“GOD SAID” . . . “I CAME TO BELIEVE GOD SAID” – A MINOR/MAJOR CHANGE

Jul 26, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

I am aware that one wanders out where the ice becomes thin when one suggests altering any part of any sacred text, the Bible among them. I am conscious that posing specific changes, particularly regarding what God is said to have spoken, will seem audacious at the least, more likely heretical. But I want to propose just that! I think I’ll blame last week’s session at my church’s Wednesday evening adult education series. We were watching a beautifully filmed video and listening to its engaging narrative, a briskly moving Holy Land tour, the commentator linking each location with an important biblical event. A particular phrase became a mantra: “This is the place where God told ______________ to ______________.” A not unfamiliar phrasing, repeated in differing verbal forms throughout both testaments. But something about it seemed dissonant, dare I say dangerous, with each repetition. I want to briefly explore that dissonance, and then offer that heretical/necessary proposal.

(Pastor and theolgian that I am, unapologetically, I must confess that these reflections have been influenced significantly by my intentional, disciplined reading of Richard Dawkins (particularly the God Delusion) and Sam Harris (End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation), two of the four currently prominent atheists, their crisp, at times strident, but focused and telling critiques worthy of reading by Christians.  My principle rebuttal, beside what seems a deepening respect and appreciation of their writing, is that they confuse the reality of God with perceptions of God.

“And God said to Noah, ‘Build a boat for yourself’” . . .  “Lord say to Abraham, ‘Do not be afraid’” . . .  “God said to Jacob, ‘Go to Bethel’” . . . “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Assemble seventy elders’”  . . . “The Lord called, ‘Samuel.  Samuel’” . . .  “Then I [Isaiah] heard the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send?’”  . . . “And the Lord said, ‘Before you [Jeremiah] were born, I selected you to be a prophet.’” . . .  “Led by the Spirit, Simeon went up to the Temple.” . . .  “One night Paul had a vision in which the Lord said to him, ‘Go to Troas’” Nothing startling nor troublesome here.  No problem so far.  Indeed the biblical narrative appears to turn, unfold and chart its course around such texts.  Lives of individuals and communities intersecting with divine presence, discerning divine instruction, “God said to me” almost natural.

But other verses began to come to mind, and the earlier discomfort returned. “And Moses said that the Lord says, ‘About midnight I will go through Egypt and every first born son in Egypt will die’” . . .  “The Lord gave the following regulations, ‘Anyone who curses his mother or father shall be put to death . . . if a man has  sexual relations with another man, both shall be put to death.” . . .  “A man, during a quarrel, cursed the Lord.  The Lord said to Moses, ‘let the community stone the man to death’” . . .  “A man gathered firewood on the Sabbath and was taken to Moses.  Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘This man must be put to death’.”  Can I offer worship and praise to a God who institutes such widely applied capital offenses, and directly orders executions?

Then I found myself thumbing through Joshua, my stomach churning, twisting with inner turmoil, approaching  the edge of outright rebellion.  “And Joshua said, ‘The Lord has given you the city.  The city and everything in it must be destroyed’ and with their swords they killed everyone in the city, men and women, young and old.” . . . “Then the Lord said to Joshua, ‘Point your spear at Ai’ . . . and the men of Ai were completely surrounded and they were all killed.”  It’s commonly called The Ban, God’s instructions to utterly destroy the conquered cities, killing all that breathes.  Perhaps history’s first genocide.  Sometimes I have to allow myself the full outrage of my thoughts and feelings, to let myself speak the ultimately heretical.  I will not believe in, I cannot believe in, I refuse to follow such a God.  Atheism is the clearly more reasonable choice.  I refuse to worship a God who issues orders to exterminate a people.

I want to give worship and praise to the Divine!  I want to read scripture, because it has been such a source of comfort and guidance, forgiveness and grace, calling and direction-giving in my life.  I have come to a conclusion that offers a solution to redeem my faith in God.  But it means venturing out onto that thin ice, mounting that unapologetic audacity, and risking being named a heretic. 

I have made a decision, a firm commitment, to read such passages in an altered form.  Henceforth, when a text says some variation of: “And God told _________ to __________.” I will change it to read, “And __________ came to believe that God told him to ___________.”  And it is the assault of Jericho and Ai that ultimately forced the change.  I am guessing that Joshua and those other leaders, desiring a rapid and thorough conquest of Canaan, transformed their God of mercy and justice, forgiveness and love, into a warrior.  They colluded to create a God, the “Lord God of Hosts” (God imaged as Commander in Chief of the invading Hebrew armies) who gave orders to massacre the inhabitants of a land to which they felt entitled.  Daring to presume to know the mind of God, an ultimate audacity, I believe God must have been appalled, heart-broken, outraged that the people he had brought through the wilderness to a beautiful and bountiful land had now transformed, no transmuted him into a warrior king.

Try it out.  Maybe privately and silently at first.  Though some of you, like me, may read scripture publicly.  Integrity requires me to make this change.  I wonder what the reaction will be the next time I read a text in this altered form.  Or what your reaction is to these paragraphs.

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BIDEN IN IRAQ . . . A (SADLY) ODD IRONY

Jul 6, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

Joe Biden is in Iraq, the mission pivotal, crucial to forward movement in building Iraqi stability and self-reliance, a matter of high urgency.  Speaking directly and candidly, as only Biden can, working to break partisan gridlock, establish political common ground, to translate collision into collaboration, embittered competition into cooperation.  All that in the face of deeply rooted animosities, broad ethnic and sectarian divides, fierce Sunni/Shia antagonisms, exacerbated by varying geographically-defined tribal divisions, a legacy of many generations.  A monumental diplomatic challenge even for one as wise and seasoned as Biden.

Imagine one of the Iraqi adversaries – per chance someone willing to negotiate, to transcend differences, to bridge the chasm, to aspire for common good – asking a reasonable and timely question: How do you deal with such differences in the United States?  Oops!

Back home Biden presides over a similarly fractious governing body, where competition stymies cooperation, ideological divide logjams bi-partisan initiative, attempts at dialogue collapse into bitter verbal assault, and gridlock derails forward movement.  With hardly a trace of “differences that divide” that abounds in Iraq.  Imagine the full Senate posed for a group photograph.  Thumb through biographical profiles of each senator.  Racial/ethnic division?  One hundred percent white.  Mostly of western European lineage.  Religious strife?  The vast majority of Judeo-Christian heritage.  Different, but not divisively so.  Deep regional differences?  Okay, “red” and “blue” states cluster on a national map, but nothing of deep historic divides.  All well-educated, most with graduate degrees, the majority lawyers.  Of upper-middle to upper class stock.  Of rival parties, voting increasingly in party-loyalty lockstep, but not unlike the “choice between Pepsi and Coke” analogy so popular in Latin American perspective on Democrats and Republicans.

“Practice what you preach,” my mother told me when I was very young.  “Be the change you are looking for” a more contemporary version.  If we want to be a “city on a hill,” an example worthy of imitating, an inspiration to place common good against partisan agendas, let’s “practice it” before we “preach it.”  Having said that . . . blessings on your effort in Iraq, Mr. Biden.  A lot is riding on it.

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REDISTRIBUTING THE REDISTRIBUTION (OF THE DISTRIBUTION) OF WEALTH . . . A BIBLICAL MANDATE

Jun 26, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

It may have begin with Michele Obama’s comment about “cutting the pie more fairly.” It gained momentum with Barach Obama’s conversation with Joe the Plumber, about a more level playing field. “Now he wants to redistribute wealth!” Rush shouted. “See, we were right all along, he’s a Marxist,” blustered Sean Hannity. “Hear this, Mrs. Obama,” responded Glenn Beck, his eyes steeled, as he leaned toward the camera, “you keep your hands off my piece of the pie!” I, too, share a passionate concern about wealth redistribution – the one that occurred from the mid-70’s to the present! I want to “redistribute the re-distribution,” and I’ll look through a biblical lens.

From the end of WWII to the mid-70’s a “rising tide lifted all (well, almost all) boats” – robust macroeconomic trends realized at the micro-level.  At differing trajectories all segments of the U.S. economy, most households across the socioeconomic spectrum shared in expanding prosperity, experiencing financial gain.  The gap between rich and poor actually narrowed.  But from 1975 to the present that trend dramatically changed – a rapid and massive wealth re-distribution.

It is early to “numb out” in the face of statistics, forgetting that human faces peer from beneath the data.  The rich/poor divide has widened at a staggering rate, increasing threefold over the last thirty years.  Across that span annual income increased just 2% for 90% of us, while the top 1% increased 57%, with that top 1% now controlling wealth equal to the lower 80% combined.  One in six of our children are poor and 37 million of us live below the poverty line, while CEO-to-worker income ratio expanded from 43-1 in 1975 to 344-1 in 2008.  A chief executive, who once had to work ten days to match a worker’s annual income, can leave the office by mid-afternoon on any given day to match that worker’s yearly salary.

Speaking closer to home, perhaps uncomfortable so: if I have assets of $2,200 (my current checking account balance), I position in the global population’s top 50%; assets of $61,000 (the equity in my home) the top 10%.  I went to www.globalrichlist.com and punched in my annual income (pension, Social Security and investment income), a modest total compared to most people I know, to discover that I am in the .93 percentile globally and the top 1.7 percentile in the U.S.

The redistribution has already occurred!  

Beneath policies and strategies – “positions” be they ideological, political or economic, philosophical or theological – are basic values and principles, a prevailing ideal, a sense of what is right and just.  As a progressive Christian I look to the Bible for guidance.  I would suggest that a foundational, pervasive, definitional dynamic is (re)distribution of wealth (land, resources, nutrition and housing, education and health care).  This theme is central, dominant and at the core of the biblical vision of life on the planet.  Space here just to bullet a few:

  • The lengthy sojourn in the wilderness called the Exodus coaxed the Hebrews to abandon the economics of “too much” with an economics of “enough,” the provision of manna the daily lesson, and a plan for equitable distribution of the Promised Land by tribe and family, profiled in the Book of Numbers, a “distribution plan.”
  • As if God knew growing inequalities were inevitable across a generation or two, “redistribution strategies” are outlined in detail, every seventh year a Sabbath Year and every fiftieth a Jubilee Year, with sweeping instructions for re-distribution of wealth.
  • Scholars suggest that in Jesus inaugural sermon, declaring “the acceptable year of the Lord,” may well have been re-instating the lapsed Sabbath and Jubilee observances.
  • More recent study asserts that Jesus overturning of the money-changers tables was a symbolic “overturning” of the economic system that advantaged the already rich on the backs of the poor.
  • St. Paul’s most focused description of “charity” (2 Corinthians 8 & 9) might be better named a teaching about “justice,” generosity grounded in a theology of re-distribution.

How to craft and implement just and timely “redistribution plans” can be a matter for crisp and vigorous public debate, but whether to address this matter, from a biblical perspective, is not an option but a mandate.

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AMERICA’S MULTIPLE ADDICTIONS SYNDROME . . . AND OUR BORDER PROBLEMS

Jun 5, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

It’s about addiction. Over-coming an addiction begins with facing and naming it. It continues with mounting the fullest measure of resolve and determination, and engaging a supportive community to support change, often other addicts. “I’m Howard and I’m an alcoholic” will elicit warm, encouraging applause at an AA meeting. Can we provide warm and encouraging applause, fellow addicts, when we say: “I’m Howard and I am addicted to oil” (or food, alcohol, drugs, sex . . . the list goes on).  How did Pogo say it: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

Too often issues are addressed individually, matters presumed unrelated, simultaneous in time but unrelated in origin. Like the circus performer keeping an increasing number of platters spinning atop broomsticks, each addition increasing the stress and danger. Three issues related to our border come to mind, two on the news cycles’ front burners and the third gaining traction as an issue of international scope. I would propose that all three, though arguably unrelated, have a common cause – the multiple addictions of the American population.

          • Despite a steady, concerted assault on drug trafficking and Mexican drug cartels, aided by the most sophisticated available surveillance equipment and military hardware provided by the United States, staggering violence is well past epidemic proportions in Mexico, rapidly spilling virus across what remains an uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable southern border. The cartels’ arsenal is just as daunting, the majority of their armaments purchased illegally in the United States. The border is porous in both directions. The war on drugs looms as potentially unwinnable. And drugs are as available as a nearby corner, from someone you know, from a friend at a party. The market is saturated. Access is not an issue. An $85 billion dollar annual profit.

         • Last year 500,000 young women, many in their teens, lured by a variety of deceptive tactics – the majority from the Far East (Thailand has been displaced by India as the major source, with 40% of all prostitutes in India being children), many from eastern Europe and former Soviet bloc nations, and an increasing number from Latin America – joined the international sex slave trade. CST, Child Sex Tourism, has become a growing industry, with 10-12 year olds the most popular age group. Child porn outsells adult porn many times over. The Department of Justice estimates that there may be as many of a million sex slaves in the Unites States under the age of 18.  Business in a dozen of our major cities is booming.  I just clicked my city’s Craig’s List site: first “services,” then “adult,” and then two hundred erotically worded invitations with phone numbers appeared. Risking a virus I made a few calls (some my local exchange!) the same man answering on several inquiries. It’s an easy access business.

          • Turn on your favorite news channel and odds are the story being covered is the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf. A map this morning suggested that we may soon look for oil on the New Jersey and Long Island beaches that are our favorites. Predictions for stemming the thousands of gallons per day spewing into the Gulf shift from weeks to months with an almost silent “if ever” clearly implied. The technology for deep water exploration and drilling clearly outran the technology of mishap management. Oil products remain as close as the corner gas station, power grid, airport, the neighborhood pharmacy, your basement or pantry, or the cars in your driveway.

Three illegal border crossings – sex slaves, drugs and oil. Three stories, not one. Or . . . one story not three! Could they be three stories with a common cause: America’s Multiple Addiction Syndrome? Psychological research had discerned that the addictive person may, across time, shift addictions, the same psychological process fixing on different substances or activities, or, develop multiple addictions. Ann Wilson Shaef, in her classic must-read The Nation as Addict, suggest that nations can develop addictions, a collective addictive personality.

It’s an axiom of our capitalist system: where there is a market, there will be a supply. As long as we collectively generate an $85 billion drug market, the world will rush to supply it, through the shortest and most efficient trade route. As long as we buy child pornography, sign up for CST, frequent the local brothel or massage parlor, roll down the window for a street-walker visible on any major city’s downtown intersections, the sex trade will continue to grow. As long as we live dependent on oil and its derivatives, and we show no signs of changing, risky oil drilling will persist.

Fellow addicts . . . are we ready for recovery?

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BP AND CORPORATE HOMICIDE . . . A BIBLICAL LENS FOR A CURRENT DEBATE

May 29, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

I am not given to hyperbole.  I prefer understatement, subtlety, turning the rhetoric down.  But missing for me in the unfolding oil rig disaster in the Gulf is OUTRAGE.  This story feels all together too familiar – corporate arrogance and governmental ineptness, slogan-izing corporate CEO’s and posturing politicians.  If anything characterized the response of Jesus and the prophets to injustice it was OUTRAGE.  So . . . a little “reasoned outrage.”

In the highly controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case the Supreme Court recently voted 5-4 to extend definition of the 14th Amendment granting corporations the rights of persons, freeing them to participate in election campaigning with the same rights and protections as individuals.  I was among those citizens who found themselves stunned and deeply disappointed, fearing that the unbridled resources of corporations poured into election campaigns would overwhelm the political leverage of average citizens, the genius of our electoral process.  It struck down a decade of legislation, foremost among them McCain-Feingold, that has banned “electioneering communication” by corporations, that had limited or barred corporate engagement in the election process.  More fully, more clearly, more decisively than ever before: corporations have personhood . . . and power.

Less known, with limited coverage in our press, on April 6, 2008 the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into effect in the United Kingdom.  Careful to provide “due process” and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” all corporations became liable to legal proceedings related to food production, transportation, workplace safety and the like. Companies and organizations can be found guilty of corporate manslaughter or murder as a result of serious management failures resulting in loss of life.  In accompanying guidelines to the law corporations are counseled to implement appropriate health and safety procedures, employee training, and periodic inspection and review.  With differing implications: corporations have personhood . . . and accountability.

For those of us who look to the bible as a resource, is there insight and guidance in scripture?  In bulleted form – inviting your further, more in-depth exploration – are three possibilities:

  • The prophets – Amos, Micah and Jeremiah come immediately to mind – held systems as well as individuals accountable, per chance from a prescient “corporations as persons” perspective.  Unjust judges and unjust judicial systems, dishonest businesspersons and unjust economic systems were equally confronted and held accountable by these prophets.

 

  • Jesus – who some would argue was silent on such issues – may in fact have made a clear, profound and resounding “statement” as he overturned the money changers tables, which an increasing number of biblical scholars interpret as a symbolic “overturning” of the political/economic  system.  Was the focus not on where the merchants had set up shop (traditional interpretation of this passage) but what kind of business they were doing?  The temple, more than a house of worship, was fundamentally an economic institution that dominated the city’s economic life.  According to historical records, these were more than a cluster of small, independent merchants, but part of a substantial, inter-connected mercantile establishment, big-business first-century style.  Those same records unmask a dominant economic monolith quietly linked political, economic and religious players, the money changers local vendors representing banking interests of substantial power – with  evidence of priestly collusion in a system profiting on the backs of the poor.

 

  • Paul – If we read Colossians 1.16-20 as Paul’s addendum to the creation story, as I do, “thrones, dominions, principalities and powers” as the structural, institutional, corporate dimension of the creation, then, as biblical scholar Walter Wink summarizes, like persons “the Powers are good, the Powers are fallen, and the Powers will be redeemed.”  Perhaps from a biblical perspective: corporations have personhood . . . good, sinfulness and a need for redemption.

 

If British Petroleum knew their “safety guarantees” were over-stated, that there were no adequate prevention strategies or available technology to respond to equipment failure; if voices of warning were silenced and cost-cutting/profit-enhancing decisions were made knowing that risk levels spiked as a result; if eleven lives were lost in an explosion and countless more lost as a result of this disaster (does “collateral damage” echo in your ears too?) – is there not premeditation and homicide?  If health-care providers have used deception and duplicity to refuse life-saving medical treatments, employed exclusions on technicalities of “pre-existing conditions” based on fabricated evidence with hundreds of deaths the outcome – is there not premeditation and homicide?  If Toyota knew the lethal potential in a faulty accelerator pedal, had statistical evidence of the extent of the risk to drivers in certain circumstances but withheld it – is there not premeditation and homicide?  Such charges have not been brought against a corporation since the Ford Motor Company Pinto gas tank case in 1980.  It is time for another?

Okay corporations . . . for the moment, I’ll agree . . . you have personhood . . . see you in court!

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GRACIOUS JESUS (I) . . . AN UNLIKELY, PER CHANCE CONTROVERSIAL STORY

May 24, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

What did Jesus hope would happen for those he met?  What do we hope will happen for those we meet with whom we speak of Jesus?  Jesus seemed most hopeful that they would “come to know God like he did,” a relationship of intimacy that was personally transforming, life-giving, healing and illuminating.  Though we can speak of Jesus power, it is his graciousness that most touches me.   And the following narrative revealed and re-affirmed that graciousness in an unusual, unexpected, possibly controversial way.  I’ll tell it briefly.

Tlamaquesapa is a tiny, rather primitive village in the high mountains that overlook Cuernavaca, Mexico.   Some women in the village fashion sturdy brooms from the twigs of a shrub that are both supple and strong. Others weave beautifully multi-colored baskets of every possible size from a hearty, plentiful small palm species that absorbs die in a way that maintains a brilliance of color.  Tuesdays and Saturdays brooms and baskets are loaded atop old and rickety buses headed down the mountain to be sold on street corners, road-side stalls and in the city market.  Life in Tlama is rugged and spartan.

These hearty people draw strength from an indigenous religion, a typical rural Mexican amalgam of beliefs that pre-date by centuries the conquest, blended with a Roman Catholicism that merged and mingled with those existing practices, and influenced by the presence of shaman-like wisdom figures or holy men.  As part of this religious practice each home has a sacred stone nestled into a wall or beneath the earth floor – the presence of which assures divine presence and protection.

I sat one morning in a dusty circle, amid faces creased and weathered by the relentless sun on their mountain slope village, and heard this story.  We’ll call him Jose.  A group of evangelical Christians, knocking door to door, convinced him that he should commit his life to Jesus.  They gave him as a gift a cross to put in a place of honor in his home.  And . . . to remove the sacred stone, which they insisted was a matter of superstition at best, demonic at worst.  He dug it up and tossed it into the field behind his property.

Some months later Jose got sick.  A doctor who visited the village once a month prescribed some medicine.  The evangelicals came and prayed for healing.  Jose got worse.  Everyone could see that Jose was dying.  His neighbor asked the shaman to come by, which he did.  The shaman asked about the cross, accepting Jose’s explanation without judgment.  “But where is the sacred stone?” the shaman asked.  “I can sense it is no longer here.”  Jose pointed to the field.  “Get the stone and bury it again under the floor, Jose,” he gently but firmly counseled.  And Jose did.  Nearby the cross, in fact.  Within days Jose began to get better and returned to full strength within weeks.

How to interpret this story?  Fellow Christian I have shared it with have reacted differently, some dramatically so.  It is for me a story of a humble, gracious Jesus.  Jesus incognito.  The same Spirit, I would submit – that manifests in a cross for many Christians, through the mystical presence of Jesus, through prayers uttered in his name, myself included – manifested in that sacred stone for Jose.  I am not sure if the evangelicals returned, and if so what they said when they heard the story.  But, as the narrative came to a close, and the peasant faces broke into a smile, I heard myself whisper, “Thank you, Jesus!”

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“I’M FINE” . . . SIMPLE, PREDICTIBLE AND PRESCRIBED . . . YET POTENTIALLY PROFOUND

May 7, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

No matter what the setting, the first words spoken in a language class are the same:  a greeting, a question, and an answer, all scripted, without variation:

Good morning.   How are you?  I’m fine, thank you

Buenos dias.  Como esta usted  Muy bien, gracias

Bonjour.  Comment allez-vous?  Je vais bien

Buon giorno.  Come sta?  Sto bene, grazie

Guten morgen.  Wie geht’s?  Mir geht es gut

Dzien dobry.  Jak leci?  Bardo dobrze

Ohayo.  O genki desu ka?  Genki Desu Wo heng hao

Sabaah al-khayr.  Akhbaarak ed?  Ana bekhair

Sobh beh’khayr.   Hale shoma chetore?  Man ham khoobam

Jo san.  Nei ho ma? Wo heng hao

What answer we ever offer, given the context, could be more superficial, even trite, less revealing than “I’m fine”?  I may have a pounding headache, just lost my job, my life unraveling, my mood atrocious, but out the answer tumbles, “I’m fine.”  But those two words, those exact words, amidst a circle whose native tongues speak the language options listed above, took on a touching, powerful and profound tone.  I could not possibly, try as I might, convey the poignancy of the hour these paragraphs quietly narrate.  The setting was our Interfaith Group that gathers once a month for two hours on a Saturday morning, their nationalities and faiths revealed in the commentary.

Someone asked how my Mexican daughter-in-law was doing, who had been through a wrenching medical ordeal, four surgeries during a month’s hospitalization.  I told of an incident at 3 am the night she came closest to dying, just as she had shared it with me.  “I felt a hand on my arm, warm and gentle,” she said.  “And looked up to see the face of my father.  He said only this, ‘You will be fine.’  I knew as he said it I could die and be with him, or live and return home.  His saying ‘You will be fine’ did not mean I would survive the night.   From that moment, I could confidently say, and still can, I’m fine!”  Her father died nine years ago!

 “I know just what she means,” Mary Ann, a Quaker and a Buddhist, exclaimed.  “Five years ago I had a brain tumor. As the surgery approached the doctor told me candidly, ‘I cannot guarantee, or predict, that you will awaken from the procedure.’  I struggled with that fact and anguished how to tell my children.  Then, in meditation, a peace came over me.  And a clarity: whether I live or die, I’m fine! Precisely those two everyday words.”

Sara, a Presbyterian, was sitting across the circle, leaning forward, tuned in.  “Thank you, Howard and Mary Ann,” she began.  Eight years ago my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, possibly terminal they told me.  Fear overwhelmed me.  I prayed; no, I begged God; do not let him die.  The struggle was relentless.  Then one night, as sleep finally approached, I felt a peace.  I let go.  I put it in God’s hands.  And those two little words are exactly right.  I was able to say from the center of my being, I’m fine!

Two Jesus women sat either side of Mary and began a dialogue, recalling their wrenching struggle when they were first told of the holocaust, and tragic personal stories of relatives.  They spoke of a rage, unrelenting hatefulness that nearly consumed them.  They wanted any last perpetrators captured and executed.  But they also realized that resentment, justified as it was, would only consume them.  Slowly, step by step, each of their stories different yet similar, they chose forgiveness.  Though their sharing was un-rehearsed, they both resonated with that little, no longer trite or superficial, ever deepening phrase gaining currency among us, I’m fine! 

A young Muslim woman spoke next, of the death of her father, an awesome loss.  “But, knowing Allah is merciful, I pray for him each day that he comes each day closer to the heart of Allah.  I miss him still, but those moments of prayer are so healing.  These are the right words.  I am able to say with quiet certainty, I’m fine!”

A trio of Baha’is joined in, knowing we were mindful of the awesome persecution, frequent disappearances and outright assassinations of fellow Baha’is in Iran, none of their three families untouched personally.  Of all ironies, their faith’s commitment to non-violence and peace is a provocation  of the assaults against them.  “Our faith, and the teachings of Baha’u’ullah, and assurance of the presence of a loving God sustains us,” one of them affirmed.  “That allows us, no matter what confronts us in everyday life, or receiving troubled news comes from Iran, to say, if you ask, I’m fine!” she added.

A Confucianist among us, and a Sikh, did not speak but their smiling nods suggested they knew what we were talking about.

The gift of that morning has become a tiny ritual repeated through my days, a meditative interlude, when I realize I am either being unduly enthralled by the ease of the day or knocked off balance by its adversity, that beneath it all – because I am held in the embrace of a loving God – I’m fine!  And when I am asked that predictable and routine answer, I intercept my haste in expected response, pause, draw a mindful breath, so I can say with my heart, I’M FINE! 

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WHEN WE FIGHT . . . WHO WINS? (Hint: it’s neither of us)

Apr 26, 2010
Howard
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I think Howard Zinn inspired the question (more about that below).  It’s a question I ask in part to inspire your asking it too.  When I am part of an ideological collision, when someone else and I have been cast as opponents, when I am expending significant time and energy challenging their point of view, when the chasm between us ever widens . . . who really wins?  (If it’s not either of us?!)  To whose advantage is our polarization?  Who benefits from the distraction?

If I were asked to name the five books that have most influenced me across the past quarter century, one title would come immediately to mind, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, written, unlike classroom textbooks, from the perspective of the politically and economically disadvantaged, or more accurately exploited.

Zinn offers historical analysis that ponders the question how a minority wealthy elite, from generation to generation, maintained positions of privilege and power.  A central thesis: a primary strategy of the powerful elite, the de facto oligarchy, was to astutely and effectively keep populations of clearly shared self-interest – logical partners of common reality, common cause and a potential common adversary – surely separate and better yet themselves adversaries.  Some examples include:

  • Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, fully one hundred years before independence, threatened to galvanize a rebellion of white frontiersmen, slaves and the white servant class, a formidable coalition ready to parlay growing resentment of the wealthy elite and openly challenge them.  Fierce military reprisals, aided by the arrival of British soldiers, and brutal punitive tactics and Bacon’s untimely death crushed the rebellion – adding an unanticipated but timely benefit to the landed rich, the discouragement of tribal leaders to unite previously divided Indian tribes in the northeast.
  • Zinn offers what seems a heretical argument that the American Revolution, the act of creating a nation, institutionalized mechanizations of control by the wealthy few over a now expanding populism potentially linking slaves, Indians and poor white servant class in common cause.
  • Westward expansion demanded “removal” of dozens of Indian tribes from their land to pave the way for the entrepreneurs of industrialization and commerce.   Knowing a single onslaught would only stiffen Indian resistance and strengthen Indian alliances, with the collusion of Christian missionary zeal, the government took them on one-by-one, a divide-and-conquer strategy succeeding.  In time to avert a budding coalition of Indians, freed slaves, and poor frontiersmen that was gaining unsettling momentum.
  • When divide and conquer fails, Zinn argues, declaring war is a tactic of last resort.   Writers no less familiar than Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller chronicled growing labor unrest, newly robust Negro organizing, the mainstreaming of Socialism and early voices of feminism in the early 1900’s.  Was potential revolution-from-within mounting, the oligarchy its common enemy?  The U.S. entered one of history’s arguably most senseless wars, Zinn suggests, only because social chaos could not be quelled by previously successful means.

I offer this small collection of historical narratives to wonder out loud: Does a powerful elite, a clear statistical minority, a de facto oligarchy, continue to succeed in keeping logically aligned populations divided and at odds?  When I yield to oppositionalism, engage in divisive dialogue, “name an ideological enemy and take them on” do I collude with the centuries old stratagem of the oligarchy?

Who gains from legislative gridlock, be it on a state or national level?  Who benefits from the collisions of Left and Right?  Who wins as rhetoric gets nastier and more polarizing?  To whose advantage is all that which obscures potential common cause beneath apparent divisions?  The Health Insurance giants and Big Pharma?  Big Banks and the Financial Colossus?  The lobbying industry (whose legions on the banking reform front outnumber legislators 5-1)?  The ever smaller number of us who hold an ever increasing percentage of the wealth?  Am I inadvertently, while intending otherwise, naively but inexcusably, more part of the problem than the solution?

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RECOVERY OR RELAPSE? Biblical Resources for Our Economic Future

Apr 18, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

Is there a word from the Lord?  This anguished question – spoken aloud or uttered in secret – cries out to present-day Jeremiahs.  Retirees bagging groceries, their grandkids interrupting college; unmanageable mortgages and bankruptcies; the unemployed, sharing the news or keeping it secret.  Unsettling feelings—anxiety, fear, or sheer panic; discomfort, sadness, or depression; sleepless nights and days of agitation.  People need a pastor.  Is there a word from the Lord?  If only we could return to October 2007, the Dow at 13,000, we muse.  When an addict “goes back” it is called relapse, not recovery.  Dare I suggest that our desire to go back economically is addiction from which we must recover?

Unsustainable, unjust and unfulfilling

The economy we must leave behind was environmentally unsustainable.   Our environment is like a bank account—deposits and withdrawals must be balanced to maintain viability and longevity.  Sustainability requires depletion at the rate of global replenishment and waste production at earth’s capacity to absorb it.  Global deforestation, rapid loss of arable land, “dead zones” clogging the mouths of rivers or floating toxic islands in the world’s oceans, massive depletion of the large fish population.  Unfettered globalization, unbridled growth accelerates momentum toward global environmental collapse.   It was socially unjust.  The quarter century after World War II a “rising tide did lift all boats.”  Wealth generation rose steadily and equitably.  Dramatically in the ’80s, precipitously in the ’90s, the gap between the rich and the non-rich dramatically widened.  And it was spiritually and psychologically unfulfilling, spawning the highest rate of mental illness in the world, 700,000 treated daily for alcoholism, 75 percent of physician appointments for stress-related conditions.  Loneliness and isolation are epidemic, what researchers term “symptoms of malaise,” with suicide rates steadily increasing.  Drug wars are fought abroad, with U.S. drug consumption the highest per capita on the planet.

Toward Biblically Based Economics

The biblical tradition offers foundational themes and core elements for a more environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling economics.  Let me offer eight.

1. Creation Economics—Bounty and Abundance

In the creation story’s repeated phrase – and God saw that it was good – “good” is an exuberant, scintillating, pulsating word better translated “bountiful, overflowing, lavish.”  Our planet can produce food enough to feed seven times its population, every nation potentially food self-sufficient. Worldwide hunger is thoroughly unnecessary, a travesty and embarrassment.  The earth can produce abundance for all, so scarcity is a contrived, not an intrinsic, issue.  

2. Manna Economics—Enough

In Egypt the Hebrews knew only imperial economics, wealth concentrated in the hands of an elite minority, an economics of accumulation resting on the backs of an enslaved people. The “two weeks walk that took forty years” and buried and birthed an entire generation, trained a people for an ethic of sufficiency.  Manna, nourishing and tasty, plentiful but unable to be hoarded, demonstrated that enough is plenty.

3. Promised Land Economics—Fair Distribution

The Book of Numbers offers stories of intrigue and frustration, preparing a people for freedom. Finally glimpsing that “land flowing with milk and honey,” the land is assigned:  each tribe’s allotment based on population, that land divided among tribal families equitably.

4. Sabbath and Jubilee Economics—Redistributio 

Inequality, over time, becomes inevitable – luck, differing degrees of healthiness and heartiness, the vagaries of weather – a second generation, then a third inheriting a legacy of gain or loss.  Yahweh proposed correctives to re-level the playing field – yes “strategies of redistribution.”  The Sabbath and Jubilee years with their sweeping redistribution agendas. 

5. Nazareth Economics—Jubilee Reaffirmed

Jesus sermon at Nazareth appears to renew the Jubilee year, sounding of a core theme of Jesus’ mission and ministry, a theme echoing resoundingly in Luke’s gospel – the political, economic and social thrust of Luke’s Beatitudes; the “evidence” offered to John the Baptist’s query; Luke’s fragment of the Lord’s Prayer; and the twin feast stories, the best seats reserved for the poor and disabled.

6. Table-Turning Economics – Status Quo Upended 

Jesus mini-rampage in the Temple, over-turning the tables of merchants and tax collectors, seems not so much to protect worship space as to symbolically “overturn” an unjust economy featuring collusion of a Roman, Jewish and ecclesiastical cabal.  (In the prophetic tradition: challenging unjust business persons and an unjust economic system).

7. Barnabas Economics—Radical Commonalit 

The evidence is unassailable and unambiguous: that the radical economic sharing advocated and practiced by Jesus became normative in the early church.  Resources were held in common, even capital reserves liquidated. No one was in need.  This sharing was practiced with exuberance, communal deepening and shared joy. 

8. Corinthian Economics—Justice, not Charity

2 Corinthians 8 and 9 profiles Paul’s theology of giving, justice not charity, a call to a “fair balance” between one person’s abundance and another’s need, “the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little” –the “abundance of the rich” met by the “abundance of the poor.”

AN URGENT, UNAVOIDABLE, ESSENTIAL FINAL WORD

These words are a challenge to pastors and everyday Christians to renew the message and movement of the prophets.  But who wants to go there?! Amos and Micah spoke their prophetic truth and scurried out of town. They intermittently threw Jeremiah into the nearest cistern. Only the power of Jesus’ person saved him from summary execution after his Nazareth sermon.  Speaking truth to power is risky business.  Such prophets are grounded in a spiritual practice, walk the talk of a new economics, wean from consumerism and materialism, re-visit their family expense budget as a moral document.  A daunting, daring, humble calling!

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KNOWING . . . BEATS “KNOWING ABOUT” . . . GOD . . . AND MUCH MORE

Apr 16, 2010
Howard
Uncategorized

I have read stirring, spirit-soaring, thundering poems inspired by the Grand Canyon.  Listened to Ferde Grofe’s Canyon Suite at full volume, sprawled on the floor, my eyes closed and imagination liberated, almost like being there.  Almost.  I’ve stood on the south rim at sunrise, off by myself, undistracted, mesmerized by echoes whispering from the distant floor, drinking in the sensual extravaganza.  Poetry and the symphony are profound gifts of creative genius.  But nothing beats the experience . . . first hand.

I recently sat quietly perusing a coffee table book of photographs and paintings of Michelangelo’s statue of David.  Only a practiced eye and the finest lens can capture the grandeur of the Italian master’s artistry.  Realists and impressionists, composers and choreographers, poets and photographers do their best.  But nothing can substitute for wandering through the warriors, a series of pieces lining each side of the passageway from the east entrance, or several unfinished pieces from the west . . . catching first glimpse of the towering, naked David . . . slowly encircling the piece in its rotunda, your breath literally, you can hear it, taken away . . . returning through the day to appreciate the accents and nuances created by the changing angle of the sun and differing blends of color refracted through the light of dawn or midday or late afternoon.

Fritz Perls, father of Gestalt Therapy, once said that we in the western world suffer from “about-ism.”  We know about so many things . . . we know so little.   We are better at what than how.  He once framed his thought in a compelling way, “Would you rather be a prevailing, internationally recognized expert on friendship . . . or have friends?!”  My friend Rachel, a true mystic, was a mentor to singers and dancers, musicians and fine artists, and when she went to Buenos Aires to conduct a public seminar, they came by the hundreds.  I sat one day in her living room as she worked with a tenor, working in a way, with a gesture and gentle word, for which she was famous.  She played the piano and he sang.  His voice was rich and deep and true, but even my untrained ear knew something, however subtle, was missing.  Rachel suddenly stopped playing, rose from her bench, walked slowly to the young man and placed her hand on his chest.  She looked steadily into his eyes and gently but firmly said, “Before you sing the song, hear the song.  Let your heart hear the song, then let your voice sing it.”  His face hinted of both confusion and knowing.

After he left, we freshened our tea and I asked, “And tell me of teaching, preaching and writing,” the heart of my life’s work.  She did as I hoped she would.  I stood, as she walked to where I had been sitting, placed her hand on my chest, and said, “Hear the word, let your heart know the truth, then let your voice or pen sing it.”  Rachel died over a decade ago, but I can still feel the warmth of her hand on my chest and hear her words of wise counsel.

Teachers and preachers; composers, singers and musicians; sculptors and painters; writers of prose or poetry . . . everyday people speaking across breakfast tables, whispering in the darkness before sleep, chatting in the front seat of cars . . . however profound or admittedly mundane the content: listen to and speak from your heart, connect inwardly with your spirit, resonate with the heart and spirit of the other. 

And so specially, importantly true of speaking of God.  My seminary professors, the various preachers I hear on a weekly basis, the voices that rise from the pages of books of faith or devotion I read, the expressed intent to speak truth about God, can simply make me “better informed,” more “about-ism” – erudite, conceptually coherent, intellectually sound – but without invitation to know God.  They and I are all the more impoverished in the exchange, alas.

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