Votivator – March 5 Primary Election
Jim Burklo
I begin by urging us all not only to pay attention to “votivators” like myself, but to consider becoming “votivators” for others. There is nothing at all dishonorable about copying the ballot choices of trusted and respected friends. It is a form of full participation in democracy. But of course, it is wonderful to go a step further and make one’s own carefully-researched choices based on reputable, verifiable sources of information about candidates and issues. And then to go yet another step further and become a “votivator” who shares those choices with others.
While I am in this latter category, I still pay close attention to the choices of “votivators” who are better informed about particular issues and candidates than I am. Please let me know what you’re thinking about the choices before us on March 5! I haven’t filled out my mail-in ballot yet!
I live in Ojai, in Ventura County, California. So my world of “votivation” has shifted since my days in Los Angeles. But I subscribe to the LA Times and read it thoroughly, and do maintain some awareness of what’s going on in the greater southern California region. (BTW, I also subscribe to The Economist Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker – reading these sources carefully, and listening to local and national public radio when I’m driving to and from work, comprise my primary diet of information on public issues and candidates.)
President: Joe Biden. The survival of democracy is very much at stake in the November election. This becomes more obvious with each passing day, as Trump makes more abundantly clear his autocratic intentions. I want to address my strongly progressive friends here. I share your deep frustration with Biden’s “blank check” support of Israel as its radical right-wing government engages in the wanton killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza. Biden’s administration should have cut off military aid to Israel when this indiscriminate bombing began. I have repeatedly sent emails to Biden and my members of Congress and the Senate with my sentiments. And you have protested vigorously, as well. The good news is that despite our frustrations, our opinions are in fact having a serious impact. Biden is now pressuring Israel to pause the fighting, get humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, end settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and accept a two-state solution to the conflict… moves that the US wasn’t vigorously pushing on October 6. And we must remember that Trump is cheering on the Israelis to do whatever they want to the Palestinians. There is a huge difference between the candidates on this issue. In our political system, we face a binary choice in November. If we care about maintaining our Constitution, if we want elections to matter, if we want real peace in the Middle East, we have one choice, and it’s Joe Biden. A vote for anybody but Joe Biden is a vote for Trump. Period. Some of us may have pinch our noses when we vote for Biden and urge others to vote for him, but the alternative is absolutely unacceptable. If Ralph Nader had not made his third-party run in 2000, Al Gore would have won the Electoral College in Florida, and we would have been spared the presidency of George Bush. Let’s not repeat that debacle.
Senate: Katie Porter. It’s highly likely that Adam Schiff will win the primary and will win in November. And I’m good with him. But I really admire Katie Porter’s intelligence and feistiness. I think she’d be a breath of fresh air in the Senate. She’s unabashed and brash, but is also a team player, which is very important in a body like the Senate that is at least supposed to be deliberative. I admire Barbara Lee a lot, and I can imagine having voted for her for Senate ten years ago – but her age, 77, is a real problem. I admire Katie’s statement re: Israel/Palestine – read it here. Another reason to vote for Katie Porter is strategic: she’s has a good chance of taking second place in the primary, which would eliminate from the November ballot the breathtakingly clueless and reactionary Republican candidate, Steve Garvey. A Schiff/Porter contest would make for really lively political conversation… and for those who care about what’s going on in Israel/Palestine, it would make it more likely that this subject would be front and center in the campaign. Both Porter and Schiff need to be pushed further on this topic.
Congress: Salud Carbajal, Democrat, incumbent. Our property is right at the very edge of his 24th CA Congressional district. I like to say that we live on the eastern border of the coastal elite! – because of the right-wing yard signs we see across the street and in the countryside beyond. But Salud Carbajal is anything but a member of that club. He was born in Mexico, the son of a farmworker, and is a military veteran.
California Senate: Monique Limon, Democrat, incumbent.
California Assembly: Steve Bennett, Democrat, incumbent.
Ventura County Supervisors, 1st district: Matt LaVere, incumbent. I’ve met him and am impressed with him. Along with 5th district incumbent Vianey Lopez and 3rd district challenger Kim Marra Stephenson, he’s opposed the oil industry’s lobbying efforts in the County. All three are the picks of the Ventura County Democratic Party.
Judge, Office #4, Superior Court, Ventura: Edward Andrews. He’s a deputy District Attorney and his boss, Erik Nasarenko, whom I admire (and whose Ukrainian parents are friends of mine) endorses him.
State Measure 1: Yes. I’m torn on this one, but persuaded in particular by its endorsement by NAMI – the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which is the advocacy organization of people experiencing mental illness and their families and friends – a group that I have greatly respected since my days of working with it in Palo Alto when I led the nonprofit serving unhoused people there. It is a huge bond that would fund housing and treatment beds and services for people suffering from mental illness. The downside is that it would also redirect substantial existing funds from the “millionaires’ tax” used by local governments to serve this population, prioritizing housing over mental health services. I and many others wish this “devil’s bargain” wasn’t part of the measure. If you vote “no”, I wouldn’t argue very vigorously with you about it! Because there’s always another day, and another, better ballot measure that could be put before us. But now’s our chance to make a big investment in housing and treatment for the most vulnerable among us, and I’m trusting that whatever problems result from this measure can be rectified later.
Matthew 20:25-28 NRSV
But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself...
A slave. A servant. Such is the status to which Jesus aspired. The status to which he inspires us to aspire.
The slave, the servant, owns nothing. The slave, the servant, tends to what belongs to the master. The slave, the servant, belongs to the master and is charged with acting only in the master’s interest.
Not what most of us have in minds for ourselves, is it? Especially for those of us who live in an individualistic, capitalistic society in which we are barraged with propaganda suggesting that each of us was meant to be a master.
But as we clear our minds and hearts of this delusion, we can see its disastrous consequences. In our quest to be masters, we lose the ability to cooperate for the common good. In our belief that each of us is the captain of our own ship, our ships run aground and into each other. We run amok, destroying our planet as we each claim sovereignty over our little patches of it. In our quest to be masters of the universe, we lose mastery even over our own minds.
We’re not meant to be masters. We’re meant to be servants. But not of any one human being.
“Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants,” said William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. We must submit ourselves as servants of the Ultimate Reality. Or we’ll end up as peons under autocrats.
Each of us is a temporary occupant of the role we play in stewardship of the Earth. We own no status, we own no position. We do our parts as we live, and we let our parts be taken up by others when our time is up.
In America today, with the whole world watching, we are presented with a choice. Will we follow the admonition of Jesus, will we remember the wisdom of Paul and of William Penn, or will we drift asleep into delusion?
Here is one simple but jarring way to understand the extreme threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy. When he occupied the office of the President, he believed that he owned it, and he acted accordingly. Just like he owned and operated the Trump Organization for his personal benefit. He believed that the Attorney General was his personal attorney, to act in his personal interests. He believed that the military was his personal armed force, to act in his personal interest. He believed that the entire government – all three branches of it, executive, judicial, and legislative, was his personal property to do his bidding for his own benefit. No matter that the underlying assumption of our Constitution is that all offices of government, including the presidency, belong to the people, and that those who occupy those offices are temporary stewards of those roles, charged with employing them to serve the people and not their own personal interests.
Donald Trump was only the tenant of the White House, but he was convinced he held title to it. No wonder he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the person who became its next tenant.
The assumption that ours is a government of laws, not of particular people, is so fundamental to our system of government that few of us have thought about it or discussed it. So when this man entered the highest office of the land and violated its essential nature with impunity, we were literally left speechless.
And because we were left speechless, because we failed to wrap our minds around how profoundly he violated the root norm of democracy, this debased person could once again occupy the office of the President. And then act without any remaining restraints on his assumption that he was, still is, and ever shall be the owner of the White House.
Donald Trump is the nightmarish cartoon image of the exact opposite of the person Jesus wanted us to be. His obvious unworthiness of his wealth and status is crucial to this aspiration. If a person so boorish, so disinterested in facts or expertise can be a billionaire and become president of the United States, then anybody can be master of the universe. His spectacular moral and intellectual incompetence isn’t a bug, it’s the main feature of the persona to which he inspires people to aspire. He’s not aristocratic, not refined, not dignified like proper rich people expect each other to be. He’s a low-class person with high wealth and power: that is the attraction. This is the message with which he has infected the brains of millions of people: “He’s me, just with a lot more money!”
Vaclav Havel, an avant-garde playwright and freedom activist who went on to become the first president of the Czech Republic after the communist system there was overthrown, believed that the survival of humanity depended on humility – a recognition that we all answer to Something/Someone beyond us. He wasn’t a religious person in any formal sense. But his sentiment resonated with Jesus’ admonition for us to be servants to all the rest: “… we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged…. Pride is precisely what will lead the world to hell. I am suggesting an alternative: humbly accepting our responsibility for the world.” (From his 1995 Harvard commencement address, later published under the title “Radical Renewal of Human Responsibility”)
We are tenants in this world, not its owners. We are stewards of the earth, not its rulers. We are servants of each other, no matter our station in life. Whatever roles we occupy are temporary assignments to be left in better condition when we leave than when we entered. And we do well to place people in high office who reflect this humble servant-consciousness. The survival of our democracy – and the survival of our planet – depend on it.
By Jim Burklo
(Matthew 26: 6-13, Mark 14: 3-9, Luke 7: 36-50, John 12: 1-8)
At a party,
when a woman,
without giving notice,
anointed Jesus with perfumed oil,
his fellow guests objected to its expense,
which could have been put to use serving the poor.
But in that extravagant act,
Jesus was made Christ, the Anointed One.
Men were made kings of Israel
with coronations of oil poured over their heads
by other powerful men in pompous ceremony.
Jesus was ennobled by surprise
by a powerless woman
of questioned repute
with fragrant oil
poured over him to excess.
And from her,
as profligately as with the oil,
love flowed out and over and into him.
Love without viscosity,
sinking into him
between and around and into his every pore and cell,
lubricating away every point of friction
between him and the world he was meant to serve;
loosening him from the rust of dogma and convention,
releasing his heart and mind
into unbounded empathy
for the sufferings and yearnings of others.
So the fine oil of love rises out of the hidden depths
through cracks in the hard strata of the world,
so subtle we cannot see, but only feel it
when, drawn to us, it finds its way
and seeps in.
At all costs, let us receive it
and share it
with abandon.
Many if not most of us spend a frightfully huge percentage of our time hunched over our “smart” phones, staring and poking at them.
It’s not all bad. But it’s certainly problematic for many, if not most, of us.
For very many of us, it is confusing to sort out good uses of digital media from the worthless or bad. As someone involved still in ministry on college campuses, I am aware that a lot of students, even at elite institutions, are lost in a miasma of highly questionable sources of information. They get lost in comparing themselves, usually to the detriment of their mental and spiritual health, to other students who have more effectively curated themselves digitally than they have. They don’t know what to believe. In far too many cases, this has led them to wonder if there is such a thing as truth – or verifiable reality – at all. Today, democracy is seriously threatened by the resulting unhealthy skepticism that makes people more vulnerable than ever to disinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories. (In response to this crisis, I have created a ritual that has spread to campuses and churches far and wide: The Blessing of the Smartphones – use it freely!)
I believe that progressive churches and campus ministries – and other organizations and communities – have a very important role in creating and sustaining a culture of consuming and producing life-affirming, socially-positive digital media. To that end, I present here a “manifesto” on the subject. Feel free to use, alter, and spread it! (Special thanks go out to my friend Bernhard Poerksen, professor of media studies at Tübingen University in Germany. His book, “Digital Fever: Taming the Business of Disinformation” (2022, Palgrave Macmillan, inspired me to write this.) I hope this “manifesto” will be a conversation-starter in congregations. Please send me your suggestions for improvement on it.
Digital Wisdom: A Manifesto
Speech and Academic Integrity on Campus:
Progressive Christian Campus Ministers Take a Stand
For more information: zoeprogressivechristianlife@gmail.com
We are leaders of progressive Christian ministries at colleges and universities around the United States, deeply concerned with right-wing assaults against free speech and academic integrity at the institutions we serve. Many colleges and universities were founded by our progressive Christian forebears, who believed in the mission of secular higher education, believed in academic freedom and integrity, and released control of the institutions they started as the country became more religiously and culturally diverse. We honor that legacy and, alongside others, we commit ourselves to carrying it forward.
On our campuses, we defend and encourage:
Academic speech spaces: classroom dialogue that reflects the academic rigor of peer-review and basis in evidence, in pursuit of broad consensus, free from dogma. We support shared governance between faculty and administration. We oppose the efforts of politicians who are trying to impose their ideological agendas on our colleges and universities.
Free speech spaces: free expression, except for direct incitement to physical harm, in public spaces on campus - making room for obnoxious or offensive speech. We will either ignore bad speech or respond to it with good speech.
Brave speech spaces: environments on campus where difficult differences can be explored through respectful dialogue, where skills in constructive communication and listening can be honed. Following Jesus' way of unconditional love, our ministries are committed to creating and supporting such spaces, in cooperation with other groups on campus. What is learned in brave speech spaces will humanize and enrich academic speech and free speech on campus.
Safe speech spaces: environments on campus where particular communities with common interests gather, where students can express their concerns freely in an atmosphere of mutual support and encouragement. Our ministries offer such spaces and support other groups in doing the same.
What does it take to change your life? -when it is clear that you need to change it?
Tis the season for making resolutions. Plans for change in our lives. Goals, objectives. But I am going to guess that a lot of us are more than a bit skeptical about making resolutions, because so often they get put by the wayside, ignored, lost in the shuffle. Resolutions that seemed shiny and compelling in January begin to fade and wilt in March. Or maybe even in January…
Perhaps another way to making changes in our lives would be to look at its process. And making resolutions or declarations is only one piece of it.
One of my very favorite sayings of Jesus is found in Matthew 12. And I think it is useful for stimulating deeper consideration of the process of making changes in our lives. He made this statement in an era when pretty much everybody believed that invisible spirits could enter into a person and take control of them. It was a folk explanation for mental illness and spiritual distress. Jesus got a reputation as a healer partly because of the stories about him driving evil spirits out of people, bringing afflicted people back to spiritual and emotional and social wholeness. So this passage has to be understood in that historical context:
“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it returns, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.”
Such a rich and even funny description of how life goes, eh? Anybody who has suffered from addiction understands this story right away. So you get clean and sober. Then what? How do you fill the space that drugs or alcohol used to occupy? If you don’t fill that space, relapse is more likely – a relapse maybe worse than the mess you were in just before you got clean and sober.
The image of the first evil spirit inviting seven others to occupy the house – familiar, isn’t it? Like the house down the street where the owner left town and let a deadbeat relative move in, and that person decides to bring in a bunch of sketchy pals as roommates, and the next thing you know, the house is a public nuisance.
In this earthy, vivid story, Jesus lays out a path for us to follow in making needed changes in our lives.
Step one, get clear about the change you want to make. The resolution, the goal, the objective. But make that resolution at the very same time that you commit yourself to making room for it. Your resolution has to have a corollary. A companion resolution that you’ll do what you need to do to make the ultimate resolution possible. And usually that involves exactly what Jesus described in his pithy story. It involves housecleaning. It involves letting go. Making room. And letting go is usually just as hard, if not harder, than achieving your resolution! So you resolve to take art classes in 2024 – great! But in all likelihood, the reason you haven’t taken art classes already is because your life is full. What activity, what existing engagements, will you commit to abandoning in order to make room for the art classes? Get specific. Count the cost of your resolution, factor it in.
And likewise, if your resolution is to clean your spiritual or physical house, what’s your plan for filling the hole that will result? You retire because you’re worn out from working at your job. But what will replace that job? What will fill the void that opens up? You don’t want the devil’s roommates to move into the empty spaces in your life. You gotta have a plan for what to do with your life.
So our new year’s resolutions have to have companion resolutions. A resolution to give something up needs to be accompanied by a resolution about how to replace it. A resolution to do something new needs to be accompanied by a resolution to let go of something else in order to make room for the new commitment. Otherwise our January resolutions will get left in the dust by Valentine’s Day.
So what do you resolve to give up in 2024, and how do you resolve to replace it? And what do you resolve to take on in 2024, and what do you resolve to give up in order to do it?
(My message for Christmas Eve at United Church of Christ, Simi Valley, 12/24/23)
It was a Christmas road trip – Nazareth to Bethlehem – for a couple of peasants, a woman and her husband. She was close to giving birth to her first child. But It had to be done – the census was the law of the land. You have to go to the town of the husband’s birth to register - no exceptions for hardship. And sure enough, when they got to town, she went into labor. No provision for that situation, either. For lack of any other lodging, they ended up in a barn.
Tonight the star of the show isn’t the star in the East. Tonight the star of the show tonight isn’t Mary, either – though surely she was the star of Advent. Tonight the star of the Christmas play, the person who matters most, is an infant. For one night, we’re baby-centric. For one night, we have a babe-lical worldview.
Some Christians like to claim that they have a biblical worldview, and have made that the basis of their way of life. It isn’t real, of course, because these aren’t Bible times, and for a hundred practical and even moral reasons it would be disastrous to try to think and live like that today. Women and children, like oxen and sheep, were the possessions of males. The despotic, ruthless rule over the land by King Herod was normal pretty much everywhere. There was no science, no meaningful medical care, no fact-based journalism. And certainly no public protections for babies outside the often precarious circumstances of their families. And of course there is a notorious Bible passage in the Psalms 137 celebrating infanticide. Such was the worldview of the people described in the Bible – what they accepted as everyday reality. The story of Jesus’ birth is gospel – it is good news – precisely because it points to a way out of the biblical worldview!
The biblical worldview is ancient history, worth knowing about, but certainly unworthy of repeating. Instead, tonight, it is worth considering: what would our society be like if it we had a babe-lical worldview not just at Christmas, but all the time? If we put babies, and their well-being, as the focus of our spirituality, and as the highest priorities of our economic and political systems?
Because what’s good for babies, ultimately, is really good for us all.
If we were serious about adopting a babe-lical worldview, we’d have quality universal health care for them – and for everyone else, so that babies would have healthy families to take care of them. With a babe-lical worldview, we’d make sure there were no babies living in barns – or cars, or tents, or cardboard huts, either. We’d do what it takes to end houselessness. If the well-being of babies was the top priority for us, then we wouldn’t be upset when immigrant mothers, whether here legally or not, got the care and support they needed in our society. If babies mattered to us, we’d be calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East, and pressing vigorously and continuously for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Because babies belong to the world, to everyone, to all of humankind, not just one sect or nation or race. Babies aren’t progressives or conservatives, they aren’t good guys or bad guys, they have no clue about any of the stuff that animates the right-wing culture warriors in America today.
For the sake of the baby Jesus – for the sake of all babies everywhere – let us set aside our differences, our disagreements, our divisions, and just sit and be present. Amazing, is it not, to be in the presence of a sleeping baby – and notice how all our preoccupations and worries and obsessions melt away into awe and wonder, into the pure attentiveness that is love – the unconditional love that is God. After all the grand entrances of angels and shepherds and wise men, I like to think that everyone settled down and said nothing, and did nothing, but just look at the baby for a good long time together.
In the manger, Jesus was a baby. Just a baby. Not a rabbi, not a riveting public figure, not a fixer or a healer, not a big shot. Just a baby. Like any other baby that’s ever been born, before and after Bible times. Being the presence of that baby, or any other baby, and paying deep attention to the baby, is salvation for the soul. It’s as good as life gets. Sitting next to a baby in silence gets our priorities straight. It brings us back to what matters. And it gets us to let go of what doesn’t matter.
Let us go forth from this time of lessons and carols with a resolve: to live from a babe-lical worldview. To feel and think and act, all the time, as if we’ve just had the privilege of sitting with and admiring a newborn baby. If we do, we’ll be moved to do our parts in bringing heaven down to earth – right here, in Simi Valley.
Silent night, holy night,
all is calm, all is bright
round yon virgin mother and child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.
Amen.