Maikimo.net taxonomy tags

Jim Wallis: “The best news of all for the American church and society is this: The monologue of the Religious Right is over, and a new dialogue has just begun.”

With Sojourners, I assess that the 2006 budget bill passed by the Senate yesterday — at Christmas! — is immoral because it cuts spending for those among us least able to sustain further financial burden, even as U.S. military spending spirals out of control ($6 billion per month on Iraq alone).

That my senator Bill Frist declared this vote “Victory No. 1” conveys more to me than he probably intended.

Because the bill has been amended, the House of Representatives must vote on it again soon. Hence with full sincerity I write to my representative again today:

As a person of faith from Tennessee, I ask you to please vote NO on the new budget bill that the Senate passed. Please do not take away health care from low-income families, the elderly, and others, as this budget will do.

I believe the scriptural wisdom, “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God” (Proverbs 14:31).

As a U.S. taxpayer, I want to help my neighbor in need. In contrast, I do not want my tax dollars going into the bottomless pit of military spending.

Yes, be vigilant about controlling federal spending, but please do it in a way that accrues blessing according to the Bible, not a curse.

Thank you.
Mike

We can do better than this. And indeed we must, else “God bless America” will be drained even further of meaning and likelihood.

My friend Dale writes about not only his Kerry/Edwards yard signs being stolen, but his God is Not a Republican or a Democrat sign was taken, too.

I’m at 7-8 9 10 11 12 Kerry/Edwards signs stolen during this past month the past 6 weeks. Just flat-out made to vanish under cover of darkness. This phenomenon recapitulates for me an entire worldview’s unfortunate M.O.: trespass, steal, suppress dissent and all contradicting evidence. It’s a strange and unconvincing plan from people preaching “freedom” and “democracy,” I think.

Two things help me short to ground my occasionally flaring anger at practitioners of this M.O.: specifically, a boxful of K/E signs that allows me to replace the sign daily if necessary, and generally, (mis)remembering the adage “Anger is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” (Google reveals Malachy McCourt actually said “Resentment is like …” but that’s close enough to work.)

Beyond my obvious-but-ridiculously-hard choice not to take poison, my prayer asking how I’d best respond keeps returning an image of the prodigal father — that is, one extravagant with his love — who watches, watches, watches for his wayward son to repent and come home, and when he finally sees his son a long way off he runs out to embrace him.

Yikes, that’s a difficult example to follow. (Whether father or son.) But imagine the result — the homecoming — what a celebration that will be!

Dale’s sign, “God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat,” refers to Sojourners’ ongoing petition to “take back our faith,” a stance I support as well. (Sojourners is “a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.”)

In his About.com article on this topic, Charles mentions the conviction —

A politics that privileges the powerful over the weak and the rich over the poor, and favors violence and the unilateral use of force over the use of diplomacy in the resolution of international problems, cannot be reconciled with biblical ethics.

That’s my inescapable conviction, too, one that arose in me during several years of seminary study:
I cannot reconcile prevailing U.S. political behavior with biblical ethics.

It’s not an exclusionary, “my way or the highway” kind of conviction — because I don’t know everything — but it’s nonetheless a fire-in-the-bones conviction in me that I understand as providing sufficient work-that-needs-doing to last me the rest of this lifetime.

For me and my house, then, this conviction is why I’m happy to support, work for, and vote for Kerry/Edwards and the Democratic worldview, however short of perfect it may be, and why I’m unable to ever, ever, ever support the Bush/Cheney worldview.

(“My house” tells me right away whenever she thinks otherwise. :-) )

half a day later:

And sometimes, like now, rage seems like a perfectly appropriate response, not to be shorted to ground. Meteor Blades reminds me:

In between my unfettered rage at the ideologues who lied us into the Iraq war and my cautious elation that we may elect someone who brings an end to that nightmare, I sometimes catch myself going numb. The statistics are numbing. Perhaps 25,000 people dead, most of them civilians. Perhaps 100,000 wounded, many of them maimed forever. …

Damn, bouncing between idealism, rage, and numbness is awkward. But part of human being, I think. Seasons turn: buds of spring burst to life, ease into fiery summer, wind down to autumn spent and brown, then cool down to icy winter, and back again. Likewise, our bodies run in cycles, ebbing and flowing throughout the day, the month, the years. Even scripture is cyclical, boldly wandering through the range of human emotions, unflinchingly touching on all extremes.

Life’s a rollercoaster all over, I think. Some of us loop-de-loop more than others, and some of us half fall out, but none of us bounces alone.

O Lord, just please deliver us from permanumb.

Sojo.net: ‘Remind America that Jesus taught us to be peacemakers, advocates for the poor, and defenders of justice.’

Allen at The Right Christians alerts me to Rev. Jim Wallis’ Backward Christian soldier: An open letter to the Christian General, Lt. General William “Holy War” Boykin, in response to Boykin’s remarks as noted, for example, at MSNBC and in the LA Times —

General, your theology bears no resemblance to biblical teaching. You utterly confuse the body of Christ with the American nation. The kingdom of God doesn’t endorse the principalities and powers of nation-states, armies, and the ideologies of empire; but rather calls them all into question. …

Brother Boykin, … Why were you never taught in Sunday school about the real meaning of the kingdom of God, and the universality of the body of Christ? And why have you never heard that only peacemaking, not war-making, can be done “in the name of Jesus?” …

When a high-ranking military officer espouses a zealous religious nationalism that claims the name “Christian” for both his nation and his army, and when he invokes the name of Jesus — not to love our enemies as he instructed, but rather to target them for destruction — the church must discipline that errant brother and name his public statements for what they are, not mere political incorrectness, but idolatry.

It occurs to me that if I, too, could do forcible truth-telling like this to brethren who’ve conflated flag and cross, nationalism and religion into an unholy, idolatrous mess as General Boykin has, I’d be doing what I’m called to do. I wouldn’t be in my present predicament of wondering if I can ever return to church.

Thanks for setting a good example, Brother Wallis.

Kynn reminds me that I am indeed a progressive Christian, though I haven’t consciously spent much time identifying as one of that label.