Tag violence

The Joy of Reconnecting

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 15:1-10

We have seen an alarming increase in violence in our country this year, especially in the last few months.  As of this week there have been 47 school shootings in the U. S.[1]  On top of that the strained remainder of our national equilibrium has been rocked by two political assassinations. 

I really don’t want to dwell on this situation.  I doubt if I could tell you anything you don’t already know.  I don’t have any words that could shed new light on our violence problem and I am all too aware that even when our words are written or spoken with the best intentions they can generate a lot of heat that enflames without bringing any light of healing.  I will say this, though.  I think part of the problem is that we, as a people, have been losing our joy.  And we’ve been losing our joy because we’ve been losing our overall sense of connection with each other.  

We sequester ourselves into like-minded cloisters, sifting ourselves into righteous versus unrighteous, clean versus unclean, and then we snipe at each other from our guarded hilltops, each group using its own specialized vocabulary to describe the wrongness of the others who are not us.  There’s nothing new about this.  It’s a dynamic as old as humanity itself.  

So how do we recapture our joy?  How do we reconnect when the connection has been broken?

Well, if we’re following the example of Jesus, we tell a story.

So this one time, some Pharisees and religion teachers were getting all cranky because Jesus was having way too much fun with the wrong crowd.  Tax collectors and known sinners—you know, those people who color outside the lines where the religious boundaries are concerned—these kinds of people kept coming to listen to him and he didn’t shoo them away or disrespect them or anything.  On the contrary, he would welcome them and invite them to join the discussion!  Sometimes he would even break bread with them.  Basically, he treated them like they were all old friends at a reunion.

This didn’t sit well with the holier-than-thou guardians of propriety.  They didn’t think associating with “those people” was appropriate for a well-known rabbi, especially one with such a growing following.  They thought he should be setting an example for the rabble.  Well, he actually was setting an example, it just wasn’t the one they wanted him to set.   So they were grumbling about him.

Jesus overheard all their crabby comments, of course.  He thought about calling them out on their snooty attitude, but what good would that do?  It would just make them defensive and even more stand-offish when what he really wanted was for them to loosen up and join the party.  So he tried to reframe their thinking with a couple of hypothetical scenarios.  Parables.  He told them some parables.

“Suppose a guy has a hundred sheep,” he said, “and one of them wanders off and gets lost.  “Won’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the wilderness to go search for the one that is lost until he finds it?  And when he finds it, he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders.  And when he gets home, he will call all his friends and neighbors and say, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep!’  It’s like that.  There is more joy in heaven over one lost soul’s rescued life than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need rescuing.

“Or how about this—suppose a woman has ten silver coins on her necklace and she loses one.  Won’t she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and get down on her hands and knees to sweep under furniture and look in every nook and cranny until she finds it?  And when she does find it, she’ll call all her neighbors and friends and say, ‘Rejoice with me!  I’ve found my lost drachma!  It’s just like that!” said Jesus.  “There is joy and celebration among God’s angels when even one lost soul returns to God!”     

Now I am absolutely sure that some of the people listening to Jesus spin these hypotheticals were chuckling, and I am just as sure that some of them were scratching their heads because there is some obvious craziness in these little stories.  Leave ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness while you go off searching for one?  Who would do that?  And sheep don’t repent.  Coins don’t repent.  And is it really repentance?  The sheep didn’t do anything to help himself be found—he didn’t wander home all sheepish about being lost.  The silver coin didn’t roll itself across the floor to rejoin the other nine coins on the necklace. 

Or are these stories allegories maybe?  Is the shepherd God?  But does God leave ninety-nine obedient sheep at risk in the wilderness to go find the one that wandered off?  Maybe. But that does raise questions, especially if you’re one of the ninety-nine.  

So maybe God is like the reckless shepherd who puts everything at risk to find the one lost sheep.  Maybe God is like the woman who drops everything and lights a lamp and cleans house until she finds that one lost silver drachma.  Maybe.

Or maybe something else is going on here.  Sheep and coins don’t repent—at least not the way we usually understand repentance.  They don’t apologize.  They don’t have a change of mind or a change of heart.   

But what if Jesus is giving us a new definition of repentance?  What if repentance is not about clearing some kind of moral bar?  What if it’s not about moral rectitude or moral correction?  What if repentance is about being brought back to where you fit in God’s grand design, being brought back into the community and communion?  What if repentance is about crossing all those artificial barriers we put up between each other, those barriers that divide us into opposing camps?

Maybe repentance is about being brought back together.  Maybe it’s about reconnecting.[2]

That would explain this other thing.  Did you notice how many times Jesus mentions joy in these two little stories?  Five times!  The shepherd carries the sheep joyfully!  He calls out to his neighbors to rejoice with me!  Jesus says there is joy in heaven when a lost soul is reconnected with the community.  The woman who finds her lost coin calls out to her neighbors rejoice with me!  And once again, Jesus says there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one lost soul is reunited with companions.  It’s all about the joy!

Jesus wanted the Pharisees to understand that they were missing out on the joy!  He wanted them to understand that there is joy in making connections with people you might ordinarily be reluctant to associate with.  There is joy when we step out of our clique or private club of like-minded associates to go out and meet the wider world.  

Matt Harding is a guys who knows all about that joy.  

Matt was living the dream.  He was working as a Video Game Developer, creating new games for Activision, one of the biggest companies in the business.  He was kicking around ideas for a new game with his team one day, when somebody suggested, “Let’s do a ‘shoot-em-up’ game.  Those are very popular.”  Matt said sarcastically, “Sure.  How about Destroy all Humans?”[3]  Matt was being facetious, but the boss liked the idea and gave the game a green light. And that’s when Matt quit.  “I didn’t want to spend two years of my life writing a game about killing everyone,” he said.  

Now Matt had time on his hands, and a fair bit of savings, so he decided to see the world. One day in Saigon, Matt was in kind of a goofy mood so he did this funny little dance in front of a restaurant, which his travel buddy caught on video.  It gave them a good laugh, so they decided that they would do this everywhere they were going on their trip around the world. 

When they got home, they cut together all these fun little clips to create a three minute video of Matt dancing in all kinds of interesting places all over the world.  And that would have been the end of it, except that Matt’s sister uploaded the video to this new thing on the internet called YouTube™.     

Dancing Matt became an internet phenomenon almost overnight.  So Matt decided to go out into the world and do it again, only this time he would invite people to dance with him.  And dance they did.  Over a period of about 15 years he recorded and posted six Dancing Matt videos which have brought joy to people all over the world.  You can find all of them at www.wheretheheckismatt.com. 

When NPR asked Matt what he had learned as he danced through the world, he said, “Here’s what I can report back: People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they’re curious to hear and see others from places far away.  

I share that impulse. It’s part of what drives me to travel.”

In her TED talk about Vulnerability, Brené Brown said, “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people.  We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong.  When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to.  We break.  We fall apart.  We numb.  We ache.  We hurt others.  We get sick.”

Right now our country is in a grumbling mood…and so is much of the rest of the world. We are not functioning as we were meant to.  We have found too many ways to separate ourselves from each other.  We have turned too many people into “those people,” the ones we don’t want to be seen with.  As a result, we’re missing the joy.  We’re missing the celebration.

We need to repent, not with apologies or penance, but by reconnecting.  We need to find our way back into where we fit with each other in God’s grand design.  We need to find our way back into community and communion.  We need to bring ourselves back together.  And maybe even dance with strangers.  Because that’s where the joy is.

[1] CNN

[2] Special Thanks to Prof. Matt Skinner and Sermon Brainwave for this perspective.

[3] Destroy All Humans is in its 7th version and is available on multiple platforms.  Clearly there’s money in nihilism.

Sacrificing Our Children for the Sin of Our Souls

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

“With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? …Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” – Micah 6:6-7

Two weeks ago in our Gospel reading from John we heard John the Baptist calling Jesus, “The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  I pointed out that sin, in this passage, was singular.  Not sins, plural, but sin, singular.  I acknowledged that it might, indeed, be a collective singular—a singular noun that functions as a plural, but then I asked, “If the world has one central singular sin, what would that be?”

In his book Engaging God’s World, Cornelius Plantinga Jr. defines sin as a culpable disturbance of shalom.  Shalom is the peace of God, the natural order of balance and harmony in creation and in society.  Rob Bell wrote, “Shalom is how God wants things to be.  Shalom is peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with the earth and with God.”  

As I write this on the 26th day of this new year, God’s shalom is not merely disturbed, it is shattered.  There have already been 40 mass shootings in our country, three of them here in California.  We are the only country in the world where firearms are the leading cause of death for children.  As of 2018 there were more than 393 million firearms in private hands in the US—120.5 guns for every 100 people.  The next highest rate of gun ownership among developed nations is Canada at 34 per 100 people.

Statistics compiled by the American Journal of Medicine are disturbing, to say the least: “US homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the gun homicide rate in the United States was 49.0 times higher. Firearm-related suicide rates were 8.0 times higher in the United States, but the overall suicide rates were average. Unintentional firearm deaths were 6.2 times higher in the United States. The overall firearm death rate in the United States from all causes was 10.0 times higher. Ninety percent of women, 91% of children aged 0 to 14 years, 92% of youth aged 15 to 24 years, and 82% of all people killed by firearms were from the United States.”

Clearly we need to do more to regulate gun ownership and reduce the number of firearms in this country.  The horrendous statistics about gun violence correlate directly to the horrifying statistics about gun ownership.  The guns are absolutely a problem, but they are also the deadly expression of a deeper problem.

Let’s go back to that question: “If the world has one central singular sin, what would that be?”  It’s tempting to say that the central singular sin is violence.  Violence is addictive, and we seem to be hooked on it in this country and throughout the world.  It’s altering our neurochemistry and our neurological pathways.  But violence is a symptom of something deeper.

We live in a culture where media, politics and economics seem to almost conspire to pit us against each other.  We are constantly pressured to segregate ourselves into neo-tribal groupings: right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal, rich vs. poor, my race vs. other races, my religion vs. other religions.  There is money, power and influence to be had in manipulating this tribalism, and when the manipulation is allowed to go unchecked it ends up force feeding us a toxic cultural soup of fear, anger and mistrust which poisons our vision until we begin to see others as something less than fully human.  And that leads inevitably to violence.

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’  But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the Gehenna of fire.” – Matthew 5:21-22

God has told us what is good, said the prophet Micah, and what does the Lord require of us—what does God’s shalom require of us but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with God—and with each other?   Love your neighbor as yourself, said Jesus, quoting Leviticus.    

If we want to stop sacrificing our children on the altar of violence, if we want to stop sacrificing the fruit of our collective body for the sin of our collective soul, we need to find better ways to show the world what kindness and love look like.  We need to find ways to make “love your neighbor as yourself” at least as attractive and addictive as violence.  We need to lift up the vision of God’s shalom, the peaceable kingdom, as a way or restoring balance and harmony among diverse and divergent peoples.  And maybe we could start by doing something about the guns.

Context

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Note: This is a transcript of an extemporaneous sermon

Jeremiah 23:23-29; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

I confess I hardly know where to begin today.  The three readings that we have this morning are the kind of texts that are very easy to take out of context and twist them to whatever end someone wants.

In the first reading, Jeremiah is calling out the false prophets.  He was speaking at a time when the false prophets were telling the people of Israel and the political powers that be that they didn’t have anything to worry about from the approaching Babylonians because God was going to save them.  And Jeremiah was saying, No, that’s not how it’s going to happen.  You haven’t listened to God’s warnings, you’re completely unprepared, and that’s just not how it’s going to happen.  He reminds them that the Word of God is like a fire or a hammer that can smash through the rock of our denial.

And then we come to the lesson from the letter to the Hebrews.  It starts off with this wonderful remembrance of all these heroes of faith, people who stayed faithful.  The passage starts off talking about how they were rewarded for their faith.  Some of them were given kingdoms. Some of them made great accomplishments.  But then it quickly turns and talks about martyrdom.  

It’s so easy, sometimes, to think of ourselves as martyrs when things are not going our way.  Or when we find ourselves facing forces or circumstances in the culture or in life that put undue pressure on us, especially if it happens because of our faith.  We forget that that letter was written at a time when people really were being tortured for their faith.  Hebrews was written probably around 63 or 64 CE, when Nero was the emperor—Nero, who would light his garden parties by putting the bodies of Christians on poles and lighting them on fire as human torches—Nero, who executed Paul by beheading and Peter by crucifying him upside down—Nero, who sent Christians to the arena to fight wild animals without any weapons.

And then come the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel:  “You think I came to bring peace?  No, I came to set the world on fire and I wish it was already kindled. I have a baptism to be baptized with and I am under such anxiety until it is complete.”  He was on his way to the cross.

At the beginning of that chapter, chapter 12, Luke tells us that thousands of people were now following him.  Thousands.  And you know Jesus walked among that crowd and listened to every single way that people were misunderstanding him.  And every single misplaced expectation.  So he talks about division.  And I don’t think he’s saying this with any kind of forcefulness or bravado.  I think he is lamenting.  I think he understands that the world is going to be pretty hostile to those who truly follow what he’s been saying about proclaiming the reign of God and working to see it established nonviolently.  

And I think it breaks his heart to say those words.  Father will be pitted against son and son against father.  I remember the first time I talked to my dad about going to seminary when I was about 15 years old.  I remember he said, “It’s a good thing to have religion, but don’t go overboard with it.”  

These texts that we have this morning, as I said, can so easily be pulled out of context and used the wrong way.  When I first read these texts this week, I couldn’t help but think about how a White Christian Nationalist preacher might use these texts.  

You could use this text where Jesus talks about division, for instance, to make it sound like he’s endorsing that, like we’re supposed to be splitting ourselves apart from each other.  You could use what Jeremiah is saying about the false prophets because it’s oh so easy to think that the people who are saying what we don’t like are the false prophets, instead of the ones who are speaking the Word of God.  And as I said, with martyrdom, it’s so easy to think of yourself as the martyr. We have romanticized martyrdom in our world today.  This is why terrorist groups talk about martyrdom and the possibility of martyrdom when they’re recruiting.  It just sounds so glorious. 

On Wednesday, Diana Butler Bass published a piece in her online group called The Cottage, where she shared that she’s extremely worried because there’s been an increasing amount of rhetoric from a certain quarter of our society about civil war, especially after Mar a Lago was searched by the FBI early this week.  There were thousands of posts saying it’s time for civil war, thousands of posts with a headline that said lock and load.  And the scary thing is that the people who are saying this don’t stop to think about what that really means.

It means violence.  And bloodshed.  It means misery and suffering.  It means crashed economies.  It means poverty and hunger.  It means destruction.  It’s not going to be like the last time.  There won’t be some dividing line between North and South.  No, it will be between you and your next door neighbor.  It’ll be right outside your door…or maybe inside your house…if it’s a thing we allow to happen.

One of the things that we are called to as faithful people is to be faithful to Jesus and to be faithful to what the scriptures are actually saying, to keep them in context and use them in context.  But also to speak to a society that is taking them out of context, to remind them of what they’re really saying when they say things like, “It’s time for a civil war.”  To remind them that what they’re saying is that it’s time for bloodshed…and destruction and violence and pain and suffering beyond their imagination.  If they talk about the words of Jesus saying, “But look, he’s calling for this division!” it’s our job to say, “No, he’s lamenting the ways we divide ourselves from each other because of the way we interpret our faith.”  

Jesus was just so prescient when he talked about our division.  So prophetic.  There are 40 church bodies in North America, in the US and Canada that call themselves Lutheran.  There are 45,000 church bodies in the world that call themselves Christian.  And all of them have separated themselves from some other church body at some point in history.  

The message of Jesus is that we are supposed to build bigger tables, not higher walls.  We’re supposed to open our doors wider, not close them against people who disagree with us on minor things.   The message of Jesus is that we’re supposed to embrace each other with love, not take adamantine stands against each other because of the way interpret a few words here and there.

As I said, I don’t know where to begin this morning, because if these three scriptures that we have this morning tell us anything, they tell us that we have enormous work ahead of us in a dangerous time.  They tell us that this is a time to really and truly be faithful to the gospel of love, to the gospel of Jesus Christ that embraces everyone.  They tell us that this is a time to speak truth for the sake of the reign of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen       

Another Sacrifice to the Shadow god

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

So. Another mass shooting. This time at a community college in Oregon. Last time it was at a church in Charleston. The time before that… well, I’m losing track.

I sit here confused. Not stunned anymore–it’s happened too often now. Not brokenhearted. I think I wept enough over Charleston that my well of anguish has run dry and I confess that the part of me that checks my own spiritual, psychological and moral pulse is more than a little worried about that. Not outraged. My outrage, too, is spent.

I sit here confused. And sad. And more than a little worried for the world my grandsons are growing up in. And more than a little fearful for the schools where my wife, my son-in-law and so many other persons I love so dearly are dedicating their lives to guide others down the transforming path of education. I sit here sad, worried, and fearful. But mostly confused.

I’m not confused about what will happen next. That’s all too boringly predictable. What will happen now in this great mediasphere in which we all spend too much of our time and energy is this. We will have a new cycle of anti-gun vs. pro-gun arguments. A few Facebook friendships will be terminated. But this cycle will be shorter than the last one because each one gets shorter as we become more accustomed to, less surprised by these random acts of violence. Blended into that small tornado will be a lot of talk about how we need to do more to care for the mentally ill, but the focus will be more about how we might be able to spot the dangerous psychopaths than how we might actually care for this unfortunate contingent of our population.

I’m not confused about how we came to be in this bizarrely immobilized nexus of violence. I study history. I doesn’t take a genius to graph the rise in gun possession and the radical neo-con reinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment against the defunding of mental health care. On a more esoteric level, it would probably be useful, too, to include some pages on the deconstruction of America’s common mythos of mutuality and how in its place we’ve been sold a mythos of individualism mixed with a simultaneous real-life devaluing of the actual individual in any kind of meaningful context of community. I would need to include the decline of the Church and religion in general in all that. No, I’m not confused about how we got here. The story is a bit complex, but not really all that long because it wasn’t all that long ago that it simply wasn’t like this. I know. I’ve lived through the changes.

It wasn’t always like this.

Some history. And a warning before you read any further: in what follows, it is not my intent to trash Ronald Reagan, although I confess that as one who lived through his era and has looked at his record in some detail I really don’t see any validity in lionizing him the way some do. Nevertheless, what follows is probably going to read as though I’m targeting him and blaming him for our current state of affairs. If it seems that way, it’s because, while history is complex and even starting points have roots somewhere, the fact is that everything does have a starting point and more than a little of the difficulty we face now began on his watch. I really don’t mean to malign Mr. Reagan. But history is history.

As both Governor of California and later as President Ronald Reagan let bottom-line accounting overrule both compassion and common sense. The irony here is that this kind of accounting, which is so necessary in a household, is disastrously short-sighted and crippling when applied on the macro-economic scale required by a national economy. I could write a good deal more about the fallacies and short-sightedness of Reaganomics, but I’ll save that for another time.

When Mr. Reagan was Governor of California in the late 1960s and early ‘70s it seemed to him like a good cost-cutting idea to close down all the state mental hospitals. It looked good on the bottom line and helped to “balance” the budget— to match income to outflow on an annual basis as he moved to give new tax cuts to corporations.

In 1980 when he was elected President, one of his first acts was to discard the Mental Health Systems Act which President Carter had signed only a month before. Again, it seemed like an easy way to cut a huge chunk of change out of the budget which would enable him to cut corporate taxes. So for one year-end report and a corporate tax cut, you get a better looking bottom line. But what happens next?

Here’s what’s happened. According to USA Today (2014) it now costs us, nationally, about $444billion a year to care for the mentally ill in our current non-system system. Most of that is toted up in ancillary costs that have to be paid for through interesting tricks in accounting since the category itself is largely defunded. It’s paid mostly by counties and communities, very few of whom have personnel, funds or facilities specifically designated for or prepared for dealing with mental illness.

Today in California there are 124,000 homeless people. 40,000 (1/3) of them are on the streets because they are mentally ill and simply incapable of managing themselves into a residence (2013 Sacramento Housing and Regulations stats). According to HUD figures, the cost to the state is $40,000 per year per homeless person, most of it in police, community services, shelters, and temporary series-hospitalizations, which means a total cost of $1.6billion per year to take care of mentally ill homeless persons living on the streets of California. Another 30,000 mentally ill in California are housed as inmates in our prisons at a cost $50K per annum each. That’s $1.5 Billion (Dept. of Corrections), for a grand total of $3.1billion per year. But according to the state’s Medi-Cal estimates, it would only cost about $900million to provide the necessary psychiatric care in home-based or institution-based residential systems like we had before Reaganomics. That would be a savings of $600million per year.

Aside from the cost in dollars there have also been staggering social costs as the homeless mentally ill become a ubiquitous feature of our urban and suburban landscapes. When I was a kid, my buddies and I took off in the morning and came back home when the street lights came on. We rode our bikes for miles and hung out in the city parks unsupervised by parents. I can’t imagine my grandsons doing that now, and for every blog I’ve seen on free-range parenting, I’ve seen an equal number of responses from people who think the idea borders on neglect because the world now is just too dangerous for that.

So when all is said and done, the free-range mentally ill are actually costing us considerably more than can be measured in mere dollars and cents. In light of all this, it seems grossly illogical to complain about or be perplexed by mass shootings by mentally ill people when we are failing to provide any treatment whatsoever for 40% of severely schizophrenic and bi-polar persons in our midst. Historically speaking, our budgetary priorities created the problem. Historically speaking, our refusal to properly regulate guns because we refuse to balance individual freedoms with collective responsibilities weaponized the problem.

So where does that leave us? We’re not willing to more strictly regulate firearms, to insist that they only be available to well-vetted, well-trained persons for use in a specific context, even though the 2nd Amendment begins with the words “A well-regulated militia.” And we’re not willing to pay for the necessary care and therapy for those poor souls whose mental illness makes it impossible for them to find a place where they fit in the world, which pretty much guarantees that from time to time the more violent among them will find access to some of the more than 300 million firearms abroad in this country and use them to act out their own pathologies and short-term mythologies in ways that are dangerous, tragic and horrifying for the rest of us.

And here’s the part where I’m confused. Apparently we’re okay with that. Apparently we’re okay with these random outbursts of bloodshed and violence. We must be, or else, like Australia, we’d do something about it. But apparently this continuing sacrifice of innocent victims is a price we’re willing to pay, although why we’re paying it, what it’s buying us, has never been explained in a way that makes any sense to me.

Why are we willing to continue tolerating these increasingly frequent episodes of bloodshed? Is this a sacrifice demanded by our society’s unnamed but clearly violent shadow god? Is that why so many treat guns as if they are somehow more sacred than the human lives they steal so abruptly? Is protecting corporations and the wealthier individuals among us from an additional 1% or 2% in taxes more sacred than providing care for the mentally ill?

We know what the problem is. We know that it rises from the easy availability of firearms intersecting with the lack of care for the mentally ill. We know this, so we know that fixing those two things would stop the bloodshed. But we don’t seem to want to. And why that is–why we just don’t want to– might be the most important question of all.