“We are nature; nature is us. We are NOT the exception to nature.” Rev. Gordon Stewart looks at basic religious assumptions of Western culture and the need to reinterpret the stories that got us here. He looks at the stories of creation, Cain and Abel, and the Wise Men who “departed by another way” as holding clues to the change in consciousness that is required in our time.
My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of baronry,
Of thee I sing.Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim’s pride,
On every mountainside,
Let freedom ring!
Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision for McCutcheon in McCutcheon et. al. v. Federal Election Commission makes very clear the view of the Court that is remaking America.
Freedom of speech is protected; it’s just that a few of us have a whole lot more of it than the rest of us. We all are “equally” protected by the Constitution no matter how unequal we are economically.
Most of us understand that money is not speech. Money is purchasing power. Money comes from our pockets; speech comes from our mouths. Those who represent us in Congress and in state legislatures do not represent us so long as their campaigns are funded by the “free speech” that comes from the pockets of the robber barons.
The sweet land of liberty is the land of barony.
“My country ’twas of thee.”
Only the most sweeping legislation to remove this unequal purchasing power from the electoral process can restore what we thought we had. But even if the miracle were to occur, this 5-4 Court will strike it down on the basis of its skewed interpretation of the First Amendment right to free speech.
My inbox is stacked up with funding solicitations. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. It depresses me. I don’t have the money, and, even if I had more, I would still have the sense that I would be throwing money into the wind. So I write. I speak. I throw into the wind words and sentences and paragraphs believing that ultimately the Wind is with us, the people. It’s my way of praying for the miracle that will give us back our country. I use what little free speech the Court has protected to effect the day when we will sing “America” that way it should be sung.
In the meantime I gain courage from the joyful spirit of the late Pete Seeger. I imagine Pete standing with his banjo outside the U.S. Supreme Court singing “God’s counting on me; God’s counting on you.”
It’s baseball season in the era of the iPhone.
There’s silence in the Minnesota Twins clubhouse, wrote StarTribune sports writer Jim Souhan last week while covering the Twins preparing for the new season during spring training.
The players sit quietly in front of their lockers before and after games glued to their iPhones. Right next to each other… on a TEAM. The clubhouse that once rocked with laughter, card games, and the loud voices of Twins leaders Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek on their way to a World Series is now like a morgue.
Teams that win have chemistry. You don’t build chemistry on iPhones. You don’t win a World Series playing with phantoms or staring into the pool for your own reflection – reading what the sports writers are saying about your individual performance. You win by bonding with the people around you. Men who play 162 games over a season find ways to keep the clubhouse loose. Boyish pranks like filling David Ortiz’s undershorts with ice so he wouldn’t notice that you had smeared his trousers with peanut butter. Stunts like reserve catcher Mike Redmond strutting naked through a tense clubhouse bellowing out a solo that cracks open the ice after a bad game. A baseball season is a long time, a long grind with losing streaks and winning streaks and long road trips where your only friends are your teammates.
Baseball teams that make it to the World Series are not quiet. They have some fun. They play. Not just on the field but on the buses, the planes, and in the restaurants and hotels where the team stays for a week or more far from home.
Twins fans can hope that when the new generation of Twins players sit by their lockers with their iPhones, they will come across Jim Souhan’s advice in this morning’s StarTRibune.
“Show us something this year.
“Heck, show us anything.
“Show us some fire, some grit; some passion, some promise.
“Show us that three years of unprofessional play was a detour, not a destination.
“Show us that you care about something other than paychecks and per diems.
Joe Mauer is the best player on the Twins, a future Hall of Famer. But he’s as emotionally flat as flatbread or a flat tire. He’s predictable. No strolls through the clubhouse singing an aria to break open the silence, no shaving cream pies, no jokes, no ice in another players under shorts or peanut butter, just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread eaten along in front of his locker, waiting to take hie new position at first base. If there’s passion in Joe, it doesn’t show.
Give us some passion. Bring on Kirk Gibson coming to the plate in the World Series on knees so bad he could barely walk, throwing his fire into a swing that pushed the ball over the fence with nothing but the pure grit from the fire in his belly, hobbling around the bases like a man recovering from hip surgery. Give me Kirk, Joe.
New rule: No iPhones, iPads, or any other such distractive devices in the clubhouse. Put ’em down. Get to know each other before you take the field. I’d wager that the first team to institute that rule would go the World Series not because they’re the most talented but because they care about each other and they care about playing as a team.
pregnancy
as your body
changes my dear
month by month by
month you become
more and more
eager more
often to be held
and touched and told
how happy i am you are
losing your girlish figure and
becoming rounder and rounder
as the new life grows within you
surprising us in spite of all we
have seen in many women
being mothers around
the round world for
years and years
and centuries
because for
us it is new
and quite
wonder
full
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, March 25, 2014
This sermon on Nicodemus, the good man who comes to Jesus in the night, was delivered last Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, Minnesota. Edward Tanner’s painting, referred to in the sermon, depicts Jesus sitting on the edge of a house rooftop with his back to the far horizon. Nicodemus is facing Jesus. Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again.
Once upon a time a pompous nobleman paid a call to the English Embassy in St. Petersburg, Russia. He walked into the office and demanded to see the ambassador immediately. “Pray, take a chair,” said the young attaché, “the ambassador will be here soon.”
The visitor took exception to the off-hand way he had been treated. “Young man, do you know who I am?” he demanded, and recited a list of his many titles and appointments.
The lowly attaché listened, paused and said, “Well then take two chairs.”
Pride, vanity, greed, self-deception, and grandiose illusion are part of the human condition…except, of course, for me.
We are creatures of the wilderness, wanderers and sojourners in time who have here no lasting city to dwell in. And so, as in the legend of the Genesis 11, we come upon the Plain of Shinar…or some other place to settle down and rid ourselves of anxiety…and we settle there as though we could build something permanent that would be a fortress against the uncertainties of the wilderness and the knowledge of ultimate vulnerability and ultimate dependence. We build our own cities and towers of Babel.
Yet there is something about us that still loves a wilderness. Something in us that knows that refusing the nomadic wilderness –“ and as they journeyed, they came upon the Plain of Shinar, and settled there” – is fraught with greater danger and social peril. Something in us knows better than to settle down on the Plain of Shinar to build something impervious to the dangers of the wilderness and time. Something in us knows that the brick and mortar will crumble, that the projects of pride, vanity, and greed will fall of their own weight, and that the high towers we build with the little boxes for God at the top of them are little more than signs of a vast illusion, the vain acts of species grandiosity. For in the Hebrew tale of the tower of Babel with its “top in the heavens,” God has to come down to see their high tower.
Every society and culture has its own version of the city and the tower of Babel. In every society there is at least the memory of the wilderness, a sense of call to recover our deeper selves as mortals who keep traveling beyond the politics and religiosity of pride, vanity, greed, self-deception, and grandiose illusions.
Perhaps that is why John the Baptist heads out to the wilderness – “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” –away from delusions and distractions of the city of Babel. And the people also went out to the wilderness and the Jordan River to go under the muddy Jordan waters to rise to the hope of a fresh beginning on the other side of the formative influences of Babel.
After the authorities have imprisoned John, Jesus asks the crowds what had drawn them to John in the wilderness. “What did you go out to see,” he asks them, “a reed shaken by the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? No. Those who wear soft clothing live in kings’ houses. What then, did you go out to see?”
Perhaps that is why Jesus begins his ministry in the wilderness. After submitting to John’s baptism, the Spirit grasped him and called him into it – “drove him into the wilderness” – away and apart from all distractions and illusions – back to the place where humankind lives before it “settles” to build the political-economic-religious tower, the impervious fortress and monuments to itsel fn the Plain of Shinar.
Those who wish to follow Jesus and those who would learn the lesson of the legend of the people who settled too early on the Plain of Shinar are called to go out into the wilderness to restart the long spiritual journey that stopped too early.
For the fact we deny is that underneath all our steel, glass, and technology, we are still animals – mortals subject to the most primitive yearnings, vulnerable creatures who possess nothing.
In his poem “The Wilderness” American poet laureate Carl Sandberg realized a great truth long before it came into vogue.
There s a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and loop and double-cross.
There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fish in me … I know I came from salt blue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with porpoises … before land was … before the water went down … before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis.
There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.
There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.
O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where; it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.
Jesus walked in our wilderness to live authentically and faithfully as a human being with all the beasts that were part of his nature and are part of our nature. When in the wilderness of John he had gone down into the waters of the Jordan and the voice from heaven declared him “my beloved Son in whom I take pleasure,” immediately the spirit drove him into the wilderness. And he was there for forty days among the wild beasts, and angels ministered to him.
By God’s grace and power, may it be so also with us.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all be this well trained in the things that bring joy to others and to ourselves? This is 10-month-old Barclay wanting to please the Alpha Dog and the Beta Dog. The commands were sit, down, roll over, off (which means “leave it”), come, and heel.
Views from the Edge 