Our Neighborhood MeetUP viewed a film on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who collaborated with German leaders seeking to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote extensively about the Christian life, including Discipleship and Life Together, a description of daily life at an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany.

Discipleship is primarily an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount.

Bonhoeffer faced an impossible choice: either the defeat of his nation or the destruction of Christian civilization. He found that traditional ethics could not guide him. Therefore, he threw himself on the mercy of God and did what seemed right to him in the situation where he found himself.

Many Christians who lived in countries under the heel of Nazi Germany faced similar dilemmas. The ten Boom family of Holland also compromised traditional Christian values, such as obeying the laws of the state, always telling the truth, and so one— in order to achieve a higher good, resistance to tyranny and rescue of its victims.

In light of such historical events, a lot of Christian discourse today strikes me as irrelevant. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of persons die of preventable causes. Global warming and other ecological issues call the future of the planet into question. People of all faiths have more in common with each other than with people who share language, nationality, and other factors but lack a common worldview.

It’s time to rethink many of the basics. I’m looking forward to reading Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins. I understand Bell tackles many of these questions.

The idea of Resistance is fascinating to me. I’m reading a second time Dorothee Soelle’s masterwork The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (2001). She begins with a quote from Rumi

Why, when God’s world is so big,
did you fall asleep in a prison,
of all places?

I admit feeling terrified of being swallowed alive by “the big machine,” our culture, which with its mass media dulls our senses and silences the whispers of the still small voice that is God’s Spirit within.

Mohamed Bouazizi  a 26-year-old university graduate without a steady job immolated himself in Tunisia when police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling without a license.

How does he fit the stereotype in Western media of youths named Mohamed?

In the democratic West we seldom see the suffering of people like him. They have to set themselves on fire to get a few moments of our attention.

The death knell is sounding for our consumer-based economy because we’re soon going to consume all there is. This, while billions—billions with a B—lack basic necessities of life.

What can one person do? How can humankind be my family in reality, not just in ideal?

These are questions I ask myself.

A sister’s account of the anti-Hitler leaflet campaign of her brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl and other students, most in their early 20s. They paid with their lives.

The book includes all the leaflets, the last of which was smuggled out of Germany and dropped by Allied planes throughout the country.

I think of students in the Middle East, demonstrating for human rights that I take for granted. Some of them also will pay with their lives.

Inge Scholl documents how her siblings’ courageous actions grew out of and deepened their faith in Christ, how they interacted with calm grace and hope for the future with those who tried them in the People’s Court (a travesty) and with fellow prisoners.

It makes what I do for Christ seem trivial. But I recall Naaman. Asked to bathe in the Jordan so that he might be healed, he became indignant. His servants asked, “Father, if the prophet had asked you to do something ‘hard and heroic,’ wouldn’t you have done it? Why not ‘wash and be clean’? (2 Kings 5)

Truth is, if I’m not up for the simple daily things Christ asks, I wouldn’t be up for some heroic deed either.

We’re seeing historic change in the Middle East. It’s critical Americans land on the right side of the struggle: for basic human rights, for political and economic freedom, for self-determination.

For years the U.S. has had sweetheart deals with dictators around the world because they support U.S. interests, particularly business interests. Much bitterness in the Arab world arises from the U.S. policy of overlooking human rights abuses in oil rich countries.

These people have committed to our ideals: liberty, justice, democracy.

Our long-term interest lies in being ahead of the curve. The world is changing, becoming more democratic.

Almighty God cares about all people of the world. God hears the cry of the imprisoned, those who have disappeared, those who have no job and no future.

Will we go with our short-term corporate self-interest? Or will we stand with the people of the world who long to be free?

My prayer is that we get it right.

Just finished reading Gone with the Wind. It was impossible to  put down. Although I knew the story from the film, I found myself day after day reading from early morning until late at night.

Why?

It’s so breathtaking. The characters are alive: Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, Melanie, Mammy. Who doesn’t know these people and care about them, whether liking or disliking them?

What a blunder it’s been to live in the South for 20 years without reading this book.

The film (to be shown on TCM tonight) has all the action sequences and much of the dialogue. I held my breath at the end, waiting for Rhett’s immortal line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Minus “frankly,” it was there.

What the movie doesn’t have are Ashley and Rhett’s indepth analysis about the dream of the Old South that still lives in many hearts today, like Scarlett’s ill-fated obsession with Ashley. It doesn’t have the explanation of “gumption,” which author Margaret Mitchell once said was the theme of the book.

It doesn’t have the stunning racism of South and North, such as the frequent linking of even beloved Mammy and Uncle Peter with monkeys and apes. Mitchell has Rhett explain the Klan as rising up to protect Southern womanhood from free issue “niggers” [sorry!] or as disappearing when Southern Democrats discovered party politics were more effective against Yankee depredations.

I understand Southern attitudes toward the North better, and see more clearly and painfully the burning, looting and desecration perpetrated on the prostrate South.

The only book more prevalent on Southern shelves than Gone with the Wind is the Bible. Baptists and Methodists have flourished, churches on every corner. Yet the only positive recourse Scarlett ever had to the Bible was to hide money in it!

The family Bible recorded births, marriages and deaths. But other than that, Scarlett’s only thoughts of God were rare fears of judgment that she quickly explained away, or bargaining prayers to save someone she needed (not loved) from dying.

I know Scarlett well. Several very like her served the churches I pastored. Whether or not God’s love ever succeeded more than Rhett’s, or like his simply wore out, is God’s call, not mine.

Many people, South and North, operate on grasping gumption, like Scarlett’s, that fierce anxiety that drives acquisition, terror of the wolf at the door—or the blue coat or Scalawag or free issue “nigger,” or wet back or Muslim terrorist (or to hark back to Nazi propaganda “Jew”) whoever it is that looms Dark in our deepest fears. 

They operate on  gumption, not grace. Their pious claims notwithstanding, they know little of the mind of the One who being in very nature God thought equality with God not something to be grasped. (Philippians 2.6)

Sometimes I feel that fear myself, and pray for grace.

Please God, one day (who knows how far in the future) may the hate, suffering, obsessions and fears be Gone which this novel portrays with the accuracy of an anatomist’s scalpel.

The question is, what else will the hurricane that finally blows them away destroy as well?

I love the Bible—having read it, learned it by heart, taught it, preached and (I hope) lived up to it all my days. I believe by composing, preserving, and passing down through generations these scriptures the Hebrew, Jewish and Christian peoples have sought to hear (often succeeding in  hearing) the true Word of God.

Darkness (whatever you understand it to be) also loves to use the Bible, however, creating diversion, division and hatred, and causing pride, hypocrisy. and legalism. Darkness also wrongly uses texts like Zephaniah to persuade us there’s no hope, no use, no future—when by God’s grace there is hope, there is a point, there is a bright future for all who listen and follow the God of light and love.

Zephaniah, one of the 12 short books at the end of the OT, gives End of the World crazies a reason to celebrate! Try this:

“I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth”
—declares the Lord.
“I will sweep away [humans] and beast;
I will sweep away the birds of the sky
And the fish of the sea….
And I will destroy [humankind]
from the face of the earth”—declares the Lord. (Zeph 1.2-3, TANAKH)

The note says the Hebrew may mean the total destruction of an area of the earth, rather than total annihilation. Either way, I’d rather not.

 For the Hebrew prophet, the issue of ecology is morality, not science. Science is a tool, a good tool, in the hands of good people. But science alone cannot correct this problem.

The prophet Hosea, much earlier than Zephaniah, makes the connection crystal clear:

…”there is no  honesty and no goodness
And no obedience to God in the land.
[False] swearing, dishonesty, and murder,
And theft and adultery are rife;
Crime follows upon crime!
For that, the earth is withered:
Everything that dwells on it languishes—
Beasts of the field and birds of the sky—
Even the fish of the sea perish.” (Hosea 4.1b-3)

So what?

A scholar I can’t name said that Bible study involves two questions: what? and, so what?

“What” tells the message, “so what” the meaning for your life.

Zephaniah, Hosea said… So what? For decades pop culture has laughed at the bearded guy in a monk’s robe waving a placard “The End is Near.” Preachers don’t talk about this stuff so much any more. But Nature programs now routinely document the imminent extinction of species and decimation of habitat. “Mass extinction event” is part of our everyday vocabulary.

Yet, nothing changes.

BP makes bad decisions to speed things up and boost profits; and, millions of gallons of crude oil foul the Gulf of Mexico. A natural environment that cannot be valued is mired for a century or more. If (or when!) the stuff gets into the Gulf Stream, who knows what worldwide destructive impact is possible.

Here’s what I think:

We know of several civilizations which flourished, depleted their resources, and vanished from the earth: Easter Island, the Mayans, the culture centered in Angkor Wat, Southeast Asia. It’s very likely that is happening again, except this time on a global scale. Perhaps, if humans are utterly stupid, greedy and blind, we can cause a mass extinction event.

There aren’t enough tears to weep, when you realize that. Nevertheless:

I Will

• reach out my hand and heart to all who strive to follow the Wisdom Tradition of their culture. 
• speak out for justice and well-being of individuals and eco-systems.
• do my best to understand my position of privilege, and deconstruct as much of that as I can.
• strive to live as St. Francis and Gandhi lived, though I can’t reach anywhere close to their level.
• follow Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, living in accord with
  • the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7),
  • the Great Commandments (love God, others, self), and,
  • the Ten Commandments.

I will live in hope.

I’m reading Francis of Assisi by Leonardo Boff. It’s a heady book. But I’m finding it worth the wade. for example:

How, beyond the mysticism of gentle and compassionate identification with the poor and the Crucified, did they make sense of their want?  No one lives by mysticism alone. Life has demands that cannot be opposed permanently. How did they humanize this objective dehumanization that is poverty? It is precisely within the context of poverty that Francis places the problem of fraternity.  Each one’s  poverty implies for others a challenge, in order, to their care, gentleness, and the creation of an atmosphere of openness and security, denied by radical poverty. For Francis, having has been toppled from its pretension of granting security and humanization to persons. Only care for one another truly humanizes life…. Care is the way of being human.

Leonardo Boff, Francis of Assisi: a Model for Human Liberation. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 66.

I can’t describe what happened to me as I read these words. Of course!! I thought. This is it!!

My African brothers and sisters know this principle, because they live it. “Nobody’s poor here, unless they’re alone,” they said. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement also knew it.

Jesus did exactly this: he invested in people, flesh and blood, fallible people, like Peter and Mary Magdalene.  If they failed, he failed.  If they succeeded, he succeeded.

I don’t know the specifics for me yet.  But I do know the principle: our ultimate security lies, not in bank accounts or IRAs, but in caring for one another, as God cares for us.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Matt 6:8 (NRSV)

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7 (NRSV)

Matthew begins with 17 verses of “begats.” Mostly we skip it. There are theological insights hidden there, however, like Easter Eggs in a  DVD.

Three groups of 14. In gematria, the Jewish system of number symbols, 14 is David’s number. D is the 4th letter in the Hebrew alphabet, W (V) the 6th. Add the numbers, you get 14. So each group announces Jesus’ relation to David. The breaking points are highlights of Israelite history, starting with Abraham, then David the stellar king, and after the deportation to Babylon.

The list includes five women (except Mary, each of them a shady lady in some respects): Tamar (v. 3), Rahab and Ruth (v. 5), the former wife of Uriah (v. 6). This week our Bible study groups looked at Tamar, Genesis 38.

Tamar’s story interrupts the saga of Joseph, just as he was going down to Egypt as a slave. Judah had three sons; he married Er the eldest to Tamar. But Er died. Judah told son #2 Onan to do his duty and raise up an heir for his brother. (This is levirate marriage, see Deut. 25.5-10.) Without knowledge of the resurrection, you needed offspring to keep your line going. Onan, however, didn’t want an “heir” of his elder brother’s to inherit 2/3 of his father’s estate; so he practiced a crude form of birth control to prevent pregnancy. Onan also died.

Many biblical interpreters have used Onan’s story as a way to discourage boys from masturbation, but that’s a misuse of scripture. The issue here is that Onan refused to follow the law and raise up an heir for his brother.

Judah didn’t want to lose his third son Shelah to a “black widow.” He shelved his daughter-in-law in her father’s house. When she realized he was not going to let her keep her dead husband’s name alive in israel, Tamar took action.

She disguised herself as a temple prostitute, a woman involved in Canaanite worship through ritual sex. Not knowing who she was, Judah had sex with her, but not before she secured tokens from him that would identify him at a later date. (A comparable act would be giving her his driver’s license and VISA card, until he brought cash payment.) But when his friend returned with payment, the so called temple prostitute had disappeared.

Family discovered Tamar was pregnant, and planned to burn her. (Double standard! No sweat for the man.) But she produced the items belonging to Judah, proving she had acted only to secure an heir for her husband, and keep the line going.

Since it is the line eventuating in the Messiah, God also wanted to keep the line going. Her loyalty and hutspah served not only her husband, but Almighty God as well! In that way “she was more righteous than Judah.” (Gen 38.26)

Tamar took grave risks of being maligned, even being burned, to accomplish what in her time and place was an honorable goal. As a single woman, she had no power. Yet she confronted the head of a clan, successfully.

Jesus must have known the stories about his mother, and have felt the sting of slurs against himself as a “bastard.” When he was confronted with the woman taken in adultery (John 8.1-11), did he think about Mary’s suffering?

The Messiah’s genealogy includes the most powerless, poorest people of the society—single women, and not even the “respectable” ones! Surely, we too need to think of women who are left out and lost by our society, if we are truly to be part of Jesus and Mary’s household.

Next: The Miss Kitty and the Longbranch of Jericho, Rahab (Joshua 2)

Flush with the success of earlier efforts, I added a protein booster whey powder, a couple eggs, and two tablespoons of oil.

After 25 minutes in the oven, the knife came out clean.

We cut the cake the next day to store it. It consisted of an outside ring, inside ring and center.

The outside was perfect, a dream of a cake.

The inside was still semi-liquid, doughy.

The center was empty.

T. S. Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Wow! What an image of spiritual life!

It is critical for our spiritual lives to be real, nourishing, whole.

Not cream puffs without cream.

And, when you’re starving, a good hearty piece of bread is better than a pastry.

I’m reading Dom Helder Camara in the Orbis Books series Modern Spiritual Masters. I was intrigued that I never heard of him before, yet the blurb identified him as a major player in Vatican II and an archbishop (?) who implemented changes to move the Brazilian and Latin American church toward ideals of Poverty and Service.

He embodied the bishop Victor Hugo described in the opening pages of Les Miserables. Fluent in French,  he must have known that book well. The Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s silenced him in the country, but could not outside.

Conservative, fervent anti-Communist pope John Paul II dismantled most of his accomplishments. His writings are largely in Portuguese and housed in Recife, I believe. Orbis is doing world Christianity a great service in bringing the riches of his thought to light.

I confess I  got a flyer offering them at half off. I purchased:

• Dom Helder Camara
• Pedro Arrupe
• Thomas Merton
• Evelyn Underhill
• Simone Weil
• Writings on Contemplation and Compassion, ed. Robert Ellsburg.

Easily a year’s worth of reading and reflection.  I was introduced to the series by the volume on Dorothee Sölle, the German theologian. That led me to read her magnum opus The Silent Cry, which I’ve written about.

Reading is a way out of despair for me. It helps me in these increasingly dark days. Advent is around the corner, my heart cries out for light, light, light!

They must have been shocked, because then, as now, Sodom and Gomorrah smelled bad.

Though not for the same reason.

The modern mind equates S & G with gay sex. That’s been so for about 1600 years. (But not before that.)

According to Genesis 19, however, the men of Sodom were as willing to gang rape Lot’s virgin daughters as his strange visitors.

The issue is gang rape, violence against persons to whom is owed the sacred obligation of hospitality and the protection that comes with it.

It’s not homosexual people.

Ezekiel 16 is the only place in scripture that spells out the sin of S & G (the “you” addressed is Jerusalem):

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.  Samaria has not committed half your sins; you have committed more abominations than they, and have made your sisters appear righteous by all the abominations that you have committed.

Ezek 16:49-51 (NRSV)

Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned for pride, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of the poor.

I know the arguments about homosexuals get hot and heavy. The prospect of gay marriage bothers many folk.

We live in a society that promises every individual “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What’s more basic to human happiness than freedom to build a life with the person you love?

Jesus built his life on loving God and neighbor. Isn’t he more offended by loveless arguments and loveless lives than by who we choose to love?

Yes, there are a few “Thou shalts” and a few “Thou shalt nots.”

Keeping two people from promising to love each other, and no one else, for a lifetime, however, has nothing to do with “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.”

It has to do with hate.

Which, last time I looked, is at the top of God’s  list of “Thou shalt nots.”