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.