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.