Friday roundup

Excellent piece by Rev. Dr. Carolyn Moore at the Wesleyan Covenant Association's website on why she responds to the looming UMC split with relief, even as she's dismayed at the death of courage that brought the denomination to this juncture:

Without context, the headlines in the national media might seem harsh and this plan to separate may come as a surprise. But for many who have been on this journey for years, this represents a significant and hopeful step forward. Most headlines last week led with the idea that the crux of the crisis is a disagreement over our sexual ethics, teachings on marriage, and the ordination of LBTQ+ clergy. I want to emphasize that the crisis in the UM Church does not rest on just these issues. Others agree. In a recent essay accurately entitled, “The Sad, Necessary Division of the United Methodist Church” David French writes:

“The secular media will cast the divide primarily in the terms it understands—as focused on “LGBT issues” – but that’s incomplete. The true fracturing point between Mainline and Evangelical churches is over the authority and interpretation of scripture. The debate over LGBT issues is a consequence of the underlying dispute, not its primary cause… there is a strain of Protestant Christianity that views the Bible as valuable but not infallible or inerrant. Evangelical Christians, by contrast, strongly dissent from that view.”

That seems an accurate statement to me. Our divide has been forming for years over multiple issues that are very real and very deep. They strike at the fundamentals of historical Christian orthodoxy. How we interpret scripture and relate to the person and work of Jesus Christ is at the headwaters of this crisis, but it is also important to note that our inability to hold one another accountable where we disagree only exacerbates the problem. When some of our leaders are unwilling to hold us accountable to the time-honored way we make decisions at our General Conferences, the result is a kind of disorder and dysfunction that is excruciating.

The hard reality we must admit today is that while we traditionalists have won votes at General Conference, we have not really held the line of orthodoxy within the UM Church. While we are thankful for the reaffirmation of our teachings, some of our American colleagues openly resist what we have reaffirmed. With no theological or ethical accountability and no will among many bishops to establish accountability, there is no line left to hold. Most of us – from across the theological divide – recognize we can no longer go on this way.

Some would implore us to stay in the current situation and keep voting for traditional values at General Conference, as if we might eventually wear down our progressive colleagues and compel them to leave. I have zero faith in that eventuality. A colleague in my conference who serves on the board of a progressive movement within the UM Church told me without blinking an eye, “We will never leave.” And I believe her. Why would she? With accountability on these matters gone – and it is – her approach is working to a degree; it is a functional response. So, we frustrate her sincerely held views on very important matters, and in return she and colleagues in her theological camp frustrate our sincerely held beliefs. This is not a healthy dynamic for a supposedly united church.

Friends, let’s support this protocol. Let’s get ourselves out of an Egypt filled with conflict and bitterness. The protocol might not be the promised land, but once we are out of the Egypt we are living in, we traditionalists can participate with the Holy Spirit in building a vital and fruitful movement that reflects our faith and the faith of our fathers. Our ground – the ground I want to be standing on – is on the other side of separation, where we can make choices from a place of strength, and without the anarchy we live in now.

It wasn't the first piece I'd ever encountered on the subject of guys who wear shorts in the dead of winter, but I was game when I saw this Atlantic article, hoping it would offer a fresh take, or a view of the matter that would take in all ages and demographics who so attire themselves.  Alas, I should have taken my cue from the title: "Why Some Kids Wear Shorts All Winter." Having thus limited the scope, we get a range of reasons that doesn't do much to shed real insight: attention-seeking, not wanting to appear wimpy, testing the limits of authority, and such. She even quotes a therapist who recommends that parents begin a conversation with shorts-clad boys thusly:

“Start with ‘I’m really curious,’ or ‘I’m wondering,’ or ‘I’ve noticed that you don’t like wearing [long pants] in the winter. Tell me more.’ What you might find is that it’s a sensory issue, that they say, ‘I don’t like the way the fabric feels against my skin,’” she said. “You might actually be able to work with that. You could be able to find something that would keep them warm but work for them a little bit better.”

Niskanen Center president Jerry Taylor posits that all this misses the obvious, something that might have surfaced if the Atlantic piece had included adult participation in the phenomenon:

Jerry Taylor

@jerry_jtaylor

Not just boys. Also men in DC. None of these explanations resonate. Per 

@RadioFreeTom

, we've simply raised people who want to be in pajamas all day and have zero sense of social decorum. Its like we have an entire adult world in day care.  

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From the Trump-occasionally-gets-one-right file: Today he announced that the National Environmental Policy Act will be getting modernized:

The proposed rule to bring NEPA into the 21st century would modernize environmental regulations without burdening “American workers, farmers, and families” by bringing new infrastructure projects to communities nationwide in an expedited fashion.

Per the White House, the proposed rule will:

• Establish time limits of 2 years for completion of environmental impact statements and 1 year for completion of environmental assessments.
• Specify page limits, promotes information sharing through modern technology, and better defines environmental effects and other key terms.
• Reduce unnecessary burdens and delays for environmental reviews.
  Agencies would be allowed to establish procedures for adopting another agency’s determinations to increase efficiency.
• Improve collaboration with state, local, and tribal governments.

 Better savor that. Those don't come along too often.

Now, how's this for an inflated sense of his own powers?

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.

10:00 AM · Jan 9, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

But why wouldn't he say this kind of stuff, given the way his sycophants drool over him?

Andrew Lawrence

@ndrew_lawrence

Lou Dobbs attacks America for not understanding we have an obligation to serve Donald Trump "It is a shame that this country which is benefitting so much from this president's leadership does not understand their obligations to this leader who is making it possible"

Mayor Pete didn't do his supposed moderate-Dem image any good by describing the shooting down (by an Iranian missile) of the Ukrainian airliner as "innocent civilians . . . caught in the middle of an unwanted and unnecessary tit for tat."


At The Imaginative Conservative, Hillsdale history professor Bradley Birzer reflects on the ancient uses of the term "The Word," or logos,  that may have informed the way St. John employs it at the beginning of his Gospel.

Father's Day: an excellent opportunity to reflect on manliness in the richest sense of the term

Occasionally, my pastor knocks it out of the park with his sermon.

Such was the case with his Father's Day message today.

It was richly multileveled. He spoke of his relationship with his own father, how the latter had led and taught through quiet example far more than overt lecturing or hammering home of formal standards. (He even got a little choked up when he noted it was the second Father's Day without his dad.) He cited the statistics tying social ills - drug abuse, violent crime, educational failure - to the absence of a father in a male's life. He made note of the fact that Jesus consistently referred to God as his Father, rather than calling him Lord or any other characterization found elsewhere in scripture.

But it was his distillation of the panoply of qualities that go into making a good father down to three that really gave shape to his remarks. These are providing, protecting and teaching. He then spoke of the sense of balance that a father needs to bring to each role. Overemphasis on providing can lead to the classic absence of the workaholic who misses the games, recitals, graduations and birthdays that are the milestones of his children's lives. Giving protection an outsized role leads to hovering and smothering and denying a child the space to fail and learn from it. Being too focused on teaching can lead to a child tuning out and thereby missing valuable lessons.

He then touched on the ways in which post-American culture elevates the undeniable virtues of the feminine mode of being human in a zero-sum context, as if that can't be good without maleness being bad. In other words, what happens is that masculinity gets disparaged. Hence we get university workshops on "toxic masculinity."

This, he ventured, is why we now hesitate to depict Jesus, who was a carpenter circa 20 AD, when such a tradesman was routinely slinging around large timbers and stones and using tools that required considerable strength to bring to bear on such materials, as manly. We want him unwaveringly gentle, with pretty hair and soft facial features. We want him exquisitely tolerant.

But that's not who he was. Yes, he made it clear that he was here to maximize the number of found sheep. The lost and the dead were his first priority. But he made it clear that their hearts were indispensable parts of the equation. If someone refuses to be found by Jesus, he has no choice when the hour of no sunset and no dawning arrives but to say, "I never knew you." When he encountered broods of vipers, he called them as much.

It doesn't take a rocket science to see why millennials are turned off by a plain-speaking messiah. They are most uneasy with the notion of right and wrong being objective. They see the church as engaging in the codification of human opinions:

Just over 60 percent of millennials say that Christianity is “judgmental,” and 64 percent say that “anti-gay” best describes most churches today. 

Just how important is the kind of example-setting that a committed father can do to the health of our culture? Well, if enough men with offspring slack at it, role models become ever-fewer:

Many youth have had no -- or very limited -- exposure to adult role models who know what they believe, why they believe it, and are committed to consistently living it out.

Authenticity is a term that can be used for good or ill. Employed in the service of some kind of "people-ought-to-just-be-themselves" ethos, it encourage narcissism and even infantile self-absorption. But a dignified authenticity - of a type nearly synonymous with backbone - is a precious commodity.

Father's Day presents those of us who are males, even if we don't have children, with a call to nobility. Male and female He created us, and He saw that it was good.

Manliness is not celebrated by the antics of singers in bro-country videos, or even action movies featuring some squinty-eyed, machine-gun-wielding protagonist with his back to the wall.

At least not nearly as well as by the example of a dedicated father, who, even in his inevitable sinfulness, perseveres in his effort to demonstrate qualities he understands to be good, right and true.

Of course, it's best celebrated by the Nazarene carpenter who said that his words came from his Father and nowhere else.

Intention for this week: to make it a mindful walk to the cross

Why is the cross the primary symbol of Christianity? One sees it on church steeples, on necklace pendants, on Bible covers, bumper stickers (including those "coexist" stickers that also include the Star of David, the Muslim Crescent and the yin-yang symbol), graves and tattoos.

But why not the empty tomb, or, say, the manger? Do they not have a bit more of an upbeat connotation?

And it's hardly recent. Iconography from the faith's earliest days puts the cross front and center.

It's clearly an insistence that something be acknowledged. What is it?

Something interesting about the way this ubiquitious symbol is displayed, and has been over the centuries, is that it's either presented as flamboyantly decorative, with curly-cues adorning its edges, or so simple - two perpendicular lines, basically - as to be starkly abstract. It's almost as if the faith is saying that the graphic details are best left to the observer's private thoughts and imaginings.

I guess that's understandable. Say you wrote a novel about some grisly crime that took place in a particular room. Would you not want your publisher's graphics people to put something rather subtle on the book cover, say, an open door, with a beam of dim light projecting out? Your target market might recoil from your work if you got too literal, or mistake what you're offering for some kind of low-brow sensationalism.

Maybe this goes a ways toward explaining why Good Friday is not the big deal on most Christians' - or Westerners' generally - calendar that Easter, or certainly Christmas, is. The most devout try to find time on that day to make it to a service somewhere, but nobody stays home from work, or gathers family for some kind of meal.

But there it is, up on that hill, with the last vestiges of daylight fading behind it, the murmur of weeping Jewish women and astonished Roman soldiers fading with it.

Step right up to it, so you can see the blood. There's lots of it.

At some point, anyone who begins a serious inquiry into just what this Christian-faith thing is has to ponder deeply what happened in the twenty or so hours between the kiss on the cheek from Judas in the Garden of Gesthemane and the scene depicted above.

What happened to that guy - our Lord, the son of the author of all that has ever existed, and is ever going to exist, anywhere in this infinite universe - was abuse of a degree of viciousness and savagery to which very few human beings have ever been subjected. The scourgings went on and on, and the Romans who administered them used the most diabolical of instruments, The spikes dug deep, tearing muscle tissue and causing massive blood loss. He was shoved, kicked, hit and spit upon, taunted. Mocked with the title - "King of the Jews" - that codified the way in which he was most misunderstood, as the anticipated political leader of a liberation movement.

Throughout the entire time, various people came up to him - including the man most responsible for his fate, Pontius Pilate - and said, in so many words, "Why are you putting yourself through this? Tell the authorities what they want to hear, and you can put a stop to this."

We all should conjure as vividly as possible this week an image of the facial expression with which He gazed at such people in response. Consider that he was weaving in and out of consciousness and lucidity, a chunk of barely recognizable shredded human tissue drenched in his own blood. But surely when directly asked why he didn't choose to end the Hell, he'd engage their eyes directly and convey something with timeless implications, implications for your soul and mine: I have to do this.

And conjure an image of the cross being raised to its full height, in the hot sun. The impact of gravity on the points - hands and feet - at which the body of Jesus of Nazareth was fastened to the wood would bring him to the moment of maximum anguish.

And consider the full depth and  mystery of the things he uttered once up there:

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

"Into thine hands I commend my spirit."

"It is finished."

Over the past several decades, Western culture has become enamored of the quest for direct spiritual experience, and has come to value that more than truth revealed in scripture. Some of it is surely due to the instant-gratification value of a mystical experience. As with everything else, we want the full measure and we want it now. We want something cosmic and mind-blowing.

What fits that bill better than what happened on that cross? The utterances listed above, the suddenly darkening sky, the rending of the temple curtain?

The removal of the seam between the profane and the sacred, the reuniting of the mundane and the divine. Creation reconciled with creator.

How's that for cosmic?

But where does the individual human being fit into this?

As I've said before, my last sticking point before fully committing myself to a faith journey was that it looked like a rigged game, that the exercise of this great gift from God, our free will, would inevitably result in sin, and that the only way to avoid the eternal outer darkness resulting from that sin was to make some sort of confession, made a mockery of that free will.

But if you'll permit yourself to really let in the details of that Friday afternoon on that hill, you'll see that it's not just "some sort of confession." Nobody would go through what that guy did, particularly after a ministry filled with parables of lost sheep and prodigal sons, and exhortations to repentance, without desiring something infinitely precious.

He had you on his mind that awful day. Your name, your face, your soul.

You may not even have an inkling you were lost until you really let in what he went through.

He wants you and me with Him in eternity.

Let's make this week truly holy. There is much on humanity's plate, but that is always the case, is it not? For this week, let us put the moment, two thousand-plus years ago, when time and eternity were wedded, and Christ invited us to see Him in paradise, front and center in our minds.

Let's accept being cleansed.