A Fourth of July Mystery

There are a number of fundamental principles that make the United State an amazing place to live. Most of the time we enjoy them and take them for granted without thinking about them very much. There are always debates as to which of the fundamental rights are most important to our nation, but I would suggest that the right of the individual to have his/her day in court when accused of a crime and the right of every person to vote are the two most important privileges citizens have in this country.
I have only served on one jury. I have gladly responded when summoned. The times I have been called to be on a panel the defense lawyers almost always excuse me because ministers are profiled as being harsh, vindictive, and judgmental (something that saddens me greatly). The jury that I served was in Texas and the case was a charge of drunken driving for a construction worker. The crew had topped off a building, brought a barrel of iced beers to celebrate, and then the worker drove home. He claimed he had only a “couple of beers” but the Breathalyzer had a different story. But society paid the jury, the judge, the jailers, the clerks, the prosecutor and a host of other people good salaries so that man could protest his innocence.
That same thing goes on every day all across the country. As a society, we pay an immense amount of money for a legal system that is created to enable each of us to have our day in court. We have invested large amounts of time and energy to try to make a system that begins with the assumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Certainly there are all kinds of evidence that the system has flaws; that money has power to distort the process; that race has played a major part in the outcome of too many cases; and that the system is over burdened with too many cases. But as a nation the USA has invested a remarkable amount of resources in creating a system to try to protect the rights of an individual.
The same can be said for the effort made by society to establish the right of everybody to vote. We as a nation have been working very hard over the last two hundred years to create a system of democracy so that all citizens are entitled to vote. It is well known that even with the highest of ideals – “all men are created equally and endowed by their creator with certain rights” – the country did not actually live up to that standard for a long time. It has been a long hard fought journey to the right to vote for all citizens. But as a country we have invested great energy, get resources, get time to making democracy available. The recent run-off election, the total cost to all counties to conduct that election, I am told, was over $3 million dollars. That is an incredible amount to spend so that less than 200,000 people can have a say in selecting a candidate. Not picking the Senator, just voting on picking a candidate.
We have good reason to be proud of our country on the Fourth of July for its commitment to protect the legal rights of individuals and to insure the right to vote of all citizens. The mystery is that most of us as individuals keep trying to figure out how to avoid jury duty and so often fail to show up to vote.

Nothing to Read

What a depressing visit to Barnes and Nobles book store. A couple of days ago I went into the Barnes and Noble book store in Raleigh, N.C. I was looking for something to read in the religious dimension of life. I did find a very large section of books, but I could not believe the stuff that was included there. If St. Paul was concerned that disciples who should have been ready for meat were still taking milk and toast, then we are back to formula. The shelves seemed to stocked with only the prosperity gospel, personal achievement, sentimental stories, and the road to happiness. (In 1960 a retiring minister in England told me that the greatest change in people in his ministry was that when he started people wanted to be good. When he retired they wanted to be happy. He was not sure the Gospel was about either.) So the publishing business is not into producing for mass consumption solid religious reflection and study.

That must mean that nobody buys that kind of book. Not in numbers big enough to make it worth the printing. The religious reading public wants what is being produced. The people seem to want easy reading, simple answers, and happy endings. A religious romance novels.

Of course, the other possibility is that there probably are not many religious thinkers and writers who can write for the general public and present the challenges of the religious life, the journey into the mystery with faith, and the high cost of living ethically in a moral confused world. It seems that C.S. Lewis is still the only one who is published who raises some of these questions and tries to answer some of them. I only saw the new book by Harvey Cox in the whole section. Harvey Cox did raise some great questions with his first book.

The search will go on. I know it is not at the seminary in Wake Forest. So the search something to read will continue. But I do pity the faithful disciple in a local congregation who is hungry for meat.

Too Late

Hopefully it is one of those moments when a lot of people learn a simple less. Doing it right can save you a whole lot of heartache. Morehead City, N.C. has a fishing tournament called the Big Rock. They go deep sea fishing for Blue Marlins and the biggest fish gets the biggest prize. This year the prize was more than $900,000 dollars, and an extra prize for a fish over 500 pounds on the first day.

The boat came in with an eight hundred and eighty-three pound fish. Everybody was impressed and the tournament was thrilled. No boat came in with a bigger fish all week. Other fish were caught but the next fish was 500 pounds. But the events took a very sourer turn when they began to check the people on the boat for fishing licenses. Rules say that everybody on the boat has to have a fishing license. $15.00 per person per year. Turns out one of the "mates" on the boat did not have one when the fish was caught at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The mate bought one, on line I guess, because they said he bought it at 5:00 o'clock as the boat was coming in. Because he did not have a license when the fish was caught the boat was disqualified and the people lost more than a million dollars in prize money.

There are a lot of tough lessons in that story. There is the lesson that it is cheaper and better to do it by the rules from the beginning. There is a whole study of the collective punishment for one person's sin the whole boat suffers. Who knows why the mate did not have one when he went out. They obviously knew that he needed it as they got him one as soon as they could. Ah, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.

Back Where They Started

Another minister friend told me about his congregation. He said it was a good congregation and could be a great congregation with seven or eight good deaths. A couple of years later he said he had had seven or eight funerals but he said the wrong people died That comment is suggestive that most ministers believe that the church they serve would be a whole lot better if the people who oppose them could be removed. There are always some people who are not on board with what any minister wants to do.

If you can't bury those who oppose you, then sometimes you can make them angry with you and they leave. That was the hope I had in my ministries. If you could just encourage them to join another church, then both of us would be happier. Well, sometimes it is not possible to find another church so they just stay home, which works pretty well. But the delightful thing that has come to my ears with the new minister is that they are celebrating at the church that all of the people that I drove away have begun to come back in response to the new minister. Here I thought I was doing him a favor by clearing out the unproductive branches. The joy at the church is that "most of those that had left are now coming back."

That is probably why the most successful ministers are those who stay in one place for a very long time. If you stay in a place like Frank Harrington in Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta for 25 years, you drive the ones who don't like you away and they don't come back because you never leave.

It is also a great example of what the folk singer Jimmy Buffet has in mind with a song about birthdays and retiring. "The one thing that I've learned in all this living is it would not change a thing if I let go." None of us is irreplaceable and when you pull the stick out of the water, the water just flows back and you would never know the stick had been there. Churches are like that. Ministers go and the old members flow back in and it is just like it was. They are back where they started. But I had a good time while there and hope the new minister has a good time driving away the ones he does not want.

Why Not?

Maybe I should just mind my own business. It is not an election that I get to vote in. I do not live in the state where the questions are being raised, but I am fascinated by the choices. There is a young woman who is rapidly becoming the leading candidate for the Republican candidate for Governor in South Carolina. As if South Carolina Republicans did not already have enough problems with their Governor. But Nikki Hawley is getting a lot of attention because of her attractive personality and her position on the issues. But the emerging issue upon many Republican evangelicals is that Nikki Hawley was raised as a Sikh disciple. She has recently converted to Christianity, but like other candidates from former religions who recently convert to Christianity, there are many leading right wing evangelicals who are "suspicious" about her commitment and her devotion to Christ.

I wonder if those who are complaining about her religious background know what a Sikh believes. Since I am so often flabbergasted by what Christians claim the Bible says, suggesting that they do not even know what their own Holy Book says, that I am not convinced that they would have taken the time to know what a Sikh believes. My own brief research on the subject says that the Sikh religion believes in one immortal being, God, has the requirement to follow the teaching of ten teachers. Those teachings focus on worship, mediation prayer; hard work and middle class (modest life) and a responsibility to share with others and to be of service to others. They are expected to be honest, content, selfless, "talk sweetly", fidelity and faithfulness in sexual activities, and to pray five times a day. There is a doctrine of reincarnation that is part of the teaching.

None of that sound too badly to me. I think the Reincarnation issue is a great divide, but it would have little impact on her political decisions. Maybe even help if she believes she would have to come back and live with the consequences of her decisions.

Seems to me the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scout have something of a similar life creed.

Nikki Hawley has joined a Methodist congregation and attends regularly the paper reports. But suppose she was still a practicing Sikh. I would much prefer to vote for a faithful, devout, obedient Sikh for an office of Governor, than to vote for some of the worthless people who claim to be Christian like the David Greene who is a Democrat running for office in the state of South Carolina. I am convinced that what we believe matters to what we do and how we live. The content of faith does have consequences. The old claim "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe something" does not fly with me. What you believe does matter. But what you really believe is evidenced by what you do. If Nikki Hawley could live up to the Sikh creeds and teachings as a Governor she would be a much better Governor than what they have had.

Even Jesus said that it is by the fruits of their actions that you will know those who are of the kingdom and those who are not.

Amazing difference

A friend suggested that perhaps God was having second thoughts about some of the things He had said. (Sorry for the male pronoun, but I think you have to use a personal pronoun and this is the standard one.) My friend suggested that in the light of the mess in the Gulf of Mexico that God might want to take back the "dominion" over creation that God was brave enough to give to humanity. Certainly when God flooded the earth, He commented that the evil that human beings had discovered made Him regret having created them. My friend suggested that maybe, just maybe, even without including the possibility of climate change and global warming in the discussion, maybe the decisions made by BP to cut corners, save money, skip the necessary testing of the deep water well and then say that it was a "big ocean" when the spill first happened by itself would be enough to depress God and make Him wish he could take back that "dominion" gift. I understand that the word in Hebrew translated Dominion here is much more a word that would suggest that we are to be stewards and care takers of creation rather than the dominance and exploitative notion of dominion.

The contrast for me is radical in my recent return from Tanzania and the massive amount of land that has been set aside as National Park and Conversation areas. The Serengeti plains are a National Park and no human is allowed to live in the Park. There are some lodges and hotels in the park and they have staffs, but no one lives and ranches in the Park. The Conservation areas are massive land areas where animals, land and natural environment are protected, studied and nurtured. Certainly Tanzanian government has worked very hard to preserve the Serengeti plains. Tourism is a major source of income and it is to their advantage to preserve the wilderness which draws people to visit. But they have not even allowed paved roads in the park. They are working hard to learn how to be good stewards and partners with the animals and landscape.

In fact there are several areas in which I think they will be able to teach us. One, Tanzanians and their country have learned how to live with little water. Rain is very precious and there are terrible periods of drought, and so they have learned to conserve and to be good stewards of water. As other nations grow and water becomes more precious in other countries we will need to learn from them how to survive with little water. Two, they have already begun to invest in alternative energies. Especially solar power. They do not have a lot of old power equipment and lines and there is not a lot of money invested in old infrastructure. They have lots of sun and lots of wind. The hotels and other businesses are already into wi-fi and satellite communications. Even in that country almost everybody has cell phones.

There are lots of things, I suspect, that bring tears to the eyes of God. The way we treat the wonders of creation, the way we treat the amazing diversity of people, the way we waste and spoil our lives by the pursuit of "lesser things." But I think my friend may be right, God must be shaking his head and saying, "What was I thinking to ask them to take care of my wonderful creation."