Month: August 2008

My docs say that I’m supposed to stay away from things that might over excite me for a week or so.  They even took away my fire department pager.  That pretty much left it to convention coverage as I dozed in and out of whatever it was that they were giving me.  The one thing I’ve been wondering about is the disappointment expressed by so many pundits that no one has brought out the pit bull to tear apart McCain and the Republicans, and that people such as the Clintons and Biden were just not hitting the home run ball of slash and burn politics. 

To be sure, our centuries are filled with outrageous attacks and counter attacks during presidential campaigns, but there is a huge difference today.  Today we have instantaneous, twenty-four hour news coverage flowing out to all people everywhere with increasingly little reserved judgment, or even competent analysis, from so-called journalists.  Moreover, at least in some parts of the country, hard-core right wing radio, and some television, dominate the airways with gross distortions of truth mixed in with entirely made up ‘facts,’ vomited out by commentators unafraid to vilify anyone with whom they disagree.

Have we sunk so low that “Swift Boating” is the expected norm for presidential politics?  Have presidential politics become the place for setting up and then destroying another candidate’s reputation, honor, dignity and humanity?  I hope not, and the speeches and crowd reaction at the Democratic convention proved otherwise.  Perhaps the Republican convention will do likewise.  We saw a taste of that grassroots change in our own community just a few weeks ago in a non-partisan race for Superior Court Judge.  One candidate and his supporters came out swinging with a small town version of Karl Rove political action.  The other simply presented himself with honesty and forthrightness.  The latter won by a landslide.  Maybe that’s a hint that the American voting public is tired of being duped by vicious, malicious political manipulators.

My neighbor across the street is a grade school teacher.  So is a friend living a few blocks away.  Both are men.  Men as grade school teachers are pretty rare these days, and that’s too bad.  What could be more important to grade school boys than a good male role model to encourage and guide them into a love of learning?  What could be more important to grade school girls than an adult man modeling what responsible, caring manhood is all about?  That’s a bit of hyperbole of course, but the point is that good male role models are a bit hard to come by, particularly men who are not parents and who are able to spend day after day as important parts of a child’s life.  That seems to be most especially true in the pre-pubescent years when beliefs and attitudes about what it means to be a man are firmly embedded.

Somewhere along the way toward opening career pathways for women, we shut down a few for men, and I’m not sure why.  It seems that, in some communities, men who are grade school teachers are demeaned as people who couldn’t make it as high school or college teachers.  What is that all about?

So here’s to my neighbors!  May God prosper their work and the gifts they offer to our children.

Which reminds me, a decade ago my female colleague in a near by city complained about how few women led congregations in our region.  At our clergy gatherings shortly before my retirement I was the only male who led a congregation.  That, of course, is not true for every denomination in our area.  Our local ministerial association is dominated by congregations that are unlikely to see any female clergy in the near future, and association notices have sometimes gone out with the salutation, “Brothers.”  But I digress and am about to get angry, and so to bed.

We always have spirited discussions in our Tuesday morning lectionary study group, but today’s got a little more spirited than usual.  Part of it had to do with our tendencies to use unstated hermeneutics with roots deep in our separate traditions to pronounce interpretations that are not easily supported by the text itself.  The text, of course, was Matthew 16.13-20, Matthew’s version of Peter’s confession.

It wasn’t simply that we all read it from a post-resurrection point of view, but that we read into it meanings that are not all that present.  Consider my friend Randy who seemed to read “…Messiah, the Son of the living God” as the same thing as “Lord and Savior” as that phrase is used in contemporary language to mean the totality of the doctrine of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus as the unique, one and only way to salvation.  I have no objection to that interpretation as long as the pathway to arriving at it is made clear, but for my friend that pathway was so thoroughly integrated into his theology that our demands that he articulate it just led to irritated confusion.  Not that we were picking on Randy, we all do the same thing all the time.

We went on to talk about what it means to have the authority to bind or loose.  Most of us, me included, jumped at the assumption that we were talking about forgiving or not forgiving sins.  But Bob objected.  Nothing in the text supports that interpretation.  One has to conflate it with John 19.20-23 to come up with that. In so doing it is wise to remember that in John the authority to forgive or retain sins is not given to Peter, but to the eleven after the resurrection. More than likely, said Bob, it has to do with the authority to permit or prohibit behaviors, ways of worship, or teachings, which is an interpretation that Ray Brown also recommends.  That not only makes more sense, but it is also supported by the text itself. 

These are cautionary matters that we must keep in mind not only when preaching but even more when teaching.  We must guard against the hidden hermeneutic.  In fact we need to dump that word altogether, and use ordinary words to explain to those we are instructing exactly how it is that the traditions of our particular denominations and our own individual study have led us to the interpretation we offer. 

Harlan Miller, Mr. Miller to most, was something of a hermit.  Raised on a farm in the early 20^th century, self-educated in the classics and the modern world up to but not much past the 19^th century, he was badly wounded in North Africa during WWII.  After years of recuperation he learned to survive on a tiny pension and SSD while doing a few odd jobs here and there.   Whatever family he had died somewhere along the way, with the exception of one distant cousin.  The church became his family but in a way that kept intimacy at arms length.  His weekly dime or quarter, or maybe penny, filled the offering plate to over flowing.  Now and then he’d make a gift to someone of a special tea he liked, or maybe gladiola bulbs from his yard.  Late in his life the youth group fixed up his shack for the winter, but it wasn’t quite enough to fill in all the cracks.  He never missed an adult bible study if he could help it and would occasionally offer his well educated 19^th century wisdom.  In his final months he was lovingly tended by a retired fire department EMT, and I think he liked it even as he complained about his keeper.  After his death we found his daily diary going all the way back to high school, all written in Latin.  Only the war years were missing.  Nothing exciting, just the record of an orderly, simple, impoverished life.  He left everything to the church.  It wasn’t much but those who knew and loved him each took a little something.  I have a roughly carved hooded monk holding a prayer book.  The folded flag normally given to the nearest of kin rests on the bookshelf in the rector’s office. He lived in the wrong century, but he was somehow a link to the dogged tenacity of those who came to settle here, not a link to those who made it and for whom streets and buildings are named, but to those who worked and lived hard lives that saw little reward.  Empires are built on such as these and without them no greatness is possible. Who will remember Harlan Miller?  Who remembers any of the millions and millions of Harlan Millers?  Will a president point up to the gallery during the State of the Union and introduce Harlan Miller?  “He farmed, he learned what he could, he got shot, he survived, he lived a long time and died in poverty; let’s all give a hand for Harlan Miller.” I believe that God remembered and laid out a feast to welcome him home.  His shack was “sold” to Habitat for Humanity. The day the shack was torn down people with metal detectors searched the back yard for the fortune he was said to have buried.  No one found a thing.  A brand new house is being built on that property today.  I helped lay the sub-flooring.  Some family, not so very different from Harlan Miller, will soon live there with maybe a little better chance and a little more opportunity.  May God bless and prosper them.

At the moment we are in Seattle and have spent quite a bit of time down by the waterfront, riding on the ferry to and from Bainbridge, and just messing around.  I’m not sure what it is about boats and ships, but put me on a boat of any kind and I’m happy.  They bring back memories of the sailboats I owned and loved in my youth.  The big floating barge like hotels loading up passengers for their seven day cruises do not count.  But the smaller passenger liners docked nearby that really do look like ships call to me from somewhere deep inside.  I really don’t care much where they are going, I would just like to be on one sitting in my deck chair having the steward bring me my very hot, strong cup of tea.  I think the problem is that I read too many sea stories and naval histories when I was young, and they warped my psyche.  Maybe it’s a good thing that we live in a valley surrounded by small mountains and high desert.  Otherwise who knows what fool thing I could get myself into. 

I had a disturbing morning.  I stopped in at the local Republican headquarters to get a McCain button for a friend of mine.  Actually I’m going to offer him a choice of that or an Obama button, and I think I know which he will choose.  But I digress.  The elderly volunteer tending the store asked if I would be willing to sign a petition demanding stronger immigration enforcement, including the requirement that local governments act for and under federal authority in a way that looked an awful lot like a set up for an old fashioned eastern European police state.

When I said that was not something I supported he let me know that, as a “Minuteman,” he had personally witnessed the flow of illegal Mexicans across the Arizona border, could attest to the great danger they pose for our national security, and told me of the egregious high cost of illegal immigrants leeching off the American taxpayer, a cost so high that it is greater than the cost of the war in Iraq.  I expressed some skepticism about the numbers and he allowed as to how disagreeing was an American right, and we owe that to the troops in Iraq fighting to preserve that right for us.  Knowing I was getting into hot water, I opined that the whatever they were fighting for, it was not my democratic American rights, that the war was a mistake that should have never happened, that we need to responsibly bring it to an appropriate conclusion, and that I didn’t know what any of that had to do with illegal Mexican immigration.  If he hadn’t been in his mid-eighties I think I could have been in physical danger.  As it is I think he was on the border of serious heart palpitations. 

So what is the story?  The right wing, anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies claims that illegal immigrants had a net cost to the federal budget of $10 billion in 2002.  Various fear mongering users of their report have twisted and contorted their data to make it seem even larger.  But for all of its prejudicial slant, the CIS study has some ballpark validity, keeping in mind that the GAO has time and again reported to Congress that the issue is more complicated than that and no study so far can be trusted 100%. The same GAO has also time and again reported to Congress that the inefficiencies of the Department of Homeland Security have bungled the enforcement mechanisms already in place.  They are not helped by employers wanting large numbers of low cost workers and consumers wanting their low priced products.  It means that although Illegal immigrants pay a lot in taxes and add value to some part of the economies in which they work, they also use a variety of social services that cost as much or more than they pay in taxes.

But what about the idea that they cost as much as the war in Iraq?  The Washington Post reported last March that the Iraq war was running about $12 billion a month, with a total cost so far of somewhere around $566 billion, not counting Afghanistan or the domestic cost of lost and broken lives.

I have no doubt that we have a serious immigration problem to be solved, but running around like a bunch of racist Chickens-Little hysterically crying that the sky is falling seems just a bit childish and terribly naïve about the danger of wanting national security (and purity?) so much that the treasured rights of hard won American liberty would willingly be given into the hands of an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. 

A couple taking a long car trip had plenty of time to reflect on my sermon on the death of John the Baptist and wrote asking why God, or Jesus, hadn’t intervened to do something about it.  After all, it would have been so much better for everyone if John had lived to continue his ministry so that Herod might even have had a conversion.

Not long ago Christian Century had an interesting article about hell. Several authors offered their take on the matter, but some of the letters in the following issue interested me more. While I have my own thoughts on hell, I was a little surprised by the writers who were delighted with the article because hell was in important part of their theology, and they were happy to endorse an image of God that was loving but just, who took sin seriously, and who would not fail to punish those who rejected his love or were unrepentant in their sinfulness.