Questions asked after the service has ended

 

We all were in worship this morning, a glorious array of humanity that, to me, represents our beloved human race. We came there hungry and went away filled.

The church my wife and I attend welcomes all hungry seekers. And while the diversity in our congregation does not include samples from all the kinds and conditions of humanity, it’s a wide enough slice to leave no doubt that we are intent upon following Jesus.

Watching my worshipping siblings come forward to receive the bread and wine of the sacrament is a major highpoint in my worship experience. These are a few of the people I see…

A couple of our families are from Africa—one who fled here to escape genocide. There is an elderly mixed-race couple who were married back when their love was not allowed to show itself. By all signs, they are still very much in love. There are, of course, white families—mom, dad, and 2 or 3 kids. And single parents, and parents of kids of a different color.

There are LGBTQIA+ individuals and couples, one of them parenting a beautiful two-year-old daughter. I suspect we welcome some trans folks to the altar, but I am not sure who they are.

There’s a young woman who nearly died a few years ago from a complicated, serious illness. She made her way up the steps to the chancel this morning with the help of her walker. And there are lots of us being helped along by our canes.

There is a range of material wealth in our congregation, though we do not seem to represent the outer extremes of either wealth or poverty. Almost everyone dresses casually, and it is difficult any more to tell by dress who has money and who doesn’t.

I do not know if I am supposed to watch this human parade as it approaches our altar. I know enough about some of them to offer specific prayers for them; others get a general prayer on their way to the rail. The only one who might hear me is God, which is just fine. We are together in God’s presence because of the people here and our prayers for one another and the world.

In my church, we not only hear about God’s love in Jesus for all humankind, but we see it embodied in those with whom we worship. It’s not idealized, abstract love, but love as inclusion of each one on an equal plane within the diverse variations of humankind. Love one another—love your neighbor as yourself—even love your enemies…the original, scriptural D.E.I. program of God’s great love.

To me, my church is a foretaste of the make-up of the heavenly commonwealth which Jesus proclaimed and for which he sacrificed himself. It is just as surely a signpost pointed toward what God wills for creation itself and for our particular order of creatures within it.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought our nation was on a path toward becoming more the sort of home for its people as my church is for me and us. I even thought that path was getting easier.

Now we are hearing that our nation is no longer to walk that path, that we are to attempt the restoration an imagined past. Some even invoke the name of Jesus to justify returning to isolation and separation, to a past when only a chosen few will thrive. But that’s not the way to follow Jesus, not the path he is walking.

Tears came to my eyes as we sang the final hymn this morning. What is to become of the long-marginalized folks in my church who are being threatened daily by hurtful, harmful, and hateful posts and X-ecutive orders, often buttressed by hurtful, harmful, and hateful theology? Will churches like ours become flashpoints of resistance simply by virtue of the range of human beings who come together week after week to be fed by the God who loves us all? What will become of the likes of us?

Science and religion in this Republican world

 

Will the U.S. Government remain a reliable source of information about important issues that affect us all?

I heard today from two people that make me wonder. One was searching for information about a flood plan for her worksite. The .gov website said that it was being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders. The other person got the same message in searching for information about sinus infections.

Information we receive from our government on matters such as flood plans and sinus infections should be based on the best available research and knowledge. It is clear that this Republican administration wants to bend all information to its peculiar spin on it. To the people who are now supposed to be serving our common good, alternate facts have as much currency as real facts, even in matters of life and death.

How long will it be before we won’t be able to trust government statistics on things like inflation and employment rates? Not long, I suspect. That seems to be the way we are headed. It’s sad, it’s dangerous, it’s ignorant.

On another matter…the president is creating a task force led by our newly-minted Attorney General to root out and fight “anti-Christian bias” in the government, with the goal of “bringing God back” into American life.

One reason may be to try to protect anti-abortion protesters who cite their Christian faith as the basis of their opposition. But the larger appeal is to those Evangelical Christians who do not know the difference between Donald Trump and Jesus Christ. The task force is a shameless appeal to one particular expression of one particular religion.

The government must be careful not to engage in any kind of anti-religious bias, but a task force to fix that problem seems to me to be an over-reach. Most of those matters are best decided by a court, based upon the constitution and the law.

And it is certainly NOT the job of the president or any other public official or body to bring God back into American life.

It’s sad, it’s dangerous, it’s unconstitutional…as any 6th-grader should know.

William Shakespeare speaks of mercy...

 The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

January 20, 2025

 

Lift Every Voice and Sing

James Weldon Johnson

Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Grieving for what we’ve lost

 

On the day of Jimmy Carter’s state funeral, I had my weekly lunch date with a group of guys my age, so I left off watching the service just after President Biden had spoken. As I sat down, it was clear to my friends that something was wrong.

Of course, I had known something was wrong, and I knew what it was. I thought I had been able to regain my composure before going out in public, but I had failed. No sense covering it up.

“What’s wrong?” one asked.

After hesitating, I shakily admitted, “I am grieving for what we’ve lost.”

“Such as…?” he asked.

Again I hesitated. “Our decency, our humanity, our compassion,” I stammered, and waved my hands to head off more questions.

This group keeps its conversations confined to things like sports, doctor visits, what’s wrong with our community’s administration, family, and the like.

Not much politics—or religion, now that religion has become dangerously politicized.

I was clear in my mind that the grief I was experiencing from watching Carter’s funeral was in fact grief over the death of decency, humanity, and compassion in our social and political discourse.

“I will never lie to you” has been supplanted by, “I will tell you whatever I can dream up to keep you on my side.” Truth is victim to expediency and to the hunger for power and prestige. Commercial advertising’s most deceptive weapons are employed in the fight for votes and money. Candidates who refuse to use those weapons are disparaged and defeated. Long-trusted news sources are replaced by crass opinions cleverly disguised as real information.

Donald Trump is not to blame for all of this (though he might like to take credit for it). The wholesale attack on what’s kept us together as a nation has been building for decades, and no extreme is wholly without responsibility for it. What Mr. Trump has done is to elevate it to the highest office in our land, giving it a legitimacy that would have shamed nearly everyone just a few years ago.

I grieve for what we have lost; lost not to the Republicans or to the Democrats or to the left or to the right, but lost to ourselves. We have given up something essential (“character,” if you will) to get us to where some want us to be, and now that we are there, the landscape around us looks like death itself.

So, I grieve.

Update on my previous post: the American flag has been taken down and replaced by the "FJB" banner!

MAGA to the hilt

 

A home in a nearby neighborhood has been adorned with MAGA and Trump signs almost without interruption since we moved here four years ago.

During the 2024 election, a Trump/Vance banner hung from the railing. After the election, the "Love not hate makes America great" sign was posted and I felt a little hopeful. Perhaps a change of heart? Then, the campaign banner was replaced with a very large "Merry Christmas" message. Very good! But last week, the FJB banner replaced the Merry Christmas one. "Love not hate," ironically, remains under it.

At the very least, it's going to be a confusing four years.

(The flag is at half-staff, at least for now.)

January 20, 2025

 

On January 20, 2025—Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—Maxine and I are meeting with a few friends to remember and reflect upon Dr. King’s work and vision for our country. We will gather from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. or so.

At noon that same day, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will be inaugurated as President and Vice President of the United States. We will not be watching the inauguration.

Some may think that it’s sour grapes, or disrespect, or something worse that are leading us to do this; after all, our candidates lost the election.

They would be wrong.

Nor are we coming together to pout, or to lick our wounds, or even to develop some grand strategy of resistance.

We are gathering on that day at that time to remember a man who looked at the United States of America and saw in our future a nation of equals before the law. Ours would be a nation whose government was committed to assuring that none of us could deny others of us our basic human dignity, nor our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as sibling citizens of one country.

Not, perhaps, a nation in which we’d all love one another; that’s too much to hope for. But it’s not too much to dream of a nation in which no-one gets away with trampling upon anyone else, and in which no collective power can treat anyone with impunity.

We will gather to own again Lincoln’s conviction that government of, by, and for the people—of, by, and for all the people—shall not perish from the earth.

We will not be a large group, by intention. So, if you like our plan for January 20, perhaps you would consider inviting some folks to join you in doing something similar. Think of it as a bright, sunny high noon of our collective spirit.