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When I was in seminary, a professor said that ministry is like building a bridge across a canyon into which people are falling. He said we must help those we can in the short term, but never lose sight of the real solution. The real solution would be not only mending broken bones but building a bridge preventing them from being broken in the first place.
This advice has turned out to be true of justice work as well. As Jesus said, speaking of justice in one’s own country is nearly impossible. People hear any call to universal justice as an attack on their own partisan viewpoints. To illustrate this idea, imagine Germany had won World War 2 and could write its own history. When a nation is unrivaled, its history and its propaganda become one. So Germany could say it only built its empire because it was being provoked by nations like Poland. If history books mentioned the Holocaust at all, it would seen it as the aberrant act of a few individuals. Conversely, any terrorist acts by foreign individuals would be deemed as justification for bombing entire nations.

Children educated into that false history would be incapable of hearing alternative versions of events, because they would hear such challenges as sinister threats to their own identity as Germans. Every military action to put down the captive nations would be seen as defensive in nature. Those who opposed the third Reich would be seen as terrorists and insurrectionists even in their own land because German citizens would believe they had a duty to govern the lesser peoples of the world and could not be put on the same ethical scale as other nations.

A prophet born into that culture would have to build a bridge that awakened Germans to their own humanity and to the humanity of their captives in a way that could be heard by a defensive populous. Shaming the people would only make them retreat more deeply into their national identity. The prophet would have to compassionately and firmly build a bridge out of a whole worldview.

Back to the present, a prophet who came to us would have to point out that our nation is the most powerful military empire of all time. The prophet would have to help us realize we have been propagandized to believe we are superior to every other nation and have a duty to interfere in their affairs. But the prophet would also need to realize that anger and shame are poor tools for building the bridge that would awaken Americans to our own humanity. Compassion is the only bridge that would give us hearts strong enough to find a tear for our victims, minds strong enough to tell our own history truthfully, and give us an identity strong enough to step outside our national trance, and into our duty to all humankind.

I receieved a question just now asking if I had a suggestion for a good book on religious tolerance, perhaps focusing on the three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Here is my response:

Bookpeople has some great children books on understanding and respecting other faiths. We have some of them in our own church library.

You didn’t ask my opinion about this part so feel free to ignore it, but I think it is a mistake to think of religious unity within the three Abrahamic faiths. The fact that we haven’t gotten along is a pretty good indication that among the things we have in common is the root of religious violence.

What unifies humankind cannot be an accident of history or something we ourselves have invented even with divine help. What would unify humankind would be for all of us to find our common roots into nature and to discover and agree to those principles that would be fair to all people, not just the three Abrahamic traditions.

For the three Abrahamic religions to celebrate what makes them unique, might also be to celebrate what sets us at odds with nature and with each other. So I would find books for children that celebrate Buddhism Hinduism, Wiccan traditions, humanist and Atheist traditions. As long as other worldviews frighten us we are nearer to violence against one another.

Every religion has movements toward and away from these common roots. We must learn to maximize what makes religion rational and compassionate, and to minimize anyone’s claims to special revelation or status.

I’m in fine health, but you can’t do as many funerals as I do, without thinking about your own. I want to go on record as saying that, if I get hit by a meteor this week, I want some poems like this one by Mary Elizabeth Frye that celebrates the body’s return to nature:

Fear based appeals to masculinity are so interesting to me. Some of the appeals say that any man who isn’t afraid of facing life unarmed is a wimp. Some say that any man who doesn’t want to hide behind a giant army is a wimp.  And most importantly this time of year, some of the appeals to fear say that any Christian man who isn’t afraid of Christmas being stolen by non-Christians is a wimp.

Bill O’Reilly has been disappointed that more Christian ministers have not risen to protect the baby Jesus from the Jews and Muslims who have the temerity to want to celebratetheir own holidays instead of the Christian holiday.

When O’Reilly asked Jeffress why so few pastors have voiced the appropriate outrage at this war on the holiday,  Jeffress replied: “Wimpy pastors produce wimpy Christians, and that is why we are losing this culture war and I believe it’s time for pastors to say, you know, ‘I don’t care about controversy, I don’t care whether I’m going to lose church members, I don’t care about building a big church, I’m going to stand for truth regardless of what happens.’”

So the argument, as best I can follow it, goes: “Real men are terrified by any real or perceived threat that their leaders point out. Real men should panic and lash out whenever their leaders tell them to, or else their masculinity is suspect. But real courage means a willingness to not to let fear define our choices. And sharing the world isn’t an attack on the Christian message, it is the Christian message.
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So, for all of my fellow Christians whose idea of Christmas is rubbing our faith in someone else’s face, I have two words for you: “Bah! Humbug!”

As a Christian and a vegetarian I have ethical objections to eating the rich.

So when I read that a CEO from Hostess admitted that, after driving the company into the ground, executives took employee pensions and applied it to their own salaries, I laid down my knife and fork and decided I needed to understand these poor rich people. When my hamster ate her young, I didn’t punish her. Why should I hold these human beings to a higher standard than my beloved rodent? After all, had I not enjoyed Twinkies and their secret cream filling? Perhaps I needed to give these poor CEO’s a chance.

As I read on, I realized that my hamster’s cannibalism was relatively benign compared to the good folks at Hostess. My hamster ate its future because it was hungry, these folk ate other people’s future. Here’s how it all went down:

In classic Enron style, back in 2005 Hostess sent out a letter saying they’d just had a very, very profitable quarter.  Their stock jumped up. The CEO, Charles Sullivan, and many of the senior executives sold chunks of their stock.   The CEO and senior executives were making out big, and the workers were making a decent living.

At that time, one of the hostess workers – Mike Hummel, blogging as  bluebarnstormer over at Daily Kos – noted that he was making $48,000 a year, a bit over the US median household income, and had insurance and a pension.

Then, a few weeks later in 2005, came the letter saying that, oops, all of that profit had really been just an accounting error – the company was actually in trouble.  Although the CEO and the top guys had all made a nice killing selling the stock when it was high, and paying a maximum income tax on it of 15 percent because they used the Capital Gains loophole that Mitt Romney used to become a multimillionaire, they now wanted the workers to take a big pay cut.

Hummel notes that the “oops” letter became the justification for asking the workers to take a pay cut, which they agreed to, and his pay dropped from $48,000 a year in 2005 to $38,000 a year last year. But every year, $3 an hour of his compensation showed up in the worker’s pension fund instead of his paycheck. Year after year. With 18,000-plus workers, it was millions and millions of dollars. Dollars that the workers had paid in, at the rate of $3 per hour.

Then came the Bain-style takedown.  In order to strip the company down to its individual brands and sell them off, piece by piece, the company needed to bust the union.  The union said, “No,” so the company went to bankruptcy court – a method Bain and other vulture capitalists often use to kill off unions.

In the meantime, the CEO and senior executives were paying themselves handsome salaries and big bonuses.  And where was that money coming from? -Tom Hartmann, Alternet

Where indeed? It is expected that hostess products will re-emerge with new owners. And Twinkies will re-emerge like a mother hamster fattened by stolen the pensions of workers. How’s that for a secret cream filling?

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/twinkie-ceo-admits-company-took-employees-pensions-and-put-it

I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I do believe in transparency. I realize that every nation has information it does not wish its enemies to have. I also know leaders use that secrecy to hide corruption and illegal activities. What follows is a shortened version of an article by David Wallechinsky. What is in bold is his, followed by my understanding of why he wants the document released. The full article is linked below. While I don’t always agree with the author, I think it is important to realize that democracy is only a name if citizens do not  know what their goverment is doing.

There are nearly 634,000 people in the U.S. living without homes. It is estimated that the cost of eliminating homelessness would be around 20 billion dollars. That sounds like a lot of money until you consider the fact that it is less than our nation uses on Christmas decorations every year. The following link will lead you to a chart on Huffington Post that shows several expenditures our nation makes every year that would be enough to address homelessness if we really cared.

This year, as we gather in our warm homes illumined with garish lights, and listen to hymns about a baby born into cold darkness to bring hope to the poor, perhaps we can remember that the baby came not to put the lights of Christmas on our homes, but the light of compassion in our hearts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/11/homelessness-christmas-decorations_n_2276536.html

I woke this morning to an AOL headline, “Evidence Suggests Flood, Noah’s Ark Existed, Says Robert Ballard, Archaeologist Who Found Titanic.”

I wish I could gather all the people who want to “prove” the Bible into one place at one time. I would like to beg them to stop wasting their lives and setting their readers on a wild goose chase. If the Bible is true, it is symbolically true about the here and now. If the truth of the Bible is about something that happened long ago somewhere else, then it would be history or science, not revelation.

“Revelation” as the word for a kind of poetry that “reveals” aspects of our experience as human beings in the universe. Our lives are so short, and we are so small, that symbols can be very helpful. Symbolic poetry can reveal our interconnectedness with all. It can share with us the experience of many lifetimes to illumine our own brief span. The poetry of revelation can  bring us face to face with experiential truths we may not want to face. For example, that choosing power over love may feel safer, but domination carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Aesop once wrote a fable about a fox who was hungry. The fox saw a cluster of grapes in a tree and repeatedly jumped to reach them but each time fell short. Realizing he would never reach the grapes, the fox muttered, “they were probably sour anyway.” Now, the point of that story isn’t really about foxes at all. The story is about rationalization. So, even if we could find the remains of the fox to “prove” the story was true we would still be missing the whole point of the story.

To answer questions about “what” or “how” we must turn to science, but questions about “who” and “why” are subjective and require a different vocabulary, that of poetry and symbols. Even if someone finds Jesus’ face on a shroud, or Mary’s face on taco, even if they find the ark with Noah still in it, we would still come back to the question “who am I in the universe?” And to answer that question we need poetry and symbols, not science or history.

After thirty years in ministry, I can say with some certainty that the religion that matters most cannot be reduced to a book, a creed, a ritual, or code of rules. To me, the essence of religion is reverence shared in community.

I realize my definition is not very typical, but over the years the moments in my ministry that stand out like Everest have little to do with what most people call “religion.”

What I remember most are silent moments around the deathbed of a friend, shared by church members who canceled other important tasks to share that sacred moment. I remember young couples getting married realizing what was most important about their wedding had little to do with licenses or rings. It is wonderful to watch two people realize they are making a life covenant together in the presence of a community who will walk with them through the whole circle of life.

As I say, I know my definition is not typical, but when scientists who have shared life experiences come together in reverent awe before some discovery, I call that moment of shared wonderment “religion.” When artistic friends who have shared life stand before some great beauty of nature, I call that shared rapture “religion.” When compassion brings friends together to help the helpless, whether or not the idea of God occurs to anyone there, I would say and say it in the fullest sense, “that is religion.”