19
June
2007
Here’s a popular multiple choice question. Our rulers, by which I mean the gang still clinging to power in the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, are: (a) incompetent, (b) venal, (c) both. The third answer comes closest, in my view, but I also think that those who focus mainly on the venality quotient in this regime too readily slight the significant role played by sheer stupidity, incompetence, and ineptitude. The Bushies cannot think to save their lives–or our lives–or the lives of millions around the world who suffer daily the consequences of ill-informed, rash decisions. And it’s not just the President. His advisers, his cabinet, the top national security people: they all seem unable to take a single, calm, measured decision about anything. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
15
May
2007
Lots of thumbsucking today and tonight about the death of Jerry Falwell and what it might portend. I don’t think it portends very much of significance. Along with his health, Falwell’s stock had been declining for years. Repellent but by no means stupid, Falwell had been reduced to making ever-more-outrageous statements in order to break the media barrier. What I hope we won’t do is conclude that the original group of Christian Right leaders–Falwell, Robertson, Kennedy, et al–represented the high water mark of their movement, and that things will get better as each of these elders receives his just reward beyond the grave. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
2
April
2007
Bill McKibben did something remarkable at the launch event for PCU’s new Eighth Day project: he brilliantly interwove dimensions of living we ordinarily think of as unrelated, and he set the whole eco-justice challenge in a spiritual context. In McKibben’s take, it’s all about hunger. It’s about our unfulfilled hunger for community in a hyperindividualized culture, and it’s about our literal hunger for the food we need to sustain ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
27
February
2007
This is the text of a sermon by Peter Laarman preached at the First United Methodist Church of Los Angeles on February 11, 2007. The sermon texts were Luke 6:17-26 and Jeremiah 17.5-10.
By now I guess it’s not news to anyone that within American Christianity the tables have been turned in a dramatic way over the course of five decades. I can sketch these changes very simply. In the middle of the last century—fifty years ago, more or less—the Mainline Protestant denominations dominated the religious landscape. The gleaming Interchurch Center in New York City—475 Riverside Drive, commonly known as the “God Box”—had just been built with money from the Rockefellers. That building functioned as a kind of a Protestant Vatican. The National Council of Churches of Christ, headquartered there, spoke for the major Protestant bodies with considerable authority, as did state and local ecumenical councils, which were then strong and well-funded.
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Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
26
January
2007
I suppose in some ways it’s a very good thing that most Americans “don’t know nothin’ ’bout history,” because if we did we might be totally paralyzed by the weight of our own story. I mean the real story, not the airbrushed version in which expanding democracy and material prosperity go hand in hand under the Almighty’s watchful and solicitous providence.
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Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
18
December
2006
He doesn’t even cry. There’s one clue. “Away in a manger the sweet baby wakes; the little Lord Jesus no crying He makes.” No wonder women especially received Him with hosannas as the long-awaited Lord of Glory. Everyone should have such an agreeable boy child! The Nativity narratives satisfy pretty much everyone: from haute bourgeois art lovers to homeless folk, unwed mothers, anxious dads, lovers of animals, even astrologers. They don’t satisfy me, however, because in this culture they sweeten and sugarcoat a revolutionary message. Even the way heavenly portents are sugarcoated is problematic. Yes, peace on earth and divine goodwill to all persons of peace—but it’s a peace with justice that is intended.
If it weren’t for the all-but-buried justice message, I might be for chucking the whole thing. But the peace-with-justice angle seems to me worth excavating. Both Matthew and Luke provide a hint. Matthew has the Star in the East bringing Mesopotamian magi to Bethlehem, while Luke has the skies ablaze with Heavenly Host proclaiming Gloria in excelcis deo! Both writers mean to create an anti-imperial counterpoint to the apotheosis of Caesar Augustus. Everybody in that early Roman imperial time understood that major astral portents accompanied the birth of Somebody Important. And everybody in Rome-immiserated Palestine would also have understood the need for some powerful astral countersignifying, because while the Emperor Augustus brought a kind of peace it was hardly a peace with justice. So the portents invented by Matthew and Luke are plainly meant to suggest that this little baby boy will became the kind of peace-with-justice troublemaker that Jesus of Nazareth actually turned out to be.
Almost no American preachers will be taking the peace-with-justice angle in this year’s Christmas sermons, however. There are two reasons for this. First, the Roman Empire ended up co-opting an insurgent Christianity in the early 4th century (a very long story—you might want to Google “Constantine” or “”James Carroll”) so that Western Christianity itself became a mainly empire-affirming creed. Second, today’s American preachers all live under a Roman-modeled American Empire and thus tend to accept its premises and pretenses with little or no dissent. In Bush’s America it takes a gutsy preacher indeed to evoke the original context of oppressive empire for the birth of a messiah: literally, one who comes to rule in righteousness.
Everything spoken from our pulpits this year, as every year, is likely to be about stillness, beauty, heavenly joy descending, and (of course) a peaceable kingdom signified by the beasts that have gathered in a stable lowly, creating what would have been welcome animal heat for a very young unwed mom, the embarrassed father, and her haloed and hallowed baby boy. Only a cur would find want to take away the pleasures of these texts, images, songs, and social traditions.
Let me be that cur for just a moment. I don’t think ethical Christianity would suffer greatly if the fairytale birth narratives were done away with. They are, after all, what grammarians would call “back-formations”: stories added to round out the life of Jesus by people writing 60 to 100 years after his highly public death. The earliest gospel—Mark—omits any birth narrative and begins instead with a radical young rabbi embracing the outcasts. That is the major message, after all.
I do like Christmas music. I do like the posada tradition, I like the shepherds, the Three Kings, even those lowly beasts. All of it notwithstanding, I say away with the manger if it keeps people from growing up and seeing the grown-up Jesus in mortal conflict with Imperial Authority. And let’s challenge our consumerist empire, while we’re at it — take a look at David Roy’s blog on Black Friday and Christmas consumerism.
(And by the way, does anyone even know what a manger is? I do, but that’s another story.)
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
14
December
2006
George W. S. Trow’s landmark 1980 essay, “Within the Context of No Context,” has been on my mind lately not only because of Trow’s recent death but also because of the utter weirdness of the current Iraq discussion in the United States.
Just this morning NPR featured a series of interviews with top Congressional Democrats, none of whom–Ted Kennedy included–was willing to call for using the power of the purse to put an end to the catastrophic occupation. Cutting off Congressional funding for the occupation would “send the wrong message,” thrummed #2 Senate Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois. “As long as our troops are there,” Durbin continued, “we need to see that they are well-armed and well-provisioned.”
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Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
2
December
2006
With the Advent season upon us, it’s time to look again at why serious American Christians have no choice but to be part of the loyal opposition to the way our society is organized. None of this will be particularly new, but these numbers do show the particular harshness of prevailing trends. Why describe this as an “anti-Magnificat”? That’s easy. In Luke 2, Mary’s song presents as accomplished fact what the reign of God will do: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
9
November
2006
This blog also appears on the Huffington Post.
OK, let me say I thought Pelosi was pretty great on her first day as second in the line of presidential succession. She was succinct, composed, unwilling to retract her harsh descriptions of Bushian ineptitude, and clear that proper governance forward cannot occur without at least some hearings on past executive misconduct.
And yes, passing some kind of minimum wage increase is a good place to start, even an inevitable place to start given the “New Direction” pledge the top Democrats made avant the voting—and given the huge boost given to minimum wage politics by six state ballot measures Tuesday. So now: a minimum wage hike, some kind of health care fix, and somehow shortcircuiting the worst of the Bush tax cuts. Brava. A good starter kit.
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Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
29
October
2006
I am a faithful reader of my newspapers’ Business sections, and I also try to keep my eye on Business Week, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal and all such vehicles written for folks in the know about money. I like the brisk no-nonsense style of business reporting but I also want to stay abreast of what constitutes the deep structure of our society–its ethical grammar, so to speak–which is all about getting and spending and the anxieties attendant thereunto. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
