The Wilderness of Sin

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew7:3 (NRSV)

I have read several responses to the Nashville Statement over the past 24 hours and I don't imagine that I could do any better than the Denver Statement by Lutheran Nadia Bolz Weber, or Jonathan Merritt, in responding to the content of the statement.  But here goes anyway.

In his biography Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis reflects on the various homosexual relationships that occurred at his boarding school when he was young.  He talks quite frankly and openly about the dynamics of those relationships, and then sort of answers the begged question: "is there something wrong with that?"  To which his answer is essentially that he was never tempted or otherwise drawn into any such relationship and so he cannot, in good conscience, condemn those boys for what they did.  Lewis, being a man of his time, was probably no where near what we would consider LGBT affirming, nor was he entirely removing all doubt from those relationships, which often involved a significant age and power inequity (older boys taking advantage of younger).  He saw the messiness of human relationships and he decided that he was not in a place to judge.

I have never personally been troubled by homosexual urges, but I have not always been entirely virtuous with my heterosexual urges, that is one log that I need to take out of my eye, but for me personally there is an even bigger blindness.  In order to gain some perspective on the issue, I'm going to steer away from the emotionally charged issues of sexuality and talk about the sin that most troubles me personally: gluttony.  I am a glutton in the most traditional sense, with regard to food, but also in other ways: I can binge watch with the best of them, I can get obsessed with an idea and devote all or most of my time to it until that itch has been scratched.  But food is still the big SIN in my life.

At some point, I recognize that my various gluttonous tendencies have been getting in the way of my personal health.  With food it is when the scale starts moving in the wrong direction and my clothes start to fit a little too tightly. I have come to recognize this as a broken relationship and a form of idolatry.  I am using something to fill the space where God's love is supposed to be.  I have been this way for basically as long as I can remember.  My broken relationship with eating started when I was seven or eight years old and despite a lot of self knowledge and suffering the consequences (high blood pressure, diabetes, just generally being too fat), it is always a struggle to keep that relationship in balance.  Over all, as an adult, I have made some progress towards health, but it is not easy and the work is constant.  It has been a long road filled with steps up and steps back, but one thing I can tell you is that hearing from thin, fit people about what I ought to do makes me want to punch noses.

What I have had to come to terms with is that I cannot ever avoid the relationship (because I would actually die), but I do have to try to keep it on a healthy track.  Which is why I think the evolution of our attitudes towards homosexual people is crucial.  Is homosexuality a sin? Well, pederast forms of it certainly are, the highly promiscuous culture of the 1970's which came to a screeching halt with the advent of AIDS, pretty surely was.  Is two people of the same gender living together in a committed, loving relationship sinful? I have to say the answer to that is no.  Until now, no culture has really given homosexual people the opportunity to live healthy, well adjusted out lives.  They have always been here and darkness and secrecy never really does good things for repressed urges.

I will tell you a dirty secret: my worst eating habits happen when no one is looking.  If I'm at dinner with a bunch of people, I can very easily pass on the desert menu, but leave me alone at home with a package of Oreos and gluttony explodes.  I can have a nice healthy salad for lunch and then justify scarfing down a bunch of Doritos at 3:00.  Sin with regard to sexual relationships, and indeed sin in general, has to do more with relational fidelity than it does with mechanics.  We learn to be faithful to each other and we learn to be faithful to God. If we are promiscuous with our faith we are idolaters, which is definitely on the list of sins that gets the Big Guy all riled up.

For instance the reason why Leviticus says people shouldn't get tattoos is because pagans got tattoos as part of their devotion to their false gods.  None of my tattoos are to false gods, so I fully believe that I'm in the clear on that front (well that and Jesus forgiving me).

The problem I have with things like the Nashville Statement is that it actually commits a form of idolatry, the idolatry of self-righteousness, and furthers that sin into behavior that is harmful to others by marginalizing and condemning vulnerable people (suicide rates among homosexual/transgender youth are higher than average, and many homosexual youth experience homelessness as a result of coming out to families who do not accept them). In a more general sense, it denies people who struggle with sin a path to find the healthy, balanced and faithful expression of their sexual identities.  The same goes for transgender people.  Look at it this way, I know that it is a struggle to eat the right way and to keep my weight under control, but I do have a healthy recourse that doesn't require starving myself. I can enjoy a good salad and fresh summer veggies, I can cook healthy meals and learn about new types of food from all over the world, because I have a healthy way to pursue my relationship with food if I so choose. If the only way I could indulge my love of food was by scarfing as many Twinkies as I could when nobody was looking, I don't think I would live very much longer.

I think a vision for a community of faith should provide the same thing for people of all sorts.  This of course does preclude certain behaviors that are harmful to others, but it is difficult to make a case based on anything but hysteria that homosexuality or transgender identity are actually harmful to others in the community if they are given a place, not marginalized and forced into denial. What is harmful to the community is telling a certain group of people that they are excluded from your tribe because of who they are and who they love.  We are seeing that across the country.  LGBTQ people are not some sort of toxic, degrading force on our society, but capable of being faithful and constructive components of it, if and when we allow them to be. It's kind of a shame that so many parts of the church are lagging behind on this crucial realization.

One More Time, With Feeling

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:

Collection of the facts to determine whether injustice exists;

Negotiation; Self Purification; and Direct Action.

-Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

I read King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, whenever I need a prophetic refresher in what it means to seek real change in society in a way consistent with Christian ethics.  I read his plea to a group of white, moderate clergy, whenever I am tempted to start to side with status quo and forget the the suffering of the least of these.  I read it because I need to be convicted of my own rationalizations and defense mechanisms.

I read it again this morning in the light of the "Nashville Statement" (no link provided, you can google it if you want) in which a gang of evangelical power players have put forth a fourteen point missive in which they not only condemn LGBTQ people, but also those of us who are trying by some degree to move towards inclusive and affirming communion.  It doesn't matter at all to those folks that I find my drive towards acceptance to be rooted in Scripture, motivated by grace and seeking to shape the church into a more holy communion.  They stated that they find my conscience, my hermeneutical position, and indeed my relationship with my Creator to be false. I feel that I have just made a conscious decision to put love first.

I read it also in light of the eruptions of violence in Charlottesville and also in Berkeley where extremist groups who have certainly not adequately dealt with the self purification step of Dr. King's prescription, are trying to enact whatever change they feel is justified using "Any Means Necessary." I read the letter because I know that Martin was sitting in a jail cell for his conviction to act, but to never resort to violence.  I read the letter, because even though his action was above reproach it was still called "untimely" by men who were very much like me.  I read it to be convicted of any way in which I am tempted to become complicit or to forget the central truth that violence will only beget more violence.  I read it so that I do not equate legitimate protest groups like Black Lives Matter with the Antifa and various leftist anarchists who have no more problem inciting violence than the Neo-Nazis or the KKK.  I read it because I need to be reminded that in any group, right or wrong doctrine is manifest in right or wrong actions, "you will know them by their fruits."

I read it also because I see what we can be as people of all colors, genders, orientations, religions, socioeconomic classes.  I see humans helping each other in the wake of a catastrophic flood.  We have come a long way since Noah, we are pitching in to make sure that the flood does not wipe out our world. I see rednecks in their bass boats, rescuing black families from the deluge.  I see rich coastal elites giving millions of dollars to the relief effort in the reddest of states. I even see the Trumps tiptoeing through the carnage to lend moral support and encouragement to the people of gulf coast, and promising to do better (I hope that's for true).

I read it because if Martin can be that hopeful from a narrow jail cell, I certainly can from my comfortable office.  I read it because if Dr. King can be that rooted in Scripture and prayer in the face of injustice and persecution, I can certainly try to do so from my privileged place.  I read it, as I do, time and time again because it convicts me, gives me hope and sets my feet upon the rock.

Consequences

In another lifetime, I studied the science of environmental protection and management of resources.  I have a degree from The Pennsylvania State University that says Bachelor of Science in Environmental Resource Management, which is now over 20 years old.  When I was engaged in this course of study, the science surrounding global warming/climate change, was still very much unsettled.  Al Gore had written Earth in the Balance, which sounded a warning that climate change was real, the consequences observable and the phenomena of rising air and ocean temperatures were in large part caused by human activity.  In a class where we discussed such current events, the professors were not absolutely convinced that the data backed up what Mr. Gore and his fellow doomsayers were shouting.
Science has unfortunately caught up, and perhaps even passed the woes predicted 20 years ago. We are not headed for a Waterworld scenario (a science fiction work of the same era), but we are certainly seeing the consequences of rising temperatures.  In another area of my education, we studied soil conservation and community planning.  You know all of those weird little ponds that often sit at the edge of shopping mall parking lots, they're called sedimentation and flood control ponds.  They are man made, not as neat little homes for ducks and geese or landscaping features, but as a way to make up for the large non-porous asphalt surfaces and huge flat roofed structures which create a dangerous amount of runoff.  The runoff contributes to erosion and non-point source pollution as it washes everything from oil dripping from someone's leaking car to a child's toy that got dropped in the parking lot while mom was trying to wrestle her toddler into his five point harness, down stream into the sewers and waterways.
Those ponds are designed to hold that runoff and allow time for things to settle and the water to be discharged downstream at a manageable rate.  The ponds are designed for water flow predicted for either 10, 50 or 100 year storm.  In fact, those designations are fairly common in designing mitigation measures.  Can the safeguard handle the type of even that statistically comes along every 10 years?  A bigger storm than your average afternoon thunderstorm but not so big it will wipe out a city.  Can the safeguard handle a 50 year storm?  That's a big girl, the type that comes along mostly once or twice in a lifetime.  What about a 100 year storm? The kind that you're only supposed to see once in a lifetime.  The first decade of the 21st century saw several of these, which doesn't by itself mean that we are on the verge of a climate catastrophe, probabilities are tricky, there is a 1% chance that we have a 100 year storm in any given year and that 1% doesn't change just because we had one last year.  Hurricane Harvey, which just went all Noah on Houston, is being called a 500 year storm, which means there is a 1 in 500 chance of such a storm happening in any given year.  I don't remember ever being asked, even as a part of a lab experiment or project, to do a design for a 500 year storm.  To my knowledge, not many community plans include that level of caution.  They are designed by engineers weighing cost/benefit and using statistical probabilities to judge what is necessary.
The fact of the matter is that Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey have both been called 500 year storms and they have happened in less than 20 years.  The statistical probabilities that we are using to plan our communities are getting trashed.  One data point doesn't hold much scientific value, but we are starting to accumulate a number of events that are pushing the consensus towards a reality that is not fake news or tree-hugging alarmism.
The thing about this is that we ignore reality at our peril.  If we continue planning our cities as though these events do not occur we are putting people who live there at risk.  If we do not develop mitigation plans and emergency response plans for these events we are committing malpractice and people will continue to lose life and property.  Denial does not help.
If we could slow or reverse climate change, great.  But for now, it is abundantly clear that we will need to learn how to deal with the consequences.

Love the Truth

The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan,

who uses all power, signs, lying wonders and every kind of wicked deception 

for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false,

so that all who have not believed the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness will be condemned.

-2 Thessalonians 2: 9-12 (NRSV)

One of the problems that the progressive forms of Christianity have is that we openly admit that we privilege some parts of the Scripture over others.  I'm not just talking about wanting to ignore the parts of Leviticus that outlaw bacon and tattoos either, or even brazenly skipping over the lists of who begot whom in Numbers.  I'm talking about more subtle rejection of certain parts of the Word, like 2 Thessalonians or the books of Jude and Philemon.  Whether you take the Red Letter Christian approach (transparency: I like that one) that focuses on the words of Jesus, often printed in red letters in many English Bibles. Or you try to mostly ignore what Paul says because you can't stand that cranky dude, we all filter the Scripture. Those of us that preach from the Revised Common Lectionary, even though that's generally a good discipline, are subject to missing some stuff here and there.

So, for the purposes of this blog and for my own personal growth, I like to revert to a habit that dates back to my pre-seminary days and just sort of open the Bible and start poking around in corners that I haven't seen in a while.  The two letters to the Thessalonians are not among my most visited places, partially because while 1 Thessalonians is among the earliest letters of Paul to the churches he founded, 2 Thessalonians has some disturbing marks of perhaps being forged to look Paul-ish, and it definitely reads a lot like something a televangelist would love to get on about whilst claiming that his or her ministry is all about loving the truth and then going on to name all the agents of Satan from Planned Parenthood to the Democratic National Committee who have obviously been overcome by that "powerful delusion."

2 Thessalonians does pick up perhaps a little too directly on the apocalyptic tone of what we label as chapter 5 of 1 Thessalonians, but does not sufficiently bend it back to a life of love and communion to really seem authentically like Paul, because while he could certainly get persnickety with his flock at times, he always did try to remind them of things like he does in 1 Thessalonians 5: 15-18:

See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Modernity brought us out of the age of superstition and taught us rationality. We were taught to question things methodically and seek answers through a scientific method.  Post-modernity has taught us to apply suspicion, perhaps rightly so, to many of the suppositions of faith, and the claims that are made by many to be keepers of the truth.  But tucked away in a letter that has been largely left in the dusty closet of the canon, I read that we are not supposed to be keepers of the truth, but lovers of the truth.
Loving the truth is the key to salvation.  Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." If we love Jesus we must love the truth.  There are, in fact, many places where the disciples seem to want to be keepers of the truth, and Jesus has to correct them and tell them that they should not hide that light under a basket, but rather let it shine, let it shine, let it shine (sorry I just broke out into song, which is hard to do in writing).
You may be guessing that I'm angling a critique at the more conservative or even fundamentalist streams of Christian faith, and yes, they are guilty of being too concerned with righteousness not truth, or they may actually be too wrapped up in trying to shield the truth from supposed enemies.  They may even often assume that more progressive followers of Jesus are in fact the ones that are under the delusion, believing what is false.  I can almost hear a late night Gospel preacher on some cable network saying as much.
But it is a fact that progressives tend to get a little too wrapped up in the sort of ducking and weaving, called proof-texting that they so strongly critique in their evangelical foils.  Except instead of trying to find "clobber passages" they try to deconstruct the "clobber passages" that fly against them.
My contention is that neither sort of behavior is consistent with "loving the truth."  In fact, the sort of acrimony that grows in the Body of Christ is a cancer that is the work of the Accuser (The Satan, from Hebrew mythology).  It's just the sort of trick that the Adversary really likes, it is the twisting nature of sin, to take something that seems like holiness and righteousness and turn it into a sour, galling fit of anger and anxiety.
What we need to understand is that our Accuser thrives on our refusal to love the truth.
I sometimes get a feeling like I need to protect Michele, because I'm her husband, I want to stand up for her in some way shape or form, I want to make her life easier.  A lot of the time though, when I really get underneath all of that,  I realize I am not actually doing it out of love, I'm doing it because I'm angry, or because my sense of injustice has been triggered.  I want things to be right and fair, but I do not always completely understand her values.  She cares a lot more about people's feelings and long term relationships, and she doesn't really think that telling someone to @#$% off would be all that helpful, nor would it be consistent with who she is.
My impulse seems like love, but it is actually control, and I think that flies in the face of how Jesus taught us love should work. The truth is the truth, just like Michele is Michele, it doesn't change because I want it to.  The truth that has been included in the Canon of Scripture is the truth whether it is the red letters, the prophecy of Habakkuk, or the letter to Jude.  If it challenges your grip on what you think you know that is just doing the job it's supposed to do.  You need to learn to love it, liberal, conservative and everywhere in between: love the truth.

Empty the Pews

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.

For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Mt. 23: 13

Strangely enough, I have not heard a lot of sermons based on Matthew 23 or any part thereof.  It is after all a whole chapter where Jesus basically trolls the religious establishment of his day.  It would actually fit pretty well on Twitter, with the hashtag #woe2U. Maybe I should start that and see if it trends... 

See I have Twitter on the brain today, I had my tri-monthly visit with my doctor this morning. My doc is a good guy who takes the time to listen and encourage patients like me who are on the constant campaign of trying to keep blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol and weight headed in the right direction.  I call these visits my little pep talks, because even when some number or other is headed the wrong way, Doc tells me all the thing I already know and I generally leave feeling better about whatever challenge I'm going through.  But he takes that sort of time with all his patients, so I spent two hours sitting on a table covered in paper with very bad cell service, so Twitter, because it uses less data than facebook, loads faster and keeps me interested with a constantly changing feed.

One of the hashtags I've been following is #emptythepews where people who are disenchanted and disenfranchised with regard to the church vent their frustrations in 140 characters or less.  As with a lot of Twitter dialogue, it can be pretty vitriolic, it can also be deeply sad and, for me as a representative of said church (even though we don't have pews) a source of grief.

I could say that I'm not one of "those Christians," I could say that those people who are expressing their pain could have maybe tried a different tradition.  You know, maybe if the evangelical or conservative streams of the church hurt you you could come on up to the house in the mainline protestant churches like my Presbyterian Church (USA) where we ain't like them bible thumpin', snake handlin', worshiptainment mega churches.  But that approach contains all sorts of rationalizations and probably makes promises that the reality of the church, any church, isn't going to be able to keep.

See, I have been around this thing called church my whole life, I grew up in it, a pastor's kid no less.  I have served in ordained ministry for almost 15 years, I have worked in larger church groups and cooperated with other sorts of Christians, and I know this, people get hurt here.  Actually pastors get hurt as much if not more than anyone else, and a lot of the time, in the wake of those wounds it's pretty easy to just say, "Screw it," and walk away.  Pastoral tenures are short and the burnout rate is high.  If the person who gets paid to be part of the church can't take it, why in the hell would we expect the people in the pews to hang in there?

Peter asked Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" (Matthew 18: 21) I'm going to paraphrase Jesus response here because most of you know the seventy times seven thing: "Peter, Peter, Peter, you precious little snowflake, seven times? C'mon man, it's going to have to a heck of a lot more than seven.  This stuff is going to get real, and when it gets real, folk is gonna get nasty.  When they get nasty, you have to forgive, and keep on forgiving, you can't get all triggered and butt-hurt, you just have to forgive."

Don't get me wrong, Jesus was not okay with religious types playing this way, seriously read the whole 23rd chapter of Matthew's Gospel.  There's not a lot that makes Jesus quite as spitting mad as the folks who are supposed to be speaking for God acting like a bunch of trifling power-mongers.  That is where the #emptythepews Twitter phenomenon really hits home, there are only a few that are of the "someone was mean to me" or "the music sucked" variety.  A lot of them, the majority I would say, are of the more Christ-like variety. The variety which criticizes the way that the church has become too much a part of the sinful systems of the world, the way in which some of the biggest voices support the hand of the oppressor and praise a materialist set of ethical principals.  Since I'm in a paraphrasing mood, I have taken the liberty of Twittering up some of Matthew 23:

• Do not do as the @pharisees do, they sit on Moses seat but they do not practice what they teach #woe2U #Jesusgettinriled
• @pharisees @scribes tie up heavy burdens and put them on the shoulders of others, but they don't lift a finger #woe2U
• @pharisees cross the sea to make a single convert and then make them into a bigger hater than they are #woe2U #childofhell
• Blind guides, blind fools, always going after gold and bling for the temple but people are starving in the street #woe2U #Godainthappy
• #whitewashedtombs pretty on the outside full of nasty rotting filth on the inside #woe2U

So you get the idea, all things considered I think #emptythepews is probably nicer.  We who are still willing to call ourselves the church and remain in this difficult communion would do well to listen to the voices that are now calling in the wilderness, do not just write them off or rationalize them away.

We must, if we are to be the church, be willing to forgive and be forgiven, over and over and over again.  It is my hope that all those who #emptythepews will not give up on @JesusofNazareth, because he really is on your side. #godwithus

A Total Eclipse of the Heart

You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, 

but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Mt. 16: 3

Ancient people experienced eclipses of the sun and moon as harbingers of something or other, sometimes good, more often bad omens. Today we have a bunch of people running about, making sure they have their special sunglasses or viewing devices made out of cardboard.  We have warnings about burnt retinas and we have good numbers of people even travelling to the best viewing locations as the moon passes directly between earth and the sun at the proper angle to create a visible eclipse over North America.

There has been much ado about this event, maybe because we just need a distraction from the traumas of the world.  Maybe our reaction to this is a sort of shadow projection of the dread with which ancient peoples responded to an eclipse. This we can understand and explain to our children, it's just the moon, it's just about angles and orbits, it's suitably impressive to draw our attention, and maybe we don't have to think about terrorism, racism, inequality and all of that.  It's much easier for us to explain a celestial anomaly than it is for us to plumb the depths of human sin and the estrangement that exists in the human family.

The ancient people who lived in dread on a day like today, could not help but interpret the eclipse as the sign of God's wrath, after all the sun goes black.  The sun, so vital to everything, is blotted out, if there was ever a sign of an angry god, that had to be it. I'm sitting here typing on my computer with the video feed of the moon moving in front of the sun playing in another window.  Technology has given us the ability to understand such phenomenon, from thunderstorms to solar eclipses on a highly technical level, breeding utter familiarity even with something that only happens once a century.

And yet... we have so little ability to understand the emotional and cultural processes that swirl around us and cause us much more woe than any eclipse. A shadow has been passing over us recently, blocking out the light.  I feel like if we stare too long at it directly our eyes could burn as well. If  you focus so much on the chaos, the anger, the hatred and the division you might just lose the ability to see the good and the kind and the beautiful.  I know I have had a hard time keeping my eyes open for anything but the shadow recently.

So, will this pass as quickly as the moon streaking across the center of this nation, casting it's shadow over crowds gathered with their funny little glasses?  Not likely.  The signs of the times move slower than the signs in the skies.  They are more complicated than orbital physics, and more important for the ongoing health of our shared experiment in democracy. Don't stare too long at the shadow no matter what kind of shades you might have.

Annotation

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting, Christ-haunted death dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last. -Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins

If you have not read Love In the Ruins, you should, now. It was published in 1971, and Percy has been gone now for a good while, but as you go ease your way through the first chapter you will get the unnerving feeling that he had a deep knowledge of America and its problems.  As a companion to Mr. Percy I also commend to you opinion articles from today's New York Times.  This one, by the conservative Catholic Ross Douthat, and this one by the more liberal Thomas Friedman. You will notice that Friedman, perhaps by nature is more optimistic, both are critical of our current leadership.  But soak that in and listen to more of Percy:

Undoubtedly something is about to happen.

Or is it that something has stopped happening?

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller coaster car as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink of that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks and the chain catches hold and the cars jerk forward?

I am both comforted and disturbed by the way that a book that is older than me can reflect the anxiety that I feel about current events.  On the one hand, my whole life has been lived since a point in history when these "ordinary catastrophes" seemed destined to bring us down.  We have had a few to be sure.  But our survival doesn't remove the conviction that Percy was right when he said:

These are bad times.  Principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places.

The culture that Percy describes in 1971 fictional terms is a little too familiar to 2017 reality:

The center did not hold. (Quoting Yeats)

However the Gross National Product continues to rise.

His fictional vision of a divided country includes Lefts and Knotheads.  The Knotheads were the evolution of the conservatives, who took a political bungle and turned being knotheaded as in obtuse to being Knotheaded as in stalwart and steadfast in defense of traditional values.  The Lefts also had taken a derogatory nickname given to them by the right and embraced perhaps the wrong parts of it.

Both political parties have had their triumphs.

The Lefts succeeded in removing "In God We Trust," from pennies.

The Knotheads enacted a law requiring compulsory prayer in the black public schools and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama.

Oh yeah and there is a perpetual war in Ecuador, which has been going on for fifteen years and "divided the country further."

Not exactly our best war.

The U.S.A had sided with South Ecuador, which is largely Christian, believing in God and the sacredness of the individual, etcetera, etcetera.  The only trouble is that South Ecuador is owned by ninety-eight Catholic families with Swiss bank accounts, is governed by a general, and so is not what you would call an ideal democracy.  North Ecuador, on the other hand, which many U.S. liberals support, is Maoist-Communist and has so far murdered two hundred thousand civilians, including liberals who did not welcome communism with open arms. Not our best war, and now in its sixteenth year.

Okay, enough already, I just needed to tiptoe through the tulips of some "fiction" that I love.  Because reality is just bumming me out. All things considered, at least Percy can make me laugh as he describes all too presciently the world that we live in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going Nowhere By Accident

You go nowhere by accident,

Wherever you are going, God is sending you,

Wherever you are now, he has a reason for you to be there.

Jesus Christ, who lives in you, has something he wants you to do,

right here, right now, where you are.

Believe this and go in his grace, his mercy, his love and his power.

-Benediction written by Richard Halverson

I have been using the benediction above for several years now.  It started out as a once in a while thing, but enough people responded positively to its message that gradually it just sort of became my stand by.  I'm always interested when it grabs people, because it's usually a part of the service that people glaze over.  Traditional benediction (good words or saying) is "And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the fellowship and communion of he Holy Spirit rest upon you this day and forevermore."  Which is good and fulfills every bit of its purpose, but the Halverson benediction does more than just bless people out the door, it actually gives them something to live into.

My only reservation about it is that it could be taken in a sort of prosperity Gospel sense, where God is just trying to bless you with every step and you should reach out and claim that blessing.  It's not about that, it is about realizing though that your steps are in God and move with the Holy Spirit.  As Christians we should be always guided by what Paul calls "The Mind of Christ," and I know that sounds sort of spooky, but hear me out.

It simply means letting the action of God move you like a current through your life.  You are not in control, you are not going to be safe, but you are going to be Holy. As I read the Gospels, I am often struck by how much of Jesus life was spent this way. He would move from place to place and the disciples and the Gospel writers don't usually give us much explanation.  Often times he would get to a place and just sort of turn around and go back where he came from. For instance on Palm Sunday, he makes the trip into Jerusalem, has the crowds going crazy, goes to the temple and then just heads back out to Bethany.  It seems like a plan, but then again it does not, but there is a purpose, a sense of moving in accordance with God's will.

I had an experience yesterday that illustrates this in less grandiose terms.  I was scheduled to go to the dentist to have a filling replaced. I arrive at the dentist's office on time and as I'm getting out of my car a man in a wheelchair comes rolling up to me.  He's an amputee and he looks like he's about at the end of his rope.  Now, I run into a lot of people asking for money in my line of work, I get all sorts of sob stories, and I've experienced a few grifters who have perfected the art of begging for cash.  This man was honestly disabled, he had his prosthetic leg tucked into the wheelchair, and he also had a colostomy port in his stomach.  That part was real enough. He wanted cash, rather than a ride, but he said that was because he lived in a place that was a good ways away, I get the feeling that maybe he had asked for a ride and people wouldn't or couldn't help that way.  Honestly I couldn't either because I had a dentist appointment.  Where he was is not a high traffic route, it was a parking lot, in a place where people  are going about their business and not much paying attention.

I don't always give cash out to people asking for help, for a lot of reasons, but I did this time.  I gave him what he asked for, he thanked me, he shook my hand and rolled off to call a ride, muttering about getting out of there.  He might have been rolling right into the liquor store for all I know, but I felt okay in my gut about giving him some cash.  I went into the dentist office, to find out that the dentist has had second thoughts about replacing my filling.  He takes a look, pops a couple more xrays of the back tooth and tells me that it doesn't need replacement right now.  I'm good to go, before my appointment was even supposed to start.

That means I really on had one reason to be in that parking lot yesterday afternoon: to talk to the guy in the wheelchair.  I looked around for him as I came out, wondering if maybe I could give him a ride, but he was gone. I hope he was honestly about what he said, I have no reason to suspect otherwise (but sometimes I still do).  The assurance I have is that, given the dentist strangeness, and the timing of things, it seems like that was what I was supposed to do.  There is no certainty in it, and maybe it wasn't the most effective thing to do, but it felt like it was not an accident.

Response

God has created all the peoples of the earth to be one universal family. In his reconciling love, he overcomes the barriers between brothers and breaks down every form of discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference, real or imaginary. The church is called to bring all men to uphold one another as persons in all relationships of life: in employment, housing, education, leisure, marriage, family, church and the exercise of political rights. Therefore, the church labors for the abolition of all racial discrimination and ministers to those injured by it. Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate or patronize their fellow men, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.

The Confession of 1967, 

The Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

Section 9.44 

So I sort of wanted to trot out something from The Theological Declaration of Barmen, where the German Evangelical Christian churches repudiate the Nazis and those complicit in their evil regime, but as it turns out it was the next chapter in the big book of Presbyterian beliefs that got my attention.  Because I have been watching the response to the latest eruption of fear, anger and violence.

Like many of my colleagues, I took a bit of a detour from my planned sermon to do a little breast beating and garment rending over Charlottesville.  The specter of racism still haunts our nation.  The increasingly toxic environment of our political life leaves us largely unable to actually talk our way through moments like the one we all watched in shock on Saturday. Politicians and public figures have really had a hard time with this one, because I think many of them are terrified of the whirlwind they have wrought.  It is not really a debatable point that our political discourse has been shaped by identity politics.  It has long since been more politically expedient to convince someone that you're on their side and you're like them than it is to try and represent a sort of leadership that is actually grown up, well-differentiated and healthy to the society it would govern.

Sure, some of the old school politicians can still dust off the uniform and comportment of statesmen every now and again, but they honestly like to win elections too, so the guiding principle has been to dive into the muck and pull the strings of some bloc of voters.  Promise the moon, lie if you have to, dance along the lines of difficult grey areas and try to stay in the good graces of your base; in most cases the constant barrage of the 24 hour news cycle and the notoriously short attention span of "the public," are on your side and if you don't mess up too bad, or leave photographic evidence, you can survive a misstep or some scam coming to light.

Sometimes you can't dodge though.  Sometimes people will see through your equivocation and your attempts to deflect the blame.  That's what happened to Donald Trump, who frankly mastered the shape-shifting, used-car-selling, ethos of modern politics the way Babe Ruth mastered baseball and Tiger Woods mastered golf (once upon a time).  But when something like Saturday happens, the lights come on and it's time for sincerity and real compassion, which he does not have in large supply.

The damning tape of David Duke, former head of the KKK, at the rally, saying, "We're here to fulfill the promise of Donald Trump," played so many times yesterday that it reminded me of MTV in the 1980's whenever Madonna put out a new video, except it was vile and not at all sexy.

This is clearly not a time to dodge the issue or try to deflect blame, even for a crass and amoral panderer like Trump, I see that just a few minutes ago, he held the obligatory press conference where he said all the sorts of things he should have said 48 hours or more ago.  He condemned Neo-Nazis, the KKK and vowed to bring justice to anyone who acted criminally.  Golf clap for Donny, the thing is his response doesn't shock me.  His first response to most things seems to only have two speeds: tepid equivocation or blind reactionary aggression. The tepid equivocation comes when he's not "sure of the room" so to speak, he's not sure what he can get away with, and he lacks a certain moral fiber to just know and set the proper tone.  He suffers even more on this front because Barack Obama was super good at the reaction part of his job, he could hold on to the sincere, serious tone of a president, while letting a few tears flow silently down his cheek, and he had all but the most unrepentant haters on his side. Trump, not so much, he can't even openly condemn Nazis and the KKK on the first try, he comes out with this thing about violence on "many sides," which even Ted Cruz thought was pretty slimy. Trump keeps losing more and more friends and influence, every time some little thing like this comes along.

It's death by a thousand cuts, at least that's what it feels like.

You know how when you were a kid and you got caught doing something bad and you said, "But Mom, Timmy was doing it too!" Yeah, that's equivocation, it doesn't work with your Mom, it doesn't work period, especially when people are dying in the street. This conflagration in Charlottesville deserves our lament, no equivocation, no excuses, just mourning and repentance, from us all, we're all in this together.  Which leads me to perhaps the hardest thing to say and do in this whole mess: Pray for my enemies.

I have to say that I don't really think that the campaigns to shame the white supremacists, putting their pictures up and pushing to get them fired from their jobs or ostracized from their schools are really going to work out so hot.  You are using the devil's toolbox with that one, and it doesn't have tools to do good and work for justice.  Trump's revenge-y speech today, also, not helpful. Those guys (and a very few girls) were out there on Saturday because they feel persecuted.  It doesn't really matter if they are actually persecuted, they have been sanctimoniously told to "check their privilege" probably one time too many.  They are the ones that get howling rage fits when someone mentions a safe space or a trigger warning, because political correctness is absolutely one of their triggers, even if they don't realize that.

One of the most important things I believe as a follower of Jesus is that only love can conquer hate, because hate begets more hate, violence begets more violence. Anger and hatred are secondary emotions, rooted in fear.  Those guys were wearing military gear and carrying guns because they were afraid, they were carrying confederate flags and swastikas because they were afraid, and because at some level those things that express anger and hatred seemed more powerful than simply being afraid.

In my mind they deserve pity.  Like my parents taught me when I was a kid, other than that they really should just be ignored, but not ignored like an infected wound that is allowed to fester, but ignored the way Martin Luther King ignored the White's Only signs or the way Rosa Parks ignored the command to move to the back of the bus.  Ignored and resisted, not ignored and tolerated.  The one thing that is true about this weekend is that if no counter-protesters showed up this would not be national news and Heather Heyer would still be alive. Does that mean we don't need to stand up to hatred and anger, certainly not, but understand that the escalation of the whole scene was exactly what the neo-nazis and such wanted, that's what terrorists always want: terror.

We have failed to understand this with Al Quaida and ISIS as well: they want us to come at them and bomb their cities and kill innocents, that's how their cause is justified.  The White Supremacists, wanted all those "SJW Snowflakes" out there in the streets shouting at them and throwing things at them, it just proved their point in their own mind: we are under attack and we have to stand up for ourselves.  They wanted Black Lives Matter, or even a bunch of Clergy out there protesting them, because that is a witness to the reality that their fear is contagious and spreading.

When I was little, I didn't believe that ignoring bullies would really help, but it did.  If I did not allow my goat to be got, if I didn't rise to the bait, the haters and the anger-mongers would go away.  As an adult, my ego can still sometimes get in the way of that simple lesson.  Let's save our outrage for defending the powerless, not bickering over a statue.  Let's save our courage to confront evil when there is someone in harm's way.  Let's stop the lynch mobs and the gangs that attack in the dark of night.  But by all means do not trade in the precious right of free speech in order to stop someone who disagrees with you from speaking.  In the light of day they are much less dangerous than if they are left to fester in the dark. If they want to march out and whine about a statue, let them, mark who they are, and do not let them pull you into their mud of hatred and anger.  They will not still be around when the men with hardhats come and pull down General Lee.

For a morning thinking about "fire and fury"

Wendell Berry is a better writer than I am.  His Sabbath Poems are invaluable provocations to the modern world and all that we think we know.  As years go by I recognize, more and more, that he is a prophet sent to the world of American hubris and materialism.  And I know that he would hate that label, and chafe against it, but that does not make it less true.  I give you this morning his Questionnaire from his collection called Leavings: 

1, How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade?

• Please name your preferred poisons:

2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do?

• Fill in the following blanks with your favorite evil and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization?

• Please list the monuments, shrines and works of art you would most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate?

• List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security for which you would kill a child.

• Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.

Feel free to attach extra sheets for your answers.