Good Friday

Our congregation does not have a Good Friday service, so unlike many of my colleagues, I had Friday to do the normal sorts of Friday things. Friday is my day off and I generally use it to get things done, in this case the agenda was getting my 60,000 mile service done on my car. I know that going to a dealership is expensive and takes longer than going to Jiffy Lube, but since I drive a VW that has some fancy features, I like to take it to the dealer about every third oil change.  But I know that it's going to shoot my day in the face and probably my wallet too.  I needed four tires and alignment done in addition to the usual "routine maintenance" which is not cheap so I kissed about half of my tax return goodbye and settled into the waiting room with a book to read and tried to make the best of it.
The waiting area was not crowded, so that was a plus, but the TV was on way too loud, and it went from some vacuous morning talk show over to one of the cable news channel, thankfully not Fox News.  I shared the room with several older black folk, two of whom were a married couple who were quite talkative, even as the wife was intensely engaged in flipping through a well worn and tabbed Bible.  Over the course of several hours, mostly just by hearing (eavesdropping, though you can't much help it in such a circumstance) what she said, I came to be rather charmed by her honest and compassionate ways, and I could discern that her Bible was actually being put to use as more than just some sort of decoration.  For instance, she was rather upset at the story of the day involving Laura Ingraham and David Hogg, the conservative talk show host and the 17 year old Parkland student.  The former had made disparaging comments about the latter not getting into some of the colleges he had applied to, and the latter and his gang of newly fledged social media warriors proceeded to call for people to boycott sponsors of the former's talk show, prompting an immediate, if if somewhat insincere, apology from an adult who had decided to mock a teenager about not getting into college. The story is a pretty standard example of the decay of our public discourse, but this dear woman had it in her head that the colleges who rejected this young man were the ones at fault before the talk show host ever put her two cents in, which is wrong, but the fact that her heart works that way was touching.  In her mind, the colleges rejected Hogg because of his involvement with the March for our Lives movement, which is probably not true at all, the timing is just all wrong and colleges reject student applications all the time, it's nothing to cry about, although I still hold a grudge agains Duke for not taking me.  I listened to this conversation and I loved this woman for her compassion, if not for the rectitude of her opinion.
I am not generally a person who gets involved in waiting room conversations of this sort, partially because I am aware of my tendency to sound like a know-it-all and also because wading into political or even tangentially political discussions these days is likely to be fraught with danger.  So having sat with these folks for several hours, listening to their good natured chit chat, there was a certain sense that I had about them: they were sincere and faithful people who seemed inclined towards kindness more than anything else.  She was a retired DC school teacher, he was a retired workingman of some sort.  She was working on something involving the Bible and it was a difficult assignment that had been given to her by the Bishop of her church. 
In comes another younger black woman who sits for a while and then notices the Bible in the hands of the older woman.  It prompts her to ask if the older woman has read Enoch, which is part of the Apocrypha, and at this point my spidey sense starts to tingle, this is not going to go in a healthy direction I fear.  Sure enough, the younger woman has some sort of fascination with extra-biblical texts, probably because they are not part of the boring old Bible.  She had some (mistaken) ideas about the structure of the Hebrew Scriptures like not really knowing the difference between Torah, Tanaach and Talmud, and they are after all T words that relate to the Old Testament somehow or other.
I was a little worried because the older woman's knowledge of the Bible was being put to the test by someone who was not using their knowledge of the Bible in good faith, but in a sort of trivial manner where simply knowing who Enoch was and that he apparently did not die (questionable assertion given the actual text, but not unique to her).  She started talking about how Enoch was one of the two witnesses, people who did not die who were supposed to do something important in some sort of end-time scenario.  Now my "bad theology" radar was blaring, and I had a window to jump in because neither of them could remember the other person who did not die according to the Hebrew Scriptures.
"It was Elijah," I said, conscious of my own tone and voice, trying to keep it low key and not patronizing.  "Elijah was taken up into heaven by the chariot as Elisha, his student watched him go."
All of them looked at me like I had just sprouted out of the sofa, "And it was actually Elijah and Moses who were the witnesses to the transfiguration of Jesus on the Mountain," I said trying to bend this story back to a place of actual Biblical reality.  I did not immediately identify myself as a pastor, I still didn't want to take the stand of the expert.  What I did do is volunteer my actual knowledge of the Bible, I did sort of wish I knew a little more about Enoch, but the Apocrypha is not a particular fascination for me.  I found that even the dear woman with her well worn King James Bible, had a very limited understanding of how things all fit into the narrative.  Her training had been in verses and pericopes and proof texting, carefully guided by her Bishop.  She was prepared to teach and preach to fellow believers, but she was not adequately prepared to face what I think was some sort of modern day gnosticism coming from a very enthusiastic and certain person.
My involvement, and my ability to inject actual Christian doctrine into the discussion actually drew this loving, sincere woman to remember her own faith with more confidence and as this happened I sensed more uncertainty from the younger woman.  She was not as zealous for her love of Enoch as a world changing text, and she made some excuse to vacate the waiting room.  The older woman then told me that she was, in fact preparing for an examination before a board of ministers to be authorized to preach and teach in her congregation, which was the difficult assignment she had been fretting about.  It was only then that I told her that I was, in fact, an ordained person who had been through seminary training.  I told her this because I wanted her to know that I understood how nerve-wracking facing the gatekeepers can be.  But I was glad I waited until this point because from that point forward she actually started taking notes about what I was saying, which totally changed the dynamic of the conversation, and then I was teaching.  By now it was just the three of us in the waiting room and I had just about had enough of trying to read and more than enough of listening to the news.  I asked her about her assignment, which was clearly giving her trouble, it was about filtering your thoughts.  I thought about how appropriate that could be to what just happened with the Enoch lady, but I decided not to disparage a person who had clearly left our little dialogue, so I told her about the practice of contemplative prayer and accepting thoughts as they come, but weighing them against the need to love and forgive.  She had been going down the road of trying to control "sinful" thoughts and trying to think only good and righteous things.  I told her this was a path to futility, and that instead she should examine those "sinful" thoughts and find out if there is a righteous way to deal with them, for instance meet angry or bitter thoughts with forgiveness.
Before I knew it, we had been talking for more than an hour, and their car was done, and mine was nearly done.  I believe that our mutual presence there was no coincidence, it was the way that God works, and even if it required me to be a bit more of an extravert than I normally would be, it was my place and my calling to be there.  It was a Good Friday.

Close to Home

Last night I was asked to speak to a group of politicians and people running for office this year on behalf of our local community action group.  The other folks speaking had statistics and programs and laws to talk about, I just had a story about an old car, specifically my old car, a 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier.  A marvel of American manufacturing it was not, and it required having a good relationship with a mechanic I could trust.  I talked about the mechanic who helped me keep my beat up old Cavalier running until it had nearly 200K miles on it, he could listen to the car, or your description of a weird behavior and tell you what needed done.  I was speaking to a group of politicians on behalf of a group of people who are mechanics when it comes to some of the broken things of our society, churches, charitable organizations like the United Way and community action groups like Lifestyles of Southern Maryland, we deal with the symptoms and breakdowns of our culture.
Collectively we tried to impress upon the politicians and aspirants in the room that we are doing pretty much everything we can to treat the symptoms, but my point was that we are still driving around in an inherently flawed, poorly designed vehicle like my 84 Cavalier.  We are living in a system that is making all kinds of noises, I think we may have thrown a rod (which I have experienced in my wife's former car, an 81 Buick Skylark, probably one of the only cars that was actually a worse car than my Cavalier).  With regard to last night, the symptoms are people experiencing poverty and homelessness in the midst of an exceptionally prosperous and expensive area.  The system is broken because a household with two wage earners at the $30,000/year threshold ($15/hr, 40 hrs/wk) still falls below the average cost of living in this area by $15,000.  The system is broken because we have numerous people in this county living without safe drinking water or even running water and/or indoor plumbing.
One of the politicians, in true politician fashion asked us, "what change do you think we should make?"  To which the leader of our little gang of do-gooders sort of threw up her hands and said something on the order of, "I don't know and I'm too busy trying to help people to stop and figure it out."  I told the politicians that we are simply too busy and often overextended in trying to help the people who are hurting to think of grand new ideas, and also that we know that the solution to poverty in general is not simple, quick or easy.  We can do our best to fight the crises that inevitably arise with the clunker of a system we have and we can learn to make the most of it, but we need them, the ones we are voting to give access to the actual design of the machine, to come up with the solutions to the problems.
This morning I woke up to yet another shooting incident at a school, this one is less than 45 minutes from my house, it is in St. Mary's County, where some of my congregation work in the schools and at the base at Patuxent River.  This is another place where the system is broken. I have heard a lot over the past few weeks in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, from many sides of the issue, about what needs to be done.  The conclusion I have come to, with regard to the eruptions of violence in our society, is that like poverty, the solution must be more than one thing.
However, our engine is smoking and our transmission is making disturbing grinding noises, there is definitely something wrong.  So guns are not the problem, but honestly they are not part of the solution either. (Note: in the case of Great Mills, it is being reported that an armed School Resource Officer, did confront and use a firearm to stop the shooter, so point for law enforcement on this one)  Mental health is definitely an issue here as well, but it is not anything like the root cause of this sort of thing.  The problem is a system where people can feel so alienated from their world that killing others out of pure malice seems like a good option.  Access to firearms increases the deadliness of these incidents, mental illness is certainly a part of this pathology.  We lack two things on a systemic level:

1. A real grown up dialog about what place guns should have in our culture.  I do not believe that preventing citizens from owning guns is the solution, not here, not now, probably not ever, but if we're going to live with the guns, we need to make sure that we do a better job keeping them in the proper hands, that may require some rigorous and maybe unpopular work on our laws.  The State of Maryland, in my opinion, already has some of the more sane restrictions on the purchase of firearms: waiting periods, background checks and all that stuff.  The guys at the range will complain about how freedom-killing these rules and regulations can be, even as they unpack their AR-15s and various other semi automatic boom sticks. Obtaining a gun in Maryland is neither easy breezy nor impossible, which seems about the right place to be in my opinion.  This happened in Maryland, where we have pretty good rules, so what that tells me is that rules aren't going to solve this problem altogether. What I'm talking about as a grown-up dialog is actually something that I remember used to exist not that long ago. When I was growing up and learning to shoot and hunt, the NRA was an organization that taught you to respect firearms and most of all to use them safely and responsibly, which seemed like the majority of their purpose. There was some mention of the Second Amendment and the rights (and quite a bit about the responsibilities as well) of gun owners, but mostly it was about how to avoid shooting something you didn't mean to shoot. These days they seem to be peddling fear and anger more so than safe hunter training; this, in my opinion is a devolution of their mission.  When I was 14 the NRA represented the grown-up telling me about always pointing the muzzle in a safe direction and triple checking to make sure a gun was unloaded before you did anything. Now that I'm the grown-up they seem to be like 14 year-old boys harboring violent fantasies about defending the American dream with machine guns blazing.  The needed conversation has to happen among the people who know guns and use guns and understand that they are indeed tools, dangerous tools designed to kill things.  It cannot be had if we're busy practicing every rhetorical fallacy on the list in order to prove that we're right or if we let our inner helicopter parent inclinations to just try and make everything super safe win the day.
2. On the mental illness front, it needs to be said that people with mental illness are no more likely to be violent towards others than the general population.  It also needs to be said that someone who is willing to go shoot school children is certainly a psychopath and probably also a sociopath.  We do not have a very good screening mechanism, nor do we have abundant treatment resources when it comes to the kind of severe dissociative problems that would put someone in a place to do such things. We are mostly busy trying to treat depression, bipolar problems and general anxiety that are manifesting at alarming rates among us, especially among youth. As we are learning was the case with the Parkland shooter, there were warning signs and even shouts that something might have been amiss, and yet the system failed to respond in a meaningful, effective way.

Honestly, I don't have any brilliant solutions to this problem, but I'm feeling like this rattling coming from under the hood is not a good sign.

The Persecution Solution

You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy," but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?  Do not even the Gentiles dot he same?  Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5: 43-48 (NRSV)

If you have some time, I suggest you read Michael Gerson's exposition about the recent history of the part of the church that is called "Evangelical." Warning, it's a bit long, because how we got from the abolitionists through Reinhold Niebuhr and ended up with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is not simple, nor is it particularly salubrious to hope and faith.  What I have found interesting lately is the place that persecution is playing in a lot of our cultural neuroses.  Which is funny to me because honestly, in the history of the world, Americans are probably the least persecuted group that have ever existed.  That's not to say there is no persecution, you could certainly point to racism and discrimination of various stripes that seems to echo persecution, but the thing that's important to remember is that disagreement does not equal persecution.

For instance (and I will strive for balance here), a university professor giving their student a poor grade for spouting liberal talking points is not persecution.  Neither is the government saying that we can no longer force school children to pray or say the pledge of allegiance. Neither is a church deciding that they will not publicly endorse same sex marriage or say that abortion is just a wonderful right that every person ought to have. Neither is a major newspaper writing stories about the misbehavior of a powerful politician. These things are points of disagreement, and maybe even moral arguments, but they are elements of an ongoing dialogue about who we are and what our values should be.  In fact, one might argue that these things are precisely the opposite of persecution. 

The interesting thing I have noticed over the past few days is that whole bunches of people on both right and left feel persecuted, and the peculiar and almost laughable thing about it is that one of their favorite things to do is to mock people who feel persecuted on the other side of the debate.  So Fox News and NRA TV love to rant about the "liberal Snowflakes" at colleges and universities, even as they rave about how Obama (he's not even president anymore) and the "liberal media" are trying to oppress them and their freedom loving ways.  And indeed there are "Snowflake" types who seem to be just itching to get offended by anything and everything, so you have inevitable backlashes against #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, not just from the right but from the left as well, and you do have student groups protesting conservative speakers.  The thing is, none of this amounts to actual persecution, as long as you can turn on a TV and see both MSNBC and Fox News, and as long as you can read both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, persecution is really a word we need to stop using, because it is an insult to people who actually are persecuted.  Not only that, but allowing yourself to feel persecuted when you are actually only facing disagreement is toxic over the long haul.

The men who wrote our Constitution were actually intimately familiar with what persecution looked like, and were rather keen on preventing further persecution from happening to them.  British Colonialism and European culture in general was super good at persecution and oppression of various sorts, which was (at least in theory) a large factor in why some folks were willing to brave the hardships of the "undiscovered country." Sadly, these refugees from the monarchy and religious wars, who felt the sting of the lash of persecution did not have such a problem inflicting it on other people though and so Native Americans and millions of Africans found themselves on the wrong end of the musket and the whip in short order.

Despite their failings though, they envisioned and drafted a legal code that was against persecution to it's very core.  Once you say, "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," you can try to argue and say that it only means white men, or that it only means male humans, or that the list of rights that are "inalienable" is pretty short, but if you make that statement in the preamble to your legal foundation...

Let's just say it's only a matter of time before black folk, women, and all other sorts of humans that white, landowning men may not have envisioned making such claims.  If we are trying to live up to the ideals of our nation and it's laws, we must put away our idolatry of the "founders and their original intent," they were not perfect, or supernaturally moral people.  We should, however, appreciate the fact that their work was rooted in an ideal that was more divinely oriented than they could have possibly imagined: a place on earth that mirrors the justice AND grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.  In the Bible, this place is described as the Promised Land, but notably it is always a reality that remains a step ahead of the people. The Promised Land was most powerful and most holy when the people were striving to reach it, once they cross the Jordan and "inherit" the land, they immediately become the oppressors and the persecutors.

This cycle repeats itself in Scripture, and throughout human history: oppressed people rise up (in Scripture, God rescues them) and grow to the point where they are seemingly "ready" to take charge of their own destiny.  Inevitably, they mess this up, because they forget what it was like to be oppressed and persecuted and, despite God's impassioned pleas, they fall in love with power and wealth and grow enamored of violence towards their rivals.

Many of Jesus' followers were looking for a Messiah, as in a revolutionary leader who would help them rise up against a whole bunch of oppressors.  They had a bunch of them: Herod and the Sanhedrin were taking advantage of them from within their own house, the gentiles were an ever present threat, and Rome was the epitome of what the dominion of gentiles would look like.  It was an ever present temptation for Jesus to take the Satan's bargain and become exactly what most people really wanted him to be: a strong leader and a mighty king.

All he had to do was start naming enemies, and beginning the process of revolution.  He had angel armies and probably could have raised a human army in pretty short order, he could have made the world his own personal empire and justifiably called it the Kingdom of Heaven, but it would not have been, because God doesn't play favorites, he makes the sun rise on evil people and good people alike.  God's equanimity can be especially annoying when you really want God on your side, but forgetting to love your enemies is a huge mistake.  I admit, when I think of people who I label my enemy, it is really hard to imagine loving them, and thus I think that maybe Jesus means this as a sort of end point of enlightenment, where mostly only martyrs and saints really live, but I have to admit that maybe it's not an end point but a foundation of an actual Kingdom of Heaven.

Learning to live in a place where people have real freedom, and can disagree with you, is a rather challenging thing.  The wretchedness of our current state of dialogue and politics is a testament to this difficulty. The solution to this difficulty is not, and let me say this again, it is NOT persecuting your enemies.  An important first step in not becoming a persecutor is perhaps learning what persecution is and is not.  Disagreement is not persecution, laws that allow others to disagree with you are not persecution.  Being asked to forbear others who disagree with you is not persecution, laws that restrict your ability to harm people who disagree with you is not persecution.  Persecution is the restriction or violation of another person's "inalienable rights," which are defined by our constitution as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The practice of law in our society is, at its core a way to litigate specific places where one person or group's "rights" come into conflict with another person or group's "rights."

The brilliant thing about "loving your neighbors" AND "loving your enemies," is that you can then treat those conflicts and friction points as exactly what they are: opportunities to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, rather than places to exploit, oppress and persecute others.  They might even seem like places to offer a self sacrificial act for the good of society.  Maybe that seems crazy, even to some people who claim to be followers of this Jesus character, but he did actually mean it, and it is actually a shockingly good idea, it could even get us truly out of this mess that we're in.

 

A House Divided

But this command I gave them: "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you."

Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but in the stubbornness of their evil will,

they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward.

From the day that your ancestors came out from the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me, or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks.  They did worse than their ancestors did.

So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you.

You shall call to them, but they will not answer you.

You shall say to them: "This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips."

-Jeremiah 7: 23-28 (NRSV)

Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls upon house.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 11:17b

The theologian Karl Barth said, "Take your Bible and your newspaper, and read both, but interpret newspapers from your Bible."  I agree with that advice, but I will warn anyone who would take up the discipline of trying to do so, it is going to trouble you greatly.  Barth also is reported to have taught that we should do theology with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, but I would not refer to what happens from this practice as theology, that term is too sterile. What happens when you read the Word along side the news of the day is that you are very likely to hear a prophet's voice speaking to you.

The two bits of Scripture above are not cherry picked for my purposes, they are the assigned readings from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel for this day in the Revised Common Lectionary.  I have been following the lectionary for the purposes of preaching for quite some time time now, and I will tell you that it very rarely lets me rest easy when the waters of our world are troubled.  Sometimes it seems almost spooky how the text for a given day or week applies to something happening in the world, given that these texts are selected by what has to be the most boring and un-mystical thing ever: a committee.

The words of a prophet are always there to correct us, whoever we are and wherever we are.  Notice in Jeremiah above, you could find a critique of conservatives in the statement: "in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward."  You could also find a critique of liberals in the line: "This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline..."  And honestly you could apply the last bit, as well as the Gospel to our entire political scenario at this moment: "The truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips."

This is not, by the way, an isolated example.  This is a daily occurrence when you do what Barth recommended.  It is enough to drive you a bit nuts.  It will certainly get you in trouble with ideologues on either the "left" or the "right."  It will run you into some places where you find you must simply be un-patriotic and admit that your nation, whatever that happens to be, cannot and will not be synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven.  It will also sometimes lead you to an almost delirious hope that if only the people would change their hearts then God's mercy would surely rescue them.  AND it will often remind you, with brutal honesty, that you can say or shout all these things until you're blue in the face, but ain't nobody gonna listen to you anyway.

Rules and Regulations

This is another one of those "overflow" blogs, where I've been working through something for a sermon or a teaching and I just have a few things I want to add that maybe don't need to get into the actual finished product.  The Lectionary Gospel for today is Matthew 5: 17-20, from the Sermon on the Mount, which pretty much means that it is heaps of trouble for people who want Jesus to be a mascot for whatever mix of prosperity and imperialism they prefer.  It reads as follows in the NRSV:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets: I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all is accomplished.  Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.  For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

 It is tempting to read this with whatever hermeneutic lenses suit you best and sit back and assume that people who disagree with your way of reading have obviously strayed into error and become those who will either be "least in the kingdom," or better still not get in at all.  But please notice that this is part of a longer teaching, and unless you believe that Jesus was as poor a public speaker as certain public figures today, who jump disjointedly around from soundbite to soundbite, you must also consider what leads to this and flows from it.
The Sermon starts with the Beatitudes, which present the upside-down "blessings" of the Kingdom.  The entire scheme being introduced here is that God is present with us in some of our most unpleasant places. It is the beginning of the unpacking of the Good News that God is with us.  Jesus is going to spend much of his most famous teaching challenging the way we think things work and offering those with ears to hear a different paradigm for understanding.  It is no different for the Law.
What Jesus pretty obviously challenges in the Sermon on the Mount, is the idea that just following the rules is "good enough."  The Beatitudes are a challenge thrown down to people who would claim God's blessings upon power, authority, success, wealth, and suchlike. Jesus then proceeds to insist that we must be salt and light and a city on a hill, people who live kingdom lives must stand out.
The foundation of such distinction is the Law, the simple rules of living a God-oriented life, distilled in the Ten Commandments, which I will list in the form that I find most helpful to remember:

1. Have no other gods, One God is absolutely enough.
2. Don't make idols or even representations of divine things that might become idols.
3. Don't use my name in sloppy or profane ways.
4. Keep a Sabbath, because rest is Holy, even God rests.
5. Honor your father and mother.
6. Don't kill other people.
7. Don't have sex with people you're not married to.
8. Don't take other people's stuff.
9. Don't speak falsely, especially if it will harm others.
10. Actually, don't even get jealous of other people's stuff, that just leads to more trouble, and usually to breaking rules 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Now, there are 611 other no-nos prescribed by the Torah (611 also the numerical value of the word torah in Hebrew, Rabbis sometimes have too much time on their hands), plus commandments one and two, bringing the total number of laws in The LAW to 613.  That's an awful lot to remember, and honestly a lot of the rules were pretty obscure and prohibited fun things like tattoos (because pagans tended to have tattoos that essentially amounted to idols on their skin), and eating pork and various sorts of seafood, which honestly would be a deal breaker for me.

Fortunately for me and my fixation with Maryland Crabs and southern BBQ, Jesus actually summed up the law in a way that allows me to both endorse the goodness of the law and the prophets, while elbow deep in old bay and pulled pork, again I will paraphrase:

Love God with all that you are, and love other people too.

That is really quite brilliant, because if you go back to the original 10, you will notice that everything is covered by those two little rules.  Nothing passes away, in fact, I would go so far as to say that those little rules are pretty close to universal.  People might argue about the definition of God, maybe even try to deny that there is such a thing, but ultimately we come face to face with a the reality of something that is beyond ourselves, and we have a choice: love it or hate it.  If you hate it, you will be in Hell, always and forever, as long as you exist.  You will be forever at odds with your own nature and the nature of everything that is and you will be always be cursed.  If you can't love that which is at the heart of being, how could you love anything?
Conversely, as Jesus points out, if you do not put that love of God into practice with other actual beings and things, you can't really claim to love the source of their being.  In other words, if you don't get the reasons for the law and grab a hold somehow of the fact that God's love is at the core of it all, you can't possibly hope to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  The scribes and the Pharisees, along with legalists throughout time and space, have surgically extracted the love from the laws, sucked it out and spit it on the ground like it was snake venom.
The rest of the Sermon on the Mount is more or less a description of what actually following the Law would look like if it was done completely and consistently. He certainly does not ease up the requirements, in fact, he makes them even tougher in the rest of Matthew 5 (Matthew 5: 21-47).  Jesus' life is a demonstration of putting that description into practice. Being a follower of Jesus is a lifelong practice of learning the truth and putting it into practice, both things, always and forever, and they will never pass away.

A Long Road Back

Yesterday, I wrote in support of newspapers.  This morning, in the NY Times opinion section I got to read this rather long piece by Bret Stephens. Which actually hits many of the points that I have been mulling over in my head over the past week at least, maybe much longer than that. Stephens is one of the conservative voices that I have felt rather reflects the reason I used to identify as sort of center-right.  He values things like truth, and acknowledges that no ideology has the market cornered on truth.  That is not a relativist statement, it is an important acknowledgement of the reality that poets have noticed from Yeats to Bukowski.  Yeats says it this way: "the best lack conviction and the worst work with passionate intensity." Bukowski said it this way: "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence."
One of the most valuable things that I read about the recently departed evangelist Billy Graham was the story of how he overcame one of his darkest moments.  The moment is, of course, his association with Richard M. Nixon, and not just in sort of a generic support, but in a rather close relationship which included tape recorded conversations in which Graham seems to be on the same bigoted and paranoid train as Tricky Dick.  Graham did a hard thing in the wake of Watergate: he admitted he was wrong.  Not just about the relatively small act of bad behavior, but about his theological confusion of America for the Kingdom of God and his idolatrous infatuation with political power.  That is respectable, whatever else you might think about the Preacher, that sort of public repentance and ability to learn from a mistake is a good thing.
It is not a thing that is much on display in our public discourse about anything at the moment.  I will be the first to admit that nuance is a really annoying feature of the real world.  Decisions and arguments are much easier when things are simple, black and white options. Who wants to parse details when it comes to things like immigration, health care and gun regulations.  No one wants to think about moderate, incremental compromises on those things, everyone wants something done right now, and they want it done all the way.  Stephens points out in the above article that one of the big threats to the free press is the way that people seem to want to be in a permanent state of rage.  They don't want to see the other side of an issue because it distracts from their righteous indignation.
It is far too easy for me to totally write off the conservative side of the coin when I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (which is why I choose not to do that), they just make me angry with their smug pandering to an ideology I no longer agree with. I do watch Bill Maher, but with an awareness that he is doing the exact same thing, just in my preferred end of the cesspool. People like Mr. Stephens, and others like him, are becoming important to me, because I can't write them off, in fact, more often than not, I agree with them, not necessarily about everything, but about enough to keep reading.
This is an important piece of our way back from where we are now: to find middle ground, somewhere, on those issues that divide us.  Both left and right have their extremists, we need to stop listening to them. We cannot and should not try to silence them or shout them down, for in doing that we become the very enemy we seek to destroy. They have a first amendment right to spew their venom with as much confidence as they like, the intelligent people, with their doubts, must learn to tune out the wingnuts and find the people that might actually challenge their thinking.
Believe me, you will be a better thinker if you don't just tune into things you agree with.  I believe that Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death ought to be required reading for people today. Even though it was written in the mid 1980's it is a prophetic analysis of what was happening and has continued to happen as people moved away from the printed word as a primary means of communication and to the visual media of television. Our brains process written things differently than we do people talking, we think more carefully about what we hear and what we say in writing (twitter and facebook sometimes challenge this premise, but do not entirely negate it).  In a world of written things, ideas can be formulated, refined and debated.  In the world of TV, everything is a soundbite and attention to detail is not really wanted or much pursued. The internet seems to have some of the strengths and weaknesses of both visual and written media, and honestly it often seems to be like the worst of both worlds. Postman was prophetic in his description of how destructive this could be to our very civilization, and boy was he right.
But here we are, stuff is broken, that we can all agree upon.  We may disagree on how to fix it, or even on what stuff is broken and on how broken it is, but the one thing that I see on all sides among people with good sense is the acknowledgment that something is indeed wrong with our civilization.  That's pretty unsteady ground to stand upon, but it may be the only place we have to start the journey back.

Trolls, and How to Beat Them

No pictures today. No pithy quotes.  Just one piece of advice: subscribe to a serious newspaper.  Most big cities have at least one.  The Washington Post and the New York Times are my choices, and yes I know a lot of people would say they are "liberal," and yes both of their editorial boards tend to lean a bit to the left, but they also consciously present voices from the right as well: George Will, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, David Brooks and Marc Thiessen to name several. You will find in the pages of either one of those daily publications facts, analysis and opinions that will both challenge your views and confirm things that you already think or feel.  You cannot blindly trust newspapers any more than you can blindly trust TV news or what your cranky uncle might tell you, but you have, in the printed (or online, but at least written) media, a way to sort out lies from fact that still at least attempts to be somewhat rigorous about that fleeting thing we call the truth.
You will need to pay for this, it costs about $20 a month to subscribe to both papers online.  The reason payment is important is because it lessens the degree to which they are beholden to their advertisers and it decreases the temptation of employing algorithms and filters to feed you what you want to see (as Google and Facebook do).  Your subscription fees pay editors who might just feel that the truth is more important than sheer volume of traffic, and so they do things like fact check things that sound sensational and perhaps even more importantly, when they make a mistake (which they do), they print retractions and sometimes even apologize for the problem.
I know how you might think about the press, I grew up with all those TV shows where reporters were sort of obnoxious attention hounds, or driven people who all too easily bend ethical principles to "get the scoop." I understand that it's much more comfortable to just listen to people who tell you what you want to hear, we have been so conditioned to sales and advertising that we sometimes have a hard time when we're not being "sold."  But this Russian troll farm (which sounds a lot cooler than it is), story is a pretty major crisis for the future of humanity. I'm not even going to go into the election meddling aspect or talk about Trump and collusion and all that.  I'm just going to focus here on what it means for our commonweal that a group of people doing nothing but employing the tactics of your average eighth grade instigator, can call into question the prospects and progress of democracy.
You've heard the joke about the internet: it gives us nearly instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, right on a device that fits in our front pocket, and we use it mostly to look at pictures of kittens and argue with strangers.  That tongue in cheek assessment is proving to have dire consequences for our political reality and our public discourse. Fox News has also proven in the medium of television that people generally prefer a mix of pleasant fluff and selective anger.  There is something rather attractive about listening to people who are angry about the same things as you are.  There is also something soothing about not having to think too hard to get to "the truth." The perfect combination is hearing someone, like say Sean Hannity (who has practically perfected the art of being angry) go on a rant about something that also makes you uncomfortable.  I personally love listening to Cornel West, or Rev. William Barber, go on prophetic rants about things that make me angry.  It is a good feeling.
Because it is a good feeling, it is unpleasant to have to think about how they might be wrong, so a lot of the time we just don't do it.  The Trolls have figured this out.  The Russian government did two kinds of things during the last election cycle; first, they hacked the DNC and released emails (this is the illegal part and this is the part that might get Trump in trouble). Second, they organized the "Troll Farm," where people just got on line and created fake social media accounts, they then proceeded to just sort of take what Americans were already saying and doing and sort of "kicking it up notch," as Emeril Legasse used to say.  It's easy, you just make an argument (about say gun control or immigration) that has already been made, but you just take out some sliver of of reason or push it just a little further towards the extreme.  You're not doing anything new, you're just repeating gossip essentially, but the Internet is a Gossip whirlwind.
Most of you have experienced that moment where someone you know re-posts a particularly jarring headline and then you look and the by-line says The Onion, it happens more than we want to admit.  If you've just woken up from a coma or come out of suspended animation, The Onion is a satirical news website.  Their headlines do the same thing as the Russian Trolls, but for the sake of being funny.  Take something intended to be satirical, move it just far enough away from funny, and repeat it 100,000 times and Bam, you have a new "fact."
That's how the Gossip Whirlwind works. I work in a church, I am a freaking expert on gossip and the deleterious effect it can have on community and commonweal.  True story, on multiple occasions the gossip whirlwind has reported a death that didn't happen yet. It very rarely does anything constructive.
But gossip is popular, and kind of fun, and humans have been doing it since we learned how to use language.  The problem we have now is that we have loosened the moorings we have to the sorts of things that would teach us how to calm the Gossip Whirlwind, things like facts and reasoned discourse and disciplined journalism.  We have let ourselves be convinced by the whirlwind that those things are just more "fake news" or that somehow all of it has some sort of bias, which mysteriously always seems to be biased away from our own previously held position.
I know better than to think that human nature is going to somehow change on this matter.  We're going to need the serious people, committed to the truth, to help us get through this moment where the whirlwind has ripped the roof off of our house.  To continue to deny that the winds have gotten this bad is not a good idea.  It would be great if we could recover some semblance of civil discourse, reasoned debate and actual ideas to improve our society rather than just new ways to spit at each other.  As I talked about yesterday, it's not necessarily the tool that is the problem, it is the misuse and abuse of that tool that creates a crisis.
The interweb has the capability to solve the very problem it started, if only we had some way to access filtered, edited, fact-checked and vetted stories about what is going on...
Yeah, subscribe to a newspaper.