Bob Cousy and the Medal of Freedom

 

Bob Cousy chokes back tears as he speaks of his late wife Missy.

 In spite of everything, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Romans 5:3-5

Ok, it’s a stretch to call it heartbreak. It’s not really suffering.

But it is painful just the same. And in spite of Paul’s promise it is hard for me to see how this leads to hope. Although I will keep looking.

I know that in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter at all.

I am long past the time when I had a naïve belief that my heroes, especially my sports heroes, were likely to live up to my expectations.

But it was painful to read the stories of Bob Cousy receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom last week. 

Make no mistake. He deserves the award.

Cousy has always had a special place in my pantheon of sports greats. Part of it was because I learned that he was cut from his high school team as a freshman and then again as a sophomore. But he didn’t give up. He got a scholarship to Holy Cross, won an NCAA championship, became a consensus All-American, and an NBA star.

This led me to believe that in spite of my obvious lack of talent, with enough practice, I too could become a great basketball player.

Obviously, that didn’t work out.

But as a young child I became a fan of the Boston Celtics. Those were the Celtics of Cousy and Russell and Heinsohn and Sanders. After one of the games, the announcer was interviewing Bob Cousy, and he asked him about the two young guards who had just joined the team, Sam and K.C. Jones.

“Well,” said Cousy, “personally I’m prejudiced, but I think they’re two of the best young guards in the league.” Actually, he said “pwed-ja-dissed.” And he called them “gods,” not guards. But my young mind reeled. My hero, Bob Cousy admitted on national television that he was prejudiced. I was glad that in spite of his prejudice he could see their talent, but even so, I was deeply disappointed.

Of course it was not long before I realized that he meant he was prejudiced in favor of his teammates, not against black people.

As a basketball player he was amazing, winning six world championships with the Celtics, and leading the NBA in assists for eight years in a row. And he has led a great life off the court as well. In 1950 when black teammate Chuck Cooper was denied entry to the team hotel in North Carolina, Cousy also refused to stay there. By every measure, he has lived an exemplary life.

Cousy has said in the past that he felt guilty that he did not do more to stand up more for another black teammate, Bill Russell, who was the target of several racial incidents in Boston. And he reached out to Russell in a letter expressing his regret. But the truth is that probably says more about Bob Cousy’s sense of right and wrong than it does of a moral failing. Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Michael Jordan are the other three NBA stars who were previously honored with the medal of Freedom.

Bob Cousy deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

So far it’s all good. Bob Cousy received an award he richly deserves. An appropriate coda to a life well lived. After the ceremony he said, “this really is the cherry on the sundae.”

But then.

The news accounts told how Cousy choked back tears as he expressed his sadness that his wife Missy, who passed away in 2013 was not there to share the moment with him even though she “put up with me for 63 years.” And as Cousy sobbed at the podium, Donald Trump put his hand on Cousy’s back to comfort him.

What?

That venal man put his hand on Bob Cousy?

It is a strange juxtaposition because Bob Cousy is everything that Donald Trump is not. He really did rise out of poverty. He grew up in a diverse neighborhood that was basically a slum. He worked hard. He promoted racial equality. He is humble and smart and decent. And, to use a cliché, he is a great family man.

“Mr. President, I know in your world you’re well on your way to making America great again,” said Cousy. “In my world, it’s been great for 91 years.”

Earlier this month, he told NBA.com, “I simply feel, without getting into the politics of it at all, like many Americans — I agree with some of the things he’s done and disagree with others.”

That’s more affirmation than Mr. Trump deserves, but I could live with it.

And then.

Cousy said the honor was special in part because “it is being presented by the most extraordinary president in my lifetime and I’m a B.R., for before Roosevelt.”

According to the Worcester Telegram “Mr. Cousy, a long-time independent, said he respects the White House as the most powerful office in the world and he felt compelled to pay tribute to the president.”

“I understand how controversial Trump is,” Mr. Cousy said. “So I didn’t want to say something that was going to go viral and get all of us in trouble, but I thought that was a nice middle ground and ‘extraordinary’ I suppose can be interpreted in any number of ways in the mind of the listener.”

Maybe.

I can understand how someone could agree with some of the policies the president has embraced. But how can a person of such obvious fundamental decency countenance the indecency, racism, misogyny, and corruption of Mr. Trump?

I want to believe that if Missy had been there he wouldn’t have said that.

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

This Is What Fascism Looks Like

The crowd chants "Send her back!" at a rally on Wednesday night

Woe to you who call evil good and good evil, 
who put darkness for light and light for darkness, 
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
Isaiah 5:20

In his speech at the opening of the National Museum of African American History in 2016, former President George W. Bush said, "A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws, and corrects them." 

"This museum tells the truth,” he observed, “that a country founded on the promise of liberty held millions in chains, that the price of our union was America's original sin."

President Bush was not the first one to speak of slavery and racism as America’s original sin, but the fact that he said it is a reminder that this should not be a partisan issue and his use of the phrase “original sin” reminds us that the issue is about faith as well as politics.

Confronting racism is a necessity for Christians regardless of their political affiliation.

Racism is evil and it produces bitter fruit for the recipients as well as for the perpetrators. There is nothing about it that can be called good. And woe to us when we do not call it out for what it is.

According to Gizmodo, after Mr. Trump’s speech in Greenville Wednesday night, the two most commonly searched words were Fascism and Racism.

You can be a racist without being a fascist but you cannot be a fascist without being a racist. Sadly, both were on display in Greenville.

One cannot use those words without being accused of being an alarmist. 

But the association is unavoidable.

We cannot pretend that evil is not evil, let alone that it is good.

Half a century ago, Jurgen Moltmann, perhaps the last of the great German theologians of the twentieth century,  was visiting the United States for a theological conference when the discussion turned to segregationists in the South.

“They are Nazis,” Jurgen Moltmann declared, “and when you are confronted by Nazis you must defeat them.”

Nothing else matters, he insisted, until you get rid of the Nazis.

As my theology professor told the story, Moltmann had insisted  to his fellow theologians that they had no business discussing theology until they had first done something about the Nazis.

I remember thinking that although the segregationists were certainly bad, it was hyperbole to call them Nazis. 

Perhaps it is hyperbole to speak that way of the Greenville rally. I fervently hope so. But by the time we know for certain it may be too late.

Jurgen Moltmann grew up in a secular family in Hamburg. As a teenager he was drafted into the German Army near the end of World War II. He was captured by the British and spent several years as a prisoner of war. During that time his captors presented him with descriptions and pictures of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and he was overwhelmed with guilt for what his country had done.

While he was held prisoner an American Army Chaplain gave him a New Testament and it transformed his life. “I did not find Christ,” he would later say, “Christ found me.” After the war he completed a doctorate in theology and his reflections on Nazism and the war led him to develop “A Theology of Hope.”

Moltmann could see, as Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others had made clear before him that the absolute claims of Nazism were theological as well as political. And that those absolute claims made it antithetical to Christianity. 

When Moltmann insisted that there could be no theological discussion until Nazism had been addressed, he wasn’t introducing politics into theological discourse. He was recognizing that until they were dealt with, the absolute claims of Nazism made authentic theological discussion impossible.

In an interview published in Newsweek.com, Chantal Da Silva spoke with Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, one of the leading scholars of Fascism. And Stanley called the Wednesday night rally “one of the single most racist moments in modern American history.” He also said that the country is “facing an emergency.”

"The word 'emergency' is tricky to use because 'emergency' is a word that anti-democratic people use all the time to justify non-democratic measures," he said.

Stanley said that he was “shocked” when he watched the video of the Greenville rally where the crowd chanted “send her back” after Mr. Trump attacked Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali refugee who came to America as a refugee who came to American when she was eight years old. 

The chants came after Mr. Trump had devoted considerable time to attacking Representative Omar along with three Democratic colleagues, Representatives Aryanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Aexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The women are all persons of color, and Representative Omar is a Muslim.

Mr. Trump initiated the controversy at 5:27 a.m. last Sunday when he unleashed this tweetstorm:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

Apart from the obvious racism of telling anyone to go back where they came from, it misses the obvious fact that three of the four women were born in the United States. Rep. Omar is a naturalized citizen (like two of Mr. Trump’s three wives).

In the Newsweek interview, Stanley observed that Mr. Trump was expressing his “deep-seated commitment to fascism” as well as racism. "This whole administration has been orienting itself around attacking and vilifying ethnic minorities," he said. "It's horrifying to see."

"Fascist ideology is based upon the vilification of 'outsiders,' you know. It's an ideology that has, at its very center, panic and fear about outsiders. All fascist movements are toxically anti-immigration.”

"Fascist ideology says there's the nation and the members of the nation and they are ethnically defined and they face this mortal threat from leftism, communism, socialism and foreigners and so you would think the president has a choice: he could run saying well you know the economy's strength or he could run with one of the most toxic ideologies the world has ever seen... and that's what he's doing.”

In the Newsweek interview, Stanley insisted that today's journalists cannot equivocate in calling out Mr. Trump’s speech for what it is: racism.

"Journalists have two competing pressures: one is to represent the different sides in political debates and, two, is to tell the truth. These run into conflict with each other when you have a very extreme situation like the one we now face where, with one political side, there is no reasonable way to represent it."

Stanley argues that Mr. Trump “is utterly clear about his white nationalism and his racism.”

“You just have to call it what it is and not suggest that it's being misunderstood," he said.



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

*The Jurgen Moltmann story was first included in a post originally published on August 16, 2017 in response to the Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Preaching in the Age of Donald Trump

Preach the Word! Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves preachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

II Timothy 4:2-4

Dad died twelve years ago today.

Part of his spiritual discipline was a regular reading of Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional, “My Utmost for His Highest.”

In his commentary on these verses, Chambers quotes from the King James Version: “This verse says, ‘Preach the Word! Be ready in season and out of season.’ In other words, we should ‘be ready’ whether we feel like it or not.” And then he observes, “If we do only what we feel inclined to do, some of us would never do anything. . . The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.”

Dad was a United Methodist pastor and he was always ready to preach the Word. He was persistent and faithful “in season and out.”

But it is perhaps just as well that he is not preaching in the age of Donald Trump.

This is not an easy time to be a Christian pastor. For that matter, it’s not an easy time to be a Christian. It’s hard to be faithful without appearing to be intensely and explicitly political.

Of course, the Gospel is a political document, but it transcends partisan politics. And although Jesus, like the Hebrew prophets before him, proclaimed an undeniably political message, we should not identify that message with one party or candidate.

It’s hard not to appear partisan in the age of Trump because he has done so many explicitly anti-Christian things. We will pause now in silent remembrance. We could start with teargassing children, or separating families, but it’s a very long list. And it seems to just keep getting longer.

There is nothing partisan about those issues, but it is hard to address them without some folks seeing it in partisan terms.

Dad always worried less than I do about appearing partisan. Actually, he didn’t worry about appearances at all. To say that he was outspoken would be an understatement. And to his credit, he never counted the cost of his witness in personal terms.

I never ask myself what Dad would say about this, because I already know.

For Dad, it was always about justice. He looked for the practical application of the gospel in contemporary life. And he was never afraid to tell you what he saw. In his mind, he had no choice.

Dad served in the Navy during World War II, and then again during the Korean War. In March of 1945, as soon as he turned 17, he received his High School diploma early and enlisted. But as a pastor, he was deeply committed to world peace.

On Veterans Day in 1966, when our church was hosting the American Legion, Dad felt he had no choice but to preach about how war generally, and the Vietnam War specifically, was a denial of everything Christ taught.

Not surprisingly, it did not go over that well.

His outspoken witness often got him into trouble, but that never kept him quiet.

If parishioners were upset with him, he would listen patiently, and explain gently. And then he would say that he was sorry, but he had no choice. He was just doing what he had to do. It was his job to preach, in season and out.

Sometimes they would agree to disagree. Sometimes his persistent witness would win them over. And other times they would leave to look for another church, with a preacher who had the good sense not to meddle in “politics.”

As a pastor in the age of Trump, I find myself trying to thread the needle; to be faithful without giving offense. But the truth is that I probably worry too much about the second part and too little about the first.

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

Happy United Nations Day

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD! 
Isaiah 2:2-5

At the United Nations building in New York City there is a statue of a man beating a giant sword into a plowshare. The sculpture, titled, “Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares,” was created by Evgeniv Vuchetich and given as a gift by the Soviet Union in 1959.

When President Reagan addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, he began by describing the journey that brought the delegates and the nations together as a kind of pilgrimage, and then he said, “We come from every continent, every race, and most religions to this great hall of hope . . .”

Near the conclusion of his address, speaking specifically to the Soviet Union as well as to the whole assembly, he asked, 

“Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences world-wide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien than war and the threat of war?”

The United Nations Charter was ratified on October 24, 1945. Today is United Nations Day. When I was a child we celebrated United Nations Sunday in church every year.

My guess is that most people don’t know that today is United Nations Day. And we do not have many political leaders who would speak of the U.N. assembly room as “this great hall of hope.”

Over the years the United Nations has been  relentlessly vilified and marginalized by politicians. Some see it as simply ineffective and others see it as a threat to our sovereignty. 

In 2012, Fox News political commentator Dick Morris wrote a book called “The Black Helicopters Are Coming.” In it he claimed that President Obama was plotting to have the United States invaded by the United Nations. Morris admitted at the time that “it sounds crazy,” but insisted that it was really going to happen.

When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly a month ago there was spontaneous laughter when he claimed that "In less than two years, my administration has accomplished almost more than any other administration in the history of our country.”

But his embrace of "Nationalism"  and his dismissal of an international approach to world problems like climate change are antithetical to the UN’s global mission. And that is no laughing matter.

The truth is that the United Nations has not lived up to our expectations. We have avoided massive world wars, and that is no small achievement. The second half of the twentieth century was much more peaceful than the first half. And the United Nations deserves some share of the credit for that. On the other hand, smaller wars have been constant and the resulting deaths and injuries have been staggering. 

In spite of its obvious limitations, the world is a better place because of the United Nations, and on United Nations Day I want to touch briefly on a few of the U.N. organizations that have fostered international progress and understanding.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is organized to reduce hunger worldwide through improving agricultural productivity and raising levels of nutrition. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is similarly targeted to reduce rural poverty in developing nations by funding relief efforts.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) promotes global cooperation to improve maritime safety and decrease marine pollution.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) acts as a forum for discussing global financial issues and provides loans to developing countries.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promotes world peace and security by fostering international cooperation in education, science and culture. They promote the fundamental freedoms endorsed in the UN Charter.

And then there are some UN organizations that require no further description: the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WHO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and the World Bank Group (WBG) which includes five sub-groups focused on promoting development and reconstruction.

It is an impressive list. Together they promote an international strategy for beating swords into plowshares. 










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

*This is a revised version of a post first published on October 24, 2012.

Ayn Rand, Jesus, and Donald Trump

Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Genesis 4:8-10

Cain assumes that he is asking a rhetorical question.

But he is mistaken.

The question is real and it will be fundamental to the long biblical narrative that follows through the Hebrew Scriptures to the end of the New Testament. Cain poses the question for God, but it is quickly turned back as the question God asks of us. 

And Jesus will tell his followers that it is the question by which their lives will be judged.

Ayn Rand, on the other hand, sides with Cain.

I first encountered Ayn Rand (her first name, she said, rhymes with swine) late one night in the fall of my freshman year in college. I was quite entranced for at least half an hour. 

My brief enthusiasm for her philosophy was, I thought, a sort of “rite of passage;” something everybody did at least once. But it was not anything to be taken seriously.

In the movie “Dirty Dancing” one of the major sub-plots is that Baby is trying to help Johnny’s dance partner get an abortion. She confronts the college kid who got Johnny’s partner pregnant and asks him to pay for the abortion. The young man, who is also romancing Baby’s sister, refuses. 

Then he pulls out a dog-eared copy of Rand's “The Fountainhead” and tells her she should read it, that she’ll like it, but that when she finishes it, he wants it back because he has notes in the margins.

He tells her that she needs to understand, “Some people count, and some people don’t.”

“You make me sick,” she tells him. And then she pours a pitcher of water down the front of his shirt and pants.

The philosophy of Ayn Rand should make us sick.

Her basic position is that selfishness is a virtue and altruism is a sin, though as a staunch atheist, she would not call it a sin. It is not just that we are not obligated to help others; we ought not to do it.

In Rand's view, our responsibility is to take care of ourselves. Period. 

In a report in the Washington Post, detailing connections between Rand's philosophy and key players in the Trump administration, James Hohmann describes Rand as “perhaps the leading literary voice in 20th century America for the notion that, in society, there are makers and takers, and that the takers are parasitic moochers who get in the way of the morally-superior innovators.”

“Her books portray the federal government as an evil force, trying to stop hard-working men from accumulating the wealth that she believes they deserve. The author was also an outspoken atheist, something that oozes through in her writing. Rand explained that the essence of ‘objectivism,’ as she called her ideology, is that ‘man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.’”

In an interview with Kirsten Powers, Donald Trump described himself as a Rand fan and said that he identifies most with Howard Roark, the hero of “The Fountainhead,” an architect who blows up a housing project he designed because his blueprints were not exactly followed by the builders. He told Powers, “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything.”

It is ironic that the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump has not been hindered by his admiration for one of the most famous atheists of the twentieth century. 

But for serious Christians, her atheism is not the most important issue. 

Unlike the theoretical atheism of those who reject the idea of God as unnecessary or unscientific, Rand’s rejection is primarily a moral one. 

Many atheists reject Christian theology while expressing an admiration for the ethics of Jesus. Rand rejects the core of Christian ethics as “immoral.”

Onkar Ghate, a Senior Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, posted an essay titled, “Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus?” 

Ghate argues that for Rand, “morality is not about subordination or service to others or to some ‘higher power’; it is not about self-sacrifice. Hers is a morality that upholds egoism and individualism: it seeks to teach you the difficult task of pursuing the values that achieve your own individual self-interest and happiness.”

In the ethics of Ayn Rand, pursuing your own self-interest and happiness is a “difficult task.” And she believed it was “immoral” to love others more than you love yourself.

Hers is a curiously non-ethical ethics. Historically, the task of ethics has been to balance the self-interest of the individual against the needs and interests of the community. Ethics restrains our natural selfishness. In Rand’s system selfishness is a virtue. 

Ghate is to be commended for his honesty in clearly stating that Rand's philosophy is opposed to the central core of Jesus’ teaching. 

And he is right. We have to choose Ayn Rand or Jesus. We can’t have both.



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

Prayer and Protest: Fox News Gets It Right

Jesus said, 
“Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
   hallowed be your name. 
   Your kingdom come.
   Your will be done,
     on earth as it is in heaven.”
Matthew 6:9-10

Fox News was widely criticized for airing a news report showing Philadelphia Eagles players kneeling in prayer before a game and claiming that they were protesting the National Anthem. The photos provided a background visual for a news report on the President’s cancellation of a planned White House visit by the Philadelphia Eagles to celebrate their Super Bowl Championship.

The President had disinvited the team because only a small number of the players (less than ten) were planning to attend. In reporting the story, Fox used pictures that purported to show Eagles players kneeling during the National Anthem, when in fact none of the players had kneeled during the anthem at any game all season. The pictures actually showed Eagles players kneeling in prayer before the game and before the playing of the anthem.

Philadelphia tight end Zach Ertz, one of the players shown kneeling, expressed his frustration on Twitter:

"This can’t be serious.... Praying before games with my teammates, well before the anthem, is being used for your propaganda?! Just sad, I feel like you guys should have to be better than this."

In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post, Judd Legum was sharply critical:

“Innocent mistake? Possible, but unlikely. Fox News commentators have been railing against NFL protest kneelers for some time. ‘And you have to ask, what are we kneeling for at this point?’ said host Pete Hegseth last September. ‘Because you talk about social injustice. This is the least sexist, least racist, most free, most equal, most prosperous country in the history of humankind.’ Tucker Carlson: ‘They’re attacking the flag and the country, and I’m just telling you that when the richest people in a society decide the country they are supposed to be running is corrupt, it falls apart’ Sean Hannity: ‘Patriotism under fire’.”

Eventually, Christopher Wallace, the executive producer of "Fox News at Night with Shannon Bream," issued this apology:

"During our report about President Trump canceling the Philadelphia Eagles' trip to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl win, we showed unrelated footage of players kneeling in prayer. To clarify, no members of the team knelt in protest during the national anthem throughout regular or postseason last year. We apologize for the error."

The pictures were deceptive. 

But there is a deeper issue here.

The complaint is that Fox News misrepresented prayer as protest.

But at the deepest level Fox (unintentionally) got it right: prayer is protest.

Karl Barth liked to say that, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” ("Hände falten im Gebet ist der Anfang des Aufstandes gegen die Unordnung der Welt!")

Prayer is a rebellion against violence and injustice. Jesus instructed his disciples that when we place ourselves before God our first petition should be for the coming of God’s kingdom of social and economic justice, peace and non-violence.

Even the simplest prayers at meals or at bed-time point toward a different reality than the one we normally encounter. We ask forgiveness for the wrongs we have done and we protest our own failings. Our protest in those moments is introspective, but it is real.

If prayer is not protest, it is not authentic prayer.

It is important to be clear with regard to the NFL players. Fox has consistently misrepresented the issue. No one is protesting the National Anthem. They have been protesting racial injustice and police brutality, which disproportionately impacts people of color. 

When Henry David Thoreau was in Concord prison for his refusal to pay the poll tax as a protest against slavery and the Mexican-American war, legend has it that Ralph Waldo Emerson asked him, “What are you doing in here?” And Thoreau responded, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?”

The exchange is apocryphal, but the question is true.

If we are at all familiar with the issue of racial injustice in America, the question is not, “Why are some of the players kneeling?” The question is, “Why isn’t everyone kneeling?”

As Christians, we should be kneeling in prayer and in protest.

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

"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.

Happy United Nations Day

Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares
by Yevgeny Vuchetlich, 1959

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

Isaiah 2:2-5

At the United Nations building in New York City there is a statue of a man beating a giant sword into a plowshare. The sculpture, titled, “Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares,” was created by Evgeniv Vuchetich and given as a gift by the Soviet Union in 1959.

When President Reagan addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, he began by describing the journey that brought the delegates and the nations together as a kind of pilgrimage, and then he said, “We come from every continent, every race, and most religions to this great hall of hope . . .” 

Near the conclusion of his address, speaking specifically to the Soviet Union as well as to the whole assembly, he asked, 

“Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences world-wide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien than war and the threat of war?”

In tone and in substance, President Reagan's speech stands in sharp contrast to the speech recently given by our current president in which he vowed to "totally destroy" North Korea if the United State had to defend itself.

"Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime," Mr. Trump declared. "The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary. That's what the United Nations is all about; that's what the United Nations is for. Let's see how they do."

The United Nations Charter was ratified on October 24, 1945. Today is United Nations Day. When I was a boy we celebrated United Nations Sunday in church every year.

My guess is that most people don’t know that today is United Nations Day. And we do not have many political leaders who would speak of the U.N. assembly room as “this great hall of hope.”

Over the years the United Nations has been relentlessly vilified and marginalized by politicians. Some see it as simply ineffective and others see it as a threat to our sovereignty. In a book called “The Black Helicopters Are Coming!” political commentator Dick Morris’ claimed that President Obama was plotting to have the United States invaded by the United Nations. Morris admitted that “it sounds crazy,” but insisted that it was really going to happen.

It doesn’t just sound crazy. It really and truly is crazy. But this is where we are.

The truth is that the United Nations has not lived up to our highest hopes, but its achievements have still been significant.

Over the last seventy-two years small wars have been constant and the resulting deaths and injuries have been staggering. On the other hand, we have avoided massive world wars, and that is no small achievement. The second half of the twentieth century was much more peaceful than the first half. And the United Nations must take some share of the credit for that.

In spite of its obvious limitations, the world is a better place because of the United Nations, and on United Nations Day I want to touch briefly on a few of the U.N. organizations that have fostered international progress and understanding.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is organized to reduce hunger worldwide through improving agricultural productivity and raising levels of nutrition. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is similarly targeted to reduce rural poverty in developing nations by funding relief efforts.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) promotes global cooperation to improve maritime safety and decrease marine pollution.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) acts as a forum for discussing global financial issues and provides loans to developing countries.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promotes world peace and security by fostering international cooperation in education, science and culture. They promote the fundamental freedoms endorsed in the UN Charter.

And then there are some UN organizations that require no further description: the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WHO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and the World Bank Group (WBG) which includes five sub-groups focused on promoting development and reconstruction.

It is an impressive list. Together they promote an international strategy for beating swords into plowshares. 

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

*An earlier version of this post was published on October 24, 2012.

John McCain's Vision for America

On Monday Senator John McCain was awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center. The award is given annually to mean and women who have demonstrated courage and conviction in working to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the world. Past winners have included Nelson Mandela, Sandra Day O’Connor, Kofi Annan, Shimon Peres, and Colin Powell.

McCain was introduced by former Vice President Joe Biden with whom he served in the United States Senate for twenty years. And they share a friendship that goes back over forty years.

Biden and McCain are old school.

They come from a time when legislators saw themselves as colleagues who might disagree vigorously on how the country should be governed while sharing a common sacred commitment to the ideals on which it was founded. McCain was clearly moved when he thanked Biden for his introduction and recalled their friendship over the decades.

“We didn’t always agree on the issues. We often argued – sometimes passionately. But we believed in each other’s patriotism and the sincerity of each other’s convictions. We believed in the institution we were privileged to serve in. We believed in our mutual responsibility to help make the place work and to cooperate in finding solutions to our country’s problems. We believed in our country and in our country’s indispensability to international peace and stability and to the progress of humanity. And through it all, whether we argued or agreed, Joe was good company. Thank you, old friend, for your company and your service to America.”

McCain talked about what a gift it was to serve the country he loves. Quoting a phrase used by President George H. W. Bush, given in 1991 at a Pearl Harbor remembrance, he called America “the most wondrous land on earth.”

He talked about America as a place where with all of its flaws. we are blessed by immigrant dreams, where we share a storied past and rush toward an imagined future. He noted wryly that America was a place where “a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for president.”

“We are blessed,” he said, “and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn.”

“The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.”

And then he contrasted his understanding of the ideals of American with Mr. Trump’s retreat from international leadership:

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

Before concluding with a personal appreciation of what it has meant to him to serve this “most wondrous land,” McCain focused directly on the new nationalism of the “alt-right.” He addressed the shouts of “Blood and Soil” heard from white supremacists at the Charlottesville rally, a phrase they took directly from Nazi Germany:

“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.”

It was a stinging indictment of the current White House, delivered clearly and concisely, without personal venom or insults.

It was old school.

In our current political climate it was almost quaint.

Thank you, John McCain, for reminding us what it means to serve your country.

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

Here is the prepared version of McCain’s speech, as released by his Senate office:

Thank you, Joe, my old, dear friend, for those mostly undeserved kind words. Vice President Biden and I have known each other for a lot of years now, more than forty, if you’re counting. We knew each other back when we were young and handsome and smarter than everyone else but were too modest to say so.

Joe was already a senator, and I was the Navy’s liaison to the Senate. My duties included escorting senate delegations on overseas trips, and in that capacity, I supervised the disposition of the delegation’s luggage, which could require – now and again – when no one of lower rank was available for the job – that I carry someone worthy’s bag. Once or twice that worthy turned out to be the young senator from Delaware. I’ve resented it ever since.

Joe has heard me joke about that before. I hope he has heard, too, my profession of gratitude for his friendship these many years. It has meant a lot to me. We served in the Senate together for over twenty years, during some eventful times, as we passed from young men to the fossils who appear before you this evening.

We didn’t always agree on the issues. We often argued – sometimes passionately. But we believed in each other’s patriotism and the sincerity of each other’s convictions. We believed in the institution we were privileged to serve in. We believed in our mutual responsibility to help make the place work and to cooperate in finding solutions to our country’s problems. We believed in our country and in our country’s indispensability to international peace and stability and to the progress of humanity. And through it all, whether we argued or agreed, Joe was good company. Thank you, old friend, for your company and your service to America.

Thank you, too, to the National Constitution Center, and everyone associated with it for this award. Thank you for that video, and for the all too generous compliments paid to me this evening. I’m aware of the prestigious company the Liberty Medal places me in. I’m humbled by it, and I’ll try my best not to prove too unworthy of it.

Some years ago, I was present at an event where an earlier Liberty Medal recipient spoke about America’s values and the sacrifices made for them. It was 1991, and I was attending the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The World War II veteran, estimable patriot and good man, President George H.W. Bush, gave a moving speech at the USS Arizona memorial. I remember it very well. His voice was thick with emotion as he neared the end of his address. I imagine he was thinking not only of the brave Americans who lost their lives on December 7, 1941, but of the friends he had served with and lost in the Pacific where he had been the Navy’s youngest aviator.

‘Look at the water here, clear and quiet …’ he directed, ‘One day, in what now seems another lifetime, it wrapped its arms around the finest sons any nation could ever have, and it carried them to a better world.’

He could barely get out the last line, ‘May God bless them, and may God bless America, the most wondrous land on earth.’

The most wondrous land on earth, indeed. I’ve had the good fortune to spend sixty years in service to this wondrous land. It has not been perfect service, to be sure, and there were probably times when the country might have benefited from a little less of my help. But I’ve tried to deserve the privilege as best I can, and I’ve been repaid a thousand times over with adventures, with good company, and with the satisfaction of serving something more important than myself, of being a bit player in the extraordinary story of America. And I am so very grateful.

What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country. With all our flaws, all our mistakes, with all the frailties of human nature as much on display as our virtues, with all the rancor and anger of our politics, we are blessed.

We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream, the land with the storied past forgotten in the rush to the imagined future, the land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for president.

We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.

I am the luckiest guy on earth. I have served America’s cause – the cause of our security and the security of our friends, the cause of freedom and equal justice – all my adult life. I haven’t always served it well. I haven’t even always appreciated what I was serving. But among the few compensations of old age is the acuity of hindsight. I see now that I was part of something important that drew me along in its wake even when I was diverted by other interests. I was, knowingly or not, along for the ride as America made the future better than the past.

And I have enjoyed it, every single day of it, the good ones and the not so good ones. I’ve been inspired by the service of better patriots than me. I’ve seen Americans make sacrifices for our country and her causes and for people who were strangers to them but for our common humanity, sacrifices that were much harder than the service asked of me. And I’ve seen the good they have done, the lives they freed from tyranny and injustice, the hope they encouraged, the dreams they made achievable.

May God bless them. May God bless America, and give us the strength and wisdom, the generosity and compassion, to do our duty for this wondrous land, and for the world that counts on us. With all its suffering and dangers, the world still looks to the example and leadership of America to become, another, better place. What greater cause could anyone ever serve.
Thank you again for this honor. I’ll treasure it.

Shiphrah and Puah Resist the Transgender Decree

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?”
Exodus 1:15-18

In the modern day version of this story Pharaoh tells the women that they should enforce his decree that transgender men and women should be forced out of his army, but here as in the original, they do not do as the king commanded them.

In today’s story the women are United States Senators rather than Hebrew midwives, but like the women in the ancient text, they love justice more than they fear the king (or his political operatives). 

Justice is a bipartisan issue.

Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand have proposed a joint amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would prevent the Department of Defense from enacting the President’s ban on transgender persons serving in the military.  

In July, Mr. Trump issued the ban in a tweet that came as a surprise to his own administration, including the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis.

Senator Gillibrand tweeted in response, "To all trans men and women serving bravely in the military: I plan to introduce legislation to fight back. We'll keep raising our voices." Senator John McCain, the chair of the Armed Services Committee called the decree a "step in the wrong direction."

The amendment introduced on September 11 would prevent the Department of Defense from discharging current transgender service personnel "solely on the basis of the member’s gender identity.”

“Any individual who wants to join our military and meets the standards should be allowed to serve, period. Gender identity should have nothing to do with it,” said Senator Gillibrand in her statement.

“If individuals are willing to put on the uniform of our country, be deployed in war zones, and risk their lives for our freedoms, then we should be expressing our gratitude to them, not trying to exclude them from military service," said Senator Collins.



Thank you for reading. Please feel free to comment here or on Facebook. Please share on social media as you wish.