Why I'm Not Mad at Colin Kaepernick

There is a modern form of religious fervor known as nationalism.  It is a doctrine which holds that the place of one's birth deserves one's ultimate loyalty and devotion.  The cardinal virtue called forth by nationalism is patriotism, displayed through emotionally charged commitment to love nation and its symbols.  The liturgical practice of nationalism involves postures of reverence and obeisance to symbols such as the national flag, enthusiastic singing of hymns and anthems to the nation, and recitation of creeds such as the pledge of allegiance.

While standard Americanized Christian theology has found it easy to merge devotion to God and Country, my own understanding of following Jesus can't help finding contrasting and conflicting visions of the proper loyalties and loves required by nationalism and Christian faith.  The assumption that the modern fiction of borders should create divisions of ontological hostility--meaning that it is right for me to love and support people on my side of a border and wrong of me to equally love and support people on the other side of a border--contradicts most of what the New Testament teaches.  Moreover, adopting a stance of suspicion, fear, and animosity toward those across the border, which much nationalistic religion seems to affirm, requires a Christian to disavow the very virtues that the Lord exhibited and taught.

While Jesus observed among his closest followers a kind of ethnocentrism that is akin to nationalism, he took numerous opportunities to challenge their prejudices.  When they would have preferred to walk around the territory of Samaria, Jesus walked straight through it.  While they would have avoided talking with a Samaritan woman, he was direct and friendly in acknowledging the common humanity they shared.  While they would have denied sharing the good news of Jesus' transformative ministry among neighboring peoples, Jesus lampooned their views by first refusing the request of the Syro-Phoenecian woman, then granting it with compassion and respect for her faith.  There are other examples from Jesus' life and words, but let these suffice to point toward a refusal on Jesus' part to let human-constructed ethnic and national boundaries determine who we should and should not love.

In the New Testament Epistle to the Ephesians, a crucial text further addresses the ways that human beings divide themselves into antagonistic groups.  Ephesians 2:11-22 draws the focus upon the divisions that exist between Jews and Gentiles.  The writer asserts that in the work of Christ, those "who were once far off have been brought near."  The made-up and hyped-up reasons that would keep groups apart have become nothing.  Jesus "is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."  Whatever sorts of ethnic, linguistic, nationalistic barriers that human beings want to erect have been made irrelevant by the love of God in Jesus Christ.

The book of Ephesians is talking about ecclesiology, that is, about what the church is supposed to be.  When people become part of God's family, when they become part of one body, when they are joined together into the household of God, the other kinds of divisions take on a very different meaning.  They are no longer excuses for domination of some by others.  They cannot justify violent behavior; on the contrary, in Jesus' dying, he is, "putting to death that hostility."  They exist as the beautiful mosaic of divine blessing in the world:  not as reasons to resent and reject one another.

Thus, the church should not know boundaries.  If you are a brother or sister of mine, regardless of what political power wants to claim you within its borders, we are in the same church.  If you are my sister or brother, my duty is to care for you and seek your good.  Jesus has set out to "create in himself one humanity in place of the two, thus making peace."  A Christian church should know no nationalisms, no ethnocentrisms, no jingoisms.  When two modern nation-states enter into conflict and war, a faithful church would refuse to join that cause.  The loyalty of the church and its members should be transnational, because we are "no longer strangers and aliens," but one family.

A key difference between the demands of the calling of Christ and the demands of the calling to patriotic nationalism can be found in Jesus' own words in the Gospel of John 15:13.  "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."  Jesus' understanding of love, demonstrated in his own resistance to the empire and its oppression toward the poor and outcast, was to continue his resistance until he was arrested, tried, tortured, and executed as an enemy of the state.  He laid down his life.  Along the way, people suggested he should take up the sword, but he refused.

Here is the difference.  Nationalism asks me to be willing to lay down my life, but first it asks me to be willing to kill other people.  Being willing to die for one's friends is not the same as being willing to kill for national interest.  The religion of nationalism calls for a full sacrifice of one's life and of one's conscience and character.  As a follower of the Prince of Peace, I must not submit to a wholly contradictory vision of the world in which I am expected to be a killer. 

So for decades I have not offered anthemic devotion to country by singing "The Star Spangled Banner."  Nor have I made an idolatrous pledge of allegiance to affirm my ultimate loyalty to the god of nation and war.  A song which glorifies the technology of war and the steadily operating machinery of death asks me to turn from the way of Jesus.

Colin Kaepernick's reasoning is not the same as what I have offered so far.  He is not addressing a conflicting pair of faiths as I have described and advocating what I am--conscientious objection to war.  He is not directly questioning devotion to country as a high ideal.  Kaepernick is protesting for the sake of the high ideals of country--he is expressing a longing for the ideals to become reality.  He is asking for a nation of high ideals, such as equal justice before the law, equal opportunity, and due process of law, to live up to those ideals.  On these matters, I agree with him.  To refuse ultimate loyalty to the nation and to reject the religion of nationalism does not mean that I also reject any good that might rise from the political community of humanity here in the United States.  The ideals of justice, of equality, and of fairness are ideals I also hold.  I appreciate the good that I receive from being a citizen of this nation, and I long for the goodness to overcome the many ways this nation has fallen short of its ideals.  

This particular song upheld as the national anthem was originally written with multiple stanzas.  In public events, people sing only the first stanza.  There is a third stanza which has stirred significant controversy as historians have studied it.  It speaks of vengeance against the enemies, particularly those who as "hirelings and slaves" have spread their "foul footstep's pollution" on the "land of the free and the home of the brave."  Frances Scott Key was a slaveholder, and while fighting in a previous battle at Bladenburg, his troops faced and were defeated by the British who were employing escaped slaves to join in the war with the promise of emancipation.  Some historians argue that Key held a special resentment and hatred toward these slaves fighting for their freedom, which he expresses in this stanza.  Other historians dispute that conclusion, and Key recorded no commentary on the meaning or context of these particular words.  It seems to me to be a compelling argument, and it adds another reason to question the practice of singing such a song with patriotic fervor.

Political dissent is at the core of what it takes for human beings to do better toward one another.  People must be able to articulate and challenge the failures of society to live up to its ideals.  The often unspoken, yet original sin of racism and white supremacy continues to bear fruit of bitterness in the United States.  Challenging the ways that social behaviors fall short of moral aspirations is the duty of those who have eyes to see and a voice to speak.  There was a time in our family's life when my beloved Everly asked me the question that must not be so different from the one Colin Kapernick heard echoing in his own conscience:  "How will we explain our inaction to our children when they ask us why these things have happened in our community?"  The only answer we could have given would be that we had failed our morality, failed our conscience, failed our God.  So we did what we knew we had to do.

I am pretty sure Colin does not think his kneeling is going to suddenly make injustice go away.  But if no one asks the hard questions, demands a hearing, and ultimately enacts resistance in public, there will be no chance of seeing change come.  No doubt, he realizes as other who risk to take a stand against the dominant ways that more people will misunderstand and be hurt than will be awakened and inspired.  There really isn't any easy way to confront systemic injustice.  People will get angry.  They will accuse you of the opposite of what you are trying to do.  But in the words of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan,

You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk.
You may be the head of some big TV network.
You may be rich or poor; you may be blind or lame.
You may be living in another country under another name.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes you are.
You're gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

I pray for all of us that we can get clear on who it is we are going to serve.  As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.  Let me invite you to do the same.  I ain't mad with Colin Kaepernick. 
 

Jordan's Stormy Banks

(I am reposting this from Everly Broadway's CaringBridge site.)

When I was still a pre-teen (I'm not sure when, but I think in Portland, Texas, around 1969 or so), I remember not the time but the experience of hearing the hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand and Cast a Wishful Eye."  I think it was the boisterous melody and rhythm that caught my attention, along with the lyrics which I could easily understand.  I also remember some kind of visual of a storm over a body of water, dark and menacing.  There were no music videos in those days, so I must have been looking at some sort of children's hymnal with illustrations.  Maybe I was at a children's choir rehearsal or "Intermediate Training Union" (you Baptists may remember that terminology).  I remember deciding to learn that song, and I still have an echo of that memory each time I hear or sing it today.

Recently, reading from Henri Nouwen's In Memoriam, I was reminded of that hymn again.  The short book begins by telling of the warm reunion with his mother when she was terminally ill, and the blessing and joy of being together.  He was reminded of the many ways in which her faith and faithfulness had anchored him and held their family together.  But after their initial time of gathering, he describes a dramatic change that happened in his mother.  She became less able to communicate.  She had moments of obvious struggle.  She seemed no longer at peace, but often disturbed, fearful.  She seemed to him to be in a fight against whatever evil, temptations, and doubts that she had suffered during her life.  He interpreted these days as a final battle as she prepared for the end of her life, a storm through which she was having to pass.

Part of what Nouwen was realizing was that his mother, who had often been for him a tower of strength, was a human being, a woman, who had her own struggles.  She was not just the one who helped the other family members with their struggles.  And he saw this working itself out in her last days of life.  His reflections, of course, put my mind into searching through Everly's days of dealing with cancer and its deadly outcome.

I thought through her last days.  From March to July 2013, there were many ups and downs with treatment and constant pain.  She was committed to do all that she could to keep living with us, and for the most part she pressed through whatever came, asking for help that she needed from us.  There were times when she became discouraged by the pain, but we kept seeking answers and trying to find a way to getting better.  Our family trip in May was for her a great triumph and celebration.  There was only a short time remaining, but none of us knew that.  We kept looking at houses in Austin, hiring inspectors, thinking about how to fit all five of us in a house together, and even negotiating a contract.  At the same time, the cancer was doing its own work.  When our house-buying plan collided with the tumors' deadly growth, the time was nigh.  The doctors diagnosed the situation, and we learned there were no more medical solutions available.  We made the transition to hospice, and Everly lived less than one more week.

During that week, she did not have the same kind of struggle that Nouwen saw in his mother.  She was very vocal with her fear initially that she would be deserting us when we need her.  But her trusted friends shouldered their priestly role in granting her absolution, reassuring her that she had done all that she could do and all that God would expect of her.  They told her they would make sure her children never went hungry or had no place to lay their heads.  And she received this grace and began to rest.

If she had the kind of struggle about which Nouwen writes, it was during her first month after the diagnosis in 2012.  Already very sick, and considered potentially beyond help from medical intervention, she entered the hospital and received her first dose of chemotherapy.  Anyone who was following her story through this illness remembers that the first treatment almost killed her.  In that first crisis, she fell deeper and deeper into a stupor.  Her body became weak.  She could not eat and had to be fed through a tube.  She slept constantly, and emerged to waking dreams and hallucinations.  She sometimes awoke with fearful concern about some matter from work or from our family life, needing to give one of us instructions on what we needed to take care of, urgently.  Sometimes these troubled conversations dealt with some relationship or other matter about which she believed she had done wrong and things needed to be set right.  I know I was not the only bedside companion who served as her minister in that time of trouble.  Perhaps, during that time, it was the stormy Jordan she saw before her, and she felt her need to face the dangers head on and get herself ready for that crossing.

She came out of that initial sojourn in the wilderness with a new outlook on her life.  She took on the disciplines needed to regain her strength and to resist deterioration.  She talked of the peace she had made with her career and her previous years of hard work toward a powerful mission.  She considered what she wanted her remaining years to count for.  And through many ups and downs, she made them count as much as possible toward the goals of taking care of her family and reminding us of the beautiful life we had shared and would keep on sharing.

I don't mean that her 15 months, minus that first month-plus of hospitalization, were constant sunshine.  Everly certainly had fears and worries.  She was a worrier, but not to despair.  And she did not handle pain well.  Many of you have heard her say honestly, "I'm a wimp."  She did not like to get stuck for an intravenous tube.  She did not like any treatment that made her burn, or get chills, or get poked or prodded.  But that part of her life was not so different from before we had to face cancer.  Of course, every time we had to get a new CT Scan and reevaluate her progress, there was anxiety.  When the news was not as good as we hoped, there was disappointment and concern.  I'm not trying to sugar coat things, but I think it is accurate to say that Everly did not face that kind of struggle against her potential dying as a constant overwhelming problem after the beginning.  She was not resigned to die, but she was not terrified by it either.  When she looked back at her experience of making it through those terrible days in 2012, she would tell us stories and share insights as one who had been through a great ordeal.  She spoke as one who knew something beyond what most anyone had known, having approached the brink of death, looked into it, turned back from it, and rededicated herself to a life worth living.  I think you will forgive me if at times I sound like I'm writing hagiography, but what I want to say is that she had faced something, had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and she did not need to repeat those experiences and lessons again.  She already had learned that even there, God is with her.

So as I look at her last days in July 2013, I don't see intense dread.  She became upset sometimes as she dealt with losing control over her body, growing too weak, too tired, too foggy-brained to act independently.  But these were flashes and passing moments.  It was difficult to speak, but she would suddenly enter a conversation with perception, instructions, and even jokes.  It was hard to swallow well, and she would cough as one who felt she would choke, then rest again.  Mostly, she was at peace with her children and all of us who cared for her around her.

I think we saw more of this struggle toward the end in the prolonged illness of Everly's father, Herbie.  His struggle was longer and painful in a different way.  He observed himself slipping into dementia and losing the strength from his athletic body.  He was exhausted but could not sleep peacefully.  The waking dreams were deep struggles for him.  I am not talking about his character or trying to say Everly did better.  I am merely describing a difference in the progression of mind and body.  Herbie's illness incited his brain in different ways than Everly's, stirring partial memories and robbing him of awareness of the loving people around him.  He feared being left alone and called out for Marie, his wife, at all hours.  He found himself running a race or fighting an enemy when he was simply in bed with family standing by.  He had fought so many battles, solved so many complex problems, trained his body and worked hard for so many years.  As that slipped away from him, he continued to fight and run.

What Nouwen learned, and what we learned from Everly and Herbie, is that our loved ones struggle.  Even when they have hidden it from us so well, they have had their struggles throughout their lives.  Some of those struggles come back to them as they take account of their lives and look ahead to what may remain.  Herbie was grateful for such a rich life, for the devotion and love of his marriage, for three talented and intelligent children, and for so many friends and young people with whom he had shared that life.  He hated to see that go, and the progress of his disease elicited his will to fight.  But some joys persisted through it all:  especially loving to be with Marie and eating ice cream.  Everly's illness took a different path.  But with both of them, we could honor their struggles and rejoice with their joys.

Herbie had been very clear about his approaching death while he was still able to communicate, before the strokes took his clear speech away.  He had had a good life, and he was ready to die.  It hurt him deeply that Everly's life would be cut short, while he might live on after having already lived a full life.  Like any parent, he would rather have taken her place so that she could live on.  Long before he died, he had "cast a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land."  And as we numbered Everly's last days, she also faced with a willing heart that she was "bound for the Promised Land."

I think that in writing about this, both Nouwen and I are striving to be honest, to tell the truth.  Dying often is not, as many of us hope and imagine, an easy slipping away.  It is not only having family together and saying good-bye.  It is also a struggle to let go of the only good that we have known and to face the ways that we did not live in every way as we had aspired.  I can't think of any more appropriate way of handling our grief over Everly than being honest about our living and being honest about our dying.  We get so focused on our own experience of our loved one's death, and that is to be expected.  What Nouwen did, and what I have tried to do here, is also to collect and put together the clues we have of what our loved one went through.  We can't say we know it with certainty, especially those periods when they were not able to speak to us about it.  But we can take what they did say, and what their convictions have been, to see through a glass darkly, until that time that we see face to face in "one eternal day where God the Son forever reigns and scatters night away."

No chilling winds or poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore.
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,
Are felt and feared no more.

Can We Be in Control?

One annual event on many church calendars is Men's Day.  As part of the Men's Day preparation, three preachers were asked to speak briefly at the Wednesday night Bible study and prayer time, all using the same text, 1 Corinthians 15:56-58.  We got our heads together to try to avoid too much repetition, and it worked well.  Thanks to Rev. Patrick Clay of Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church and Rev. Dennis Horne of Monument of Faith Church for being my excellent partners in this enterprise.  I focused on verse 56 because it gave me the opportunity to think about the relationship of sin and the law.  The focus, according to the theme, was on men, but of course the same kinds of arguments found in this sermon can apply regardless of a person's gender.

1 Corinthians 15:56-58

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

I want to address the first portion of the passage, verse 56, a compound sentence which says, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.”  The question I want us to consider for a few minutes is “Can we be in control?”

One of the great unknowns of human existence is death.  Everyone faces it eventually.  We watch helplessly when loved ones die.  We remain on this side of a great, impenetrable divide.  The uncertainty of death arouses great anxiety in some people.  Others are able not to dwell on such fears, and some face the inevitability of death with a kind of calm resolve and peace.

            Those who put their trust in God can often put aside their anxieties about death and rest in the hope of God’s salvation.  With or without faith, most people manage to keep thoughts of death at bay through one strategy or another.  They keep focused on living and on building security in this world.  But that does not mean that fear does not break through now and then.  Death can be a powerful shaping force in our lives, even if we keep the subject buried just below the surface of our consciousness.

            Death, or its possibility, may drive us to change our diets, to start exercising, to take various medicines, to have surgeries, to break old habits and start new habits, to take a vacation, to change jobs, to move to another climate, to improve our relationships, to pray and meditate.  Death makes us act because it is the ultimate loss of control.

            If that is true, that death is the ultimate loss of control, then perhaps we might also say that the desire and efforts and strategies that people use to take control of their lives can be ways of warding off death.  And warding off death can be a good thing.  God made us for life.

            But there is a kind of striving for control that can get out of hand.  We talk about people with a “controlling personality.”  We say that some co-workers are “micromanagers.”  And we accuse people in our lives of being “control freaks.”  We protest to people who try to tell us what to do and how to live, “You’re not the boss of me!”  There is a kind of concern for control that is not good for relationships and gets out of hand.  It may, in fact, mask an underlying anxiety about losing control.  It may be a reaction to the fear of death.

            We don’t want an untimely death.  On the other hand, death comes to all, and in the right season it can be received with grace.  But when we let ourselves get so concerned with controlling every detail of our lives and the lives of people around us, could it be that we have let ourselves be controlled by fear of death rather than by the goodness of God’s gift of life?

            The Apostle Paul wrote in this text that the sting of death is sin.  He says that death has a sting.  The sting is what hurts us.  The sting is the harm that comes to us.  Death stings us because of sin. 

            On one level, that means that if we die in sin, we face a future without hope.  Death swallows us up, and we are in the clutches of an enemy we cannot defeat by our human power.  The sting of death, in this way, speaks of dying in sin and facing judgment.   I would like to say more here, but the time is short, and I can come back around to this in combination with the next important thing to say.

            On another level, saying that the sting of death is sin means that death gets its poison into us through sin.  Sinning puts us into the atmosphere of death, the sphere of influence of death.  Death sneaks its way into our lives and pollutes them and twists them and dominates them, and it does this through sin.

            One of the principle biblical concepts of sin is our desire to control our lives without depending on God.  All the way back to the Garden of Eden story, human beings believed that they had a better plan than God.  It’s not a story about a magic fruit tree and an arbitrary prohibition from God.  It is a story about human beings trying to become sovereign over their own lives and realizing how unready and how unqualified they are to take charge for themselves. 

            We, like Adam and Eve, often find ourselves trying to take control.  We want to run things.  We want the people around us to do things our way.  Men want their wives, their co-workers, their neighbors, their kids, their siblings, their girlfriends, their buddies, their teammates, to do things their way. 

            You know the guy I’m talking about.  He can’t seem to listen to others.  He gives long speeches about how to do things (Lord, help me here, I’m talking to myself.)  He gets angry when people don’t automatically comply with his plans and his wishes.  He always acts like the expert.  He’s got a plan for you and expects you to carry it out.  If he’s a pastor or deacon, he may try to enhance his control by invoking God as his sponsor.

            In the extreme, he may be like the prominent athlete in the news who wants control so bad he breaks out into violent acts.  He can’t be questioned or challenged.  And the odds are that every church, ours included, has in its pews men (or women) who have resorted to violence to control their loved ones.  It’s wrong.  It needs to stop.  God and the church can help you get help and stop.  You don’t need to demand to be in control over others and become violent.

            One thing Paul is telling us here is that trying to fight off death by controlling everything around you is really a way of giving in to death.  Instead of pushing death away, fear of death is pushing itself into our lives.  We think we can prevent the chaos by keeping everything under control, but the chaos is working within us, pressing upward toward consciousness, fighting our love for life and replacing it with control.

            Only God is capable of guiding our lives.  So I’m not saying don’t use your gifts of leadership and administration.  I’m saying let them operate in a realm of grace and freedom and love.  Grace means letting God work through other people, not controlling other people.  Freedom means being open to changes in plans and the choices of others.  Love means listening and valuing the many people God sends into your life, with all the gifts they bring.

            Paul expands his argument by saying that the power of sin is the law.  I could spend a few weeks talking about the ambiguous concept of the law in the Bible and theology.  There are many controversies over its significance across the history of the church.  But let it suffice tonight to say that the law has a limited good purpose.  It cannot save us.  But understood rightly, it can guide us.

            Our anxiety, however, makes us want the law to be our salvation.  We think it is straightforward.  It is simple.  It is clear.  There it is in black and white on the page.  We feel that we can follow something that is in plain view.  So we sometimes wish and long for the law to be our salvation.  It is, again, a strategy of control.  And as you know, the people who own authority over the law, own the rest of the people.

            Again, you have seen this guy.  He knows the regulations.  He has told you exactly what he wants done.  He wants it done this way, no matter what good idea you think you have.  In our churches, he says that we have always done things this way and it worked for our parents and their parents and the ones that came before.  He says the constitution and bylaws of a Missionary Baptist Church tell us what organizations and officers to have, and that should be good enough to do the work of the church.  He loves standard operating procedure and prefers no variations.

            But law cannot save.  It is by grace we are saved.  The power of sin is the law.  Law turbocharges our sinfulness.  Law boosts sin’s power.  Law becomes the lever to let sin shove the world around.  The law is a club in a violent man’s hand to beat down his opponents or any who question him.  That’s not the purpose of the law.  So when sin gets it’s grip on us, we use the law to intensify our controlling impulses.

            So don’t be one of these guys.  You can be a man without being in control of everything and everyone around you.  Let God send co-workers, fellow-travelers, teammates, into your life who can bring their goodness and truth and beauty with them.  Let it be life that flourishes, not death through the sinfulness of control and the power of law. 

           God gives the victory.  Jesus gave up control as he prayed in the garden.  He laid out his ideas for a good plan, but he acknowledged that there might be other plans that would work out.  He said, “Not my will, but thy will, be done.”  He went down a path that was not in his own control.  It looked like death would win.  Death tried to sting him, but he was without sin.  The law tried to condemn him, but he was the lawgiver himself.   
           When it seemed that he would be swallowed up by death, instead, death was swallowed up in victory.  Jesus knew that the God who loved him before death would still love him even into eternity.  In the world Jesus gave us, death is not a destroyer, but a passage to new life.  He showed us the way.  May we walk in it with courage, and not succumb to our fears.

Sitting Vigil

It's already July 18 in Scotland, where I sit in the little hamlet of Pittscottie, Fife, where Heather, David, Evan, and Andrew Moffitt live.  I'm awake in the middle of the night, listening to a playlist I made on May 24, 2013, the last anniversary Everly and I had while she was living.  I don't know if I'll feel like going to sleep tonight.  It won't be July 18 in the US for a while longer.

Naomi and I went to Edinburgh on Thursday, the 17th.  We visited the Divinity School where our friend Chun-Pang Lau earned his doctorate.  We climbed up the rocky crag and visited the Edinburgh Castle.  Then we walked down the Royal Mile, stopping at various sites, finally reaching the Holyrood Palace.  Along the way, we had lunch at the Elephant House, where J.K. Rowling often went to write her famous Harry Potter books.  We had a great evening with the Moffitts over dinner and cobbler.

David finished his drive back to Austin to be with Lydia on the 18th.  He also will be packing, hauling some things to Salado, and doing some cleaning in preparation for moving out of the Austin apartment.  Lydia is in school, and she is working out the tension and grief with some time in the open air of parkland along the Brazos River.  I love the name of that river--Rio de los Brazos de Dios, which translates to "River of the Arms of God."  I hope she is feeling those arms around her.

Events are blurry to me now.  Pastor Travis Burleson came by to offer prayer last July 17th.  Nancy Ratliff came with dinner and sat up talking to me until Everly told us to go to bed.   Lydia stayed up to sit with Everly.  In the morning, Everly had labored breathing, and it was not long until she breathed her last.  You will surely understand that our hearts were broken last July 18.

The pain can still be very intense.  Please don't expect us to be "over" this loss.  How can you be over the force of nature that was Everly?  Yet, we also are not in the same grieving place that we were a year ago.  We've had to make some decisions about living the lives Everly expects us to live.  David is moving to Ann Arbor to work and be with his partner, Michael.  Naomi is getting ready to start graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying social work.  Lydia is putting on the final press toward graduating with an engineering degree from Baylor.  I'm trying to buy a house and relocate back to North Carolina where my work is.  I would not claim to speak for each of them, but I suspect they like me struggled with knowing how to make such important life decisions without being able to talk it through with Everly.

So we are not and won't be over Everly's dying.  It will be with us and in us.  But we also realize, as Everly sought to instill in us during her last days, that we are not to abide in a place of death.  We have to be about life.  The people who sell plaques about people's names associate Everly's name with the great-great-grandmother of all of us, according to the Jewish creation story, Eve.  And they say that name means "Life; to live; to breathe; enlivening."  Everly enlivened us.  She expects us to live.  She sent us forward, even without her, to breathe, to live, and to give life to others.

Now at 3 am I am listening to blues singer Lizz Wright sing The Youngbloods "Get Together."

You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both--
It's there at your command.

Come on, people now,
Smile on your brother.
Everybody get together--
Try to love one another right now.

It's a choice we have to make, made more real by the grief.  Sinking into the pain and fear of grief is tempting, but not the path that we and Everly have traveled down and lived for.  "Anyone knows that Love is the only road." (It's okay to feel afraid.  Don't let that stand in your way.) 

It's the week of Peace Camp, the nickname for the annual gathering of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.  Our family went to Peace Camp for countless summers.  Everly made important life decisions based on her experiences and conversations at these gatherings.  She loved being with the folks who she got to see only at this time of year.  Sometimes she felt it was her only church all year.  It was during their gathering, which of course we could not attend last summer, that Everly died. 

We and many others gave donations in Everly's honor to support students who need help to attend the BPFNA gathering.  We got a wonderful thank you note from one of Everly's Peace Camp buddies, Alice Adams, letting us know that those funds had helped four Burmese students from Louisville, KY, be able to travel to Peace Camp in Canada this week.  She would be very pleased to have a part in that.

Darrell Adams, a kindred soul, has often sung at Peace Camp, and we have his CDs and have listened often.  One song he has recorded that we love is a traditional hymn whose author is unknown, "How Can I Keep from Singing?".  It says one thing that I want to say on this sacred day of remembrance.

My life flows on in endless song
Above earth's lamentation.
I hear the real, though far off hymn
That hails the new creation.

Above the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul--
How can I keep from singing?

I also want to remember Everly's motto for her season of struggle against cancer:  Don't Postpone Joy!

I think it's time to get some sleep.

Madder as the Day Went On!

Last night, I fell asleep looking at a news story about the bombshell budget proposal whose poster boy is Rep. Ryan, R-Wisconsin.  Then I woke up this morning thinking about it, so I finished reading the article.  Then, as the day went on, I kept reading and kept getting more upset.

As has been the case with the Party of NO for the past few years, Social Security, Medicare, and the social safety net have been held up as bankrupting the country.  There is no doubt that the cost of health care is at the heart of what is destroying the people of the US and the economy.  But Medicare and Medicaid are not the cause.  Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because the health care industry is operating with out-of-control greed, and the health care industry lobbyists are running the government.

Pres. Obama and his advisers offered ideas about reform, but before reform could get started the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the hospital industry, and on and on had derailed real reform.  What we got was, I think, a step in the right direction.  But it did not do what was needed to slow the growth of health care costs.  Its opponents also have no interest in slowing the growth of health care costs.  They only want to make American safe for health care profits.  So if health care is going to cost more and more, they want to make sure that taxpayers are not paying for the poor and elderly to get some.  That might require the wealthy to pay their fare share of taxes, and the sinister dementia of current right-wing politics is that the wealthy deserve all that they have gotten, and the rest of us deserve to do without.

As you can tell, I have been getting madder as the day has gone on.  I have tormented my facebook friends with post after post, which of course they have been free to ignore.  So I decided I would collect them all into one blog post for those who want to think through this with me.

around 11 am

Thank you, government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Don't forget, corporations are people, too. In fact, they are special people who get a better deal than the rest of us lowly human people. Mr. Obama, Mr. Ryan, stop posturing and FIX THIS!

10 of the Biggest Corporate Tax Cheats in America

f you or I were running a small business and we kept one set of books showing how much money we were making and a second set for the IRS that painted a picture of an enterprise on the brink of bankruptcy, we'd end up behind bars.

But that's standard operating procedure for corporate America.

around 3 pm

Let's see: spinach, hamburger meat, peanut butter, chicken, tomatoes, and besides food there's lead paint on toys, radioactive compounds in toys. All in all, doesn't Ryan's budget make sense when it fires all the inspectors? Mr. Obama and Mr. Ryan--tell the truth, serve the people, do what is right, FIX THIS.

Congress: Support funding for FDA food safety

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, urged Congress to support funding for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)s food safety functions in advance of a House hearing on the FDA budget.

around 3:30 pm

I gave some effort but should have tried harder at my kids' high schools. Let's hear it for this Atlanta group's recruitment for non-violence.

American Friends Service Committee/Atlanta: SCAP Brings Non-Military Options to Stephenson High

Stephenson High school invited Student Career Alternatives Program to their first spring career fair, which took place today. This marked our second visit to the Stone Mountain high school. One striking thing that we again noticed today that the student body is over 99% African American, which seems to further confirm the fact that Atlanta Metro school have become resegregated over the past 20 years.

We were all impressed with the counseling staffs dedication to the students and their post high school careers. So many high school counselors cave into parents request to hold career fairs after school instead of during school. The fairs that take place during school hours are so much more accessible to students.

We had hundreds of students come talk to us through the course of the fair. Students explored ways to serve their country, travel the world, find adventure, get money for college, develop artistic skills, and other job skills training without out having to join the military.

around 3:30 pm

Recruiting for nonviolence

Before You Enlist! (2011 revision)

Straight talk from soldiers, veterans and their family members tells what is missing from the sales pitches presented by recruiters and the military's marketing efforts. Produced by Telequest, Inc with support from AFSC. See http://youth4peace.org/ for more info.

around 4 pm

Here is the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Bill to Massively Increase Senior Adult Medical Bankruptcy presented by Rep. Ryan.

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Health Care

That is what headlines would look like if the United States had an independent press. After all, this is one of the main take aways of the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the plan proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee.

still around 4 pm

The budget debate is between those who would reign in the mountains of money going to pharmaceutical corporations, physicians, for-profit and "non-profit" hospitals, and private insurance companies, and those who would keep letting them rob the rest of us to pay bonuses to their top executives.  Mr. Ryan and Mr. Obama, tell the truth, stop the "giant sucking sound" of money going from the people to the corporations.

The New York Times Thinks That Congress is Full of Philosophers | Beat the Press

The New York Times apparently missed the elections last fall. This is the only possible explanation for its assertion that the budget debate in Congress "is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare."

The people serving in Congress got their jobs because they are effective politicians. This means that they have the ability to appeal to powerful interest groups; there is no requirement that they have any background in, or adherence to, any political philosophy.

The debates over competing plans for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are most obviously about the distribution of income between the wealthy and the less wealthy.

a little later, around 4 pm 

Look at the third graphic line from the bottom: this is the projected percentage of health care cost turned back upon the retiree on fixed income in Ryan's plan.  Of course, if most of the seniors go bankrupt, then we can put them on Medicaid instead--oops, that will be gone, too.  Sorry, Mom and Dad, but we're better off if you die.  Ryan says this will save the taxpayers $400 billion over 10 years, which may or may not be accurate.  Ten years of war in Afghanistan has cost $400 billion, and eight years in Iraq has cost $800 million.  This year $119 billion is budgeted for Afghanistan alone.  Ron Paul, where are you when we need you?  Cut the cost of these wars and bring the troops home.  That way we can keep medical care available for seniors.  Cutting the cost of medical care is essential, but this is not the way to do it.

around 7:20 pm

Calculating the costs of killing--Cadillac Death Machines and Yugo Safety Nets

MLK, Jr., speaking about the war in Vietnam in 1967:  "You may not know it my friend, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 dollars to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only $53.00 dollars for each person classified as poor.  And, most of that $53.00 dollars goes to salaries for people who are not poor."

Available data on enemies killed per year in the past three years is sketchy, ranging from under 2000 (Army data in mid 2009) in a year to about 4000 (Wikileaks) to 5225 (Afghan government).  At a cost of over $100 billion a year that would mean somewhere between $20 million and $50 million dollars to kill each enemy soldier.  Grisly.  Sickening.  Expensive.

Who is benefiting from such an outsized cost for the blood and guts of war?  Not the taxpayers.  Not the soldiers.  Not the seniors on Medicare or the malaria sufferers of Africa.

So there you have it.  Mad.  Sick and tired.  The world is not the church.   Too often, the church is not the church.  The phrase "hell in a handbasket" comes to mind.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.  Where there is despair, let me sow hope.  Where there is darkness, let me sow light.  Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.

Isaiah and Economic Justice 12: The Peaceable Household (Oikos)

Isaiah 11:1-11

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
    and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the spirit of counsel and might,
    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
    or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
    and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
    and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
    and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

    On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
    On that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that is left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea.

In another familiar text from Advent, Isaiah 11 speaks of a shoot growing from a stump.  It is a familiar image for anyone who has had a tree cut down in the yard.  Unless it suffered from disease and died all the way down to the roots, it usually keeps sending up new growth every spring.  If you did not want the tree, then you have to keep cutting it back, maybe even digging it out.

Isaiah says that this is the nature of God's judgment.  It is like pruning.  The damaged, diseased, dead, unbalanced, or otherwise problematic parts are cut back to reshape and revitalize the tree.  Christians have long seen this as a Messianic text linking Jesus to the promises God made to Israel.  The Messiah brings a new beginning from the same root of God's love in calling Israel to be a holy nation.

Even without Christological interpretation, the text describes a ruler who is wise, pious, righteous, equitable, faithful, and just.  The ruler will provide justice to the poor and to the meek.  All who would abuse and oppress them will receive swift and harsh judgment.  It is a promise of a different kind of world than the one that has brought the prophetic oracles delivered by Isaiah against Judah.

The lines which follow have inspired the imagination of writers, painters, musicians, and everyday folks through the centuries.  In classic poetic parallelism of Hebrew literature, line after line names a vulnerable animal and a dangerous predator.  The vulnerable are lambs, kids, calves, cows, oxen, and human infants and toddlers.  The predators are wolves, leopards, lions, bears, asps, and adders.  They appear in pairs, perhaps echoing the pairs going into the ark, but this time shockingly from different species who are not usually at peace.  The multiple species also echo the story of Eden, in which the various species lived in harmony.  To reinforce that allusion, it says that lions will eat straw like oxen.

The juxtaposition of the weak alongside the predators reminds the reader of how things have been in Judah.  The powerful have preyed on the vulnerable.  Often, when people describe themselves as powerful, whether it be kings, bankers, day-traders, generals, senators, and such, they compare themselves to predators.  Sport teams prefer mascots like lions, tigers, hawks, eagles, vipers, bears, wolves, and panthers.  It was true long ago as well.  Kings liked to be called lions.  Biblical language reflects this, for example the term "the Lion of the Tribe of Judah" can refer to a king from David's descent.  Chapter 10 refers to the king of Assyria as a "Bull."  But these lines challenge that kind of language.  They speak of a transformation of nature.

These poetic lines provide a restatement in different language of what the shoot from Jesse will bring.  Lions, bears, and adders will become known for their gentleness.  Lambs will have no reason to fear wolves.  Human babies need not scream or run from the presence of poisonous snakes.  The change from business as usual, what the powerful thought of as "natural," will be complete under the plan of God.  Those who were previously predators and those who were previously prey can now live together harmoniously because there must be no oppression of the poor, no twisting of the laws to favor the wealthy, no double standard shaped by money.  When everyone listens and learns the ways of God, it will become clearly rational that together they must make sure there is no one in need among them.  When everyone loves God and the goodness of God's creation more than private control, status, power, and luxury, then finding the way to live together in harmony will again be revealed as the purpose for living.

Clive Rainey, one of the originals from Habitat for Humanity, uses a term that makes some sense here for thinking about economic life.  He says that part of the benefit of Habitat's approach to housing comes from "rooftop moments."  Rainey is referring to those moments when a Habitat homeowner, putting in sweat equity on the home she is going to buy, finds herself alone working on the roof with a church-going banker, manager, or business owner.  As often as not, the pair are of different skin colors.  In those minutes or hours spent working, eventually people who come from groups who almost never have occasion to speak with one another strike up a conversation.  They almost inevitably find their presuppositions about one another shattered.  As they tell their stories to one another, they begin to imagine a world not so divided into the successful and the failures, the rich and the poor, the hard-working and the lazy, the smart and the stupid, the deserving and the undeserving.  I think this is what the wolf and the lamb lying together is supposed to tell us about the household of God.

The Greek word for household is oikos, the same Greek root from which we get our word economy.  An economy, if it is like a household, is a system of provision through interdependence and mutuality.  Everyone is not exactly alike.  All have distinct gifts.  Some may excel beyond others.  But at base, all contribute and all benefit.  When needed, all sacrifice, but as the Apostle Paul says, they do so in proportion to what they have.  Some must contribute and sacrifice more in a commitment to care for each person.  The Peaceable Kingdom is also a Peaceable Household.  They are both Beloved Community.

Carter's RACE 7: Perpetual Peace for Our Kind of People

As the Enlightened European race moves toward its destiny, its political development is driven by two poles, and advance toward both makes advance toward either possible. The first pole is humanity’s development toward a cosmopolitical universal history. Reason, as the selfsame character of the species in all persons of the species, drives humanity toward this necessary outcome. On the other hand, the distinct nation-states must develop toward democratic polities. Such democratic polities are hindered by the infighting among Europeans.

In both cases, the emergence of an Enlightened race of human beings is the critical task. Yet in both the remote orient and the central occident, the unenlightened alien remains a problem. Carter says,

To reflect on the problem of the alien body, whether without or within, is to attend all along to the perfection of the white, occidental body.

This problem gives Kant the task of articulating a political structure and process by which whiteness can be perfected. It will require the subjugation of the racial alien within and without. Again, quoting Carter,

Race controls Kant’s ostensibly egalitarian politics of global civil society and a domestic civil society.

A political theory emerges. Kant will ground it in his new science of anthropology. It becomes, as Carter shows, the predominant research and teaching project of his entire career as a professor. It links together his “1780s critical phase” and his “1790s postcritical phase.” He seeks the answer to how the purified reason of his critical work might emerge as the perfected humanity of Enlightenment, a destiny borne by whites and the emergence of reason in their transracial humanity.

In an unpublished, and incomplete, essay on Baptist ethics and race relations in the U. S., I undertook to examine baptist historiography and how it affects baptist theologizing, and in particular how it has engaged topics of race. My analysis of one historian led me to compare his methodology for describing baptist identity to Kantian use of polar logic, as in the antinomies. Perhaps most fascinating to me now in reflecting back on that essay is Carter’s emphasis here on how the polar logic becomes a driving force toward progress in history. Unlike Hegelian contradictions, the Kantian antinomies do not struggle until one overcomes and absorbs the other, but they remain in antinomic relationship as an engine of progress. Both law and freedom drive the advance of human rationalization of society. Both remain established in the vision of any end, even though they seem to stand in contradiction.

If baptist identity affirms both the authority of Scripture and liberty of conscience, some would argue that it maintains a sort of Kantian antinomy. I gained from Carter’s argument something that I did not recognize in my original analysis of the historical approach. This antinomy drives progress. It identifies a field in which the internal teleology of baptist existence develops. In part, one might recognize just such a teleology in certain baptist historiography. I do not intend to say that such teleologies are driven by race in the same way that Carter has shown Kant’s to be. On the other hand, it may be that such reasoning, widespread beyond the teaching and writing of any particular historian of baptists in the US South, may require further examination toward identifying the residue of race-driven theories of universal history that may have shaped baptist historiography.

Occasionally I get email with a link to a really good short video. This one is about the financial and human costs of the Iraq invasion and occupation. I encourage you to take a look at it. It's called "The Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree."

I shopped for the following on my $3 trillion budget.

Heifers for 600,000,000 families through Heifer International
PRICE: $300,000,000,000.00

Two-week peacemaking trip to Israel/Palestine for 3,800,000 US Citizens with Christian Peacemaker Teams
PRICE: $7,980,000,000.00

Intensive Spanish lessons in a Guatemalan language school for 70 million US Citizens, for eight weeks including food, lodging, airfare, and spending money
PRICE: $322,000,000,000.00

10 Years' Salary and Benefits for 2 million school teachers at an annual rate of $70,000
PRICE: $1,400,000,000,000.00

Birkenstock Sandals for 6 billion people, to keep everyone's feet healthy in warm weather
PRICE: $720,000,000,000.00

Front Doors for 1 billion family dwellings through Habitat for Humanity
PRICE: $150,000,000,000.00

Kitchen sinks for 1 billion family dwellings through Habitat for Humanity
PRICE: $100,000,000,000.00

MerleFest 4-day pass with best reserved seating for 3,600 people
PRICE: $810,000.00

2008 Toyota Prius Hybrid car, which I can't afford on my usual budget
PRICE: $22,300.00

Russian-made high-tech Space Toilet, which could come in handy someday
PRICE: $19,000,000.00

Speech Therapy/Coaching for the President, VP, Cabinet and Members of Cabinet Rank, National Security Advisor, and members of Congress (four hours each) so that none of these national leaders will mispronounce the word "nuclear"
PRICE: $167,700.00

TOTAL: $3,000,000,000,000.00