From a Distance

I have been dealing with a lot of thoughts about how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as a pastor.  There have been some difficult decisions to make for sure.  At the end of last week, I asked the Session to vote to suspend all "in person" activities of the Church.  They agreed unanimously, for this I was grateful, because as of that moment we were ahead of the curve on this issue.  Our Presbytery had given us a recommendation, but as of the end of last week government had not provided the leadership we really need in moments like this.
Over the weekend I kept feeling more strongly that our decision had been the right one.  Every time I saw a doctor or an epidemiologist say that this "social distancing" practice is the only way we currently have to prevent the pandemic from becoming an event of tragic proportions.  There is no cure, there is no treatment really, we don't even have adequate testing capability (again thanks to denial and an attempt to minimize this crisis by our almost unbelievably inept administration).  The only thing we can do is to bring everything to a screeching halt in the hopes of physically preventing the transmission of the COVID-19 virus.
I often joke that my undergraduate education served only one function: to give me a piece of paper that was necessary for admission to Seminary.  However, in the past week the things I know about biology, and (Lord help me) statistics were pretty useful in analyzing what data we have available.  I know what an exponential growth curve looks like on paper, and in instances of contagion like this one, you get to see it in full horror-show mode.  The science of this thing was pretty clear a while ago, unfortunately we have made rather a habit of ignoring science when it comes to areas where we hold certain pathological "beliefs."  Our economic interest has been strangling our scientific response to climate change for 20 years.  COVID-19 just raised our temperature in a much more immediate and undeniable way than greenhouse gasses.
Even though it is not terribly scientific, it was the cancellation of the NCAA tournament that really snapped me out of the "keep calm and wash your hands" mentality.  It was the notion that something that stood to generate revenue in excess of one billion dollars would just be flat called off that made me think that maybe this wasn't just another chicken little moment.  I will admit that when it comes to weather events and other such impending doom I tend towards skepticism.  I was going down that road with this one too, but thankfully something told me to avoid that trap.
This virus has actually weaponized our own ability to keep calm and carry on against us.  It uses our greatest strength as a species: our social nature, as a tool to propagate itself as surely as the virus hijacks our cells to procreate.  Most of our strategies for survival involve banding together into communal structures and institutions that can give us the collective resources we need to surmount challenges.  This requires that as well, but somehow we must figure out how to do that from a distance.  So while in the face of wars and famines the church has often been a place of sanctuary and rallying together, in this crisis we have to tell people to stay away.  It seems wrong, but it's not.
The word pastor is derived from the pastoral role of a shepherd.  Everything in a shepherd's world would indicate that keeping the sheep together is the best way to keep them safe, except for in this case that's the opposite of the truth.  In the face of this, some new things are necessary, and maybe they have been necessary for a while.  We need to learn to use all the communications tools we have available, we need to consider what community really looks like in the face of a challenge like this, because something tells me this won't be the last time we face a problem like this.

And Then There Were Two

Elizabeth Warren just dropped out of the democratic primary.  We are down to Bernie and Biden, two almost eighty-year-old white guys.  I have been reserving my energy on this election cycle until it really matters, out of a need for sanity and spiritual survival.  But I have to say Liz dropping out makes me sort of sad, because I have felt like she was the smartest of the bunch for quite some time.  I feel like at least some of her inability to get traction in the primaries was a result of her unabashed intelligence.  There is a strong current in American culture that despises true intelligence. Isaac Asimov described it well:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread, winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I have this sneaking suspicion that that tendency becomes even more vicious when it comes to women.  At this point, I'm sort of thinking that our first female president is going to have to come from the right, ala Margaret Thatcher, because she will have to be an "iron lady" that adheres to the take no prisoners sort of political tactics that the Republicans have mastered since Reagan.  We have already seen an inveterate politician (Clinton) and a brilliant and qualified organizer (Warren) fail because the American people couldn't find them "likable" enough.  Meanwhile male candidates can be deeply flawed, even dangerously so, as is the case with Trump, and still garner wildly irrational support.
Only time will tell if it was actually Warren's extensive "plans" that scared people off.  If they end up choosing Bernie Sanders, I think that will be proven false, because Bernie has even more "socialist" ideas with less clear details than Liz.  If they choose Biden, it will just be a case of the establishment going with the "safe" bet.  I get that impulse. I saw someone on Twitter say that the best campaign slogan for any of the Democrats would be, "If I'm elected president, you won't have to think about me every day."
Which is where I have been since this whole thing started.  I just want the Trump era to be over, it makes me feel sick to my stomach far too often.  I think that Liz Warren would have been a great president, she probably would have gotten maybe a quarter of her plans to see the light of day, even if she got eight years.  Most of the wildest dreams/nightmares like Medicare for all would have been DOA, but she would have made sure to put back some of the regulations that protect us from the most rapacious aspects of capitalism.  Unlike the current chief executive, she actually knows what those regulations he has been shredding like cheese were there to do.
I don't know, out of that whole raft of plans she had, which ones would have actually gotten implemented, but I do know that when our nation confronted a crisis she would have brought that intellect and that undeniable sanity to bear upon it, instead of just tweeting out of an irresponsible level of ignorance like you know who.
Maybe it's just the desire for some semblance of peace, but I think I'm coming down on Uncle Joe's team for right now, but I can't think of another single person that would make a better VP than Liz Warren.  I mean if Joe put her in charge of pretty much anything I would feel pretty good about that.  I mean a lot better than putting Mike "I don't believe in science" Pence in charge of a global pandemic response.
I guess I have always wondered if that isn't democracy's biggest flaw: we elect popular people.  It was true in School, it was never the brains that got elected class president, it was the kids that could schmooze the best.  I guess I always hoped that, like so many other things that change in adulthood, things would be different out here.  Sorry Liz, I wish I had the chance to vote for you.

The Pale Rider

When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature call out, "Come!" 

I looked and there was a pale green horse! 

It's rider's name was Death; and Hades followed with him; 

they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, 

famine and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth.

-The Apocalypse of John 6:7-8

A while back it was Ebola, before that it was SARS, and of course we have had the specter of AIDS with us for most of my life.  Now it is the Corona virus. Plagues and pestilence are nothing new to humanity, the Black or Boubonic Plague is perhaps the most famous (because it happened in Europe), but there is good evidence that there have been multiple ravages of human populations over the course of history.  Diseases were probably responsible for destroying the massive pre-colombian civilizations before we white folk ever started showing up on this side of the Atlantic.  What happened to the Aztecs? The Maya? The Incas? The Lenape?  European settlers played a part, but it probably had more to do with microorganisms than it did with Conquistadors. That doesn't make it less tragic, but our violent colonial impulses to wipe out the natives were mostly just a rear guard action.  Diseases did most of the work before most of our scurvy ridden ancestors stumbled off the boats.
History gives us some grim warnings about the way diseases can crack our heads but good.  In our globally connected world, we really do need to give some thought to how a virus that started in Wuhan China now has people in New York City wearing those little white masks.  The potential for a pandemic is not a laughing matter.  You can argue all day about the virtues and dangers of globalism, widespread contagion being a big hit on the minus column, but the fact of the matter is, we're probably not putting that genie back in the bottle and regressing to isolated tribal society.
While I'm not generally given to interpreting Revelation too literally, I think John of Patmos was actually a fairly astute observer of human society.  Those horsemen really are pretty accurate symbols of our greatest perils, and they have been for a very long time.  I know, that's not comforting, but what I'm going for here is that the humility it brings us can and should be a good thing on the whole.
Our collective response to crises like this is actually improving, even if it still leaves something to be desired.  The world rallied to face the threat of Ebola even though a pretty short time ago most of the world would have just clucked their tongues and said, "too bad it happened, but at least it was far away from here."  AIDS kicked us hard and left us with a bunch of bigotry and hang ups to sort through, but sort through it we did, and Magic Johnson is still hanging around.
I'm not saying that the Corona virus and other pestilence is here to teach us a lesson, viruses and bacteria don't have any purpose other than self-propagation.  But pay attention to what things like this are teaching us about what it means to be humans in this world.  We are learning that our connections might bring vulnerability, but connection is also what helps us solve the problems we encounter.  It's pretty obvious that we can't get those riders back behind the seals, they're out there and doing their work.  New and stronger diseases keep coming at us, new ways to kill and destroy are always coming down the pike, because they're getting better at what they do; we need to be doing the work of being better humans.

Team Meeting

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger,

The speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

And satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

Then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

-Isaiah 58: 9b-10

Alright liberal types, it's time for a team meeting.  I would like to call particularly on those who identify as Christian, and those who hold the Hebrew Scriptures sacred, but honestly we need our atheist and agnostic folks on board as well.  We can all agree that Donald Trump is a big, obnoxious, ignorant, orange bag of lies, but that, unfortunately, is not going to get us much of anywhere over the next nine months.  I think we can also agree that every single Democrat has some strengths and weaknesses, but that pretty much all of them would be a significant upgrade in the humanity department from our current chief executive.

We have two choices going forward, we can either keep hammering at how despicable Donny and his gang of corrupt, spineless sycophants are, (which feels good, I admit) or we can do something that will actually get rid of them.  Unfortunately, stringing together all the insults in the world, even erudite and clever ones, is just playing right into his hands.  Trump has demonstrated that calling someone a big stupid head on Twitter is as effective in winning over his base as calling them a "Vesuvius of Mendacity" as George Will called him in an editorial in the Washington Post (that's my personal favorite). In fact, Trump actually gets credit among his tribe for being vulgar and un-complicated in his taunts and in pretty much everything else.  MAGA world does not know what 'mendacity' means, nor do they much care; to them it's just more elitist snob talk aimed at making them feel inferior.  Never mind that George Will is a pretty conservative type guy, he still uses too many big words to be trusted.

That's the mindset we are confronting here, and we need to do so with some level of empathy, or else we will be exactly what Trump accuses us of being: clueless, elitist, and determined to destroy all that red state folks hold dear.  These people have a deep feeling of estrangement from people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, from places like San Francisco and New York respectively.  They read and hear about political correctness run amok and the rise of cancel culture, and to them those are the "existential threats," not Donald Trump and his ham-handed bullying of Ukraine or his boundless self-dealing.  He tells them he understands them, even as he is tweeting from a gold toilet, and by God, he might actually just understand them.  He seems to be able to keep their loyalty and maybe even their love.

I'm not naive enough to believe we will be able to win back the MAGA crowd by November, but we absolutely need to win back the folks on the edges, and we will do so most effectively if we don't go full on Lefty-Liberal.  As much love as I had for Bernie four years ago, this time around he's starting to look like four more years of Trump.  Primarily because he is what Trump would be if Trump had decided to go left instead of right.  My belief is that if we play Trump's game, fight fire with fire so to speak, we will lose.  We will lose if we lose and we will lose if we win.  We will lose if Trump gets four more years in frightening ways, but we will lose even if Bernie gets elected because he will never get any of his stuff done.

Even if we flip congress, the Democratic party is never going to fall into the kind of lockstep it would take to ram through something like Medicare for all.  There will be no bipartisan support for it at all, and we will probably even lose a bunch of Dems who already put their necks on the line for the ACA and aren't about to bail on it now that it's stable.  That's the pragmatic reality, but the spiritual danger goes even deeper.

The spiritual danger is that we will continue to dig our ideological trenches deeper and pull further back into our echo chambers and tribal identity cliques.  Each side will continue to regard the other as a dire threat to all that is holy (in their own mind), and instead of "forming a more perfect union," we will be feeding the chasm of hatred that now separates us.  Trump did not create that chasm, he has simply decided to party naked on his chosen side of it.  After four years of watching that with disdain, I cannot ignore the consequences, and I don't want us to make the same mistake on this side.  We need to start building bridges across, not spitting at the folks on the other side. It's hard work, because the stakes are high and power has a way of making a convincing argument that winning is the only thing that matters.

I guess my hope for this season of political primaries is that the person who runs against the Donald turns out to be someone who can heal and unite us.  I hope we can really be better than we have been over the past four years, being this nasty is really wearing me out.

The Beating Drums

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

-Mark 13: 7-8

For fairly obvious reasons, this Scripture has been running through my head for the past few days.  Trump finally did something that wasn't just bluster, he actually took out an Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani with a drone strike.  This has generated all sorts of pearl clutching and honestly more diverse reactions from all over the political spectrum than most of what the Donald has done in this three year farcical collage of a presidency. Ross Douthat has an interesting analysis in the NY Times today about the differing paradigms of foreign policy if you want some political science in your day.

My interest is more along the lines of the moral and spiritual impact of things.  While I lean towards a pacifist interpretation of the Gospel, as a child of the 20th Century, I grew up with far too much evidence of the damage that unrestrained evil can cause.  While mutually assured destruction did seem like utter madness, I suppose you have to say that the idea prevented us from turning the earth into a charcoal briquette (we are just taking the slow cooker approach). I still find it hard to "not be alarmed" at wars and rumors of wars, and in a very real sense I do wish we could all lay down our swords before we die by them.  However, it is a fact that men like Soleimani and Donald Trump are pretty much destined to be the ones pulling the levers of power.  Even when we do get a thoughtful diplomat like Barack Obama, things like Libya and Syria still go down, and the measured, grown up reactions that I admired in Obama, do actually turn out to have been mistakes.

I guess that has always been an appeal of Trump, he is a bully, but if he's on your side, it would seem, he can help you fight those other bullies.  Iran is definitely a bad actor, on many levels.  Hopeful analysis from inside tells us that the Iranian people are yearning to breath free and rid themselves of the Mullahs that control the rather brutal and restrictive Islamic, Shiite theocracy.   But so far, there has been no Persian Spring, and even if there were, the Arab Spring has not left us much reason to hope that things would really change that much.

Our own track record with Iran is pretty dismal, we toppled a primarily democratic state that had many signs of actually becoming a modern society on par with say France or Spain, and set up the Shah, who proved to be a despot whose inept rule provoked a revolution that brought Khomeini to power. For those of you who don't remember Khomeini, that's this guy: 

That's right, Mr. Death to America himself.  Ronald Ray-gun brought down the USSR, but he couldn't do jack spit about the Ayatollah Khomeini.  We hated and feared this old man so much that we supported a certain Iraqi named Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.  Hindsight is 20/20, and we really should have stayed the hell out of a 1000 year old war between the two major sects of a religion that really only agree on one thing: we (the USA) are the devil.  That's right boys and girls, the one thing that unites two disparate groups of Muslims that split right after the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 CE (no I didn't forget the first digit), is their dislike of our decadent western behinds.

The thing that really scares me the most is that President Donald J. Trump seems to lack even the basic 7th grade social studies understanding that I just laid down right there. At my most cynical I believe that he is actually trying to "wag the dog" by starting up a hot conflict to distract from his impending impeachment (that's a good punk band name right there). But even if I give the Donald his due, which is hard on a spiritual level, and say that he actually did get a bad guy who totally deserved to get himself bombed into the next life, I just can't imagine how this is going to end well.

That's why I need me some Jesus.  He saves me from myself. I am still worried about the members of our armed forces who might bear the casualties of what would invariably be a really awful conflict.  I am still worried about the millions of Iranians, who don't necessarily think we are the Great Satan, but who happen to live in a country that is governed according to the standards of an essentially medieval religion.  I have this hope that, somehow, a new and better world might be born out of this mess, but I'm not really looking forward to going through labor.

A Civil War?

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all authority; for it has been given to me, and I give it to anyone I please.  If you then will worship me, it will all be yours.

Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" 

-Luke 4: 5-8

When Christianity Today, published their editorial by Mark Galli, calling for the impeachment and removal of Trump, I felt a little like Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, after Vader turns on Emperor Palpatine and chucks him into the core of the second Death Star, "I knew there was still good in you." But I also recognize that such a stand by a conservative evangelical publication has a cost, and given the strictures of the publishing business, I hope we don't have to build a funeral pyre for CT soon.  Red Letter Christians, an evangelical group with whom I share much more natural affinity, has been on this bandwagon for a while, but they reiterated their disapproval of the mendacious scam of the last three years. 

Of course Franklin Graham doubled down on Trump, claiming that his Father, despite being bed-ridden and of anything but sound mind and body in November of 2016, somehow voted for Trump, a claim that was quickly twitter-slammed by other members of his own family.  Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham and their ilk are not going to abandon Trump any time soon, and are indeed still shilling the whole "chosen one" angle, which is quite frankly blasphemous and entirely contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

First of all, the actual "chosen one," Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, was given the opportunity to rule the kingdoms of the world, and he solidly rejected it.  The false teachers will tell you it was because he was too wise to trust Satan on such a thing, that he knew the promise itself was a lie.  But that's only partly true, Jesus also knew that power of the sort that was being offered was a lie in and of itself.  If you think you can accomplish the goals of the Kingdom of Heaven by using the tools of the devil you are actually not a follower of Jesus, you are a sorcerer, who arrogantly believes you can control the dark spirits of power and violence rather than have them overcome you.  Hate, does indeed appear to make you strong, (Star Wars' fictional religion does have some moments of truth).

What I hear from those who still, even after all this, support Trump is some version of a Faustian bargain: "I don't like him, but he gets things done," even if he demonstrably does not get much of anything done other than make a general mess of things.  Or perhaps it is the "lesser of two evils" argument: "he's better than Killary, or Nancy Pelosi," both of whom happen to be rather shrewd, successful and female, but it's not just that, it's (insert poorly disguised excuse for sexism here).  Finally, there are the people who actually do believe, probably thanks to Fox News, that Trump really is the strong leader they have been praying for, rather than a global laughing stock who traffics in fear and division at his own expense and to the detriment of our democratic republic.  The reason, I think they are willing to be so willfully blind is because they have let hatred infect them so thoroughly that not only do they disagree with "liberals," they deeply wish to "own the libs," and believe that without someone to defend them against the "lefties," they will be doomed to live under the rule of atheists and communists. Honestly, I pretended to be asleep while that conversation was going on, rather than try to argue with them.

The question that is on my mind lately though is, "Can we have this argument/fight/war in a civil manner?"  It seems to be devolving into shouting matches, and "call outs" at worst and arrogant dismissal of opposing viewpoints at best.  I have said many times over the past year that I really miss George W. Bush, because while I often took issue with his policies and his warmongering, I never felt like I was dealing with a cult.  Cheyney was unnervingly evil, but he was just the Veep and W. was honestly unlikely to be impeached for anything, or kick off early.

This is the bargain that has been made by a certain segment of the Christian Church in America, for the illusion of power they have abandoned Jesus, they have rejected his example, from how he resisted the temptation of the Satan to how he willingly laid down his life.  When did Jesus grab for power? Never.  When he was offered the kingdoms of the world, did he take them? No. When they tried to make him king, did he accept? Also, no, he dodged them.

I found a passage that comes from one of Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems, I used this as our prayer of Confession on the "low Sunday" that falls between Christmas an New Years:

Hate has no world.

The people of Hate must try to possess the world of love,

For it is the only world,

It is Heaven and Earth.

But, as lonely, eager hate possesses it, it disappears.

It never did exist.

And Hate must seek another world that love has made.

Jesus showed us the way that love must move through this world, as a stranger and an alien, it has no home in the world of power and violence.  The Kingdoms of the World are illusions and lies compared to the reality of Love.  If we love we know God, and we are in Christ.  If we think there is another bargain to be made, we do not know the truth.  What Wendell apprehends is that Hate cannot own, dominate or pollute Love, what he sees though is that Love will not even use the tools of Hate to defeat Hate itself, it simply disappears and remakes (resurrects) the world once again.

A Proverb

One who justifies the wicked and one who condemns the righteous

are both alike an abomination to the Lord.

-Proverbs 17: 14

I have not written here for quite some time.  Part of the reason for this is that I have been spending a greater share of my time exercising my body, and less time sitting in front of a computer.  But honestly, I could have found the time if I so chose, I just didn't choose.  The reason for this silence is in part that I just don't know if I have anything of value to say about the events that have dominated the past several months.  I have been following the inquiries and the testimonies, I have been watching the Tweets and posts, and it would seem to me that there is pretty clear evidence that our not-so-beloved leader is a corrupt person, but then again, I knew that in like 1998, this is not new information.

I have some measure of confidence that our Republic will survive the impeachment.  In fact, I have been given confidence in watching William Taylor, Maria Yovanovitch, George Kent, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, and even in a strange way Gordon Sondland.  The thing that became clear to me was that these people, even Sondland, all had a clear sense that something was rotten in Ukraine.  None of them are what you would call liberal, let alone leftist.  Most of them, Sondland being the exception, are career government people, call them bureaucrats if you want, but they are professionals whose training and experience qualify them to deal in international affairs on behalf of our nation.  Even the lone Trump booster, Sondland, seemed to realize that the gig was up, they had been caught doing something that probably has pretty severe consequences and seemed to apprehend that lying to Congress was going to put him in the pokey with Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone (eventually).

What I am not so sanguine about is whether or not our commonweal will ever be what it was four years ago.  Trump has erupted with what George Will colorfully called "a Vesuvius of mendacity." The man just rarely tells the truth.  This is, of course, entirely consistent with who he is and who he has always been.  I spent a good deal of time being angry with people who voted for Trump, which includes some people I actually love very much.  At this point though, I feel sorry for them, because if they have an ounce of perspective and are paying attention to any sources other than Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, they must realize that they were conned.  They were conned the way that all the people who did work for Trump and didn't get paid were conned, they were conned the same way all the students at Trump University were conned, they were conned the same way that apparently the entire Republican Party is being conned.

In the process of duping his way to an electoral victory, Trump has had to up his game from simply sly mendacity to outright demagoguery.  Now that he is out there on that thin ice it is far too dangerous for him to back up or admit that he is a sham.  He simply must continue to erode our common conception of the truth.  And the thing is, he has help.  He has willing co-conspirators in his assault on objective truth.  I feel like history will not be kind to Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, or even Mike Pence (who might actually be President for a minute before January 2021).  They will be the Spiro Agnew and Gordon Liddy of this debacle.

This is what worries me though, their calculus in allowing themselves to be rolled up in this sewer sandwich is a cynical political decision.  They know that there are still enough MAGA hat folks out there to last them through the next election cycle.  And the worrisome thing is that I suspect they're right, which means that our collective sojourn in the land of lies and half truths is not over.  Even if Trump gets his orange posterior handed to him next November, even if we fire the firer in chief, there are a lot of people who have hitched their wagons to the engine of falsehood that has been pulling this manure wagon through our society.

Our collective sense of trust is going to take time to rebuild.  We can't have another Trump, or another Clinton, we need more politicians like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, people whose integrity is not in doubt, even if you disagree with their policy.  We cannot accept con men, even if you think they will get you what you want.  I know, this sounds unrealistic, but it is in fact the supposition upon which our Constitution is founded, that our rule of law would constrain the raw greed and self-interest inherent to our worst impulses and a search after a "more perfect union," would elevate us to be more than just savages who look out for number one.

Jesus said that a bad tree will bear bad fruit and a good tree will bear good fruit.  He was very insightful about such things, even if you're not a person of faith, you can trust him on that one. Look at the fruit: indictments, prison sentences, world leaders (even Boris Johnson) laughing at him, cruel policies towards the poor and the immigrant, and to top it off our modern equivalent of Scribes and Pharisees saying how he might even be the chosen one.  A good economy is not the only measure we should be taking of how things are going.  How does this feel?  To me it doesn't feel good, it feels like, well... an abomination.

I'm going to be quiet again for a while, sanity requires it.