THE COMMON GOOD IN VIEW OF NEWTOWN


Law; an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community"
                                                                                                                            Thomas Aquinas

  Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men (Highlight mine( ; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.

John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.  

                                                                                                                  Jeremiah 31:15

Yesterday it was my job to preach about joy and the advent of God in the context of the tragedy of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  It was not the first time I had to make sense of tragedy from my pulpit and it will not be the last.  My thoughts today are with my unknown colleagues who will be conducting funerals, with the parents of children lost sitting in the pews in front of them.   I have done that more than once and those visions never leave you.  My prayers are not only with grieving families, but those who must speak for God on these darkest of days.

Christians of late have not been distinguishing themselves on the political front.  Too often our theologies,  I believe,  are made to conform to whatever our natural or chosen political leanings are.  I have seen this again and again for example in how various Christian groups and denominational leaders talk about Israeli-Palestinian issues.  Simplistic ideologies transcend all political and theological spectra.  Not only can we do better, we must do better.

I do not believe people of good will in general and people of faith specifically can remain passive.  It is time for "an ordinance of reason for the common good" to be addressed concerning our culture of violence.  It is time to no longer tolerate child sacrifices at the alter of libertarianism. As Christians, we believe that the two great commandments lifted up by Christ to love God and love our neighbor are absolute; not the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.  My Christianity also makes me realistic and practical.  I do not believe we can ultimately  legislate or medicate ourselves to a perfect society.  But we can legislate safety and we can chose to cultivate different values and appetites.

  I saw a statistic the other day that 1 in 3 Americans believe that extreme weather is a sign of the End Times.  Unbelievable!.  I do not remember global warming as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  But Jesus once said to his generation "You can read the weather, but not the signs of the times."  How many little angel signs do we  need--- on the campuses of Columbine High School, Virgina Tech University, Sandy Hook Elementary?

I am not an expert on public policy, merely an informed observer, but I feel as followers of Christ,  we must consider these "ordinances of reason for a better common good:"

1.  Hand held weapons of mass destruction must be banned
I come from a long line of hunters who have all submitted to the laws regulating the size of gun magazines.  You do not need 30 rounds of ammo to shoot a deer.  Skeet shooting with semi-automatic weapons is not sport.  One does not need armor piercing bullets to hunt turkeys.We should listen to the majority of law enforcement on this issue.  The sale and purchase of all other weapons should include background checks and licensing.  Of course, people will get around this and criminals will break whatever laws are passed-they are criminals, that's what they do.  But just because people drive intoxicated, does not mean we should legalize it.  On the contrary, stricter laws and enforcement have changed behaviors and for the sake of  public safety there is a whole range of weapons that need to be taken off the market.

2.  Voluntary boycotting violent entertainment and reassessment of First Amendment protection of the industry.  What if we just stopped buying violent video games for our kids and  stopped watching movies and T.V. shows that glorify or desensitize one towards violence? (You still have time to take them back before Christmas if they are hid away in your closet).   I know this is tricky, but I think most reasonable people know the difference between Saving Private Ryan and The Saw franchise. As for free speech rights protecting a multibillion dollar industry, it may take litigation to change the video game's equivalency of "crying fire in crowded theater."

3.  More Christian community support for individuals and families facing issues around mental health.   First of all it should be stated that the vast majority of problems in this country and in the world come at the hands of those whom society has deemed mentally healthy.  Having said that, we need to do all we can to support those caring for family members diagnosed with some form of mental illness. Church communities need not only be sympathetic and informed; we need to be places of welcome for those whose illness and the stigma associated with it often lead to isolation.  This also may not be time to be cutting funding for community mental health agencies.

Number one requires my voice and vote; number two requires a change of values; and number three requires a gospel vision of reaching out "to the least of these."    There is no panacea and I do not presume that my three suggestions would have saved anyone's life in Newtown.  But it might have and we must do all we can to try to prevent future such events.  Jesus gave us the keys of the kingdom and told us to "tend my lambs." What if Christ showed up today and asked us to give an account.....but He won't today.  He is too busy attending memorial services both here and throughout the world; weeping once again for the innocent victims of violence

ADVENT 3 IN VIEW OF THE TRAGEDY IN NEWTOWN

http://www.mediapresbyterian.org/media/pod/2012/12/16/god-produces-joy

My attempts to speak from a public policy perspective will follow later.

Peace,

Bill

Rules of War

I know this is a lazy way to post, but I have received a lot of comments about this sermon (some of them even positive:).  I promise in the next few weeks to write a real one.

Peace,

Bill


http://www.mediapresbyterian.org/media/pod/2012/08/19/rules-war

Children of Lesser Gods

I know its been a long time since last post.  The dissertation project has taken all my limited writing energy:).  Of the many things the Presbyterian church is divided over , how to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been one of the most heated debates over the last decade.  There are groups in the denomination who are part of the international boycott, divestment, sanctions movement (BDS),, which among other things designates Israel as an "apartheid state" and should be subject to the same kind of international pressures South Africa was in the 70's & 80's.  All the major mainline denominations are debating this issue on one level or the other,  as well as a number of evangelical groups. Media Presbyterian sponsored an overture that Philadelphia Presbytery passed suggesting an alternative approach to divestment.  

 

Presbyweb recently ran an article  (May 3) first published in the May 2nd  issue of Jewish Exponent (jewishexponent.com) about my involvement in the overture Philadelphia Presbytery passed calling for positive investment as opposed to divestment as an approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.   In many ways, I have been a reluctant combatant in this battle for the last 10 years.  I chaired the Avodat Israel administrative committee primarily to find a theologically coherent way to resolve an issue that created great animosity in our presbytery.  I served on the Jewish-Presbyterian dialogue team in an attempt to help our denomination have a more coherent and consistent understanding between what the two faiths shared, as well as where they differed.  And in 2010, when asked to serve on the Middle East Monitoring committee, I agreed, with the hope that there might be a possibility to serve the cause of peace and justice in a way that was not dominated by either an Israeli or Palestinian narrative, but rather the dictates of the Gospel.

While I disagree with those who are supportive of divestment and are promoting the larger BDS agenda, I respect their convictions and appreciate their frustrations.  The philosophical differences that existed among members of the Monitoring group did not prevent us from finding a larger arena of common commitments to peace, justice, and even more importantly, to our church.  So much of the shared life of the Presbyterian Church USA has become a plethora of affinity groups vying for what often ends up being pyrrhic victories at the expense of our ever decreasing life together.   Somehow, if we cannot live with some modicum of peace among ourselves, what kind of moral authority can we hope to have to speak to the complexity of larger geo-political struggles?  If we practice distortive politics and rash rhetoric in our internal denominational politics, how can we ultimately stand for justice for others?

I recently spoke to a group of Jewish leaders and said that I am not willing to abandon a position that is Pro-Palestinian, Pro-Israeli, Pro-Peace and Pro-Justice. I neither presume to know what that might look like, nor am I optimistic that it will happen anytime soon.  Ironically, saying the same thing earlier this year led to me being accused of being anti-Israel in a conservative publication.   On the other hand, some have inferred that because I have worked with a variety of Jewish organizations, that somehow makes me against justice for Palestinians.  There is nothing further from the truth.

A proper approach to the issue needs to somehow hold so many different factors together.   How does one get to a stable functioning Palestinian state from the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank?  How does one appreciate Israel’s very real security issues while calling the country to obey its own laws and evolve its democracy?  How does one deal with unresolved injustices from 1948?  How does one approach the problem of refuges and settlers? What are Christian responses to the insidious growth of antisemitism?  What will the region look like as the Arab spring transforms into something yet to be determined?  What does an Iran with nuclear weapons mean for the whole region? 

The Biblical and theological issues are equally complex.  What are the promises to the patriarchs that are still in effect (Romans11:25ff)?  How do we live under and respond to the unified cry of the prophets that God is on the side of the oppressed?  How do we live out the peace of Christ in this issue?  How do you balance the seemingly competing commitments to justice, concern for our Middle Eastern Christian brothers and sisters, and the necessary work of interfaith understanding and relations?  How do we reconcile our denomination’s contradictory positions?  How do we approach complex issues in a more balanced way when there is significant bias entrenched in our structure and process? 

I really do not have very many answers, and the more I study all the dimensions of this issue, the less I seem to know.  Maybe it’s time to regain our theological acumen and discern how to speak the truth in love on this issue.  I always attempt not to be a reductionist in my thinking and theology, and my hope is that actions of this summer’s General Assembly will avoid that temptation as well.  Spiritual, intellectual and rhetorical humility is a corporate virtue we desperately need to cultivate.

The "Green" Tea Party

“The public, which has been wrong before and is wrong now, can accept only demons and angels on the stage”                                                                                                              Théophile Gautier

I was having lunch with my friend Mark* recently, who is not only one of the brightest people I know, but truly the most open-minded as well.  Our conversation turned to politics and the subject of Michelle Bachmann and the Tea Party came up.   Mark commented, while he disagreed with many of their positions and methods, he appreciated their motivation.  "At heart, Michelle Bachman wants this country to be run by Christian convictions."  He observed.  "I want this country to live by the Christian convictions of justice, protection for the most vulnerable, care for creation, and working for peace.  The point of divergence would be on what constitutes Christian values and their order of priority."  As I walked away from lunch, I was struck with the nearly extinct virtue my friend possessed:  the ability to respect the convictions of others as genuine, without diminishing the differences between his position and theirs.

While the "Occupy wherever" movement is not explicitly religious, it does seem to embrace other Christian values that the libertarian Tea Party ignores.   Frankly,  I am surprised that it has taken this long for the streets to rise up against institutions that have bankrupted this country, continue to hold its future hostage, while making its upper management and shareholders rich.  Many of them may not know what they stand for any more than the average Tea Party member actually understands the Constitution,  but the "Green Tea Party,"*
is voicing the frustrations and fears of the first generation in a long time (maybe ever) in this country who are looking forward to a dimensioned standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

That's why I find it disappointing that a tea party activist proclaimed the Occupy Wall street protesters "unemployed, uneducated, and uninformed." (New York Times, 10/21/11)   First of all, I am not sure the Tea party folks  really wants to play the Occupy folks in Jeopardy.  Secondly, it seems to me that diverse populist groups would be better served by stepping back and seeing that they share a common dissatisfaction with the status quo and a shared conviction that our country has somehow lost its way.  But I doubt that will happen.

One of the great public psychoses of our age is the discrepancy between the public commitment to plurality and diversity and the totalitarian spirit of private interests.  One alleged victim can hold the entire institution hostage; bastions of free thought and expression have "zero tolerance policies" that make acting like a kid a disciplinary action.  We have a congress that is willing to play politics with our national credit rating.  I am a member of a denomination that contains minority interests groups who have no problem risking the disaffiliation of half its membership in the name of their understanding of justice.  We have a leader of the Tea Party accuse the "Occupy" folks of lacking any respect for our form of government,  while her movement indiscriminately wants to dismantle the social contract.

As Christians, whether our  natural affinities lie with the Tea Party, Green Tea party, or non-aligned coffee drinkers, we need to be able to both affirm truth wherever it may lie, and critique error and ignorance across political and ideological divides.  There is no clear formula for the "in the world, but not of the world" matrix that Jesus gave us, but it does allow us to be engaged with society's problems (in) while creating a certain objective distance (not of).  While neither a rigid originalist  approach to the Constitution, nor a radical street democracy are going to solve any real problems, sincerity and strength of conviction can be fertile ground for positive change.  But unless conviction and earnestness are held in check by some higher standard, they can become justification for greater harm, destruction and tyranny.   For Christians, Jesus is still the way and the means by which competing truths need to be filtered, regardless of your tea preference.

So if Jesus and the disciples were around today, which group would they join?    Matthew would probably be more comfortable with the Tea Party and I can see the sons of Thunder (James & John) drinking with the Greens.  Judas would probably drop off his resume at a Wall Street firm, just in case; while Peter would be for whatever group they would be visiting at the time.  Thomas would think the whole thing a waste of time and go to Starbucks. What about Jesus? Which side would he take? That is easy-neither!  But my guess he would show up at rallies from both sides, listen, then offer whoever had ears to hear  a better way.  Not a bad strategy for 2011.














*Mark's name has not been changed to protect his innocence.  There are inherent risks to being my friend.  This is one of them.

*Copyright pending

Smells like Holy Spirit

If I find Him with great ease, perhaps He is not my God.
If I find Him wherever I wish, have I found Him?
If He can find me whenever He wishes, and tells me 
Who He is and who I am, and if I then know that He
Whom I could not find has found me: then I know
He is the Lord, my God...
                                                   Thomas Merton from No Man is an Island

(Nothing I am about to write is nearly as profound as the above quote.  So the best use of your time may be to just read the quote again and think about it.  If you decide to read on, then make sure you go back and read the quote again after reading my meandering thoughts.)



Recently I was participating in an ecclesiastical discussion.  Someone commented that they were sure the Spirit would guide us, to which I said, "I highly doubted that."  One person kind of laughed and another kind of gasped and we moved on.  My guess is that they thought I was joking, but I wasn't.  It was my most serious contribution to the whole discussion.

My comment was not intended to be a judgement against the group;  it was more of an expression of my growing  conviction  that the Holy Spirit is not an extension of our collective or private activity.  It seems to me that  most Christians pray, vote,think, and feel  their natural prejudices and proclivities and then afterwards  tag on "the Spirit's leading" as justification.  For instance, I do not think that the Holy Spirit was behind the recent changes in my denomination's polity and ordination standards.  I do not think the Holy Spirit was necessarily preserving the old standards either.  Maybe God is in changing demographics, shifting mores, and presbytery fatigue, but my guess is these dynamic are generally under the domain of Adam and Eve's prodigal children.

The same issues can be found in the realm of prayer.  We cannot help but speak to God "just as we are" and certainly the Psalms illustrate that God does not judge prayer by its theological content or intent.  But if we rise from our prayers the same way we knelt, then we have missed something and that something is the Holy Spirit. You can manufacture a feeling, meditate an ecstasy, and maybe even psyche a healing, but you cannot produce Spirit.  Only God can give God's self.

I think we are  "Ss"piritually weak, because we have not cultivated the discipline of  "waiting on the Lord to renew our strength."  I think this is part of what Merton is saying in the above quote.   We pray to ourselves, bless ourselves, and sometimes we even act as if we have given ourselves absolution.   We equate our "spirit" (whatever that is) with the Holy Spirit.  The Scriptures and the Tradition do promise that the Holy Spirit dwells in all Christians and that through the work of the Holy Spirit we are maintained "in Christ."   But no where does it collapse human intuitions and feelings into the Holy Spirit.  While there maybe infinite possibilities of understanding the Holy Spirit as the immanent principle of God in the finite, if we are to remain Christians, we must never forget that God is God and we are not.
I do trust in the church's ability in the long haul to get things right.  The Trinitarian debates were messy, and the Christological debates often tragic, but in the end I think Nicaea and Chalcedon got it right.  From the accounts of the councils, it was as hard to see the work of the Holy Spirit on the ground then,  as it is now.  Yet God's freedom is not obliterated by humanity's freedom to be wrong.  Just recently, I experienced a profound sense of the Holy Spirit guiding our elders through a difficult discussion.  The result was both surprising and faith affirming and much better than what we could have come up with on our own.   In retrospect, there was a collective waiting for God to help us find our way rather than the need to have one's convictions win the day.

 Contemporary American Christians of all brands are way too confident in their convictions that their ways are God's ways and that  "Spirit" is leading them.  We have a lot of liberal and evangelical gnostics running around promoting a religious version of "tea party" faith.  Good theology is humble theology; deep prayer involves spending a lot of time in silence waiting to be found.  One must never gets beyond realizing that to proclaim Jesus as Lord is to constantly remember we need him as Savior.   And to be led by the Spirit entails "being led" by an infinitely free being,  not an earnest praise band or a moving social cause.  Of course, an infinitely free being is free to use an earnest praise band or just social cause to move us, but we must be careful not to equate what moves us with the move of the Spirit.

I feel led to go home now and enjoy this beautiful day. I am agnostic as to the source of the inspiration.

Peace,

Bill

Does God need to be forgiven?

"Miss Anne, is it wrong for me to believe it was Jesus who asked my forgiveness?"....she put her hand on her hip, "So why wouldn't Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?"

                                                           from Jesus, my Father, The CIA and Me by Ian Morgan Cron


One of my oldest and best friends in the world is Don.  I know of no one who integrates the best of being a Christian and what ministry should be better than he does.  He also tells me about books I would never read but should.  It was Don who told me about Cron's book.  So I bought 12 copies to give to my Tuesday morning men's Bible study and recommended it on the church website, without reading it.

So this past Tuesday after talking about Psalm 123, I asked the guys what they thought of the book thus far. A few of them  mumbled something (we meet at 6:30 in the morning, so there is a lot of meaningful mumbling.)  But one person said he was troubled by Cron's believing Jesus spoke to him during a church service, asking  Cron to forgive him (i.e.Jesus) for allowing him to suffer so much as a child.  I had not gotten that far in the book and it occurred to me that recommending books I had not read my not be the best policy.

Now anyone who hears the voice of Jesus-real or imagined, makes me a little nervous.  But it was the idea that God would/should/could ask for forgiveness that concerned the other fellow the most.  "That disavows the whole point of the book of Job," he proclaimed.  Good point

                       God is God
                       We are not.
God is good   We have sinned  Jesus died for our sins.
                         We repent
                        God forgives
                        Reconciliation

The essence of the faith seems to be fairly straightforward.   But maybe there is room for infinite mystery in the spaces around the Gospel story.  The more I reflect on it, the stranger the Cross becomes.   Its meaning fails to be contained in any single version of the atonement.  "Christ paying our ransom,' "Christ the substitute," "Christ the exemplar of love," "Christ the victor," "The crucified God"-frankly I find merit and lacking in all of these theories or images of the meaning of Christ's death.

So could the cross be God saying I am sorry?  Why not?   Could you not hear these additional "last words of Christ" from the Cross.  "I am sorry that life can be so hard, trust me I know."  "I am sorry  you are in so much pain, me too." "I am sorry you had to watch (fill in the blank) die."   "I am sorry for all the tsunamis, and earth quakes and famines and plagues, and particularly capital punishment on this given Friday."  I am sorry that you are lonely and probably just could use a hug, but being that I am up here, I cannot help you out. "And I am sorry that I did not intervene and change (fill in the blank) so they would not have (fill in the blank) and everything would have had a happy ending-I got the same answer in Gethsemane."

If you found anything in the preceding paragraph offensive:  good!  You might be closer to understanding the scandal  of the Cross.  I can argue why none of the above is God's fault.  But that does not help someone in the depths of despair, hurt and anger.  There are times when reason, theological solutions, and the big picture do not help.  There are some tragedies and deep sorrows that seem to beg for a voice from the depths of the cosmos shattering the silence with "I am really sorry."  Maybe the silence of God in the face of the Cross is
 such an apology.

I once was talking to a friend about something awful.  He said, "I want to say to God-what the (you fill in the blank)!  How can You (God) be letting this happen? I feel awful that I feel this way, but it is really hard to believe."  I responded by saying it sounds to me like a pretty good prayer. Maybe not a goodnight prayer for children or a public prayer for Sunday morning, but it certainly has a psalm-like quality to it.  I pray everyday that he will experience something of a two-way mercy from God.

I read the aforementioned section in Cron that Tuesday night.  I am still not sold on his writing, but I was glad that God had given him what he needed.  Because there is no limits to the Divine love, then there are no restraints on the extant of the Divine humility.  Maybe God is powerful enough to transcend our rules for what is and is not appropriate God-like behavior.  I think all bets are off when it comes to a deity that would be incarnate in a unwed teenage mother, born in a cave, and killed as a capital criminal all for the love of a barely evolving species.  If  Christ "suffers the children to come" to him, certainly he will do what it takes to heal the child that suffers.  And at last count, that population is growing at an astronomical rate.

Peace