A Day of Atonement

This is from a sermon I preached five years ago this month. I just ran across it in looking through some old files. It struck me as remarkable appropriate for the present time, despite the obvious datedness of some references.
God looks across the vastness of God’s own creation at what human beings have made of it: what once was a luscious and verdant garden has become a dark and desolate space devoid of life – and we might take note of the fact that present-day Iraq is said by some to have been the home of the Biblical Eden. Thus the righteous judgment of God is plain: I have turned away and will not turn back. I will leave you to your own devices. You have made yourselves destroyers of worlds, now live with what you have destroyed. We can think of this on a geo-political scale or on scales more local and personal – from international relations to interpersonal relationships, from the betrayals of kings and presidents to our own acts of betrayal.
That is the judgment of God: to grant us the freedom to dwell in the hells of our own creation.
And perhaps the greatest sin of all is the choice that we make – over and over and over again – to remain there. We make an idol of our present pain and refuse to consider the possibility of a future otherwise. We trust in surges of economic or military might and are blind to any other power or possibility. Our myopia denies the gift of imagination that God has given us, and, indeed, denies the very God who gives it.
In spite of all of that, God does not stop in judgment, but acts with love and mercy to invite creation into redemption.
Indeed, the prophetic oracle to which Jeremiah responds appoints him not only to “pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow,” but also to rebuild and to plant. The city – the polis – has failed by every measure to live into the covenant community that God calls forth – the community of compassion and celebration, the community of shared suffering, shared burdens, yes; but also the city of shared wealth and resources and harvest and celebration. The utter failure to live into that vision – the vision of the commonwealth of the beloved – is the occasion for the prophetic pronouncement of God’s judgment.
God’s judgment is simply this: any city that fails to live into that promise, that vision of authentic community – any city that fails that project fails, plain and simple.
We live in just such a time; we live in just such a city; we live in just such failure; we stand under just such judgment.
Jeremiah’s words bear repeating:
“From the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, they committed abominations; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord” (Jer. 6:13-15).
Let us say it plain, that the people may understand: from the least of us to the greatest we pursue the outrageous gains of speculative markets; we buy the i-thises and i-thats that, by their very names, underscore the market’s utter disdain for authentic community; we strive mostly to assure our own place on the ladder of success without blushing at the fact that our incomes are 45 times or more the median global per capita income and many more times more than that of the least of these our sisters and brothers in the global commons; and we sit idly by while our nation engages in wars fought to ensure that gap remains firmly in place – all while our leaders promise us “peace, peace, and security, security,” but there is neither peace nor security for we stand under God’s judgment.
But the story does not end in judgment. We are called, in the tradition of Jeremiah, to imagine a future otherwise, to imagine a new Jerusalem and to call it forth even at this late hour.
The pivot point arrives for Jeremiah at the moment he realizes that repentance is possible, that the present time may be redeemed and transformed because the future belongs to God. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” When that day comes, “then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy.”
Why such hope? How can such a promise be spoken in the midst of desolation? Because the future belongs to God – “to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,” as Paul sings in doxology.
The future belongs to the God made known to Christians in the one who welcomed the tax collectors and sinners into his presence; the one who understood the fundamental value of the least of his sisters and brothers in the household of God; the one who knew that no measure of worth or accomplishment or power or success makes anyone 45 times more valuable than anybody else; the one who knew that no surge in violence could ever bring peace in a world where some still champion economic and political systems that define such vast disparities of wealth as the just results of an invisible hand.
That very God calls us now to be quite visible counterweights on the scales of justice.
Our pivot point has arrived. Even in the present darkness, the time for light and more light has come. Repentance is possible and the present time may be redeemed.
A day of atonement lies before us.
Now the dictionary defines “atonement” as “reparation for an offense or injury,” and a certain conservative orthodoxy holds that such reparation was made through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. I don’t think much of that orthodoxy. I don’t like what it says about the possibilities of human life, I am disgusted by what it suggests about God, and I cannot abide the way it simply dismisses the life of Jesus as mere prelude to his death.
But I do like the word. I like the suggestion, imbedded in the word itself, that we can be at one with God, that our purposes and God’s purposes can come together in reconciling love.
That possibility is the pivot point upon which Jeremiah’s prophetic vision turns, and it can be the point upon which the present time turns as well.
How can I stand before you and make such a claim, given all I’ve just said about unjust economies and unjustifiable war? How can I stand here having laid out what can best be called the case of humanity’s fall, and suggest that redemption is at hand?
No logic can explain it, no calculus account for it, no economy comprehend it. This is a moment that calls for that larger perspective I mentioned at the beginning – a kingdom perspective.
For if we are who we say we are – children of a loving God; and if we believe what we say we believe about that God, then we must sing with the psalmist,
”The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations!”
The reign of God announces a profoundly different kind of kingdom, not so much about power as it is about covenant fidelity – about steadfast faithfulness, about a Godly power that is concerned not with the acquisition of more power but, instead, concerned first and foremost precisely about the condition of those with no power. Imagine our rulers putting such concerns first – imagine Republicans and Democrats concerned not with who controls the Senate but with how the hungry are to be fed, not with who will win the White House but with how the sick are to be cared for, not with the culture wars of Red and Blue but with how a just and lasting peace can be constructed. This is not to say that there are no important differences between the parties, but it is to call deeply into question their quite similar relationships to the question of power.
That same psalm that sings kingdom praises recalls the nature of God and of God’s power, telling us that this God “keeps faith for ever, executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, sets the prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, lifts up those who are bowed down, loves the righteous, watches over the strangers, and upholds the orphan and the widow.”
We are called into relationship with this God. We are called to trust this God before any princes and rulers, any Democrat or Republican, and even and especially against the lure of so many socially constructed idols: militarism, consumerism and every other “ism” that tempts us to put our trust in something less than ultimate, something other than God. And we are called to put first in our lives the same concerns as this God puts first – precisely the concerns that all the false gods ignore or belittle: justice, welcome of strangers, compassion for the outcast and marginalized, shalom for all creation.
That is how we become at one with God. That is how we mark a day of atonement. That is how we live kingdom lives. That is how we claim for ourselves the promise of Jesus that the kingdom of God is among us, within us, here and now, in this very place at this very moment.
Trusting that truth, then, I am able to say confidently that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. And thus I trust that though the arc of the moral universe is mighty long, it does bend toward justice. Though the nations tremble under tumult of war, the time of the prince of peace is at hand. The time for peace is at hand.

Morning Circles

Sunrise. Roosters calling. Coffee in hand.
I walk a labyrinth freshly mowed in the grass.
Bare feet in the dew, one foot in front of the other.
Steam rises from the mug.
Morning is not broken and I have no need to fix it.
In time I see the prints from where I've been.
The past leading out before me.
Feet covered in clippings,
I'll leave a trail of memories all over the house today.

The View from Pittsburgh. July 2012.

If you visit Pittsburgh, among of the first things you notice are the beautiful bridges that cross the three rivers shape the city. In a city of bridges, then, it was sad to watch bridges burned in actions of the assembly and the words of some of its participants, but at almost the same time it was a joy to watch new bridges being constructed through both faithful action and dynamic worship.

In terms of actions I turn to the newly formed “Presbytery of the Twitterfeed” – which met at #ga220 – for the best summation I saw: “#ga220 let’s discuss how to discuss this for four hours, do parliamentary craycray, discuss for two hours, then vote to do nothing.” And that’s pretty much the “report from GA.”

Seldom have so many confabbed for so long to get so little accomplished.

On the closely watched items of particular concern to More Light Presbyterians, the results were a mixed bag. On same-gender marriage the assembly, against the recommendation of its committee on marriage and civil unions, defeated an overture that would have changed the wording in the worship directory section on Christian marriage that defines marriage as between “a man and a woman” to “two people.” (That is the measure that National Capital Presbytery declined to endorse earlier this year.) The assembly also declined also to offer an authoritative interpretation of our Constitution that would have offered protection from prosecution in church judicial courts to pastors who preside at same-gender weddings in civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage is legal.

Rather than take any firm action, GA has asked the whole church to study the matter for the next two years.

On the other hot-button issues before the assembly they voted down the assembly committee on Middle East concern’s most controversial recommendation on divestment of holdings in three companies – Hewlit-Packard, Caterpillar, and Motorola – that continue to do business with the Israeli defense forces in the occupied territories. GA did endorse a boycott of Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories’ products and dates from Hadiklaim, both companies produce their products in the occupied territories in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

I was disappointed but not particularly surprised by these votes. After all, this assembly installed my friend and neighbor, the Rev. Tara Spuhler-McCabe as vice moderator on Sunday morning, after the moderator election last Saturday evening, and then sat back and watched as a conservative drumbeat mounted against Tara for presiding at a same-gender wedding in the District this spring. When the noise reached an ugly level, Tara decided, on Wednesday, that to continue as vice moderator was too much of a distraction to the assembly so she resigned.

In that atmosphere, there was simply no way that deep discerning was going to occur. In truth, sometimes the assembly struggled to maintain simple civil discourse.

In the midst of the anger and hurt and exhaustion and disappointment that follow on such decisions, it’s important – essential, even – to note the good, but often overlooked work of the assembly; and it is fundamental to who we are to lift up the mighty power of God evident in worship at the assembly and, sometimes, in the committees themselves.

In terms of business that reminded me of God’s powerful presence: the 220^th General Assembly endorsed the interim report on discerning God’s call to the Presbyterian Church to consider the question of aligning ourselves with the historic peace churches with respect to questions of violence. That effort, which lifts up a truly profound possibility of transformation in the church, began with action in my session.

The assembly also turned back, by margins of roughly 3 to 1, efforts to roll back the ordination standards to the days of G-6.0106b. GA also endorsed the new translation of the Heidelberg Catechism. The revisions removes the phrase “homosexual perversion” that had been inserted through the use of the New English Bible rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, a translation that added the phrase not found in the original Greek.

The assembly also spoke a prophetic word to the church and the culture around several financial and economic issues. We have been instructed, as congregations, as individuals, and, I’d argue, as church-related organizations, to look carefully at lending practices of the financial institutions with whom we do business. If they are part of the problem of predatory lending and usurious interest then we are part of the problem, too.

Scripture throughout warns against financial practices that victimize the poor and the economically marginalized precisely because such practices erect insurmountable barriers to justice and thus to community, and, fundamentally, such barriers to community are also always barriers to communion with God.

The gospel passage used in each worship of the assembly was Mark 2:1-12, the story of the paralytic whose friends cut a hole through a roof to get him close enough to Jesus to be healed.

Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community drama team reconstructed the story set in a contemporary Presbyterian church whose elder-in-charge-of-greeting cares more about the appropriate appearance of the church and its members than about sharing the gospel. Appropriate, in her eyes, clearly meant white, middle-class, straight and clean cut. After offending several visitors who didn’t quite measure up to her standards, the new minister shows up. The new minister is an African-American woman – the horror! The new minister invites the elder to accompany her down to the city where, she says, she’s met Jesus living under a bridge. The elder-in-charge-of-greeting is dumbstruck, resists until she falls down exhausted, screaming “don’t take me to Jesus; I have to go to church!”

That enactment of the gospel led to the preaching of elder Tony De La Rosa, a partnered gay man who opened his sermon welcoming his mother and his mother-in-law. Tony, who is interim executive of the Presbytery of New York City, really could have sat down at that moment.

Instead, he preached a powerful, poignant and prophetic word to the assembly calling upon the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to dig through the ceiling and break down the walls to help the outcast, the broken, the sin-sick get to Jesus.

Years ago I brushed the dust of Pittsburgh off my feet because the folks in positions of power in the church there didn’t care to hear what I felt called to say. It was a joy to return barely a decade later to witness a married gay man preaching the word of God to the General Assembly of the church.

We have still a long way to go, but the arches on the bridges of Pittsburgh bend gracefully across three rivers to carry the rich and the poor, the struggling and the lost, the wondering and the redeemed across to the other side. Those graceful bending arcs of steel reminded me last week that the moral arc of the universe does, indeed, bend toward justice. When we do the work of love it bends the whole world round, and it will carry us on to the other side.

Here I Stand, With Tara

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) this afternoon failed to endorse an assembly committee's recommendation to send to the church's regional bodies (Presbyteries) a proposal to change the denomination's constitutional worship directory definition of marriage. The change would have replaced the words "a man and a woman" with "two people."

While I am a strong and outspoken supporter of marriage equality, I don't think this measure had a chance to pass in the presbyteries, and I'm not going to miss that fight. We will stand in the struggle, and continue to do what God calls us to do -- including blessing the Christian marriages of same-gender couples regardless of what the state or the church calls them. I will continue to end such services saying, "I declare that, in the eyes of God and of this church, you are married! Y'all can kiss!"

 
From my Facebook page from earlier in the week: It's time to stand in solidarity with Tara Spuhler McCabe. But, first, a word from our daughter, who, when she heard that Tara is being brought up on charges for marrying a lesbian couple said, simply, "I thought she was already married." A little levity before some ecclesiastical disobedience.

I am thinking of that scene from the end of "In and Out," when all the high school kids stand up and say, "I'm gay." So, I'm standing up to say that I have officiated at same-gender services on more than one occasion. 

Though this pastoral work did not involve signing legal documents (because the state of Virginia will not issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples), I have declared same-gender couples to be married in the eyes of God and the gathered community of the church. 

Oh, and I knowlngly ordained married gay elders years before the denomination blessed that action. Who else out there among my Presbyterian colleagues will stand up and declare their participation in the exact same activities that Tara is being so cruelly attacked for?

It is time to declare: here I stand, I can do no other.

A Pastoral Perspective on Marriage Equality

I suppose there’s something appropriate about coming out at a More Light event, so, by way of full disclosure, although I am a pastor in National Capital Presbytery, which includes the marriage equality District of Columbia, I serve a congregation in Arlington, Virginia, and, last time I checked Virginia was a lot further from marriage equality than we are from the District.

So I wondered why Michael invited me to be on this panel. At first I thought perhaps he was hoping that I would take a bit of pressure off my neighbor in Arlington and our new vice moderator, Tara Spuhler-McCabe, by outing the rather long list of friends and colleagues in National Capital who have officiated at same-sex weddings.

Sorry to disappoint, but I honestly have no idea. I do know that pastors who serve Virginia or Maryland congregations can, with only a modicum of DC bureaucratic hoop jumping, get licensed to officiate at weddings in DC.

But that’s really not at all what I want to talk with you about, because almost six years ago, Clarendon adopted a policy that precludes its pastor from signing marriage licenses for any couple. We did this because the church is not in the wedding business; we’re in the Jesus business.

So these days when I talk with couples – straight couples or same-gender couples – about celebrating their covenant promises to one another, we spend a lot of time talking about Jesus – about what it means to follow Jesus in the context of a marriage, about how love of partner is related to and informed by love of God, about how God’s covenantal promises to us may shape and inform the promises we make to one another, and about how the role of the church with respect to that is to invoke God’s blessing on sacred vows and the relationships we promise to have and to hold.

Soon after we made that decision, a young woman came to worship with us one Sunday morning. In speaking with her after worship, she shared that she had come to Clarendon to “check us out” on behalf of friends, a lesbian couple who were afraid to come and worship because they were not sure that “all are welcome” really meant “all.”

The friend read a flyer at church describing our policy on marriage, talked with me and with some members of the congregation and understood clearly that her friends would be welcomed with joy. Our policy is part of our witness to God’s radically inclusive love.

A little more than a year after that, I was blessed to bless the union of two lovely young women, Lisa and Heather, and sometime soon I’ll get to baptize their beautiful daughter, Ava.

I’ll never forget their wedding day – a perfect spring day at a gorgeous Virginia winery! After the service, I was approached by Lisa’s brother – who, I’d been forewarned, was not really comfortable with his sister’s sexuality, and had a lot of questions and concerns about this whole same-sex union thing. I was a bit wary when he told me that on the ride up from SW Virginia his daughter had asked, “daddy, will this service be on the news?”

I chuckled and said, “thank God, no” thinking, “what a hassle that would be” and wondering just what he was getting at in telling me this.

He cut me off saying, “you know, it should have been. That way everyone could see how perfectly normal and ordinary this is.” It was a profound and holy moment because what he was really saying was, “that is my sister, and I love her, and I want her to be happy.”

As I think about pastoral concerns and the question of marriage equality, I have to admit that one of my chief pastoral concerns is for my colleagues. I want all of them to be able to experience such ordinary joy and such holy moments of transformation, and I don’t want any of us to have to worry about our ordinations simply because part of the Jesus business calls us to walk with couples – straight and same-gender – into the wondrous, blessed journey of covenantal promise and married life.

Thank you.

Not Here You Won’t

Last evening National Capital Presbytery had a discussion on marriage. That’s certainly not news, though, as was noted in the introductions to the discussion, “it is long overdue.”

Because it’s far too late to make news, I won’t bore you with the “positions” that were articulated. At this point, most of us can make all of the arguments whether or not we agree with them. Courtesy of Pew Research Center we did see some interesting demographic data that no doubt surprised many members of the Presbytery if for no other reason than how the facts underscore how rapidly the culture is changing around us with respect to marriage.

The facts and the arguments are more or less interesting, I suppose, depending upon your knowledge base and opinions, but the tone of the evening was far more fascinating to me than the content. Because we were not debating an issue to be voted upon, the discussion had no winners or losers, and thus the evening felt far less anxious and stressful. Perhaps the fact that no votes were taken also meant that some stridently partisan voices (like mine) were quiet. For the most part, the “the usual suspects” did not lead, but, instead simply participated around tables to which we were randomly assigned.

After various perspectives were offered (that’s the not-news-worthy part) we were invited to talk with others at our tables prompted by a set of questions, the first of which was:

• Where did your understanding of marriage come from?

At my table, that question prompted reflections about our respective parents and our own marriages, and that’s when the evening got interesting and profound. One person at our table grew up Roman Catholic and has been married for 29 years to a woman who grew up in a Presbyterian congregation in Alexandria. When he went to his priest to ask about getting married in the church, the priest said, “not here you won’t.” When his fiancé went to her pastor to ask about getting married in the church, the pastor said, “not here you won’t.”

Many of us at the meeting last night have performed weddings for couples who come from different faith backgrounds. The differences can certainly be hugely significant, but for most of us that significance would be the beginning of the conversation not the end. We can scarcely imagine saying “not here you won’t” to a straight couple that comes to us seeking, for all the right reasons, to get married in the church. But that is precisely the word that gay and lesbian couples hear from the church all of the time: “not here you won’t.”

Another person in our small circle noted that, as an African-American woman married for more than four decades to a white man, she had experienced first-hand the resistance to changing attitudes about marriage and that her husband had been threatened more than once because of their marriage.

Then she went on to tell us a remarkable, uniquely American story of change. Her great-grandmother, whom she had known and whom she remembered from her childhood, was the daughter of a woman produced by a union between a slave and slave-owner. She noted that “folks who aren’t supposed to be having sex have been doing it for a long time, and it’s nothing new!” She went on to tell us that a few years ago the white descendants of that slave-owner had tracked her family down when doing genealogical research, and that now they hold a joint family reunion of the sons and daughters of former slaves and the sons and daughters of former slave-owners.

At the time when those two family lines first crossed no one could have imagined their joyous reunion just a few generations later. Indeed, had the slave and master sought to be wed, every church in the land would have told them, “not here you won’t.”

We Are Not Alone

There’s a large Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh that is known, in some circles, as Mellon’s fire escape. It was built on the donations of Andrew Mellon, and the clear implication of the nickname was that building a cathedral was Mellon’s best chance of escaping the fires of hell to which he would be consigned by a life marked by rapacious greed.
It was the ultimate money laundering scheme, and I thought about it last evening when I heard Wendell Berry describe the intimate connection between philanthropy and pillaging.
Berry was in DC to give the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Established in 1972, the Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities. It is awarded each year by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the federal agency charged with serving and strengthening “our republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans.”
Berry framed his remarks with the story of his grandfather, a Henry County Kentucky tobacco farmer whose 1907 crop was rendered worthless through the monopoly machinations of the American Tobacco Company and its founder, James B. Duke.
Duke is the namesake of Duke University. I don’t know whether or not the Duke foundation contributes to the National Endowment for the Humanities, but that’s about the only funding source that could be more ironic than E*Trade Financial, which, along with the History Channel and the Owsley Brown Charitable Foundation, provided major funding for the Jefferson Lecture.
Duke, as Berry said last night, disregarded “any other consideration, followed the capitalist logic to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, the economic fate of thousands of families such as my own.”
Berry has written often on the theme of proximity and the importance of small places. Last night he spoke of “stickers” – a term Berry’s teacher Wallace Stegner used it to signify those “who love the life they have made and the place they have made it in,” and to distinguish a stream in American life that runs apart from the mainstream of “boomers,” Stegner’s term for “those who pillage and run, who want to make a killing and end up on Easy Street.”
“James B. Duke was a boomer,” Berry said, motivated by greed and the desire for power. Stickers, Berry insisted, are motivated by affection for the small places which they steward. The logic of corporate capitalism is that of the boomer, of Wall Street, of E*Trade and other financial institutions that exist to serve the dream of Easy Street.
I almost wrote “who exist …” in the previous sentence, and thus barely sidestepped the trap laid for us by the United States Supreme Court when it assigned “personhood” to corporations. Berry noted last night the great irony that institutions that have no self are, nonetheless, defined most purely by selfishness.
The deeper irony, as Berry alluded to, lies in the complex web of culpability in which each of us is caught in relationship to the logic of capitalism that determines the shape and structure of the economy that encompasses us. That web has been spun over the past century by men such as James Duke and Andrew Mellon and Bill Gates and Mitt Romney and the other five thousand or so who have comprised the “one percent” since Duke’s company consigned Berry’s family to poverty.
Every one of us is caught in it, participates in it, serves it, gains and loses in it. My livelihood depends upon it, laundered by the church though my pay may be. As much as I might like to think otherwise, I am holding the ladder steady as Mr. Mellon continues his climb. (That is a description only of the smaller economy of our society not of the larger economy of the Kingdom of God, and thus it is a statement of political ethics and not of eschatological theology – although the two are not unrelated.)
This would be true enough if I served the Presbyterian church in Henry County, Kentucky. It seems all the more so true for those of us who serve the vast American suburban population. When Wendell Berry’s grandfather’s livelihood and farm were threatened by the corporate economic powers of the early 20th century the Berry family was among the majority of Americans who lived on farms or in rural communities and small towns.
Now the majority of a much larger nation lives in the suburban sprawl of major metropolitan areas or in the cities at the heart of the sprawl. Not only are we caught in the web of corporate capitalism, but we are also far removed from the small places to which one can relate with affection over the course of a lifetime. If, as the title of Berry’s lecture holds, “it all depends on affection,” then what is the proper, effective, realistic way to live out such affection in places that are defined as much as anything by the kind of bland sameness that removes affection from the equation altogether?
Most of us live as if we live in no place in particular at all. The Target up the way from my house in Arlington is virtually indistinguishable from the Target that was up the way from where we lived in the suburbs of Cleveland, or of Pittsburgh, or in the city of Lexington, Ky. Target is the major funder for the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, and thus a particular example here. I imagine the E*trade branch locations are the same, as well, though out of my experience.
 Affection demands particularity. I have no real affection for Target, though it carries the basics and it is convenient. It saves time.
Affection also demands time. It demands that we spend time. However, the prime directive of the present economy and of suburban life in general is to save time. The gadgets that I can and do buy at Target promise to save time, to make me more efficient. Target, in that way, promises to liberate us from the demands of the very places where we live.
I only know of Andrew Mellon through the bank the bears his family name and through the church built with his money. Perhaps he felt as trapped within the logic of the larger economy as the countless families who were dispossessed at the other end of his business dealings. Maybe the staff at the church he built feels trapped, too, as surely do lots of folks who attend that church, which serves an economically marginal urban neighborhood these days. I know with certainty that lots of folks in the various suburban congregations I have served feel trapped in the logic of an economy that can put a price on almost any thing but that cannot account for that which is of real and lasting value.
As Berry noted last night, millions of Americans since the economic crisis of 1907 lost their farms, homes and land, and the economic crisis of our time has similarly displaced millions more. Despite the obvious fact that this experience is far from unique, perhaps the singular nature of modern economic crisis is how alone we feel within its logic.
Berry has insisted for decades now, against the tides of his time, that none of this is inevitable. He insisted so again list night in the face of visible ironies: beginning with corporate sponsorship of a national endowment for whatever it is that “humanities” might mean within this economy, and including an entirely expectable yet still odd display of so-called patriotism in the presentation of colors by the U.S. Joint Armed Forces Color Guard and the music of the U.S. Air Force Band Ceremonial Brass Quintet playing beneath a huge screen on which was projected a quote from Berry’s essay, “The Failure of War.” In that essay, published a decade ago, Berry wrote”

“We experience no shortages, we suffer no rationing, we endure no limitations. We earn, borrow, spend, and consume in wartime as in peacetime. And of course no sacrifice is required of those large economic interests that now principally constitute our economy. No corporation will be required to submit to any limitation or to sacrifice a dollar. On the contrary, war is the great cure-all and opportunity of our corporate economy, which subsists and thrives upon war. War ended the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we have maintained a war economy—an economy, one might justly say, of general violence—ever since, sacrificing to it an enormous economic and ecological wealth, including, as designated victims, the farmers and the industrial working class.”

Despite that long history of state and corporate military and economic violence, despite the displacement of millions and the deaths of countless others, despite the economic logic that seems every day to extend its reach and circumscribe our lives, our futures, our imaginations, Berry continues to insist that, ”this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.”

Skittles, Violence and Justice

Like many folks, the more I read about the incredibly sad and tragic death of Trayvon Martin the angrier I get. Perhaps I should just stop reading the stories. As I understand it, ostriches are seldom troubled by anger.
There’s plenty of legitimate targets for anger in this case: the 28-year-old white man who shot and killed the 17-year-old African-American kid armed with Skittles and iced-tea; the Florida police department that refuses to arrest Zimmerman; Florida lawmakers who passed an inanely named “stand-your-ground” law that allows people such as Zimmerman too easily to claim self-defense; Florida voters who filled their legislature with the yahoos who passed the nation’s first such law in 2005.
Take your pick. But my wrath is aimed at the National Rifle Association.
This front organization for weapons manufacturers promulgates legislation such as “stand-your-ground,” and then pushes bills through state legislatures across the country. More than 20 states followed Florida’s lead in adopting such laws, which could more accurately be called, “shoot first, ask questions later” laws.
Since Florida adopted its version there have been hundreds of shootings in which the shooter claimed self-defense. While the right of self-defense is a long-standing one, under the “stand-your-ground” laws asserting self-defense is often enough to end a police investigation short of trial. The laws effectively create a presumption of immunity from prosecution upon merely the claim of self-defense.
As the facts thus far reported in the case of Trayvon Martin make clear, the claim of self-defense can be remarkably flimsy. Martin was walking through a gated community from a 7-11 toward the home of his father’s girlfriend when Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, spotted him. Zimmerman called 911, reported a “suspicious person,” confirmed that he was following Martin, was told explicitly by the 911 operator not to follow the person and that police were on the way, nonetheless confronted the unarmed teenager, and shot him dead.
Because police cannot establish precisely what happened between the moment Zimmerman stepped out of his truck and the moment he pulled the trigger, claiming to feel threatened – perhaps by lethal Skittles – they have pressed no charges simply because of Zimmerman’s claim.
While we may never know exactly what happened in those critical moments, there’s one thing that I am utterly certain of: if you change the racial context of this event the shooter would be in jail under arrest for murder no matter what he claimed about self-defense. It is completely inconceivable to me that if, for example, my own teenaged son were walking through the nearby historically African-American neighborhood and got shot by a 28-year-old black man that the shooter would be walking the streets of Arlington a free man a month after killing a white teenager.
I won’t blame the NRA for America’s entrenched racism, but I will blame them for taking advantage of it during their decade’s long attempt to make of us a nation armed to the teeth with laws that protect gun users from prosecution even when they shoot and kill unarmed kids. Urban violence – a racially coded trope in American culture – has long been a staple of NRA communication and lobbying efforts.
Meanwhile, a bill before the Arizona legislature seeks to establish “as a class one misdemeanor, the crime of resisting arrest by passive resistance.”
On the face of things, the two pieces of legislation have nothing to do with one another. One establishes a presumptive immunity from civil or criminal prosecution with a claim of self-defense, while the other makes passive resistance to a lawful arrest itself a crime.
But the Arizona bill is, in fact, the other side of the coin from the stand-your-ground laws, and both of them embrace violence as the appropriate response to threats. In stand-your-ground states, individual citizen violence is upheld as the appropriate response to perceived threats against one’s person. The Arizona bill upholds the state violence of forcible arrest against perceived threats against state institutional prerogative, and, significantly, against the power of nonviolence.
It’s almost as if Arizona lawmakers have seen that nonviolence can be a force more powerful than violence and, in their fealty to the so-called law-and-order agenda of the purveyors of violence, they are doing their best to undermine nonviolence.
At the confluence of these two laws stands a nation’s love affair with violence, romanticized by the well-funded image masters of the NRA, who either fell lock, stock and barrel for the myth of redemptive violence or, perhaps, actually invented it from whole cloth in order to make a buck selling their death-dealing toys.
While they continue to sell us a wild, wild West vision of vigilante “justice,” the soul of Trayvon Martin cries out for authentic justice.

Call Me a Snob

Call me a snob, but, really, I'm just a chicken.
Let me explain. Apparently a serious candidate for a major party's nomination to the presidency of the United States seems bent on discouraging Americans from going to college ... or something like that. It's sometimes hard to figure out exactly what Rick Santorum really means, unless he's talking about gay people. He's crystal clear on that: he doesn't like them.
Maybe he doesn't want Americans going to college because they'll change their minds about gay people. The conservative wiki site, Conservapedia, citing a study of exit-poling from several years ago, sternly warns:

"The fact that the strongest predictor of support for same-sex "marriage" is level of education shows that brainwashing into professor values has a corrosive effect on morality."

It really says that. Maybe that's where Rick goes to get his info, or maybe they go to Rick to get theirs. As I say, I find him confusing.
On the other hand, maybe kids who choose to go to college are just more open-minded even before President Obama gets the chance to remake them in his image. Polling seems actually to bear that out: college freshmen are almost twice as likely as the general public to support same-sex marriage, according to a Higher Education Research Institute survey a while back. Maybe the brainwashing is just that good.
Or, maybe, Santorum really is just that crazy. As I said, sometimes it's difficult to tell.
Still, crazy as he may be, Santorum's thoughts on education did get me thinking. More accurately, the reaction of his audience got me thinking. Speaking in Troy, Michigan, over the weekend in the run up to today's Michigan primary, Santorum said:
"President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob."
The crowd shots at that point showed folks applauding, laughing, smiling and generally nodding their heads in approval. Then came the big applause line:
"There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, who aren't taught by some liberal college professor (who) tries to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."
Sure, it's easy to dismiss this as typical campaign fear mongering. Santorum raises the "liberal" boogie man and panders to latent American anti-intellectualism. Moreover, I certainly wouldn't expect a Republican candidate to point out or praise President Obama's personal journey of using higher education opportunities to lift himself to the highest rung of American power.
Even so, I wonder why the speech resonated with the crowd. After all, according to various surveys, 94 percent of parents believe their kids will go to college, 75 percent of Americans think college is very important, and 60 percent believe it is essential to success.
Maybe Santorum found the six percent of parents who don't think their kids will go to college.
From where I sit, ridiculously over-educated, white, middle-class, living inside-the-beltway, enjoying incredible privilege, it's easy to dismiss Santorum's supporters as ignorant and bigoted (and there are, no doubt, ignorant bigots out there who support him). But as I watched video of Santorum's speech, I couldn't help wondering what the people are afraid of.
I'm convinced that what they're afraid of is the future.
While Troy is a relatively affluent suburb of Detroit, it's still, well, a suburb of Detroit. That is to say, it sits in one of the country's most hard-hit areas economically, and in a place whose people had, at the depth of the recession, just about the most negative economic outlook in the nation.
Going to college is an inherently optimistic decision because it is almost always about hope for the future. Maybe Santorum's supporters consider that snobbish because they are so busy longing for a past -- not "the" past that actually happened, but "a" past that they imagine.
I feel for them in their fear, but I do not wish to join them in that imagined past. Talk about scary.

The Fast I Choose

So my friend Nichola (see comments from yesterday) posted this morning on Facebook:

So, at last night's Occupied Ash Wednesday gathering, the one person present who had no substantial connection to Christianity was blown away by Isaiah 58, and at the end, said something like, "Oh my god, this is so beautiful! If your book says this about 'raising your voice like a trumpet,' and 'shouting out loud about the rebellion of the people,' and 'feeding the hungry,' why isn't this plaza packed with church people?" Those of us who are Christian just looked at each other sheepishly.

Why isn't the public square packed with church people? Is that part of a more basic question: why isn't the church packed with church people? Or is it the other way around?
The list of reasons is long and complicated, to be sure, but it gets down to some basic questions of faithfulness. Do we really believe the prophet's vision:

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

It is beautiful. But do we believe it, and not just in the manner of giving intellectual assent to the proposition that God is with us and thus we shall be the repairers of the breach, the restorers of the streets? Do we believe it such that we are willing to give our lives to it?
The evidence -- in the public square and in the church house -- is not promising.
On the other hand, many of us continue to show up in those places and more, and we continue to lift up words of hope, of love, of justice.
Oh, and here's a hymn inspired by Isaiah's vision for singing in the public square or the church:

This is the Fast

Is this the fast I choose for thee
Of ashes, tears and empty misery?
Or rather this: To share abundant bread
That all my children will be loved and fed

Why do you fast yet still not see
Your sisters suffering in poverty?
Their children cry and still you do not hear;
their fathers bowed and broken by their fear.

This is the fast I choose for thee
Of justice, peace and human liberty
Not forty days, but all your yearning years
My love will wipe away all human tears

Break, bless and eat; then drink this wine
The fast I choose makes ev’ry midnight shine
You shall be called restorers of the street.
Arise, now shine! And make your fast complete.

Tune: Truro (Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates; Christ is Alive!; Live Into Hope!)
Feel free to use it. Copyright, D. Ensign, Lent, 2005

Lent and the Impossible

It has been a very long time since the days when I was doing doctoral work on 20th-century French philosophy. Indeed, it was actually in the 20th century! But for some reason as Lent begins this year I've been pondering the impossible.
The impossible was a recurring theme in Jacques Derrida's writing, and while none of that work is ready-to-hand at the moment (search engines notwithstanding), I'll reduce it violently to one observation: the answer to any question worth posing is (the) impossible.
You can trace the impossible, the impassible, the entirely and unutterably other through much of Derrida's work, and, in particular in his lengthy dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. Their conversation was central to my ancient dissertation.
What's any of this got to do with Lent?
Levinas was fond of interesting equations. I recall, for example, his observation that "paternity is a relationship with a future that is not my own." I'm pretty sure I remember that after all these years because I was playing with it in a paper I wrote while we were anticipating the birth of our firstborn -- who turns 21 this week.
Other of Levinas' equations were pithier: ethics is liturgy. That one I recall because I teased it out in work that I was doing even as I was beginning my own turn, or re-turn, toward what we too easily reduce to "the religious."
I don't recall if Levinas actually wrote "ethics is the impossible," or if I'm making that up. But, hey, this is a blog post not an academic article -- thanks be to God, or the impossible I Am, or that which, in this very moment, calls me by my name. In any case, his various observations about "ethics" drew me deeply into the long conversation that he and Derrida conducted through various texts over many years. In those writings they regularly addressed, indeed their conversation turned on, "the impossible."
I got to thinking about that in terms of practices one "takes on" or "gives up" for Lent. Most of the time we go for the low-hanging fruit of the the imaginable, the possible. There's nothing wrong with that. Picking up something that one can actually accomplish is always worthwhile, in this or any season. Letting go of something that one needs to let go of, and that one can, in fact, let go of is also always worthwhile.
But what if we aimed deeper or higher toward "the impossible"? What would it look like to practice "the impossible"?
In their own distinctive ways, both Derrida and Levinas focused considerably on encounters with the other. Levinas wrote extensively about face-to-face encounters and confrontations with the face of the other. Derrida wrote a good deal, especially late in his life, about hospitality and the politics of friendship. All of that work was about the impossibility inherent in the claims that others make on us.
I can't recall at this point -- again, blog post not academic paper -- whether either Levinas or Derrida riffed on Paul's eschatological observation that "now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
Such knowledge is at once the impossible and the fundamental demand that others place on us. We all want to be known. The essence of hospitality, the root of ethics, perhaps even the ground of politics and certainly of justice is found in that basic desire to be known fully.
To the extent that any of our Lenten disciplines aim, ultimately, at deepening our relationships -- with God or with others -- they aim at the impossible.
What if we took on "the impossible" for Lent?

I Am a Witness

I am a witness, standing on the side of love.
Sometimes that is the most important calling to which we respond. We show up. We stand together. We witness. We speak of what we have seen and done.
I was asked this morning to say a few words of blessing at the Valentine’s Day public witness for marriage equality at the Arlington County Courthouse as two of the elders in my congregation sought a license to make true in law what has been true in fact for more than two decades: they are married. Anyone who has ever spent any time at all with Ron and James knows that they are married. Indeed, any definition of marriage that excludes them misses the mark completely when it comes to describing a loving, committed, life-time, compassionate, faithful, joyous, creative relationship.
As I noted this morning, at Clarendon we stopped signing legal documents for straight couples until that day comes when we can sign them for all couples who come to us seeking to celebrate their promises to create and sustain the beloved community of two within the larger context of the beloved community of all.
Since that time, we typically begin services of celebration for all couples with Jesus’ words, “render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and render unto God that which belongs to God.”
Our love and our promises belong to the God who, in sovereign love created us all equally in God’s image, called us good, and promised to stay in relationship with creation through all time – through, as it were, richer and poorer, sickness and health, and, because God is God, even in the time beyond time itself. Thus to God belongs our love, our commitments, our compassion, our faithfulness, our joy, our creativity – all those foundational values upon which good marriages are built.
What then belongs to Caesar? The truth. That is to say, what we owe to the commonwealth is the truth as we have been given to see it, the truth spoken in love to the power of the state. The truth is that we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. For many of us, straight and gay, those foundational rights can only be authentically claimed when our lives are joined together with the one we love. The truth is, there is no compelling reason for the state to deny to same-gender couples what it so freely grants to straight couples.
We owe Caesar the truth, for the truth will set the commonwealth free from the weight of oppression, the blinders of bigotry and the shackles of its own history.
This morning, several dozen of us joined Ron and James as witnesses to the truth. Though sometimes the moral arc of the universe seems mighty long, when we do the work of love, when we speak the truth in love, when we stand as witnesses on the side of love, the arc bends the whole world round.

Pissed-off Presbyterian Pastor Passes on President to Pitch Pots

I’m a beginning potter, or more accurately I am taking a beginning pottery class, so perhaps I can be forgiven for pitching pots instead of throwing them, but I am a lifelong Presbyterian so I know process, and I know when process is being used to obfuscate rather than to clarify.
This evening National Capital Presbytery voted down an overture to General Assembly from the session of the congregation that I serve seeking concurrence with an overture already passed by the Presbytery of East Iowa seeking an authoritative interpretation from the Assembly affirming that pastors in civil jurisdictions that have legalized same-gender marriages can solemnize such vows without fear of being brought up on disciplinary charges in church courts.

That’s Presby-speak for saying we wanted assurances that pastors can conduct legal same-sex weddings, including signing marriage licenses, without worrying about be defrocked by the church and we wanted National Capital Presbytery to go on record supporting that position.

I’m not pissed that the overture was defeated. Disappointed, yes, but not angry at the result. If I have any anger at the result it is entirely self-directed because I failed to do the organizational legwork to get out the vote tonight, wrongly assuming that the long pattern of NCP voting about 2-1 in favor of GLBT-related issues would hold.
The first (or maybe second) speaker against the motion introduced a motion to defer arguing that the Presbytery needs time to talk about marriage. I suppose since it took the church 30 years of “talking” to get to the point of ordaining gay and lesbian clergy and lay officers there may be a point to that perspective. After all, we’ve only been “talking” about marriage for about a decade. The first overtures on same-sex unions came to and through the General Assembly in the late 90s.
But the truth of the matter is, and always has been, we only actually talk about any of these “uncomfortable” issues when someone proposes an overture and we vote on it. Up or down. The denomination empaneled a study group that issued a lengthy report on marriage at the 2010 assembly and invited the entire church to engage the question. As far as I know, nobody in NCP took them up on it.

The bottom line is now and always has been this: a motion to defer is a motion to do nothing at all until the next time somebody forces a vote.

To suggest otherwise is simply disingenuous, and I’ll stick by that charge until the maker of the motion invites the long-time married same-sex couples in my congregation to dinner for some conversation on the meaning of marriage.
I use the word “disingenuous” perhaps disingenuously here, for that word was what really pissed me off tonight. The makers of the motion – that would be my session, and, let’s be perfectly “out” here, that would be me – were called “naïve and disingenuous” during the debate on the overture tonight, and our capacity for compassion was called into question.
When colleagues who have performed same-sex weddings in jurisdictions where they are legal have been brought up on charges in church courts (and they have) it is not disingenuous to ask for clarity from the General Assembly.
When pastors in this Presbytery (including yours truly) are being asked to perform legal same-sex weddings in the District of Columbia, it is not disingenuous to seek some assurance that the church courts will not be used to block us from following the dictates of conscience and pastoral responsibility.
And when a same-gender couple who has been together for more than 20 years asks a pastor about the possibility of being married in the church, is it disingenuous to suggest that the call to compassion might have something to do with that couple’s suffering?
Supporters of the motion tonight were asked to consider the suffering of our conservative sisters and brothers, and, in particular, the ones who met in Florida last week to talk about forming a new denomination. As I noted at the beginning, I am a life-long Presbyterian. I am sorry, truly, that some folks feel like they no longer have a home in the PC(U.S.A.). But if the call to compassion has any meaning whatsoever in this debate, it must begin with consideration of persecutions, pogroms and pink triangles. Conservatives are not being bashed, beaten, or killed. Queer folk still are right here in this Presbytery. Conservatives are not being harassed to the point of suicide. Queer teens still are. If you want to talk about the passion, let’s begin there.
So, yes, the evening pissed me off – enough that I skipped the State of the Union Address entirely in favor of session two of my pottery class. I threw my first pot tonight. I’m far from an artist, and this piece of clay will never shout out for gallery space. But as I sunk my fingers into it and worked it at the wheel, I realized that the clay wanted to be a cup – not really a chalice because even if that’s what the clay wanted the potter’s hands were not up to the task. I also realized that the cup wanted, eventually, to find its place in the home of the married, gay, Presbyterian elder who introduced the motion tonight. Clear a spot Travis!