Society

Being American on the 4th of July — Somewhere Else

July 4, 2020 0 Comments

For me being American is about a people, a place, and the promises and dreams that were nurtured there. This combination has the potential of nurturing hope.

My favourite places were lived in without much thought in my younger years of their promises. I was just living, enjoying, and experiencing the life I lived as normal. In fact if questioned at the time of this picture (see above) I would have probably thought everyone’s life was like this. But upon reflection I think my sister and I knew even then that the regular weekend and summer trips to camp on land that my mother’s parents had farmed was not everyone’s norm. But once there, we were having a grand time anyway!

Nor was it normal in my neighbourhood at the time to have an immigrant father who solemnly put the flag of the United States in its holder as a reminder of the journey he had taken and the promises he had made and the promises a country had made to him. Even when he was disappointed that these promises would not be fulfilled in the highest court of the land to the degree to which law and merit would have warranted, he continued to be thankful for the freedoms we enjoyed in this place and with these people. I believe my dad treated his movement of appreciation, flying the flag, what some would call patriotism, as a civic act of thankfulness and of hope.

For even when personal advancement and success did not meet all his dreams, my Northern Ireland, Irish Catholic father was grateful for the freedoms he enjoyed with us. These freedoms were measured out in society in such a way that we could pick up the newspaper and read the news and the opinion sections without fear. Where we could attend religious services and assemble with any people and in any church, on any given day as we desired. Where we could access the legal system and seek justice as needed. Where we could vote and generally expect that the elections would be fair. Where we could walk down the street without worrying that our neighbours or the police would track us with guns drawn and fingers on the trigger.

It does not escape me that what I have described above is now being tested and has been tested all along.

But are these aspects of liberty what made me an “American?” 

Yes, but not by themselves.

Being American for me has in large part been about a society infused with hope. It’s strange to me but hope seems dangerous. Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, knew his hopes were dangerous to others. But, when the full ideals of our hopes cannot be fully met in this place, people, and it’s promises, I know, even as Roger Williams knew, that we must look elsewhere. Disappointment of hope can be crushing. That’s why I look ultimately look to Jesus and His Kingdom for my hope. “Hope we have as an anchor to the soul.” (Hebrews 6:18-19)  I have now lived half my life outside of the United States of America  because of the promises and dreams fuelled by Jesus. No matter where one lives or started life the allegiance to Jesus supersedes all others and some allegiances of the soul must be renounced in order to be free in Christ. (If you don’t know Roger Williams, b. 1603 — d. 1683, please get to know him!)

Yet every follower of Jesus has a body and lives in a land so I do carry some tension in my body. Participation in the life of the land can be limited to “our neighbour” but most followers of Jesus I know at least still choose to vote locally and federally as participants in our common governance. Some even choose to participate in politics with the ambition of serving others and not just themselves. I have been thankful for the immense liberty I have enjoyed as an American and now as a Canadian where we celebrated “Canada Day” on July 1st. Both countries share a “freedom construct” that seeks to share liberties broadly. And so I am thankful that I enjoy civilly many of the liberties only once afforded to kings and queens.

Yet, not all people in our lands are getting to participate fully in or enjoy the fruits of our most noble ideals. The blindness and the inequities created by self-interest work against some people and their places. When dreams fuelled by promises remain unrealized hope decays and the accompanying despair can be a crushing burden. It will be replaced by raw self-interest so people are enslaved to false loyalties and governed by fear. That’s what racism and classism does. Every meme and cheap news story becomes a physiological reinforcement for finding identity in what we are against or what we fear rather than in the higher ideals of what we could be for.

I hope for my friends and family in the States that we would insist on creating favourable conditions in which the most noble ideals are extended and even re-formed in all neighbourhoods across America (and Canada) socially and economically. That’s what hope inside our liberty seems to demand. 

So thankfully our calendar arrives again with me still living on the 4th of July. To celebrate I had grits for breakfast! Butter, salt, and pepper. Want some? I had coffee with almond milk, no sugar, in an “Ole Miss Civil Engineering” mug given to me by a dear person who prays for me. But does any of that make me an American? Today I’ve been asking myself, “how do I know I’m an American?” What do I carry in my body, beside grits, that tells me I’m an American? 

Here’s what I’ve discovered: I carry in my body more than memories, I carry hope.



Pictures:
1. Me and my sister enjoying “the camp.”
2. The Seal of Rhode Island created by Roger Williams.

Relationships, Society

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Slow Reflection Required

June 16, 2020 0 Comments

For a week I’ve been processing the prophetic vision God gave Bob Ekblad. He writes about it here, “Exposing and Repenting of Racial Injustice.”

Then Timothy Dalrymple from Christianity Today writes a painful call for churches to face the painful realities of slavery and their complicity in theft. He writes,

“Two original sins have plagued this nation from its inception: the destruction of its native inhabitants and the institution of slavery. Both sprang from a failure to see an equal in the racial other. As Bishop Claude Alexander has said, racism was in the amniotic fluid out of which our nation was born. There was a virus present in the very environment that nurtured the development of our country, our culture, and our people. The virus of racism infected our church, our Constitution and laws, our attitudes and ideologies. We have never fully defeated it.”

How could anyone read that and not want to be repentant? 

What is the Holy Spirit saying to the churches?

So after watching the Giglio, Cathey, Lacrea video, The Beloved Community, I’m asking myself, “Why is the church so weak?” Lord have mercy we are ASTHENEIA! How can we land in the language of “blessing” for slavery? ever. It’s awful!

Then I’m finding a whole segment of white Christians who still want to argue about personal responsibility as if America is a great moral vivarium and experiment in the exercise of individual rights. These days we’ve been invited to a funeral and all they can talk about is who’s fault is it and all they can say is stuff that basically equates to “Well everybody dies.”

And then I stumbled on the posting of a friend that was normalizing the language of extermination. Vile and wicked so it was. I walked around for an hour deeply grieved. How could this be in a brother’s heart? What cesspool did he dive in to find this stuff?

I think slow reflection is needed.

So if any video or summary of history has moved you a bit, even if it is by Phil Visher from Veggie Tales, please read a book. If you aren’t ready to read a book, at least read some testimonies of what it’s like to Breathe While Black. I’ve been moved by these.

I know you were hoping you could just go ask a co-worker. Don’t do it. Don’t ask them to be your counsellor for change. You are exhausting them.

Slow reflection is needed so read a book.

Some changes are coming quickly for some policy, but in the time that it takes you to read a book, some change could happen in you. Language expresses the heart. And we need some changes at the heart. Reading is marination of the soul.

There’s a lot of gospel work to be done. 

From my own reading list:

Stamped from the Beginning. Ibram X. Kendi
How to be an AntiRacist. Ibram X. Kendi
The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Willie Jennings.
White Fragility. Robin DiAngelo 
Between The World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates
Through the years I’ve read the works of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou

Slow reflection is needed. Read a book. You will find The Christian Imagination to be especially taxing. Reading slowly and seeking comprehension is good.

I’m forming an opinion that part of the reason we (the white-ish churches of North America) are so weak is that we have narrow emotional veins and our vision of Christian maturity is utterly malformed. Maybe a slow work through The Emotionally Healthy Church could be helpful for learning how to grieve. The lack of empathy still confounds me. But where empathy is lacking perhaps there has been unmetabolized griefs. 

At the end of the day without slow reflection there is no love and no repentance. 

There’s a lot of gospel work to be done. Read the Bible and read a book.

(I know, there’s a lot of podcasts to listen to as well. That’s not my realm. I’ve got one chorus in this post: Read a book.)

Update, 16 Jun3 2020. Louie Giglio has posted an apology for his “blessing” statement.

Change, Relationships, Society

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Personal Responsibility and Systems

June 8, 2020 2 Comments

Among some of my friends in the face of racism today there’s a call to just take personal responsibility for being a good person. That’s a good start, but they want to deny “systemic racism.”

I don’t think we get a pass as followers of Jesus on not seeing the systems we are a part of. A reading of Revelation in the New Testament is actually meant to disciple us so we can see the systems. Re-look at the use of “Babylon.” We are meant to understand that “powers and principalities” animate our society that includes us.

As to Canada we do have systems that have codified race. Our system was even held up as a model to be copied. I keep hearing folks calling the identification of systems and the codification of race a “liberal” idea. That’s not an idea, it is a reality.

“Canadians were among the most vocal opponents of the South African apartheid system. What’s not so well known is that the South African apartheid system was based, in large part, on the Canadian Indigenous apartheid system.

In the 1940s, when white South African politicians were designing a system that would keep people of different races separate, they came to Canada to study our system: its Indian Act, status cards and reserve system.”

Canada’s persistent apartheid system. Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and senior fellow with Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

These SA politicians in the 1940’s actually came to British Columbia for their learning tour.

So, yes let’s take personal responsibility for our internal beliefs, attitudes and actions that are racist. And let’s keep examining our systems with a new vision of life together. The examination will help us recognize that some policies and structures need to be dismantled. But we are resistant to examining systems if we have benefited from them. We are inclined to attend to our “self-interests.” And here’s why protesting is so important: If we do not accept why remaining at “System R” is untenable we will not exert the will to accept the pain and long journey for change — to move toward “System Y.”

The Lord’s Prayer is a protest prayer. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we express a yearning for a system change.

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

A kingdom is a system. Jesus is teaching us to pray. Praying the Lord’s prayer has become so habituated that we fail to let the Spirit of God disrupt us so that we pay attention to why in this world we yearn for Jesus to show Himself as King. But this prayer is not just a yearning for the future. It locates us in the present and in our neighbourhoods where in following Jesus we take up His Cross. The prophetic voice and activity of God’s people is meant to be for a whole-bodied salvation. The Lord’s Prayer is meant to bring us into a life fortified by the Presence and Provision of God in the face of the evil one. If that evil shows up in the systems that we are stewards over shouldn’t we do something with God about it?

Society

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John 1.9-11 — The World Did Not Recognize Him

March 20, 2020 1 Comment

To talk about Jesus is to hold in mind the one who predates the Creation for He is creator within the Communion of God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

To talk about Jesus is to hold in mind the one who entered Creation as a participant with us in our common situation.

9The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 

John 1:9-11, NIV

John holds that Jesus arrived in the world as the true light that gives light to everyone.

He was received like a superstar right? Like a long-lost son, right? Like a long-lost friend, right? Like a king?

No — in general folks missed Him. They missed the one who made them, the one who knows them best, the one who loves them. They missed Him.

They did not recognize the true worth, value, and weight of the who walked their streets.

I do not condemn them. Apart from God’s grace I would be in the same stupor — I would not have recognized the incredible glory, majesty, and beauty of Jesus.

Our Common Situation: seeing but not knowing

Jesus though, did not condemn them for not recognizing Him. Instead Jesus felt grief  — many times he felt grief. (See Luke 19:41-44) He knows the full cost of our stupor, our blindness. We are already under a death sentence. His disciples were angry when Jesus was not recognized and welcomed. In their rage and indignation they wanted to call down fire from heaven. (See Luke 9:51-56) But Jesus, He rebuked His disciples.

The disciples give voice to what it’s like to be unrecognized, unappreciated, and unwelcomed. Jesus is familiar with the feeling and the pain of being under appreciated, unknown and rejected. Of course there were some who received him, whose hearts where opened by The Father and The Spirit to receive Him. (We will get to that in our Journey with John) But the pain of being the creator, the genius behind it all and not being recognized — Jesus knows.

It causes me to pause and recall C.S. Lewis’ insight about our human condition. We see with our eyes and then we don’t see. We too easily forget, ignore, or don’t even know about the unseen spiritual realities of this world and all our relationships. Too many folks live in a 3D world when they were made for a 4D world. You and I were created for a relationship with self, with people, with the stuff of earth AND for a relationship with God. All our relations are holy.

We all have blindspots when it comes to seeing people. Lewis writes:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.


The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.


It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.


All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.


It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.


There are no ordinary people.


You have never talked to a mere mortal.


Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.


But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.


This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.


We must play.


But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.


And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.


Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, (HarperOne, 2001) pp. 45-46

Glorious Recognition

What would it have been like to have grown up with Jesus, watched his ministry, ignored His teaching, scorned him at his death as a felon, and then have to revaluate it all upon learning of His Resurrection?

O for the grace to say, 

“Oh, look it! My neighbour Jesus, He was the holiest of all!”

Prayer:

Heavenly Father,
I want to see Jesus. I want to see Jesus in all His glory: our Creator, Our Saviour, Our Lord, Your Beloved! Grant me the grace to see more. And in having recognized Jesus may I see all my neighbours with new eyes. May I long with Jesus for their full redemption and their glorious fellowship in your Communion. Oh come Lord Jesus — Shine on us.

In Jesus Name,
Amen.

Journey Through John's Gospel, Society

anxiety squeezes your mind

March 12, 2020 0 Comments

Here’s a reflection on Covid-19, change, and uncertainty.

When we are anxious or worried our mind is squeezed into a tighter and more narrow view of ourselves and the world. It’s not a comforting hug. It’s a death grip.

You may be feeling squeezed right now by a constant barrage of information and uncertainty. Such anxiety squeezes God out.

Jesus spoke to a crowd of folks who were used to being squeezed by anxiety. He knew he was speaking to many who counted on each day’s work and each day’s decisions in order to make it into the next. The poor make multitudes of decisions everyday, asking themselves questions designed for survival. They are constantly working out opportunity cost. This is how scarcity works.

If I buy this I won’t be able to purchase that.
If I buy this will I have enough at the end of the month?
If I don’t buy this who in my family will miss it?
If we don’t get enough work in this day,
what else will we have to miss out on?
If I don’t get this now it won’t be here for me latter.
What’s going to make me feel better?

The answer to that last question is so important.
When anxiety runs deep it makes all of us poor.

Some of us have become masters of managing scarcity in order to make aspects of our lives work. Students are masters of this with time and their own energy. However, as I also discovered, students are masters of scarcity until they are not! We cannot be in control of everything all the time!

Jesus offers another way through His presence and the promise of His peace. To the anxious His words must have sounded outrageous.

Matthew 6:24-34, NIV

24 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.


Jesus is brilliant.

Jesus knows that when we worry we have settled for a different master than our Heavenly Father. He knows that when we worry we have set our hearts and the issue of our security on other matters. He knows that when we worry we can settle for shortsighted acts of unrighteousness (like hoarding) in order to secure the future for ourselves. He knows that when we worry we are not able to see the opportunity of His Kingdom in each and every day.

Ugh! I write this with compassion for you and for me.

When the world worries are we going to act with love?
When the world worries are we going to live open to Jesus and His Kingdom?
When the world worries will we make adjustments with them and find the opportunity in this moment to love?

You and I can love by taking the advisable precautions.
You and I can love by reaching out to another and listening.
You and I can love by sharing resources from what we have.
You and I can love by praying with another and setting our hearts and lives together before our Heavenly Father.
You and I can love by reading the Word of God together.
You and I can love by setting our hope on Jesus.

The danger before us is not just a matter of what we run out of. The danger before us is a matter of believing we are alone.

Pause. Watch a bird. Look at flower. Locate yourself in this world.

Pray. Enter the embrace of God in His communion — The communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Locate yourself in His Communion.

Pastor. Reach out to someone else and invite them into the realities of Jesus’ Kingdom with you. Locate yourself in relation with others.

Change, Society

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