What if...

A couple of weeks ago in class, we talked about the impact of certain words and how words have been and can be hijacked. The discussion is often one where progressive religious folks complain that language has been hijacked by the religious right. On Sunday evening, however, I had the good fortune to hear a self-avowed evangelical bemoan how that label had been damaged to the point that he, Tony Campolo, no longer wants to use that name, but instead, has begun to refer to himself as a “red-letter Christian.” His overarching question is: What if Jesus meant what he said?” His statement brought to mind the pointed bumper sticker: “When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies’ he probably meant don’t kill them.”

That question can feed a lot of debates ongoing today; torture, immigration, health care coverage for children, war, etc. That question should also prick everyone, regardless of one’s “labels.” Just as conservatives have tried to reframe “values” to be all about abortion and sexuality, progressives have also chosen a few key issues, to the exclusion of other items that are equally important.

Issues lists are being compiled frequently as we move toward the next presidential election. Are we doomed to continue to make lists such that some items come to the fore over others, or would it be possible to construct questions for ourselves that would lead to just action in a more global sense? Is Tony’s question the key?

Framing the issues

In our most recent class discussion, we considered that progressive Christians are generally on the defensive when it comes to dealing with issues of the day. Indeed, they are often left reacting to what the religious right has defined as the most important issues, even if those issues seem out of whack for most people. For example, abortion and sexuality concerns are put out in front on most conservative agendas, with these subjects being defined as important issues impacting families.

Because the religious right is choosing the music, so to speak, progressives are trying to dance to tunes that do not sound right to their ears, and the steps they take are often awkward as a result. However, if one begins to pull apart religious right arguments, they begin to fail because they have no internal consistency on either a rational or moral level.

Take abortion, for example. The religious right argues that once the egg is fertilized and cells begin to divide, you have a baby, and anything done to end that process of cellular division becomes murder of a human being. The mother does not have a right to end that pregnancy. However, once the child is born, the concern for the child wanes. Now, the parent(s) has ultimate control and responsibility, and should not expect the government to assist with things like health care coverage, for example. If, as a result of the child being born into poverty and/or immigrant status, conservatives have a problem with being responsible to help that child achieve all that she/he can; it’s not their problem. But if that child later commits a crime, it may well be fine to put that human to death on the basis of the infraction. It may also be the case that this child, because of having grown up in poverty, would choose to go into military service in order to get benefits he/she would be unable to get otherwise. Again, it would be justified to the religious right to place this person into a war where he/she may be killed.

There is no justifiable way to make sense of these disparate ideas. If we value human life, then we should value it at all stages, not just at those stages we deem important – or convenient.

I also had the good fortune to hear Tony Campolo preach this evening, and his sermon will be feeding my blog for much of the next week. I think he has much to offer Christians in thinking about taking the teachings of Jesus to a logical – and radical – level.

The blame game

Yes, it has begun in earnest…the blame game, that is. It started early in the week here in San Diego, as questions were raised about why water carrying aircraft were not in the air immediately after the wildfires began.

Excuses were offered. The first was that California Fire officials could not just let any and all aircraft take wing without supervision. That description makes sense until closer questioning exposed that “supervision” meant only approved CalFire persons were qualified to be aboard these flights, even though the military equipment and personnel offered had been trained to fight fires in conditions much worse than that faced by the civilian firefighters.

Another blame game concerned the casualty count. Some local conservative radio personalities have argued that the reason so few people died in these wildfire evacuations – relative to those asked to evacuate before Katrina – was that these Californians took personal responsibility for their actions. When asked to evacuate, they packed up and left. Katrina victims, in their argument, refused to take the personal responsibility to evacuate because they were acculturated to wait for the government to do any/everything for them. When the government did not physically arrive to remove them from their homes, the hurricane’s flooding overtook them while they waited for someone else to solve their problem.

Missing from their equations, of course, were the socioeconomic differences present in these two populations. If one lives in the suburbs of a major city, it is usually the case that one has transportation to allow for the commute to a job in the city. If one lives in the inner city, it is usually the case that one depends on mass transit as owning a car can be quite an expense in city settings. It is also the case that in inner cities, poor people are often shunted to areas that do not get much attention by the city, i.e. areas close to factories and other not so desirable locations such as those surrounded by levees!

My bigger question is this; why did this blame game need to be started? I cannot fathom a reason other than a need to draw comparisons on a racial basis. In all the TV coverage I saw this week, none of the wildfire victims interviewed were African American.

Are we learning anything?

The sky is very hazy and the acrid smell of smoke fills the air. I just happen to be in San Diego for several days, arriving not long after the wildfires began to spring up. http://www.nbcsandiego.com/slideshow/14396456/detail.htmlindex.html?currentSlide=3&taf=dgo

San Diego is the 7^th largest city in the US. I’ve been impressed by the outpouring of support residents have shown: taking supplies to Qualcomm Stadium where many evacuees are staying, donations to blood banks, cutbacks on electrical and cell phone use.

There are two things about this situation that I find to be very sad, though. One is that absent an emergency like this one, many of these residents would not be giving much thought to the needs of other people surrounding them. During a “normal” period, folks without homes, food, etc., would only be tended to by specific agencies or the few folks who do give thought to these people while the rest of us continue on in our lives.

Second, this area of the country has vegetation that thrives because of fire; as a local geologist pointed out, some of the plants must have fire/smoke to germinate seeds. However, in our haste to expand, new housing developments are built in areas populated by such vegetation. To protect these homes, regular burns are not typically allowed for fear they will get out of control. Because there are no regular burns, every few years, when conditions are just right, uncontrolled burns do take place, “destroying” thousands of acres of land, along with any dwellings placed on them. As the same geologist noted, the populace tends to learn things after events like earthquakes; building standards are changed, for example. But we don’t tend to change our ways after these wildfires.

I wonder when we will begin to realize that we live with nature and do not control it. We see in the litany of creation in Genesis 1 that God gave us dominion over the land, but as many have noted before, that word usually gets read as “domination.” Likewise, we’ve been taught to take care of the least of those among us, but we don’t often think about the needs of others until emergencies arise, and then only because we can really see ourselves in the faces of those being displaced. Somehow we manage not to see ourselves in the faces of the poor and needy on a regular basis.

Say what?

I really try not to watch TV as I’m pretty sure that some programs are designed to suck away IQ points as I stare at the screen.

I occasionally allow myself to be drawn into a drama, and most often it is because I see in the story things that I deal with all the time in my life as a pastor. For example, I recently got hooked on a drama called “Damages” which is shown on the FX channel, though I think the season is soon to end.

The show focuses on a law practice, an easy target for a pastor or anyone else given that there are only about 12 million lawyer jokes circulating through the world at any given time. It is taking every bit of my self-control not to list my favorite one here.

In watching this series, I realized two things. First, serial TV is no different now than when I was an undergraduate hooked on soaps in the late 70s; if you can see the occasional episode, you can keep up with the plot. The second realization is that the reason these series flourish is because they encourage paranoia in relationships.

One of the main characters in Damage, as portrayed by Glenn Close, the principal partner in the law firm, tells another character that the key to life is never to trust anyone else completely. How sad. If we cannot trust anyone, how can we ever hope to have a healthy relationship? Every relationship in this drama is based on mistrust, and as I remember my days in the corporate world, before I finally said yes to the call to ministry, I can imagine that things have only become more cutthroat than they were then.

Our relationships will not be healthy unless we are willing to do two things, two things that are interrelated. We must be both willing to be honest, and willing to be vulnerable because we are honest. In my work as a pastoral counselor, I see too many people who function in a constant passive-aggressive mode, a way of being that is toxic to honest and helpful communication. There’s a reason that the second testament offered testimony on living together successfully, and that testimony said that you always go directly to the person with whom you have a problem, even if it means taking others with you to document the problems. Issues must be dealt with directly, or they will become like infections and kill us from the inside.

Social justice in practice

In our last class discussion, one of the questions raised by our guest lecturer, Tim Ahrens, pastor of First Congregational Church (UCC) in Columbus, OH, (http://www.first-church.org/) was whether it is possible to do social justice work as a preacher and pastor of a local church. In re-reading our class logs, it appears that every student agreed this not only can happen, but should happen. Most of us cannot imagine a pastoral ministry that would not have feet planted firmly in both the local congregation and the larger community.

In my work with our local community organizing group, CHANGE, our lead organizers teach us about thinking of the world the way it is, and the world the way it should be. Our goal as a community organization, then, is to do the work we think is necessary to make our city what we think it should be for the betterment of all. This is an inherently biblical way of thinking about the world, in my view, because it calls us to doing what we pray for in the model prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This model of community organizing also recognizes another important biblical principle, that of bringing people together across what had previously been unfathomable divides of gender, ethnicity and class, a strategy that refuses to scapegoat “them” in order to serve “us.” This principle can be hard in our culture when the presumed leader of the country proclaims that “you’re either for us or against us.”

Today I was in a situation where it would have been easy for those seated around the table to drop into the us/them mode, ultimately leading to a shouting match. An African American male was convicted of the beating of a Caucasian woman, even though there is no physical evidence linking him to the crime. He did, after a time, confess to being on the scene, but his eventual polygraph results were inconclusive. Our community is on alert because it has already been the scene of a highly publicized wrongful conviction, that of Darryl Hunt, (http://www.darrylhuntproject.org/about.html) so the African American community and its Caucasian supporters are understandably worried that another injustice has occurred. But we – mostly clergy - gathered around a table with the district attorney and had a civil conversation, learning many things about how hard it is for the DA’s office to be successful because of lack of staffing, training, pay scales, etc., not to mention the inherent racism we all know is endemic to the criminal justice system. The end of the conversation concerned how we, as citizens, can find ways to rectify these problems – in conjunction with the DA’s office – so that further injustices will be unlikely.

Democracy is messy, but done well it should bring us together rather than pushing us further apart. That sounds like something with which Jesus could agree.

Oh dear

The Winston-Salem Journal, our local newspaper, runs a poll question each week. This week’s question was: Is anyone dear to you serving in Iraq or Afghanistan?

My immediate assumption was that the poll’s authors were trying to get at whether people responding to the poll have relatives or friends serving in these war-torn areas. Perhaps there will be some sort of follow-up question to see how those with close ties to people serving in the military differ in regard to views on the war when compared to those who are not connected to any service members.

However, my next thought was that perhaps the poll’s authors were looking for something deeper, because regardless of how we view the war, we should see everyone serving there – along with the civilians living there – as dear to us. For if we do not see these people as being just like ourselves, as being as important as we are, we have made them into objects disconnected from us.

Even though national polls now show people have little support for the war, there is still no major outcry from the public to end the war and bring the troops home immediately. Instead, we can continue on with our lives without being too inconvenienced by the loss of life occurring every hour this war continues. In this way, we have proved through our lack of action that we do not consider the people in Iraq and Afghanistan to be very dear to us. Like the characters in the biblical parable, we are able to pass by a ditch filled with wounded people and continue on our way without stopping to help.

Until we recognize that all of our lives are interconnected, atrocities can continue. If we don’t find dear ones when looking at the faces of Buddhist monks in Myanmar, uninsured sick children in the US, AIDS patients in Africa, or Afghani farmers struggling to feed their families, then we have lost our essential humanity. As Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, to love another person is to see the face of God.

Folks you need to know

A good friend of mine, Jimmy Creech, is now executive director of a group called Faith in America (http://www.faithinamerica.info/). His organization has been going into smaller US communities, particularly in the midwest, to put a face on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. In addition to public events, they also run advertisements in local media in an attempt to remind folks of how religious bigotry has been used to suggest that women and African Americans are inferior, and that interracial couples should not be able to marry. In each case, scripture was used as a basis for the bigotry.

Faith in America recently held an event in Greenville, SC, where they were greeted by some sign-carrying “Christians”:

As the press release noted, these protesters were surprised by the number of straight allies who challenged them.

Also present at the event was a young woman, Erin Davies, who has been the victim of two recent attacks. The first was a defacement of her VW Bug. Instead of trying to repair the damage, she has allowed it to remain on the car, and is now taking the car to various events around the country. See her story at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLMR7Nre4x4.

I am thankful for the continued work of Jimmy Creech. If you don’t know his story, you need too; he lost his ordination in the United Methodist Church because of his refusal to treat LGBT Christians as second-class members of God’s beloved community. I still think of him as one of my pastors. Thank you, Jimmy.

I am also thankful for Erin. Her courage is empowering. As she says, her actions are holding up a mirror to the world. People cannot avert their eyes from overt homophobia directed at her – and so many others. Thank you, Erin.

Reclamation projects

OK…I’m back. It has been a while since my last posting as life does have a way of overtaking my best intentions!

In our last online class discussion, there was a lot of questioning about words, particularly words that are so freighted with meaning that we begin to shy away from them. The first word that came to mind for me was “feminist” because it seems to have become “The Other F-Word.” Popular wisdom is that young women no longer call themselves feminists - even if they may subscribe to feminist ideals – because conservative pundits have tarred and feathered the word with negative stereotypes which I won’t even honor by repeating here.

But a second word followed closely after “feminist” and that word was “values.” Thankfully, a number of folks before me have tackled that word, and so members of the right-wing no longer hold control of that concept. I’m glad that so many progressives have decided to begin talking about other “values” that matter, like providing health-care to children whose families can’t afford insurance, for example!

Of course, my using the word “progressive” is a reflex against the “L-word” – liberal! When I read definitions of “liberal” I marvel at how well conservatives have butchered what should be such an honorable description: a liberal is “tolerant of different views and standards of behavior in others” and favors “gradual reform, especially political reforms that extend democracy, distribute wealth more evenly, and protect the personal freedom of the individual.” (from Encarta Dictionary) How did we manage to let that word be bludgeoned to death?

So as I prepare to close this entry, let me note that I am a proud feminist – and a liberal to boot. I’m also a lesbian, and a Baptist, two more words that grab folks’ attention. As I’ve joked to friends, though, it’s much easier for me to come out as a lesbian than as a Baptist in most circles! My Baptist forebears worked against the kind of fundamentalism that has become the trademark of groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, and so will I as I try to reclaim what should be a proud heritage of separation of church and state, sole competency, autonomy of the local congregation, and the priesthood of all believers. If you aren’t sure you believe that there are such Baptists left, visit www.allianceofbaptists.org and www.wabaptists.org for some pleasant surprises.