Musings

The Assault Against Higher Education: How Shall Progressive Christians Respond?

Dear ZOE colleagues:

After some summer rest, and when we begin to plan our programming for fall, I hope we can strategize about how our ministries can take leadership roles on our campuses in response to the current attacks by the Trump administration against colleges and universities.  Defunding research, dismantling DEI, shuttering cultural and queer student centers, denying visas to foreign students – these are just opening salvos in the culture war that is being waged against the institutions where we minister.

Very many secular colleges and universities in the US were created by progressive Christians.  So we have a stake in this struggle - a unique voice to add to the resistance.  Ours are often the only Christian groups on campus that fully support the mission of secular higher education.  I doubt that any of us want "viewpoint diversity" that results in putting 6-day creationism alongside evolution in university earth science courses!  We don't want government funding for research to be held hostage by the current government's political agenda.  We can raise our witness in defense of independent, secular higher education with shared governance by faculty with tenure protections, and real free speech for students and staff. 

Trump's administration is loaded with high-level officials who are all-in for the Seven Mountains Mandate  - a crusade for domination of all spheres of culture by right-wing Christianity.  We are the alternative Christian voice on our campuses.  How shall we make our voice heard, on campus and in the wider public sphere, to resist this fundamentalist, totalitarian agenda - with our own positive vision?

Our ministries have protected student club status, with professional staff support - so we are uniquely able to offer programs on campus that the universities themselves are being pressured to abandon.  We can host speakers, events, vigils, and programs on and off campus – effectively “adopting” ethnic, cultural and queer groups that have been cut or abandoned.  Our ministries housed in campus-adjacent churches are in a great position to house and support such efforts.  This is already happening at a number of our campuses.  Check out what Collegiate Presbyterian and its “The Vine” campus ministry are doing right next door to the University of Iowa at Ames – serving as a meeting place for students and faculty to keep campus diversity and inclusion work alive.

Part of the challenge before us is to craft a vision of the “beloved community” we want to prevail on our campuses.  Toward this end, as a conversation starter, have a look at this piece in the New Yorker re: pluralism as an alternative, perhaps more politically viable framework for pursuing diversity and inclusion on campuses.  Eboo Patel of Interfaith America is in the forefront of this response to the current crisis: see a video of him on the subject here.  We are perfectly positioned to be leaders of this conversation on our campuses - as progressive, religiously pluralistic Christians.  

In August, let’s do a ZOE ZOOM on this subject, and get the conversation going in earnest, so we can go into fall semester/quarter with at least the beginnings of a shared strategy.  Let me know your thoughts about how we can proceed!

I believe that if we can step out boldly and publicly as defenders of secular higher education, a higher level of support for our ministries will follow. 

Jim Burklo

Executive Director, ZOE – zoeoncampus.com – [email protected]

Showing Respect for our Soldiers

 

I do not make this statement lightly: this past week, fascism arrived in America.  The moment came when Trump mobilized the Marines to put down protests against the ICE raids in Los Angeles.  It was bad enough that he took over the state Guard for this purpose, but it is absolutely unacceptable for our outward-facing armed forces to be used against our own civilians, as is common in authoritarian regimes.  All of us, across the spectrum of political opinion, must protest this with vigor. 

On Tuesday, Roberta and I went to downtown LA to participate in an interfaith vigil against mass deportation.  For miles, we drove through the heart of the city to Grand Park, without incident and without any sign of trouble or damage.  It was a big, peaceful, spiritually-uplifting event.  I stood on the platform with a big and diverse group of faith leaders.  The mayor spoke and prayed calmly and eloquently. In the crowd there were a few young folks dressed in black with black head coverings.  But they were surrounded by peaceful people: there was no trouble for them to exploit.  The prayers and messages stirred our souls. The churches and temples and mosques and gurdwaras of LA are united in defense of our immigrant neighbors. There have been pockets of violence and destruction in the city, which LAPD has managed without need of outside help.

The people of LA, the people of California, will not be subjugated by Trump, will not be intimidated, and will not stop showing up in support of long-term, law-abiding migrants when ICE barges in. And we won't let our brothers and sisters in uniform be manipulated for political purposes.

We must speak with one voice against turning our men and women in uniform into partisan pawns of an oligarch.  They did not sign up for this when they took their oath to defend the Constitution.  Trump recently spoke to soldiers at Ft Bragg and whipped them up to boo against the Democrats - a grotesque violation of military rules against the politicization of our armed forces, whose job it is to defend all of us, regardless of our political orientations.  MAGA swag was on sale at the event, on the Army base property. 

Nor did our soldiers assent to a religious dogma when they volunteered for service.  But that is what is now being imposed on them.  On May 21, the Secretary of Defense convened a fundamentalist Christian worship in the Pentagon during work hours.  The pastor of Pete Hegseth's church led the service.  The church belongs to a network led by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who advocates for theocratic domination of government and society.  (Read all about him here... he wants voting to be by household, with the male head casting the vote.)  Hegseth offered no alternative worship or prayer service to include the very many other faiths represented in our nation's military.

The message is loud and clear:  if you want to get ahead in Trump's military, you'll need to at least pay lip service to fundamentalist Protestant Christianity.  This has been implicit in many quarters of the military for a long time.  Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been struggling to assure true religious pluralism in the armed forces for decades. But the Trump administration is taking the country backwards.   Hegseth is making the implicit illegal presumption explicit.

The best way we can show respect to the people in uniform by whom we may be confronted on Saturday, June 14 is to protest the fascist regime that is now giving them orders.  Wave the US flag, smile at them, and speak truth to the power that is abusing them, just as it abuses women, trans and queer folks, immigrants, and the rest of us!

Money and God

What is money?  Cryptocurrencies push the question up in our faces.  The “crypto” in cryptocurrency means “hidden” – obscured.  But in a way, all money is cryptocurrency.  What is a dollar, really?   Ultimately a dollar is worth what people believe it is worth – it has little intrinsic value in itself.  Now that we have a president who is spectacularly inept at managing the economy with his wild turnarounds on tariff policy, and now that Congress is about to add trillion dollars to the government budget deficit, which is funded by selling dollar bonds to governments and investors all over the world, amounting to the government "printing" more money  -  people around the planet are beginning to question the stability of our currency.  The value of a dollar is a figment of the collective imagination of humans.  It is a habit of mind that can change.  The dollar is getting more “crypto” by the day. 
 
When you get down to the root of it all, money is the quantification of trust, of faith.  There’s something religious about it, eh?  You put a twenty dollar bill in your wallet and you trust that it will be worth something when you go to the store.  You trust your employer to tells its bank to send a number to your bank, and you send numbers from your bank to the banks of the companies that provide you with the stuff you want to pay for.  Our cash is printed with the words “In God we trust”, promoting the fiction that there is supernatural backing for its value.  A backing that most assuredly isn’t there, whether or not you believe in God!  If we were honest, we’d have these words printed on our money:  “Just trust that this piece of paper is worth something”. 
 
Money isn’t divine.  But there is something divine about maintaining trust and faith in each other.  Children trusting their parents to take care of them – that is a sacred trust.  Neighbors trusting neighbors to pitch in and help in times of crisis – that’s a sacred kind of trust.  The trust we put in each other in our churches is holy.  And the institutions we create to enable our economy to run smoothly and predictably – that too necessitates a sacred trust. 
 
The global financial system, precarious as it is, backed up by little but habits of mind, inspires both awe and suspicion - especially now, as we are getting a look behind the curtain to see the very flawed humans turning the cranks and pushing the levers that generate its illusions.  The weirdness of cryptocurrency, and the peculiar characters behind it, practically beg us to do what Dorothy did in exposing the Wizard of Oz for who he really was.
 
How do we change the money system so that it serves humanity more equitably and humanely, without tearing away the delicate filaments of trust that hold it all together?  At its root it is a religious question, a spiritual question.  How we make and spend money – that’s a matter of morality.  How we structure the way money is created and how money flows – that’s a matter of a morality founded on spirituality.  How does love move us to gain and distribute money – both as individuals and as a collective? 
 
Money itself is not sacred, nor are the banks and financial institutions through which it moves, but the trust that gives money value has a sacred quality which we must hold precious even as we demand reforms to the financial system to achieve greater economic justice.  We’re going backwards on this front today, but soon enough we’ll have the chance to elect politicians who can move us forward on economic justice.
 
In the gospel story about him, people hated Zacchaeus because of his ill-gotten gains.  Tax collectors in the Roman empire effectively were robbers.  They were given an amount they had to deliver to the Romans and they were set loose to gather it up by hook or crook, backed up at sword-point, and keep whatever extra they collected in the process.  We can be sure that he set neighbors against neighbors, getting them to rat each other out about who had more money than who, so he could extort as much as possible from all of them.  Zacchaeus was a cog in a machine that tore apart the filaments of trust between people.  So folks were boggled when Jesus invited himself to dinner with this social pariah.  Jesus inspired him to pay back what he had extorted from people.  Jesus’ mission was to restore trust among people, to inspire people to forge communal relationships that would enable them to thrive.  His encounter with Zacchaeus was a microcosmic reform of the money system of the day, moving its needle in the direction of economic justice.  Let’s do our parts toward the same end today!

Mending the World

(A cartoon from Iran, after a terrible earthquake there....)

 

Every hole and tear and sign of wear in a beloved piece of clothing tells a story.  As do the dings and scars and wrinkles and divots on our bodies.  They make us who we are, they recite our sagas for us without words. 

I know a lot of folks who have tattoos, and my theory is that they haven’t had enough damage done to their bodies, haven’t experienced enough wear and tear to have any visual stories to tell, so they feel compelled to tat their skin in order to tattle their tales!

In Britain during the Second World War, Coventry Cathedral, dating back to the 14^th century, was blasted mostly to bits by the German Luftwaffe.  What took many decades to build, and seconds to destroy, took decades more to mend.  Just like what’s happening today – in just 100 days, whole swathes of essential government services were wiped out, and when this disastrous administration finally ends, it is going to take years to mend what’s been ripped and torn asunder.  Coventry Cathedral today is a striking modern edifice that beautifully incorporates the remains of the medieval structure.  The mending restored the cathedral to its function, while letting its long and rich story remain visible.  I pray that when our current political debacle is over, the mending process will memorialize what has happened, so that our people will remember the damage done and the price paid.

Arty, cool-looking patches on old clothing satisfy our eyes but also touch our souls, resonate with our hearts, because they are powerful metaphors for our human experience of striving and suffering and redemption and renewal.  Seeing patches on holes in the knees of Levi’s remind us of the strain and sweat we exerted while we were wearing them – gardening, building, fixing, cleaning, working.  The patches are badges of honor for our labors that resulted in the holes and tears. 

The sacred myth of the Christian gospel tells us that after Jesus resurrected, he walked and talked like he did before his crucifixion – but he wasn’t quite the same.  The wounds that killed him were still visible on his hands and feet and side, though they’d apparently mended enough that he wasn’t bleeding any more.  You could say that Jesus was tatted out!  And those tats told his tale. 

So let us wear our visible signs of wear and tear with deep respect for what we’ve been through, for all we had to deal with to get where we are today.  Those divots and dings give us character, and let us revel in it.

Of course, some of the most significant dings and divots and wears and tears are those we suffer within – ones that aren’t immediately visible.  But one way or another, these invisible marks will become visible.  And often the best patches for inner invisible tears are visible tears.  I remember plenty of times when my tears have mended my heart.  And when I’ve been a witness to the same in others. 

When we mend what has been torn, there’s usually no use using the same kind of cloth as the item needing repair.  The idea isn’t to make it look the same as it did before it wore out.  Often that’s a hopeless enterprise.  Might as well make it obvious that you’ve mended it – but be creative about how you do it.  Japanese culture has much to teach us about artful mending.  There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a broken bowl is made whole with lacquer dusted with gold holding the pieces together, highlighting and beautifying the cracks.  A kintsugi is worth more than the bowl before it was broken! And sashiko mending is a Japanese art form, embodying the principle of wabi-sabi – perfect imperfection. 

Let us artfully, creatively mend the world of its rends and tears – not pretending we can make it like it was before.  That just makes things worse.  We’ve got people running our national government now who want to “take America back”…. But back to what?  They want to “restore” our country to their hallucinated image of its former greatness, but are wrecking it in the process.  What we need to do is to mend it and build it better than ever before, creatively employing elements both old and new...

A Vax for the Musk Mind Virus

 

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself…” Philippians 2: 5-8
 
This same mind is the one in which Pope Francis lived and died.   
 
And this same mind is the vaccine for the Musk Mind Virus.  
 
I am a sort of Forrest Gump.  Through no conscious intentions of my own, and certainly not because I’m anybody special, I have repeatedly stumbled into front-row seats in the theaters of history.  It all began when I started my career as a pastor in Palo Alto just as Apple took off, and I got to know some of the key players in the advent of personal computing and the internet.  I wrote articles for Whole Earth Review, the magazine started by the futurist Stewart Brand.  His Whole Earth Catalogue, a fat, regularly-updated compendium of creativity in tech, practical hacks, and alternative lifestyles, was the nearest thing to the internet at the time, and a lot of Silicon Valley techies were profoundly influenced by it.  Referencing the tech revolution, he famously declared: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”  Some folks in Silicon Valley ran farther with Brand's dictum than he ever intended.
 
One was a friend of mine - a brilliant scientist who ran one of the most important and prestigious Silicon Valley institutions.  He was a nice guy who suffered from what I would now call the Musk Mind Virus.  He had been told that he was preternaturally intelligent from his early childhood, and over time came to believe that his mind was so extraordinary that it was capable of paranormal powers.  It took me a while to realize that he truly believed that he was going to be the savior of humanity.  He drifted into the study of New Age literature and practices.  He confided in me that he was frustrated.  He was certain he was close to unleashing his extraordinary power but just couldn’t quite break through with it.  We’d take hikes in the redwoods above Palo Alto and talk.  As gently as I could, I urged him to reconsider the nature of spirituality.  “It’s not about superpowers,” I told him.  “It’s really simple and basic.  It’s about paying attention and being kind.”  But he just couldn’t hear it.  He believed that his god-like nature was a thing to be grasped.  Sadly, his hubris ended up wrecking his life.
 
Our government is now being trashed by a grown man who sincerely believes he is a superhero.  Elon Musk read a lot of science fiction when he was a kid.  He identified with the protagonists so completely that he convinced himself he was one of them.  He believes he is “as a god”, and that it is a thing to be grasped.  The Musk Mind Virus has become an existential problem for the United States. 
 
Recently, in the course of my work as a pastor, I met with an undocumented woman who has lived and worked hard in the US for twenty years and has two young kids who are US citizens.  She is now petrified by the prospect of being deported.  “My kids don’t even speak Spanish!  If I am sent back to my home country, what will I do?”  she lamented.  I counseled her as best I could to stay brave, know her rights, and know that our church people and many others will stand with her in solidarity through this frightful time. 
 
On our nation’s current trajectory, she’ll be but a bug-speck on the window of Elon Musk’s Starliner.  In his addled mind, the little people - the immigrants, the poor, the vulnerable, and the sick - are expendable distractions from the pursuit of a grand and glorious future super-human civilization colonizing space.  Musk is focused on his imagined humanity of the future, not on the welfare of real people today.  His is the mind behind Adolf Hitler’s last words, adjuring his followers to make way “Für den Mann der kommt nach mir”… For the coming man.  The uber-mensch master-race of the future - not actual humans here and now.  Musk said to Joe Rogan recently:  “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
 
Another vector of the Musk Mind Virus is Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who mentored JD Vance.  Thiel is a libertarian who has declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible.  He has advocated for “sea-states” created by billionaires that would exist apart from the sovereignty of any nation.  He is one among a cabal of billionaires, lost in their hubristic fantasies, certain they know what is best for everyone else.
 
Let Pope Francis’ rejoinder to JD Vance, on the topic of how immigrants and refugees should be treated, continue to vibrate within us as a vaccine for the Musk Mind Virus:  “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”  Folks like that immigrant woman, whose tears flowed before me as she poured out her heart in fear of deportation, should be front-and-center in our consciousness.  We must empty ourselves of arrogance and take on the form of humble servants to each other.  The survival of democracy and human decency depends on it.

Let the Mountains Be My Home

 
(I was listening to the "Perro Sessions", a jam with Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, and others - and got the inspiration to turn their rendition of "Mountain Song" into a call and response chant.  The tune from Perro Sessions is HERE - I sing it, badly, HERE, just so you get the gist of it  - the lines in italics are chanted in a lower key - play with it!  And if you come up with your own rendition of it, record it and send it to me and I'll share it!)

Let the Mountains Be My Home

Gonna let the mountains be my home

And there I’ll let my people roam

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Where Moses met me through the cloud

Gonna let the mountains be my home

And Elijah cried to me aloud

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Where Jesus sat for forty nights

Gonna let the mountains be my home

And kept me ever in his sight

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Up my switchbacks may you climb

Gonna let the mountains be my home

What you’re seeking may you find

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Up my canyons steep and long

Gonna let the mountains be my home

I hear the echo of your song

Gonna let the mountains be my home

I hear the stepping of your feet

Gonna let the mountains be my home

To the summit where we’ll meet

Gonna let the mountains be my home

And there I’ll let my people roam

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Gonna let the mountains be my home

Buy Seven Blessings Now!

 
Pastor Paula White-Cain is a White House Special Government Employee and Senior Advisor of the newly created White House Faith Office.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder, she is now offering seven supernatural blessings on those who donate $1,000 to her ministry.  Heaped on to these blessings of health and prosperity are a 10-inch-high Waterford cross, some devotionals and an “olive wood communion set,” which includes unleavened bread and grape juice from the Holy Land, two “beautiful” olive wood communion cups and a booklet.  You'll also be subsidizing a truly fantastic conflict of interest for a government employee.

What are you waiting for?  All this for just $1,000? 

But hold on a second, before sending Paula your money.  I can offer you an even greater blessing for your $1,000:  hard work by spunky grass-roots nonprofits offering lively resistance against the scambolic religion of Donald Trump's favorite prosperity pastor.

Why settle for just seven blessings?  There are organizations delivering hundreds of blessings every day, sharing a radically different Christian message with the world.  Donate HERE to Progressive Christians Uniting in support of ZOE: Progressive Christian Life on Campus, the network of progressive campus ministries that I serve as the (volunteer) executive director.  You'll be nurturing the progressive faith and social justice commitments of the next generation!  Donate HERE to ProgressiveChristianity.org , the world's hub for progressive faith, offering networking and terrific resources for churches and individuals.  A little bit of money goes a very long way for both organizations.  And if you'd like a longer list of really remarkable organizations that I would strongly suggest you support, just email me and I'll pass it along to you. 

White-Cain, in her pitch for the $1,000, said:  “As we read in Exodus 23, when you honor God during this Passover, God will assign an angel to you, be an enemy to your enemies, give you prosperity, take sickness away from you, give you a long life, bring increase and inheritance and give a special year of blessing.”

What she left out from Exodus 23: “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness... You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in their lawsuits... You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds officials and subverts the cause of those who are in the right... You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." 

If you want the blessings that come from working for justice, put your $1,000 somewhere besides Paula White-Cain's pockets.  Put it into advancing the kind of Christianity that stands up for the most vulnerable among us!

Kingdom Thinking

 

 

If we are looking in the Bible for specific public policy prescriptions for the present day, we’re going to be frustrated. 
 
But if we’re looking for inspiration to practice compassion through our social, political, and economic systems, we’ll find plenty of it in the scriptures.
 
In the gospels, Jesus made many references to the “kingdom of God” or the “kingdom of heaven”  as the state of the world to which we should collectively aspire.  He made it clear that this kingdom was one of justice and compassion. 
 
A kingdom is a social system.  There’s nothing “individualistic” about it.  Of course, Jesus taught that individuals can make choices about whether or not to advance the kingdom of heaven on earth.  But the kingdom was social, communal, and collective.
 
Fundamentalist Christianity in America generally delivers the opposite message.  It preaches a gospel of individualism.  Your salvation is your personal business.  You decide whether or not to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.  It is important to note that this idea is relatively recent in the history of the faith.  If you were a Pilgrim living in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, and someone had asked you the question:  “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”, which is the question that evangelicals consider essential today, the Pilgrim would have been flummoxed.  The response might well have been: “But we as a people are the elect of God, predestined for his salvation!”  The idea of individual salvation, as opposed to collective, communal salvation, would have seemed very strange.  And these were among the founders of Christianity in what is now the United States!
 
I had a young friend, years ago, who did a stint as an actor at the Plymouth Plantation.  Her role was that of the daughter of the pastor of the community.  She was asked regularly by visitors who were fundamentalist Christians if she had accepted Jesus as her personal Lord and Savior.  And in order to stay in character, she had to express bewilderment at the question.  Because it was not the question at the time, nor was it the question in Christendom up to that era.
 
The idea that salvation is social and not just individual is lost on very many Christians in America today.  America has turned personal responsibility into a cultish mantra, and twisted Christianity into giving it religious cover.  The head of Trump's new "Faith Office" preaches the "prosperity gospel", which contorts Jesus' message into making personal wealth the measure of individual religiosity.  Obviously it is important for individuals to take as much responsibility for themselves as they can, and do their best to survive and thrive.  But it is also quite obvious that we depend on each other in very profound ways.  And that we should expect each other to cooperate in doing so. 
 
Jesus’ kingdom of heaven on earth is not a kingdom of the individual.  It is a social kingdom, where people work together to take care of each other.  But just how do we take care of each other?  And how do we make decisions together about it?  Just where do we draw lines between individual and social responsibility?  How do we protect individual freedoms while at the same time require individuals to make contributions to the common good?  Inevitably, it is a messy process.  And the Bible doesn’t give us nice, tidy answers to these questions.
 
Jesus lived in a province of the Roman empire, a huge kingdom that encompassed virtually all the world that was known to the people subject to it.  So when he talked about the kingdom of heaven, the language he was using was outrageously revolutionary.  He was advocating a social system ruled not by an individual emperor, but rather by God ruling directly over people.
 
Anyone who thinks Jesus wasn’t political needs to engage in a closer reading of the Bible.
 
“They (Jesus and his disciples) came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him.  He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him.  Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.  When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.”  For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”  Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.  Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding;  and the unclean spirits begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.”  So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.”  Matthew 5: 1-13.  
 
The man, known as the Gerasene Demoniac, suffered from what we now would call mental illness.  But at the time he was thought to be possessed by demons.  Upon asking the name of the demon, the man answered Jesus:  “My name is Legion.”  That is a direct reference to a Roman legion of thousands of soldiers.  Nearby was a herd of pigs.  Jesus directed the demons out of the man and into the pigs, which then went over a cliff to drown in the water.  Why were pigs being raised in Israel, a nation of people who do not eat pork?  They were being raised to feed the Roman legion!  No wonder that when the townfolk nearby discovered what had happened to the pigs, they begged Jesus to go away.  They were terrified of reprisal by the Roman legions.
 
Jesus was advocating for an alternative communal system in which divine compassion was the constitution. 
 
How does that aspiration translate for our time?
 
Very clearly, it suggests a social structural system that is not centered on the whims of a tyrant.  That perspective was baked-in to Jesus’ Jewish religion.  Long before his time, the people of Israel clamored for a king in a time when the country was under threat of invasion.  The prophet Samuel's eloquent, prescient warnings against the inevitable depredations of tyranny ring as true today as they did then (I Samuel 8). The Bible was an inspiration to the founders of this nation to embed checks and balances against tyranny into the US Constitution.  Today the scripture inspires us to preserve those constraints against real and present threats against them.

We didn’t get to this constitutional crisis overnight.  A highly orchestrated and extremely well-funded campaign has been underway for decades to focus the attention of the public on anecdotal, individual cases instead of on reliable information about systemic social problems.  If bad things happen, it is because individuals screwed up.  Don't blame the Empire!  Don’t blame corporations.  Don’t blame unfair laws.  Don't blame institutional racism.  Don’t blame systems.  And don’t blame the big shots at the top of those systems!  Instead of relying on unbiased, professionally-gathered statistics to determine the nature of a social problem, the oligarchs want us to focus on outlying individual anecdotes that give cover for their preferred positions.  The result of this ongoing campaign of privatizing public problems has been disastrous.

If we rely on individual anecdotes to come up with public policies, we’ll fall into the rabbit-hole of “what-about-ism”.  You've got your anecdotes, but what about mine?  To bring the kingdom of heaven closer to earth, we’ve got to get out of that vortex and use a scientific approach instead, looking at the wider population.  But the cult of privatization wants us to focus on individual exceptions.  A very bright and determined girl growing up poor in a poor neighborhood and going to an underfunded public school, with a mother who demands that the child do her homework, goes on to a very successful adulthood.  Should we base public policies about education on the assumption that every kid growing up in poverty is equally exceptional, and has equally exceptional parenting?  Determining the safety of vaccines isn’t a matter of telling stories about somebody you know who knows somebody else who got sick after getting a vaccine.  It is about careful gathering of population-level data without prejudice, and then weighing the risks versus the rewards of the vaccine.  And recognizing that, ultimately, there’s really no such thing as individual health.  There’s only public health.  Of course, individuals can make choices to improve public health.  But, ultimately, if we want to be healthy, we’re going to have to work together to make it happen. 

You can call this “kingdom thinking”.  At the moment, this is counter-cultural thinking.  But it is the kind that Jesus practiced and preached.

Remembering Our Dear Deported Neighbors

Shortly, I'm going to put up a shrine in front of the church I serve, dedicated to the memory of our law-abiding undocumented neighbors who have worked hard and built lives in this country for ten, twenty, thirty years or more, and now face the frightening prospect of being deported.  I hope many other faith communities do the same.  (If you set up something like this, please let me know right away, and I'll work on getting national publicity for it!  Let's get creative and share our ideas...)  Now is the time for our churches and temples to join together in making a public moral witness for humane treatment of immigrants and refugees.

 “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the your God.”  Leviticus 19: 33-34. 

Deporting long-term undocumented immigrants is a clear violation of this admonition.  They should not be punished for the failure of this country to come up with fair and humane reforms to our immigration system.  They should be given a path to citizenship, so they can come out of the shadows and contribute even more to our country.

I doubt seriously that the great majority of Americans want to treat immigrants and refugees with the callous disregard currently aimed at them by the Trump administration.  Indiscriminate deportation and ending the resettlement in the US of carefully-vetted refugees is not what most folks voted for. 

It is way past time for common sense and decency to prevail.  For God’s sake, let’s make it happen now.

Trump has an historic opportunity to do the right thing about immigrants and refugees.  He’s got a slim mandate to take action on the subject.  So far, he has chosen the path of performative cruelty.  But we still have time to pressure him to do the right thing, and actually fix our immigration system rather than destroying it.

And that is to balance justice with mercy, humanitarianism with practicality.  It isn’t a radical new idea.  Twenty years ago, the bipartisan McCain-Kennedy proposal was introduced in Congress.  It would have secured the border and provided a path to citizenship for long-term, otherwise law-abiding undocumented migrants.  Republicans scuttled the plan because they saw the immigration issue as a rich vein of voter resentment that they could exploit for partisan gain.  That crass cynicism brought us to this present moment of vicious treatment of immigrants and refugees by the Trump administration.  For Trump, “America First” means no immigrants entering the country at all. 

But for God’s sake, let’s remember:  America = immigrants.  Some came fifteen thousand years ago, and the rest came long after, and more keep coming, and that’s what America is all about.  The American people want a sustainable number of immigrants and refugees and asylees to enter this country through a humane and orderly process.  No, we don’t want people to be so desperate that they hop fences and walls and cross into our country through treacherous deserts where so many die of thirst and exposure.  No, we don’t want people to enter our country with insecure, temporary status awaiting asylum hearings that might not happen for many years for lack of judges to adjudicate them.  We want an adequately funded judicial system to consider their claims fairly and quickly.  We want fully and properly vetted refugees to be able to enter our country, with limits on their numbers. 

And no, we do not want our hard-working undocumented neighbors who have been here for decades and have behaved themselves, like the great majority of the rest of us, to be uprooted from the country they call home.  They’re as American as the rest of us, despite their lack of papers.  The fact of their long-term presence is an indictment of our nation’s failure to reckon with the immigration problem in a sensible and humane way for so very long.  It is completely irresponsible and inhumane to deport people today if they’ve been here for many years, contributing to our common good.  If they have proven themselves worthy of citizenship, they should be awarded it.  But people who have come here recently without documentation can be subject to deportation, prioritizing those with criminal records. Few of us want our borders to be wide open to anyone who crosses without permission.

We also want a system of temporary workers from other countries to take jobs our own citizens won’t fill, with a structure that affords them dignity and protection.  And we want a certain number of high-skilled workers to come into our country to power our tech industries.  All this can be accomplished with careful calibration that protects our own citizens’ economic security.

This isn’t rocket science.  The solutions have been in front of us for decades.  For God’s sake, let’s drop the hyperbole and just get down to common decency and practicality.  We can do this.  Let’s demand it of our politicians, whether we like them or not.  Let’s make it as easy as possible for them to do the right thing, and to do it sooner than later.

(More on the faith response to the immigration crisis HERE)

Ten (of the) Commandments

 

What are popularly known as the Ten Commandments appear in slightly different forms in Exodus chapter 20 and Deuteronomy chapter 5 in the Hebrew scriptures.  But they’re among over 600 other commandments that the scripture says were transmitted to Moses by God.   As certain state governments raise the timeworn demand that they be posted prominently in schools, we have to ask: why stop at ten?  Limiting the list is an example of “cafeteria Christianity” – which fundamentalist and progressive and Catholic and every other kind of Christian practices all the time.  The Bible does not specify that what we call the Ten Commandments are any more important than the very many others that Moses passed down to the people.  So why not post all of the hundreds of them? 

Or at least post different lists of ten? 

Such as the list below.  I present them not because they’re my favorites, but rather to illustrate just how messy it gets when a particular faith tradition is promoted in taxpayer-funded schools and buildings.

Ten (of the) Commandments

1.  “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the your God.”  Leviticus 19: 33-34.  (An inconvenient commandment for people of a particular political persuasion today…) 
2.  "You shall not make gods of silver alongside me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold.”  Exodus 20:23.  (Likewise!)
3. “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk”. Exodus 22: 19.(Jews interpreted this to mean that you can’t cook or serve meat with milk from the same animal.  No more cheeseburgers or lasagna for you – sorry.)
4. “If someone leaves a pit open or digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restitution, giving money to its owner but keeping the dead animal.”  Exodus 21: 33-34.  (An unpleasant way to buy a steak!)
5. “The person who has the defiling disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’  He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”  Leviticus 13: 45-46.  (If you have eczema or acne, you’re out…)
6. “When a woman has a discharge of blood that is a menstrual discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. Everything upon which she lies during her impurity shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean.” Leviticus 15: 19-24.  (Sorry, ladies, you’re on lockdown during your period and seven days after!)
7. “You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials."  Leviticus 19: 19.  (Toss all your clothes and shoes that are made of combinations of different kinds of cloth or leather – they are an abomination to God.)
8. “If a man has sexual relations with a woman who is a slave, designated for another man but not ransomed or given her freedom, an inquiry shall be held. They shall not be put to death, since she has not been freed, but he shall bring a guilt offering for himself to the Lord…”  Leviticus 19: 20-21.  (This one ought to leave us speechless.)
9. “When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall remain seven days with its mother, and from the eighth day on it shall be acceptable as the Lord's offering by fire. But you shall not slaughter, from the herd or the flock, an animal with its young on the same day.”  Leviticus 22 27-28.  (A potent argument for vegetarianism, is it not?)
10. "You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you..." Leviticus 19:27-28.  (Men, toss those trimmers and hide those tats!)