The Queen came by for our weekly yesterday so we spent the day watching the inauguration. Well, okay, we spent the day together with the inauguration playing in the background, given that at 11 months and almost but not quite walking she has more important work to attend to, including the display ‘watch how fast I can make grandpa get out of the chair by grabbing this wire’ to whatever angels she still sees while watching the reaction and laughing hilariously. She took two steps yesterday, realized it, and laughed so hard she fell down. She shows her impatience with diaper-changing ineptitude of grandpa 1.2 hands by twisting and crawling, which, natch, slows the process down even more. We have fun.
 
She was kind enough to kick back in my lap with a bottle and be rocked for the inauguration itself, falling asleep during the speech, nestling into me, changing, perhaps, the way I heard the words of our new president. She is one of the ‘post racial’ generation—her father is black (African/Filipino, I think), her mother is white (German/Slovak, as reported); she’s got a slug of uncles and cousins who are Latino. Her face is the face of the two million gathered in Washington to witness that the moral arc of history does indeed bend toward justice. She’ll grow up in a society where all of this—even a black president—is just part of the natural way things are. The wars and riots and terrorism and suffering it took to win freedom for slaves and voting rights and equal opportunities for all people will for her be an irrational history: ‘Why did people treat each other like that back then?’ I’m gratified that whatever other legacy my generation leaves (or saddles) her with also includes the possibility of this moment, when the darkest hypocrisy of the American revolution—that of slavery and racial humiliation—is finally repudiated by the election of one of the despised ones. The ground has, indeed, shifted beneath us.
 
Peacefully, for today. They call it ‘the peaceful turnover of power’ and, while we’re not the only country where it happens, we’re probably the most noticeable, and we shouldn’t take it for granted anyway. It’s one of those mostly unnoted miracles of the workings of our democracy. I watched the bigwigs of both parties parade around to join in this perhaps holy moment when power is relinquished from one to another, background banners reading “Thank You Mr. President” and “Welcome Mr. President” (Americanese, I guess, for ‘the king is dead, long live the king’). I’d already spent a couple of days thinkin’ ‘Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be the secret service guys working this’ and was genuinely thankful for them; while also thankful I wasn’t one of the two million to go through those security checks—I’m not a pleasant fellow when the jackboots are rifling through my stuff, as the darling and other fellow travelers can attest. I do, nonetheless, pray for them, acknowledging the reality of human brokenness that necessitates the work.
 
Mega Man Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Mega Church and author of mega-selling books gave the mega invocation—as per usual, a sermon dressed up as prayer. I’d do the same thing, probably, but nobody asked me, which would have been wiser since the inauguration committee fired quite the little tempest in a teapot amongst the civil rights for gays et al supporters by asking him to do it, given his condemnation of homosexuality and his participation in getting the hideous Proposition 8—repealing the rights of gays—passed in California (along with the Mormons, who dumped about $20 million into the effort). The argument—not without its merits methinks—is that it’s akin to asking an avowed bible-believin’ racist to do it. I’m actually sympathetic to that; but ambivalent ’cause you gotta talk to him, you gotta include ‘them’ somehow. We need to be done with excluding those with whom we disagree. Interestingly, I read a report that the web page at Saddleback has since changed, easing its language about homosexuality. Could it be a fact that inclusion and discussion really work? In any case, the mega pastor’s mega invocation wasn’t bad, given the crowd he comes from, though I was discomfited by his tacking the name of Jesus on it (personalized as the phrase was) and then launching into the Lord’s Prayer, thinking that’s the trouble with evangelicals (and other less enlightened christians): they can’t get over their own religious exclusivity of its Jesus or hell, so end up being trapped in it. He actually said some good things, but I had to leave the room when he started in on ‘our father’ ’cause some things are just too hard to watch, the utter christian inhospitality of using the prayer in this way being one of them.
 
Far more enticing to my ear was the mega benediction prayed by the 89-year-old Reverend Joseph Lowery, an ancient civil-rights leader who worked and suffered with Martin Luther King to end segregation in the south. I’m seeing a wobbly old black man stooped a little by the years and the battles standing in front of two million people and the whole world and prayin’ through the scars of his own suffering:
 
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.
 
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
 
For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
 
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
 
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
 
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.
 
We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.
Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
 
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) — when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white will embrace what is right.
 
Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.
 
And the crowds roared ‘Amen!’ ‘Let it be so!’
 
As do I.

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes.” (Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis”)

So Junior’s taking to television tonight in his final (I hope) address to the nation as president. I never thought the day would come; quite literally: I fully anticipated a military coup in the name of national security from these guys, and in fact won’t feel we’re out of those woods until after the inauguration itself, though they’ve not left much worth running a coup for. It’s been a long and brutal eight years, but come Wednesday I’ll be able to brag ‘I survived the worst governing administration in American history’ and still be speaking generously about them. It’s been amazing to behold. They’ve turned everything they’ve touched into shit. Their way has been the violence and destruction of ignorant 12-year-old bullies. They have made a mockery of our deepest values, from the unprovoked invasion of another country to the legitimization of kidnapping and torture (‘disappearing’ people like some banana republic) to their indifference toward returning wounded veterans; well, their indifference towards suffering in general. They have publicly humiliated and persecuted decent and honorable people from among them who wanted to serve the country but dared to disagree, to speak the truth, to abide by the law. They took Jesus, dressed him in a flag like the Roman soldiers did, and then crucified him with war. They who came so proudly marching in have disgraced themselves. And moreover, they have disgraced me and my country.

O, how much do I despise thee? Let me count the ways. . . . I hope they spend the rest of their days in court, defending themselves from their criminal behavior.

The darling and I will undoubtedly watch this historic event if for no other reason than to get our final boos and hisses in; though I want to be absolutely sure he in fact says he’s going (an old hated foe shows up at his enemy’s church funeral and when asked why, ”cause I wanna make sure that bastard’s really dead’). It ought to be interesting. The newsies have been reporting about the latest scramble to ‘remake’ Junior’s legacy—’we did some good things, y’know, and the rest wasn’t our fault’. I wonder how he will live with what he has done, with who he has become? though I don’t expect much from him—Bubble Boy’s not been famous for an over-abundance of self-awareness. Could he wake up one day and like Gregor Samsa discover the cockroach he is (his inner cockroach, eh)? I ain’t bettin’ what little’s left of the farm on it.

But that we’d have to endure this little nothing of a man also says something about us. That’s the trouble with living in a democracy—you gotta take some responsibility for the leaders you get. They were elected on their appeal to the baser human instincts, the dark passions of intolerance and hatred coached forth in the politics of resentment, the pride of ignorance, and the strategy of division. That one’s on we the people. We fell prey to their fear-mongering; we justified greed as a virtue; killing as a way of peace, unilateral arrogance as appropriate neighborly behavior; we let thugs take over civil discourse, cared only that we could get all that we wanted right now without regard for others in the world around us or the generations to come after us. These guys were elected because they appealed to something dark and primitive, indeed, even reptilian in the mind of we the people.

Though I sometimes wonder if it is not the existential fruit of the process of redefinition I’ve noticed over the decades, from us as a nation of citizens to us as a nation of consumers. Presidents, especially, have dropped language about American citizens to American consumers, resulting in an expectation not of the responsibilities of citizenship and an awareness of the national community but the ego gratification of being pandered to. In any event, we are living in the judgment on what we’ve done, and it ain’t pretty.

As a nation history has jerked us toward repentance, perhaps, demanding that we live in a fundamentally different way. The facts are pretty much there, staring us right in the face: you have turned it into rubble.

But it is out of rubble that a new creation is born. I pray that our next president will be given the wisdom, compassion, and nobility so tragically lacking in those who have brought the whole thing down.

Goodbye, Junior. Good riddance.

New (though quickly aging) Bishop Mike and I hooked up for lunch about a week and a half ago to hand off the prayer kneeler I’d been carrying around in the back of the pickup for three weeks after fetching it from Bethlehem in B’mont ’cause he saw it there and wanted to borrow it and to have lunch together. Yep, he was gonna put the kneeler in his office for private devotions, and I had visions of Thomas Becket and Martin Luther mea culpating it to medieval torch light—not bad company if you’re into kneeling for private prayer; you’ll know they are holy by the calluses on their knees.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that: we each adopt the prayer posture that works for us. When we packed up New Testament Ray’s Audi for Chicago we just had to jam his 3-foot square meditation pillow in last of all, huffing and grunting and smashing the bag of chips I’d bought. My own best prayer posture is sitting on the deck in tee shirt and shorts with with my legs propped up, a glass of tea and a cigar. Chuffin’ with Jesus; thankin’ God. (Though not so much in the winter, leaving my spirit as well as my body pale and torpid. I suppose if I were a real prayer warrior I’d sit out there regardless of the weather. On the other hand, when God wants me to pray she’ll make it sunny and warm.)

In any event, I’m glad that the bishop prays on his knees, and hope he doesn’t let this sincere piety go to his head. (Bush, too, is sincerely pious.)

N B Mike mentioned his upcoming trip to Israel with about 40 other ELCA-type bishops (US and Canada) for the annual ‘bishops’ academy’ or whatever it’s called that had been scheduled before Israel started bombing Gaza just after Christmas, in some grotesque incarnation of Herod slaughtering the children in Matthew: of the 900 Palestinians killed so far, one third of them have been children; of the 10 (ten) Israelis killed, none were adults, and 3 were killed by friendly fire. I haven’t been inclined to give to the Israeli Defense Fund appeal showing up on tv. The Gaza strip is a narrow piece of land 25 miles long and seven miles deep on the Mediterranean coast between Israel and Egypt where 1.5 million Palestinians live, the most densely populated area in the world; about 500,00 live in refugee camps and many of the rest live in poverty and squalor. Even in my historical ignorance about that conflict it strikes me as responding to rock-throwers with a holocaust; or, you insulted me so I’ll take out your family.

I told Mike good luck and mentioned that I’ve never been particularly drawn to visit the place, its status as ‘the holy land’ notwithstanding, ‘Come, see the place where Jesus prayed and buy a postcard’ like kneeling not being my particular cup of tea. Though some years back I started working with a charter company in Turkey to put together a two-week sail across the Med to Israel; but then Beavis and Butthead invaded Iraq, and I knew that idea was kaput. But I was interested in visiting Israel if I could sail there.

Thus it was that the bishop hoofed it off to Israel, and a few days back sent out this post:

First I want to assure you that we are in no danger. Security is high, but we walk the streets freely as one would any international city. The Palestinians are extremely gracious.

We have been listening carefully to both Israelis and Palestinians. Both seem desperate to make their case. The cycle of violence seems unending. The Israeli blockade of Gaza has caused unprecedented suffering. Hamas rockets terrorize Israelis. The current operations seems to only stir more hatred, and provide more excuses to justify violence.

Yesterday we met with the Chief Rabbis (Keene: they still have those?), then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Today we are at Augusta Victoria Lutheran Hospital on the Mount of Olives. I am impressed at the Lutheran presence here. We have the only Protestant Church in the Old City and the only cancer center in East Jerusalem, thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm. A housing project and sports center are in the works.

LWF and the UN are presenting programs to help us fully understand the situation here. Bishop Younan, himself a refugee, is a incredible person, maintaining good relationships, yet speaking boldly against oppression.

The Reverend Munib A. Younan is the bishop of The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Palestine and the Holy Land. There’s a fun job. LWF is the Lutheran World Federation.

While actually preparing my own sermon on Saturday (for which the crowd expressed it’s deep approval on Sunday) I checked the story of the bishops’ visit on the ELCA website. It sounds like things got interesting (ELCIC = Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada):

The Lutheran bishops met with the two chief rabbis of Israel, Rabbi Yona Metzger and Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who spoke about the current fighting in Gaza.
For nearly eight years Israelis living near Gaza have been subject to periodic rocket attacks on their homes, launched by Hamas from Gaza, Metzger said. Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, but it has the right to self-defense if Israeli lives are threatened, he said.
“When you return to your countries, please be ambassadors to our feelings,” Metzger said to the Lutheran bishops. “We don’t want war. We don’t want to kill innocent people. We want only to defend ourselves.”
The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop, told the rabbis that the bishops opposed the escalating violence. “I hope you hear — it didn’t sound like you have — our rejection of any violence perpetrated upon the people of Israel — the violence of suicide bombers, Hamas rockets, or rockets from the north today,” Hanson said.
The rabbis feel “deep distress” for the loss of innocent lives in the Gaza conflict, Amar said. To help explain the large number of civilian casualties, the rabbis said authorities showed them maps and photos of where they believe rockets have been fired from Gaza. Earlier in the day, a rocket launched from Lebanon into Israel was determined to be an isolated incident. . . .
Hanson said Lutherans and Jews have strengthened the foundation given to them from shared spiritual history and sacred texts during the past 25 years. He referred to the actions of the ELCA and ELCIC in the 1990s repudiating Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings. Lutherans and Jews are [at] work together in the Middle East in the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, he said. In the United States they join together in the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative.
He told the rabbis that “as a Christian leader, on the basis of the Christian tradition of just war-unjust war principles, it is impossible for me to see that the response of Israel to the Hamas rockets meets the ethical test of proportionality or concern for noncombatants.”
Hanson said it was his prayer that Lutherans and Jews could have honest conversations. “If we can’t have honest conversations, who is going to win this encounter with religious extremists and fanatics who thrive on violence begetting violence?” Hanson asked the rabbis.

It seems at first politically ironic if not actually hypocritical that this white Christian bishop from a country that outright rejected just-war principles as anachronistic when it came to Iraq would now be applying it as an ethical norm for somebody else. Yet, Hanson does not speak so much as an American as he does a Christian leader; a religious leader. At the time of Iraq the Bushies would not speak to any religious leaders who did not share their view, blowing off, for example, the grand poobah of Bush’s own denomination, the Methodists, not to mention our guy. But even beyond that, these are, as it were, religious guys speaking religious language, and I admire the way my poobah talks-’dude, we think you’re going way overboard here’. Y’know? Sometimes even with friends you gotta say ‘man, this just ain’t right.’

In the name of our mutual God.

Well, I’ve been putting off writing this for fear of pissing off my less enlightened brothers and sisters yet once again (you know who you are), but the postponement has made it impossible to write anything else, so there you go: I gotta do it. Besides, how do you know you’re alive if you haven’t stirred anybody up? Cemeteries are pleasant and peaceful, but they’re still cemeteries.

The darling and I have been paying rapt attention to the presidential primaries, eagerly looking forward to that day come next January when we can sing with Gerald Ford, “At last our long national nightmare is over.” We’ve even been helping to bring Camelot about by sending some shekels off to our hero, Sir Obama. This, of course, after attending to the debates. Well, okay; mostly the Democratic ones. I’ve tried to sit through the Republican debates, but they talk about a world I don’t inhabit. I caught an interview where the candidates were asked what one book (besides the Bible, thank God) they would take with them into the White House. John McCain (who is the least terrifying of those guys to me): The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. Barack Obama: A Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. That about sums up the differences, eh? And, oh yeah, there’s that war thing, too.

Admittedly, I’ve not read Adam Smith’s 18th century treatise on economics, published in 1776, to which I guess the discovery of the magic hand (hidden hand?—BombMaker Fred knows the right phrase) of the free market is accounted. But it seems to me that the unbridled free market let loose by Reagan has found its perverted extreme in the last decade and is now being revealed for the idolatry it is (idols, of course, always prove their destructiveness, that’s what’s meant when the Bible talks about the living God being a jealous one, methinks): human life has been diminished by our worship of profit. The rich hog the trough and more and more the little ones are pushed out to scratch in the dirt, and laws are passed to continue it. Hence a quote I shared at the preachers’ study this morning from t.s. eliot, “Choruses from The Rock”:

When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

See? I’m thinking McCain’s got something backward there. On the other hand, I did read Obama’s selection, A Team of Rivals. I read it last year, in desperate need of some light in my patriotic darkness. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, all of whom had been his political rivals for the presidency, and each of whom had his own political agenda, often at odds with Lincoln’s, sometimes even working behind his back to defeat him. The thing about Lincoln was he always respected these guys as seeking the best thing for the country even in their disagreements (and “disagreeable” behavior), and equally always spoke graciously of them, even when exposing their buffoonery. He had a way of pointing people beyond themselves toward a greater human community. Obama’s style and comments bring to mind what I’ve read of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. He calls us to live more nobly as individuals and as a nation.’Course, some may take a different position. After all, there’s Hillary, as well.

So we have a black guy and a white woman, and one of them is going to be the party’s nomination for president and get my vote. But I’m thinking of the history of my life, remembering the civil rights’ struggles of the 60’s—the televised scenes of burning cities and brutal police with billy clubs and German shepherds and fire hoses and the terrorism of the klan against a people seeking hope on the nightly news when I was a teen, and how my dad and I debated the “negro issue” and we discussed it with our pastors at Luther League gatherings and talked about it with folks at church. And later, at an age when I could most fully appreciate it in all of its dimensions came women burning bras (yeah buddy!) and working for their own full human dignity and freedom. We had to learn how to live with women clergy (yeow!) as full equals, who, by the way, still come up against that—what? skirted ceiling? glass pulpit?—in which churches shut them out of the more, say, prominent positions (e.g., senior pastor and such). (An interesting aside: women were not given the vote until about 40 years after the—obviously male—slaves were given it, at least constitutionally.) And this year I’m going to vote for either a black guy or a woman.

Ain’t history grand? Surely, along with justice and healing, the universe bends in the direction of irony.

In honor of it all, and because my pal Kerry (not to be confused with my sister of the same name, whom I love) spent a week of his daily devotions on Martin Luther King, Jr and tweaked me into a run to ye olde bookstore where I picked up A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington and weighing, oh, ten pounds. Here’s a story: I bought a record (vinyl) of MLK speeches and sermons a couple of years after leaving seminary, to study for my own preaching. It’s still around somewhere, I think. Beautiful stuff, though not a style one could reproduce in, say, a white rural Lutheran church (even if one had the linguistic rhythm of Black American Christianity). And now I’m finally getting around to reading his words themselves, savoring a writing or a speech a day, like a meditational reading (lectio almostdivina). Check it out, from 1960:

Whatever the cause, God has been profoundly real to me in recent months. In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm and known resources of strength that only God could give. In many instances I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has a cosmic companion. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.

And another dandy from 1958:

Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the first mile, but it goes the second mile to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community. The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go to restore broken community. The resurrection is God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.

Think about that, m’boy, and then:

Therefore, if I respond to hate with reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in community by meeting hate with love. If I meet hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community. Booker T. Washington was right: “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” When he pulls you that low he brings you to the point of defying creation, and thereby becoming depersonalized.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday; an opportunity to turn once again toward the direction of creation.