Sacraments Wholesale

The Ordinary Miracle of Christmas

2011-12-25T22:57:00.000-05:00

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, * praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.-Luke 2:1-20

We are still amazed at what the shepherds tell us, amazed even that we are amazed at this story. For the dirt-poor pregnant unmarried teenager who brings a child into the world upon whom she lays her nation's hope for salvation is not really so different from any young mother in poverty and oppression across the ages and around the globe. Young mothers always believe in the possibility that their child will be the one who ends the war or finds the cure for cancer or makes the streets safe again or sends the occupiers packing. And it is not really so miraculous that a child could be born apart from the usual way. For it happens every day in fertility clinics across the planet.

It is in fact, the very ordinariness of the story that fascinates us. The ordinary hopes of an ordinary mother. The ordinary recklessness of ordinary young people taking chances with life and ending up struggling against poverty, pain and panic. In the ordinary face of a baby the story calls us to see a God incarnate in the ordinary.

We can demythologize the Nativity story, chalking angels, shepherds, mad kings and magi up to the myth-making of the religious enthusiast. We can find all sorts of ancient stories of Gods come to walk among us, of grand and wise prophets misunderstood by their contemporaries who meet sad and untimely ends, of mothers' broken hearts and the unfulfilled hopes of people living in darkness yearning to see a great light. But demythologizing this story will not rob it of its power. For it is our story and that is its power.

The Jesus story is not true because of its miracles. It is true because its ordinariness. It is true because in the deepest part of our hearts we know that every mother fears the sword that may pierce her own soul, that every night angels sing, and that shepherds tell tales of music that echoes off the stars, and that every baby's face shines with the image of God.

The ordinary story of Jesus, Lord and Savior, Messiah and Martyr, is the story of love, of hope, of goodness, faith and sacrifice. The human story. The Word made Flesh. Our story.

Everything is Political. Especially politics.

2011-12-14T21:16:00.000-05:00

Thomas Mann, the German social critic and Nobel laureate once memorably said, "There is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics." Like much of what he wrote, he was dead on. Particularly in the politically charged atmosphere of a highly divided nation on the brink of an election that will decide whether or not it continues as a center-right social democratic republic or a hard right confederation of business-dominated special interests.

And nothing illustrates that like the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known to Fox News viewers as Obamacare, but to the rest of us simply as health care reform. I'm not a huge fan of the PPA-ACA, but not because I believe it to be some sort of dark socialist plot to undermine the American health care system, but because I believe it to be a large-scale giveaway to insurance companies in the largest corporate raid on American pocketbooks ever. And because it does not solve the basic problem of health care for millions of people. Even the most rosy estimates of the PPA-ACA put the number of uninsured at 14,000,000 after the full implementation of the law in 2018. Single-payer, universal health care access would be cheaper, simpler and fairer. But the law is at least a start towards insuring that every American can get access to health care without using hospital emergency rooms as primary care centers.

One of the law's provisions is that each state must implement a state-run "health insurance exchange," a sort of Travelocity of health insurance, public and private. If a state elects not to do that, then the federal government will operate the exchange in that state. Back in March, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley issued an Executive Order creating a nonpartisan South Carolina Health Planning Committee to decide whether or not the state should establish a health insurance exchange.

Today's Charleston Post and Courier published an article headlined "SC Gov. Haley dictated health panel finding" with the subtitle "Outcome ordered before committee met." The article cited recently released emails among the Governor, her staff and the Director of the the Department of Health and Human Services, Tony Keck. The work of the Committee, it charged, was a sham, and all along the Committee's report was fixed.

Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper. I know, because I was a member of that Committee.

When Governor Haley asked me to serve as a consumer advocate and representative of the nonprofit sector, I agreed without hesitation. I spend way too much time advocating for quality health care access as a basic human right to say no to an opportunity like that. Besides, I wanted to advocate for a federally-run exchange, because I simply don't trust South Carolina state government to serve the interests of people who are not a)wealthy and b) well-connected. Whatever problems the federal government has in its programs to serve the poor, the sick, or the disabled, (and they are many) it still does it better than we do things when left to our own devices in the Palmetto State.

We worked long and hard through months of meetings, reams of reports, mind-numbing Power Points and expert testimony. Some members of the Committee originally felt that South Carolina should run its own exchange and tell the Feds to take a hike. But after all the work, and more than a few good-natured political jabs around the table, we came together in a final report that said there were so many unknown factors around the implementation of the law that we could not, in good conscience recommend a state-exchange. As one of the Senators on the Committee noted, "we can't even get the computer systems we have up to federal standards, there's just no way we are competent to do something this complicated."

We encouraged some interim steps: staying in serious conversation and negotiations with the federal agencies charged with implementation, encouraging private exchanges, and promoting smaller-scale, community-based health access networks, like the Duke Endowment funded AccessHealth SC and Tri-County Project Care, run by Charleston's incredible visionary surgeon, Dr. Casey Fitts.

And you know what? Not once did I hear from Governor Haley telling me to support a pre-determined outcome. Because if she had, I would have raised hell. And though I may have been the token liberal on the Committee, I believe many of the other Committee members would have as well.

Everything is politics. The Committee's final report contained a lot of politically charged language that made me roll my eyes. But I voted for it because, in 2014, South Carolina will not have a state exchange and barring a Supreme Court overturn or a Congressional roll-back, the federal government will be running the South Carolina Health Insurance Exchange and hundreds of thousands of people who don't have health insurance now will have it.

It's precisely the opposite of what the tea-guzzling-tell-the-feds-to-get-their-goddam-government-hands-off-our-health-care crowd wants. And that's a good thing.

SNAP Challenge Day 5: The Banality of Poverty

2011-11-17T22:11:00.001-05:00

There is a sameness to it, an endless,soul-sucking semi-existence that offers neither a way out nor a way through butonly a way to exist. It is the banality of poverty.

We feel sorry for the poor. Sorry thatthey don't live the way we do, sorry that their values are not ours, sorry thatthey smell bad or don't pick up the trash in their yards or have all those loudand undisciplined children with the runny noses and the wild, animal eyes.Sorry that they stay poor. We pity them, for we are not in their dark cavernwith them.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote that"the poor do not need our sympathy and our pity. The poor need our loveand compassion." Of course, she was a saint, so she often said outrageousthings. Love and compassion are too much to ask for in a society where if youdon’t have a job, you should blame yourself, as former and probably future GOPfront-runner Herman Cain said the other day. We can feel sorry for the poor(probably Herman Cain does), but we will be damned if we are going to love themand feel compassionate towards them.

Love, particularly in the Judeo-Christiantradition, has the sense of self-giving. It is not about throwing money at aproblem, it is about throwing one’s very life at it. And compassion? It means“to suffer along with.” Teresa threw her life at the problem of the poorest ofthe poor. And the problem didn’t go away, in spite of all her prayers. And soshe moved on to compassion for the poor—suffering along with them. She immersedherself in the poor, lived, worked and died among them. Still, poverty didn’tbudge. It just went on and on.

The nature of poverty is to designitself for perpetuity. When Bill Clinton, that famous Reagan Democrat,conspired with current and probably soon to be former GOP front-runner NewtGingrich to “end welfare as we know it” he succeeded. Welfare, as it existedfrom the time of the New Deal until the late 1990’s, ceased to exist. Peoplewere expected to get an education and then get a job. They would get temporaryassistance from a society that felt sympathy and pity but not love andcompassion. Thus ended welfare. Still, poverty didn’t budge. It just went onand on.

Today, the welfare system has been transformedinto Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental NutritionalAssistance Program. The first assumesthat after 48 months of a poor person’s life, he or she would have the capacityto stand up and take responsibility and join the great American middle-class,replete with SUV, two-car garage, flat-screen television and soccer games onSunday morning. The second assumes that the food budgets of the lower classwould be “supplemented” until they accumulated enough wealth to be respectableand responsible consumers of gadgets, clothes, houses, and marble slab icecream. But the assumptions were wrong. Poverty didn’t budge. It just went onand on.

The banality of poverty is clearest inits food: cheap, low in nutrition, but high in fat and processed sugars. It’ssameness is numbing. After awhile, you don’t even think about it, you just eatit. After awhile, it even starts to taste good.

Like my grits ($.15) from this morning.Or my peanut butter and preserves sandwiches on white bread ($.35 ea.) atlunch. Or my spaghetti with canned green pepper flavored sauce ($.88). It’s notbad. Not good, either, but not bad. It leaves you numb. Full, but notsatisfied. And it goes on and on, just like the problem it was supposed to fix.

SNAP Challenge Day 4: On the Limits of Existential Activism

2011-11-16T22:15:00.001-05:00

When the Hollywood types, who are unrepentant members of the1%, were dropping by New York's Zucotti Park to show their "support"for the Occupy Wall Street protests led primarily by drumming, chantingunemployed young people in Guy Fawkes^® masks, I knew the movementwas doomed. Just like the Tea Party (which is so 2009), was co-opted by themainstream GOP, the Occupy movement was being co-opted by the forces againstwhich it protested. Of course, the Hollywood types wanted to be identified withthe purity of youthful protest. They wanted to experience, to live into,to participate somehow in this greatgenerational Munchean scream against the power elites, because they knew intheir heart of hearts that it had the moral high ground. It is anexistentialist dream: to learn by pretending to be something one is not.

John Paul Sartre once described existentialists as peoplewho "believe that existencecomes before essence." Theelites who show up and pretend to protest against themselves, gain not themoral high ground, but merely an absurdist henna tattoo of truthiness (toborrow a Colbertian term) designed to display what it means to be 25, jobless,highly educated and without hope for the future. The tattoo will eventuallywash off and the elite can go back to their everyday world of money, power andprivilege. But for now, they bear the marks in their bodies of suffering andprotest.

I write this, not as an anti-government “conservative” (alovely, but meaningless term), but as an enthusiastic advocate of activist,efficient and effective government. In today’s strange political environment,that makes me a “liberal” (another lovely, but equally meaningless term). Itwas my liberalism that caused me to sign on to the SNAP Challenge, whereparticipants agree to live for a week on a $4 per day budget for food in orderto “experience” what the people who really live on a $4 per day budget for foodreally experience.

I’ve been saving my money all week, so I could go out withfriends tonight to Motor Supply Bistro and have a salad. I blew the $7.50 I hadsaved so far this week on a sliced Fuji apple salad with blueberries and pecansover curly leaf lettuce with feta and an orange-key lime vinaigrette dressing.It was utterly Divine. I would have worshipped it, but I was too busy eatingand reveling in the incarnate glory of fruits and veggies. Strangely, I feltthat I deserved it: I had grits for breakfast ($.15) and two peanut butter andstrawberry preserves sandwiches ($.35 ea) for lunch.

Years ago, when I was much closer in socio-economic level topeople who live on food stamps, I was visiting a friend in Atlanta who reallydid receive food stamps. He described the giddiness of going to the grocerystore at the beginning of the month and carefully choosing a month’s supply offood. Carefully, because he was going to include a large, juicy porterhouse orrib eye as part of his monthly allotment. I was shocked—after all I paid fullprice for all my food, and as a tax payer, I was paying for his porterhouse.Shouldn’t he be buying more peanut butter?

“You just don’t get it, do you? We are barely scraping bymost days. Can’t I have a day once in a while where I get to eat something Iwant, instead of just eating to fill me up?”

Here’s the real lesson I’ve learned this week. SNAPrecipients are people for whom food becomes an obsession, not because they aregathering with other rich people to nibble on the latest Pate de Foie Gras washed down with Beaujolais Nouveau, butbecause they have to obsess with food to simply stretch their inadequateresources over a month. The poor are just like us, with less money. I have notbeen poor this week. I live in a nice house, I have a great job, I drive afabulous car, I’m writing this on a computer that costs as much as some poorpeople’s cars. I could quit this experience anytime I choose. This is allexperience, not essence. I am only existentially poor.

But I am more awarethat my food choices are just that: choices, not necessities. And though I maynot be in the 1% of American wealthy, I am in the 1% of the planet’s wealthy.And I can make better choices, every day, in my ethical and personal life. Ican stand up for people who don’t have choices. That’s what this week has beenabout. And I am profoundly grateful for having been reminded of that.

Woody Allen once said: “I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.” There are no easy answers to the problem of food insecurity in the richest country in the world. But experiencing it, even for just a few days, even in such a limited and yes, hypocritical manner, has made me more determined than ever to keep working on the problem.

SNAP Challenge Day 3

2011-11-15T23:26:00.001-05:00

It’s the third most popular grain grown in the world, aftercorn and wheat. But since so much of the corn grown is used other than forhuman consumption, rice and wheat are tied as the staples of human life. Riceprovides more than 20% of all the calories eaten by all 7 billion humans on theplanet.

I suspect it was at least that for me today. But oats andwheat put in respectable showings as well.

Day 3 of the SNAP Challenge began with a steaming bowl ofoatmeal. I think I’m getting the hang of this now. You put about 25% more thanthe required water in the bowl before you flip the microwave to “irradiate” andit comes out with a milky colored liquid, which is nearly enough to convinceyou, if you’re not thinking too clearly in those pre-caffeine moments, thatyou’ve put milk on it. Which you haven’t because there’s not enough in the foodstamp budget for milk. A bowl of oatmeal is only about $.15.

I was in Florence today, at the remarkable SoutheasternInstitute of Manufacturing and Technology at Florence Technical College wherestudents can train for jobs that got sent off to Asia in the last decade ofglobalized economic madness. (In Asia, by the way, they eat lots of rice. Soyour food stamp diet can prepare you for a high tech career in some exotic Asiancountry where they still believe in economic development.) The SIMT was packedwith business and education leaders from around the Pee Dee imploring anaudience who already agreed with them that South Carolina should invest inearly childhood education. There were in attendance as well, the usual suspect electedleaders, all of whom nodded dutifully, while checking their smartphones andhurriedly rushing off to the next meeting. The Business Leaders Summit featureda sumptuous buffet for lunch. But I went out to my car and devoured my twopeanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwiches. Afterwards, I went back into hear about brain development in children and was left to wonder how many ofAmerica’s children would have a diet that would let them excel, even withbusiness leaders advocating for improving child care and early grade education.

I ran in the door at 6:45, my stomach grumbling and turnedon the oven while I changed my clothes. I took out one of my five Wal-Martchicken leg quarters, salted and peppered it and then put it into bake.Whereupon I made rice, loaded with salt, pepper and Blue Bonnet margarine.

Total food expense for day three: $2.15. Which means I’mahead of budget by about $5.50. So the second half of my week might just seesome veggies. Maybe even the banana that’s been dancing my dreams, which whiledefinitely only a banana, seems every bit as sensual and seductive as Freudsuggested that it would.

SNAP Challenge Day 2

2011-11-14T22:26:00.001-05:00

There's an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show (that I am not old enough to remember) called "the Gunslinger", a parody of the great Western noir film High Noon. In it, Sally serves Rob a perfect Southern meal:

Sally: "Here's your favorite -- fried chicken."
Rob: "Oh boy, and hominy grits!"
Sally: "Oh, I don't know, about forty or fifty..."

Laugh, you miserable Madison Avenue Yankees, but grits is what we got here to live on. At least during the SNAP Challenge. Or what I've got anyway.

My second full day of the SNAP Challenge began with a bowl of steaming hominy made in the microwave. Hominy is made from white corn that's been soaked in an alkaline solution and then sold by Wal-Mart. The reason that they are such a staple of the Southern diet is that they are cheap, plentiful and filling. Especially when they are mixed with cheddar cheese or shrimp and sherry like Emeril does it.

Of course the staple form of grits comes sans cheese, shrimp or sherry. It comes with water, salt and butter. Unless you are on a SNAP budget and then it's margarine, which is basically a yellow glob of vegetable fat. But it melts quickly and makes a beautiful yellow lake of oil on top of the white mound of bubbling corn meal. And it's cheap. My breakfast only cost about $.15 and it lasted (sort of) until 2 PM. Let me warn you though: putting grits in your mouth before letting them cool off for at least three hours is hazardous to your tongue.

Of course I didn't eat during the lunch meeting with Upstate politicos, who dug into a beautiful salad, loaded with green vegetables, antioxidants and vitamins. I sipped water. But I did hungrily devour my two peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches ($.35 each) in the car afterwards, which carried me through until supper time at 7PM.

That's when the Gwaltney Chicken Hot Dogs (With Pork and Beef Added) were served with the store brand macaroni and cheese mix. Why they are called Chicken Hot Dogs when they are made with Pork and Beef is a mystery to me, but they are only $.11 each, so who cares if the provenance is a bit shady? Besides I was boiling them anyway, since the grill has been put up for the season. I'll say one thing: these are definitely not your Rabbi's Kosher Beef Hot Dog. They are, however, nicely hot dog shaped, which is a plus. They taste like the parts of the chicken, hog and cow and that you really shouldn't eat. Especially without mustard. Which I couldn't afford on my SNAP budget.

It was the macaroni and "cheese" that was the best part of the meal. Made with my trusty Blue Bonnet and water (no milk, after all), it formed an interesting orange-tinted paste that coated the pasta adequately and almost convinced me that it was good old fashioned Kraft Mac and Cheese.

I only spent $.89 on supper. Today's total food budget: $1.74. Not counting the Prilosec.

I'm up by about $3 so far. And that means that Wednesday, I can actually have something green and leafy. I may survive this week after all. My blood pressure will be through the roof and I will require Lipitor by IV, but I will survive. Just don't tell my insurance company.

SNAP Challenge Day 1.5

2011-11-13T20:27:00.001-05:00

Today is when reality met the rubber which was on theroad that bites. Or something. It was Day 1.5 of the SNAP Challenge.

You see, everyone else started this morning, but I, in myusual Occupy Pantry Street sort of way, started last night, so that my finalSNAP Challenge meal will be next Saturday’s lunch. I would try to explain it,but it’s a combination of Kabbalist theology and quantum mechanics, and youwouldn’t understand.

Anyway, this SNAP challenge thing is really pretty easy.As long as you don’t like to eat food that actually tastes good or is good foryou.

Here (courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Social Services)is the list of what you might buy if you were shopping using a SNAP EBT card(which has replaced the old food stamps):

· Any food or food product except for ready-to-eathot foods

· Baby formula, goat's milk, Pedialyte andPediasure (Goat’s Milk???? It’s $3.50 a quart at Wal-Mart!! Are you freakingkidding me?? Why not Russian Caviar? It’s food, right?)

· Seeds and plants used to grow foods includingfruit trees (Excellent, I will just waituntil May to eat while my tomatoes grow.)

· Fresh produce items from authorized vendors (Don’t remind me. I saw a little kid todayeating a banana. I would have stolen it, but his dad was bigger than me.)

· Meals prepared and delivered by a meal deliveryservice such as Meals on Wheels

· Meals at congregate meal sites such as soupkitchens (Soup kitchens charge? I toldyou a GOP majority was a bad idea.)

· Nutritional supplements such as Ensure, Isomil,Boost and Sustacal (“Sustacal,” now thatsounds yummy.)

· Weight loss products such as Dynatrim, SlimFast, Cambridge Diet and Nutrisystem (Seriously?Slim Fast? I can’t even satirize that.)

· Artificial Sweeteners (Tastes like chemicals because it’s made from chemicals. Definitely notfood.)

· Distilled Water (Why distilled water and not mineral water?)

· Ice (Icemade from distilled water, apparently.)

· Lactaid caplets and Lactaid milk (Try the goat milk instead.)

· Cooking Sprays, such as Never Stik and Pam (Sorry, I need the margarine to make stufftaste slightly edible.)

· Prepared cold sandwiches or salads that will notbe eaten in the store (As if I couldafford one of those $4.95 sandwiches…)

Okay: on to the challenge. Breakfast today was oatmeal (store brand of course). But Icouldn’t afford milk from any mammal, or even sugar, so it was plain. I triedit with Blue Bonnet. Cost: $.15 It didn’t taste bad, but it looked ferocious.Dr. Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary of theEnglish Language, defined oats thusly: "A grain, which in England isgenerally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." The ironyof an Englishman asserting that his native cuisine was superior to anyoneelse’s is delicious. After all, beyond fish and chips, what do the English haveto eat anyway? But maybe Samuel Johnson once tried oatmeal with Blue Bonnet onit.

Lunch was rice and beans left over from dinner last night.Cost: $0 because I already charged it off last night.

So, tonight, I was faced with a repellent mash of rice andbeans and leftover oatmeal. I had already taken an antacid and thought betterof trying either. So I took two slices of my store brand white bread ($.05 ea.)and some peanut butter instead. Total: $.25 Maybe by Wednesday, I will havesaved enough to buy a head of lettuce and a tomato. By Thursday, I willprobably being willing to kill for a Honeycrisp apple. They are, after all, $1 each.

The SNAP Challenge Day One

2011-11-12T21:28:00.003-05:00

When Jennifer Moore, at the United Way of the Midlands, asked me if I would like to participate in this year’s SNAP challenge, I accepted without giving it a great deal of thought. The SNAP Challenge, part of the National Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week is this week (November 13^th-20^th). United Way of the Midlands and Harvest Hope Food Bank are partnering to launch the SNAP Challenge to help over-nourished people like me experience in a small way what the people who live on SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program—known by its more common name as “food stamps”) benefits experience every day.

The guidelines are pretty simple: you have $4 a day to buy food. Go.

So, I set off to Wal-Mart to shop, figuring that Publix, Earth Fare and Fresh Market (my usual food sources) wouldn’t be likely to help me get by on my $4 daily allotment. I spent $27.82 and in return I got:

Hot dog buns $1.25

A loaf of white bread $1.00

A bag of black beans $1.22

A bag of white northern beans $1.22

2 1lb. bags of rice $1.26 ea.

Oatmeal $1.68

Quick Grits $1.16

A package of chicken leg quarters (5) $4.42

2 boxes of macaroni and cheese $.64 ea.

A package of spaghetti $.82

A can of mushroom flavored spaghetti sauce $.82

1lb. Blue Bonnet margarine $.92

Salt and pepper set $1.06

Peanut Butter $2.88

Strawberry preserves $2.08

A package of chicken hot dogs (with pork and beef added) $.88

2 sweet potatoes $1.01

2 baking potatoes $1.20

The 1% sales tax set me back another $.28. But still I figure I can make it stretch over the week. Even though there are no vegetables, no fruit, no milk, no French Truffle oil, no Cheeze-Its. Hell, there’s not even any Romano cheese for the pasta.

I realize that my SNAP experience will not be an exact replica of what the 45 million Americans who have to real choices about food experience every day. I will probably feel like crap, since my diet, which is usually very high in fresh vegetables and fruits, is going to be loaded with cheap chicken fat and starch. And since I am a of good Irish Catholic stock, I’ve taken the liberty of taking a couple things “off budget”: coffee and alcohol. (The Irish, you’ll remember, convinced the Pope to put St. Patrick’s Day in the middle of Lent so they could have a party in the midst of the great forty day fast…God, thank you for Canon Lawyers.) Caffeine is not a food, I reason, it’s medicine, hence the coffee. And I’m going to Pub Politics on Wednesday, and even though I can’t eat there, I can drink. Thank you, Jesus, Buddha and Allah. (Okay, not Allah, he’s a teetotaler.) And if you think that my “off budget” legalism is cheating, may I remind you that we fought two trillion dollar wars “off budget” during the George W. Bush presidency and nobody but Ron Paul cared. I’m not inviting him for dinner anyhow.

Tonight was my first meal, white beans, rice and chicken. It required a lot of preparation: soaking the beans overnight and then cooking them for two hours in a broth of water, salt and pepper. I cooked a chicken leg quarter slowly for an hour to make a broth for the rice and then put it in the refrigerator to cool and let the fat rise to the top. It didn’t really work though, so the rice was a bit fatty, but on the whole, it was pretty tasty. There are beans and rice left over for lunch tomorrow. Total cost for dinner: about $1.75, including leftovers.

This is going to be interesting. Unhealthy, but interesting.

To Everything There Is a Season

2011-11-12T20:02:00.001-05:00

Years ago, when I started this exercise in vanity (in all its senses) I had no idea if anyone would read it. That was before the Twitterverse and when Facebook was largely the realm of college students. Before Nooks and Kindles and IPads. When I still got my newspaper in paper form.

But people did read it, and some of them became my friends. And some of my friends read it too. Over the course of the last year, however, I seemed to run out of things to say. Or at least things I could say outside the safe space of my spiritual director’s office. It largely became the place that I posted the sermons I preached at St.Martin’s in the Fields Episcopal Church in Forest Acres, a wonderfully diverse community of faith that stood as a bulwark against the narrow divisions of left and right, conservative and liberal. And then, I just had to choose silence while my personal life careened out of control. My marriage ended, my kids were gone, my house suddenly empty and quiet. Silence seemed to be a course of both wisdom and necessity.

As the ancient Hebrew poet once wrote:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

And so it is again, a time to speak. Perhaps this time, no one will read it, having decided that I had wandered away and wouldn’t be back. If you’ve stumbled here whether accidentally or by choice, I hope something I say can be useful to you in this new season.

The Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A: Waiting Tables

2011-05-22T16:18:00.001-04:00

In Honor of the Ordination

Dianna LaMance Deaderick

and

Patricia Marie Gotautas

to the Sacred Order of Deacons

in Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church

Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14

He looked up to heaven and saw what no one else could see: Jesus, standing by a golden throne, in the empty blue of the Palestinian sky.

It had only started a few months before, following that great Day of Pentecost, when the streets of Jerusalem were filled with thousands of pilgrims from around the Empire: Galileans, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Jews, Cappadocians, Pontians, Asian, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, Cyrenes, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs. That day, three thousand people, from around the Empire had heard about Jesus of Nazareth and had been baptized in his name. Peter's words of redemption, hope and forgiveness had pierced their souls and nothing would ever be the same.

But of course, everything was still the same: Tiberius was still on the Roman throne, and Caligula, that man of lawlessness, panted in the wings, waiting for his uncle to die. The followers of Jesus were still a hated and heterodox sect of Judaism, who insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their leader, whom they considered Messiah, was still alive. The twelve men who led them all claimed to have seen him, alive, and munching broiled fish and bread, washing it all down with great swallows of the red wine that they claimed he could even make from water. Joining them, amid the jeers of both the Bible-thumpers and intellectuals, was not the sort of choice one made sanely, weighing the evidence. For the evidence screamed a warning: run the other way.

But he had not run. He had buried himself under the water of the Jordan, as certain as the water which dripped off his head, that their message was true. And not just true in a narrative sense: true in the great galactic sense that the Universe had been re-ordered on that bright spring morning fifty days before. And he knew that day that there was something to this Jesus story, something so wondrous and graceful and joyous that there could be no going back to his home, his old life, the day to day numbness of life under the hope-crushing boot of Empire and Religion. He was called to love mercy, do justice and walk humbly before his God.

So when the followers of the Way, as they began to call themselves, settled in for good in the Holy City, Stephen was one of the voices that proclaimed that being a follower of Jesus meant more than just taking on some sort of religious vow: it meant that your life was suddenly lost and that there was a cross with your name on it outside the safety and purity of the Temple gate. Stephen was one of the voices who heard the hard words of Jesus about the “other sheep:” the women, the lepers, the drunks, the hookers, the gamblers, the insurrectionists, the collaborators and the poor, shoeless little children whose bellies ached for food but whose souls were full of Spirit.

Because, the followers of the Way, the ones who were risking the wrath of both Empire and Religion, of both Law and Prophets, lacked one thing: they did not understand the call to justice. And who could blame them: they had the Bible on their side, a thousand years of tradition, a great scroll of finely scripted liturgy that proclaimed the Lordship of Yahweh for a Hebrew-speaking Covenant People descended from Abraham, and bound eternally to salvation. But Stephen and a handful of others saw that, unless the Way distinguished itself from the rest of the Jewish people and embraced those who slightly less than pure, it would only fade into the irrelevant noise of a world more concerned with people who did things right than with people who longed for all things to be made right.

So when the Phyrgians, Asians, Cappodocians and all the rest set themselves up in a sprawling refugee camp it was Stephen and six of his friends who claimed that the Good News proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with Religion or Empire and everything to do with mercy, justice and humility. Even the Twelve were no match for the Gospel.

In spite of the fact that believers were pooling their resources together to help the poorest among them, the widows in the refugee camp were hungry and all because they spoke a different language from the majority of the followers of Jesus. Stephen and his friends knew that the Twelve could sermonize all they wanted about repentance and baptism and the prayers, but as long as even one of the baptized suffered, the whole body of the Way suffered.

For they knew that Cross was borne not by Jesus alone, but by everyone who felt the marks in his hands and in her feet and side. Following his Resurrection, Jesus had first appeared, not to the Twelve, but to the women among them, and in fact, one particular woman, the one who had anointed his head and feet with an alabaster jar of the world's most expensive perfume. The one unafraid to touch him, the kiss him, to declare him the single most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on. The woman who refused to stay an outsider. The widows in the camp were outsiders to the Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus, but if they stayed that way, the Gospel itself was imperiled.

The Twelve were concerned with more important things: “It is not right” they said with all the seriousness of Apostolic Order, “that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait at tables. Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.”

The People of the Way thought that was a good solution. The Twelve, holy as they were, would devote themselves to making sure that the prayers, the word, and the liturgy were duly celebrated, that baptisms continued in the Jordan, that the great enterprise of Temple, Law and Tradition continued among the Jesus people. So they brought Stephen and his friends Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and the Syrian Nicolaus before the Twelve who laid hands on them and declared them servants of the Table. They would serve to make Christ and his redemptive love known, by their word and example, to those among whom they lived, and worked, and worshiped. They were to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world. From the moment the Twelve laid their holy, religious hands on the Magnificent Seven, the Church would never be the same: there would always be the voice of Servants of the Table, the ones who knew clearly that the life, death and Raising of Jesus meant, not a new religion, not simply Word and Prayers and the Apostles' teaching, but the loving of mercy, the doing of justice and the walking in humility to the place where their own Cross awaited them. To be sure, they worked to feed the hungry, but they had another dimension to their new vocation: to prevent the followers of Jesus from believing that it is more important to pray in the presence of poverty than to eliminate it.

And that's how Stephen found himself, on a high place, outside the walls of Jerusalem, his eyes focused on something in the blue sky that only he could see. Earlier that day he had dared to preach in the Synagogue of the Freedmen and declared that the word of all the Prophets and Yahweh himself were fulfilled in the life of Jesus, the Nazarene prophet whose presence still hung over Jerusalem a year after his death. Fury poured forth from the good, pious and holy people who were trying to pray and listen to the Scriptures that day. How dare this waiter—who could not even speak proper Aramaic—come into their place of worship and speak such unholy words. Had not the Chief Priests themselves ordered turned the Nazarene over to be executed by the Roman authorities? Had the Nazarene not died, on the hill outside the Temple, a sign of his false claims? Were they still not the Chosen Ones of Yahweh, the Children of Abraham, the inheritors of an Eternal Promise, the People of the Covenant, of the Land that stretched from sea to shining sea?

He'd been hauled before the same Sanhedrin who had condemned the Nazarene and there he stood, unrepentant before them all. He began a long and winding sermon that took them through the entire sweeping story of salvation, beginning at Abraham, through

Moses, David and Solomon. After declaring that God could not be confined to a building, no matter how holy or beautiful, he fairly spat his sermon's climax: “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.” Then he did it. He committed the act that would forever mark the short, glorious and tragic life of the first martyr of Christianity. Stephen, the waiter, the Deacon, the martyr, looked into that bright, empty unbroken Palestinian blue and told them: “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”

That was all the crowd of promise keepers needed. They covered their ears and rushed him, a buzzing angry swarm of hornets, intent on only one thing: destroying this despicable man who dared to blame them for the injustice that they had committed. They dragged him outside the walls of Jerusalem, to demonstrate once and for all what justice looked like: like a rock, soaked with the blood and brains of anyone who would dare question whether that is really justice. The text gives us a tantalizing peek at the future of the Gospel when it notes, almost as a footnote, that “the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.”

As the rocks smashed his skull, Stephen struggled to his feet. He raised his hands high to the blue vault above: “Lord Jesus,” he cried, “receive my spirit.” Another rock knocked him to his knees. “Lord,” he whispered, as his eyes rolled back into his head, “please don't hold this against them.” Then he crumbled into a tiny, dying ball of mercy, justice and humility.

The calling of these first Deacons might have passed away into the lost memory of the ancient Church had it not been for one blessed and ironic fact: the Apostles only wanted to get back to feeling holy and not have to encounter the unpleasant reality of a world that cries for justice. Yet, when they laid hands on the Seven, they managed to unhook the Gospel from Religion and turn its power loose on the world. From then on, the Church would understand that in order to devote itself to Word and Prayer, it had to to devote itself to waiting tables. It had to live a forgiving Gospel, an inclusive Gospel, a Gospel that reconciled and made all things new. That young man Saul, who stood there, arms folded, in approval of the murder of the young man Stephen, would later gaze into the sky in Syria, and see what Stephen saw. He would lead the Church into the fullness of the forgiving, inclusive and reconciling Gospel. And though the text does not say it, nor did Saul ever later discuss it in his writings, by the time he became the Apostle Paul, he, too, was preaching the message of Stephen. Some Gospel seed must have taken root in his heart that day.

The history of the Order of Deacons in God's One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is the history of the Church on its journey to discovering Gospel truth. As the message spread throughout the Empire, Deacons were deployed to the little house churches that sprung up everywhere the message was preached. They had a special role: to serve the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the imprisoned in the Name of Christ and to act that role out liturgically in the Mass for all God's people, wearing their stoles over their shoulders, like the towel Jesus used to dry his disciples' feet at the Last Supper. That's why Deacons proclaim the Gospel and set the Holy Table for the Eucharist. That's why Deacons' sermons are so very different from those of Priests. The Deacon's call is outward, towards the world, and the Priests' inward towards the Church. Because Deacons had a special and prophetic call to remind the Church that as a Body each of us is likewise called to do this, they often came into conflict with the hierarchical structures of the Church. By the time of the Middle Ages, the first Order of Ministry after the Apostles was reduced to a temporary, transitional step towards the Priesthood. Finally, by the mid-20^th century, the Church heard once again the message of Stephen and his friends, and the Diaconate was re-established, this time, one hopes, once and for all.

There have been times that the Church has forgotten the simple truth that the Gospel is not pie in the sky when you die, but is the hard, sweaty, dirty work of transforming the world now. And each time it does, the Holy Spirit raises back up the ancient order of Deacons to pick up a towel and start waiting tables. Amen.

American Horcrux

2011-05-07T22:33:00.000-04:00

Americans Celebrating on May 1, 2011

Osama Bin Laden is dead, his body buried at sea, in a dubious interpretation of Islamic law by an American government at pains to see that his corpse would not become a fetish for his followers. The United States, and most of the rest of the Western world, has spent the past week congratulating itself on the demise of the man who was at once the most hated and admired human on the planet.

Palestinians Celebrating on September 11, 2001

Bin Laden's death prompted spontaneous celebrations in America's streets, as a decade of anger, humiliation and war gave way to flag-waving joy. President Obama said "Justice has been done." But it is a strange sort of justice.

In the past decade, the United States has become an armed fortress, where the torture of suspected enemies has been re-branded as "enhanced interrogation"; a bankrupt shell of an empire, its vaults emptied by endless wars; a divided nation whose elected President is called "a dedicated enemy of the Constitution" by his opponents. The world is painted in stark black and white, a Manichean land where good and evil are absolute and ends justify means. Harry must slay Voldemort and Frodo destroy Sauron, for the future of humanity or magic or Middle Earth hangs in the balance.

But the real world is not The Deathly Hallows or Lord of the Rings. And the death of a single individual, no matter how immoral his actions were, will not create New Heavens and New Earth. Humans are an untidy mix of sin and grace, of good motives tainted by evil, of brokenness and redemption. The world is full of gray ambiguity--and even the alabaster cities of America are crusted by its dust.

Though both J.K. Rowling and J.R.R Tolkein's fantasies warn of the dangers of becoming corrupted by the evil one wishes to end, the Harry Potterization of America skips over the hard words, heading straight for the final scene. We cannot even see the irony of dancing in the streets at the death of our very own Voldemort. Using the dark magic of hatred, Osama Bin Laden became the American Horcrux, stealing our national soul as we sought to kill him.

But in real life, there is no Elder Wand, no magic spell, no miraculous ending. Osama Bin Laden is dead, and there will soon be another to take his place.

The Second of Easter Year A: Bearers of Forgiveness

2011-05-01T22:35:00.004-04:00

Acts 2:14a,22-32

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

They slipped through the alleyways, after the sun had set, each from different directions. They were careful to keep their keffiyah pulled forward, over their faces. They were certain that every centurion recognized them, every policeman was following them. They spoke to no one along the way, ten silent shadows, fearing the light, taking refuge in the darkness. But they all made it to the tiny house with the upper room, overlooking the garden. A quick rap on the door and it opened, silently, and each stepped inside, locking it behind them.

They crept up the stairs and stood around the room, candles flickering against the drawn shutters. Every footstep outside raised the hairs on their neck, the whinny of every horse echoing like an equestrian army from the streets below. They whispered their stories.

Peter was first. “We went to the tomb this morning, before the sun was really up. Magdelene had woken John and me up. She said that she had gone there earlier and that Caiaphas had stolen the body. We ran there, and there was nothing inside but the shroud he had been wrapped in. I can't believe those people. It's not bad enough to murder the greatest teacher in all Israel, but now this. I don't even love this country anymore. I feel like I don't belong here.”

John interrupted. “I went inside, because Rocky, as usual, was making some kind of excuse.” Peter started to object, but he held up his hand. “I'm talking. I looked around the tomb, and even in the gray dawn it was really strange. There was the linen cloak neatly folded up in the corner, and the shroud, rolled up like someone had taken it off him. I left Mary sitting there, crying, and Rocky just standing in the doorway, his mouth open, but, for once, not saying anything.” He glared at Peter with red-rimmed eyes.

“You didn't even stay with us when he died. I took his mother to my house. She never stopped crying until this morning when her sister and Magdelene came back and they all left.” Peter was looking at the floor. “But as strange as that was, what was even stranger was that they came back later and said they saw him, and he was alive.” Peter was staring off into the corner. In the darkness, you could make out the tears streaming down his face.

“Women, hysterical creatures. They came by my place today too,” said one of the others. “And they told me the same ridiculous story. That they saw Jesus, in the garden, and he was alive.”

Opf course, it was impossible. They had seen the trial. They had watched his torture. They had seen him nailed to the patabulum and hoisted like a signa militaria over the city. They had seen his feet nailed and heard the crowd mocking him. They watched as the last hope of Israel choked on his blood and died. And they stood, on the hill, as two old, rich men bore his body away. He was dead, no matter what the women said, no matter that the tomb was empty. Besides there had been an earthquake on Preparation Day and another aftershock that morning. It was all too obvious that Caiaphas had taken the body from the tomb and dumped it somewhere. It was just one more insult from the man of iniquity.

Everyone looked at Peter. Peter looked at no one. John touched his arm. “Simon,” he whispered. No one called him that, but his wife, and Jesus, in his more serious moments. Peter's shoulders heaved in great jerks, as he sobbed, his face in his hands. John felt a strange mixture of anger and pity.

“Has anyone seen Judas?” Someone asked finally, to break the awkwardness of the moment.

“He's dead,” answered another, and related the tale he had heard in the market.

“I just don't understand. What was he thinking?”

“He was a thief. Don't you remember how he used to carry the money pouch? How do you think he afforded those nice sandals and those trinkets he was always buying from the traders?' The others nodded.

“Well,” said Simon the Zealot. “it's a good thing he took his own life. That saves me from running him through with my sword. The filthy traitor.” The others agreed. “I hope he rots in hell.”

“Wait,” said one, “Where's Thomas?”

“Who knows? I saw him for a moment, this afternoon, and he wouldn't even look at me. He's probably gone back to Galilee.”

“Another traitor.” They all stared at Peter, accusation heavy in the air. Peter just moaned in anguish.

The cool night air stirred around them and the shutters flew open. The flames on the candles bent as if the night itself was trying to blow them out. The perfume of ten thousand roses filled the room and their knees went weak at the sweetness of it. From behind them, in the shadows, came an old, familiar voice.

“Peace be with you.” They turned, and stared. Even Peter stood, before falling prostrate to the floor.

“Peace be with you,” said Jesus. “As the Father has sent me to you, I am sending you to all the others.”

They crowded around him, shouting, forgetting their fear, their tears, their accusations, their hatred.

“Is it really you? Are you really alive? But how?” They touched him, tentatively at first, then hugged him, kissed him. He pulled back his tunic, so that they could see his wounds. He was laughing in that way he always did when he had told some silly joke, or bested some adversary in a theological jousting match.

“I'm alive.” He smiled. “I told you, for three long years, but you weren't listening. So, now, for once, hear me out. Come close.” They gathered around him. He blew on them.

“Now, breathe, deeply, my friends. Take the Holy Spirit deep within. Learn now that you can forgive, for there is much forgiveness needed, and it needs to start here. Whatever you forgive, will be forgiven, and whatever you don't forgive will just lie there, festering forever.”

A week later, they would gather again in that room, with Thomas, who hadn't gone away at all, but whose heart was still filled with anger and doubt about it all. And Thomas too, would learn the power of Resurrection to undo sin, to create a fresh new world, to bring forgiveness.

Thomas, the great evangelizer, who would later take Christianity far into Asia, has been unfairly dubbed “Doubting Thomas.” But he was not different than the other apostles, he was just a little late to the party. They had all doubted Magdelene's story, they had all doubted, even John and Peter who had seen the empty tomb for themselves.

John's story of these two appearances of the Risen Jesus in the week after Easter is not about the banishment of Thomas' doubt, but the enthronement of forgiveness as the centerpiece of the story of Jesus and his followers. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams put it like this: "There is no hope of understanding the Resurrection outside the process of renewing humanity in forgiveness. We are all agreed that the empty tomb proves nothing. We need to add that no amount of apparitions, however well authenticated, would mean anything either, apart from the testimony of forgiven lives communicating forgiveness."

The Resurrection of Jesus was not a final act of victory over the paper lion of Rome or the corrupt religious leadership of Palestine. That had been taken care of two days before, when the anointed King led his followers, not to an armed uprising, but to a willing death upon a Cross. The mightiest army in history could not crush the Spirit of freedom which revealed the stark illegitimacy of military might. The holiest of religious practice could not condemn the Holy One of Israel by simply calling him a blasphemer. He had received their blows and their indictments, bowed his head and forgiven them. The victory over Empire and Religion was complete by three o'clock in the afternoon on that Good Friday when all the sinfulness of the world was swallowed up in the broken body of a dead prophet.

Easter was for the disciples. They could not be sent forth into all the world, bearing the Gospel of forgiveness, until they themselves had experienced Jesus' forgiveness. They had all run away into the shadows. They were all complicit in his murder. None of them had testified at his trial. They had all allowed their doubts to triumph over faith in God's promises. None of them had believed that this was part of the plan of God all along. Even Judas, who had engineered the betrayal, when faced with the reality of it, walked into darkness rather than accepting the light.

So there could be no future for the Gospel of God's Reign without its vanguard grasping that Jesus had, of his own volition, chosen death, and they were forgiven for their unfaithfulness. In fact, there could be no Pentecost, no outpouring of the Spirit, until they themselves breathed the perfume of forgiveness and stood ready to forgive the world.

The Empty Tomb, and all the appearances of Jesus for the next forty days, were not primarily about how seeing the Risen Jesus brings faith, for Jesus tells Thomas, “"Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." Faith can only come when we realize our own complicity in the evil which stalks the world and accept the fact that God has forgiven us for what we have done and what we have left undone.

When Jesus says: "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" he is not setting the Church up as some grand office of Who's In and Who's Out, the merchants of who was saved and who was lost, but as the bearers of forgiveness for all the world. Their sole job was to paint the world in bright Easter colors. As Eugene Peterson puts it in his paraphrase of Jesus' words, The Message: "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive someone's sins, they're gone for good. If you don't forgive sins, what are you going to do with them?"

Indeed, what will we do with the sins we have not forgiven? We can bundle them all up and carry them around, but we will only find ourselves dangling from a noose, like Judas. If only he had stuck around for another day, and had slipped furtively through the night with the others, perhaps we would be taking communion this morning in the parish church of St. Judas Iscariot. Instead, we can only weep for the one who willing chose to die, rather than live in forgiveness. It was in his failure to accept that he was forgiven, for he knew not what he had done, that Judas died alone, strangled by the sin tethered around his neck.

Our very own Easter story is completed when we rise again, shining bright with the knowledge of forgiveness for every sinful act, for every sin that could ever be conceived and tell all the world that it, too, is forgiven, that the Empty Tomb stands eternally as the reminder that in Peter's words: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

That salvation is not ours alone, but belongs to everyone. As the Father has sent Jesus, he now sends us. Amen.

American Good Friday

2011-04-22T10:05:00.001-04:00

Today we shall weep for last night's lost basketball game
and no longer for a child shivering in an African hut
still scratching the bites that will kill her.

Mourning rises like incense,
hope crucified on the corpse of a tree.
Wild beasts stalk the land, sniffing the air for a whiff of milk or honey.

Our God is dead, forsaken, broken, whipped by our own flagella.
We cry out for Elijah and the crowd waits in silence
for a chariot of fire to bear us away.
But there are no chariots here anymore,

Only ashes to mark the place where our gold turned to rust, where moths devoured our silken garments and all our barns turned out to be too

Big after all.

Maundy Thursday: Shorting Jesus

2011-04-21T22:40:00.000-04:00

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

In his bestselling book about the 2008 world financial crisis, The Big Short, Michael Lewis weaves a compelling tale of the small group of people who were paying attention when the rest of the world was rushing like a herd of Gadarene swine, possessed by devils, over a cliff.

The apologists for the criminally corrupt system that calls itself “capitalism” have spent much of the past three years telling us that no one could have predicted that the market for Collateralized Debt Obligations, (worthless mortgages bundled together into even more worthless mortgage bonds) would unravel—and to such devastating consequences. Of course, the point of Lewis' book is that not only was it possible to predict, but it was impossible not to. The main characters in his book did predict it, and in the process, made billions when the system blew itself to bits. Only an extraordinarily deluded cult, like that of free market religion, would have consistently kept betting that the laws of economics had been suspended and that the madness of the crowds would last forever.

It's Maundy Thursday in Holy Week, the observance of the ancient Mandatum, that Jesus' followers should wash each other's feet as a symbol of mutual servanthood as he did theirs on the night of his arrest. It is a mostly neglected ritual, practiced in those churches who still use some form of the traditional liturgies, and in a smattering of Anabaptist, Holiness, and fundamentalist free churches. It has none of the glory of Easter or Christmas and, is often avoided by even the otherwise devout. That's because, Maundy Thursday seems like shorting the Gospel.

After all, everybody knows how the story ends: an Empty Tomb, a Risen Christ, the disciples forgiven and gathered back, ready to convert the world. Why dwell on all the dark stuff between the Triumphal Entry and Easter sunrise? The good guys win, so let's have a Cantata!

The problem is, without the dark days of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, there cannot be an Easter. Without a Gospel that focuses on serving other people there cannot be a Gospel of Resurrection. Without the Big Short of Jesus' betrayal, abandonment and death, there cannot be the joy in the morning.

I'm going short on Jesus tonight. I think it will pay off big time.

A Homily for Palm Sunday Year A

2011-04-17T20:08:00.000-04:00

What Should I Do With Jesus?

Matthew 21:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9

Philippians 2:5-11

Matthew 26:14- 27:66

No one could remember who started the chant. Later, some people said it was one of the Galilean women, in town for Pasha, the old women, who rock back and forth when they pray, in ancient dance with the Spirit. Others said it was one of the Zealots, their hands resting on their hidden daggers, daring the Romans or the Temple police to interrupt. Others said it was one of his, maybe the one who betrayed him, stirring up the crowd with a shout of insurrection.

But whoever started it, the crowd began to repeat it, until it became a deep rumble, an earthquake, a roaring of the sea. “Hosanna!” they cried in unison, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of Yahweh!”

They clapped as they chanted, and people began to lay down their cloaks, and covered the Roman bricks with palm branches. “Hosanna!” they stomped. “Blessed!” they cheered. “The one who comes in the name of Yahweh!” they shouted.

He sat awkwardly, sidesaddle, to keep his feet from dragging on the ground. The little donkey's ears pricked and her eyes darted back and forth among the crowd as they pressed in to touch him. He squeezed their hands as he passed, and kissed the infants they held out to him. He was smiling. His eyes went up to the top of the wall. On one side, a garrison of Romans stood. On the other, the Temple police. Each group glowered at the spectacle on the road.

It took him a long time to pick his way slowly through the throbbing crowd, through the cheers, the songs, the chants, the incense of revolution rising to mix with the smoke ascending from the Temple chimney.

He stopped finally at the gate to the Temple and dismounted. The entire city, it seemed had turned out to see him. His men looked at each other, swords at the ready. The time had come.

Of course, the story doesn't end the way it starts, in triumph. It ends in tragedy. A young man, who had called his people to live a new life of freedom, apart from the crushing boots of Empire or the smothering cloak of Religion, hanged as a traitor, a rebel, an enemy of God and the State.

In the end, there would not be a crowd that called for a new King on David's throne, but a crowd who demanded blood, vengeance, and the swift, justiceless peace that dictators so crave. For in every revolution, there are those who prefer slavery to revolt, order to freedom, quiet to justice. In every revolution, there are those who side with power, who would crush dreams and silence hope. And the revolution proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth was no exception.

For, this preacher of Nazareth, this son of a carpenter, this man of the people, had come preaching the end of the status quo. He had proclaimed the equality of women, the empowerment of the poor and the re-ordering of the social system. He urged people to abandon tribe and tradition and follow him into a new world, where the Kingdom of God was not some prophet's sweaty night-time fantasy, but a living, breathing reality in the here and now.

And for that vision, he was executed.

We've often heard that the crowd of the Triumphal Entry was the same as the crowd outside Pilate's palace. But the record does not say that. Nor does the reality of revolution support it. One has only to watch the unfolding revolt in one dictatorship after another these past few months to grasp how the two crowds exist in the same places at the same time, each with a competing and irreconcilable vision for their nation. Will it have the order of military power or the messy volatility of freedom? Will it end in joyful celebration or in a puddle of blood? Which crowd will win? It all depends on what future the people really want.

When asked: “What should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” the crowd outside Pilate's palace opted for Caiaphas' compromise with power that one man should die, rather than risk the vengeance of the Empire. They regained the peace, temporarily, but in a few short years, the false peace of compromise would perish in the unquenchable fire of the Roman legions.

I wonder which side we would be on. Would we have believed that the the Day of Salvation had dawned or that peace at the expense of justice should be maintained? Would we have been ready to die with him or would we have called for his blood to be on us and on our children? Would we have stood with him at his trial, or denied we even knew his name?

Which crowd would we have been in that day? Which chant would we have shouted to the highest heaven?

For though two thousand years have passed since that fateful week, the question remains the same: What shall I do with Jesus, who is called the Messiah?

The First Theological Council Day 2

2011-04-09T20:45:00.001-04:00

The day began with Morning Prayer, followed by a meditation from Bishop Waldo in which he expressed his own view that he yearns for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the Episcopal Church. He said that this is very different from an endorsement of promiscuity, whether in straight or gay relationships. Further, he noted, that not every expression of homosexuality is necessarily an expression of "orientation" but may simply be good old fashioned sexual immorality, just as every heterosexual act is not pure.

He told the delegates that we tend to rejoice when those with whom we disagree suffer a fall, citing the example of the Song of Mriam at the Red Sea. But he noted that human (or even angelic) rejoicing in the suffering of another being is never acceptable to God, no matter how many theological points it may put on our scoreboard.

He emphasized that he was expressing a personal opinion and not speaking ex cathedra. In other words, he spoke as a fellow traveler on the road, and was not trying to impose an episcopal viewpoint on the delegates. Further, he said that he just might be wrong, and wanted to be in dialogue with those who disagreed. Later in the day he clarified what some heard as an endorsement of the presumed 2012 liturgy on the blessing of same-sex relationships. He was neither presuming that such a liturgy should be approved, nor in fact stating that he would vote to approve it without serious theological work having been done beforehand. He stated that those who favor blessing same-sex couples tend to be dismissive of the Biblical holiness codes, especially in Leviticus 17-20. Yet they seem to have no problem with legal prohibitions on other Biblically condemned sexual acts, like rape or incest. The theology of same-sex relationships must include an honest discussion of Biblical sexual ethics, especially those which do not conform to modern understandings of proper sexual behavior.

Small group discussion followed and from all appearances, the delegates engaged the topic eagerly and honestly. In my group, the consensus was in favor of full inclusion, but there was deep regret that most conservatives were reluctant to publicly express their dissent, for fear of being shouted down. That would be tested shortly when the plenary discussion followed and the floor microphones were opened.

The first speaker was a priest (and a dear friend of mine) who openly dissented. That gave other conservatives the courage to speak as well. But there were also passionate and moving expressions from others, including several gay delegates, some of whom are open about their sexuality and others who are quietly closeted. One priest, in tears, told of her gay son, brother and sister and how she loved them simply as son, brother and sister, never even thinking of their sexuality. Another priest said he would be forced to renounce his vows if General Convention continued its delay of full inclusion.

In the afternoon, delegates sat by congregation and talked about how they might bring this discussion back to their own parishes. There was a general longing for guidance from the Diocesan staff and a clear desire to prepare a deep theological study that was loyal to scripture, tradition and reason while demonstrating that God was indeed "doing a new thing" in the Church's understanding of faithful, monogamous same-sex relationships. Bishop Waldo promised the appointment of a theological study group, made up of trained theologians on all sides of the issue.

The day ended with Holy Eucharist.

*************

So what did it all accomplish, this gathering of 400 people trying to be in communion, while in great disagreement? It may ultimately fail, an attempt to reconcile what may prove to be irreconcilable. After all, this is not like Congress, trying to agree on a budget, where all sides must give a little to get a vote through. This is a matter of truth, of justice, of the very fabric of the Gospel. Truth is not simultaneously true and false, and the Church knows that. We've tried to have it both ways for thirty years now, and the time has come to "stop limping along on two opinions" (1 Kings 18:20-21). Either the Episcopal Church believes that grace is sufficient or it doesn't.

But at least the Diocese of Upper South Carolina is finally, at long last, talking about it.

The First Theological Council Evening Day One

2011-04-08T22:31:00.001-04:00

I was late getting out of Sumter and hit the Friday afternoon spring break traffic that snarled its way out of Columbia along I-26 nearly to Chap in before it settled down to a more normal, merely dangerously overcrowded narrow-shouldered highway of death at 75 MPH. So I missed the opening session of the First Theological Council and, from the leftovers I spotted, what appeared to have been a rather scrumptious dinner. I slipped through the crowded room during "The Church's One Foundation" to the joyful strains of "by schisms rent asunder and by heresies distressed," (The irony was not lost, and I couldn't help but smile.)

The evening opened with a meditation by Bishop Waldo on what it means to live in community. He emphasized that the monastic life of St. Benedict and his order was to guide us and that we should strive in our small groups to show a spirit of forgiveness, reconciliation and mercy. As I typed my notes, I could see the man next to me shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He finally leaned over and said, "You're not supposed to do that here." I stopped, puzzled. "I'm just taking notes." I wanted to add, "But don't you see how wonderfully hip I am on my Zoom, so much cooler than those poor misled, IPad people," but apparently before I came all high-tech note-taking had been banned. I looked around for a quill and a roll of papyrus but all that was available were cheap pens and tiny pads of paper. In the spirit of Benedict I switched off the Xoom. It's going to be a long damned weekend and these updates aren't going to be as easy as I'd hoped.

We were then led through a facilitated discussion of three paragraphs of the opening of the Anglican Covenant. Each participants was given plenty of time to react to questions like "When I is it more faithful to be in communion than to be right?" A perfect setup for people who are comfortable with ambiguity and impatient with pat answers, but not so good for people who just aren't sure about all this stuff. The group talked for an hour and then the plenary resumed and people came up to microphones to say things like "What does it mean to be right?"

One delegate even went so far as point out that we were there because of same-sex relationships and that families are families even if they have two mommies or daddies. It was clear that most or all of the people who spoke were from the liberal or moderate side of the debate. Bishop Waldo even tried to draw some conservative voices, reminding us that this was a safe place for diverse opinions, but the conservatives spoke volumes with their silence. The trust that is necessary for open exchange is not yet born. Perhaps tomorrow?

The evening ended with Compline, that most gloriously sublime Anglican service and people wandered out, into the warm spring night.

Theological Counciling

2011-04-07T19:14:00.001-04:00

On a day when the news media and the Twitterdom are obssesed with the imminent closure of the United States government, the earth rocked again in Japan and wars continued to rage across Africa and the Middle East. But since "earthquakes in one place after another" and "wars and rumors of war" are simply just an excuse for a two minute story in the mindless news cycle, what more appropriate time could there be for the Episcopal Church in Upper South Carolina to spend the better part of two days talking about how Christians should talk to each other, that is, if we ever really were to talk to each other about something more substantive than parish budgets, the proper colors in which to drape the altar, and where the youth group is going on its annual ski trip.

The Diocese's First Theological Council will be held Friday and Saturday in the historic Christ Church, Greenville. As Theological Councils go, it's not exactly Nicea. The delegates will not wrestle with the deep divisions that threaten the Anglican Communion, but with the simple act of hearing other people who claim that Jesus is their Lord, too. The Council will use the first eight paragraphs of the already dead-on-arrival Anglican Covenant, which most certainly will never become the new operational norm for Anglican Churches. That's because the Anglican Covenant is a deeply flawed vision of what Christian community is and how it should function in a Church which has historically resisted any attempt to require a statement of faith beyond some very simple things.

In the five centuries since the great and unfortunate Protestant Reformation, Anglicanism has said that it considers itself in communion with any Christian fellowship which accepts four basic things: 1. The Holy Scriptures, as containing all things necessary to salvation; 2. The Creeds (specifically, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds), as the sufficient statement of Christian faith; 3. The Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion; 4. The historic episcopate, locally adapted. But since 2003, the Anglican Communion has been struggling to find an understanding of sexuality that could be rooted in Scrpture and yet open to people who are gay or lesbian. Hence the Anglican Covenant.

To be clear, the Anglican Covenant is not really under consideration during the Council. That will come later, presumably after some debate among the delegates to the Diocesan Convention. Even if the Diocese approves the Covenant as a new creedal statement, it's unlikely that the Episcopal Church will follow suit, nor is it likely that a majority of the other national Churches which make up the Anglican Communion do so. Conservatives don't think the Covenant is punitive enough (devoid as it is of anathemas for those who violate it) and liberals are in general agreement that it is too punitive (replete as it is with anathemas for those who violate it). It is the perfectly awful result of theology by committee and will likely suffer a well-deserved defeat.

Still the Covenant contains some useful things. Bishop Waldo's instructions to the delegates are to study the Introduction to the Covenant, "because the Introduction provides high-level principles for Christian community from scripture, tradition and reason. The Covenant itself articulates details for living out those principles in the global communion. For our purposes at this Council, the high-level principles will be more relevant." In other words, it admonishes Anglicans to treat each other with mutual respect and charitable assumptions, things long taken for granted in a faith communion that prided itself on unity amid diversity.

So, we shall gather, and worship together as we have always done and we will re-learn things we have always known and try to practice them.

Since invitations to the Council were limited by space considerations to convention delegates, clergy and a smattering of other elected diocesan officeholders, there are more than a few people feeling left behind. It is my intention to provide regular updates via this blog and Twitter throughout the Council for those with their noses pressed to the glass. That's probably going to cost me some of my regular readers and a Twitter friend or two, but it's a small price to pay to let some sunshine into an otherwise murky process.

A Homily For The First Sunday in Lent Year A: Into Temptation

2011-03-13T22:01:00.001-04:00

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Romans 5:12-19

Matthew 4:1-11

We imagine him out there, sitting in the shade of some overhanging crag, wrestling with a fallen Angel. We tell the story as if it were all so obvious that his opponent was some red demi-god with a forked tail and pitchfork. But we misread the Gospel when we imagine it like that.

For he was not some Superhero in a cape, with extraordinary powers of resistance. He was a human, as we are, struggling to understand what God wanted him to do with his life. After he wandered off from his encounter with his cousin, John the Baptizer, he was as confused you or I would have been. John had tried to talk him out of being baptized—for John's baptism was reserved for notorious sinners, for tax collectors, hookers, drunks and ne'er-do-wells of various stripes. But he had insisted, impelled by something he couldn't quite grasp. And then there was that mysterious voice, and the white dove who had landed on his shoulder, as he came up from the water.

During his sojourn in the desert, for forty days and nights, he went over the scene, reliving it moment by moment. He remembered his parents' words to him, their quiet re-telling of the story of the shepherds and the Magi. He remembered his bar-mitzvah, when he'd holed up in the Temple for three days, while his frantic parents scoured the Holy City searching for him. He remembered his father's instructions in the carpenter's shop—on how to carve a piece of wood or make a table for a rich man's home. He was tired and hungry and thirsty and pretty much prayed out.

That's when the Tempter showed up. Did he come as an old man, full of the wisdom of the ages? Did he come as a young boy, in search of a rabbi to guide his life? Did he come as a beautiful woman with a smile as bright as the sun and a playful twinkle in her eye? To understand the Temptations of Christ, one must read the original story of sin in the Book of Genesis.

The writer of Genesis opens the story like this: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made.” The temptation of the first humans came not from some alien place, but from within the Creation that God had declared Good. The snake, who is not called “evil” or “the devil” but simply “crafty,” poses a very simple question: "Did God say, `You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

The woman, perplexed perhaps by this talking serpent, is quick to respond, “Oh, no. We can eat from these trees. It's only the tree in the middle of Paradise that we can't eat from. As a matter of fact,” and she eyes the man beside her, “we can't even touch it, or we'll die.”

Notice that she gets the Word of God twisted in her response. There was no prohibition against touching the tree or its fruit—only its eating. And the serpent chuckles. “That's ridiculous. God knows that if you eat this fruit, you will become Gods yourselves. That's why he doesn't want you to do it. Why, if you eat it, you will not only not die, but your eyes will be opened and you will understand Good and Evil.”

The Tempter, in his first appearance in the Bible, is telling the truth—at least partly. Because when the man and woman do eat the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened and they don't die, at least right then. All that happens is that the universe is rent in two and suddenly, there is Good and Evil when a moment before, there had only been Good. The Tempter quotes God's Word, but in a way that twists its intent. The hapless human couple stands naked before each other and are overcome with guilt and shame.

That's the same way the Tempter tries to engage Jesus. First, an innocent sounding question: “So, you're struggling to figure out if you're the Son of God? Look, you're out here in the desert and you're starving to death. If you're confused about it, why not just find out: turn these stones into bread. For God's sake, man, don't starve to death if you've got the power to do something about it.”

But Jesus has been meditating on what it meant to be called Son of God. And he, unlike Eve, does not get the Word of God wrong:"It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

It is not so easy to break the spirit of someone who has been dwelling in the desert with holy memory. So the Tempter comes back for round two. Suddenly they are standing on the very top of the Temple, in the center of the Holy City. "Look, this whole Son of God thing is really tough. You are going to need every last bit of Divine confirmation you can get. Just throw yourself down there. Because you know the scripture: 'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.' After all, if you are the Messiah, nothing bad can happen to you.”

But Jesus is not so easily convinced: "Again it is written,” he replies, “'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

But the Tempter has not lost his thirst for yanking Evil out of Good, and in a flash, they are at the top of the world's highest mountain. Atop it, they gaze out on the Seven Wonders of the World: from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Temple of Artimes at Ephesus. The Colossus at Rhodes, the Great Pyramid of Gaza, Zeus on Olympia, the Persian Tomb of Mausolus, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria.

The Tempter smiles. “Pretty impressive, isn't it? Look, being a Messiah from some backwater village in Galilee, in that ridiculous little province where you live—what do you call it? Oh, right, Palestine. Well, being a Messiah there can't give you any of this. All that's going to happen to you is those people are going to turn on you and kill you. But I can give you what everyone really wants: riches, power and glory. Go back there, and there's a cross with your name on it.”

And Jesus looks him straight in the eye. “Get out of here, Satan! For it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"

The Temptations of Adam and Eve and the Temptations of Jesus are not so very different. In each case, the Tempter is offering something that they already had. He is just offering it in a way that will be certain to disrupt the relationship they had with God. And he does it by twisting the word of God so that it says the opposite of what God meant.

And each case, they were only offered what they already had. The couple in Eden had plenty to eat and they knew what Good was: the entire Creation. Jesus had the power to turn water into wine and to feed five thousand people from five pita loaves and two tilapia. So it would have been easy to turn to stones into bread. Jesus had angels who would minister to him—they had been there on the night he was born and they came to the desert that day, as the Tempter walked away in defeat. Jesus may have been from little Nazareth of Galilee, but he already had all authority in heaven and earth. He didn't need to bow to down to the dark power that runs the world's political systems to get something that was already his.

We have these stories in scripture to remind us that our wrestling with dark forces, our Temptations, whether in the Garden or in the Desert, are really just the experience of every human. We are constantly tempted to declare something or someone Good or Evil, though that is the sole province of God. We are constantly tempted to gain power over others or fling ourselves off religious roofs in order to impress others with how pious we are. We are constantly tempted to use the things that God has given us for ourselves rather than for others. And why wonder why we find ourselves so overcome with guilt and shame.

We are tempted to use the season of Lent as a time of Grace-getting, using our penitence as a sort of religious insurance policy, cashing it in to pay for our trespasses. But, as St. Paul notes: the gift of Grace is not like the trespass. This isn't a zero sum game between God and us. We have been given Grace, freely. We may be tempted to turn Grace into religion, but Grace is a free gift.

Scott Peck once told a story about a Northern traveler who stopped for breakfast in a country restaurant in the rural south. You know the place, you've probably eaten there yourself a time or two.

The traveler ordered his favorite breakfast: coffee, eggs, bacon, toast.

But when his plate arrived, he was puzzled by the white stuff in the middle of his plate. “Um, miss,” he said, summoning the waitress.

She came back to his his table, “Yes, sir, is everything all right?”

He pointed at his plate. “What is this stuff?”

"Why sir,” she replied, “them is grits."

“But I didn't order it," he protested.

The waitress smiled her best Southern smile. "Sir, you don't order grits. They just come!"

For the gift is not like the trespass. You don't order it. You don't manipulate it. You already have it. It just comes. Amen.

Outside the Locked Doors of the Cathedral, A Call for Justice

2011-03-12T15:37:00.000-05:00

They came, hundreds strong, standing in the spring sunshine. They were young and old, working class and middle class, union and nonunion, white and black and brown. There were Muslims and Jews, Christians and nonbelievers, Unitarians and Baptists and Lutherans. There was a sprinkling of Episcopalians, the usual suspects: the Chair of the HIV/AIDS Ministry, some folks from the Cange, Haiti outreach, an old hippie or two. They clapped and cheered and called upon our elected leaders to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly before our God. They prayed for the Governor and the Legislature.

But I'm not proud of my denomination today. Because 500 yards away stood the historic Trinity Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina.

And its doors were locked.

We missed a chance to witness to the leaders of this State that their heart and treasure are not in the Kingdom of God. Because we're still so captivated by the culture that we don't understand that doing justice means more than opening a soup kitchen or donating some food to the food bank. We're still so sound asleep that we haven't heard the knocking at our door and the quiet voice of our Lord imploring us to wake up. We're still so contorted by our debate over sexuality that we've forgotten that the whole Law and Prophets hang on two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. We blew it. Again.

That God can raise up the Children of Abraham from rocks is small comfort. But at least the rocks were there, praying. Maybe next time, the Episcopal Church can show up.

Ash Wednesday, Year A, March 9 2011 --A Reward in Full

2011-03-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

It was April 1945. The women of Ravensbruck whispered the rumors that the war was nearly over. All the years of hard labor, of torture and terror, would soon be behind them. American troops were advancing on Berlin from the west and the Russians from the east. Any moment now, they would be saved. They were skeletons, their malnourshed breasts giddy with hope.

Until they woke up that morning to the sounds of screams and the shouts of the guards. The order had come from the dying Reich that the camp should be emptied of its inhabitants. The orders came for 20,000 to be marched out and the rest gassed and then cremated. In one of the cells, huddled in the gloom of impending death, sat a woman. Whether she was old or young we don't know. How long she had been there, we don't know. Was she a Polish Jew, a faithful Catholic a Gypsy, a lesbian? (For all of them and dozen other groups bore the brunt of Germany's mad rage at Ravensbruck.) We don't know. But what we do know is this: before the guards came to drag her away, she found a piece of paper and a pen and she wrote a prayer. Then she stuffed it into a crack in the wall. This is what she wrote:

Lord, forgive not only the men of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Remember rather the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart that has grown out of this. And when they come to judgment, Lord, let all the fruits we have borne be their forgiveness.

It's Ash Wednesday and those terrible hear words fall hard on our ears: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Someone makes a crude ash cross on our foreheads and then we go off to work or to school or to shop and later, it all seems a little surreal. For we are not dust: we are living, breathing souls, and this whole ancient rite seems a bit overwrought and hysterical. It does not seem to have much meaning in a world that teems with life. Maybe that's why there are so few people in our pews today. This is so very different from our weekly Mass, where the celebrant absolves us of our sins and Alleluias ring off the rafters.

But not today. Today we are looking directly into the eyes of everyone whom we have wronged in ways great and small, but we have done and by what we have failed to do. Our own failings pile up, corpse-like, in the torture chambers of our heart. We count them and we shudder. Did I really do that? Did I really say those things? Is there still that place in my heart that unforgiveness lurks and eats away at my soul? Yes, and yes and yes.

For that is what Ash Wednesday is about. The confrontation with the most difficult of all sins: the sin of religious observance that is all about what we do, rather than who we are. In today's Gospel, Jesus does not condemn fasting or prayer or giving our money to the poor. In fact, he assumes that people who want to live the values of God's Reign will do them. It is the way we do them that brings us the reward we deserve.

If you are here today to get your forehead swiped like a credit card so you can go on about your life with nary a thought of your own sinfulness, then you will receive your reward. You get to leave here, little bits of ash across the bridge of your nose, and you can take satisfaction that everyone who sees you later will know that you are faithful to the old traditions. You will have your reward in full. Go and rejoice in that.

But if you come to the altar today, trembling in deep awareness of the ways in which you have broken relationships, stored up treasure on earth, ignored the call to justice and refused to forgive those who have wronged you, then you will have your reward in full as well. You will dwell in the light of grace and the awareness that the Reign of God is not about what you do, but about who you are. Go and rejoice in that.

For Ash Wednesday is a bit of a divine prank. We are already forgiven of every sin we have committed, every hurt we have caused, every lustful and hateful thought ever to linger in our dreams, before we ever set foot in this place. We don't need a religious rite to receive divine grace. But if we are willing to open ourselves fully to the divine reality that all our accomplishments and all our failures are just so much dust, we can receive the gift of grace as a treasure, a sacrament, a life-giving touch from the One who looks on in secret and forgives.

The prayer of the woman of Ravensbruck was the prayer of someone who had dwelt fully in the reception of her own ashes. She knew that she was about to join the ash pile of human history. Her prayer was as much for her tormentors as it was for all of humanity. Her forgiveness was a sacrifice that rose to highest heaven. When you receive the ashes today, imagine that they are her ashes, for they are, and yours and mine and Jesus'. And you will have your reward in full.

The Supreme Court and the Westboro Baptists: The Right to Be Wrong

2011-03-02T21:56:00.000-05:00

Today's United States Supreme Court 8-1 ruling that members of the Westboro Kansas Church have a constitutional right to their repugnant protests of military funerals is offensive to most people who have any sense of decency--but that does not mean that the Supreme Court is wrong. In fact, in its defense of the cult's right to protest, the Court has reminded us of the most fundamental right of the American people: to speak their mind even if their mind is twisted, perverse and wicked.

Chief Justice John Roberts, citing previous Court rulings that protected protesters' rights to burn the American flag or distribute offensive cartoons of political figures, said that the government cannot punish words or ideas "simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable." That's exactly right.

When religious or political extremists use their freedom wrongly many people would prefer that the government shut them up. Why should we allow them to attack innocent people with their hate speech? Because we're Americans, that's why. Contrast the Court ruling with the assassination yesterday in Pakistan of Shabazz Bhati, Pakistan's outspoken Minister for Minorities. Bhati, a devout Christian, had long defended the constitutional right of Pakistan's Christians and other minorities to worship in freedom.

Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for his murder. And the Pakistani government, which increasingly finds the ideas and words of people like Bhati too dangerous to protect, is unlikely to do anything about it. And while President Obama, along with Pope Benedict, the Archbishop of Canterbury and other world leaders all condemned the killing, our Supreme Court has today issued the most prophetic response to Bhati's murder.

The right to speak freely, the right to think wrongly, the right to believe the most absurd and disgusting things are just that: human rights. And they are not to be abridged. Not in America. May it always be so.

Draconian: A Second Look At the GOP's Cuts

2011-02-13T17:09:00.000-05:00

Okay, perhaps I wasn't being fair yesterday when I slammed the Tea Party's proposed budget plan for the rest of the federal fiscal year (which runs until September 30). Maybe I was just being a sorry liberal, not caring about my children and grandchildren and the oppressive debt they are going to have to pay off. Maybe I just didn't care about the job-crushing,innovation-stifling, anti-American, Neo-Marxist-Muslim Caliphate that Barack Hussein ~~Osama~~ Obama is trying to foist on an unsuspecting nation. Maybe I'm just a tool of the enemy.

So I decided to look even closer at the House Appropriations Committee Tea Party-inspired plan. Here's what I found:

Terminated programs:

AmeriCorps
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Project RIO (Reintegration of Ex-Offenders)
YouthBuild (a jobs training program for youth in the juvenile justice system)
Green Jobs Innovation Fund
Career Pathways Innovation Fund
National Health Service Corps Scholarship Fund
Family Planning (Title X)
Teen Pregnancy Prevention Discretionary Grants
Mentoring Children of Prisoners Grants
Even Start Family Literacy Program
Striving Readers Grants for Middle and High Schools
High School Graduation Initiative (School Dropout Prevention Initiative)
Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (higher ed financial assistance for very low income students)
LEAP (work-study program for low-income college students)

Even the Tea Partiers can't completely gut every domestic social program (yet), but they are proposing deep reductions in the following:

Community Health Centers which serve the uninsured (46 percent of regular appropriation)
Substance abuse treatment (more than $200 million cut)
Community Services Block Grant (44 percent cut)
Low Income Home Energy Assistance contingency fund (66 percent cut)
FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program (50 percent cut)
Title I (K-12 education for low-income students) ($693.5 million)
IDEA (special education) grants to states: (nearly $560 million)
Commodity Supplemental Food Program (11.4 percent cut)
Community Development Fund ($2.95 billion, or 66.3 percent cut)
Project-based rental assistance ($715.5 million, or 8.4 percent cut)
Public Housing Capital Fund ($1.07 billion, or 42 percent cut)
Housing for the Elderly ($551 million, or 67 percent cut)
Housing for Persons with Disabilities ($210 million, or 70 percent cut)
Head Start ($1billion, or 15 percent cut) Yes, I misreported this yesterday as one of the terminated programs. More Marxist disinformation. Sorry.

Back in 7th century BCE Athens, a lawyer proposed a new set of laws, to replace the oral traditions and to be administered through a new court system. Draco's solution to the arbitrary and unfair traditions was to impose extremely harsh sanctions. Debtors were forced into slavery. The death penalty was ordered for even minor infractions of the penal code. "Draconian" became the term for any legal solution utterly lacking in moral sense.

So, on reflection, I wasn't being fair yesterday. If the GOP succeeds with this madness, (an all too real possibility), the deficit will continue unabated and the real structural problems with Medicare and Social Security will remain. But America will be poorer, less educated, less healthy and less competitive than we already are.

Here's fair: restore taxes to their pre-2003 levels for people like me, fix the gaping holes in the Medicare and Social Security systems and save the country. That's fair.

But this--this is just Draconian.

The Tea Party's Foolish Budget Consistency

2011-02-12T09:11:00.001-05:00

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. --Ralph W. Emerson

On Wednesday, after Hal Rogers said he would cut $36 billion from current-year federal expenditures, the Kentucky Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee was dragged into a dark corner of the Congressional playground and threatened by Tea Party bullies, the feathers of their Indian headdresses waving in the revolutionary breeze. "Cut more!" they cried. "Cut $100 billion! Or else!"

So he did. His proposal on Friday to completely eliminate or severely reduce the size of hundreds of federal programs beginning on March 5 reads like the midnight fantasy of a Heritage Foundation intern: cut spending on HIV/AIDS, overseas food grants, juvenile justice, neighborhood policing, space exploration, weather services, food and shelter programs for the poor, community-based health care clinics, the Internal Revenue Service. Completely eliminate the perennial conservative bugaboos of Head Start, NPR and AmeriCorps.

You have to give the Tea Party credit: they yearn for consistency. They promised that they would cut spending and this is their first attempt. They are going after programs that make their cultists writhe in glorious hatred. But they are incredibly foolish in their consistency.

In the scope of a $1.5 trillion deficit, they have left untouched the real causes of the deficit: reckless tax cuts, over-reaching military adventures, Medicare and Social Security. Average monthly federal spending in FY 2010 in Iraq is $5.4 billion and in Afghanistan is $5.7 billion. That's more than $125 billion a year ignored by Tea Party and its statesmen, philosophers and divines.

But the foolish consistency of the Tea Party demands elimination of AmeriCorps, where AmeriCorps members spend at least a year serving their country, working in programs at nonprofits and schools. That's going to save $1 billion as it puts thousands of nonprofits out of business. Not to mention the 100,000 people who will be unemployed on March 5 when the program ends. Of course, the Tea Party's budget doesn't have any extra money in it for unemployment insurance claims from out of work nonprofit staff and AmeriCorps members. For that would be inconsistent.

And the Tea Party is not inconsistent. Foolish, yes. Inconsistent, no.

South Carolina's Great Notion: Jump in the River and Drown

2011-01-23T17:14:00.000-05:00

The politicians are talking about "sharing the pain" and "making tough choices." But as the The State notes in the first installment of a series on the losers in the political game of cutting vital state services, it is the "least of these" who will bear the brunt of South Carolina's morally and fiscally bankrupt government.

Medically fragile children, elderly shut-ins, the mentally ill, families rent by addictions: these are the losers. The winners will be the political elites who will wag their heads in mock compassion, and cut deep and wide. There's nothing we can do, they will intone, our hands are tied. We have this pledge, you see, that says we will never raise taxes, and since we no longer have the money to build Soybean Museums or establish endowed chairs in Southern Studies, we must cut services to the sick and the poor. Of course, the politicians remind us, they are sharing the pain. They are making tough choices.

February 1, TANF payments to South Carolina's poorest families (what used to be called "welfare") will be reduced by 20%. This means that those families receiving the maximum payment of $271 a month will now receive $216 a month. Of course the politicians remind us, they are sharing the pain. They are making tough choices.

The politicians have a great notion, that the faith community and the nonprofit community will step in to rescue them from their malfeasance. That could happen, I suppose. But if the past is any guide to future, I'm not very hopeful. In 2010, the largest nonprofit funder of health human services in South Carolina, the United Way, raised $55,000,000 from generous donors around the state. The sounds pretty impressive until you realize that the deficit in health human services in the next six months is more than $250,000,000, nearly five times as much as the United Way raised in a year. The great notion of South Carolina's political elite was borrowed from the blues singer, Leadbelly, in Goodnight Irene:
Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in the town,
Sometimes I get a great notion,
To jump in the river and drown.

South Carolina is getting ready to jump in the river and drown. Shared pain. Tough choices. Not a life preserver in sight.

A Sermon for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

2011-01-16T13:16:00.001-05:00

Epiphany 2

Year A

Come and See

Isaiah 49:1-7
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42

Almighty God, by the hand of Moses your servant you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last: Grant that your Church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, and may secure for all your children the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

He couldn't get it out of his head. The crowd was there as always: the devout older women, mumbling prayers quietly; the younger ones, the ones with bloodshot eyes from the working the long night before; the men: sweaty traders, polished businessmen, the occasional lawyer or scholar, and all manner of assorted drunks, thieves, pickpockets, and politicians. They brought their tales of faith and fortunes lost and gained, of trysts in the dark with somebody else's spouse, of petty crimes and grand larcenies. It was the same, day after day. He would pray with each one and pull them into the muddy water with him. He pushed them down, holding them beneath the sacred flood and then pull them out, just as they began to panic under the water. They would smile, every last one of them, as they turned back to the rocky shore. And he would motion for the next.

Then one day came someone he would never have expected. It was impossible—this could not be. For he was not like the others, he was pure. John knew him as well as he knew anyone on the earth. But he insisted and John, struggling against the core of his being, relented. They didn't pray first. There was no confession. John watched him, below the water for what seemed like forever. And when he stood, his white linen robe dripping mud, John took his hand. From out of nowhere, a white dove fluttered and lighted on the man's shoulder. John stumbled back, blinking his eyes. As he walked away, this one whose life was so intertwined with his own, John suddenly realized that he had never known him at all. He looked back at John from the shore and nodded, slipping away into the crowd. In that moment, John realized his work was ending.

The following morning, he was walking along the path back down to the River, he caught sight of Jesus meandering slowly down the river road. John found himself shouting: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! I've been telling you that someone was coming after me that was far more important than I am. This is the one—the one that I've been doing all this work for. When he came to me to be baptized I saw the Spirit land on him just like a dove. God told me this was going to happen, that one day the Spirit would come and mark the One who would baptize you with Spirit instead of water. I saw it, yesterday. I'm telling you: this is the Son of God.” The man in the white linen looked at him silently, and walked away.

The next afternoon John stood on the shore, telling two of his followers, Andrew and a friend, what had happened when Jesus came walking back by. “There he is,” John shouted, pointing through the crowd: “The Lamb of God.” But Jesus didn't even seem to hear. He just kept walking.

Andrew nudged his companion. “Let's see what he's up to.” They nodded their goodbyes and trotted along through the street, toward the city, a few paces behind. The man in the white linen turned. He looked them up and down. “What are you looking for?”

For a moment they were speechless. What were they looking for? Andrew blurted out: “Where are you staying?”

The man in the white linen said simply, “Come and see.” And they spent the first of many a remarkable night with the man who would change the universe. Andrew left for awhile and his found his brother. “We have found the Messiah, come and see.”

As he and Simon entered the house, Jesus rose to welcome them. “Simon Johnson, I've been waiting for you. Around here, you're going to be called Rocky.”

It's Year A in our Lectionary cycle, which means that most of our Gospels this year will come from Matthew. But this week, we hear from John, the last of the Gospel writers, and in some ways, the most important of all. For John's version of the Jesus story is not written as a biography, or even as history in any meaningful sense of the term. It is written with a single, defining purpose, as he writes in the epilogue: “So that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” It is a Gospel of questions, and questions answered with questions, from “What are you looking for?” to “What is truth?” and “Do you love me more than these?”

Well, you might say, we answered those questions when we showed up here this morning, so give us something else, preacher. Of course we are here because we believe, at least on most Sundays between 8AM and noon. But this brief little story of the two days after Jesus' baptism shows that there's a whole more to believing than just saying “We believe.”

Let's start with Jesus' first words in the John: “What are you looking for?” Now there's a question to ponder on your bed at night. What am I looking for? True love? A better job? A fix for a broken heart? The replacement of treasure vanished when the banks melted? You're here, in this place, singing all the songs, repeating the psalms, amening the prayers, eating the bread and drinking the wine, and there's that little voice inside that moans: “I still haven't found what I'm looking for.”

Because, as Andrew, Peter and their unnamed friend discover, there is a whole lot more to believing than simply believing. First you have to find out where Jesus is staying.

John uses one of his favorite words here: the Greek verb μενω: which means, to stay, abide, last, remain, endure, continue, dwell. It implies a sense of permanence. John the Baptist recognizes Jesus when the Holy Spirit remains upon him. When Jesus provides enough food to feed 5,000, with bushels left over, he tells the crowd to seek food that does not spoil, but that lasts for eternal life. He promises that he will dwell in those who dwell in him. And every time that Jesus stays somewhere, people faith pops out all over.

We would love to believe that Jesus stays in places like this: beautiful buildings given,as the brass plates say, “the Glory of God.” But Jesus didn't take his new followers into a building like this. He took them into the city, into the beating heart of humanity and revealed to them that there is where he was staying. Over the next three years, time and again, he would plunge into the muddy waters of people, baptizing himself in their daily lives, giving them small glimpses of what the world could be like if they would only come and see it.

Jesus may come here when we gather in his name, but he stays in the world, a world which he has come into to transform, a world that, in the end, all too often rejects his message. He is staying, not among the religious, but among the rest: a Samaritan woman who had gone through three lousy marriages; another, naked in the city square, on trial for her life, because she had committed adultery, beggars blind and lame, swarms of hungry and sick people. Come and see, he says. This is where I stay. If you're looking for something, something real, something eternal, you are only going to find it out here, among the people. He disciples learn, slowly, that finding Jesus means looking in the places where no one would expect him. Like John the Baptizer, they would only come to know him when they discovered that that everything they knew about him was wrong.

A year ago this past week, the island nation of Haiti was destroyed in an earthquake that killed a quarter million people. The world responded with huge promises of aid. Haiti, we vowed, would be rebuilt. This time, the rich nations of the world wouldn't make the same mistakes that plagued Haiti for centuries. This time we knew what to do. But a year later, a million people are still homeless, and Haiti remains as wrecked as ever. The criminal elite that still rules the nation has worked devilishly to stall or stop or steal the help that has come. Rich donor nations have not paid more than 80% of their pledges. Rebuilding a nation means more than just believing that it needs to be done. It's tempting to believe that Jesus, if he ever was present in Haiti, has surely gone on to more promising fields. When we ask, “Jesus, where are you staying?” He answers, “Come and see.”

During the past year, Episcopal Relief and Development provided shelter for 10,470 Haitians, medical service for nearly 60,000, food for nearly 30,000, non-food supplies to more than 40,000, water and sanitation to nearly 50,000, and jobs for thousands more. Jesus hasn't left Haiti, even if others have, and we can find him, if we will only come and see.

On a cool spring evening, April 4, 1968, Martin King was hungry. He was in Memphis, where a sanitation strike had paralyzed the city. He knew he had to speak to the workers, the city leaders and to preach a sermon the following Sunday. In room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, he got up from the desk where he had been working on his sermon. He shaved, put on his coat and stepped outside his room onto the balcony where James Earl Ray had him in the crosshairs of his 30.06.

Two weeks before that, King had spoken to the sanitation workers and told them: "It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. I can hear the God of the universe saying… 'The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness'." The people who heard Martin speak thought Jesus had left them and it was time to take things into their own hands. Following his sermon, riots broke out across the city. The violence broke Martin King's heart. So he had requested a chance to come back to Memphis, to speak to them again, and this time he would urge them to follow him in a peaceful march, protesting in silent witness the injustice of their lives and livelihood.

He had done that the day before, April 3. That night, at the Masonic Lodge, Martin preached peace and justice like he had never preached before:

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.”

And then came the prophetic moment, for Martin had been staying a long time with Jesus. And he knew that staying with Jesus changes you, just like changed Andrew and Peter and their friend.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

At 6:01 PM, on April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray squeezed off a single, perfect shot from his hunting rifle. In the days and weeks ahead, some people thought that Jesus had gone on to more promising places, as the cities of the America burned. But Jesus just said, come and see.

This weekend we remember the life and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr. When Jesus asked him what he was looking for, he answered “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'..That my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

And Jesus said to Martin, “Come and see.”

Today, an African American man is the President of the United States of America. A young Indian American woman is the Governor of the State of South Carolina. Because there were people who were willing to stay with Jesus and finish the work that Martin started. It's not finished yet, and Jesus is still here, bidding us “come and see.”

Yes, Jesus is here in this beautiful place. But more importantly, he is outside those doors, patiently staying, working alongside us to bring his kingdom to our city, our state, our nation, and our world. The work of justice is holy work, and it is not easy work. Sometimes the enemy comes in, sowing seeds of hatred and discord. Sometimes a madman picks up a gun and sprays death into the fields of innocence. Sometimes, we get tired. Sometimes we forget what we are looking for.

But Jesus keeps calling us to come and stay with him and see. If we do, we will find what we're looking for. Amen.

Words Have Meaning

2011-01-09T21:31:00.001-05:00

"Words have meaning," as any Dittohead can tell you, is Rush Limbaugh's favorite rejoinder to the political Left. Ironic, isn't it that so many of his fellow travelers on the Anarchist Highway have suddenly become deconstructionalists, insisting that words are only words, so fraught with nuance and ambiguity they are ultimately devoid of inherent meaning? The Right wing has attempted, since shortly after the tragic murder of six people and the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, to claim that their use of revolutionary rhetoric and calls for a "Second Amendment remedy" if they fail at the ballot box, are just metaphors, misunderstood and twisted by their enemies into a call for people to actually take up arms against the United States of America.

When Sarah Palin puts Democratically held congressional seats on a map with crosshairs over them, when Glenn Beck warns that "there will be rivers of blood" if America loses conservative values, when conservative bloggers called for vandalism against Democratic officials offices during the (first) debate over health care reform, or when Rep. Michelle Bachmann tells her constituents she wants them "armed and dangerous" we are expected to accept that they are just words, devoid of meaning, just rhetoric, just the sort of ordinary political debate that happens in a free Republic.

If those same calls were issued by a radical Muslim imam, they would be held up as incitement to terrorism. And when some deranged Muslim hears those calls and blows somebody up, the Right says that's what happens when people repeatedly call for a war--somebody eventually answers the Bugle Song. But it's a false equivalence, says the Anarchistic Right, to equate their calls for "extremism in the defense of liberty" with calls to armed jihad against America.

The Left is not entirely without guilt in this issue, but there has been nothing on the Left to compare with the daily onslaught, on talk radio and cable "news" programs for violence against the political enemies of the Right. In fact, Rep. Gifford's Tea Party-backed opponent in the last election held a campaign event advertised with the supposedly metaphoric tagline: "Get on Target For Victory in November. Help Remove Gabrielle for office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly." According to the deconstructionist Right, it was all in good fun, just a harmless fundraiser. Kelly can't be blamed if some nutbag thought he meant to actually shoot her.

While we don't know what was in the head of Gifford's would-be assassin, and it appears that he was a mentally unstable young man rather than a cold-blooded political murderer, it is impossible to believe that his actions were not influenced, at least in part, by the divisive and hateful speech coming from the Right.

It is past time for the rhetoric of hate, violence and insurrection to end. This country can not long endure the reproaches of pseudo-patriots stirring up irrational fears. The media empires that are making billions in profits from selling soft-core revolution need to be held accountable.

Because, no matter what the post-Gifford Right-wing now says, words mean things. Dittos, Rush.

The Second Sunday After Christmas Day Year A

2011-01-02T18:19:00.003-05:00

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

His head was pounding. In the near darkness, he could just make out the leather sack, filled with the little pebbles of dried sap. He tucked it under a rough camel hair blanket. But he could still smell it. He never was that big on incense. But she loved it and so he'd figure out something to do with it. Make her a necklace maybe, since he could never afford to buy her one made of real jewels, not on the wages of a carpenter. And he wouldn't be going to back to work in Bethlehem any time soon.

He lay back on the pillow and watched her sleeping, her breasts rising and falling softly, the baby nuzzled between them. He stroked her hair and she stirred.

“Wake up, my love.”

She wrinkled up her nose and started to turn away, when the baby woke up with a sigh. “Joseph, you woke him up. He just got to sleep an hour ago. I thought he'd never settle down after the astrologers left.”

“Mary, we've got to go.” He stood up with a sigh.

“Go? Joseph, what are you talking about? We don't have to go anywhere, but you have to go work.” She sat up, holding the baby close. His eyes were open as he nursed, boring into Joseph as if he knew the deepest thoughts of his heart.

“I'm not going back.” He lit the fire, his back to her.

“What? What do you mean? Joseph, it's been so hard. You just got this job and we just got this place,” she looked around the tiny room. It wasn't much, but it was better than the barn they had been living in. “You can't just quit your job. We have a baby, remember?”

“We're going to Egypt.” And while she sobbed, he told her about the angel in his dream, and about how they had to leave Bethlehem before Herod found out where they were. Besides they had a bag of golden coins, it would be enough to get them started in a new land, far away from the crazy Idumean who called himself the King of the Jews.

It's only the second Sunday after Christmas and the Jesus story is already full of tension, fear and death. The astrologers are slipping out the back door of Joseph and Mary's house while Herod's storm troopers are sniffing around the front. The angel comes wafting into Joseph's dreams like a wisp of incense smoke slowly rising to the ceiling. The little Lord Jesus, no longer asleep on the hay, is being jostled about by the forces of life and death.

What in the world is Matthew trying to tell us? Luke's Nativity story makes a certain narrative sense: the young couple leaves Nazareth to go Bethlehem for the census. They stay for a week, get their son ritually circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, and go home to raise their family. But Matthew—dear Matthew, he packs so many story layers into each sentence that's you could spend a lifetime and never tease them all out.

In Matthew's story, the young couple is just in Bethlehem, as if they've been there all along. There's no census, no inn with no rooms, no shepherds quaking with fear, no heavenly host. There's just Joseph, with his technicolor dreams of angels who are always giving him impossible tasks. If you didn't read Matthew closely, you might think that Mary, who never utters a word in Matthew's version, is the bit player and Joseph is clearly the star. But Matthew's story has to be read with your eyes very close to the scratches of his quill, or you miss the delicate layers of the story and the reasons he tells it this way.

Matthew starts with a genealogy that traces Joseph's ancestry back to Abraham, and he puts some names in italics for us: Judah and Tamar, Salmon and Rahab, Boaz and Ruth, David and Bathsheba. Now if you weren't paying attention in Sunday School or if you tune out during the Old Testament readings each week, those are the names of some other famous couples in Biblical history, every one of them wrapped in the red silk tangle of sexual scandal, just like the young couple in Matthew's story.

Then there is Joseph himself, who, like another Joseph in Hebrew history, knows that angels speak in dreams. The first Joseph, whose dreams got him sold into slavery in Egypt, parlays his dream-weaving talents into the Prime Minister's seat. Matthew's Joseph runs off to Egypt, after the angel warns him that Herod his coming for his little boy.

And Herod: Matthew's Herod is a despotic, paranoid-schizophrenic, who would just as soon slaughter you as look at you. He killed two of his own children, one of his wives, at least one mother-in-law, and once, the entire membership of the Sanhedrin. He knew his subjects so hated him that, according the the historian Josephus, he decreed that one person from three hundred families in Jerusalem should be slain on the day of his death, insuring that somebody would be mourning in the city. Josephus tells us that Herod's sister Salome quietly ordered his troops to stand down, which only made his subjects more delighted at his demise.

But Herod, pitiful and mad king that he was, is a cardboard cut-out of the king of Egypt at the time of the birth of Moses, who, terrified at the prospect of immigrants taking over the country, ordered a systematic slaughter of all the newborn immigrant baby boys. Now the Lectionary this morning leaves out this horrifying part of the story, but in Herod's madness, he orders all the children under two in Bethlehem to be murdered, in a vain attempt to undo the Messiah's coming.

So off Joseph, Mary and Jesus go, sneaking along the Gaza peninsula, until they are safely out of Palestine and in Egypt—exactly the sort of journey a refugee family would take if they believed that their traditional enemies were more to be trusted than their own countrymen. In other words, Jews wouldn't normally consider Egypt safer than Israel, unless....unless there's more to the story.

Remember the first Joseph gone off to Egypt? And when did Joseph and his family come back home? Four centuries later, after surviving slavery and genocide. And who led them back? Moses. The second Joseph is off to Egypt, to protect his young son. And they only go back home after surviving poverty and genocide.

Matthew is sitting down with his Bible and looking for pattern matches—and he find them everywhere he looks. Moses was the Anointed One. Jesus was the Anointed One. The children of Israel found safety in Egypt. Joseph, Mary and Jesus find safety in Egypt. That's why he keeps writing: “This was to fulfill...”

Matthew is a conspiracy theorist of the first order, only he's not looking for linkages between the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, George Soros, the Knights Templars and a shadowy group of European bankers. He's writing at a time that the Jewish world had fallen apart, a generation after Jesus. The Temple lies in ruins, the Romans have carted away its gold and silver, there isn't even a puppet-King sitting on a cardboard throne any more. And faithful Christians, searching the sky for a sign of Jesus' return, are getting discouraged. Revisionists are even suggesting that Herod wasn't such a bad guy after all—he did a lot for the economy and rebuilt Yahweh's Temple, after all. The religious elite, who always viewed the Jesus movement as a deviant sect, had never let up in their attempt to portray Jesus as an ignorant showman, the illegitimate child of an immoral woman, a false Messiah like so many others, who didn't in the end, protect them against the Empire after all.

Matthew is at pains to remind the Jesus movement that their faith is not in vain. The prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures pointed ahead to restoration of the Davidic dynasty—that's why genealogy is so important to Matthew. All those scriptures about Israel as God's Son, says Matthew, come to their fulfillment in a man who really was God's son. Just like David, he came from Bethlehem—even though he grew up in Nazareth. Just like Israel itself—he came out of Egypt. And just like Moses, he was preserved through a massacre of other children. Mathew is saying that there is a divine conspiracy at work here—things aren't what they seem, and you have to peel back the layers of the scripture, history and tradition to figure out the deep truth of the Jesus story.

So other than giving us a great plot for a History Channel episode on The Great Conspiracies of the Ancient World, what lessons can we take from Matthew's nativity story?

Lesson One: Jesus is not the kind of Savior that most people want. Faced with the pain and suffering of living in a broken world, we long for escape. Jesus goes right into the heart of the world—right into Egypt, even though that's the last place we would think we would find a Savior. Matthew is telling us that we're not going to get raptured out of this world—we are called rather to live deeply in it, and transform it by our presence.

Lesson Two: Even when political rulers sow seeds of death on the most vulnerable people in society, whether by neglect or disdain, God calls us to protect them. The Angel in Joseph's dream orders him to protect the child by acting, quickly, decisively and a great personal cost. In a time when the prevailing view of the poor, the sick and the homeless is that they deserve their plight, we are called to be Josephs, challenging the dark powers on their own turf, and covering the bodies of the poor with own bodies.

Lesson Three: Jesus is not just for Christians. We're going to hear more about the Visit of the Magi during Epiphany, but the aroma of their frankincense in today's Gospel reminds us that Jesus has come for even people whose view of God is very different than ours. The Magi were astrologers from a far away land. They were, in that quaint old Latin word for country-bumpkins, “pagans,” poly-theistic believers in a host of gods, who worshiped in ways both foreign and shocking to monotheistic Jews. They are here, in the center of the Christmas season, to remind us that Jesus is either the Savior of the whole world or he's the Savior of nobody. He is incarnate as a Jewish male descendant of David—but his Anointing makes all creation whole again. Even people from other faith traditions.

The Divine Conspiracy of Christmas is a deliberately shocking story. It's supposed to shock us out of complacency, fear and loss of faith. It's suppose to move us to action on behalf of the world, so that what has been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled.

We are God's co-conspirators in the Christmas story. Let's go to Egypt.

Amen.

The 4th Sunday of Advent Year A- The Strangest Dream

2010-12-18T21:53:00.002-05:00

Isaiah 7:10-17

Romans 1:1-7

Matthew 1:18-25

He began laying down these tracks just two weeks after she died. You can hear it under the music: the only woman he had ever really loved, who dragged him out of the pit of Hell, who was always faithful to him even when he wasn't faithful to himself, had gone home—and he can't wait to join her.

It's a remarkable mixtape of faith, passion, hope and pain, with great songs like Sheryl Crow's Redemption Day, Tom Paxton's Can't Help Wonder Where I'm Bound, and The Sons of the Pioneers' Cool Water. Johnny's voice is long gone, but his love for June Carter burns through every breathless phrasing. My favorite cut on Johnny Cash's Ain't No Grave is Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, his gravelly cover of Ed McCurdy's lilting old anti-war song from 1950.

Last night I had the strangest dream

I'd ever dreamed before

I dreamed the world had all agreed

To put an end to war

I dreamed I saw a mighty room

Filled with women and men

And the paper they were signing said

They'd never fight again

And when the paper was all signed

And a million copies made

They all joined hands and bowed their heads

And grateful pray'rs were prayed

And the people in the streets below

Were dancing 'round and 'round

While swords and guns and uniforms

Were scattered on the ground

A strange and hopeful dream, indeed—as divine signs always are. They come unbidden to the unseeking, bright promises with dark edges of hope and warning. Like the one that came to Ahaz, King of Judah at the end of the 8^th century before Christ.

The tiny kingdom of Judah was in deep trouble, as it mostly always was. The ascending power of the Assyrians, a breakaway province of Mesopotamia, stretching across parts of what is now modern Turkey, Georgia, Iraq and Iran, was pushing southwest, through Syria and the northern Kingdom of Israel. The rulers of Syria and Israel have formed a coalition to fight back and they have been trying unsuccessfully for months to get Ahaz to join them. Finally, they send in an elite force of saboteurs across the land and try to stage a coup d'état , scheming that, in regime change, they can force Judah to become their ally. But Ahaz has schemes of his own: figuring that the Assyrians were likely to win against the puny forces of Syria and Israel, he has been toying with the idea of an alliance with the Assyrians. Still he can't help but remember that he is Judah's King, the descendant of David, and he is supposed to trust in Yahweh for his help. One day faithful, one day faithless, Ahaz can't stand the uncertainty anymore and goes out for a walk along the lake on Fuller's Field Highway. That's when he sees the priest-prophet Isaiah and his little boy.

Ahaz' heart sinks. Nothing good ever comes out of meetings between prophets and kings. Isaiah bows as he approaches the troubled king.

“Your majesty, greetings. You look troubled, sir. Is there a problem? You are the King of Judah, after all, son of David. What have you to be afraid of? The Lord will give you a sign, if you ask for it. Whether it's as high as heaven or as deep as the world of the dead, just ask.”

Ahaz does not want a sign from Yahweh, or from anyone else. He wants to have his throne secured. He wants to send the Syrian and Israelite meddlers back into their home countries with their tails between their legs. He wants peace with Assyria. He wants Isaiah to go away. “Prophet, you know what the Good Book says: 'You should not put the Lord to the test by asking for signs all the time.”

Isaiah smiles his sardonic, prophet smile. “You know, you people tire both God and me. So whether or not you want a sign, the Lord will give you one. You know that young mother-to-be? She's going to have a son, and she's going to call him Immanuel, God is with us. Because before he even gets weaned off curds and honey, those ridiculous excuses for kings up north in Syria and Israel will be consigned to the dustbin of history. Your throne is safe, Ahaz, but, it's too bad you wouldn't trust in Yahweh instead of trying to out-scheme the schemers. Because Assyria is coming, and they are going to roll over this whole land and devastate it.”

From nearly three thousand years later, we have no idea who the young mom-to-be was in Isaiah's prophesy. She might have been Ahaz' wife, Queen of Judah, the mother of the boy-king Hezekiah who would preserve his nation under the crushing weight of the Assyrian invasion. She might have been the Isaiah's quirky prophetess wife, who was always calling their children by names both wondrous and terrible: Mahershalalhashbaz, (“Quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil”) or Shearyashub, ("a remnant shall return”). A little God-with-us would, no doubt, have made a great forward on the family soccer squad. Whoever she is, and whoever the little boy was, his birth would provide a sign to the wavering, doubting people of Judah: God was with them and God's incoming presence would bring both promise and peril, hope and warning.

That's probably why Matthew uses the encounter of Isaiah and Ahaz to tell us about the strangest dream of Joseph. Joseph is engaged to be married to a young woman named Mary. Like every couple in the tension-fraught pre-nuptial eternity between the popped question and the quivering vows, there arose a problem between Joseph and Mary. It seems that Mary was pregnant. Pregnancy before marriage was not, in itself, so unusual in that day. In fact, there was no actual prohibition against pre-marital sex, as long as it led to marriage. But Mary wasn't pregnant because she and Joseph couldn't wait for the huppa. In fact, Joseph hadn't touched her, at least not in that way. But apparently somebody else had.

And she had come up with the most ridiculous story to explain her swelling belly, and the child of someone else who grew within her: she said the Angel Gabriel came to her one night and asked her to become the mother of a King who would reign over the house of Jacob forever, and she had agreed. Joseph had stormed out of Mary's home, leaving her in a crumpled heap of pain and rejection. He didn't know who it was that had stolen the heart of his beloved Mary, but there wasn't a man on the planet stupid enough to believe that story. Joseph slammed doors, and hammered nails, and raged at everyone around him, while he tried to put his broken heart back together. He ws a decent guy, and even though Mary deserved a public trial and stoning, he couldn't bear to do that. He decided that he would just quietly call off the engagement and let people assume what they wanted about the child. Maybe the guy who stole his girl would man up and take care of the child he had fathered.

Finally he gave up on that horrible day and lay sobbing on his bed, Mary's beautiful, tear-streaked face burned into the back of his eyelids. He tossed and turned, until finally sleep came, not the sleep of rest, but the sleep laden with dream-signs of promise and peril.

In his dreams, Mary's angelic face faded into the face of an angel, who spoke in the tongue of thunder and whisper that is the tongue of angels. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

The angel's voice was so clear and startling that Joseph bolted up and looked around, listening for the rustle of great feathered wings flapping. But it was dark and quiet, and the summer air hardly stirred. He looked out the window at the bright stars of heaven and knew what he had to do. He could hardly wait for the sun to rise.

Divine dreams and signs always bring promise and peril, hope and warning. That's what it means to hold God in your hands or in your dreams. The little boy Emmanuel would protect Ahaz from his fears—the loss of his throne. But he would usher in a Fear more terrifying than anything Ahaz could have dreamed up: the end of the sovereignty of the Davidic dynasty. From then on, Judah might have kings, but she would never be free of Imperialist boots on her neck. Joseph's beloved fiancee would bear a son, heir to the throne, but it would be in a poverty-racked backwater, and he would only save his people at the cost of his own life. Promise and peril, hope and warning.

That's why Christmas is so hard to get. We dream of tinsel and sugar plums, for the sweetness of ginger and cinnamon and the softness of slowly falling snow. But Christmas is not about sweetness, though it is about salvation. It is not about the promise of a manger, it is about the peril of a cross. While it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, it is far more fearful to hold the living God in your hands. It is far more fearful to dream with God, hope with God, make promises with God. For when we open ourselves to seeing God in our hands, in the everyday signs of everyday lives, of children and love affairs gone sour, we risk our lives. For only in risking our lives can we understand the dream-signs of God-with-us.

Just before the season of Advent began in 1989, a remarkable dream-sign came to the people of Germany: the fearsome beast of the Soviet Empire lay dying and a group of young Germans came to dance on its grave. Tom Brokaw, then the news anchor for NBC, arrived and trained his camera on a crowd of children dancing and singing Ed McCurdy's old peace anthem: Last Night I had the Strangest Dream. The world rejoiced, the terror was over. God-with-us had finally, at last, brought justice and peace to world that hadn't slept since its heart was broken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even though the world promised two long decades ago to put an end to war and reap a peace dividend, it wasn't long before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the Long War in the old lands once named Assyria began. Because, while the world held God in its hands on that November night in 1989, we were not willing to believe God's sign. We kept trusting in our own strength, our own schemes, our own power. And something far worse than the Soviet Union befell the world: a war against an invisible stateless enemy, that wins by turning its adversaries against themselves.

Just like it wasn't too late for Ahaz or Joseph, it isn't too late for us to grasp what God-with-us really means. Ahaz didn't listen and Joseph did, but neither of them escaped the peril that comes with the divine in-breaking. In our day, we have been given a series of most remarkable dream-signs to remind us that God is, indeed, with us. It is our choice to believe or to turn away to our own schemes.

Our world is wracked now in fear and disbelief, afraid to trust that God is with us. In fact, it is rival notions of who is God is, and how God is with us that is tearing our world apart. In the wake of fear-soaked dreams, the blood of holy innocents is spilled and we make deals with devils in the hope of defeating an enemy that has arisen because we have refused to trust in something greater than military might. Human rights are sacrificed on the altar of security and security becomes a sad victim of the war for God.

This Christmas, when Emmanuel once again comes into our dreams, will we see him as the Prince of Peace, or the God of War? It's our dream-sign and we can choose its ending. Whatever choice we make, it will cost us our lives. Amen.

Sanctimonious Refudiation

2010-12-08T22:30:00.000-05:00

So let me get this straight: a candidate runs on a platform that promises significant change and when he doesn't come through, it's not because he lacks the will to govern, it's because they were foolish enough to believe that he would.

In explaining why he caved in to the people who destroyed the budget surplus, who believe that unemployment benefits are only for un-American losers and that you line the pockets of the rich while trampling the needs of the poor, President Obama told the White House Press Corps:

People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position, and no victories for the American people. And we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are, and how tough we are -- and in the meantime the American people are still saying to themselves, not able to get health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, or not being able to pay their bills because unemployment insurance ran out. That can't be the measure of how we think about our public service. That can't be the measure of what it means to be a Democrat. This is a big diverse country, not everybody agrees with us. I know that shocks people.

Well, no sir, it doesn't shock people that "not everyone agrees with us." What shocks people is the degree to which you repeatedly refudiate your campaign promises.

When Sarah Palin coined that term in her now famous Tweet, people snickered. But, as Herself noted, the Bard made up words all the time and this one is particularly Shakespearean. Half "repudiate," half "refute," what better way to sum up this disillusionment of those who thought that "change" meant that America would somehow be embarking upon a new course? Instead, we have the spectacle of the Great Change Agent making excuses for why we really can't change. We can't close the gulag at Guantanamo, we can't have a public option for health care, we can't repeal the Bush-era budget busting of tax cuts for the rich, we can't have full civil rights for gay and lesbian couples, we can't stop the abuse of the Bill of Rights under the Patriot Act, we cant...

Whatever happened to "Yes, We Can?" The President has refudiated it. His refudiation does not win him friends among those whose only goal is to see him fail, while it leaves those who supported him feeling ever more betrayed. Or as the Bard had the Earl of Pembroke wryly muse to King John: "oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault worse by the excuse."

The First Sunday of Advent Year A: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

2010-11-29T08:42:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13:8-14

Matthew 24:36-44

Everyone has a favorite. Some people cite Neville Shute's On the Beach, with its interminable wait for the poisonous radiation that has destroyed all life in the northern hemisphere to finally reach the beaches of Australia. Other people say it's definitely Stephen King's The Stand with its Anti-Christ who rules from Las Vegas and the climactic showdown between good and evil. Science fiction purists prefer Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle where civilization is destroyed by a comet that collides with the earth. For those who want their apocalypse covered with gore, George Romero's black and white classic Night of the Living Dead stands as the ultimate vision of the end of the world. My own favorite is Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which Earth is bulldozed by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspatial express route, and wherein all the ultimate questions of life, the universe and everything have the same strangely satisfying answer: 42.

If you're looking for the perfect End-of-the-World playlist to go along with your books and movies, be sure you've included Jimi Hendrix's Third Stone From the Sun, REM's The End of the World as We Know It, Barry MacGuire's Eve of Destruction and of course, Bob Dylan's Talkin' World War III Blues where "the whole thing started at 3 o'clock fast. It was all over by quarter past."

The end of days, the last things, the apocalypse, whatever you want to call it, is endlessly fascinating to us who live on this side of time. And it has always been so. The writer of Genesis weaves a promise of the end of the world into Yahweh's curse of the talking snake when he warns it that the offspring of Eve will crush its head someday. And a few chapters later, the world does end, in a global deluge worthy of any modern apocalyptic storyteller. The Hebrew prophets filled scroll after scroll with the promises of suns gone dark, melting moons, shaking mountains and rivers flowing red with blood on the Great and Fearsome Day of the Lord.

In today's Gospel, Matthew has Jesus and his friends sitting in an olive grove on a hill overlooking the city of Jerusalem. They have spent the day in the Temple, and the disciples are overcome with religious and national pride. Jesus warns them not to be so impressed with marble and gold, for that all they have seen will someday be laid to waste. They are stunned. Yahweh's Temple? The City of Jerusalem? What about the covenants, the promises, the Kingdom of David? Jesus is adamant: it's all going down.

“When?” they ask, “when will these things happen? And what will be the sign of your coming and the end of time?”

“Listen,” Jesus replies, “nobody knows that. I certainly don't. The angels in heaven don't have a clue. Only God knows. It's going to be like it was during Noah's flood: everything will be going along like it always has—people will live their lives, they will get married, have careers, houses, the stuff of a good life—and then, bam! They will be snatched out of their everyday into judgment. That's why you've got to be ready all the time. You don't leave your house unprotected at night, because you have no idea if this is the night some bandit has decided to rob you. So just be ready for it.”

Well, of course they were and they weren't. In the first few decades after Jesus, his followers stayed in a constant state of expectation. Every clash between the Jewish resistance and the occupation forces of Rome offer the possibility of being the one that would end it all and bring on the return of Jesus. You can hear the breathlessness of that hope in St. Paul's words to the small group of Christians who lived hidden in the belly of the imperial beast:

You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.

Paul is consciously evoking Jesus here in his counsel to the Roman believers: Don't get entangled in the world. Don't borrow money. Love each other intensely. Get ready for the battle ahead. It's coming, maybe tonight.

Paul wrote Romans from Corinth, from which he was about to leave on a mission trip to Jerusalem. He had spent months raising money for the orphans and widows in the holy city and was anxious to be on his way. While occupied with his care for the poor, Paul also had an eye on what was going on in the Imperial capital. And right about the time that Paul was penning this letter, Emperor Claudius died, and his nephew climbed atop the golden throne of Rome. He would be the last of the Julian dynasty and he's the poster child for bad government. His name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but I suspect you know him better as Nero. And Paul had every reason to be concerned about Nero's rise: within a few years, as the Christian movement began its rapid spread in Rome, Paul would be arrested and executed by Imperial decree.

The world could not possibly last much longer. In Palestine, a string of victories by the Jewish insurrection resulted in a surge of Roman forces, who started a methodical occupation beginning in Galilee in 66. The Romans, under the determined leadership of General Vespasian, began working their way south, crushing every outpost of guerrilla activity on the way towards Jerusalem.

Christians were not the only ones fixated on the state of the Empire: the Roman Senate and the military leadership was as well. The Senate, increasingly alarmed by Nero's tyranny, voted to impeach him. When the mad Emperor committed suicide, Rome itself seemed to be possessed by his demons, as usurpers, pretenders and criminals all vied to be the next Caesar. Finally, Vespasian listened to the pleas of his fellow generals and returned to Rome to be crowned Emperor. It was left to his son Titus to complete the pacification of Palestine.

Titus surrounded the city at Passover of 70, and began a siege that cut off all water and food supplies. Inside the city, things were becoming desperate, and the guerrilla leaders, never very good at doing anything other fighting, began to fight among themselves. Each day, everyone inside the city, prayed for divine rescue. Every day, outside the city, the troops dug trenches. In May, after peace negotiations broke down, the Romans burst through the walls and began to slaughter anyone who put up the slightest resistance. No one knows why--and historians suspect it was an accident--but somebody started a fire in the Temple during the chaos following the breach of the walls. From the Temple, the fire spread quickly through the rest of the city and the Romans took advantage of it. The Royal City, the throne of David, Seat of the Covenant, was destroyed. Titus arrived back in Rome and his proud father erected the Arch which still stands over the city. If you look closely at it, you can see the image of a Roman legionnaire carrying a menorah.

All over the Empire, followers of Jesus, bowed in prayer, one eye on heaven, waiting for his triumphant return. For the world had ended, and the New World must be arriving. They waited, watched and prayed. Though the sky remained stubbornly intact, and Jesus was nowhere to be seen, the followers of Jesus never quite made peace with the words of Jesus. Each time the handbasket of human accomplishment seemed headed perilously down the vertical shaft of oblivion, Christian sects arose to interpret the grimness and declare that this, finally, was the End of the Age. They always were and always will be wrong.

So why are Christians so obsessed with the time of this unknowable Time? The truth is, it is not just Christians, but their religious kinsmen in Judaism and Islam that long for the End to come. Judaism still longs for her Messiah and Islam waits for the Day of Resurrection, where Allah will make his final judgment on humanity. Other religions long for the End as well, from Bahiaism to Rastafarianism, from the Norse Final Destiny of the Gods, to the Buddhist coming of Lord Maitreya, there is some deep yearning in the heart of people for the a final resolution to all that is. Even among the post-religious secular folk, it is an article of faith of that human selfishness and greed are destroying the world and life as we know it will end, whether in the melting of the polar ice caps, or in nuclear conflagration.

The reason is simple: humanity knows in its heart that there is something terribly flawed in the cosmic order, and that the arc of the universe is bent towards justice. One need not be a socialist to understand that the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the vast interwoven web of earthly life is stretched taut to a near breaking point and that it cannot go on like this forever. One need not be a secularist to know that pouring millions of tons of carbon in the air and dumping toxic waste into the seas every day is madness. One need not be a neo-Luddite to grasp that one day some nation which possesses the ultimate weapon will plunge humanity into its greatest crisis since creation.

But the point of Jesus' teaching on the Mount of Olives was not to cower us by fear, but to fill us with hope. The end of the Temple was not the end of faith—it was not even the end of the Jewish faith. Jesus was trying to tell his followers about a new kind of faith, one that is not focused on buildings and laws, priesthoods or prophets but one focused on justice, righteousness and peace.

This is the first Sunday in the short season of Advent. Advent is often portrayed as a poor second cousin to Lent, where you can snatch some extra forgiveness for all those summer and autumn sins that have gnawed at you since Pentecost. But divine grace is sufficient for cleansing our sins and we don't need four more weeks to think about what we have done and what we have not done.

Some people think that Advent is a simply a time for monastic reflection, a warm, quiet, purple and blue zone amidst the consumer reds and greens of the Selling Season. But the Bible lessons for Advent are not monastic texts: this week we have the images of field hands harvesting and millers grinding; the next two weeks we will follow John the Baptizer's frenetic ministry from the Jordan river to a Galilean dungeon. Then, on the last week, we will watch Joseph wake up from the most startling dream, and rush off to marry his pregnant fiance.

We call this season Advent—from the Latin “coming”—because it is the time for us look, not for a way out of this world, but for a way into it. Advent is the season of coming: the coming of love, the coming of justice, the coming of peace. It is a time to renew our commitment to live each day as if this could be the Day. We have come into the world, and we are to be each of us, an incarnate Jesus for the world.

Yes, the world is broken and like people of faith in every age, we long for its healing. But the healing of the world, the beating of swords into plowshares, the loving of our neighbors, the seeking to right what is very wrong on our planet: these are our everyday tasks as we seek to enter the world. There is very real suffering in the world, and we may be tempted to see the world through very dark lenses. We could justify holing ourselves up in some Christian holy city, trying to keep the legions of hopelessness and pain outside. That is the surest way for them breach our walls.

Advent calls us to fling open the doors and enter ourselves into the places where it is darkest, where we can touch the deepest suffering, soothe the deepest pain, repair the broken walls and establish peace. The sign of Jesus' coming and the End of the Age is right here, right now, in this Advent season. It is you—formed into the body of Christ, being who you are called to be in the world, waiting not for its End but for its Beginning.

Christ the King Sunday: Be Warned

2010-11-21T17:24:00.000-05:00

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says theLord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”

In the September of 2009, after several weeks of thinking about how to best accomplish it, she decided that the time had come to remove to remove her troublesome intestines. She was home alone, and lacking the necessary surgical tools, she found a butcher knife. She sat, naked on the kitchen floor, and plunged it deep into her belly. A friend found her a short time later, wild-eyed in a pool of blood, her guts spilling out onto the tile.

Seven hours of surgery later, she was admitted to the now-closed psychiatric wing of the regional medical center. A month later, and still quite insane, she was discharged, homeless and helpless. In the months that followed, she teetered between mania and depression, and finally, after another two months in the hospital this spring, she was discharged into the hands of her family. Another six months of intense outpatient treatment, and she has finally returned to stability. It was her fourth suicide attempt over the last quarter century.

During all those years, the convoluted system of public health and disability supports had repeatedly failed her. Despite repeated diagnoses of bi-polar disorder, in between the low points, she had tried to support herself. Once, a long time ago, she was an honors student in a nursing program, a licensed massage therapist, a tax payer. But those days are long over. She had been repeatedly turned down for Supplemental Security Income and Disability payments. This time though, this system worked. She was awarded $441 a month in SSI and Medicaid health coverage. She jokes that she can finally buy her "welfare Cadillac," if only she could still drive.

My sister is one of the lucky ones. She has a family that has loyally stood by her through decades of her illness and always been able to feed, clothe and shelter her. Once, years ago, when she had appealed a denial for public health benefits, she and I sat before a Social Security judge.

"I believe you can work," he said. "I'm denying this appeal."

I looked over at her. She weighed less than 90 pounds then, and sat huddled in the chair, never looking at the judge. She nodded and sobbed quietly.

I was furious. "Look at her!" I shouted, slamming my fist on the table before me. "Would you hire her?"

The judge stared at me, unaware that a second mad Irishman sat before him. "Your honor," I sneered. "Would you give her a job?"

"Case dismissed," he said. And he got up and walked away.

I cursed him as he quickly shut the door to the courtroom behind him.

Finally, justice is done. She has a small income, not enough to live on, but enough for a few essentials. Most importantly, she has health care coverage.

Yet, it is now all threatened. Because South Carolina's leaders have not thought about what happens to the real people they deride as cheaters, liars, lazy bums, cancerous growths on our society, they have bankrupted the system that is at the long last able to offer her a tiny safety net. By spring, the Medicaid coffers will be empty and my sister, and 600,000 other South Carolinians, will lose their health care.

I will hold them accountable and will hold her and those who suffer with her up as the evidence that the false shepherds who run our government are deserving of every last bit of opprobrium we heap upon them.

But it is not me they should fear. On this Christ the King Sunday, they should be reminded that there is One who judges the judges and Who will attend to them for their evil doings.

Be warned.

A Hopey Changey Breakfast

2010-11-09T21:50:00.000-05:00

I had breakfast this morning with one of South Carolina's leading liberals. Over coffee, oatmeal and pancakes at the Original Pancake House, we laughed in the way that people do at a wake, sadness tinging our jokes blue. She's not religious, not even spiritual, and believes that whatever bootstraps that our nation might have to collectively pull ourselves up by do not come with divine shoehorns. We buy our tickets and we take our chances. Yet, somehow, by the end of our breakfast, we had found our mutual hope in the basic decency of the American people. We left, determined to keep up the struggle for justice, even in the face of a new regime for whom justice means only punishment, and not the righting of wrongs, the bringing of mercy, the humble advancing of the common good. Because, we believe, the People of these United States of America really do long for City on the Hill, whose bright, shining light is a beacon for the whole world.

If one is realistic, which is say, honest, about our chances to yank the American dream out of the fires of Empire, then things don't look too good. Our fiscal house is a mess and all the rhetoric about balanced budget amendments and ending earmarks and shrinking government do not mask the very real pain that faces us. Child poverty rates are rising at the fastest level in a generation; the federal Emergency Food and Shelter Program, a $200 million a year lifeline to families sitting on the verge of homelessness is on the chopping block; even the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka "food stamps") is facing cuts from those who think that enhancing children's nutrition at school means cutting it at home. That's not to mention the impending cuts in TANF, Medicaid and other programs for the poor.

In South Carolina, our elected leaders have created a catastrophe in waiting, spending down every trust fund, cutting taxes willy-nilly, without thought for the future, a future that came ever so quickly. Now, there is the very real possibility that what must be sacrificed is health care for the poor, and even that won't balance the budget.

In the face of all that, and with a new regime taking the reins of a government it despises, what hope can there be?

Quite simply this: the American people built this imperfect social democracy because of the suffering of the aged, the poor, the sick, the homeless, the helpless. It was not constructed in some alien place and imposed on us by a vast foreign conspiracy. The American people demanded it, they voted for it, and they made sure it got funded. It hasn't always worked the way it was intended to work, and sometimes had perverse effects on the people it was supposed to help. The American notion of the common good is not working so well right now, and people are demanding change. The rage of the new regime is focused on a system that's broken, not on the dreams that created that system.

Counterintuitively, it is the Left which can move the nation back towards a more perfect Union by demanding that social programs be accountable, by being willing to end programs that don't work, by being willing to try new approaches and by insuring that we pay for the things we want. The common good cannot be achieved through endless multi-trillion-dollar deficits that will only mean the end of that good eventually. Liberals must tell the truth that across the board spending cuts will not solve the problems facing us, any more than across the board spending increases financed by China could. We must push, prod and protest to protect the most vulnerable, and we must work to be sure that the coming pain is equally shared by us all.

Once upon a time, our forebears pledged their lives, their fortunes and their mutual honor to found this nation. They understood that we are all in this together, and that only together can we find a way out.

The 22nd Sunday After Pentecost Year C: A Sinner’s Prayer

2010-10-24T16:15:00.000-04:00

Joel 2:23-32
2 Timothy 4:6-18
Luke 18:9-14

“Their flight may be likened to an immense snow-storm, extending from the ground to a height at which our eyes perceive them only as minute, darting scintillations, leaving the imagination to picture them indefinite distances beyond. When on the highest peaks of the Snowy Range, fourteen or fifteen thousand feet above the sea, I have seen them filling the air as much higher as they could be distinguished with a good field-glass. It is a vast cloud of animated specks, glittering against the sun. On the horizon they often appear as a dust tornado, riding upon the wind like an ominous hail-storm, eddying and whirling about like the wild, dead leaves in an autumn storm, and finally sweeping up to and past you, with a power that is irresistible. They move mainly with the wind, and when there is no wind they whirl about in the air like swarming bees…The noise their myriad jaws make when engaged in their work of destruction can be realized by any one who has 'fought' a prairie fire or heard the flames passing along before a brisk wind-the low crackling and rasping; the general effect of the two sounds is very much the same."

That’s how the U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture described the locust plague that descended on the prairies of the American Midwest in 1874-75. Some two million acres of farmland were devastated, leaving poverty, hunger and desperation in its wake. This year, in Australia, the largest locust swarms in a century have decimated major crops and sent food prices soaring. On the island nation of Madagascar, already sitting on the edge of starvation, the second locust plague this decade is threatening to push 2.3 million people over the cliff into famine. Locust plagues are not just the stuff of the Old Testament.

But if locusts can devastate still in the 21st century, imagine how destructive they were in an age without modern science, without pesticides or international aid organizations. The first day, you notice a locust nibbling at the green head of barley at the edge of your tiny plot of land. You quickly crush it. The next day there are a dozen and you gather them all into a cloth sack and toss them to the chickens. The following day you start early, as the sun is coming up over the horizon, and in the pink light of dawn, your heart sinks. The field is covered. You grab your children and you all work feverishly, until the sun is so hot, no one can go on any longer—and still the damnable beasts come. Within a week, there is nothing of your crops left, and your neighbors’ fields are stripped as bare as yours.

Panic fills your throat—all you can think is that you have nothing set aside for the winter, nothing even for tomorrow, much less today. Total economic and environmental collapse spread throughout Israel in the fifth century before Christ in the locust plague referred to by Joel in today’s Old Testament reading.

The tiny nation, never a match for the great military powers of the region, had struggled for nearly a century after the exile in Babylon to just regain something of its pre-exile prosperity and it never quite got its economic house in order. Caught in the midst of larger geo-political struggles, the reborn nation was perpetually in the way of some would-be world ruler’s dreams of empire. The people felt completely helpless. Yett the prophet Joel knew that there was something the people could do—they could pray. Because in the midst of their fear, there was hope. In the midst of their panic there was the one thing that would carry them safe and secure into the Day of the Lord—the promise of Yahweh that he would give an early rain to renew their harvest—and repay them for the seasons of empty storehouses. Joel’s call to prayer and repentance is now part of our Ash Wednesday liturgy, and it still moves the hearts of those aware of their own failure and sin: “Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!”

We don’t have the historical record of what happened next, but from what we do know of the years of silence between the last chapters of the Hebrew scriptures and the opening verses of the Christian ones, Israel shortly thereafter began a long period of spiritual revival with a restored Temple and a renewed priesthood.

And the ones most responsible for that revival were a group of scholars who followed in the footsteps of the great priest-scribe Ezra. Ezra strongly resisted the Israelite tendencies towards assimilation with their national neighbors and led the great revival of the Mosaic covenant. His followers, believing that it was abandonment of the traditions of Moses that had resulted in one national disaster after another, resisted the creeping Hellenization that occurred after the invasion of Antiochus Epiphanes, successor to Alexander the Great. Their story is told in the apocryphal books of First and Second Maccabees a thrilling record of their resistance to pagan influences in Judaism. They didn’t have a name then, but by the end of the second century before Christ, they became known as the Pharisees.

They were one of the two major Jewish denominations that existed in the first century world we read about in the New Testament. The other, the Sadducees, were most closely associated with the upper classes, the elite, highly influential ruling class, led by the priestly clan of Levites. The Pharisees were a populist movement that, according to the first century Jewish historian Josephus, had the support of the common people. They accepted as divine scripture, not just the Five Books of Moses accepted by the Saducees, but most of what we now call the Hebrew Canon, the Christian Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi.

In other words, the Pharisees were the good guys: rooted in scripture and tradition, they were intent on keeping Judaism pure, so that their nation would never again have to endure near total destruction. They were on the lookout for the Messiah, the descendant of David, who would complete their work of purifying the nation. They read their Bibles, fasted, prayed and tithed. They stressed moral purity, and faithfulness to the covenant that set the children of Israel apart as a special, exceptional nation.

That’s why it seems so surprising that Jesus has his most tense encounters with the group of people most predisposed to have been his followers. But there was something about how the Pharisees viewed their own faithfulness that got under Jesus’ skin. Today’s Gospel lesson lays it out:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Tax collectors were among the most despised people in Israel, and with good reason: they were collaborators with the Empire, collecting the tribute that paid for the Roman troop patrols of the occupation. Like every Empire, Rome needed huge outlays of cash to pay for its conquests and for the grand public works programs that kept the occupied territories in a state of relative calm. As in every age, whenever there are huge outlays of government cash, corruption and graft are not far behind. Tax collectors were not just traitors in the eyes of the Judean people, they were mobsters who collected protection money on top of the Imperial tribute to enrich themselves and consolidate their own power. The thought of a tax collector going into the Temple was bad enough, but the thought of one going in to pray was downright preposterous.

Pharisees, on the other hand, were quite at home in the Temple and the houses of prayer throughout the land, known as synagogues. This was their space, and they lived to protect it and keep it strong and proud. The Pharisee, from his place off to himself, could probably look out from the Temple mount onto the crowded streets below. Surrounded by the beauty of the gold-domed Temple, high above the holy city, he probably felt his heart thrill with patriotic pride. He was part of the very fabric of this place. His prayers for the protection of the Temple and the keeping of the Law insured their continued place as the center of Jewish life. He was glad he was not like other people, caught up in their lives of sin and immorality. He delighted in the Law and took joy in the sacrifice of tithing. He was righteous. He just wasn’t saved.

The tax collector, on the other hand, had no personal righteousness to lay claim to. He was a sinner, he was lost, and he knew it. He couldn’t even pray a decent prayer. Overcome with intolerable memories of his sin, all he could say was “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” But that’s all it took. God justified the tax collector while the Pharisee’s prayer bounced off the ceiling. It sounded good to him, but God found it somewhere between silly and irrelevant.

Now, the temptation for us in examining today’s Gospel is to congratulate ourselves in not being like the Pharisee. After all, we know we’re not righteous, we know we’re sinners saved by grace, we’re accepting of others and conscious of our own failings. We must be justified, right?

The truth is that the very act of our self-justification over against others makes us far more like the Pharisee than the tax collector. And that’s especially true in our actions and views towards those with whom we disagree. Those Episcopalians who are on the liberal side (full disclosure: that includes me), often see ourselves as the vanguard of truth, the defenders of the Gospel of grace, the only thing standing between the complete collapse of Anglicanism and the post-modern world. We are glad that we are not like those fundamentalists who hate gay and lesbian people, who believe that women should be in submission to men and deny that Jesus is a Democrat.

Nor are we the only ones. A friend recently told me a story of attending a worship service in another Diocese, where the preacher railed against the “Phariseeism of the liberals.” My friend was outraged. When he told me about it, I laughed. Of course, the preacher was right. Liberals have long held conservatives in contempt, making no secret of their disdain for those whose view of scripture and the nature of the Church is traditional. The problem is, conservatives have done the same thing.

We’re both Pharisees, more concerned with being righteous in our own eyes, with saving the Anglican Communion, with winning the argument whatever the cost in people hurt, spiritual lives destroyed, and the Gospel trampled, than in recognizing our common lostness. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Gospel today offers us an opportunity to understand our sense of being lost as the key to being found. It means recognizing ourselves as sinners, having the humility to acknowledge that we just might be wrong about something, and throwing away our foolish pretensions to righteousness.

Joel’s call to Israel to repent contained not just the promise of rain and a renewal of the economy, but a promise that the Spirit would be poured out in return. For those who have wandered in locust-stripped lostness, Yahweh promises to repay the years the locusts have eaten.

Each week right before the Great Thanksgiving, we kneel and say the sinner’s prayer:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole hearts. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we might delight in your will and walk in your ways.

It’s a simple prayer, but says Joel, it is literally earth-shaking. It rattles the foundations of everything that we believe, everything we stand for, everything we think we know. Because it’s Yahweh himself who’s doing the shaking. It is Yahweh himself who forgives us, not for our sakes, for the sake of his Son, who is our righteousness. The locusts are gone, the rains come, the earth sprouts anew.

And everyone, Pharisee and tax collector, liberal and conservative, righteous or not, who calls upon the Lord will be saved. Amen.

The 21st Sunday After Pentecost: Do Not Lose Heart

2010-10-17T16:43:00.000-04:00

Jeremiah 31:27-34
2 Timothy 3:14 - 4:5
Luke 18:1-8

Everything has collapsed. And their parent’s generation is to blame. Ruinous taxes; an out-of-control government that spent lavishly on ill-fated military adventures but ignored the needs of everyday people; a yawning gap between the haves and have-nots; a sexually obsessed culture that could no longer recall how it once honored loyalty and fidelity; the total abandonment of the its founding principles, both sacred and secular, have led to the end of a long and remarkable national experiment. They were supposed to be a city on a hall, a light to all the nations and now they were a joke, a pariah, a failed nation—little more than an asterisk in the annals of history.

They had been warned, but it was too late. They had chosen to make a foolish last stand, led by a worthless leader with delusions of grandeur and that foolishness was still mind-numbing. The armies of Nebuchadnezzar had swarmed over the walls of Jerusalem, burning every building, including Solomon’s once beautiful Temple. What was left of the national treasury was captured--along with the upper classes of politics, culture and religion-- hauled ignominiously off to the deserts of Mesopotamia. The Kingdom of Judah, once a place where justice and equality were the ideals, was a wrecked and hopeless basket case. The generation that remained behind gritted their teeth against their fate, bitter at their parents, bitter at their kings, and angry at the failure of their prayers.

Few members of their parents’ generation still lived among them, but one was a priest and prophet whose years of warnings had been ignored. Jeremiah had been protected by a handful of loyal followers and hidden away from the Chaldean wrath. His heart was as broken as theirs, but his prophetic voice was still strong. He found a quill and an old piece of vellum and began to write about the future for the young people who no longer believed that there was such a thing as a future.

“One of these days,” he wrote, “God will bring back the people, and this place will begin to grow again. Seeds will sprout, crops will grow, flocks will graze on green pasture. No one will repeat the sad proverb that ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’”

Most anyone who read Jeremiah’s words in the late six century before Christ would have considered him a madman. There was no concievable way that Israel and Judah could possibly be reborn; nothing could ever come out that desolation but hopelessness and endless poverty. But Jeremiah could see what his young audience could not see. He could see the will of Yahweh to renew his covenant with them and bring them back to justice and righteousness.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

There was nothing wrong with the old covenant, if only they had kept it. But they forgot that the purpose of the law was to create economic and social justice, a country that welcomed people from other nations and that cared for the poor, the orphans, the widows. They had forgotten that the purpose of their worship was not to make them smug and self-righteous, but to make them humble and ready to forgive. This new covenant, Jeremiah tells them, will be different. They won’t be able to ignore what was chiseled onto stone tablets hidden away in a relic room, because this covenant would be chiseled into their hearts. The work of prophet-priests would end, nobody would have to remind people to know Yahweh, because everyone would know Yahweh—Yahweh would be present in their hearts, their minds, their spirits.

The people listened and they prayed. They prayed for years and that generation passed, along with the aging prophet. One day, from the east, there came a Savior, whom the later prophets called the Anointed One, the Messiah, Cyrus the Great, who crushed the Babylonian empire and liberated the Jewish people and the other nations under Babylon’s boot. God was faithful and the new covenant was created in a new Israel, with a new Temple and a people determined to keep the covenant.

Unfortunately, their good intentions were no match for political avarice. As the centuries played out, Israel again found itself under foreign occupation, first by the Greeks and finally by the Romans. Once again, injustice was the rule. Once again the people, this time, old and young, found themselves crying out for salvation. Once again God answered their prayers and sent a prophet. But he was not a priest. He wasn’t even a member of the educated elite. He was a carpenter, from a tiny northern village notable for nothing but utter nondescription. He knew was the power of prayer and the power of hope. He prayed and things happened. People got healed. Hearts were changed. People repented of their sins. The poor knew hope for liberation they had never known before. He had a saying about all his signs: “If you only have faith as big as a mustard seed, you can tell a tree to go jump in the lake and it will.”

Our gospel story this week finds him on a long trip south, towards Jerusalem, where he will confront the political powers that have kept his people enslaved. Along the way, he keeps reminding people that God’s kingdom has arrived, and that it is not a kingdom in the usual sense of the term, but is carved by faith deeply into the hearts of those who yearn for it.

Yet, the reality of life in an occupied land was at odds with his message of liberation. When would God act? When would the Romans be cast out? How long would they have to live with the stink of Roman troops fouling their streets, Roman magistrates fouling their justice system, Roman idols fouling the very air they breathed? How could anyone not lose heart under those conditions?

So Jesus told them a story.

“Once upon a time, in little city not far from here, there lived a particularly corrupt judge.” The crowd snickered. There were plenty of those to choose from. “In that city was a widow who appeared before him and asked for justice to be done in her claim against her opponent. The judge, who had no fear of anyone and didn’t even believe that there was a Supreme Judge, refused to even hear her case. Still, the widow persisted. She confronted that judge every day before his judgment seat. She followed him around the marketplace and told everyone how he was treating her. She stood outside his house with a big sign that said: ‘Stop Unjust Judges!”

“Finally, to shut her up, he took the case and ruled in her favor muttering to himself, ‘I’ve got to shut this old woman up. She’s wearing me out.’”

He looked around at the crowd. “Now listen. If even a mobster judge will eventually do something right to protect what little reputation he has, don’t you think God, the Righteous Judge, will eventually answer your cries for justice?” And then, with a sad little smile, he added, “But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

In those unjust days, widows were at the bottom of the social heap. They had no rights to the property of their dead husbands because it either went to their firstborn sons or one of their husbands’ other relatives. Even orphaned little boys had more civil rights than widows. Young women might have been property sold by their fathers to the man who could pay the highest dowry, but old, used women had no value at all. They were completely dependent upon the mercy of a public welfare system that had long before stopped working for them. The old woman knew that the original covenant given by Moses and prophesied for renewal by Jeremiah did value widows. The law said that they were to be protected, clothed and fed by the community—and if they had a son, he was commanded to care for his mother out of his father’s estate. By Jesus’ time, the Talmud, the rabbinical commentary on the law, even went so far as to order courts to set aside some of the son’s inheritance to be doled out by a judge to care for a widow uncared for by her son.

The story doesn’t give us any of the widow’s backstory, but it does tell us that she had justice coming. Now the Hebrew words for justice (mishpat), and righteousness (tsedaqah), are not just about a legal system that protects the rights of everyone but also about economic structures that provide equal social justice. And they often appear together, as in the prophet Amos (5:24): "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." In other words, even though we don’t know exactly what the woman’s case was about, we can be pretty sure it was about money.

Money is one of those subjects best avoided in polite society. We don’t ask how much money people make or question how they spend it. And we sure don’t ask how much they give to charity or to support the work of the Church. But the Bible isn’t shy about the use of our wealth. It is given to us, not to be used for our own good, but for the common good of God’s people. Moses even commanded that every seventh year, the entire tithe was to be set aside for the welfare of the Levites in the Temple and the orphans and widows in the land. Every fifty years, all debts were supposed to be cancelled, so that no one could ever create the kind of concentrated wealth that we take for granted. That was the Mosaic version of justice and righteousness in the use of money.

The reason that the Mosaic legal system collapsed was not that it was a poor system, but that it was ignored by God’s own people. They quit paying their tithes, resentful of the workers who served in the Temple, resentful of the poor, the orphans and widows who, they saw as social parasites whose poverty was deserved. In our polite society, we don’t talk about tithing and we don’t talk about taking care of the poor. In fact, we find the whole subject distasteful, threatening, un-American. It sounds like wealth redistribution or socialism or some other vaguely unsettling economic system. After all, we worked hard for what we have and if the poor, the orphans and widows would only work hard they would have what we have too.

And that’s precisely why Jesus asked his sad question: “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on the earth?” He knew how hard it would be us to have faith, to pray for justice, to wait and pray and work and give our wealth away all without losing heart. But he still expected us to do it.

The judge in the story does not relent and take her case because he is suddenly seized by the Holy Spirit and made righteous. He gives in because the widow is wearing him out with her demands. The Greek literally says that she is “giving me a black eye.” Her prayers pummel him into justice. It must have been very hard, to be a person with no rights, no wealth, no social connections and yet pursue the dream of justice. Eventually, the wicked judge gave in.

Jesus is not saying that God is a wicked judge—quite the opposite. He’s saying that if such a despicable person is finally able to do what is right because an old woman is giving him a black eye, wouldn’t God, the Righteous Judge, answer our prayers for justice in our time?

There are a lot of parallels between ancient Judah, first century Palestine and modern America. One of those parallels is that each is a society which has forgotten how God wants us to use the divine gift of wealth. In spite of the doomsayers, it is not too late for us. If we can imagine a nation formed for justice and righteousness, we can pray it into existence. If we can imagine a world where the poor are care for, we can pray it into existence. If we can imagine a Church, on fire for doing the work of ministry, we can pray it into existence.

In 1961, right in the midst of some of the darkest moments of the struggle for African American civil rights, Martin Luther King said:

I am convinced that we shall overcome because the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice….

And so if we will go out with this faith and with this determination to solve these problems, we will bring into being that new day and that new America. When that day comes, the fears of insecurity and the doubts clouding our future will be transformed into radiant confidence, into glowing excitement to reach creative goals and into an abiding moral balance where the brotherhood of man will be undergirded by a secure and expanding prosperity for all.

Yes, this will be the day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands all over the nation and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual: “Free at Last, Free at Last. Than God Almighty We Are Free at Last.”

We’re not there yet as a country. We’re not there yet as a Church. We have to work some more. We have to pray some more. We have to give some more. We must never lose heart. So that when the Son of Man comes, he will find faith on the earth. And that faith must be ours. Amen.

Dear Senator McConnell: Sink the Hunley and Take Care of the Poor

2010-10-15T12:10:00.000-04:00

Dear Senator McConnell:

Like you, I was distressed to learn of the financial deficit at the Department of Health and Human Services. And like you, I believe that it's vital for State government to act in a responsible and transparent way with public funding.

But, after reading your letter to HHS Director Emma Forkner, I believe that you are not offering any solutions to the grim fact that more than 650,000 of South Carolina's residents are too poor to afford the health care that you and the General Assembly have so generously provided for yourselves. Of course, that shouldn't surprise me: you and the majority of our elected representatives have repeatedly demonstrated that you have no concern for anyone but those who can afford to support your political career and your pet projects.

Take for instance, your quest for funding for one of your favorite projects: restoring the Confederate submarine, the Hunley. On the same day you wrote your smackdown of Emma Forkner, I received a letter from you asking me to give $3000 to sponsor the Friends of the Hunley's Annual Oyster Roast.

Now I love history, and want the full American story told, including the disastrous rebellion against the United States of America that the Hunley so poignantly recalls. So don't think that I'm anti-history. But in a time of crisis in state government, it is irresponsible for you to appropriate another single state dollar to this multi-million dollar boondoggle. Further, it's irresponsible for you to ask me or anyone else to make a charitable gift to such a project, while you and other state failed leaders play a fiddle tune to the burning of our social safety net. It's not just irresponsible, it's a a sign of your secular humanist, Social-Darwinist worldview.

You see, I come from the Judeo-Christian tradition, with which you may not be familiar. For Jews and Christians, it is a sacred duty to care for the poor and to act as defender of those who have no one else to defend them. Some of the holy texts that form our worldview are these:

Deut. 26:5-9. The Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, and imposed hard labor on us. Then we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction and our toil and our oppression; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with great terror and with signs and wonders; and He has brought us to... this land flowing with milk and honey.

Luke 4:16-21. And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read... "The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He appointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD... Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

Ps. 140:12. I know that the LORD will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and justice for the poor.

Is. 25:4. For You have been a defense for the helpless, a defense for the needy in his distress.

Ps. 10:14. The unfortunate commits himself to You; You have been the helper of the orphan...O LORD, You have heard the desire of the humble; You will strengthen their heart, You will incline Your ear to vindicate the orphan and the oppressed.

Is 41:17. The afflicted and needy are seeking water, but there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst. I, the LORD, will answer them Myself, as the God of Israel I will not forsake them.

Luke 6:20-21. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours in the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

James 2:5. Did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?

The real solution to our state funding crisis is not in a hypocritical call to "stand up for the Constitution," but in working together to do what is necessary to care for the poor, break the cycle of poverty and create an equal opportunity for everyone. The Constitution, after all, says that the purpose of government is to "form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." You have failed to honor those purposes. Your glorification of the Confederate rebellion against the Union shows that you mock the provision of the common defense, to say nothing of establishing justice, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty.

You were elected to solve problems, not ignore them. If you can't do that, then quit taking our tax dollars and go do something else with your life. If you were chosen to run a private sector corporation and had wrecked it so thoroughly, I doubt that many Boards of Directors would retain you.

Meantime, sink the Hunley, Senator. We've got poor people who need our help.

Senator McConnell's letter to HHS Director Emma Forkner is found here.

The 20th Sunday After Pentecost Year C: Unchaining the Gospel

2010-10-10T15:43:00.002-04:00

Jeremiah 29:1-7

2 Timothy 2:3-15

Luke 17:11-19

The small village lay at the northern edges of Palestine, where two ancient fraternal enemies, divided and eternally bound by both religion and tradition, co-existed in an uneasy truce woven of exhaustion, poverty and despair. The prosperity known along the trade routes of the Empire had never reached places like this. The future for most people was mere subsistence, scratching out a living in a dry, barren land from a few animals and the uncertain crops that grew abundantly one year and disappeared into dust the next.

Outside its sorry gated entrance sat ten men, their bodies tattooed by disease into a mass of sores, splotched white and red, a sign that they were sinners of an altogether other sort: the worst of the worst, bearing a curse from God they would carry to their early, desperate graves. Banished by law and fear, their only comfort was in the presence of each other. Despised by God and their own people, they lived to die, the sooner the better.

Yet even the lepers had ears, and they had heard of the healer who wandered through the land. They knew the stories of the Galilean rabbi who, by the sheer force of love, opened the eyes of the blind and made the lame walk. They had even overheard the tale of how he had touched lepers and made their skin pure again. And one day, they saw him, with his entourage, laughing at some joke about priests or politicians, and their broken hearts rose in hope that he would see them too.

The law said that, if you were a leper, you could never come close to another human being, lest the sin spread from your cursed flesh to theirs. You could only shout to them to stay back, out of the contagious zone, to go on about their lives as if you didn’t exist. People were only too glad to comply. But desperate hope is hope nonetheless, and for the first time in a long time, they dared to believe that life might return to them. “Jesus,” they cried out, “master! Have mercy on us!”

He had been watching them of course, for no one, no matter how outcast, was ever invisible to him. He stopped, and his friends took a couple steps back. Leprosy was incurable, and legend had it that even being close to one of these people could spread the curse to you. He looked them up and down, the torn and dirty remnants of their clothes clinging to the frames of starving bodies. He spoke the words they longed to hear: “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”

Moses, the great prophet, had given the law about lepers, and said that, if one had, through some miracle, been healed, he or she should call for a priest and display the evidence of soft, pure skin. The priest would come outside the gate to determine whether the curse had been lifted, and if so, offer a sacrifice. After a week, if the curse had not returned, the lepers were declared clean, and allowed to return to life in the community.

The ten men ran off, calling for a priest to come look, shouting that they were healed, that they were forgiven, that they were human again. Jesus watched them go and started back towards the village when was a tug at his robe. He looked down in the dirt at the man laying prostrate before him. It was one of the lepers, his skin now supple and clear, glowing beneath the rags that covered him.

“Thank you,” he said. “thank you. You have given me back my life.” The man spoke with a slow Samaritan drawl.

Jesus shook his head wistfully, “Funny, I thought there were ten of you guys. And the only one who took time to give thanks was the foreigner. I guess that’s about right.” Jesus reached down and pulled him up. “Bless you my friend. It’s your faith that made you well.” The man bowed, and ran off, not to see a Jewish priest, but into the hills, back to his people, leaving Galilee far behind.

We don’t really know what the disease the Bible calls leprosy was, but there are reports of it from very ancient

Egypt

, and whatever it was, people believed two things about it: that it was highly contagious and the people who got deserved it. They had done something wicked, some secret sin of heart or flesh, which burst out on their bodies to reveal their inner evil. And so laws were given, in every ancient society, and those with skin diseases were kept far away from the rest of the community, lest their sin spread to everyone else.

Lepers had no rights, no family, no community to turn to other than each other. It was perfectly fine to hate them, and to blame every problem in society on the vileness of their presence. Jesus, on the other hand, took a special interest in lepers, and broke the prohibitions against touching them. He honored them as fully human and welcomed them back into the family.

Like every story of Jesus’ healing, there is more to this one than a disease miraculously cured. Luke is trying to tell us, not just about a medical problem, but a spiritual one. The nine Jewish lepers did what they were told: they went off to find a priest who could declare them healed and fit to be a true Jew. It’s not that the Jewish lepers didn’t have faith—who wouldn’t have, given that their skin had suddenly stopped itching and the bleeding sores had disappeared? It’s just that, without a thought, they went back to their rituals, never even stopping to wonder if a religion which cast aside people like garbage was itself was the problem. They were obedient, and they were oblivious. But the Samaritan leper, the one that would have been viewed by the people of God as doubly cursed—a foreigner and diseased—is the only one who grasps what is going on. He abandons religion, ignores the law, and comes back, right into Jesus’ presence, where Jesus says: “This is what faith looks like.”

While we don’t know what Biblical leprosy was, we do know what it did to people: it marginalized them, dehumanized them, stripped them of their dignity, and allowed the unleprous majority to justify its bigotry towards them. And Biblical leprosy still exists, wherever and whenever some group is marked as cursed and contagious. For those who follow Jesus in his call to heal the world, it remains the most difficult of diseases to eradicate. For its eradication lies, not on the skin of those we consider lepers, but in our own hearts.

After all, we tell ourselves, you know how lepers are, and how they will contaminate everyone and ruin everything we’ve worked for, if we let their curse infect us. They hate us because our hearts our pure and our skin soft, smooth and clean.

After all, we tell ourselves, you know how Muslims are, and how they will blow you up just for being Christian, and how, if we don’t wipe them off the planet, they will ruin everything we’ve worked for. They hate us for our freedom and our prosperity, they hate our religion and our God.

After all, we tell ourselves, you know how gays and lesbians are, how they will molest children and destroy families and traditional values, if we don’t root them out of our midst. They hate us for our piety, they hate our faith and our flag.

After all, we tell ourselves, you know how pregnant unmarried women are, and how, if they are allowed into our classrooms, they will seduce our young people into abandoning marriage and destroying our nation. They hate us for our morals and the vows that keep us together.

After all, we tell ourselves, you know how Mexicans are, sneaking across our borders, bringing their drugs and their gangs and stealing our jobs, getting welfare and free health care and having babies who don’t deserve to be called Americans. They hate us for our language and our heritage and our clean and orderly neighborhoods.

After all, we tell ourselves, you know how the unemployed are, spending their days in a drugged haze at our expense, growing fat with their government benefits, instead of working hard like we do. They hate us for our careers and our nice houses, our large screen televisions and our IPads.

You know how the national Church is, or the liberals, or the Tea Partiers, or all those other groups that we imagine are to blame for that increasing sensation of itching under our skin. Every time we see another patch of our own skin go red with blisters, we are certain it’s because some leper has brushed us too closely.

The story of the Ten Lepers is our story. Most of the time, we are the Nine, clinging to our traditional understanding of the world: rushing off, bursting with blessings, and forgetting where those blessings come from. We want to get as far away from the leper colony as we can—and we don’t want anything to do with the people who might infect us with their sinfulness. We, the healed ones, are on the lookout for the lepers, the diseased Others, who are surely at fault for whatever is wrong with us.

In the Second Letter to Timothy, St. Paul—or if you believe the modern scholars, one of Paul’s disciples—writes that “The word of God is not chained.” An unchained Gospel can heal us and the world around us. But a chained Gospel, which is only a thinly veiled magic show, with parlor tricks that mimic real healing, can only serve to keep us in our own leper colony, away from everyone else, blaming everyone else for our own rotting souls.

Jesus’ Gospel is an unchained Gospel, and it frees us for the faith which makes us whole. It allows us to see others for who they really are, and not just a stunted and perverse caricature, tattooed onto our own retinas. It allows us the freedom to give thanks, not just for our healing, but to spread that healing to world which desperately needs it. We can leave the leper colony we have erected for ourselves, but only if we are willing to get up and let our faith make us well. Only if we are ready to touch the unclean Other, and let ourselves be touched by them.

Poverty in America--Dead Men Do Tell Tales, But We Don't Listen

2010-09-26T22:34:00.000-04:00

Proper 21C

The 18th Sunday After Pentecost

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."--Luke 16:19-31

Poverty in our nation has reached a level not seen since 1960, fueled by the financial meltdown that began two years ago. In case you've forgotten, the financial meltdown was a result of an irrational belief in the magical power of the Market to regulate itself. Safeguards that had kept the worst sorts of banker avarice in check were dismantled beginning in the mid-1990's and eventually, the Magic Market chewed its own head off. Though economists now say the worst is over, most of them were the same people who said bringing down the regulatory levee walls would result in a rising tide that would lift all boats. That worked well about as well for Wall Street as it did for New Orleans. But this post isn't even about why Glass-Stegall should never have been repealed or whether credit default swaps or other financial derivatives should be banned. It's about how we keep stepping over the poor, making sure that our fine linen garments don't brush their festering sores.

Today's Gospel lesson from Luke gives us the parable of a rich man and the poor beggar who lived ouside his gated community. The beggar died and ended up in the bosom of Abraham and the rich man died and ended up in that terrible part of the underworld, Tartarus, which, according to both Greek and Roman mythology,is a place of torment for sinners of the worst sort. Jesus, as a Jew, didn't even believe in such a place: first century Judaism held that at the Last Day, both sinners and the righteous would be judged according to their deeds. So what's he doing telling a story featuring a gruesome pagan mythology? He's doing what he does best: he's telling a joke.

You see the point of the story is that even if Lazarus comes back from the dead--and remember that John's Gospel features a story of a friend of Jesus named "Lazarus" who actually does--the people who ignored what "Moses and the prophets" had to say about justice for the poor would still ignore him. If you can step over the poor everyday when you're on the way to work or to church, then the sudden re-appearance of a previously dead beggar at your door wouldn't likely impress you. Jesus probably laughed heartily at that point, as did most of his audience, except the Pharisees, who looked about as amused as a group of Congressmen listening to Stephen Colbert talk about immigrant farmworkers.

But let's not pick on the Pharisees, okay? They were mostly good, God-fearing folks, trying just to protect their religion and their way of life. They wanted the same things we want: a nice house, successful careers, low taxes, to be left alone by the government. It wasn't that they hated poor people. They took up collections on the Sabbath day, some of which (a very small some) was used as a charitable fund for the poor. No, they didn't hate the poor. They just didn't want to do anything that would really address poverty, they didn't want to understand their role in creating it, or why it was the main concern of "Moses and the prophets." Just like us.

What if we could fundamentally alter the American way of life so that everyone would really have an opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What if we really did want to "establish Justice...and promote the General welfare" of all Americans? The first thing that would happen is that Christians would be calling their elected officials to ask what they were planning to do about the rising poverty rate. And if they told us that they were planning to cut taxes of the rich, we would laugh in their faces, and toss them out of office.

But of course, we don't want to do anything about poverty. That would be a "transfer of wealth" or "socialism" or some other shop-worn epithet that means that we want what we've got, and we don't really care if some bum is lying in the street with a dog licking his bleeding sores, we are damn sure not going to pay more taxes. And if somebody came back from the dead, with a warning that our blindness to injustice and poverty would result in our judgement, that wouldn't persuade us either.

We didn't believe Moses when he told them that keeping Yahweh's laws meant justice for the poor or when the propehts warned that all our religion was utterly useless if we didn't work to bring economic equality to our nation. So why would anybody believe it when some ex-dead guy says that the way we treat hungry, homeless, naked, sick and imprisoned people is the way we treat him?

Hilarious isn't it?

The Poor? No Big Deal. They Can Just Get Jobs.

2010-09-19T23:20:00.000-04:00

Proper 20
Pentecost +17

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.--Amos 8:4-7

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.--Lyndon Baines Johnson, May 22, 1964

The vision of a Great Society lasted two generations, so maybe that's not so bad, considering the fleeting nature of most human endeavors. But news this week that the U.S. poverty rate has reached levels not seen since 1960 was greeted mostly by yawns. We were far more interested in Lindsay Lohan's cocaine-fueled Tweets than in whether or not our actions have trampled on the needy and brought ruin to the poor.

Like Israel in Amos' day, we long for a mythical free market, where there are no restraints on buying or selling, and where getting a little extra profit at the expense of public health and safety is no big deal. The problem, we believe, is too much regulation, and too many lazy people who don't want to work. If all those people who are newly poor would just go get jobs, and quit whining about how hard their lives are, we could all get some peace. After all, there are forty million poor Americans in a country with thirty million illegal immigrants. So fully three quarters of our poverty would instantly vanish if we send them all back to Mexico or El Salvador and let the poor pick our tomatoes. Then we could just forget all those ridiculous anti-poverty programs.

Of course, Amos has to go spoil it all by saying that God isn't going to forget. But what's a little divine wrath if it means lower taxes?

Terry Jones, Damned Heretic, Has a Right to Be Wrong

2010-09-08T23:17:00.000-04:00

The United States of America, founded by religious dissenters, from Puritans and Quakers, to Roman Catholics and Baptists, has as one of its basic principles that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech." Of course, law is made in many ways, only one of which is legislative. There are judicially created laws, like the ones giving Presidents the right to invoke "state secrets" to nullify the Bill of Rights in national security interests. There are signing statements, which Presidents may employ to defy the will of Congress. There are Executive Orders, which Presidents issue to make their own laws, as President Obama did, following the passage of the health care reform, forbidding the use of federal funds for women seeking abortions under the new law. But there are more subtle forms of law, such as when the government tries to use its bully pulpit to sway public opinion on a given issue. That's happened recently, when leading members of the Administration, from the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and the general prosecuting the war in Afghanistan issued harsh condemnations against a Florida Pentecostal pastor who is planning to burn a pile of Qur'ans on September 11.

That last--the law of polemic--creates a mob, ruled only by the twin demons of demogoguery and propaganda. It is quite effective, since it appeals to the angels of our lesser nature, and it is the enemy of republican ideals.

The fact of the matter is that our nation is in dire straits, broke, rudderless and desperate. The throngs that surrounded Candidate Obama have been replaced by snarling Tea Parties clamoring for their country back. The rise of the Anti-Obama Messiahs, led by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, and supported by an assortment of blame-the-immigrants-first media outlets, is sign of how bad things are. Light on policy and heavy on emotion, they are made-to-order strongmen (and women) for a country cracking up on the rocks.

And the Administration has played right into their hands. Barack Obama has kept the worst of George Bush's security state policies in place, from extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretaps of Americans' private communications, all in the name of the endless and meaningless "war on terror." And now, the Administration has unleashed its most capable attack dogs on a religious group engaged in a stupid act of political theater masquerading as prophetic witness.

The right of the Reverend Terry Jones and his silly band of holy warriors at the Dove Outreach Center to burn the Muslim holy book is, however distasteful, protected under the First Amendment. It is un-Christian, uncharitable, disgusting and needlessly provocative. It is not, however, un-American. It is protected speech and protected religion. It is within my right, as a fellow Christian minister, to tell Jones that such actions make him fit only for the Hell he dreams of for Muslims. It is not the right of the United States Government to say that.

This is our fight, the fight of those who understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be the salvation and healing of the world against those who want to twist it into some narrow, vile and hateful cult. Terry Jones has dishonored the Name of Christ and the Cross on which he was murdered.

But in the United States of America, he has the right to be a false Christian, and the United States Government should leave him alone. The Church has a way of discipline for heretics like Terry Jones: they are cast outside the communion of saints until they seek forgiveness of their error from those they have wronged. Which in this case, is the Muslim community here and abroad and the entire Christian Church.

So, I must defend the right of Terry Jones to be a damned heretic, as I defended the right of the Muslim communities in Lower Manhattan to build their new community center. Those brave men and women, living and dead, who fought for those rights must not have died in vain.

Stand for Religious Freedom and Against Intolerance

2010-09-06T20:17:00.000-04:00

Remember September 11th and Be Counted.

A group of ordinary Americans have come together to affirm this country's commitment to its founding ideals of religious freedom and respect for all faiths. We are troubled by acts of bigotry and intolerance aimed at Muslims in recent months, which do not represent the America we know. We hope that the thousands who share this commitment and our faith in America will sign this pledge.

We are proud to live in the United States, a country founded on the principles of tolerance and religious freedom as embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
We affirm America's commitment to these principles.
We condemn bigotry and intolerance by any and all, especially those who murder others in the false name of their religion.
We condemn the act of burning the Koran, a sacred text for millions of Americans and others around the world, as we would condemn the burning of all sacred texts.
We pledge to remember Americans and others from around the world, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths, who were murdered on September 11, 2001, American service men and women of all faiths who have lost their lives in the wars since then, and innocent civilians, of all faiths, who have died in those wars, and to honor their sacrifice by reaffirming our commitment to the principles of tolerance and religious freedom.
We encourage all to light a candle on the evenings of September 10 and 11 in memoriam and in reaffirmation of these principles.

If you agree with this statement, I hope you will sign the pledge at: http://tiny.cc/Tolerance . And please urge your friends, family, colleagues and others to consider this, too, so that we can clearly show that the voices of intolerance do not reflect the true America.

Guess Who's coming to Dinner: The 14th Sunday After Pentecost

2010-08-29T14:32:00.000-04:00

Sirach 10:7-18
Hebrews 13:1-8,15,16
Luke 14:1,7-14

They were watching him, but then they were always watching him. Some of them secretly admired him, most of them public despised him, but everywhere he went, every one of them was always watching him. He could cite the law with stunning accuracy; he quoted rabbis, street prophets and ministrels with equal ease. And his wit was sharper than the the assassin's knife—and as effective at deflating egos and stirring up the masses.

It was a beautiful Sabbath afternoon, and he had been wandering through the city, in one of those apparently aimless, effortless jaunts his often took. No one could ever really know why he had gone down that particularly alley or squatted next to that particularly vile smelling beggar. This day, he's wandering, but with a purpose: he's off to a banquet at the home of one of the city's most prominent lawyers. Before he gets there, he's managed to offend nearly everyone around him, first by healing a woman whose spine was so bent that she'd crabbed about the city for nearly two decades, and people would just turn away from her rather than gaze on her pretzled body. Then, there's a man with dropsy, where your body swells with excess fluid, while your tongue craves a drink like an empty creekbed craves rain. And Jesus heals him too, smirking at them with a sardonic “What? So none of you would give your donkey a drink on Shabbat? He was thirsty. I gave him what he needed.”

And with that, he wanders into the lawyer's home, is greeted by the servants, and takes his place at the long banquet table, filled with trays of fruit and and unleavened bread, steaming pots of lamb and fish, and jugs of sweet, cool wine. In contrast to the poverty of most people, this home has the finest of everything, from the finest food to the most accomplished servants, from the stunning silk tapestries on the walls to the polished stone of the floor. It's the kind of home people want to be in, especially if they have in mind trying to one-up its decorator.

Everyone at the table is watching him. But he doesn't notice. Or if he does,he doesn't care. Instead, he watching the latest guests arrive. The men—for they are all men; this is a Pharisee home after all and one does not invite women, children or beasts to dine with those who bear the image of God—look around the room and quickly size up where the best seats are. Ah, yes, there towards the front, in those spaces closest to the soft striped silk pillow on which the host will recline. They squeeze in tightly, so that the seats around the host's pillow seem somehow bent, like the whole banquest is going to be pulled into the host's radiant orbit. They thirst for the glory of sitting close to a man as rich and gracious as this, a man who knows God, a man in whom there is no guile. They thirst like an empty wine goblet thirsts for its filling again.

Finally, the host sits, and leads them in the Shabbat blessing. They raise their goblets high and praise the One from whom this bounty flows. A chorus of joy-filled, wine soaked voices fills up the place.

“Excuse me.” The voice was nearly drowned out. “Excuse me,” louder this time, and those around him took notice. Finally, a blanket of self-imposed silence settled over the table. It was Jesus, of course.

Accusing eyes dart at the host with that “What-is-he-doing-here-anyway?” look that the in-crowd always give each other when one of the out-crowd shows up. Why would he have invited this self-important Galilean to ruin their perfectly lovely Shabbat evening together? This guy fashions himself a prophet with his parlor magic, his band of ruffians and the gullible women who think he's cast demons out of them hanging all over him in public. He ruins every gathering he comes into: he twists Heaven's perfect and glorious Law, he stirs the people up against the Empire and the Temple. In short, he's not the kind of person you invite to your home for dinner, and certainly not in this kind of company.

Jesus holds up a goblet. “Excellent wine, my friend. Thank you.” The host nods, a weak smile frozen on his face. “I was just noticing the seating arrangements, though. Quite peculiar. I mean, here I am down at this end of the table, and I've got about an acre to loll about in. While all of you seem to be crowded together at that end, by our esteemed host. What would you have done if the President of the Synagogue had shown up? Or one of the Chief Priests? Why, the host would have had to ask you to move down here, so he could put them up where you just presumed you were supposed to sit. Dreadfully embarassing to all concerned. I suggest that next time you come to a banquet, you find one of the least prominent seats, and let the host invite you up front, if he wants you there. It's like my blessed Mother always says, the rich and mighty are going to be brought down low and the lowly are going to be rich and mighty.” Jesus took a bit of lamb and chewed it thoughtfully.

“My dear friend, thank you for this meal and for inviting me into this lovely home. A great place to spend Shabbat dinner, and let me tell you, it beats the dirt floor in a barn anytime.” He chuckled to himself, at some secret joke.

“Anyway, I suggest,” he took another bite, and wiped the gravy from his beard. “I suggest that the next time you have one of these dinners, you go out on the street and talk to some of the people that I met on the way here. After all, this bunch,” he waved half a pita around the room, “this bunch can have you over for a feast anytime. I mean half of them are memorizing the menu, so they can out-gourmet you when they have their stuffy little party for the all the other rich schmoozers. But the people I met on the way here, some of them are so poor, they'd gladly bus this table for the privilege of licking our plates. There are blind folks, with flies gnawing at the caverns of their eyesockets and the ones who are crippled up so badly that it breaks your heart just to look at them. Those people, they can't give a party for you, like your friends can. Which,” he took a sip of wine, and another bite of pita, “which is okay, if you know what I mean? After all, if you take care of the poor, the blind, the sick you win a front row seat at the resurrection, not just a font row seat next to some insufferable, rich bore.”

Sweet Jesus, why do you have to be so mean to us? I mean, he's talking to us, you know. We, you and me, we're the rich people he says are going to get their comeuppance soon. After all, even if we are of modest income, by American standards, even if our nest egg got broken while we slipped on Wall Street's fashionably slick marbled floors, even if we only have one home, one car, one bank account, we are still fabulously wealthy by the standards of the much of the rest of the world.

Today's Gospel is not really about seat assignments, after all. It's about the way we choose to live, and the way we see other people who can't live the way we do. It's about how Empires rise and fall because they grow so fat and arrogant as to believe that they are immune from the laws of divine justice that govern the world. It's about Churches so focused on their buildings that they forget that Churches are people, not buildings. It's about the choices we make, the public policies we support, the way we want to humble those we consider inferior to us, whether they live outside our guarded gates or have snuck in to try their hand at the roulette wheel of American success.

This past week South Carolina's Commerce Department released the most detailed report ever on economic devlopment in that blighted region we dismiss as the “corridor of shame,” those poor rural communities along the asphalt pipeline called Interstate 95. It's not really surprising, but it is shameful: In those places, there is only one job for every three people who are of working age. Imagine, one job for every three people! But who can blame the employers for not setting up shop there? The schools are still segregated, with black children in crumbling public schools that only graduate half of the children entrusted to their care; property tax rates are ruinously high as desperate local governments struggle to find some revenue to support basic services; the only careers for young people are working at the Hardee's or the Subway or taking a chance on the underground drug economy that rules these places. The smart ones choose to leave their families far behind. There are no public parks, or art galleries, or quaint little bistros serving over-priced faux-Euro entrees with delicately sculpted vegetables garnishing gilt-edged platters. We are complicit in the poverty of both body and soul in those places. For we have supported the policies that have made it so and voted for leaders who enrich themselves at the expense of the poor.

All around our country, led by pundits, politicians and preachers, crowds gather, clamoring that they want their country back, as if someone else has taken it away from them. Yesterday, we were treated in unintentional irony to the spectacle of two such crowds, winding around the National Mall, each laying claim to the legacy of a man who gave his life on behalf of the poor. But neither of them were crowds of the poor, the hungry, the desparate: they were crowds of the protected, the pampered, the proud. Rabbi Ben Sirach wrote in today's reading from the Apocrapha: “Sovereignty passes from nation to nation on account of injustice and insolence and wealth.” The country that we used to have, the one where we welcomed strangers as if they were angels, the one where boatloads of refugees from lands without hope could come here and share in our hopeful future, is now a country that we snatched from ourselves. We hold ourselves hostage to our wealth, even as it slips through our fingers. We fret as China and India use more and more of the oil and gold and tungsten and uranium that we thought was ours alone. We are angry because because Muslim Americans want to build a place to pray that's too close to a place where thousands of people, including innocent Muslim Americans, died in an atrocious act of hate. We scrunch ourselves together at the head of the table, away from the unworthy ones at the other end, vying for God's favor. And all through dinner God is telling us that he's at the other end, with the people we are trying so hard to avoid.

Ben Sirach's words are a warning to us about the inevitability of entropy. Every human Empire that ever existed collapsed, not because it became too diverse, but because it became more unjust, insolent, and wealthier than the one before. And the cost of injustice, insolence and wealth is borne by the poor, the outsiders, the lame, the blind, the ones who can't repay. Just like the human body decays, says Ben Sirach, nations decay, dying even while they are still alive, forgetting why they came into existence in the first place.

The anonymous writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews packs the end of his or her letter with sentence piled on sentence of prophetic utterance. Love each other. Take care of strangers, the outsiders, the immigrants, because they might be angels. Under the Roman Empire, anyone seen as a threat to social stability could be jailed and tortured until they confessed to something, whether they were guilty or not. The writer urges us to feel their anguish and not just shrug it off as the price you have to pay for security from your enemies. Make sure your marriages are strong. Stop obssessing about money. Remember that God will take care of you. And then, just in case somebody still believes that social justice is not the center of true worship, the reading ends with: “Don't neglect to do good and to share what you have, because that's the kind of sacrifice that pleases God.”

One of the greatest tragedies of history unfolds each day of our post-modern lives: a world of 6 and a half billion people raises enough food to feed all of them and more. Yet, 1.2 billion of them are hungry. 24,000 children die every day from hunger and diseases caused by hunger. That's eight September 11th's every day. But nobody's going to jail for it. No political leader is being held accountable for it. We're not clamoring for regime change or chasing the elusive perpetrators into the mountains. And do you know why?

Because we know that we are complicit in those deaths. Because the policies that bring cheap food help to our grocery stores starve the people of other countries. And I don't want the price of my Wonder bread to go up. Injustice, insolence and wealth always destroy a nation. They will destroy ours, unless we turn it around soon.

You have an opportunity, on the National Day of Service, September 11, to spend a few hours helping to feed people who are hungry in St. Martin's Stop Hunger Now Event. And you have an opportunity to come to adult education all through September to learn more about the ethics of food and the causes of hunger. And you can do something today, right now. You can remember the people who are starving in a world where there's too much food. You can feel their torment, as if it were you being tormented. And you can promise that you will do whatever you can to change the unjust laws that starve people, that you will hold our leaders accountable for that injustice, that you will never stop sharing what you have and doing good to those who don't have at all.

It's a funny thing too, about God's justice. Saving their lives means saving our own. Sharing our abundance means having more blessings. Loving strangers means entertaining angels. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

Why Franklin Graham is Wrong

2010-08-21T22:44:00.000-04:00

His father was one of the greatest evangelists of this or any other age, but Franklin Graham ain't your daddy's evangelist. His work with Samaritan's Purse, particularly in Sudan, is legendary, but his $416,000 salary and $117,000 benefits package (according to the organization's 990, available on www.guidestar.org) gives one pause about his commitment to the people of the world living on less than $1 a day. (I guess that could be said about most of us who work to bring justice to the poor; Jesus, after all, told us to sell all our belongings and give the money to the poor. I am as unfaithful as Franklin Graham in that regard, just not as highly compensated.) But this is not about Franklin Graham's salary, this is about Franklin Graham's theology.

In a half-hearted acknowledgment of Barack Obama's Christian faith on CNN, Graham commented: "I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name." He continued: "Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That is what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said."

The reason that Graham is wrong has nothing to do with Sharia law, which does, indeed, regard the child of a Muslim father as Muslim. When a baby is born, the Islamic call to prayer is whispered in its ears, and parents are expected to make every effort to raise their children as believers. And he is quite correct that Jewish tradition views the mother as the legitimate transmitter of Jewishness. Islam is patrilineal and Judaism matrilineal. In the Hebrew version of the Abraham story it is only the child of Sarah (Isaac) not the child of the Egyptian slave Hagar (Ishamel) who fulfills the promise of God. The Qu'ran reverses this, making Ishmael the legitimate fulfillment of God's promise, while still presenting the birth of Isaac as a miracle.

So what's the problem? The problem is that Graham is supposed to be a Christian, and Christian theology is that "God shows no partiality and that in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God. " (Acts 10:34) That's what St. Peter figured out after meeting the Italian soldier Cornelius and his family. St. Paul continued the push for a universal gospel, and proclaimed that "Abraham 'believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.' So you see that it is men of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'In you shall all the nations be blessed.' So then, those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith." (Galatians 3:6-9)

What Graham has done with his backhanded compliment of Obama's faith is to undermine the very basis of both Evangelicalism (his father's faith) and Biblical Christianity. If one's faith is predetermined by birth, than Evangelicalism is demonstrably false in its insistence on converting the world to Christianity. But more importantly, if God hates Muslims, than both Peter and Paul were wrong, not to mention the entire sweep of Biblical universalist faith from Abraham on. After all, Yahweh promises Abraham that "all nations would be blessed through" his faith. Amos (9:7) claims that God had covenant relationships with the Cushites (Ethiopians), Phoenicians, and Arameans (Arabs). Micah (chapter 4) looks forward to the time when "all nations" shall live together in peace, the verse that is chiseled into the monument in front of the United Nations building. In spite of both Jewish and Christian attempts to own God, their own book proclaims that God's love is universal. (John 3:17--yeah 17, look it up!)

There is one last point of Graham's commentary that bears comment: the President's name. While it is true that Barack (the English spelling is the name in both Arabic and Swahili--the language of the President's Kenyan father) is a popular Muslim name that means "blessed," it is also a Hebrew name, spelled in English as "Baruch." Graham hints that by giving him a Muslim name, the President's father made him forever Muslim. That's like saying that, because Graham's father named him "Franklin," he's French. It's just plain silly, as etymological games usually are.

I am not going to question Graham's faith, taking his word that he accepted Jesus Christ. That is what he says he has done and I cannot say that he hasn't. But I can say, without a doubt, that he doesn't understand Jesus Christ at all. And that he's not French, in spite of his name.

Et tu, Harry Reid?

2010-08-16T23:09:00.000-04:00

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

In the two decades before the Civil War, America was an ugly place. The winds of war stirred across prairies and plantations. The Industrial Revolution, abolitionism, waves of poor immigrants from Europe and a rising intolerance began to threaten the young nation from within, even as enemies, old and new, threatened her from without. Nowhere was it uglier than in the Utah Territories, where the followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons) had grown increasingly paranoid from the attacks on them by evangelical Christians and a Republican Party itching to shoot somebody. The controversy eventually resulted in several massacres of non-Mormon settlers by Mormon militia and the invasion of Utah by the United States Army under the command of Winfield Scott. "The Utah War" was finally settled by treaty, shortly before the Civil War began, but the fact that a minority religion could be viewed as an an enemy of the state forever tarnished the sanctity of the First Amendment's protection of religious liberty.

Harry Reid should know this. He's a Mormon. He should be one of the foremost defenders of the right of Americans to practice their faith according to their conscience. But instead, he has chosen his place among the enemies of the Constitution and the very foundation of the Empire of Liberty that it was supposed to establish. And he did it for the reason that most politicians cave on basic principles: political expediency. He's in a tight race for re-election against one of the most extreme examples of intolerance and bigotry in the political sphere. He decided that, instead of standing up the truth, he would stand up for a lie. The lie is that, while Muslims may have the right to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, they shouldn't, because it offends him. Or more truthfully, it offends the majority of Americans who are willing to trade away the Bill of Rights because they are afraid.

I can't even believe that I have to point out something so basic to America as the right to worship unmolested by government. But there is something in the air these days in America. Something so evil and hateful and dangerous that, left unchecked, it will accomplish what Al Qaeda and its acolytes could not: the end of the American experiment. That evil is the fear of other people who are different than the majority; the hatred of people who worship God in different tongues. The dangerous idea that government should be able to tell a minority religion where it can pray, how it can worship, what it should believe.

The "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy is so hideously stupid that it is nearly impossible to find appropriate words to describe it. And it is littered with disinformation, as propaganda always is. There are already two other mosques in South Manhattan, but they have outgrown their present spaces and need a new space to worship. They sought proper zoning, paid for their property and developed their plans. They played by the rules. They were given the green light by local officials to begin building. But then the evil clouds rolled in, with the shamans of hate doing their pagan rain dance below. The Palins, Gingriches, Hannitys and their fear-mongering bigotry was no surprise. The surprise is that the majority of Americans could be so completely swayed by their rhetoric: "Of course they have a right to build, but they shouldn't because it's disrespectful."

What's disrespectful to America is that a government official would try to bully a religious group into compliance. What's disrespectful to America is that a government official, especially one that is himself a member of a religious group once persecuted for its heterodoxy, should try to control men's souls. What's disrespectful to America is the trampling of the Constitution in an attempt win an election.

Full disclosure here: this is personal to me. While both of my parents were baptized Catholics, they strayed from the faith of their parents and converted to the minority religion of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Before their deaths, they returned to the "faith once delivered to the saints" but not before raising four children in a religious movement that disdained the flag as an idol, that refused to serve in the military, that viewed every other religion as inspired by the Devil himself. I know how it feels as someone's spit runs slowly down your face because he doesn't like your religion. I know what it's like to bear the tyranny of the majority. I left the Witnesses twenty-five years ago, but I will defend to the death their right to practice their faith as they see fit. I will do the same for the Muslims of Manhattan or Mount Pleasant. I will defend the First Amendment with the Second if necessary, without a thought for my personal safety. I may have to, if the present situation endures.

I hope Sharron Angle trounces Harry Reid. It's not that I agree with her--I loathe her bigotry and hatefulness. But Harry Reid's treachery has rendered him unfit for public office. No matter which of them is elected, the tyranny of the majority will advance and the cause of human freedom will be diminished.

And as for the Muslim congregations of South Manhattan? Peace be upon them. May the God of Abraham honor them and grant them peace. May they stand firm against intolerance and hate. And may God save us all.

The Ground Zero Mosque and the Hobgoblin of Little American Minds

2010-07-31T20:32:00.000-04:00

Emerson was wrong.

It is not foolish consistences which plague little minds. It is foolish inconsistencies. One of them has to do with our current notion that government is gradually encroaching on our freedoms. The NRA frets about gun rights (in spite of the fact that they have been expanded, not restricted under Barack Obama). Liberals agonize about the loss of due process as Miranda rights are restricted and the government expands its demands on internet providers to give them more private information under the rubric of "homeland security." But when it comes to allowing the government to restrict religion and abridge the free exercise thereof, a growing number of people, of all political stripes think that's perfectly fine. Especially if there are sectarian movements in that religion which promote terrorism against the United States.

Leading national "conservatives" (as truly useless a term as "liberal," since neither of them mean any more than which news outlets you believe), are demanding that a house of worship not be built near the site of the September 11 World Trade Center attack in Manhattan, despite the fact that the congregation wishes to build it as a sign of peace, not war. I'm talking about the "Ground Zero Mosque" of course.

On his website the other day, Newt Gingrich wrote "There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia." Sarah Palin famously coined a new word when she asked American Muslims to "refudiate" the mosque. The cabal that runs right-wing cable news and talk radio are frothing at the mouth.

What they all forget is that it really doesn't matter what the laws are in Muslim countries or how intolerant Wahabbist Muslims are. This is the United States of America. We have a Constitution guranteeing that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

In New York, the State Constitution, Article 1, Section 3, promises: "The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all humankind; and no person shall be rendered incompetent to be a witness on account of his or her opinions on matters of religious belief; but the liberty of conscience hereby secured shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, or justify practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of this state."

The foolish inconsistency of fearing government regulation of insurance companies and banks while clamoring for government prohibition on the free exercise of religion is the hobgoblin of little minded Americans. Actually, it's only one of them. Like carping about deficits while demanding tax cuts for the rich or blowing a trillion dollars on quixotic imperial quests. Or saying "government is the problem not the solution," while demanding larger and stronger military and security appratus. (I shouldn't have to point out that the military and national security are operated by the government, but I probably do.)

The only more foolish than these inconsistencies would be electing or re-electing the people who promote them.

An Open Letter to Nikki Haley and Vincent Sheheen

2010-07-29T00:16:00.000-04:00

Dear Representative Haley and Senator Sheheen:

I am writing you from the bank of a clear, cool lake, 350 miles northwest of our beloved state, deep in the woods of the Cumberland Plateau. Absence, you know, makes the heart grow fonder. Like the two of you, I deeply love my adopted state of South Carolina, and want nothing more than to see it prosper in every way imaginable.

To do that, I believe that we have to have a state government that serves the people who pay for it, one that's functional, frugal and focused on the common good of all South Carolinians. I believe that each of you want that as well. But I'm not really writing to you about your race for Governor. I am writing to invite you to my home for dinner. Now I'm not a big political donor, and that's an honor usually reserved for them. And I know that you don't exactly have a lot of time these days. Still, I would like to have all the Haley's (Michael, Rena and Nalin) and the Sheheen's (Amy, Austin, Joseph, and Anthony) join Suzanne and me for a good old-fashioned Italian dinner (with Grandma's meatballs) and get to know each other's stories.

You see, I don't think the next 90 days are going to give us much of a chance to do that in a setting that's free of scripting, handlers, and the demonic rhetoric that's poisoning our society. And I think we need to know each other's stories.

Representative Haley, I want to hear what it was like growing up in rural South Carolina in the 70's and 80's as the child of immigrants. I want to know how it felt to be different, to be ridiculed for your heritage, for your parents, for their strange accents and stranger religion. I want to know how you began the spiritual journey that led you to become a follower of Jesus, of how you have been formed by your Methodist understanding of the Christian faith, about how John Wesley's teachings influence your life. I want to know how you and Michael met, why you fell in love, how you chose Clemson, why you became an accountant and entered the family business.

Senator Sheheen, I'd love to hear how it was, in Camden of the 70's and 80's, to be the son of a prominent family, descendants of an immigrant from someplace where people eat pita and hummus instead of shrimp and grits. I'd like to know what moved you to follow your uncle's path into politics instead of staying safely in profitable small town legal work. I want to hear about your spiritual journey, what your dreams are for your children, how it is to be the parent of twins. I'd like to know if you and Representative Haley knew each other at Clemson and if the way your lives have now intertwined seems funny or odd or full of destiny. I'd like to hear how you and Amy met, why you fell in love, how you chose your children's names.

I want to share my story with each of you, about how it felt to be the child of Jehovah's Witness ministers in a small southern (Baptist) town. About how it felt to be forbidden by your religion to salute the American flag during a time when anti-war protesters were burning it. About my spiritual journey to Anglicanism, my service in the public square and how I got to Columbia. I want to tell you how I met my beautiful and grace-filled wife, about our five children and why our house is decorated with flamingoes. I want to talk about music and movies, books and food.

In other words, I want us to know each other as fellow human beings, as fellow South Carolinians, as fellow Americans. I want us to laugh, to cry a little bit, to share an evening that might just change all of us forever. You see, I'm just nutty enough to believe that if we really understand each other, we can learn to work together on the things that matter most. I don't think we have to agree, but I think we have to know each other. I think if we do, we will find that we really do want to get to the same place, even if it's by a divergent path. I think we need to see where our paths cross and choose to stand together at those places.

I have high hopes for each of you. I am praying that you really do represent something different for our state, that the victor in November will reach out to the loser and incorporate him or her into the closest circle of advisors. I know it's a crazy idea. I know your management team will tell you no, under no circumstances, would we do that. He's the enemy. She's dangerous. Still, I'm telling you that the single most important thing you can do to prepare to be Governor will be to listen to each other's stories. You could start this summer with dinner at our house.

Grandma's meatballs are scrumptious.

The NAACP: The Power Of A Relic

2010-07-18T22:18:00.000-04:00

A finger bone. A bit of body ash. A piece of the True Cross. A single beard hair. Virtually every religious movement has its relics. The ancient Jews had the bones of Joseph, and later, a sample of manna, that mysterious substance that fed them through their forty year trek in the Canaanite desert. The ancient Athenians had the bodies of Oedipus and Theseus. Buddhists had all manner of pieces of the Buddha, despite his distaste for any sort of religious veneration. Even the iconoclastic Muslims have relics of the Prophet, including his cloak, sword and a hair from his beard. Christianity produced a veritable industry of relics, especially in its Roman and Orthodox branches. Political movements produce their relics too: Stalin, entombed in glass and South Carolina's Confederate Relic Room come to mind. (I'm not comparing the Daughters of the Confederacy to Stalinists. Or maybe I am.) Relics serve, for believers, as a way of remembering those who have gone before, offering homage for their faithfulness and the truths their lives revealed.

The American Civil Rights Movement, that long struggle against the legacy of slavery and racism produced its share of relics, too. The civil rights movement was, at its best, a religious movement, calling Americans to repentance for the creation of a society both separate and unequal, which eventually tore down the barriers blocking the way for people who are not of European descent. Its triumph is most notable in the ascension of an African American to the Presidency. It has its relics as well, one of them being the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Calling the NAACP a "relic" has become quite fashionable on the hysterical right. They mean that there is no longer any need for such a thing as an organization that advances "colored people." But I use the term in its religious sense: the NAACP, reminds us that there was a time, not so very long ago, when black Americans were second-class citizens, when there was a need for an organization to actively call for their advancement. We gaze upon their story, and we remember.

And here's the strange thing about relics: they have no power in themselves. They are just memory devices, mnemonic tricks, to keep us from forgetting the story of the relic. That's why the NAACP still has power in a time when a black man is President, when young black or Hispanic or Asian Americans can truly become anything they choose to be. It's why, when the NAACP passed a resolution condemning racism in the Tea Party movement, it set the punditsphere all a-Twitter. Everyone clearly remembered the time of legal racism in America, and whether one agreed with the Tea Party or the NAACP, no one wanted to go back there.

It's why the Tea Party Federation yesterday excommunicated Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams after the overtly racist "Letter to Abraham Lincoln" post appeared on his blog. No political movement which expects to be taken seriously in America can allow itself to be racist, whether in appearance or intent. The majority of Americans are not racists, nor will they support political movements which are, no matter whether they are "right" or "left." This is a good thing, and the Tea Party Federation should be commended for it. Whatever racist elements have glommed onto a movement which is ostensibly about the size and role of government need to be expunged, decisively and quickly. Because America has changed.

One need not be a supporter of South Carolina's Nikki Haley to rejoice that a woman of Indian descent has a pretty good chance to inherit the Governorship of our state. One need not be a small government libertarian to be glad that Tim Scott, a black man, trounced Paul Thurmond, scion of South Carolina's one-time Dixiecrat Governor, in the GOP primary for the 1st Congressional District. Both Haley and Scott have a lot of convincing to do before liberals will come over to their side. But liberals should be delighted that they are there. For their racial background will eat away at what remains of the poisonous Dixiecrat legacy. The backwoods bigots, who don't want a "raghead" or a "n-----" in the Governor's Mansion or in Congress, now find themselves further marginalized. The Democrats long ago abandoned them, and now, the GOP will have to as well.

Relics, to an unbeliever, may seem like silly superstition. But listen carefully, and their story can still work miracles.

Sacraments Wholesale

The Ordinary Miracle of Christmas

Everything is Political. Especially politics.

SNAP Challenge Day 5: The Banality of Poverty

SNAP Challenge Day 4: On the Limits of Existential Activism

SNAP Challenge Day 3

SNAP Challenge Day 2

SNAP Challenge Day 1.5

The SNAP Challenge Day One

To Everything There Is a Season

The Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A: Waiting Tables

American Horcrux

The Second of Easter Year A: Bearers of Forgiveness

American Good Friday

Maundy Thursday: Shorting Jesus

A Homily for Palm Sunday Year A

Matthew 21:1-11Isaiah 50:4-9Philippians 2:5-11Matthew 26:14- 27:66

Matthew 21:1-11Isaiah 50:4-9Philippians 2:5-11Matthew 26:14- 27:66

Matthew 21:1-11

Matthew 21:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9

Isaiah 50:4-9

Philippians 2:5-11

Matthew 26:14- 27:66

The First Theological Council Day 2

The First Theological Council Evening Day One

Theological Counciling

A Homily For The First Sunday in Lent Year A: Into Temptation

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Romans 5:12-19

Matthew 4:1-11

Outside the Locked Doors of the Cathedral, A Call for Justice

Ash Wednesday, Year A, March 9 2011 --A Reward in Full

The Supreme Court and the Westboro Baptists: The Right to Be Wrong

Draconian: A Second Look At the GOP's Cuts

The Tea Party's Foolish Budget Consistency

South Carolina's Great Notion: Jump in the River and Drown

A Sermon for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

Words Have Meaning

The Second Sunday After Christmas Day Year A

The 4th Sunday of Advent Year A- The Strangest Dream

Sanctimonious Refudiation

The First Sunday of Advent Year A: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Christ the King Sunday: Be Warned

A Hopey Changey Breakfast

The 22nd Sunday After Pentecost Year C: A Sinner’s Prayer

The 21st Sunday After Pentecost: Do Not Lose Heart

Dear Senator McConnell: Sink the Hunley and Take Care of the Poor

The 20th Sunday After Pentecost Year C: Unchaining the Gospel

Poverty in America--Dead Men Do Tell Tales, But We Don't Listen

The Poor? No Big Deal. They Can Just Get Jobs.

Terry Jones, Damned Heretic, Has a Right to Be Wrong

Stand for Religious Freedom and Against Intolerance

Guess Who's coming to Dinner: The 14th Sunday After Pentecost

Why Franklin Graham is Wrong

Et tu, Harry Reid?

The Ground Zero Mosque and the Hobgoblin of Little American Minds

An Open Letter to Nikki Haley and Vincent Sheheen

The NAACP: The Power Of A Relic

Matthew 21:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9

Philippians 2:5-11

Matthew 26:14- 27:66

Matthew 21:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9

Philippians 2:5-11

Matthew 26:14- 27:66