On Distributing Ashes at the Train Station

Today I offered “ashes to go” at the White Plains train station.  It’s apparently controversial, but I’m letting others do the heavy theological lifting. I wanted to experience it before I reflected.

It was cold. Below freezing. We still haven’t gotten out of the polar vortex, which I think has decided that it’s very comfortable in its new digs and has decided it will never leave.  Besides, spring has gone fishing. Ice fishing.

At first, I stood outside the train station in my cassock and surplice for a bit, but once I found myself unable to move my hands, I entered the lobby across from the newspaper kiosk.  It was also cold. The doors kept opening as commuters rushed in.  To keep my hands warm, I’d rub them against each other as I held my little glass bowl full of burned palms. I would have rubbed them between my surplice and cossack, but I worried it would look vaguely illegal. So I kept my hands visible.

I stood still, as I didn’t want to be pushy, merely present.  Available to the seeker, but conveniently ignored by the apathetic, distracted, and irreligious. I didn’t want to raise anyone’s anxieties or hurt anyone’s feelings by being so enthusiastically a priest.

People said, “I heard about this.” Apparently the radio and papers found this fascinating. Press might be good. Look at those quirky Episcopalians, standing in the cold, offering dirt and telling people they’re all going to die.

“I didn’t know this was happening,” said another. This?

“Can you do this?” Am I allowed? Well, I won’t tell anyone if you won’t, I didn’t say. I have a license. Continue reading “On Distributing Ashes at the Train Station” →

Gawain de Leeuw4 Comments

On Deescalating (A Sermon on Matthew 5: 21-37)

A few weeks ago I saw a photo of three Orthodox Monks standing in between protestors and the police in one of the central squares in Ukraine. They merely held a cross and prayed.

Although there are times when a priest must take a side, in that moment they illustrated Christ by being in the way, interrupting the escalating dynamic, offering space for each side to stop the violence. It may be that one side is more righteous than the other, but the solutions are available without further loss of life.

Last week we heard Jesus make some rigorous demands upon the faithful: don’t get angry; don’t be lustful; don’t divorce. Reconcile. It’s easy to get caught up in the prurience of the passage (Matthew 5:21-37) and lose sight of the fundamental challenge. Jesus is not becoming a puritan, suppressing our sexuality.

He’s saying: don’t escalate.

Deescalate. It’s easy to get wound up, to become overwhelmed, to create more problems, to enter into a frenzy. So if you are getting into one, stop. Do what you need to to get your mind back on track, centered, calm.  Don’t become your own obstacle.

The intuition: be careful – we don’t know who else we will harm.

Yes, sometimes in our current context it chafes to be told to rein in one’s emotions. And perhaps there are times when that control is avoidance, merely delaying the inevitable emotional outburst. Instead, Jesus pulls us out of the frenzy. It’s a mistake to hear this only as Jesus wagging his finger. He is equally encouraging us to let ourselves be soothed.

Last week, a man named Michael Dunn was on trial for shooting Jordan Davis, a black teenager, at a convenience store for listening to hip-hop music loudly. It may be another example of racism; or why Stand Your Ground (or “Shoot First”) Laws are immoral; or why we need further gun control. At the very least, however, we had one man who could not negotiate with his own anger, and his racism and weapons exacerbated the event, the murder of a young man.

When Jesus says, even anger leads to judgement, it is precisely this sort of case he illuminates. The man could have responded with humor or simply left the scene quickly. Instead, he chose to escalate.

Deescalating is a mechanism of reconciliation; it is a crucial precursor to the challenge of forgiveness. Deescalation changes the dynamic between individuals and groups, allowing for the possibility that our responsibility, our impact upon each other, for each other, is shared. We all go to heaven, or send each other to hell.

Deescalating may be difficult. Yet discerning and identifying the complexity of our shared life is one of the purposes of prayer and faithful action, and we affirm that the benefits of stepping back, from letting honor be God’s and not our own, we diminish the possibility of creating hells for ourselves, or for others.  All over, from cyberspace, to Stand Your Ground, to political protests evince the dangers of rapid escalation, and how it creates an obstacle for healthy relationships.

When we are in the midst of conflict, when we must negotiate the valleys of community life, let our words be simple and plain. May we work first to support one another, perpetually offering space for reconciliation.

Gawain de Leeuw12 Comments

Jesus and the Billionaires

Are billionaires being persecuted? Certainly they feel under attack.

I understand the sentiment. They are easy targets. There are a few of them. They have a lot of power, and have access to the political elites. They may not know a lot about politics or economics, but they can make money, which always calls people’s attention. Personally, I don’t think there’s much evidence that billionaires are more thoughtful, intelligent or tasteful than anyone else; they are simply better opportunists.

Still, certainly billionaires are not necessarily the fundamental source of the problem our world faces. On this they might be right. They don’t cause all of us to pollute the air; nor do they all deny evolution and climate change. Some are libertarians when it comes to sexuality; or support projects they think effectively reduce suffering in the world.

So blaming them as a class is not exactly just. Continue reading “Jesus and the Billionaires” →

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Notes on MLK Jr

Martin Luther King would be 85 this year.
 
I wonder what he would notice about race in today’s world.  Certainly our president; perhaps that there are more public displays of diversity.  Casual racism, at least, is gauche and impolite.   There’s little disapproval for having friends of different ethnicities.  Certainly there’s a generational shift, and as those who grew up comfortable in a more racially divided environment die, I trust younger generations will find racism to be confused, unnecessary, wrong. 
 
I imagine he would still notice that the country still struggles with many disparities between whites and blacks.   Our country remains, for the most part, segregated.  Black men get incarcerated for non-violent crimes at a disproportional rate.  Many African-Americans struggle to build the generational capital that others take for granted.  And 2008 had a huge impact on black wealth throughout the country.  I suspect he would be outraged at the way some states are restricting voting rights.  Although there has been some improvement in the material conditions of many people, but others are still poor and the way out of poverty seems obscure. 
 
Race has had a very specific impact in the US.  It is certainly not the only country that has difficulties with rival ethnic groups (remember the Danes and the Saxons?  Just don’t get me started on the Picts).   But our political choices and conversations have usually begun and ended on our inability to come to terms with the consequences of our specific racial divide.  Defining who we are as a country is necessarily woven in with the narrative of racial injustice and the institutions that have protected white control of the political and economic process.   And we forget how recently most blacks lived in a country where they were repeatedly terrorized.
 
So what is to be done?  In the church, we have a role to build networks, tell stories and listen.  We remember that we were once enslaved by racism, but that there is a better world.  We will still build golden calves long the way:  we will wonder if the previous world was worth leaving.  But we have faith that building communities based on love and freedom is worth the struggle.   It means that sometimes the privileged learn to share; and the oppressed risk to speak; that our stories and desires are probably more tightly linked than we understand.  But it’s tough, for often the smallest differences that cause the greatest anxieties. 
 
How would we eliminate racism and injustice?  It’s hard to change hearts, but we could diminish the impact of racism in our country that are not based on race.  Such policies are expensive and currently politically unviable: full employment at a living wage, universally affordable health care, and excellent education would benefit everyone, and could certainly be paid for if we simply substituted our three wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and drugs with such investments.  This would not end the discomfort between the different, but it might mitigate the consequences when the rules are rigged.
 
So we celebrate Martin Luther King Day.  Let us remember this prophet, who died unpopular, who challenged us to stand and sing until our land rings with liberty, so that we may discover the promise of our God and of our native land. 

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Chris Christie and the Decline of Political Virtue

There are rules in the political world.  Rules of honor and shame.  Rules of respect.

We respect the office that people hold.  Even if they are not our candidate, we may address them with their title, and allow them to do the specific role they were elected to do.

Tradition, custom, and law, guides us.

They can help us be gracious victors and magnanimous losers.  After an election, the loser offers their respect and sometimes support.  The victor acknowledges the campaign was hard fought, and both make a nod to the theater of politics.  They even call each other on the phone.  It’s politics, not war.

We should be disturbed when these customs, these rituals, aren’t acknowledged.  When Ken Cucinelli refused to call McCauliffe after the Virginia Governor’s race because it demonstrated an inability to depersonalize the political, to still see a human being outside one’s political party.

Christie didn’t want to just win, but to get total victory for election to New Jersey.  Not merely 51% but as much as possible.  I’m not convinced that’s the presenting legal issue, but it reveals a bit about our current political culture.   Nobody wants to lose, for the stakes are too high.  And nobody wants a weak victory, because that means negotiation with the opponent down the road.  These battles are great for the media, because we find these stories compelling.

When total victory becomes our desire, the rules of respect get broken.   Our public life suffers.  It is for this reason Chris Christie represents both an entertaining, but fundamentally destructive, symbol of our political life.

Let me admit I had a fondness for exactly what I find dangerous about his style of politics.   Since I deeply want a credible Republican party that believes in math and evolution, I was giving him a fairly long leash.  But overall, his open contempt for the traditions that make governing possible may render his own office to be ineffective.  Who would trust him now?

When he refused, for the first time in the governor’s history, not to approve the tenure of Judge Warren, he disrespected the traditions and roles that had preceded him, taking an expansive view of his own authority.  The Democrats, furious, asserted their own authority.  And thus, we identify another place where a breakdown of tradition resulted in a fairly needless political controversy.

Certainly no political institution or party is immune from responding hysterically to microscopic issues, from seeking public vindication to increase one’s political capital.  In part it’s because it’s remarkably difficult to address the challenges that are facing our common life effectively.  Outrage is remarkably easy for everyone.

But as the right loses their belief in custom and authority, they lose what makes make politics, and compromise, possible: a halt in the dynamic of outrage.  Burke’s understanding of conservatism and its attenuating habits was that it protects us from violence; the respect of traditions was a respect of people.  But Christie, I believe, benefitted from a media culture that found contempt appealing, and a conservative class that has a revolutionary base.

Admittedly, what I liked about Christie is what I liked about LBJ – a sense of his own power.  But unlike the 1960’s, private vindictiveness became public, and as our ideological points become polarized, compromise becomes a political liability.  I wouldn’t single out Christi here.

I enjoyed Christ’s forwardness. Perhaps, however, it was a veil to misdirect the public and a way to undermine his opponents.  He eagerly fed an avaricious public’s desire for simple good vs evil narratives: making his opponents seem uncooperative, simple and weak.  This has revealed how his own effectiveness depended upon identifying and punishing enemies.  To some extent, It’s the political game; but we need these counter traditions of respect, reverence and restraint to balance our impulse to outrage and to actually make legislation.

Chris Christie represents an overall decline of our political culture.  Yes, by nature, politics is messy, clean, and vindictive.  But this is why there are rules of respect given each person’s office and where effective politicians are forgiving and rarely hold a grudge.  Christie used his office, and his presence, to hold others with contempt.  We shouldn’t be surprised that his circle of advisers understood this as a legitimate way to govern.

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The War on Poverty

It’s the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty.  Some would argue that we lost. There are still poor people.

Jesus did say they’d always be there.  But when I hear someone say, “well, the war on poverty was a failure,” I hear, “who gives a crap, anyway?”  But the faithful should remember:  we’re not off the hook (Matthew 25:31-46).

That there remain poor people does not indicate the war failed.  The small transfers in wealth did make a difference between misery and … less misery.  Surely the transfers did not cause people learn job skills or become financiers – but they do alleviate pain.

The programs implemented cannot replace some cultural and economic shifts that happened in the 1970’s.  Blacks who were gaining a foot hold in the middle class, did not acquire the wealth that whites did.  Their housing prices lagged even though they sought better opportunities.   Furthermore, good middle class manufacturing jobs were declining.  While we were alleviating poverty, we were still producing more poor people.

We forget that poverty has allies.  Poverty means a cheap labor market.  Some institutions benefit from the poors’ desperation.  It’s easy to exploit them and then blame them for their problems: just make sure, for example, all the markets around them are a little more expensive; charge them exorbitant fees for overdrawing.  Whereas the prosperous have room to make the occasional financial mistake, and can spend frivolously, the poor are penalized if they do not count every penny.   A beer, a gift, a small tax – each of these make a difference.

It’s difficult to admit there will always be some people who are dependent.  So we find remarkably ineffective, and expensive, ways to care for them, like prisons.  Although “Stop being poor” is our demand our lack of imagination ends up having us shut them in a jail cell where we foot the bill.  Why couldn’t we have built a school or paid them to beautify our cities?

Our own moralism, where we demand people “get a job,” is a useless way of solving the problem.  Such moralists don’t really know where the jobs are, nor would they hire the poors anyway.  Economists are quite aware of the problem:  there’s a gap between skills needed and the labor market.  We can’t snap are fingers and make hungry kids who can barely read into software engineers: even our great entrepreneurs usually had food on their table and some degree of stability.   So when I hear someone say “get a job” I also hear “you’re worthless, so why don’t you jut make your way to some labor camp and die.”  For the faithful, however, we say work is meaningful, but that does  still not determine God’s love for anyone or their intrinsic dignity.  God still loves the drunk. 

Last, the various programs were always meant to be a cheap alternative to a better solution: full employment.  A national program that actually financed the war on poverty as if it were an actual war might have been much more effective.  If we had spent the six trillion dollars we spent in Afghanistan and Iraq and instead provided the 12 million unemployed jobs at a middle class (about $75,000) wage for six years we would have strengthened the middle class.  The economic multiplier would have been enormous – because the unemployed tend to spend, the growth in GDP would multiplied at least ten times – and with such an expansion, we would have been able to balance the budget.  Ideally this would be part of rebuilding our massive infrastructure – construction remains one of the few industries that cannot be shipped overseas.  But we don’t have the political will, and it is far more expensive.  It’s easier to spend on war, and on a credit card.

Is there a dependent class?  Perhaps.  But I doubt we’re quite serious about getting people out of that “cycle.”  The poor are not organized – and many tend to vote against any sort of collective interest.  Occasionally you’ll find some poor person saying that they feel guilty for living on medicaid and food stamps. blaming some other person they know for being dependent.  They are ashamed of being poor, and many of them don’t like hand outs.  They’ll let themselves be punished because they’ve internalized the idea that they deserve their fate.  But the conservative class thinks they can just go out and start a business when they have no cash, no investors, and few skills.

We still have poverty, and we did fight a war.  But we thought we could fight it on the cheap.

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Legalize It!

David Brooks goes off on marijuana this week.  He offers that don’t do as I did attitude that only the well-heeled can argue to the rest of us.  It’s another affirmation that the laws are there for the poors.

I support a regulated drug market.  The evidence is prohibition makes drugs more dangerous for communities, their users and the enforcement community.   Realistic, non-prohibitive drug policies are more humane and cheaper, reducing violence and giving addicts consistent opportunities to reduce their addiction at their own pace in a way that costs less.  Examples: Portugal and Denmark.  Example for the other side?  Mexico.

The argument should end there.

Drug addiction is a problem, but jails are the worst place to solve them.   They are the most expensive, least effective places to teach people to make meaningful alternative choices.  After all, no politician wins votes by spending more money on teaching “higher” values to felons.

David Brooks makes his argument by comparing higher vs drug addled happiness, but I think he is pretty limited in his understanding of “drug use.” I enjoy my coffee and gin on the day’s book-ends.  It has not stopped me from listening to Wagner or reading Proust.   Isn’t it possible that for some, the former is better high; and latter more comprehensible?  And I’m not even talking about their usage.

Don’t get me started on the drug use of artists like Coleridge and Basquiat.

The down and dirty problem is that the war on drugs has been a de facto war on poor, black families.  Whites and blacks use most drugs at the same rate; blacks, however, get the rap sheet.  Brooks avoided it.  Once a felony, then no job.  Then it’s working with other felons.  The drug conviction itself keeps them out of the labor force.  Legalization is not about “happiness.”  It’s about the ruined lives along prohibition’s way.

There are some non-race based policy changes that would diminish the impact of racism in our country.  One is affordable health care.  The second would be full employment.  The third comprehensive public education.  And last, ending the war on drugs.  This last one would liberate a substantial plurality of black men in jail.

Ending the war on drugs would be a fair way of reallocating our resources that would proportionately help those who have been disproportionally affected.  We’d free up our police forces to focus on violent crimes.  We’d not need to militarize them against drug lords.  And neighborhoods would be safer because people could get their high legally.

We’ve spent one trillion dollars on this war, and the demand has not stopped.

Prohibition is a waste of money.  Criminalization doesn’t work.

Legalize it.

Gawain de Leeuw2 Comments

Happy New Year!

Yesterday was the celebration of the Feast of the Holy Name.  The church says Jesus was circumcized on this date, affirming that Christianity is linked to Judaism, and that Christ had a history, a location, a culture.

For some this signifies the incredible.  Some would prefer God, or Jesus, to be a lot like a superhero.  In that case the story seems more like a comic book, a fantasy of the origins like the Green Lantern or The Hulk.  But the merit of the story is that we can’t get out of our historical context and cultural location.  Although we may feel righteous about who we are in our current context, we are always embedded and bounded.  For some this is a trap, a prison; but in another way it is a lot like gravity – without it, what kind of collisions would ensue?  Could we behave comprehensibly without the cultural knowledge we do have?

I often find that people are likely to judge the people of the past based on our contemporary morality.   But when we enter their judgement, we remain unaware of what they believed was truly at stake.  The cosmology of the ancients, their everyday experience of the world remains foreign.  I doubt that most of us would survive well even in 19th century America, not to mention 15th century England, 13th century Mongolia, 8th century France or 1st century Palestine.  We are learning much more than they did; and certainly we are not completely different emotionally, but those worlds are foreign places.  Our world has become both large and small – we intuit the cosmos, and yet it seems that the world as at our footsteps.

Holy Name reminds us that our God, by being embodied, works within our own materiality.  We may not necessarily name accurately who God is like.   Although it seems, however, as if we have implicitly limited God, we do not say that God cannot be placed in other cultures.  We still say we see God engaging any place where love is the primary form of grace. 

The good news is that the sources of liberation and hope we need are already here.  Discovering the sacred heart of God is not done just through becoming an expert; it is not done through becoming perfect; it cannot be except through the lens of our cultural context, the traditions and signs that are available.  For this reason, a theologian must identify the present symbols and signs  – the objects that convey meaning – and question them here.  People only experience the divine through the words and culture they inherit; the cross and the empty tomb reveals their worthy, if ephemeral, nature. 

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The Invisible Among Us

Sermon Given on October 13th, the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23.

It’s tough being on the outside, to be excluded from the group.

 We don’t choose to be excluded most of the time, except for those moments of principle:  it simply happens to us.  We get sick; we become part of the class of people who is unhealthy.  Sometimes we are quarantined; and then we feel contagious, so we avoid others; or deserving so we are ashamed.  If not, we ask, “how did I become such as one of these, a leper, an outcaste?”

We’ve been a part of the tribe;  we begin to notice the way people avoid our faces, who stop returning our phone calls, who quickly end their conversations with us.  Or there are the voices of pity and feigned concern, just enough time to assuage their guilt and truncate the relationship.  We become lepers.  Continue reading “The Invisible Among Us” →

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Sermon Notes on Proper 20 year C

Almost every week I write about the questions I’m asking as I read the lectionary texts for the week.  This is not an academic enterprise, but my reaction to the text as I read them.   I ask the questions in advance because it helps me preach without a text.

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

What does it mean to be healed?  Can having money be healing?  Is it possible to have a sense of being complete, of joy through spending?  Certainly when we have none it’s possible to question our own worthless.  Is healing a feeling of peace?  When do we feel whole?  Why is it fleeting?  What is it like to move from satisfaction to dissatisfaction? 

In Psalm 79:1-9 the author says:

79:5 How long, O LORD? Will you be angry forever? Will your jealous wrath burn like fire?
79:6 Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call on your name.
79:7 For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation.
79:8 Do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors; let your compassion come speedily to meet us, for we are brought very low.

Here it’s almost as if, after asking for God to punish other nations, he is saying “Oops, I guess I wasn’t that great a guy also.”  This is how we feel about other nations – and religions.  But then he reframes his prayer:

79:9 Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and forgive our sins, for your name’s sake.

Often our prayer is like a movement.  It goes from one stage to the next.  Our spiritual and emotional lives are always dynamic.  We initially seek revenge; but that is not where God is.  Instead of destroying others, we need to be saved from ourselves.

In the first letter to Timothy (2:1-2) the author seems to say, don’t look in my direction, King.  I don’t need your approval, I just want the best for you.   So just assume I’ve got your best interest at heart.  Don’t kill me.  I don’t think this is obsequiousness, but conveys the sense that the work of the church is not the same as the secular work of kings. 

The gospel of Luke this week (Luke 16:1-13) is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager. 

I think of the manager as being average:  not frugal; just a cog in the machine.  The rich man gets wealthy through exploiting the work of others; and his manager is no different.

The manager thinks differently.  The prosperous are those who count every penny; they measure relationships through a careful inventorying of what allows them to accumulate.  The middle manager knows he will not have that kind of luxury to make those calculations. 

Debt and the accumulation of wealth are deeply linked.  Some argue that the origin of money itself is upon the backs of owing lives:  of the debt implicit in slavery.  Money is the accounting of a life.  The middle manager is divesting himself of that sort of debt.   

When Jesus says “dishonest wealth,” I wonder if he is implying that all wealth arrives through some sort of dishonesty.  It is not that people make money just through lying, but that we accumulate through denying the truth that a life cannot be counted. 

I might explore what is wealth for?  I’ve suggested before that it is to be spent and circulated, not hoarded.  But I also think that there are components of wealth the gospel critiques.  In our own culture, I believe the gospel would critique our culture of convenience, our implicit frugality in trying to get the cheapest deal, and the hastening of time and space which our economy has created.   It is not merely money that Jesus critiques, but money as a certain sort of technology that alters the way we manage our social life.

It is also possible that this is a problem of administration.  The reason why capitalism became successful was because of the interplay between prudence and discipline with accumulation.  Virtues associated with the church became a part of making money.  All economic institutions from the corporation to the state require administrative virtue if they are to be effective. 

What does it mean to serve wealth?  Money is an effective incentive, and counting matters.  But why does it matter?  For what do we strive?  It is not the buying things that is the problem; it is how that convenience, that quick gratification distracts us from God.

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