Monthly Archives: June 2012

Who Deserves to Die?

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Have you seen one of these posters?

We’ve moved to a small town, so I haven’t.

This new campaign, with posters popping up in major cities across the country is two things that really get me excited. First, it is a guerrilla marketing campaign that arrests each person that sees a single poster. You stop, you think, and you feel. Like the recent anti-smoking ads with the effects of lung cancer. Or those old Truth ads about what’s in cigarettes. Or even that “your brain on drugs” omelet ad. You are stopped, you are thinking, and you are repulsed.

I also like that it is buzzy and noteworthy. They have us interested in finding out what it is all about tomorrow. I love that.

There is a secret, third reason I like them. They are our message.

I know that they are likely to be a health awareness thing about lung cancer. We are bound to be disappointed by what is revealed, because once we know what they are for, they will cease to motivate us.

Except that the message is much bigger than any one campaign. At least any one campaign that isn’t the Jesus campaign. Or, more precisely, the Kingdom of GOD campaign.

That message, of picking random people and saying that person deserves to die is our greatest sin. The church has taken these posters and made them true. They are our literalism. We have, and continue to vilify the other, the stranger, the friend, the lover, the sister, and the child. We have, throughout history and to this day, told innocent people that they deserve to die because of who they are. Because of what they believe. Because of who they love. Because of what they eat. Or with whom they eat.

We have called on the deaths of so many people. There is no amount of penance Christians can do to make up for its sins. We have been, and continue to be, evil.

And it may seem weak or ridiculous, and it certainly isn’t sufficient, but I am sorry. I am sorry that my people have sinned. That I have sinned. That Christians have been so unworthy of your sympathy or respect.

The campaign, though, is also about shining a light on the ridiculousness of wishing the death of others. It isn’t just a cross for us to bear, but a true opportunity to repent. An invitation to see what many Christians have always believed: that no one deserves to die. That there is no integrity to seek someone’s death, to hope for it. That our reconciling, as the parable of the Good Samaritan teaches, is not about getting back together with friends, but with enemies. That even our most detested, reviled enemies that warrant our hatred, must be given the opposite. That everyone must be given mercy and love. No buts. No exceptions. We can’t other someone and say the line stops with him. “I draw the line at him. What he has done. He is unlovable.” EEERN! Wrong Answer. No exceptions. Not even hipsters. Or cat lovers.

And maybe then we can realize how much of Scripture, and specifically the Torah, we misunderstand. That we aren’t to condemn or kill in the name of GOD.

Ever.

Ideology, Not Sense or Wisdom

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When I wrote the other day about a lack of wisdom, I wasn’t prepared for an even more stunning thesis: that ideology would trump both common sense and wisdom. I had taken for granted that common sense was often used to support the governing ideology. In the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to uphold the already controversial 5-4 decision of Citizens United, the Roberts Court displayed neither wisdom or common sense in a brazen defense of ideology that shows little respect for the purpose of the Law.

How these “individuals” define “free speech”.

The essential groundwork of the issue is found in how the framers of the constitution understood the form of government they were developing. They understood that democracy cannot exist without liberty. In this way, liberty means much more than personal sovereignty, but the protection of the minority from the rule of the majority. In this way, the very basis of democracy necessitates liberty. Democracy is tyranny without a liberty that generates equality. This was the basis for all of those arguments about taxation and voting with which we are very familiar.

The rallying cry “one [person], one vote” is one of equalizing individuals and does not treat as equal one person and one organization. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was written to specifically describe equality among people. For in the very defense of Citizens United, the conservatives see the organization as both an individual unto itself and a collection of individuals, granting a sort of dual citizenship that twists basic logic into an unmitigated mess. It also rejects the founding principles the conservatives purport to defend so vigorously.

This disaster is the culminating sequence of events that sought to resolve what many have long mistaken for an oversight: that the First Amendment was written for individuals alone and was intended to include corporations. Except that it wasn’t; for corporations were despised by the founders for what they were capable of doing to destroy democracy. They were seen as the villainous corrupter of democracy, and the source of compromising both the authority of the government and the liberty of the people. They were familiar with the dangers posed by large, unregulated corporations after the East India Company operated outside of British law for years. They were excluded from the First Amendment on purpose because they were not intended to have the rights of individuals.

Returning to the case itself, this was, by all credible defenders of the law, a slam dunk refutation of the Citizens United case, as the state of Montana had written laws to defend against the very corrupting influences the conservative majority argued were not present in the original Citizens United case. They had examples of corporate buying of elections and the example of how democracy flourished without the moneyed interests, as the state operated much cleaner, substantive elections than anywhere else in the country. Campaigns required only a few thousand dollars to run, rather than multiple millions. Campaigns could be run by individuals based on the issues rather by party apparatuses set up to maintain the control of both their party and their benefactors. It was both the negative and positive refutation of the Citizens United experiment.

In choosing to not even hear oral arguments, The Roberts Court demonstrated how highly they placed their ideology over the very substance of the case, and demonstrated neither sense or wisdom in blindly supporting their previous decision. They could not be bothered with reasoning through the case or hearing a verbal attack on the lynchpin of the defending case.

This was their chance for a “redo” and save face in the original case. The Citizens United decision, already widely criticized by legal scholars of all stripes, was as naked and appalling a use of authority the Court has used since Bush v. Gore. But in many ways, was actually worse. In the latter case, they were hiding the true results of a single, close election. In this and its previous case, the Roberts Court is undermining our very democracy by decimating the true understanding of liberty: that all people are equal, and the minority must be protected from the tyranny of the majority. And today’s tyranny isn’t just abuse under the law, but abuse of our minds through substanceless campaign ads. Now, as ever, corporations and people are unequal.

In choosing to defend their ideology rather than deal with the substance of the law they have sworn to defend, the Roberts Court have irrevocably undermined their authority and forever compromised the American experiment. Now, the coming ruling in the Affordable Care Act case is much less likely to hurt them, since this case has already severely compromised their authority.

Perhaps that is why they ruled on this first.

[Picture used from Occupy Chicago Facebook page. Also, two other rulings came down, one of which they got right.]

In the Boat

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a Homily for Proper 7B  -   Text: Mark 4: 35-41

Getting to the boat

Andrew and Simon were fishing in the Sea of Galilee. They were casting nets into the water. As fishermen, this was their work. A stranger approaches them and says:

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

This strange statement elicited a stranger response in them. They did it. They dropped the net in the water and left everything behind.

From that moment on the sea, Jesus has been pulling people from where they are to then go where He is going.

When the crowd gets too big to travel by land, Jesus and the disciples travel by boat. The crowd still follows. When they get to Jesus’s hometown, they surround them and demand more. Then Jesus and the disciples file back into the boat and Jesus teaches the crowd about faith and the Kingdom of God from the boat. Then setting off on their own, Jesus gives the disciples special instructions.

It all builds to this moment in the boat.

Faith and Fear

Jesus with his disciples on the Sea of Galilee...

Jesus with his disciples on the Sea of Galilee, Ernst Georg Bartsch, 1967 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We know that Jesus is talking about faith and this gospel pericope is clearly about faith, but we have trouble with why. Why is Jesus sleeping? Why isn’t He jumping up and helping them? Why does He condemn the disciples for waking Him?

We ask these questions because we know what it’s like to be afraid. Those waves beating against the side of the boat, the storm threatening to sink the boat and drown its passengers, the chaotic moment and the sheer terror of what they see as the likeliest scenario.

We know what it’s like to be afraid.

We fear for our safety, our health, our church’s health. We fear for our children and our friends. And we hear these statements about faith in the midst of the storm and we want to shout back “What do you know?” when we really want to cry “Why aren’t you helping me?”

In our lives, today, we’re afraid Jesus is sleeping in the back of the boat; not up here where we are. As the storm around us rages, He is sleeping.

Living Faith

That special instruction the disciples received was about faith in the midst of fear. I’m sure of it. It was everything they needed to overcome adversity – intellectually. They still needed to experience it. To try it.

They learned about faith, they understood it, and they committed to it. Now, they need to do it. So they set out for the other shore, facing great adversity. But the adversity was much more than they expected. And they thought the faith itself would overcome it. That faith as an abstract and intellectual thing would save them. When that doesn’t work, they rouse Jesus, for He must have some answer. And in this truly defining moment, Jesus is transformed from teacher to savior, bringing even greater fear from His disciples than the storm does.

The confusing chastisement: calling his disciples cowards: is not about volume of faith, as in not enough faith (remember the mustard seed last week?) but the placement of their faith. It is about the response to fear, not the fear or faith in abstract. It is not the teaching or the belief system or sense of certainty that Jesus is looking for. It is faith in a powerful Kingdom born only from us.

Overcoming our Fear

Our greatest fears today aren’t the ones we speak about like the church, our children, and society. And it isn’t even death, though we definitely fear that. Our fear is that this thing we do on Sunday, this gathering as the community in the name of St. Paul, that this means something more than ritual or symbol. That it is something powerful and that Jesus invites us to cross the sea in that boat from our safe, intellectual place to the other side, where faith and action are integrated. That our love for God and neighbor are one. Where no one is left out ever in our midst and every person is made healthy and whole by being in community. Where there is no me and you, only we.

Where we are already the Kingdom of God.

[NOTE: The sermon ended here at the 8:00 service. At the later service, I invited us to move straight into the Prayers of the People, holding hands, and collecting our prayers together. This is captured in the audio above. The audio, beginning shortly before minute 9, has the prayers, the creed, and the blessing (though quiet).]

Rediscovering Wisdom

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We like common sense. That folksy, personal anecdotal understanding of the world that just, you know, sort of…makes sense. That common sense that encourages parents to tell their three year-old to stop playing with a ball –and is horrified when they throw it one more time. We throw our arms up in frustration and wonder “what happened?”

Didn’t I just tell you not to play with that!

The real problem? We’re ignoring the most important detail: the child is three years-old. Or, more accurately, we are expecting of our child what is not developmentally appropriate.

We are ignoring the most important ingredient.

Common sense is great, but what we really need is wisdom. We need to know what we want and what is going on.

As I wrote about the spoon, our big problem is that we are eager to resolve our problems with only half of our brain. We throw up blinders to specifically ignore the details.

An easy example of this is how our common sense approach to teen sex actually produces more of it, and more complications of it. Abstinence-only education, which makes a kind of sense (if you don’t want kids to have sex, tell them not to) is intellectually consistent, but statistically foolish, producing the opposite results of what we actually want. Unfortunately, we double-down on the common sense: which is worse than making the initial mistake. Our desire to intellectually defend that common sense over the wiser approach is what I am condemning. We shouldn’t encourage sex, but ignoring the lessons learned in implementing such priorities is deeply foolish.

The more insidious problem is the common sense idea that regulations are shackles to our success. We know that we hate rules and our country was founded on breaking them. And worse, we confuse our desire for breaking the rules with a belief that the rules are actually bad for us. We also know that children thrive in environments that are predictable, orderly, and highly structured. Rules aren’t our problem.

Instead of recognizing the obvious psychological connection between success and systems that are geared toward our success, we argue for the breaking of those systems, simply because we don’t like them. This is especially true with our view of economics. Many of us have swallowed the argument that regulations on business drives business out  of our state or country. Or that rules will impede our growth, or worse, directly harm our economy. The data just doesn’t back this up.

In her excellent report, Stacy Mitchell puts the two important pieces together: the “friendliness” of the state toward the expressed interests of businesses (meaning actually doing the things that the businesses ask for) and the current level and growth or decline of small businesses. The data is directly opposite the common sense approach that regulations harm businesses. In fact, the data demonstrates that small businesses thrive in the most regulated environments. Despite what the common sense wants us to believe, these practices may benefit really big businesses, but they actually harm small business growth.

Like an unregulated environment hinders a child’s development.

This is the reason we need to rediscover wisdom: because we are unhealthy without it.

Question:
What spoons can you find?
What is your experience with common sense without wisdom?

Creationism requires a global conspiracy of lying scientists and/or a lying God

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Fred Clark writes:

Creationism requires a global conspiracy of lying scientists and/or a lying God.

There’s no getting around it. Creationists may prefer not to think to much about the conspiratorial implications of what they’re arguing, but creationism just won’t work without the actual existence of such a “fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics.”

And Another Spoon

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Here’s another Spoon.

Label Genetically Engineered Food | Common Dreams.

Unlike people in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Russia, New Zealand and other countries where labels are required, Americans don’t know if the food they eat has been genetically altered.

As it stands, we’re hiding the cost of our food and what’s in it. There is only one benefit to hiding the truth about our food; or perhaps there is only one company that benefits from hiding the truth about our food. Guess which one?

Further Proof of the Spoon

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In this great comment on Forbes (of all places), The Dark Secret of Meritocracy: Reality is Rigged, Karl Smith speaks to hidden costs and the world it creates.

His argument?

Cheaters may almost never win but, given equal opportunity and a large enough competition, the winners are almost always cheaters.

What does this make of cheating?

[What's the spoon? Check out the first post here]

Revealed By Spoon: the Hidden Imbalance In Decisions

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The last few days, the following photo has bounced around my space in Facebook:

The cynical person will no doubt ask: what are the comparable costs of metal spoons, eh? Why don’t we compare apples to apples, here?

And then the intuitive among us will point out, yeah, but you only buy one metal spoon and wash it when you are done, rather than take a plastic spoon and throw it away on a daily basis. That’s how it scales.

For me, I am more interested in weighing the total cost when making a decision. When we decided whether or not to take a plastic spoon with the understanding that it will be thrown away, it is irresponsible of us to take only those sets of facts to be part of that decision. We are misguiding ourselves into making an easier, and more selfish choice. This is clearly the case, since the entire defense for not throwing away the spoon has been deemed irrelevant.

Many of our decisions contain these hidden costs; we simply ignore them. When corporations pollute, there is virtually no mechanism for attributing the real cost to the polluter. Or often when a business goes bankrupt, they clear out of the building, but don’t sell it, so it remains vacant for years, depreciating the value of the businesses around it. Or there is the plight of the heirloom tomato, which is going extinct due to cross-pollination and genetic modification. Or the problem of cutting the police force in Trenton, NJ by 1/3 led to an exponential increase in crime, not 1-to-1, but more like 1-to-10.

All of these examples were made easier when the true costs were hidden. They also encouraged selfishness on one group’s part over the needs of others.

What then, is the hidden cost of such selfishness? What are we paying for when we allow others to selfishly hide the costs?

Question:

What decisions do we make that contain hidden costs that we ignore?
Why do we ignore them?
What is the cost of ignoring those costs?

[UPDATE: Here are two follow-ups about the Spoon. One about meritocracy and one about food labeling.]

When Pants Don’t Fit, Quit Wearing Them

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English: jeans for men 中文: 男用牛仔裤

We all hate when our pants don’t fit. My wife put my favorite jeans in the dryer and now I have to lose a couple of pounds to get them back on. Thankfully, these aren’t jeans I’ve had forever. I’m not trying to put on any pants I wore in high school, trying to prove something to myself that I’ve still got it. And yet, our pants, just like our paradigms, are treated with the same devotion.

You may have heard about the married Mormon humorist that came out on his blog as gay and happily married (and sexually fulfilled in the marriage). If not, read for yourself. I read about him in a post by Dianna E. Anderson, whose great response was “I truly don’t know what to do with this.”

Anderson’s response was to deal with the tangled elements of the issue and what she personally makes of it. It highlights all of the symantics of our dominant paradigm. How the labels and the understanding don’t quite piece together how we’d like them to. As we try to put together the puzzle called “marriage” and the one called “sexuality” we are left with pieces that don’t fit and don’t work the way we talk about either or both subjects.

Official "Vote NO on Prop 8" logo

Official “Vote NO on Prop 8″ logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There was incredible evidence of this during the Prop 8 hearings in California in which all of the arguments for the defense (anti-gay) were treated as incredible by the judge. There was a “if you can’t demonstrate how this hurts your marriage, you expect me to only use humanism in this way but not that, and you expect me to believe this has anything to do with your religion, what are we doing here?” vibe to it. The entire spectacle of Prop 8 has completely trivialized the existing dominant paradigm: that marriage totally rocks, but only for gainfully employed, Christian heteros.

But what we’re left with at the moment is a hazy feeling of what marriage is really supposed to be about. The way Josh Weed talks about marriage, and I mostly agree with him, is to describe something of true value that requires sacrifice. And too much of that talk has been used to abuse the LGBT community and treat its members as crazy outliers in need of reform. The problem is that we have been breaking apart a nihilistic and cancerous paradigm, but have lacked the ability to articulate its replacement. Or, more precisely, a plurality of people demand a paradigm and are willing to tear down the current one only if it will be replaced with a superior one. And much to their chagrin, the replacement paradigm doesn’t look enough like their expectation for a paradigm.

Here’s my solution to the problem. Find what fits and wear it. Then take what doesn’t fit to Goodwill. If it is stained or torn or out of style, throw it away, because Goodwill is going to anyway. Don’t obssess about what you wear to Goodwill.

Marriage

Marriage (Photo credit: Lel4nd)

The problem is the dominant paradigm, not its replacement. And it does not necessarily track that the replacement paradigm must be articulated by the reformers before the dominant paradigm is replaced. Not in this. Because the new paradigm won’t be as constraining and reckless as the old. It will be based out of an understanding that marriage is primarily about the love of the couple, which is a natural extension of what came before it. The contract entered into by two consenting adults. Before that, the contract entered into by a man and another man concerning that man’s daughter. And before that, a contract entered into by a man and several other men concerning their respective daughters. Or the contract between a man, another man concerning that man’s daughter, and their female slave. And so on. The biggest change, then, is not about sexuality, but about contracts between men. And we long ago rejected that tradition–that orthodoxy.

We know what has happened to marriage: It has become about love. And love isn’t only about sacrifice, but embrace. It isn’t only contracts between consenting men (and even nonconsenting men). It is about the people actually doing the living together, the binding together. It is about intimacy and love and the Scripture abounds with all manner of support for that view of relationship. Our culture is crying for a view of personal relationships to be about love.

The Weeds can serve as a perfect example of intimicy, not because of their tradition, but in spite of it. How Josh and Lolly describe their marriage is in the true spirit of love and devotion, in a way that transcends our juvenile obsession with other people’s privates, and their faith tradition’s relationship to a past system of binding. In fact, our current, cobbled together view of marriage, that is both divorced from its long, ignoble history while willing to allow some radical transformations and not others, is comically unsupportable without major revision or rejection.

Question:

What ways is your generation’s view of marriage different than your parents’ and grandparents’?