What Do We Owe?

A brief rant: this has been irritating me for days so I am going to write about it. Last week I was passed by a car that had at least two bumper stickers. One had something negative about entitlements – on the driver's side so I could not read it. On the passenger side was one that said: I don't owe you cr*p!

Yes, I get the anger and the frustration. I do not agree but I get it. I do not get the absurdity of the comment.

Perhaps this person receives none of the government handouts we call tax breaks or always pays the extra amount at the gas pump he (and it was a he) that is not charged because we subsidize oil companies or will never collect social security or medicare. But … let us pretend/assume that given the age of the person he attends a church. Given the bumper stickers it is unlikely he attends a synagogue or a mosque. If he does then he “knows” or “confesses” that he owes others at least the following: love, compassion, hospitality. Those are not Christian “options.” We owe them as part of the faith. I hope, for the sake of this person's integrity, he is a thoroughgoing libertarian objectivist and also despises Christianity.

Here is a parallel critique in a kinder format. 

privilege 

The Chapel Hills Peace Pole

Chapel Hills now has a peace pole gracing the west side of our building.  Given in memory of the Rev. Harry Stroessner by his family, the pole will symbolically continue Harry’s witness for peace.  I knew Harry as a friend and colleague before he joined Chapel Hills and enjoyed his smile and passion and persistence.  Harry had a great laugh and a great way of embodying the gospel.

We will miss him.  We will remember him.

Wendell Berry asked a good question

What are people for? is the title of an essay and a book Berry published years ago.  I am posing the question as a sermon title on Sunday as part of a series using the Season of Creation lectionary

The topic for this Sunday is Humanity.  I decided to use the “excitement” engendered by the leaked video in which Governor Romney describes the 47% of the population that is unlikely to vote for him to energize and inform worship this Sunday.  I think the Governor is incorrect.  Any number of “government dependent”  folks:  retirees, disabled vets, folks on disability, etc.  may well vote for him.  Who knows?  But the Governor’s comments do invite us to practice the  “division” into camps and groups  that politicians and pundits and we preachers enjoy.   DavidBrooks, tongue in cheek I think, called it a nation of makers and moochers.

So to answer the question Wendell Berry posed we might say:  people are made to mooch.  That answer does not sound correct.  People are made to make.  Is that better?

In the materials I made available in preparation for worship this week I provided some quotations to generate thought.  There are two creation stories in Genesis and each has a different answer to the question.  Paul points toward not grasping power: power are made to empty themselves.  Jesus point to service.  Berry  himself says we are made for “good work” and then wishes to talk not just about work but the kind of work.  Annie Dillard steps a little sideways and calls us to practice looking in amazement.

Which of these readings would you affirm?  Which do you think is mistaken or inadequate?  What is wrong or lacking?  What paragraph or sentence or summary would you share as one or an answer to "What are People for?”   Post your answers.

Worship this Sunday:  Humanity      What are People For?  

Genesis 1:” ²⁷So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ²⁸God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Genesis 2:  ¹⁵The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

Philippians 2:⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, ⁷but emptied himself

Mark 10: ⁴²So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. ⁴³But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, ⁴⁴and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. ⁴⁵For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

. In "What Are People For?" Wendell Berry offers this answer: people are for good work. In the book's new essays Berry ex­pands that answer and responds to the standard political solution to unemployment: to create jobs and retrain people to work in a new economy.

What the standard political solution lacks, according to Berry, is any sense of the importance of vocation and place in its understanding of what people are for. "According to the industrial standard and point of view, persons are needed only when they perform a service valuable to an employer." This perspective ignores the fact that people might be needed for reasons other than economic ones, or that there might be a kind of work to which a person is uniquely suited, even called.

Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there

Alan

Time Heals All Wounds Maybe?

The word “all” is too much – the word all is almost always too much.  Time does heal some wounds.  Not all.  If you put a band aid on a small cut and keep it clean and dry the wound will heal in time.  Bruises and bumps and strains will heal … in time.  Let us call those outer wounds – injuries that happen to our bodies.  Some of those will heal in time. 
Drastic ones may not.  Barb’s uncle lost the tip of his fingers in the snow blower mistake they tell all of us not to make.  That injury will not heal – the fingers are gone forever.  The pain is gone, and he has adapted well.  There are also inner injuries:  abuse, neglect, death of a loved one, loss of relationship, angry words at a family gathering. 

How has it been for you with wounds and time?  Has time healed them all? Or some?  Or none?

One of the scriptures we will use on Sunday is Psalm 30: 5:  Weeping may linger for the night but joy comes in the morning.  Has that been true for you?

Post whatever thoughts you wish to share over or come at 9:45 on Sunday for coffee and conversation.

Thoughts from others:

It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.   Rose Kennedy

"There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold". -Frodo, The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkein

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

William Faulkner

Time doesn't heal, it's what you DO with the time that does.

Lorelei Shrugged

I had the opportunity to practice my grandfatherly skills during a trip to visit my granddaughter. 

 We do not share many physical resemblances but as you can see we both have the same take on the world.  I spent time with her and then returned home while Barb went down for a longer visit and I spent some time visiting our parents (3 of them) who live in a retirement home/nursing facility.  That physical and emotional location – involved with babies and the elderly on a personal basis -  leads me to my criticism of what is rapidly becoming an intellectual and political activity in these United States: appreciating the thought of Ayn Rand. 

While watching the obligatory talks from Wayne Dyer during a local PBS fundraising event I heard him say something like:  “It is important to speak on behalf of the people not in the room.”  I believe that to be correct.  I believe that to be correct and a moral duty when the others in the room are speaking of those absent in derogatory and mean spirited ways.  There are no Objectivists in the room with me – but I do not have to go far to find them.  They show up whenever I watch and listen to political commentary.

What does not show up, or to be more precise, who does not show up, in the novels of Ayn Rand are babies and old people.  In his remarkable review of Atlas Shrugged, Whittaker Chambers notes:  Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained.  Children and old people are not able to strive and succeed and dominate and fashion their own lives.  Maybe in their future and maybe in their past – but now they need assistance.  Someone has to put the welfare of those two classes of people above their own and care for them.  We call that self-sacrifice.

One of the remarkable things I have noted is how many folks who call themselves Christian espouse the philosophy of Ayn Rand at the same time.  I have not been able to discern how that works – what about the constant reference to the widows and orphans and sojourners within your gate (that would be the old, the needy young, and the immigrants) as being those who God wants us to protect.

It is true that big “gummint” may not be the way to care for them, but it seems to me that the question is not should we care for those folks, but rather how.  There is an interesting essay in one of the Christian Century blogs that invites that conversation rather than the one we are now having. 

Who is in your room, or your heart and mind, when you consider how to live your life?

What makes you shrug as if to dump things off?  What makes bend over and pick things up to help carry them?  Or is it who or whom instead of what?