The Manger Child

The Manger Child: A Christmas Sonnet

The Story once was full of joy

With Angel’s songs and Wise Men’s toys.

“Good News to All and Peace on earth”

A child was born of holy worth.

The Story spread on acts of love,

But Power soon added a glove

And Force became a common part

To bring conversions to the hearts.

The Story struggles yet again

There is a hero without sin

Who maybe asks if you’ve been nice

Yet seems to give without a price.

What happened to the Manger Child?

He’s been replaced by Santa mild.

rick brand, 2013

One for Pope Francis

     I have not seen it or read all of it. I have only heard reports about what it said, but I celebrate the message I heard. I heard that the new Pope, Francis, has issued an 80 page analysis of economic realities. In it he has indicated that he did not believe capitalism is an economic system that was compatible with the Christian faith.  I think that that needs to be said more and more.  The unregulated pursuit of profit is not an approach to life which those of us who want to follow Jesus ought to support. Even the regulated form of capitalism is not very attractive.   There is a reason why so many of the other countries have something called Christian socialism.
     Because I have not had a chance to read the whole thing, I do not know what all the major points are that are brought to bear against capitalism, but I would argue that capitalism is built on two major evils: the sin of greed and the sin of selfishness.  Capitalism pushes for more and more profits. CEO's set profit goals and eliminate activities that do not reach those goals.  One commercial for a bank once had the line "I think my money ought to be making more."  More, More, More.  In our small town we have seen a number of large company outlets closed; not because they were losing money, merely because they were not growing their profits at the targeted magic number of some CEO in some far away place.  Good jobs and nice stores closed because they were not making "more." The movie that had the line "Greed is good" may be an extreme but that is what capitalism pushes for.  Why would the wealth want tax shelters in small islands if they were not greedy to keep what they have and want to make more.
     Greed and selfishness may be part of the same evil, but the selfishness is manifested in the fact that one only cares about what I make and not what happens to you.  Capitalism is focused on each person being out for their own advancement and not caring what happens to others. In fact, the competition in capitalism means that I want to eliminate you or weaken you so that I can make more.
     Pope Francis is right, and he has already been vilified by a host of people. Condemned by radio conservative people.  There is too much of our American Christian community wrapped up in our flag, our country and our capitalism for there to be too much acceptance or appreciation of what Pope Francis says, but he is right

Where is Rudolph Otto now?

     When I was in seminary one of the major works was by Rudolph Otto entitled, The Idea of the Holy. In that work Otto said that there were two major aspects of the experience of the Holy. One,  the first was the aspect of mystery.  What Bob Dylan said, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones."  There was something strange, something unexplained, something that does not fit in the normal rational explanation. Mystery. The second aspect was fear. Otto called them Mysterium and Tremendum. Mystery and Fear. Isaiah in the Temple, Woe, is me.  That dimension that has all the angels saying every time, "Fear not." Do not be afraid.  But that frightened response to the presence of the Holy.  Reinhold Niebuhr once suggested that in the presence of the Holy there is no laughter or silliness.

     From what I have seen in worship over the last five years is that neither of those aspects is a part of the current religious celebrations.  Worship is now causal, now familiar, there is a sense of competence  in the ministry that we can handle this. There is no mystery. There is no trembling when handling holy things. There is joking and laughing.  Annie Dillard once said we were children playing with a chemistry set and had no idea of the dangers that existed in playing so lightly with the chemicals.  There is a lot of touchy feeling, loving and hugging, and talk about God's as the God of grace and glory, but that there might be righteousness that would consume us and burn up all of our nicely constructed liturgies doesn't seem to have entered the consciousness of any of the churches I have visited or seen.

     If Rudolph Otto was doing his research now, he would never have been able to develop that definition of the Holy because neither aspect: mystery or fear seems anywhere near our current religious landscape.    

Wounded by their own Words

     It is well known that Bart Erhman is out for revenge.  His constant stream of books and articles, his appearance on television programs, all of which focus on the historical criticism of the scriptures and the New Testament times.  His books on the history of the writing of the scriptures and how they were subject to errors and to theological biases are all the response to his anger and frustration at being deceived by the Christian community in which he was reared.

     Dr. Erhman was converted, as he has told us, in a very strict evangelical, fundamentalist congregation. He was told and he accepted that the Bible was the word of God and every word in the Bible was inspired and divine. He was told the Bible was the inerrant word of God. He was so devoted to that theology that he wanted to be a Biblical scholar.  When in his studies of the Scripture he began to learn the truth about the vast number of manuscripts of the Bible and how many different readings there were to so many different passages, he began to discover that the Bible was not without its human dimension.  He discovered that he had been lied to by all those preachers. The Bible was not inerrant as a text.  His response has been to engage in attacks upon the Bible and Christianity ever since.

     What perhaps is not as well known is that Reza Aslan, who is the author of the much discussed book Zealot: The life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, was also converted from Islam by an evangelical Christian community.  As an adolescent living in the USA he was converted to Christianity in a fundamentalist church.  Once again, as an undergraduate he encountered the critical biblical scholarship that exposed the shaky foundations of that fundamentalist message. He abandoned Christianity and returned to his roots as a Muslim.  Now he, also, is writing books that criticize the basic message of the Christian faith.

     "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." but the Christian faith is also discovering that "that woman" has a match in a fundamentalist convert who discovers that the proclamation of an inerrant Bible is a lie.  The Bible is indeed, an inspired book, inspired by the faith of the humans who wrote it and the message of the presence of a Holy One in the midst of History is good news, but the text that tells that story is as flawed as any other book that is published.

And still it goes

     One of the things that amazes me most about the series of mystery writers is that the conflicts never change.  John Rebus was never trusted by the upper level management of the Edinburgh police. Alexandra Cooper still fights with the same people every story.  Joanne Brady continues to have trouble with her deputies.  You might think that after these heroes and others have solved so many crimes the forces they are with would support them whole heartily.    I understand that it would not make for a very good series of mystery books, but that is another problem.

     But when you do think about it, there is the reality that facts do not often change people's minds. Whether politically or socially or economically the facts do not seem to have much impact on the way we think.  You can have 95 nations and all the Nobel prize winning scientists you want conclude that global warming in happening and that human activity is very much a part of the cause, and yet lots of people will not change their mind.  There are still flat earth people and two gunmen conspiracy people on JFK's shooting.

     So the best means of transformation of people is in the living contact with a different way. Those who hate certain groups of people will not be talked out of their bigotry by facts, but let them met an individual and they may begin to change.  Most of the conversions of people I have read and met have been because of the personal lived witness to faith, and not by facts and logic.  Your life is still the best testimony you are able to give.

Words of Gardner Taylor

To quote one of the most distinguished preacher of American,

"It is one thing for secular special interests to organize themselves around punishing the poor and penalizing the handicapped; it is altogether another matter, and infinitely more atrocious, when religion aligns itself with the ugliest moods and deepest biases of the community around it.  There are forces of reaction and meanness and oppression loose in the country today which mask their harsh bigotry with the Word of God and the persuasiveness of a certain synthetic ministerial unction. They castigate people whose ideologies do not agree with theirs. They are passionate about life before birth but are not nearly equally intense about the quality of life after birth. They criticize, and rightly, crimes of violence, but they have not one word of criticism for corporate robbers who bribe, misappropriate, lie, dodge income tax, and practice cutthroat methods of business operation."

Spoken in l983 and now 30 years later the words are even more appropriate and the evil done as only gotten worse.

Forgetting where you came from!

     It makes a great story. He was born to a single mom who could not read, but who made him write book reports and read them to her so she knew he was doing the work.  He ate welfare food, got health care from the clinics and got government paid for glasses. He was accepted into college and med school because of affirmative action.  And now he is a rabid opponent to all of those programs.  Dr. Ben Carson. He wants to promote himself as a great story of individual achievement that proves that those who are on welfare could get off and out of the ghetto if they would just work hard.   His story is a great story but why does he want to deny the same help to others?   Somehow there must be a conflict and confused personality in him that does not want to have to remember that struggle and the struggle that others are still trying to make.
     The same confusion exists in most of the southern states. All those southern states that have representatives in congress shouting and preaching about the need to eliminate welfare, worker's comp, unemployment benefits, medicare and medicaid, live and are elected in states that are receiving more in federal aid than they are contributing to the government in taxes.  That is the Southern states get back more in those programs in terms of total dollars than they pay in taxes to the Federal government. The whole area is receiving welfare and are dependent on the liberal northern states to pay for them.
     It takes somebody with more intelligence than I have to understand the mind and the attitude that can stand up and bite the hand that is feeding it so loudly and aggressively.

I was amazed!

     Twice on my recent trip aboard I was left with my jaw on the floor by comments of members of our group.  It slowly became known that I was a Presbyterian minister, and I think it was true that most of the members of that group considered themselves believers.   So one of the members commented to me that he had read an article that reported that a well known theologian had admitted that at times he had doubts about the existence of God. The group member then told me that he believed that any theologian who had doubts about God had way too much time on his hands and needed to find something better to do.  I did manage to ask him if he never had doubts about the existence of God.  I even suggested that there was no faith without doubt, but he did not seem to be able to grasp that notion.  Is the chess board black with white squares or is it a white board with black squares on it?  You may be sure that it is one or the other, but surely every once in a while you think it might be the other way around. Well, when one looks at life there are beautiful things, glorious people, works of art, good deeds, grace abounds, and so you are sure of the goodness of God, and then you see the crime, hatred, the killing, the greed and you see senselessness of pain and suffering and don't you wonder, doubt maybe whether there is a good God or even a God?  My jaw hit the floor when he told me that he did not think a theologian should be doubting the existence of God.

     The second time it bounced off the floor was when a very highly educated and successful lawyer for a fortune five hundred company told me, when we were looking at the magnificent craters, the deep and beautiful glacier lakes and rivers of New Zealand, those rain forests of millions of years and the erosion of the granite rocks, that he had never thought about the Genesis story of six days of creation which he thought was the way it had happened.  The whole six twenty four hour creation story put up against the vast awe inspiring mountains and cliffs and he never thought of reconciling or attempting to integrate one with the other.  Granted it was not his life's work and he had family and lots of things to worry about, but if people who have his kind of education and experiences can go through life with these things compartmentalized, how can we ever make any kind of progress in finding a faith witness that matters. How can we find an educational curriculum that is scientific if we still want the six day creation poem taught as science?

    Once again there is evidence that education is not all that is needed for the achievement of a robust and dynamic faith in the midst of the reality of the world we live in.  There is no honest faith without doubt, and there is no vibrant and dynamic faith without the power to bring the poetry and truth of scripture into alliance with the research and data of history and science.

   

A Little Honesty, Please

     Driving in the car with a man whom I had just met, he was talking to me like he did not know what I had been or who I was. Maybe he did know who I was and thought I needed to be "reformed." He was telling me about how Christians in China have to be very careful. That if one teaches the Bible, one can be killed. I have heard the same story, but I have also heard much recently that the Chinese government has kind of adopted a "Don't ask, Don't tell" about practicing the Christian faith.

    But the lecture on Christianity in China lead to another lecture on the virtues of the Christian faith, in his mind. According to him Christianity is the only faith that has given women equal rights. All other faiths have suppressed women.  I did not want to get into any major discussions of World History with the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans who all had women gods and women priest.  I did not want to try to venture into the oriental religions as I do not know much about them myself.

     And I was very pleased with myself that I kept my tongue and did not point out to him that his Southern Baptist still do not want women to be preachers; that the Roman Catholic Church has been trying to shut up the American nuns, and will not let women be Priest. That as a Presbyterian I have a personal memory of the fight to allow women to be Elders and Ministers.  Jesus was very progressive in his day in the treatment of women, widows,  children, and foreigners, but the history of those who followed Jesus does not indicated that they have been more progressive in the treatment of women. St. Paul tries to limit the involvement of women in worship.

     The defense of Christianity is a worthy thing, but to do it with inaccurate information does not help the cause.  As Linda Fairstein in her series of mystery stories with Alex Cooper, the woman who tells her story about being raped had better be honest in all parts because if it is shown you lie or misuse the facts in one small place, the jury will think we are lying all the time.

What Hypocrisy!

There has been a stream of criticism on the television about the lack of leadership in Washington to solve these major financial issues.  I think that is true. I think neither the House nor the Senate has the kind of leaders who can work out some compromise.

I think is grossly unfair to blame President Obama for the stalemate as I have heard many do. Because Obama does not have, even as President the power to make things happen as CEO's in other companies  do.

I think it is grossly unfair of the many CEO's who have been quoted as saying that Obama has failed to produce leadership when the leaders and CEO's of the auto industry were not able to reach solutions without going into bankruptcy court. The CEO's of Wall Street banks were not able to find a solution to their self created problems without getting help. The Airlines were not able to find solutions to their financial issues without going into bankruptcy court.

It is a pretty arrogant group of people who can look at Washington and claim a lack of creative leadership when none of them were able to find "creative leadership" to resolve their problems without outside help.  Congress and Obama had nobody to come in and give that outside help.  There are 500 arrogant stubborn people in Congress and Obama cannot even make his own Democrats stay in line let alone get the Republicans to cooperate.

It is a classic example of hypocrisy to hear business leaders talk about failure of leadership.

ANOTHER REMINDER OF THE POWER OF EVIL

And so it drags on for another day. The two sides continue to demonize each other. The solution to the problem is that the “other side” ought to just give in and give up.  Both sides wrap themselves up in the “arrogance of righteousness.”  One side even claims that they have “God on their side.”  Perhaps both of them ought to go back and listen to one of Bob Dylan’s great songs about “God on our side.”

But that is one of the great disguises of evil, to make itself look so much like the good.  One of the great powers of evil is to be able to make a second level good into an absolute good. To take a minor and make it a major. To take a good cause like “debt reduction” and make it into an absolute when the absolute ought to be “to govern for the good of the country.”  The power of evil has the splendid power to make those who are remaining steadfast feel like they are saints.  They are being persecuted for righteousness sake.  Both sides claim the high road, and believe themselves to be doing good. Evil enjoys watching this kind of fight between two committed sides.

Because it has the ability to look so much like the good, there has always been the temptation to think that evil can be easily overcome.  If these two good intentioned sides would just talk to each other, we could easily solve this problem. Boehner has been quoted as saying, all Obama has to do is come down to the House and give in. Reid has said all the House has to do is pass a budget without Health Care restrictions.

In fact, it is one of the worst mistakes that continues to be made in Western Civilization since the age of Enlightenment. It is the quick and easy assumption that evil can be simply and painlessly overcome.  “A weak awareness of the power of evil is the simple, shallow, optimistic notion of the West.”, so said Gardner Taylor, one of this country’s great Black preachers.  It is the arrogance of education that all we need to do to achieve the good is to get more people education.  But education only makes the evil ones more skillful. Look at Osama Bid Laden.  Education is good but it does not eliminate evil.  Wealth, Fame, Military Power, Democracy, Political power, none of them are able to overcome evil.  Certainly religion has not been able to overcome evil. 

One of the greatest problems with American protestantism is that its major public expressions completely avoid dealing with the problem of evil. If you listen to Joel Osteen evil is just a lack of effort and faith in yourself.  All the prosperity gospels discount evil as quickly as possible. Bad things may happen but with a little faith and effort you can over come them.

Someone once suggested that all evil needed to succeed was for good people to do nothing. Well, that is pretty simplistic as well. The power that religion does give is the power not to pretend that evil can be overcome. Evil is around us, in us, in our systems, in our economy, in our lives, and we ought not to pretend that we can just deal with is easily and quickly.  The best way to deal with it is to acknowledge it and ask each other to call it to attention when we see it.   What is happening in D.C. right now is simply evil and it obviously will not be overcome easily.

Celebrating the ordinary

     Not many of us who were around at the time will not remember the shock, the confusion, the horror, the stunned reaction to the events of 9/11.  Some have criticized President Bush for the way he sat and continued to read at the day care, but most of us did not know what to do or what to make of it or how to react to the news either.
     Now we mark the day by pausing and remembering the victims, the first responders, and the families of the victims.  We are still suffering the consequences of that attack with two wars in the Middle East that have become longer and more costly than Vietnam.  There is another crisis in the Middle East that is pretty much the same struggle all over again.
     But some of us mark this day by a celebration of the little ordinary things.  The ordinary normal things that are the context of our lives. The silly little things that those who were killed in the attacks will never be able to share again.   The early morning cup of coffee with the newspaper in hand. The comics and the sport page. The sport page filled with young people working hard and trying to become the best they can become.  Celebrating the constant flow of competition.  To watch the birds at the feed, to see the young off to school, to get the "Obligatory picture of the first day of kindergarten" of the grandchild.  To read a few pages in a good book. To watch and listen to the station of one's choice on the early shows.
      Maybe it does not seem like a great show of respect or honor maybe, but it seems to me it is the absolute most appropriate way to honor them. To enjoy, to celebrate, to share the ordinary, normal, routine activities of our daily lives is what they would all have wanted to share.  These are the things that the family miss most. The morning huge, the first kiss, the packing the lunches, the mowing the grass, the going to work, the coming home, the fighting the traffic, that french fries and the coke. The beer at the end of the day. To honor their lives and to remember their deaths by living ours and enjoying the ordinary average routine of life. They were wonderful ordinary people, and in a lot of ways we remember that by pausing and appreciating our own good ordinary life.

Stupid Things I Have Seen Recently

     Of course, there are decisions and events that I do not agree with, but which can be argued wisely and cogently.  While I do not believe we need to be bombing Syria by ourselves, without international support, I have read strong rational arguments for that action.  But sometimes there are just plain stupid decisions made. The last couple of weeks there have been two glaring ones:
     1. The decision to override the Governor McCory's veto of the drug testing for welfare benefits. The Governor thought that was an unproductive bill. Two states, Florida and Colorado, have already done that and discovered that the number of people found to be doing drugs was smaller in percentage of that population than the general populations.  The program cost both states money. It did not reduce the amount of welfare benefits by enough to cover the costs of the test.  So here you have the governor telling the legislature that this was a bad move; the evidence from two different states showing it was a bad move, and the N.C. Republican legislature going ahead and overriding the veto.  Just plain stupid.
     2.The second action was from South Carolina at a Wild Wings Cafe.  A family gathering of 25 people had come to Wild Wings to have a "going away" party for one of their members. They waited in line for 2 hours to get seats enough for all of them. They were seated as a group, and no sooner had they been seated than the assistant manager came and told them they would have to leave. Why? because one white customer felt "threatened" by them.  My label of stupid is not on the race issue. It is the plain economic issue for the manager. 25 customers versus 1 customer.  Which makes the larger impact on your bottom line?  Why didn't the manager just ask the one white customer to leave if he/she felt threatened?  Is that what we tell people? If you feel uncomfortable in your surroundings, then it is wise to get out of there?   As a PR problem Wild Wings has it big time. But it was just plain stupid of the Assistant manager.
      Ken Copeland and his ministry telling his people they need only trust God for their good health and not get vaccinated or do to the Doctor is another stupid thing as far as I am concerned but I will let them have their measles and hope they don't give it to others.

Conflicted

     It appears that everybody has a reaction to the Zimmerman verdict.  There is great anger on the part of many and there is rejoicing in the minds of some. I am conflicted and confused.
     I am disappointed in the verdict. I was convinced that the verdict would be a manslaughter decision. The "Stand Your Ground" law is a mistake and a major step back to an old west mentality where everybody carries a weapon and we see who is the fastest draw.  When the event first happened and there was the possibility that Zimmerman would not even be charged with any crime because of that law, there was a great outcry of injustice. The demand was that he be arrested and charged with a crime.  Eventually that happened.  He was arrested and has been tried.
     So we have had the trial and the jury that was accepted by both sides of the legal proceedings found him not guilty.  That surprised me. That disappointed me, but I have been disappointed by the decisions of lots of legal trials.  Hedge Fund managers get off from fraudulent activities.  A major scammer in the Health Care in Alabama was found not guilty.  Mafia bosses walk away from lots of crimes.  Cases are dropped because they do not have enough evidence to convict an obviously guilty person. We live and die by that "reasonable doubt" clause.  North Carolina was very progressive for a few years with a Racial Justice act that allowed those condemned to death to reexamine their cases if race was a major factor in their sentence. The Republicans have since rescinded that law. But the legal system has disappointed lots of us lots of times.
     One of the times I was very surprised and disappointed by the legal system was the O.J. Simpson trial which had lots of the same dynamics involved as this trial, and it was a decision that was celebrated by the same people who are upset by this decision.  It is not a perfect system. We are not perfect people. We are still a society that has deeply flawed elements in it when it comes to race relations.  We are all racists.  Those attitudes will continue to be reflected in our behavior.  We have to continue to look at them and talk about them.  We will have a lot more of these kinds of events: Hispanics against whites. Asians against black, Arabs versus Jews as our society continues to become multicultural.  To claim we have made no progress in out ability to talk about them is to ignore the obvious. To think that we have solved the problems is just silly. All parents have to tell their children, be careful who you hang out with, be home before mid-night, consider what you wear and what people will think about you when they see you, say "yes sir and no sir" to adults and do be smart, see trouble, walk away, call 911. Those are not unique to any racial group.
     I am old and frustrated that so many of the fights that have been fought still have to be fought again. Our civil liberties are like a little clearing in a jungle and we have to keep fighting all the vines and weeds that try to grow up in the clearing.
     The Zimmerman-Martin case almost did not have a trial. There was a demand for a trial and that was held. The jury has spoken. The decision is not the one we wanted, but many of the people who "wanted a fair trial" were really just wanting to have a legal confirmation of their immediate opinion that Zimmerman was guilty.  The trial was held. The verdict was given.  I will put this in the O.J. Simpson file of cases I was shocked by the decision and move on.

Moral Monday - Women's Health

     This Monday was focused on the suddenly passed legislation in the N.C. Senate that was a very restrictive bill on Women's health options.  The crowd was much bigger than the first Moral Monday on Clergy Day, and it was made up of a lot diverse groups. This one had a lot more older women and their husbands than the first one I attended, and I think there were less African Americans in attendance.  If it is any indication of the size, at the first one I went too, I easily found people I knew. At this one I did not run into anyone I knew.

     As I was walking back to the car after the rally, I was carrying the sign I had held up all evening. "United for Women's Health."  I passed a young woman who was walking to her car in a parking lot. She saw my sign, and as we walked passed each other, she said loudly, "Abortion is not women's health."  It took me by surprise and all I could say on the spur of the moment was "Well, that is a large debate."

      That debate is at the heart of much of what we are talking about.  Abortion is not a good thing. Abortion is an act of violence that is not wanted by anyone I know.  But the question is who gets to decide that question.  There were good posters which read, "If you want to make health care decisions for women, go to med school."  The question is who is going to decided whether or not an abortion is the final solution to a horrible situation.

     It is a large debate because those who want to make that decision for women, who want to say when and how and if a woman can have an abortion, also want to make the decisions about whether or not a teenage girl can get the morning after pill. Those who want to make the decision about abortions also refuse to allow the teaching of birth control, the pill, and condoms.  Those who want to make the decision about abortions also do not want to provide help to single moms who carry the child to full term and have the child.   The people who make these rules about abortion have these funny ideas about sex and how it works so that they believe rape cannot cause a pregnancy.  The people who want to make the decisions about when, who and how a woman can have an abortion have been primarily men, like bishops, popes and priests, like Senators and Representatives who are old males.   As somebody in Ohio in their state legislature suggested, Men ought to be required to have psychological counseling before getting Viagra.

     It is a large debate because there are just so many factors, so many issues to be considered. All the things that the anti abortion people say about abortions are probably true. All the horrors of an unwanted, unloved, unhappy, child are also true and very obvious for long term cost to family and society.  So how are we as a society going to balance all these issues.  I am united for women's health care because I believe that in these kinds of complicated situations the person closest to the situation, the woman, ought to have the power to make that decision. For a political party which wants to get government out of our lives, they have had a pretty aggressive agenda of getting themselves right in the middle of telling lots of people what they can and cannot do.

Paula Deen - so am I!

     So  Paula Deen has used the N word in previous conversations.  Well, lets face it. You could not grow up in the South as she did and not use it.  It was not and is not a term of equality. It is not a term of respect, but if you walked, talked, went to school, had a group of friends, played ball, went to dances with your white friends, you heard it and it came out of your mouth.

     I have already confessed to being a racists and using the N word at a Martin Luther King breakfast. I told them nobody taught me that word. My parents wanted me to be a Christian and love everybody, but it just seeped into the language and became part of the words we used.  It was used to choose sides in teams. " Eny-meny-miny- mow, catch a ........ by the toe" There were lots of those kind of things that as a young child you just absorbed.  If you were working very hard and the sweat was pouring off of you someone might say, "Boy, you are sweating like a N."  So the fact that Paula Deen confessed that she had once used that term is not a surprise at all.

     I think it would be much more important to discover whether or not she still uses that term in her relationships with other people. Does she still tell those stories that some people try to call jokes?  Does she still slip and use those "cliques" which have the N word in them.  Or has she attempted to grow and change and recognizes that those are hurtful and inappropriate words.

     It has just been a few weeks since the great southern Prophet Will Campbell died. Will knew the south and our deep seated divide.  Fleming Rutledge, a friend, tells that she talked with him once and mentioned her Virginia birth. She was talking about her past and how she had worked to become more accepting. Fleming wrote," I was confiding in him about my conversion. "My father," I said sadly (I adored my father) but smugly, "was a racist." "Fleming," said Will. Pause. "We're all racists."

      And I don't think Will was just limiting it to white and blacks. There are those who look down on the American Indians. The black community has historically had problems dealing with Hispanics and Latin Americans.  I remember the Kingston Trio once had a song about problems around the world, and it ended with the line, "And I don't like anybody very much."  Why is Iraq still in chaos except for a great divide between two religious groups. Arabs and Jews look down on each other.  Maybe in the technical term some of these are not racial divides, but it is still true that all of us feel superior to some people and dehumanize some group of people because of their skin, the accent, their hair, their economic condition or some other way.

     Paula Deen is a racist?  So we all are racists. The more important questions are do we recognize it and ask for help and try to mitigate the damage that we do by so being.

Interfaith?

     The meeting had been billed as an interfaith gathering of clergies. This was one of the Moral Monday gatherings in Raleigh.  There were Jews present.  I did not see anyone who was identifiable as Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. But the reality was "We don't do interfaith very well."

     The speakers approached the presentations as if they were sermons in Christian Churches.  Jesus and his words and work on earth were a major focus of most of the talks. A few speakers attempted to reference Old Testament passages, but the major impression as one of the first speakers said, "We are in Church"

     We are a society which is learning how to be multi-cultural. We are a people who need to learn how to be interfaith in our public meetings.  It is a learning process.  Emory University in a graduation ceremony had a benediction pronounced by every major religion.  That is certainly one of the ways the Clergy Day could have been interfaith. There could have been speakers of the major religions invited to  speak. The Rabbis in Raleigh did sign a document support the work of the Moral Monday gatherings. A rabbi speaker would have added a good dimension. An inman from a mosque would have been a nice addition.

     The other way of making a gathering interfaith is to edit the talks so that we are only talking about the blessing of the Holy upon our work. That the work we are doing is seeking to be faithful to the guidance of the One who made creation.  We want to reflect in our laws and our customs the values of the great religions.  There are many ways of talking about faith, about social justice, about ethics that grow out of one's faith without limiting that talk to Jesus.  Buddha, Mohammad, Moses, and others can all be named.

     As I left the meeting a woman walking next to me in the rain said, "You know, for an interfaith service you think they could have had a little more sensitivity to multi-faiths."  As we go forward we need to balance the speakers, so that each faith has a chance to push its faith posture, or we need to restrict our language to the more inclusive descriptions of faith. I once heard a prayer concluded, "for we pray in the name of the Grace that saves us."  That got an Amen from an atheist at the table.

Clergy Day - Moral Monday - a reason for going

     I was there among the hundreds, maybe a thousand, in Raleigh for Clergy Day-Moral Monday. It was billed as an interfaith gathering and there were Jewish people and potentially Muslim people.  But from what I could tell most of the speakers where Christian.

     I was there because I believe that this kind of action may have the power to awaken the average citizen to the issues and changes that are happening.  I believe that is necessary because I believe what Winston Churchill said, "The best and most effective argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."  The average person is general unaware of what is happening in those areas of life that do not affect her immediately. If you can get a jury to try O.J. Simpson for murder, a jury who had not heard of the case and did not have an opinion on it, then you know that there are lots of people who do not pay attention to daily events.   A friend of mine said he even hated to listen to NPR because it was so depressing and things never got resolved.  The political news is such a "downer" that one can understand why most people do not listen to it.

     Such demonstrations as Moral Monday, in my view, may make enough noise to get the average voter to notice what is happening in the political scene. Because there are so many things that the Republican legislature in N.C. is doing to the public that negatively impact the quality of life for so many that the average voter needs to stop and pay attention.  

A Great Church Story

     I was reminded today of one of the great stories that came out of a church covered dish supper in Texas.  It is a wonderful story of a citizen in the Kingdom of God teaching a power player in the world a lesson.

     There was a huge covered dish supper in this large church. The Speaker was to be the Governor of Texas who was campaigning for re-election.  The crowd was very large and it looked like they might run out of chicken.  The decision was made that a woman would serve the chicken giving one piece to each person.

     The line was thinning out but so was the supply of chicken when in rushed the Governor and his staff. The Governor came to the table and presented his plate and the lady put one piece of chicken on the plate.  The Governor said, "Listen, I have been rushed all day. I did not get lunch. I am very hungry, could you give me a second piece of chicken."  The lady said there is only enough chicken for one piece per person.

     The Governor was a little annoyed and got a little huffy. Starting talking loud about how he needed a second piece of chicken, he was hungry. Then he said, Do you know who I am?"  The woman giving out the chicken said, "Yes, your the Governor, Do you know who I am?"  The Governor was surprised. He said, No, who are you?   The woman said, " I am the woman in charge of giving out the chicken. You get one piece like all the other people. Move along."

     In the scriptures James tells us not to treat those with power and wealth any different from the rest, and she set a marvelous example of how the church should be.  One piece per person. Move along.

The Challenge of Fear

     The essay was a clear and well documented piece. The author's thesis was that the United States was under attack. There were groups, countries, and individuals who were out to destroy the country. It was not hard for the author to find a number of events to substantiate his claim.  We are under attack. Perhaps there is no real argument on that point.

      The greater question is how are we to respond to that challenge. How are we to combat those groups. How do we respond at a nation to these individuals, this cells, this countries who have different values and different agendas?  It is a question that will have to be discussed in a lot of places.  It may be the question that shapes our entire future.

     The essay was of the opinion that we needed to hunker down. We needed to close our borders to outsiders. We needed to put restrictions on free speech and free assembly. We could no longer enjoy the kind of openness and hospitality that we have offered because the enemy has been taking advantage  of those conditions.  We needed to increase our police and increase the number of activities that were illegal.  There would need to be some surrender of our privacy in order to allow the government to check on the activities of subversive groups.  People who were part of anti-government groups, citizens who were members of strange cults and special interest groups, neo-nazis, groups that promoted the dominance of one race, all these groups would have to be restricted and controlled.  He was afraid that we would have to change the way we lived in order to preserve our country from all these groups.

       Of course, what the essayist was suggesting was that we would have to help the enemy destroy our country by becoming like the enemy in order to fight the enemy.  We would have to sacrifice the very things that makes the country special and unique in history in order, supposedly, to preserve it.  It is not the way that most of the people in the country seem to want to fight the terrorists, the anarchist, the enemy.  When an act of terror is supposed to try to make us shut down or pull back, most people claim that they will not let the "act of war" stop them from living their lives.  Airplane travel is still planned. Marathons will still be run.  All religions will still be protected by the law. All citizens will be given their rights of assembly and speech.

     The fear of the conflict we are engaged in with many different levels can cause us to change the way we live and to become like the enemy to fight the enemy or we can continue to promote, defend and enjoy the rights and liberties we have and trust that those values and principles will overcome the efforts of the ones who seek something else from life.

Need more than talk

     Yesterday I was part of a group of Volleyball officials who assisted in the Valor Games at UNC-Chapel Hill.  It was a delightful day of exercise, silliness, and fellowship as about 30 veterans engaged in competition of "seated volleyball."  All players had to have their bottoms on the floor as they played. It was a great equalizer as nobody had played before and even people who had played volleyball before  had not played on their bottoms.
     The Valor Games are programs run by volunteers to bring veterans together to have some experiences that bring some fun, brings some social interaction, and bring some feelings of being able to participate in life again after the horrors of war.  Many of these veterans were missing arms, legs, and eyes.  Their emotional concerns were not visible.  But in the seated volleyball they all had a great time. As the competition moved towards the championship, the chatter, the razzing, the good natured trash talking, and laughter increased.
     There was an opening exercise to the games which had all of the public speakers telling these 100 veterans who were involved in all the different games how much they were appreciated, how grateful we were for their sacrifices and how much we admired them.
     But there is something immoral about the whole thing. We were volunteers and unpaid. The speakers talked about how much we owed all our military.  And yet the Veteran's Administration is somehow unable to handle the work of providing these veterans with the services they need. The VA hospitals are over crowded and unfunded. The military does not encourage soldiers to report their problems, politicians will talk lots but refused to increase the spending for these veterans.  We heard a lot of nice speeches, but these soldiers deserve more than talk.
     These soldiers particularly need for us to step forward and provide all the help and benefits we can provide because they were sent to fight two very unnecessary wars.  Our struggles with terrorists could very well have been engaged in as we engage in fighting the mafia.  The international community would have been much more helpful if we had worked with them to contain the terrorists. These soldiers were continuously returned to the combat zones and the draft was never resumed to make these wars become a national concern.  We used the National Guard as part of the regular army which was never its intention.
      We sent these young people to fight in strange places in unconventional wars that were really invasions by our country that were unnecessary, and now we cannot provide for them all of the help they need?  A major embarrassment for us.  On this memorial day week-end we will again hear lots of speeches. What these soldiers need is help, not talk.

Christian Love is something you do.

     The woman owned most of the land in the community and she was the queen of the society in her town. In the 1960's she had urged her church to sponsor and integrated summer program in their downtown church.  Naturally the officers of the church voted to approve this program, even holding their noses, because she thought it was a good idea.

     The young pastor of that church was now sitting in her parlor and venting his anger and frustration because the treasurer of the church would not write any checks to pay the bills for the integrated program because he did not think it was something the church should be doing.   The young minister was ranting and complaining and telling the woman how much he disliked the treasurer.

     The woman kindly looked at the young minister and said, "Oh, you don't know him like I do. You have not lived with him as long as I have. When you get to know him better, you will dislike him even more.

     But "Whoever told you Christian love is about how you feel towards somebody?  Christian love is not how you feel. Christian love is something you do."
 
     And it is true all through the New Testament Christian love is about doing to those you don't like, whom you cannot stand, and doing to them what you would do to those you like. It is about feeding those who you think are lazy and worthless. It is about clothing the children who sass you. It is about treating those who are sneaky and mean, the way you would treat the kind and gentle.

     Jesus says that our place in heaven depends on how we treat those who are not the best and brightest. They way we feed the hungry, the thirsty, the lame, and the prisoner is the way we treat our friends. Jesus asks Peter, do you love me?  Then feed my sheep.

     Jesus on the Cross did not just die for those whom he liked. Jesus died on the cross to save those who persecuted him very much as he died for those he liked. Christian love does not care how you feel about somebody. It is about doing for all people what you would do for your friends.  Love is something you do.

Who gets to use the word Christian?

     There has been a great flurry of comments today about a 34 year old black NBA player admitting that he is a homosexual young man.  The thing that has me most interested is that there seems to be no way to decided who gets to use the word Christian to describe their position.

      The young man told of his early childhood. How he was taken to Sunday School, helped in Church, was a disciple of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus, the new commandment that "You love one another as I have loved you."  How Jesus does not seem to allow the sexual misconduct of the women to separate him from them. How Jesus seemed to have a great acceptance of all people Samaritans and Romans and lepers.  The young man has claimed for himself the traditions of the Christian faith as he had it taught to him and he celebrates the inclusive love of Jesus as something he tries to follows.

     On the other hand, one of the most blistering attacks of the young man has come from those who want to claim the title of Christian and to use their version of Christianity as the whip to castigate this young man.  The language has been harsh and judgmental.  The blogs and the attacks on him have pour in from a host of people who claim to be Christian and who want to somehow make the reality of this young man go away.

     Sunday at a church I was in we closed worship with the song, "They will know we are Christian by our Love."  I am convinced that Jesus never ask us to be right but he does want us to be loving.  We are not called to be successful. We are not called to be judges. We are called to be kind, compassionate, loving towards each other.  And there are boundaries in love or it is not love. Paul talks a lot about what love is. Nowhere does he say it is cruel or mean to others.   The young man is trying to be an honest and truthful young man and to live as best he can following the words of Jesus. He deserves better from those others who want to claim to be Christian.

Confused Calvinists?

     As a life long Presbyterian I have lived with the constant question of whether or not I believe in Predestination.  After a few tries it became a bit easier to deal with as there became a few standard points to be made.

     1. Predestination is not fatalism. They may be connected but Predestination deals only with where a person will spend eternity.  Your final destination has been predetermined, if you believe in Predestination. The decision of where you will spend eternity is in God's hands.  God is in charge and he makes the final decision.  Fatalism is that every action you make in this life is God determined. Frequently they do go together.
         An example of the other side is Gardner Taylor's words "It is beyond misunderstanding. It is that the choice for God is surely in your hands. Not his. If your destination is to be heaven here and hereafter, it is in your hands and mine. If heaven is to be your home, it is in your hands, and mine, and not God's"

     2. There are a variety of shapes to Predestination.  There is the best known by Calvin called double predestination.  God decided at the beginning who would go to Heaven and who would go to Hell. Those who go to Heaven go on God's gracious gift and those who go to Hell go as their just deserves.
There is the universalist predestination which says that God has decided that in the end everybody gets saved. God so loved the world, and by golly ultimately all the world will be saved. Rob Bell has recently voiced this view.  There is a version that says the God has predestined to save all the humans who ..............   (fill in the blank). Accept Christ, love their neighbor, feed the poor, knows that if their is a heaven they will only be allowed in by  God's goodness. (Some want an answer that includes those who are not Christian.)  There have been lots of different answers to the blank.

     3. Almost every Christian who is asked acknowledges the first principle of Predestination. God is the Boss. God is sovereign. God is in charge.  God is almighty. God is the one who controls history. God is the one who will bring history to an end when God wants it to end.  It is upon this fundamental that Calvin began and at every point of decision, God gets the vote. Do we decided where we go by our will or does God decide.  Ha, who is the boss. God decides.  If we want something and God does not want us to have it, who decides?  Calvin just stuck with his logic at every "Y" in the road and it was always God. So God decided who goes to heaven or hell.

    4. But most people balk at the final point of the equation. They argue then why did Jesus come, why did we get given instructions, why did we get created if we have no part in anything.  Whosoever will does not mean everybody will. So there is a rebellion of the mind at the claims human decisions do not matter in this dialogue with God.

     5. As G.K. Chesterton would love it this is one of those amazing paradoxes where most Christians I have met want to hold both of these principles: God is Sovereign.  Humans have free will. How to hold those together is the trick.

Fairness?

     It was a discussion in the locker room of the Y the other day.  Someone was talking about how it was not fair that so many people did not have to pay any income tax. The complaint was that there were so many great wealthy companies that did not pay and about 40% (he said) of our citizens did not pay any taxes.  He was feeling mistreated and overburdened. It is not fair. It is not fair he kept saying.
   
      I told him that I have long ago abandoned any passion for life to be fair. It was not something that I wanted to argue for and was not something that I hoped ever happened.  I did not want life to be fair from the purely selfish reason that I would have to give up way to much of what I have.

     I had just read a piece that one of the Hollywood directors was going to join an effort to demonstrate the world's poverty by trying to live 5 days on $1.50.  $1.50 is said to be what 1.4 billion people around the world live on a day.  So if life is going to be fair, then they have to be give a little more than that for them to get up to my level or I am going to have to give up a lot of my bounty to even things out fairly.

      I really do think that God loves the whole world and we in the United States or America were not intended to take for ourselves all of the resources of other countries and bless ourselves with them.  I do believe that as disciples of Jesus we really do need to start looking at how we can live with less and share more with other people and other countries.  Taxes are just one thing that is not fair, and I pay what Quicken tells me I owe, but if life is going to be fair, then I have to give out and give up a whole lot more.

     The person I was talking with was not happy to look at life from this perspective.  It was not what he wanted to hear.  Then again lots of things that Jesus said about care for the needy, the children and the widows are not heard gladly either.

Maybe the Reason makes all the difference

     As a nation some of our most patriotic actions began as radical acts of terrorism.  If England was the government, then our Boston Tea Party was a radical act of terrorism.  It was one of the acts that began the momentum for the revolution which became our war for independence.  So now looking back we celebrate that event.
     There is a great record of history within the Christian faith that suggests that even the Church has radical actions. Martin Luther posting his complaints on the church door was a radical act of protest.  Minority groups acting in opposition to the governing powers always carries a risk. It is not always helpful. It is very often violent.  It is very often deadly.   From my years I remember the radical group of   anti-Vietnam war protesters. I remember the burning of cities as part of the struggle for civil rights for Blacks.  I remember Waco, Oklahoma bombing, Atlanta Olympics, and others.  People on both sides were hurt. Police powers were used to control the actions. Civilians were wounded or killed.  Even when Dr. King took charge of the civil rights fight and it became "non-violent" the response of the powers in control was vicious and violent. Blacks were killed and wounded.
     Radical groups come together in a shared vision of their reality.  They share the conviction that things are not as they should be; that they are being mistreated and abused; that they must do something to bring about change.  They must make others aware of the injustice and bring about change.  It seems very consistent that radical groups share something of the Old Testament prophets message that God will bring punishment and suffering on to the people He loves that they will change.  Repent. Turn around. See the situation more clearly and make adjustments.
     The Radical group of the Westboro Baptist Church believes that their cruel and insensitive protesting at funerals will make the rest of us aware that God is punishing nice kind normal people because we have permitted and accepted homosexuals.  Their radical actions grow out of their understanding of the Bible.
     The 9-11 attacks were done by the radical group because they believe that American arrogance, American companies, American military, American cultural influence of music and movies is destroying their culture, their economies, and their countries.  They have a different vision of life and they believe that the "American Way" is a threat to them and so they act to "wake up" Americans so that Americans may change.
      As I write this we do not have any idea as to why the two young Boston residents left those bombs at the end of the Marathon.  If we can find out the reasons that motivated them, we may be forced to look at what happened differently.  Because history has a way of changing how things are looked at.
Most of the actions of radical groups are considered criminal when they happen.  They break the rules and they offend our sense of community and society. But like the Boston Tea party as time looks back that is now considered a wonderful thing.   The Civil Rights movement has made great strides because those radical acts made all of us look at the way we lived out our Declaration of Independence.
     One of the things that seems different in this bombing of the Marathon is that no cause has been  connected to it. When other terrorist groups pull off an attack they usually claim it and explain the reason for it.  Whatever the reason these young men had, it is hard for us now to imagine that there is anything that can be found to justify this bombing, but it would help us all feel better if there were at least some cause for them.  A cause would, at least, give some reason, and we would much rather have some reason than to believe that we live in an irrational world.

Dismantling Public Education

     The Old Testament talks about teaching the children the history. Passover meal is a history lesson. "Why is this night different from all others?"  Tell the children the story of the mighty acts of God in the history of the Jews.  Proverbs is a whole book of instructions. "Raise up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it." My mother always consoled herself that it did not say that while the child was young he would not depart from that way, but when he was "old".
   
      The New Testament spends a lot of time fighting off false doctrines. The story of Jesus Christ, and him crucified was all that Paul said was necessary, but he had to spend a lot of letters teaching the early church what that meant for daily living.

    Certainly the Roman Catholic Church is nothing but a huge teaching institution. All churches are in the education business.  Like so many other things that the Church did that society saw were good and so adopted them for all people.  Education was first done by the church and then it was decided by society that it was something all people should have and so public education by the state was begun.

     One of the great advances in history and in the United States was the creation of public education and the requirement that all children should be educated at least to the age of 16.  Nothing has fueled the advances, the raising of the level of living, the development of the arts, the inventions, the books, the movies, the whole culture more than public education.  Sports might be a way out of the ghetto for some minority people, but the public education of all children has been the way out for so many more.
 
    It is this great strength and tradition that is being dismantled in this country. In North Carolina this process is being rushed through by the Republican legislators.  There are bills that would remove the limit on class size. The more students in a class the fewer teachers are needed and the less teaching can be done. There have already been major funding cuts to all levels of public education and the university system faces a cut in $150 million dollars. There is a bill to create school vouchers so that parents might send their children to whatever school they want. The destruction of the public school system comes about by the fragmentation of education.  When one school teaches that all the information about the millions of years of creation is a myth, and another teaches zoology, anthropology, and biology as evolving we are setting up a horrible problem for our country.  When one school wants to teach that the holocaust never happened, and others teach it as fact, we have a problem.   When sex education ought to be required to help reduce the number of abortions, there will be schools that never bring the subject up.  There is a bill in the N.C. legislation to remove tenure from teachers and to establish standards for evaluating teachers.   Many agree that teachers need to be evaluated and that better education happens with good teachers, but to establish these kinds of standards and expect to get teachers who can measure up and still pay what the legislators want to pay them is just to court disaster steadily.

      There is plenty of evidence that our current public schools are struggling to provide what is desired. There are chartered school which are providing examples of how education can be done better, but the mere creation of 1000's of chartered schools does not guarantee that they will be any better than what we have.  Public Education needs help, but slicing it up and imposing all kinds of new standards on the teachers does not seem to me to be the best way.
   

Ignoring Most of Their Bible

     One of the most depressing things for me about the whole political climate is that so many of the people who have the agenda of cutting programs to the needy, those who want to provide more resources to big business and the rich, those who think that those who receive food stamps, who get free breakfasts, who get aid to families with dependent children, those who need mental help programs, those who think that we need to cut social services and close the programs that help unemployed claim to be be devout and faithful Christians.

     It seems to me that many of them have this great fear that Christianity is on the wane. That as this nation lives out its ideals about being a multi-race, multi-heritage, multi-faith nation the country they knew and loved is being trashed and insulted. The lost of prayers in Jesus' name at city council meeting, at home football games, at high school graduations means that the people there are not faithful people who are trying to live out their faith in their own private and personal lives.   There are great reasons to celebrate the separation of the Christian faith from the cultural, social, political fabric. If they would read how exciting and dynamic the early church was in the Roman world, they might be more excited. The Christian faith has always done better when it had to fight for its place in a plural religious community. So all the efforts to impose Christianity as the state religion, to impose a religious laws of values against certain people marrying, to impose Christian ideas about abortion, to require Christian practices is to fight against making the Christian faith strong and exciting.

     The second reason that I get most depressed is the evidence that so many people have not read the book they claim to believe. There are so many obvious reason: 1) The Old Testament talks a lot about how the people of God are supposed to treat and welcome the strangers in their midst.  If the Old Testament words about homosexuality are going to be held up, then why not these words that speak about how to treat the immigrants in this country? 2) When you move to the New Testament there is a very consistent message from Jesus and all the early church that our duty as Christians is to help those less fortunate- feed the hungry, give drink to the thirst, clothe the naked, care for the sick.  The whole early church welcomed the widow and children and cared for those who were the bottom of society. The idea that giving more money to the rich will mean more money for the poor just has not happened. Putting in place limits on unemployment benefits, and putting drug test of welfare receivers with the idea that it will make them get a job when there are no jobs available will only create more problems. Paul says not many in the church of Corinth were wealth, rich or powerful.  3) Jesus spoke more about the problems of money than anything else. He told the young ruler to go and sell what he had and serve the poor. There is nothing in the New Testament that favors or give special privileges to the rich. In fact, in James, the church is warned about not doing that.

     We have a horrible political stalemate in our country. We are very evenly divided between red and blue. The vision of so many people who are very much against the poor, the hungry, the unemployed claiming to be good faithful Christians forces many of us to think of finding another name for ourselves.
How can you read the Bible and study what Jesus says and not have more compassion for those who are below the poverty level. Especially when the rich 1% had their income go up by 17% last year and the minimum wage continues the same.

The Myth of the Great Free Market

     One of the mantras from one part of our society is that we need to encourage and celebrate the free market economy.  This great ideal is what made this country great. That one could work and rise to the level of success that the work merited.  We made it possible for the little man to rise up and be the big man.  Any complaint or criticism of the rich and wealth was an insult to this country's founding ideals. The rich are where they are because they have worked hard in this free market and made it to the top. Not only did they make it to the top it their efforts to make it to the top, they have enriched the multitudes that they used to help them. The wealth does not trickle down from these successful "free market" people, it gushes down and nourishes them completely.
     That is the myth I keep hearing.  What I hear from most of my small business and from these same free market people is that the market is vastly over regulated.  We need to reduce the regulations. Cut out all these restrictions and limitations, all these safety concerns and environmental constrictions and allow small business to make a profit.  Well, that is the first reason I suggest that this notion of free market is a myth. There is no free market. Never has been. And never should be a completely free market.  If they argue there are too many restrictions, they confess that the market is not free.
      The market is not free because we have seen what kind of evil is done by a completely free market in the past.  When airlines had their safety regulations reduced they had a lot more incidents of trouble. When Standard Oil was controlling the whole gas and oil production, the government had to step in and break up that monopoly.  When technology was in its infancy, AT&T was the dominate phone company that was limiting and preventing growth, so the government had to break up AT & T into little Bell's. There is no free market because an absolute free market would be victim of the greed, power, and corruption of the human heart.  One only has to look at the housing- subprime mortgage mess to see that greed, power, and corruption play out.
     There is no "free market" because the common good of society need to have some checks and balances on the market. Without those checks of drugs, food, safety, and other products there would be chaos in the market.
     The other side of the free market myth is that no business or corporation wants a free market. They all want special privileges and loop holes and opportunities only for their own business.  The company with the contract does not want there to be open bidding for the services. The gas and oil do not want alternative energies developed.  General Motors had the best electric car in California ages ago, but killed and lobbied against electric cars for ages. That is part of the myth of the free market. Nobody really wants a free market. They want regulations to benefit their market.

Worship as Surgery

     I have been listening to some old cassette tapes of worship services from a church in Charlotte.  I keep these tapes and listen to them because this church was created and shaped by the conviction that worship is vital.   The preacher was a man named H. Louis Patrick and he was exceptional.  He was, in  my opinion, the best preacher I have ever heard.  But not only was he a great preacher, he was also convinced and the church conducted worship as if it was absolutely essential.

     I remember hearing George Buttrick, another outstanding Protestant preacher in New York City, who once quipped that he would entertain "layman" Sunday as soon as they had layman surgery at Mt. Sinai Hospital.   I have quoted that before and been jumped by other preachers who suggested that liturgy was "the people's work" and so they should be involved.  It seems to me that singing hymns, confessing sin, saying what they believe in the creeds is a pretty heavy load for the layperson.

     But I think that what Buttrick meant and what Patrick believed is that worship is as important to the human spirit as medical surgery.   People do not causally decide to skip an appointment for their surgery.  They do not allow their games to cancel their surgery.  Medical concerns are number one concerns. They are a top priority.  Buttrick and Patrick both believed the same about the need for the human spirit for worship as the people of God. Worship is not a causal come and go affair. It is, as Anne Dillard suggested, humans playing with dynamite, when the Power and love of God might irrupt in the midst of the people.  Worship ought to be carefully and prayerfully planned and conducted.

      It is this attitude, this expectation, this view of worship that seems to be missing in so much of the Protestant worship that I have seen in retirement.  There is too much carelessness in what is done. There is too much focus on the activities of the announcements. There is too much "hail fellow well met". There is too much of a desire to have people "be happy."  There is too little challenge and demand of the gospel shared.   Probably too much psychology and too little good theology.  (I know there is too little Bible being used if what I hear from the religious speakers in politics. They either have a much edited smaller Bible or they aren't reading the one they have.)

     I am very lucky. I have a whole box of these cassette tapes that I can play when my "sin sick soul" needs surgery.  But I pray for the Christian faith in the USA.

Like a Penny

         I am not sure when it began. Somewhere a long time ago I got some coin books and apparently from time to time, I would put pennies in those books.  I did not give much attention to the penny collection for a long time. Then one day when my younger son and I were joking about the fact that he and his brother would have to clean out and dispose of all the stuff my wife and I had collected.  He responded that what he was looking forward to getting his hands on was my penny collection. Who knew?
          Since that time, in my retirement time, I have become much more regular in my searching for pennies.  Pennies minted in San Francisco seem to have stayed on the west coast.  After 1940 the only pennies I am still searching for are "s" pennies. That is the state of my collecting.
          Still the daily examination of another fifty pennies, (I look through one roll of pennies each day), constantly is a reminder of the great need for us to be kind to each other. Nobody knows the kind of life we have had to endure. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen" are words from an old song, but they are the message I get each day from the pennies.
           I spread out the pennies and it is amazing the vast range of conditions of the pennies. It is not necessarily related to the age of the pennies. I have found pennies minted in 2010 that look like they have been hit with hammers.  There are pennies from the 1970's that look like they have been soaked in acid.  There are pennies from the 1960's that look brand new.  Every time I look at a penny the thought comes that this penny has a story to tell. Where it has been? What it has been used for; what it has had to suffer. Who knows how many times it has been put through a washing?  Who knows the kind of treatment that has been given to this penny. Was it put in a box and left, ignored?  But each of those coins is still a penny. Still worth one cent.
           If pennies are each subjected to a great variety of stories, so too are human lives and each person has different experiences, different pains, different opportunities, and different abilities.  If I could constantly remember that I would be a whole lots less eager to jump to judgments about another person. If I could remember my penny lessons, I would remember that despite all the varieties of people they are each a person and still worthy

what do we "deserve"?

WHAT DO WE “DESERVE?”

Again this morning I heard another commercial which claimed that I deserved something. It was a tax preparation company claiming that their product would help me get back all the money I deserved. This was not the first time somebody wanted to sell me something because “I deserved” it.  I have hear vacations of a life time being pushed towards me because “I deserve it.”  I have been offered automobiles of outstanding excellence because “I deserve it.”   Some may remember the music, “you deserve a break today, so get up and get away.”

Where did we get this impressive notion that we deserve anything?  Teachers tell me that there students think that because they showed up and took the test, they deserve a good grade. It appears that many colleges and universities, especially the more selective ones, have a problem with students and parents who think they deserve great grades.  If we are paying $40,000 a year tuition, then our child deserves to get all A’s seems to be the argument. 

When did we start thinking that our mere existence on this earth entitled us to all of these benefits?  What did we do to deserve these blessings?  It seems like this attitude is showing up everywhere. The passengers on the crippled cruise ship are now suing the owners because “nobody deserves to have to be in those conditions.”  But what makes them special? Why do they deserve not to be in those conditions and people in Katrina were in those conditions, people in the Northeast are in those conditions after Sandy, and a billion people around the world live in those kind of conditions every day.  Granted the passengers paid money for the trip, and expected something different and better, but the people in New Orleans and the Northeast had paid for their homes and their communities and expected something better of life. Stuff happens. How come the passengers “deserved” not to be subjected to life’s unpleasant surprises? 

Don’t you have to do something to be able to claim that you deserve something? Isn’t a pay check only given if you work?  The people working hard at terrible jobs for minimum wages do have a right to argue they deserve a higher wage. They have earned it, but it is amazing how much some people are paid who do not deserve even minimum wages. They have harmed their companies and still get paid amazing salaries.

The idea that we are entitled, that we deserve what we get, that we deserve even more than what we have already has a horrible impact on our ability to be grateful and thankful for what we have been given.  There is no way anyone in the developed world can claim to deserve the life he has and that those in the developing world deserve the kind of life they have. All we can do is say a thank you, to be humbled by the immense blessings we have been given, that we did not earn, and to enjoy what we have without the constant unpleasantness of thinking that we have been cheated or denied something we were supposed to be given.  Just because we are alive does not mean we deserve anything. Lots of people in this country have been blessed by gifts, by opportunities, by help from others, by luck, by circumstances, and by timing. There is little place for this “deserve” attitude, and a much large place for “thank you, thank you thank you.”

Sanitize Faith - A Blind eye to the human side

From time to time I have seen and read some of those descriptions of the physical pain that would have been inflicted upon Jesus during Holy Week.  I was reading this morning a sermon about the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual pain that Jesus must have endured.  It caused me to reflect upon the fact that in my Presbyterian experience we have exhibited our intellectual tradition by ignoring or downplaying the grimy and bloody part of the story.  We might talk about the pain of being betrayed by one of the people you had picked and trusted. We might mention the torture of the guards with the crown of thorns, and we might talk a little about the sweat of blood in the garden, but we would not be comfortable, I don't think, with a focus of the sweat, the strain, the stumbling, the fatigue of Jesus as he carries his cross. Certainly to spend a lot of time talking about what happens to the body of a human on a cross would not be appreciated, I don't think, by a Presbyterian congregation.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not think that many Presbyterians would want a preacher to dwell too much on the labor pains, the sweat, the hurt, the blood, the afterbirth of Christmas either.  The human reality, the spit, the dust, the dirt, the tired, the frustration of teaching disciples who do not get it, the git and grim of the ministry of Jesus is not something that has been a big part of years in the church.

And I wonder if that has been a loss to us or a matter of little consequence?

A soft voice, a gentle heart and a quick word

It is not so much that things were better "back in the day." The McDonald's commercial speaks to that issue with its morning breakfast biscuit. It is just that I have been reading some of the sermons of a few of the minister who had retired by the time I had begun to do ministry.  I bought a lot of books of George Buttrick, Paul Scherer, Arthur Gossip, James Stewart from Scotland, Ed Steimle, Gardner Taylor and others.

There are a few things that seem to be consistent in a lot of their sermons that I am just now getting around to reading. Too late to do me much good, but there is a joy in reading them.  They do have their different styles and some of them have a voice of conviction and confidence that is interesting to hear. Paul Scherer has a wonderful way of dismissing the false and misleading ideas of faith and worship. Buttrick had a quality of voice and writing that put things simply and directly.  He was not heavy handed or overbearing.

Gardner Taylor is most impressive for his great pastoral heart that keeps showing up in paragraph after paragraph.  He does not try to pretend that everything is well. He constantly is reciting the things that may be wrong in our lives. If he is talking about the problems in society most of the time it is from how those challenges affect the reader.  His tone is gentle and sympathetic.  And what is even more impressive is that he quickly makes his point about what God in grace and do and leaves it there. He seldom tries to convince and "argue" you to faith.

If he were to preach on the 13th chapter of I Corinthians, he would talk about how faith can disappoint. How you have had faith in an elect official and he has failed you. How you have had faith in education and you still are looking for a job. How you have been kind and gracious with charitable acts and the people who have gotten the gifts are not thankful.  How you have sacrificed for you children and they have turned out poorly. We have had faith, hope and love, but they have not lived up to their billing, but the love that Paul is talking about is not your Love, but God's love for you. God's love for you never fails. Never ends.  And he is through.  No long attempt to defend or validate his claim about God's love. Just the statement.

I am not sure that our society is prepared or receptive for that kind of preaching now, but I know it is vastly different from what I heard.  I just know I am ready to read those kinds of gentle simple words.

A Straight Path to Citizenship

When I met with couples about to be married, one of the questions that always had to be asked was about children. Did they want them?  How many did they want?  Often there was a little debate about having them, but the larger question would be how many, and when.  When would they want to start a family.  I was always comforted when I heard them give me a plan. "We intend to work five years, save our money, buy a house, and in year seven begin to try to have a family." That was definite and precise. Those who said they would have them when they could afford them were confused and too vague.  They would never get to the place where they would think they had enough money to have them.

I have the same concern about the plans for the path to citizenship for the immigrants in this country.  Those who suggest that the path to citizenship has a clause that the citizenship will not become real until the "borders are secure" give me and others the "willies."  They can always say that the borders are never secured enough. Now if the plans suggest that there will need to be so many new border guards, so much money in the border budget, or any other kind of precise definite number then it might work. I would rather see just a straight clean path to citizenship.  It may be high and hard, but it ought to be straight forward and honest.  I think it was Jesus who said your "Yes" ought to be "yes" and your "no's" no, and there is not even a need to swear because you are speaking truth. We need that in this plan.