Going on TV again in support of marriage equality. Celebrating one year in NY state.
I was interviewed by Rachel at WUTR yesterday afternoon. Click the link below to see the report:
1 Year Anniversary of Same-Sex Marriage in New York State
Space Station Video
If this video from the International Space Station doesn’t make you want to weep for joy and wonder, you may want to check with your doctor because there’s a chance that you might actually be a block of wood.
Caption Contest!
Do your worst…
Winner gets… I don’t know, we’ll figure that out later.
God Loves Your Enemies
This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.
Excerpt from chapter 4 of the book:
Dear child of God, if we are truly to understand that God loves all of us, we must recognize that He loves our enemies, too. God does not share our hatred, no matter what the offense we have endured. We try to claim God for ourselves and for our cause, but God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion. And our prejudices, regardless of whether they are based on religion, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else, are absolutely and utterly ridiculous in God’s eyes.
This past week was one of those weeks for me when current events caused me to rethink my entire Sunday sermon. We’ve been making our way through this book, God Has A Dream by Desmond Tutu, and I was already planning to preach this week on chapter 4: “God Loves Your Enemies”. I had planned on using historical figures and events in order to illustrate my points about justice and forgiveness, but then we all woke up yesterday morning to news reports about a brutal massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. With 71 people wounded or killed, some of them children as young as 6, this is now being called the worst shooting spree in U.S. history.
Integrity prevents me from ignoring this awful headline while I extol the virtue of forgiveness in your presence. I’m a firm believer that anything we talk about, sing about, or pray about “in here” (i.e. in this sanctuary on a Sunday morning) has to matter “out there” (i.e. in places like Aurora, Colorado) or else it just doesn’t matter.
In moments like this, I think justice and forgiveness matter now more than ever. However, unlike some other preachers you might hear, I won’t be offering you Bible verses or bumper-sticker slogans designed to help you get around or get over horrible tragedies like this. Instead, just like we’ve been doing these past few weeks, we’ll be talking today about the kinds of spiritual values that can help us get through the horror.
The main value I want to talk about today is one that guided Archbishop Tutu and the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in their work of rebuilding South Africa after the fall of the racist Apartheid regime. They knew that if they were going to create a new society where people of all races could live together in freedom and equality as “the rainbow nation”, then they would need a different model of justice than the one most commonly associated with western culture.
You see, the model of justice to which we westerners are most accustomed is technically referred to as retributive justice. You might not have heard that term before, but you are almost certainly familiar with the concept. Retributive justice is built on the principle of crime & punishment. “You do the crime, you do the time” is one example of retributive justice. “An eye for an eye” is another example of the same principle. The idea behind retributive justice is that, if a perpetrator suffers to the same extent that he or she has caused others to suffer, then justice has been served.
On the whole, this isn’t a bad starting point for thinking about justice. It’s based, first of all, on the principle of reciprocation. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is a positive example of the principle of retributive justice in action. Many of our professional and business relationships are solidly built upon this idea. The promise of reciprocation provides people with an incentive for cooperation, since they can accomplish more together than they can alone. Reciprocation works out pretty well for most people, most of the time.
When it comes to crime and punishment, this same principle seems to apply as a good foundation for fairness: “If you give me something, then I owe you something of equal value; If you take something from me, then you owe me something of equal value.” All in all, it sounds pretty fair.
Over time, we’ve managed to build a complex criminal justice system around this basic idea of fairness. The development of governments means that some offenses aren’t committed just against individual people, but against society as a whole. We’ve come up with multiple ways for offenders to pay back the debt they owe to society: through paying fines, performing mandatory acts of community service, serving time in prison, or (in extreme cases) paying with their lives. Some other cultures who operate with a retributive model of justice still make use of physical suffering as a means of restoring the balance of fairness. In those societies, thieves have their hands cut off and delinquents are publicly whipped, although most people in our country find the ideas of maiming and torture distasteful, to say the least.
So, while the basic principle of retributive justice tends to work pretty well for most people, most of the time, it does have its limits. There comes a point when we need to go beyond it in order to serve the causes of real peace and justice.
For example: what do you do when a perpetrator commits a crime so heinous that no amount of retribution can restore the balance of fairness? I think we’re all finding ourselves in just such a situation this weekend as headlines pour in about the massacre in Colorado. 12 people are dead and dozens more wounded. Even if James Holmes (the shooter in Colorado) was to receive the death penalty, there’s no way for him to be killed 12 times. It’s just not possible for the balance of fairness to ever be restored through retribution in a case like this one.
Here is another example: what do you do when retribution brings no peace? Larry Whicher, whose brother Alan was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, was present for the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the man responsible for that attack. After it was over and McVeigh was dead, Larry said, ”I expected more of a sense of closure and relief than I had. It was weird.” “An eye for an eye” was not enough to serve justice and bring peace to Larry Whicher.
Jesus seemed to have an inner sense that retribution was not enough to right all the wrongs of this world. In defiance of his own culture and religious tradition, he called upon his followers to move beyond the “eye for an eye” principle of justice. He seemed to indicate that something more is needed if people truly want to find peace in the wake of injustice. What could that “something more” be?
Desmond Tutu ventures a guess, drawing on his own cultural traditions. He says:
We have a had a jurisprudence, a penology in Africa that was not retributive but restorative. In the traditional setting, when people quarreled the main intention was not to punish the miscreant but to restore good relations. For Africa is concerned, or has traditionally been concerned, about the wholeness of relationship. That is something we need in our world, a world that is polarized, a world that is fragmented, a world that destroys people. It is also something we need in our families and friendships, for restoration heals and makes whole while retribution only wounds and divides us from one another.
The end-result, the goal, of the justice process, according to Desmond Tutu, is not punishment but forgiveness. Justice is served and peace is found when genuine friendship between victim and offender is able to emerge.
This is difficult. Forgiveness is far more difficult than mere punishment. Some might even call it impossible. But if we are going to call ourselves Christians and followers of Jesus, then we have to at least allow for the possibility that he was onto something when he said what he said about moving beyond “an eye for an eye.” The call to Christian peacemaking is a call to trust that forgiveness is much more foundational to the fabric of the universe than retribution. We might even say that forgiveness lies at the very heart of God. Therefore, when we mere mortals choose to walk the hard road of forgiveness, we aren’t just laying the foundation for greater peace in our hearts and justice in the world, we are drawing near to God. In fact, I would venture to say that we are never closer to God than when we find it in our hearts to forgive those who have sinned against us. Forgiveness is the single hardest, yet most worthwhile, calling of the spiritual life.
While I was preparing for this sermon, I came across the story of Rais Bhuiyan, a gas station attendant from Bangladesh, living in Texas in 2002. One day, he was working behind the counter when a man came in and pointed a shotgun at his face.
The man with the gun asked him, “Where are you from?” Before Rais could answer, the man shot him in the face at point blank range. Miraculously, he survived, although he was horribly scarred and lost his right eye. The man with the gun, Mark Stroman, had already killed two other men in the same way. Mark called himself “the Arab Slayer” and claimed to be carrying out these killings as vengeance for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
While he was recovering in the hospital, Rais Bhuiyan promised Allah that he would make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca if he was allowed to live. As it turned out, Rais lived and made good on his promise to Allah. During his pilgrimage, Rais came to the conclusion that God was calling him to forgive the man who shot him. From then on, Rais formed a relationship with Mark Stroman and tried to stop his execution.
“This campaign is all about passion, forgiveness, tolerance and healing. We should not stay in the past, we must move forward,” Rais said, “If I can forgive my offender who tried to take my life, we can all work together to forgive each other and move forward and take a new narrative on the 10th anniversary of 11 September.”
In response to this, Mark Stroman had this to say, “”I tried to kill this man, and this man is now trying to save my life. This man is inspiring to me. Here it is, the attacker and the attackee, you know, pulling together. The hate has to stop – one second of hate will cause a lifetime of misery. I’ve done that – it’s wrong, and if me and Rais can reach one person, mission accomplished.”
Ultimately, Rais Bhuiyan’s attempts to stop Mark Stroman’s execution failed and Mark was put to death by lethal injection. The article I read was published on the day he died and I was shocked when I looked up at the date it was published: July 20, 2011. Exactly one year to the day before James Holmes opened fire on a movie theater full of people in Aurora, Colorado.
This is what restorative justice looks like. This is what we get when we move beyond “an eye for an eye”.
I’m not saying that it comes easily or quickly. The road to forgiveness is a long one. It’s full of twists and turns and pot-holes along the way. Sometimes, it feels like you’ve been traveling it forever with no end in sight.
When I think about the struggle to forgive, I think about the closing scene from the movie Dead Man Walking, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. The scene takes place at the funeral of Matthew Poncelet, a young man who has just been put to death for murder. Sister Helen, the main character of the film, looks up to see Mr. Delacroix, the father of the murder victim, standing on the outskirts of the cemetery during the service. After it’s over, she walks up and talks to him.
He says to her, “I don’t know why I’m here. I got a lot of hate. I don’t have your faith.”
Sister Helen responds, “It’s not faith. I wish it were that easy. It’s work. Maybe we could help each other find a way out of the hate.”
“I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t think so.” And then he walks away.
But then, in the very last shot of the movie, we see Sister Helen walking into a church. The camera peers through one of the windows from the outside. Inside the church, we see Sister Helen and Mr. Delacroix kneeling together in prayer. I love this final image. Here we have a man who is not there yet, when it comes to forgiveness, but is walking the path and working through the problems. I love this image because I think it’s a perfect analogy for where we are today: you and I, together in this church.
Only two short days since a brutal massacre, you and I are not there yet when it comes to forgiveness. Yet, we have come together this morning because we choose to have faith in “that which is within each of us and yet greater than all of us.” We have come here today because we suspect that there is more to this universe than senseless violence, that life itself has meaning, and that the powers of death and hatred will not have the final word. We have come here today following a “holy hunch” that there is more at work within us and around us than the blind forces of reciprocation and retribution. When it comes to forgiveness, we may not be there yet, but we are walking the path, participating in the process, and working through the problems.
We are here today, we are together, and we are not alone. That fact, by itself, gives me hope and strength enough to keep going on the journey toward forgiveness.
I love you.
God loves you, God loves each and every person who was in that movie theater on Friday, God even loves James Holmes, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Be blessed and be a blessing.
Being Church
Found on Facebook:
Too Cool To Not Share
Reblogging my own post in order to own up to a mistake. Read the note at the bottom.
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.
.
Note: I recently discovered that I unintentionally plagiarized this poem. Call it a case of unconscious memory. When I first wrote this post, I thought it was original to me, but then I went back and picked up the book EverythingBelongs by Richard Rohr and found this same poem within its pages. Oh, the embarrassment! So, mea culpa: this poem is not original to me, but can be found on page 62 of Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. Apologies.
Truth
Truth is not some absolute and unchanging philosophical, moral, or political position. Rather, truth is a “living reality” that everything exists in communion with God. Ultimately, this insight is linked back with transformative compassion for the world – that which Christian tradition calls wisdom.
-excerpted from Christianity for the Rest of Us, by Diana Butler Bass
God Loves You As You Are
This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.
We’re in week 3 of our summer series: God Has A Dream
based on the book by Desmond Tutu
Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org
I John 4:7-21
Excerpt from the book:
Dear Child of God, in our world it is often hard to remember that God loves you just as you are. God loves you not because you are good. No, God loves you, period. God loves us not because we are lovable. No, we are lovable precisely because God loves us. It is marvelous when you come to understand that you are accepted for who you are, apart from any achievement. It is so liberating.
We too often feel that God’s love for us is conditional like our love is for others. We have made God in our image rather than seeing ourselves in God’s image. We have belittled God’s love and turned our lives into an endless attempt to prove our worth. Ours is a culture of achievement, and we carry over these attitudes to our relationship with God. We work ourselves to a frazzle trying to impress everyone including God. We try to earn God’s approval and acceptance. We cannot believe that our relationship with God, our standing before God, has got nothing to do with our performance, our works.
Someone has said: “There is nothing you can do to make God love you more, for God already loves you perfectly and totally.” But more wonderfully, there is nothing you can do to make God love you less—absolutely nothing, for God already loves you and will love you forever.
I’ve been told more than once that, practically speaking, every preacher really only has one sermon inside of him/herself that gets preached over and over again from ordination until retirement. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but if it is, and if I get to pick what that sermon is, then I think would pick something like this: “God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.”
Those of you who worship with us regularly are probably chuckling to yourself right now, because that’s how we end our sermons here every week. I don’t mind admitting that it’s almost like a kind of slogan. Hey, if you’re gonna have a slogan, it might as well be something like that, right?
But sometimes, I get a little scared that we use it so much that it loses its meaning for us. God’s love is probably the single most overlooked of all the divine attributes. It’s usually the first thing that kids learn in Sunday School: “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.” We hear it so often at church that we take it for granted as a basic part of our theology. We never let the truth God’s love seep into us and soak us to our very bones.
Can you imagine what it would be like if we took showers in the same way that we reflect on the love of God? We’d step behind the curtain and turn the water on for all of five seconds and then get out to dry. If a person just did that every day, could he or she honestly say that he or she had “bathed” and was “clean”? No, we wouldn’t say that. Would you want to sit beside that person at church? No, I wouldn’t either. But, if that’s the case, why then would we expect people to want to come and sit beside us in our churches when we Christians, who claim to believe that “God is love”, don’t ever give that love more than five seconds of tacit consideration in our weekly liturgy? Can we really say that we’ve “soaked” our souls in God’s unconditional love?
This morning, I want to invite you to go deeper with me into this mystery. I want us to spend some time kicking back together in the Jacuzzi of divine grace. We’ll know that we’ve been in there long enough when it starts to change us. In the same way that soaking in water wrinkles our skin and makes us smell like soap or chlorine, soaking in God’s love changes the way we “smell” to the world.
As Archbishop Tutu points out in the book, we live in a society that thinks of itself as a “meritocracy”. The American Dream says that anyone who works hard and does what is right can reach the top of the ladder of success. To be fair, there is something very liberating in this ideal. In ages past, you had to born into an aristocratic family in order to have access to resources and opportunities. There are some who would argue that we still live in such a society. But, in a conscious philosophical sense, America refers to itself as “the land of opportunity”, where anyone can potentially become the President or an astronaut, if they want it and work hard for it. This is a good ideal to have. It speaks volumes about the American commitment to liberty and equality. As my dentist once observed, “The United States is the first country in history to be founded on a philosophy rather than an ethnicity.”
However, even when this philosophical system is functioning properly (which isn’t all the time), it can still leave us with a conscious or subconscious disdain for the “losers” and “failures” of the world. Even though we know better, we often assume that those who are poor must somehow deserve their suffering. We don’t like handing out our spare change to homeless people because we think “they’ll just spend it all on booze or drugs.” We don’t like hearing about people on welfare because we think they might be somehow “cheating the system” while the rest of us subsidize their laziness. Well, I’ve spent lots of time with people who are homeless or on welfare. Yes, some of them do abuse drugs and others do stay at home when they are physically capable of working, but not all of them do so. Many really need the extra help that they receive. In fact, most of them actually need a whole lot more help than they’re currently getting. I’ve also discovered that even those who are “abusing the system” in one way or another are doing so for reasons that are more complicated than mere laziness. Having listened to their stories on more than one occasion, I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I would not being doing the exact same thing that they are doing, given the right circumstances.
Our American meritocracy inclines us to look down on those who fail in life. “They made their own bed,” we say, “so let them lie in it.” But I don’t think we often stop to think and realize that, for many of them, that bed is a deathbed. Many of them are so caught up in cycles of poverty or addiction that they can no longer “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.” When we dismiss them as worthless, we are functionally taking away their basic human dignity and saying to them, “You don’t deserve to live.” These children of God, our brothers and sisters, are being given the death penalty for their mistakes. Those who snort, “Just get a job, you lazy bum” as they pass by are casting themselves in the role of executioner.
I recently heard a rant by a popular figure whose name I will not mention. This person says:
“There comes a time when compassion can cause disaster. If you open your home to scores of homeless folks, you will not have a home for long…
…Personal responsibility is usually the driving force behind success.
But there are millions of Americans who are not responsible, and the cold truth is that the rest of us cannot afford to support them.
Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own. But [some people] don’t make distinctions like that. For them, the baby Jesus wants us to provide no matter what the circumstance. Being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self-destructive.
The Lord helps those who help themselves. Does he not?”
“The Lord helps those who help themselves” could be the unofficial motto of our American meritocracy. Many people think this proverb comes from the Bible. Let me assure you that it does not. Believe me, I’ve looked.
These words from this contemporary public figure strike me as eerily similar to the words of another passage that I came across while I was studying for my ordination exams in the Presbyterian Church:
“We know something of Christian duty and love toward the helpless, but we demand the protection of the nation from the incapable and inferior… We want [a] Church which roots in the national character, and we repudiate the spirit of a Christian cosmopolitanism.”
This passage comes to us from the so-called “German Christians” who ardently supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and subsequent dominance over Germany during the Nazi era.
In this week’s chapter of Desmond Tutu’s book, our friend the Archbishop shares with us a passage from Harald Ofstad’s book, Our Contempt for Weakness:
If we examine ourselves in the mirror of Nazism we see our own traits—enlarged but so revealing for that very reason. Anti-Semitism is not the essence Nazism. Its essence is the doctrine that the ‘strong’ shall rule over the ‘weak,’ and that the ‘weak’ are contemptible because they are ‘weak.’ Nazism did not originate in the Germany of the 1930s and did not disappear in 1945. It expresses deeply rooted tendencies, which are constantly alive in and around us. We admire those who fight their way to the top, and are contemptuous of the loser. We consider ourselves rid of Nazism because we abhor the gas chambers. We forget that they were the ultimate product of a philosophy which despised the ‘weak’ and admired the ‘strong.’
The brutality of Nazism was not just the product of certain historical conditions in Germany. It was also the consequence of a certain philosophy of life, a given set of norms, values and perceptions of reality. We are not living in their situation but we practice many of the same norms and evaluations.
This passage literally scares the hell out of me. I’m not just swearing here. When I look at my own culturally shaped ideals and realize that they might lead me to one day condone in my country what happened in Germany during the Third Reich, I want to tear them out. I wish I could go through some kind of exorcism that would protect me from that demonic and infernal part of myself. I feel motivated to look deeper into myself and hold tighter to what I believe is the heartbeat of the universe: the biblical truth that “God is love.”
Friends, the Lord does not help those who help themselves. The Lord helps the helpless. The Lord helps those who have made such a mess of their lives through their own fault that they cannot put themselves back together again and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The Lord helps the undeserving, the losers, the failures, and the washouts. The Lord helps the cowards, the deserters, the deniers, the betrayers, and the sinners. The Lord helps the lost, the lonely, the losers, the left-out, the lazy, the let-down, the lustful, the lascivious, the lecherous, the lushes, the loveless, the lackluster, the lame-brained, the listless, and the low-down. In short, brothers and sisters, the Lord helps us.
As Archbishop Tutu tells us, “None of us meet the norms or standards for success in all ways… we all feel inadequate in some way.” He says elsewhere that we are all subsidized by God’s free grace. He continues:
At the risk of getting myself into trouble, I will say that in a sense it actually doesn’t matter what we do. For nothing we can do, no matter how bad, will change God’s love for us…
Just like a mother loves her child no matter what, so god loves you even if you don’t succeed, even if you don’t win. Our capitalist society despises weakness, vulnerability, and failure, but God knows that failure is an inevitable part of life and that weakness and vulnerability are a part of creaturehood. They are part of what makes us human. It is through this weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul…
When we begin to realize that God loves us with our weakness, with our vulnerability, with our failures, we can begin to accept them as an inevitable part of our human life. We can love others—with their failures—when we stop despising ourselves—because of our failures. We can begin to have compassion for ourselves and see that even our sinfulness is our acting out of our own suffering. Then we can see that others’ sinfulness is their own acting out of their suffering.
As you can see, friends, our soaking in God’s love changes the way that we look at the world. We are tempted to breeze past these simple words like, “God is love”, and take them for granted because they strike us as so irrelevant to what we think of as “the real world”. We think of compassion as weak and useless. Our culture teaches separate our lives into these semi-schizophrenic categories of the public and private spheres. In the private sphere, we’re supposed to tell our kids that compassion is important and that they are loved unconditionally. In the public sphere, we’re supposed to live by the principles of “winner take all” and “survival of the fittest”. And because our culture measures “success” (and, by extension, the total value of our lives) by what we achieve in the public sphere, we tend to think of those cut-throat values as the way we should live in “the real world”. So you see, our tendency to dismiss and ignore God’s unconditional love for us is not simply a slip of the memory. I would go so far as to say that it is the result of a spiritual conspiracy that is currently choking the life out of our civilization.
If we are to live the kind of “abundant life” that Christ tells we are meant for, the main thing we need to do is turn our attention, in an intentional and extended sense, toward the truth that God loves each one of us unconditionally and without proviso or qualification. That, my friends, is the truth that can set our hearts on fire and change this world forever.
God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.
May this truth never become so routine that it loses its meaning for you. May it soak you to the bone, cleanse your soul, and change your world from the inside out.
Be blessed and be a blessing!
Why You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral
My wife sent me this brilliant piece this morning. The original author is Aaron Freeman. It first appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2005. As you’ve probably figured out by now, I tend to identify myself as a somewhat religious person. The professional language used here is not the one in which I’m trained, but I nevertheless find it beautiful and inspiring. I would even go so far as to say that the physicist and the minister (this one, anyway) are describing, each in their own way, the same grand mystery of ultimate reality, in which we all live, move, and have our being.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 