A prayer for law and order

 

Dear God,

We pray for law and order in our land.

We thank you that ours is a nation that values both the benefits of individual freedom and the security of law that orders our life together. We are grateful for dreams we can turn into reality, and for the protections of law that help keep one person’s dreams from being another person’s nightmares. We are grateful for our founders’ gift of a constitution that recognizes both individual rights and social responsibility.

When there is tension between what we want and desire and the wants and desires others cherish, we depend upon sound law to manage that tension fairly and peacefully. We admit we are often blind to laws that favor us at the expense of another, if not in their wording then in how they are interpreted and applied. Free us from treating the law callously or cynically for our own ends. We confess those inequitable laws and the inequitable application of laws that threaten and decay good social order, exacting untold costs upon those they victimize.

Forgive us when deny justice and the legitimate appeal for justice in the name of law and order. Open our nation’s eyes to the reality of the often legalized oppression under which many of us continue to live. Open our ears to the cries of those who face daily discrimination because they belong to groups not valued by the majority or by those in power. Shape our laws and our legal system into instruments of justice as we seek to become a more perfect union in our diversity and difference.

We pray for those who make, enforce, and execute our laws. And we pray for those agitate and work to create a more just order based upon more just laws. Help all of these to work together for the good of all.

We pray for law and order in our land.

Amen.

Donald Trump and evangelical fervor

I am one of those Christians who simply cannot understand why some other Christians believe our current president is a new revelation—or even incarnation—of God right up there next toJesus of Nazareth.

Almost nothing of Donald Trump’s lifestyle, message, values, ethics, or actions has any discernible relationship to the Jesus reported in the gospels. Some of his evangelical Christian defenders, when asked, tend to agree with that assessment, but go on to praise what he has done or will do, which they see as faithful to Christ. I usually do not agree with their understandings of what the Bible generally regards as leaders’ key responsibilities toward the peoples and nations they lead. I just do not see Jesus, or the prophetic tradition out of which he ministered, in the man in the White House.

Something was shared with me on Facebook yesterday that gives me insight into the passion of some evangelical Christians for Mr. Trump. It’s a short video that declares, “President Trump Born for Revival!” In it, Dr. Clarence Sexton, founder and president of The Crown College in Tennessee, tells how a Bible that is tied to a revival in the Hebrides in the 1940s and 50s now sits in the Oval Office. He suggests that perhaps this means God is using Mr. Trump to bring revival to the United States.

I confess I am not much on revivals. I realize that some who are reading this understand the term even less than I do. Here’s my take: basically, a revival is a religious service, or series of services, in which powerful preaching results in powerful, emotional, and visible response by the congregation. Lives are changed in revivals as people make heart-felt confessions of faith in Jesus, and commit their lives to following him. Revivals have an important place in American religious history, and many churches today still hold revivals.

Unfortunately for Dr. Sexton’s story, at least one website (godreports.com) that is sympathetic to revivals  and revivalism says it is not true. It reports that there was a revival in Scotland in those years, and it was quite powerful. But the part about the Bible and Mr. Trump is not true, did not happen. Remember, this is from a site sympathetic to revivals, not from some “fake news” outlet.

I suppose the first thought that comes to many minds is the thought that came to mine: Since when does truth matter when some people talk about Mr. Trump? But we need to go beyond that to see in this story the conviction that even when you cannot see any link between Jesus and the president, such a relationship is there anyway. God can work in ways we do not see. In other words, you do not see the relationship; you do not see how God is using Mr. Trump to bring revival to the US; you do not see how what he says and does is congruent with the ways of Jesus—you do not see any of that, but it is there. Because you know it’s there, you just know it.

How do you argue with that? How do you talk about real issues when the person you are talking with “just knows” the truth, a truth you are obviously not gifted to access?

I suspect this sort of “spiritual secret” about the man is circulating widely among many passionate Trump supporters. It is fed by the likes of “President Trump Born for Revival!” It really allows no room for serious political back and forth.

What is “the soul of America?” Your answer, please...

I guess the Democrats are the ones framing this election as a “battle for the soul of America,” but no doubt a Republican or two has used the same phrase. I think many of us, no matter where we stand on the political spectrum, see this election as something akin to that.

But what do we mean by “the soul of America?” In a way, unless we can agree on what our national “soul” is, or looks like, or represents, the phrase is empty of meaning and as a means of setting direction. We are battling for an abstraction that, lacking content, gives no clear goal. How will we know we have won this battle if we do not know what we are fighting for?

The word usually translated as “soul” in the Hebrew scriptures is “nephesh.” To the Hebrews, the soul was the core of a living being…that being’s essence. People did not have souls that could be separated from their bodies; people were souls. The soul was the animating principle of a person. It was what made that person tick, what drove and motivated and defined that person as a full human being. The Christian scriptures largely seem to hold to a similar understanding of the soul: not something that inhabits our bodies for a time, but something we are for our entire time.

I would like to generate a discussion of “the soul of America” in the context of the current election campaign. I am not very confident I will get many responses, but I will ask anyway.

As you listen and consider the descriptions of and visions for our country that are being articulated this fall, and that are begging for your vote, how do they match or not match your understanding of our national soul? What words or phrases best describe our soul? If necessary, what words or phrase do not represent our soul? What makes us tick?

The soul is who we are. So, who are we, anyway?

The president wants my money...and more

As the Republican Convention gets underway, I am receiving an ever-increasing cascade of ever-more strident appeals from his campaign (so they claim) via Conservative Direct. Everyone—the president’s family members, the vice president, the campaign manager, the president himself—is practically begging me to step up to the plate and give, because the president is checking daily—even hourly—to see if my name is on the donor list. Often I have one hour to give to have my gift matched by as much as 700%. But don’t worry, another generous match will be offered before the day is over.

These emails are so strange. Perhaps one of the strangest came a day or two ago:

“We need your input.

“The corrupt Democrat Convention ended and it's only a matter of time before the Fake News comes out with a PHONY poll about where President Trump and Vice President Pence stand.

“It's no secret that their results will be pro-Biden-Harris and totally biased. We've never been able to trust what the Fake News media says, and we're not about to start now.

“In order to get the TRUTH, we just launched our Official Presidential Issue Poll - the ONLY accurate poll out there - and President Trump has requested that we personally reach out to YOU to get input on what REAL Americans are thinking.”

Yeah, right. The only reliable poll is one sent out by “Team Trump” to a Trump-approved list of his most faithful followers, and analyzed and reported to the world by that team. How dumb do they think his faithful are? (How dumb are they to keep sending these to me?)

It would all be laughable were it not so serious. Here is a guy who has so taken over one of our two major political parties that he himself will claim the best speaking slot all four nights of that party’s convention. What can you expect form the “only one who can save us?” Seems pretty clear they do not want anyone to watch except those who are already convinced. I won’t add to the convention’s ratings by watching myself. Call my mind closed…I accept the charge.

What’s more, he is using the White House and other Federal sites that represent all of us—all of “we the people”—as stages for his appearances. In his mind just as he is the Republican Party, so he also is the United States of America.

I don’t buy it, just as I don’t buy the claim that what the Democrats are offering is “socialism.” But even if that were true, I’d sure choose democratic socialism over plain old garden variety dictatorship…which is what our current president wants my financial help in securing for him. No way!

Me and Jefferson and White Supremacy

One of the many reasons we celebrate Thomas Jefferson is his work authoring our Declaration of Independence. He, and a relatively small group of mostly young accomplices, not only believed that the American colonies should be independent of Great Britain, but also also that the new nation they proposed to start should be founded upon the notion that governments are expressions of the will of free people.

But Jefferson was not perfect, and his vision for the United States of America was clouded by significant blind spots. He owned slaves, and the issue of slavery was a deeply contentious one as our founders tried to create a single new nation on this side of the Atlantic. And we know that when he wrote that “all men are created equal” he meant men, and white men at that. Thomas Jefferson was, like his compatriots, a person both of extraordinary vision and of his own time.

We can and will continue to honor Jefferson, and the others, for the lasting good they did at great risk to themselves. But we also can and must at the same time acknowledge their shortcomings and failures. Otherwise, we may never move beyond them.

As I’ve been working through the Me and White Supremacy project of our presbytery—which is basically about me and my participation in white supremacy—I recalled several times some words of Jefferson’s that show just how blind he was. On July 6, 1775, Thomas Jefferson published a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, an argument for going to war to secure our independence.

(I know these words because American composer Randall Thompson set them to music in 1942 in a piece called, The Testament of Freedom. I have sung it several times. But now, I don’t think I can sing again.)

Consider these words: “We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.” (More dreadful than involuntary slavery?)

Or these: “We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations (earlier dubbed, “our innocent posterity”) to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage upon them.” (But it’s okay to force hereditary bondage upon others?)

He says that Americans must be “with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves.” (How far would he—or I—go to defend Black people who made such a resolution about themselves?)

And this: “In our native land, in defense of the freedom that is our birthright and which we ever enjoyed till the late violation of it; for the protection of our property, acquired solely by the honest industry of our forefathers and ourselves; against violence actually offered; we have taken up arms.” (Not property acquired by blood and broken promises, and worked as surely by the enslaved as by the free?)

These words of Thomas Jefferson’s are painful to read, even more painful to sing. We now know, or by now we should know, just how blind they are to the reality that was all around him, and that is still around us almost 250 years later.

But if I try to fling those words back into Jefferson’s face, it is my own that takes the hit. I have not understood, because I have not seen, the full extent of the injustices and moral compromises supporting the kind of life I have been privileged to live and to enjoy. I see today more than I saw yesterday, and it’s really uncomfortable. Once I see, I cannot not see.

It is well-known that in 1781, Jefferson faced slavery and its awful consequences more directly, causing him to write, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” Unfortunately, he left the bringing of God’s justice up to God, apparently hoping slavery might be abolished by some gentle divine fiat. It didn’t happen that way, of course. Nor will it happen that way for the racism that still plagues us. I—we—need to do far more than tremble.