Get Back Your Peace; Shake Off That Dust

Our preacher last Sunday morning suggested something that specially spoke to me.

As I drove to church that morning I had reflected on an article I’d just read that listed the attempts to impose mostly Christian religion upon our educational system. One of those is to take tax money away from public schools and give it to families to pay private (often Christian) school tuition for their kids.

Our preacher summarized Jesus’s orders to his disciples/apostles as he sent them out on his mission into the world (as reported in Matthew 9 and 10) this way: “don’t panic.”

I believe there is a real sense of panic behind the push by many in the Christian family to use public funds and resources to force children to hear and (they hope) respond to a Christian message. That panic sounds more or less like this:

OMG! People in our modern, pluralistic, and secular nation are not paying attention to our message about Jesus the way they should! It’s time to stop playing nice and FORCE them to hear what we have to say. Enough of this separation of church and state MALARKEY! We don’t have time anymore for the niceties of inviting them to believe; we have to use every resource to force them! And who has more resources than those provided by everyone’s taxes? To battle, brothers and sisters, before it’s too late!

That’s panic, plain and simple.

But Jesus says, “don’t panic.”

Here’s a passage from Matthew 9:11-15:

Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.

Here’s my informal restatement of it:

“So, you go out with my message, and people don’t listen? Let them go in peace, yours and theirs. Shake off your disappointment—you do not need that burden—and look for new opportunities, and speak to those. Someone will hear if you do not panic but just keep marching on, faithful to my instructions to you. And those who don’t listen will get theirs when the time comes.”

That last sentence is a tough one. Because someone does not listen to the disciples turned apostles, they get wiped out by fire and brimstone? What if the fault is the messenger’s? What if they didn’t approach others right, or at the right moment, or whatever? It’s a threat that seems meant to induce panic, in the apostles as well as in their hearers. It certainly points to the urgency of the mission, and says there are consequences if it fails. But worse than Sodom and Gomorrah?

I tend to see God’s judgment as mediated through God’s greater mercy, mercy as simple as time given for reflection and change. We cannot force panic anymore than we can force grace, and it is not ours to try. After all, it is God who will judge as God sees fit; judgment is not in our playbook.

Moreover, if you continue to read through to Matthew 10:23 you will see that things are about to get even more difficult for those who are sent out. They/we are going to be brought before authorities because of what they/we are proclaiming. The powers-that-be will quickly realize that the message of the freely-granted love and justice of God is a threat to their power. And they will hate anyone who tells people that.

If we are that anyone, we need not panic. We will be given the words to say when we need to say them. We must endure faithfully and passionately “to the end,” telling and living the story of Jesus and his love to the world.

Coming back around to where I began: the temptation we must avoid is that of using the world’s power (tax money, for example) to help us tell that story because we’ve panicked by the resistance we meet. To do so is to compromise the liberating message of salvation itself. It may turn out to be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for us on the day of our judgment.

Get back your peace; shake off that dust. Don’t panic. Do what you can as you can. God’s got this.

Springsteen and Beethoven Meet on Memorial Day

A sort of musical harmonic convergence seems to me to have taken place this Memorial Day weekend here on the North Coast.

“Springsteen Rocks Cleveland with Political Fury” was the headline on cleveland.com Saturday morning. I wasn’t at the Friday night concert, but reportedly “the Boss” shared his rage about and hope for our country with his audience for nearly three hours. Must have been quite a show, a blessing to his fans and a bane to his critics. (I hope both would defend his right to express his convictions freely.)

Meanwhile, just a few miles away the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus and a team of absolutely riveting soloists were performing Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. The Sunday afternoon performance, which we attended, made clear Beethoven’s rage at injustice of any kind, including illegal incarceration. But the libretto does not end in rage, but in a celebration of freedom. As is well known, Beethoven firmly believed in the worth of every human being as a free member of our human community.

Right at 300 years separate the lives and art of Beethoven and Springsteen, yet I am quite sure they would celebrate each other’s convictions if they could ever meet. To those who dare to hope, the longing for better ways to live together as a human family is neither diminished by time nor compromised by set backs. Out of such hope artists of every age critique what is wrong and point us toward what can be set right—what we can set right, if we have the courage to take a stand.

Then, last night, we watched the annual Memorial Day Concert on the Mall in Washington. We remembered again and shared our thanks for the men and woman who sacrificed their lives to protect our nation and its vision. That concert, plus hearing Fidelio and reading about Springsteen’s show, reminded me to honor not only the deaths of our defenders, but also the ideals and hopes of the United States of America they died for--all worth our remembering and our defending.

Ersatz Euergetism

Have you ever been ambushed by a new word?

      You are calmly reading, and suddenly a word appears you don’t know, occupying so unassuming a place in a sentence that you think you should have been seeing it all of your life. That unexpected appearance without explanation raises your fear that everyone else has known that word forever, that you alone are ignorant of it.

That is how I felt like last week as I was reading a short commentary on one of the apostle Paul’s New Testament letters. Without warning, a new-to-me word came out of the bushes:

“In the first-century Roman context, euergetism was accompanied by standard expectations regarding the giving and reception of gifts depending on the status of the parties involved.” (Notes on 2 Corinthians 9:13 in The Westminster Study Bible [2024].)

Well, of course.

As the beneficiary of more than a little education and who has lived quite a long time with that education and who regularly reads, writes, and pays attention to words, I cannot remember ever being confronted by euergetism.

(My word processor cannot remember it either because it insists on underlining the word in red because it thinks I have misspelled it. I am not the only dunce!)

Of course, I got a sense of the word’s meaning from the way it was used in that sentence. Going further, Wikipedia informed me that

“euergetism (from the Greek word for ‘doing good deeds’) was the ancient Greco-Roman practice of wealthy and high-status individuals voluntarily distributing their personal wealth to benefit the community. It served as a system of exchange: donors gained immense social prestige, while cities received vital public works and entertainment.”

The root of euergetism occurs 4 times in the Greek New Testament, but the word itself is a relatively modern construction. As now used, it applies when a wealthy donor gives something to the public in return for recognition and status. Every gift is a deal; every offering is part of a transaction.

If you knew the meaning of euergetism before reading this essay, I salute you. If you have ever used the word, I double salute you. And if you use it regularly in causal conversation, I still salute you, but for your pretentiousness.

A couple of points about what follows my being ambushed by a new word:

First, shortly after I learn a word that is new to me, I almost inevitably come across it a second and even a third time. It is as if it has been waiting in the wings to stride out on the stage and say, “See, I warned you this was coming! Thank me!”

The second point is that the new word helps me talk about something happening here and now. For example, what do you call it when the President of the United States builds things bearing his name and likeness in D.C., but cons other people (including tax payers) into paying for them? What do you call doing that?

Ersatz euergetism, of course…as if you didn’t know.

Turning Point USA DBA a Charity

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA recently added me to their mailing list. I have no idea who sold them my name and address.

A couple of weeks ago, my first mailing offered me a bright red, “We Are Charlie Kirk” wristband and an opportunity to make a donation.

Last week’s mail brought me a small American flag and an impassioned letter from Riley Gaines, former All-American swimmer turned anti-trans-people activist. Her letter invited me to participate in the “Campus Patriotism Project” by signing a tag attached to the flag and returning it so that it can be displayed “with thousands of others from like-minded patriots at one of 4,500+ schools with a Turning Point USA chapter.”

What will these flags inspire? Charlies’s dream—a dream of “inspiring young men and women to get married, start families, and rely on each other the way their great-grandparents did.”

Here is a graphic included with that mailing:

It conveniently overlooks the truth that the next patriotic generation can and should fight to raise both flags. The two flags are not mutually exclusive.

One more thing, which you may note in the lower right-hand corner of that picture: Turning Point USA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization. That apparent fact completely upends my understanding of what it means to be a charity. TPUSA’s tax status, like its partisan rhetoric, baffles me.

My Stars

 

I never thought that stars were mere pinpricks of light on a black canvas hung just beyond my reach…at least I’ve convinced myself that I never thought that. I honestly believe that I have always known that stars, like the void around and beyond them, are way beyond any reach, brighter than any consciousness.

Constellations have never made sense to me, except for the Big Dipper (and the Little One, too). Growing up on American’s vast prairie lands, I learned early on how to find the North Star in an instant. And Orion: I could easily point out Orion presiding over winter’s bitter cold. But somehow I knew that those connected dots in the night sky were the product of shepherds’ imaginations fixated on that sky, imposing an order that simply wasn’t there.

The stars—individually and collectively—are brighter and bigger than all of us, out of the reach of any of us. They have their reasons.

The way I understood the stars when I was a child…was that unique to me? I don’t know, because I never asked. Perhaps once my father had said to me, Dean, the stars are giant suns millions and millions of miles away from us, and even though my brain could not really understand him, I understood it where it mattered. Same with the Milky Way…a long-shot view through to the edge of the galaxy that bears its name. It is astonishing, but the star-filled wheels of distant galaxies far outnumber and outshine it.

Maybe I believe that I always got the shine and enormity and distance of the stars right because I have always felt that almost everything is more than I am. I am a tall man, but in my head I’ve never measured up to most other people. Almost everyone else is far more important and successful and popular and all the rest than I am. Generous folks have tried to convince me otherwise…oh, you are bigger and brighter than you think…but I have always been quite sure they are wrong.

In my late teens and early twenties, I loved to sit on the front stoop of my parents’ rural Iowa home on warm summer nights and contemplate the stars and their possible intersection with the Bible and theology I was learning in school. As I sat in those stars’ silent, soulful presence, I felt more deity than I felt in reading all the words of all the books.

But then again, the words in those books helped me feel stars and be awed by them and yet not be tempted, as were the ancients, to worship them and their fellow travelers out there, beyond the firmament.

I rarely see the stars these days, blinded as I am by the lights of our human technology and impudence. I have a favorite high desert retreat where stars are as visible to me as they once were, but now it is hard for me to go there. So, I imagine the stars of my childhood and youth, and I wonder if anyone will ever grasp them for what they truly are, or how humankind fits into their eternal schemes.

I have never thought that I outshine stars.

My Heart and “the Pity of War”

 

Wednesday afternoon, in anticipation of getting a new pacemaker ten days from now, I had an echocardiogram. It was both exciting and scary to watch my beating heart on the monitor— seeing it keep on beating, albeit irregularly, without any awareness or conscious effort on my part, as it’s been beating for over 80 years.

I was home less than an hour when MyChart posted the report of the cardiologist who read the results (with a bit of AI help, do you suppose?). An essay consisting of words that I do not understand and coolly impersonal numbers and values purportedly describing my beating heart is now available for my own cardiologist to read and understand and interpret.

Which is my heart—a muscular organ that second-by-second keeps me alive, or an organized series of letters and digits on a computer screen? Which is my heart to those doctors? Which is it to me?

Last night Maxine and I heard Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, Chorus, etc., conducted by Klaus Makela. I’ve known and loved this powerful work of poetry and music since college days, and last night it cast its magnificent, heart-rending, and soul-searing spell on me once again.

I wonder how my heart would have looked to an echocardiogram after the chorus’s final, hushed, a cappella plea, “May they rest in peace.” Broken, I think.

We Sang Mozart

 

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon. We’d been practicing Mozart for two and half months—together and on our own—but on that Sunday afternoon, we sang Mozart. We sang his Solemn Vespers and Coronation Mass.

I was one of fifteen basses in a hundred voice choir, and there were four soloists and a small orchestra of instrumentalists and one determined conductor. Months of hard work came together inside a glorious quasi-Gothic church sanctuary, and it was as if the building itself—bright shining stained glass and all—was singing Mozart.

I did not sing Mozart the way the best of Mozart’s singers sing him. I did just okay, though better for me than I’d expected a couple of days before. I think that I found some notes that others missed, and that others got rhythms that I messed up, a holy harmonization of just right and almost right, with a wayward just plain wrong as well along the way. We came together as one—even when we had to be dragged back together when too many of us tried to outpace our conductor’s tempo, his face first almost panicked, then relieved.

We all sang Mozart despite our lacks, amateur singers that most of us are.

We sang Mozart on that Sunday, and for a while, embraced in that space’s rose-tinted late afternoon light, something of the holy—of the wholly other—shined through our faces from deep in our souls. (Did anyone see it?) Genius touched us, and we returned his touch: his music’s assurances and shocks, chords and progressions we could not imagine until we heard them, surprises of syncopation and dissonance that transformed sounds sung in time into music that sounded eternal, celebrating living life and loving love the way the creator celebrates, banishing all things ugly, hateful, and deathly.

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon, and for a time we were where no one else will ever take us.

Soli Deo Gloria.