Every once in awhile, reflecting on a moment of time leads me to look for what I may have said in a sermon at Shepherd of the Hill. I post “Assurance in the Storm” in hope it may speak a word of assurance while living through the storm.
Gordon C. Stewart, sermon “Assurance in the Storm,” Brooklyn Park, MN, Sunday, November 12, 2023.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve said that if, God forbid, what happened in Germany would ever happen in America, I would stand up and speak out. It’s always been part of who I am. I made that commitment early on as a fledgling Christian who saw the flag and cross as the warp and woof of the same cloth. To be a disciple of Jesus was to be an American patriot, to take up my cross on behalf of democracy and freedom. As I saw it then, there was little, if any, distinction between standing for the Hallelujah Chorus on Easter and standing for the national anthem on the Fourth of July. Every school day began standing with hands over our hearts to face the flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished the pledge, we took our seats for the Bible reading and a prayer. Once a week we ducked under our desks in fear the Russians would hit Marple Elementary School with a nuclear strike.
That was a long time ago, but not so long ago to have forgotten. Flawed though it was, there an unspoken code which Robert Bellah later called the “American civil religion,” a societal consensus that knit us together in one commonwealth, an aspirational commitment to goodness, however strong the forces that threatened to shred it.
Humility was a virtue; arrogance was not. Pride goeth before the fall — don’t get too big for your britches — the foolish man built his house upon the sand, and the rains came down and the floods came up…. When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down in the place of honor . . . For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Honesty was a virtue; lying was not. Revenge was not a virtue. Blessed are the merciful . . . . You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you . . . . Glamour, greed, and wealth were not virtues. Blessed are the meek . . . . Your rich men are full of violence; your inhabitants speak lies, and their tongue is deceitful. Blessed are the poor. The rich man went away sorrowfully. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the poor…. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume, and thieves break in and steal… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; you cannot serve both God and wealth.
Robert Fulgrum’s Everything I Learned in Kindergarten gives insight into a social ethic akin to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, by which, in the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia), one navigates the “golden mean” between the opposites. The virtue of courage, for example, is the middle way between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity is the golden mean between the extremes of stinginess and profligacy. Confidence avoids the opposing extremes of arrogance and self-loathing.
Robert Fulgrum’s Everything I Learned in Kindergarten offers practical insight into a social ethic like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, by which, in the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia), one navigates the “golden mean” between the opposites. The virtue of courage, for example, is the middle way between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity is the golden mean between the extremes of stinginess and profligacy. Confidence avoids the opposing extremes of self-loathing and arrogance.
This moral consensus is rooted in classical Greek and Roman philosophy and culture every bit as much as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition and scripture. A Thesaurus lists the following adjectives to describe the most egregious extremes of unacceptable behavior and character to be avoided:
At Marple Elementary we feared bullies, but we did not respect them. Though we were often rude, crude, cruel, and mean, we knew better. We were taught that all of us are responsible to each other. We were accountable for our behavior. We were taught to be good sports. We didn’t like sore losers. Getting revenge was not a virtue.
What is happening to us? “I am your revenge.” When did vengeance become a virtue, while truth-telling, honesty, and personal accountability went out of style? How did it become acceptable to insult another person with belittling nicknames? How did attacks on courts, judges, prosecutors, and grand juries (ordinary people exercising their civic duty without favor or prejudice) become accepted practice in American daily life? How did it happen that the party of Abraham Lincoln has become the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Goetz, and a Freedom Caucus cowering in fear of the bully? How did criminal indictment become a Medal of Honor?
“I’m a legitimate person. I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s all a hoax.” Legitimacy is the question now. Can it honestly be said that a former president and the Grand Old Party are still legitimate players in a constitutional republic? I’m old now, but not too old to forget the promise I made as a child.
“What is your life?” asked the writer of the Epistle of James. “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes…. As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.” (from the Letter of James 3:13-17 NRSV.)
Marple Elementary School vanished. The wrecking ball of time demolished it, but some of its old students are still here to fulfill the promise we made to our young selves. If ever there was a time to stand up and speak out, that moment is now.
Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Minister (HR), author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (49 two-four page meditations of faith and public events), host of Views from the Edge: To See More Clearly (gordoncstewart.com); Brooklyn Park, MN, September 13, 2023.
Stepping back from my dismay that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has not yet indicted Donald Trump brings into view the wider context that suggests good reason to give AG Merrick Garland and the DOJ the benefit of the doubt.
In the executive branch of federal government, the Department of Justice is responsible for protecting and enforcing “the rule of law” but the DOJ cannot do its job by itself. The Attorney General would be foolish to indict Donald Trump without careful planning with other departments and agencies that bear responsibility for domestic civil order and national security. How, when, and where to take Donald Trump into custody are daunting questions the DOJ cannot answer alone. The likelihood of January 6 on steroids received cheers just a few days ago when Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene stoked the embers of January 6.
“I tell you what,” she said, “if Steve Bannon and I had organized that [i.e., January 6], we would have won, not to mention we would’ve been armed.”
Collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security, Capitol Police, Speaker of the House and Minority Leader, Senate Majority and Minority Leader, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees and the Secret Service would seem wise and prudent. Donald Trump is no longer in the Oval Office, but his fingerprints everywhere in the executive branch of government, in Congress, and in the judiciary. One slip, one leak could trigger a greater horror than January 6.
There are ‘moles’ — Far Right operatives — embedded in the institutions meant to protect the Constitution and we, the people. No interagency plan is secure. The DOJ is in a pickle. The pickle is green, but it’s not Kosher. It’s only green inside, with different shades of green we don’t see in ordinary times, green as in Marjorie … and Peter Navarro’s “The Green Bay Sweep.”
This week, the House Special Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will make public its referrals for criminal investigation and release its final report. The Republican Party, led by the Freedom Caucus, will call it a witch hunt. Jim Jordan, soon to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, will fulfill his pledge to investigate the investigators and impeach Attorney General Garland and the president who “stole the election” of 2020.
January 3, every elected member of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will take the Constitutional Oath of Office. “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion….”
The Constitution has already been undermined by Far Right members of Congress who cross their fingers while mouthing the words about domestic enemies. Once again, they will have no scruples taking the Oath without reservation or purpose of evasion.
Nothing feels sane these days because it isn’t. Doubt is always in order.‘Thinking outside the box’ requires us to keep our eyes fixed on what is happening inside the box — the institutions meant to uphold and preserve the rule of law, guard the nation from enemies foreign and domestic, and protect the future of democracy.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, Author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, December 18, 2022.
Thanks for listening.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness, 49 two to four page social commentaries on faith and the news (2017 Wipf and Stock), writing from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. April 16, 2022.
Coming Next Week: What Makes Us Tick?
It takes me a long time to see more clearly. Views from the Edge has been around 10 years now! Do I continue? And, if I continue, why would I, and what would I do differently going forward? The last few years have forced me to look again at who I am, what I do, and why. You might say it’s a vocational thing.
I am not a pundit. Nor do I wish to be one, though I sound like one too often. So I said to myself, get back to doing what you do best. Speak from faith, but not to faith, as Eric Ringham of Minnesota Public Radio put it when All Things Considered was still airing guest commentaries. What did Erick mean? Take your faith with you into the public square, but write for everyone. Don’t write That’s the essential work of public theology and a public theologian.
In that spirit I will seek to speak aloud the faith that is in me, the faith the drives me into the public square. Guest commentator Harry Strong will look more closely at Brian McLaren’s work on biases. We promised readers a fuller review of McLaren’s 13 measures of bias ( one’s and others). My commentaries will speak aloud the faith that is in me and its relation to American culture, the Prosperity Gospel and QAnon.
Thanks for dropping by,
Gordon, Nov. 5, 2021
After posting “The Incendiary President” yesterday, someone with better memory than I remembered the guest commentary aired by Minnesota Public Radio’s All Things Considered 10 years ago. Some things don’t change. The audio has vanished, but MPR’s archives preserves the text. In 2020, we are reaping the harvest of what we’ve sown.
Our nation is being poisoned by inflammatory rhetoric. How else does one explain the sending of a used condom to a Minnesota congresswoman, or the phone message left on Rep. Keith Ellison’s answering machine: “Timothy McVeigh said dead government workers are good government workers. Goodbye, Sambo”?
And that’s just here in Minnesota.
The success of a democratic republic depends upon the civility of its citizens and their respect for the offices of public servants, regardless of who occupies the office. Unless we clean up the language of our civil discourse, we are inviting unimaginable tragedy.
According to a Harris Interactive Poll taken this month, “more than 20 percent believe [President Obama] was not born in the United States, that he is ‘the domestic enemy’ of whom the U.S. Constitution speaks, that he is racist and aynti-American, and that he ‘wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.’ Fully 20 percent think he is ‘doing many of the things that Hitler did,’ while 14 percent believe ‘he may be the anti-Christ’ and 13 percent think ‘he wants the terrorists to win.'”
Though I distrust the percentages of any poll, whatever the real percentages of such views, this cocktail is lethal. But it is not new. The acrid taste is familiar to my generation We grew up in another time when the civil discourse was being poisoned.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy was dumping poison — instigating a national witch hunt for communists and communist sympathizers in government, the entertainment industry, and labor unions. In the spring of 1954, McCarthy’s crusade of insinuation, innuendo and guilt by association was brought to an end by journalist Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welsh, attorney for the U.S. Army.
Sharpening his teeth to devour his adversary by character assassination, McCarthy snarled and reminded Welch that one of Welch’s colleagues had belonged to an organization suspected of communist sympathies. Welch replied with words we all need to hear again: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Welch’s words took our breath away back then. They still do. A sense of decency is the only thing that will strengthen us to escape the politics of assassination and allow us to seek solutions in a difficult time. In Murrow’s words, “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from the fearful.”
Painting the president of the United States or members of Congress with McCarthy’s sloppy brush as domestic enemies — let alone as the Antichrist — gives deranged minds a license to send used condoms or hateful voicemails. Or even to plot an assassination.
I am a pastor. The use of Christian scripture to stoke the fires of fear and hate are the hardest to take. The Christian life takes evil seriously, but there may be no greater evil than ill-informed, loud spirituality. All the great religions hold some version of the essential tenet expressed in the First Letter of John, which, incidentally, is the only place in all of Christian Scripture that the idea of the Antichrist appears. “He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still.”
Where are the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welsh now? We need them again.
———————————–
Gordon C. Stewart, Minnesota Public Radio (91.1 FM), March 29, 2010. Re-posted September 4, 2020.
Support MPR or your nearest NPR affiliate.
Tony Schwartz knows Donald Trump in a way no one else does. Ten (10) days before the 2016 election, he shared his experience at an Oxford University public forum preserved on YouTube.
Click HERE to listen in on what you knew and didn’t know before listening to the ghost writer of The Art of the Deal, the book that put a 38 year-old real estate developer on the NYT Best Sellers list and onto the world stage.
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (49 two to four page social commentaries on faith and the news), Chaska, MN, April 4, 2020.
George Stephanopoulos’ Oval Office interview with President Trump is going viral. For the first time in history an American president sees nothing wrong with a candidate for public office accepting a foreign government’s dirt on an opponent.
Every member of Congress knows that’s illegal. However how wide the chasm between Republicans and Democrats on this president or the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (“Mueller Report”), there should be no question about this one. President Trump handed Congress an issue on which its members are sworn to act. Either the President was ignorant of the federal law that protects the integrity of the American electoral system or he was consciously defying the rule of law.
Today Republicans for the Rule of Law begins airing “THE OATH” — a TV ad calling on Congress to act. Click HERE for more on THE OATH. Bill Kristol, serves as director of Republicans for the Rule of Law
Today Republicans for the Rule of Law begins airing “THE OATH” — a TV ad calling on Congress to take action. Click HERE for more on THE OATH.
Bill Kristol, a conservative highly respected in Republican Party circles, is director of Republicans for the Rule of Law.
As always, leave a comment to join the conversation, if you wish.
If you’ve come by Views from the Edge, you know where we stand. If you haven’t visited us before today, Click our May 25 commentary In the winkling of an Eye: Impeach or Wait? Or click Impeach or Wait: It’s an Oath of Office Question for MinPost’s republication and reader comments.
King George III is remembered as the “mad” British king responsible for losing the American colonies that became the United States of America, a constitutional democratic republic. The cause of George’s illness continues to be a matter of dispute.
The new American constitutional republic turned its back on King George III [shown here in Allan Ramsay’s portrait “King George III in coronation robes”] and on any future British royals who might re-claim the American colonies. But old habits die hard, and, it seems, old Kings never die.
Mad kings like King George III occasionally re-appear in dark suits and red ties without their coronation robes when a free people forgets its origins. “Mad King George” disguises himself as the people’s sole protector against barbarian invaders who threaten his realm. “Mad King George” throws a fit as defender of the republic, and once again raids the nation’s treasury to protect an anxious people from the threat that comes from his head.
This morning, King George III, acting under the limited powers granted a president by the U.S. Constitution, declared a national emergency to stop the invasion from the southern border. Announcing his decision in the White House Rose Garden, he declared, as he had centuries before in England:
“Anyone who does not agree with me is a traitor and a scoundrel.”
I never believed in ghosts, but I do believe experience is our best teacher. Some ghosts come back to haunt us. After all these years, the ghost of “Mad King George” has emigrated to the colonies to reclaim the subjects he once lost.
— Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 16, 2019.
After a week of contentious struggle in the U.S. Senate that left the nation not just red and blue, but black-and-blue, I harkened back to “the administered consciousness” (Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man) that mutes Cain’s question after he had slain his brother Abel: “Am I, or am I not, my neighbor’s keeper?” And “who is my neighbor?”
Views from the Edge 