American Horcrux

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.

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

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.

The Tea Party's Foolish Budget Consistency

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.

Words Have Meaning

"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.

Christ the King Sunday: Be Warned

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.

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

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.  

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.
 

Et tu, Harry Reid?

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 Diocese(s) of Ft. Worth: Jesus Loses Either Way

When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels—to say nothing of ordinary matters? If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer—and before unbelievers at that?  In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded?--1 Corinthians 6:1-7

Jack Iker spent years at war with the House of Bishops, declaring The Episcopal Church hopelessly apostate. Now, he bizarrely claims to be a Bishop of the Diocese of Ft. Worth after a much-publicized schism where he led most of the Episcopalians out of The Episcopal Church. Why?

Mammon.

By claiming that the Diocese of Ft. Worth of the Anglican Church in North America (a splinter group of former Episcopalians trying to get recognition as an "official" Anglican national church) is the same as The Episcopal Diocese of Ft. Worth, Iker and his lawyers hope to be able to keep the property of The Episcopal Church.

And the court is as bewildered as can be. The 2nd Court of Appeals has ruled that "a corporation cannot sue itself" and that a judge deciding the merits of the case would be "unnecessarily confused by presentations from two opposing factions who claim to be the 'The Corporation' and 'The Fort Worth Diocese.'"

Instead of following St. Paul's suggestion that wayward (or whacky) believers be left to their own devices rather than being hauled into court, The Episcopal Church has now created another mess. Even Jack Iker has figured out the PR benefits of letting dissidents take their toys with them: the (ACNA) Diocese of Ft. Worth has allowed individual congregations to retain their property if they chose to stay part of the (TEC) Diocese of Ft. Worth. Who's looking more Jesus-y here?

What happens next in this dispute is anybody's guess. But as a Deacon of The Episcopal Church (the real one), I have a bit of advice for our leadership: let them go in peace and take the hit to the balance sheet. In the end it doesn't matter. This is just stuff. Our treasure is in heaven.

Continuing this court case is only going to further alienate the world from the Church. And that means no matter how the lawsuits turn out, Jesus loses either way.

South Carolina Conservative Hypocrisy: Gay Escorts, Gun Rights, Miranda

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.--Matthew 23:23

The author of Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality, and co-founder of the Family Research Council, the Rev. Dr. George Rekers, has just returned from a ten day vacation to Europe with his gay escort. Rekers, University of South Carolina professor emeritus of neuropsychiatry, and anti-homosexual Baptist preacher, was photographed by a reporter for Miami's New Times as he pushed his luggage cart through Miami International Airport. He admitted that he met his young companion on Rentboy.com, a website that is exactly what it sounds like. Rekers insisted that he brought him along to carry his luggage, a double entendre that even "hiking the Appalachian trail" cannot top.

Meantime, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham is advocating selling guns to suspected terrorists as a necessary protection of the Second Amendment, while lamenting the reading of Miranda rights to suspected terrorist Faisal Shahzad. (Shahzad had not just explosives in his vehicle, but a 9mm handgun as well, according to CNN.)

Now let me say that I believe in the Second Amendment, and I am deeply suspicious of government attempts to abridge it. I also believe in the Fifth Amendment, which requires due process and the prevention of self-incrimination of suspects, and am deeply suspicious of government attempts to abridge it. The "Miranda rights" to silence and to an attorney are drawn from the Fifth Amendment, as the right to carry a gun is drawn from the Second.

In South Carolina, where slimeballs like Rekers regularly denounce gays and lesbians, while hiding their own sexual lives and where the political yammering class regularly denounces the President for the "constitutional infringement" of regulating insurance companies, hypocrisy is virtue, fascism is necessary to security and justice, mercy and faith are nowhere to be found. 

Thanks, Eric Bedingfield: Wingnuts Can Actually Help Us Do Justice

Because South Carolina must jealously guard its reputation as the Ground Zero of the war on intelligent political discourse, we can be thankful that, at last, Greenville's Eric Bedingfield has (along with a crew of the usual wing-nut suspects) provided us with H4919, that is, in Bedingfield's words, "virtually the same" as Arizona's anti-immigration measure.Too bad we weren't first. Now we'll have to wait for another day to Race to the Top of the fascist-paranoid pole.

In a sense, however, Bedingfield is doing us all a favor, by forcing the libertarian Left and Right to work with people of faith and the pragmatic Middle to achieve comprehensive immigration reform this year. 

As Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform points out, there  some important Biblical principles that surround immigration:

• All people, regardless of national origin or citizenship status, are made in the "image of God" and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect (Genesis 1:26-27, 9:6).
• There is an undeniable responsibility to love and show compassion for the stranger among us (Deuteronomy 10:18-19, Leviticus 19:33-34, Matthew 25:31-46).
• Immigrants are our neighbors, both literally and figuratively, and we are to love our neighbors as ourselves and show mercy to neighbors in need (Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:25-37).
• While the rule of law is necessary to protect a society, there is a Biblical mandate to oppose unjust laws and systems that harm and oppress people made in God's image, especially the vulnerable (Isaiah 10:1-4, Jeremiah 7:1-7, Acts 5:29, Romans 13:1-7).

Immigration reform is an issue of faith. So, let's be thankful that the wingnuts have forced us into action. Let's get this done.

I know it was you, Fredo.

I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!--Michael Corleone, The Godfather II

I'm a Christian who believes in Social Justice. I'm left of center politically. I'm suspicious of religious people who drape the flag around the Cross. I hate warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding and defending dictators to fatten the coffers of Wall Street. I believe that a civilized nation should provide health care to its people, refrain from making war on nations that haven't attacked it, and do its best to relieve the suffering of the poor. I take seriously the notion that the federal government has been formed "to create a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." I voted for Barack Obama. Considering the alternative, I would vote the same way again.

Still, these days, the hair is standing up on my neck. Universal health care morphed into welfare for insurance companies. Reforming the financial system is going the same way. Instead of regulating the banking industry, Obama seems committed to gutting the reforms passed the House last year and offering watered-down fake reform that will not only let the barbarians at the gate back in, but sit them down at the table and offer them a lovely Chardonnay as they plot to ravage what's left of the middle class. And if you like corporate welfare in health and finance, you better start buying energy stocks, because Climate Reform is coming, along with endorsements from the largest energy companies in the Fortune 500.

And that doesn't even begin to acknowledge that the Obama Administration has, for the most part, kept the worst violations of the Bush-era demolition of civil liberties in place. That extraordinary rendition programs are still in place. That Guantanamo still houses prisoners held without charge or trial and that reports of torture and murder there are still dribbling out. That prisoners are still being tortured in secret Afghan prisons.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove in their wildest imaginations could never have pulled this off. In one stunning Nixon-goes-to-China-moment after another, Barack Obama continues to sell us out. The only reason he hangs on to any liberal support at all is that his opponents are even worse. As long as the Republican Party is sipping tea with the likes of Glenn Beck, Obama will get the votes of the left. But he won't get our hearts anymore.

A Republic of Patriots or a Confederacy of Dunces?

In his excellent history of the United States between 1789 and 1815, Empire of Liberty, Gordon Woods writes: "By the end of that second war against Britain in 1815, the central impulses of the Revolution had run their course. Americans believed that their Republic was at last secure and independent, free from hostile mercantile empires and the ravages of European wars that had tormented them for over two decades. Democracy and equality were no longer problematic issues to be debated; they had become articles of faith to be fulfilled." The nearly 800 pages that follow lay out the Founder's great debate: between a strong federal government with a standing army and a confederation of independent states, each with its own militia, akin to the modern European Union. A half century after Jefferson, the issue appeared settled: this was a federal republic, not a confederate union.

The great debate grew out of America's original sin: the enslavement of captured Africans whose cheap labor powered the economic ascent of what would become the powerful nation the world had ever known. Though 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War that ostensibly started over the the meaning of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution--that is federal versus states rights, it was really over only one of those "rights": the right of some people to own other people. The evil of slavery, and the religious and philosophical cartwheels which were necessary to defend it, nearly tore the idea of this "nation so constituted and so dedicated" to shreds. The 14th Amendment took another century to be fully recognized in the Civil Rights Act. And still, there are those today who question its validity, though in terms more circumspect than before.

From South Carolina, where the treasonous symbol of the Battle Flag of the Army of Virginia still flies proudly at the Statehouse steps, to Virginia itself, where a proudly Christian evangelical Governor has just declared  this to be "Confederate History Month" (only belatedly noting that, yes, those glorious patriots of the Old South did own black people and that was not nice), the notion of a federal republic is once again under attack. It's not just the idealists of the Myth of Confederate Glory that are undermining the republican ideals: Congresspeople, like Iowa's Steve King and Minnesota's Michelle Bachmann regularly use language laced with revolutionary rhetoric.

So is the Republic falling apart, or is this simply the renewal of the American ideal, the purification of our republican soul? If Gordon Wood is right, it's only the latest act in a play over two centuries old, which will, in due time, subside. If he's wrong, then we have once again stepped on to a battlefield "testing whether that nation or any so conceived so dedicated can long endure."

 We may now longer be a Republic of patriots. We may now only be a Confederacy of dunces.

The First Sunday in Lent: Going From I to We

The First Sunday in Lent

Year C

February 21, 2010 

Going From I to We

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Psalm 91

Romans 10:5-15

Luke 4:1-13

Your nostrils quiver at every scent in the air, the idea of food becomes reality. Gnats buzz your face and you see plump quail ready to be roasted. Dried springs of long dead brush look like apple trees hanging low with red globes of sweetness. Even rocks, baking in the sun, begin to resemble fresh loaves, dripping with olive oil. But there is nothing to eat. There is only the routine of sleep, waking, walking, sleeping, while your body gnaws away at the only thing there is to eat: itself.

But for those who are prepared, something else can happen in fasting. As the physical melts away, the spirit is left free. This freedom allows the spirit to see, even when the eyes blur. That’s why every spiritual practice the world over, from Christianity to Hinduism--and everything in between--practices fasting. You have to stop chewing on the fruit of good and evil for awhile in order to understand that you probably don’t know that much about good and evil after all.

At the end of Deuteronomy, the children of Israel stand at the edge of the desert, their forty years of migration over, a vast new land stretching before them. They have survived slavery, hunger, civil unrest, religious madness and religious malaise. They have survived attacks from their ancestral enemies and their ancestral friends. They have virtually nothing left but hope, a generation once lost, ready to renew itself in grace.

They are thinking about the possible future, when there will vines and fig trees, when the black earth will put forth its fruit, when they can trade and invest and retire old and happy. Moses looks over the vast crowd of people and reminds them that they are not a people with a background in real estate. Their forefathers after all, were wandering Arameans, and they had lived in other peoples’ lands, where they had to trade their souls for food. Hunger had formed them into a people whose story started in famine but would end in milk and honey. Moses tells them that what they are about to receive in the new world will never belong to them, and gives them a sacrament so that they will not forget:

Take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.

When they gave their offering to the priest, they were to pray this prayer:

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.

It is a hard lesson to learn, and the children of Israel forgot it more often than they remembered it. Like them, we forget it too. We own nothing. Everything that we have, whether a lot or little, has come from the earth, which belongs to the Lord. Armies may hoist their flags over patches of dirt, whether little or great, pretending that raising a tiny piece of cloth carries a real meaning, pretending that it means the governments they represent can do with the land what they wish, extracting every last ounce of life, and trading it off for wealth and power. Eventually, though the Star of David fluttered above Israel’s army, it was no match for their failure to remember that the land was not really theirs, that other people matter, that justice matters, that enterprise is not and cannot be free, for it all belongs to the One who made it. After awhile, after it all, they lost it all.

In 2010, the Church enters this season of Lent, two years into what the media has dubbed “the Great Recession” without a sense of why we are here, what this time of fasting and preparation should mean for us, and how our spirits can learn to see again. This Lent should cause us to remember how we got here and why the world is in such deep trouble. The world needs us to see clearly and describe what we see, so that it might learn as well.

We got here because we began to believe a lie: that there is some all-knowing, all-powerful, “invisible hand” called “the Free Market” which guides those who believe in it into prosperity and freedom. We got here because we began to take the pagan idea of the Omniscient Market seriously. We stripped away the laws that restricted the worse sort of financial avarice. Banks began loaning money to people who had no possible way to pay it back, because underwriters believed that the Market God would miraculously provide them more money. Portfolio managers packaged those hopeless loans into huge baskets of offerings to the Market God, and for awhile it seemed that the Priests of the Market were right: housing prices soared, stocks gained dizzying new heights, money flowed freely in a drunken orgy of consumption.

But one day, like Toto in the palace of Oz, some little terrier pulled back the curtain in the Free Market Temple. And all that stood behind the curtain was a mirror. We stared in horror into our own tear-streaked faces. We were the Market God, and we had made up a whole world where you could rich by buying things, where you could never max out your credit lines, where you could live solely for yourself with nary a thought to the common good. Now the Free Market Temple has been repoed, and everything up for auction.

Lent affords us an opportunity to reflect on the truth of our situation and learn to see again. Like Jesus, facing the devil in the desert, we can be remember that it is God alone whom we must worship and God alone whom we must serve. Jesus, returning from his forty days of fasting and prayer in the wilderness, came to tell the truth to his nation. This Lent, we must learn the truth, and be ready to proclaim it to our nation and all the nations of the earth.

First of all, we do not live by bread alone. Material things are the source neither of life, nor of happiness. A society which values wealth over people is inching towards its own destruction. In America, the top 1 percent own $3.3 trillion dollars in wealth, or 33.8 percent of the national assets. The next 9 percent hold 37.3 percent. That leaves 28.5 for the next 90 percent.  Spend a Lenten meditation on that.

I will confess something to you. I am in that 90 percent. Odds are, you are as well. It makes me very uncomfortable to see that I am supporting a system where it is fine to redistribute wealth from the bottom up, just not from the top down. It is perfectly acceptable in our nation to revile the poor as criminal, drug-addled, baby-making machines, while advocating redistribution of wealth to large corporations in the name of economic development. What is not acceptable in our nation is to proclaim that our present difficulties result from the worship of a lie and the abandonment of advancing the common good. What is not acceptable is the notion that we might have to pay for the things that we want. What is not acceptable is to proclaim that we are responsible for each other.

Lent can also teach us the necessity of worshipping God alone. The Free Market is not only not a God, it is not even free. It has limits, and those limits include the fact that the Free Market requires winners and losers and an ever-widening gap between them. Its limits mean that those who want no regulations on their ability to accumulate wealth will erect elaborate regulations to keep others from accumulating it. Eventually the Free Market crumbles under the weight of its own irony.

Lent can teach us to see clearly that we are all, in some sense, descendants of wandering Arameans. That we have nothing which has not been given to us and that in giving to those who have less than we do, we enrich us all. Learning this lesson well, we can shift our own priorities and those of our Church and our nation. We can do this, starting in our own lives with a re-ordering of our lives. Writing about the economic meltdown, pastor and writer Jim Wallis asks:

How will this crisis change us? The answer isn’t going to be found in reading the latest economic analysis, hoping for better indicators, following a political ideology, or even updating the economy. It will be found as individuals, families, friends, small groups, churches, mosques, synagogues and entire communities wrestle with the question of values together.

In the offertory prayer Moses gives to Israel, the language moves from the individual: “A wandering Aramean was my father” to the social: “the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us”… “the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” The redeemed and renewed society transforms the individual: “So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.”

This Lent, in this time of spiritual hunger, can be the opportunity to shift our viewpoint from I to We. This Lent can be the time to rediscover who we are as people of God, what our values are, and to hear the voice of God clearly against the noise of the market. Then we can tell the truth, the truth that we are in this together, that decisions made today effect tomorrow’s children, and that we will no longer accept a society which lives only for the moment and devalues some people while declaring others masters of the universe. We can tell the truth that Lord requires that we do justice, love mercy and walk humbly before Him.

This Lent our hunger for the freedom of the spirit can liberate ourselves, our nation, our world.