Of Immigration and Jesus

What do we do when the law of the land requires us to violate the Gospel of Jesus?

This past week the governor of Arizona signed into law the strictest, some say harshest, law regarding immigrants that exists in our land. Folks from all over the political spectrum are weighing in. Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine wrote a brief response. Wallis has built his reputation on his balanced political stances and his careful reading of the Christian scriptures. He has this to say of the new law in Arizona:

“The law signed today by Arizona Gov. Brewer is a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation. It is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It is not only mean-spirited – it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe. This radical new measure, which crosses many moral and legal lines, is a clear demonstration of the fundamental mistake of separating enforcement from comprehensive immigration reform. Enforcement without reform of the system is merely cruel. Enforcement without compassion is immoral. Enforcement that breaks up families is unacceptable. This law will make it illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona, and will force us to disobey Jesus and his gospel. We will not comply.”

Thirty Years of Ministry

April 20th is the 30th anniversary of my ordination. Thirty years! It has taken me around the block a few times. I have made countless visits, dedicated parishioners' children and buried their parents. I have knocked on doors at 2:00 A.M. to inform people a loved one has been killed in an accident, or committed suicide; and I have crawled into car wrecks to pray with people as their life drained away with the gasoline, motor oil and antifreeze. I have preached hundreds of sermons, sat through more committee meetings than I ever want to count, and listened to the most intimate confessions of people who cannot live one moment longer with their burden. I have received numerous notes of thanks from parishioners that made me feel like a million bucks, and I have received a letter so vicious that I felt as though I had been physically kicked. I have cried, and I have laughed a lot because of the joy of it all.

Most of that time I did not pray every day. I was too busy.

Mistake.

The impetus to pray for an hour a day came when I realized that preaching was no longer the piece-of-cake task it once had been for me. Preaching used to be so easy: I was so very confident of my answers-–as confident as my parishioners often were of their questions. I was sure of life, sure of my place in it, sure of my unshakable faith. Then came the news that a sister had been killed in a hiking accident. Then the rape and murder of a friend. Then discovering a lump in my body where there should have been no lump. Then a truck and I (on my bike) tried to share the same piece of pavement (I lost). Oh sure, the searing pain of the losses subsided with time, and the cancer is long gone, but the foundations upon which my world view rested were badly shaken. Preaching became far more difficult, for the simple reason that living became far more difficult. And I won't preach what I don't have the guts or maturity to practice. As I said to my parishioners one Sunday morning, "Preaching is easy. It's practicing that's hard." But then, many of them knew that already.
Thirty years. Both preaching and practicing are getting harder; so I pray all the more. Thirty years, and God keeps whomping me on the head and telling me to keep at it and to love more . . . and to pray more. Thirty years, and I am blessed beyond measure. And prayer is what binds it all together.
Pray for me. I shall for you.

April Fools: Humor in the Bible

The Bible might have a reputation as one of the most humorless books around. I mean, it starts with a bang, but quickly descends into genealogies, massacres, and accounts of obscure kings. The New Testament gospels are pretty interesting, but let's face it, not all that funny. So on April Fool's Day, where's the humor?

There is some, believe it or not. Remember, the Bible is fundamentally rooted in oral culture, and so the kinds of stories that are fun to tell are often the kinds of stories that find their way into the Bible. Those stories are, occasionally, pretty funny. And if you know the original Hebrew and Greek, the text is actually littered with word plays and puns.

I'll just share one example to illustrate the point. The book of Acts is pretty ho-hum from a humor standpoint (lots of traveling and preaching and people getting stoned, and not the kind that makes them giggle). But there's one story in particular that stands out as probably, in my opinion, the funniest in the entire Bible. It's the story of Eutychus in Acts 20:9-12. I recommend reading it on The Brick Testament, and if you click on that link, you'll see why.

Eutychus was listening to a sermon by Paul. They were apparently in an apartment building, and not a house, since they were on the 3rd floor. (You can see a Roman example of the sort of building they were probably in, in the picture up at the top of this post). Paul was in town, and started preaching. He went on, and on, and on, and.......on and on. Finally Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, fell asleep. He fell out of the window, 3 stories to the ground, and when they got to him, he was already dead. Paul had killed Eutychus with his boring sermon.

Somehow, Paul is able to revive Eutychus. Everyone is relieved! Lesson learned, right? Wrong. Paul marches right back upstairs, Acts tells us, and continued to talk until dawn.

See, now that's funny! Who doesn't love a joke about boring preachers who just don't get how boring they are? And it's right there in the Bible! I imagine this as a story that Christians would have told each other for generations, remembering the time Paul, one of the most important and influential Christians of all time, literally bored a man to death.

What Is God In?

In Confirmation, we've been talking about the historic creeds of the Christian church--the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, and so forth, up to the UCC Statement of Faith. We've been taking the time to work through some of the theological concepts that those creeds espouse, especially the tough ones like the trinity, the holy spirit, incarnation, and the like. A couple of Sundays ago, we were asking what God's relationship to the world might be. Is God completely separate from the world? Is the world God? There are lots of ways to conceptualize the relationship.

One of the Confirmation students said he thought that God was in everything and everyone. I told him that he was a panentheist, and he looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. But then I explained that panentheism is the belief that God permeates the world (but distinct from pantheism, which believes that everything IS God). He seemed pretty satisfied to be called such a thing.

One of my favorite songs is an ode to panentheism. I first encountered it at my small Baptist college in the South, oddly enough, and it's stuck with me ever since. The singer, Billy Jonas, has cropped back up in my life lately, since he does a lot of children's music that my 2-year-old loves. But I thought I'd share this panentheistic song, God Is In, and see what reactions people had. Remember: God in your Tupperware, but not the lids, so buy some spares.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

One of my favorite things about learning Biblical languages is catching all the little inside jokes and plays on words that are in the Bible. There are dozens of them, sitting there in the Hebrew or the Greek, but we read over them in English, completely unaware that they are there.

One of the most clever examples of this is in Genesis. Everybody knows what the first man's name was, right? He was called Adam. But do you know what his name means? In Hebrew, the names almost always mean something, and Adam's name is no different. His name is derived from the word "dirt," which is "adamah." So in Genesis 2:7, God is literally forming the "adam" from the "adamah," the man from the dirt. Right there at the beginning, humanity is linked with the earth God made us from.

The point is underscored a little later in Genesis, when God tells that very same Adam that "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (3:19). The word the NRSV is translating "dust" here is the same word from earlier: "adamah." The scripture is warning us: don't forget who you are and where you come from.

These are the words we hear today, on Ash Wednesday. "You are dust, and to dust you shall return," we are told, with the imposition of ashes. It's a reminder of our mortality, and of the fragile nature of our existence, and of the limited amount of time we have here in this place. God has formed us from the dirt--the same stuff that the world is made from--and someday we will end up back there.

But Ash Wednesday is not about fatalism or nihilism. It's a call to purposeful living, to an honest assessment of our place in the world. We can read it as a call to ecological awareness, since it's right there in the first pages of our Bibles that even our bodies are part of the earth's ecosystem. But most of all, let's let Ash Wednesday be a call towards the understanding that our lives are held in God's hands, and that all our affairs--whether in our individual lives or our lives together--are intertwined with God and this beautiful world that God has created.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust--and thank God for that.

Confirmation

Many of you received an email and/or a letter from the church about a week ago, detailing our ongoing fiscal difficulties, and announcing the 2010 Annual Meeting. As we prepare the Confirmation class for its attendance at the annual meeting, we've been talking about how churches work, what their processes are, etc.

In light of this ongoing preparation for the Annual meeting, this past Sunday in our Confirmation class, I had the students do an exercise. I gave them a copy of the 2009 budget, and then gave them the amount of revenue we expect to have in 2010 and 2011. As you may know, those numbers are far apart. I asked them, in three groups, to pretend that they were the church council, and to propose a budget that matches our resources to our expenditures.

Their responses were one part creative, one part outlandish, and one part somber. They quickly realized, going through the budgets line by line, that the budget wouldn't be balanced one $500 item at a time. One group proposed doing away with the church's telephones altogether, and having everyone email the church when they needed something. Another group suggested turning off the heat and air conditioning. One group suggested an across-the-board pay cut for all staff. A couple of groups suggested doing away with retirement. Two of the Confirmation students were unwilling to cut their own parent's jobs. One group thought we should rely on a cottage industry of elves for revenue. I wish I were kidding.

In the end, the Confirmation students realized that in difficult economic times, difficult decisions have to be made. None of the three groups made the same proposals as the other two; every group had its own take on the budget challenges, and every group proposed to face those challenges differently. In the end, I think they came away with a greater understanding of what it takes to run a church, and what it will mean when they take that vow of membership in May.

Those Confirmation students can be models for us. These are not easy times, but we can face them together, with eyes wide open, and with the knowledge that God stands with us and before us, calling us ahead on our mission. While we may not be unanimous about where we go from here, we can still go there together, bound to one another with love.

Let Jesus Point the Way?

Gun sights with scripture references? Supplying US troops with good Christian help in killing enemies? Yes! In a January 20, 2010 BBC article the American company Trijicon, founded by a "devout Christian" and which says it runs to "Biblical standards", is putting biblical references on sharpshooters' gun sights. Just imagine, look down the barrel of your gun, find your human target and be guided with the reference to John 8:2, "When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life". Jesus will light your way to your kill your enemy.

Hey, toss out any qualms about this. So what if Jesus said, "Love your enemies"? He didn't really mean it. Now being a "devout Christian" means letting Jesus point the way, literally, for you to kill.

What? You don't think that one scripture reference will be sufficient ammunition for you to kill someone? Wait! There's more! This company also supports the devout with yet another helpful passage. Found on the company's Reflex sight are references to II Corinthians 4:6: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." It just warms your heart, doesn't it? We can give "glory to God in the face of Christ" . . . by blowing off the face of our enemies!

Sorry for the sarcasm. I am sick with disgust about this. To twist the message of Jesus and the angels (whatever happened to "Peace on earth, good will to all people?) is beyond abhorrent.

Let me grieve for Christ's Church. Give me space to pray as Jesus taught us, "thy will be done … and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us."

Let me grieve for Christ's Church. "Oh, my God, what have we come to?"