff from the book of Revelation.  Let's prey on people's racism and prejudice, and let's convince them that our little family has something important to do.  It's pretty much the same thing that ISIS does, without the Beatles songs.

This is what I think made Manson so unnerving to so many: they could almost see how he did it.  They could look at those girls who had fallen under his spell, and see their daughters.  They could see kids who were dealing with the aftermath of a rather violent deconstruction period.  Their nation could not be trusted, their faith had never been nurtured in the first place, they had been weaned from the nuclear family on to cold gruel of materialist consumerism, and they were longing for something to feel a part of, Charlie Manson gave them something.

The thing that I am thinking today, as Manson has died at a fairly ripe old age, is how we didn't really learn our lesson about the danger he poses.  We eventually learned to laugh him off, he was this crazy little guy with a swastika carved into his forehead, still protesting his innocence and granting the occasional insane, ranting interview.  It would be easy for people of my generation to completely forget the brutality that he unleashed. We still need to teach our kids to resist the "sales" pitch from people who would prey on their boredom and disaffection, who would offer them a community, which even if it is soaked in blood, seems better than no community at all.

What still terrifies me about Charlie Manson, even now that he's gone, is the fact that someone like him could very easily happen again, and we still wouldn't have any idea what to do about it.

What Matters

You are the salt of the earth;

But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5:13 (from the Sermon on the Mount)

This has been one of those meaningful but difficult days that following Jesus sometimes throws at you, or at least it should.  The first thing on my agenda was the usual Friday walk with the dog around the lake.  I wasn't sure I was going to fit it in, because this Friday was going to be anything but a day off as per usual. I knew I needed it though, like Jesus needed to go off by himself and pray sometimes.

The next thing on my agenda was conducting a funeral for a two month old baby boy, who I was supposed to baptize last Sunday.  I know, I'm sorry, that's kind of a gut punch and I didn't give you much warning.  It feels that way to me too.  His name was Keith Takha Akaragwe, the son of one of the Cameroonian families that have recently become a part of our congregation.  He was healthy and happy and then last Saturday night his mother put him to bed, in the usual way.  An hour later she went to check on him and he was in distress, paramedics came, the hospital tried, but his fragile little life could not be saved. And so instead of celebrating a baptism with all the usual joy, we have spent the week mourning.

In my nearly fifteen years of ordained ministry, this is the first time I have had to do a memorial for a baby.  If it weren't for one dramatic outlier (involving children being killed by their father), this would have been the most difficult one to date.  The large majority of people I have had to memorialize had at least had a fighting chance at life.  When older people die there is a certain way you can deal with it, you can remember funny things about them, you can make a well timed joke (yes at funerals). I think the trick is to memorialize them the way they were and not the way sappy bereavement cards do it. You tread a very fine line along edge of irreverence, it cuts the through the maudlin feelings and brings reality in as sort of bracing balm against despair.

You have no room, and no material to work with in the case of a two month old baby.  Reality doesn't need to be brought in, it is raging and in your face.  It is a wailing mother watching them put a tiny little casket in the ground, it is songs of lament sung in a tongue you don't understand but somehow you know every word they say.  I have never felt so ill-equipped to offer comfort in my life.

This is where my intellectual ability and even my theological perspective fails me.  This is where I fall back on the basics, the understanding of the sacraments as actions of God's grace, the familiar words of Psalm 23, the Lord's Prayer, the simple affirmation that, no matter what, we are in God's hands.  It is not elegant or well thought out, sometimes it seems naive, but I don't know how else to stand in front of a tiny little casket and try to construct some sort of meaning that isn't pure brutality.

The faith of that moment is pure salt, it has to be built into the spiritual chemistry of my heart, because I can't fake my way through it, I can't come up with enough eloquence to somehow say that two months on this earth is enough.  It is the one funeral I have ever done where I didn't even think about using Ecclesiastes 3, because damn it, there should never be a time for tiny little caskets.

Then it was done, tetelestai, and I had more to do.

The afternoon was spent cooking chili for the nearly forty people who are experiencing homelessness, who are being given a home in our church this week.  The program is called Safe Nights, and tonight I was part of the dinner team, and now I'm spending the night here at church in case a circuit breaker trips or they need some help with something related to the building.  I spent the afternoon dealing with spices, salt, pepper, chili, adobo, paprika, a little of this, a little of that, making a pot of chili that was decidedly larger than what I normally make.  One of the young men in the Safe Nights program told me, "that chili was on point!" So I did it right.  I wish I had the same assurance about this morning.

Normally, I sit here in my office on my night watch during Safe Nights feeling pretty good about what we're up to as a church.  And I suppose there's a little of that, but this year there are so many little ones here, and a larger than average number of grown ups.  We barely have enough room for all of them in the inn, and that reminds me of the fact that charity does not adequately make up for lack of justice.  There are a few of these folks that we see year after year, the regulars, they know the routine, they are pretty settled into the homeless routine, that's one thing.  As Jesus said, "we will always have the poor," yes I suppose that is true, there are some people who will always find themselves at the margins of society, and that is why we we always need to act charitably towards "the least of these."  Good and fine, we can run Safe Nights from now until the second coming if we have to, but we are seeing a growing number of people in this program, who, if the system were fair and just, would be able to make it on their own.  There are people here who have jobs, people who, with a bit of a boost, would be able to become actual assets to their communities rather than having to sleep on cots in crowded church basements.

After we fed the crowd, I withdrew to my office and got around to reading the paper, in which I found this opinion piece the New York Times, by David Brooks.  I commend the whole thing to your attention, but I would like to share the following:

Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that's what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis.  Freedom without connection becomes alienation.  And that's what we see at the bottom of society - frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction.

His main point is that for people to live and thrive in a free society they must be formed into people who can handle freedom.  This is a solid biblical principal.  The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years, not because they were lost in a relatively small area, but because they were not ready to inherit the promised land.  The slave mind had to die out and the free mind had to rise in order for them to be ready.  Jesus' disciples were a case study in incompetence and blindness until they were trained, commissioned and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
What I did this morning was a product of years of formation and walking in faith, and I know that it is, in its turn, only one more step in the journey. As is every pot of chili I make for Safe Nights or each outstretched hand I take.  What I hope I am growing into is a person who can enter into the joy of my God in all circumstances, in other words, someone who is ready for the freedom that comes in and only in union with Christ.
It breaks my heart that sometimes it takes a tiny casket to remind me of that reality, that in life, and in death, the only truth is in Jesus the Christ, if we lose that we lose our saltiness and we're good for nothing.

Uncovering

Do not say, "Why were the former days better than these?"

For it is not from Wisdom that you ask this.

-Ecclesiastes 7: 10

Are you surprised by Harvey Weinstein? Kevin Spacey? Louis C.K? Bill Cosby? Roy Moore? Or any of the high profile men that are accused of using their power to gain some sort of sexual advantage over young women (or in Spacey's case young men).  It seems that the floodgates of accusation have opened recently, but the behavior that is being splattered across the headlines is certainly not new, nor particularly rare.  In Weinstein's case it seems as though his sexually predatory behavior was almost comically (not in the ha ha sort of way) well known.  People made jokes about how he would assault and abuse people and everyone knew about "Harvey being Harvey."

Now that our collective outrage has turned on this sort of behavior, we are perhaps ready to deal with something that has been an all too common reality for women, for a very long time.  The reality is that those with power (wealth and celebrity being the two sorts of power most visible recently) have always had a way of taking advantage of those less powerful than themselves.  Whether it is pedophile priests, Jerry Sandusky or Bill Clinton, people with status seem to believe that they can get away with abusing people under them and having the system defend them.

The reality is that the system does often defend them, which is why many of these allegations take years if not decades to percolate out into the light of day, and even when they come to light, there is no shortage of apologists who will tell you "surely this can't be true."

Since, over the weekend, several evangelical types have used the Bible to justify Roy Moore's behavior towards teenagers, I would like to take the challenge so to speak, because the Bible is sort of my thing.  One justification was that Mary was pretty young when Joseph married her and the theory is that he was an older man, perhaps a widower or someone who could be trusted to care for a young girl who was pregnant under suspicious circumstances.  The Gospels that deal with Jesus birth explain it pretty much this way, that Joseph was not a lecher, he was an honorable man who, far from taking advantage of a a vulnerable young girl, actually went out of his way to protect her from shame  and dishonor (which is a big thing even today in Middle Eastern society, but don't get me started on honor killings, I could go on all freaking day, because that stuff pushes all my anger buttons).

That, however, is nothing like the scenario surrounding Mr. Moore, or Mr. Weinstein, or any of them.  That scenario is pretty much the exact opposite of what is being alleged.  Even trying to bring that in as a comparison is foul and villainous, but it wasn't the only Bible based rationalization.

Someone mentioned David, as in King David, son of Jesse, a man after God's own heart, singer of psalms and slayer of giants, also, consequently, adulterer, murderer, a man who couldn't even prosecute the rape of one of his own daughters, and finally a decidedly dirty old man.  We can honor David for a lot of good things, but the Bible is also pretty unapologetic about his flaws.  For those of you who are not avid readers of the books of Samuel and Kings, let me fill you in on the high points.  When David had established his kingdom, he started to get a little complacent in his power, so one year, when he should have been out defending the realm and fighting off the Ammonites or something, he stayed around the palace and ended up getting into an affair with a woman named Bathsheba, who was married to Uriah the Hittite.  David had a bunch of wives already, but in typical man-fashion he always wanted a little more.  Bathsheba gets pregnant and David is not able to scheme his way out of that, so he ends up compounding the error by having Joab make sure that Uriah bites the dust in battle.  So now David is free to move in and actually take Bathsheba as his wife, but the baby dies as a punishment for David's sin, so now David has adultery, murder and the life of an innocent child on his hands.  You should not be looking at David as a model for how to live your life at this point, nor venerating him as some sort of hero, that Goliath incident is long ago and far away.

But wait, as they say, there's more.  When David is older, he has a lot of kids by various wives. He has a daughter named Tamar (never name your daughter Tamar, please, just never do it) who is the sister of his son Absalom (also probably not high on the list of baby names).  Another one of his sons from another mother is Amnon and Amnon gets the idea that Tamar is super pretty and he wants to get some of that, so he rapes her, because Harvey Weinstein did not invent this sort of horror, he just kept it rolling.  David finds out about this, but because Amnon is his son, he sort of shrugs it off, which of course Absalom is not having one little bit.  Absalom kills Amnon and a bunch of other sons of David, because Absalom is a bit of a hot-head (think Joe Pesci in Goodfellas), he goes into open revolt and for a while actually drives David out of Jerusalem and usurps the throne.  David doesn't have the heart or the will to deal with Absalom any more than he did with Amnon.  He does not do justice, as the King should, and eventually it again falls on Joab (the same dude that handles all of David's dirty work) to eventually defeat and kill Absalom.

The story of David's moral failure is not done yet, because we still have to talk about Abishag the Shunamite, who was a young, pretty slave girl whose job it was to keep David warm in bed.  After various rapes, murders and revolutions this seems like small potatoes, but it caps off the reality that you probably shouldn't be using David to justify the way you treat women, he was not a good role model.

This sort of behavior is always a danger to the Kingdom, it always needs to be challenged, it always needs to be named.  We are in the process of the most recent round of challenges.  What we should repent of is the reality that we let it get this far and stink this bad.  It's shaping up to be that this can't be a one sided repentance either.  Left and right both have their share of abusers.  We need to work on this thing really seriously, but please save me your shock and surprise, it's not like it's new.

Of Logs and Eyeballs

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye,

But do not notice the log in your own eye?

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 7:3

Sometimes I feel paralyzed by this verse.  Probably because I feel that judging others is one of my own personal battlegrounds with sin.  One of the peculiar things about having a teenage son, who in my case happens to have a very similar personality to my own, is that one sees an almost comic caricature of ones own personality flaws.  My son is a know it all extraordinaire, and I am also, a lot of the time.  In studying Myers-Briggs Personality Types, and through long searching of my own ego, I understand that the natural inclination I have towards this is rooted in a desire for competence and self-reliance.  Jack and I are both INTJ or INTP depending on the day (Find out what that means here).  That last letter is the only one on my inventory that proves fluid from time to time.  Fifteen years ago I was pretty securely on the J end of that particular spectrum, the J and the P stand for Judging and Perceiving.  When I am operating out of my J tendencies, I am at my most stubborn and bullheaded, because I am doggedly sure that I am right, about pretty much everything.

Pastoral work, parenthood, and probably just plain getting old have pulled me (sometimes kicking and screaming) back towards the P end of the continuum.  To (over) simplify, J is about the destination and P is about the journey.  I find that personally, I function best when the two are in balance, and teaching the J side to appreciate the P is a healthy thing for me to do.

An interesting side effect of this personal balancing act is that I tend to get "triggered," as the younglings say, by judgmental people.  And in my line of work I tend to run into a fair number of those, particularly when I stick my nose out into the broader church.  I believe in the unity of the Body of Christ, and so I try to work with folks from other denominations.  I am not against working along side Pentecostals or Roman Catholics, Lutherans or Methodists, whatever, but there are times when the legitimate differences between those groups can rear up and get kind of ugly with regard to the log/speck dynamic.  At those times it is probably fortunate that I am an Introvert on the Myers-Briggs scale because if I was an ENTJ, I would probably get into more fist fights.  As it is, I am thankful for my ability to conduct internal dialogues, even if they are outraged, without becoming outwardly hostile.

My NT complex means that I gather information through intuition (as contrasted with sensing) and process it through thinking (as contrasted with feeling).  It also means I am in a minority of the population. Unlike the shifting sands of my J-P continuum these inclinations have been remarkably stable and strongly rooted since the first time I took the MBTI in high school.  In practice this means that when I encounter a "trigger," I feel it in my gut, and sometimes pretty strongly in my gut.  But then I need to take the time to think it through before I determine what my response ought to be.  In formulating my responses, often my Introverted nature reels in whatever sort of "enlightened" invective I might otherwise spew forth, particularly if I sense that I will be simply talking to a wall.

This is sort of the long way around to saying something that I think might be valuable to a lot of people who are trying to follow Jesus in the world. I hope it is most valuable to people who are, right now, feeling alienated by the Conservative Evangelical brand of Christianity that is sucking all the oxygen out of the room right now in this country and which, despite the name Evangelical, is anything but "Good news."  I am not naming names or describing scenarios by which I have come to this insight, which you might call a prophetic word, or you might call blasphemy if you are one of the people who is guilty of the sort of thing I'm about to talk about.  What I am offering here is a critique of a certain type of behavior by people who claim to follow Jesus.  It would have no bearing on a Buddhist or even on a Jew because it is rooted wholly in the ethic of Jesus that calls us to care for the least of these and the little ones.

Please listen Christians, try not to get defensive, know that I have had this very thing sticking in my own eye and it has been a great relief to have it out finally.  I'm trying to help:

You do not own God,

Or even seem to really know God very well.

Jesus does not agree with everything you do

He refuses to hate the people you hate

People can believe differently than you

Jesus loves them too.

People can sing different songs,

They can read the Bible with different eyes

They can even get saved differently than you.

Jesus can save people through sacraments,

Jesus can save people through overpowering moments of emotion

Jesus can save people through a still small voice

Jesus can save Catholics, Protestants, Pentecostals, Anabaptists, millennials, baby boomers, gen-Xers, heterosexuals, homosexuals, transgender people, cis-gender people, non-binary people, dog people, cat people, lizard people, vegans, smokers, potheads, Justin Beiber fans, prostitutes, drug addicts, terrorists, bigots, racists, homophobes, Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Trumpers, Never-Trumpers, Arabs, Israelis, black people, white people, Asian people, Indonesian people, Indians from India and Native Americans, Caucasians (the real ones from the Caucasus), Germans, Swedes, Dutch, Russians, Turks, Egyptians, Irish, Scottish, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Norse, Latino, Mestizo, Inuit, Eskimo, Samoan, Bajun, Cajun and hillbillies of all sorts, Gauls, Huns, Vandals and Visigoths...

You get the idea, Jesus saves, God loves, stop trying to narrow that down

You're making a fool of yourself.

Woe!

The bible on my desk was open to this:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the Law:

justice and mercy and faith.

It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.

You blind guides!

You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel!

-Jesus of Nazareth (Mt. 23: 23-24)

Because the text for last week was the beginning of Matthew 23.  The whole of Matthew 23 is more or less devoted to Jesus ripping the religious authorities of his world up one side and down the other.  The newspapers this morning are full of the story about the Church near San Antonio where a man walked in and started shooting.  The event itself is tragic and leaves us groping in the dark for some sort of reason or meaning to it all, but we don't come up with one.  After Sandy Hook, where the victims were mostly elementary school children, and where we had an actual grown up occupying the Oval Office, I thought, "surely something will be done now."  I think that's where I first started to notice that the only thing that was really being done was "thoughts and prayers."

Now, after a list of tragedies that has grown so long I'm ashamed to start actually start naming names, we come to another senseless violent act that happened to a church full of people who were in the middle of worship.  The usual "thoughts and prayers" are going out, the tithes on mint, dill and cummin are being paid in full, but the weightier matters of justice and mercy and faith... not so much.

I used to think that gun control was the answer, but I'm increasingly thinking that is just the gnat we are actually arguing about straining out, not the camel we are swallowing.  Don't get me wrong, I agree with a lot of common sense gun regulations (here I will add my usual disclaimer that I am a gun owner, I like shooting, but I despise the NRA and their totalitarian approach to the issue), but honestly this goes deeper than guns.  This is a blasphemous spirit embedded deep in our psyche, and I think "thoughts and prayers," are the idolatrous offering to that blasphemous spirit.  They are window dressing, offered as sympathy by people who have the power to change things, but refuse to do so.  More from Jesus' burn fest in Matthew 23: 

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, 

but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth.

So you on the outside look righteous to others,

But inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

It may surprise you to learn that what happened in that little Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas is actually something that many churches have considered a definite possibility for a while now.  Years ago, the insurance company that covers a lot of churches sponsored a seminar, which was actually hosted by the Presbytery at the church I served at the time.  There they gave us the run down on armed security guards and the possible response measures to an "active shooter" situation.  To be clear, the church I served, along with most of the churches represented that day were no bigger than Sutherland Springs Baptist church, which means we had limited resources for things like security. We mostly got a nervous laugh out of the idea of having armed security guards and so we had to sort of think about much more modest responses to what was being pitched as a "real danger."

The conclusion I have come to over the years is that there really is very little we can do about the deranged individual that seeks to do us harm. The people in Charleston welcomed Dylan Roof into their prayers and they treated him kindly before he shot them, their families forgave him, illustrating Christ's compassion in the world.  The response of Sutherland Springs is still in progress, but I believe that we as the church must have another way of responding to the violence of the broken world. We must, therefore attend fully to the "weightier matters of justice, mercy and faith."  That means we cannot give up our hope and faith in the God that conquers death in exchange for an idol that promises to help us avoid it.  Idols cannot deliver on their promises, because they are not real.  The expressions of "thoughts and prayers," has become trite and hypocritical at this point.  The thoughts aren't going to change anything and the prayers are misdirected, vague and sentimental.

I believe in the power of prayer; I believe there is a God who answers our prayers, but I do not believe that the prayers of "thoughts and prayers," are being actually offered to that God, they are being offered to the blasphemous idol of our own arrogance and stubborn pride.  They are being burned on the flaming idol of our power hungry, violence loving, fear-diseased egos.

I'm not giving thoughts and prayers to the people of Sutherland Springs this morning.  I am offering them my lamentation, and my cry to God for comfort.  This is not a prayer, it is a yell, perhaps even a scream, I want it to be something that only a holy and loving God will be able to receive, because I believe that only a God who has a heart capable of breaking will understand:

Lord God, Enough!

Enough of the desolating sacrilege.

Enough of the whitewashed tombs.

Enough of our own sense of self-importance.

Enough of our blasphemous addiction to power.

Enough of our idolatrous craving for security.

Enough of our consuming fear of death.

Enough of our paralyzed, helpless prayers.

Enough, O God, Enough!

A Song About ALICE

Some day you, or someone you know might find themselves in a similar situation.

-Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant

Sometimes you know things are bad on a gut level, but then you get the statistics and somehow that just makes it worse.  Yesterday was one of those days.  I spent six hours over at the local community college at a symposium put on by the United Way about the study that they call ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed).  The entire ALICE Report for the State of Maryland can be found here.  The data collected by the United Way in several states across the country is troubling to say the least.  There were, in addition to the usual community action types, several representatives from politicians offices including the Governor of Maryland (Larry Hogan (R)) and a Senator (Ben Cardin (D)).  Conspicuously absent were the local politicians, the County Commissioners apparently do not care for the data reported by the ALICE study. Politicians disliking facts and numbers seems to be a rather troubling bugaboo these days.
The reality reflected by the ALICE report should not be a partisan issue, because like say the evidence relating to climate change, it is not something that only effects one side of the aisle.  Somehow though, politicians seem wont to ignore bad news if they can. It's not healthy to ignore the warning signs, and it is especially dangerous to flat out reject a diagnosis. I want to explain to you little about what I learned about the diagnosis of what ails us.  Let's start with what ALICE means:

• Asset Limited: Assets are things like cars, houses, family support networks, business capital, even a good credit score.  One of the defining characteristics of people who fall into the ALICE classification is that they do not have things to start with.  Let's take a house for example, because that is one of the largest expenses most of us face on a monthly basis. A particular challenge for Charles County Maryland is lack of affordable housing.  We are 5000 units below our quota for affordable housing, and the definition of affordable is really, really loose in these parts.  Rental units are not plentiful and there is a long waiting list for things like HUD and Section 8 housing.  A Townhouse in this area can run in the neighborhood of $300,000 with most homes going for significantly more than that. Also, we are on the edge of the DC metro area, but the mass transit system is limited.  There is a commuter bus that is utilized by DC workers and there is a local transit operation called VanGo, but the hours and routes are limited so in order to make a go of it you really need some sort of vehicle as well.  These expenses can easily run you into a pretty hefty monthly bill.  The cost of living here is one of the highest in Maryland, which is surprising to many people.
• Income Constricted: I get it, most of us feel "income constricted," at some point or another, but the actual numbers are pretty hard reality.  ALICE uses a criteria that is different from the Poverty Level in determining who falls into the category.  Poverty Level is currently $11,670 for a single adult and $23,580 for a family of four, but that is a national level and for someone trying to actually survive in the DC area that level of income would mean you are homeless.  So ALICE did some work on determining what it takes to actually survive in a given area and uses what they call a "survival wage." This income level accounts for the bare minimum and does not leave any room for savings or emergency medical costs or really even certain things that could reasonably considered a necessity like a cell phone or internet access.  For a single adult the survival income is $23,568, or over double the poverty level (hourly wage: $11.78).  For a family of four the monthly survival costs are $61,224, assuming kids aren't in the workforce yet that means Dad and Mom have to make at least $15 per hour or some combination that averages out to that.  The household "Stability" budget is $39,030 for an individual and $121,656 for a family of four, that means you have more or less normal stuff and aren't one step away from catastrophe.
• Employed: That's right all you out there in Rush Limbaugh land, these are not freeloaders, welfare queens, and moochers, they are people with jobs, in some cases jobs that you might think are pretty good jobs.  There are the obvious ones like cashiers, waiters, waitresses and restaurant workers, ALICE definitely does live in the restaurant, but there are also people like childcare workers and construction laborers that do not quite make the survival wage on their own.  Also if you look at the stability numbers, many school teachers and government employees don't make it.  People who work hard, people who have gotten the education and played by the rules can still fall into this place where you can't quite make ends meet.

It also bears noting that this is a growing problem.  For all of you who like to trash millennials for their cell phone obsessions, you need to know that this is more than just an iPhone or a Verizon bill problem.  Survival wages don't even include those things at all.  The economic reality that young folks are inheriting is demonstrably harder than the world the Boomers rolled into.  The required resources studied in the ALICE report have increased by around 25% in the past ten years, and wages have not kept even close to that pace.  Also consider that some of the things that may have been a luxury 10 years ago (internet and cell phone) are increasingly necessary for full participation in adult life.  Also consider that, depending on where you live (or can afford to live) travel time and the opportunity costs of a long commute significantly effect your quality of life.
It's starting to make more sense that so many people feel disenfranchised and are running around like balls of anger and discontent. I kept thinking yesterday that we are depriving people of the American Dream.  Hard work is not enough any more.  The system is far beyond broken when a household income of $100,000 per year is not middle class, it's not even "stability."  I heard, even in a room of people who are mostly invested in helping poor people, a certain level of shock that this is actually where we are.  I was surprised as well.
Sometimes, when things challenge your perspective, you would rather just ignore them, or try to break apart their methodology, or call them fake news or whatever.  I do not think that's a good idea on this one, because this trend is going the wrong way and desperation is not a good place for large numbers of people to live their lives, we ignore ALICE at our own peril.