I know, I know. I’m more than a little late on novelist Anne Rice’s defection from the Church. In a Facebook post last week she wrote she was quitting Christianity “in the name of Christ.” Why?
“I reached a point where I felt that I couldn’t be complicit any longer in the things that organized religion was doing. I really saw it as a fairly simple repudiation, you know? I was exonerating myself. I was saying, ‘Look, when you — when you see the persecution of gay people by the Mormon Church or the Catholic Church, I’m not part of this. I’m out. I don’t support this anymore. When you see the oppression of women. I’m not part of it. I’m stepping aside. This follower of Christ is not part of that Christianity.’ That’s really what I thought to say.”
Anne Rice was raised as a Catholic, left the Church for a while, and then strongly re-embraced her faith in 1998. To see her speak about these issues, among others:
Command Chaplain Col. Donald W. Holdridge of the 200th Military Police Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, the Army Reserves top chaplain for MPs, believes faith in Jesus can cure Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He wrote an 11,000-word essay, “Spiritual Resiliency: Helping Troops Recover from Combat.” In it he says:
“Combat vets need to know that most of these [PTSD symptoms] do fade in time, like scars. They will always be there to some degree, but their intensity will fade. What will help them fade is the application of the principles of Scripture.”
He then goes on to list some resources to help combat vets with PTSD. Four out of 10 are evangelical organizations whose mission, at least to some degree, is evangelizing to members of the military. Not everyone shares Holdridge’s views. Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, responded with:
“This is a carefully calculated, base, evil, vile, filthy and despicable perversion of the United States Constitution which, at once, heinously divides and demoralizes military unit cohesion while concomitantly lubricating and accelerating soldier suicides.”
Whether you think the chaplain is on the right track or obliterating the boundary between Church and State, you can learn more here.
When we were developing the cover for What He Said, we knew that we wanted to include Jesus’ blessings from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Among these, 5:9 was always a favorite:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”
Peacemakers. Not peacewatchers or peaceenjoyers. Makers. Active participants who work toward peace. In the middle of a conflict, working toward peace is a difficult task fraught with peril. And Jesus bestowed a special blessing on those who at least try.
“Last month’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project found that humanitarian groups can be judged guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism merely by holding peaceful dialog and engaging in political discussions with proscribed organizations. Those convicted may be sentenced to up 15 years in prison.”
Earlier today I was wondering if there was a consensus out there as to people’s favorite gospel. Short answer: no. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all chosen and for many different reasons. I surfed around a bit and found this post to best illustrate my point. Yes, I know it’s three years old, but they had the same Gospels way back in 2007 that we do now.
Scroll down to see the 47 comments and you’ll see what I mean.
In the eighth chapter of John, there’s a story of a woman caught in the act of adultery and the crowd that’s ready to stone her. (Bart Ehrman in his book, Misquoting Jesus, shows that the story was not part of the original scriptures and was added later, but I digress). Jesus is writing on the ground with his finger and looks up at the would-be stoners and says:
“He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.” – John 8:7
Lots of shoe gazing ensues, followed by crowd dispersal. Jesus diffused the situation by changing the perspective.
Which is something we should all be doing regarding the BP oil spill. Fists in the air won’t accomplish much; more shoe-gazing might. Mark Johnson writes a compelling post about this in the God’s Politics blog:
“I know, however, that I am in no position to “throw the first stone.” My style and standard of living cries for oil wells to be built.”
I just saw this column by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. In it, he describes the swift excommunication of a nun who saved a woman’s life. Meanwhile, all the priests and bishops guilty of child abuse are “re-assigned,” or in rare cases, suspended, or in even rarer cases, defrocked. But still allowed to take the sacrament.
Two passages from the story hit home for me. The first is a quote from a doctor who works at the same hospital as Sister Margaret.
“She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago. The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated. True Christians, like Sister Margaret, understand that real life is full of difficult moral decisions and pray that they make the right decision in the context of Christ’s teachings. Only a group of detached, pampered men in gilded robes on a balcony high above the rest of us could deny these dilemmas.”
The other is from Kristof:
Sister Margaret made a difficult judgment in an emergency, saved a life and then was punished and humiliated by a lightning bolt from a bishop who spent 16 years living in Rome and who has devoted far less time to serving the downtrodden than Sister Margaret. Compare their two biographies, and Sister Margaret’s looks much more like Jesus’s than the bishop’s does.
The Arizona immigration law is an extremely sticky one. Those who support the law cite stressed state budgets and the need to stop home break-ins and drug/gun smuggling. Those who oppose the law point out that data show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than legal residents. They also lean on Jesus’ words to love your neighbor. I found this video to be an interesting presentation of both sides:
This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. This is probably obvious to all of you, but things whiz by at such a pace these days that I thought it worthwhile to slam on the brakes and back up a couple of days.
I had always thought of Mother’s Day as another Hallmark invention designed to sell greeting cards and chocolate treats. Not so. The original call for celebrating Mother’s Day in the United States came from Julia Ward Howe in 1870. She was an abolitionist, suffragette, poet and pacifist. She also wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
After the carnage of the Civil War, she wanted to get other Mothers to unite to protest the senselessness of their sons killing the sons of other mothers. One of the results of her efforts was the “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” Its overriding message, like that of Jesus, is simply, peace.
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
In the foreword of our book we wrote, “One final point. No one really knows if the words you see in What He Said are what He actually said! We don’t have any voice recordings or transcripts from the Year 1, and Jesus didn’t keep a journal. Further, scholars have documented how the Bible changed over the years as generations of scribes laboriously made copies (from copies) for their particular Christian communities.”
Along these lines, L. Michael White, a professor of Classics and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin, recently published a new book called Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite. In the book, White:
“demonstrates that each of the four gospel writers had a specific audience in mind and a specific theological agenda to push, and consequently wrote and rewrote their lives of Jesus accordingly—in effect, scripting Jesus to get the desired audience reaction.”
Scan the top headlines on any given day and if you’re not already depressed, you might soon be. Church abuse scandals, war, terrorism, giant garbage patches floating in the ocean, political rage, the list goes on.
I thought I would try to combat some of the negative effects of the day with a weekly post featuring some act of kindness (random or otherwise). Maybe you’ll look forward to the Thursday post to get a fix of positive energy.
To set this all up, I thought you might enjoy reading this article on achieving happiness. Jesus would approve. In a nutshell, Dr. Tom Muha says (and research has proven) that being kind to others not only helps them, it makes you happier. It makes you feel better about yourself and “can create an upward spiral in which helping others continually feeds your sense of well-being.”
One small note: your act of kindness needs to be “autonomous,” meaning you have to find the initiative within. Taking the garbage out after your mom yelled at you three times to do it probably won’t raise a smile. And remember:
“…when you do merciful deeds, don’t sound a trumpet before yourself…” – Matthew 6:2
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