Category Archives: Religion

God of the Profits or God of the Prophets?

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October 14, 2012 at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska

Text: Amos 5: 6-7, 10-15, 18-24

This morning I ask you which of the gods we will bow down and serve: the god of the profits, the organizing principle for those who were at ease in prophet Amos’ time, or the God of the Prophets who thundered against excessive profits in the marketplace?

Some will say that’s too simple.

Amos didn’t think so. Isaiah didn’t think so. Micah didn’t think so. Jeremiah didn’t think so. Jesus didn’t think so. Mohandas Gandhi didn’t think so.  We’ve heard from Amos and from Jesus.  Here’s what Gandhi called the Seven Deadly Sins of Society. The first sin on Gandhi’s list is

  • “Wealth without Work,” and the last is
  • “Worship without Sacrifice.”

Less than one month before we go to the polls to cast our votes for candidates for public office, I put before you from this pulpit the question of which God you will serve.

Will you commit yourself, or re-commit yourself, to the God of the biblical prophets, or will you line up your life and your values behind the god who thinks there’s no problem with wealth without work, worship without sacrifice?

I have never been more troubled in my life than I am today. It’s not because belong to a political party. It’s not that I want my team to win and the other team to lose. It’s because I believe in the God of the Prophets. I wake up every morning to scripture. And what do the scriptures say?

There were two sets of scripture that informed Jesus’ life. The Torah (also referred to as “The Law”) and the Hebrew prophets. “All the Law and the prophets are summed up in this: You shall love the Lord your God…and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus put the Voice of the prophets in the center of Jewish faith and life. Often he sounds like Amos.

We celebrate the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain. We read in Luke’s Gospel:

“He lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said,

  • ‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
  • ‘Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.
  • ’Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.”

And our hearts rejoice. Because some of us, like Jesus’ first disciples, live in poverty; some of us know what it is to be hungry. Some of us are weeping now, wondering when we will laugh again.

Jesus consoles us. And these words of consolation are lifted up in the churches, as they should be.

But you can’t stop reading there if you want to follow Jesus. For in the very next lines of Jesus’ Sermon to his disciples, he echoes the thundering voice of the prophet Amos and his Woes:

  • “’But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.
  • “’Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.
  • “’Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.’”?

Jesus is calling it like it is. He is describing the revolution of economics, political power, and redistribution of wealth that is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is an economy – God’s economy. The economy preached by the biblical prophets and Jesus. The world of our best dreams where no stomach is empty, no one goes hungry; no one goes without health care. No one lives on the street under the viaduct, or in a car. No longer will those who have laugh at or pass by those who don’t.

The message of Jesus does console. It comforts the afflicted. But it also afflicts the comfortable. It causes trouble. It makes waves. It speaks the truth. It cuts through the lies that keep the privileged privileged.  It calls us to take responsibility in the here and now – to implement in the most practical ways the summary of the Law and Prophets. The over-riding question for the Christian is HOW to love my neighbor as myself? How to live now in the economy of God as the protest of hope and love within the economy of greed, disparity. How to live NOW as those whose worship DOES mean sacrifice.

A businessman notorious for his ruthless pursuit of profits once announced to Mark Twain that before he died, he meant to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. “I will climb Mount Sinai,” said the ruthless profiteer, “and I will read the Ten Commandments out loud from the top of Mount Sinai.”

“I have a better idea,” said Twain, with a twinkle in his eye. “You don’t have to go to the Holy Land. You could stay home in Boston and keep the commandments.”

Earlier in his life, Samuel Clemens (who became known as Mark Twin) had been a young reporter in Virginia City.  He was walking along the street one day with a cigar box under his arm when a wealthy lady acquaintance said to him scornfully, “You promised me that you would give up smoking.”

“Madam,” he said, “this box does not contain cigars. I’m just moving.

Today we are asked to make a decision of stewardship. In three weeks we will make other decisions in the voting booth. As we consider these decisions, remember Amos yourself which God of the Prophets/Profits your decisions will honor. Will your action bear witness to the economy of greed and extravagance, the world of Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins?

  • Wealth without Work
  • Pleasure without Conscience
  • Science without Humanity
  • Knowledge without Character
  • Politics without Principle
  • Commerce without Morality
  • Worship without Sacrifice

Or will your decisions proclaim with Jesus the different Kingdom for which every heart longs to celebrate?

In conclusion, a writer named Ted Kooser invites you to think of yourself as a Daddy Longlegs.  You know the Daddy Longlegs, those strange creatures with those tiny little brown bodies like a small brown pill, walking across the floor on those eight long legs.

“Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,

A life rides, sealed in a small brown pill

That skims along over the basement floor

Wrapped up in a single obsession.

Eight legs reach out like the master ribs

Of a web in which some thought is caught

Dead center in its own small world,

A thought so far from the touch of things

That we can only guess at it.

If mine, it would be the secret dream

Of walking alone across the floor of my life

With an easy grace, and love enough

To live on at the center of myself.

You don’t have to go to the Holy Land to read the commandments from Mt. Sinai. Walking on your eight long legs across the floor of your life, you can walk with an easy grace, and with love enough to live on at the center of yourself…You can make love real today right here in Minnesota.

Mitt Romney

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Moral Mormon, yes, at Church and home.

Is there, though, a hint that he objects

To the rules that women have the same

Trouble with the Priesthood that kept blacks

….

Restricted out of the Church for years?

Or that Morman kindness to the poor

Might be a good model for the U. S.

Nation?  Can we even up the score?

Everybody knows he’s handsome, smart,

Yes, and  rich–but does he have a heart?

– An acrostic verse received this morning from Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL.

The “Nones” at the coffee shop

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The “Nones” are the fastest growing group in the United States religious landscape. Time publicized the story in its March 12, 2012 issue.

Last week Rose French, religion editor of the Star Tribune here in Minneapolis, personalized the Pew Forum research in  “Fastest growing group in religious circles? The ‘Nones’”  (10.15.12).

The story begins with Marz Haney, a young woman who grew up attending an evangelical Christian church every Sunday. But she had questions. And, it appears, the church she attended wasn’t big enough for her big questions.

Questions and doubts are not enemies of faith. They are the friends of faith. They refine, correct, expand, and reform faith. They challenge what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith.”

Sartre, of course, thought that all religious faith was bad. Some of the “Nones” agree with Sartre. Others still profess faith or “spirituality” but live it outside the boundaries of the traditional institutions that no longer hold meaning for them.

“I had some doubts all along. I was sort of in continual doubt about my personal salvation,” says Marz Haney.

That Marz and others have concluded that spirituality/faith/religion is all about personal salvation brings me great sadness. That she would think so is a reflection of the right turn that began to dominate the American religious landscape beginning in the 1950s.

To many of the “Nones”, fear and hate have become the face of Christianity. Sometime in the late ’50s, the televangelists began to change the face of Christianity to the world. Those who tuned in watched and heard the voices of snake oil salesmen selling purple handkerchiefs that would heal, if only you purchased one and put the hanky on your television screen while the evangelist prayed for you. Intelligent faith was turned into an oxymoron. One either is intelligent and without faith, or full of faith and without intelligence.

At the coffee shop recently, the proprietor who greets me “Good Morning, Your Reverence” with a smile, invited me to join a conversation he was having with two other coffee drinkers. “You can help us here,” Mike said. His grin told me this was a set up. “If God created the world, who created God?”

“Hmmm. Interesting question. Really good question. Really, really, really good question. It assumes, of course, that everything is created. That’s the way we think. If something’s here, it has to have been created. But that begs the question endlessly. So….maybe some things are not created. Whatever that is ultimate reality. In theology, the word we use for the ultimately real is ‘God’.”

Several weeks later a young couple sat at the table at The School of the Wise, a coffee shop and wine bar humorously named after the euphemism for speakeasies during the era of Prohibition. The couple had sent a message through the church’s website inviting a conversation about their needs and whether Shepherd of the Hill Church might be a good fit.

They were “Nones”. I love this couple! They made my evening. So honest. So genuine. So open. Wondering and hoping that perhaps Shepherd of the Hill might be a place unlike that mega-church up the road whose very small print declares belief in “the intention, eternal punishment of the wicked”. They were cautious but feeling the need for a community that welcomes rather than scorns, unites rather than divides, thinks as well as feels, and moves them beyond self-absorption in the comfortable but confining precincts of economic privilege.Sitting in a coffee shop with The New York Times on Sunday Morning over a cup of coffee was no longer enough.

Which, of course, is what the gospel is about, as I understand it.

Jesus had one message: “the Kingdom of God/Heaven is at hand.”  A “Kingdom” is a society, a commonwealth. A society is people in relationship. “At hand” means “Now!” The kingdom of Heaven was something like the heaven the young couple and I were experiencing right there at the back table in The School for the Wise – real people in real relationships, exploring ultimate reality over delicious mocha-mint-lattes, looking beyond our privilege and celebrating the magnificence of a moment that is at the very heart of  creation as we know it.

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Exhaustion

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I’m exhausted…spiritually exhaused. They’re exhausting me…all the emails…and the voice mails telling me that if I don’t give one more dime one more time…my candidate is going to lose…and the world will come to an end…and it’s going to be… my fault.

Anyone else feeling that way?

I’m also torn up inside. I’m trying to be civil…trying to understand why this election is even close…and trying not to be haughty and naughty.

I’m missing my afternoon nap. I love my afternoon nap with Maggie and Sebastian, my buddies here at home. They still sleep like logs…the way I used to…before the Presidential debates and emails that clog my inbox and the phone calls from chummy best friends I’ve never met who want just one more donation of “just $5” so so-and-so knows s/he can count on me.

It’s an illusion. Anyone else feeling that way?

Meantwhile…between the emails and the phone calls…I visit the dying…in hospice care…who live on the edge of existence itself…who sip comfort from the deeper wells. My spirit is strangely quieted. Strangely calmed.  We sit in silence. I read a psalm or two. We…the dying…and I are refreshed. Ready for a nap.

I go home and stumble upon a prayer by Wendell Berry “To the Holy Spirit”:

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,

Who in necessity and in bounty wait,

Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken,

By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.”

 

Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, North Point Press, 1964.

The First Duty of Love

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Paul Johannes Tillich

This morning’s crossword quote is from theologian Paul Tillich:

“The first duty of love is to listen.”

To learn more about Paul Tillich click THIS LINK.

Most weeks I return to the works of Tillich. Paul Tillich has rescued many a faith, including my own, when doubt had been mis-perceived to be faith’s enemy.

“Doubt is not the enemy of faith; it is one element of faith.”

– Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith

Tillich’s statement about faith and doubt go hand-in-glove with listening as the first duty of love. If you missed “Staying Together” on Views from the Edge’s, scroll down.  Steve’s poem puts these two Tillich quotes into practice of listening. Here’s a sip:

“Listen, learn, respect, rephrase, repeat

before you even start to speak.”

What Divinity Is

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Steve Shoemaker wrote this in response to Wallace Stevens’ poem “What Is Divinity” posted today on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Click HERE for the Wallace Stevens poem and the Stevens’ bio posted today on The Writer’s Almanac.

         What Divinity Is

    (A response to Wallace Stevens)

…

The Madonna who pulls back just enough

of swaddling cloth to show the Magi what

had bled so recently on our behalf.

The twelve-year-old who finds a place to sit

among the wise (but disobedient

to both his searching, mystified parents.)

The  young man with the twelve who heals, confronts

the proud, turns water into wine, asks who

is without sin?  The one who shows the way

right here on earth to live in peace with neighbors,

enemies even…a human who

took bread and fish and shared it with the crowd…

the man who died alone crying for God.

 

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Oct. 2, 2012

America and “the Fall”

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WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange addressed the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. His speech is reminiscent of American theologian William Stringfellow who declared in 1968 that we were already living under the rule of “extra-constitutional powers and authorities” that operate covertly in the shadows of democracy.

Watch WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking by satellite from Ecuador where he lives in exile. Unedited Politics deserves credit for posting this.  Of particular interest are references to President Obama that hold his Administration accountable while seeming to grant some credit and holding out hope that he might change things.

Julian Assange Speech to UN General Assembly: “US Trying to Erect National Secrecy Regime” – 9/26/12.

William Stringfellow

William Stringfellow – author, lay theologian, lawyer among the poor and defense attorney for Bishop James Pike and the Berrigan Brothers (Frs. Phil and Dan) – wrote the following in 1973:

“In this world as it is, in the era of time, in common history – in the epoch of the Fall, as the Bible designates this scene every principality has the elemental significance of death, notwithstanding contrary appearances. This is eminently so with respect to nations, for nations are, as Revelation indicates, the archetypical principalities… All virtues which nations elevate and idolize – military prowess, material abundance, technological sophistication, imperial grandeur, high culture, racial pride, trade, prosperity, conquest, sport, language, or whatever – are

subservient to the moral presence of death in the nation. And it is the same with the surrogate nations – the other principalities like corporations and conglomerates, ideologies and bureaucracies, and authorities and institutions of every name and description…

“The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America… Since the climax of America’s glorification as a nation – in the ostensible American victory in World War II, most lucidly and aptly symbolized in Hiroshima – Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for

the most part, been consigned to despair… Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is a pervasive Babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century, America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary connotations, is being annihilated.”

– An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, William Stringfellow, 1973. (Bolded print added by Views from the Edge)

WikiLeaks at the United Nations 9/26/12 – a Reflection

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Watch WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking by satellite from Ecuador where he lives in political assylum. Unedited Politics deserves credit for posting this. It’s chilling. But it’s important. Of particular interest are references to President Obama that both hold him accountable and seem to hold out hope he might still do what lies beyond the power of the Oval Office.

After watching the video, read William Stringfellow’s words in An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, published in 1973. Stringfellow argued that “extra-constitutional” powers and authorities had already walked off the republic.

Julian Assange Speech to UN General Assembly: “US Trying to Erect National Secrecy Regime” – 9/26/12.

William Stringfellow – author, lay theologian, lawyer among the poor and defense attorney for Bishop James Pike and the Berrigan Brothers (Frs. Phil and Dan) – wrote the following in 1973:

“In this world as it is, in the era of time, in common history – in the epoch of the Fall, as the Bible designates this scene every principality has the elemental significance of death, notwithstanding contrary appearances. This is eminently so with respect to nations, for nations are, as Revelation indicates, the archetypical principalities… All virtues which nations elevate and idolize – military prowess, material abundance, technological sophistication, imperial grandeur, high culture, racial pride, trade, prosperity, conquest, sport, language, or whatever – are

subservient to the moral presence of death in the nation. And it is the same with the surrogate nations – the other principalities like corporations and conglomerates, ideologies and bureaucracies, and authorities and institutions of every name and description…

“The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America… Since the climax of America’s glorification as a nation – in the ostensible American victory in World War II, most lucidly and aptly symbolized in Hiroshima – Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for

the most part, been consigned to despair… Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is a pervasive Babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century, America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary connotations, is being annihilated.”

– An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, William Stringfellow, 1973. (Bolded print added by Views from the Edge)

Color and Saint Austremoine (PJ McKey)

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Via Lucis often makes my day. Today was one of them. Click and enjoy.

Color and Saint Austremoine (PJ McKey).