Small Is Beautiful?

David Brooks got religion, albeit a tad late. Brooks column yesterday was called "The Gospel of Wealth," and he used it, in part, to praise David Platt's book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.
Platt leads a megachurch -- more than 4,000 members -- and has begun to call megachurches into question. Brooks quotes what I imagine is the heart of Platt's critique: “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”
Brooks observes that the first decade of the new century saw Americans buying "bulbous vehicles like Hummers and Suburbans. The rule was, The Smaller the Woman, the Bigger the Car — so you would see a 90-pound lady in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders."
But that image is too cute by more than half. Brooks seems to conveniently forget Arnold Schwarzenegger buying one of the first Hummers off the GM production line in 1992. Seeing Arnold posing beside his trophy vehicle one might even think that we hop into our four-wheeled behemoths, look down over the road, tune in our satellite radios and worship ourselves on the church of the great American highway.
Brooks is a smart man, and I'm sure he knows that the trends he identifies with the 2000s began well before Y2K. The SUV trend began even before Arnold bought his first Hummer, and as far back as 2000 sociologists were noting that over the previous 50 years the size of the average American family had declined by half while the size of the average American single-family home had more than doubled from a bit smaller than 1,000 square feet to about 2,500 square feet.
The excesses of the materialist American Dream are not a post 9-11 phenomenon, and believing in a golden age of balance does not mean that there ever was such an age. There is a reason that the last generation has been called the Second Gilded Age. Unchecked excess drove the American economy into the ditch in the late 1800s. This is truly nothing new under the sun, even though the SUVs may be only a few decades old.
The same is true of those McMansions in the exurbs with all of the SUVs in their driveways. I don't know if Realtors have the same market research, but vehicle manufacturers had strong opinions about SUV purchasers by the early 2000s. Malcolm Gladwell cites Keith Bradshear's 2004 book, High and Mighty:

According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

Brooks doesn't say, but he could, that lots of those bulbous vehicles find their way from McMansion driveways to the parking decks of suburban megachurches every weekend. I don't know if that is necessarily true of Platt's Brook Hills church but I will note that when I looked it up on Google Maps the first vehicle on the street view was a late-model SUV.
Could it be that the suburban megachurch phenomenon is closely related to the megahouse and megavehicle trends? Does it all reflect a deep-seated insecurity that has been with us a lot longer than the Bush-era paranoia that may, itself, simply be magnifying underlying fearfulness?
It is no surprise that a thoughtful, faithful leader such as Platt appears to be would find something missing in the megachurch setting. Fear is the opposite of faith, and in the midst of so much striving for security fear feels rampant. It's hard to be faithful when everyone around you is so scared.
In the face of this, what might the "small house movement" be telling us about the future of faith? I imagine that most of the houses where Jesus broke bread and received gracious hospitality were closer in size and scale to those of the small house movement than to McMansions, and surely house churches were the norm of an early Christianity that could never have imagined today's megachurches.
So, Mr. Brooks, welcome to the party. Better late than never.

God Is In the Ipod

Billy Jonas recorded God Is In before the age of the ipod so he didn't include it in the lyrics. (Take a minute and click on it and give it a listen. Lovely and incredibly creative song.)
Now that you're back ... God is in the ipod, or, at least in mine, at least this noontime while I was running four miles.
It remains damn hot here, mid 90s. While I love the sweat-soaked feeling that comes with running in this weather I won't claim that running itself feels very good when you can feel the heat rising off the pavement up through your feet.
But music helps ... unless the songs are about death. The ipod shuffled up Sarah Mclachlan's Hold On, a song about the pending death of a lover. Interestingly, it was a good song to run to today with a rhythm that fit my slow pace. I hadn't heard it for a long time, so I listened to it twice. Naturally, the song and the suffering made me think about death for a moment.
It was a passing thought until the next song came along: Black Peter by the Grateful Dead -- "Just want to have a little peace to die/and a friend or two I love at hand."
By the time that one played I was thinking that dying would feel better than running.
I also thought that I'd like to have a collection of songs about death played as the prelude to my own memorial service. Naturally, I'd like there to be several more decades of music to choose from before anyone has to plan the actual service.
As I considered the possibilities, I quickly concluded that I'd like the songs about death to end with the sanctus from Rutter's requiem. At that point in my run, the ipod shuffled to Rutter. I kid you not. It wasn't the sanctus, but another selection from the same cd.
God is in the ipod shuffle, playing tricks just for fun.

War Is Over ... War Goes On

With far less fanfare than President Bush's infamous declaration of "Mission Accomplished," President Obama announced something only slightly clearer: the end of combat operations. Given that 50,000 American troops -- presumably well armed and trained in the arts of war -- remain on the ground in Iraq the president's Oval Office speech last night seems like a milestone without much meaning.
Since March of 2003, 4,416 Americans have died in Iraq. Untold tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. We have spent almost $750 billion.
With 50,000 American troops still in Iraq those costs, in lives and in dollars, will continue to increase.
The president promises that we will have no "boots on the ground" in another 18 months or so. I doubt we will get an iconic "helicopter on the roof" photo opportunity of the end of this war, but I am sure that we will spend just as many years counting the costs of this one and trying to figure out why we were there in the first place.
Meanwhile, the death toll in Afghanistan climbs to 1,269, and the cost approaches $350 billion. When will we ever learn ...

Remembering Katrina

The fifth anniversary of Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast got me thinking back to the brief time I spent there that fall in the early days of the clean up effort. Here's something I posted then. Alas, five years on, our theological discourse remains in greater disrepair than does the Gulf Coast, what with mosques burning and Glen Beck's preaching.

Katrina Diaries: Theological Storms

Rita swirls out in the Gulf, bringing sporadic rain and a steady breeze with sweet relief from stifling heat and humidity. No amount of wind can clear the air of the bad theology that clings to the aftermath of Katrina. The other day I heard a radio preacher talking about the judgment of God on the voodoo-welcoming people of New Orleans.
Never mind that a god so narrow minded as to wipe out people seeking various ways to the divine does not deserve praise and worship. A god who discounts as collateral damage the hundreds of people who probably shared the radio evangelist’s faith doesn’t even deserve respect. A jealous and angry god is one thing – perhaps even a Biblical thing – but a god with such lousy aim is worthless. A god who unleashes flood waters on poor people trapped in New Orleans by a system that forgot to evacuate them is not the God of Moses who parted the waters for a people escaping a system that enslaved them.
I met some folks today at a church that sits right on the coast in Biloxi among a row of houses built just after the Civil War. The homes on either side of the church were destroyed, but the church itself escaped with nothing more than a flooded basement and a few damaged doors. One of the people I met there said, “God must have been watching out for his house.”
Less than two blocks away, 30 people died when the motel they were in collapsed. Here’s a god with pin-point precision but confused priorities. A god too busy watching over a temple of bricks and mortar to protect the flesh and blood next door is not the God made known in Jesus Christ, the suffering servant.
But when you wander through streets that look like a war zone, it’s hard not to wonder who and where God is in all of this.
Desmond Tutu has written, “The God we worship is the Exodus God, the great liberator God who leads us out of all kinds of bondage. Do you remember what God told Moses? [God] said, ‘I have seen the suffering of My people. I have heard their cry. I know their suffering and am come down to deliver them.’ Our God is a God who knows. Our God is a God who sees. Our God is a God who hears. Our God is a God who comes down to deliver. But the way that God delivers us is by using us as […] partners, by calling on Moses, on you and me.”
Ah, and therein lies the rub. Lousy theology lets us off the hook. It is fatalistic rather than faithful. If spirit is wind and fire – pnuema and ruah – then surely God can speak to us through the ferocious winds of Katrina and Rita, and surely part of the message is simply this: “here I am; where are you? Here I am, come and join me.”

The Really Dumb Things ...

The Pew Research Center's August 19 poll is getting a lot of attention because it reveals that one in five Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim, and only a third identify him as Christian. Newsweek is running a piece on line called Dumb Things Americans Believe that leads with the Obama/Muslim opinion.
Of course, one in five Americans also believe in witches. As an astute friend is fond of saying, around election time, "never underestimate the random stupidity factor in American politics."
Never underestimate the power of the noise machine, either. Almost 40 percent of Americans believe that the recently enacted health care insurance reform legislation creates panels that will make end-of-life decisions. Never mind that it is demonstrably false, the idea is out there and it has taken hold.
The noise machine is not confined to right wing delusions. A poll taken last September revealed that a quarter of Democrats believe that President Bush had something to do with the attacks of September 11.
Random stupidity is just that: random and stupid.
Not all of the dumb things Americans believe are foisted upon us by political interests. The Newsweek piece refers to a Gallup poll from 1999 showing that 20 percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth. One wonders about the overlap in this polls.
Clearly, there's a lot of just plain ignorance. Almost half of Americans don't know which of the Abrahamic faiths is the oldest, though one would think that identification might be a clue.
The same poll that found significant ignorance about Obama's faith also found that more than half of Americans think churches should stay out of political matters while 43 percent believe churches should express themselves on social and political issues.
Every time I see such poll results I grieve that we have such narrowly constrained perspectives on both our politics and our faith communities.
That narrow understanding of these critical spheres of life has something to do with some of the really dumb things Americans believe that were not asked about in any of the polls that Newsweek referenced.
Though the Founders would not have recognized them, we now hold some "truths" to be so self-evident that we don't even bother to ask about them in our polling, and they have everything to do with impoverished national political and spiritual life.
Questions, for example, about the nature of empire, the unquestioned dominance of our military-industrial complex, the equally unquestioned place of corporate rule in our politics, economy and media. The blind faith that we put in these institutions tops my list of really dumb things most Americans believe. I'm not holding my breath waiting for a Newsweek piece on them.

on the same bus now

If there are words there I am going to read them. I can't help myself. So I caught a headline from the execrable Washington Times this morning. The woman seated in front of me on the bus was highlighting an article headed, "Muslims, not Americans, Intolerant."
Being a tolerant American, I suppressed the urge to scream.
I wondered if the woman reading was using her red pen to underline points she agreed with, new pieces of information, or the logical fallacies that the piece surely contained beginning with its headline.
Oh, sure, I could be leaping to conclusions about the content. I wasn't rude enough -- or close enough -- to read the body type over her shoulder. I suppose it is possible that the article was merely reporting an opinion survey in which non-American Muslims and non-Muslim Americans were asked, "are you tolerant? and the Americans claimed more tolerance. Possible. I suppose.
But given that the on-line version of the Times today carries three opinion pieces opposing the proposed Islamic community center two blocks from the Trade Center site it seems likely that the article in print was one of those. Perhaps it was the piece that says President Obama is "a cultural Muslim who is promoting an anti-American, pro-Islamic agenda" -- whatever that means. Maybe it was the piece that concludes, "if the mosque is built, the terrorists win." Or maybe it was the one written by Ted Nugent. Ted Nugent? Really? Nugent calls Muslims, "voodoo nut jobs" practicing "voodoo religion." Ever the tolerant American, Nugent does allow that "Not all Muslims are religious whacks who deserve a bullet."
What can one say about Mr. Nugent? Ignorance and hate with a nice backbeat?
On the other hand, the only difference between his vile drivel and the other two is that he doesn't hold anything back. After all, this is a guy who recorded, "Out of Control."
It's clear who, in the opinions of Nugent and his fellow travelers at the Times, should be in control: white, American, Christians.
Letting go of the controlling power of politeness, Nugent has given voice to what so many opponents of the community center don't quite say, but what the headline writer captured perfectly: Muslims are not Americans.
I'm sure that would come as quite a surprise to the four to six million Muslims who are Americans, but why let the facts get in the way of an intolerant screed?
It may even have come as a surprise to my fellow travelers on the bus, where I could look beyond the Asian-American woman who was reading the paper to a Latina woman with her three young children, an African-American woman who appeared to be on her way to work, a snappily dressed young man who looked vaguely Indian, a young African-American man, and two other Caucasians. One of them, a young woman, was wearing a head scarf which, on this 90+ degree day seemed more likely to be a religious statement than a fashion one.
I don't know which ones of us were the tolerant Americans and which the intolerant Muslims. It's just so hard to tell these days when we're all riding the same bus.

Getting Over Ourselves

I have been on the road most of the last six weeks. Interestingly enough, I've managed to be out of internet range most of that time. Six weeks of mostly off line time gets one quickly in touch with one's connectivity addictions.
How long can you go without checking e-mail? Facebook? Your favorite web sites or blogs?
How long can you go without coffee? Chocolate?
I didn't suffer any shakes, but I was certainly well aware of a desire to "check in."
I was also well aware that my checking in or not had little, if any, impact on anyone else. The world will get along just fine without me.
The first step on the road to letting go of our own idolatries probably lies in recognizing that, for most of us, the most important idol is the one who looks back at us from the mirror ... and then in acknowledging that even that one is not essential to the rest of the world.
None of that is to say that we are not important to our families and communities, and that a very few of us are even important beyond those contexts. But none of us is essential. The world will go on without us. It got on just fine before us, and it will keep on just fine long after we're gone.
Coincidentally, perhaps, at a gathering this evening discussing some verses from Luke 6, we concluded that perhaps one of the lesser known of Jesus' beatitudes was, "blessed are those who get over themselves ...." We didn't quite come up with the second part, "for they shall ...."
As for me, I've not gotten over my six weeks in the non-wired wilderness and shall return to the indispensable blogging!
Here are a few pictures from the sojourn.

General Assembly

A quick slide show from GA, set to David Lamott's wonderful song, "Hope." Thanks, David.
General Assembly

The Burger King of Kings ...

I left Minneapolis for a week of vacation down in Tennessee, out of the frying pan of GA into the fire of July in the hazy, hot and humid southeast. It was all good, and the best (or, something) had to be this church sign of Jesus that brought the car to a screeching halt for a photo op. There's just not much better than roadside religious Americana. The kids call this one "camel Jesus" for some reason. Judge for yourselves.

Blogging the Assembly

Late last night the Assembly voted to commend to congregations and presbyteries a study report on same-gender marriage. Following that vote, GA voted to let that action be the Assembly's response to a series of overtures that proposed changes in the definition of marriage in our directory of worship, and one that would have clarified pastoral rights and responsibilities in relation to same-gender marriages in jurisdictions where such marriages are legal.
The final vote on that proposal came sometime after 11:00, and it passed by about 40 votes. I think some of the commissioners were just too tired to keep debating into the night. I was certainly tired by that point.
The argument that carried the day, it seemed, was that the study document provides an opportunity for the entire church to enter a season of study and discernment about marriage.
So we move ahead. I have deep doubts about the prospects for conversation. It has been our experience over the years that, absent a proposal requiring a vote, the church simply ignores difficult issues until the next GA.
The question is not going away because the people whose lives are most deeply wounded by the church's inaction are not going away.
So, on the whole, GA was a mixed bag.
If nothing else, this Assembly provided one great line. During the marriage and civil union committee's hearings Tuesday afternoon one conservative advocate lamented that over the past half dozen years or so GA has become "a big gay party."
That's one of the best descriptions of the joyous people of God I've seen in a while, so here's my motto for the 220th GA: Pittsburgh 2012 -- The Next Big GAy Party!

Blogging the Assembly

I don't know what it is with me and laptops these days. Mine has blown some video function again, and since yesterday the screen presents everything as if it's a film negative. Incredibly annoying, and it reduces the world (the on-line world, in any case) to a pale and mostly monochromatic version of itself -- kind of the like the Presbyterian Church, come to think of it.
But a couple of things happened today that offer hope of a more colorful and diverse communion. The one that will get all the attention is the vote this afternoon to open ordination to called and qualified gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons. Along with thousands of others, I've worked for a long time and countless hours on that goal, and today is another step on the long road to equality and justice.
Not many will pay much attention to one other item. GA voted down a recommendation to allow for the creation of linguistic presbyteries. Some in the Korean-American church sought the change, but it struck many as a Trojan horse in which theological purity was the real issue. Saying "no" to the proposal makes it more likely that the Korean-American Presbyterian congregations within the denomination will continue to be more fully integrated into the larger church and thus the larger church will continue to be shaped and informed by its Korean sisters and brothers as well as the other way around.
There is a great deal of fearfulness that surrounds these votes: fear of change, fear of the other, fear that the changes will bring about the end of the PC(U.S.A.).
I am afraid that the "changes" my laptop is undergoing may be fatal this time. But the church is much sturdier, and it will endure. I hope that soon both the church and my screen look brighter and much more colorful.

Blogging the Assembly, Day 3

I am just too tired to think about much, though Jay Leno is on right now in the background and he seems to have just hosted a wedding on Latenight. How romantic ... and spiritual.
Well, the committee on civil unions and marriage at GA today endorsed a change to the church's definition of marriage from "one man and one woman" to "two people." It probably won't get us on Leno, but it will open a lot of doors that had been closed.
The committee that deals with ordination issues recommended a rewrite of G.60106b -- the section of our Book of Order that bars ordination of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender church officers. The revised language removes all such categorical barriers.
It was a good day at GA. But now it's almost tomorrow, so I'm crashing.

Blogging the Assembly, Day 2

I heard this story today: in March of 2003, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, the session of a Presbyterian church in Iowa was meeting. The pastor asked elders to share their thoughts on the simple question, “what would Jesus do?” As they went around the circle, one elder became increasingly agitated. When it was his turn to speak he said, “if you’re asking me if Jesus would drive a tank into Bagdad, then my answer is no. But Jesus would be wrong!”
That story underscores for me one face of the faithlessness that plagues our nation. We really do not believe in the power of Jesus Christ to transform lives. We really do not trust in the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit to have real power in the real world to bring us even one hour closer to the reign of God’s shalom.
I saw this car yesterday just covered with bumper stickers. One in particular caught my eye. It read, “atheism is the cure to religious terrorism.” Needless to say, I found the sentiment off putting, atheism being its own peculiar brand of religious intolerance.
And I thought, no, for us Christians, the nonviolent way of Jesus is the cure – the only effective response to the violence of terrorism and every other form of violence from the personal and local to the regional or global.
In the Confession of 1967, our Presbyterian forebears spoke a prophetic word calling the church to commend to the nations the way of nonviolence. As the Confession states, “The church, in its own life, is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace […] even at risk to national security.”
A lot has changed in the 43 years since that confession, but the timeless charge to be ambassadors for Christ in his ministry of reconciliation has only grown more urgent in a world awash in violence. Just yesterday there was another suicide bombing in Baghdad and a bomb scare that briefly closed New York’s Kennedy Airport. Day before yesterday there was a murder about 8 or 10 blocks from I am right now – the 25th murder this year in Minneapolis.
I can’t help but hear Jesus saying, “enough of this. Put away your swords.”
If we are to be the body of Christ in the world, then it must be us who says, “enough of this. Put away your swords. And your guns. And your bombs.”
To say that with power and authenticity we must learn to live it in our own lives. It is not enough merely to say – or even to sing – we ain’t gonna study war no more, we must also begin to study the nonviolent way of Jesus, and to listen, anew, for Christ’s call to us to be peacemakers.
Our church, through an overture that is under consideration here this week, is inviting the whole church into just such study and discernment. We want to have a conversation similar to that which the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity invited us into a few years back; this time around the practice of nonviolence and its implications for our common life, including asking ourselves challenging questions about our own theology of war and our participation in it.
My church sits less than two miles from the Pentagon, and some of our members are connected to the defense establishment one way or another. We also live and work in Metro DC, often called the murder capital of the world. So this is very real to us.
We do not wish to see the creation of a limited study group that would bring to some future assembly a position paper to be voted up or down and then placed on a shelf to gather kudos and dust. Rather, we encourage the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program to work in consultation with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fellowship to find or develop low-cost and no-cost ways to engage and facilitate a conversation across the church.
Both programs are already beginning to use social networking and other electronic means to disseminate information, and we believe that is but the first of many possible steps that can be taken.
As our Constitution reminds us, the mission of the church in any generation is to be found in "sharing with Christ in the establishing of his just, peaceable, and loving rule in the world" [G-3.0300c(3)(e)]. We believe GA action endorsing our overture can be a crucial step in fulfilling that mission.
We shall see.

Blogging the Assembly

A few images from the first 30 hours or so of the 219th General Assembly.
Elder Cindy Bolbach, from our neighboring congregation at First Presbyterian Church in Arlington, was elected moderator. That means that four of the past five General Assembly moderators have joined us at Clarendon for worship or fellowship during the past seven years. For a little church that often finds itself at odds with the denomination we do seem connected to its leadership. And we say, "yeah, Cindy!"
Before heading in to the opening worship this morning I joined my More Light friends and colleagues in a public witness across the street from the convention center, reminding those entering worship that not everyone feels welcomed by the church. We were led in singing by a man wearing a fabulous rainbow stole that had graced our communion table at Clarendon a week ago.
Worship at GA is a pretty grand and moving affair, and it included puppets, waving banners, dancers and a liturgical artist, as well as preaching, communion, and, for the first time, a baptism.
I have spent the rest of the day in meetings or preparing testimony, and now I'm watching fireworks out my hotel window. A nice beginning.

Fidelity and Chastity ... Again

I’m preparing this week for the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which opens Saturday in Minneapolis. I will be advocating for change in the denomination’s ordination practices among other things. We are calling for a revision or removal of the so-called "fidelity and chastity" clause of our Book of Order that was put in to deny ordination to gays and lesbians.
As the process plays out again, I've looked back at some things I wrote prior to the 217th General Assembly about what fidelity and chastity truly mean, and about how honoring the body is a part of faithful living -- although not a part touched on at all by those who would deny ordination to some classes of people simply on the basis of sexuality.
Truly honoring the body with fidelity and chastity is a profoundly counter-cultural practice, because it reminds us that we are beautifully made in the image of a loving Creator. Honoring the body reminds us that each and every body – no matter age or gender or sexuality or appearance or sickness or health or size or status – each and every body is fearfully and wonderfully made. Honoring the body, then, turns us toward the Creator and away from images and ideologies that would devalue and devour our bodies.
As with so much in Christian practice and theology, we will understand this better if we learn if from those who are poor; in this case, poor in body. I shared a meal some time ago at the L’Arche community in the District. L’Arche is a global movement begun in France about 40 years ago by Jean Vanier. L’Arch communities create homes for people with severe mental and, often, physical disabilities, who live with their helpers in community.
Toward the end of the evening I spent with them, Andrew, a young man who does not speak beyond grunts, took me by the hand and led me around making sure that I had met each member of the community, as we had gathered after dinners in a couple of houses in Adams-Morgan. Andrew has dancing, smiling eyes, and his grip on my hand conveyed an incredibly deep hospitality.
Sometimes, Andrew has trouble walking. He had a bruise on his chin where he had hit his face in a recent fall. I was deeply moved, that evening, by the community director’s simple question: can you imagine what it would be like if falling down were a regular part of your life?
That reminded me that some people know they have a body because it hurts.
A few years back, Jean Vanier spoke at Harvard, and he said,
"Many people know they have a head because they have learned that two and two are four. They know that they have hands because they can cook eggs and do other things. Many know they have a sexuality because they have experienced strong emotions. But what they do not always know is that they have a well deep inside of them. If that well is tapped, springs of life and of tenderness flow forth. It has to be revealed in each person that these waters are there and that they can rise up from each one of us and flow over people, giving them life and a new hope."
I’m still not sure I know what fidelity and chastity really mean, or if the progressive church can really receive any gift from these words that have done such great damage to so many over the past decade in our denomination. But if there is a gift there to be discovered, I believe it has something to do with the way that honoring our embodied selves can tap that well and allow life and tenderness and love and faithfulness and wholeness and holiness to flow in and through our lives and our communities.

And On It Goes ...

So President Obama has fired General McChrystal. He fired the warrior, but he should have fired the war instead.
Afghanistan is now the nation's longest war, and it is an unwinnable engagement, perhaps the very definition of quagmire. The news is full of the McChrystal intrigue but scant attention is being paid to the substance of the conversations reported in the infamous Rolling Stone article.
I don't pretend to know much about military matters, and so I'll just take it at face value that the disparaging remarks about administration officials quoted in the article necessitated McChrystal's firing. Apparently the general and his inner circle questioned President Obama's engagement, and one aide said that White House national security adviser Jim Jones was "stuck in 1985."
There were other, ruder, remarks quoted in Rolling Stone, and the sum was clearly enough to get the general fired.
But the article also quotes McChrystal's chief of operations, Major General Bill Mayville, saying of the overall situation in Afghanistan that, "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument."
When the military leaders charged with directing a war realize that there is no way to achieve anything that will even look like a conventional victory it is time to find leaders who will simply get us out quickly and responsibly.
As a soldier returned from Vietnam, John Kerry famously asked of America's second longest war, how do you ask one more young American to die for a mistake.
It's way past time to ask now about the wisdom of asking one more young American to die for an argument.

No Child Left Behind Here

Our fifth grader completed elementary school today. This morning we went to her promotion ceremony. I always love attending events at the school if for no other reason than reading the names of our kids' classmates: Uuganzul, Tasnim, Tamudgen, Mustafa, and my favorite, Dixie Espinoza.
The children at Hoffman-Boston speak dozens of languages and come from families with roots planted in soils all over the world. More of the kids there receive subsidized school lunches than at any other elementary school in Arlington, as well. Some of the families may be poor, but the school provides a rich learning environment. But it is a failing school under terms of No Child Left Behind.
Whenever I hear discussion of that law I think of Hoffman-Boston. Our kids have had a phenomenal experience there -- richer and deeper by far than they experienced in some high-achieving, affluent, suburban districts in other districts whose student populations were more monochromatic and mono-socio-economic. It's far from perfect, and, sadly, the worst educational aspects of the experience come when the school drills its students for the tests that determine whether or not the school is considered failing.
Still, as I watched the beautiful children walk across the stage this morning, I watched the future of the nation and I trust that when they take center stage perhaps no child will be left behind.

Saying Yes and Saying No

So I'm in the midst of writing a sermon for Sunday morning and I've just written something about being a congregation known in the community for the way we welcome the outcast and marginalized and there comes a rapping on my window. It was a young deaf man looking for help paying for a prescription.
I've met this young man before. He's come looking for help. Because I can't sign we communicate with short notes back and forth. It's a bit tough to communicate, to be certain. But it was clear that he wanted help with $30 worth of prescriptions. I say "wanted" because it is impossible to know if he "needed" the money -- that is to say, was he telling me the truth in his notes? Moreover, it was equally impossible to know whether he needed help from the church -- that is to say, did he have other resources at his disposal beyond asking the church? were we the first stop or the last?
The bottom line, for me, this time, was that the answers to those questions did not matter to me. I had $30, so I gave it to him. That doesn't make me a saint, but does it make me a sucker? And in whose eyes? Does that matter?
Given the bit of history that I do have with this young man, I am confident that he did use the money for prescription meds, but what if he didn't?
I am absolutely certain that I have more of this world's goods than he does. I'm confident that I am not more worthy of those goods than he is. I'm certain that I don't know what it would mean to be more worthy.
However, I remain confused about the role of the church in all of this. As a congregation we don't have money lying around to give out to people off the street.
Our mission money goes to support the Arlington Food Assistance Center, the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Program, Rebuilding Together, the general mission fund of the Presbyterian Church, More Light Presbyterians and various other organizations or institutions whose work is consistent with our mission.
We do not hold back any for distribution to people off the street. As a congregation we've concluded that our money is used more efficiently giving it to groups to use for people in need rather than giving it to individuals. Is that faithful? It does require us to say, "no" to most individuals who come asking.
And how shall we be known?

Friday Afternoon Blog Repair Manual

Last night at the Fourth Annual Northern Virginia Interfaith Pride Celebration, a colleague read from a 20-year-old entry in her personal journal recalling the evening when, as a still closeted lesbian pastor, she sat in a church board meeting as members discussed pulling out of their denomination over its increasingly liberal positions on GLBT concerns. She wrote that evening of feeling incredibly alive and filled with the Spirit that she found empowering her to be herself and to begin speaking out.
I cannot do justice to the beauty of her writing, and after the service several of us were thanking her for her words and joking that our own personal journals read nothing like that.
Indeed, I haven't kept a personal journal in many years and when I look back at the ones I have kept I find them mostly cringe-inducing. Perhaps it is looking back at the person I was and finding that, like pictures from high school that make you say, "I can't believe I actually wore that stuff!" the words leave me thinking, at best, "I can't believe I actually wrote that stuff," and, at worst, "I can't believe I believed it."
But I did indeed sport the short shorts and tube socks of the late 70s, and I did think what I thought. The short shorts are going to make a comeback -- or so I threaten my kids. But the thoughts are rightly consigned to my own amnesia.
As I celebrated Pride last night I did so with the hope that homophobia will someday soon strike everyone the way a high school yearbook does (minus the fondness of nostalgia) -- can you believe that was really us? Did we really look like that? Did we really think like that?

It's Hot Out There

Well, of course it is. It's June in Virginia, after all. It's always hot in Virginia in June.
On the other hand, it's been pretty hot for a while. In fact, NASA reports that we just experienced the hottest April globally in its data set that dates back to 1880. January to April was the hottest such period in those records, and the same data suggest that the earth just endured its hottest 12 months in those 140 years.
As the Evangelical Climate Initiative puts it so clearly, "Now is the time for followers of Christ to help solve the global warming crisis."
The truth is clear. The planet is heating up. How much of the heating is driven by human activity is too complex to pin down with utter exactitude, but a century of research clearly shows that industrial activity (manufacturing, energy production and use, transportation) plays a significant role in the changes. Just as clearly, there are changes we could undertake that would make a huge difference.
The moral imperative from our Judeo-Christian tradition is obvious. We are stewards of what we have been given. We are part of creation and we do not stand apart from it. Moreover, we have an ethical responsibility to hand on to our children a liveable world. At the moment we are failing.
The gaping wound in the Gulf, bleeding crude oil into a beautiful ocean, is a symptom of our failure, and it should spur us to action. Oh, I know, it's not directly related to climate change, but it is a part of the same system.
That system must change, and it is up to us to change it.
Part of the solution is political and part is personal. I probably should have ridden my bicycle instead of my motorcycle to church today. On the other hand, I did leave the car at home (and it is a low emission, fuel efficient hybrid -- not to mention a pretty sweet ride.) Each of us can make changes that make a difference.
I also called both of my United States senators today to encourage their support of comprehensive climate change legislation as part of a Virginia clergy call-in day in support of a clergy statement on climate change.
Meanwhile our state attorney general is attacking climate change research both from the EPA and the University of Virginia.
Perhaps the AG is an authentic climate change skeptic or maybe he is cynically playing to his conservative political base. It could be both.
Whatever the case may be, the opposition to climate change legislation is clearly part of a conservative political program driven in significant part by corporate interests whose bottom lines could suffer if the United States adopts strict emissions controls. As the Union of Concerned Scientists reported several years ago, oil interests -- in particular Exxon Mobile -- have poured millions of dollars into funding climate skeptics.
And I've just fallen into their well-laid trap by getting lost in the political weeds of what should be, first and foremost, a moral issue.
Perhaps the fact that a growing number of evangelicals share a moral outrage about the state of the earth will change the political calculus on the issue. They understand on this issue that their interests are not the same as those of the oil industry.
After all, everybody sweats, and it's getting hotter all the time.

parting shots of spring

Spring brings our own small blossom festival, which corresponded this year with the great laptop die-off. If you'd been at our house two months ago, this is what you'd have seen on the way to the front door.

In All Things, Moderation

I don't reckon Plato had blogs and spam in mind when he suggested moderation but that's what it's come to friends. A few of you offer comments from time to time and I welcome them -- even the persistently argumentative and disputatious ones. When I started this little thing years ago I imagined that it might serve sometimes as a place of dialogue and a few times it actually has. I continue it because I find it a useful, even helpful, discipline. If a few folks find my ramblings amusing or provocative, that's an added plus as far as I'm concerned. However, when spammers start leaving comments with links to on-line Chinese pornography -- why am I surprised that there is such a thing -- I'm drawing the line. So I've turned on the "moderate comments" option. I promise never to block even the most obnoxious comments if they are remotely on point, as long as it doesn't link to something disgusting. Keep it clean, people!

Remembering

I rarely watch TV news so I don't really know how much time is being spent focused on President Obama's Memorial Day activities. I hope it's not much, because it is surely not a newsworthy item.
It seems that, like President George H.W. Bush before him, Obama is sending his vice president to Arlington National Cemetery next Monday. The president will be in Chicago and will visit a national cemetery there. Some people are trying to make a big deal out of this but I won't link to them here because I don't want to drive a single extra reader toward this one more shining example of what is so wrong with our politics.
On the same day that news of the 1,000 American casualty in Afghanistan was published we're supposed to be worried about what cemetery the president will visit to honor America's war dead on Memorial Day?
I have ancestors buried in the national cemetery in Chattanooga -- veterans of World War I. As far as I know, no American president has ever visited that cemetery. Does that make the sacrifices of those buried there less significant? Would they be elevated in death beyond what they were in life if a president did lay a wreath there? Will their deaths mean any less because President Obama visits a national cemetery in Illinois rather than one in Virginia next week? Were dead veterans dishonored when Vice President Dan Quayle went to Arlington National Cemetery each Memorial Day during the first President Bush's term of office in place of the president?
Honestly, none of those questions makes any sense at all.
The real question to be asked on Memorial Day is this: why are young men still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq?
To ask that does not dishonor their service. It is, in fact, the only question that does justice to their continued sacrifice. For if we cannot ask the central questions of our time and discuss and debate them in civil and substantial terms then nothing they have done will amount to anything more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Those who would distract us from that central question are the ones who dishonor the memory and the service of the men and women we remember on Memorial Day.

Russian Roulette on the Laptop

Just got off the phone with a nice Indian man who has done his best to resuscitate my practically brand-new laptop which has been randomly shutting down pretty much since I bought it two months ago.
He had me drain the power from it, which involved pulling the battery and holding the power button down for about 20 seconds. It doesn't take much to drain power.
He walked me through a couple of simple steps to reset the machines bios -- whatever that means. Whenever I see "bios" I think "life." It does seem that this machine has a mind of its own, so why not a life of its own as well.
Which brings to mind the announcement yesterday that scientists have created a cell from whole clothe. Well, that's not exactly correct. The New York Times reports it this way:

The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life, by synthesizing an entire bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell.

According to the Times article, the environmental group Friends of the Earth (whose KSU chapter I was an officer in a long time ago and in a strange set of circumstances not worth going through here), condemned the achievement as "dangerous new technology," and urged an end to the research.
Of course that is unlikely. Technologies, once out of the scientific bag, seldom get put back in.
Those who pull them out of the bag, Venter in this case, almost always trumpet their discoveries or achievements with promises for valuable advances for humankind. Venter spoke of new energy and medical advances that might emerge from synthetic cells that could be invented in the future using the technologies he has pioneered.
Sometimes -- often? not so often? too often? -- the technological advances have profound unintended consequences that the scientists, in their drive to discover, overlook.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was almost an exception, or, at least was cognizant enough of the consequences of his scientific work to say, upon the detonation of the first atomic bomb, "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."
The edge of science is often a kind of Russian Roulette, although some of the bullets really are magic while others are deadly.
I'm playing my own small blogging version right now. I have no idea whether or not the fixes my Indian friend recommended will work. If not the laptop will shut down with no warning and I'll lose whatever I'm working on. So I'm pausing regularly to save it -- not because it's worth any great effort, but because I'm spending the time so I might as well have some pixels to show for it at the end of the day.
I would hope that scientists working in Venter's field would likewise take enough time along the way -- pausing to save, as it were, the rest of us from unforeseen shut downs.
Wow! All the way through a brief post without a shutdown. I hope the work that Venter is pioneering does a whole lot better than that.

Honor and Lies

The sad, strange and silly saga of Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, has prompted a lot of commentary. It seems that Blumenthal has claimed, falsely, that he served in the American military in Vietnam.
It's not the first time and probably not the last that someone who did not serve in that war has claimed to have done so.
In this morning's Post, former editor and reporter and Vietnam vet Henry Allen decided to answer the question of "why they lie about Vietnam."
Allen puts it this way: "The fact is that regardless of whether a war was moral, justified, won or meaningful, having served in one -- particularly in combat -- confers prestige."
I suspect that he is correct, but in a limited way.
Chris Hedges, in his brilliant War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, writes, "the rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
I doubt that Allen would put much stock in Hedges' opinions because Hedges only covered wars and never fought in one. After all, in this morning's piece, Allen also writes,
"Once I listened to a former war-zone correspondent who was eager to demonstrate that his time under fire was the same as a soldier's. He said, I'd get up in the morning and face the decision of whether I should head out where it was really dangerous.
But soldiers don't get to decide. They don't have choices. That's part of the hell of war."
Allen would likely have more respect for the observations of Tim O'Brien, whose towering work, The Things They Carried, includes this observation:
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."
One wonders why participating in an addiction to obscenity and evil continues to confer prestige. That it does strikes me as incredibly sad. It's like the old drinking stories of recovering alcoholics -- they know that the drink could have, and maybe should have killed them, just as it did so many of their buddies, but they cannot let go of the irresistible feeling that the drink gave them.
There have been 6,492 coalition casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq as of May 20, including 37 this month in Afghanistan.
The prestige toll continues to rise every day.
As to Vietnam, well, I was 15 years old in April of 1975, when the last Americans left Vietnam. I organized and participated in my first protest against American militarism on Armed Forces Day in 1978.

So, where was I ... Oh, yeah, Kent, 1970

Oh, yes. May 4. Kent. 1970. Busted laptop. Hm, one of these things is not like the other.
In any case, the story I wanted to tell goes like this:
In the spring of 2000 the organizers of the memorial events that year invited all of the survivors of the shootings to Kent. I don't know if that happens every year. I do know that in the early years, including the years that I was a student, the school administration really did not want the survivors on campus because they were a visceral reminder of something the university simply wished to forget.
But in 2000 the surviving victims of the shooting were invited back and many returned, which was really neither here nor there for me except that in the spring of 2000 I was serving a church in Mt. Lebanon, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh.
In 2000, May 4 fell on a Wednesday. It was both a work day for me and a school day for our children so we quickly concluded that the trek to Kent, about two hours west of Mt. Lebo, was not going to happen. I was at the church on that Friday afternoon later than usual, and the rest of the staff had left for the day. I was walking around the front of the church, something I rarely did because the main entrance off the parking lot actually went into the back of the place. I noticed a middle-aged man and woman and a teenage girl trying the door to the fellowship hall, so I walked over to them and asked if I could help.
The man said he had grown up in Mt. Lebanon and attended the church as a child, and was back in town for the first time with his daughter. He wanted to show her some of the places that had been important to him and the church, which had hosted dances for high school kids on Friday and Saturday nights in the late 60s, was one of those places.
One of the family, I don't recall which, was wearing a 30th anniversary May 4 t-shirt and I remarked that I was a KSU grad.
That was when Jim Russell introduced himself. He told me that he had been shot at Kent on May 4, 1970. He was standing at a 90-degree angle from and more than a football field's distance from the National Guardsmen who turned and opened fire on the students that afternoon. He was shot in the thigh and the forehead by the only Guardsman firing a shotgun. The rest had machine guns.
In 2000 he lived in Oregon, having moved west in the mid-1970s to escape the shadow of Kent. He shared with me the bitterness he felt toward the university and the authorities, who wanted either to forget the whole thing or blame the students.
He vividly remembered the calls to "shoot 'em all," and the names -- "worse than brown shirts and night riders" according to Ohio Gov. James Rhodes -- that the students were called by high ranking government officials.
He shared with me that he'd lost a job in Ohio in the early 70s when his employers learned of his connection to the shootings, a story he also shares in the story linked above. He also noted that a new university administration during the 1990s had changed the way the school dealt with the survivors of the shootings and had made them feel welcome on campus for the first time in a quarter century. While time had healed his physical wounds and many of the psychological ones as well, I doubt that Jim Russell ever felt completely at peace with the events of May 4, 1970. He died in 2007 at 60.
A memorial service was held at Kent and the story on it in the Akron paper at the time drew echos of the same response the shootings did in 1970: the students deserved what they got.
Forty years later the shootings continue to haunt the lives of those caught in the crossfire. In fact just this week Alan Canfora, who was wounded on May 4, asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to reopen the investigation of the 40-year-old case based on new evidence from an audio recording of the shootings. A Cleveland Plain-Dealer investigation this spring used new audio enhancement techniques and discovered a voice clearly ordering the Guard to "prepare to fire" seconds before they opened fire for 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.
Doris Krause, the 84-year-old mother of Allison Krause, who was 19 when died from fatal wounds received on a campus parking lot more than 100 yards from National Guardsmen, said of the new discovery, "I'm an old lady, and before I leave this earth, I'd like to find out who said what is on that tape."
Forty years on and it remains true that the powers that be will bring to bear deadly force on those who threaten the base of the power, and they will also go to any length to avoid being held accountable for their actions.
They used to produce t-shirts each spring at Kent that read, "long live the spirit of Kent and Jackson State." I never bought one because I was always skeptical that there was any such thing as a spirit of those places and the killings deaths of the spring of 1970. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the spirit is simply the tireless search for the truth about what happened that day and the pursuit of something like justice even all these years later.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon's Coming

Forty years ago today Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed college students at Kent State, killing four and wounding 13. In the aftermath of the shootings President Nixon remarked, "when dissent turns violent it invites tragedy." Of course, it was not the dissenters who turned violent that Monday morning. It was the empire's police, armed with weapons of war trained on unarmed college students in the middle of a campus that was stirred in protest against the empire's war in Vietnam.
I graduated from Kent 13 springs after the shootings, and participated in memorial vigils each of the five springs I was on campus. I've stood in the spots where the kids were mortally wounded, and I've stood on the spot where other kids turned and fired their weapons.
In other words, I've looked at the shootings from both sides now, and from both sides it has always been clear to me that had Nixon been capable of honesty he would have said, "when dissent begins to threaten the foundations of established order then the established order will bring to bear deadly force to quell the dissent." But no president can ever be that honest.
As a Kent alum I have a bagful of memories of May 4 memorials, but the most affecting May 4 connection for me happened more than 15 years after I'd graduated during the time when I lived in Pittsburgh.
I'll share the story in a subsequent post. My laptop is, once again, seriously misbehaving -- crashed twice since I began this post. Urrrrg.

with the Bishops and Elders

I spent much of the past two days with the Bishops and Elders Council of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Monday we met with Josh DuBois at the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
The first thing that should be said is that Josh DuBois is one whip-smart young man. The amount of information that he holds in his head is more than most of us hold in our electronic data bases. Oh, to be young!
The second thing to be said is what a difference an election makes. The Bush Administration steadfastly refused to engage national GLBT leaders on the pressing concerns of the community: employment and housing discrimination, GLBT poverty, the issues that uniquely confront aging gays and lesbians in health care, housing and family law matters. Monday afternoon it was clear that the Obama Administration is informed and engaged on the issues that actually comprise anything that might be called "the homosexual agenda." That agenda has nothing to do with "spreading a lifestyle" and everything to do with protecting lives and rights. The present Administration, while far from perfect on these issues, simply sees them far more clearly because they do not come at them with blinders provided by leaders from the Religious Right.
Those leaders include folks like Lou Engle, founder of The Call. Engle is reportedly headed to Uganda to support its off shoot program, TheCall Uganda, whose stated mission includes praying for help with "the challenges in our country such as ... witchcraft and human sacrifice, homosexuality and increased immorality."
While there is a certain attraction to having the Lou Engles of the world out of the U.S., we really ought to export the best of what we are not the worst. Uganda has plenty of problems with the U.S. exporting hate.
Engle's visit is timed to support Uganda's much-discussed anti-homosexuality bill, a law that would make same-gender relationships a capital crime and, if I were Ugandan, even criminalize this blog for failure to report known homosexuals and leave me liable for up to seven years in prison for my associations.
Meanwhile a bit further south, two young men in Malawi, Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, remain in prison, facing sentences of up to 14 years, for the crime of professing their love for on another.
Yesterday, on the steps of National City Christian Church, a young African gay man named Moses gave thanks to God that "something good is happening" as he prayed for the safety and liberation of his family, friends and gay and lesbians brothers and sisters in Africa.
As Dr. King put it, we are all bound together in an inescapable web of mutuality. Whatever effects one directly effects us all indirectly. The freedom to love one another must not be bound by any government, and just as we must be concerned for the rights of marginalized people here we must stand in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed everywhere.

Earth Days

It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as my favorite Presbyterian minister used to say.
I got a note from my uncle this morning. Yesterday was my late aunt's birthday as well as the anniversary of their engagement. He recalled that their first book was on creation care, although long before that term of art had come into use.
John's note details what is happening in his garden this spring, and notes that both of the camps that he directed over the many years, Hanover and New Hope, had substantial demonstration gardens that helped feed the camp community.
None of that particularly suprised me. I have seen John in the garden many times over the years at Hanover -- the first time he met my two sons he was working in the garden, dripping sweat and loving life.
But reading his note prompted me to wonder where his love of the garden came from. My father, John's younger brother, never muched cared for gardening. My mom loves it, but dad never had any interest that I could discern. He knows nature that way one might know a set of facts. He always knew what kind of tree was growing in front of him, but as he grew older it seemed that trees were mostly obstacles to mowing the grass.
To be sure, my dad has always been an environmentalist in his convictions, but not so much a practicing one beyond the point of basic stewardship of resources -- and on that point I have always had the impression that it was more about saving a nickel than saving the planet.
Until the past few years I would have said that I was much more like my father than like my uncle. As urban dwellers in Chicago we rarely had any green space in which to garden, and we never went out of our way to create any.
During our interim sojourn between those years and our Arlington time we did have yards, and we did some basics, but those were also the years when our children were young and so time was always at a premium.
But I think the bigger issue was that we did not stay put long enough to put down roots, literally.
Now we've lived in the same house for almost seven years, and there's no move on the horizon. We've planted a tree, an autum blaze maple, and stayed put long enough to see it grow taller than the house. We just planted another, a Japanese emperor maple, that will never grow as tall as the house, but I hope to stay put long enough to see it broaden across one half of our small front yard.
Tending to the earth requires time, and time spent in one place. It also requires focusing on that one place with considerable attention. I think this was the great difference between my father and his brother.
Now my dad is slipping gradually into Parkinson's dimentia, and he lives pretty much out of focus all the time. But long before the disease struck, my dad's restless, creative energy drew his focus always to the next thing, while my uncle not only stayed put physically, he also stayed put emotionally.
I have always been, in that respect, my father's son. The horizon has always beckoned, and I've always looked for the next thing. I'm sure that will always be true, but I have learned that the only reason the grass if ever greener on the other side is because someone stayed put long enough to make it that way.
As I watched the pictures from the Gulf oil rig disaster this week, it struck me that we need all of that oil because we are a culture that does not value roots. It is altogether fitting that the great crises of our time are and will be about what our lifestyles are doing to all of the roots that we are too busy to tend.

Greetings from Asbury Park ...

Well, not exactly, but I did pass the exit as I was counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike on my way up to Stony Point this afternoon. And there's your two pop cultures nods for the day.
It has been a while since I last posted; in fact, it's the longest pause since I started this blog four or five years ago. I've come face to face with my own ridiculous dependence on convenient technology. It's not just technology I'm dependent upon, it's convenient technology.
As noted last month, my laptop died a sad and overheated death. I spent several day in vain hope and resucitation efforts loading and reloading operating systems and so forth, only to conclude in the end that it was a hardware issue. Apparently the video card melted down, almost literally, due to overheating.
That happened the same week I severely sprained an ankle (trying to keep up with a kid half my age on the basketball court). All of that happened just before Holy Week.
All of which was enough to make a preacher cuss -- holy @#$!, as it were.
So, just in time for Easter I got a new laptop. But by that point not only was I in the midst of the business of the season, I was also out of practice, or, better, out of the practice of writing.
We are what we practice. When we set aside practices for whatever reason, it is all too easy to leave them set aside. Sometimes that is not a bad thing. To every thing, and every practice, there is a season.
But often we leave practices set aside because they are either habits or they are not. The practice of eating well, the practice of living lightly on the earth, the practice of worship, the practice of prayer, the practice of sport or art or music require, well, practice.
Contrary to the old saying, practice does not make perfect. Practice does, however, make us. Moreover, practice is not always convenient, and for one as addicted to (or practiced at) convenience, temporary inconvenience becomes a too easy excuse for setting a practice aside.
So I'm picking this practice back up, even as I engage again the practice of making peace as part of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fellowship at its first ever convocation of peacemakers this weekend at the Stony Point Center in New York.
I am spending the next couple of days in the company of a wonderful collection of remarkable people whose experience and wisdom humble and inspire me. The grace of being in their presence this evening has, if nothing else, given me the energy to wake up the blog and pick up the practice. Not empty and aching ... but still off to look for a new, more peaceful America.
Sorry, the New Jersey Turnpike just does that to me.

Patience

This week, in a book I'd set aside at least two years ago, I found a slip of paper on which I had written a couple of commitments: to practice patience and to find moments of joy to celebrate each day.
I was an excellent reminder to stumble across just now. We are almost to the end of Lent, and stand at the moment on the edge of Holy Week. Holy Week demands patience, as we move from the waving of palms and the loud "hosannas" to betrayal, crucifixion and the longing for new life.
Personally, I'm forced to wait right now, as I continue to be homebound with my injured ankle. Moreover, my laptop has resisted all efforts at resurrection! So, I can't get out because I can't drive or walk much, and I can't communicate with the ease we've all become accustomed to.
Obviously my Lenten commitment has gone the way of the laptop!
The situation has also challenged that old commitment to patience and celebration, to be sure. On the other hand, it has driven me back to some books I'd set aside, including John Crossan's God & Empire, in which I found the slip of paper.
Crossan invites us to confront the questions that inevitably arise when Christian faith confronts political empire. As we marked last week the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and as we mark next week the death of Jesus at the hands of the empire of his day, it seemed a timely coincidence that I should return to this book and find in it my own promise to practice patience and to seek joy.

Saving ...

As noted a couple of days ago, my laptop is misbehaving. As a result, I've spent a lot of time -- writing time -- backing up files in case this is a sickness unto death.
Backing up files reminds me of one of the Platonic dialogues about writing. I don't recall which dialogue -- Phaedrus perhaps -- but the conversation concerns the notion that writing is a secondary and thus lesser form of communication than speech.
Backing up files would come way down the road, then, and the entire internet would as well.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I would happily have gone on at length on this stuff, but I've forgotten most of it and I guess I didn't save the files. Ah well.
Back to backing up.

One Ton of Fanmail ... or They Just Don't Write Hate Mail Like They Used To

The piece I wrote for People of Faith for Equality Virginia responding to Attorney General Cuccinelli's recent actions ran today as an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. By this evening I've only received two e-mail condemnations, neither of which was particularly interesting or creative.
Times have changed. Ten years ago I was forced to resign a church in Pittsburgh after preaching a sermon on same-sex marriage rights. Five years ago we got threats after Clarendon announced its marriage rights policy.
Today? A couple of lukewarm e-mails that don't even rise to the level of hate mail. I am somewhat disappointed. After all, if we're not getting hate mail we're not doing our jobs, a colleague once reassured me.
On the other hand, the nonresponse is informative on at least two levels.
It could be further evidence of the rapid decline of print media and simply indicate that no one is reading op ed pieces anymore. There is a sad truth to that. It's not sad because of what it says about the failures of the media (which are many and manifold), but rather because increasingly we only find opinion pieces in electronic space that is finely sliced and segmented, and where we seldom encounter voices we do not already agree with. To that extent, the death of the tradition of Sunday op eds saddens me.
The nonresponse could also be evidence of the continued rapid cultural shift that makes speaking out for the rights of GLBT people far less likely to engender angry response than it was just a few years ago. When we did the marriage policy change at Clarendon in 2005 the mail did not stop for weeks and the response included threatening phone calls to church.
The best this round of mail could produce was a bit of pathetic partisanship from someone in Mechanicsville: "Gays don't want equality, they DEMAND superiority; and, 'want to be out there' (pun intended) flaunting on television as often as Obama is...which is way too often!"
Harry Knox, from HRC, preached at Clarendon this morning. He was speaking with a group of us following worship and noted that roughly 90 percent of the American public now supports ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, including a majority of Republicans.
Times are changing ... and you have to work a lot harder to generate good hate mail these days.

Everything Put Together Falls Apart

The curly haired boy pictured further down has infected me with his cold.
Some strange viral thing infected my laptop yesterday.
Everything put together falls apart.
One could go lots of places from there, but my head is stuffed with anything but thought today so I'm just going to leave at that.
All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot but this back together again.

Sometimes a Cigar Is ... Just Another Day

The great privilege of ministry comes in walking through the valleys and across the mountain tops with people. I've had my share of such experiences, and they inevitably remind me of what I love about my job. Celebrating with couples who have become friends as they marry. Weeping with friends who have lost loved ones. Marching with friends seeking justice. Organizing with friends seeking peace. Studying with friends seeking wisdom and understanding. These are the moments of ministry that I, and most of my colleagues, love.
If we're lucky, we serve in communities that offer many such opportunities. I am lucky.
If we're unlucky, we serve in communities that are riven with strife over old wounds never healed. I have been unlucky.
But lucky or unlucky, all ministry has -- like all work -- its days of merely pushing the paper into the next tray. It's almost 5:00 p.m., and I've pushed a lot of paper today: session packet e-mailed - check; session packet copied - check; bulletin copied - check; e-mail blast out - check; sanctuary prepped for Sunday - check; web page updated - check.
Sometimes a day is just a day.
On the other hand, even on such a day, I managed to have lunch with one of the wise elders of the community and to share some organizing materials with colleagues in justice work.
Inspiration comes on such days as this in the details -- where God is.
So when the day gets long and seems to be dragging on tend to some details and seek the Lord where she may be found.

Something's Happening Here ... What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

I spent several hours yesterday serving as a peace marshal at a health care reform rally sponsored by Health Care for America Now. While the event was rowdy, it never veered toward anything nonviolent so I didn't have much to do other than watch and listen.
The target of the rally was the meeting of the insurance industry group America's Health Insurance Plans, which gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in DC. The choice of hotel was as tone deaf as the recent rate hikes announced by several insurance companies. One wonders who does PR for these folks. Are they simply so removed from the reality of this particular moment that they don't realize how they look, or are they so arrogant that they don't care how they look?
As one industry employee attending the conference said, “Why don’t you just pull up in Rolls-Royces and Porsches?”
It reminded me of the auto executives flying into DC on their private jets to meet with congress and ask for a bailout. Who advises these folks?
On the other hand, I'd ask the same question of the rally organizers.
Some aspects of the event were well planned. Some 5,000 people participated according to an estimate in this morning's Washington Post. The target of the demonstration -- AHIP's meeting -- was well chosen, and the speakers did a good job of posing health care reform as reigning in the well chronicled abuses of the insurance industry. For what it was, the demonstration was a fine and successful event.
But while I am all for taking to the streets in protest, more than a decade after Seattle the rallies and demonstrations with drums and puppets and street theater all begin to look and sound the same. It seems too pat and predictable, and too easy to dismiss. I wonder what it would feel like to ask participants to dress up rather than down, to walk in silence rather than making noise, to disrupt business as usual in a completely different manner, and to engage the issue in a way that challenges the system and demands its end in uncompromising language that does not simply demonize those who profit from it and support it.
What if 5,000 people, all dressed in dark suits or skirts, walked 10 across through the streets of the headquarter cities of the insurance companies and marched into those office buildings -- or into the arms of arresting police filling the jails -- presented tons of claim forms, or read off a list of thousands of names of people who died last year because they did not have insurance, or simply stood in silent mass witness to those lives?
Such a demonstration would take incredible discipline, and a huge amount of organizing and training not to mention money. In other words, it might take way more commitment of time and treasure than people are willing to give -- which may just be why we've been stuck with an inefficient and unjust health care insurance system for more than 100 years.
Then I spent last evening at a gathering of the Luke 6 community in formation. We spent our time studying the founding text. The sixth chapter of Luke is Jesus' sermon on the plain and Luke's version of the Beatitudes. Luke's version of these teachings is famously more challenging than that in Matthew 5 (which is challenging enough for me).
I was struck, yesterday in particular, by the opening stories of the Luke text. In it Jesus is practicing direct action and protest. He goes straight into the territory of those who oppose him -- the scribes and Pharisees. In Luke 6 Jesus goes to the synagogue and scandalizes the religious leaders with his teaching about what is appropriate to the Sabbath. Without ever speaking a personal word about the people he opposes, he calls into question everything that they support.
While they may have felt humiliated, their humiliation is never the point of Jesus' action nor of Luke's writing. Both the actions and Luke's account leave open the possibility of restored relationship while completely undermining the system that has broken relationships to begin with.
Like the rest of Luke 6, the opening stories present incredibly difficult challenges to those who would try to follow Jesus, in this case, into the streets. I ended up yesterday feeling completely inadequate to that challenge and rather glad to be on the rolls of Blue Cross than on the way to the cross.

What? Pastor Glenn Beck ...

Apparently Fox News' Glen Beck was talking about churches recently. This is all hearsay because the only time I actually hear Glen Beck is when Jon Stewart plays clips of Beck for the sole purpose of mocking him.
Anyway, apparently Beck was telling his listeners to be wary of church web sites that use words or phrases such as "justice," "social justice," or "economic justice." I hear that he told folks that if their church's sites used such phrases then they should quit the church because it was no doubt a den of socialists.
I thought I'd better check my church's site to make sure that we're not socialists, so I clicked on the home page. Damn! There it is. In the center of page. Quotated. In italics.

God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

OMG! We're socialists! To make matters worse, we claim, as part of our mission statement, that we try to live out the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
One wonders if Beck has ever actually opened a Bible. Mine has more than 300 verses that explicitly speak of God's deep concern for justice for the poor. But then again I probably have the revised socialist edition.
It reminds me of the days when I was looking for ministry positions. I noticed that liberal church's church information forms (sort of a reverse resume) always used the phrase "social justice." Conservative churches always used the phrase "Bible believing." I never did find a "Bible-believing congregation deeply committed to social justice."

Responding to Cuccinelli

Below is a letter to Virginia's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who last week sent a letter to Virginia's colleges and universities informing them that none of their non-discrimination policies that pertain to gays and lesbians would be enforced by his office and that the schools should rescind the portions of policies that refer to gays and lesbians.
I wrote this for the board of People of Faith for Equality Virginia and we are seeking signatures from any Virginia clergy or religious leaders who are willing to sign on. Please use the "comments" to add your name and leadership position.

Sir,
When I read of your recent recommendations to Virginia’s colleges and universities I thought immediately of the father of our great university system. Thomas Jefferson famously said of other people’s religious orientations that they neither picked his pocket nor broke his bones. I’m sure he would agree that another person’s sex life neither picks my pockets nor breaks my bones.
But when bias against a person's sexual orientation picks their pocket through job discrimination or breaks their bones through gay bashing then it is the responsibility of the state to protect them in every appropriate manner. Hate crimes laws and antidiscrimination laws and policies are long-standing, well-established and proven legal means of affording such protection. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Virginians clearly face discrimination and hate crimes and the fear that accompany them.
Failure to act in the face of that reality is a black eye on the Commonwealth, and on the office you hold. To act in direct contradiction to the reality must have Mr. Jefferson spinning in his grave.
When you know that a woman is threatened on the job because she is female would you not bring the full weight of the law to bear in any resulting legal proceeding? When you know that a family loses their home because they are black would you not prosecute? When you know that a public college or university refuses to register a Christian student group because of its faith-based bylaws would you not pursue the case with vigor?
When a college professor is fired for being lesbian or a young man is beaten and killed because he is gay why would you not do the same?
That is the question your recent letter to Virginia colleges and universities warning them on including sexuality in their nondiscrimination policies raises. When you know that more than 15 percent of all hate crimes are committed against people based on perceived sexual orientation how can you in good conscience block protection of gays, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students and faculty on Virginia campuses? When you know – and there is overwhelming evidence – that young men are victimized on college campuses because they are gay why do you use your office to enable the victimizers?
You can deny that allegation, but our state’s long history of racial discrimination and violence clearly teaches us that when public officials do not act to protect those who are victimized because of who they are then those who perpetrate such acts are enabled and even encouraged to continue. Failure to use the full weight of your office to protect vulnerable Virginians is wrong. It is immoral. It is an affront to the very One who, self evidently, created us all equal and with certain inalienable rights.
Like Mr. Jefferson with respect to other faiths, you do not have to be gay or lesbian, you do not have to like gays or lesbians, you do not even have to respect them, but you do have a constitutional responsibility to protect them and your recent actions demonstrate clearly that you are failing to live up to the responsibilities and obligations of your job.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice. I urge you to reconsider your position and stand on the right side of history.
Sincerely,
Rev. Dr. David Ensign
Pastor, Clarendon Presbyterian Church, Arlington
For the board of People of Faith for Equality in Virginia