The Little Scroll

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

2012-02-09T08:46:00.000-08:00

Three may keep a secret, Benjamin Franklin said, if two of them are dead.

That’s a succinct insight into human nature, and not surprising from one of history’s most garrulous gossips. I wish more people would take that truism to heart.

It’s astonishing how many otherwise intelligent people think secrets can be immutable, including the Department of Defense. When I was 18 I was given a “secret” security clearance by the Air Force, the result, I immodestly think, of FBI interviews with my teachers and admiring contemporaries. It could have been “top secret” but it wasn’t, so I suspect the FBI interviewed my history teacher, Mr. Dodge, who would have hinted I was a liberal, or my chemistry teacher, Mr. Palmer, who had documentary evidence I was mentally sluggish. Be that as it may, I’m not sure what my secret clearance was supposed to accomplish. I spent three years on a base in England knowing I was not to reveal there were tactical nukes stashed in our Quonset huts. I may have mentioned it to my mother and no doubt the Baader Meinhof Complex had its suspicions, but they never heard it from me.

Our justice system is also based on the idea that people can keep secrets.

I cringe (secretly) when I’m on jury duty and the judge admonishes that the facts of the trial cannot be shared with anyone, including our spouses. Yeah, right. Even as I nod obediently I know I can’t wait to get home to my wife to spill all the details, not only about the obviously guilty defendant, but about the tics and sweet imbecilities of the lawyers and my fellow jurors.

I also cringe when school boards or church boards meet in “executive session,” which is to say, in secret. I was never the best investigative reporter in the world, but I rarely had difficulty finding out what goes on behind closed doors.

There are three types of people who emerge from executive sessions: people who eventually reveal the details with the utmost reluctance; people who can’t wait to reveal the details; and people who hold on to the secrets either because of their personal integrity or because it feels powerful to know something others don’t. The third type is never much of a problem for reporters because the other two categories are so densely populated.

In church and denominational offices, there are many things that should be handled discretely – that is, kept secret – but there is little agreement what those things are. When I was a communicator for the Baptists, I thought it was essential to protect information about overseas missionaries that might compromise their safety. But my fellow church bureaucrats were also concerned to hide information that arguably should be public, such as the salaries, benefits and travel budgets of staff executives. Another secret area was the wide category of “personnel matters,” which was intended to keep evaluations and other awkward matters strictly between bosses and employees. But the personnel category has been used by more than one church organization – always ostensibly to protect the church – to hide the crimes of a sexual abuser in their employ.

And here’s the thing: the most carefully guarded secrets will always emerge, sometimes sooner than later. In the early days of my tenure as an American Baptist communicator, the photocopy machine was shared by the office of communication and General Secretary Robert Campbell. Whenever Bob announced a new staff appointment, he felt it necessary to embargo the news until appointees had a chance to inform their erstwhile employers they were leaving. He’d send his secretary to the photocopy machine to make copies of the announcement with strict instructions not to let anyone see it. But on more than one occasion, she would make the copies and leave the original in the copier. Quickly, the secret document would end up on my desk, giving me a chance to start gathering biographical information about the appointee for a news release, long before the announcement was official. I doubt Bob ever knew how I seemed to have an inside track to such things, and I never told him. I can keep a secret.

Apart from the justifiable veil of the confessional, I suggest the church should operate as much as possible in the sunshine. For the most part, it might be said church secrets are ferociously guarded for the same reason academic politics are so vicious: because, as one institutional president put it, “the stakes are so low.” Surely persons in pews who contribute to missions have a right to know how much their church is paying its bureaucrats and whatever special benefits may accrue.

When it comes to secrecy, the church might look to the style modeled by Jesus, perhaps the most transparent figure in history. The incident of the curing of the leper early in Mark’s Gospel may have been a lesson to Jesus that secrecy is futile anyway.

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter. (Mark 1:40-45)

There may have been many reasons Jesus didn’t want the leper running at the mouth, and sermons of yore have noted a few: It was early in his ministry and he wasn’t ready to attract premature scrutiny from scribes and Pharisees; he was busy going about his ministry and he didn’t want to be mobbed by admiring masses if word spread that he was some kind of miracle worker; he wanted the man to focus on the cleansing rituals at the temple. Whatever his reason for wanting the man to keep it under his keffiyeh, Jesus was not being off-handedly modest. He meant it. He warned the man “sternly,” according to Mark, which is to say: Go away and shut up about it.

But if a secret paper discovered on a photocopier is worthy of revelation, there is no way anyone is going to keep quiet about being cured of a dread disease. The fact that “he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word,” leaves little doubt what happened. The cured man leaped into crowds snagging every thawb and elbow he could grab, perseverating the news. And he must have been convincing, because curious people swarmed to Jesus “from every quarter” and Jesus “could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country.”

Because of the passionate public relations campaign of a cured leper, Jesus goes overnight from being an articulate carpenter to a national celebrity.

It was inevitable, of course, but perhaps it happened before Jesus was ready for it. He’s a little like a small business owner who has to scramble when the demand for his product exceeds early projections.

Certainly that’s the way it should have been and, besides, what were the alternatives? To take sick people into hidden corners to discretely cure them, or to clandestinely pantomime the reign of God? God sent Jesus into the world to be visible, to be apparent, and to let the truth ring out. The scenario of a secret messiah was never part of the plan. And once the word got out, Jesus never had another quiet moment unless he hid in the country.

That’s the kind of translucence Jesus models for the faithful. For the record, Jesus never ordered any of us to “say nothing to anyone.” Quite the contrary.

“No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:15-16), “but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

The trick, and it is a big one, is to live our lives in such a way that people may see our good works and give God the glory.

But all of us will fall short on that score. If we are human, many of our works may not be good enough to shine before others. That’s precisely the reason secrecy has crept into the church and into our lives.

But we know in our hearts that secrecy is no way to honor Jesus who came to redeem us, or to serve God who calls us to proclaim the good news.

The church and its members will always have defects and sins they will not wish to expose to the world. But that is certainly no secret, and it is no reason to slam shut the door of secrecy.

As flawed as we may be, Jesus is calling us to follow the example of the leper who perseverated the good news of what God did for him.

And leave our cherished secret security clearances at the door.

Jesus' Day Off

2012-02-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

What’s on your nighttime reading table?

This winter I’ve waded my way through biographies of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Catherine the great, King Edward VII, King George VI and – as I have most years since 1959 – John F. Kennedy. When the movie Gandhi was released in 1982, I went to the Columbia University book store and bought every book about him I could find. It was the same when the Shaka Zulu television series was released in 1986.

Why do biographies have a special fascination for us – and I’m not just talking about us history nerds?

We read biographies, President Kennedy wrote, because we need to answer a basic question: “What was he (or she) like?”

Catherine Drinker Bowen, the biographer of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Bacon, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Sir Edward Coke, among others, visited Eastern Baptist College as a guest lecturer in 1970. The gig must have been mandated by her publisher and she did not hide her reluctance to mix with the scrubbed adolescents of a Christian college. She couldn’t tell the difference between a Mennonite plain coat and a clerical collar, and she was evidently dismayed by questions she regarded as witless and puerile, such as, “was Adams a born-again Christian?”

But Bowen, ensnared by her contract, stuck with it, and after a couple of days she seemed to resonate with the students’ natural curiosity. She smiled with resignation when someone asked her if there were any historical facts she regretted being unable to uncover.

“Oh, God, yes,” she said. “Washington. There is so much information about him – his height, his build, his wooden teeth – but nothing about how he talked.” Her voice rose with remembered frustration. “I was crazy to know how that man talked!”

Decades later, I wish she had found something about that because there must be a few Eastern alums – not just me – who fretted about that ever since. We know Washington mumbled during his first inaugural address and people in the first row couldn’t understand him. We know he spoke with an English accent much like that of the redcoat General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne. But was he an Olivier baritone or a Capote tenor?

We will never know. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

Readers of history are faced with many unanswered questions. I’d like to know, for example, what Abraham Lincoln’s teeth looked like. Historians are unsure and there are no photos of Lincoln smiling toothily. At least one contemporary thought Mr. Lincoln had perfect white teeth, but Lincoln’s only reference to his dentation describes an unsuccessful extraction and a toothache so painful that he wrote to a friend, “my mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk, nor eat. I am literaly (sic) subsisting on savoury remembrances.”

But our curiosity about Washington’s voice or Lincoln’s teeth pale in comparison to our interest in an even more significant historical figure: Jesus of Nazareth.

By the time we reach the fifth Sunday in Epiphany, the Common Lectionary has steered us through biblical anecdotes painting a vivid but incomplete portrait of the Nazarene. We see Simeon and Anna cuddling the baby Jesus in the temple as they testify to his true identity. We see the adolescent Jesus, confounding the elders in the Temple and admonishing his parents that they should have smart enough to look for him in God’s house. We have seen the young adult Jesus standing on the shore to call disciples to service, and assuring Nathaniel, “You shall see greater things than this.” We have sensed the charisma of the young man whose call is so irresistible people drop everything they are doing to follow him. And we have seen the supernatural power of a man who orders evil spirits back to hell.

Even so, there are times when we get crazy to know something more about Jesus than we can discover in the Gospels. It doesn’t make it any easier that his basic nature is vigorously debated. If we read his biographies to answer the question, “What is he like,” we will find the answer filtered through the myriad teachings of scholarly theologians, desert fathers and ammas, ascetic saints, Borgia and Medici popes, Henry VIII, the Inquisition, the Reformation, hangings of witches in Salem, the Pentecostal tent movements, Billy Graham crusades, Vatican II, and the occasional Baptist movement to burn the Qur’an.

All of this omits a lot about Jesus that must be obvious to all of us who have one thing in common with him: he was a human being, “tempted in all ways,” and subject to all the ordinary and extraordinary experiences we all share.

Some of these human experiences have been ignored or buried by church conferences in the second and third centuries. Ebionists argued Jesus was an ordinary man. Gnostics declared he was a spiritual being who only appeared to have a body. The hypsostatic union decreed in 451 that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human. Most Baptists accept that latter view of Jesus, but since none of us can imagine what it is like to be divine, we must focus on our first hand knowledge of what it is to be human.

But so much of being human is naturally vulgar and it is hard to imagine Jesus as subject to the same human constraints. Because if he was fully human, it is necessary that he experienced what the bible disdains to mention, including hormonal awkwardness born of desire. Too, Jesus acknowledged being accused of gluttony and wine bibbing, so it’s likely he enjoyed good food and drink. If he enjoyed them a lot, we may postulate he had occasional gastric distress after eating too much food and a raging headache after drinking too much wine. Nausea, diarrhea and flatulence would have been part of that universal equation.

The human body is an uncomfortable thing to carry around with you, and it was so with Jesus as it is with us. He suffered the unbearable heat of Galilee like everyone else, got gooseflesh and a cold nose when the temperature dropped, felt sleep deprivation when he was kept up all night by admiring crowds, and occasionally lost his temper and snapped at innocent creatures or objects, such as the hapless fig tree.

Eleven verses in Mark’s spare Gospel (1:29-39) offer a capsule portrait of Jesus the human. The brief passage is fully packed. It shows him at his messianic best: restoring Simon Peter’s ailing mother-in-law to health so she can make lunch for the itinerate band, and then, with “the whole city gathering at the door,” healing the sick and casting out demons.

Mark does not stipulate one aspect of the story, perhaps because it’s obvious: all this activity is exhausting. Jesus is burning his candle at both ends. Sooner or later he is going to need a break.

“In the morning, while it was still very dark,” Mark reports, “Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”

For Jesus’ sake, I hope it was the kind of prayer session in which we all indulge from time to time: the kind in which we close our eyes, empty our brains, and snuggle up to God. In other words: a holy nap.

But the respite doesn’t last long.

“And Simon and his companions hunted for him,” Mark divulges. “When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’”

It’s a wake-up call. It makes me think of other biographical anecdotes, as when President Kennedy’s chief counsel, Theodore Sorensen, reported how he woke up an exhausted JFK during the 1960 presidential campaign: “Get up! Nixon has been out campaigning for hours already.”

Jesus’ response to Peter sounds like resigned determination: “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

But the human Jesus also needs to take care of himself in order to do “what I came out to do.”

There is ample evidence in the Gospels that Jesus was wise enough to do that, taking advantage of dinner invitations and offers of hospitality around Galilee, and not spurning offers of comforting massages.

Nicholas Allen presented this side of Jesus to children (and the adults who read over their shoulders) with Jesus’ Day Off (Random House), an extracanonical view of the Nazarene illustrated with childish drawings and departing from any generally accepted view of Jesus. Some of the drawings may offend some traditionalists, as when the twelve disciples are portrayed sleeping in small adjoining beds as if they were the twelve dwarfs, but children will quickly grasp the underlying truth: Jesus must get tired sometimes. His miracles start going awry. He tries to walk on water but sinks up to his calves. He needs a break. The story finds him running, jumping, swimming and enjoying his freedom from the cares of messiahship. At the close of the story, he feels a little bad that he has wasted a whole day. But God the Father assures him that wherever he passed, miracles happened.

Jesus got tired. That’s the easiest thing about him to understand.

Tim Rice captures Mary’s gracious attentions to the human Jesus in the musical, Jesus Christ: Superstar. She insists Jesus rest his weary bones, singing:

Try not to get worried,
Try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you,
oh, Don't you know
Everything's alright,
Yes, everything's fine.
And we want you to sleep well tonight.
Let the world turn without you tonight.
If we try
We'll get by.
So forget all about us tonight.
Sleep and I shall soothe you,
Calm you and anoint you:
Myrrh for your hot forehead
oh, Then you'll feel
Everything's all right,
Yes, everything's fine.
And it's cool and the ointment's sweet
For the fire in your head and feet.
Close your eyes,
Close your eyes
And relax:
Think of nothing tonight.
Everything's all right.
Yes, everything's all right.

Jesus the human got tired as we get tired. Even the most works-oriented Christian must realize that God expects none of us to run ourselves into exhaustion. We aren’t worth much to anyone when we burn ourselves out. Jesus sets the example: he preached, he cured the sick, he cast out demons, he raised the dead, and he rested. If you’re fully human, being fully divine doesn’t mean you can be on duty 24/7. As musicians say, even the most inspired musical score needs periodic rests to be beautiful.

Jesus was fully human. That much we can understand. But his humanity also gives us clues about the divine side of his nature.

When I was a child, I’d look at paintings of Jesus and note that he had a golden halo around his head, an unmistakable sign of his divinity. I wondered, when I was young, why so many people doubted his parentage when all they had to do was look at his glowing head.

At the same time, I figured faith was easier for Jesus than it is for the rest of us because he could see God and talk to God every day and never have any doubt that whatever happened was orchestrated by God.

But I wonder if that assurance is really possible when the son of God takes on human flesh.

Because Jesus was fully human, I suspect, he had no special guarantee, no unmistakable sign of God’s presence, no nimbi or haloes, no signs in the sky, to show him the holy.
He had to operate on pure faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

That’s not easy, and how well we humans know it. Stepping out in faith without a visible safety net is scary and many of us won’t do it.

But Jesus did it all he time. Jesus never stopped trusting God and Jesus never doubted that God’s promises would be fulfilled.

That faith is a facet of humanity that is palpably divine.
Jesus, like us, was a frail human being who walked many a hot Galilean road and worked strenuously and made himself available to all who needed him. And occasionally he needed a nap.

We work hard too, and there is nothing more holy than a Sunday afternoon nap.

But Jesus, unlike us, was also fully divine. And the message he worked so hard to impart to his fellow humans is that the spark of divinity exists in all who are created in the image of God.

We may not see it. But the divine savior who understands our human weaknesses so well is urging us to step out in faith to accomplish whatever God is calling us to do.

Whether we can see the safety net or not.

Holy Creep Fest

2012-01-25T12:48:00.000-08:00

They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, throwing him into convulsions and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’ At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. Mark 1:21-28

Remember when you believed in evil spirits?

I mean, really believed in them?

For many of us, it was in early childhood when these creepy creatures danced in the shadows of our bedrooms after lights-out. We saw them, heard them, felt their sinister presence, and often communicated with them.

Some philosophers say we are born with knowledge of the other side – the angels as well as the devils – but our awareness dims in direct proportion to our ability to communicate it. By the time we develop a rudimentary vocabulary, all memories of the other side have disappeared except for those occasional childhood glimpses of disembodied entities.

Somewhere in the recesses of our minds are memories of moving shadows that interrupted our childhood sleep. We’d shout out for our parents who, long blind to the other side, would shuffle wearily into our rooms and assure us there was no such thing as monsters under the bed. After Mommy or Daddy repeated that blessed assurance a few hundred times, we started to believe it. By the time most of us entered elementary school, we stopped seeing the spirits, and by the time we reached the seventh grade, we stopped believing we ever had. Or so goes the theorizing of some philosophers.

In the days before radio and television – and, God knows, long before three-dimensional, quadraphonic experiences with Harry Potter – evil spirits were an essential ingredient of childhood imagination. The reason fairy tales had the power to terrorize kids is that haunted forests filled with ravenous wolves, ogres, trolls, and witches already existed in their minds.

Perhaps these horror stories were intended to entertain the young, but they were also used to warn kids about life’s dangers – as in “crying wolf” – and to keep children under control. Some parents warned children about the boogey man who would “get you” if you didn’t behave.

There are dozens of theories about where the boogey man came from, but my favorite can be traced back to Napoleon Bonaparte. When England prepared for a potential invasion by Napoleon in 1803, “Boney” – later “Boogey” – was used to scare naughty English children into submission. In the words of a charming nursery rhyme:

Baby, baby, naught baby,
Hush! you squalling thing, I say;
Peace this instant! Peace! or maybe
Bonaparte will pass this way.

Napoleon never invaded England. He was defeated twice and exiled twice. There is a story that when Napoleon was exiled for the last time on St. Helena Island in 1815, the children of his British guards remembered the rhyme and Bonaparte soon became aware of it. Witnesses said they occasionally saw him placing his index fingers like horns against his head and chasing laughing kids away from his chateau.

But the hair-raising persona of “the Boogey Man” is based more on his other-worldly origins than on Bonaparte’s earthly power. The Boogey Man creeped children out because of they knew instinctively evil spirits exist and can be dangerous.

That evil spirits exist I have no doubt. But is it always possible to recognize one when you see one?

Jesus immediately discerned the malevolence lodged in the man who came to the synagogue in Capernaum, and the spirit recognized Jesus. Mark’s minimalist Gospel describes a dramatic scene, but nothing as harrowing as scenes in The Exorcist. Jesus says to the spirit, come out of him, and the unwilling host convulses as the spirit screams and departs. Just like that.

Mark would have been a lousy screenwriter. When unclean spirits are portrayed, Hollywood producers want to see Linda Blair twist her head 360 degrees and vomit green slime; they want to see huge, hideous faces with multiple rows of blackened teeth; they want to see monstrous gargoyles that freeze hearts and make audiences scream.

But what do unclean spirits really look like? Given their incorporeal nature, it would be hard to tell, but chances are we’d be surprised at their appearance.

When I was two or three I had an imaginary friend. I have no memory of him beyond a vague impression that he looked like Dagwood Bumstead. My parents said I seemed to have a relationship with this figure, who remained with me until my brother Larry was old enough to be a more tangible companion. There is a photograph of me at 2 playing with a hose near an old barn, and if you look closely there is a ghostly image of a child standing patiently by the barn door. (See inset.) It does not appear to be double exposure, but what is it? My imaginary friend? A guardian angel? An evil spirit?

These are unknowable and generally meaningless questions, except for the role they play in my genetic memory. But I suspect they are not unique. I suspect we all have similar memories hidden in the caverns of our unconsciousness. They are like dreams: windows on a world we knew before we were born and to which we will one day return.

The biblical allegories offer vague and imprecise descriptions of that world beyond. Jesus’ encounter with the unclean spirit in the synagogue is one of those allegories. It tells us this much: evil spirits exist; they have the potential of doing great damage to souls and their surroundings; but good spirits also exist in the form of a loving creator, a solicitous advocate, and a savior with the moral authority to rebuke evil and order it away from us:

“Be silent and come out.”

Even so, the origin of evil in the world, the question of why God allows it, and the fundamental nature of evil spirits – it’s all a puzzle.

There are wonderful biblical and extra-biblical accounts of fallen angels like Lucifer who hate God and exist to seduce humans away from God’s love and refuge. But since humans would not be seduced by hideously and horrifyingly ugly devils, one has to wonder: what does evil look like?

I have a suspicion that many devils are quite beautiful: desirable creatures who lure us away from God with the promise of instant gratification and the assurance that we can do anything we want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, an allegorical book of letters from a junior devil seeking advice from his senior on how to seduce humans away from God, an interesting image emerges. The two demons augment their influence over their “patients” by concealing their identity and encouraging humans to be content with their apathy toward God and religion. “Talk to (your human) about ‘moderation in all things,’” Screwtape advises. “If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul.”

In his introduction to the book, Lewis writes: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

Unfortunately, those “opposite errors” neatly summarize where many of us stand.

Many obsess daily over books and films about vampires, zombies, witches, wizards and ravenous fiends – some with unexpected twists, such as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The millions of dollars generated by vampire and zombie films are evidence of what C. S. Lewis calls an “unhealthy interest.”

But many more of us – perhaps most – scoff at the existence of evil spirits and attribute evil behavior to psychosis and inadequate psycho-pharmacology.

The more reasonable path, Lewis suggests, is down the middle.

That path involves trusting our earliest instincts that evil spirits exist and attempt to seduce us away from God’s protection.

And the path requires a calmness of faith that shields us from the temptation to panic at the presence of evil, or the temptation to obsess over media-generated distractions that portray evil as harmless thrills before the credits roll.

In Mark’s first chapter, it unfolds like this:

Jesus, still an unknown itinerant from Nazareth, is preaching eloquently in a nearby synagogue.

Unexpectedly, a possessed man wanders in, and the evil spirit within him recognizes the preacher.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth,” the spirit cries out. “Have you come to destroy us?”

Calmly – perhaps without raising his voice – Jesus responds. “Be silent, and come out of him.”

And the spirit comes out. Just like that.

The reaction in the synagogue is amazement.

“What is this?” They asked. “A new teaching – with authority? He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

This is the proper balance when it comes to confronting evil: a calm recognition that the Lord of our Lives teaches with an authority that leads us to salvation as surely as it delivers us from evil.

That is the path to which we have been called, and with God’s help, that is the path we shall seek.

And no wonder.

As one cinematic scene of exorcism reminds us:

The power of Christ compels us.

The Ichthus Conference

2012-01-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10

There are few jobs more demanding than general secretary of the National Council of Churches.

I’ve known six general secretaries, and one thing they all have in common is a lack of free time. They rise early, work late and accumulate frequent flier miles like secretaries of state. They lead a diverse membership of nearly 40 communions ranging from Coptic Orthodox Christians to the United Church of Christ. On occasion, general secretaries find it difficult to please everyone. In my experience, there were times when even the most ebullient of them sank exhausted into their swivel chairs at the end of the day.

One of the general secretaries was Bob Edgar. A former member of Congress, member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, finance director of Senator Paul Simon’s presidential campaign, and a senate candidate himself, Bob was no stranger to hyperactivity. But the job is wearing, and it showed. But once a year Bob would return from the road with a lighter step and easier smile and it was rumored he had discovered some secret font of rejuvenation.

And perhaps he had. If you looked closely at his calendar each summer, two weeks were blocked out for what appeared to be a dreary and demanding ecumenical conclave: The Ichthus Conference. Ichthus, the Greek word for fish, dates back to the first century when Christians identified themselves to one another by drawing an arc. If the other person responded by drawing a connecting arc, forming a simple fish, they knew they were safe. But in modern terms, ichthus invokes images of ponderous clerics engaged in endless discourse about the various styles of baptism, Eucharist, ministry and trilateral dialogues.

But Bob also used the symbol as a special Christian code. For him, the Ichthus Conference was a two week fishing trip with his brothers, and it did wonders for his mental health. Today, Bob is president and CEO of Common Cause, and I notice he is still attending ichthus conferences once a year.

All the foregoing reflection is inspired, of course, by the appearance of Jonah in today’s Common Language Lectionary. All of us know Jonah had his own ichthus conference. It wasn’t relaxing and recreational, but it was uncommonly motivating.

Most of us were introduced to Jonah in our earliest Sunday school years. Maybe some of us sang the delightful ditty to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down:”

Jonah was swallowed by a whale
By a whale,
By a whale,
Jonah was swallowed by a whale.
Swallowed whole!

Jonah prayed to God above
God above,
God above,
Jonah prayed to God above
And was forgiven!

As we grew older we learned something about the species of the creature that hosted Jonah. The subject comes up in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, a fictionalized version of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925. I love the dialogue in the 1960 film version between Spencer Tracy, playing Henry Drummond the agnostic lawyer, and Frederick March, playing Matthew Harrison Brady the fundamentalist politician and perennial presidential candidate:

DRUMMOND: Tell me. Do you feel that every word that's written in this book should be taken literally?

BRADY: Everything in the Bible should be accepted, exactly as it is given there.

DRUMMOND. (Leafing through the Bible.) Now take this place where the whale swallows Jonah. Do you figure that actually happened?

BRADY. The Bible does not say "a whale," it says "a big fish."

DRUMMOND. (Finds the place in the Bible, shows it to Brady.) Matter of fact, it says "a great fish." What's your feeling about that?

BRADY. I believe in a God who can make a whale and who can make a man and make both do what He pleases!

The point is made – it’s a great fish, not a whale – but the dialogue continues:

DRUMMOND. I recollect a story about Joshua, making the sun stand still. That's a pretty neat trick. Think Houdini could do that?

BRADY. I do not question or scoff at the miracles of the Lord.

DRUMMOND. Have you ever pondered just what would naturally happen to the earth if the sun stood still?

BRADY. You can testify to that if I get you on the stand.

DRUMMOND. If they say that the sun stood still, they must've had a notion that the sun moves around the earth. Think that's the way of things? Or don't you believe the earth moves around the sun?

BRADY. I have faith in the Bible!

DRUMMOND. You don't have much faith in the solar system.

BRADY. (Doggedly.) The sun stopped.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s go back to this week’s lectionary selection, which actually appears quite late in Jonah – after the cameo appearance of the great fish.

I’m not sure why the best part of the story is left out. If this passage were a movie review, we’d call it a spoiler: It skips the build-up, buries the climax, drowns the denouement, but reveals how everything turns out. Jonah says yes to God, warns Nineveh that God is about to strike them all dead, the Ninevicans repent, God changes God’s mind, and everything is swell. Whoa! Slow down!

One of the best things about Jonah is that it’s a story of struggle, resistance, denial, fearful confrontation, near death, surrender and success – as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. It’s a story we can relate to.

Perhaps you read the cover story in last week’s New York Times Magazine about Judith Clark, entitled “Young, Cold Heart.” [See http://nyti.ms/ykIlj8]

Clark, Tom Robbins reported, was one of “a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons who tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N.Y.” The unarmed Clark was a get-away driver in a crime that led to the deaths of two armored car guards and two police officers.

Writer Robbins, who knew Clark in high school, makes no excuses for her participation in a crime that cost four lives. He describes her callous disregard for the charges and her refusal to participate in her own defense. A relative of one of the victims describes “her smiling face as she was led out of the police station in Nyack.” In 1983, an Orange County judge sentenced her to a minimum of 75 years in prison.

Clark remained uncooperative and unrepentant during her first years in prison, once pulling a two-year stint in solitary confinement in Bedford Hills prison.

Robbins writes that it was Clark’s young daughter who helped her break through the cold wall of indifference. Gilda Zwerman, a sociologist, said to her, “I understand how you did this to yourself. What I don’t understand is how you did this to your daughter.” Robbins reports, “Clark tried to look defiant, but her lip twitched, and she began to quietly weep.”

The breakthrough began a slow process of re-engagement with the world, and today her rehabilitation is regarded by many observers as nothing short of remarkable.

The prison warden and other officials recommended to New York Governor David Paterson that her 75-year sentence be commuted, but he declined – reportedly because he feared he would be “tarred and feathered” by victims’ rights advocates.

Clark may well remain in prison for the rest of her life, but she claims she feels deep remorse for her role in the 1981 robbery. She remains a model prisoner and appears content with her punishment.

“Not long ago,” Robbins wrote, “Clark spoke at a Bedford Hills event. Her theme was the Book of Jonah. Like Jonah, she told the audience, she had spent years in self-destructive behavior and had been cast overboard into a stormed-tossed sea for her actions. Like Jonah, she found rescue in the belly of the whale, in her case behind bars. ‘In prison,’ she said, ‘I learned who I was.’”

The story of Jonah is the story of everyone who has heard God’s voice and ignored it.

The story of Jonah is shared by all who run away from moral obligations and threaten those around them with their cowardly irresponsibility.

The story of Jonah is the story of all who had to be picked up and cast aside by those whose only livelihood was threatened by their presence.

And the story of Jonah is the story of everyone who needed to be forced -- dragged kicking and screaming – to carry out God’s commands.

In so many ways, the story of Jonah is our story, too.

The good news is that once Jonah learned who he was, a servant of God, he was redeemed. God still wanted him to risk his life by going to Nineveh with the news that God was about to destroy the city. But once Jonah freed himself of his shackles to fear and trusted God, everything began to change. The people of Nineveh repented. God decided not to destroy them. And justice and righteousness were restored.

Was Jonah really swallowed by a great fish?

Matthew Harrison Brady has no doubt of it. Henry Drummond scoffs.

But surely an intelligent lawyer like Mr. Drummond knows. Beneath the fish story is a far greater truth:

When God calls us to a task, the hardest thing on earth may be to say yes.

But the consequences of shutting God out of our lives are even harder. Taking that path may well remind us how lonely it could be to sleep with fishes.

Big Mike

2012-01-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

This week, the Revised Common Lectionary and a national holiday offer an interesting juxtaposition. The first chapter of John hints at the effortless charisma of Jesus who tells potential disciples, “follow me,” and they drop what they are doing and follow him. And the calendar reminds us this is the 83rd birthday of another charismatic leader, namely, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What these two things have in common is the response to the call of God to abandon everything and enter a new life – and perhaps a dangerous life – of ministry and service.

John, who often adorns Jesus with a nimbus of mysticism, adds precognition to the messianic bag of tricks. There’s Nathanael, standing beneath a fig tree minding his own business, when Philip wanders by, babbling ecstatically about meeting the Messiah, a Nazarene. Nathanael thinks Philip has been tapping the wine skins and cracks wryly that nothing good will come out of Nazareth. But – hey, he has nothing to do besides stand beneath a fig tree – so Nathanael re-laces his sandals and reluctantly follows Philip. Soon, the two encounter Jesus, who shouts out, “Hey, I saw you standing beneath the fig tree when Philip called you.” Nathanael is stunned. That modest act of prestidigitation knocks the wind out of Nathanael. It’s all he needs to sign on for the duration of Jesus’ ministry. Even Jesus is amazed. “You believe because I saw you beneath the fig tree?” he asks. “You will see greater things than this.”

In our day, we have already seen greater things than the gift of second sight. Every time we walk through Times Square, we know someone is watching us on television. But even greater than that is the power to take a wandering, directionless human being like Nathanael and give him a resolute faith and an unwavering moral purpose.

That kind of power amazes us even in this age of cyber miracles.

From what I hear, Martin Luther King, Jr. had that kind of power.

When I started work at the American Baptist Churches offices in Valley Forge, among the fringe benefits were the many colleagues who had known Martin, marched with him, strategized with him, sat on platforms with him, and befriended him. Martin was dually aligned with the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., which was actually formed in 1961 to give him a denominational home, and with the American Baptist Churches USA.
As I listened to stories of Martin, I quickly noticed everyone had a different view of him. If you talk to some of the old ladies at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – also dually aligned with the PNBC and ABC – they will happily regale you with unique stories no one else knows. “Let me tell you,” they will say, leaning close to your ear, “Martin’s favorite hymn was, ‘Amazing Grace.’” But don’t write that down. The next old lady will get a far away look in her eye and say, “I remember Martin telling me how much he loved, ‘Be Not Dismayed whate’er Betide, God Will Take Care of You.’” And later, as, you sit down in the old fellowship hall for dinner and ask your hostess if she knew Martin, she’ll reply, “Oh, my yes, and he once confided to me that his favorite hymn was, ‘It is well, It is Well, With My Soul.’”

It makes you wonder how many people historians have interviewed when they write their books. The one fact about Martin than I’m sure of, because empty bottles of it are prominently displayed among his personal effects in the MLK museum, is that he liked Aramis cologne.

Reminiscences among my American Baptist colleagues also varied. My first boss, Dr. Frank Sharp, who was head of American Baptist News Service in the seventies, regarded M.L. as “a difficult celebrity,” in part because it was Frank who negotiated with Martin’s staff to get him to last-minute meetings and hastily scheduled press conferences on time, an almost impossible task. Dr. William Scott, ABC executive minister in Buffalo, met Martin shortly after the successful resolution of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and wrote in his diary, “He is young and inexperienced and in no way prepared for the leadership that is about to be thrust upon him.”

Dr. William T. McKee, the first African American to head a national American Baptist program board, was responsible for supervising me as director of communications for the ABC, and I would spend hours in Bill’s office as he tried to keep me out of political trouble. Bill, who grew up in Berean Baptist Church in Brooklyn, knew Martin well and often got tears in his eyes when he talked about him. When Bill served on the national staff of the ABC Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board (MMBB) in New York, he was often in contact with Martin England, a white MMBB staff member in the ABC of the South. Both Bill and England were concerned that Martin Luther King had no life or health insurance, and they both pressed him to sign up for MMBB benefits. According to Bill, Martin kept putting it off but finally agreed to sign the application form in 1963, five years before his death. Bill’s eyes would overflow when he talked about that. “If he hadn’t, his wife and children would have had nothing,” he’d say. I heard the story often.

“I called him Mike,” Bill would say quietly, almost as if no one else was in the room. It was from Bill that I learned that Martin and his father had been named Michael King when they were born, and the elder King changed it to Martin Luther King, in part to satisfy the last request of a dying grandfather. But close friends continued to address the two by their original names. Insiders knew them as Big Mike and Little Mike. This is not a secret, of course, but neither is it widely known.

Martin was assassinated in 1968. My kids, all of whom were born after 1976, tended to think of him as a distant historical figure, lost in the archival dust along with Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson. Even before my hair began to thin out and fade to gray, though, the kids suspected I was old enough to have encountered some of these old-time figures. But they figured they had really underestimated my age when they asked if I had known Martin Luther King, Jr.

“No,” I replied. “But I knew his father.”

“His father?” None of the kids ever challenged that. They always had trouble figuring out when I was making things up. They still do.

But I did know Daddy King. He remained a loyal American Baptist all his life and attended many ABC biennial meetings when I was on the staff. One time I stood behind him in the J-K line at the registration tables and listened to a young African American woman on the other side of the table ask his name.

“Martin Luther King Senior,” he said, carefully accentuating each syllable.

The young woman giggled.

“No,” she said nervously. “I really need to know your name.”

I was standing behind him, looking at the back of his large gray head, so I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. But he did make it clear he was not teasing.

“Young lady, I am Martin – Luther – King – Senior. And I am quite sure of it.”

The chastened young woman handed him a registration card, and the great man wandered away.

I was invited by an ABC colleague to have coffee with Daddy King during that meeting, and not long afterwards The American Baptist magazine interviewed him for an anniversary story honoring his son. He sat serenely at his desk and opened letters with a silver knife as he answered questions. His voice was so deep and cavernous that a staff writer and I argued whether to compare it to “pebbles falling on a tin roof,” but we decided that would be disrespectful. We reported that his voice was “deep.”

We probably asked him questions he had heard before. We asked if he was bitter following the murder of his son and the loss of other family members, and he quoted the King James Bible: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

I don’t recall the exact year of the interview, but it was after Daddy King had lost a second son, A.D. King, who died in a swimming pool accident in 1969; and after and his beloved wife, Alberta, playing the organ in Ebenezer in 1974, was shot by a deranged man who had planned to shoot her husband.

The elder King’s quiet grace and determined forgiveness were almost super human and a marvel to those who witnessed it.

If you talk with aging members of Ebenezer Baptist Church today, there is one thing on which they all agree: Martin Luther King, Sr., was the model of love and the harbinger of justice that molded his oldest son into the singular civil rights leader he became.

Baptists who attended the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Ebenezer Church in April 1968 have many stories to tell: how President Lyndon Johnson sat frowning and drenched in sweat in the middle of the congregation, or how Ralph Abernathy saw Bobby Kennedy in the rear of the church and went to the microphone to invite him to the front.

But many remember a more private moment, when Daddy King saw his son lying in the coffin for the first time. Daddy King began to weep and reached out to his son – some say it was if he was trying to wake him up – and whispered, “He never hated anybody. He never hated anybody.”

Daddy King worshipped at Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta on November 11, 1984. Later that same afternoon he suffered a heart attack and died at 5:41 p.m.

I don’t know what his last words were, but when I heard he died I thought of his four word eulogy for his eldest son: “He never hated anybody.”

What better way to sum up a life? Probably none of us would be comfortable with the opposite assertion, “He loved everybody.” Who among us is capable of that? Even if we have been spared the violent deaths of loved ones, who among us have not experienced insult, bigotry, unfairness, intolerance, xenophobia, sexism, ageism, or discrimination? There are simply persons who cross our paths who are unlovable. And perhaps the hardest commandment of Jesus is to love our enemies. Chances are we cannot, if we are honest, claim that we love everybody.

But with God’s help, it may be possible to get through the snares and thorns of life without hating anybody. That would be grace indeed.

Martin Luther King – Junior and Senior – never hated anyone. But more than that: each had cultivated the divine spark which is planted in all of us but nurtured by few of us.

Daddy and Martin King had what Jesus bestows: the power to live lives of purpose, a power so vivid that it inspires directionless persons to breathe life into their own divine spark, setting them on the path to faith and endowing that faith with an unwavering moral purpose.

Millions were inspired to a higher moral purpose by the example of Martin Luther King – Junior and Senior, Big Mike and Little Mike – and because they lived, the world is very different than the world into which they were born.

But today’s world is still imperfect, and God is still calling each of us to discipleship and diaconal service.

As with the disciples Jesus called so long ago, we may be content to go to him and confess, “You are the son of God, the King of Israel.”

But Jesus continues to push us to greater service, the same way Jesus called Daddy King and Martin Luther King, Jr. to greater service for the good of all.

Jesus’ message is clear: it is not enough to be satisfied with the great things we see now.

With a little bit of effort, Jesus assures us, “You will see greater things than these.”

The Gift of the Magee

2012-01-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

I begin with a digression.

The tiny Central New York village where I grew up was not exactly isolated. Morrisville’s location on U.S. route 20, which connects Albany with Buffalo and points west, places it directly in the flow of intellectual and cultural currents. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt motored up route 20 to pay his respects to I.M. Charleton (right in the picture above), the director of the Morrisville Institute (now Morrisville State College).

This little known event suggests Morrisville was not the least among the hamlets of New York State, because one future world leader discerned the importance of cultivating village intellectuals like I.M. (who, if not a Republican, was the only person in the village who wasn’t.) History does not say whether Morrisville was at the top of FDR’s itinerary, or why he appears to have left the engine running as he sat in his car and charmed the local gentry. The important thing is, he came.

In 1930, no one knew what Franklin Roosevelt’s future held, but even then he was impressive enough that I.M. Charleton thought it good to stand on the curb to wave as the Gov whisked by. To the best of my knowledge, Morrisvillians never saw the like, before or afterwards. Some say they glimpsed Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson at Sautter’s Diner in 1964, but Wilson is virtually unknown except to those who cross the Tappanzee Bridge, which is named for him. The visit of FDR was one of the most historic events ever to take place in the village, and someday a plaque may be placed in the pavement where his oil pan leaked 82 years ago.

I posit all this for two reasons. One, FDR’s visit was as memorable to Morrisvillians as if exotic kings from the east had dropped by for coffee and pie. It gives us chronic bible leaders an emotional point of reference for what it must have been like to wake up in a barn in Bethlehem and see three kings stepping delicately over the sheep droppings.

And, two, I always think it’s important to make it clear that my home town was not intellectually or culturally isolated, despite our Central New York accents that make us sound like lethargic Chicagoans. This stems from my frequent embarrassment, decades after leaving Morrisville, to discover no one else pronounces words the way I was taught. Our teachers held that the name of the ancient queen of Egypt was Klayo-PAY-tra, and that the Communist leader of China pronounced his name the way it was spelled: Mayo Tissie Tongue.

And in the seventh grade, when we were introduced to the short stories of William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the name of O. Henry, I was entranced by a story I thought was entitled, “The Gift of the Magee.”

In my defense (and on behalf of Morrisvillians), I must assert that it is very difficult to see the word m-a-g-i and quickly grasp that it is pronounced with a long a and a long i. The dictionary pronouncing hint is even less clear and looks like a logo for a foreign car: mædʒaɪ. Moreover, the word magi was never used in the United Church of Morrisville. We knew about the itinerant kings, of course, because each year we built a manger scene on the front lawn of the church. But I was ten before I realized they weren’t from a place called OrienTARR. And 15 before I realized they were magi, not magees.

Ideally, my digression should end here, but I’m still transfixed by the unexpected visit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to my home town. Like FDR’s visit to the Morrisville Ag and Tech institute, the visit of three kings to Bethlehem was calculated to make everyone feel important. If something was happening that warranted the appearance of the future president or the erstwhile kings, it had to be taken seriously.

Two days ago, Christians around the world celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas that, along with twelve drummers drumming, marks the arrival of the Magi at the manger where Jesus was born. In our household, we observed the traditional Latino celebration of El Día de los Reyes and exchanged small gifts in honor of their kingly largesse. But this is not a practice I grew up with in Morrisville, and it is not a universal observance.

Views as to who the kings were, in fact, are as varied as the Christian church itself. Some sects, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, excise references to the Kings because they were regarded as sorcerers of Satan. That’s a minority viewpoint, but it does make you want to look a little closer at these guys.

A handful of scholars believe los tres reyes were precocious astronomers who mapped the stars and studied the passage of planets, but that would have placed them several hundred years ahead of their time. Most observers are convinced the kings were garden variety astrologers, a possibility supported by the fact that they not only looked at stars but believed that celestial bodies had something to tell them – and, more than that, they followed one star for hundreds of miles to find out what it wanted them to know.

Of course, the moving star of Bethlehem was more likely a migrating planet than a fixed star, but who knew about such realities of astrophysics back then? One thing seems certain: the first thing the kings would have checked in Entertainment Weekly was their horoscope.

The term magi, from magus, is a reference to the priests of Zoroastrianism, who studied the stars and planets and made elaborate charts to work out what their movements portended in the currents of human life below. The three magicians from the east didn’t become “wise men” until the 16th and 17th century, when scholars who wrote the King James Version of the bible decided to call the magi “Wise Men.” Elsewhere, the drafters of the bible used the same word to denote “sorcerer” or “sorcery,” notably in reference to Elymas in Acts 13:6-11, or Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-13.

Matthew does not identify the three kings, or magicians, or wise men, but thanks to long standing church tradition, we call them by name: Melchior a Babylonian scholar; Caspar (also Gaspar, Jaspar, Jaspas, Gathaspa, and other variations), a Persian scholar; and Balthazar (also Balthasar, Balthassar, and Bithisarea), an Arab scholar.

Everything else we know about the kings is circumstantial. One reason we know they were important is that when they dropped by the palace to pay their respects to King Herod, the King took time to meet with them. This was either a professional courtesy to his fellow kings, or – as Matthew tells it – Herod had heard the rumors that a king of the Jews was about to the born and he invited the three sorcerers in to find out what they knew. The wily Herod asked the three to let him know when they found the lad, “so that I may go and pay him homage.” Yeah, right.

Matthew states explicitly that when the triumvirate found the baby Jesus laying in the manger, they gave him three symbolic gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But the kings were smart enough to know Herod was setting a trap for the baby – Matthew says they were warned in a dream – and they “left for their own country by another road,” evading Herod and his agents. Herod realized he had been duped by the kings and, according to Matthew, ordered the death of every new born male child in Bethlehem.

No one knows what happened to the kings after they returned home, although there are many interesting legends. Some believe one of the magi was baptized by St. Thomas, the “doubting Thomas” of Scripture, while he was en route to his missionary tasks in India. Both the Mar Thoma Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India trace their origins to the first century visit of St. Thomas to South Asia.

But it was Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned as pope from 590 to 604 A.D., who placed the traveling wise men in their proper historic perspective. In one of those rare sermons that is remembered for 1,500 years, Gregory stressed the fact that the wise men, having searched for and discovered the Christ, took a different road and never retraced their route. “Having come to know Jesus,” he said, “we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

Despite all the mystery and speculation about whom they really were, the three magi continue to preach a powerful message across the millennia.

They were three non-Jews whose minds and spirits were open to powerful spiritual currents, including cryptic indications that a powerful monarch was about to be born to the Jews, a group they might have dismissed as a relatively minor sect in the Roman and eastern worlds.

When the three sorcerers perceived a unique sign in the heavens, a bright object that appeared to move ahead of them, they followed it out of intellectual and metaphysical curiosity.

As they pondered the heavenly sign that moved before them, they consulted their charts and concluded it was leading them to a rendezvous with a infant whose power and significance exceeded all they ever knew.

En route to Bethlehem, they decided to mark the occasion with significant gifts to the baby king: gold as a symbol of kingship on earth, frankincense as a reminder of God’s presence, and myrrh, an embalming oil, as a symbol of the death that would be required to bring the prophecy to fruition.

When they arrived at the end of their journey, these wise men born to riches did not hesitate to enter a rude, odiferous barn, because they knew the power and glory that resided in the human baby resting in an old feeding troth.

They came from afar and they knew who they were seeking and when they arrived, they worshipped the baby in the troth.

When they had met Jesus, they knew their lives must be changed forever. And they chose a new road for passage, having decided that they must never again retrace the steps that had brought them to this radical encounter with the son of a God they were only just beginning to know.

The very presence of these three splendid strangers must have amazed the parents of Jesus and astonished other witnesses in area. The visit of the obviously important Magi would have been regarded as a sign that something big was happening – just as Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930 appearance in Morrisville was a sign of something big.

But the glistening kings knew something that may have temporarily eluded others: they knew the magi were not the most important presence in the tiny barn.

That honor belonged to the smallest person in the room, the feeble infant still struggling to find the strength to lift his head.

It was the baby that the wise men came to see, and once they had seen him, their lives were changed forever.

And as we watch them in our minds eye, three kings stepping out on history’s stage, choosing a new route of enlightenment and understanding, may we all be eager to follow them and the star that brought them to God’s salvation,

westward leading,
still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.

What happens next?

2011-12-31T11:37:00.000-08:00

In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s autobiographical musical, “In the Heights,” there is a poignant scene in the second act. The characters have just survived a night of looting in the midst of a Fourth of July blackout. Usnavi, the main character, has lost his bodega because of vandalism, but his main concern in the sweltering heat is the health and safety Abuela Claudia.

USNAVI:
Abuela

ABUELA CLAUDIA:
Are you okay?

ABUELA CLAUDIA/USNAVI:
Paciencia y fe!
Paciencia y fe!

USNAVI:
So we survived the night, what happens today?

What happens today? The question crosses all our minds, but there is no answer. We can’t predict the future. It would be futile to try.

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money,’” writes the Apostle James. “Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.” (James 4:13-16)

In the musical, so much happens after Usnavi asks the question, “What happens today?” The musical is no longer on Broadway, but it is on tour, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t like spoilers. Before the day is over, Abuela will split her lottery winnings of $96,000 with Usnavi and his cousin, Sonny. Before the day is over, Abuela will die of heart failure in her bedroom. Before the day is over, Usnavi will make plans return to the Dominican Republic, the home of his parents. But before the day is over Sonny will arrange a special tribute to Abuela Claudia that convinces Usnavi to stay in the Heights. None of these events were likely when Usnavi began the day with the question, “So we survived the night. What happens today?”

Our lives unroll uncertainly before us. Maybe today will be much like yesterday, and perhaps yesterday was much like the day before. On the other hand, no one can suppose there will not be catastrophic changes in the soothing routine. When a family in Connecticut went to bed for a long winter’s nap late last month, they had no inkling that the smoldering embers left in a bag by the fireplace would burst to life and, before the night was over, claim the lives of three children and two grandparents.

We tell ourselves that tomorrow is promised to no one but, in fact, nothing is promised to us. My Sociology Professor Tony Campolo – who, when I had him in class, did not know that in a few tomorrows he would become an evangelical superstar – used to say how scared he was by evangelists who sought to frighten you into salvation with familiar taunts: “You don’t have to come forward to be saved now, you can put it off until tomorrow or the next day. You can walk away tonight with hell fires crackling around your ankles and wait until some other time to be saved. But – But! – what if you walk out that door tonight and get hit by a bus?” We’d ask Tony, the existential sociologist, if the sermon made him afraid of hell fires, and he’d reply, “No! It made me afraid of buses!”

As we look around us today, at those we love, at familiar surroundings, common items we hold in our hands every day, are we missing invisible signs that might shed light on what happens next?

Some historians have said that one of the eeriest images of the television age took place on the morning of November 22, 1963, as cameras captured the crisp, full-color images of President and Mrs. Kennedy descending the mobile stairway from Air Force One. Mrs. Kennedy beams as brightly as the Dallas sun as she models her pink suit and trademark pillbox hat, and a Dallas newsman who has never seen JFK in person marvels at the charismatic young chief. “He’s taller than I thought,” he reports, “he’s tanned and lean in a well tailored suit and a light green shirt. He’s the prince of America.” In this glistening moment, the future seems secure, God appears to dote on the United States, and the unwary President bares his teeth in a grin of grace and domestic tranquility.

But as we know so well a half century later, these happy moments are fleeting. Within minutes of the grinning descent from Air Force One, as the motorcade heads into downtown Dallas, the President will be gone.

JFK.
Blown away.
What else do I have to say?

I’m inclined to think it would be terrible if we knew how our lives will evolve, if OuiJa boards and botanicas provided spoilers of what lies ahead.

Who needs it? My maternal grandmother got it into her head that she would die on February 6, and all her life she would greet each new year with dread anticipation that this would be the fatal year. She passed so many years safely – more than 80 of them – that the rest of the family lost patience with her morbid annual observance. Then she died, on February 6. Perhaps Grandma had some divination of the day, if not the year, of her death. But what good did it do besides making her miserable every January and February?

As I write this, I’m flashing back to an old Mutt and Jeff cartoon I saw decades ago in the Syracuse Herald-Journal:

Jeff: I Wish I knew where I was going to die.
Mutt: Why? What good would that do you?
Jeff: I’d never go near the durn place.

All of this prognostication gives power, perhaps, to the story of the ancient woman and man encountered in the temple by Mary, Joseph and Jesus when they went there to designate their first born male as “holy to the Lord,” and for Mary’s purification as a woman who had recently given birth. (Luke 2:18-40)

Simeon and Anna had gifts of divine discernment, and when the young couple and new baby boy came to the temple, the old ones knew exactly who they were. They also knew what the future held for them, and it was not all good news.

Before she met Simeon and Anna, Mary’s knowledge of her prospects was that they were spectacular. The angel said she was with child by the Holy Spirit, and the shepherds tramped down from the fields to tell her what the angels said about the birth of the messiah, the Christ child. And “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)

But while Mary was treasuring the future in her heart, a harsher reality awaited her and her family, and the old folks knew it. Because the messianic franchise is not all bliss and glory.

Both Simeon and Anna had taken up residence in the Temple, and both of them knew for whom they were waiting. When she saw the baby, Anna “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Simeon discerned God’s promise that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah, and he, too, recognized the baby immediately. He held the child tenderly in his arms, and praised God:

“Master, now you are
dismissing your
servant in peace,
according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your
salvation,
which you have prepared in
the presence of all
peoples,
a light for revelation to the
Gentiles
and for glory to your
people Israel.”

But it was to Mary that Simeon turned on a more somber note.

“This child,” he said, “is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”

And then: “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

This is a spoiler about events to come that had yet to be revealed to Mary, the teen-age mother who was still pondering the glory of being the mother of God’s son. God, who had kept this information from her until now, called upon a kindly old man in the temple to tell the whole truth: blessed are you among women; but an anguish of spirit akin to a sword in your soul is your fate as well.

The agony that ameliorates the ecstasy follows shortly afterwards, when Joseph, Mary and the boy Jesus are forced to leave behind everything they know in order to escape the death sentence imposed on all newborn boys by the murderous King Herod. There are few hints, in canonical scripture, what it may have been like to raise an adolescent Messiah, but the attitude of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple is suggestive. Jesus had gone missing amid the Passover crowds in Jerusalem, and Mary and Joseph searched frantically for him. “Child, why have you treated us like this?” Mary demanded. “Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”

Clearly an apology is in order, but the boy’s response is slightly arrogant, or would have been if he had been your kid: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must have been in my father’s house?” (Luke 2:48-49).

A few verses later, Luke reports that Jesus “was obedient to them,” but perhaps this only meant he was turning over a new messianic leaf. Disappearing from one’s parents is not an act of obedience.

At this point, the future still held many incidents of soul-piercing intensity, including the adult Jesus’ departure from Mary’s home, the sermons that convinced Jesus’ own siblings and friends that he was nuts, the angry crowd that followed him with the intent of throwing him off a cliff, the hostility of the religious authorities who felt threatened by his authority, and, ultimately, the arrest, flagellation, and crucifixion. Mary, who had once pondered God’s goodness and her son’s glory in her heart, ultimately sat at the foot of a Roman cross and watched her son die a slow, excruciating death by asphyxiation. The only pain that could have equaled that was the figurative sword thrust so cruelly in her soul.

On that day so long ago, when Mary took her infant son into the temple for his dedication to God, would she have been better off if there had been no Simeon to warn her about the future?

Perhaps not. She would have discovered the truths about life soon enough. She was still a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus, but as a young girl in a family oppressed by a malicious foreign rule, she must already have known life has equal portions of joy and pain. As she grew older and experienced more of life, this reality would have become more certain.

But Mary was also witness to the fact that there is more to life than joy and pain and the finality of death. She also played a major role in the decision of the Creator of the Universe to experience the misery and agony of human life in such a way that pain might be forever expunged from the soul’s eternal essence. Because Jesus suffered on the cross, the sword that pierced Mary’s soul – the swords that pierce all our souls – are forever removed.

It is always tempting, as we live out our lives, to want to know when the inevitable pains of living will come, or when death’s sting will come to us, or where. Some of us would welcome the spoilers, the mystical predictions, which will lay it all out before us. And others will be just as glad to go through life never knowing when that belligerent bus will put a quick end to all we know.

But none of that really matters. It’s enough to know that pain and death will come, whether we know how or when.
But just as certain, as made clear to Mary by Simeon and Anna, the ancients of the temple, is that God has a plan to take away our pain, and the day will surely come when we can praise God for a long-promised blessed release,

for my eyes have seen your
salvation,
which you have prepared in
the presence of all
peoples,
a light for revelation to the
Gentiles
and for glory to your
people Israel.

Shock and Awe

2011-12-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

The first 20 verses of the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel are sheer poetry, and many of us don’t get into the Christmas spirit until we hear them read aloud in the King James version:

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shown round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The words make our spirits soar as much as any Christmas carol and most of us can recite them by heart.

Perhaps Luke, the dear and glorious physician who wrote these words, is using a little poetic license.

The shepherds who, with their ancestors, had been expecting God’s Messiah for generations, were probably not expecting it to happen in quite this way. They were expecting God to intervene in human history with dramatic timing, certainly with angels and trumpets, probably with earthquakes, presumably with wind and fire. And then would come the Messiah on a gargantuan fire-breathing steed, his brawny hand grasping a glistening sword, slashing heads and limbs from their Roman oppressors and hated polytheist neighbors. They were expecting something akin to the way Donald Rumsfeld predicted the opening salvos of the Iraq War: shock. And awe.

But no. Nothing like that. No earthquakes, no fire, just an ordinary night sitting downwind from the scent of the sheep. Most scholars believe it wasn’t even December, a date arbitrarily chosen by the early church because it fit in with other feast days.

And hidden from the shepherds’ gaze, in a small barn, redolent of animal droppings and compost, an ordinary woman in labor crouches over the hay. In one of the humanity’s most common functions, this woman pushes out a baby boy.

How many other babies were born that night within a 50-kilometer radius of Bethlehem? Tens? Scores? Hundreds? Whatever the volume of natal activity that night, one more birth would hardly have been noticed. The incarnation of the Creator of the Universe into human flesh took place in a manner no different, perhaps even less dramatic, than the manner in which you and I were born. Did persons outside the barn even hear the cries of a newborn struggling to fill his lungs with unfamiliar air? Did the lowing cattle quickly lose interest in the human drama and resume the bored chewing of their cuds? Was there ever a night so quiet, so devoid of drama and astounding events?

This is where the angels come in. The heavenly host awakens the shepherds in the middle of the silent night and scares them to the brink of infarction. While the shepherds are clutching their chests and catching their breath, the angels point to a malodorous hovel which the shepherds knew well.

“Behold!” the angels say. “This is not the hut you think it is! This is delivery room of Christ the Lord.”

I can’t begin to imagine what the shepherds must have thought. No doubt they were frightened out of their wits, and no wonder. How often does one encounter even one angel, let alone the whole heavenly host. And how disorienting, how counter-intuitive it must have been for the shepherds, transfixed by heavenly fireworks in the sky, to follow the angels’ orders to avert their gaze to a crude little shed at the edge of town? Were they too frightened to say aloud what they really thought? “What? This lousy little lean-to is where you want us to seek the Messiah?”

One suspects that without the angel chorus, humanity might have entirely missed the big event. The sheer ordinariness of the occasion was one reason the early church went out of its way to exalt the importance of the Messiah’s lowly birth.

In addition to angel choruses, the church also stressed the significance of the affair by tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to some major players in Jewish history.

Matthew – famous for the “begats” which many Sunday school students were forced to memorize – begins the family tree at Abraham, moves on to King David and King Solomon, follows the royal line through Jeconiah, and ends up with Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus. Luke’s more audacious genealogy goes all the way back to Adam and includes the Prophet Nathan and also leads to Joseph.

This is the point at which some wise ass seventh grader in Sunday school raises his hand to point out that Joseph was not a blood relative of Jesus, so what difference does it make?

The point, perhaps, was to persuade us that the incarnation of the Creator in a baby boy in Bethlehem was a bigger deal than it looked on the surface. But one also has to wonder – as wise ass seventh graders often do – why the lineage would make a difference.

Many of us are aware of notable ancestors and we drop their names to suggest that we, too, are bigger deals than we look. My paternal grandfather, eager to prove he was more than an Oneonta bureaucrat, meticulously probed his family tree to identify impressive antecedents. His main goal was to prove he was a Mayflower descendant, which many Euro-Americans can do by tracing the elaborate web of the millions of people who were connected by endless marriages and intermarriages to the 102 souls who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. My grandfather concluded the Jenkses were descended from Mayflower pilgrim Elizabeth Tilley, who married her fellow passenger John Howland. The inscription on Auntie Elizabeth’s grave gives hope to all would-be lineage enhancers:

Here ended the Pilgrimage of
ELIZABETH Tilley HOWLAND
who died Dec 1687 at home of her daughter
LYDIA & husband JAMES BROWN
in Swansea - ELIZABETH married
Pilgrim JOHN HOWLAND who came
with her in the Mayflower Dec 1620.
From them are descended a
numerous posterity.

I’ll take Grandpa’s word for it that the Jenkses are indeed among that numerous posterity. A less obscure ancestor (because we share his surname) was Joseph Jenks, Jr., the Royal Governor of Rhode Island Colony from 1727 to 1732, and a Baptist benefactor of Roger Williams. One would have thought that would have made me Baptist royalty when I worked for the American Baptists in Valley Forge, but that honor had by then been relegated to bureaucrats who traced their ancestry to Sweden.

Actually, Governor Jenks is my favorite ancestor because he literally stands out among his peers. He was reportedly 6 feet 7 inches tall – freakish in 1727 – and none of his American-made clothes seemed to fit. According to one legend, Grandpa Joseph sent a hand-written note to England to order a 6 feet 7 inch cloak befitting his office. Months later, a package arrived at the colonial mansion: a 6 feet 7 in clock. Clearly I was not the first in my line with illegible handwriting.

My mother, Mary Emerson, traced her line to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it would be nice to imagine that a corpuscle or two of his transcendental genius courses through our family veins. Every Thanksgiving I think of his succinct and eloquent prayer,

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

What a cool guy, that Uncle Ralph. It’s fun to think my family swims in his gene pool and, who knows, maybe yours does, too. But I can assure you, there isn’t a weaker pick-up line than, “Hey, Babe, I’m related to Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

And when you come down to it, what difference does it make? The late mystic George Carlin rightfully chastised those who are prideful of attributes they had nothing to do with, such as being Irish or having red hair or being descended from Zulu chiefs. It’s all good, but it has nothing to do with how you use your own life for better or ill. You can’t blame your larcenous tendencies on being descended from John Dillinger, or attribute your virtues to being a scion of Baptist royalty. How you live your life has nothing to do with those who came before you, and everything to do with you.

In the same manner, it didn’t matter a whit that Jesus was descended from King David, and I’m sure his royal line didn’t add a mite to his stepfather’s livelihood as a wood worker. It may have pleased some early church bureaucrats to claim Jesus was the latest in a long line of Jewish monarchs and prophets, but it doesn’t seem entirely relevant. The only familial relationship that really mattered was God, and it was God Who Jesus addressed as Abba, Father.

Into the feeble human flesh of the frail babe in the manger was poured all the power, authority, creative energy and omniscient power of the Creator of the Universe. Isn’t that shock and awe enough? The host of angels was a nice touch, and the impressive genealogy is interesting (so long as we are not required to memorize it). But the most breathtaking development here is that on one ordinary night, the Creator of the Universe was born in a barn without a perceptible whimper.

It makes you pause to catch your breath.

But it is truly something to celebrate, an event that brings all of us to our feet for a rousing chorus of “Joy to the World.”

Christmas Day has come, and soon it will be gone for another year. But let’s not allow the season to depart without reflecting on the quintessential quietness of the incarnation.

Amid all life’s challenges, stresses, sorrows and pains, we will occasionally find it tempting to call on God for dramatic intercessions, miraculous visions, stellar signs that we will be rescued from the travails that plague us. Like our ancestors who yearned for the dramatic rescue of a mighty messiah who would be attended by earthquakes, wind, and fire, we will pray for clear solutions and unambiguous remedies.

But the God in the mundane manger seems to prefer a more subtle approach. The ordinariness of God’s entry into human history is a powerful reminder that God is with us constantly, even on the most run of the mill days.

And when we need to cry for help, we know God will be there in time of trouble, too.

We may just have to listen very carefully amid the tumult to hear God’s still, small voice.

Dream Along With Me

2011-12-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

I can see it now, as vividly as if it were yesterday.

My mother is taking my baby brother Larry and me on a morning walk around Morrisville. Larry is in a stroller. I’m 3 years old and walking beside Mommy and Larry. We cross Main Street and turn left on Mill Street. We pause in front of a telephone pole while Mommy leans over the stroller to re-button Larry’s shirt. I point to the looming pole.

“Remember,” I ask, “when I climbed to the top?” Mommy stands and smiles.

“No.”

“But you were right here,” I insisted.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were!”

Mommy sighed and we began walking again. End of conversation.

But I did climb the pole! I remember it so well. And Mommy was there and Larry was there …

It was, of course, a dream. The walk with Mommy and Larry happened every day, and at one point during nap time I dreamed I had climbed the familiar telephone pole.

And what a powerful dream it was. Even now, nearly three decades after my mother’s death, the memory of this dream invokes the clearest image I have of her as a pretty young woman. But at 3, I hadn’t sorted out the difference between dream memories and real memories.

The psychiatrist C.G. Jung raises the question of whether we ever really sort it out. Dreams, Jung said, are windows between our conscious reality and our unconscious spirituality.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul,” Jung wrote in The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1933). Our daily waking experiences overwhelm our ability to remember everything, so we remember some, forget others and lose track of everything else that has happened to us. “But in dreams,” Jung said, “we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man … there he is still in the whole, and the whole is in him … It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral.”

Dreams, Jung believed, are spiritual glimpses into memories our brains have forgotten but our souls retain forever.

But Jung cautioned those who would interpret dreams that these glimpses are not always understandable. “The dream is often occupied with apparently very silly details,” he wrote in On the Psychology of the Unconscious (1953), “this producing an impression of absurdity, or … so unintelligible as to leave us thoroughly bewildered.”

About 15 years ago I had a dream that was remarkable in its length, plot, color, detail, and unintelligibility – and remarkable in that I have retained so much of it over so many years.

I’m in the large reception hall of a great house. The floor is marble, the dark wood walls are elegantly polished, and a vast staircase spirals upwards toward a dim yellow light. As I watch passively, several two-dimensional heralds who look like fugitives from a stained-glass window enter from the right, their glass feet clicking against the marble floor. The heralds trill their trumpets shrilly and begin to march up the staircase. Pope John Paul II enters from the right and follows the heralds upstairs. The Pope looks harried and tired as he makes his way up the steps. He is surrounded by hundreds of people of all races and ages, chirping in cacophonic unison. Some are in modern dress, others wear medieval rags, some are adorned with armor, and still others look like cartoons and computer-generated grotesqueries. Their noise intensifies as they process up the stairs. The Pope turns to look at me. He shakes his head and shrugs. As he continues up the staircase, I notice he is wearing black pumps with two-inch heels.

What the heck was that all about? Was I receiving a divine revelation about Pope John Paul, perhaps a message from on high that the church needs to welcome and affirm all God’s people? Or was it silly nonsense, “producing an impression of absurdity”?

Beats me. Jung said he could not interpret his own dreams, and he pointed out in Psychology and Religion (1938) that the church was reluctant to interpret random dreams. “In spite of the Church's recognition that certain dreams are sent by God,” Jung noted, “she is disinclined, and even averse, to any serious concern with dreams, while admitting that some might conceivably contain an immediate revelation.”

Dreams play a profoundly dramatic role in many biblical narratives, so the church has to take them seriously. Remember an earlier Joseph whose dreams were both prescient and dangerous:

Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, ‘Listen to this dream that I dreamed. There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf.’ His brothers said to him, ‘Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?’ So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words. (Genesis 37:5-8)

And who could blame the beleaguered brothers for hating him? Joseph’s dream is clearly a divine revelation about the future. Perhaps he would have been better off if he hadn’t mentioned it to his brothers, but then, he had to be stupid enough to brag about it in order for to fulfill God’s metaphors.

In the case of Joseph, the betrothed of Mary, the dreams are vivid messages from God and require prudent action.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. Matthew 1:18-25.

That’s a remarkable turn of events: Joseph did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.

Thank God Sigmund Freud would not be born for another 1,856 years, because that could have been disastrous. Freud, unlike Jung, believed dreams had no spiritual import but were either erotic in nature or expressions of wish fulfillment. You know. Sex.

How would Dr. Freud have counseled this hurt, confused young man?

“Joseph, my boy, you will never set your anger aside if you don’t face it honestly. You have been a good boy, you have never laid hands on this women who has been betrothed to you. And yet she is with child! Sure, you’ve been cuckolded. Sure, you’re hurt. Sure, you’re angry. But this dream of yours – forget it! This dream is only your wish that you and Mary could go back to where you were, that nothing would have changed, that you can still possess this woman and make righteous, innocent love to her. But hoping for that and dreaming about it will not make it so. Forget about it.”

Freud would have gone on to advise Joseph that sex is a fundamental human drive and he needed to understand that if he wanted to start all over again. But no one thought like that when Mary found herself with child. What people thought was written down in the Bible:

“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress will be put to death,” says Leviticus 20:10, among other verses.

Maybe Joseph was thinking, hey, the adulterer was probably a Roman bastard and maybe Mary didn’t have a choice. So – what the hell – I’ll just throw the girl out and get on with my life.”

But then Joseph closed his eyes and had a dream. And, there being no Dr. Freud to confuse him, the dream had a profound impact on his thinking and on the history of the world. He went to bed a cuckold. He woke up the stepfather of God’s son.

That’s one hell of a flip flop. One commentary suggests Joseph’s dream is the first recorded example of post-hypnotic suggestion. The Star Wars generation will see evidence of a Jedi master manipulating the conscious mind:

Obi-Wan: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Storm Trooper: These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Storm Trooper: He can go about his business …

But the truth is, we know Joseph better than that. We know he is not a weak-minded wood worker subject to mere hypnotic suggestion. He is a good and righteous man. He’s the sort of man who recognizes God’s voice when he hears it, even if it comes in a dream. And he’s the sort of man whose personality is strong enough to withstand the withering stares and judgmental gossip of prying neighbors. His wife is pregnant with God’s son, and Joseph makes a moral decision not to care what anyone else thinks. His message to the neighbors is a brass-age rendition of a modern bumper stocker: God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

What an extraordinary man, this Joseph. His is a story we hear so often we have stopped wondering what it must have been like for him. He was the oldest son of Jacob, the scion on a patriarchal lineage extending back to King David, a man who grew up expecting to be the unchallenged head of his household. It is remarkable, radical even, that Joseph was able to step back from all that and assume one of history’s best known second banana roles.

Joseph was one of history’s most notable dreamers, a practical man who predated Jung by two millennia but who understood that dreams are windows to the soul. Once Joseph heard God’s message in the stillness of the night, he set a new path and never looked back.

Granted, not all of us have dreams that are as easy to understand as the ones that were visited upon Joseph. And most of us have had dreams that are, as Jung said, unintelligible and occupied with silly details.

But that does not diminish the possibility that our dreams are spiritual experiences, and that they come laden with messages from that part of our unconscious where God speaks to us.

The next dream you have may be perplexing, confusing and beyond your comprehension. But it can also be an opportunity to reflect on the power of Joseph’s dream, and to embrace all such REM experiences as a potential blessing.

Perry Como put it this way:

Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star
Come along, come along, leave your worries where they are
Up and beyond the sky, watchin' the world roll by
Sharin' a kiss, a sigh, just use your imagination!
On a cloud of love, we'll hear the music of night
We can wink at the moon as we hold each other tight
And if we go in the right direction, heaven can't be very far
Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star!
We can wink at the moon
as we hold each other tight . . .
And if we go in the right direction, heaven can't be very far
Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star!

__
See an Advent reflection on Joseph by the Rev. Martha M. Cruz: http://bit.ly/siY4t4

Mother Mary Comes to Me

2011-12-10T05:49:00.000-08:00

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be,
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
-- Sir Paul McCartney

With titles like Queen of the Universe and Mother of God, you’d think the she would play a bigger role in our Baptist consciousness. But we’re not big fans of Mary most of the time, although she is an important character in our Christmas pageants.

In our church in Morrisville, we always found some girl who looked cute with a white towel draped over her head as she gazed lovingly at the 40 watt light bulb in the role the baby Jesus in the manger. But eleven months out of the year, Mary was rarely mentioned in church.

It wasn’t until I was in the Air Force, still a teenager, that I got a sense of Mary’s predominance in other Christian families. I was a chaplain’s assistant assigned to the United Kingdom, and one of the priests I worked for was Leo Lyons, a tall, white-haired captain with a crinkly Robert Young smile and unwearied father-knows-best demeanor. Father Lyons was relatively egalitarian when it came to relating to lowly airmen so I tended to be uncritical of his theological views. What made sense to him was fine with me.

One spring Father Lyons announced he was taking a leave to visit Portugal, and it took me a while to grasp that he wasn’t planning a recreational sojourn. He was going to visit Our Lady of Fátima.

“Who?” I asked, envisioning an exotic dancer.

Chaplain Lyons raised his eyebrows the same way he did when I thought a monstrance was a figure from a Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelly novel.

“No, Our Lady the mother of Jesus,” he said, spelling it out in words I could understand.

“She was from Portugal?”

“Noooo,” Father Lyons said with the patience of a veteran priest who knows teaching is never as easy as it looks. “She appeared miraculously to three shepherd kids in 1917.”

I nodded, speechless. The Baptist tradition doesn’t offer anything quite so interesting, and I was deeply impressed by the faith of Catholic chaplains and its panoply of miracles.

Mary’s manifestation in Fátima astounded me. Her sheer power to appear and talk to people was a startling contrast to the chipped plaster Marys of manger scenes who stared blankly at their plaster offspring. The more I learned about the Mary of Fátima, the more impressive she became. The shepherd children testified she was beautiful. She emanated light so bright it hurt to look at her. She addressed the children in fluent Portuguese and gave them spiritual insights, images of hellfire, and - famously -revealed unto them three eschatological secrets. What Mary told the kids was so astonishing that the Roman Catholic Church kept her third prediction a secret until 2000. By then, most people assumed the secret warned of worldwide nuclear conflagration, but the actual prediction was more prosaic. During a visit to Portugal in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI exegeted it as a forecast of sorrows that would be heaped upon the church, in part wrought by the scandals of sexual misconduct of priests.

Be that as it may, it is awesome – to use the word when it actually seems appropriate – that a woman absent from the stage for some 2000 years still had the power to influence world events and distract political and church leaders. In October 1930, following a canonical inquiry, the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima declared the visions “worthy of belief,” and every pope since Pius XI has declared the miracles at Fátima really happened.

Whatever happened at Fátima, the story usually gets Baptists and other non-liturgical types shaking their heads. Skepticism about faux miracles is one of many issues that led to the Reformation, and we Baptists are the Doubting Thomases of the ecclesial landscape. Not that we’re incapable of believing improbable things, but when it comes to miraculous manifestations or bleeding statues, we won’t believe it until we see it. When I traveled to Rome toward the end of my European tour of duty, I was eager to view the Incorruptibles, the saints who lived such virtuous lives that their remains – as Father Lyons and other priests assured me – had never decayed, but were laid out untouched by corruption. I guess I was expecting rosy cheeks and moist lips, because the centuries-old Incorruptibles looked like dark, leathery mummies to me. My Catholic companions expressed pious awe at the miracle of their preservation, but I couldn’t see it. They may have been acting, or they may have had greater faith than I.

Even so, none of these wonderments have had the same impact on the on the world as Mary. One has to wonder why Baptists and low-church Protestants have been so unaffected by her charisma. She was, after all, the mother of Jesus. It’s not that we dismiss that, but neither do we assign the high status or deep respect accorded to her by our Roman Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers.

Given what we know about Mary, we have vastly underestimated her.

She was, among other things, a peasant girl. She was born into a strictly patriarchal culture where girls counted for little, and her family had to contend each day with an occupying army with soldiers who treated the Jews as superstitious bumpkins. Mary and other girls were inconsequential members of their families, valued only for their cooking and cleaning skills. Mary was not expected to read, have opinions, make decisions, or fall in love. She did not go out and choose her husband because she liked his limpid brown eyes and sinewy chest. Joseph, like everything else in her life, was consigned to her by her father. Joseph, one might even say, was forced upon her. Based on what we know about the culture, Mary would have been between 12 and 14 when she was betrothed, and her betrothal probably happened shortly after her first menstrual cycle.

What happened next must have been terrifying. Look at it from her point of view. She’s 14. She’s engaged to a stranger. She’s innocent of the ways of the world. She may not even understand what sexual intercourse is, but she’s old enough to know that if she does it before she is married, her parents and her neighbors will drag her out of the house and stone her.

Then one day Mary discovers she is pregnant.

That could not have been good news to her, even if it was delivered by an angel. Her first thought must have been that the angel was delivering a sentence of certain death. And even when the angel sought to reassure her that everything was all right, it’s hard to imagine she was in any sense relieved. With child, you say? With child – by God? You wouldn’t believe it today if someone said you or your daughter was pregnant by God. And chances are, Mary didn’t believe it at first, either. She was an unbelievable choice to have an unbelievable conception to bring an unbelievable baby boy into an unbelieving world. The salvation of humanity requires of us the same intellectual discipline claimed by Alice, Lewis Carroll’s own precocious teenager: to believe three impossible things before breakfast.

This moment at which Mary was informed of her pregnancy – the Annunciation – has been portrayed in literature, song, Frescoes, statuary and art for two-thousand years. One of my favorite Annunciation paintings was done in 1850 by the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In this depiction, Mary cringes on her bed, drawing away from the messenger of scary news, her face tense with fear and disbelief. The Freudian coup-de-grace is that the model who posed in the role of Mary is Rossetti’s own sister, Christina, who also made a name for herself as an English poet.

Some would say this whole artistic scenario is messed up, and they would have a point. But, given the reality of what is supposed to be happening in the scene, how could it be otherwise?

Certainly a miracle has happened here, and throughout its history the church has seen it this way: a virgin has conceived by the Holy Spirit, God knoweth how.

But, according to Luke, a new miracle of equal power begins to unfold. Once the shock wears off and Mary catches her breath, this 14-year-old peasant girl, this cipher who can’t read and has been told never to think, begins to utter one of the most revolutionary statements in human history.

God has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’ (Luke 1:51-55, NRSV)

Overthrow the powerful? Raise up the peasants? Feed the hungry? Reject the rich? The angel must have been as shocked as Mary was when she was informed she was pregnant.

From the very beginning, demure little Mary far exceeded the expectations of her family and culture. In the same way, she obviously exceeds the expectations of Baptists and others who set her aside years ago along with the high liturgical trappings and arbitrary hierarchies of the oppressive churches we abandoned. Ironically, as we can detect from her opening speech (“The Magnificat” as it is known in those high churches), she is the one thing we should have held on to.

We Baptists shed a lot of high church trappings that reminded us of the Church of England and other oppressors. Given the importance Mary’s son assigned to his last supper, for instance, it seems almost heretical that we limit our communion ordinance to once as month. We’ve abandoned the beautiful litanies and liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer because we think it’s holier to pray from our hearts. And despite our eagerness to be witnesses of our faith, we no longer cross ourselves when we pray, thus tossing aside one of the more visible demonstrations of what we believe.

I guess we can live with that. We also exchanged priests, bishops and hierarchs for soul liberty and the priesthood of all believers, and who can say we are not better off?

But when you consider the importance of Mary to the church and to Jesus, I wish we had not been so quick to set her aside. Her very first utterance, as recorded by Luke, sets the scene for all that is to come. The God we expected to come in shock and awe came instead as a mewling, puking boy. But turning all our expectations upside down was the prelude to turning the universe on its head. And with Jesus still zygotic in her womb, Mary knew it all.

But more than that, it was Mary who nursed him, guided his first steps, toilet trained him and whispered in his ear the Godly secrets that would change the world. Jesus was God, and Mary was his mother.

In a sense better understood by our higher church sisters and brothers, Mary is also our own mother in that she symbolizes a side of God we rarely let ourselves acknowledge: God’s feminine side.

Years ago I attended the funeral of a good friend on the American Baptist staff. He was young and energetic and his sudden death with a cerebral hemorrhage was a devastating shock. As we sat sadly in our pews, my late friend’s wife was surrounded by her young children. The children, confused and frightened, began to cry. And their mother reached out her arms to them and hugged them tightly, whispering comfort in their ears.

The minister who officiated at the funeral nodded to the widow. “Here we see how God comes to us as a mother,” he said. “God shares our grief, our sense of loss, but the Mother God’s first instinct is to embrace and console her children.”

Sometimes we need a divine mother, a goddess, who understands a crucial aspect of human life that Jesus never knew: the experience of motherhood. One thing the angel did not reveal to Mary at the Annunciation is that giving birth to God’s son would not be all gold and frankincense. That message fell to a dying old man when the baby Jesus was presented in the temple.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul, too. – Luke 2:34-35, NRSV)

Throughout history, when a woman is overwhelmed by the joys of motherhood, or when the sorrows of motherhood break her heart, the mother of Jesus understands with an intimacy that transcends the experience of fathers and sons. “I’m a mother so I pray to Mary,” many women say. “She was a mother, too.”

Sometimes I wish I was as comfortable as many of my Catholic and Orthodox friends in relying on Mary as an eternal reminder that God whom we call Father has another dimension we rarely call on: the Goddess. God the mother.

That aspect is clearly revealed to us in the person of Mary, and we Baptists need to work harder to see it. Annunciation Sunday is a perfect time to remind ourselves of the crucial role this peasant woman played in the life of Jesus and in the foundation of the church, and give her the honor she is due.

Mother Mary, come to us. Speaking words of wisdom.

Getting a Head

2011-11-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight”,
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ -- Mark 1:1-8.

Where have we heard the following story before?

An angel of the Lord appears to an old man and declares, “O Zakariya! We give thee good news of a son: His name shall be John: on none by that name have we conferred distinction before.”

The old man replies, “O my Lord! How shall I have a son, when my wife is barren and I have grown decrepit from old age?”

The angel replies, “So thy Lord saith: ‘That is easy for Me: I did indeed create thee before, when thou hadst been nothing!”

The old man insists, “O my Lord! Give me a Sign.”

“Thy sign,” the angel answers, “Shall be that thou shalt speak to no man for three nights.”

The scenario rings a bell, but from which of the four canonical Gospels is it? Or perhaps it is from the historian Flavius Josephus who wrote Jewish Antiquities in the first century of the common era. Or could this be the dialogue of one of thousands of Christmas plays and gospel movies that have been produced since the invention of film?

Actually, the passage is from the Qur’an – sura 19 (Maryam), verse 7. The only thing I held back, to make it harder to guess, is the name John. The baptizer – the precursor – the forerunner – is named Yahya in the Qur’an, but he is the same figure who came to proclaim the coming of Jesus.

It’s surprising how John’s influence has so profoundly affected Muslims and Jews as well as Christians. More than any other figure of the gospels except Jesus himself, John the Baptist has permeated our culture. He is the subject of plays, movies, books and operas. Actors such as Charleton Heston and Michael York chewed up the scenery with their portrayals of John as an eccentric, wild-eyed and bellowing fanatic calling hoarsely on sinners to repent.

As the centuries passed, even the artists who portrayed John became legends on their own. Karl Perron, the German bass-baritone who sang the role of John in Richard Strauss’ Opera Salomé, was a life-long hypochondriac who believed harmful germs would enter his body through his ears. During rehearsals of Salomé, Perron would stuff balls of cotton in his ears and quickly retreat to his dressing room between acts. He would turn his head away from cast and crew members as if they were disease-carrying pariahs. This was an annoying habit to some of his colleagues, and it led to a disastrous denouement on opening night. In a climatic scene after Salomé’s dance, when the platter bearing the plaster head of John the Baptist was carried on stage, the head had cotton balls stuffed in its ears. The stunned singers and musicians dissolved into laughter, and it was several moments before the opera could proceed.

Art has not always provided a useful rendering of the story of John the Baptists. The 1953 movie Salomé, starring Rita Hayworth in the title role and Alan Badel as John, is best known for Hayworth’s dance of the seven veils (which, in the interest of research integrity, I watched several times in succession last week). Hayworth’s dance is breathtaking, as is evidenced by the possibly feigned but convincing heavy breathing of Charles Laughton in the role of Herod.

The scene may have created a fitting emotional illusion of what it was like in Herod’s palace when Salomé began dripping veils, but it is otherwise inaccurate. Director William Dieterle’s film version would have us believe Salomé is a Christian who thinks she’s dancing to save John’s life. That’s not only un-biblical, it takes all the fun out of it.

So what was John really like? If you grew up Baptist – or Babtist – you may have heard a Sunday school teacher try to convince you that we trace our roots back to John. But – as satisfying as it may be to tell our Presbyterian friends that our founder predates John Calvin by 1500 years – there’s no truth to the claim. Our 18th century origins had nothing to do with John.

Only in the Qur’an, it seems, is John Yahya known for his kindness:

“And piety (for all creatures) as from Us, and purity: He was devout,
And kind to his parents, and he was not overbearing or rebellious.
So Peace on him the day he was born, the day that he dies, and the day that he will be raised up to life (again)!” —Qur'an, sura 19 (Maryam), ayah 13-15.

Other ancient views of John raise questions about our stereotypical image of him as a raging prophet dressed in animal skins and eating locusts. According to Bart D. Ehrman in Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, the records of the contemporary Ebionites portrayed John as a fellow vegetarian. He did not, the Ebionites insist, eat locusts, and he preferred his honey in the form of honey cakes, or manna. If John were a vegetarian, that would also raise doubts about his propensity to dress in the skins of dead animals. The image of John that emerges looks more like the dapper, purple-clad gentleman in the Tiffany stained glass window that illuminates North Baptist Church in Port Chester, N.Y. (above, right).

So who was John?

No doubt he was not a raging maniac, and Mark did not believe he was an esthetic vegetarian. “Now John,” Mark says, “was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” Okay. Not my cup of tea, but there it is. One can only hope the locusts weren’t still buzzing when he bit into them. Probably not. He was surely a discrete eater, or he would have scared away more crowds than he attracted.

But his culinary habits don’t really matter. What we do know about John is clear enough.

It was John who was sent by God to give us an important message:

“Prepare the way of the Lord.”
It was John who “appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”

And, most significant of all, it was John who came prepared to turn his back on fame and influence as soon as his cousin, Jesus, arrived on the scene. That’s not a common attitude. It’s like Steve Jobs telling everyone, “but even more important than me is Tim Cook, who must increase as I decrease.” Not bloody likely.

But John said, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Even two-thousand years later, John’s message is too important to be dismissed by speculation that he was a rustic eccentric who ate bugs. It is still John’s message that calls us away from the frenzied chaos of our Christmas preparations and says, stop. Take a deep breath. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Be patient.

Waiting, as Henri Nouwen wrote, is essential to the spiritual life.

“But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting,” Nouwen said. “It is a waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for. We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus. We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the ascension of Jesus we wait for his coming again in glory. We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in the conviction that we have already seen God's footsteps.

“Waiting for God is an active, alert - yes, joyful - waiting. As we wait we remember him for whom we are waiting, and as we remember him we create a community ready to welcome him when he comes.”

It is John the Baptist who calls us to create that community of readiness.

It is our job to nurture one another and live in that community with patience and joy, so that when this hectic season culminates with the coming of the Christ child, it will be a happy celebration and not a blessed relief.

Anticipation

2011-11-25T12:50:00.000-08:00

Mark 13:24-37
‘But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
‘From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’

The Heinz family – that singular conglomeration of aristocratic noblesse oblige who gave us Senator John Heinz, Teresa Heinz Kerry and 57 combinations of condiments – didn’t get rich by underestimating the American people.

When they made their luxuriously thick ketchup, they realized they had a potential problem. The ketchup was so dense you could hold the bottle upside down for what seemed like hours before the first drop would dribble on to your cheeseburger. Almost no one in the United States has that kind of patience and the Heinz people feared millions would desert their delicious condiment in favor of Brand B, some thin, runny, but instantly available tomato liquid. Brand B offered lower satisfaction, perhaps, but instant gratification.

In 1979, with the aim of stemming the migration away from their viscous product, the Heinz people implemented a TV ad you may remember well. Two boys are shown patiently holding a Heinz ketchup bottle over their hamburgers as the first drops of red goo begin to form at the bottle’s mouth. In the background, Carly Simon sings: “Anticipation. Anticipation. It’s making me wait.” In the 32-second commercial, the boys have plenty of time to decide postponed gratification is good. As the scene closes, the words appear on the screen: “Heinz Ketchup. The taste that’s worth the wait.”

There you go. A first Sunday of Advent sermon in a single sentence. The taste that’s worth the wait.

This singular phrase, historic in the ad business, is a helpful clue as we parse the unexpected passage placed before us by the Revised Common Lectionary. This is not only the first Sunday in Advent, but the first Sunday of Year B, the year of Mark.

The passage, known to scholars as “The Little Apocalypse” because it quotes the adult Jesus’ prediction of the end times, is not very Christmassy. There is no babe in the manger poetry, no paeans to the Christ child, no glory to God in the highest, no peace on earth. Instead, we are warned that stars will be falling from heaven and we are advised to keep awake.

That’s not Silent Night. That’s the Ride of the Valkyries. Who knew we would begin this joyous season with dark warnings of the collapse of all we know? Where are the tidings of great joy?

Karoline Lewis, assistant professor of preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, thinks the rhetorical bombshell might be good for us. “There is a certain realness in this Gospel text to begin the Advent season,” she writes. “It cuts through any sentimentality and romanticism about Christmas and reminds us that incarnation is risky business.”

The passage in Mark, like its counterparts in the Revelation to John, is the basis for the expectation of the rapture, that at the end of time Jesus will appear in the clouds and send out his angels to collect his elect from the four winds.

Rapture theology can be distracting and even dangerous, as you may recall if you were watching for the end of the world on May 21 when Harold Camping said it would happen. Camping and his followers spent fortunes on bill boards and T shirts to alert people to the end of time, financed in part by many who sold everything they had to pay for the ad campaign.

Most Christian scholars said then that Mr. Camping was a tad eccentric. Even Al Mohler, the conservative president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary –whose statements about the National Council of Churches and its member communions have been less than insightful – spoke with wisdom on the Camping issue.

“Given the public controversy, many people are wondering how Christians should think about his claims,” Mohler wrote. “The Bible does not contain hidden codes that we are to find and decipher. While Christians are indeed to be looking for Christ to return and seeking to be found faithful when Christ comes, we are not to draw a line in history and set a date.”

In the first centuries after Jesus’ resurrection, persecuted Christians yearned for the return of Jesus and prayed daily for him to keep his promise. The Apostle Paul didn’t predict the date of Jesus’ return, but he thought it was imminent: “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (I Corinthians 15: 51-52). A couple millennia later we are still waiting, and many Christians have lowered their expectations.

I was in a workshop with Robert Schuler in January 1981 when he bet the millennialist Hal Lindsay a million dollars that Jesus would not return before the year 2000. Clearly Schuler’s ideas about the Second Coming of Jesus drifted leftward, but I was more impressed by the fact that he was a man who knew when a wager could not be lost. Lindsay, incidentally, declined.

It used to be that evangelicals tended to avoid actions against climate change on the grounds that eco-justice didn’t really matter because Jesus would return before the polar icecaps had fully melted. More recently, conservative theologians like Richard Cizik, formerly a leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, jumped into the eco-justice movement with both feet. As thousands of evangelicals followed in his wake, it was clear that most acknowledged the near unanimous verdict of scientists that global warming is caused by human abuse of the environment. It was also an indication that many evangelicals no longer plan their lives around the notion that Jesus will return before their mortgages are paid off.

The Second Coming of Jesus is a basic tenet of faith, appearing in the Nicene Creed, the Apostle’s Creed and in most Baptist affirmations. It’s something we should be eagerly anticipating. But our reaction to the “The Little Apocalypse” set aside for our first perusal of Advent suggests we find the idea a little scary. It’s no coincidence that most of the end-of-world movies are classified as horror, and even films with a rapture theme portray a vengeful Jesus in pursuit of terrified sinners.

That probably says more about us than it says about the films. Most of us live lives of reasonable contentment and we would prefer to indulge the non-threatening Yuletide trappings of tinsel and wassail than contemplate the stars falling from the sky.

The future, for many of us, is a very scary place because so little is known about it. No matter how hard we try to live virtuous lives, all of us have fallen far short of perfection – and the future, we fear, is where all our chickens come home to roost.

This month when we watch the inevitable rebroadcasts of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (if you only have time for one, I recommend the 1992 Muppets version), the ghost of Christmas yet to come is the creepiest character of all – not because of his menacing cowl and skeletal fingers, but because he shows Scrooge his own just desserts, the righteous judgment on the grasping, self-obsessed life he has led. It is Scrooge, not the ghost, who is the chilling character in these scenes. Ebenezer’s life of depraved indifference to the poor leaves him no chance of heavenly reward, and he knows it. He fears the ghost of Christmas future most of all. He has no hope of relief, no promise of the joys of postponed gratification, so his anticipation of the ghost’s awful truth is agony for him.

“Anticipation. Anticipation. It’s making me wait.” And the anticipation is hell.

Most of us, perhaps, have less to worry about than Ebenezer Scrooge, but at Christmas time we’d still rather trill with Silver Bells than pulsate with apocalyptic cannonade.

Given all this, it will take a little discipline to remind ourselves: when we anticipate the coming of Jesus, there is no difference between welcoming him as an innocent child or as a rescuing savior.

Karoline Lewis offers reassuring words: “The darkening of the sun, the dimming of the moon's light, and the stars falling from heaven means the end of the world as we have known it. That death will be no more because God will die is something to anticipate during Advent. This is not to be a downer just when Bing really kicks into high gear with White Christmas. It’s to speak the truth, about ourselves and our unrealistic expectations; about God and how God exceeds them.”

Advent begins, and there will be many joys to share in the coming weeks: the Advent wreaths, the manger tableaus, the pageants, the lights, the presents, the family gatherings, and the familiar carols.

The Advent message, as always, is that the Creator of the Universe has taken on human flesh, coming to us in the form of a powerless, innocent infant.

And the message is also that God, through this child, has come to die on a cross, conquer death, and ultimately to return to gather those who have been redeemed in loving arms.

What does it matter if the stars fall from the sky if death has been defeated and a new, more perfect life begins?

The bottom line on the first Sunday in Advent is this: the coming of Jesus is good news.

And our Advent prayer is to savor the anticipation of the miracles yet to come.

Come, Lord Jesus.

GEEPS

2011-11-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

Stephen Schwartz’ mystical Godspell, now at the Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway, breathes new life into the Gospel stories most of us know by heart.

The musical has been doing that for forty years, and now the infusion of disco, hip hop, blues and funk brings the parables even closer to home. One of my favorite skits in the show is the separation of the sheep (“baaahhh”) from the goats (“maaahhh.”) As the goats realize to their horror that they are being shut out of the kingdom because of their lack of empathy for suffering people, they taunt the sheep: “But, Lord, if we knew it was you, we would have invited you over – for LAMB chops.” But Jesus – on stage as in the bible – is unyielding. “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And (you) will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Is it possible that Jesus could be so mean? You can hear the pathos in the bleating of the goats: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” But Jesus makes it plain: when we step gingerly over a sleeping homeless person at Grand Central Station, we step over Jesus. There is a story that when First Lady Rosalyn Carter did just that in 1978, her Baptist heart broke. She wept.

But life isn’t always simple for us goats. This week, my niece in Melbourne, Fla., posted this on Facebook: “Doorbell rings at midnight- creepy guy with a sketchy story trying to get in our house. This song is for my husband, who got up and went to the window with a baseball bat and while our daughter and I hid under the covers. He's so brave!” First the guy said there had been an accident. Then he said he had taken a cab but needed help to pay the driver. Finally, with the dog barking ferociously inside the house, the guy disappeared.

Was that guy Jesus? Not bloody likely. But how do we judge the divinity of every panhandler who greets us in the mall with a sob story? The truth is, sooner or later, we’re all goats. Maaahh.

But much of the time, we’re sheep, too. We care for those who are hungry, thirsty and ill clothed. We support the poor. We nurse the sick. We have our prison ministries. Baaahh.

It’s interesting to note, by way of a scientific affirmation of a metaphysical observation, there is such a thing as a goat-sheep hybrid – a geep. This doesn’t happen often in nature. Goat and sheep do cohabit on a thousand hills, and they have been known to cross species lines and do the nasty, although their offspring rarely survive. But sheep-goat chimeras were created by researchers at the Institute of Animal Physiology in England by combining sheep embryos with goat embryos. The offspring were a mosaic of goat and sheep tissue. The parts that grew from the sheep embryo were woolly. Those that grew from the goat embryo were hairy.

It’s puzzling and perhaps a little disturbing to wonder why physiologists would want to do this, but it does make an unusual sermon illustration. When Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, how will he deal with the fact that most of us are geeps?

Actually, I think this is a bigger problem for us than it will be for Jesus. He knows very well that all of us sin and fall short of the glory of God, and there must be some kind of divine formula to protect us from eternal punishment when we miss a deposit at the food pantry. But how much slack is Jesus willing to cut us?

Last week I watched an interesting 2004 European film called, “The Downfall,” directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, which depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's life in his Berlin bunker in 1945. In an unlikely but apparently documented scene, Eva Braun – soon to become Frau Hitler – and Hitler’s young secretary, Traudl Junge, take a cigarette break in the bunker and talk about der fuehrer. “I’ve known him for ten years, and yet I don’t really know him at all,” confesses Eva. The lithesome Traudl takes a deep drag and shrugs. “In private moments he can be so kind and gentle,” she says. “At other times, he is so brutal.”

Hitler is one of those malevolent figures who cannot be rationalized, so monstrous that partisan comparisons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Hitler fall ludicrously short. No one in history, with the possible exception of Caligula or Stalin, was as bad as Hitler. He is evil incarnate.

But I remember reading an essay by entertainer Steve Allen that speculated no one can be malicious all the time, and he used Hitler as an example. “Probably much of the time he was a very nice fellow,” Allen wrote. The speculation seems to hold true in many scenes from “The Downfall,” which are based on eyewitness accounts. At one point Hitler rages at his generals, saying the German people deserve to starve and die because they hadn’t done enough to defend the Reich. In other scenes, he tweaks the youthful cheek of a pre-teen soldier, or pats his secretary on the shoulder, saying, “You need to get some rest, dear.”

I tend to agree that no one is a monster 24-7. Many of the murderers I knew as a newspaper reporter were perfectly nice people. There is as telling scene in HBO’s Treme in which a felon in prison warns a visiting lawyer that a New Orleans councilman she admires is on the take. The lawyer, who believed in the councilman’s integrity, expresses shock, but the prisoner finds her attitude to be naïve. “We’re all nice guys,” he says. “We all love our mothers. We all root for the Saints.”

Even so, it’s not easy to think of ourselves as both good and evil, simultaneously goats and sheep. Our hymnology assures us that faith in Jesus will wash our all our sins away, leaving our souls – in that irksome Victorian metaphor – white as snow. We fervently want to believe that people can be good, that there are those who do not have “an evil bone in their bodies.” We’d like to think this was true of our sainted mothers, our favorite pastors, our idolized teachers. We’d like to believe that, someday, it will be true of us.

We’d like to think that, perhaps, but it’s not good theology or, for that matter, good psychology. The great psychoanalyst C. G. Jung insisted that evil and good do and must exist together in every human heart. In a Southern Cross review of an unpublished essay by Jung, Frank Thomas Smith quoted the great man:

“Evil is the necessary opposite of good, without which there would be no good either. It is impossible to even think good out of existence.” Jung, Smith writes, believed in the “titanic magnitude of evil,” and he believed Christian theologians “consistently and disastrously dwarfed the picture of evil as arising from the unconscious of humanity.” In Civilization in Transition, Jung wrote that evil “is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam’s relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.”

Jung wrote these words before Hitler came to power, so history’s ultimate expression of “grossly underestimated” evil was as yet unavailable. But there is always ample evidence that evil impacts our lives with “titanic magnitude.”

Perhaps one of the messages in the parable of the sheep and the goats is that humans must strive to overcome the resident evil in our hearts by conscientiously living out God’s commandments to support the poor, “the least of these,” as Jesus called them. But out best efforts to be Christlike are not always successful. There are times when we will be moved to help "the least of these," but also times when we will step over their sleeping bodies on subway vents. As in many animated features, the angel of our good nature orbits around our heads with the angel of our evil nature, one reminding us we are sheep, the other dismissing us as goats.

It’s not pleasant knowing good and evil are competing for our attention, but the knowledge does keep us realistically balanced. Some people go through their lives assuming they are good and godly, even while they ignore “the least of these” who cross their paths.

A couple months ago, as the nation celebrated Labor Day, many Christians were disturbed that other Christians felt justified in removing government support for “the least of these” in order to move toward balancing the federal budget. As so-called bible believing Christians in Congress were calling for budget cuts in programs that support the poor, others were saddened by the reality that one in five children are raised in poverty and 40 million Americans are living below the federal poverty level.

“Be that as it may,” the National Council of Churches said in its Labor Day message, “it is clear that many politicians, even those who name the name of Christ, will not mention the poor in their holiday rhetoric. If that's due to forgetfulness on their part, let us offer this reminder: poverty exists at unacceptable levels in this bountiful land. While politicians can certainly differ on strategies for helping the poor, no politician who claims the bible as authoritative can ignore the poor. And no politicians who ignore the poor can claim the bible to be their guide – not at any time, and certainly not in this time of great need.”

The National Council of Churches offered to send a free bible to any politician who needed clarity on that point.
The biblical message is stated with particular clarity in the parable of the sheep and the goats. The one in five children and the 40 million Americans living in poverty should make us all think of the face of Jesus, and his declaration that whatever we do to help them, “you have done it unto me.”

That probably won’t remove from us the stigma of being geeps, or temper the issue of good and evil in human hearts.

But it will remind us that when we walk among those who are hungry, those who are thirsty, those who can’t afford a decent set of clothes, those who are persecuted by injustice, we aren’t walking among strangers. We are walking beside Jesus.

We won’t be able to help everyone, perhaps. But knowing who we are walking with should be wonderfully clarifying – and motivating.

Cue Talent

2011-11-12T18:42:00.000-08:00

‘For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, “Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master. ”And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, “Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master. ”Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours. ”But his master replied, “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 25:14-30

The Divine M, who is preaching on this parable this morning, notes that the message could be construed to offer clues where Jesus might stand on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Any Keynesian economist would assume that the rich man in this story got rich at the expense of the many who are poor. Yet Jesus appears to approve not only the rich man’s praise of servants whose shrewd investments paid off, but he especially relishes the man’s condemnation of the “wicked and lazy slave” who buried his capital in the ground.

On the surface, this could be the biblical foundation for a Christian MBA program. But let’s not get carried away. It could also be interpreted as a program for keeping your slaves productive and happy. We all know that our Southern Baptist antecedents were skilled at this kind of isogesis when they claimed biblical justification for fact that they and their missionaries owned slaves. (Parenthetically, not all Baptists felt that way; it was on this very issue that Northern and Southern Baptists split in 1845.)

So we are forewarned that it is wise to read the bible carefully to avoid reading into it messages that are not there. In the parable of the talents, is Jesus praising rich slave owners? Or – as we have been taught in our Sunday schools from time immemorial – is he praising people who make the most of the gifts God has given them?

It’s convenient, at least in English, that the biblical word “talent” is the same word we use to describe those human qualities that make us who we are.

A talent (in Latin, a talentum) is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, a one foot cube. When used as a measure of money, it refers to a talent-weight of gold or of silver. In Jesus’ parable, no one knows exactly how much money is involved, but it’s clear we’re talking big bucks.

Human talent is far more difficult to measure.
When I was in college I took a film course at Shorty Yeaworth’s Cinema Institute (see http://thelittlescroll.blogspot.com/2011/09/god-dont-call-me-at-office.html) and we went to the Philadelphia studio where Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” originated. We went there to learn how a television program was done, and I was deeply impressed by the skills and knowledge of my fellow students: the three camera operators who kept the picture centered and steady, the sound technicians who sat at huge control boards to maintain the intricate balance and treble and bass, the director who watched the show on three screens and sent instructions where the cameras should point and which view should be selected for the main screen. The gifts of many people behind the scenes of a television show are a hidden but essential part of any broadcast, and that day – as key grip – I wrapped a coil of heavy cable around my shoulder and felt privileged to be a part of this electronic miracle.

As the show prepared to go live, a student who said he was from Christian Television, which no one else had heard of, sat in the anchor chair as the technician focused the light on his powdered face and blow-dried hair. The young man, who up to this point had not exhibited any skills beyond a well-modulated voice, squinted into the camera and waited for a signal to do something.

In the control room we could hear the director count backwards. “… three … two … one …”

Then: “Cue talent.”

Suddenly the show was live, and the young man at the anchor desk began reading from a prepared script about the purpose of the program, which was mostly to give film students a chance to learn how to do it.

But the director’s final order stuck in my head. “Cue talent”? This was the first time I had heard the term that is used to describe the person in front of the camera – the anchor, the reporter, the weather guy, the sports woman, anyone whose picture appears on screen. Back in Shorty Yeaworth’s film course, my first reaction was that the phrase was replete with irony, because it referred to the least talented person in the room. In later years when I was a newspaper reporter, I often pondered this irony at the scene of a plane crash or tornado devastation when I was interviewed by late-arriving “talent” from local television stations who begged the print media reporters to fill them in. But that was merely a reminder that “talent” is a relative term, so let me go on record that there are thousands of truly talented television reporters, and I cite two of my favorites: Ann Curry of the Today Show, and my nephew Andy Jenks in Richmond (be his tweep @AndyJenksNBC12.)

Talent is something we regard highly in other people, and those who have a lot of it are objects of sometimes eccentric adulation, as when women scream ecstatically and throw their panties at rock bands. I’ve demonstrated a bit of that kind of fanaticism myself, as those who remember my high school idolatry of JFK will know. My years as a newspaper reporter in Pottstown introduced me to several idols of a different nature, including the late "Smokin' Joe" Frazier, a gentle Christian man with iron fists.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because I tell the story all the time, but in 1992 I was in National Airport in Washington waiting for a flight. I went to an empty gate so I could read without being jostled and opened the paper. Before long a ground agent escorted a tall, slightly stoop-shouldered man to the same gate. The man obviously had the same aim as mine – to sit quietly alone and read the paper before his flight was called. I looked up and recognized him immediately: it was Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, one of the most talented players in the history of baseball, who had been in Washington as a part of the 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America.

The reason we admired Joe, even in his retirement, is his extravagant talent that set him apart from nearly every other player in the game. As Joe sank into his seat, I lowered my paper and stared at the back of his head. Occasionally a passerby my age or older would do a double take as they realized who was sitting at the gate. But we all respected Joe’s privacy, and he sat alone and unbothered for several minutes. Soon, his flight was called and the same ground agent – a woman so young I wondered if she had any idea who he was – came over and to escort to the entryway. He stood and flashed his Mr. Coffee smile and disappeared into the crowd.

I dropped my paper and walked over to Joe’s empty seat. Hesitating slightly as if I was approaching the burning bush, I sat down. I sat down in Joe DiMaggio’s warmth and gurgled with happiness.

My spouse, the Divine M, thinks that was more than a little weird. It wasn’t like I could absorb Joe’s talent or essence by sitting in his ninety-eight point six for a few seconds. But, I insist, it wasn’t like I was throwing my panties at him, either. It was an expression of manly obeisance to a genuine idol. And I’m glad I did it.

Talent is also the bread and butter of the theater. There are scores of supremely talented people on stage, but, sadly, there are millions of supremely talented people who never get a starring role or even a recall to audition.

One of the barriers to talent in the theater, I think, is that the key to success is often one’s physical appearance. Beauty is often more important than talent, and actors who would be perfect for the role of Evita or Reno Sweeney or Liza Doolittle will never be cast because someone doesn’t consider them pretty enough.

Thank God for high school and local theater, where there is much more leeway. In “Once on This Island,” the character of Ti Moune is a petite girl, a girl of color portrayed by one actor as a child and by another as a teenager. On the Broadway stage, the role was played by the beautiful and petite LaChanze, who fits the image perfectly, and in most big stage productions the same strict casting call is pursued.

In one high school production we saw, the child Ti Moune was portrayed by a lovely African American child, but between scenes she morphed into a tall, 200 pound white woman. This may have been confusing to the audience, but it was a creative way of using the most talented person in a pivotal role. And the equally talented cast was able to sing with a straight face the beguiling lyric, “Don’t you remember your little Ti Moune from the tree?”

Talent is much admired by all of us, but for some of us it is a vicarious admiration. We notice the talents in others but not in ourselves. This is a truth known to every pastor who has tried to recruit people for programs and ministries in the church – greeter, choir, evangelism, Christian education, newsletter, building maintenance – because a dismaying number of people are likely to respond, “Oh, I can’t. I have no gifts. I’m not talented that way.”

Here’s where the parable of the talents slaps many of us in the face. It seems safe enough to demurely turn away from a task on the grounds we’re not skilled enough to do it, and no doubt the pastor will express polite understanding and look elsewhere. But the still, small voice inside us may remind us of another response: “Throw this worthless slave into utter darkness, where there will weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Oops.

One point of this parable may be to remind us that the gracious modesty our mothers raised us to express may not always be the answer God is seeking when he calls us to do something. And another point seems to be that God has given each of us talents in abundance, no matter who we are. And when God calls us to use those talents and make them grow, God does not want to hear humble excuses.

All of us know people who talents are underestimated, either by themselves or others.

Lately I’ve been thinking of a cousin I haven’t seen for a half century or more. She was the daughter of my maternal grandmother’s brother and his wife, Uncle Everett and Aunt Wilma Close. Grace was a little older than my mother and her brother, and the cousins used to play together in Andes when they were children.

Grace still lived with her parents when I was a child and we visited the Closes whenever we were in Andes.

Grace used a wheelchair and she had a severe disability that was never identified. It could have been cerebral palsy She could not control the movements of her hands, which seemed to be constantly wrestling with one another, and she had difficulty forming words.

Aunt Wilma always dressed Grace in a black dress or flower print dress, possibly because it easier to get off and on, but the dress and the wheelchair created the illusion that Grace was an elderly lady. But she must have been in her thirties when I knew her. My mother said one of the games she and her brother would play with Grace when they were kids would be to hold her by the shoulders so she could pretend to walk like normal people. Grace’s hands would push gleefully against each other and she would laugh delightedly until her exhausted cousins had to put her down.

Grace lived quietly in her room in a farm house on the edge of the village of Andes. I don’t know if she could hold a book or read, and there was no television in the house. She may have listened to the radio, but I have no idea how she spent her days.

I do know that when we stopped by for visits, Aunt Wilma would greet us at the door and Uncle Everett go to his chair and the family would sit in silent Yankee taciturnity, which was regarded as polite interaction. But when Grace wheeled into the room, laughing and squealing with delight that visitors had come, the mood changed. Whatever our spirits were, Grace would raise them – by laughter and smiles and undecipherable noises. She didn’t engage in conversations, but when we asked how she was she would nod and smile, making it clear that everything was perfectly fine as far as she was concerned. Given that she spent her life trapped inside a dysfunctional body, her happiness was both uncanny and infectious.

I’m sure no one would have considered Grace to be a gifted or talented person, but this woman to whom nature had given so little invariably gave much to all who met her. She had been given the tiniest of talents, but somehow she reinvested what she had in an attitude that multiplied her gift ten fold.

In my youth I was in awe of supremely talented performers, politicians, and athletes. Heroes like President Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio and Joe Frazier were given substantial gifts by their creator, and they invested them with vigor, multiplying them in ways that would make Jesus proud. That’s why the rest of us, not having received the kinds of gifts they had, enshrine them in halls of champions.

At the same time, most of us were given greater gifts than Cousin Grace. If we’re not investing them as vigorously as she did, we should be ashamed of ourselves. For me, she will always be a reminder that we need not make excuses about our weaknesses, or seek to convince ourselves that, given the overwhelming challenges facing us in life, there is little we can do to make a difference in the church, in our households, in our communities, or in our world.

Maybe we don’t have the skills or the gifts to change the church or the world. But God has given us sufficient gifts to make a difference, just as Grace made a difference in the lives of so many people in Andes.

God didn’t judge Grace for not changing the world. But God does judge her as a good and trustworthy servant because she multiplied her gifts many fold. As her earthly life came to an end, I have no doubt of the Lord’s greeting to her: “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

May we all be inspired by heroes like Joe DiMaggio and John Kennedy. But may we base our lives on the faithfulness of people like Grace, who were given so little but turned what they had into manifold blessings.

Why We Tell the Story

2011-11-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Once upon a time, when the Israelites had finished the arduous task of conquering Canaan, Joshua called them together to tell a story.

The point of the story was to refresh their memories of the great oral megillah , the divine deposition, that defined who they are and what God expects them to do. It’s Joshua up there on the stage, but you can almost see Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, making the same point.

“Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years. We have traditions for everything... how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl... This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I'll tell you - I don't know. But it's a tradition... Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the stories we tell one another. Without them, it would be difficult to define who we are. If your family is anything like mine this Thanksgiving, there will be more oral tradition served up at the table than turkey. Tales will be told, stories will be spun, family memories will be deconstructed, analyzed, and exaggerated. There will be someone – in my house it’s me – who will repeat stories told many times before, often with different emphases or surprisingly different endings. Much of this discourse will take place with the understanding that the truth should never get in the way of a good story, and for the most part, it wouldn’t matter anyway. No matter how the stories are told, they always bring us closer to understanding who we are – and what God expects of us.

My paternal grandfather Addison was austere and perhaps a little authoritarian. My mother was politely reserved in his presence, and I’ve wondered if she wasn’t a little afraid of him. Mom lived with her in-laws during the Second World War when Dad was in the South Pacific and she worked for a war materiel plant near Oneonta, but few stories emerged from that period of her life.

Grandpa may have been a little severe in the presence of adults, but I remember him as a warm and doting presence – and a great story teller. He could describe Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox with such clarity I could see the out-sized duo trampling through the Catskills, and of course I thought at the time the tales originated with him. On the surface, Paul Bunyan lore had little to do with who I was or what God expected of me. On the other hand, I’ll never forget sitting on a bench behind my grandparents’ house, watching the conspiratorial crinkles around his hazel eyes as he spoke so quietly only I could hear him. It set the context for my existence that has lasted all my life.

As my siblings and I grew up in Central New York, we were immersed in fables from both sides of the family. Our mother, Mary Emerson, traced her ancestry to an Emerson who held an important but imprecisely described position as “George Washington’s body guard,” and a generation later we find Ralph Waldo Emerson sitting transcendentally on a branch of the family tree. I can’t find documentary evidence for either claim, although Mom always said that when she visited Emerson’s Old Manse, she saw pictures of relatives on the wall that were identical to tin-type portraits preserved by her father. On the Jenks side, there were royal governors, iron works operators, revolutionary war soldiers and – judging from the fact that several Jenks graves in the cemetery in Oneonta have no recorded death dates – possibly a vampire or two. There are literally hundreds of stories emanating from these traditions, and no doubt many of them will be retold this Thanksgiving, as will many Cruz and Montes reminiscences from Cuba. All of these stories are important because they are essential glimpses into who we are, and what God expects us to do.

This week, in that pregnant period between All Souls Day and Veteran’s Day, there is one story I can’t get out of my head – a story of my father’s participation in World War II. Like most post-war baby boomers, the war had an incalculable impact on my formative years. My father’s life was changed forever by what he experienced in the New Guinea campaign. And, a priori, so was mine.

When I was growing up in Morrisville, most of the dads I knew were veterans. Dee Cramer was in the Navy, Taze Huntley was in the D-Day invasion, Jack Irwin was a teen-age tank gunner in Europe, Del McKee was a marine. At one time or another they were all surrogate fathers to the boomers whose diapers they were changing, and they had another thing in common: they never talked about the war. They acted like the slaughter hadn’t had the slightest effect on them.

A few years ago I tried to tell their story in doggerel:

They were all imposters, these inoffensive, pear-shaped guys.
They’d never hurt a soul, only themselves in darkened bars,
Where you could find them most ev’ry night, propping up a guise
Of innocence while anesthetizing their old scars,
Terrified that buried memories would begin to stir
And bring them face to face with all the demons on their backs.

My own father, for example, would vainly seek to blur
His thoughts with cold beer and cheap scotch to drown out
awkward facts.
He had his favorite stool at Ted’s Town House, where he sat
Next to a retired Air Force vet with demons of his own.
Listening to faded soldiers engage in idle chat,
Making everyone laugh at jokes, or, on occasion, groan.
You’d swear war was a rare diversion too good to be missed.
In Dad’s war tales, no one ever died, just one sad sack clown,
A drunken gavone from Queens who went out to take a piss,
Fell head-first into an over used latrine pit and drowned.

“I told his mom he died a freakin’ hero,” Father said,
And the bleery vets in Ted’s would fall apart in laughter,
As they did whenever tales of the war’s beleaguered dead
Were told devoid of painful truths and details of the slaughter.
Then Dad would stumble into his battered Plymouth wagon
And inch his way up the hill to home and a glass of rye
To douse all the fires of thought and the obnoxious dragon
Of memory, and pass out on his pillow with a sigh.

When Dad was younger his war memoirs seemed more heroic.
With prodding, he would tell the stories that enthralled his sons.
Tales of stupid generals who, were it not for stoic
Officers and old grunts, would’ve ended up on the dung
Heap of history because of the sure-to-come defeat
Their smart ass West Point tactics had most surely guaranteed.
The good guys would have shed their blood in cowardly retreat
Save for second looeys like our dad with the guts to lead.
We scarce believed a word but we loved Dad’s private version
Of war history. Our star-struck awe seemed to make him glad,
His transparent obfuscation was for him a safe diversion
From the truths he couldn’t face, and nothing else to add.

We might have never known the truth, but after Mother died
I was rummaging through the attic and found an old wood
Box nailed so tightly shut that I suspected it must hide
Some rare mementoes. I’d’ve opened it there if I could
But it was firmly nailed so I dragged it downstairs and
hacked
It open. Inside were souvenirs of war and V-mail,
Worn Japanese chopsticks, medals and papers tightly
wrapped,
A canvas-covered journal! I could feel my face go pale.
Could it be that secret truths my father never spoke
Were written down and buried with his medals in a box?
With trembling fingers I held the little book to stroke
Its canvas cover to see what secrets would it unlock.

On each page my father’s hand, elegantly scrawled in pen,
Recorded all the weeks and months of his three-year sojourn
To Australia and New Guinea. There were names of men
He praised as good guys, good eggs. All they did, he said,
was yearn
For sex and home. Dad’s account was simple and
unguarded,
Meant only for his eyes. A certain nurse was introduced,
A pretty WAC named Mary who was lonely and
gold-hearted,
The details Dad provided made it easy to deduce
The record surely wasn’t for our Mother’s tender eyes.
He wrote of Brisbane and Melbourne and a harrowing flight
To Papua New Guinea through choppy and stormy skies
To a pitted jungle strip where they landed late at night.
The journal claims malfeasance for a colonel left unnamed,
But General Eichelberger is cited for damnation.
A few words tell of buddies who were wounded, killed or maimed
On steamy patrols amid the jungle’s devastation.
Then Dad himself is on patrol near Buna late at night.
He hears grunts and startled farting of a Japanese patrol
And a silhouetted figure looms with menace in Dad’s sight.

“I.D. yourself, goddammit,” says my father, sick in soul,
The answer sounds like leather on the muzzle of a gun.
Dad feels the vomit in his throat and closes both his eyes.
He doesn’t see the flash of his concussing cold M-One.
The silhouette collapses with a gasp of mild surprise.
It was too dark to see a thing, Dad crumpled to the ground
And hugged the M-One to his face and felt the muzzle’s heat.
The jungle now was quiet and the only human sound
Was the ghastly, gurgled groaning of that silhouetted heap.
Dad pulled the rifle closer and tried hard to close his ears
The terrible moaning ebbed and flowed throughout all the night.
Dad thought of Oneonta and the sweetly passing years
Of youth, and closed his eyes against the coming of new light.

When the grayness of the dawn came he opened both his eyes
And saw the Japanese teen-ager, chalky white and still.
His blood had leaked throughout the endless night and now he lies
An abandoned, empty shell. He was Dad’s first war-time kill.
The teen-ager was gut shot. He died in agonizing
Misery. His face was youthful and unlined, even pretty,
But all Dad saw was an enemy uncompromising
In his love for Hirohito. Dad killed him without pity,
Though now as he beheld this human carcass drained of blood,
It was hard to ignore the common bond of humanity
He held with this dead stranger pacified inside the mud.
The war was an accumulation of insanity.

He felt a thickness in his throat. He opened the man’s shirt
To find I.D. He found a chest besieged with lice and ticks,
And recoiled in sick disgust as he rummaged through the inert
Man’s clothes, and removed a well-worn tube of wooden chopsticks.

Dad kept the chopsticks all his life and never did explain
How he got them. He never talked about Buna, either,
Or the single murder that caused a lifetime filled with pain.
He talked of naked native girls and of jungle fever,
How he hated Eichelberger, author of disaster
In New Guinea. But still the horror of those jungle rites
He kept a secret, and took the tale to his hereafter.
But his fondness for whiskey and his sweats on frigid nights
Were reminders all his life that his soul bore many scars.
It was not the kind of story you shared with eager sons
Or daughters, or with fellow war imposters in the bars.
He grieved to see his children kill themselves at play with guns.

Dad never told anyone all the details of this story. I don’t know if it would have helped him if he had. His friend and pastor, Jack Irwin, the teen-age tank gunner in Germany, wrote an entire book about his experiences, Another River, Another Town (Random House, 2002), and I think the experience was cathartic for him. But even more important, telling the story is essential to opening the door to some of life’s great mysteries: Who am I? Where did I come from? What does God expect me to do? And what does my life mean to others who share my space?

Dad’s World War II story is horrendous, as were the stories of millions who shared this terrible experience. After the war, Dad led an ordinary life. He married, had five kids, taught high school, worshipped at the United Church of Morrisville, joined the Lion’s Club, and marched on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day with his fellow legionnaires.

Ordinary enough. Yet I suspect hardly a day passed that he didn’t think of that incident on Buna. It changed him forever. And, in ways we scarcely noticed, it affected his marriage and his children. The story of Buna is one of the building blocks of who we are, without which our knowledge of ourselves would be forever incomplete. And that is why we tell the story.

There is a beautiful musical that has spent too little time on Broadway, Once on This Island. Son Will and daughter Victoria have each appeared in different school renditions of the show. It’s the story of a little Haitian peasant girl, TiMoune, who dies following a star-crossed love affair with Daniel, a rich man’s aristocratic son. Based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Little Mermaid, it is full of beauty, passion, pain and death. In many respects, it’s a metaphor of life. And despite its painful elements, it is a story that must be told. In the final act, following TiMoune’s death, the company dances and sings:

We tell the story
We tell the story!

Life is why
We tell the story
Pain is why
We tell the story
Love is why
We tell the story
Grief is why
We tell the story
Hope is why
We tell the story
Faith is why
We tell the story
You are why
We tell the story
Why we tell the story
Why we tell the story
Why we tell the story

Hope and faith are also the reasons Joshua recounts the story to the people of Israel. When we know out stories, we gain new insight into the primordial stew from which we sprang. We discover who we are. And in that discovery, we are given a great gift: to choose hope and faith and God’s own path for our lives.

Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.’

Situational Commandment

2011-10-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? ’He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. ”This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ Matthew 22:34-36

What is the greatest commandment?

For many, the answer requires some thought and no one is better at thinking than our oldest daughter. Years before Lauren was in kindergarten, a Sunday school teacher asked her if she knew God’s law. Thinking carefully, she replied, “Always wash your hands after you go potty.”

What a testimony to parental guidance sending a child down the fastidious path of godliness. I can almost hear Jesus, suffering the children as he did, responding indulgently, “Um, yes, but the second greatest commandment is love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus did us a favor by summarizing the law of the prophets into two simple phrases. As we have noted earlier in this space, there are 613 laws set down in the Old Testament, ranging from huge (don’t kill, don’t steal) to pissante (don’t yoke an ox and an ass together, don’t wear weaves of wool and linen). There are, to be sure, rabbinical and ecclesiastical lawyers who, perhaps lacking a life, can discuss the laws in benumbing detail. But for most of us, a quick digest saves a lot of time.

Jesus was not the only religious leader to summarize the law in a few words. The Rev. J. Richard Fairchild, a Canadian pastor whose online sermons are read unaccredited each week from innumerable pulpits, has helpfully isolated some of those abstracts:

“What does the Lord require of you?” inquired the Prophet Micah. And then he answered with just three commands: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
The Prophet Isaiah based the commandments on just two of them. He wrote: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed.’” (Isaiah 56:1)
Amos saw one guiding principle upon with all the commandments are founded, He wrote: "This is what the LORD says to the house of Israel: "Seek me and live" (Amos 5:4)
The Prophet Habbakuk, too, expounded the Torah on the basis of a single thought: "The righteous shall live by their faith." (Habbakuk 2:4)
The great teacher Akiba, virtually a contemporary of Jesus, said this when asked the same question that Jesus was asked: “The greatest principle of the Torah is expressed in the command: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Leviticus 19:18)
And Hillel, also from the first century of our era summed up the Torah in this maxim: "What is hateful to you, do not do to others. The rest is commentary: you must go and study it."
Finally, the teacher Ben Azzai found a principle even more fundamental in the words: "This is the story of humanity: when God created us, God made us in His likeness."

The summaries are simple and direct. But life is complicated and oblique. There are times when we have to wonder: is the Golden Rule an adequate guide for all conduct?

I went to a sectarian college where rules were rules and the student handbook recorded almost as many regulations as the Old Testament 613. Alcohol was strictly forbidden on campus, and they meant it: a Korean exchange student was summarily expelled for cooking with wine. Men and women were encouraged not to sit close enough to touch, and the handbook strictly forbade “public displays of affection.” But public displays of animosity, as I enjoyed pointing out to the dean, were not explicitly banned and often erupted on the soccer field.

And, in the necessarily oxymoronic atmosphere that existed on a Christian campus in the psychedelic sixties, the rules were often contradictory. Eastern Baptist College in 1968 may have been the only institution of higher learning in the U.S. where the religion department taught Darwinian evolution and the biology department promoted creationism. I was always proud of that eccentricity, but it was confusing. The Eastern Baptist College disparities made it anyone’s guess how the rules of Christian conduct might be stated in a simple, declarative sentence.

Then at the very end of my senior year, I took my first course in philosophy under Dr. Peter Genco, a black-bearded mensch whose dissertation was rumored to have proven the existence of God. Among the text books we studied was Situation Ethics, The New Morality (1966, Westminster Press) by Joseph Fletcher, a medical ethicist who, more interestingly, was an Episcopal priest turned atheist. The book was, for me, an apotheosis of philosophical discovery because it offered an enticing formula to guide ethical behavior.

Simply put, the greatest commandment of Fletcher’s domain was love. Ethical behavior was measured by the amount of love expended in the process. The more love you showed, the more ethical was your behavior.

The idea made ethics quantifiable and opened doors traditionally shut to nice Christians. I’m talking about sex.

Fletcher offered four situations in which ethical behavior might be contrary to conventional morality but would be okay depending on the amount of love you showed. The greater the amount of love, he said, the more ethical your behavior.

Given the hormones flushing through my 20-something arteries, the idea was most appealing.

One of the examples Fletcher cited (it may or may not have been a real-life story) involved Mrs. Bergmeier, a German woman caught in the cataclysm of the Second World War. She was picked up by a Soviet Army patrol one day while foraging for food for her three children and sent to a prisoner of war camp in the Ukraine. Her husband, after rounding up the children, spent months in a desperate search for her. In the Ukraine, Mrs. Bergmeier learned that her family was looking for her but Soviet rules would not allow her to be released unless she was pregnant. A friendly camp officer graciously offered to help and before long the expectant Mrs. Bergmeier was released to her family.

That worked for me. Here was Mrs. Bergmeier and the generous camp officer, each loving their neighbor as themselves. And wasn’t this extra-marital coitus an expression of the purest kind of love?

Actually, Fletcher doesn’t say. He leaves that to his readers to figure out. Professor Genco, as I recall, was having none of it. “Sex,” he said, “requires three magic words: ‘I take thee.’” Without a lifetime commitment to your partner, sex is a sin. So went the official line of the Eastern Baptist College faculty. But would it also be a sin for Mrs. Bergmeier to remain morally pure but separated from her children? Again, Fletcher doesn’t say. You tell me. It’s an ethical dilemma.

Every Sunday morning before church, I do a quick scan of the New York Times Magazine, especially “The Ethicist” column by Ariel Kaminer. Each week, the ethically challenged seek Ms. Kaminer’s advice. It’s fun to guess what solution she may suggest for each moral quandary.

Not long ago, the following letter appeared:

I smoke a fair amount of marijuana. Sometimes I ask my friends if they want me to pick up weed for them as well, in which case they give me the money upfront. As with any other commodity, prices are usually cheaper when buying in bulk. I will often not give the change to my friends and instead use those few dollars to further my own discount. Is this unethical? I’m the one going through the effort of gathering buyers and conducting the illegal transaction. Or does that just make me a drug dealer? NAME WITHHELD

The letter made me choke on my coffee. Here, under the guise of neighborliness and with a sensible entrepreneurial spirit, this dude was trying to justify illegal activity. How do you rationalize that? Smoking weed doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t love God. But is the writer treating his neighbors as he would want to be treated himself? Is he violating the golden rule?

Ethicist Ariel Kaminer saw right through him:

The size of someone’s commission doesn’t make him a drug dealer. What does? Same thing that makes someone a Toyota dealer: acting as a go-between on a commercial transaction involving a producer and consumers. So you’re a dealer — one with a distinctly mellow business plan but no doubt lots of friends.

She added:

Opinions abound, of course, about the ethics of buying drugs in the first place, based on the right to pursue your own pleasures, the risk of supporting narcoterrorism, the damage that drugs can do, the damage that the war on drugs can do, the duty to obey the law, the duty to oppose the law and so on. But that’s not what you’re asking about. You’re asking about your cut.

If nothing else, this example from “The Ethicist” shows how far some people will go to justify their behavior.

It also suggests how difficult it is to make ethical decisions, even if all 613 biblical laws are digested into that seemingly effortless phrase:

‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. ”This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

On these two commandments, Jesus said, hang all the law and the prophets. But they are not like the cheese cracker commercial in which a plain cracker is magically infused with 613 pounds of cheese so that you get all that cheesiness in one tasty bite. And you know, if you’ve actually tasted the cracker, it’s not that cheesy.

In the same way, infusing 613 laws into a single phrase isn’t going to make it equally potent. You have to know a little bit about the laws that are being summarized. You can’t love God and love your neighbor without some understanding of what that kind of love is all about.

As Fairchild (hereby appropriately credited) once preached:

Jesus loved God - and he loved the world that God made. All of it. And so he came among us as a servant rather than as a master, as one who forgives and heals rather than as one who judges and destroys; as one who made himself poor so that others might be made rich; as one who was obedient to God - even when obedience meant he would suffer and die; as one who trusted that God would judge rightly and reward those who lived by faith. You know that God first loved us. That God is with you even now to fulfill all his promises. Our response should be to walk humbly with God - and to do justice and love mercy, trusting in God’s great mercy by which we are born anew to a living hope.

The greatest commandment is not a substitute for the law. It is a reminder of what the law and the prophets are about. It is a reminder of what love is all about.

And, most important of all, it is a reminder that neither the greatest commandment nor the 613 laws it summarizes will be worth anything unless they guide us to the love of Christ, and to the understanding that it is easiest to love Christ when we remember that he first loved us.

Caesar Fever

2011-10-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? ’But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.’ And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’ They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away. (Matthew 22:15-22)

The first I remember hearing that story was in 1956, when Daisy Jo Morrison read it to our Sunday school class in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. Daisy Jo was nubile and cute and triggered pre-pubescent stirrings in us 10 year old boys. Mostly I remember the way her lips formed the words, “I Would Be True,” which was hymn 180 in our little red hymnals. She’d lead the singing nearly every Sunday and we responded with wistful lisps, as if it were a futile lovers’ pact.

But I digress. The biblical reference to a coin attracted my attention because I knew the value of money. A dime could be exchanged for an thick Superman comic book at Dougherty’s Drug Store, and when I wasn’t absorbed with Daisy Jo’s evangelical tools I was trying to imagine what a biblical coin looked like. The Indian head nickels in the collection plate were possible clues, but I suspected they looked little like the coinage carried by Pharisees. So I wondered.

Naturally, there was no way to Google the Caesarian coin; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t even born in 1956.

But now we live in an age of instant gratification where a few well-chosen keystrokes will fill the computer screen with pregnant links. Hundreds of photos of 2,000 year-old Roman coins appear to satisfy any numismatist’s curiosity, and so do links to thousands of articles about the Caesar who reigned in Jesus’ time: Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus.

Historians refer to him more simply as Tiberius, to distinguish him from his predecessor emperors whose names he acquired to show his superior pedigree.

Daisy Jo Morrison never went into this kind of detail and perhaps it was just as well. I don’t know how the other kids imagined Caesar, but my image was of President Eisenhower in a toga: ancient, smiling, bald, and good. When Jesus told the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar,” I didn’t consider that to be a bad thing. Probably my parents did the same thing, rendering their offering unto the collection plate every Sunday and unto Ike every April 15. It sounded like a reasonable plan to me.

But – and it’s a big but – Tiberius may have been a soldier-statesman, but he was no benign Ike. Those of us of a certain age learned all that in 1978, when I, Claudius – a BBC television adaptation of Robert Grave’s two novels on the first Roman emperors – appeared on PBS. Tiberius was convincingly portrayed as a paranoid, dispeptic, sadistic and homicidal wacko by George Baker, MBE, a British actor and writer who, in real life, was very nice. (Baker, 80, died October 7.)

Historians generally agree that Tiberius was not nice, although it’s hard to be sure because accounts of the emperors were written by either their friends or their enemies, both of whom were known to distort their anecdotes for devious ends.

Even so, we probably know more about Tiberius that either Jesus or the Pharisees knew when they beheld the Emperor’s countenance on a dinarius. Tiberius was the son of Livia, the second wife of the Emperor Augustus. At Livia’s insistence, Augustus adopted Tiberius, thus placing him among several possible successors to the throne. Livia moved to strengthen her son’s position by convincing Augustus to order Tiberius to marry the emperor’s daughter, Julia. This made it necessary for Tiberius to divorce his wife Vipsania Agrappina, whom he loved dearly. A marble bust of Vipsania, although missing her nose, suggests she was quite beautiful.

But Tiberius hated his new wife, Julia, and the forced marriage appears to have sent him on a downward spire. He declared he had no desire to be emperor, but by the time Augustus expired, all Tiberius’ rivals had been killed or died of what may have been natural causes. The way Robert Graves tells it, Livia arranged to have her son’s competitors poisoned or otherwise removed. It makes a better story, but the historical evidence is unavailable.

Once Tiberius ascended to the throne, he seems to have lost interest in politics. He eventually retired to Capri, where he pursued a life of sexual depravity. He delegated most of his power to a soldier crony, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who ruled despotically in Rome. Sejanus, as admirers of the PBS series know, was played by Sir Patrick Stewart, better known for his later role as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Sejanus eventually plotted against Tiberius so the emperor had him removed and executed. The rest of Tiberius’ reign was a blood bath of debauchery.

When Jesus was shown a coin with Tiberius’ likeness, he was looking at one of history’s most evil villains. In that context, an invocation to “render unto Caesar” sounds like an encouragement to aid and abet.

The question is whether Jesus’ is saying citizens have equal obligations to the church and their government. The problem is, both institutions are equally imperfect.

Once during the Vietnam War I helped prepare a young man to present a biblical case to his draft board to obtain conscientious objector status. “I told (the board) that Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love your enemy,” the young man reported later. “They said, ‘Jesus also said to render unto Caesar, and military service is how you’ll do that.’”

Throughout history there have been good Caesars and bad Caesars, and it seems unlikely Jesus intends us to render unto all of them.

I was born 16 months after Adolf Hitler died, but he was one bad Caesar whose evil impact endured long after he was gone. To my knowledge, no circulating German coins ever bore his likeness, but he did appear on Reich postage stamps. In fact, so many Hitler stamps were printed that they exist as worthless curiosities. It’s gratifying to note that a stamp commemorating a German pastor who opposed him has greater value.

Pastor Martin Niemöller is well known for this Nazi era statement:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Nazis came for Niemöller in 1937 after he became the leader of a group of German clergy opposed to Hitler. He was sent to the Sachsenhausen and later to the Dachau concentration camps until he was released by the Allies in 1945. He was charged with “not being enthusiastic” in his support for the Nazi regime. The crime was actually a capital offense. His most famous colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. But Niemöller never wavered, and he remained under the constant threat of death at Dachau until he was liberated by the Allies in 1945. He became a president of the World Council of Churches when the ecumenical body was formed in 1948.

One of the most powerful tributes to Niemöller is a play written by Gordon C. Bennett, retired professor of language arts at then Eastern Baptist College: God is My Fuehrer, a dramatic interpretation of the life of Martin Niemöller. Written in the midst of the Vietnam era, the play is Bennett’s testimony that a Christian’s highest authority is God in Christ, not governments and certainly not draft boards.

The play is out of print, but its impact on my life has been long-lasting. I took several courses from Gordon between 1968 and 1970, and I recall his research involved a trip to Germany where he met with Niemöller. Gordon has spent his entire life as a witness for peace, rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

I never met Martin Niemöller, but I had colleagues at the World Council of Churches who knew him well. I think what makes him such an impressive figure is his ordinariness: soft spoken, small in stature, with unexceptional aims. He admitted that he supported Hitler when he first came to power, “mostly because I yearned for a return of the Kaiser.” But once it became clear that Hitler sought to take God’s place at the center of national life, Niemöller turned away from Caesar and never looked back.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus’ statement reverberates throughout history, not only as an ingenious rhetorical device to avoid a lawyerly trap but as a clear affirmation of what Baptists have historically maintained: the state and church must be kept separate.

That way, when the state begins to stray from the commands of God, it is easier to remember that Caesar’s authority is not equal to God’s: not in A.D. 30. Not in 1940. Not now.

“For it is, and must remain the case,” Martin Niemöller said, “that we must obey God rather than human beings.”

The Tin Anniversary

2011-10-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

We celebrated a significant anniversary this week. Ten years.

It would be a tin or aluminum celebration if we were marking a resilient marriage, but there was no nuptial endurance involved.

On Friday, the War in Afghanistan passed its first decade. Eighteen months ago, this had already become the longest war in American history. It has lasted longer than Iraq and longer than Vietnam, both of which fizzled after eight and a half years. By comparison, the American Revolution was 6.7 years, the Civil War lasted four years, and World War II – which so preoccupied and altered the lives of our parents and grandparents – was only 3.7 years long. But Afghanistan, the energizer bunny of belligerence, keeps going, and going, and going …

More than 2500 American, British and other coalition troops have been killed so far, and no one really knows how many Afghanistan, Taliban or al Qaeda operatives have died. Polls show a rapidly increasing majority of Americans opposing the war.

On Friday, the National Council of Churches reiterated its call for an early end to the war in Afghanistan:

“After nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, it is clearly too late to correct the mistakes and miscalculations of the past [the Council said]. But we set before the churches a call to greater vigilance in the future. It is no mere cliché that history repeats itself, and there is little doubt that U.S. presidents and military leaders will again be tempted to choose war over diplomacy as a means of redressing grievances. When those circumstances arise, may the church, which too often has been silent in the face of war, be prepared to offer its Christian witness that war is always contrary to the will of God, and that there are alternatives to war that wise leaders must seek.”

If the Council is right – if war is always contrary to the will of God – one has to wonder why good Christian presidents have so often taken us down that bloody path.

And if war is always contrary to the will of God, why does the Gospel reading cited in this week’s Revised Common Lectionary seem to refute it?

In Matthew 22, Jesus tells of a king’s outrage when his servants are beaten and murdered. With righteous retribution, the king sends his army to slaughter the malefactors and burn their city.

Jesus! What are you saying?

It’s more than a little disturbing that Jesus seems to be providing the scriptural basis for George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in 2001. Bush, like the king in the parable, responded to an act of war by sending vast armies to Afghanistan.

Parallel parables in the synoptic gospels are no less difficult. In Luke 14, Jesus asks:

What king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

It’s hard to read this passage without thinking of the Powell doctrine: General Colin Powell’s declaration prior to Desert Storm that U.S. troops would not be sent into battle in Iraq unless they were vastly superior to the enemy they would confront. Powell’s approach was obviously wise. Desert Storm remains the shortest of all U.S. wars, lasting just one and a half months in January and February 1991.

Even so, it’s hard to understand why in these passages Jesus seems to blandly accept the reality of war. These passages from Matthew and Luke don’t sound like the Prince of Peace who told us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek. No doubt insightful preachers will explain that Jesus is merely spinning hyperbolic yarns to impress upon his listeners what will happen to those who rudely reject him. But is all this figurative bloodshed necessary?

The injection of martial arts in the parables of Jesus also evokes the famous brutality of Psalm 137 in which the psalmist fantasizes a horrifying revenge against his Babylonian oppressors:

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!’
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

The notion of seeking righteous revenge by bashing enemy babies against boulders is – well, it’s unchristian. Blogger Jacob Schriftman www.schriftman.wordpress.com shares our horror:

The psalmist does not merely predict such a horrible scene [Schriftman writes]; he feels happy about it. He does not find the scene horrible but desirable. He does not say, “As a consequence of the Babylonians’ sins, a terrible judgment shall strike the nation. Even babies’ heads will be smashed against rocks. It horrifies me, and I pray that if possible those babies could be spared …” He does not pray that. He does not even confine himself to predicting the event. No, he gloats. He rejoices. He is pleased imagining the smashing of the babies.

As appalling as the image may be, the truth is that most of us feel ambivalent about this kind of retribution. The rage we felt following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 is a case in point. Would we have been repelled by the prospect of murdering the innocent progeny of the terrorists? Or would we have smiled? As a matter of fact, we might have been of two minds on the subject.

Probably most of us can understand that. There have been times in my life when I’ve been conflicted by opposing viewpoints. In 1968, my last six months in the Air Force were spent at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas. One of my jobs as a chaplain’s assistant was to interview airmen who were being reassigned to McConnell after a tour in Vietnam. After years of assuming the U.S. war was necessary to counter Communist expansion, I was stunned to hear the reports of the returning vets. With few exceptions, they felt the war was unjustified, untenable and (perhaps they felt comfortable saying it in the chapel) immoral.

I transitioned from McConnell to my freshman year at Eastern Baptist College in a very few days. In the interim, I reappraised my attitude toward the war and decided the returning vets were right. When I was recruited by Eastern’s student-run peace and freedom committee to participate in an anti-war forum, I accepted.

In those days veterans who became campus anti-war activists rose quickly in the BMOC ranks. I became a frequent spokesperson at rallies, was interviewed by the local press, and quickly grasped that the gig was marvelously chick-magnetic.

But the real benefit of my ideological repositioning was the chance to develop a biblically-based theology of peace. My mentors were John Ruth, a Mennonite minister, writer and professor of English; and a fellow student, Bob Ulle, who memorized vast portions of the bible and could recite peace passages to draft boards on demand. John, who was quietly resigned to the fact most people in 1968 mistook his Mennonite plain coat for a Nehru jacket, was an exemplar of a 500 year-old Anabaptist peace tradition based in the teachings of Menno Simons. Both John and Bob (who became a Mennonite layman shortly after graduation and died tragically young a very few years later) made peace and non-violence a way of life.

They made it plain that children of the God of love, redeemed by the Prince of Peace, could live no other way. Schriftman suggests that the peace message of scripture is abundantly clear and discerning readers should avoid proof texting or misinterpreting verses that are out of step with our understanding of God’s message. Psalm 137, he writes, “is in direct opposition to Jesus’ command to pray for our enemies and pronounce good things on those who hate us. But it goes not only against the New Testament. Even Proverbs knows better: ‘Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.’”

What is the primary message of Jesus? He put it succinctly enough: “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” It is impossible to dig holes in that sentence large enough to drive an army.

So what is Jesus’ purpose in telling stories about the military adventures of strident kings? His point, I think, is to build a memorable metaphor so his listeners will never forget: those who reject God’s realm and God’s messiah will be out in the cold forever. Or worse.

Once you get passed references to the military ambush and the sacked city, I think the metaphor works. And far be it from me to suggest Jesus should have used a more peaceful illustration. He doesn’t need any copy editing from me and he’s entitled to tell it as he sees it. But telling it is a far cry from endorsing the kind of behavior he’s describing, and writers are entitled to use their imaginations. Andrew Greeley’s torrid novels describe the sexual acrobatics of his characters in such erotic detail that it steams my glasses. But just because he writes about it doesn’t mean the celibate Father Greeley does it.

In the same way, just because Jesus talks about generals and armies doesn’t mean he endorses them. His eternal message of peace and love cannot be overcome by willful proof texting and misguided isogesis.

Peace and love. Love and peace. The message is from God, not a hippy commune. And as we begin the eleventh year of America’s longest war, this eternal message must not be ignored.

Yup

2011-09-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

On hot summer evenings at Lackland Air Force Base, when our basic training flight was granted a rare night off, we’d gather on one of the base’s vending machine patios and bitch about how tough it was. It wasn’t really all that tough because the Air Force was reluctant to send out-of-shape young adults to march in the 100 degree Texas heat (we heard there had been fatalities), so we spent many days memorizing Air Force esoterica in air conditioned classrooms. But we thought we were working our asses off, at least compared to the leisurely last days of our bygone civilian lives, and we loved the patio breaks. We could sit on hard benches, smoke Luckies and suck back Dr. Peppers while keeping a wary eye out for psychotic sergeants.

This was in 1964. The Bay of Tonkin incident had happened weeks earlier and, although none of us knew this would trigger a massive U.S. troop surge in Vietnam, we were all wary about the future. We’d smoke as many cigarettes as we could in the time allotted and talk about stuff we thought was important: whether we’d get a pass into San Antonio, whether Sergeant Ellefson was certifiably nuts, whether our girlfriends were thinking about us, and whether we’d survive the dreaded basic training obstacle course and be sent to risk our lives in some deadly rice paddy.

Oddly enough, we talked a lot about theology. One night I sat smoking with a basic trainee from El Paso while he patiently explained why Catholicism was superior to my religion. My dog tags said I was United Church of Christ, based on a guess I made to my recruiter because my home church was the United Church of Morrisville, but I had no idea what the UCC was or what it stood for. The intense young Texan on the patio assured me his church was the true church because it generated real miracles, including the appearance of the Virgin at Fatima and the inexplicable tears that trickle down the alabaster cheeks of certain saints. “These things give me such an oomph in my faith,” he said, and all I could do is nod vacuously because my church was not big on visitations or dubious phenomena. The young man (whose name I never knew) said with some regret that his church wanted him to remain a virgin until he married and he wasn’t allowed to masturbate. “But wet dreams are not a sin because they are involuntary and I do look forward to those wet dreams,” he said. I nodded realizing we had discovered some theological common ground and watched as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. He smiled but, unexpectedly, his smile faded and he looked beyond me, into the darkness.

“The ten commandments,” he said in a whisper. “I’ve broken eight of then.”

I watched him mutely as a sadness crept across his face. I was 18, so it never occurred to me to doubt that a boy so young could be such an accomplished sinner.

“Which ones?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked away.

“Did you kill someone?”

He shook his head adamantly. I tried to remember the other nine commandments. Swearing, lying, having sex, stealing. What else? Not going to church? Worshipping Zeus? Wasn’t there something about coveting your neighbor’s ass, which we used to snicker about in Sunday school? But what was coveting?

We sat in silence. Soon the break would be over and we’d have to retreat to our sweltering barracks for another sleepless night.

I cleared my throat. “What ones didn’t you break, then?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t understand the question, but his mood brightened abruptly again. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Time’s up. Here comes the T.I.” I looked up as the sergeant (a “technical instructor” in Air Force nomenclature) strutted onto the patio pointing to his watch. Still smiling, the young man winked at me and waved. “God bless you,” he said cheerfully. He was assigned to another barracks and I don’t recall ever seeing him again. I wish I had gotten his name so I could Google him to see if he had ever become governor of Texas or a shopping mall sniper or, perhaps, a monsignor or bishop. But he disappeared into the night, and now I wonder if he’d ever found the time to break the other two commandments, whichever they were.

I wouldn’t have remembered any of this if the Revised Common Lectionary hadn’t placed the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20, on the reading docket for the week. I rarely dwell on this chapter, because when you get to my age, you can’t read the commandments without reflecting on which ones you’ve broken, and how often. Have I worshipped idols? Possibly. Have I disrespected God’s name? Have I misused the Sabbath? Have I stolen? Have I disrespected my parents? Have I – well, let’s stop there.

Somewhere there is a cartoon showing two monks laboring at their calligraphy over two ornately designed bible broadsheets. One monk turns to the other and says with a smirk, “Someone is going to get a break. I’ve left out a couple of commandments.”

Sometimes it does seem the law and the commandments are too darn much. This notion has obviously occurred to the rabbinic sage, Mel Brooks, who in his History of the World Part I included a scene of Moses coming down from the mountain struggling to carry three stone tablets. As Moses approaches the crowd, he intones, “The Lord God has given into me these fifteen …” But one of the heavy tablets slips out of his grasp and falls to the ground in a hundred pieces. But Moses thinks quickly: “…these TEN commandments.”

It’s entertaining to speculate what those additional five commandments may have been, but it’s not really necessary. Once the basic ten became a part of Jewish law, they began to multiply like sea monkeys in water. Leaf through your bibles, through Leviticus, through Deuteronomy, through Numbers and beyond, to see what happened. The original ten commandments were annotated, expanded and commented on sixty-fold. Oy vey. I’m wondering how morose my friend at the Texas patio would have been had he been moved to confess, “I’ve violated 585 of the 610 laws in the Pentateuch.”

And well he could have done so. Who can possibly remember all the laws of the bible?

Consider just a handful, arbitrarily chosen from Deuteronomy 22:

You shall not watch your neighbour’s ox or sheep straying away and ignore them; you shall take them back to their owner. If the owner does not reside near you or you do not know who the owner is, you shall bring it to your own house, and it shall remain with you until the owner claims it; then you shall return it. You shall do the same with a neighbour’s donkey; you shall do the same with a neighbour’s garment; and you shall do the same with anything else that your neighbour loses and you find. You may not withhold your help.
You shall not see your neighbour’s donkey or ox fallen on the road and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up.
If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.
When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof; otherwise you might have blood-guilt on your house, if anyone should fall from it.
You shall not sow your vineyard with a second kind of seed, or the whole yield will have to be forfeited, both the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard itself.
You shall not plough with an ox and a donkey yoked together.
You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together.
You shall make tassels on the four corners of the cloak with which you cover yourself.

And so forth. There are other laws that permit parents to go to extremes to discipline disobedient children. Remember Bill Cosby’s warning to his rebellious son? “I brought you into this world and I can take you out.” That’s entirely consistent with God’s law, if not necessarily God’s expectations.

The original ten commandments are difficult enough to interpret. The weight of 600 biblical laws is so burdensome we have only one choice: to be crushed beneath them, or stop reading them. Which would you choose?

As I was reading though the Pentateuch this week, I remembered something I had read in my youth, an article in Mad Magazine. Mad, also a product of rabbinic insight and dead-on humor, noted that President Eisenhower had a tendency to ramble, obfuscate and puzzle the public with musings and non sequiturs. The President probably did this deliberately, as his press secretary, James Haggerty, suspected. Prior to a press conference, Haggerty warned the President that a number of issues were sensitive and he could not afford to make a gaffe. “Don’t worry, Jim,” Eisenhower said. “I’ll just confuse them.” And on many occasions, he did just that.

Mad Magazine’s solution was simple: Hire the most laconic and taciturn man in America to serve as an interpreter for the loquacious president. Their candidate: Gary Cooper. During each press conference, the magazine suggested, after Eisenhower finished speaking, Coop would go to the mike and say, “Ike says, ‘Yup.’” And if the rambling utterance appeared to head in a different direction, Coop would distill it again: “Ike says, ‘Nope.’”

How nice it would be, we say to ourselves, if we had a similar device to help us interpret all the laws and the prophets going back five millennia.

Thankfully, the device is already in our possession – in the words of Jesus.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? ’He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matthew 22:34-40)

You don’t have to be an ecclesiastical lawyer to realize how complicated biblical law can be. The very complexity of the law has led to wide misunderstandings and dangerous misinterpretations. Over the centuries, good Christians have used the law to start wars, burn each other at stakes, trade in slaves, commit genocide on cultures that were considered inferior, relegate women and girls to the status of property, and despise others with different languages, complexions, religions or sexual orientations than our own. All in the name of God’s law.

But in the midst of our confusion, Jesus offers a clarifying note: “God says, ‘Nope.’”

All the law and the prophets can be distilled into two simple sentences, Jesus declares:

Love God.

Love your neighbor.

In the final analysis, it may well be that each of us has broken one or four of the ten commandments. And it goes without saying that the Decalogue is one of the most important documents to emerge from human history, because these commandments constitute the first time basic rules of conduct and morality were written down.
But it would be a shame to follow our ancestors into the maze of confusion that the law became.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Jesus has shown us the way through the maze, in five unforgettable words.

God grant that we discover the secret of living them. Despite its daunting profundity, the secret can be stated simply enough:

Say “yup” to God.

The Star Trek Canticles

2011-09-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

I was long twilight struggling in the Cold War during the original broadcasts of Star Trek, so I missed most of the series. After I returned from overseas I caught glimpses of two episodes on a 10-inch black and white TV from Sears and I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I thought they were terrible. “Mudd’s Women” was about a space profiteer (they wouldn’t dare say “pimp”) who marketed beautiful women to horny starship crews. “The Trouble with Tribbles” was so crammed with gratuitous cuteness that it made my teeth hurt.

I thought later manifestations of the series, including “The Next Generation” and “Deep Space 9,” were terrific, but I never caught on to the Trekkie hysteria that accompanied the original series.

But earlier this month I turned 65 and several of the kids pooled their resources to buy me an iPad. The gift, which confirms that boys and old men are mostly distinguished by the cost of their toys, was much appreciated. Within hours I signed on to NetFlix and, at the suggestion of son Will, began watching Star Trek for the first time.

The series, re-mastered in 2006, has been a revelation. Backgrounds and planet surfaces have been digitally enhanced and the Enterprise’s engines drone with stereophonic realism somewhere behind the left quadrant of my head. The pores and nose hairs of the actors, invisible on my Sears TV, are distractingly vivid and I often find myself studying William Shatner’s scalp for signs of an embryonic toupee. But Shatner, like the rest of the crew, is young and beautiful. As who wasn’t in 1967? (Nichelle, you can park your space boots beneath my bed any time.)

Sure, many episodes flirt with the puerile, and sometimes the digital improvements call too much attention to ridiculous props. In one awkward scene, a silicon-based life form resembling a colossal placenta is supposed to threaten Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. The two actors – Shatner and Leonard Nimoy – must have struggled to keep from laughing as the groaning creature advanced and retreated on invisible little wheels. The monster was known to be a mass murderer of humanoids, but Spock contorts his face and gingerly places his hands on the thing to perform a Vulcan mind-meld. Connected with the creature’s essence, Spock discovers the beast is really a misunderstood mom and basically nice. Connected with NetFlix, viewers discover what may be the funniest scene in the whole franchise. Maybe it worked better in black and white.

Despite the sometimes uneven quality of the stories, which I suspect may be part of the series’ charm for many Trekkies, there are also some compelling tales that I would consider morality plays. I suspect episodes in this category were largely conceived by the series’ ingenious creator, Gene Roddenberry.

One such tale is “Errand of Mercy," originally broadcast on March 23, 1967, written by Gene L. Coon and directed by John Newland. This episode marks the first appearance of the Klingons, an alien race that enters the series with bland make-up and fiercely warlike proclivities and appears in later manifestations of the franchise with bizarre three-dimensional make-up and peaceful aims. In this episode, the 27th of the series, Klingon commander Kor is portrayed by the late John Colicos, a Canadian actor who relies on talent rather than make-up to look fierce.

Here’s the story: On stardate 3198.4, relations between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire have reached the breaking point. The USS Enterprise has been sent to the world of Organia, a non-aligned planet near the Klingon border, to protect it from annexation by the Klingons.

Kirk and Spock beam down to Organia and discover an inexplicably pacifist population led by Ayelborne, a bearded figure dressed in a robe apparently borrowed from Roddenberry’s bedroom. The late John Abbott, an English character actor, exudes a serenity so unshakable that viewers suspect he’s toking Maui Wowwie. The planet’s elderly councilmen (emphasis on the “men”) are equally spaced out, and all of them are incomprehensibly placid about the impending Klingon invasion. Naturally, Kirk and Spock are incredulous and infuriated by the population’s pacifism in the face of an imminent invasion by thugs who make the Nazis look like Swan Lake. The population retains its unruffled tranquility as Kor and his storm troopers take over the planet and begin executing Organians 200 at a time.

Clearly the situation calls for major conflict resolution that will restore peace and stop the Klingons from killing everyone. But how?
It’s a little difficult to tell if the Organian’s Ayelborne is supposed to make viewers think of Jesus or Gandhi or both. Or perhaps neither. The Organians face their brutal enemy with vacuous smiles and appear to prefer death to resistance.

Mohandas Gandhi, one of the more evolved souls of the twentieth century, resisted the British Raj in India with a strategy he called Satyagraha, loosely translated “soul force” or “truth force,” a passive resistance that eschewed violence but ultimately forced the British to grant India its independence. It was the same strategy employed by Martin Luther King, who kept a framed portrait of Gandhi in his office. Skeptics have opined that if Gandhi had employed Satyagraha against a power less absorbed with the ideals of fair play, such as Hitler, he would have been squashed like a bug. And this, in the Star trek morality play, is the possibility the Organians are facing.

It’s evident that throughout scores of original Star Trek episodes, Roddenberry was crafting video homilies about race relations and human conduct. The conflict between the Klingons and Starfleet is a Cold War metaphor. As the episode progresses, warships of the federation and the Klingon empire are poised to engage in a battle so cataclysmic that the special effects required to show it would not be developed for another 40 years.

What to do?

The scriptures offered this week by the Revised Common Lectionary are also anecdotes of conflict and its resolution. In Exodus 17:1-7, Moses is again facing open insurrection in the wilderness, this time because the children of Israel are dying of thirst. And in Matthew 21:23-32, the chief priests and the elders are trying to trick Jesus into claiming a special relationship with God so they can stone him.

What to do?

The Star Trek denouement is remarkable. As Federation Star Ships and Klingon battle cruisers begin their apocalyptic encounter, their controls suddenly go dead. Their photons fizzle. Their phasers dangle limply.

What the hell happened? Commander Kor and Captain Kirk levitate in rage that their powerful weapons have been rendered useless. But how?

Ah, but didn’t we know it all along? Councilman Ayelborne, still gazing limpidly into a horizon no one else can see, explains it in placid monotones. The Organians have interceded, he avers. They have shut down the operating systems of the belligerent fleets and they won’t restore power until both sides agree to live in peace. It turns out that the Organians, evolving for millions of years, have shed their corporeal forms and exist now as invisible globules of energy. They assume an illusory humanoid form when they have to entertain under-evolved guests or satisfy Screen Actors Guild minimums. “The Organians are as superior to us,” Spock observes, “as we are to the amoeba.”

At the end of the episode, Klingon storm troopers and the Crew of the Enterprise depart in peace – a fleeting arrangement that cannot last long if the Star Trek franchise is to endure another season.
But as diverting as the story was, Cold War viewers must have been left with the distinct impression that true peace – true human harmony – cannot be a reality until evolution has advanced a few million years. The very idea is, as we would have observed then, heaped in bummerosity. But it raises an interesting question: Just how evolved do you have to be to love your enemies and live in peace?

During the Raj, when Britain’s imperial power was strangling India, the British Viceroy, Lord Irwin, asked Gandhi how he would solve the problems between their two nations. According to reports, Gandhi picked up a bible and opened it to Matthew 5. "When your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount,” Gandhi said, “we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world.”

Gandhi also famously said to his British overlords, “I like your Christ but I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”
There is painful truth in that statement by a Hindu mystic. Among other things, it suggests why Roddenberry and the creators of Star Trek believed it would take millions of years for humanity to evolve into a peaceful, loving community. As a matter of fact, the formula for that beloved community was preached two millennia ago on the Galilean hillside. And for two thousand years, Christians – so unlike their Christ – have steadfastly rejected it.

I wondered, watching episode 27 of Star Trek, if writer Gene Coon and producer Gene Roddenberry were thinking about the Sermon on the Mount when they created the loving Organians. Their society is clearly based on Jesus’ teachings:

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth …”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God …”
“…Everyone who is angry with his brother or sister shall be liable to judgment …”
“Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also …”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you …”

What Coon and Roddenberry could not comprehend, I suspect, is that a peaceful, loving, and harmonious world would not require millions of years of evolution. It would merely require enough faith to believe what Jesus said long ago, in the distant mists of the Bronze Age. Peace on earth is not a strange new world to which we will someday boldly go. Peace on earth is the realm of God that has been with us all the time.

It’s sobering to think how different the world would have been if we Christians had been a little more like our Christ. The crusades, the Inquisition, the barbaric extermination of indigenous peoples in the age of Christian exploration, the bloody empires, the carnage of countless wars – including the War in Afghanistan which goes on and on – all were unnecessary, all were violations of God’s law, and all were a blatant rejection of our Christ.

In this week’s lectionary reading, Jesus makes it clear that the most pious among us will be the first to close out ears to him. "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” he declares, “For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.” (Matthew 21:31-32)

That’s another way of warning us that Christians will not be like our Christ.

Star Trek has created a wonderful illusion of a world in which all women and men live in peace, where ethnic backgrounds and color lines have no meaning, where there are no poor, where hunger does not exist, where no child ever awakens to the sounds of violence and terror.

Gene Roddenberry couldn’t imagine that world becoming a reality for many centuries.

But the foundations of that world were put in place thousands of years ago.

And the mission assigned to us all is as elusive as it is simple: to boldly go where no Christian has gone before.

Unfair Practices

2011-09-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, union organizers and evangelicals were hard to tell apart. They ate at the same tables, harmonized in the same choir lofts, and often shared the same beds.

In the late 1960s at Eastern Baptist College, Tony Campolo would occasionally bring a guitar to his sociology classes to lead us in rousing union songs that sounded like hymns.

There is pow'r, there is pow'r
In a band of workingmen.
When they stand hand in hand,
That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r
That must rule in every land --
One Industrial Union Grand.*

Tony’s point, I think, was that the gospel of liberation provided the soil that nurtured the seeds of the labor movement. I’d like to think that Moses and Jesus, emancipators as they were, would have been union men. But you can't prove it by the passages cited in this week’s Common Lectionary.

In Exodus 16, Moses, long past his honeymoon with his starving band of Israelites, is pelted by stinging grievances so relentlessly that he begins to feel like a freshman in a varsity dodge ball game. And in Matthew 20, Jesus scoffs at a committee of workers who demand fair wages. “The last will be first and the first will be last,” he sniffs unsympathetically.

As a card carrying member of Local 38010 of the Communication Workers of America (AFL-CIO, CLC), I wonder if I should speak out about that. The situation Jesus is talking about in Matthew is blatantly unfair: workers who have been busting their butts all day “in the scorching heat” learn they will receive the same wage as laborers who have been on the job for barely an hour. No wonder the exhausted day workers complain, but Jesus sides with management on the issue.

I can’t imagine a shop in the world that would put up with that. Equal pay for equal work is a measurement of justice, and the union exists to protect workers from precisely the sort of exploitation Jesus appears to endorse. My spouse’s parents, immigrants from Cuba, would have floundered in the U.S. without the unions that made sure they were paid just wages for their labors. In 1946, my father was hired as a teacher in upstate New York at an annual wage of just under $1,000. The faculty had no union to seek a more appropriate level of remuneration, or to arrange to pay teachers during the summer break. Between June and August, Dad worked as a road crew laborer and part-time insurance vendor.

Here’s where I want to insert an autobiographical cliché, “We were poor but we didn’t know we were poor,” but actually Dad was quite good at making sure we knew it. By the time the faculty finally organized and joined the United Federation of teachers, nearly 20 years after Dad taught his first class, I had graduated and was on my own. While Dad rarely shared details about his finances, it was clear that his annual wage had risen dramatically – not, I might add, because the union was gouging the tax payers of the district, but because for the first time teachers were receiving a fairer compensation for their work.

I tried to think of an anecdote to illustrate how much my own union changed my life, but it didn’t. I don’t think any of us reporters and photographers believed we were being paid enough – in fact, I never worked harder for less than in my newspaper days – but our salary and benefits negotiations accomplished little. Perhaps our instincts as journalists convinced us the First Amendment would be somehow damaged if we walked out and closed the paper. And when we were pressed to confront management, our preferred tool was the informational picket line, at which we excelled. We were exemplars of the Charlie Brown school of confrontation: we didn’t win any ball games, but we had a lot of interesting discussions.

In Exodus we read about a somewhat different situation. Moses is not facing a work stoppage as much as an open revolt. The children of Israel are long passed the euphoria they felt when they escaped Pharaoh’s cruel bondage and now hover on the verge of starvation in the desert. They are now desperately unhappy that Moses’ campaign promises have not been fulfilled. Before the revolution, they complain, “we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread,” but now they complain to Moses, “you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Their ingratitude is shameless but perfectly understandable. It’s similar to people-in-the-street interviews with Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union, when basic needs like food and fuel were hard to come by. Suddenly Russians of a certain age remembered the Stalin years as the happiest of their lives.

The attitude of the Israelites is not Moses’ fault, of course. It’s not unusual to lose faith in human political leaders when we realize they cannot live up to our deification of them. It’s this kind of disillusionment that President Obama is trying to counter on the campaign trail, and he is not the first to experience it. In the fall of 1963, President Kennedy’s poll numbers were teetering and he believed he faced a close race against Senator Barry Goldwater the following year. It was an assassin’s bullet that installed JFK into the pantheon of political gods. Had he lived, he would have been just another pol with a toothy smile, trying to glamour voters to stand by him through one more election.

Faced with a possible insurrection, Moses tells himself that “the complaining is not against us but against the Lord.” God recognizes it, too, and intervenes by scattering a miraculous meal – manna from heaven – on the morning sands. Crisis averted.

Manna was evidently concocted in Heaven’s Kitchen so no one knows what it tasted like, except that it had the powers to placate an angry mob. There, however, speculative manna recipes. If you visit the eastern U.S. archdiocese of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch in New Jersey, for example, you will be served manna derived from a concoction traced back two millennia. It is white, delicately chewy and preternaturally sweet. The archbishop probably uses it judiciously, because he knows it is impossible to hold on to your anger or resentments when you eat manna from Paramus.

As we desperately isogete the labor and crowd management issues evident in the passages from Exodus and Matthew, I think we can discern this: there is both bad news and good news in these stories.

The bad news is this: God is willing to treat us unfairly.
Consider the children of Israel, victims of the ultimate bait-and-switch: promised milk and honey but stuck with thirst and starvation.

And consider the poor sweaty wretches who worked all day in the vineyard and were appalled to receive the same wage as those who wandered lazily passed the vineyard at the end of the day and worked for an hour.

The good news is this: God is willing to treat us unfairly.
In the desert, the children of Israel may still be decades away from the land of milk and honey. But God remains a palpable presence in their midst, and their faith is rewarded with food from heaven’s kitchen.

But the best news of all is in the vineyard Jesus intended as a metaphor for God’s judgment.

Salvation is not a fair wage offered exclusively to those spend all their lives working out their deliverance in fear and trembling. If that were the case, heaven would be as lonely as Ghadaffi 's compound.

Salvation is an unfair wage offered both to the life-long stalwart and to the last-minute seeker for whom faith is unsought, unplanned and accidental. The most famous example of this kind of barefaced unfairness is the criminal on the cross, whose last words on earth are to beg Jesus’ favor in paradise.

In the final analysis, I think, Moses and Jesus would have been good union men. Moses was the ultimate shop steward, arguing before Pharaoh that his work force should be granted its freedom. And Jesus had a classic union constituency in mind when he declared God had sent him to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberty for the oppressed, and economic justice for all.

Where Moses and Jesus may differ from more traditional union leaders is that the contracts they were negotiating were not just for the workers and the weak, but for management and the powerful as well.

There’s absolutely nothing fair about that. But it is very good news for us all.
___
* Words by Joe Hill, 1913

September 11

2011-09-10T05:51:00.000-07:00

We all have our stories.

Martha and I had just settled into our offices in The Interchurch Center, more than 100 blocks north of the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, Martha directed public relations and communication for the United Church of Christ Pension Boards on the 10th floor (as she still does), and I was communications officer of the U.S. conference for the World Council of Churches on the 9th floor.

I was probably sipping the last dregs of my morning coffee when Martha called. “Did you hear a plane has flown into the World Trade Center?”

Instinctively, I turned to my keyboard and typed www.ap.org. The Associated Press had tentatively moved a story with a file picture of the twin towers.

“What a mess,” I thought. I could imagine a small plane veering off course from Teeterboro and straying into one of the 1,340 foot-high towers. No doubt some office workers in the tower had been injured.

Martha called back. “We have an office on the 19th floor,” she said. “We can see the towers from there.” I met her at the elevator and we went up. Tom, the office IT director, shook his head as we walked in and nodded toward a southerly window.

The towers were nearly seven miles south of us, but in my memory they seemed just a few blocks away. Black smoke billowed from the northern façade of the North Tower, and I still assumed an errant small plane had done the damage. Most of the people in the office had stopped looking out the window and had returned to their tasks.

We watched the smoke streaming eastward for several minutes.

“I have a service downstairs in the chapel,” Martha said. One of her coworkers had died over the weekend, and Martha was in charge of the memorial. We thanked Tom for allowing us to satisfy our curiosity and walked out. Seconds after we closed the door behind us, the second plane hit the South Tower.

By the time Martha and her colleagues emerged from the memorial service, both towers were fully involved in flames and on the verge of collapse.

Across the river in Hoboken, Martha’s cousin Tony watched in horror as people leaped off the towers to escape the flames and fell to their deaths on the plaza below.

Martha’s cousin Alina was stranded with her colleagues at Brown Brothers Harriman on nearby Wall Street. In the Empire State Building on 34th street, Alina’s husband, Steve, was making urgent calls to her office to see if she was all right.

Back at the Interchurch Center on 120th Street, my colleagues Jean and Sonia were literally holding each other up as news came of the collapse of the North Tower. Jean’s niece, who had been staying with her that summer, worked at one of the buildings adjacent to the towers and Jean had been unable to reach her.

As I sat in my office overlooking the Hudson River, I spun my radio dial, seeking additional updates. I listened briefly to an FM deejay who said he was broadcasting from one of the towers. “They’re telling us to evacuate,” he said excitedly, “But I’m staying at my post as a public service, ‘cause folks need to know what’s goin’ on …” I spun past him looking for 1010 WINS or another all news station and didn’t give the deejay a second thought. But ten years later, I wonder: did the guy wise up and get the hell out of the tower? Or did I accidentally tune in to his last words on earth?

It wasn’t easy getting news about what was happening outside. I began receiving emails from a World Council of Churches colleague in Geneva. Martin was monitoring the news in Europe and it was in one of his emails that I learned a plane had also struck the Pentagon in Washington. “You are at war,” Martin wrote ominously.

Our offices in The Interchurch Center at 120th Street and Riverside were far from Ground Zero and still unaffected by the calamity that was unfolding downtown. Two days later, a foul yellow haze that stung the eyes and burned the throat would spread throughout all of Manhattan. But in the midday hours of September 11, the air was still clear uptown. If you turned northward toward the George Washington Bridge, it was a beautifully pristine late summer day.

Outside the city, persons following the events on television wondered if all New York was in flames. Our son, Will, then a junior at Port Chester High School, left an urgent message on Martha’s cell phone. He said he had heard the city was under attack by military jets flying out of the White Plains airport and he pleaded with his mother to get in touch with him. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the message until hours later, when we were all safely home.

Daughter Victoria was in sixth grade in Port Chester on September 11 and we felt sure she would be safe with her teachers until the end of the day. However, daughter Katie was in a special education program in an outside school district and needed to take a school bus home. What the traffic situation would be like in Westchester County was anyone’s guess.

“Let’s go pick up Katie,” Martha said. I told Jean and Sonia that we were heading home, and they waved their hands as if to shoo us out. “Be careful,” Jean said. She had just heard that all bridges and access routes to Manhattan has been closed.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see how far we can get.”

As it turned out, Riverside Drive was virtually empty. When we got to the Bronx-bound Henry Hudson Bridge, I looked for signs it had been closed. Instead, an MTA officer waved us through the tolls. We made it to Katie’s school in Ardsley in half the usual time.

But there were scores of cars jamming the high school parking lot. Parents from all over the district had come to take their children home. We parked at the far end of the lot and headed for the nurse’s office to sign Katie out. We found ourselves waiting in a line of anxious parents as a stressed-out gray-haired nurse scolded us. “This is crazy,” she hissed, “You people are over-reacting,” as she impatiently scribbled her signature on dismissal slips.

After several minutes, Katie was escorted to the office by her teacher, Erin. Erin smiled at us but she must have had other things on her mind. She knew her brother, an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, could have been one of nearly 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center. It would be weeks before his remains were identified, but hours after the attack his fate was still unknown.

That night, as the sun began to set on September 11, the Port Chester members of the family were safely home on Wesley Avenue. Throughout the tri-state area that night, thousands of shaken people who made it home kept an eye on their neighbors’ homes to see if they returned safely. But many never did.

As supper was being prepared, I stepped outside briefly, probably to retrieve something from the car. A military fighter jet roared overhead at a low altitude; if the jet had been slower, I could have read the words on the fuselage, but it thundered angrily and disappeared. My knees buckled as I ducked instinctively, but in an instant it was silent again. I thought to myself, “We really are at war.”

It’s difficult to exaggerate the worldwide effects of September 11. The attacks – and our reaction to the attacks – had an indelible impact on billions of people. On September 12 we learned that our British friends John and Bridget had been from London to New York on September 11. When U.S. airports closed, their flight was diverted to Nova Scotia. They and other passengers were taken in by friendly Canadian farmers until the planes started flying again, on September 14.

Our daughter Lauren had planned to fly from Washington State to Philadelphia on September 11.

“I was going to a wedding in Philadelphia on the 15th,” Lauren recalls. “My flight was supposed to be a red eye leaving on the night of the 11th, but it didn’t get out until the 14th. I waited on line at (the Seattle-Tacoma airport) so long that I got free water and snacks from the Red Cross.”

Lauren was in a tiny minority of Americans who still wanted to fly that week. As it turned out, she made it to the wedding on time. “The minister pointed out that weddings are always audacious acts of hope in a world full of tragedy,” she recalls. “It’s hopeful, loving, life affirming acts like marriage that get us through everything else.”

It was not easy to find loving, life affirming acts in the aftermath of September 11. It’s not any easier today as the war in Afghanistan, launched as a direct reaction to the terror attacks, goes on and on. For many of us, the murder of Osama Bin Laden a decade after the attacks did little to ease the anger and salve the grief.

Perhaps one of the most prophetic statements that came out of September 11 appeared within days after the attacks. It was called, “Deny them their victory,” and it was written by four interfaith leaders* and signed by 4,000 people, including Martha and me and perhaps including you.

“We, American religious leaders, share the broken hearts of our fellow citizens,” the statement said. “The worst terrorist attack in history that assaulted New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, has been felt in every American community. Each life lost was of unique and sacred value in the eyes of God, and the connections Americans feel to those lives run very deep. In the face of such a cruel catastrophe, it is a time to look to God and to each other for the strength we need and the response we will make. We must dig deep to the roots of our faith for sustenance, solace, and wisdom.”

The statement continued: “The terrorists have offered us a stark view of the world they would create, where the remedy to every human grievance and injustice is a resort to the random and cowardly violence of revenge – even against the most innocent . . . The terrorists must feel victorious.

“But we can deny them their victory by refusing to submit to a world created in their image. Terrorism inflicts not only death and destruction but also emotional oppression to further its aims. We must not allow this terror to drive us away from being the people God has called us to be. We assert the vision of community, tolerance, compassion, justice, and the sacredness of human life, which lies at the heart of all our religious traditions. America must be a safe place for all our citizens in all their diversity. It is especially important that our citizens who share national origins, ethnicity, or religion with whoever attacked us are, themselves, protected among us.”

Ten years after the attacks, I still can’t bring myself to watch the television images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. They are simply too painful.

But equally painful has been the cycle of violence that has swirled around us for so many years, with no end in sight.

Five years ago my friend Michael Livingston, then the President of the National Council of Churches, was attending an interfaith gathering at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan. The event, was hosted by the U.S. Ambassador to Kazakhstan, happened to be held on September 11. The Ambassador asked Michael to lead the gathering in prayer.

“God of history,” Michael prayed, “even as we remember the death and deep pain inflicted by such desperate acts, we acknowledge our own participation in a world community that has failed to accept and celebrate our common humanity. We fail one another: when one child goes hungry anywhere in the world, when one person is persecuted for adherence to a particular religion or no religion at all, when preventable diseases cause one unnecessary death, when air and water are polluted or exploited for economic gain.

“Merciful God, we are none of us innocent. And if we share responsibility for the harm we have done to one another in the past—sometimes in the name of religion—then surely we share responsibility for our common future. Help us O God, to resolve to know one another, as you know us; to accept one another, as you accept us, to love one another, as you love us.

“Let the memory of 9/11 move us to build a world of justice without exploitation; of peace without violence; of joy at the sheer wonder of life on this beautiful planet; of community that celebrates the great diversity that is our divine gift.

“God of signs and wonders, move among us as a healing spirit, binding our wounds, forgiving us our debts, reconciling our differences. One world, one God of many names, hear our prayer.”

Amen.
___
* The writers of "Deny Them Their Victory" were Jim Wallis, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, David Saperstein, and Bob Edgar.

God, don't call me at the office

2011-09-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

There are at least two voices of God in the 1956 epic “The Ten Commandments.” One is Charleton Heston, which creates the impression that Moses is talking to himself at the burning bush. It makes you wonder if God or Moses is supposed to be a ventriloquist.

The cinematic device also makes you wonder if Cecil B. DeMille was actually that deep. Is he intentionally raising psycho-theological questions about the inner call of Moses? Or does he really like Heston’s manly voice?

Later in the film, when God spoke as a pillar of flame, the uncredited voice is Donald Hayne, a sometime actor and DeMille’s production assistant. Both baritones affirmed the 1950s notion that God has a male voice. We Boomers quickly grasp the irony in that, because it was our mothers who ordered us to remove our muddy sandals when we entered the house.

When I was a student at Eastern Baptist College in the sixties and seventies, we loved watching rebroadcasts of DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” and the burning bush was one of our favorite scenes. We’d watch slack-jawed as Heston, with magnificently restrained intensity, crept toward the bush while a oddly familiar basso profundo intoned: “Put off thy sandals from thy feet, for the place wheron thou standest is holy ground.”

That’s either a scene of awesome power, or – given that Moses and the bush are both over-acting - a classic of unintended humor. “How do we know,” my Eastern classmate David would ask, “that God sounded like that? How do we know he didn’t sound like Truman Capote?” David is now Father David, an Episcopal priest, and I’m sure neither he nor I have been able to read that passage since then without hearing it in a high-pitched, nasally whine.

Even so, the scene does have power. It tells you what it feels like when God calls you to ministry. Heston and Heston, in scenery-chewing dialogue, do their best to communicate the awesomeness of the encounter.

Heston is playing an unlikely candidate for God’s mission. I mean, the Dude is 75 if he’s a day. He’s a common sheep herder. He’s inarticulate. He’s a confessed murderer. And the fact that he thinks God is speaking to him directly suggests he’s a borderline schizophrenic. Moses recognizes these deficiencies and he’s incredulous that God is calling him to free the children of Israel.

But God sees qualities in Moses that no one else sees. God sees qualities in all of us that are hidden from view, both to ourselves and to others. Sometimes God calls the oddest people to service. Consider Malcolm Muggeridge, the acidic English journalist and agnostic who, late in life, suddenly perceived a convincing case for Catholicism. Tony Blair now devotes much of his time to Christian ministry. And former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, known in his heyday as Jimmie McGroovie, is seeking ordination in the Episcopal priesthood after resigning in shame because he lied about having an affair with an aide.

These are good examples to keep in mind when we find ourselves facing Moses’ dilemma: called by God to an important ministry and utterly convinced that there are millions of people more qualified. God sees the possibilities that are hidden from us.

Even when we’re not looking at ourselves in a mirror, we probably know dozens of people who got God’s call when they least expected it, or when they felt unworthy.

I often think of Irvin Shortess “Shorty” Yeaworth, a film director and musician who died in 2004. In 1970, Shorty, who was six feet tall, organized a school for aspiring filmmakers in his aging studios in Chester Springs, Pa.

“Cinema Institute” was open to all but it mostly catered to young boomers from Christian backgrounds. The institute was designed along lines of a dental or barber college: inexperienced students were assigned to work on real films while experienced professionals guided them. Customers who wanted to make a movie could do it on the cheap by assigning the job to Cinema Institute, and in a few short weeks the school churned out presentable documentaries on nearby Valley Forge National Park and a Mary Kay cosmetic convention in Philadelphia.

I worked on a biographical drama called “The Quiet in the Land,” the story of Christopher Dock, an 18th century Mennonite school teacher. I was selected for the job by my Eastern Baptist College mentor, Professor John L. Ruth, who was author, senior producer and star of the Dock film. I was the film’s key – and only – grip. (The details of that experience must be left to another blog. Suffice it to say that I learned you can’t love filmmaking if you don’t love stress.)

Even so, Cinema Institute was a great experience, in part because I met a lot of people who, like Moses, were called by God to change the focus of their lives. Foremost among the faculty was Don Murray, the Oscar-nominated actor and who lived in the same dormitory style accommodations as the students. The institute was held in January and the 200-year-old buildings in which we lived – a Revolutionary War hospital converted to a film production studio by Shorty – were haphazardly heated. Ice formed in the toilet bowls each morning, and the showers spewed out frigid water. Most of us – including Murray – skipped the showers. We were a redolent hippy horde when the course was over.

One of the classrooms was a small sound stage that simulated a living room, with a fake staircase that disappeared upwards into a nest of black-hooded overhead lights. Posted on the wall was a black-and-white glossy of actor Steve McQueen posing on the staircase. Trivia buffs recognized the scene from the 1958 horror film, “The Blob,” which was McQueen’s break-out starring role.

The director of “The Blob” was Shorty Yeaworth himself. The film, generally assigned three stars and credited as a ground-breaking model of fifties horror drama, was well-known to all of us at the Institute. Shorty also directed other horror films that shivered the timbers of my easily-entertained generation, including “Flaming Teen-Age” (1956), which he also wrote, “4D Man” (1959), and “Dinosaurus” (1960).

It’s going too far to suggest that Shorty was on his way to becoming another John Ford, but he certainly had a knack for the off-beat and his directorial style was widely copied in the fifties. In 1960 he had reasons to believe he would rise even further in cinema history. But the Presbyterian layman and choir director heard God’s call to service, and he abandoned the genre of the weird forever. The creator of “The Blob” began producing and directing films with a Christian message, including “The Gospel Blimp” and “Way Out,” both in 1967. He directed over 400 films for motivational, educational and religious purposes. The films were popular in churches and passably diverting, but none of them achieved the notoriety or generated the income of the cult classics of his youth. But Shorty never looked back. He heard God’s voice and he answered God’s call. I’m sure he gave little thought to what he had given up.

Despite having turned away from the Hollywood hegemony, Shorty had a lot of friends in the film-making community, including “closet” Christians like Murray, who directed “The Cross and the Switchblade” starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada, in 1970, and Robert Lansing.

In later years Shorty devoted himself to easing tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. He died at 78 in July 2004 when he apparently fell asleep and his car went off the road near Petra in Jordan. He was working at the time on an entertainment complex in Jordan called Jordanian Experience at the Aqaba Gateway.

I ran into Shorty several times over the years. He always remembered my name, a remarkable feat of memory that I was too young and self-absorbed to appreciate, and he never failed to ask about other former students of the Institute. I’m sure one thing we students have in common is that whenever the original “Blob” appears on the Sci-Fi channel, we nod knowingly and tell whoever is in the room, “Yeah. I knew the director. Him and me was buds.”

One of the best models of Christian ministry I’ve known is the Rev. Harold Wilke of the United Church of Christ.
Harold served on the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York and directed The Healing Community, which promotes awareness about access to a life of faith. He published numerous books and articles, including “Creating the Caring Congregation,” for congregations moving to integrate persons with disabilities into the faith community. He was a founder of the National Organization on Disability (NOD).

If you know of Harold, you probably remember his unusual role at the the White House signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990. Following the signing, President George H.W. Bush passed the signing pen to Harold. He accepted it with his foot – because he was born without arms.

Harold Wilke had more dexterity in his right foot than I have in my right hand. I had lunch with him on occasion and watched him perform the simple act of eating. Using his toes, which were covered by a faded black sock, he would slip a napkin into his collar, adjust his silverware, and slip morsels of food into his mouth without spilling a crumb. If I asked him a question, he would stare thoughtfully into his coffee, absent-mindedly swirling it as he answered. All with his foot. When we finished eating, he’d slip his foot back into his shoe.

After you knew Harold for a while, you no longer noticed he had no arms at his side. A lot of people didn’t notice it at all. “When I preach in a robe,” he once told me with a rye grin, “people come up to me and say, ‘that was a fine sermon. I notice you’re not one of those preachers who pounds the pulpit.’”

After I got to know Harold well enough to ask impertinent questions, I wondered aloud how long it took him to get dressed in the mornings.

“Faster than you, I’m sure,” he said, pausing for my reaction.

“Look,” he said. “I lay my clothes out every night on the floor. When I get out of bed in the morning, I roll onto them and slither into them like a snake.” He twisted and weaved his shoulders hypnotically to show me how it was done.

I never did talk to Harold about his call to ministry, possibly because I thought it might be more personal than how he puts on his underwear. But I’m sure there was a time when God came to Harold as God did to many of us, and said, “Have I got a job for you.” And I wonder if Harold’s first reaction was to complain like Moses: “Are you kidding, God? I’m nearsighted. My socks all need darning. People stare at me like I’m a side-show freak. And did I mention you didn’t give me arms?”

Probably Harold Wilke would not have been the first person you would think of as a candidate for ministry. Possibly his initial interviews with an ordination council had their awkward moments. But God knew what God was doing.

Harold was born with a profound disability and profound insights into what it was like to be disabled. He became the premier leader in developing ministries with and for disabled persons, and he was a prime mover in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. What a poorer world this would be if Harold Wilke had turned away from God’s call.

Probably Moses wouldn’t have been the first person you would think of as a candidate for ministry, and the biblical record is clear that Moses tried to evade it. What a poorer world this would be if Moses had turned away from God.

You may not be the first person anyone would think of as a candidate for ministry, either. But God has given each of us gifts we may not even know about yet. And when God calls us, the hardest thing in the world may be to say yes.

But what a poorer world this will be if we turn away from God.

Shiphrah and Puah and Miep

2011-08-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about the Stockholm Syndrome, I thought it might describe the stresses of a Swedish elementary school.

In fact, the term refers to a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm in which hostages became emotionally attached to their captors and defended them after nearly a week in captivity. The syndrome, described by psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, was cited a year later when heiress Patty Hearst, after being kidnapped, bound and raped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, changed her name to Tanya and blithely joined the band of hippy cutthroats.

Maybe that’s not exactly what’s happening in the fifth grade, but I can remember instances when my teacher seemed more like a subjugator than an educator.

Mrs. Seymour was not the best teacher in the Morrisville-Eaton school district, but she was the strictest disciplinarian. Her morning roll calls hummed so quietly that we could hear the muffled chaos in adjoining class rooms. Mrs. Seymour kept order by using her hand as a weapon of mass destruction. She believed in corporal punishment and she could slap kids silly.

She had two favorite targets: an African American girl and a boy with huge ears. The girl usually caught the teacher’s hand when she turned from a whispered conversation with the girl behind her and the sharp slapping sound made the hair stand on our heads.

I would hear the girl sobbing as Mrs. Seymour walked away but I was afraid to turn around and look at her. She was the only child of color in the room, so it wasn’t hard to discern Mrs. Seymour’s problem with her. I don’t know what bothered her about the big-eared boy. Maybe she thought he was funny looking. She would slap him without warning and he would look stunned, protecting his cheek with his elbow.

Of course I knew it was abusive behavior but I never mentioned it to anyone, not even Dad, who was a teacher in the same building. At 11, I thought nasty teachers were a rare but unavoidable fact of childhood and I did my best to keep conflict to a minimum. I made a tactical decision never to associate with the weeping girl or the stunned boy. Mrs. Seymour was nice to most of the other children in the class. Long before we knew what the Stockholm Syndrome was, I greedily accepted her affection and occasional hugs.

It’s not a happy memory and it’s not even an unusual experience. Most of us had toughening moments on the Serengetis of our playgrounds and we try not to remember the details. We learned very early how difficult it is to stand up to abusers and bullies.

That's what makes it all the more remarkable when we discover people who have the courage to take that stand. Judged by the behavioral standards of the Genesis patriarchs, two characters introduced in the first chapter of Exodus are exceptional:

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live." But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. Exodus 1:15-17.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the courage of these two women, and equally difficult to emulate it.

Shiphrah and Puah were members of an oppressed class whose daily survival depended on their ability to stay out of the way, avoid attracting attention and do what they were told. Pharaoh, the undisputed monarch of a vast empire, was worried that the enslaved but prolific Jews would soon outnumber his army. He decided to thin their ranks by killing the boy babies. It’s unclear if he gave the order to other midwives, or how many of them decided to get along by going along and smothered the babies between their mothers’ legs. But we do know that Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh and let the boy babies live.

They lied to Pharaoh and told him the Hebrew women delivered their babies before they could get to them, and Pharaoh, a unique blend of ruthlessness and dumbness, let them go. But Shiphrah and Puah had no reason to count on official stupidity to protect them. When they defied Pharaoh, they expected to die. They chose to die rather than carry out an order they knew was wrong. Their survival was an unexpected miracle.

It’s a little surprising that Shiphrah and Puah are such minor characters in our Sunday school lessons. Their courage and faithfulness transcends all whose stories were told in Genesis, and sets the stage for the dramatic events that will follow in Exodus.

They are pivotal figures whose roles were noted but not fully acknowledged by the writers of Exodus, who were of course male. With a little more insight, Exodus would have opened with the lines, “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not notice Shiphrah and Puah, lowly Hebrew women who would soon outsmart him and ignite the long fuse to revolution.”

Shiphrah and Puah set the gold standard for defending the powerless against bullies and tyrants. Almost all of us get a chance to take stands similar to theirs, even if on a smaller scale. All of us would like to think we would have their courage to stand up for others. But when you look at the history of the world, you quickly realize how rare were Shiphrah and Puah.

During the Holocaust, the Gestapo offered small rewards to citizens who turned in hiding Jews: a bottle of schnapps, a bag of sugar, a carton of cigarettes and occasionally a handful of deutschmarks. It doesn’t add up to 50 pieces of silver, but to many trying to survive in the stark deprivation of wartime, it was temptation enough.

Tens of thousands willingly followed orders comparable to Pharaoh’s command to kill Jewish baby boys. Those who reported Jews to the Gestapo received minor gratuities, but if they had failed to do so they could be shot or dragged outside their houses and hanged. Thousands who followed the model of Shiphrah and Puah to save Jews from certain death paid with their own lives.

We know some of the names of those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Miep Gies (pictured above), who died at 101 in January 2010, is the woman who hid Anne Frank, her family and friends in an unused room over an office building in Amsterdam. It was Gies who rescued Anne Frank’s diary when the family was betrayed and arrested in August 1944. Anne’s father, Otto, the sole survivor, published the diary in 1947.

Gies, who would have been summarily executed if police had known of her complicity in hiding the Franks, believed it was worth the risk. Television interviews reveal a woman with a distinctly non-heroic demeanor. She was small and soft-spoken and her ability to disappear into a crowd may have helped save her life. It was only in a figurative sense that she stood tall, like Shiphrah and Puah.

Toward the end of her long life, Gies wrote, “I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more – much more - during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.”

Persons who stood in that long line of good people were Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved an estimated 90,000 Jews in Hungary by granting Swedish passports, setting up safe-houses, and distributing food and medical supplies. Jan Karski was smuggled into the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw and reported what was happening to President Roosevelt and other world leaders.

Too, Cardinal Archbishop of Lwow (Count Andreas Szeptycki) ordered that the clergy reporting to him act to save Jews. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a founder of the Polish resistance, organized an underground organization comprised mostly of Catholics to save Jews.

It’s no coincidence that so many of the righteous gentiles who risked their lives for their fellow human beings were Christians.

One of the remarkable phenomena to emerge during the period was the Confessing Church, a reaction to the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement that embraced Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic statements and de-emphasized the Old Testament.

When Hitler embraced the movement, the Confessing Church arose and declared the Nazis to be heretical. Some of the leaders of the Confessing Church, such as Martin Niemöller or Heinrich Grüber, were sent to concentration camps. While Grüber and Niemöller survived, not all did: Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sent first to Tegel Prison, then to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was hanged.

Throughout history there have been Shiphrahs and Puahs who have risked their lives to stand as a barrier between the powerful and the weak. And, like Shiphrah and Puah, “they feared God; they did not do as the King … commanded them” (Exodus 1:17). They recognized an authority far above the powers and principalities of perfumed Pharaohs and ranting dictators.

Pharaoh’s power was dazzling and limitless. The Nazis were evil on a scale that drains the imagination. They were all archetypal bullies against which all other bullies pale.

Usually, the forces we are called to confront are not as awesome. Racist fifth grade teachers. Homophobes who shout “God hates fags” at soldiers’ funerals. Islamaphobes who think Muslims are the enemy and yell vile threats at Muslim children. Xenophobes who think 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S. should be arrested, deported, or deprived of basic protections under the law. Ecclesiophobes who hate the churches for accepting and welcoming everyone – everyone – into the fellowship of Christ.

We often encounter individuals or groups who don’t believe God loves everyone, or that Jesus accepts everyone. What do we do when we hear these people say hateful, bullying or merely ignorant things about the people they don’t understand? My approach is to be passive-aggressive. Not wishing to get involved, I listen silently and politely to the rants of ignoramuses. But I write nasty blogs about them later.

The lesson of Shiphrah and Puah is that we have to take a stand when evil is afoot. And the lesson of the Gospel is that we don’t have to keep silent about it. God has given us the authority to speak out.

Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. (Matthew 16:16-20)

Jesus (in the non-apostolic view) is not addressing Peter alone. He is addressing all who confess him. Jesus calls you and me individually, and all of us together, to be the bedrock on which the church is built. And along with that comes the keys to the kingdom, the authority – and the responsibility – to speak God’s truth.

Shiphrah and Puah took a courageous stand to speak God’s truth in action, even if it meant their lives. Jesus bids us to take similar stands. Because he has anointed us

“to bring good news to the poor … proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18).

Whenever tyrants or bullies or ignoramuses bid us to do evil, or to stand aside silently while they taunt and threaten the weak and powerless, Shiphrah and Puah have shown us the way. And Christ gives us the authority and, God willing, the courage to act.

Who was that masked man?

2011-08-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

If it hadn’t been for Sid Caesar, I wouldn’t know that Joseph’s reunion with his brothers is one of the funniest schticks in the bible.

“And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it ... Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.” (Genesis 45:2; 14-15a.)

Call me insensitive, but the scene is hilarious. It’s set up like a spoof of This is Your Life on Caesar’s TV comedy program Your Show of Shows (1950-1954). Caesar plays Al Duncey, a man in the audience who is unwillingly pulled to the stage by Carl Reiner to have his life examined on national television. (Yes, kids, Ralph Edwards actually did have a show like that, but it was never as amusing as Caesar’s send-up.)

The riotous episode reunites Duncey with his long-lost Uncle Goofy, played by Howard Morris. Their reunion is so emotional that it frustrates Reiner’s efforts to move the show along. Caesar and Morris weep and embrace and embrace and weep and can’t keep their hands off each other. Finally, as Reiner insists it’s time to move on, Caesar carries Morris to a chair. But still sobbing convulsively, Morris climbs on Caesar’s back and howls as Caesar awkwardly drags him to back stage. But as additional guests are introduced, Uncle Goofy leaps into the huddles of reunited relatives, all of them blubbering copiously.

Okay, it gives me pause that I can recall the details a 58-year-old TV show but can’t remember the skeleton on last night’s Bones. Be that as it may, once you see that scene, I dare you to read about Joseph and his weeping brothers without snickering. I try to be piously reflective, but all I can see are these big hairy dudes, their desert burlap soggy with tears, climbing over each other to embrace their gilded brother whose Egyptian mascara is streaking down his cheeks. It has all the homoerotic energy of a Worldwide Wrestling Federation bout. I love it.

Granted, the intent of the story is not so much to amuse as to remind the reader that God is the God of history, and that the brothers’ scheme to sell Joseph into slavery was brought to naught. In the dramatic moment when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, he tells them not to feel bad because their dastardly scheme was God’s doing, not theirs.

“So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and Lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.” (Genesis 45:8)

It’s a little difficult, in the second decade of the 21st century, to accept the concept of God as the governor of history. The Holocaust, Stalinist genocides, endless wars, chronic human hatred, AIDS, cancer, xenophobic excesses, 9/11, bad things happening to good people, all make it hard to explain to our children how God watches over us and keeps us safe. In the late 20th century, evidence of God’s presence was so rare TIME asked, “Is God Dead?” and artists and writers began to insinuate the theme into their work. Prior Walter, the angel-designated prophet living with AIDS in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, expresses his anger that God has gone missing:

“He isn’t coming back. And even if he did … If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph or whatever in the Garden again...if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century He returned to see...how much suffering His abandonment had created, if He did come back you should sue the bastard. That's my only contribution to all this Theology. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.”

Not everyone believes God has abandoned creation, although theater audiences generally applaud Prior Walter’s bitter complaint.

But even if the God-in-history angle takes some sorting out, the central character Joseph remains intriguing. He is a classic literary conceit: the person with issues who, for whatever reason, disappears for a long period of time and reappears at a dramatic moment to save the day. The conceit often includes an element of mystery, a secret identity, or a masquerade. Joseph the shepherd boy disappears and, for all practical purposes, is lost to history. Then, when he is all but forgotten but when it matters most, he reappears as a person of great power.

Modern literature is full of such characters. The ones we knew when we were children were Superman and the Lone Ranger. Both mythical heroes shared with Joseph a violent banishment from everything they knew. They wandered in an uncertain wilderness and eventually emerged with amazing powers and indisputable moral authority. Superman was a refugee from a shattered planet who wandered the known universe before arriving on earth, where his super strength and moral authority were virtually messianic. (See Messiah in Blue Tights from an earlier era of Little Scrolls, below.)

The Lone Ranger was a virtuous lawman whose band of Texas Rangers was massacred by the Butch Cavendish gang and who lay dying in the sun until his loyal indigenous associate and life companion Tonto nursed him back to health. Long after Cavendish was no longer around to recognize him as the ranger he couldn’t kill, he wore a mask as a sign of moral authority and justice for all.

There are also interesting Jungian twists on the story of people who, like Joseph, disappear and later reappear with a different image. There are legends in many cultures about soldiers who go away to war and are not heard from for years, until they mysteriously reappear and resume conjugal relations with their startled wives. One such tale was told in the 1993 film, Sommersby, starring Jody Foster and Richard Gere. Jack Sommersby (Gere), a surly and somewhat abusive man, leaves his farm to fight for the Confederacy and never returns. That’s okay with his wife (Foster), who manages very well on her own. But then a man strongly resembling Jack and claiming to be him shows up unexpectedly. He looks like Jack, but there’s something wrong with him: he’s nice. Is he an imposter? And if he is, why does he know so much about Jack’s past life? It’s a mystery and, for those still planning to get the DVD, I won’t reveal the ending. But the story is very Joseph-like: he’s here, he’s gone, he’s back – and he’s very different.

My favorite Joseph character in literature is Jean Valjean, the central figure in Victor Hugo’s massive 1862 novel, Les Misérables and, more recently, lead tenor in the Broadway opera of the same name.

The full story of Jean Valjean is too complicated to be told here, and the musical drastically abridged it, but literati who made it through the novel know he was born of poor parents in tiny French village. When he was a child, his parents died. One suspects Hugo is not trying to be funny, but the story goes that Jean’s father, also Jean Valjean, falls out of a tree and his mother, Jeanne Valjean, dies of milk fever. Jean is raised by his sister Jeanne Valjean, but hard times fall upon them and young Jean steals a loaf of bread so they can live.

It’s at that point that Jean, like Joseph, disappears from familiar surroundings. Like Joseph, he is forced into the insidious form of slavery maintained by the French penal system. Assigned prisoner number 24601, his sentence for stealing a loaf of bread is five years. Adding penalties for bad behavior, he’s in the clink for 19 years.

When he is finally released, Valjean is taken in by Bishop Myriel, a kindly only man in the town of Digne. But Valjean steals the bishop’s silver and runs off. When police capture him and return him to the bishop, Myriel pretends to scold Valjean for not taking the silver candlesticks as well (“Would you leave the best behind?”). Chastened, Valjean turns away from temptation and commits his life to God.

When we see Valjean again in the musical, he has evolved from hardened criminal to the virtuous mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. Just how that happened is voluminously detailed by Hugo, but for theater-goers it’s enough to gauge the dramatic ascendency from prisoner to chief executive. It’s not unlike the rise from slave to Pharaoh’s first minister.

For the rest of the story, Jean Valjean’s life is full ups and downs: he risks his life to protect prostitutes and an escaped prisoner, among others, and when his identify is discovered by police Inspector Javert, he is forced to go into hiding with Collette, his adopted daughter whom he has rescued from a life of poverty and abuse. It’s all in the book, and much, much more.

But at the end of the story, Valjean can look back on his life and know that God has brought him from a life of poverty and crime to positions of power and opportunity that he has used in love to protect the weak, the poor, the young, the oppressed and the disempowered. I defy anyone to hear without weeping the song in the final scene of the musical:

Take my hand
And lead me to salvation.
Take my love,
For love is everlasting.
And remember
The truth that once was spoken:
To love another person
Is to see the face of God.

That truth once spoken – to love another person is to see the face of God – is the real message in the story of Joseph and his brothers. Despite all the angry, cruel and resentful baggage they are carrying, they still find it possible to love each other. That’s a major miracle, and it enables all the brothers to see God’s face as they gather in Pharaoh’s pristine palace.

It was not, as Joseph told his brothers, God who made them sell their little brother into slavery so many years before. His brothers committed that sin on their own. It can’t be blamed on God.

Nor is the story of Joseph and his brothers a confirmation that God controls the events of history. Evidently, in the fallen world in which we live, God has designated that responsibility to a flawed humanity.

So maybe it’s not history, per se, that God controls. What God controls are the hearts and minds of the individuals who make history. Earlier in Genesis, when Joseph first recognized his brothers after years of separation, he had the power to arrest them, torture them and execute them. But God spoke to his heart, and that potential vindictive history – so common in our time and in all times – never happened.

It is the God of love, not the God of history, who is introduced to us late in the book of Genesis. Love changes everything. And when the brothers repented of their cruelty, their jealousy and their sins and decided to love each other, history was changed forever.

And they knew it had changed because, when they least expected it, they could see the face of God.

Pictured above: Clockwise from top left: Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger; Colm Wilkinson as Jean Valjean; George Reeves as Superman; Joseph and His Brothers by Francois Pascal Simon Baron Gerard; Sommersby with Jody Foster and Richard Gere.

Messiah in Blue Tights

2011-08-08T17:50:00.000-07:00

NOTE: Man Of Steel flies into theaters June 14, 2013. Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring, Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel, Diane Lane as Martha Kent, Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Michael Shannon as General Zod, and Russel Crowe as Jor-El. This anticipated event inspires a re-file of The Little Scroll published in The American Baptist in 1979 to celebrate Christopher Reeves and Superman the Movie.

Even a Sunday school dropout would recognize the plot:

A wise, all-knowing father in the sky looks down on the earth. He sees a torn and primitive planet badly in need of help, and he sends the world his only begotten son.

The son, whose miraculous arrival on earth is heralded by a star in the heavens, learns the virtues of working with his hands from his adopted earthly dad. The lad grows in the favor of his friends, even as he begins to notice that he has powers and abilities far beyond those of mere mortals.

Then, the boy senses that his time has come, and he departs to the barren wilderness for a time of testing. While meditating in the wasteland, the spirit of his other-worldly father prepares him for the mission to come.

Finally, transfigured and self-assured, the young man returns to society, which stands in awe of his miracles, his goodness and his power. Only the forces of evil stand in his way, and these forces launch a never-ending struggle against him …

Movie makers recognize a good plot when they see one, and this particular storyline, despite its familiarity, has found a new vehicle. Superman has proven to be a critical and popular success.

Unfortunately, Superman opened in first-run-theatres two weeks before Christmas, just as the television networks were broadcasting their own special programs about the coming of that other messiah, Jesus. Anyone whose knowledge of messiahs is restricted to what is shown on screens will have to conclude that the messiah in the manger is no match for the messiah in blue tights.

The Jesus of the tube is a fairly one-dimensional and distant character whose ice-blue eyes look through people and who has a penchant for talking at clouds rather than to crowds. People keep their distance from him as if they thought he had some benign form of leprosy, but otherwise treat him with the same deference Philadelphians reserve for Frank Sinatra.

For the most part (NBC’s Jesus of Nazareth being a rare exception) the Jesus of the tube never sweats, never smiles, and never relates to people as if he has the slightest idea what it is like to be the human beings he has come to save.

Superman, on the other hand, is a perfect balance of just-folks humanity and all-powerful being. In the skillful portrayal of actor Christopher Reeve, the man of steel performs his miracles with a casual warmth. Even after he has single-handedly saved a portion of humanity from destruction and resurrected the dead – two singularly messianic acts – he is as human and as approachable as your next door neighbor. Moreover, Superman’s alter-ego, Clark Kent, is a kind of a bumbling Everyman who gets hung up in the same revolving doors and waits for the same never-arriving elevators as us all. Superman is one god who knows what it is like to be human.

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to isolate those things which Jesus offers but Superman doesn’t. Superman doesn’t offer to reconcile the world with his father – there’s not even evidence Jor-El is mad at us. More important, though Superman is a nice guy who obviously wants to be liked, he certainly doesn’t claim to have the words of eternal life. Superman can only save you if you fall out of a building.

On balance, despite the fact that people who haven’t darkened a church doorstep in years are flocking to see Superman, Jesus is the superior messiah. The question is: if it came down to the ultimate competition, would Jesus or Superman win the Academy Award?

For those who have had a personal experience with Jesus, there would be no contest.

For those unchurched people who rely on movies and TV shows for their knowledge of messianic figures, however, I think the competition would be a bit stiffer. Those who seek Jesus only on the screen are not likely to find him, They will only find a plastic figure seeking to portray a God to whom we cannot relate – and Superman will be a preferable alternative.

But dramatists and actors who portray Jesus ought to learn something from the screen portrayal of Superman. People are fascinated by Superman not because he is super, but because he is a super being who acts human. He is no aloof, unapproachable person who is removed from the aches, pains and emotions of humanness – and that makes him all the more super.

But the same is true of Jesus. The messiah who reconciles the world to God is no celluloid automaton who performs special-effects miracles. Jesus transforms history not because he is a distant God with no ties to humanity, but because he is God in human flesh: a human being capable of pain, perspiration and laughter. It is the power of his godliness which saves us, but it is the warmth of his humanness which attracts us to him. If he were merely God without laughter or tears, he would not be so humanly appealing or even, in literary terms, so unusual. But he is a wonderful savior because he is not merely God – he is one of us. And that is awesome indeed.

It may be that television, with its infatuation with melodrama and special effects, is not capable of portraying the real Jesus. It would be a helpful start, however, if the TV Jesus were portrayed as being a little more human. That would be an important step toward making him more godly.

Joseph had it coming

2011-08-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

“Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him.” Genesis 37:19-20)

The famous phrase is inscribed on the tomb of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta. But there’s another phrase from the same chapter of Genesis that not only clinches the dysfunction of Jacob’s family, but informs only-children what it’s like to have siblings.

“But when his brothers saw that their father loved Joseph more that all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.” (Genesis 37: 4)

This particular passage, like the sagas of Cain and Abel, Jacob’s battles with his brother Esau, the parable of the prodigal son and others, is easier to understand if you have siblings. The rivalry is natural. And while most sibling encounters don’t lead to fratricide, many sisters and brothers who have pulled back from one another’s throats could paraphrase Chris Rock: “I don’t approve of brothers killing brothers – but I understand.”

I was the oldest of four brothers and a sister and while I spent my teen years wishing I was a Kennedy, I now realize that to outsiders, we looked like a black-and-white sit-com. “The Adventures of Elmore and Mary”. “Leave it to Paul”. “Dad knows best.” Even our daily dialogue, recalled decades later, sounds like it had a laugh track.

Scene: 14-year-old Philip is in his room typing letters to his political idols while Dad has drafted Larry and Jim to help him hang tools on the garage wall.
Dad: I can’t find the stud. Where’s the stud?
Jim: He’s upstairs typing. (Laughter. Applause.)

I looked for a picture of the five of us kids together and had to cut and paste. The black-and-white portrait looks like it was initially discarded by the photographer, Mr. Nickel, who by day was a teaching colleague of Dad’s. Seated from left, I’m the one with evil eye, Jim is in the striped Charlie Brown T-shirt gazing into a distant future, Larry is happily day dreaming about Ann Margaret (or he should have been) and Paul is studying the photo optic mechanics of the SLR camera. In part to avoid exacerbating sibling issues, I added a picture of baby sister Susan. In living color as well as in her Little Miss Sunshine stage, Susan is modeling Christmas pajamas. Actually, the sibling issues began before Susan was born when Mom began preparing us boys for a new member of the family. Paul held resolutely to his demands: “I want a doggie.”

I spent two glorious years as an only child. Alone and adored in the tiny apartment over Flora Cramer’s house on Main Street in Morrisville, I couldn’t have been happier. Early snapshots show me sitting on Dad’s lap, chewing on his pipe, or sitting bathed by sunlight in a bay window, watching bulldozers on Main Street in 1947. I even enjoyed the luxury of an imaginary friend only I could see, but whose ectoplasmic form was mysteriously captured on film while I stood nearby. (See the red circled figure above, for which I offer no explanation.)

As any only-child knows, having one’s parents to one’s self is an Edenic experience. It was only after the fall that siblings Cain and Abel began competing for parental attention and Cain killed Abel. Looking back, I think Cain had a reasonable defense. God liked Abel best and praised him at Cain's expense. “The Lord said to Cain why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin in couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” (Genesis 4:6-7) Just the kind of condescending, parental preaching no child can bear.

My brother Larry was born almost exactly two years after me. I was too young to be aware of any Cain-like hostilities toward him, but these animosities are often unconscious and revealed in family tales told decades later. One of my favorite relatives was often reminded by her mother that when she was a toddler, she reacted poorly to the usurpation of a baby sister. “What shall we do with Sissy today?” her mother asked her. “We could drown her,” she suggested.

I don’t recall having fratricidal impulses when I first met Larry – and I should interject here that Larry is a retired architect, writer and an active member of Calvary Baptist Church in Denver. I don’t encounter his quiet wit and unconditional affection often enough. But perhaps it was not always so.

When I close my eyes, I can actually remember this: I’m not sure how old we were, but Larry had just started crawling. We were still living in the apartment, and we must have been rambunctious (one of Mom’s favorite words) because Flora the landlady often knocked on our door to ask Mom to keep the noise down. Those ominous visits would unnerve Mom, but rarely deterred me as I took advantage of my superior ambulation to chase Larry with objects he found terrifying, my favorite being a serpentine enema hose I found in the bathroom.

One day, when Mom left the apartment for a few moments – probably to apologize to the landlady for the noise – Larry and I were playing in the bedroom. There was a tall, narrow dresser in the room and I enjoyed pulling out the drawers to form steps so I could climb to the top. Larry, not old enough to attempt such a journey, would watch longingly as I giddily ascended. As I sat on the top of the dresser this particular morning and looked down at Larry looking up at me, I had a sudden inspiration. I scurried back down the creaking drawers, opened the bottom one, and pushed Larry into it. Noticing how perfectly he fit in it (once all the underwear and lingerie had been tossed out), I pushed the drawer shut.

Silence.

Larry was not whimpering. He likes it! Hey, Larry! Exhilarated, I scurried to the top of the dresser to declare my domain. Before I reached the top, the dresser began to topple forward. I jumped to safety, but the dresser fell on its face in a pile of its former contents. All the drawers made exhaling sounds and closed under the weight.

Silence.

I wish I could say this was the last time in my life that an action of mine had unexpected consequences. I was beginning to surmise that what had happened was not good and I might be in trouble. The feeling did not go away when I heard my mother’s footsteps outside.

More than sixty years later, I can only wonder what was going through my mother’s mind. “I will only be gone a minute. What can happen in a minute?” She must have heard the muffled crash of the dresser as she came through the door.

I can’t remember the expression on Mom’s face, but given that she had a progressive cornea deterioration disease that would take away her sight, she must have questioned the fuzzy scene before her. The tall dresser was now prone in a pile of socks, panties and boxers on the floor. I was standing calmly beside it.

“What happened?” Mom asked.

I looked at her quizzically.

“What did you do?”

I shrugged.

“What made the dresser fall over?”

I shrugged.

Then, more urgently: “Where is your brother?”

I was too young to know that the answer to that question had already been scripted in the bible, so I stuck to my story. I shrugged.

At this point Larry, who may have been shrewdly silent while waiting to see if he was in some kind of trouble, decided it was time to whimper.

My mother looked stunned, and at first I thought it might have been the dresser itself that was whining. Not understanding what was happening, Mom’s eyes darted around the room to see where Larry’s voice was coming from.

“Where is he?”

I shrugged again, but thought it not inconsistent with my testimony to put my thumb in my mouth and nod toward the bottom drawer.

As soon as she grasped what had happened, the power of a protective lioness surged through her veins. With unnatural strength, Mom pushed the heavy dresser on its side and pulled open the drawer. Larry tumbled out unharmed and, so far as I could see, unruffled. Compared to being chased with an enema hose, he probably thought snuggling in the warm recesses of a piece of furniture was no big deal.

I can’t remember what happened after that – whether Mom muttered something about just waiting “until your father gets home” or whether this sibling confrontation resulted in punishments or consequences. But it does remind me that when it comes to sibling relationships, anything is possible.

My siblings and I were alternately loving and rowdy, forgiving and aggressive and always competitive for attention. We got into loud fights and vicious wrestling matches that led to the parental prime directive: don’t bleed in here. When the three youngest members of our blended family engaged in the same loud confrontations in Port Chester, my spouse Martha – an only-child – was appalled and thought there must be something wrong with them. But as one-of-five, I knew better. The sibling rivalry was normal. All too normal.

The story of Joseph and his brothers begins in Genesis 37, and it’s not a pretty one. Joseph, the youngest of Jacob’s large brood of sons – remember Jacob, the dirty rotten scoundrel who stole his brother’s birthright? – is his father’s favorite. “Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his children, because he was the son of his old age,” goes the story (Genesis 37:3). You can’t be an only-child and understand why that’s a dangerous dynamic, but it also helps to be old. I’m 65, and a miracle baby at this stage of our lives would certainly attract my attention. I would probably spend the rest of my life staring at him with my mouth open.

This is probably what happened to Joseph, and both he and his brothers noticed that their old man was constantly staring at Joseph with his mouth open. And Joseph began to get the idea that he was special. His father lavished him with gifts, including the famous robe of many colors – actually “a long robe with sleeves” if the correct translation is used – and Joseph proceeded to make several tactical errors that must be explained by the fact that his frontal lobe had not developed. He had dreams that sheaves representing his brothers bowed down to his sheaf and, stupidly, he told his brothers about it. The dreams continued, and “his brothers were jealous of him.” (Genesis 37:11) They plotted to kill him but, out of mercy or guilt, they sold the boy to Midianite traders for 20 shekels of silver. The Midianites took Joseph to Egypt. In a breathtaking act of sibling cruelty, they killed a goat and smeared the blood of Joseph’s coat so Jacob would think the boy was dead.

The story has been told in many forms for millennia. One of my favorite versions is the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, where the Pharaoh of Egypt is portrayed as an Elvis impersonator. But the fate of Joseph and his brothers is yet to be told, and the Common Lectionary wants us to stop reading here today. Imagine Joseph in shackles, humiliated and rejected, in the hands of a Midianite caravan en route to Egypt. What happens next? It’s a lectionary cliff-hanger.

Now, back to my own band of sibs. We turned out all right. As time passed we grew up and began our own families in various parts of the country. We eventually evolved into occasionally mature and often nurturing human beings who love each other and wish we had more opportunities to see each other. Growing up in Elmore and Mary’s place may not have been easy on Mary and Elmore, but we survived. And looking back on it, the memories are happy ones.*

And one of the benefits of growing up as competitive siblings is that when we read the story of Joseph and his brothers, we don’t have to Google bible commentaries to understand what is happening. We know. We lived it.

Perhaps very few of us would have sold our most annoying sibling into slavery. But it would have crossed our minds.
And the grace we hold in common is that the God who watched over Joseph and brought him from slavery to salvation is the same God who brings order to our own lives. The God who guided Joseph’s brothers from murderous dysfunction to ultimate reconciliation is the same God who watches over us all.

Fraternal love may not be instinctive, and it’s not always the sort of thing we can accomplish on our own. But with God’s grace, siblings can transcend their natures. With God’s grace, we can emerge from the Jungian tumult as sisters and brothers together.

* Larry, as I mentioned earlier, is a retired architect in Denver. Jim is a semi-retired physician in Saranac Lake, N.Y. Paul is an electrical engineer in Saint Cloud, Fla. Susan is a healthcare professional in Orlando, Fla.

Wrestling the Angel of our Better Nature

2011-07-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

Karl Barth never heard of cable news, but he’d be reeling this week if he read the bible with CNN blaring in his ear.

With the federal debt ceiling deadline looming and civilization hanging in the balance, Republicans and Democrats in Congress grappled to a sweaty impasse. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22-31), politicians of both parties stubbornly refused to yield. And while politicians tussled over which federal programs would be slashed to cut the budget by billions or trillions, few worried that proposed cuts will do serious damage to programs that support the very poor. It’s as if, when Jesus told his disciples to feed a hungry crowd of 5,000, the disciples told the kid with the fish and chips to get lost (Matthew 14:13-21).

The partisan stalemate in Washington is infuriating. A half century ago, when I was about 15, the faculty of Morrisville-Eaton Central School presented a whimsical drama for the entertainment of our tiny central New York community. I don’t remember the name of the play but I remember Mrs. Drake, the school librarian, portrayed a character given the memorable line:

“Thirty needles and thirty pins and thirty dirty Republicans.”

As one of the town’s rare Kennedy supporters, I liked the line. But Mrs. Drake, a pillar in our mostly Republican village, resented the line and suggested it be changed to:

“Thirty dogs and thirty cats and thirty dirty Democrats.”

Copyright issues and the fact that Mrs. Drake was playing a left-leaning dowager convinced her she had to say the line as it was written. But fifty years on, I’m beginning to agree with her on both counts. The wresting match between dirty Republicans and dirty Democrats is not pretty.

No one knows what will happen Tuesday if Congress does not raise the federal borrowing limit, but most analysts think it will be bad – very bad. Fictional White House staffer Toby Ziegler said on an episode of the NBC television drama The West Wing, failure to act will mean this: “The immediate collapse of the U.S. economy, followed by Japan sinking into the sea, followed by a worldwide depression the likes of which no mortal can imagine. Followed by week two.”

Yet Republicans and Democrats continue to tumble on the brink. Clearly some 307 million of us innocent bystanders have the right to ask: What the hell is wrong with you?

What is wrong is that leaders of both parties have danced to the edge of disaster because they think their posturing will help them consolidate power. They are seeking to maneuver their way into majorities in both houses of Congress and take over the White House in 2012. Never mind that increasing numbers of American voters are disgusted by their inability to compromise on a plan to avert economic disaster. This week-end’s legislative drama made that clear enough. First Speaker John Boehner posted a bill that would require the government to revisit the debt question in the midst of next year’s campaign. The bill passed the House late Friday, despite the fact that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it would never pass the senate, President Obama said he would veto it, and a score of Tea Party Republicans refused to support it. Then Saturday, Reid presented a Senate bill which purported to include all the provisions demanded by Republicans, but it was dismissed in a symbolic vote in the Republican House. Back to the brink.

If all this wrangling is about winning control of Congress and the White House next year, one wonders how valuable these acquisitions will be in a post-default America. I envision passing the tattered figures of the House and Senate leaders as they stumble in the steaming rubble of post-apocalypse Washington. “How’s that take-over plan working out for you, Guys?”

Republicans and Democrats have made their positions clear. The GOP calls for lowering the national debt by making massive cuts to the budget but without raising taxes. Democrats say the debt must be reduced by spending cuts and by implementing new revenue streams, mostly in the form increased taxes on the very rich. Both parties say their approach will require huge sacrifices in order reduce the debt, and both say they are acting in the interest of the American middle class. But who is making the sacrifices? Obviously not the rich. And really not the middle class. I haven’t been asked to sacrifice anything to save my country. Have you?

Sisters and brothers, we face a scary week. Both the president and the speaker express confidence that they will work out a compromise before the economy of the United States slides into Sheol, but what if they don’t? The situation has become so bad that you’ve got to wonder if human wisdom can prevail. We have found ourselves inside a Roman tragedy in which human greed and folly have created a situation so twisted and bound with knots so complex that human hands will never untie them. When classical plays got to this stage, there was only one solution: the deus ex machina – the god in the machine, which is to say, Mighty Mouse – here I come to save the day – or some godlike figure who will be lowered onto the stage to offer godlike solutions to human dilemmas.

Come, Captain America!

Actually, if you’re the type who reads the back pages of the paper, you may have noticed that the god in the machine has actually landed on stage. The question now is whether the god will win enough audience applause to attract the attention of the wrestling wretches on stage.

Last April, a group of unusual Christians came together with the idea that the budget debate in Washington, which focused on taxing the rich and protecting the middle class, was omitting an element that breaks God’s heart. That element was the struggling poor in the United States – families who lost their homes in the recession, who live in their cars or on the street, working families unable to rise above the poverty line, children who go to bed hungry most nights, elderly and disabled struggling to survive – when was the last time you heard your favorite politician speak about these poor and vulnerable populations?

Last April this unusual group of Christians came together to form a Circle of Protection around government programs that support the poor. The group is unusual because it's composed of Christians who usually don’t talk to each other: the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, Sojourners, Bread for the World, the Alliance to End hunger and more – liberal Protestants, Evangelicals and Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, historic African American churches, living peace churches and others. These groups have historically followed different paths of ministry. But last April, they agreed on one thing: when the politicians in Washington talk about cutting the budget, they have an absolute imperative to protect programs that support the poor – Social Security, Medicaid, support services for the hungry and homeless, or foreign aid that keeps millions of people alive. Yet Washington isn’t worried about the poor because the poor can’t afford to hire lobbyists. So these Christians decided that the Circle of Protection will speak for the poor. When the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches agrees on an issue, it’s clear both are listening to God’s voice.

On July 21, Religious leaders representing the Circle of Protection met with President Obama in an “extraordinary” 40-minute meeting. They emerged expressing confidence that the chief executive sees the need for a circle of protection around government programs that support the poor.

“We were asked not to quote the president directly,” said the Rev. Michael Livingston, director of the National Council of Churches poverty initiative, who was among the Christian leaders who met with Mr. Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

“But the president used a biblical phrase that has been quoted in the church for two thousand years,” Livingston said. “He referred to ‘the least of these,’ which was the phrase Jesus used to describe the poor and hungry who needed to be fed and clothed and treated as sisters and brothers.” (Matthew 25:45)

Obama’s use of the phrase showed he understood why the group had come to the White House, Livingston said.

Roman Catholic Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, said the group stressed with the president “the fundamental moral principle that we should put the needs of the poor first in allocating scarce resources. Matthew 25 has gotten all twisted to say ‘whatsoever you do for the forgotten middle class you do unto me.’ We’re not interested in which party wins but we support those who are likely to lose, the families feeding kids looking for work.”

Ramirez noted that there are several “givens” in the debate over the budget, including the Republican given that there be no tax increases and the Democratic given that tax breaks for the rich should be eliminated.

“When you listen to the debate it seems that protecting the poor is not a given,” Ramirez said. “We asked the president to join us in forming a circle of protection around the poor. They have no lobbyists, but they do have the greatest moral claim.”

Last Thursday, these Christian leaders, joined by Jewish and Muslim leaders, took the deus ex machina to center stage.
Frustrated that their pleas to the Administration and Congress to protect funding for the nation’s most vulnerable are being ignored, nearly a dozen leaders from the faith community were arrested inside the U.S. Capitol Building.
Despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Capitol Police, the leaders refused to end their public prayers asking the Administration and Congress not to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

Among those who were arrested was Rev. Livingston.

“Congress is paralyzed by toxic partisan politics while people suffer,” he said. “Our elected officials are protecting corporations and wealthy individuals while shredding the safety net for millions of the most vulnerable people in our nation and abroad. Our faith won't allow us to passively watch this travesty unfold. We've written letters, talked with and prayed for our elected officials, and prayed together daily in interreligious community. Today, we 'offer our bodies as a living sacrifice' to say to congress 'Raise revenue, protect the vulnerable and those living in poverty.'”

The God in the Machine is on stage now. Yet the wrestling between parties continues. In a sense, the modern Jacob wrestles stubbornly with the angel of his better nature.

Genesis 32:24-32: Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed. ’Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle.

Jacob, who stole his birthright from his twin, Esau, has been a dirty, rotten scoundrel until this night at Peniel. All his life he has sought power and advantage at the expense of everyone else. And then an angel came, and wrestled with him, and Jacob realized for the first time in his life that God was calling him to a higher service. This is one of the great conversion stories of Genesis, as Jacob the liar and fraud realizes this may be his last chance to get right with God. He holds desperately to the angel and will not let him go until the angel blesses him. And when the blessing comes, Jacob realizes: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

This week the members of the Congress believe they are wrestling with each other over issues they believe to be important. Let us unite our hearts in prayer that they will realize who they are really wrestling with – the God who loves the poor and blesses those who create circles of protection around them.

Political deals to protect the rich from higher taxes, or win the support of the middle class, may win votes. That remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: supporting the rich while ignoring the poor is no way to win the blessing of God’s wrestling angels.

Jacob's Blather

2011-07-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

His biographers can’t find the actual quote, but theologian Karl Barth is credited with the advice to read the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

Whatever Barth said, this two-fisted devotional approach had unusual power this week when the news was about NewsCorp’s hacking scandal and the Common Lectionary pointed to Jacob, the scandalous hack of Genesis 28.

It’s a weird week when Rupert Murdoch, owner of NewsCorps, and the Patriarch Jacob compete for the Creep of the Week award. This peculiar combination of newspaper and bible sent me into a tailspin of reverie. Bygone shades from my past appeared vividly, including Walter L. Herring, editor of the Pottstown Mercury in the early nineties.

My tenure at the Mercury more or less corresponded with Walt’s, although he came to the paper at the height of a distinguished career in journalism and I joined the staff following a 20 year tenure as a Baptist editor that ended with the demise of The American Baptist magazine.

Walt was a 1965 graduate of West Catholic School for Boys in Philadelphia, but I never figured out if he was religious. He did not present himself as a godly man. When he died in October 2006, his obituary acknowledged that working for him could be terrifying. “His volcanic temper was legendary,” wrote Jack Croft, former managing editor of the paper. “He was known to berate reporters and editors in expletive-filled tirades when he felt that his standards weren’t being met or that less than maximum effort was being given.”

I witnessed those tirades often, sometimes several times a week, but I don’t recall being the object of one. The worst thing he ever said to me, and it was in resigned tones, is, “Your lead sucks.”

I was a year older than Walt but he was vastly senior to me in terms of newspaper experience. He knew about my church background, but he never asked about it. It neither impressed him nor did he hold it against me. He didn’t hold my age against me either, but he occasionally took advantage of it. When a fifties-era crooner came to Pottstown to open a department store, Walt assigned the feature to me because he knew I had heard of Julius LaRosa.

I kept thinking of Walt this week while reading Genesis 28, the story of the scoundrel Jacob’s hasty escape from those he had so cruelly wronged. I knew what Walt thought of scoundrels. I began to wonder how he would have reported Jacob’s story.

I used to describe Walt as one of the purest misanthropes I have ever known, mostly because I met so few people Walt liked. Certainly he would have hated Jacob – a liar and a thief, a self-promoting opportunist who climbed over the backs of weaker people to get to the top – a man who certainly deserved the loathing of his brother Esau who vowed to kill him. There were a lot of people like Jacob who made the front page of the Mercury: politicians, mobsters and slum lords to name a few, and also people who committed crimes even Jacob would have abhorred: rapists, wife beaters, child molesters and murderers. Walt hated them all, and not just the bad guys; he also hated the cops who didn’t work hard enough to bring them to justice and the defense attorneys who occasionally got the malefactors off. And God help the reporter who didn’t stay on the story until justice was done.

But I don’t want to leave the impression that I didn’t appreciate Walt, or that I’m offering him as an emblem of the often cynical profession of journalism. I look back on him as one of the best bosses I ever had. You never had to wait for an annual performance review to know how you stood. If Walt liked your story, he said so. If he thought you had mishandled a source, he said so. If your lead sucked, he said that, too.

And while it is true that Walt’s barometer of cynicism was abnormally high, he never gave up on the idea that things could be better. Jack Croft, in Walt’s obituary, quoted co-workers: “Beneath the ‘tough guy’ front was a compassionate and generous man who mentored young writers and demanded that his newspapers speak for those whose voices were ignored.” Often that meant going after the employers, landlords, and entrepreneurs who made their fortunes at the expense of others, or the politicians who failed to provide promised services for borough residents. Most of those powerful people hated Walt as much as he hated them.

Even so, I think you can make a case that Pottstown is a better community because Walt was editor of the Mercury. The more we’ve learned about the NewsCorp hacking scandal – including reports that a News of the World reporter hacked into the cell phone of a murdered teenage girl and made it seem she could still be alive when he deleted her parents’ urgent messages – the more it appears Rupert Murdoch has made the world a bleaker place.

This impression has been around a long time. Several years ago, British satirists Hugh Laurie (TV’s “House”) and Stephen Fry (who has appeared in cameos on “Bones”) produced a video send-up of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in which Murdoch takes the place of the discouraged George Bailey. In “It’s a Soaraway Life,” (see below) Laurie’s Murdoch appears at the railing of a bridge over icy rapids and declares, “I wish I’d never been born.” Fry’s Clarence, an Angel Second-Class, dives into the rapids to rescue Murdoch and grants his wish.

As Clarence and the now unborn Rupert wander around a world Murdoch has never touched, a tabloid newspaper headline shouts, “Niceness up 40%.” When Rupert and Clarence visit a pub, Murdoch notices it’s filled with minorities. “This is not my kind of place,” Rupert complains. Clarence explains, “You weren’t here to teach everyone to sneer at their neighbors because they were poor or different or left-wing and they ended up liking each other. They might even like you.”

The point, of course, is that one person can make a big difference in the world, for evil or good.

Jacob was one of those people who made a big difference in both camps. He was the cause of great distress in his family, refusing to feed his starving and dimwitted brother until Esau sells him his birthright to their father’s fortune, and later deceiving his purblind father, Isaac, by posing as Esau and receiving Isaac’s blessing. Through blackmail and deception, Jacob stole everything his brother had.

What a creep he was. As our story opens, Jacob is on the lam because his brother Esau wants to murder him, and he probably suspects God is none too happy with him either. At the end of a long day of running, Jacob falls asleep.

(Jacob) came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, ‘I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you. ’Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ (Genesis 28:10-19)

What? God is giving Jacob a nice dream and promising great blessings? Where’s the justice in that? It reminds me of a Mercury news story when charges were dismissed against a teenager accused of vehicular homicide. Three women on a morning walk had been killed when the young man’s car veered off the road, but the judge declared it was negligence, not murder. I can still see Walt Herring’s mouth drop open in amazement. He was probably thinking about the dead women and their families. His comment, from which I delete two extraneous syllables for family reading, was, “Unbelievable.”

Jacob falls in the category of a bad person to whom good things happen. For most of us, that is unbelievable indeed. Mr. Murdoch is also in that category. This week, he’s apologizing to Parliament and the parents of the teenage murder victim whose phone was hacked by one of his reporters. But he still has a kazillion jillion dollars in his bank account. The world may be worse because he was born, but good things are still happening to him.

It’s possible, of course, that the hacking scandal will be a turning point for Rupert, an epiphany that he can use his worldwide media empire to give voice to voiceless and justice to the oppressed. Stranger things have happened. Stranger things happened to Jacob the heel, who didn’t deserve the blessings he got but whose trust in God took preeminence over his pursuit of prestige and power.

That’s good news. Jacob didn’t deserve it and Mr. Murdoch doesn’t deserve it and, when you come down to it, none of us deserve it. But when God decides to use us to advance goodness and justice and faith around the world, it doesn’t matter if we deserve it or not. The God of love and justice will use us anyway. In the end, the best truth we can hear is unbelievable: we don’t always get what we deserve.

I suspect Walt Herring might have had difficulty with that notion, but I’m not sure. His faith may have run deeper than I knew. I do know he was taken from us too soon. And I’m convinced that in his own irascible, profane and hot-tempered way, he made his corner of the world a better place. Had he not been born, as the Angel Clarence would have said, he would have left an awful hole.

Hunters Beth Nat Hooly Men

2011-07-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

There is an ancient tradition of the church that hunters are not holy.

I say this with deference to my friends and relatives who love hunting. When I was growing up, almost every autumn Uncle Bob killed Bambi’s mother or one of her cousins and our dinner tables were laden high with venison for weeks. But I have mixed feelings. Uncle Bob was a good man, but Bambi’s mother was good, too. And I hate venison.

I grew up in rural Central New York where hunting was popular and everyone 14 and older was eligible to take a 12-gauge or .22 into the woods. With fond memories of Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett, I spent hours in the woods across the road from our house. I had no interest in assassinating quail, but I shouldered my .22 more or less as a beard, so my hikes looked like manly quests and not effete interactions with nature. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, John Nickel and I took our .22s to the village dump on Cedar Street and shot rats. That was exhilarating at first, until we discovered how hard it is to kill a rat. Rats can take a lot of lead before waddling beneath piles of junk, growling and cursing in their nasty rat lingo.

Uncle Bob loved hunting, but my father hated it. Somewhere in a family album there is a picture of Dad crouching with his rifle beside a 5-point buck that he had shot. Standing behind him with broad smiles are three or four other guys, one of whom was the high school principal, my father’s boss. Dad is not smiling. He looks like he is about to throw up.

I wondered about that picture for years. Why are the guys who did not shoot the deer so happy, and why is the guy who did so sad? I never asked Dad about it, but last year when Martha and I watched the HBO miniseries, “The Pacific,” I realized what had happened. The series traced the experiences of U.S. marines in the Pacific Theater of World War II. One of the marines, Eugene “Sledge” Hammer, is shown slogging his way through some of the bloodiest island battles of the war. When he gets home, Eugene’s father takes him deer hunting, but the young veteran is sickened by the prospect of taking another gun into another field and he collapses in tears. Suddenly I realized why Dad looks so ill in that snapshot. He had carried his rifle into the jungles of Papua New Guinea and he used it to shoot enemy soldiers. That happy little postwar hunting party in Central New York must have brought back terrible memories.

Even so, to this day not many people in Central New York would think of hunting as an unholy pursuit. When upstate Representative Kirsten Gillibrand was appointed to the U.S. Senate, she sought to ingratiate herself with an expanded constituency by avowing, “Up here, most folks go hunting and shoot their Thanksgiving turkeys.” Could be, but I don’t remember a lot of neighbors doing that. You can’t relax and enjoy your bird if your tongue is exploring every bite for lead pellets.

The first time I heard any reference to the unholiness of hunters was at Eastern Baptist College, and it wasn’t in a sermon – it was in a 650 year-old poem.

By cause that it was old and somdel streit
This ilke Monk leet olde thynges pace,
And heeld after the newe world the space.
He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen,
That seith that hunters beth nat hooly men,
Ne that a monk, whan he is reccheless.
Is likened til a fish that is waterlees –
This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloystre
But thilke text heeld he nat worth an oystre;
And I seyde his opinioun was good.

If you were an English major – and you would know it if you were – you will recognize the mellifluous middle English meter of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All of us in Jene Beardsley’s classes had to memorize 20 lines of the poem in middle English. That's a very useful exercise and it comes in handy when you get unwanted solicitation calls at 9:05 p.m.

“Mr. Jenks, let me tell you about this wonderful new development in water softening systems …”

And I reply,

“Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote.”

“Uh, beg pardon?”

“And bathed every veyne in swich licour, of which vertu engendred is the flour …”

“Sorry. Wrong number.”

Actually, Chaucer’s reference to hunters is uttered by a monk who’s a little bit off his rails and dismisses as worthless as a plucked chicken the idea that hunters are unholy. He’s also enjoying his unregimented life outside the cloister.

By reason it was old and somewhat strict,
This said monk let such old things slowly pace
And followed new-world manners in their place.
He cared not for that text a clean-plucked hen
Which holds that hunters are not holy men;
Nor that a monk, when he is cloisterless,
Is like unto a fish that's waterless;
That is to say, a monk out of his cloister.
But this same text he held not worth an oyster;
And I said his opinion was right good.

The notion that “hunters beth nat hooly men” is not a biblical verity, but it does appear to be traceable back to Esau, the older twin of Jacob, the sons of Isaac and Rebekah. If Field & Stream needed an attractive cover model, Esau would not be it. The writer of Genesis portrays Esau as a “skillful hunter,” but an impatient and impulsive man – two traits that every hunter knows may be dangerous on the hunt.

Even so, if you were a hanger-on at Isaac’s tent and had to choose between the brothers, I think you’d conclude Esau – although perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer – was morally superior.

According to Genesis, the brothers’ sibling rivalry began earlier than most: when they were still in Rebekah’s womb. The boys wrestled and twisted so violently that Rebekah thought she was going to die. In the days before obstetricians, she went directly to God with her complaint, and as with many modern doctors, God was only partially helpful. God did give her prenatal information that went far beyond the gender or health of the fetuses:

‘Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger.’

On the other hand, God did little to ease her violent cramping. The wrestling continued until the time of labor. When the boys finally hurled themselves down the vaginal track, Esau burst out first. He was startlingly red and hirsute, so they named him Esau, which of course means Harry. His brother, struggling for the advantage down to the wire, is dragged out grasping his brother’s heel. They named him Jacob, which means Heel. As it turned out, both names were appropriate. In a future updating of the New Revised Standard Version, they may re-translated as the Harry and Heel brothers.

The boys’ bitter rivalry was exacerbated, as often happens, by parental favoritism. Rebekah, whose postnatal soreness must have lasted for months, loved Jacob because he was smooth-skinned and liked to hang around the tent with his mother. Jacob loved Esau because he liked his meat and Esau the hunter had more slabs on him than a Lady Gaga dress.

The climactic chapter of the boys’ rivalry is reported almost too casually. The passage that should have begun more ominously, as, “It was a dark and stormy night,” opens like a gentle fairytale: “Once.”

Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!’ (Therefore he was called Edom.) Jacob said, ‘First sell me your birthright.’ Esau said, ‘I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?’ Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’ So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright. (Genesis 25:29-34)

Neither brother looks good in this account. Esau is impatient and impulsive and convinced that if he doesn’t eat immediately, he’ll die. (Hey, I’ve been there, but I’ve always had faith there was a Big Mac somewhere in my future.) Jacob refuses to feed his brother until Esau gives him a prize of enormous value – his birthright to all his father’s lands, servants, riches, sheep, and property. How can Jacob be so selfish, so calculating? And how can Esau be so stupid? (Or, if we take the biblical account literally, how can he have been so hungry?)

“Thus Esau (or Harry) despised his birthright” is the cliffhanger for today. The Common Lectionary wants us to reflect on this moment before we’re allowed to read on. No doubt many of you have already read past Genesis 25 into subsequent chapters, and if you have, please, no spoilers. Developments in future episodes will keep you on the edge of your Kindle: deception, betrayal, murder threats, fugitives living in poverty, erotic bating-and-switching – a mini-series that will make The Tudors look like Ozzie and Harriet. Future chapters will also provide subtle reminders that if you’re looking for models of clean living and Republican family values, Genesis is not the place to look.
Fittingly, the Gospel reading prescribed by the Common Lectionary for this Sunday is Matthew 13:1-9:

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!’

The parable of the sower is a helpful metaphor to keep in mind as we re-encounter the familiar histories of the old Patriarchs. When God first approached Abraham and told him his seed would conceive a nation as populous as the stars in the sky, God didn’t mention how rocky that sowing would be. The Patriarchs were not perfect. Many of them were distractingly quirky, and it’s easy to get angry with Jacob every time you read of his cruelty to his brother and his deceit of his father. Some of the seeds the Patriarchs sowed fall on rocks, others on thorns. But God remained faithful to their covenant, and in the end their seeds grew incalculably more than a hundredfold. The Patriarchs, imperfect as they were, remind us that God’s seeds have also been planted in us – and as imperfect as we are, God has promised to bring forth a sumptuous harvest.

As to the adage that “hunters be not holy men,” I cannot agree. I don’t know if my former neighbors in Central New York are really hunting their Thanksgiving turkeys in the woods, but I do know this: slaying a turkey in the exhilaration of his flight is more humane – and more Godly – than raising them for months in suffocating crates before binding their feet and wings and stuffing them head-first into electric decapitators. Men and women who shoulder their 12-gauges and seek their game in the unfettered forest may not always be pious, but they clearly have a moral advantage over the operators of reeking slaughter houses and overcrowded chicken farms.

Anyway, that’s my opinion. I may be wrong. But that’s a blog for another day.