That We All May Be One

Leonard Pitts, the controversial but always thoughtful, African American columnist wrote a piece the other day on abortion in which he identified himself as pro life and pro choice. Basically, he said that he found himself moved and persuaded by the familiar slogan that “Abortion stops a beating heart,” but believes only a woman, in consultation with her doctor, clergy, other advisers, should be able to make that decision. So, he is pro life…and pro choice.

I find myself in that same category. I believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, or at least a “potential” human life. Since no one on this earth, scientist or pope,  knows when human life in the womb actually begins, it seems to me that we must err on the side of the earliest possible moment which would be conception…or at least implantation. Abortion does indeed stop a beating heart.

But, tragically, there are times when human lives are legally taken every day. By soldiers in war, by the police in instances that are truly “justified,” in self defense or the defense of others. And while I am no fan of the death penalty because I believe it to be often unfairly administered and not a proven deterrent to violent crime, I accept that there are some acts so heinous as to warrant even this extreme measure.

So, in cases of rape and incest, in cases dealing with the life of the mother, and a number of other medical, psychological, and sociological realities which it would be impossible to enumerate or categorize, the tragic taking of a nascent life must be permitted morally. In these cases, only the mother whose body alone is the bearer and guardian of another human being — again, in thoughtful, prayerful, consultation with her physician, clergy or other counselors, family and friends as available — should be empowered to make that decision and given all the safety and support she needs to follow though on this most difficult choice.

This should not be a question of law, except to assure a woman’s legal right to make that choice. Society also has the responsibility to see that she has the comprehensive health care necessary to assure her healing and eventual flourishing in the years to come. With no particular pleasure or even satisfaction in the position and certainly no judgment on those who reach different conclusions, I stand with those who believe that abortion should be

Safe…legal…and rare.

Over the last several months, I’ve had the pleasure of being engaged in an online book study with a group of colleagues primarily from the Mennonite and Methodist traditions. We were discussing a book entitled Chosen? –note the question mark! It was written by a renowned Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann, and in it he reassesses his uncritical support of the state of Israel in the Palestinian/Israeli struggle over the land called Holy in the Middle East.

Most of us Christians in this country have an overwhelming bias toward supporting Israel in this struggle. We hear stories from the Bible every Sunday like our Old Testament reading this morning from Genesis where God is portrayed as giving the land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants… for all time. And when we read stories of violence and terrorism today even in the holy city of Jerusalem, as we have again over the last few days, we weep with Jesus in Luke’s Gospel as he cries:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing. See, your house is left to you.  And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ’Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” (Luke 13:34-35)

Certainly, I am one of those with a “bias” towards Israel and the Jewish people. My Lord Jesus Christ was a Jew. All of the apostles were Jews. All of the writers of the New Testament (with the possible exception of St. Luke) were Jews.

Like Paul in his Letter to the Romans, I believe Christianity can best be understood, not so much as a “new” religion, but as a branch… grafted on to the vine and deep roots of Israel’s tree. That’s why we read from the Old Testament  as well as the New every Sunday. I think it’s quite likely that Jesus did not even initially come to found a church… but to renew the faith and the practice of Judaism, of his own people!

And yet, because of studies such as the one I just completed with my online colleagues, and even more, because of a number of trips I have made to Israel and Palestine over the years, I know that there is another story…another narrative. It is the narrative of the Palestinian people who can make an equally ancient claim to the land Joshua once conquered.

It is the narrative of the more recent Palestinians who were displaced from the land of Palestine in 1948 when the world decided (quite rightly, I believe) to assure a homeland for the Jewish people who had just suffered the horrors of the Holocaust and who needed us to reassure them that this kind of thing would happen “Never again!”

It is the narrative of Palestinian Christians today who are caught squarely in the midst of the struggle between Arab Muslims and Israeli Jews. Sadly, most Christians in the United States are unaware that there are Palestinian Christians…in Bethlehem and Jerusalem and Ramallah…on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. There are even Palestinian Episcopalians there!

One of them, a friend I traveled with on one of my journeys, is fond of telling about the time a tourist said to him, “Oh, you’re a Christian! How long have there been Palestinian Christians?” His response: “Since the Day of Pentecost!”

Yes, there two narratives, two understandings of the complex situation in the Holy Land. And it is those two narratives, deeply believed and deeply cherished by both sides, which make a “two state solution” so difficult to achieve in the land of Jesus’ birth.  I’m sorry to have to inform you that my online colleagues and I did not solve the problems of the Middle East at the end of our book study!

But I think it’s safe to say that most of us would agree with at least one of Dr. Brueggemann’s conclusions in answering the question, “How should U.S. Christians be involved in promoting a solution (to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma)? In my judgment, he wrote, Christians must be zealous, relentless advocates for human rights. This means exposing the violations of human rights by all parties and recognizing the imbalance of power that makes Israel’s violations of human rights all the more ignominious. Christians must be zealous advocates with the U.S. government to check unilateral support of Israel as a bottom-line assumption. Our longstanding commitment to the security of Israel must be coupled with protection of human rights for Palestinians, not one without the other.”

Well, however, you come down on this issue, as we travel through the weeks of Lent and especially as we begin to trace the events of Holy Week which took place in and around Jerusalem, a city holy to each of the world’s three great monotheistic religions, please heed the Psalmist’s ancient plea to “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” Broaden your prayers and your concerns this Lent!

Pray that the Palestinian people may realize that violence will never be the path to that kind of peace. And that, if resistance to occupation and oppression must be mounted, only non-violent resistance has any chance of success.

Pray that the Israelis will heed the warnings of their great prophets that they may indeed be God’s Chosen People, but they are chosen for mission, not for privilege. They are chosen to witness to the God of justice who has always called them to welcome the stranger and the sojourner because they were once strangers and sojourners too.

And pray that our Christian witness, in this country and around the world, may always be balanced and fair. And that it may be fueled by the passion and tears of Jesus himself in today’s Gospel:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.”

Pray for the eventual gathering of those hens — Jewish, Muslim, and Christian hens – under the shelter of the Most High! As the Psalmist puts it this morning:

7) …in the day of trouble he shall keep me safe
in his shelter; *
he shall hide me in the secrecy of his dwelling
and set me high upon a rock. (Psalm 27)

The Pope was wrong. Technically. In the recent dust-up between the Vicar of Christ and the vicar of corporate America, the Hair may have come out on top ahead of the Chair. When/if Pope Francis said that, because of Trump’s outlandish and cruel policy proposals (building a wall, deporting Muslims, etc) he was not “a Christian,” he was technically wrong.

One can be good Christian or a bad Christian, a conservative Christian or a liberal Christian, a heretical Christian or an orthodox Christian, a barbaric Christian or a compassionate Christian, but if you have been baptized with water in the name of the Trinity (as presumably Donald Trump was if he is indeed a Presbyterian) then you are a Christian.

Obviously what the Pope intended to say (and perhaps did say, if there are translation or language issues) is that the Donald’s behavior and policies and intentions are not in line with the Christian faith or with the teachings of Jesus. That is, of course, demonstrably true. In fact, if Matthew 25 does indeed give us any indication of the ultimate standards by which we shall be measured, Mr. Trump may have a very tough Judgement Day!

Of course, brilliant politician that he is, Trump has spun this encounter into scores of free hours (yet again) of publicity and likely parlayed it into votes in evangelical, dare I say, anti-Catholic South Carolina and beyond. It seems to matter not that he even blew this opening by claiming that the Vatican is set behind secure walls which they themselves built so that America can do the same. Anyone who has visited, or even seen pictures of, the Vatican, will know that it is wide open and visited by millions each year with little more than standard metal detector screening to get inside!

Of course, part of Francis’ endearing charm is his willingness to speak openly and often off the cuff even to reporters in the back of a plane. Even more endearing is his deep compassion for the poor and marginalized, the last and the least. Donald Trump has not the slightest interest in such persons who are, in his opinion, most likely “murders and rapists and some, he assumes, are good people.”

I only hope the Bishop of Rome’s honest attempt to call him out does not, in the strange calculus of this year’s political season, end up strengthening his appeal.

Appropriate condolences and expressions of appreciation for an influential and provocative Supreme Court Justice have been offered at the unexpected death of Antonin Scalia yesterday. That is most appropriate, as would be delay in the immediate politicization of the process of approving his replacement. Let us at least observe an appropriate period for the grieving of his large family and many friends before switching on the judicial sausage-making machine.

I would like to focus instead on the many descriptions of Justice Scalia as “brilliant” and as possessing “a keen intellect.” He is universally acknowledged as a constitutional “originalist,” a method of constitutional interpretation that looks to the meaning of words and concepts as they were understood by the Founding Fathers. In other words, rather than seeing the Constitution as a “living, breathing document” he believed that it must be interpreted exactly as the 18th century framers would have understood it.

That is, it seems to me, exactly what biblical fundamentalists argue when they advocate expounding the “plain sense” of the Bible without need for interpretation, contextualization, or an understanding of progressive revelation even within the text itself. And while such Bible teachers may know the Scriptures backwards and forwards, chapter and verse, and while they may be experts in the Hebrew and Greek languages in which the original documents were written, they would not qualify as biblical “scholars” in my opinion.

Rather, they too deny that the text they study (in this case, the Bible) is a living,breathing document but rather seek to interpret it as it was originally written by its ancient authors, with their “scientific” knowledge and primitive world views. Perhaps these Bible teachers should be called “biblical originalists.” And, in that case, Justice Scalia might best be described as a “constitutional fundamentalist.”

As an African American commentator said this morning, “If the Constitution was not a living, breathing document, I would still be a slave and only worth what someone would pay for me.”

Most holy and merciful Father:  We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinned by our own fault in thought word and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. (Page 267, The Book of Common Prayer)

So begins the “Litany of Penitence” Episcopalians use on this Ash Wednesday.  As much as I value the forty days of Lent as a season for prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, I must admit to increasing discomfort with our focus on begging for mercy from God, often seemingly groveling before the Holy One as “miserable sinners” not worthy to “gather up the crumbs under (God’s) table.”

Our sins don’t hurt God nearly as much as they hurt one another and ourselves. How much better if we said these words from our General Confession to each other, to the ones we have actually hurt and wronged by our thoughtless and selfish behavior:

“…I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done, and by what I have left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart; I have not loved my neighbor (either). I am truly sorry and I humbly repent. For the sake of…Jesus Christ…have mercy on me and forgive me…”

I think we need to spend a whole lot more time this Lent asking one another for forgiveness and seeking to amend our lives for those many ways we have sinned against one another. Including the broader, actually more important, categories than we usually confess, such as those included farther down in that same Litany of Penitence:

“…all our past unfaithfulness, the pride, hypocrisy and impatience of our lives…our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people…our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves…our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work…our waste and pollution of…creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us.”

Yes, we have plenty of need for a season of “penitence and fasting.” Let’s just have the courage to confess our sins and ask forgiveness of the ones we have actually wounded —  one another.

Every Shrove Tuesday I think of Bill Sanderson. He was a priest in a neighboring parish in Cocoa Beach, Florida and was in a clergy, lectionary-study group with me for six or seven years. We also played tennis together several days a week for some of those years.

I think of Bill on this day because he was something of an iconoclast and, on Shrove Tuesdays, Bill and his parish eschewed the usual “pancake supper” and held instead a steak and wine dinner. His point was, if we’re going to fast, let’s really fast and if we’re going to feast, let’s really feast.

The parish I attend now does something of the same thing. While sticking to the traditional pancake supper, they feature really good, live jazz music offered by the Manny Lopez trio, a local celebrity and his friends. The mood is entirely festive and an appropriate way to feast before the fast begins tomorrow on Ash Wednesday.

As Christians, I’m afraid we’ve really leveled out and tamed the annual cycles of feasting and fasting. Very few of us give up anything particularly significant for Lent beyond desserts or chocolate. And, with the possible exception of a few champagne receptions after the Easter Vigil, we don’t even celebrate together with much gusto.

All this is, I think, to our impoverishment. Of course, we don’t “have” to fast. We certainly should not do it to earn God’s favor or punish ourselves with some kind of penance. But, denying ourselves something, saying No to ourselves in small things can in fact strengthen our spiritual muscles so that we can say No when it is really important in life — No to cheating on our taxes…or on our spouses. No to drugs. No to revenge and violence.

Nor, I suppose, do we “have” to feast. Only if we want to celebrate the incredible gift of this fantastic universe and the beautiful “earth, our island home” on which we live. Only if we are grateful to have awakened this morning to another day of living and moving and having our being together as colleagues, friends, and lovers. Only if we recognize that none of this comes to us because we have earned it. But only because

God is good…all the time!  All the time…God is good!

And that calls for a Celebration.