"violent radicals"?

Palm Sunday and the flow to Easter is the story of a great hope being killed by the power structure.
Jesus rides in and there is a group, a crowd of supporters, who welcome him as the bringer of a new reality. They think he is the messiah, the long awaited hero, the one to rescue Israel from Rome. To bring in a new glory time. They may have had the wrong expectations as to how this kingdom was to be established but they had a great passion for change and for something better.

The established leaders of the synagogue, the business leaders whose economic fortunes were wrapped up in business with Rome, the political leaders who did not want to be put out of their positions of power came together, and with a lots of negative press, with the proper disbursement of money, and a lot of smart arguing with Pilate they got rid of Jesus. "Jesus was not killed by atheism or anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion which is always a deadly mix." (Barbara Brown Taylor)

It is amazing how often that pattern has repeated itself just in my life time.  The March on Washington for Civil Rights was a huge event. The people gathered and were hoping for a better day. They were seeking equal rights and human dignity.  The power structure of white, rich, men wisely made a few concessions, but they bided their time. They plotted and arranged and Dr. King was killed  and the work began to dismantle the concessions made. Even now in 2018 the rights given are being taken away.

The people marched against the war in Vietnam, all they wanted was peace, and the end to a very immoral war,  and the power structured attacked them as "traitors, commies, draft dodgers, unAmericans, and the leaders resisted the marchers until a new President was elected.

This year Women had a march. They want respect. They want the right to have control over their own person. They want equal pay. They want a better life for women. They want to have health care, and the responsibility to make decisions about their reproductive powers.  The old white power structure lashed out and called them names, called the radical feminists, male haters, lead by disgusting lesbians. And the women's health issues are still being made by old white men without any women on the committees.

This Saturday there was a march on Washington and around the country by youth and their friends who only want to live in safety from gun violence.  The power structure immediately went on the attack and called them "violent radicals," claimed the students were being directed by news agencies, adults were making money off the students. All kinds of misinformation; fake posts of photo shopped pictures, death threats to the student leaders.

And so it goes there are marches, like Palm Sunday, like march for Gun safety, that have good, positive, helpful, healthy, needed reforms as their goal, and in response to those pushes the "military-industrial-religious-wealthy 1%ers respond by attacking, those who are sure they know the mind of God, denying and threatening and opposing the positive because it would disturb their comfortable arrangement.

Easter is the way God indicated which side of these parades She is on.

Never Enough

Toy people know that a child who buys one of a set will never settle until they have all of the set if they can.  There is something hard wired in us that seems to want more and more, another one, the next one.  There was a bank that had a commercial that was based on the idea, "I think my more should be doing more."

Those in power in our legislators seem to think that there are some budget items that should keep getting more and more. The trump budget gives to our military an incredible raise and this is the military complex that is already the largest in the world.  Our military spending is already more than the next 25 developed countries in the world and 23 of them are allies of our government. This plus the fact that trump says NATO partners need to pay more of their share so where is the saving going to go?  Never enough money in the military ever to make us safe.

There is the fact that in this country the gap between the Corporate executives in major businesses and the salary average of the basic employees is somewhere over 400 times.  The CEO's make 400 times the average salary of the employees of their companies.  That is the way it was. The paper just reported that the average CEO's salary increased in 2016 by 16 percent, but the average salary of the non-exempt employees barely moved at all.  There is never enough money to satisfy the greed of the CEO's.

The same greed and pride is a major component in the disgusting salaries of professional sports. NBA, NFL and MLB all have players who are well compensated but who are claiming they have been disrespected because they are not being paid properly.  Never enough money to satisfy the pride of some people.

And of course, the bottom line then from government and corporations is that there is never enough left over to build the best schools, to have health care for all, to provide for the elderly, to give enough money to hire enough counselors for mental health, to get enough workers in all kinds of offices and programs.

Maybe if we did exercise what we were supposed to learn in Kindergarten about sharing, and being peaceful, we might have more to help

Only one side of the issue

The News and Observer has a picture in the Section A of a church that has a yard sign which reads "11 Muslims killed 2977 Christians on Sept. 11, 2001."  I am not sure just what the message might be. I can imagine that they want us to remember the victims of that attack. I suspect that there is an implied attack upon Muslims in that statement. It would fit in with trump's attack on Muslims and his attempt to ban them from this country.

But like so many things in our deeply divided world right now, it does not tell the whole story. It does not tell how many Muslims have been killed by our unnecessary war in Iraq. It does not tell how many Muslims have been killed by the conflicts in Afghanistan that are the results of the forces and sects that have been ignited by the wars in Iraq.  It does not recognize the arrogance of American political power in the long history of that region that has been supported by Christian missionary zeal.

They will correctly tell us that they are simply stating the facts. Those are facts, but facts are never independent of context and the context of the long history of American domination of the oil countries and the context of the response to that event which has killed many more than 3,000 cannot be ignore.

Church - Politics - always has been

It was supposed to be a big deal. President Trump signed another (he has signed so many) executive order that would allow religious groups to be much more politically active.  It will be possible for Pastors and Churches to receive contributions and to make political endorsements of candidates and issues.

But what is the big deal?  The evangelical right, fundamentalists group have been doing that kind of thing, passing out voter guides for more than twenty years. The liberal, hippie group used to do that back with the war in Vietnam, Civil Rights and Nixon.  Both sides used to try to get the IRS to take away the tax exempt status of the other for engaging in political activities.  I guess that will be the only difference.

But the rest of us moderate, middle of the road Christians have to confess that we have also been political active in a much more revolutionary way. It may not appear that we have been very good at it, but we have been promoting an entirely different kingdom. We have been fermenting a completely different society. We have been pushing for a different kind of government.  We have been asserting that the powers of this world are illegitimate and corrupt.  The values and the standards of this current culture are destructive and transitory: wealth, power, fame, military might are fleeting.

The kingdom of God is permanent and eternal. The life style and the blessings in the other political reality are based on a sacrificial power of love. That the people who live in this other world live by grace, hope and love. There is a refusal to accept as absolute any of the laws and requirement of the worldly powers because we know there is a kingdom where there are higher, better, more justice, more accepting, more compassionate standards.   The church declares, when it is being true to its Lord, that refusing to pay hard workers a living wage for their work is a violation of the law of God's kingdom.  The church is political when it declares that there is no reason why any on this earth should be hungry when we have food enough.  The church is being very political when it says that the profit motive is not nearly as eternal as the stewardship of the water, air, and land that we all live on.

The Church, when it is living and loving as the body of Christ, is a dangerous revolutionary force.  It has been the incubator for political change down through the ages.  Even when the church has been tempted to act like a political empire, the power of the message of the Cross has spurred reformation and change.   The only hope this country has is the possibility that that part of the Christian community will stand up and be the Church.

Liberals Hate the Bible?

The email came from a completely unknown person.  The subject line had "Why Liberals hate the Bible."  The email claimed to have a video that would irritate the Liberals even more and make them hate the Bible with a greater passion.  I did not look at the video.

It is not true that liberals hate the Bible. I know a great number of liberals who love Jesus and who seek to understand the scriptures and to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. What most of the liberals I know hate is what has been done to the Bible by power hungry, conservative, religious preachers.

What I find most disturbing are two things: one the desire to impose their Christianity upon the whole world. Not to offer that grace of Jesus as a gift, but to enforce it by law.  Jesus Christ is the gift of God's love to the world and Jesus suggested that the love ought to be set on a lamp stand and let the light shine and people could come to it. There did not seem to be any desire on his part to "make" other people believe or behave the way he said. Two, the way they deny the power of God's gift of salvation by their actions.  If we are saved by the Cross of Jesus, and that has been done, then those who accept the gift have no fear of it being tainted or destroyed by what others do. If the clerk is in fact a saved Christ by the grace of Jesus, then her salvation is not in danger by her doing her job and issuing marriage licenses to those who apply. If the doctor is a born again Christian then his salvation is not removed if he provides medical treatment to women who had done what he considers sinful acts.

All Liberals do not hate God. Liberals do not all hate Jesus, Liberals do not all hate the Bible. What we hate is the way that people like Franklin Graham, Joel Osteen, so many evangelical conservative people use it as a club to bash others and to leverage themselves into political power.

"Promote the General welfare"

In the preamble to the U.S. Constitution there is the phrase that says the constitutions is being established in part to promote the general welfare.  I think that is another another way of saying that the constitution is established in part to provide for the "common good."  I don't think it is too much of a stretch to suggest that our political system has lost contact with the "general welfare."  I do not think that I am the only one who thinks that there is no agreed upon definition of what is the "common good."   In fact, I might even go so far as to suggest that neither party has much interest in seeking the "common good" or the "general welfare" of the country and are both operating out of the position of what is good for their power and how to sustain their power base.

I do not suspect that we will get any help in wrestling with the question of the general welfare in the next four years. But perhaps these next four years could be helpful if there were among people a calm, civil, thoughtful discussion of what does the "common good" or "general welfare" look like for all of us in the 21st century.  With automation, technology, globalization, and religious fervor changing the patterns and the goals of society, the "general welfare" of our society will certainly look a great deal different than it did in previous generations. Thus the idea that the USA could be made to look like it did in the 1950's is a very destructive and counter productive goal.

When planes and trucks are operated with no drivers, when so much of the economy is service and technology and yet some one still is needed to repair and to build and farm, the common good will be hard to define, but it needs to be defined so that both parties can work together to make progress.

Honored in the Absence -Christian use of Scripture

The whole religious climate in this country is getting very depressing and dangerous.  We have a very strong Christian religious fanatical element. We have a strong Roman Catholic tradition that has lots of rigid and dogmatic positions. The Pope seems to be trying to bring the "ship" around a bit, but that is slow. We have a growing faithful Muslim community and some rabid fundamentalist Muslims as well.  The Muslim fundamentalists have a lot of mixed motives and reasons for their attacks upon the West.

Today while sitting in a worship service, the name of William Stringfellow came back to me.  William Stringfellow was an American lay theologian. He was a Harvard educated lawyer. He was  a civil rights activist.  Stringfellow was convinced at Baptism one entered one into a lifelong struggle against the "powers and principalities" of systematic evils. This is what the New Testament calls the powers of death.   This is larger and more devious than individual sins. This is the power and authority that institutions, government. international corporations, and even church denominations. From his convictions Stringfellow insisted on the primacy of the Bible for Christians.

I remember reading of one of his experiences. It seems he was working in Harlem with Dorothy Day. He was working out of a church that had a swimming pool. It was one of the few swimming pools in the neighborhood.  In order to be able to use the swimming pool, youth had to come to Sunday School. Stringfellow was asked to teach the class of high school youths. He tried to follow the church literature for a while, but it was so deadly. He decided that he would resort to Scripture. Every Sunday morning he would simply read them the book of Romans.  The students just sat there and looked bored.  But every Sunday morning he would re-read the book of Romans. Finally after six or seven weeks some of the students began to ask him questions about the book and about the message. He had some significant life changing experiences with those young people.

Almost every Christian Church I know talks about the primacy of Scripture, but you really have to wonder what that means.  So many of the places I visit have an hour or more of worship service, but there is no more than two or three minutes of attention give to the "hearing of the Word."  There are worship services where they read two or three passages of Scripture, but the person who is reading the scriptures does it so poorly that no one can hear the words.  Of course, there are services of worship where the scriptures are so mistreated. They are not even given serious intellectual examination. Poetry is taken as history.  History stories are taken as prophecy.  Events in the Old Testament are supposed to be predictive of events in the 21st century. Symbolism is taken literally.
Cultural traditions are made into divine commandments.  As so often is said one can make the scriptures support anything you want.

The Bible is a collection of reports, conversations, witnesses, personal testimonies, poetry, songs, and memories about God and what he has done in the lives of those people.  We are invited to join in that conversation. It obviously suggests that God may be active in our history in our lives in unique and unexpected ways, but the ways and the circumstances of the past are not the divine requirements.  If God enables Samson to kill lions with a jaw bone of an ass, does not mean that his disciples now ought to all carry jaw bones for protection. It may suggest that God will equip his servant with the items she needs when confronting danger, but it is not always a jaw bone.

For the Christian religion, and Presbyterians are Reformed and one of our mottoes is "Sola Scriptura" to be so dogmatic about the Bible and then to spend so little time on honest serious study and discussion of it,  denies its own affirmations about the role of scripture in their thinking.