Christmas: A Lesson to Be Lived

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” ¹⁶So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. ¹⁷When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; ¹⁸and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. ¹⁹But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Luke 2:15-20

Like Mary, we should treasure the words of the story and ponder their meaning.

Unfortunately, if we do that, our peaceful holiday cheer will soon be displaced by a deep discomfort at the huge disconnect between the biblical message and our commercialized celebration of the holiday. Even before Jesus was born, in the proclamation brought by the angels to Zechariah and to Mary, Luke tells us that the baby will bring a challenging message about transforming our lives and the world around us.

On Christmas Eve, our Christmas Pageant closed with a wonderful poem by Howard Thurman,  an African American preacher and theologian, who was Dean of the Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1964. The poem is about what it means to take the Christmas message seriously. It is titled, “The Work of Christmas.”

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
           To find the lost,
           To heal the broken,
           To feed the hungry
           To release the prisoners,
           To rebuild the nations,
           To bring peace among people,
           To make music in the heart

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

Tax Reform (The Magnificat in Reverse)

He has brought down the powerful 

from their thrones, 

and lifted up the lowly; 

he has filled the hungry with good things, 

and sent the rich away empty.

Luke 1:52-53

The new congressional tax bill is not tax reform. It is just tax cutting. And it is not just cutting taxes; it is distributing the overwhelming majority of those cuts to the wealthiest among us.

And it is not just at all.

The wealthiest 1% of all Americans already control substantially more than the bottom 90%. Under the new tax bill that top group will gain a little bit more.

This is the Magnificat in reverse. The rich are filled with good things and the poor are sent away empty.

Of course the theory-- and we should be clear that this is a political theory without any economic evidence to back it up-- is that if the wealthiest people have more money they will invest it in enterprises that will benefit everyone. Right now the wealthiest individuals and corporations are sitting on a lot of capital. The theory is that if they had more capital they would create jobs and raise wages.

This has not worked in the past, but (apparently) hope springs eternal.

For at least four decades the American economy has been devoted to a massive redistribution of income from the bottom to the top. The gap between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans has been growing, and the middle class has been shrinking.

And let’s be clear. This gap has widened under both Republican and Democratic presidents. There have been different rates of increase but there have been no great reversals.

President Obama made income inequality a major policy priority. He was able to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while maintaining those cuts for the middle class, and he was able to expand healthcare for middle and low income families. But those modest policy changes were more than offset by the massive gains in pretax income that went to the wealthiest Americans as the economy recovered from the crash of 2008.

The new tax bill will deal a possibly fatal blow to the Affordable Care Act. By repealing the individual mandate, the bill will result in 13 million more Americans without health insurance. That number could rise if the increase in premiums caused by the repeal of the individual mandate causes premium costs to rise dramatically. We know that premiums will go up. We don’t know how much they will go up. 

This is not unintended. 

In a celebratory gathering on the White House lawn, Mr. Trump deviated from his prepared remarks to offer a candid assessment: “I shouldn’t say this, but we essentially repealed Obamacare.”

As Dana Milbank reported in the Washington Post:

“Trump, in a Cabinet meeting earlier Wednesday, let his fleeting encounter with honesty get the better of him when he read aloud the stage directions that called for Republicans not to advertise that they were killing Obamacare. ‘Obamacare has been repealed in this bill. We didn’t want to bring it up,’ he said. ‘I told people specifically, "'Be quiet with the fake-news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it.”’ Because I didn’t know how people would —.’ Trump didn’t finish that thought, but he said he could admit what had been done ‘now that it’s approved.’”

Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act may not be the only casualty.

When the deficit increases, and we know it will, lawmakers will be “forced” to “reform entitlements.”  By “entitlements,” they mean Social Security and Medicare. And by “reform,” they mean cut.

So the rich will have their taxes cut and the poor and the middle class will have their Social Security and Medicare cut. 

Merry Christmas.

"When You're a Star, They Let You Do It"

Trump and Gingrich share the stage at a campaign rally.

“With what shall I come before the LORD,
   and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
   with calves a year old? 
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
   with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
   the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ 
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
   and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
   and to walk humbly with your God?”
Micah 6:6-8

On January 31, 1999 I preached on the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. The Lectionary text from the Hebrew Scriptures was that familiar passage from Micah.

I began with a quotation from Martin Luther: “If you preach the gospel in every aspect except for the controversial issues of your time, then you have not preached the gospel at all.”

I now know that Luther did not actually include the adjective “controversial,” but in those days before I checked everything on the internet, I was working from my memory of what someone else had quoted as what Luther said.

Luther’s comments had haunted me for months as I carefully avoided anything beyond a few oblique references to impeachment.

I had avoided it for good reasons. First, there was the danger of too much opinion and too little Bible. Second, I didn’t want to make people unhappy by talking about an unhappy topic. And finally, I did not believe that it was a matter of the soul—it wasn’t where we were living.

At the end of the sermon I asserted two conclusions.

The first was that committing adultery and lying about it ought not to be an impeachable offense.

The second was that President Clinton ought to resign. Monica Lewinsky was an intern. She was barely an adult. He should have been her protector rather than her abuser.

There was more, of course, I talked about the prophetic tradition, about concepts of justice and mercy and humility, and I threw in a heavy dose of Reinhold Niebuhr. But the bottom line for me was that he ought to resign.

My memories of the Clinton impeachment hearings came back to me as I watched with amazement while the charges of sexual misconduct piled up against celebrities and politicians.

When I preached the sermon in 1999 I did not know that the chief architect of the impeachment process, Newt Gingrich, was cheating on his second wife at the same time that he was self-righteously condemning Bill Clinton. Ironically, Gingrich was having an affair with a staff aide who was barely older than Ms. Lewinsky.

It is a somewhat perverse characteristic of human nature that by divorcing his second wife and marrying his mistress he made his affair somehow seem more acceptable. The Clintons, on the other hand, are widely pilloried for staying together. And to make that strangely commonplace judgment even stranger, it is Hillary Clinton who is more widely condemned. 

But all of that is ancient history.

The present tsunami of allegations is unprecedented. And so is the reaction, which seems to indicate that as a society we will not tolerate this any longer.

The bad news is that sexual harassment and sexual abuse and far more widespread than many of us would have imagined. The good news is that women are being taken more seriously. 

And now there are consequences.

Al Franken, John Conyers, Blake Farenthold, and Trent Franks have all been forced to resign. And Roy Moore was defeated.

Donald Trump alone remains apparently unscathed by the allegations against him. And the sweep of the allegations is breathtaking. 

Newsweek reports that Mr. Trump “has been accused of rape and attempted rape a total of three times, once involving an alleged victim who was a year younger than Moore's accuser.”

He has been accused of walking in on beauty pageant contestants, some of whom were teenagers, while they were changing.

And, at last count, nineteen women have come forward to accuse Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. The Atlantic has helpfully summarized the allegations and the corresponding response from the President.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump has denied everything. When a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Is the official White House position that all of these women are lying?”, she responded with a resounding affirmation: “Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning, and the president’s spoken on it.”

In addition to the denials, the President has also attacked the women by calling them liars and by making fun of their physical appearance, saying that they were not attractive enough for him to want to sexually assault them.

Really. That’s what he said. And he said it more than once.

Other men who have been accused have responded with denials. Some have issued only half-hearted apologies, but none of them have attacked the victims as Mr. Trump has done.

But wait.

You know there’s more.

Mr. Trumps case is unique in that he is the only one who has bragged about his sexual assaults. “When you’re a star,” he boasted, “they let you do it.”

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

Don't Call Them Pharisees

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table.
Luke 7:36

In the many debates online or in person about the inclusion or exclusion of LGBTQ persons in the United Methodist Church, two things are almost certain. 

First, someone on the traditionalist side of the debate will accuse those in favor of inclusion of not accepting the authority of the Bible. And then someone on the inclusion side will accuse the traditionalists of being Pharisees.

It is almost a ritual.

When those arguing for inclusion say that the traditionalists are Pharisees, they are invoking a slur that has gone unchecked for centuries.

But the traditionalists are more like Sadducees than Pharisees. We often speak of the two groups together, but the Sadducees and Pharisees were very different. 

Like everyone else in my generation and like almost everyone who went to Sunday School and grew up in the church, I learned early on that the Pharisees were the bad guys. They were self-righteous and hypocritical, obsessed with observing the letter of the Law, yet utterly tone-deaf to its spirit. They were rich and powerful, and they colluded with the Romans in opposing and eventually killing Jesus. They were ritually clean, yet morally corrupt.

And I learned in seminary that they were the perfect foil for preaching. Every narrative needs a good villain, and the Pharisees were the perfect villains for almost any preaching topic. 

It was perfect, with the slight problem that it was wrong.

The Pharisees were reformers.

They had a three-fold belief that God was a loving father, who loved humanity so much that he gave us the Torah, the Law, so that everyone who followed the law would have eternal life (fellowship with God, now and forever).

The three-fold belief of the Pharisees gives rise to the animating question of Matthew, Mark and Luke: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” If the way to fellowship with God now and forever is found in following Torah (the way), what does it mean to follow Torah? What specifically must I do? And the answer is the same in each of the three Gospels: love God and love your neighbor.

The Pharisees were not literalists, they believed in a two-fold understanding of the Law as both written and oral. The written Law was unchanging, but the oral Law was reinterpreted by each generation of Rabbis. The Pharisees gave us the Synagogue, and the rabbinate, and they gave rise to both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.

The Sadducees were in many ways the tradionalists of their day. 

They rejected the Oral Law because they were literalists. They believed that the written word should not be interpreted; it should simply be obeyed. 

The Sadducees were judgmental because they had no openness to the future. They were not waiting for the Messiah and they did not expect a Messiah because they did not believe that God would do something new.

Seventy-five years ago Harry Emerson Fosdick began his Christmas Eve sermon by saying, “We think this evening about the Sadducees.” He called them “the unloveliest people in the New Testament.” The sermon was titled, “Recovering Our Angels,” and he attributed the Sadducees’ miserable behavior and attitude to the fact that they did not believe in angels.

The angels that Fosdick referenced were not winged creatures in the sky. They were the messengers of God that come to us in myriad ways and incarnations, to inspire and comfort and sustain us.

Now, perhaps more than ever, we need our angels to lead us into the future.