Category Archives: Religion

Just a bunch of hypocrites

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“It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.” – George Whitefield (1714-1770)

Many folks who remain in the churches have learned to live with poor sermons. Others have heard them and moved on.

William Sloane Coffin memorial photo

William Sloane Coffin memorial photo

One of those who had given up met one of America’s great preachers one day in a casual encounter.

“I don’t go to church any more.” he said, “They’re just a bunch of hypocrites!” To which William Sloane Coffin replied, “You bet. We are! And there’s always room for one more.”

William Sloan Coffin’s sermons always gave offense. As Chaplain at Yale, it was his pulpit that sparked and led the campus civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. It was Coffin who presiding at the burning of draft cards. It was this offensive preacher who co-founded Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam and served as leader of SANE/FREEZE, America’s largest movement for global nuclear disarmament. Coffin became Senior Minister of Riverside Church in NYC, one of the nation’s great preaching churches built for Harry Emerson Fosdick, the pacifist preacher thrown out of his previous congregation for sermons that status quo maintainers found offensive.

In the parlance of William Sloane Coffin, the well known statement that “the church is a hospital for sinners; not a museum for saints” [variously attributed to Augustine of Hippo, St. John Chrysostom, Abigail van Buren, and others] might be re-rendered “the church is a hospital for hypocrites; not a museum or a mutual congratulations society for the sinless.”

In a future post Views from the Edge will reflect on the American religious landscape in light of Whitefield’s observation and this retired preacher’s search for a new church home.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 7, 2015.

Their Blood Runs in Mine

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Our friend Dennis Aubrey posted “The Destruction of History” today on Via Lucis, lamenting the latest in the sordid history of religion destroying history and art.

Dennis Aubrey and P.J. McKey love beauty, history, and the religious architecture of Gothic and Romanesque churches they photograph in Europe. Sometimes, like today, they express a profound despair over the destruction done in the name of religion.

“Now we have word that ISIS has defaced and destroyed artifacts in Mosul, including Assyrian statues of winged bulls from the Mesopotamian cities of Ninevah and Nimrud. Video released by the newest barbarians to assault the cultural history of humanity shows a man using a power drill to deface the works.

“As so often throughout history, the excuse was religion. ‘The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him.’  How many times in our work at Via Lucis have we read variations of these words from Catholics, Huguenots, Calvinists, revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and military leaders?”

Years ago during a sabbatical in St. Andrews, Scotland, the destruction wrought there by my Scottish reformation forebear John Knox and his followers chilled my soul. The people who bred and raised me – Presbyterians of Scottish descent and religious sentiment – did this. They took the commandment to have no other gods as license to destroy, maim, and burn church art and heretics. Their blood runs in mine. Their DNA is mine. And, if confession has any meaning or merit whatsoever, the children of such crimes must say we’re sorry. Really sorry. Repentant. No more destruction. No more following the orders of bully prophets, no matter whose name they claim to honor.

Thank you, Dennis, for your post. On behalf of my ancestors and in the spirit of spirituality of beauty, love, and peace on the other side of destruction, thank you for your artist’s eyes. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for the hope in something better in a barbaric time.

– Rev. Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian minister Honorably Retired, Chaska, MN, March 4, 2015.

Jewish Voices for Peace

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Jewish Voices for Peace (“JVP”) asked its constituency to thank those who will pay a price for their public refusal to attend Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before the Joint Session of Congress yesterday. Here’s the letter:

Thank you for taking a principled stance against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s inappropriate speech.

Netanyahu, who has presided over a 23% increase in illegal settlement building and a brutal assault on the people of Gaza that killed over 2,000 Palestinians, should not have been given this platform to speak to US elected leaders.

It was unacceptable for a foreign leader who has repeatedly snubbed US officials to come to Washington to directly challenge President Obama’s diplomatic efforts, promote his own reelection campaign, and try to drag us into war.

Thank you for courageously taking a stand against the speech.

The Board and staff of Jewish Voices for Peace fully recognize the continuing cancer of Anti-Semitism. Like the Prime Minister and Elie Wiesel, they, too, would surely say “Never again!” to the Holocaust (“Shoa”). They, too, are concerned for the survival of Israel. They, too, love Israel, but they love it differently, the way the Hebrew prophets did – in the way that lovers quarrel, critically and self-critically.

U.S. Senator Al Franken (MN) is one of those who yesterday exercised the lover’s quarrel. By not taking his seat, perhaps he could hear the sound of a different clapping from Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Micah.

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” – Micah 6:8

As one of your constituents, thank you, Senator Franken for standing tall for justice,mercy, and humility.

 

Slender, cross-eyed, and handsome

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The Rev'd George Whitefield

The Rev’d George Whitefield

“It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.” – George Whitefield (1714-1770)

A preacher’s search for a new church home following retirement is often an exercise in sin, a prolonged, prideful discontent with the state of the churches one visits.

George Whitefield seems to have spent his whole ministry offending and displeasing, although the huge crowds he drew outside the church walls lead me question how offensive or displeasing his sermons were.

An honest word from a real human being 

Perhaps the photograph of this heralded Anglican priest, “the Father of the Great Awakening,” and this PBS documentary description of him illuminate why the preacher who offended and made his hearers displeased with themselves drew the crowds.

“Slender, cross-eyed and handsome, George Whitefield was an Anglican priest and powerful orator with charismatic appeal.”

While others were reading their sermons from prepared manuscripts, George knew that good preaching is different from a public reading at the book store. He memorized his sermons or spoke extemporaneously with gestures considered too dramatic by the more stoic New England preachers. But one suspects there may have been something more to his success. Perhaps his eyes communicated a real human being, someone unable to hide behind being merely slender or handsome, a man whom frail and vulnerable human beings didn’t mind hearing an honest word that offended and or made them displeased with their own posturing games of pretense.

In honor of George Whitefield, a recently retired pretentious Presbyterian preacher worshiped at a nearby Episcopal Church. The word from the pulpit was deliciously real. He didn’t commit the preacher’s sin. He’s going back next Sunday.

Église Abbatiale Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes (Dennis Aubrey)

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Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture is a Views from the Edge favorite because of its ability to synthesize art, history, theology, and social commentary centering on the deeper things of the human spirit and the awe of Gothic and Romanesque architecture. In the midst of this post, Dennis Aubrey draws attention to the lion which appears to be spewing foliage. I proposed to Dennis that perhaps the lion is “eating straw like the ox” in Isaiah 11 and 65, Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, an interpretation that seems to go well with the church’s sculptural rendering Jesus’ Parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25.

Église Abbatiale Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes’s Last Judgment scene suggests an artistic interpretation that eliminates the divide between sheep (saved) and goats (damned), a pictorial witness to the final judgment as universal forgiveness and salvation. To enjoy the original, complete with photographs, scroll down and click on “View the Original”.

Dennis Aubrey's avatar

The church of Saint Jouin de Marnes is known as the Vézelay Poitevin, a tribute to its importance and beauty. It was named after a 4th century hermit named Jovinus from Mouterre-Silly near Loudun. Desiring a retired, contemplative life, he settled on a site of a Roman camp near the road from Poitiers to Angers, ten miles southwest of Mouterre-Silly. The site was called Ension and was in the swamps of the river Dives which flows two miles to the east. In 342 he founded an oratory church which attracted a modest religious community. By the time he died in 370, Jovinus had achieved a great reputation for sanctity and miracles. Over the years, his small community grew in importance, but eventually there was another decline.

In 843, however, the monks of Saint-Martin-de-Vertou in Brittany were forced to abandon their monastery by depredations of the Vikings. With the help…

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Verse – The Trinity?

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One form, but multiplicity…
Motion, immutability…
Can we glimpse God.
So weird, so odd,
In limerick theology?!

Is the Divine One one or three?
Is He a he or She a she?
A comedy!
A mystery!
One was and is and Three will be!

Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015

Magic Wars

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There’s no record the wars of the Bible
Found in Exodus are that reliable
Historically.
Fortunately
Hebrews found Holy Land bloodlessly…

(This written as a FaceBook comment in response to a comment protesting a post by the brilliant & perverse Nina Paley about her newest feature length animated movie, “Seder Masochism“–retelling the Exodus story, like she retold the Hindu tales in “Sita Sings the Blues”, portions of the latest, and all of the former can be seen FREE many places on line!)

– Steve Shoemaker,  Urbana, IL, Feb. 22, 2015

God, Guns and Gravy

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J.H. is an astute student of partisan politics. He wrote this response to yesterday’s post on the Confederate flag flying in northern Florida:

Lincoln, TR, Eisenhower, could not be nominated for anything in the old south Republican, Tea Party havens. The Southern Strategy worked for Reagan. The Civil Rights & Voting Rights bills caused a huge shift from Johnson’s Democratic Party.

Reagan’s opening speech for his re-election campaign was in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He called it “New Federalism.”

That and the Robertson Christian Coalition & Jerry Falwell – Cal Thomas Moral Majority linked the evangelicals to the Catholic’s Right to Life. The Reagan, Robertson-Ralph Reed, Falwell-Thomas team crushed the tradition of Lincoln in the Republican Party and kept the battle flag flying. The Obama is a Muslim, he hates America, under-educated Faux Views watching angry white over 50 man is represented in the South.

“God, Guns & Gravy” is alive under that flag.

J. H.

 

 

The prayer from hell

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June Griffin, Cumberland Missionary Society, praying invocation opening Tennessee Senate session, 2015.

June Griffin, Cumberland Missionary Society, praying invocation opening Tennessee Senate session, 2015.

Not even Saturday Night Live or Bill Maher could make up.

Open the Link to Christian minister opens Tennessee Senate with prayer and SCROLL DOWN to watch the video of June Griffin’s anti-government Prayer of Invocation opening a session of the Tennessee Senate.

There used to institutions for people like this.  I used to visit the patients there, but those state hospitals were closed years ago. Today they’re sitting legislators or offering the invocation praying for a Christian-American version of ISIL.

 

 

 

Life begins on the other side of despair

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It was Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist novelist, philosopher, and playwright, who declined the Nobel Peace Price for Literature in 1964, who said it. “Life begins on the other side of despair.”

Sartre’s statement resonates with those who have stood at the edge of the abyss of the loss of life’s meaning. Some don’t make it to the other side. Some move to the other side of the abyss with no faith but faith in themselves to create meaning they once ascribed to God or some objective moral order. Others arrive on the other side with their inherited faith not only deconstructed, but re-constructed. I am one of the latter.

Reading of the shooting suicide of a 27-year-old Iraq War veteran philosophy student in the library at Mankato State University takes me back to Sartre’s statement about life and despair. Timothy Lee Anderson was an honorably discharged U.S. Army gunner in Iraq. His picture in The Daily Mail shows him in an Iraqi combat zone with his weapon. In the background of the photo, Iraqi women in traditional Muslim dress appear to be crossing the street. How, I ask, does a guy who served as a gunner in the Iraq War choose philosophy as his major when he comes home to the U.S.A.?

Philosophy is not a popular choice these days. Unlike computer science, it’s not job- related. The word ‘philosophy’ derives from two Greek words meaning love (philo) and wisdom (sophia). Philosophy is the love of, and the search for, wisdom.

Wisdom is born of experience, not inheritance. It’s not hard to imagine the dashed, unexamined, inherited convictions of a young Army recruit: a world dependent on American goodness and might; an America with a manifest destiny in the global order; an exceptional nation privileged and responsible, whether by religious or political creed, to bring its blessings to the rest of an ignorant, unenlightened, uncivilized, and sometimes terroristic and defiant world.

Nor is it hard to imagine a soldier’s despair upon return, reflecting on his experience in search of greater wisdom among the philosophers. The early reports of Timothy Lee Anderson’s life experience point to a less than comfortable homecoming with arrests for marijuana and violation of an order for protection. The gun shot he fired at himself on the second floor of the Mankato State University library was a shot of despair, whatever the immediate reasons or circumstances.

The great sorrow is a life that ended too early on the despair side of the yawning abyss of collapsed meaning. It remains to the survivors and the rest of us who look with sadness on Timothy’s tragic departure to learn that claims to religious-national exceptionalism and wisdom go together about as well as bombs and day-care, guns and libraries.

– Gordon C. Stewart, February 3, 2015.