An Inconvenient Truth

What would I do without my friend Charlene, pastor of the First Congregational Church here in Casper. She has written a thoughful article for her congregation which I wanted to share here. It's not "inconvenient" for me that this is appearing as I am heading to the hills, the Black Hills, for a visit with family. Last week—well—conveniently, it's been too hot here to do anything. Lynn

An Inconvenient Truth

The Al Gore documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth presents the scientific case that global warming exists and asks the moral question: what are we going to do? As you watch: you see Mount Kilimanjaro in the process of losing its famous snows over three and a half decades, and Glacier National Park its glaciers in a similar period of time; you see an ice shelf in Antarctica (previously thought to be stable for another 100 years) breaking up within the astonishing period of 35 days; you see a healthy coral reef, juxtaposed with images of a dying coral reef that has been bleached by hotter ocean waters; you see the great inland seas of Africa and Russia dry up; you hear about polar bears being unable to find ice to rest on and drowning. I wanted to weep for “creation that has been groaning awaiting redemption” (Romans 8:12).

Gore, quoting Mark Twain, says "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." I believe that the church has some of those know-for-sures. We know that God gave us dominion over the earth and we are to be fruitful and multiply. Well, we have filled the earth, fulfilling that command and it is time to celebrate the completion of the task.

Then there is the inconvenient truth that we were given dominion over the earth. While people have tried to save this scripture by making it stewardship, dominion is a concept at odds with many other passages where humans are seen as sojourners, strangers, aliens on the land that belongs to God and has a independent relationship with God.

When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord.
Leviticus 25:2

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.
Leviticus 25:23-24

For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord; for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.
Psalm 96:11-13

Praise ADONAI from the earth, sea monsters and watery depths, fire and hail, snow and mist, storm-winds that obey his word, mountains and every hill, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all livestock, creeping reptiles, flying birds,
Psalm 148:7-10

Humanity isn’t asked to sing for, dance for, praise for creation. Creation is capable of its own relationship and response to God. But we have used the concept of dominion to justify our extinction of 1000s of species and changing the climatic pattern of the earth. When the main element of this creation story is to tell us that God created and creation is good. If it is good why do we feel justified in polluting and killing the earth.

What would it mean for us if we accepted the inconvenient truth that God has an independent relationship with creation and that God calls upon us to redeem creation? “I was handed not just a second chance, but an obligation to pay attention to what matters.” Gore speaks briefly about the accident in April '89 when his young son was nearly killed by a speeding car. But it's a phrase or quote that I think can apply to all of us. He continues “I tell this story because it was a turning point that changed me in ways I couldn't have imagined .... I also reevaluated the nature of my public service. I questioned what it really means to serve” (pg 68).

What would it look like if we as a church began serving creation? Bill McKibben's article from the Christian Century, “Hot and Bothered” argues that churches need to respond like they did during the civil rights movement.

That is, church people in jail and arrested for protesting outside the environmental Protection Agency offices and coal-fired power plants. That is, churches demanding deep and dramatic changes from parishioners”

Can you imagine a church that takes serious a call to service; a call to live on the land as strangers, as people who have been given the earth to hold in trust for God; a call to experience creation singing with joy before God. Coming from an energy state, what would it mean to actually ask and demand that are representatives hear the cries of the earth and act to save creation?

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

We went to Maine, is what we did. The three of us in our family, plus David, a travelling companion for our son, Seth. Seth just recently turned seventeen, which is quite an achievement. David has been seventeen for a good time longer.

We stayed in a old fishing shack fixed up with modern conveniences, like running water, electricity, a bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, and quite serviceable furniture. All in all, though, it was still basic shelter. It was the location that gave it special charm. Built on stilts on the bank of a little creek that emptied quickly into the sea, the shack put us on the edge of the action. The tide’s action was the main event. At low tide, the creek was a trickle one could easily jump across; at high tide, the creek was 100 yards across in places, and gathered around the stilts that held the shack high and dry.

Across the creek, acres of salt water marsh spread lush and green. The grasses were uniform in height, according to species. One type of grass occupied the seaward edge of the marsh, another grew behind the first, taking over as a transition before giving way to the forests on higher ground. Slicing through the marsh was a channel connecting our creek’s little inlet with the full-sized bay to our north, Cape Porpoise.

Birds were everywhere, most of which we could not identify, because shore birds have never been our strong point. But we did recognize and enjoy a group of snowy egrets wading in the shallows upon jet-black legs and bright yellow feet. Breeding plumage was evident, but the breeding itself, well, that must have taken place behind closed bulrushes.

By the way, we worshipped on the second Sunday in July at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, just south of our creek in Kennnebunkport. Not in the small but formidable church building did we worship, but outside, on a high bluff overlooking the open sea. This open air sanctuary was equipped with set of pews coated with gloss paint, facing a large stone altar. On the front row to our left sat members of the Bush family: George Herbert Walker Bush (“Poppy”) and Barbara, son Jeb Bush and his wife and children. Jeb’s sister (forgot her name) passed out bulletins to worshippers as they arrived and served as a Eucharistic minister during communion.

It was all very interesting. The summer priest was an affable sort. This was his normal post. Each season he comes up from Shreveport, Louisiana, where he is Dean of the Cathedral there. The sermon taxed neither the mind or spirit, but the liturgy was quite satisfactory. The priest, with a fine voice, supported a somewhat surprising repertoire of camp-style music, the words printed on handouts: Kum By Yah, We Are One in the Spirit, that sort of thing. Afterwards the Bushes hung around with the worshippers -- most of whom, like us, were visitors -- just like regular folk. Then they got in their secret service vehicles and left.

We were introduced to another Episcopal priest, the headmaster of St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, and his wife. We talked on the church lawn under a bright and warming sun, also like regular folk. Afterwards, we bought coffee in town and had brunch back at the creek. Our host and hostess, Chris and Marcia, fixed blueberry pancakes and sausage. Later, we went out in their Boston Whaler onto the big water and sat watching harbor seals surface and play around. Again, all very interesting.

But what really captured our interest was the tide, coming in and going out, ebbing and flowing. We watched it build under a gorgeous, waxing moon, each night’s flow higher than the one before. And then we saw it lessen with the moon.

When you’re living on top of the tide like we were, when all of our actions are regulated by this planetary regulation, we learn to adjust, and in our case, very quickly. There’s a natural grace in and around the tide, the great cleansing action of the sea, the mixing of salt water with fresh, the churning of life and the estuarial genesis of life that goes on twice a day every day all over the world. The tide brings water from far way, varying places to the most local ones. It flows to possess land and air, reducing and elevating all to liquid. The stationary is set into motion, is linked with one and more of a thousand possible currents to wind up virtually anywhere before it rests. It rests just for awhile before the tide finds it and sets it once more in motion, into the swirling stream of life. It’s all about life, this grace, natural and otherwise. And this life, from the simplest to the most complex form of it, is all about grace.

As Ever,

Dee

Peace, Unity and Purity

In the Burns and Burns Civil War on PBS, the recently late Shelby Foote said that one of the causes of the War Between the States was the failure of various interests within America to reach a compromise on issues like slavery and states’ rights. Americans pride themselves about being a principled, uncompromising lot, but the opposite is the case, he went on to say. The ability to compromise has been and continues to be a key American strength. But when sides hardened and stopped talking in the 1850’s, it was Johnny get your gun.

A similar dynamic played out during the days of Martin Luther. Before Luther, the Roman curia was expert at meeting reform movements with a disarming embrace. A monastic order might be established, both to give voice to the dissenting point of view and to bend it toward the overall Catholic cause. In this and other ways, the church thrived by being flexible. By the time of Luther’s 95 thesis, however, the church’s leadership had calcified into a particular pattern of positions, and there was no place in them for the ideas of this upstart Augustinian monk.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian church approved a compromise carefully stitched together over four years by the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. And Gerald Stephens was right on in his earlier posting about the General Assembly coming to “his town.” One can detect a fresh breeze blowing through the Presbyterian Church, and it may stir up a new way of discerning and welcoming leadership for the Body of Christ. If that happens, it’s because a large, tradition bound, unwieldy bureaucracy was able to bend, to find an opening, to relax muscles of control.

Our church’s cleaving issue (in the double sense of something that holds together and splits apart) hasn’t the full weight of slavery or of salvation by grace by grace through faith. But it—the nature and practice of homosexuality—is hefty enough. Many, many years of thinking about the issue are under reconstruction. The emerging shape of such thought repulses some, while others rejoice. Whatever the outcome, the conversation has been launched, and cannot be recalled.

One senses fertile possibilities if the church can hold the compromise together long enough to let it germinate. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Paul tells us, and he wasn’t talking about Egbert and Lulaleen getting hitched. (Okay, 1st Corinthians 13 includes Lulaleen and Egbert’s relationship, so it’s acceptable to read it at a wedding, but we just need to remember that it’s aimed at the broader audience of all Christians, the whole church.) Part of the agony and the joy, the elation and the drudgery of living in faith with God and the people of God is learning how to endure “all things” together, like all kinds of personality types, divergent social and educational levels, competing political alliances, genetic and ethnic differences, theological persuasions, and various ways of expressing human sexuality. It is excruciating work, to live at this depth of intentional community. Many people, fleeing its intensity, retreat into shelters of sameness, under umbrellas of uniformity, especially in churches. But for those who stick with covenant faithfulness, through thick and thin, dividends of mercy and grace are received.

So it is like marriage. Life-long partners unwilling or unable to compromise hard won, deeply held values don’t stay married very long. Or they spend their lives in a loveless marriage, or, worst of all, an abusive one. Good marriages are marked by spouses who regularly, in big matters and small, meet each other more than half way.

This Presbyterian compromise concerning who may be ordained by whom and where will make us stronger believers in Jesus. Because both sides in the homosexuality debate had to give up something in order to build this bridge between them, lessons of humility have been taught and learned. Nobody knows all they think they know. Everyone needs to listen more and speak less. All benefit as they learn to be still, let God be God for a change, and see what new thing the Spirit will do blowing through and around a patient, open minded, grace-seeking people.

I recommend the most recent issue of Presbyterian Outlook in its entirety. It has the very un-Outlook cover of a couple walking in a grassy field under a huge, inviting sky. (By the way: how ‘bout that new editor, Jack Haberer, friends and cousins? That ol’ boy is doing ‘em a good job!). I particularly commend the article by Frances Taylor Gench, who, besides teaching at the “other Union Seminary,” the one in Virginia, was a member of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. It’s a beautiful exposition of John 17, the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus. She writes:

“Now unity with God in Christ is one thing. The hardest thing, I think, to overhear is Jesus’ prayer for our unity with each other, for there may be no doubt of what it consists. For all those who believe in Jesus as the One sent from God—God’s own Son who binds God to us and binds us to God and to each other as God’s own children—that that unity consists in one thing above all else: love. The language of love is the primary language by which Jesus in John speaks of the life of the believing community. The one commandment, the only ethical injunction he gives us in John: love one another… the unity believers share lies in something beyond doctrinal agreement… It lies in our experienced love of God in Christ, which keeps us together in spite of our differences and links us with disciples past, present, and future. Mutual love is at the heart of John’s vision of the Christian life -- the identifying characteristic of the community that continues to exist in the world in Jesus’ name. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “if you have love for one another.”

You want true believers, look at the Middle East. Uncompromising people make great fundamentalists, and when mixed with small doses of political fervor and technological sophistication, fundamentalism, like its offspring, war, is unhealthy for children and other living things (remember that one?). Uncompromising people do not forgive others as they have been forgiven and neither do they love their enemies. Fundamentalists we have known have not impressed us with their understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, so recently the background text for these postings. They seem unwilling to bless those who persecute them, and unable to turn expose a left cheek after an assailant strikes the right. Not that any of us find those practices easy.

Though we were born a few years too late, we remember the days of the anti-war movement well, and marched in some of its demonstrations (It’s Your War, Too!, IT’S YOUR WAR, TOO!) Some of us even wrote letters to the editor expressing our disgust with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Our sociopolitical consciousness, such as it was, owed gratitude to the earlier civil rights movement and to the feminist movement which grew from the culture of peace-mongers. We’re not saying that we joined the Black Panthers exactly, and burning bras was all right with us because we kinda liked the resulting look. But with the misty-eyed and murky-minded conviction of a college sophomore, we pledged ourselves to be staunch supporters of the cause. “Compromise” was a dirty word, and no decent person with whom we associated would ever give an inch (Didn’t Janis Joplin sing a song about that, or was it Joan Baez?). Ah, those were the days.

And here we are this day praising compromise as a wonderful, life-giving thing. Maybe our praise is a sign of wisdom, or just of old age. Maybe it’s the easy way out for militant moderates like us, who still get all choked up over the idea of reconciliation of sworn enemies and who hold ever so tightly to the dream of the beloved community, made up of every breed of human beings imaginable, and their dogs and chickens, their cats and horses, too.

Or perhaps—just perhaps—through the sifting, thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis, dialectical doors of compromise lies the realm of maturity, of spiritual purpose, of which Jesus speaks, again, in the Sermon on the Mount. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

As Ever,
Dee

Combining Ignorances

I have this penchant, it seems, for sitting down to write about things about which I know nothing—natural grace, Germany, the religious temperament—and tonight in one crashing attempt to combine my various ignorances, Goethe.

I’m particularly interested, this time, in the poem Gesang der Geister über den Wassern. Here it is:

Des Menschen Seele
Gleicht dem Wasser:
Vom Himmel Kommt es,
Zum Himmel steigt es,
Und wieder nieder
Zur Erde muss es,
Ewig wechselnd.

Strömt von der hohen,
Steilen Felswand
Der reine Strahl,
Dann stäubt er lieblich
In wolken wellen
Zum glatten fels,
Und leicht empfangen
Wallt er verschleiernd,
Leisrauschend
Zur Tiefe nieder.

Ragen Klippen
Dem Sturz entgegen,
Schäumt er unmutig
Stufenweise
Zum Abgrund.

Im flachen Bette
Schleicht er das Wiesental hin,
Und in dem glatten See
Weiden ihr Antlitz
Alle Gestirne.

Wind ist der Welle
Lieblicher Buhler;
Wind mischt vom Grund aus
Schäumende Wogen.

Seele des Menschen,
Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!
Schicksal des Menschen,
Wie gleichst du dem Wind!

And here’s a very bad translation or, more accurately, an English paraphrase:

The human soul—
It’s like water:
From heaven descending,
To heaven returning,
And down again,
Drawn to the earth,
Back and forth—always, back and forth.

Pouring from a high,
Steep wall of rock,
A pure stream
Breaks into mist,
Into waves of clouds
On the smooth rock below.
Then lightly
It simmers, like lace.
Quietly it whispers
Into the deep.

Where cliffs rise up,
It plunges down,
Mad with foam
Downward, down, down
Into the depths.

In a shallow streambed,
It slips through a meadow.
The stars see
Their reflections
In a polished lake.

The wind is the wave’s
Sweet, sweet lover,
Stirring swells
Deep within.

The human soul—
How like water!
Human fate—
How like the wind!

I have the utmost respect for translators, but I wouldn’t want to be one. It’s too hard to try to capture both sound and sense and avoid going off on your own tangent. Anyway, by the time I’m done—even with a job so bad, or wandering, I can't call it a translation—I don’t have energy for much more than one or two or three questions, some with (very) tentative answers.

The religious temperament—is it likely to be allegorical? If so—and it seems to me it is—to what extent?

Is this the way natural grace “works,” that is, we read into nature what we hope to see there? I think it is, at least in the Protestant tradition: it’s a matter of faith finding understanding and not the other way around. Not ever.

Finally, is water like the soul and wind like fate? Or conversely, is fate like the wind? It does tend to blow where it wills and sometimes gently and sometimes a gale; so sometimes we do hear the sound of it, but sometimes we don’t.

Is the soul like water? I’m not even sure I know what that question means, but it is the more arresting image. For example, if it were, the soul would take the shape of its container. Which is what, the body? Or, perhaps, the deeds that shape it? It would take the shape of its container. It would also run downhill. It would freeze at a certain temperature and float on itself; it would boil at another temperature and float away. As Goethe says, it would go up into the heavens; and then it would come back down. And it could come, though he doesn’t say so, as snow or sleet or hail as well as rain.

Fallling on the just and the unjust alike.

Rick

Consequences

Dan and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth on Monday. As Al Gore says at one point about some of his illustrating video footage, “It’s like a nature walk through the book of Revelation.” There wasn’t anything in the nearly two-hour presentation about global warming that I didn’t know (except how funny Al Gore can be!). That’s what made the movie so compelling. It is time to stop knowing and start doing.

As the movie credits began to role to the background of an original song by Melissa Ethridge, I turned to Dan and asked, “Are we going off the grid now?” Dan said nothing. We’ve been moving that way for awhile anyway. Interspersed with the credits were suggestions for “simple” things to do. We’re doing most of them, and I had a picture of either using the poop from our three dogs (plus one visiting—Ziggy, of last week’s post) and the four cats or of finding a way for them to run on some kind of wheel and generate a little electricity.

We stood up to leave. I turned to Dan and said, “There are going to be consequences, aren’t there?” He said nothing. We got out of the theater. I suggested going to get a beer (walking of course) and talking about the movie. He smiled and said, “Let’s ride bikes.” See, I knew that there would be consequences.

Sometime last fall, Dan got a great deal on three yellow Hummers, which I think is a funny name for a bicycle. We gave one to Charlene’s 10-year-old son, who had outgrown his bike, and kept the other two. Dan has been riding his to work since the weather turned warm. Mine was been sitting in the living room, in the hall, and finally in the shed until the 4th of July when I finally agreed to ride it.

I went to K-Mart, got a helmet, and for the first time in thirty years, I got on a bicycle. I hadn’t forgotten how to ride a bicycle. I rode a bicycle—a blue Schwinn—all over town when I was a kid. I rode with no hands and no helmet. I had just never ridden one with brakes in the handle bars and gears to shift that can’t be shifted unless you are also pedaling. We went to an empty parking lot. As long as I was going up hill I was fine because I was going slow. It was coasting down hill that shook me up.

Monday night, I got on again, whined for awhile, and then for just a few minutes let go and enjoyed the ride. Don’t look for me in the Tour de anything. But who knows, I might ride to work or at least downtown to the movie theaters.

I’ve been working on a sermon on the Mark story about the beheading of John the Baptist. Since the reading from the Hebrew Scripture is the story of David bringing the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, I’ve been playing with the metaphor of dancing, particularly Herod’s dancing around the truth of John and Jesus like a prize fighter.

I, however, am more likely to approach the dance with the truth of the Gospel just like I ride a bicycle, by paying too much to my feet—or in the case of the bicycle, just holding on so tightly that it’s not my butt or legs that hurt when I am finished. It is my shoulders. What I say every Sunday is that “God loves us. Let’s act like it.” That is as good a summary of the Gospel truth as I can come up. God’s love—which is often an inconvenient truth when I want to live my life by my own terms—has consequences. Good consequences. Good consequences when I am able to let go of myself and enjoy the ride—or Rick—the nap.

More Dogs Join the Hunt

We were talking about the religious temperament, or I was, trying to decide what to believe: Are we religious by choice? By the grace of God? (To paraphrase Lady Brett to Jake Barnes at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to think that?”) Or, are we religious by nature? It’s in our genes; and some of us are and some of us aren’t.

I don’t know what to think about this, so I take, if not the usual, a frequent refuge of fools. I start reading randomly. First, this old appreciation of El Greco I found recently among a friend’s cast-offs. “Take El Greco,” I say, as if that’s a step toward an answer.

Take El Greco, who began apparently as a painter of icons. That wouldn’t require a religious temperament, I don’t suppose, but it might be helpful to have one. And by all accounts El Greco did. That, or he had astigmatism.

That’s one alternative explanation for the increasingly elongated figures in the later paintings—not only elongated but disproportionate: astigmatism. But how to account for the fact that in the sculptures, the figures retain their natural dimensions?

So a religious explanation for the paintings seems more likely. The late El Greco wasn’t trying to paint reality. He was painting a vision, or his reaction to a vision—he was trying to paint the faith that was absorbing him. So, as Dale Brown (The World of Velázquez) points out, even when El Greco depicts the infant Christ’s adoration by the shepherds, “an event that particularly lends itself to realistic portrayal,” he avoids simple representation. Instead, while the shepherds are “recognizably human . . . as they realize that they have come upon the Christ Child, they writhe and assume fantastic postures. In distorting them,” Brown concludes, El Greco “conveys his own sense of awe in the presence of the divine.” He is not describing shepherds before the Virgin and child; he is portraying his own feeling of being twisted by the mystery of God.

Excursus: El Greco comes from Venice and Rome to . . . Toledo. Contrast Velázquez, who can’t wait to get out of Seville if it’s only as far as Madrid. He might have remained; there were more than enough religious commissions in the Andalusian city to keep him till death did them part. But Velázquez departed for the capital, because “his bent was clearly for the secular rather than the spiritual” (Brown again, though my italics). So off to Madrid and the Hapsburg court—poets and politicians, lords and ladies, lap dogs and dwarfs. O, brave new world . . . .

Huxley’s novel. I don’t want to go into why I was reading that recently—or rereading it—because then I’d have to admit that I wasn’t reading it; I was listening to it on two long car trips to Michigan and back. But Michael York was reading it. That must count for something in terms of cultural points.

At the end of the fifth chapter, odd little Bernard Marx is on his way to Solidarity Service to “achieve atonement” with his group of twelve. “Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities to a larger being.” It works for eleven of them, but not for poor Bernard, who is distracted by Morgana Rothschild’s eyebrows. But if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.

Bernard simply lacks the temperament for faith. That’s the sad, the frightening end of it: he lacks not just a religious temperament; he lacks the temperament for faith.

Dogs and Dogma

Why every boy should have a dog. To learn that it’s okay to go around in circles before you sleep. And it’s okay to sleep more than once a day. Especially on weekends.

Sunday afternoon.

I’ve preached and prayed and sung. I’ve led a congregational meeting—the usual five minutes’ worth, in this case to bring one of our less important congregational practices into conformity with our denominational Book of Order.

I’ve eaten lunch—the usual wait at The Depot; the food is okay, better than okay, but the service is the slowest in Staunton if not the entire Shenandoah Valley. But The Depot is where we go, this group I eat with one or two Sundays a month.

I’ve come back to my office to write, but I’m readier to take a nap.

I like naps, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in them. The chances you’ll wake up from one feeling better instead of worse are, in my experience, fifty-fifty. Or, the chances I will wake up feeling better, or worse, are fifty-fifty. It’s a matter of temperament, I’m told. Some temperaments thrive on naps; some don’t. And some, it must be, are in between.

So much, it seems, is a matter of temperament. Even, some say, religion. It’s in our genes that we are religious, or, at least disposed toward religion, whatever that means. I’ll have to lean back in my chair to think about that one.

And I wake up feeling no better but no worse. This, given my natural pessimism, is a good result, because if it was fifty-fifty, chances are I was going to wake up feeling worse.

What does it mean, though, to have a disposition toward religion? Does it mean a (natural) interest in mystery or in metaphysics—which may have room for mystery or may not? Does it suggest an openness to the future or a dependence on the past? Is the religious temperament prophetic or priestly?

I have no idea. I do know that one trouble with a nap—even if I wake up without a hangover—is that I can wake up with a different matter on my mind than the matter I decided to sleep on.

This morning, after I’d climbed out of bed, put on my Sunday clothes, and walked down to the church, after I’d rewritten my sermon, and gone into the sanctuary to preach it through (and listen to it in that great, empty hall), and rewritten it again, after I’d gotten the prayers ready and the hand-out for the congregational meeting, as I was between buildings—in the alleyway between the Frazer Building (1920) and the sanctuary (1872)—on my way to pray with the choir, it hits me: “Is church just anachronistic?”

I say that’s a different matter, because it doesn’t to me, at first blush, have to do with religion, which I’m deciding this Sunday afternoon does have to do with both mystery and metaphysics . . . and openness, though it also has to do with singing—and I’m on my way to the choir—and praying—I’m on my way there to pray; so maybe the question is a religious question, after all.

Except: it’s also an institutional question. Here’s the derivation: the verb, institute, comes from the Latin institutus, the past participle of instituere “to set up,” which in turn is made up of in- “in” + statuere “to establish,” or, more literally, “to cause to stand.” And statuere is clearly related to statute, which has to do with law: getting into conformity with the Book of Order, closing loopholes.

Law, and not religion, because they're completely different “beasts.” Or is it a question: Law and not religion? Because they're two heads of the same beast. And, thank God, it’s time for another nap.

Rick

Rabbits and the Church

Late this week. Nothing last week. Two weddings, a funeral, and I am now in a continuing education seminar. What I offer today, with her permission, are some reflections by my friend and colleague Charlene Hinckley, pastor of the First United Church of Christ here in Casper. Note: Ziggy is a dog and my dog Ursa's best friend.

Lynn

I was out walking Ziggy the other day, enjoying the cool breeze while watching Ziggy running without dying from the heat. Ziggy was off after a bird when I came upon a rabbit. Somehow Ziggy had completely missed the rabbit. The last time she had spotted one she ran after it so fast I thought, "Great she will never come back," but luckily the rabbit was quick enough to get under the shed before she could reach it.

I was trying to decide what to do about what I realized was probably a dead, sick or injured rabbit. I wandered how to keep Ziggy away while moving it so no other dog tried to have a meal. Just when I had decided to get the plastic bags out of the car, the rabbit springs up and shoots across the field heading for shelter under the building. Ziggy was oblivious to the whole event.

While I had thought the rabbit was dead, the rabbit was playing dead awaiting its chance to make a break and get away from Ziggy, so that it could live another day. That rabbit was full of life, it had just been waiting for the right moment, the right time to spring up full of the life pouring through its veins.

I wonder sometimes if the church is like that rabbit. Are we so fearful that we are playing dead? Are we afraid of what it will mean to love and serve God with our whole hearts? Are we afraid that new people will be different from us? Are we afraid that there will never be enough money, people, time, energy? What is we are afraid of that keep us dead?

The fear keeps us paralyzed. Lost and trapped in the fear we are too paralyzed to run home, to run toward life, to run toward God, to run toward ministry. We are to afraid to run into the breath and fire of the Holy Spirit poured down upon us to give us the strength and courage to be the church, to be God’s hands and feet caring for this world, this community, this people we have been entrusted with.

A Modest Proposal – Briefly Made

Dear Dee,

I take it you are in almost complete agreement with Alan Dershowitz, who is now arguing that while torture is never really acceptable, it is a reality. It has been used and presumably will be used, perhaps even should be used when “it is felt that by torturing an obviously guilty [terrorism suspect], the lives of multiple innocent people could be saved.” (The italics are mine.)

Dershowitz said this on NPR’s Morning Edition this past Monday, and he said it quite emphatically even though he acknowledges that there is no real empirical evidence that torture does work—and so save lives. (Note that I am continuing to make a practical argument against assassination as well as a theological one. Not only is it wrong, but there is no evidence that it works. Remember: history cannot supply evidence.)

But you’ll agree, I’m sure, that torture is a reality. It has been used; it will be used. Indeed, while it is never really acceptable, it ought to be a choice, when, as Dershowitz puts it, “the lives of . . . innocent people could be saved.”

Where you’ll disagree with Dershowitz, I take it, is in his contention that in a civil society it should be regulated so that may only be ordered by a duly elected official, who is in turn responsible to the electorate for its use. You would allow it as well for a group of conspirators.

Providing, of course, that at least one of the conspirators was a theologian.

Just making sure I’ve got this right,

Rick