Monday, May 23, 2016

Confessing Failure to Help

It's 10pm in the parking lot of a hotel, and we are just arriving, tired and looking for a good night's sleep. A minivan pulls up, window down, and a young Black woman says, "Sir, I'm not asking for any money or anything but we just need a place to sleep tonight. We can check into a shelter in the morning, but they don't have room for us tonight."

Well, I'm not going to ask her to share a room with my wife and me, and I'm not going to check her in on my credit card and ID, taking responsibility for anything that might happen in the room, regardless of how long she might stay. I doubt the Holiday Inn would even allow that under the circumstances.

I admit that I am suspicious, thinking that it is really just money she wants and that she may be going home somewhere at bedtime. I'm concerned about who else might be in the car and whether it is an organized scam, maybe even a setup for armed robbery if I get too close to the car, wallet in hand. My wife has walked on to the hotel entrance and is waiting there for me.

So, I ask the woman, from some distance, if she has a credit card, and she says she doesn't. I suggest that the shelter that has agreed to take her in the morning should have a referral system for some place she can get temporary shelter. Surely suburban Atlanta has such a system in place for single women with children, if that is, in fact her situation. I don't see the children but there seems to be a child seat in the car. I would have known where to send her in Columbia SC.

I tell her that I can't help her, and she drives away.

After getting to the room, I still have her on my mind and wonder if she is circling through the parking lot and soliciting other arrivals, so I go back outside and look around. My plan is that, if I see her, I will ask her to park her car at the door of the hotel and come inside by herself, in view of security cameras, so I can see her ID and discuss her dilemma with her. I have a couple of hundred dollars in cash and will be glad to give her enough to pay for a room somewhere that does not require a credit card, a small gift of no consequence to me and possibly very helpful to her.

I don't see her anywhere. So, I go back to the room feeling guilty for passing up an opportunity to help somebody, obviously in much worse shape than I, even if she is lying and scamming.

If I ever face that same situation again, I now have a plan. I will say to the driver, "Drive to the front door of the hotel, step out of the car by yourself and go just inside the door by yourself, where there will be security cameras and I can see your ID and we can discuss your situation in a public place. Maybe I can help."

If she takes me up on that, I will be glad to give her enough money for a night in a hotel. And I won't have to feel guilty, and she can do whatever she wants to with the money. If she doesn't take me up on that, I will know it is a scam.

As for the young woman I encountered Friday night, at least, if she was telling the truth, she is in a shelter now.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

Pentecost 2016 - Five Years Catholic

At Pentecost, 2011, I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Columbia, SC. From a purely logical standpoint, I had concluded, hopefully under the influence of The Holy Spirit, that Jesus established The Church, His “Body,” and left Apostles in charge, promising the guidance of The Holy Spirit, and that that Church, with its apostolic succession, was The Church I wanted to be a part of. And, yes, I know there has been much misbehavior of Catholics and Catholic leadership down through the centuries even with that guidance of the Holy Spirit. However, Jesus promised not that the Church would be perfect but only that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.

Aside from that logic, a number of things about Catholic faith appealed to me spiritually and theologically. It is not just about me and whether I am “saved” but is primarily about growing in worship of and service in the name of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, obedience of the Greatest Commandments and The Great Commission. Catholicism recognizes that there is divine mystery and theology beyond human understanding but eloquently, if imperfectly, expressed in the centuries old Nicene Creed, a clear statement of The Gospel of Jesus Christ which we are commanded to proclaim. That divine mystery is acknowledged in the reverence and ritual of Mass, the focus on the timeless sacrifice of Jesus, and the mystical sharing in His Body and Blood clearly prescribed in the Gospel of John and practiced in the early church and down through the centuries.

Before making the change from Lutheran to Catholic, I read through the several hundred pages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and concluded that the Catholic Church could reasonably be described as “full gospel,” a term relatively recently and narrowly applied to some charismatic evangelical churches, but that, in the case of Catholicism, it would mean paying attention to all of Sacred Scripture, and to the ways it was written, compiled, understood, preserved, revered, and practiced by the early Church.

The key statement in the Catechism about the Bible is this: “All Sacred Scripture is but one book, and this one book is Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ.” (P134). With that understanding of the Bible, Catholicism generally resists the temptation to boil down the complexity of our relationship with the Triune God to simple formulas and selected Bible verses without context. We reverently hear readings of Sacred Scripture from the Old Testament, Psalms, Epistles, and Gospels in most celebrations of The Mass, but it is clear that Catholics do not worship the Bible (or Mary either). It is the Triune God alone, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whom Catholics worship.

I have joked that one reason I became Catholic was that I wanted to be persecuted. Not true of course but I do hear and read disturbing condemnations of Catholicism from time to time from serious and faithful non-Catholic Christians. There are still divisive issues that keep us from being one, but I have concluded that the answer to those divisive issues is usually not either-or, but both-and. We have been saved, and we are being saved, and we will be saved. We are predestined and we are called to make decisions for Christ. We are adopted, our names written down, justified by grace through faith, and we are commanded to persevere, obey, work, give, serve, love, learn, and finish the course. Jesus came to save souls and to save the world. God created the heavens and the earth (in unknown ways) and that act of creation continues and includes all the processes still operating, including any “evolutionary” processes. Eternal life begins when we are baptized and there will be a resurrection, details of which I have no knowledge and about which I have no concern, at some future time. These are just examples. If one carefully considers Sacred Scripture in its entirety, I believe that the both-and approach is validated and that we waste our time insisting on either-or decisions rather than serving together. We, the Body of Christ, have a job to do.

During progression through three prior Christian denominations, I sometimes had the conviction that the current theology I was hearing was correct and would argue in defense of it. Now, in the Catholic Church, I believe that the theology is sound, but the primary feeling is one, not of being right, or of needing to prove or argue in favor of anything, but of being at home, in The Church, even if I sometimes see and hear things (usually expressions of personal piety or theological slants) that cause a little discomfort. And I take comfort joining weekly with Catholics around the globe, hearing the same selections from Sacred Scripture, reciting the Nicene Creed, and “passing the peace” in hundreds of languages, and then standing in line with fellow worshipers, awaiting my turn, to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.

Thanks be to God!


Friday, September 25, 2015

"Believing," "Believing That," and "Believing In"

  • Matthew 24:23 - Then if anyone says to you, 'Look! Here is the Messiah!' or 'There he is!'-- do not believe it.
  • James 2:19 -  You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe-- and shudder.
  • John 3:16 - For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.
Those are three often quoted Bible verses, the first giving an example of “believing” something heard or read, the second an example of “believing that” something is true, and the third an example of “believing in” some thing or some person. The little three letter Greek word translated “in” is important in John 3:16 and can also be translated “into.” Trying to understand the Greek is complicated by the fact that the word translated “believe” can also be translated as “believe in” or “have faith.” So, putting those two Greek words together can be translated as "have faith in," or “believe in in” for double emphasis implying a serious, life-changing, kind of belief.

The reason I thought of commenting on the subject of belief is the frequency with which people are accused of not “believing in” global warming or of not “believing in” evolution. Use of that language supports speculation that those two topics, global warming and evolution, have become twenty first century matters of faith, or perhaps even religions. Well, let me make it clear that I do not "believe in" global warming, nor do I "believe in" evolution.

Before you get too excited and start calling me names, let me hasten to add that I do “believe that” our climate changes with time and “that” there has been a significant warming trend over the past few thousand years, maybe even a degree or so in the last few decades, and “that” it is at least partly due to human activity. Just the presence of 7 billion bodies at 98.6 degrees F should have a warming effect, with or without any atmospheric CO2 influence. And certainly our cutting of so much forest in recent centuries would have tended to result in warming. I just don’t “believe in” global warming to the extent that I organize my life or even my day around the concept. (I do recycle and moved into the city at least partly to cut down on driving, but I still take hot showers, keep the house at comfortable temperatures throughout the year, and drive a gasoline powered automobile.)

I also want to affirm that I “believe that” evolutionary processes are an important part of God’s creation even though they really have not been proven conclusively to result in new species and offer no explanation for why there is anything to evolve. I see no reasonable way to refute the evidence of their existence, nor do I see any good reason to try to do so. I just don’t “believe in” evolution to the extent that I let it guide my daily living and set my priorities or even suggest atheism. There is really nothing I can do about it anyway. I understand that evolution is a very slow process, and I have not been trained in any genetic modification techniques.

Turning to religion, with respect to personal faith in something around which I can try to organize my life, I can use “believe” in all three ways.

I “believe” the Catholic Catechism statement on Sacred Scripture: “All Sacred Scripture is but one book, and this one book is Christ, ‘because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ.’” Well, of course such believing is a matter of Christian faith, and we really can’t expect people of other faith traditions or of no faith to buy it.

I “believe that” Jesus was the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, con-substantial with the Father, that through Him all things were made, that for us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, that by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man, that for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; that he suffered, died, and was buried. That on the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. That He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and that his kingdom will have no end. (That is all from the Nicene Creed.) And, here again it is a matter of faith which Christians tend to view as a gift and not a personal accomplishment. It is not something to generate pride, but rather something to motivate thanksgiving and action.

But neither “believing” nor “believing that” approaches what Jesus really asks of us. It is only “believing in” Him, as in John 3:16 quoted above, that approaches the ideal. And that means having a desire, even if we fail, to organize our lives based on what we have been told and what we have learned about Him and what we have come to believe about Him. It might be like a "believer in" global warming adopting a cold shower, open window, bicycle only approach to life, which wouldn't be all bad. It might be like a "believer in" evolution dedicating his or her life to trying to persuade others of the truth of it and the absence of any creator, which would be all bad.

Objectively, “believing in” Jesus, means, at the very least, being baptized and a part of His Body, the Church, which He founded and left to do his work, obey his commandments, and follow his example. It is through His Church that we achieve unity with Him. Subjectively, however, the interesting and often confusing thing is that understandings and expressions of that unity by the millions of Christians around the globe vary as much as the differences in their personalities, dispositions, educations, understandings, cultures, environments, spiritual maturities, and personal histories. And that is a lot of variability, and a very good thing, creating many opportunities for us to help each other along.

So, don’t be looking for “cookie cutter” Christians as you travel the globe, or even as you look around the community in which you reside.

1 Corinthians 12:27 - Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. 

Colossians 1:15-19 - He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.




Friday, July 31, 2015

Designated Giving, Loss Leaders, and Planned Parenthood

(Often there are intersections between politics, economics, faith, and church. This is one of those cases so I am posting this on both blogs.)

Encouragement of designated giving can be an effective fundraising tool but, except in the case of major capital campaigns for specific projects, has little or no effect on programs of non-profits using the method to raise money. I am reminded of the confession of a police department that, although their fund raising campaign was focused on bullet proof vests for officers, they were going to buy the same number of bullet proof vests regardless of the fund raising result. It was just that bullet proof vests support an effective emotional appeal for money. 

As a young adult, I was a member of a Southern Baptist Church that taught tithing and essentially forbade designated giving, unless pre-approved by the Board of Deacons, because it was seen as a way for church members to vote with their money and personally impact church priorities, a clear responsibility of the Board of Deacons. It was also a nuisance for the church treasurer to keep up with the various designated funds and make sure they went to the right place.

About that same time, the local Community Chest was raising a million dollars or so each year to fund locally popular non-profits serving the community. Over the next couple of decades, the Community Chest gave way to United Way, and some of the agencies being funded under the new regime were extremely unpopular with some of the donors pressured to give to the annual drive. To assuage their concerns, donors were allowed to designate their gifts to one or more agencies and leave the others out. It made no difference of course in the distribution of the funds except in the very rare case that designations to a particular agency exceeded the budgeted amount for that agency. I doubt that ever happened. And money of course is fungible, making it impossible for a designator to track his or her hundred dollars and make sure it went to the Boy Scouts or whatever other agency he or she might have designated and not to some organization with goals perceived by him or her as suspicious.

Loss leaders of course are those products sold in groceries and other retail outlets at a "loss," less than their fully allocated cost of acquisition, selling, and distribution, because they are known to increase store traffic and total sales revenue and thus result in greater profits even if showing losses as individual items. It has been a long standing tradition, for example, for groceries to feature Coca Cola products one week as loss leaders and Pepsi Cola the next. (Both soft drink companies were rumored to require the stores to feature their products at least fifty percent of the time if they were to have the privilege of selling them at all, and that was judged by smaller soft drink companies as a grossly unfair trade practice.) The point is that revenue is revenue and always contributes to the bottom line profits whether the particular product generating the revenue, based on the accounting system in place, shows a profit or not.

What are the points of this rambling? There are two: 

  1. Whether the $500M in federal funding going to Planned Parenthood is designated for services other than abortions is absolutely immaterial because money is fungible and enables the organization to grow and increase impact on society while directing whatever other income it has to expansion of abortion services. So long as the books show spending on services other than abortion is equal to or greater than the federal funding, the organization can claim that none of the federal $500M went to abortion services. Accounting is a wonderful art.
  2. Whether the collection of revenue from transfer of fetal tissue, in the form of body parts, shows a profit based on the accounting system in place is absolutely immaterial. The claims of Planned Parenthood that they are only offsetting cost with the revenue collected would be like Publix Supermarkets claiming that it is not profitable for them to sell soft drinks as loss leaders. It obviously is profitable or they would not do it.

So, here is my recommendation for Planned Parenthood. Spin off whichever is the smaller of the two major parts of the organization, Abortion Services or Women's Health, and then let the Federal Government contract with the Women's Health part to provide Women's Health Services on a cost plus basis just as they pay through Medicare for elderly health services. If funds were to be transferred from the Women’s Health entity to the Abortion Services entity, that would be very difficult to hide with accounting manipulations. Then the Abortion Services part of the organization could look elsewhere than the US Congress for funding. I suspect there will be plenty of it, probably largely from organizations much more interested in preventing births than in Women's Health. PP Abortion Services might even become the larger of the two. 

And, to Congress, until Planned Parenthood engineers that divorce, there should be no federal funding of it.



Monday, June 1, 2015

Gospel Distinctives

There are lots of interesting differences among the four Gospels. Here is an interesting one to contemplate. Click on the image for a readable version.


Friday, May 8, 2015

Clamoring to Concede Freedom of Religion

By clamoring for financial concessions and support (from federal, state, and local governments), thereby transferring our responsibilities to others, we people of faith have slowly given up freedom of religion in the United States of America. It started innocently enough when we were overwhelmingly, at least nominally, Christian and when we almost all agreed that Churches were important to the general welfare and the common good and that every marriage of a man and a woman resulting in children who would be raised and cared for by a full time mom and a wage-earning, grocery-buying, mortgage-paying dad was a key building block of our society. We all pitched in to make those things happen by granting financial concessions to churches and their pastors with tax exemptions, housing allowances, etc., to married couples by allowing them to pay lower taxes with joint tax returns and lots of exemptions, and to all citizens by letting those who wished to do so take tax deductions for gifts to their churches.

The so-called establishment clause in the US Constitution, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." was not violated, but Congress made many laws encouraging the establishment of religion and rewarding the free exercise thereof. And that worked fairly well so long as we were overwhelmingly religious and Christian and of pretty much one mind about what was good for the USA. And the unfairness inherent in the facts that singles, couples without children, and folks who didn’t give money to their churches had to pay higher taxes to make up for the rest of us was not a major problem.  

But then we became “diverse” and “multicultural,” and the definition of “church” was broadened to include some things the old-fashioned Christian church considered just plain wrong, and the concept of “non-profits,” even profitable ones, getting tax advantages similar to those of churches became popular. And people began to believe that it is unfair for only some “family” configurations to get tax advantages. A fundamental truth is that when concessions are offered by government, the citizens will clamor to receive them. (Government governs best when focused on doing its job rather than on devising concessions-for-votes programs.)

Even Christian charities, hospitals especially, began to clamor for government grants and government insurance payments, all of which came with strings attached, some of those strings requiring that some Christians deny or abandon core beliefs or lose funding.

So, here is my suggestion. Let’s render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s and pay our own way without asking others to shoulder the burden for us. Let’s pay property taxes on our property and fair and flat income taxes on our incomes. Let’s fund our own charities with no government involvement. Let’s eliminate financial motivation for following the commandments of Christ and leave only the Holy Spirit as the prime mover. By so doing, we can begin to regain the freedom of religion that we have lost. I believe such a change would lead to bigger and more powerful Churches taking up space in the world, proclaiming freely the Gospel, speaking freely on public issues, paying their fair share for government provided services, asking for nothing and giving everything, inspiring and attracting believers, and a lot fewer storefront churches doing little other than paying utility bills, making mortgage payments, and supporting founding pastors and their families.

We would have true separation of Church and State, most IRS employees would take early retirement, politicians would quit spending their time granting concessions for votes, freedom and faith would take giant steps forward, and the clamoring would cease.

(Revised slightly May 10th, 2015)


Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Richard John Neuhaus: Liberal Lutheran to Conservative Catholic

A new biography, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by Randy Boyagoda, does quadruple duty.  It provides a well-researched and documented critical look at the life and work of Neuhaus, in the context of  US history, including sociological trends, from the 1960’s through the early 2000’s, societal pressures on and changes in the role of the Church, or religion in general, in public life, and the continuing struggle over unresolved Reformation issues among and within Catholic and Protestant bodies. It is a great read.

Neuhaus (1936-2009) was raised the son of a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor in Canada, received the Master of Divinity from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, and served as pastor of Brooklyn’s low income, mostly minority, St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in the 1960’s. He preached and spoke in favor of social justice and civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and became well known as a liberal activist. As his liberal friends and associates moved leftward and more secular in the 1970’s, Neuhaus moved right and became a strong spokesman for conservative Judeo-Christian ethics and positions on public issues.

One of a diminishing minority of Lutherans who saw Lutheranism as a reform movement within the universal Catholic Church, Neuhaus gave up on Lutheran reform, was received into the Catholic Church in September, 1990, and was ordained a Catholic Priest a year later. Included in the biography are his eloquent explanations of the reasons for this change and for his shift to conservatism.

A prolific and powerful writer, Neuhaus is perhaps best known for The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, published in the mid 1980’s, and comprising a direct challenge to the emerging Political Correctness movement. Neuhaus later assured his own access to the Public Square through founding of First Things: America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life. The journal achieved a paid circulation of more than 30,000 and has continued after his passing.

The image of Neuhaus based on the biography and on his quotes therein is of a bigger-than-life, somewhat rude, impatient, and outspoken man who loved bourbon and cigars and didn't hesitate to consume even the cigars in a friend’s living room. However, watching him speak on one of the many YouTube videos available (example), he comes across as a loving pastor serving God and neighbor. Well, I suppose that too is a bigger-than-life image. You can download the book to your Kindle or iPad here






Published also on www.permanentfixes.com.