American Flag Worship

I saw a shorter version of this article in the Episcopal Cafe. This is apparently the full version and "fleshes out" the subject a bit more. Much more could be said about this, and I have in the past. One item that is telling about Flag Worship is the phrase that was added during the 1950s. That addition was, "... under God..." Consider where in the pledge this phrases is inserted. Previous to its addition the pledge said in part, "... one nation indivisible..." The sense of that phrase was that the United States was one nation made up of many states yet one. With the insertion of "... under God..." the sense of this part of the pledge was changed. Consider the phrasing: "... one nation under God indivisible..." The sense with the addition is now one nation under God (and assuridly in the minds of many people the one and only nation under God) that is "indivisible" from God. In the minds of many Christians this places the flag (country) as the fourth member of the Trinity. There is only room for three in a Trinity. This is clearly idolatrous. And should you nievely think think that in some "Christian" churches removing the flag from a promenade place near the alter would be a small, insignificant thing, think again. From personal, painful experience I know that it is not.

What American Flag-Worship Looks Like to a New Citizen

...and to those long denied liberty and justice.

RELIGIONDISPATCHES.ORG

National Religion

Violence is America’s religion

 August 28, 2015 / 2 Comments

Helen Ubinas writes in the Philadelphia Daily News that violence is our religion. We are alternately entertained and horrified by it and each day the weight of it all threatens to bury us all.

We talk so much about politics being our religion, about sports being our religion, about religion being our religion.

Jesus, look around: Violence is our religion. We worship at its altar.

It’s become our national devotion. We’re sad, we’re mad, we’ve been wronged, we want to get even, we want to go down in a blaze of deranged glory and we turn violent.

And how we react, or don’t react, to whose lives are affected by the violence has become more divisive than any religious or political view. Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.

The truth: No lives matter, because if they did, the moment to prove that was when a roomful of babies were massacred in a Connecticut elementary school or when nine faithful churchgoers were executed in a weekly South Carolina bible study or when the blood of generations of nameless, faceless young people stains city streets all across this country.

Posted by Andrew Gerns

The above post comes from The Episcopal Cafe (http://www.episcopalcafe.com/violence-is-americas-religion/) .  The title of the post "Violence is America's religion" is apt and accurate. To put this into religious terminology WE are practicing a form of idolatry. It's not only the idolatry of violence, it's the idolatry of The Gun. According to gun ownership advocates everyone needs to have one because that is where we can look for protection. Really?! To continue the religious theme; look at the Psalms and notice how often the psalmists look to God as their protection. They see God as a rock a word they use to designate protection. But the worshipers of Violence / Guns say that OUR protection is in an AK-47 or a handgun that holds 17 rounds in a clip and 18 with one in the chamber like the one that killed the reporters during a live on-air broadcast. Then there are the demi-gods of flag, country, and military. If you think these are not some of the "... other gods before me" that our Creator warns us about consider the holy days (i.e.. national holidays) or national scripture (i.e. the Constitution, and Declaration of Independence) that are reverentially held and celebrated. There is nothing wrong with these institutions as long as they are kept in perspective; as long as they are not worshipped, deified, or idolized (there’s that word idol again).

But now for some pessimism: If the slaughter of 20 children (babies really) in their school, if the murder of parishioners in there Wednesday night Bible study, if the killing of teenagers by other teenagers in our cities, the shooting of reporters on live television (and the list goes on) will not shake this country out of its easy acceptance of these idols nothing will. Since the killing of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. starting in the turbulent 1960s we, as a nation, have known that the easy access to and the over abundance of guns in this country is a problem (another religious word: an abomination) but we fail to recognize it. We fail to recognize it because we have become numb to the violence and pain. We see it for a time on the 24 hour news, we become tired of hearing about it, the top “Breaking News” story switches and we forget; until it happens again. We don’t see it as a problem or if we do we see it as unsolvable. No problem, not a problem that can be corrected so we do nothing. Is this where we are?  

See: Exodus 20:3 and Deuteronomy 5:7-9a.

An American Idol - Guns

In the Spring 2014 issue of "Episcopal Peace Witness" published by the Episcopal Peace Fellowship the book America And its Guns: A Theological Expose was reviewed. The review sent me to Amazon to see if the book was available and to read any reviews about the book listed on the site. The reviews are usually, if not always, positive (Amazon wants us to buy the book) but it is possible to gain some insight about the book there.

The initial review said this:
"James Atwood contends that the thirty thousand gun deaths America suffers every year cannot be understood apart from our national myth that God has appointed America as "the trustee of the civilization of the world" and even "Christ's light to the nations" Because these purposes are noble, and we are supposedly a good and trustworthy people, violence is sometimes "required" and gives license to individuals to carry open or concealed weapons, which "save lives" and can even be "redemptive" Atwood, an avid hunter, cautions that an absolute trust in guns and violence morphs easily into idolatry. Having spent thirty-six years as a Presbyterian pastor fighting against the easy access to firearms, one of which took the life of a friend, he uses his unique experience and his biblical and theological understanding to graphically portray the impact guns have on our society. He documents how Americans have been deceived into believing that the tools of violence, whether they take the form of advanced military technology or a handgun in the bedside stand, will provide security. He closes with a wake-up call to the faith community, which he says is America's best hope to unmask the extremism of the Gun Empire."

Dr. Linda Gaither in her review in the "Episcopal Peace Witness" says:
"James Altwood describes his powerful book ... as a wake-up call for a sleeping giant, America's Churches. His task is to stir up awareness of an Idol which everyday competes with the Good News of the Peaceable Kingdom for the hearts and minds of Americans. That Idol he names the Gun Empire. To that Idol are offered 30,000 dead Americans, slain by gun violence, every year. Gun violence, Atwood suggests, ... is a spiritual problem...'  

Certainly vast numbers are associated with the Gun Empire. There are 300 million guns circulating in America today, almost enough for every man, woman, and child, with 3 million more sailing off the assembly line every year. ... more Americans were killed with guns in the 18 year period between 1979 - 1997 (651,697) than all the servicemen and women killed in battle in all U.S. Wars since 1775 (650,858). ... Over 3000 children are killed unnecessarily by guns in this country every year, ... Yet no sane gun legislation on behalf of reducing the number of guns has passed Congress since the 1994 Brady Bill." 

This American obcession with guns is not new, but the reality of the pervasiveness of the Gum Empire (to use Atwood's term) and the "theology" connected to it became real and apparent to many of us who lived through and during the 1960s. The assanation of JFK, Robert Kennedy, Dr. martin Luther King Jr. and others brought to the forefront the need not only for appropriate legislation but for a fuller understanding of how the Culture of the Gun is so embedded in and destructive to our society and the lives of the people who live in it. This book is going to be one of my future reads.    

This post was originally published on the "Christian Century" web site. It can be found at: http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2014-05/jimmy-carter-and-demise-progressive-evangelicalism 

Jimmy Carter and the demise of progressive evangelicalism

May 14, 2014 by Randall Balmer
Jimmy Carter rode to the White House in 1976 on the twin currents of his reputation as a “New South” governor and a resurgence of progressive evangelicalism in the early 1970s. Progressive evangelicalism, which traces its lineage to 19th-century evangelicals and to the commands of Jesus to care for “the least of these,” represented a very different version of evangelical activism from that of the religious right.

In the wake of the Second Great Awakening in the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th century, evangelicals in the antebellum period unleashed their moral energies to reform society according to the norms of godliness. They enlisted in peace movements, criticized capitalism, and sought to eradicate slavery. They supported prison reform to rehabilitate criminals and public education as a way for children of the less affluent to improve their lot. They supported equal rights for women, including voting rights.

To a remarkable degree, the evangelical agenda of social reform endured into the early decades of the 20th century, when its program expanded to include, in addition to women’s rights, the rights of workers to organize. William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic nominee for president, is most often remembered for his less-than-stellar performance at the Scopes trial of 1925, but a more accurate portrayal of Bryan would place him squarely in the tradition of progressive evangelicalism.

Evangelicals, obsessed as they were with dispensational premillennialism in the early decades of the 20th century—Jesus will return at any moment—drifted toward political indifference. During the Cold War, they joined many other Americans in the crusade against godless communism.

Progressive evangelicalism, however, mounted a comeback in the early 1970s amid the final years of the Vietnam War and the corruptions surrounding the Nixon administration. A few evangelicals gravitated to the forlorn 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, the Democratic senator from South Dakota, opponent of the Vietnam War and former Methodist seminary student. I recall skipping my own chapel at Trinity College in Deerfield to attend McGovern’s address in Edman Chapel at Wheaton College on October 11, 1972. But Wheaton students greeted McGovern with jeers and catcalls, an indication that progressive evangelicalism was hardly hegemonic among evangelicals. Several Wheaton students hoisted a huge “Nixon” banner and paraded around the chapel.

The year following McGovern’s defeat, however, Ronald J. Sider gathered 55 evangelicals at the YMCA in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend. The document coming out of that meeting, the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, condemned militarism, persistent racism and the yawning gap between rich and poor. At the behest of Nancy A. Hardesty of Trinity College, the declaration also included a statement on women’s rights. “We acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity,” the declaration read. “So we call both men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.” In 1977, Sider published Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, one of the most popular evangelical books of the decade.

Enter Jimmy Carter. In his inaugural address as governor of Georgia in 1971, Carter said, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” As governor, he reformed the state penal system and ratcheted up support for public education. An evangelical himself, Carter campaigned for president on themes consistent with progressive evangelicalism: military restraint, a less imperial foreign policy, human rights, racial reconciliation, affordable healthcare, and equal rights for women.

Carter’s ability to pursue those goals was hampered by a stubbornly sour economy, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the taking of American hostages in Iran. However, he managed to renegotiate the Panama Canal treaties and shift American foreign policy away from reflexive Cold War dualism toward an emphasis on human rights, thereby securing the release of political prisoners. He advanced the cause of peace in the Middle East far beyond that of his predecessors (or successors), and he appointed more women and minorities to office than any previous president.

At the same time that Carter was pressing an agenda informed by, and consistent with, progressive evangelicalism, however, other evangelicals were organizing against him. Politically conservative evangelicals, who had tilted toward the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s, had been thrown off-balance by the Watergate scandal and the corruptions of the Nixon administration. With the approach of the 1980 election, however, they had regained their footing and began organizing, paradoxically, to defeat Carter, their fellow evangelical.

Why? The simplest explanation is that politics trumped piety. Despite their evangelical affiliations, leaders of the Religious Right were eager to restore evangelical voters, after a dalliance with Carter and progressive evangelicalism, to the familiar precincts of the Republican Party and a notably more conservative political agenda. And they were prepared to go to extraordinary ends to do so, including an embrace of Ronald Reagan, a divorced man with episodic church attendance, and blaming Carter—inaccurately—for rescinding the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and various “segregation academies.”

The 1980 presidential election represented a turning point in U.S. political history. The Reagan landslide heralded not only the Republican capture of the White House and a Republican Senate, but Carter’s defeat also signaled the eclipse of progressive evangelicalism in favor of a political agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party itself.

Administration – A Ministry

Ezekiel 34: 11 – 16; Matthew 25: 31-40

In the May 12^th section of Brightest and Best A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro it is Florence Nightingale who is remembered. As the author says in the text, “Florence nightingale is probably best remembered for her service in the Crimean War … where she reordered the military hospitals in less than three years … and during the same period she established the Nightingale Fund for training nurses.” He goes on to say that, “… her contribution was not in the particular care she rendered…” (to individuals) but that she “… was an administrative genus  - something we do not often recognize as heroic.” We often think, justifiably, of administration as being guardians of the status quo. An opinion we have accepted through observation. Florence Nightingale, however, did not fit this mode of doing administration. As the author says, “Florence Nightingale had to be both innovative and creative in her administration … in her time and ours, the old patterns and the accustomed ways will hardly serve our stewardship. No doubt the fire she knew on the Crimean battlefield was as nothing compared to the strafing she took within the human institutions who resisted … the reform she advocated.” (Emphasis mine)

I can imagine that as a priest in exile Ezekiel had to deal with change for probably the people in exile with him would say, as do the lyrics in a Godspell song, “How do we worship God in a foreign land?” Jesus too had to deal with change that was resisted by the religious authorities of his time. For example, they said that his disciples should not be gleaning grain on the Sabbath for it was against the law (the rules the established way of doing things). Jesus, however, was more concerned that his disciples were hungry than he was with the establishment rules. He was also more concerned with the welfare of people when he healed people on the Sabbath, again a crossing of the establishment rules. Compassion dictated a change in the rules; the accustomed way of doing things.

As Ezekiel and the people of Israel were in a foreign land that required change in how they worshiped, as Jesus attempted to drag the people of his time into a “foreign land” of change and as Florence Nightingale did the same thing in her time; today we find ourselves “in a foreign land”. Our accustomed ways of “doing church” do not seem to be working. Our congregations grow smaller and grayer and the emerging generations, for a variety of reasons, are not coming to church. So what do we do in this foreign land of the post-modern twenty-first century? Perhaps a part of the answer resides in the phrase I used above, “… not coming to church.” Perhaps it is the church that needs to get outside its walls and go to them. Perhaps we need to recognize that some things have been left behind in Jerusalem and it is time to “sing a new song”. This is not a comfortable place to be or a comfortable task to embark upon; but where is it written that comfort is a prerequisite to Christian discipleship? Indeed, much of scripture would suggest otherwise.            

A Look At Lent Is Not Rocket Science 

     During Lent this year I have been reading the meditations by Bishop W. Nicholas Kinsell, the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island. The book, Lent Is Not Rocket Science: An Exploration of God, Creation, and the Cosmos looks at Lent and faith in general through what I consider a unique lens. The bishop's method of exploring faith is informed not only by his understanding of Christianity but also by the training he received as an astronomer, and as a physicist. This interesting combination of faith and science does not hinder the understanding of either discipline but in fact strengthens the contimplation of both.
     Today on Holy Saturday Bishop Kinsell does not delve as deep into scientific theory as he has in other meditations but neither does he ignore it when he writes:
"What happened in the tomb during the night between Saturday and Easter dawn? No one knows. There is very little we can say about the event scientifically. But something happened. No matter how you want to understand it, as a miracle beyond the ken of scientific knowledge or as a physical phenomena that we as yet do not understand, clearly something happened. Any examination of the historical evidence leads us to admit something happened.
     As so many people have noted, there's no way to explain the radical shift that occurs in the followers of Jesus, who abandoned him on the morning of Good Friday, cowered in fear in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday, and had some sort of radical life-changing experience on Easter. Whatever happened, it was profound enough that, according to tradition, every single one of apostles was willing to suffer persecution and death because of it. And the people, as eyewitnesses told about what happened and were willing to follow, not always to their death, but in life-changing ways large and small.
     It would be very lovely thing to be able to explain in detail what happened to Jesus' body, how it was that life returned to it. It would be extraordinary to have firsthand evidence of what the disciples experienced when Jesus met them in the Upper Room or along the road to Emmaus. But we don't have that. And we probably never will. Perhaps that is by God's design.
     But I hope as a result of this journey through Lent you are more willing to be comfortable with not understanding soothing and still accepting its reality. So much of science is in that situation. I've focused on topics of astronomy and physics because that was my early training, but there are mysteries we see but cannot understand in other fields as well. Theology is occasionally described as a discipline that involves faith seeking understanding. The traditional sciences in their own way are disciplines that involve observation seeking understanding. Perhaps the difference between the two is not as great as we often imagine.
     Jesus' bodily resurrection challenges us all to question things we don't understand. That willingness to question has led us to many new insights and understandings. But many people react to the unknown of the resurrection by either trying to explain the resurrection away of by trying to draw a veil around the event and warning people not to enter the sacred precincts. I wonder if, instead of trying to hide the difficulties surrounding the event or trying to resolve them too quickly by denying the reality of the resurrection, we might not better profit by committing ourselves to a journey through the door that the resurrection has opened in our understanding of the world. Perhaps that is the task of the Easter people."
     At the end of the meditation Bishop Kinsell poses this question:
"The mystery of the resurrection is beyond our human understanding, but its power clearly changed Jesus' disciples. How has it changed you?"  

     Bishop Kinsell uses the past tense occasionally in today's meditation and when he does that he is, of course, referring to previous comments he has made in this series of meditations. I have read, and contemplated the juxtaposition of faith and science that the bishop has supplied and I have been able to appreciate the mystery of faith in a new way by hearing his explanations of the mysteries of science and the connection he makes between the two. Tomorrow is Easter and I am tempted to read tomorrow's meditation today; but I will resist that temptation and look forward with expectant anticipation. And, it occurs to me, that that is appropriate because isn't Easter the calumniation of expectant anticipation? Isn't it the Son light after the darkness of the previous week? Haven't we, as Christians knowing and believing what we know and believe, looked forward to Easter morning and our Savior's resurrection?
     There is only that one day left in the good bishop's meditations and I will miss the daily exercise (truthfully I missed a day or two once or twice and had to catch up) of reading them. If you have not been reading them during Lent I would encourage you to get the book and read it either daily as meditation or simply as you might read any other book because I think that you will find the insights contained there both unique and thought provoking. Lent Is Not Rocket Science was available in print form (at one point they had sold out but said more were on the way) or as a E-book in various foremats through the publisher Forward Movement. Their web site is www.forwardmovement.org.
      

The Difference Between Science & Religion