Hope for and Participation in a Better World

December 15, 2019  Isaiah 2:2-4 and Mark 1:1-10

Isaiah presents to us a vision of what God wants for the world.
All the people of the world will come to God,
and Isaiah speaks of everyone coming to Jerusalem,
For if God had a house it seemed that it would be in Jerusalem.
Everyone will learn God’s ways
and God will arbitrate all disputes.
Because God will settle all disputes, and there will be justice for all,
there will be no need for war or the weapons of war.

John the Baptist twists the vision of Isaiah a bit.
Isaiah says God is going to bring all people together, in peace, in Jerusalem.
John the Baptist says that God is coming to judge the world
make war against evil and destroy all the hurtful evil people in it.
That’s how we will get justice.

This is contrary to Isaiah’s vision in which all people will be saved.
Isaiah was what we call a Universalist.
All people who responded to God would be saved.
If you didn’t respond,
you were simply excluded from all the good things of life.

[This is the same message as everybody’s favorite in the Gospel of John 3:
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Those who believe in him are not condemned;
but those who do not believe are condemned already....
This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world,
and people loved darkness rather than light....”]

[I should note that the Gospel writer John was not the same as the Baptist.
There is yet another John, writer of the Revelation at the end of the Bible.]
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Here is what many scholars now think happened:
Jesus became a disciple of John the Baptist but for a short time.
John preached that God was coming in the future to judge all people.
The only escape was to commit to God,
and show that commitment through baptism.
Jesus joined John by being baptized.

Have you ever noticed that Jesus didn’t baptize anyone?
This is puzzling because one definition of a sacrament
is that it is an action instituted by Jesus.
But Jesus didn’t do it; John did.

Jesus didn’t baptize because he abandoned the teachings of John.
Jesus didn’t demand of people that they repent the way John did.
Jesus didn’t ask people to repent or to change
because his message was different.
Jesus preached that “The kingdom of God has come near;
He probably didn’t say “repent, and believe in the good news.”
I think the word “repent” was added here to connect him to John.

So John said that God was coming soon.
But Jesus said: “the kingdom of God has come near.”
Or he says the kingdom is in your midst or among you,
or he tells parables about the Kingdom
comparing it to various things in nature
or the ways people can treat each other with kindness or mercy.
Live as if the Kingdom were here now,
as if God and not the Romans were in charge, now.
God is ready to intervene in our lives anytime.
Jesus appears not to have worried much about the future.
Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God was a lot like Isaiah’s.
People living under the rule of God in peace.
People gathering around a table, sharing the gifts of God.

Jesus had been a disciple of John, but left John and started his own group.
He only asked fishermen to become fishers of people, not to be baptized.

What happened?
The gospel writers conflated or meshed
the messages of John the Baptist and Jesus.
The result was adding new endings to some of Jesus’ parables
that put into his mouth the ideas
about God coming to judge in the future;
ideas that really belonged to John.
Between the time that Jesus was crucified and the gospels were written
the followers of Jesus experienced frightful, destructive times
in which many thousands died at the hands of the Romans.
Jerusalem was destroyed and many who were not killed
fled elsewhere for their lives.

The experience of this devastation meant that the new Christians
saw everything differently.
Jesus’ message of living the love and peace of the Kingdom
now looked – weak.
So – The gospel writers included in their narratives about Jesus
speeches attributed to him that sound like John

Things like “Two will be in the field; one will be taken; the other left.
Two women will be grinding meal together;
one will be taken and one will be left.”
The stories about Jesus coming again are mostly a message of FEAR.

Many scholars do not think that these are the words of Jesus,
but that the early church wrote them
searching for ways to deal with their dire situation after Jesus had died.
Jesus was gone and had left his followers with teachings
to live in the Kingdom of God now, as if God ruled the world.
We all know how hard that is to do.

One way to express the hope of that better world to come,
was to say that Jesus, because he was the Christ, would come again.
But in the story of the first coming of Jesus, we still find
peacemaking and non-violent resistance to the powers that be.
Jesus’ message wasn’t entirely lost,
but something had gone terribly wrong with the Christian vision
and we are still suffering from it.
Christmas is not about John’s message
of judgment, punishment, and destruction.
Christmas recalls Isaiah’s vision of right living under God.
Christmas is about Jesus’ vision of a better world growing out of our hearts
in communities of trust where people share a meal around a table.
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A better world for all is not a perfect world.
A perfect world is not what life is about.
If we think of all the issues before us, we can find solutions
if we hold to a simple, common vision of a better world,
but with compromises.
So for example, In a perfect world there would be no war,
but this is not a perfect world.
Therefore, we need to be careful what wars we get into,
and we need to restrain ourselves when we go to war,
which is now a stated goal of our military
even though such restraint fails again and again.

Another example. In a perfect world, it is logical to think
that there would be no homosexuality or transsexual changes.
There would be only people who know themselves clearly
as men and women, who are attracted to each other.
But this is not a perfect world, and so we have to find ways
to live with the reality that a small percentage of God’s children
are differently oriented in their sexuality.
It used to be that almost no one would admit to that reality,
but now we mostly all do.

Another example. In a perfect world there would be no abortions,
and no unwanted children, – but this is not a perfect world.
We need to improve the abilities of parents
to raise and educate their children.
We need to help people reproduce responsibly,
And some abortions will be allowed, because it is not a perfect world.

You get the idea.
The question always before us is
How will we live with the realities God seems to have given us?
Only God could bring a perfect world.
The better world is our responsibility.
There are no absolutes.
Only difficult ethical decisions on a case by case basis.

The better world is possible because
we have been given the abilities to make a better life for everyone.
The better world will require hard work, difficult conversations,
compromise, and continual modifications
of laws and policies until we get things not right, but better.
---------------------------------
In order to have a better world, we need a vision of a perfect world.
Sadly I see that there are many people in our country and elsewhere
who have no vision for a better world
or they don’t want a better world, except for themselves.
Or they only want to tear down the world we have carefully built
to improve the lives of as many as possible as much as possible.
“Let those who have ears, hear,” as Jesus used to say.

Dominic Crossan, a great student of the historical Jesus, has in retirement
traveled all over the Biblical world, and he discovered something.
He says: “We know that the prophets and Jesus had a goal and vision
for life that can be summarized as ‘justice’.”
They spoke of the household of God and the Kingdom of God,
where God rules by justice for the poor and oppressed.
But all of the temples, and monuments, and tombstones of ancient Rome
tell us that their goal and vision for life,
that the purpose of their empire was VICTORY.
It was winning. Nothing else, If you won, you had achieved the ultimate.
That was the purpose of life in the Roman Empire.

The vision of Isaiah, and the vision of Jesus is for justice
for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry and thirsty.
Jesus tells us how to get there.
He says:  Live now the way you hope things will be in the future.
The Empire of God is in your midst; it is among you.
Make the future present just as we have made the past present
in our celebration of the birth of Jesus.
When we see Jesus in the poor, sick, in prison, or hungry and thirsty,
that’s when the Kingdom of God comes near to us.
In Christmas we celebrate the birth of a king born into poverty,
forced to be a refugee, a member of an oppressed people.
In Christmas we proclaim a king who does not command,
who does not lead armies or make war, but is the prince of peace.
How best should we observe his birth?

The Forgotten Creed -- About a book by Stephen Patterson

Galatians 3:27-28

As many of you as were baptized into Christ 
have clothed yourselves with Christ. 
There is no longer Jew or Greek, 
there is no longer slave or free, 
there is no longer male and female; 
for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 

Mark 7:24-30 – The Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith

Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre 
(in what is now Lebanon, 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee). 
He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. 
Yet he could not escape notice, 
but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit 
immediately heard about him, 
and she came and bowed down at his feet. 
The woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. 
She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 
He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, 
for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 
But she answered him, 
“Yes, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 
Then he said to her, “For saying that, 
you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” 
So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Sermon:

In November I preached from this same passage in Galatians, 
which says that in the Spirit, there is no longer Jew or Greek, 
no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.
I said that this is one of the fiercest expressions
of the Good News to be found in the Bible.
Paul proclaims here that Jews are freed from obedience to the law
and the arrogance and separatism of tribalism.
This means that religion is not defined by sacred books 
or the claims of temple or church authorities, 
or by the power of kings or political leaders.
This was revolutionary in the history of the world.
I learned this in seminary from a commentary on Galatians written in 1921, 
By Ernest DeWitt Burton, and I will read it again:

“Religion, Paul says, is not conformity to statutes, 
but a spiritual relation to God 
expressed by the word ‘faith,’ 
and an ethical attitude toward others, 
summed up in the word ‘love’.  
Morality, Paul affirms, is not achieved by keeping rules, 
but by living in fellowship with the Spirit of God 
and in consequent love towards people, 
issuing in conduct that makes for their welfare....  
Paul makes religion personal rather than ecclesiastical, 
and he makes morality a social relation grounded in religion... 
This is not today the real creed of any great part of Christendom.”
--------------
But – I just read a book by a Bible scholar I know, Stephen Patterson, 
called The Forgotten Creed.
He is speaking of these very words from Galatians.
He says that right there hiding in plain sight
is the first creed or statement of what the early Christians believed.
Re-building the text, he thinks it was used in baptism and read originally:

“We are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
there is no slave or free, 
there is no male and female;
for we are all one in the Spirit.”

The Apostles’ Creed we use tells us 
what to believe about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
It was written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
The Apostles didn’t know it.
Every phrase in it is there because 
of an argument in the church in the 200 years after Jesus.

But this earlier, forgotten creed is simpler and easier to remember:
No Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female.
This forgotten creed doesn’t mention Jesus or God.
It is about peoples’ lives.
It is about life and death.
It’s about the difference Jesus made in the lives of his earliest followers,
It’s about us and how we should relate to each other.
It’s about people, our differences, and what we do about it.

First, it’s about the different races and ethnic groups people belong to.
We know a lot about that.
It’s about slaves and free people.
That sounds more like history than anything we know about first hand,
but maybe not because it is about class.
It’s about male and female.
We know a lot about that!

The book subtitle is: Christianity’s Original Struggle 
against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism

This first creed opposes the blessing Jewish men recited to have been born
“A Jew and not a Gentile, a man and not a woman, 
a free man and not a slave.”
Foreigners, slaves, and women were most contemptible everywhere.
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Think about NO JEW OR GREEK

Everyone thought that “the other,” foreigners, were barbarians.
Patterson writes “Jews othered non-Jews, Greeks othered non-Greeks, 
Romans othered non-Romans.”

The “others” were often thought to be dirty, stupid, 
idolators and sexual deviants.
Patterson tells a lot that I did not know
about the hatred between Jew and Greek in the ancient world.
About the time of Paul’s vision of Jesus,
mobs of Greeks had killed thousands of Jews in riots 
in Alexandria Egypt.
Three years later thousands were killed in riots in Antioch, Syria
where Paul would in a few years debate Peter
about whether or not Greeks could become Christians.
(close to where Russia has set up their major base in the last few years).

There is always contempt, fear, and loathing of the Other.
Today the Other is Black, Muslim, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian.
And we rich, white, North Americans are Other to them.
The stories of riots in Alexandria and Antioch sound a lot like the riots
against Blacks in NYC during the Civil War, 
Tulsa, OK in 1919, 
and the Black towns burned to the ground 
by good citizens in the South,
and the riots against Mexicans in LA during WWII.
We should be thankful that there is as little killing of each other 
as there is today.

Paul offered something new: table fellowship of Greeks with Jews,
in communities of reconciliation gathered around 
the memory of a Jew, Jesus.
It’s difficult for us to understand that Paul was a Jew 
who never intended to start a new religion.
His question was never “How can I, a miserable sinner, be saved?” but
“How can Gentiles be included in the promises of God?”
Everything he wrote was argument about the inclusion of Gentiles
in the promises of God, not doctrines for us. 
Patterson says Paul “became convinced that the spirit of the person 
who had taught – love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you,
turn the other cheek –  
lived on and had come to in habit him, to direct him, to control him.”
All the words in the New Testament against the Jews 
were put there in the next 100 years 
when Paul’s churches had become mostly Greek churches 
With the beliefs we have inherited.

Think about NO SLAVE OR FREE

Slavery was so common in the first century 
that it is not mentioned as such in the gospels.
But everyone called a “servant” was a slave.
Slaves were “servi.”
If you weren’t a slave, you sold your labor on a daily basis, 
and may have lived worse than a slave 
who may have been fed and housed.
In such a system what must it have meant for Jesus to say 
that we should be slaves of all.

Romans called slaves “bodies” and “things”
Many thought slaves were not people, not human,
because if slaves were human you couldn’t treat them as animals. 
Most slaves were people captured rather than killed in war.
We might picture slaves as Black, 
but that was just a convenience of the past few hundred years
so they would be visibly different to whites.
But in Rome you could be white and be nothing more than a slave, 
told what to do, abused by your owner, sold to another.

A lot of what is said about slaves in the gospels makes sense
only if the gospel writers were slaveowners!
Some Biblical scholars think Jesus was a slave.
There is no evidence that Jesus or Paul thought 
that there should be no slaves!
Slavery was so normal it wasn’t talked about.
But early Christians who must have known this forgotten creed
formed “common funds” in their churches
from which they would buy the freedom of one of their own.
We know this from writings describing the practice, in passing.

We think we do not know slavery, but we do.
Writers are more and more drawing parallels 
between the prisoners of our legal system to slaves of old.
In the US prisoners work to help pay for their incarceration.
We have the largest number of prisoners in the world, and
when a prisoner is released, his or her life is severely limited, 
like slaves of the past.
Whenever we speak of class distinctions or differences,
we are speaking of the same social and economic issues 
of slavery in the ancient world.
Slavery was the primary class division of the ancient world.
Poverty is the equivalent today.
To be poor is to be like a slave.

Think about NO MALE OR FEMALE 

We are caught up in the struggle of women to be equal to men
and to end male dominance in social, business, and political life.
Paul would have understood the Me Too movement,
because he made many women to be ministers of his churches.
An analysis of the names of all the women in his letters says that it is so.
Patterson argues that Phoebe mentioned in his letter to the Romans 
was his boss.

This helps unravel the mystery at the end of the Gospel of Thomas.
Thomas is the gospel found 70 years ago in Egypt, 
which shows a different kind of Jesus community, 
based on Jesus’ teachings, not his death and resurrection. 

Here is the last verse of the gospel of Thomas:
Simon Peter said to Jesus and the other followers: 
“Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.”
Jesus said: “Look, I will draw her in so as to make her male, 
so that she too may become a living male spirit, similar to you.”
“Every woman who makes herself male 
will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

What on earth does that mean?
Patterson explains that in ancient Greece women were not thought to have
soul or mind which were believed to be masculine.
The Greeks argued that women, therefore, could not be leaders, or Guardians.

Socrates disagreed. 
He said women too had THUMOS, 
the courage, presence of mind, spirit, and spunk 
to speak up and articulate ideas and reasoned proposals.
Until the time of Jesus, most thought THUMOS was the property of men,
but in Thomas, Jesus taught that women had “living spirit” like men.

Patterson says that this meant that 
“Women have the same inner makeup as men do. 
The spirit, the divine element breathed into Adam at the dawn of creation,
can reside in women and in men. 
Mary, it turns out has the same male power, the same THUMOS as Peter.”

Women, not Peter, figure as the real leaders of the Jesus movement 
in our scriptures. 
The the woman at the well, women at the tomb, the women in Paul’s letters,
they are the grassroots leaders of the early church.

There are many other stories of the prowess and bravery of women leaders 
in the early church, but they didn’t make it into the Bible.
Some of these stories are strange, 
and to read about sexuality in the Roman world can be shocking.
--------------
So, I gave you the story from Mark of the Syrophoenicean woman.
She is a Greek, a slave, and a woman.
She illustrates the forgotten creed.

But Jesus treats her as men treated women 
and as Jews treated Greeks and slaves,
and she calls him on it.
She has THUMOS and Jesus himself is changed by this woman. 
[Another blogger pointed this out to me.]
Until this time Jesus has only reached out to Jews, but now
Jesus realizes that Gentiles don’t have to wait for his message.
Now Jesus sees that bigotry, slavery, and sexism 
are all tied together and are wrong.
This may be the moment of the creation of the “forgotten creed!”
In Mark, after this incident he travels through Greek territory teaching,
healing, and feeding multitudes.

END:
This forgotten creed hasn’t really been forgotten.
I became a Presbyterian because the Confession of 1967
had the theme of reconciliation as the core of the gospel,
the same as the forgotten creed in Galatians.
I put some of those words in the call to worship and prayer of confession
this morning.

We should know after 2000 years:
There is no black or white or brown or yellow or privileged.
There is no Jew or Muslim or atheist or Sikh or Hindu or Buddhist.
There is no rich or poor, blue or white collar; low, middle, or upper class.
There is no immigrant or illegal; no superior or more entitled male.

“We are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
there is no slave or free, 
there is no male and female;
for we are all one in the Spirit.”

Are Kavenaugh’s Accusers Telling the Truth, or Is Kavenaugh?

In the public interest I offer the following criteria in understanding certain current events.

Information needed to evaluate a woman’s claim against a man for sexual misconduct or attack:

1. Were there witnesses willing to speak publicly about it? [This is unlikely.]

2. Did she share her story with others after the incident and can those people verify that she shared her story then?

3. Did she seek counsel for trauma resulting from the incident, even if years after the incident?

4. Does she have any personal, financial, or political motive for her accusation?
A. Does she have troubled relationships with the accused, members of his family, his friends, or his supporters?
B. Does she seek financial gain or would she benefit financially from an accepted accusation?
C. Does she have demonstrable connections with politicians or groups which oppose the accused? [Her political leanings and support of particular candidates or party are not by themselves a political motive.]

5. Is she willing to talk to law enforcement and be subject to an investigation? [Such willingness is suggestive of truthfulness.]

The following would be true if the accuser is making a false accusation:

1. There will have been no witnesses.

2. There will be no history of her recollection of the event to others.

3.  Her story will not be consistent with accusations by others or confirmable by anyone else.

4.  There will be no discoverable motive for making the accusation.

5.  The accuser will not ask for or want an investigation. An investigation likely will reveal an ulterior motive and the falsehood of the accusation. 

To evaluate the accused we have to consider that:

1. Witnesses provided by the accused denying the incident are suspect because they may have a motivation to lie because of friendship, political association, or financial consideration.

2. Outright denials by the accused are by definition self-serving.

3. Unwillingness to talk with law enforcement and undergo an investigation shows defensiveness and unwillingness to prove his innocence.
 

Conclusion: An investigation by experienced law enforcement is necessary. The finding of fact by such an investigation will likely prove or disprove the accusation.

I welcome additions and corrections to my "metrics." A professional who has considered criteria and process is @SethAbramson available on threadreaderapp.com.

Can We “Accept” or “Get Over” Trump?

Last night I watched the film Wind River. A wildlife officer and hunter counsels Martin, whose 18 year old daughter has been raped and killed. The wildlife officer had lost his daughter to a similar fate. He says that a grief counselor had told him:

"I got good news and bad news. Bad news is you'll never be the same. You'll never be whole. Ever. What was taken from you can't be replaced. You're daughter's gone. Now the good news, as soon as you accept that, as soon as you let yourself suffer, allow yourself to grieve, You'll be able to visit her in your mind, and remember all the joy she gave you. All the love she knew. Right now, you don't even have that, do you? That's what not accepting this will rob from you. If you shy from the pain of it, then you rob yourself of every memory of her, my friend. Every one. From her first step to her last smile. You'll kill 'em all. Take the pain, Take the pain, Martin. It's the only way to keep her with you.”

The day after Thanksgiving Donald Trump re-tweeted advice from two black women in Milwaukee. Diamond and Silk are among his supporters and recommend that if anyone wanted to fight about Trump at Thanksgiving dinner,“He is your president. Deal with it. Or get over it. Build yourself a little bridge and climb up and get over it,”

I heard this on the radio and at first I couldn’t find it on the web. I wanted to know how to "get over" Trump. Searching for the story I stumbled on advice from psychologists and spiritual directors on how to “get over” the loss of a lover or the death of a loved one. Their advice all centered on acceptance, although I didn’t think that the advice was as good as what I heard in Wind River.

Christine Hassler was the first such counselor of my search. She advises us to accept our losses and if we cannot do that, it is because “we are still judging what happened.... Until you accept what happened with zero judgment of it being bad or wrong in any way, you continue to keep it alive inside you. What happened, happened. It’s in the past. Your judgments about it continue to keep it present and impact your future.... Let go of your opinions and victim stories – they are not serving you. As you do, you empower yourself to free yourself of anything you may have been carrying around like a heavy backpack. Take off the backpack so that you are free to fully embrace all the great stuff that is available to you in the here and now.”

Seems like good advice, but there is a difference between a loss that happens once and one that continues on and on. Trump daily assaults us with bluster, lies, and decisions reversing decades of efforts to make life better for millions of Americans. This is a loss that is “unacceptable,” as Charles Blow reminds us. If we accept these losses, if we accept Trump as our president (who lost the popular vote and won by a quirk in three states), we will have surrendered who and what we are and whatever truth there is in our national life. We can’t “get over” or “accept” the loss of democracy and government that exchanges the desire "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” for the agrandizement of corporate billionaires and those who think they must ally with them.

John Pavlovitz, a Christian minister, writes I Think I Hate This President—and I Think I’m Okay With That. John struggles not to hate anyone as he had been taught, but then lists all of things and people he loves, opposed by Trump. So he hates what is hateful. “And because of the deep love that I have for this country, for its Constitution, and for it’s beautifully radiant diversity—yes, I hate this President. I hate what he and those alongside him are doing to good, loving, decent human beings who call this place home, and I’m going to keep hating such things because that is simply the other side of caring for the least. Silence in the face of oppression isn’t love it’s compliance, it’s participation. Opposing it is how I show who and what I am for. Hatred of injustice is a redemptive way of loving people most threatened by it.” Our anger is righteous.

We have already lost a lot. Long standing values and practices have been trashed. Parts of our government are gone or dissolving, so that we are unrepresented in important parts of the world and unprotected from those who advance themselves and even provide jobs by polluting our water and air and earth. Many aspects of representative democracy are crumbling. We have many reasons to fear unintended consequences of actions being taken that no sensible person would consider.

Acceptance as surrender will not do, but we must find a way to find peace within ourselves while we resist. We can “get over” Trump by surpassing and transcending his every word and action with good, letting nothing go by, letting no one think that he is normal or acceptable. When we have done that, we can claim peace for ourselves, at least until we must rise in resistance again, perhaps tomorrow.

We must accept the reality of our losses, and absorb the pain of it all, but this is not the case of accepting the death of someone who will never return. We will see reason return because the seeds of destruction lie within everything Trump and the Congress are now doing. But the dangers are real. Is it possible that those who lived in Nazi Germany thought it best to "accept" and "get over" Hitler? Resistance is good. 

Trump likes to enrage us by his tweets and by his every stupefying statement, so don't bother listening to him. Just keep an eye on the analysis and reviews of the policies and votes that come from the swamp they have created. Share the good ones. Yeah, he tweets that stuff. Yeah, he says stupid and outrageous things. So what? We resist and we fight for justice and a better day. Remind yourself and others what we love, which is why we resist and do not "accept."

Our Veterans' Day Band Concert -- Hearing the Gettysburg Address Again for the First Time

Two things redeemed our Veterans’ Day concert by the Lake George Community Band from the deep, dark well of false patriotism and militarism into which we easily could have fallen.

First was a contemporary composition from 2003 commissioned by the NM Military Institute Regimental Bands of Roswell, NM. Each Time you Tell Their Story is a reading accompanied by concert band by Samuel R. Hazo:

No soldiers choose to die. It's what they risk being who and where they are. It's what they dare while saving someone else whose life means suddenly as much to them as theirs. Or more. To honor them, why speak of duty or the will of governments? Think first of love each time you tell their story. It gives their sacrifice a name and takes from war its glory.

This seemed a new way to express patriotism. Sacrifice is still the theme, but loss and grief are given larger status.

Second, we played a concert band piece which I assumed was old, but was published in 2009, was Lincoln at Gettysburg, a simple music setting for the great address. Lincoln’s speech seemed eerily current, and important for today because of the thoughts expressed about our nation, our values, and the internal war that continues to consume us. The first line is striking:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Liberty is claimed by all sides of current disputes, and oddly, we are more divided today than recently about the equality of people. Jefferson had not explicitly included colored slaves, native Americans, or Spanish residents of the thirteen colonies, and few who heard or read the Declaration of Independence would have thought of them. But when Lincoln was speaking of “all men” he was thinking of Negro slaves. Today when we hear “all men” most all of us hear it to be inclusive of women, gays and lesbians, transgendered people, as well as those of other races, ethnic backgrounds, and religions. That tells us how much we have changed! But Lincoln went on:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Yes we are so engaged, and while we are not yet again killing each other, our hold on liberties and equality are being challenged and tested. This reading seemed so modern and not of history but of today.

Lincoln was asked to dedicate a great burial ground, which still reeked of human putrefaction at the time of the speeches, four months after the battle. But Lincoln declined to glorify the dead or the battle they fought, instead saying that the dead had dedicated the field themselves.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This speaks of my America, which is not about the worship of guns, the revival of racial nationalism and the flag of the Confederacy, the acceptance of misogyny and sexual harassment, the increasing distance between not only rich and poor, but rich and the middle-class, the stupefying incompetence and false values of our Congress and Senate, and a man in the White House, unelected by the popular will of the people, who frightens children and makes women cry. All these things make us wonder if the deaths at Gettysburg were in vain.

Other works the band performed in addition to standard marches, included one that honored the death in battle of one of the first soldiers to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. I quote Walter Cronkite who explained once, that

Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.

No one wants to be first to die in a war, few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it. and as John Kerry told Congress about the war in Vietnam, that no one wants to be the last soldier to die in a war.

My question is, "How can we glorify in any way the death of soldiers in a war so ill-conceived and false as our war in Iraq?" Is there a way to write music to express shame and regret? Composers today seem more inclined to express the power and destruction of war, and the loss of loved, real people.

The issue becomes political, because many went to fight in Iraq not for oil or even glory, but in revenge for 9/11. Revenge is famously unrewarding. We are more inclined to music that is inspiring, invigorating, exuberant, solemn and hymn-like, with emotional lyric lines, and crashing cymbals, with a lively and defiant finish. These are the words publishers used to describe the compositions we played for Veterans’ Day.

The problem of military music partly lies with the music publishers and the music education establishment. All protest music from the ‘60's has disappeared from the publishers’ lists. Patriotism and militarism sell. Remembrance and the hope of glory sell. The bands can draw crowds of veterans. Politicians applaud and give funds for music programs. Veterans organizations give money to community bands who agree to honor them! The military loves the assistance in recruiting new, young soldiers, who will be veterans soon enough, or among those honored fallen. And the music is written for other purposes: to provide music for a certain "grade" of performance, to provide examples and "studies" requiring difficult or unusual instrument fingerings and rhythms, to cut another notch on a composer's conducting baton and resume.

The sister of a bandmate won’t attend our concerts because she believes such music and performances glorify war. I agree. Those who attend are inspired and encouraged to feel that they now “support our troops.” Government policy is forgotten or never to be thought about. Martial music makes you want to march, but someone else tells you in what direction to go.

Don’t Politicize Veterans’ Day!

Betty Little, our NY Dist. 45 State Senator , spoke Nov. 3 at a breakfast event honoring our veterans, sponsored by the Glens Falls Senior Center. She was the first speaker and in her first few minutes, she commented on how good it was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, how important the flag is, and how protests surrounding the flag and the National Anthem are wrong.

I reacted so angrily that I left the event because I hadn’t understood until that moment how an issue becomes politicized and how twisted our national life has become. Politicization takes something that belongs to everyone and divides us by suggesting that the issue belongs to one political view or party. Politicians love to speak to and for veterans because the appeal is emotional, because so many of us have personal ties to one or more of the 380,000 who died in battle or from battle injuries since 1941. Mostly veterans are attractive to politicians because they constitute 22% of our population, a sizable voting bloc.

But Americans who have served or died in war included Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, and were of all colors. Such service and losses are not political. We hope that our soldiers fought and died for liberty and justice for all, for the values in our Constitution, including our freedom to protest against every sort of injustice. Our first amendment protects dissent and protest against our nation, flag, anthem and pledge. To be against protest is to be against freedom of speech, and threatens our democracy with tyranny.

Citizens tend to support politicians in time of war, even when our national response to world problems with military solutions is unwise. Patriotism is love of country and pride in our values and many accomplishments, which mostly are not military. Criticism of the NFL and other protesters may gain a politician some votes, but not honestly. Senator Little is entitled to her views about the flag and the NFL, but they have nothing to do with honoring veterans.

Since the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, the Republican party has claimed that opposing the use of military force for any purpose, is to oppose the United States and be against all who serve and have served. This has always been a lie. To want our nation to have a just and rational foreign policy is the highest kind of patriotism. Instead, we have had too much patriotism of the sort that encourages military service in support of bad policy, profiteering, and political gain.

Some in the military understand this, perhaps better than those of us who do not serve. A few years ago I heard the head of a local American Legion unit say, “Americans are willing to serve, but we want the cause to be just and the use of the military sensible.”

Once we enter a war, we cannot easily get out, so that wars perpetuate themselves. Walter Cronkite explained this once: “Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.” Few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it.

(A portion of this post was sent to The Chronicle, a weekly newspaper in Glens Falls NY.)

Are We Still Friends If We Fight? – A Sermon

I Corinthians 13 and Luke 6:27-36

OOPS
When I told my wife what I was preaching on this week, 
she called me a hypocrite.
She is right, the first thing I need to say is 
that I am not filled with love for my enemies.
Love for those beyond my family 
       is not something I can claim much; 
I can only aspire to it.
I think I can explain some of my difficulty.

I have two stories I would like to tell.
That’s how we are supposed to spice up a sermon, 
        with stories from real life.
Unfortunately, I asked my preacher friends on the internet
whether it is ethical to tell stories about real people, 
even if you don’t name them, or if they live miles away.
I was told by several people not to do it without their permission.
They are probably right, so I pulled a whole page from this sermon.

The stories were about disputes I had with two different people;
Each one of them accused people of a different nationality 
of being less than worthy of our respect.
Each dispute was about politics.
In the first one I responded badly.
I did better in the second.

UGH
I’ll bet most of you could tell similar stories.
My life isn’t the only one that has been made difficult 
by our political and social divisions.
Maybe yours has been, too.
I am not saying anything you don’t know,
about how divided people are from each other.
Many people report losing friends in the past year 
        because of political differences.

Family disputes have risen, too.
Fear of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner has risen
because in too many families there is someone 
who is going to say something 
        that causes others to explode in anger.

It isn’t just families; it’s churches, too.
We might think that Christians would all see the world 
        in similar ways, and share the same values, but it is not so.
There is not one church of Jesus. 
Churches are as fractured as political parties.
Churches don’t have the membership or influence they once had.
And all the other institutions in society are declining 
        or changing drastically 
from what they used to be in our lifetimes.

Each of us is influenced more and more
by values we adopt from sources other than the church.
Our values have changed.
In 201l, the Public Religion Research Institutes asked in a poll 
whether elected officials "could fulfill their public duties 
if they committed immoral acts in their private lives.” 
61% of white evangelical Protestants said "no.”
In October of 2016, PRRI repeated the poll. 
This time, only 20% said immoral personal acts 
disqualified a politician from public office.

AHA
What is going on? My friend says we have different worldviews.
A dictionary tells me that 
“A worldview is the set of beliefs 
about the fundamental nature of Reality.
  These beliefs ground and influence 
all our perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. 
  Our worldview is our philosophy, mindset, set of values,
                outlook on life, ideology, faith, or even religion.”

So Worldview is about values, many of them grounded in religion.
Jesus and Paul taught values.
Here they are in our readings today.
To be a Christian is to value love so highly 
that we are asked to love our enemies.
We are asked to be generous and forgiving, welcoming, patient, 
and compassionate, and many other good things.
  
WHEE
The last time I was here, as everyone remembers really well (!),
I spoke of values and how they are key to understanding God.
I said God is whatever lies behind or underneath or above 
our deep symbols and values.
That’s pretty abstract, but this thought is carried to an extreme 
in the Bible itself, in the 1st letter of John, where we read that 
“God is love.”
Such a statement invites us to say then that “love is God,” 
although the Bible won’t go that far, 
        and the church hasn’t either, but recently some of us have. 

If we have been in a Christian church for very long,
we have learned the golden rule, 
included in the passage from Luke this morning: 
“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

What is the street version, the cynical version of this teaching,
[“Do to others before they do to you.”]
What is the cynical idea of what “golden rule” means:
[“Whoever has the gold, rules.”]
These alternative rules tell us how the world really works:
Helping others doesn’t help you get ahead.
Thinking of others first just puts you behind.
These rules imply that Jesus is a wimp.
      His teachings are for losers.
The value here is not love, but survival, and dominance.
The way to survival and dominance here 
      is not the value of giving, but greed.
The goal here is not compassion, but competition.
The values underlying competition are animosity, 
even meanness, and cruelty, if they are necessary to get ahead.

Note that the famous love chapter extols love, 
but does not tell us what it is.
Instead it tells what love is not.
These things are not included in love: 
envy, boasting, arrogance or bluster, 
rudeness or making a scene, 
insisting on our own way, 
being irritable or throwing fits, 
resentfulness or negativity, and injustice.

So what are the opposite, positive values which are preferable?
I looked up the antonym, the opposite of each word.
They are: Charitableness, peacefulness, humility, and patience, 
kindness, positivity, and doing justice.
These are the positive values that make up "love."

Many church members have told me over the years 
that their favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 6:8:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
  but to do justice, and to love kindness,
  and to walk humbly with your God?”

We were supposed to learn such things in Sunday School,
or hear them in Sunday sermons, 
        enough for them to inspire us.
But we seem to be learning from Jesus or God less 
than from other role models.

YEAH
So how do we deal with family and friends, and co-workers?
When someone says something shocking to you –
it might be prejudice against another group of people.
it might be contrary to what you think 
                are good Christian values.
It might be a different political opinion than you hold.

The first thing is to be silent. I did not do this.
Only thinking about afterward can I say: Stop and think. 
Maybe count to ten.
Do not respond from the emotional region of your brain.
Respond calmly and without raising your voice.

You might say “I disagree with you on that.”
Or, “I don’t believe that.”

Maybe the best thing to say is “Tell me why you think that.”
Or, “How does that make our lives better.”

If the fight occurs anyway, 
follow the advice in the letter to the Ephesians,
“Do not let the sun set on your anger.”
That was my rule always, when I was a pastor.
Apologize for your part of the dispute.
Saying you are sorry is not a sign of weakness.
Apologies tend to make us gain respect and strength.
But apologies have to be real:
 “I’m sorry if you were offended” is not an apology.

Another helpful strategy is to turn the conversation to something
the two of you have in common, and build from that.

Or to say “I value you as a friend, 
        and I don’t want to fight with you.”
This gives permission to the other person to back off, too.
Or respond to the other person’s need as I did last week:
“Tell me about your shoulder pain. 
          I had shoulder surgery last March.”
In that case we both talked at length about 
        what had happened to us, 
we found that he knew my doctor,
and wanted to know about the doctor that did my surgery.

Am I going to do better in such situations in the future?
Maybe, but maybe not.
I have studied conflict management in at least three, heavy courses.
I have a fair track record at managing groups 
and working with congregations in conflict.
One on one is a different matter. 
A large group is easier.
Christians can learn to fight fair in a group.
But the risk that one party of two will leave 
and break the bond between them is huge.

Even the possibility of losing friends 
        isn’t the biggest problem before us.
My friend says we should agree to disagree.
I do not like that.
It means that there is an ocean of topics and important issues 
that we cannot talk about with each other.

If friends cannot speak about issues facing the entire nation,
there can be no genuine representative democracy,
which requires citizen participation, 
                not only in the voting booth,
but in dialogue with each other.
The ancient Greeks and Romans devised ways to do that.
But worked for them only for a short period of human history.

If we cannot have difficult conversations in our churches,
that will be the end of the teaching of Christian values.
BTW, Congress voted recently in their budget bill (not yet passed)
to end IRS enforcement of the rule 
that prevents churches from preaching politics 
and raising money for political causes.
  If you don’t like that, write your Congressman and Senators.

So I am working up courage to open a conversation with a friend
about something that we both care about 
                but about which we disagree.
We cannot continue in this country 
                to ignore the great issues of our time
by only speaking of them with those with whom we agree.

I’ll bet there are issues that cannot be spoken of 
        in your congregation.
Too sensitive, too difficult, too controversial.

I would like to think that there is hope in returning 
        to the basic values we learned from the Bible and the church.
Do you think there is hope?
And will you do something about it?


May we all strive for the highest kind of love,
in which we do for others what we would want, 
Even when we do not want to do it for the other.