The Moon and Morning Prayers

The morning was bright and sharply cold, the sky a deep rich blue.  

The pup set out across the driveway with me in tow, eager to go about his morning business, and I glanced upward at the moon, low in the waking dawn.  It was a sharp-edged crescent, enlarged by the illusion of the parallax effect, lovely in the sky.

We bustled up the street, he snuffling at the scent of earth, me perusing the beauty of the heavens.  I'm not sure when I became a person who liked rising at first light, but the loveliness of morning's first embrace is a peculiar side benefit of being in charge of a dog's morning potty break.  We walked up the hill, and I reflected on that crescent, so perfectly inscribed in the warming navy of the sky.  Such a moon would have meaning to billions of human beings, a marker of faith.  For me, it is simply beautiful, and a work of the Creator.  

Our eager boi sniffed and marked as we made our way up the street, then came to the stretch of sidewalk where he always goes.  Like clockwork, he did.  I cleaned up, and we turned to return home.

Halfway back, I saw movement in a driveway.  I wasn't quite clear what it was, not at first.  A form, crouched low on the ground at the end of the driveway of a neighbor.

The neighbors in question have a home decorated in Americana, flags and eagles and the like.  They drive Fords and Fords only, SUVs and a well equipped F-250 that sees use as a commuter car.  They own very very big dogs.  She's of the wave-and-say hi sort, and he's lean and bald and bearded.  At one point, for a brief while in 2020, that big ol' truck sported both an NRA and a Trump Punisher sticker, so, well, that's what that is.

I wondered, for an instant, if one of them might have fallen on a patch of ice, so I quickened my pace.  

As I approached, I realized two things.  First, that the person on the ground was not one of them.  It was a delivery man.  Deliveries are at all hours now, early in the morning, late into the night, so this was not a surprise.

Second, as I watched him rise, resettle his janamaz, and kneel upon that mat to again bow himself in prayer, that he was Muslim.

He remained deep in his morning prayer as I and the dog passed, and I left him in peace beneath the crescent moon and dawn.  By the time I had reached my house, and turned to look back up the street, he and his vehicle were gone.

My soul has been much reflecting on the nature and necessity of prayer lately, and this moment seemed...something.  

Particularly now.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.

Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.

Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.

It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  

Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  

They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  

Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  

The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."

To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  

The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.

Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.

Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.

Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.

Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

What Fighting for Your Religious Freedom Looks Like

Anger, fear, and resentment are wonderful ways to motivate and radicalize a constituency.  And so there's an episode in our history, long forgotten to most of America, that's on my mind as the political umbrage machine finds reasons to stir our fears this season.

One of the major rallying cries for this upcoming election is this: Religious freedom is threatened.  How?  Well, there's an anecdote here, and a snopes-fail story there, but really?  All that matters is that people are riled up enough to feel motivated.

And sure, there are real threats to the freedom of religious practice elsewhere.  In China, for example, where churches are forced to close for just being churches.  Or in the Middle East, where being Christian means you may be tortured and beheaded.  Our self-aggrandizing sense of "oppression" is an embarrassment to the faith, a mockery of the very real crosses borne by Christ followers around the world.

"Tyranny?"  Lord help us, we have no idea what that means, although the folks who are manipulating our fears would be happy to show us, I'm sure.

That's not to say that religious freedom hasn't been challenged before in the United States.  It has. When that's happened, though, and when it was resisted, what did that look like?

What does defending your religious freedom look like in a constitutional republic, when it's genuinely at risk?

For that, my research into the dynamics and lives of the Old Order Amish for my forthcoming novel surfaced an interesting case.  There was a time, in the mid-20th century, when the Amish were jailed for their beliefs.  It was the era when public education was increasingly a national priority.  The United States was in the midst of the Cold War, and them Russkies were edumacating their young 'uns up real good.

If we didn't develop a new generation of scientists and mathematicians and engineers, the Red Menace would overtake us with their Sputniks and their Soyuzes and their ICBMs.  Next thing you know, we'd be singing the Internationale, watching terrible propaganda musicals, and being herded into interminable performances of abstract dance at the Bolshoi.

So STEM education was the rule of the day, and everyone needed to be on board.  School was mandatory.

But a group of Wisconsin Amish refused to send their kids to school past eighth grade, on religious grounds.  They were conservative Christian agrarian/craftsman pacifists, and they wanted to educate their children to be part of their community.  They had nothing against literacy, because the Amish were and are avid readers and writers.  They had nothing against math, in so far as you need some math to run a farm or a small business or a household.

But the rest of modern-era public higher education was preparing their children for an economy in which they did not want to participate, an economy that was antithetical to their faith.   So they refused.

Their children simply didn't show up to class.  Or, if forced to go to class, they'd flee into the cornfields.  Amish parents were accused of encouraging truancy, of subverting the American way with their backwards ignorance.  Charges were filed.  The Amish held their ground.

Amish elders were jailed, repeatedly, for breaking the law of the land.  They maintained their position, relentlessly and peacefully, with the stubborn gentleness of that movement.

Ultimately, they won.  In 1972, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the Old Order Amish, in a landmark decision establishing the rights of parents to see to the education of their young ones.

But there's a detail in there, one that the current self-absorbed hullabaloo about religious freedom willfully ignores.  The Amish were only interested in defending their way of life.

They were not, in any way, imposing their way of life on others.

Let me repeat that, because that's the part we seem confused about:

They were not, in any way, imposing their way of life on others.

I'd bold it and put it in all-caps, but hopefully, that point has been gotten across.

What we "English" do did not matter to them.  They had their way, their path, their Ordnung.  Others were not expected to live by it, not coerced by the power of the state into living according to their rules.

Now, I'm a fan of public education.  Is it perfect?  No, of course not.  But it's a good thing, a public good, something that makes our nation better.  Smarter.  Stronger.  Faster.  Nonetheless, I can respect both the Amish position and the way in which they went about defending their inalienable rights.

In a democratic republic, where your neighbor's freedom matters as much as your own, they showed us how defending religious liberty is done.

Christian Business and Religious Freedom

The ongoing uproar over legislative actions in Indiana and Arkansas over the rights of businesses to serve or not serve customers based on religious preferences will echo in our ears for a while longer.

The question, of course, is: why?  Why this strange sprawling mess, in which conservatism manages to make itself look terrible?  Religious freedom is kind of a bedrock value in the United States, and the right to believe as you wish and act accordingly is one that is central to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet this has been botched, with "standing up for liberty" now morphed into "wanting the freedom to refuse business to people I think are sinners."

This is mostly couched in terms of wedding-stuff.  What about the infidel-weddings?  Could you refuse to provide flowers for a Muslim wedding?  Or a Jewish wedding?  Or the nuptials of a Buddhist and a Bahai?  I mean, they're all supposed to be going equally to hell, right?  None of those would be Christian weddings, right?

And...we're talking mostly about businesses that serve *weddings* here, not marriages.  Is the wedding-industrial-complex suddenly a religious thing?  Or is it a cultural accretion, one that's nice and purty and astoundingly expensive, but has no more bearing on the dynamics of a healthy, lasting marriage than the brand of limo that takes you to your reception?

Christian marriage ain't about having a Jesus cake, people.

I don't know how this would even work, honestly.  Could a Christian restaurant owner be justified in refusing service to a man and a woman who might possibly be meeting for dinner before an extramarital tryst?   Would the Christian owner of a roadside motel do the same?  How would you check, without offending every customer you have?

As I read through one in the now nearly endless series of writings on this issue, something else struck me.  The author, a fellow pastor, was genuinely baffled as to how and why anyone would make an issue of this.

"I've never understood why separation and ostracism seem to be the posture of choice," he wrote.

In response, I found myself wondering if it might go beyond theology.  Perhaps, in some way, it is also a peculiar and unintended fruit of the "Christian business" concept.

Here, I'm not talking about folks who are businesspeople and Christians, or who view core Christian virtues--welcome for the stranger, wisdom, honesty, patience, kindness--as defining their business ethics.  To be honest, I think we could use more of that and less self-serving greed and short-term profit-maximization in the C-suites of American business.  If you're that kind of Christian businessperson, you're a blessing.

I'm referring to that peculiar trend within Christianity, in which businesses actively advertise themselves as Christian, with the intent of developing and connecting to other Christians as their primary customer base.

As a pastor, I see those directories come through, on a regular basis, filled with lists of businesses who can be "trusted."

It's an output of that strain of Christianity that views itself as fundamentally at odds with the world, and that carefully seals itself off from corrupting influence by creating a mirror-economy run by and for Christians.

AmeriChrist, Inc., I call it.

You listen to Christian music, you watch Christian film, you frequent Christian bookstores.  You find your mate on Christian dating sites, you hire Christian plumbers and electricians, you vacation at Christian resorts, and make your life about Christian everything.  It's about creating an economic circle of like-thinkers.

For those Jesus folk who want no connection to the world, that way of being can reinforce the faith.  But it also creates insularity and disconnection from the broader life of our republic.  If everything you see mirrors back yourself and your way of speaking, and you will only do business and have exchange with people who think and speak as you do, then it becomes easier and easier to rationalize actions that only make sense within your own echo-chamber.

Which is why, I think, so many of the folks behind this initiative seem genuinely confused at the uproar.  Living within their own separate economy, they have lost the capacity to connect, or to understand how they are heard.

And as someone who genuinely and deeply cares about sharing the Way of Christ, I must also ask: what impact does that insularity have on our ability to articulate the Good News to those who aren't already "in?"

Lord help us.

Arizona, Faith, and the Definition of a Person

The faith-o-sphere is all alight these days with shimmering debate and umbrage about a-soon-to-be-enacted law in the state of Arizona, one which allows individuals to refuse to perform services that violate the integrity of their faith.  It's cleared the Arizona House and Senate, and now sits with Governor Jan Brewer for signature.

This puppy will be a law, at least in that state.

Amidst all the furor, I thought to myself, gosh, perhaps it might be a good idea to actually read the bill as it stands right now.

Hard to talk about it meaningfully unless I've actually read the danged thing, now, eh?  And so I did.

You can too.  Just follow this link.

There are many things that are challenging about this law, and many reasons folks are up in arms about it.  There are legitimate concerns that it...like another law passed in Kentucky...might permit waiters to refuse to serve customers who offend their faith.

"Hi!  I'm Ida Mae!  Welcome to PQ McQuackenbushes!  Hey, wait.  Are y'all friends, or are y'all gay?  'Cause if you're friends, let me tell you about our specials.  If not, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to move to that two-top over there so that slut Jolene can be your sinner-server today."   It feels just a teensy bit too much like segregation.  Just a tich.  Just a tad.

But I have another problem with it.

My concern, as a pastor and a person of faith, goes somewhere else.  It lies with how the bill describes what it means to be a person.  Because personhood matters in America, and our rights as individuals are central to the integrity of our republic.

But a person, according to this law, is defined as follows:

41-1493.5 "Person" includes any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution or other business organization.

And there, I have beef, as should anyone who takes faith seriously.

I have written on this before, but the assumption of corporate personhood bugs the bejabbers out of me when it comes to asserting faith and religious conviction.  Because as deeply as personhood matters in our republic, it matters more to our relationship with our Maker.  An individual can have faith.  We worship, we pray, we sing.  We are, ourselves, loved and culpable and redeemable and faithful.  We stand accountable before our God.

A corporation does not have faith.  It cannot.  It is a thing.

No, scratch that.  It's less than a thing.  An object is real.  But a corporation is not real.  It is a legal construct, an illusion, a phantasm that has no reality.  It cannot feel, or weep, or laugh, or be saved.  It is not sentient, or self-aware.  It cannot be held to account.  In fact, corporate structure exists solely for the purposes of escaping accountability, a mask that hides individual liability.  It has no soul, and with no soul, can have no faith.

A corporation is no more a person than a statue of Ba'al is a god.

And yet the Arizona bill as written asks us to understand that this soulless nothing can have a belief.  It can "sincerely hold" this belief.  It can "exercise" faith.

No, it cannot.

And yes, I understand the legal conceit of corporate personhood.  I do.

But that understanding doesn't make me less bothered by it.  Because if in the defense of "religious freedom", we are watering down what it means to be both faithful and a person, we're treading in some dangerous places spiritually.

Eddie Long, Torah, and Religious Freedom

This little bit of strangeness worked its way to me yesterday, forwarded by a friend who has an eye for the absurd in the faith.   The video depicts the "coronation" of Eddie Long by New Birth Missionary Baptist church, his Atlanta-area megachurch, and honestly, it's difficult for me to watch.  It's hard to even look at it.

It's hard because Eddie Long is, well, a charlatan.  He's a strong proponent of the prosperity gospel, making him of those pastors who manage to skip over Jesus telling us about the spiritual dangers of wealth and head straight for a million-dollar-a-year compensation package, up to and including a church-funded Bentley.  He's clearly a person who has trouble reining in his appetite for acquiring things, but no trouble whatsoever in making other people think that his appetites are nothing to worry about.

It's hard because such displays of ego and the worship of a single personality are utterly antithetical to the call to be a pastor.  The pastoral call is to be the servus servorum dei, the servant of the servants of God.  If we understand the teachings of our Rabbi, Christian leaders realize that our task is the giving of ourselves and the humbling of ourselves, even to the point of cleaning the dirt off of the feet of others.  Self-promotion is not part of that.  It just ain't.

It's hard because Eddie is a serial sexual predator, whose preaching against "the gays" didn't prevent him from indulging his other appetites, which included a string of young men in the church.  Unlike a congregation where the pastor is beholden to a denomination or at least an empowered lay leadership team, New Birth exists because of Long.  He is the brand.  Faced with charges, he knew he could ride them out.  So he just stood his ground, claimed "human weakness," and paid off accusers.  This ceremony is part of his humble reclaiming of the mantle of ministry after that little mess.  

But mostly, it's hard because as a pastor with a Jewish wife and kids, it's hard to watch someone who claims to be Christian misusing and desecrating a Torah.  

As part of the ceremony of coronation, the master of ceremonies for the event brings out a Torah scroll, which he insisted had survived the Nazi depredations at Auschwitz and "Birkendahl."  After spewing some highly dubious information about the connection between Hebrew and genetic codes, the guy leading the event then led the stage hands through the process of wrapping Eddie in the scroll.  "He's covered in the word," crowed the Emcee, as the crowd shrieked with glee at the sight of their Eddie, wrapped up in a Torah like a sweaty, well-oiled burrito.

Then, of course, they slap a prayer shawl on him, lift him up on a throne and parade His Nibs around the stage.  It reminded me of a Bar Mitzvah party in hell, only without Gilbert Gottfried singing Hava Nagila.

Touching a Torah scroll, as anyone with more than twelve seconds of exposure to synagogue worship knows, is viewed by observant Jews as a serious no no.  When reading from Torah you take care not to be in contact with the text itself, out of concern for damaging it and out of respect for the holiness of the text.  When my older son was reading Torah during his mitzvah last year, he tracked his position in the Hebrew with a yad, a silver finger at the end of a short wand.  This object exists for the sole purpose of preventing contact with the text.  If it happens, it happens, but it is something you don't do intentionally.

For Long's congregation, those twelve seconds are entirely lacking, of course.  There's no exposure to anything other than the "teachings" of their Eddie.  They know what they've been taught, and what they've been taught is to give their money and their faith to Eddie.  They are oblivious to the fact that for some observant Jews, this is the equivalent of watching a Koran burning for a Muslim, the equivalent of an Army mom watching Westboro Baptist protest a soldier's funeral.

And yet, within the boundaries of our hard won religious freedom, this is their right.  

Sure, it bothers the sane and the ethical and the aware.  It's maddening.  It's tempting to want such things banned, to be able to storm in with the Homeland Theology Department's SWAT team, rescue the scroll, tase the fool, extradite him, and deposit him in a neighborhood of Haredim.  That could make for an entertaining Youtube.

But...and here I knowingly depart from Calvin...the role of the state cannot be to police belief.  The most difficult thing about freedom is our propensity to misuse it.  If we want to organize our lives around a charming, utterly self-confident idiot, we may do so.  We are free to give our worldly possessions to a manipulative egomaniacal predator if we so choose.  We are free to give our lives over to cults.  We are free to organize our lives around demonizing other faiths, or insulting and belittling and misrepresenting the beliefs of others.  

And if we weren't, then we wouldn't be free.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday

Yesterday was my first Sunday as the pastor at Poolesville Presbyterian Church, and it was a remarkably pleasant day.  Not perfect, of course, but no Sunday ever is.

But though I forgot to hike up the robe I haven't worn in years before ascending the pulpit, I managed to only stumble slightly after stepping on the hem, rather than doing the full failblog-worthy pastor-tumble into the side of the organ.    Though I mistakenly assumed there was only one tray of bread for communion at the second service, I managed not to dump the lower one all over myself, catching it at the last moment.  "This is my Body, Fumbled Unceremoniously on the Floor for Thee" is just not how that goes.  Though I forgot that eating a big slice of the lovely welcoming cake and then eating a big hunk of delicious watermelon might not be the best thing to put on a first-day-nervous stomach, I managed not to do the Linda Blair exorcist projectile vomiting thing during the scripture reading.  Which was for the best, given the target-rich environment in the cozy little sanctuary.   All in all, things worked as well as I could have hoped.  I could not have been made to feel more welcome.

And I preached on Philippians, because it was the lectionary text that seemed to best speak to a First Sunday in a pulpit.  I didn't manage to do the World Communion thing.  But though I was free to preach as I chose, I didn't participate in Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday was, in the event you hadn't heard of this effort, a movement on the part of some right-wing pastors to challenge the Internal Revenue Service restrictions on endorsing candidates from the pulpit.   According to current regulations, pastors are legally bound not to use their pulpits to actively support political candidates.  This is partially a separation of church and state thing, but mostly it has to do with the nonprofit status of churches.  As tax-exempt 501(c)3 organizations, congregations receive certain benefits...like deductability of giving, exemption from property and sales taxes, and the like.  This is as opposed to political parties, which are 527 organizations.  They are exempt from corporate taxation, but must pay property and sales tax, and you can't deduct what you give to them, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

Because churches are (c)3 and not 527 organizations, pastors are told they can't use their pulpits to advance the cause of particular political candidates.  Can we preach on issues?  Sure.  That's never, ever, ever been an issue.  Does our engagement with and proclamation of the Gospel have ramifications for our lives as citizens?  Absosmurfly.  When I preach about loving the stranger and the alien, being good stewards of creation, and being wary of the siren songs of hatred and extremism, that has direct political implications.  It just does.

But once you start using a church/nonprofit organization to actively and explicitly support a political party...what's the difference between you and that party?  Things get mighty murky, mighty quick.  Which master do you serve?

For the big-parking-lot pastors who seem to be driving this initiative, this restriction is seen as a violation of their religious freedom.  Why can't I endorse from the pulpit!?  Don't you tell me what to do!  How dare the state restrict my beliefs!  I am the master of my megachurch domain!  I rule here!

Here, though, what I can't quite grasp is why those pastors don't see the slippery slope they're sliding down.  Pastor James Garlow, one of the more vocal proponents of this movement, seems utterly incensed at what he describes as "...government intrusion in the pulpit."   So in defiance of the intrusion of government into matters of faith, standing on his religious freedom and his rights under the separation of church and state in our republic, he wants to...put...politics...into...the pulpit.

Explicitly.

Am I the only one who sees the incongruity here?  Or that in seeking "freedom," what is really being sought is the right to be loosed from the yoke of preaching and teaching the Gospel, and to dabble in the power that comes from being able to deliver voters?