If You Walk By Some Flowers, Notice Them. It's Good for You.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

May 28, 2022

Uvalde: I Don’t Want My Hurt to Go Away

Garrison Keillor in his Garrison Keillor and Friends blog, “What We Know Is Not Nearly Enough,” on May 27th included this:

“Senator Lee of Utah who has voted against mandatory gun registration said that “glorification of violence” and “breakdown of the family” are responsible for the shooting, and how do you address those? Censorship of Netflix and Hulu? Requiring regular church attendance? Senator Romney said, “Grief overwhelms the soul. We must find answers.” Apparently he feels that prayer is an answer, but it’s dismaying to see, according to Newsweek, that Romney has received $14 million in donations from the National Rifle Association over the years. Evidently his soul was not sufficiently overwhelmed.”

Then, after more, and I do commend the entire blog to you, Keillor concluded with this: 

“I propose that Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney take the $14 million and use it to make nonviolent TV shows that glorify good families. I wish them well. Meanwhile, I don’t care to do any shows in Texas.”

What is going through my mind and heart about Uvalde?

I am aghast, appalled, angry and heart-broken and like Steve Kerr implores, urgently trying not to get numb to this. 

Keillor’s above summation is spot on.

Crazy and absurd and tragic and sick is the influence of political support money and the lack of decision-making based on the practicality of what works (if you take AK-47's off the streets they cannot be used to kill children) in favor of taking money for your campaigns from whomever comes along and accusing others, the "left,"  of having bad values and, evidently, thinking the solution is changing their values by imposing yours (half of which are just as violent as the so-called "bad values" of the "left": let's take, for example, wives being submissive to their husbands or, state governments executing criminals. These are not violent actions of a violent culture with violent values?).

Not all of us Americans have lost our minds. We still support things that actually work.

Nor have we lost our hearts. We still will not knowingly benefit from the donations of those who traffic in violence. 

When a bully brother is beating up his little sister with a stick, you take the stick away and ensure he will not get it again. You do not give a big(ger) stick to the little sister and tell her good luck. 

There is a difference between a fundamental right and an absolute right. Fundamentally, the bully should be able to pick up sticks. But he should not be able to beat up others with it. Fundamental means you have the right. Absolute means you have the right no matter what you do with that right. Gun ownership is not an absolute right. It is a fundamental right.  Is there an absolute involved? Yes, the bully absolutely should not be able to beat up others with his or her weapons and when they do they have given up their fundamental right because they absolutely will beat up others if they keep getting their sticks. 

I live in Florida. Yes, I know, Florida. I wrote to my two U. S. Senators yesterday, Senators Rubio and Scott. Yes, I know, Rubio and Scott. I told them to vote “Yes” on H.R. 8 that had its Second Reading in the Senate on May 25. Yes, I know the chances. But I will write them again today. Many of you are doing much more than me in working to control and reduce gun violence. I am trying to find out more ways to help, things that I can do. What do you suggest? I know there must be a strong combination of advocacy and action. 

I am trying not to become numb to this.

 On Mother's Day this Year in our House: There's Cake, and then there's Raspberry Elegance

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Tuesday May 10 and Saturday May 14, 2022

Just Another Psalm and Boom, There It Is, The Problem of Evil

In reading Psalm 98 today it occurred to me that if you ask most Christians what it says to them, what it means to them, it is that it is a way of expressing how they are thankful to God for when God does well by them (which means that when things go well they attribute that good to be something provided to them by a Benevolent Being). Then, too, if you asked them about what is happening when things go badly for them they would be perplexed because God’s goodness to them is not an act of charity but rather a character trait. And so there would be perhaps only two logical choices for why the sordidness arrives: one, God’s goodness has seen fit to provide badness for our own good. Or two, our badness deserves more badness because God’s goodness cannot withstand such badness. And there you have the classic answers to the vexation of evil. What’s troubling (to me, and the history of theology and philosophy) is that both are rationales constructed to let an Omnipotent God (the very definition of a god) off the hook for allowing (not really powerful in the end) or inciting (not really loving in the end) evil. 

Well then. I have a small mind and will not proport that what the paragraph above poured out on a Tuesday in May surmises things comprehensively when it comes to the vastness of why evil. But I will say it’s helpful to me as an encapsulation. 

But there is, alas, more. Or at least more to say. And so on the following Saturday, more: God chooses, not based on merit, but based on God’s decision. Not within any legal structure or system, but outside of it. So, a Zacchaeus (Corrupt Tax Worker) has just as much of a chance with God as a Nicodemus (Pristine Pharisee). It’s God’s decision, election, that is the operating system at work, not a legal structure, Law, that causes, drives God to select or bless. 

God chose Israel, without merit, just like God created the world, out of nothing, not legal structure, no merited reason. God is just simply life, given. Only God gives life and life is only what God gives. And this is precisely what evil is when law is the operating and guiding system – because God can and does choose to give life or take it and I, we, have nothing to say about it. I have no agency, not way to influence the choice being made for me. That is not good in my book. It is evil. 

Steven Paulson, in Luther’s Outlaw God, Volume 1 (Evil, Predestination and the Hiddenness of God), writes this:

“In hardening Pharaoh’s heart, we learn that the term necessity is confusing not just because it is inadequate to describe what Pharaoh’s heart actually wants but because it says two opposing things. Necessity says one thing concerning the law, but says something opposite this law when necessity concerns a promise. In the law, necessity means coercing a recalcitrant human will to will what God’s will wants in the future – that is, to get your untamed will to align with God’s steady, cultivated will and so finally accomplish the law’s demands. But Luther’s necessity means certain, and certain means opposite things in the law and in the gospel. In the law, certain means forced; in the gospel it means what no opposition, even my own, can overcome.”

God’s will of only giving life where and when God decides will not and cannot take any quarter. God doesn’t destroy the earth (the flood story) based on the law (humankind deserved it because they did bad things) but because something got in God’s way, something opposed the Life-Only Giving God. God doesn’t destroy the Canaanites (the promised land story) based on the law (they deserved it because they were, among other things, polytheistic) but because they got in the way of God’s deciding to give life to Israel. 

The fact that God destroys, “hardens Pharaoh’s heart,” should not offend us or scare us but rather alert us and encourage us to the fact and truth that God does not Lie. When God promises, nothing can or will get in the way of the promise. 

[A detour for a moment, if you will allow. One of the key tenet’s in Martin Luther’s working exegetical approach to Scripture (his day job was as a Bible scholar/professor) was something we describe today as the “plain sense of Scripture.” Luther engaged, and worked in opposition to what the classical biblical scholarship of the time (in the mode of Scholasticism) used as the accepted biblical interpretive approach: all Bible accounts/stories/narrative could and should be interpreted in one or more of four ways: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogical (concerning future heaven/hell). Luther, said, no, don’t layer on these four meanings as options for understanding. Instead, just take the “plain sense.” Meaning, take it at face value. This means if a passage is obviously, plainly, figurative language (“The Lord is my Shepherd….”: God is not a literally a herder of sheep; God takes care of us like a herder cares for the flock), then let it be that. But if a passage says “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” as in our focus here, for example, then take it to mean what is plainly says. It does not say “God allowed Pharaoh’s heart to be hardened” or “Pharaoh hardened his own heart.” Erasmus, not a shabby theologian and philosopher himself, whom Luther famously engaged in his 1525 treatise, The Bondage of the Will, used just this trope to get God off the hook of what looks like God driving Pharaoh to do something Pharaoh himself didn’t want to do. Luther insisted the text means what it actually says, plainly:  It says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. God did the deed. When you take a text to mean plainly what it says you run into some challenging stuff concerning God’s will and predestination and evil. But Luther wasn’t afraid of the challenge. Nor should we be. Here’s another example: Exodus 4 where God tries to kill Moses. Read it and wince.]

But wait! What if God chooses someone else and not me and I have nothing to say in the matter! What if I am Pharaoh? That is not fair – and of course that is true enough when you operate in the legal structure of deserving or not deserving. But if I operate in the illegal structure of gospel, the non-legal structure of gospel, nobody gets anything they deserve. They only get what God decides and, remember this,  God decides only Good. Will I be saved? I do not know based on my life. I only know (certainly!) based on God’s life. And God only creates and resurrects. 

God’s election, choosing, omnipotence of certainty (as opposed to the omnipotence of force) is distasteful, unnerving, evil to us because we have no agency, no power, no decision-making influence.

So how can we say God only creates/resurrects when too, God clearly killed Pharaoh? We can only say it if we say the killing is life-giving – and it was, it liberated Israel. But that’s not fair! What about poor Pharaoh!? He’s just a pawn? No, because the fact that God does not lie, that God makes good always on God’s Promise (creation of world and election of Israel are the meta-narrative) means that for even Pharaoh there is hope. Even after God took him out. The salvation story does not tell us God is fair, it tells us that God does not Lie, that God is only creating and resurrecting because that is what God promises. 

Because God is hope and we are not hope, there is always and only hope. For all people. For all creation (let’s get off the high horse of making everything about people and forgetting the flora and fauna and igneous rock, passim. Scripture says clearly all creation is God’s focus).

And so how will we know this – that there is hope delivered by God without a legal system, outside of a legal structure of fairness, that is not about fairness but about unconditional love, about only life and resurrection, that mercy is not leniency in the law but rather is the abolition of the law as the deciding factor for and in destiny?

We know all this in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Watch him, listen to him, follow him until you can’t take anymore, this unfettered and untethered (the law, and grave, cannot hold him) man who chose all the wrong people for the right reason, and you kill him (and so, just to be clear and absolute about it, you have nothing to do with your salvation – you destroyed it, you destroyed him).

It is not fair. He is only Good.

And good for nothing?

No, good for something, or more correctly, and precisely, good for you.

When he said “this is my body and blood” for you, he meant it. 

Again, how will we know there is hope for us outside of fairness, especially important and relevant to us when we know we haven’t been fair at all (we killed him and we kill him still) and, mind you, when we have been fair and think that that is going to get us somewhere? Only when it is given to us.

There is Hope. 

Take God’s word for it. 

Take it verbally – Scripture and Sermon (the very reason you must find yourself a good Preacher).

Take it visibly – Sacrament (the very reason you must get yourself to that wine and bread hebdomadally).

Just Take it. 

Lose the Fear. Find the Hope. 

Take it. 

                                                            What's Next for You?

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

What Kind of Believer Am I?

“Early in the morning I cry out to you, for in your word is my trust” (Psalm 119)

When I read the Scriptures in the morning I don’t usually talk to God in what we might call the traditional or regular prayer conversation practice or approach. I talk a lot with God, but rarely in the first-person. When I do actually talk in the first-person to God it is, I will say, a bit refreshing. There is a certain freedom that comes therein from not accumulating information or understanding or insight in those moments of sharing, but rather just relating who and what I am and what I already know and feel and think. The way I most do the first-person conversation is in reading and thus praying the Psalms in the first person, when, of course, the writing is actually such (make sure you know who in the Psalm is doing the talking. Things can shift from person talking to God talking in a heartbeat with nary a comma). 

One can read the first-person without being that first person. Instead, you read it as an observer of the person in conversation with God. When doing that, that listening in on the conversation, I am in the mode of gleaning insight, analyzing theology, growing in faith and life understanding. But when I am rather in the conversation, myself the speaker, I am loosed from the task of learning and thus active in experiencing the thought and emotion expressed, something that has redeeming value whether or not any insight is gained or solution to challenges, even those perhaps talked directly about, found. At the risk of characterizing the nature of the relationship we have with God as one of equal partners and thus cozying up to God as if in any given moment the conversation might turn and God would be the beneficiary of my attention and companionship, what happens in these first-person conversations with God is rather like a good conversation with a friend. Even if circumstances or conditions don’t change, even if direction or solution is not found, you feel better nevertheless.

Excursus: on God as a friend. I have never liked the old hymn “What a Friend We Have In Jesus.” Not only is the tune sappy but the text sentimentalizes the relationship we have with God and promotes the identification of God as The Great Explainer of all things perplexing and The Great Helper from all things debilitating. This is the God of Religion, the Divine One who bails us out and not, to corrupt the whole thing even more, simply unconditionally, but does the saving within the concocted (by us) covenant that demands our obedience to the law and if we disobey we get no saving after all, thank you very much. So, lose the hymn, please. And abandon the theology of glory. But, now, don’t lose sight of the fact that Jesus purportedly said a very interesting thing about friendship with us. He in fact calls us his friends and says this is because he has let us in on everything he knows of God (John 15:15). Interesting. He confides. It’s what good friends do. It seems to me only fair that we might be polite about it all and reciprocate. And so, friends. But please, realize what is going on here. Jesus made the first move and made himself vulnerable, and it killed him. This is a friendship of equals because he intentionally and deliberating made this so (see Philippians 2 for how Paul famously describes this changing of status, position and power). And so, we are equals, in awe.

So, back to the business at hand. 

I am not a Supernaturalist, one who sees God as intervening to change circumstances whether called for or not. But I am also not a Deist, one who sees God originating and setting the world in motion and then stepping away with hands off to see how it all evolves. I am a Christian, one who claims that Jesus of Nazareth is who God is (peace through distributive justice by non-violence) and that all the biblical accounts of God’s extra-natural, supernatural actions (hardening Pharaoh’s heart, parting the Red Sea, Elijah’s fire, you name it, including, mind you, the physical resurrection of Jesus) are mythologies to illuminate and declare (not just describe, but actually enact this truth by virtue of the declaration – in other words what we mean by Promise instead of Demand, Gospel, instead of Law) that unconditional love (“agape” type, the type Paul uses to describe love in I Corinthians 13, opposed to “phileo” or “eros”), short hand for “peace through distributive justice by non-violence,” is in the end (and from the beginning) the only thing standing, and left standing, forever.