Remembering the Irish

So lately I've seen a few people link articles discussing the way that Irish immigrants were treated in the early days of colonization and our history as a nation. My family exists in a way that oddly straddles that line... my Dad is descended both from wealthy protestant Irish who founded several quite profitable ventures (I hear the McCurdy Department Store is still going, they are distant family) and potato Irish who were Catholics. It's a tradition I'm very proud of.

So I want you to take my full meaning when I say I do not wish to belittle the harshness those immigrants faced, true blue institutional racism placed up against them, difficult barriers that had to be overcome, used and abused and discarded by countless regimes until they clawed their way into the power structure and were able to enact change. It's part of my story, I know it, and I know that while it resembled, in some ways, the plight of the African American slave, it was not the same experience. I've never seen the mileage in rating suffering, but bad as my ancestors suffered, the African slaves suffered worse on average.

But that doesn't matter.

Even if the Irish suffered the way the Africans did, even if they had it worse, it would not excuse the way that story is being used now, or the implications that because we "got over it," so should they.

One of the refrains of the Old Testament is the near constant reminder of the Jewish people that they had been slaves and immigrants, once. There had been a time when they were without a home, a time when they had been without safety, when their very existence depended on the whims of another.

"A wanderin Aramean was my father," they are called on to announce at Passover, a declaration that all they have is a gift, a vast improvement over what was and a call to remember to be kind to the wanderers and sufferers of today. Slavery, according to Biblical law, was meant to be a temporary state, to keep someone a slave for life was an insult to the traditions, slave owners always called upon to remember the time when THEY were slaves.

So if the Bible means anything to you, if you claim to follow its word, you'll know that the recollection of Irish oppression and subsequent oppression dick wagging contest to be an exercise in futility, a betrayal of the very concepts you claim to adhere to.

Because if your ancestors did suffer in the way you claim, that should not be a call for others to "get over it," but rather a call to sympathy. In time, the Irish fought their way into the power structure, became the power brokers, fought and earned the respect we now take for granted. Instead, when you look and see others fighting for their right to exist and be respected in this nation, we should remember the time when we were the outcasts... and ally ourselves with them.

Because we knew what it was like to be treated as less than human, we would never DARE to do the same to anyone else.

For Politics, I want a Politician.

I am so over this election season.

I am particularly over it as a person with a platform who occasionally gets a call or a visit from someone who wants me in their camp.

For starters, my ability to do the kind of things they usually want me to do is pretty darn limited. I do not speak FOR my church, rather I speak to them, so I don't have the authority to, say, have the church back a candidate, as that could get my church into some legal trouble, as would signs in my yard (which is the church's yard) etc.

But what I am really tired of is politicians telling me that they aren't politicians. "I'm not a politician, I'm a Marine!" You see, that's a false statement. I know that because there are certain things marines do, as part of being a marine, and things politicians do. Running for office is not a part of being a Marine. It is, however, a part of being a politician.


You can deny being a bus driver all day. If, however, your job is driving a bus, then you are a bus driver.

Some have transitioned to using the phrase "career Politician" but that really doesn't help, either. Especially at the State and Federal levels, our politicians face a great many challenges, many of which will only be dealt with through compromise, the ability to say and hear what you and others believe and arrive at workable solutions. Simply having good ideas isn't enough... you need the ability to make those ideas reality. (Something certain third party candidates conveniently forget.)

So when they say they aren't "career politicians" what they mean is that they are amateurs. If I am sending my daughter to her first day of school, I don't want to hear how the person driving her bus is an amateur. That wouldn't make me want to support their bid for bus driver. Why, then, would that be something I want for the one who will guide policy for her school system?

So yes, Candidate shaking hands with steel workers despite cutting their workers rights, you ARE a politician. And by your own admission, probably not a good one, or at least not an experienced one. At this point in History, we need our A team, not the JV. This isn't Amateur hour.

So point me to the politician. Here's hoping they have good ideas, too.

When I support the Flag

During the Olympics, I am always at my most patriotic. It really is pretty silly, but during the Games, even if it's a sport I know nothing about I will hoot and holler for the folks who fly the same flag as I do even if I have no real understanding of what is going on. Even my daughter, Katrina, got dolled up in red, white, and blue and joined me in cheers of "Hoooray, for the USA!" much to her two month old bewilderment.

So on this September 11th, I watch as American Flags big enough to cover football fields are trotted out... and I have a slightly different reaction. Because this isn't the Olympics anymore, and in this moment, the stars and stripes represent something a bit different than they did.

During the Olympics, the Flag represents passionate athletes coming together and competing to the best of their ability in a celebration of athletic achievement that, somehow, manages to transcend some (if not all) of the political difficulties that surround them. Those athletes are our champions, and the flag is lifted because in a way that I don't entirely understand, those athletes represent all of us. Their victory becomes our own, no matter who they are or where they come from.

The flag I saw today, as football kicked off, was different. It came at the start of the game, not in a time of victory, with participants and observers alike instructed to rise and honor it. This was done with additional edge to due the events being memorialized today, as well as a knowledge that several athletes had vowed not to do so. Suddenly this wasn't an act of celebration, but rather a litmus test on national TV. Do you respect the flag? Here you are, the cameras will be on you the second you don't. Do you?

That's not Patriotism. It's peer pressure.

I've attended many pro games live and I have always stood during the national anthem. Given certain prohibitions in my theology concerning idolatry, it has always been vaguely worrying, but I always figured that, like during the Olympics, the flag served as a symbol... by respecting it, I was showing respect to everyone it represented.

Today... I'm just not sure that is the case. Today we are informed by many that the flag, to them, represents something other than freedom. It has become a symbol of fear and oppression. And rather than deal with that head on, we have proceeded to shoot the messenger, to burn jerseys and lash out at people saying that they do not feel included under it's promise.

For a Flag that is supposed to represent Liberty and Justice for all, that is a pretty harsh condemnation in the form of what was supposed to be defense. Suddenly social media is full of those who leap to the defense of the piece of cloth, rather than seeking to understand why others might not feel that the piece of cloth is serving its purpose as being representative of them, as citizens of our nation.

Once that has happened, my idolatry detector is blaring full blast. Once the piece of cloth has been elevated above the people it is meant to represent, our values have gone fully out of whack, and the flag comes to represent injustice and conformity instead.

Now, context will always matter. When I am in a situation where the flag represents us as a nation, whole and without exception, celebrating our champions together in times of victory, I will respect it every time. But when it is used as a litmus test, demanding that we ignore the realities of our world in the name of jingo blinded patriotism, I won't.

Because the flag can be a symbol of both freedom and oppression. The former is a symbol worthy of respect. The latter is a symbol that MUST be rejected, if the true promise of the former is ever to be truly realized.

The Dangers of Pop Theology

One of the questions that often gets thrown my way by my atheists and others who are not regular participants in a life of faith is WHY people believe things a certain way. The Bible being the beautifully complicated document that it is, why do belief patterns seem to run one way so often?

It's the sort of thing that often gets lampooned by internet memes and the like, where the Bible clearly takes one stance that no one cares about, and vaguely mentions another that is seen to be almost mandatory to the faith.

One simple example: what is your visual picture of Hell? It doesn't even matter if you don't believe in it, it's a prevalent enough cultural concept that you've probably imagined before. So what do you see when you think of it?

Did you imagine a multi-level prison with wards for committers of various sins being punished in ways that were poetic justice for those sins, with the Devil alternately serving as ruler over it or Highest security prisoner?

A lot of people do. It isn't the ONLY cultural representation we have, but it is far and away the most prevalent, to the point that even if a Westerner thinks Hell doesn't look like that, they have at some point rejected it and chosen something else. It is the standard.

But here is the thing about that standard... it is utterly non-Biblical. There is very little Scripture to support it, and virtually nothing that could have built the picture independent of other sources. Building a concept of Hell exclusively from the Scriptures would build varying vague images of an eternal waiting room, a refiners furnace, or simply oblivion.

The image we have was largely crafted by Dante Alighieri for his Inferno, which was then borrowed and modified by countless other writers for their versions. The poetic justice bit seemed to resound the most powerfully and so, for many people, that is simply what Hell is, despite the problematic worldviews that can come from it, most obviously the picture of physical suffering as deserved punishment.

But largely, it's just a detailed picture. No matter what your picture of hell, if you believe in it, you believe it is a thing to be avoided, and so the specifics are largely window dressing. But if such a central tenant of belief can be formed so profoundly without any regard for the actual Biblical record, where else can such things happen?

When I was a teenager, I believed that homosexuality was a sinful lifestyle. So when someone asked me recently about why people believed such a thing, I decided to start with myself... why did -I- believe that?

The most obvious reason would be the Biblical message, right? It's supposed to be where all of this starts, after all. But that wasn't it. The Bible doesn't talk about ANY sexuality as often as you would think considering how fixated the church and Christians can be about it, and homosexuality is being discussed only a fraction of those rather rare instances. And of those instances, none were particular relevant to me in my faith education. I have to look them up... they're not just resting in  my head, ready to power my theological understanding. So whatever influenced me that way, it wasn't the Bible.

The next usual suspect would be my childhood pastor, who is easy to track down because he was also my Dad. It probably won't surprise many people to know that Dad is one of the foundational influences of my theology, especially my theology of being a pastor. Nearly everything I do as a pastor is either an acceptance of something I learned from him or a rejection of it. When it comes to homosexuality, though, Dad was also largely silent (except in near constant messages about the importance of loving and respecting EVERYONE, which at last count includes homosexuals) and so my belief that homosexuality was sinful can't be laid at his feet, either.

So I was at a loss. The Bible hadn't taught me to judge homosexuality, neither had my pastor growing up. So who did? Easy. Practically everyone else. The sinfulness of homosexuality was just sort of accepted and talked about, it was a thing people assumed, then when called upon to justify found helpful texts. This even included homosexuals, who whenever they talked about the faith simply assumed that part of them was considered taboo and either rejected faith because of it or continued faith in spite of it.

The origin of such theology likely predates even the Scriptures, hearkening back to a very simple human trait... fear and disgust for the other, a concept that the Scripture Writers struggle with even in the midst of calling upon us to reject it. We feel it, we see it in others, and if we are ever called upon to acknowledge it, we scramble for our justifications wherever we can find them, from a handful of scriptures removed from context to poor understandings of biology to a call to cultural purity.

The fact that many people believe a thing is not a reason to automatically reject it anymore than it is a reason to automatically espouse it, but it is important for people of faith to examine their beliefs and know where, precisely, they come from. Do you believe that the Bible is the basis for your faith? Great. But is it really, or are you simply following the herd?

Christians are called upon to love God with all of their hearts, minds, and strength. That means we can't just take the simpler, easier route. Faith is hard work, not an excuse to stop thinking. Challenge your beliefs, examine their sources, before you find yourself hurting someone else in the name of God, only to learn that God never told you to do what you were doing.

I wonder what level of Hell Dante would craft for that.