Raising Basileia

I depart from my usual thematic content with this post; it has nothing to do with theological engagement or with the Kingdom of Heaven.  It has everything to do with something I feel quite profoundly and about which I am deeply troubled: in the 235th year of our history I fear America has lost her way, and we all are complicit in that waywardness.

In his book, The Rights of the People, author David K. Shipler contends that our constitutional freedoms have been incrementally and steadily eroded in the pursuit of security, especially since 9-11.  He points out that there have been six different moments in our history when the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have been gutted of their effectiveness–usually in the face of some overt threat–and that the country has typically found its collective way back once the threat has passed.  One need only recall the great injustice to Japanese-Americans, systematically rounded up and effectively jailed during World War II.  We recoil at such memories from the vantage point of 70 years later.  More recent history suggests we have not learned the lessons very well.

Shipler reminds us of the relative ease with which the Patriot Act was enacted in the wake of 9-11 and  its subsequent renewal as an example of where Americans have been willing to give up bedrock freedoms against government intrusion, all in the presumed interest of perhaps making it easier to catch terrorists.  Never mind that the Bill of Rights insists that legitimate law enforcement was never supposed to be easy, but constitutionally deferential.  Security has now trumped the framers’ unique  insistence on restraining government’s ability to intrude on our privacy.

It seems that the slippery slope of lost freedoms hits even closer to home.  Shipler goes on to observe how the Fourth Amendment guarantees against unwarranted searches have all but gone by the wayside vis-a-vis local law enforcement, as trial courts and appellate courts are all too willing to allow police to take the very short-cuts that the framers sought to limit–all in the name of expediency.  Getting guns off the streets, arguably a laudable consideration, leads to a broader interpretation of the sort of exigent circumstances that previously led reviewing courts to establish exceptions to the once hard and fast requirements of the Fourth Amendment.  I use the gun illustration as one where the community standards for proper law enforcement oversight has slipped in the pursuit of a commendable goal.  One could easily cite the drug war as another example of the same sort of collective acquiescence to a particular brand of tyranny in the pursuit of a greater good.  Make no mistake my friends: we all suffer when freedoms are chipped away, and they could not be so compromised if we were not so complicit in the process!

The erosion of liberty is but one symptom of America’s downward spiral, and  sadly, we are so engaged in calling one another names that we miss our essential commonality.  The Left Wing cannot appreciate that its insistence on individual rights is–or should be– defended by the animated and  vigorous and libertarian rhetoric of the Right.  And the passion of the Right Wing is diminished by their easy disdain for the liberals on the Left.  Instead of informed dialog on the issues of the day, our national debate–if one can truly regard it as such–degenerates all too quickly into something far less helpful . This is shown to be all the more absurd when we recognize that restraint on governmental authority is so often cited by conservatives and liberals alike, in different contexts to be sure, but the conviction is there nonetheless.

Certainly the erosion of constitutional liberties is broader than Fourth Amendment considerations alone; the courts have shown their willingness to carve out exceptions in other areas of criminal procedure as well.  The sad truth is that the central characters in most of these dramatic legal episodes are criminals–or suspected terrorists– for whom decent, law-abiding  people have little sympathy.  The problem, as Shipler reminds us,  is that the rights of all of us are compromised as well.  But nobody seems to notice how far we have slipped from our original ideals.  Worse yet, nobody seems to care.

One wonders if we simply have become so intellectually complacent as to take no notice of our decline, or if there is some force at work which is at once more insidious and pervasive as to render us incapable of appreciating the danger that we face.  I submit that America’s soul sickness is  born of a  new contempt for one another in the face of a creeping awareness that America is not the country it was just 50 years ago.  The increasing ethnic and racial diversity of our population and the sudden absence of the Cold War threats that once united us have turned us into a nation that longs for the idyllic days when moral certainty was the rule, and there was comfort in the fact that people who looked liked us were in charge of our national destiny.  A dark-skinned chief executive reminds us that those days are behind us, as we scramble  to find new enemies to assail. Undocumented immigrants, homosexuals, abortion rights advocates, Muslims…liberals?  The quest to define and oppose the un-American “other” is now what animates us, rather than a fierce appreciation of our commonality.  Questions about the legitimacy of a bi-racial President find ready expression in such a fearful reality.

As I began this post, I indicated that this installment was not a theological observation.  However, I do note that it has a great deal to do with a sort of civic spirituality, if you will.  America has long enjoyed a kind of civil religion, which is at once nominally Christian and filled with a mythical sanctification of our history that, one could argue, has served us well for the past 235 years.  The nearly religious experience one has when visiting national monuments in Washington, DC is evidence of the sort of pseudo-holy deference to the myth that is America.  This is as it should be, for there is great truth in myth.  Employing the same pedagogical presumptions of higher literary criticism, it matters little if George Washington actually cut down a cherry tree and later came clean about with his father; the “truth” is in the substance of the myth itself .  And the myth of America is–or once was–powerful indeed.  Nowadays, we seem more focused on singling out those who do not easily fit into the myth.

Much of our decline has transpired since World War II, a time when America was united as it never was before, according to many historians.  Under the present polarization, one doubts if we can ever come together with such clarity and purity of purpose.  It has been said of John F. Kennedy, that he possessed the  uncanny ability to sense that America was already adrift in the postwar years and to offer an alternate narrative.  Those of us who remember the 1960s know something of the palpable excitement that seemed to bubble up with the ascent of JFK.  His words and his persona hinted at a certain hope for the future for which America hungered and to which millions responded.

Yet even then America was inching toward a loss of its very soul, a process that had found voice in a new national credo, according to author Andrew Bacevich (Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War), a postwar embracing of America as the  sole purveyor of democratic ideals to the rest of the world, irrespective of having been asked to provide them.  Our new role as the world’s policeman naturally engendered an expansion of that “military-industrial complex”, about which President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address to the nation in 1961.  The rest is a sad history of global intervention that comprises the sorry stories of Vietnam, the two Iraq wars, Afghanistan, and several intervening episodes that illustrate this commitment.  The international tensions of the Cold War years were part and parcel of this mindset and served an importance purpose in defining America’s purpose in the 1950s and 1960s.  And even  Ollie North’s  illegal “war” against the Nicaraguan  Contras in the mid-1980s somehow fades into an implicit acquiescence that what is perceived as being good for America trumps any legal considerations.  It is not a huge leap to the abuses of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib of more recent memory.  America deserves to be number one–whatever that means–and we will not allow the law, or ethics, or morality to get in the way of our quest.

The public rhetoric at present is evidence of a country seemingly more concerned with being right than with being righteous.  The depiction of the Left Wing as being comprised of Godless secularists fits nicely with the self-righteousness of the Right, which has successfully positioned itself as the God-fearing folk who have been called to be the sole guardians of the American civil religion.  In a somewhat frightening development, some candidates for national office have begun to say that in no uncertain terms.  The implication, of course, is that all others are wrong–a conviction that seems to find favor with many who are haunted by this fear that America is not what it once was.  They are clearly right about that on more than one level.  Gone is any hint of tolerance for opposing views as we find ourselves more and more distant from the very ideals we profess.  Calling the President a liar in public or suggesting that he serves illegitimately all speak of this existential void in which we now find ourselves and with no willingness to name it, except to talk louder and employ invective in the hope that we might find our way again.  But sadly, we do not seem even to notice that we are lost.

If America is to find her way again, the process begins with a recognition that indeed we have strayed, and that the truth of our waywardness will be hard to accept.  I have long admired the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which convened in the aftermath of the apartheid horrors as they were brought to light and were atoned for.  Can we ever conceive of such an initiative in America?  What good might come from a public confession of national wrongs–from slavery to the ill-conceived 2003 invasion of Iraq?  I suspect that our deeply ingrained myth of America will forever preclude any well-intentioned attempt to come truly clean.  The pragmatists will say that the masses could not handle the truth and perhaps they are right.  But then, one cannot apologize when one truly believes there has been no lasting harm done.

The other obstacle to national penitence (maybe this post really is theological!) is the insidious nature of our slow decline–so subtle as to avoid detection–and which embraces us all, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative.  The relinquishment of constitutional liberties, of which I spoke earlier, is both a symptom of the diminution of our national character and one which occurs in such incremental steps that most of us miss it altogether.  Add to that the fact that administrations of both parties have presided–and continue to preside– over the erosion of freedoms, and we see that indeed all have sinned.  Keep in mind that all of this is in service to the postwar credo of American superiority, which is either informed by our mythological narrative, or perhaps is the stuff from which the narrative springs–without the ugly parts!

To borrow the language of author Bacevich in a slightly different context: “In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul.  It’s the perfect antidote for excessive self regard.”  Bacevich was speaking of his own epiphany with regard to America’s global role  from the perspective of his 23 years in the U.S. Army.  I suggest the process be employed on a broader national level.  But then, the Christian doctrine of mortification is centered in the work of the Holy Spirit, and we have no such national deity.  So where does that leave us?  Without leadership and without a legitimate national identity, that’s where.

Many of of us had hoped Barack Obama would be the “one.”  I am not unmindful that others were just as convinced that his predecessor, George W. Bush, had been similarly anointed.  America suffered a great indignity on September 11, 2001 and in the days and months that followed, decisions were made policies enacted–ostensibly in the interest of national security.  If Andrew Bacevich’s analysis is correct, such decisions and policies are the end result of a deliberative process that is so entwined with the post-WW II credo of American primacy that any authentic discussion of their merits is absolutely precluded.  We all buy in to this notion of America’s unique global role, such that legitimate questions are never raised, or if they are, they hold no sway.  Just take a look at the overwhelming support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the United States Senate by presumably smart people!  The end is seen as justifying the means, and even the Obama’s of the world must live with and justify the consequences.  The credo is just that strong.

I am thinking of America on this Independence Day and praying for a return to our national essence as envisioned by the founders and without the  clap-trap about being a nation founded on Christian principles.  The founders were men of reason whose measured passions were products of the Enlightenment.  Clearly, they believed in “nature’s God” as cited in the elegant language of  the Declaration of Independence, and they designed a government intended to effectuate certain universal principles that belong to all persons.  Limitations on government were seen as necessary and desirable, and they encouraged the give and take of intelligent discourse without resorting to demonizing the opposing viewpoint.  They would be appalled at the rancor of today’s political scene and they would be disgusted at how we have sold our national soul to the money interests.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams…they would recoil at how we have allowed our nation’s inner structures to crumble while being embroiled in conflict after global conflict.  They would be sorrowful at how we have so stripped the Bill of Rights in the interest of expediency. Ours is not the America they envisioned, but there is hope.  There always is.

Now is the time for a new national narrative that is based on the rational thinking that first prompted the founders to become founders.  If America is to flourish and become the country it can be–the country we all love and believe is possible–then we must come to our senses and reject the sound-bite mentality that so easily yields the quick-fix for complex problems and finds expression in the  jingoism that has held sway for the past seven decades.  We must envision a world in which America is but one citizen–one with massive resources and impressive ingenuity–and one whose motivation has less to do with dominance and everything to do with being the ideal to which all other nations aspire.

Such a process may take another generation to accomplish, so we ought to be about the quest now.  I believe we can make the shift because I believe in the American ideal.  We have lost our way but for a moment.  May we find the resolve to begin the journey back to wholeness.  God bless the United States of America!

July 4, 2011

By this time, there have been hundreds of published reflections about the death of Osama bin Laden and the ensuing elation over the news.  My thoughts come so late in the flow of opinion that they may well be lost in the tide, but I offer them nonetheless.  My motivation has to do with my uneasiness with they way in which we celebrate the destruction of another human being.  I had similar queasiness with that now infamous cell phone camera footage depicting the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

I know someone—possibly a friend—will be quick to remind me of what a bad man Osama was.  Please don’t.  I too remember the horror of 9-11, an event that directly prompted me to become a fire service chaplain.  Furthermore, I am not a pacifist—a contradiction of my Christian faith and an admittedly inconsistent stance that simply does not square with my otherwise unqualified embrace of the message of Jesus.  I like to believe that I am spiritually and morally astute enough to recognize my too easy acceptance of sin when it serve my own purposes, or when such acquiescence is employed in the pursuit of “the greater good.”  Better that one evil man should pay with his life for his atrocities.  And make no mistake: Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer.

The range of actions we seemingly accept in the name of national security—Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, water-boarding, extraordinary renditions, torture memos,  sanctioned assassinations, etc.—serve to remind us that we are first and foremost about security.  There seems to be an all-too-easy acceptance of things that might otherwise be deemed unworthy of America, not to mention a contravention of espoused Christian values.

Some commentators have made much of the post-announcement celebrations that many college student engaged in on Monday night.  I heard a good NPR program about the celebration that was held on the Boston Common.  Several students shared their reactions, ranging from one student who said he was disgusted by the spectacle to the young woman who expressed annoyance that the media speculation about the president’s late evening announcement interrupted the last few moments of Celebrity Apprentice. 

From where I sit, we are all less than genuine if we pretend that violence is ever cured by more violence.  I am glad that there is now some closure to the grief of 9-11, but I wonder if this escalating violence is where we wish to go.  No doubt that there will be repercussions, and I believe  President Obama and the most thoughtful of our leaders have considered that.  We are many centuries from the development of the so-called “just war” doctrine, and as I have said in this space before, most of us would readily dub WW II that way.  But what about the fact we have waged a war in Iraq that has already seen more civilian casualties than the total dead on 9-11?  And all of them died because of either a horrible miscalculation about weapons of mass destruction, or a trumped up rationale that was known to be false from the outset.

The poet John Donne’s words are apt: “…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”  Osama bin Laden’s murderous actions on 9-11 were evidence of evil, to be sure.  Perhaps Sunday’s death was inevitable—necessary even.  But the taking of life is always short of what God intends.  We should do better.  We should want to do better.  And if we cannot, we ought not to gloat about it.

Transfiguration of the Lord/March 6, 2011/Exodus 24:12-18; 1 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

Having preached through all three lectionary cycles many times now, the challenge is to find something new to declare.  I tend to adhere to the discipline of the lectionary because it encourages me to be authentic, and sometimes even to preach on a text from which I might otherwise shy away.  More than one mentor has cautioned against re-cycling sermons, for reasons that I embrace as genuine, not the least of which is the reality that spiritual and theological growth often expose the folly of re-working a message that might be several years old.

Nonetheless, I remember the first time I preached on Transfiguration Sunday and how pleased I was with my [unique?]  interpretation of the texts.  While it might be nice to stay up on that mountain and to forever enjoy the elation of that experience, I suggested, life is more commonly lived on the level plain and in the valleys.  The emotional thrill of the mountaintop moment must inevitably give way to coping with life as it happens down here.  Peter’s urging about building three structures–one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah–is born of a desire to savor a  spiritually poignant moment beyond its time rather than merely to embrace the moment for its instructive value and let it go.  Oxygen deprivation does strange things to the brain; the real work is down here, I declared.

To borrow a lyrical phrase from another writer, who grew up in my hometown, “I was born with the Ohio River at my feet and the mountains at my back.”  Such was my birth and my formative years in Huntington, West Virginia.  My eyes beheld the glory of the mountains (Appalachian foothills, actually) each time I walked out my front door.  The aesthetic effect of the fall colors was especially striking, looking as though God had dumped cans of paint of various hues on the trees that graced the mountainsides.  I spent my share of time on some of those mountains as a youngster, and many of my experiences involved breathtaking vistas.  The memory of those  adolescent ventures remains strong, and each autumn, the slightest whiff of wet leaves takes me back to those glory days in the land John Denver aptly described as “almost heaven.”

The view from the summit is often awe inspiring, and the very notion of having ascended a mountain peak is itself noteworthy, if for no other reason than the accomplishment of having done so.  The Matthew text combines the mountaintop experience metaphor with a more overt narrative, i.e. the appearance of Moses and Elijah in a magnificent scene in which the transfigured Jesus is observed talking with them.  The voice from heaven is reminiscent of the same voice that is heard on the occasion of Jesus’ baptism.  The three disciples witness this, and predictably it is Peter who suggests the construction of the three booths.  The wisdom of such a project presumes that their mountaintop stay would  be extended. The pericope concludes with Jesus ordering the disciples not to share what they had witnessed.

So what do I say this Transfiguration Sunday?  If all preaching is context-specific–and I believe that it is–I will remind my congregation that those moments of clarity, such as Peter and company experienced, are indeed blessed events.  I will ask them to recall the glory of our recent sesquicentennial observance wherein we celebrated the work of the past and looked forward to what God has yet to do with us.  I will tell them that the giddiness of mountaintop experiences is a matter of grace, not intended as a terminal event, but divinely useful for spurring us on.  Having been called to be the body of Christ in our time, our task is to draw sustenance–perhaps even inspiration–from our time up where the air is thin.  And having been so nourished, we make our necessary descent to the place where our  ministry continues. Sounds familiar.

Did I get it right the first time?  I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

As of January 1, I embarked on a new pattern of professional endeavor.  The budgetary challenges my congregation faces have made it necessary for me to reduce my hours at the church considerably.  This means I have to make up the difference, so to speak, by working in the secular world.  Not a bad concept as far as concepts go.

In Detroit in the 1950s, there was a ministry experiment in something called the Detroit Industrial Mission, in which ordained clergy took jobs on the line in the then burgeoning auto industry.  I actually served a congregation which had once participated in that project.  In that model, the congregation had three pastors who shared parish responsibility while  each earned a living working in an auto factory.  The idea was that the participants were to bear witness to the industrial milieu of a city like Detroit in the hope that their experience would help them become ministers who would be formed by what they did for a living, as well as to bring something of God into the world of industry and commerce.

In 1974, the late Studs Terkel, a Chicago icon, wrote a book entitled Working, which was a series of monologues about working life from all sorts of people.  Terkel observed that the experiences he chronicled were as much about earning daily bread as they were about finding daily meaning.  I think most of us can relate to that.

My Reformed faith teaches me that all I do is to give glory to God and that whatever any of us do for a living is to be done excellently.  By that reasoning, every client I represent in the various labor/employment proceedings in which I am engaged is performed to the best of my ability–not for the sake of professional responsibility alone–but because God requires it of me.  My love for God mandates that I be the face of Christ to some folks who are spiritually unsettled because of their present circumstances.  They do not have to know I am a minister, and most don’t.

It is largely a matter of vocation, which emanates from my baptism, and not from my ordination.  Every disciple is under the same mandate.  For me, there may be a unique advantage that will find voice in my preaching and teaching.  However, I would be less than honest if I do not confess that working in another sphere involves a necessary distraction and forces me to be more intentional about spiritual formation.  Again, not altogether a bad thing.  Perhaps I will be a better pastor and preacher because of it.

My particular religious tribe, as Leonard Sweet would say, understands ordination as a rite which sets me apart for the unique roles of preaching and the administration of the sacraments.  Indeed, Paul reminds us that all spiritual gifts have their specific purposes and are gifts of the Holy Spirit, which combine to effect the up-building of the Body of Christ.  Being a minister is who I am, but being a disciple is perhaps more to the point.  The same is true if one is a police officer or a teacher, an auto worker or an accountant.

I must also confess that for all of my attempts to be sanguine about my new work pattern, there is a bit of anxiety around the edges.  What if my non-ecclesiastical work is slow or uncertain?  Still, I am kind of excited about the possibilities.  As with all things, I leave it in God’s hands.

As I drove back to the office from a luncheon featuring one of the candidates for Michigan’s  governor this fall, my eye fell on a brightly colored bumper sticker made up to resemble a campaign sticker.   The message was simply “Elect Jesus the King of Your Life.”  While I might otherwise squirm a bit at such sentiments (see my post Trivial Jesus), I recognize that life is largely about how we each respond to the allure of various things, phenomena,–or perhaps even other people–that pull us into varying levels of loyalty.  The Jesus of the Gospels seems to have given voice to that when he spoke of the impossibility of serving two masters.  You can’t do it, he said.  We possess the capacity for only so much devotion, and we must be careful how we assign it.

The Brief Statement of Faith of the Presbyterian Church (USA) speaks of our human tendency to “accept lies as truth” even as we blur the image of God in ourselves and the social order we create and maintain.  Humans are continually searching for meaning, and perhaps  many are lured into looking for affirmation in all the wrong places.  Sometimes the error is obvious, but the dilatory effects of misplaced worship is often much more subtle.

We accept those lies perpetuated by our culture and commended to us by others as normative–not because we intentionally rebel against devotion to God–but because we so easily fall victim to the attraction of “all the vain things that charm me most” as the old hymn reminds us.  The divisive and polarizing effect of postmodern American politics keeps us culpable, it seems.  That tendency to easy identification of the demonized “other” is just so convenient.  If we embrace the conviction that all of creation is essentially good, then we can see the fundamental error of casting those with whom we do not agree as somehow evil.  I must be reminded of that often.

But that to which we assign loyalty is often much more subtle in its allure and insidious in the effect it has on our very souls.  Some of that which draws us away from God is obvious: money, power, position, reputation, greed, etc.  We may even convince ourselves that these things do not hold power over us and that we merely use them for a greater good.  We may find, after some introspection, that we have duped ourselves.  Often we just don’t get it.

In this season of stewardship campaigns, I have been thinking about the notion of loyalty to God that finds expression in the ways we set our priorities, especially the way we handle our money.  The postmodern church seems to have fallen victim to the consumerist mindset that regards offerings as payment for services rendered.  It follows that we render unto God only to the extent that we have received value-added returns from the church in the form of experiences that do not threaten our sense of self.   That which challenges our comfort is more often met with a resistance to giving, rather than giving which is cheerful.  The church has fallen into the business of selling something (entertainment?) that would not qualify even as cheap grace in the struggle to pay our bills.

Perhaps electing Jesus as the king of our lives is a conscious and deliberate selection we all need to make.  How would that consciousness change our giving behavior?  More to the point, how do we preachers get that message across?

I was an adolescent when the Death of God movement was in full swing forty-plus years ago.  The idea was first put forth by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century.  In the theological movement of the 1960s, some thinkers postulated that God had actually died, pointing to the horrors of the Holocaust as the historical moment when death had occurred.  In their new book, The Grand Design, physicists Stephen Hawking and Len Mlodinow, suggest that God–if God ever existed–is now rendered unnecessary.

Hawking  and Mlodinow posit something called “m-theory,” which holds that the universe was created out of nothing, a stark contrast to the Hebraic understanding that the pre-existent chaos of the universe was actually brought under control by the Creator.  There was something already there, suggests the writers of Genesis; it was God who brought order out of the primeval mess.  I’ll leave it there for now.

Lots of well-meaning folks will be driven to wring their hands when something like m-theory hits the news, and the instant reaction is often a defensive posture that lacks the intellectual acumen of that to which they react.  There is often a retreat into a kind naive counter-intellect that seeks to preserve the simplicity of one’s childhood faith.  I do not share that anxiety.

I have come to believe that my tiny intellect can never capture the vastness of God, a conviction shared by Calvin and others through the centuries.  However, I can admire two brilliant physicists for their work–and I do–it’s just that it seems to me that they are working within the wrong context.  Martin Marty, writing in a recent issue of The Christian Century, remind us of Augustine’s observation that “God is like the nature he made.”  Marty points to the work of Jose Ortega y Gassett, who presses on to the conclusion that “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is…history” (History as a System, 1941).

Marty concludes that if indeed God is like the nature he made, then it follows that God has a history.  That is where Hawking and Mlodinow are in the wrong context; they are talking physics when the genuine context is actually history.  Calvin was right; God is known  best by what God does. I can live with that.

Detroit radio host Craig Fahle of WDET-FM,  the local affiliate of NPR, is planning a series entitled “The New Normal” based on the changing life and habits of ordinary folks in light of the present economic challenges.  This past Sunday, one of my parishioners handed me a Parade magazine article in which author Lee Eisenberg (“Your Money or Your Life?”) discussed how our lives are deeply influenced by the belt-tightening we have all had to do of late.  Specifically, says the author, we may now define “value” differently, such that the previously coveted symbols of wealth give way to more genuine epiphanies about what makes life truly good.  Preachers and poets have been saying that for years.

The truth is that we Americans were spoiled for too long.  Our standard of living has been the envy of the world, even if it did involve not a little ostentation and conspicuous consumption.  It never bothered us much that we we used up an inordinate percentage of the planet’s resources and that we could never figure out how to feed the rest of the world, although I am certain we would have if we could have.  Now, just two years into an economic and financial meltdown, we are all feeling the pinch–some more than others, of course.  My congregation is struggling mightily to stay afloat and vibrant in a small suburban city where home foreclosures have been rampant and the unemployment rate is probably approaching 25 percent.  In this bleak landscape, one truly wonders if there is a word from the Lord.

Practically speaking, I sometimes wonder if the concessions that so many have had to make at their places of employment–things like working more hours for less pay and salary cuts–will become permanent.  One could argue that we were always artificially affluent and that the cutbacks are just the needed correction in a market-driven economy.  Even if that’s true, such acquiescence to a hard reality will do nothing toward paying that mortgage on a homestead which is now “under water.”  That’s a whole other discussion.

But perhaps there is a spiritual upside to all of this, and it has to do with our being reminded, albeit rudely, that “Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 124:8).   Before this is all over (it’s anybody’s guess as to when), we will have learned to rely on each other and on the Providence of God alone.  Perhaps we will have discovered that life is what happens while we are trying so desperately to make a living.  Maybe the new normal will be what God intended for us all along, and we were just too busy to notice.

I have admired the observations of columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. regarding some uniquely American dysfunction since I first read it in his Why Americans Hate Politics (2004). The three “ghosts” we have never successfully exorcised, says Dionne, are tension around gender issues, race, and the Vietnam War.  A couple of well-publicized incidents involving the second of these have been lessons in missed opportunities in the past year or so.  Remember the Prof. Henry Louis Gates incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts last summer and then President Obama’s infamous “beer summit” in response?  More recently, there was the sudden departure of Dr. Laura Schlessinger following her use of the n-word on the air.  She quit in response to the ensuing national outrage but later predicted that she would be back.

America is haunted by the race specter, but apparently is also unwilling or unable to talk about it in any effective way.  Some thoughtful people think President Obama abdicated the responsibility to illuminate the deeper issue in the wake of the Gates affair, preferring to host Gates and the arresting police officer for an innocuous kiss-and-make-up session at the White House.  In contrast to then-Sen. Obama’s race speech while running for the presidency, it was a disappointment.  Schlessinger’s on-air behavior was offensive to be sure, but then she is not the political or moral leader that we hope Obama is.

It’s not as if the ugliness of racism rarely comes up; it is all around us.  Some would say it’s part of our very fabric as a nation.  And each time a Don Imus or a Michael Richards is caught making racially-tinged remarks–indeed, when African American comedians get laughs from the use of that horrid word–we are reminded that it’s really okay to harbor notions that relegate dark-skinned people to a sub-human existence.  Oh, we go through the motions of punishing the offenders on some level, but nothing ever really changes until the next gaffe when we feign collective outrage all over again.  It’s almost as though we know we ought to be profoundly offended at such things, but are not.

A few years back, the folks at Sojourner’s published a study guide in which racism was called out as America’s unique original sin.  Our inability or unwillingness to deal with race has led to historical accommodations to our blindness that have played out in phenomena like slave galleries in churches and the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.”  Ecumenical Theological Seminary president, Marsha Foster Boyd, has recently asked why the furor over the proposed mosque near ground Zero when there has never been the same outrage over churches being constructed over the remains of slave dungeons.  Why, indeed?

I submit that we cannot purge our collective sin unless we first name it–and here’s the kicker–not until white Americans stop believing they have no culpability for it.  Only then will we no longer tolerate ugly words that are born of a soulful darkness which permeates the American experience and defies expungement.  America has dodged the issue of race for 400 years, moving from rationalization to confrontation to denial.  It is time we stopped whistling in the dark.

I fancy myself an insightful observer of social phenomena of all sorts, and it seems to me that contemporary socio-political discourse has become inordinately mean-spirited in the past 30 years.  Interestingly, the time frame seems to be contemporaneous with the rise of the new right and their odd alliance with the so-called “Christian Right,” which I would argue is neither Christian nor right.  This past weekend’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial is one more volley in the war against progressivism that seems to motivate persons like conservative commentator Glenn Beck as he recently encouraged members of social justice-oriented congregations to leave the fold.

Thankfully, Mr. Beck does not speak for millions of social justice Christians, many of whom were offended at his attempted hijacking of the civil rights movement.  Glenn Beck is no Martin Luther King, Jr., despite the professed coincidence of his rally falling on the forty-seventh anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I note that a version of the same speech was given by Dr. King in Detroit two months before the famous March on Washington.

I am inclined to give anybody the proverbial benefit of the doubt, so perhaps rather than ascribe to Mr. Beck and the raucous tea party devotees that we hear so much about these days some motivation that is–shall we say– less than altruistic, let us presume that their ignorance of the grand sweep of the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition is simply that.  I have always believed that decent folk will respond to a good education.

My seminary training–and indeed the indoctrination of my many years as a pew-sitter–included a conviction that the Bible evidences a preferential option for the poor and dispossessed over and against the rich and privileged.  As one of my Old Testament lecturers used to say, “You don’t have to like this…I didn’t write any of it!”  Indeed, this line of thinking has found its way into classic Catholic social teaching, as well as being expressed in most mainline Protestant theological traditions.  Those who would deny the legitimacy of this conviction are naive at best.

However, I find the rhetoric about “restoring honor” and the need to “return to God” perilously thin and devoid of any proper recognition of the prophetic tradition, which I would argue, is the essence of Jesus’ teaching.  I am growing weary of the meanness that attaches to alarmist pronouncements about taking our country back.  Take it back from whom?  The black guy?  Because he should not be there?  Is that the real message?  If so, I will thank those who espouse such things to refrain from couching it in religious language that betrays the God who clearly and persistently tells us what is required of us, namely the execution of justice and mercy.

Speak if you choose, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin.  It is your right.  But please, know what you’re talking about first.  I am growing impatient with mean people.