Downsizing Our U.S.A.

Several years ago my wife and I downsized our home, discarding many things that had been ours for decades. We were moving into a smaller home, appropriate to our age and abilities. Such downsizing is a common practice for our generation.

Today’s Republican Party is leading our United States into downsizing, even though we are not old as nations go. We are shedding much of what we have picked up during the last two and a half centuries, even some of what we claimed was ours at our founding.

Republicans under Donald Trump seem to think our country is weary of its life, and no longer able to muster the energy to imagine and live beyond the present moment.

Have we tired of the rule of law, and the equality of all people before that law? Does it take too much energy to respect one another and appropriately constituted authority? Are we weary of protecting religious pluralism, and of encouraging the unfettered search for truth in science and the humanities? Are we so shriveled inside our thin skins that we cannot tolerate diversity of personal expression and artistic experimentation? Does age-related ringing in our ears make it hard for us to sort out political tensions as they are reported to us by a free and responsible press?

The Republican right legislates and budgets as if we no longer have the resources to assure basic necessities of life for our poor, or health care for our sick, or opportunities for those who have long been excluded.

The party of the right downsizes our understanding of who we are when it denigrates the millions of us who are not of European heritage. If it cannot deport them, it can and will end programs and policies that might allow them to participate fully in our economic and social abundance. It is as if we tried that kind of idealistic thing when we were young, but now we are old, and we really don’t care any longer about anyone but us and our kind.

We shrink back from the rest of the world, and forego long-established treaties and alliances, often in favor of regimes the likes of which the United States has spent the last 80 years resisting. Relationships of mutual trust are bullied into transactional deals, reducing ourselves to one more player among many. It was hard work being the leader we once were; let someone else take the reins.

We abandon our history by insisting its telling be scrubbed of anything that does not make us look good—like a funeral elegy in which it is not polite to tell the whole truth.

When my wife and I downsized our possessions, we did not give up who we are at heart. But that is what is happening to our country under this administration and its enablers. An impoverished hard-right leadership is trashing the very things that have made us a truly great nation, casting aside values and promises that can never be reclaimed or restored. Loud boasting about our greatness will never regain what we have given up.

Our republic does not have to end this way. We can challenge the agents of our downsizing by renewing our commitment to what made the world take notice of us in the first place—our love of liberty and justice for all. Each of us can choose at least one ideal, practice, or person to stand up for in public. We can send the naysayers on the right packing, and reclaim our heart.

Independence Day, 2025

On national holidays I plant two 12 by 18-inch Americans flags in amongst the flowers in front of our house. I will plant them tomorrow morning, on the Fourth of July, our Independence Day, 2025. But it won’t be easy.

I know: some Americans are celebrating where the Republican administration and congress and, I feel, Supreme Court are leading us. But I am among the dissenters who disapprove of where we are being taken, who feel it is a betrayal of the best of our values, ideals, and practice of self-government. So I am tempted not to fly our flag tomorrow.

But I am not going to do that. In part because, I would not have liked it had someone done the same, for example, when the Democrats were in positions to govern. But more importantly, because I am an American and I want everyone to know it.

I have a claim on and stake in this nation, and honestly believe we can do better—much better—for the good of all of us than does the law the President will sign tomorrow. I will continue to make my aspirations for our nation known as long as I am able. 

Tomorrow we celebrate the 249th birthday of our nation. But we were not really free to be that nation until several years later after a bloody war. It took a fight not only to liberate us from Great Britain’s rule, but also to be free to constitute a nation whose government, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, would be of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, and for the PEOPLE! 

In the end, I will plant my flags tomorrow for you and for me and for all of us people, and in the fervent hope that one day, the people willing, we will once again aspire to be a nation where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are real possibilities for us all.

The good old days of working together

This afternoon, while our U.S. Senators squabbled in Washington, I rode my bicycle along 13.5 miles of the towpath trail in our wonderful Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was a beautiful day, and I was deeply thankful I was here rather than there.

CVNP was created out of mostly privately-owned land through the joint efforts of Republicans and Democrats some 50 years ago. (It was the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area at first.) If this land had not been protected by our Federal Government, today it would no doubt be packed with as many homes, businesses, and perhaps even factories as its rugged terrain could bear, all tied together by endless strands of concrete and asphalt. Instead, it is 33,000 acres of natural beauty stretching between Cleveland and Akron, offering easy escape to some sense of wildness to millions of people.

I could not help but wonder if such cooperation as created our park would be at all possible today. Frankly, I doubt it. Seemingly gone forever are politicians who want to work together for the honest public good, not for who can gain or exploit what from whom.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park could not happen today. Who knows when someone will find an excuse to undermine it, given the trajectory we are on? It's one more reason I shudder for our nation's future.

Tell the truth? Someone may be listening!

 

This sign is now posted at our nearby Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Makes me wonder how the Native American guide we had several years ago at Little Bighorn National Monument is faring. If she's not unemployed already, she soon will be. Makes me angry.

Deportation by the Numbers

Fox News reports this morning that President Trump has ordered ICE to “‘expand efforts to detain and deport’ illegal immigrants in ‘America’s largest [c]ities,’ including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.”

Trump is quoted, “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” He further justified the effort as “fulfilling our Mandate to the American People.” (Did he mean from the American people?)

When the LA demonstrations were at their peak, I began a piece offering my opinion that, when it comes to immigration enforcement, quotas are the problem, referring to the demand that ICE arrest for deportation at least 3,000 people a day. An enforcement quota strongly pushes officers to round up as many people as possible, with little regard to their individual circumstances, in order to meet the quota. Trump’s Truth posting today confirms the fact that this whole thing is about politics, and nothing else.

Adding to it is the fact that he has now ordered ICE to ease up on the agricultural and hospitality industries, and to focus on urban areas largely populated by Democrats. It is patently obvious that the President is serving his own interests (votes from rural areas and money for his hotels and resorts) rather than the nation’s, something he instinctively does with almost everything he touches.

I am reasonably certain that the majority of Americans support the fair application of our laws when it comes to immigration enforcement, as flawed as many believe those laws to be. There was a chance to make these laws more just and tailored to current realities before the last election, but candidate Trump advocated not passing that bill. Doing so would not have served his need to keep the immigration pot boiling.

Deportation by the numbers and over-the-top responses to protests both make Donald Trump look strong. But behind that look there hides an extremely insecure man, and many are suffering and compromising their integrity in order to bolster his poor sense of self-worth.

We are all the people...

 

This is a story I wish I could fill with details, but I am afraid for the safety of its central characters.

A woman who helps us with an important job in our house immigrated to the United States from Central America several years ago. She is friendly, energetic, and a good worker.

Recently she, with the help of her husband whom we’ve not met, did a very great kindness for us. What she did was far beyond her job description. It was justplain neighborly, and she neither asked for nor seemed to expect anything in return.

She is a U.S. citizen, and has a U.S. passport. She recently returned from a visit to her homeland.

She told us that not long ago she was stopped by the police in a neighboring suburb, apparently for no other reason than that she looked foreign. At least that’s the only reason she can think of. She had to show them proof of her citizenship.

This is terrifying. I know it’s not new for police to stop people whose skin color seems to them to be reason enough to stop them. But it is always wrong, and it seems likely only to get more common as the Republican administration ramps up its war on immigration and immigrants.

It it is also one step closer to even more wrong as the Republican party takes aim at more and more Americans whom it considers outside its norms.

If we can’t save a man our government admits it wrongly deported to a two-bit dictator’s prison, who else will we not be able to save? In the end, none of us.

Christian belief and Christian nationalism, according to Karl Barth

 

Does what we believe matter? You bet it does! And it matters very much when it comes to so-called “Christian” nationalism in our own time.

Twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth had no doubt that belief mattered. And that is the point of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac post for today, Barth’s birthday anniversary (1886). Find the whole post if you can.

Keillor writes that Barth “became disillusioned with the liberal theology he had learned at the university, and this came to a crisis point in 1914. Liberal theology was optimistic about modernity and felt that humanity's progress was part of God's plan and therefore had divine blessing. Barth believed that there was a fundamental divide between humanity and God, and that the line was too often blurry. He believed that the truth about Christianity came only from the revelation of Jesus Christ — he called Christ "the one word of God." He was particularly upset when governments used Christianity as a way to justify actions that he considered very un-Christian. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals signed a manifesto declaring their support of the German cause in World War I, and among the signers were several of Barth's former teachers. Barth was disgusted, and he began to doubt ‘everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians.’”

Keillor’s Barth birthday essay ends with this: “When the Third Reich came to power in Germany, Barth was strongly opposed to Hitler and the ‘German Christians’ who merged the Gospel with Nazi nationalism. He wrote most of the famous ‘Barmen Declaration,’ which rejected the idea that the state could have power over the Church, or that the Church could have power over the true essence of Christianity. When he refused to begin his classes with ‘Heil Hitler!’ or to swear allegiance to him, Barth was kicked out of his teaching post and Germany. He moved back to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life writing his monumental work Church Dogmatics, which at the time of his death was 13 volumes and more than 9,300 pages.” (italics are mine)

Terms like “liberal” and “conservative” can be slippery and their meanings certainly change with the passage of time. And thank God we don’t have to read all 9,300 pages of Church Dogmatics to get to the gospel truth that the melding of state and church is heresy. But maybe we should dust off at least some of Karl Barth's writings to help us clarify what we believe and how that belief informs our political convictions.

Earth Day 2025 and 1963 and 19963

 1963

We hereby demand more Jobs!

We hereby demand more Power!

Let us go on record right here and now that we hereby pledge

to Tame This Treacherous Torrent!

[applause.]

We hereby demand more Recreation!

We hereby demand more Reclamation!

We hereby demand more ECONOMIC GROWTH!

We hereby demand more…PROGRESS!

[thunderous applause.]

Spin the wheels. Faster. Hum whirl flash rumble hammer revolve

explode.

Grease the gears with outboard oil.

Grease the gears with the fat of beaver who aren’t any use.

Grease the gears with the blood of deer who aren’t any use.

Grease the gears with dissolving cottonwoods and the sickly

sweet perfume they wear when they drown.

Grease the gears with the stale slime on the shore as the banks

fall over and as the grass and the moss and the brush and

willows and reeds and seeds and pods sink underwater.

Grease the gears with my and your blood and the blood of

everyone who floated down and lost himself in the side

canyons and on the riffles and sand bars

And left part of himself on the walls.

We’re all under water now, and drowned.

We burst the ranks of the walking dead, and the killer goes

Unscathed.

19963

“No, it wasn’t always this nice.

Most always, yeah, but for a little while the water didn’t flow.”

He shook his antlers and went back to browsing.

Jerry and Renny Russell: On the Loose; Sierra Club-Ballentine Books, 1967.

-  -   -

From 1968 to 1970, I served as Assistant Pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Medford, Oregon. As a newly-minted young minister, one of my primary responsibilities was youth ministry. As my too-brief time in Medford neared its end, several of the senior highs and our adult advisors and I took a short back-packing trip into California’s Marble Mountain Wilderness.

As our trek ended, they presented me with a copy of On the Loose, in which those who made that hike wrote expressions of appreciation for my being with them. I’ve treasured the took and the memories it holds since then, but was recently reminded of it, and have reread it.

The two entries above struck me as even more appropriate for Earth Day, 2025, than perhaps ever before as our government abandons all pretense of caring for our home planet. I am quite sure they were written in response to the building of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, completed in 1966 despite long and passionate opposition.

Singing for joy while anger rages

I was privileged recently to be a chorus member in a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Church-goers who do not know the work itself likely know the main melody of the fourth movement because of the hymn, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” It’s a tune that’s hard to forget.

The words Beethoven (1770-1827) set to music are by German poet Frederich Schiller (1759-1805). Schiller and Beethoven were products of the Age of Enlightenment. Both the American and French revolutions happened in their lifetimes, and concern for the freedom and rights of all men was utmost in their minds. (Beethoven famously tore up his Third Symphony’s dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte when he learned Napoleon had crowned himself emperor.)

Schiller’s poem, “Ode to Joy,” is reflected in the words of the hymn. But the poem’s words are themselves worth our attention as our country is dragged into authoritarianism by a political party intent upon dividing us from one another in as many directions as it can.

What is the joy Schiller celebrates in his ode? What gives humankind joy? Schiller is very clear that joy comes in knowing that one day “all men will be brothers,” because “a loving Father” above us all has made us all, and intends for us to live as true friends to one another.

Not trusting and living according to such a hope for all is the enemy of joy.

That explains to me why the men and women who are today using their positions in government to divide us often look grim and angry. It is a sad business to despise and denigrate your siblings 24/7.

You cannot know joy when your hold on power depends on your ability to separate and isolate the members of your human family by class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or anything else you might dream up. When, in order to hold onto your position, you have to keep finding new targets of your fear and wrath, you must make sure no one ever sees a spontaneous spark of pure joy flash from your eyes. Your eyes must look like the eyes of a bird of prey, always searching for its next victim. You dare never relent!

Ever-fearful vigilance leaves no room in the human heart for joy, or even for simple happiness.

The words of Schiller’s poem invite his readers to see that all of us are siblings because all of us are offspring of one creative process (to put it in inclusive and non-theological terms). In our concert, Beethoven’s music pushed our voices into impossibly high ranges as if singing in the stratosphere would finally make us and those who heard us listen, and look, and see the truth to which custom and habit blind us.

Our chorus sang together the joyful hope that one day “alle Menschen werden Brüder”—that one day, all men will become brothers. We all must choose whether we will continue to nurse and feed anger fueled by division and distrust, or embrace the joy of loving the humanity that all of us share. The world is weary of anger. I dare to hope it is not too late for more of us to try the way of joy.

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.