Questions

In everything do to others as you would have them do to you;

For this is the Law and the Prophets.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 7: 12

I know that the above quotation doesn't come as a surprise, even to folks who are entirely non-religious. The thing is you don't actually have to be a follower of Jesus to believe that, the Law and the prophets were binding to Jews regardless of their opinion on resurrection or the messianic identity of Jesus, and have become so to both Christians and Muslims.  Beyond even that though, do unto others as you would have done to you, is about as close to a universal ethical principle as we humans can get.  It's the first thing I remember trying to reason through with my kids when they did something wrong to another person: "how would you feel if someone did that to you?"  A three year old can get it, and be convicted by the negative corollary of what hopefully becomes a more positive moral and ethical guide as they get older. It doesn't actually need any theological backup.

As I observe the zeitgeist of our culture at the moment, I wonder if we are morally lapsed to the point where we don't get something that a toddler can usually hold in the earliest developmental stages of empathy and reason. 

I have some questions: 

1. If you were hungry, would you want someone to feed you; or better yet help you get what you needed to feed yourself?
2. If you were sick, would you want someone to help you get better; even if you didn't have the money to pay for it?
3. If you were on the run from a war or a catastrophe, would you want someone to open their borders and their doors to you?
4. If you were trapped in an abusive relationship, with a person or a substance, would you want someone to help you get out?
5. If you were homeless, would you want someone to give you shelter?
6. If you were oppressed and denied basic human dignity, would you want someone to come to your defense?

Do not run away from the basic moral task by writing these questions off as some sort of bleeding-heart liberal nonsense.  They are not, I'm not implying that any particular side has cornered the market on selfishness and meanness.  I acknowledge that in answering any and all of these you might have a whole host of rationalizations running through your brain.  My goal here is not to lay the guilt at the doorstep of any particular political platform or ideology.  If you feel guilty, you may want to take stock of why that is.

We all fail this test at some point. We all deny others the same basic things that we would hope for if the shoe was on the other foot. We all hedge our guilt away by applying a different standard: "do unto others as we suspect they would do to us," or even more cynical, "do unto others before they get the chance to do unto you."

The thing is that this is just the basic human part of the scheme.  This is the part that people should follow whether they want to follow Jesus or not.  Jesus actually shifts this into a higher gear: "do good unto others even though you know they will not do the same for you." "Do good unto others even though you know they will betray you and brutalize you and kill you."  But I don't expect everyone to be able to get there, I'm not climbing up on my preacher soapbox today, I'm trying to stick to my basic human platform at the moment.

Twenty

I, I would be king,

And you, you would be queen,

And nothing could drive us away,

We could be heroes, just for one day.

-David Bowie, Heroes

One of the major themes of Scripture is that God takes our mess and makes good things happen.  Genesis by itself has story after story of family dysfunction that somehow God holds together into something like a plan.  The characters of the Bible, from Abraham, to David, to the disciples of Jesus in the New Testament, don't succeed because they are heroes, but because they are God's chosen children.  It's a humbling thing to live under that sort of narrative, where you really can't take much credit for whatever happy ending might come.
Today is the twentieth anniversary of my first date with Michele.  It is a date that she remembers with as much faithfulness as our actual wedding anniversary, but honestly, I'm always a little puzzled as to why.  Our first date was not so great, I mean it wasn't the worst catastrophe ever, no one got hurt or seriously injured, it just wasn't anything like what you see in those romantic movies.  It doesn't really even fit into a romantic comedy, because the mishaps of the evening are not really funny, or even that remarkable.
Michele had worked hard to get me on this date.  Despite her family's old-fashioned griping about how girls shouldn't call boys, and my own self-absorbed, over-worked resistance, she persevered and got me to go to a movie.  I had to work later than I thought and we missed the early show, and so we ended up starting even later than usual.  I did not know that Michele had skipped dinner, and so I suggested that we just go for coffee while we waited for showtime, we drank some big coffeehouse concoctions with way too much sugar and caffeine and got ourselves mildly embarrassed by a sketchy old guy with a guitar who was entertaining at the coffeehouse that evening.  So far so good, but then it was time for the movie.
My choice of film revealed several things about me, none of which is particularly flattering.  First off, I was pretty selfish, second of all, I didn't have any clue about the young lady I was taking on this date, or indeed probably much of a clue about women in general.  My choice was Face Off, starring Nicholas Cage and John Travolta.  It was that brief moment when both of those actors were at the height of their popularity. Travolta was still in his post Pulp Fiction honeymoon with the public and people were discovering that he actually could act in a non-disco, non-talking baby, movie.  Cage was still in the grace period where people thought his portrayal of edgy, borderline personality characters was actually acting.  But for me the real draw was the director John Woo, because in college I had immersed myself rather too deeply in the world of action movies, and had discovered Woo's Asian movies, like The Killer, and Hard Boiled and sort of expected his American debut to be something exceptional, especially given the involvement of big stars like Cage and Travolta.  For those of you unfamiliar with Woo's Hong Kong career, his Asian career featured Chow Yun-fat, who you may know from his role as the King of Siam in latest film rendition of The King and I.  The Killer is an action movie about a hit man that is tense and beautiful, it is violent but in a very artistic, choreographed sort of way, with slow motion sequences that almost certainly inspired the Wachowski effects in The Matrix.  I had high hopes that Woo would bring something new and distinctive to the American Action movie.  He did not.  It was one of my first lessons in the ability of dysfunctional systems to suck every bit of light back into them.
Face Off is not a good film.  It's not even particularly good by action movie standards, it falls far short of Die Hard and wallows somewhere around your basic Jean Claude Van Dam flick. What's more, it made Michele nauseous.  Partly because she was nervous (about little old me?), partly because she hadn't eaten, partly because we just had sugar/caffeine/embarrassment overload in the coffee house, and partly because there is a scene that implies and dimly reflects a guy with all the skin on his head flayed off.  What's troubling about that?
Every year on June 27th, Michele goes through the litany of all the things she could have done differently.  I just have one thing I would have done differently: not been so blindly selfish as to pick a movie that stood virtually no chance of being enjoyable for her, even if she had not started feeling ill.  As it was, we didn't have much in the way of conversation to end the evening, it was mostly just me apologizing for the movie and her seeming very disappointed that the whole thing had gone south.
By the motion of radical grace and probably a considerable amount of stubbornness, we went on a second date, and a third, and a fourth, and so on.  Twenty years, two children and three states later, we still do not like the same movies, but we're still together.
I think about our story as a sort of contrast to the strategies that are most often espoused in dating culture, most of which seem to focus on things in common and trying to make things go swimmingly well.  I think, if anything, our first date probably prepared us for the reality of an actual marriage a lot better than some contrived, flawless evening.  Life is messy and ain't none of us perfect.  We are selfish, and clueless, nervous and easily flustered, but we can still learn to love each other.
I guess at this point, I no longer think about that night and wish I had done anything differently, I understand that whatever it is that we have started growing then.  Maybe it was just the realization that, after that crash and burn, we still actually wanted to pick up and try again.  That is a reality that we have had to live out more times than I care to remember, and we will probably have to keep doing it.
Happy Twentieth First-Date-Aversary Michele.

Where I Don't Want to Go

Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished.  But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will bind you and take you where you do not wish to go.

-Jesus to Peter in The Gospel According to John 21:18

The myth of our culture tells us that our goal should be greater and greater independence.  When we are young, most of us longed for the next open door: a driver's license, a college degree, and the horizon of a future filled with possibility.  I don't remember anyone, in my teens and early twenties, who really looked forward to "settling down."  It seemed we all wanted to blast off, and the major frustration always seemed to be that there was one more gate that needed unlocking, and even if we got through it, it just took time.

It took enough time that, now in my early 40's I wonder how I got here:

Enjoy that taste of back when MTV still played music and nerds discovered video cameras. 

Seriously, I find myself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and some beautiful kids, and behind the wheel of a (less large than before) automobile.  But I now think of my youth as the time when I was free, weird.  Because I don't remember feeling free then, and when I get a dose of realism, I understand that all the things that bind me are the things that really matter.

John tells us that Jesus was implying something about the fact that Peter was going to die violently at the hands of the same sort of people who had crucified him, and that is one way you can interpret that text, the literal, plain sense that is popular with modern and postmodern folk.  But back in the early days, and I mean really early, like second century early, there were wise and holy men who knew that scripture has layers and levels of meaning, and that once we have dealt with and grasped certain things that are said, we can dive deeper and find more truth.

On a bigger level, Jesus was describing for Peter what the path of descent, or the Way of the Cross was going to be like.  It's no longer going to be about you and what you want.  Your desire for control needs to be crucified and surrendered for the sake of something more, something holy.  So much of the stress of adult life is created by things we cannot control.  It is often only in traumatic moments like when we lose things and grieve that we realize how small and trivial all our worries really are.

My job puts me in contact with those moments probably a bit more often than the average bear, but exposure is not a vaccine.  There are things that still hit me in the solar plexus with a stunning blow.  Sometimes it's obvious, like when my friend John died of cancer a few months ago.  I knew that was coming, and I knew it was going to hurt, it always would have. But there are also things that are a bit more at arms length which now seem to draw blood too.  A former colleague, younger than me, passed away from a rather sudden and aggressive cancer over the winter. A young woman who I knew as a kid in my Dad's church also went down to cancer last week. Just a few days ago, a friend and colleague's husband took his own life.  These were more distant relationships, and in my younger years I probably would not have really thought much about them, because I had not allowed myself to be bound yet.

But now they bind me, and they stagger my sense of control, and they remind me that none of us are guaranteed much of anything by this world, no matter how hard we work or how much power we think we have, or even by how good we are.  The peculiar thing about it is that, while this would have put a dent in my faith in whatever idea of God I had as a young person, that feeling of uncertainty does not push me away from the Jesus that I have come to know and follow as a grown up. I don't quite know why that is.  Trying to sort it out is sort of what I do here, and in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, and in my prayers all the time. I think, as far as I can tell, it is because those connections and bindings are what really give life meaning.  It is understanding that God did not avoid or sever those bonds, even though we certainly give enough reason to do so.

I can try and fall back on all sorts of religious jargon and platitudes, but none of them really do justice to the underlying mystery of a God who would get so intimately involved with all of our brokenness and pain.

(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God).

After this, he said to him, "Follow me."

-John 21: 19

Modern Maturity

I am writing to you fathers,

because you know him who is

from the beginning.

-1 John 2: 13a

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of maturity lately.  Honestly, as I approach my 43rd birthday in a little over a month, there are lots of times where I still don't quite feel like a grown-up. Since Father's Day was yesterday, I see that lots of you have really amazing Dads, I do too.  Some of you, maybe not so much, or maybe some of you have lost your amazing Dad, and just can't do the social media thing yet.  What I found interesting though, as I suppose I do on Mother's Day and Memorial Day and pretty much any other day that honors a certain segment of the population is that the sentiments were so very unanimous and flattering.

I can think of times when I have seen my Dad doing really impressive things, like when he would preach a really good sermon where people would laugh and cry and be challenged.  People would say things like, "Wow, your Dad is something else."  I never really had a problem with the "american dad" image problem, where we think our Dads are stooges because so many of our cultural father figures are bumbling idiots (or worse). 

I have had friends whose relationships with their fathers are strained, and maybe even broken, and I have been thankful for the fact that mine never has been, but I am most thankful for the fact that I can think of my Dad without necessarily creating a myth out of him. I have seen my Dad mess things up and I have seen him succeed brilliantly. I have seen my Dad pushed past his breaking point and keep going. I have seen my Dad lose a son and I have seen him welcome over half a dozen grandchildren, not always under the best of circumstances. I have seen my Dad tired and run down, and I have seen him catch fire with an idea that drove both of us across an ocean to walk an ancient Pilgrimage.

Our Camino journey was a microcosm of a lifetime relationship, we experienced joy, struggle, blisters, shin splints, grief, gratitude, failure, accomplishment, we got on each other's nerves and we rejoiced at each other's presence, it was not all one thing or another, but day by day we walked nearly 500 miles.

It occurs to me that maybe the worst thing I could do to my kids (other than abusing or abandoning them) is to let them grow up without seeing their Dad be human.  It's tempting to try and be superman, but that path usually actually leads you to become Darth Vader.  The drive to be strong and invulnerable and get those accolades for being a dependable "always there" kind of Dad is pretty tempting. At some level I want my kids to think I'm a hero, but I'm actually thinking that it's probably better for them to realize I'm not, I mean it will be better for them to grow up with an actual Dad rather than some ego-inflated idea of one.

When we idolize what maturity looks like we do actual maturity disservice, and by extension we look past the actual mature people who are there to show us.  We want every old person to be Yoda, and so we miss the goal altogether.  Maturity is the ability to sort out truth, find what is truly good in life, it is earned by experience and should be tempered in wisdom, but if you invent some pure vision of what that looks like, you're never going to find it.  Sometimes you have to sort through some serious crankiness to get at what maturity is really like, it can hide under layers of cynicism and have some really bitter spots where lessons learned were just too hard.

All things considered, it's a shame that we wait so very long to actually consider ourselves grown-up these days.  We're pushing our adolescence into our thirties, and maybe even into our forties (says the guy with a Millennium Falcon and a three foot Darth Vader action figure in his Pastor's Study).  I think part of that is that we have not been shown what a healthy maturity looks like, it doesn't mean you have it all together and always make the right decision, it means you learn to deal with life, even the hard parts, without becoming small and bitter.  Maybe sometimes that means letting the kid in you breath a little bit, maybe it means giving yourself permission to break up a little at times, maybe it means just learning to be a better human than you were yesterday.  Maybe that's the plan, and it has been from the beginning.

Deeds of Darkness

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and the people loved the darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come into the light, so that their deeds might not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.

-Jesus of Nazareth, (The Gospel According to John 3: 19-21)

I don't have it in me to write yet another jeremiad about the latest shooting tragedy, and it's not because the victims in this case were powerful congressmen who were supposed to be protected by lots of "good guys with guns."  It's because I think we have made our choice to have a society where this sort of thing is possible, and so we're just going to have to deal with the toxic stew of mental instability and deadly weapons.  If Sandy Hook didn't stop our madness... if we will not be moved to protect children at school... why would this one be any different? Nobody is safe, and nobody will be safe until we come to our senses.

I am beginning to wonder if we have any senses left to come to.  Over the last week, I have watched two very powerful men give testimony to the Senate investigative committee looking into "the Russia thing." I saw James Comey last week, and Jeffrey Sessions yesterday, and I have come to the conclusion that someone is hiding something.  I don't pretend to know what.  I have my doubts that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet, I think Trump has pretty much proved that whatever else he might be, he is nobody's puppet.  His own handlers can't even keep him from generating legal problems for himself and their agenda via his Twitter feed.  But Comey, in his testimony, was brutally honest, even when confronting realities that did not make him look good.  This man, accustomed to power and politics admitted openly and without emotion that he was not as brave and forthright in his interaction with the Donald as he probably should have been.  He admitted that, following some very shrewd, if not exactly admirable, political instincts, he made sure that his side of the story got out.  After watching Comey testify, it struck me that, if he didn't have the stink of this affair all over him, he might be a rather imposing candidate for something.

Sessions, on the other hand, looked like a squirrel caught in a leg trap.  He dodged, he dissembled, even the "friendly" questions from his own side were not simply opportunities to set the record straight, but further enforced the notion that someone is hiding something.  All parents know about those moments when you catch your kids up to no good.  You know the look, you know the denial.  Sometimes you're even listening around the corner when you hear one of them tell their accomplice, "Don't tell Dad."

It would appear that we are in the denial stage of one of those incidents.  The Family Circus had a mysterious character that lived in the house named "Not me." Bart Simpson had the famous one word response: "Ididn'tdoit." This is not a cartoon, despite appearances and coloration of some of the characters. Comey said that there is no doubt that the Russian government acted to interfere in our election, that is not in question. "There's no fuzz on that," saith a man who would know better than anyone.

If I'm giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, which I'm getting a little thin on these days, but okay. I would say that the Russians wanted Trump elected because they saw in him someone that would be much more favorable to their interests than Hillary Clinton.  The Russians didn't love Obama because he didn't play their games, and he was hard to draw out into the open.  After eight years of a frustrating diplomat who did nothing but elevate the status of our country in the eyes of the world, they wanted America in the hands of the ultimate wheeler-dealer rather than in the hands of another inveterate politician who would have also been the first woman president, and who had a sense of the importance of that role. Clinton would have been even less favorable to the Russian state as it exists now than Obama. The possibility of another eight years of stodgy Democratic politics as usual probably gave Putin indigestion. A bombastic cult of personality would be much more fun. Putin knows how to deal with Trump, you pump his ego, you let him claim some superficial victories, and never let him see you laughing behind his back.

The Russian interference did not need any direct encouragement or guidance from Trump or his campaign, they had their own reasons and those reasons are manifestly clear.  The question is now, why the Nixonian cover-up? (If Nixon had been a stooge AND a crook.)  Is it Trump's ego (very possible scenario) that will not allow him to admit to himself that maybe he didn't win this election fair and square?  That would be the most likely and while it might be damaging, it would not be fatal, unless the obstruction and obfuscation continue to step over lines of legality.  Or is it that someone in their ranks actually did collude with the Russians, which would be dangerously close to if not actual treason.

Do not forget that, in our two most recent Presidential scandals: Clinton and Nixon, it was not the actual crime or indiscretion that was most crucial, it was lying about it that triggered the wheels of justice.  Whatever the truth at the core of this mess turns out to be, a lot of people are walking around with really guilty looks on their faces.

Peeking Over the Fence

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?

Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

-Jesus of Nazareth (Mt 5:46)

I have been making an effort to understand some of the arguments from the other side. The urge to allow my blood to boil over that latest outrage is strong, but counterproductive, and ultimately not well with my soul.  I have sought out sources of what I think might be reasonable dialogue, mostly by reading things on this wondrous font of information.  There are blogs and journalism aplenty, much of which I can read for free, which means without directly supporting any sort of agenda other than by giving them traffic through their website.  I avoid idealogues of various stripes, and I have been working on a systematic way of identifying such (still very much an inexact science).
The more I look for markers of ideological rigidity, the more I find myself sensitive to it in places I thought I could trust, which is proof to me that this exercise is producing growth.  One of the areas that I have found myself agreeing with my "enemies," is in the critique of liberal intolerance in the name of "political correctness."  Universities and colleges (Evergreen, Berkley, Duke) seem to be the epicenters of this phenomenon, although I am forced to agree that it is a much wider problem.
I have had to do a great deal of sorting in my reading about this issue, because a lot of the critique of political correctness comes from people who are simply rude and bigoted people who do not wish to have to think too carefully about what they say and to whom they say it.  These people generally drop key indicators of their orientation by using jargon that has become derogatory within their milieu.  Examples are "snowflake," which, as a friend of mine pointed out on Facebook, is actually a reference to something voiced by Tyler Durden in the Chuck Paluhniak novel Fight Club. The basic premise is that Durden is breaking down a group of modern men whom he believes have lost their sense of self because of the blight of modernity.  They recover their selves by fighting and acts of mayhem.  Durden is heard to tell the recruits: "you are not a precious snowflake."  The Fight Club critique of modernity and it's ability to rob individuals of their dignity is pretty insightful, but one needs to remember that (Spoiler Alert): Tyler Durden is a psychotic alter ego of the narrator, he is a symptom of a profound mental illness and on top of that a fictional character in a book, and thus most of what comes out of his mouth should be viewed with some suspicion.  I wonder what Paluhniak thinks when he hears people use that phrase in public discourse as an attack word?
Another flag is the use of the acronym SJW (social justice warrior), which at first glance I thought was at least a little funny.  I mean, it was funny because I have known these people, I went to college and even seminary with a lot of them.  They can appear very much like the walking stereotypes that the use of a derogatory acronym implies.  They've always got some cause and they're usually ready to "call out" people who step outside the lines of political correctness.  White males are particularly vulnerable to being at the pointy end of an SJW, because of our privileged position in society.  Okay, I admit, we often deserve the "call out" for our blithe use of racist and sexist language or our tacit acceptance of systemic injustice (usually because it benefits us).  However, the "call out" is not a terribly effective tool against those who it is most often directed towards.  If you call a "privilege check" on someone who does not feel particularly privileged (even if they are), or if you simply assign a label someone who is already hostile to your position, you are going nowhere fast.
At some point protest and activism passes an apex of effectiveness and begins losing the battle against the cultural immune system and the status quo.  Situations where certain dissenting voices are drummed off campus, or professors are censured or fired for their divergent opinions are fever moments where the fight for progress becomes critical.  It's like I heard someone describe tonsilitis at one point: normally the tonsils help your body fight off infections, but if they get over-run and infected, they essentially start fighting for the other team.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood this as an important axiom in working for change, and it was near the center of his insistence on non-violence.  If we want academia and the worlds of education and ideas to help lead us forward they are going to have to play the game by a higher standard.  If King had launched into a "call out" every time he heard someone use the N-word, he would have been written off as simply over-sensitive and "uppity." It has taken decades before we could get to a point where Ice Cube can go on Bill Maher and articulate exactly and rationally why that word is not acceptable, even in a joke.  He said, "It's our word now, you can't have it back."
It may take even longer for certain other ideas to change, and a certain amount of push-back from the "old guard" is inevitable.  The troubling thing is that, in our world of "bubbles," and increasing polarization, too many people see criticism as a personal attack, and are super ready to take offense.  I was taught the virtues of tolerance and respectful disagreement by old-school liberals, the fact that Ann Coulter or Milo whatshisface can't keep a speaking engagement at Berkley disrespects the ideals of the movement as much as any repugnant idea they might spew out.
I wonder if agreement is too much to ask.  Maybe we just need to learn to disagree better.

How Empire Ends

And their empire crumbled 'til all that was left

were some stones the workmen found.

-Sting, All This Time

In Star Wars, the Galactic Empire evaporates in a decisive moment, when Vader throws Palpatine into the core of the second Death Star and then Han Solo blasts the core with a photon torpedo.  Ewoks dance and (in the much maligned CGI enhanced version) we see the galaxy far, far away celebrate having the yoke of evil removed from their shoulders.  In real life though, empires don't actually end in a moment, they fade, they crumble, they wane like a moon that has passed full.

Given my abnormal interest in Church history, I am tangentially familiar with the rise and fall of numerous empires.  The Old Testament shows us some good ones: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and of course Rome.  Rome is inexorably connected with my main area of expertise: Christianity.  It was under Roman occupation that Jesus lived, and it was at Roman hands that he died, and it was the Roman Empire that persecuted and then later adopted the faith.  I have read significant portions of Edward Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (though I admit not even close to all of it), in which he actually traces the source of the demise of the empire to Christianity "eroding traditional values." Sounds weird doesn't it?  But to a society that was built around the idea of many gods, and an emperor who was considered a god, the challenge of a monotheistic faith was certainly a significant chink in the defenses.  I find myself thinking a lot about Rome as I read the daily news, I think about the mad emperors Caligula and Nero, I think about the barbarian hordes, the Vandals and the Huns, I think about the senate, corrupt, scheming and fixated on holding power, sometimes locked in detente or open hostility with the Imperial authority.

In the end, it was some of Rome's greatest strengths rather than their inherent weaknesses, that led to failure.  Any empire must exist as an idea in the minds of its subjects, whether it is the shining civilization of Greece under Alexander, or the mighty Pax Romana, or the Great and Glorious British Empire, or the Star Spangled Freedom of the United States.  Rome had learned how to evangelize the barbarians with their idea. In the expansion of the Empire, Rome did not try to blot out the sun, rather they assimilated cultures and people, they adopted new gods and new ways of honoring those gods. They understood that their civilization would benefit from people who became citizens rather than just always being hordes that must be kept under the boot heel of military authority.  Even as imposing as Roman legions were, no empire built on sheer force can abide for very long, you must win hearts and minds and you must turn barbarians into citizens.  You will never do that if you try to kill their gods, it is a much better idea to adopt them.  

Jesus himself reflects the wisdom (from the inverse perspective) of this policy when he is questioned about paying taxes (always a sore spot in any Empire), "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's). Don't spend your energy bashing your head against an immovable object. The Christian church, when it grows and lives and breathes is good at living this truth as well.  When we make room for more people, for different ideas and ways of following Christ in the world we are a rising tide and a growing light.  When we shrink back from things that make us nervous we become a cold and shrunken shadow of ourselves.

G.K. Chesterton deals at length with the repeated flows and ebbs of the church in his book The Everlasting Man, he says that in his study of history he sees at least five or six times in its history that the church has died.  Fortunately, he says, "we serve a God who has managed to find his way out of the grave."  Worldly Empires, however, don't generally work that way.  Once Rome declined it never came back, once Britain began to cede it's grip on the new world and the trade routes, there was no climbing back up that mountain.  Neither one of those empires have vanished into the sands of history.  You can still go to Rome and see the remnants of the empire, you can visit the Vatican and see what the Church looked like when it was inseparable from the Empire, you can still find Hadrian's wall at what used to be the edge of the Empire.  The British flag still flies in various corners of the world, reminding us of the last great colonial power, but the Monarchy is now just a figurehead, the real power has moved to the democratic power of the people.

We should not be so foolish as to think that our Empire will last forever though.  Especially if we give up on the ideas that exist at a deeper level than our empire.  We are founded on "self evident truths," many of which we seem all too ready to give up on for various reasons.  For seventy years, since the end of WWII the United States has been a leader in the world, we have demonstrated the difficult path of diversity, equality and opportunity; we have struggled for justice.  In our growing years we succeeded in our high minded pursuit sometimes and we failed sometimes, but we always tried.  What I see now is that we have decided not to try.  We have decided to accept self interest above community.  We have decided to live in fear of others instead of allowing new ways and new hope into our nation.

Those living in hopeless, violent and impoverished places used to look to the idea of America as a dream, now they increasingly see us as a selfish, oppressive and closed nightmare.  We have lost our idea, we have abandoned our values, and as much as I hate to say it the brand of Christianity that is most visible is far too Imperial and imperious, and it may actually be playing a part in destroying the values that hold us together.  I'm not worried about the Church, because resurrection is our thing.  It doesn't work that way for empires though.