How Far Will the President Go To "Prove" that Muslims are Violent?

So draw a line through the following events:

First. the President puts up three videos on Twitter, all produced by an extremist group in England.  All purport to demonstrate Muslim violence against others.  One has been debunked as non-Muslim violence and the other two are of questionable provenance (we don’t know where they came from). 

Then, the President gets it from all sides, including from the British PM, who is owning the extremist group.  

Third, it is declared from the White House that the evidence does not matter.  Because these videos are meant to be evidence, are they not?  They are meant to prove the hypothesis of Muslim violence, are they not?  Isn’t that why they were posted by the President of the United States in the first place?  Sorry, getting off track…  The Evidence does not matter because it is axiomatic that Muslims are violent.  It is a ‘truth’ that Muslims are violent.  It is a presupposition, a stereotype, a cultural cliché, a biased assumption, a racist conclusion…

Fourth, the plain meaning of this statement generates even more controversy and reaction.  It is not going away just because the White House has essentially said it should.  It's in danger of becoming a legitimate 'thing'.

Fifth, the President declares an American recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and that the US will move the embassy there, pending a feasibility study. 

Now, the President could have potentially jammed the biggest lever under the unmovable stone of Middle Eastern Peace with this declaration.  President Trump could have offered this as the tremendous carrot that it is for Israel contingent to moving the Peace Talks forward.  It could have been a carrot for the Palestinians if a legitimacy of their claim to Jerusalem as Capital was on the table.  This could have been a catalyst for the greatest breakthrough in the Middle East since President Carter got the Israelis and Egyptians to sign a peace deal.

But it seems, to these eyes, that this declaration was made at this moment because our President is hellbent and determined to prove that Muslims are violent-by this very provocative action.  If feels like there is a presupposition, a stereotype, an axiom that our President cannot be wrong.  Even if we have to walk the edge of a sharp sword to prove it.

So when something happens, and I am not alone in assuming that SOMETHING is going to happen, the narrative will not be that the President is paying for a provocative action, but that Muslims are, in fact, violent.

My prayer is that this is the moment when an Islamic leader of the stature of Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. will rise up in the midst of the maelstrom that is Middle Eastern politics to lead a movement of nonviolence in response to our President.  Then perhaps we can get to the real presupposition to be made about people of the Muslim faith.  Muslims, like us, are HUMANS.

“More Than Food”

^{Matthew 6: 25-34               Sermon: Sept. 24, 2017}

²⁵“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ²⁸And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³²For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

“More Than Food”

          If you have not had the chance to read the articles in the Herald as yet, let me share with you the gist of the situation.  For the last quarter of the church’s calendar, there have not been enough funds to pay the bills.  We put a temporary fix on that with a large transfer of cash from whatever reserves we have left.  So today, we are probably okay.  But we also have holes in the roof in at least four different places, we have water coming in under the floor in the Auditorium, we have at least a dozen other maintenance projects that need to happen, and I do not know what I am missing from that list.  On top of that, summer attendance plunged, like it usually does, but this time that plunge happened shortly after Easter.  What am I forgetting?  It has been a nightmare to seek to recruit people for leadership roles or any other roles in the church, and the current Session is operating at less than half capacity. 

          So, a lot of you are probably asking, “What happened?”  Some might be asking, “How did you screw up pastor?”  or “How did Session screw up?” or “Whose fault is this?”

          Let me tell you what happened.  A disaster happened to this church.  It is strangely fitting how this is happening right now, in the aftermath of Harvey and Irma and Maria.  Images of disaster and the recovery are fresh for the looking, if we so choose.  So what disaster hit us?  Affluence hit us. 

          I think the first real experience I had with the disaster of affluence in a church was a number of years before I was ordained.  I was still a member at my home church, Metuchen Pres., and I was on a choir trip with my yet to be wife Lynn and the rest of their choir up to Montreal and Quebec City.  They are both French-speaking cities, Quebec even more so than the more cosmopolitan Montreal.  But we sang in Quebec City at an English-speaking Protestant Church, it may have been Presbyterian.  And we outnumbered the congregation about two to one as I recall.

          I had the opportunity to talk briefly to the pastor and I know a little bit about church life up there, being born and raised in Quebec.  They suffered from affluence.  There were enough investments on the books to allow them to pay for a minister on a full-time basis and to maintain their beautiful facilities.  And open their doors to groups like us.  It might have been that they had enough investment income that nobody would ever have to give to that church again.  And they would never have to do ministry except to be the Anglo church in a French city.

          Now you might argue that I am describing what could be considered ideal conditions for a church.  Imagine, never having to worry about money.  The downside of that is never having to worry about God providing for the needs of the congregation.  We were in exactly that place.  Fifteen years ago, a very generous bequest was made to the church that made it easy to do church with no real consideration to the fact that God provides in lockstep with our faith.  And here, now, we are at the disaster point because there is no money to match even the daily needs of the church, much less the repairs to this gorgeous building dedicated to God’s work, much less the work of ministry in the world around us. 

          Before somebody begins the question “Why didn’t we…”, let me answer it at once.  Because we didn’t have to.  Again, fingers can be pointed, me, the Session at the time, our benefactor.  Then there will be plenty of people who will continue the conversation with “You should have…”  I am a Rutgers graduate and people have been offering hindsight wisdom to their football team since way before I attended there.  It’s never helped their football team, it isn’t going to help us.

          Our position is far more simply defined, something like this, “Lord, it has hit the fan, what are we going to do?”  His answer is our text for today.

²⁵“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ²⁸And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 

          I suspect the reaction to this response is going to be something along the lines of “not very funny pastor”.  Do not worry?  If now is not the time to worry, when is it? 

          And I tell you that the time to worry is LONG past.  We do not have time to worry about the storm, it has hit and it has kicked the stuffing out of this church.  If there is a very form for “to disaster”, we have hit it as surely as a rock thrown off a cliff will hit bottom.  And the promise we have from God is that we will not founder under the weight of the disaster.  He goes on to say,

³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³²For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 

       For someone who has been involved in a disaster, it becomes a VERY personal thing.  My disaster is Hurricane Sandy.  I thought for a long time it was 9/11, but it wasn’t.  Because the “superstorm” was where I got up close and personal with people who’d lost everything.  And Middlesex County got off lucky compared to what happened further south.  Although I can say with absolute certainty that there is still at least one household in this city that has not recovered from that storm.

          But at that time, these very questions began the agenda, what are we going to eat, to drink, to wear, to live?  What are we going to do to get our lives back?  And they did.  It was done exactly the way Jesus describes it:

³³But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

          The kicker was that most of the people working for that recovery did not have the joy that I had of the ideal of the Kingdom of God, of God’s righteousness.  They did not have what I had, the hope of our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for every person.  Most of them did not have the image of a perfected world to work for, not directly.  They certainly do not know, not in a personal sense, that which Jesus did to accomplish this shot at perfection.  But somewhere in their hearts, in their minds, in their created beings, that nugget of divinity existed nonetheless and they carried on that work to help people recover, sometimes, I hate to say it, to the detriment of those who know Jesus, who live the command to strive for the Kingdom of God.

          That is a huge reason why, how many years later, I make it a part of my ministry, and the ministry of this church in our community, to be a chaplain to those who will respond first, cops and firefighters, Emergency Management and similar agencies.  Because when it hits the fan, they are going to be the ones leading the striving after God’s righteousness to make things better.

          Which is why it is so tremendously lucky that the Lord has finally made it very clear exactly where this church stands, to recover from this disaster.  Because in this moment, resources and abilities and possibilities are open to us.  This is the time for every Christian in the place to stand up and stand together and make this recovery our own.  It is the time that we lean into the resurrection faith granted by our Lord Jesus Christ and make that the model for what this church shall be as it rises up from the disaster around us.

          Because the other option is unthinkable.  The other option is to let the ship sink, to allow the last two members standing on the Session to shut off the lights as they close the doors for the last time.  That option is to let the disaster win. 

          Not on our watch.  Not if we truly believe and allow Jesus to lead us to recover from even this.

Amen

What About Them?

Lorraine and Henry Ambrose in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania; Steven Robinson Jr. in Lexington, Kentucky; unnamed in Houston, Texas; Antwan Rutherford in Macon, Georgia; Jonathan Sandoval-Aleman in Long Beach, California; Unnamed in Baltimore, Maryland; Blair C. Ranneberger in Willards, Maryland; Timothy and Susan Adams in Flomaton, Alabama; Unnamed in Phoenix, Arizona; Jeffrey Allen Ramsey Jr. in Salisbury, North Carolina; Callum Braxton Boggs in Afton, Virginia; Unnamed in Springfield, Illinois; Unnamed in Indianapolis, Indiana; Unnamed in Indianapolis, Indiana; Jonathan Cheers in Nashville, Tennessee; Jason Youngblood in Hazlehurst, Mississippi; David Paul Pedan in Jackson, Mississippi; Samuel Julius Nave in Sterrett, Alabama; Christopher Mullen in Charleston, South Carolina; Ladarius Cardwell in Opelika, Alabama; Unnamed in Gretna, Louisiana; Unnamed in Tolleson, Arizona; Unnamed in Puyallup, Washington; Unnamed in Boulder, Colorado; Unnamed in Festus, Missouri; Unnamed in St. Louis, Missouri; Christon Chaisson in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Why is it that one person’s death can trigger such a huge response when so many others are simply ignored?  The death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia was a great tragedy, and it shines a light into the racist underbelly of America.

But what about them?

These names are drawn from www.gunviolencearchive.org, from a survey of people killed by gun violence in the United States on Saturday, August 12, 2017.  This does not include those who were wounded, those who are going to die from their wounds, and those incidents unreported where gun violence was involved.

What about them?

Somewhere between 161 and 178 people died from drug overdoses on August 12, 2017.  That number is probably low because 1) it is based on statistics from 2016, and overdose deaths have continued to rise and 2) it was a Saturday and weekend deaths tend to run at higher rates that during the week.

What about them?

What about first responders?  What about police officers and fire fighters and others who put their lives on the line, and those who will make the ultimate sacrifice, like the two troopers in Charlottesvilles?

What about them?

How many more will die for how many reasons that we will not protest, that we will not consider, that we will not even know about?  How many homeless?  How many poor?  How many with inadequate healthcare?  How many by their own hand?

What about them?

What if we started to look beyond our own borders?  What goes on in the rest of the world?

What about them?

In a few days, if the past is any indication, things will settle back into the daily routines.  People will move on, forget, no longer care.  Remembering one life is a worthy beginning so long as we remember them all.  

Charlottesville, Virginia: Seeking Context

                Draw a line, starting at Gettysburg in the north, to Antietam, through Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Richmond, then west through Appomattox and Lynchburg, and it forms a rough, inverted question mark around the city of Charlottesville, Virginia.  According to one website[1], Charlottesville supplied uniforms, swords, and artificial limbs to the Southern war effort.  The Presidential home of Thomas Jefferson is nearby and it is the home of the University of Virginia.  This is where my prayers are today.[2]

                And this city, located in the heart of Virginia’s Civil War, has made the bold decision to embrace the honest history of its past, to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee and to rename the park dedicated to the leaders of the Civil War "Emancipation Park".  According to one news report, this is the fourth round of protests since May by white supremacists and neo-Nazis.[3]

                Can we, in New Jersey, truly understand what it means for a city, in Virginia, to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee?  Can we understand this is a legacy of having an African-American president in the White House for eight years?  In the frothing maelstrom of the polluted waters that form the alt-right backlash, from President Trump on down, Charlottesville, Virginia is removing the statue of Robert E. Lee.  He is the man who would be “apotheosized” two years after his death. “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime.”[4]

                The honoring of Robert E. Lee, of Jefferson Davis, of the pantheon of Confederate war heroes, it commemorates the defenders of the “Golden Age” of the antebellum (I looked it up: ante-before; bellum: war; 'before the war') south.  Somewhere along the way, the history of what actually happened transformed into the mythology of what people selectively and re-interpretively remember happening.  This mythology is at the heart over the conflicts about the “Rebel” flag and its place in open society.  It continues as we begin to debate the place of the statues of the heroes.  And consider that the tide is flowing toward their removal, consigning these symbols of this evil chapter of American history to the past.  The mythology is fading as reality catches up.

I think this mythology arose in response to Reconstruction.  The era of Reconstruction was a time of vengeance against the South after the war.  If I understand my history, it was from that time that the call came ‘the south shall rise again’.  That is where they sought out the Golden Age, the mythological greatness of what had been.  Economically, the South was great in that time.  Virginia especially carried the legacy of the Revolution, giving us four of our first five Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.  There was an established ‘aristocratic’, 'gentlemanly' class in the south never so clearly defined in the north. 

To this day, the plantations that remain stand as sentinels of that class structure, that top class, that aristocracy, temples of the mythology of Southern-White-greatness.  It is that mythology, of the aristocracy, that continues in the hearts and minds of those individuals bearing the 'Stars and Bars' and the Nazi flags in Charlottesville throughout these protests.  It is that mythology, that Golden Age, that continues in the cultural fiber of the American South to this day.    

But there is a problem.  Mythology is running into history.  Yes, the era of Southern prosperity in the antebellum south was as nothing as has been seen since.  But what has been discounted is the cost.  The prosperity of the South was built upon the horror of the Middle Passage.  It was built on the foundation of the bodies of Africans and African-Americans.  Two million people died in that passage, two to three times as many before they even reached the ships.[5]  Who can even number those who died here?

                On a scale between total, exploitative inequality amongst humans and total respect and equality for every individual, the balance advanced powerfully to equality, in the person of our first African-American President.  His cultural legacy against racism will, I believe in time, overshadow his political accomplishments.  The prolonged, violent backlash that began while he was in office, that continues now, is evidence of that.  History has shown that for every push, there is pushback.  But, as before, we shall overcome.  This is the historic context against which we must measure what is happening in Charlottesville.  Now, the stakes are at their highest. 

                 In America, we celebrate our right of free speech.  We celebrate it so much that we will permit the likes of the Ku Klux Klan to speak-though they are the worst that the ‘church’ has ever produced in America, we will permit neo-Nazis to speak-though they carry the legacy of Adolf Hitler, we will permit the alt-right to speak-though they seek to undercut every advance made against racism, we will permit anyone to speak, because we can speak in response and in rebuttal.  A protest will lead to a counter-protest.  Hate speech will be met with the speech of love.  Until now.  Now the speech of love is met with deadly violence.

                It may be that history remembers Heather Heyer as a martyr to the freedom of speech we enjoy as Americans.  We must remember her, her family and friends, and those who continue to protest, in prayer.  It must be that we pray for James Alex Fields Jr., who decided to turn his car into a weapon to silence another’s right to speak.  It must be that we remember and pray for the families and the friends of Pilot Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, who died in the line of duty while responding by helicopter to the events in the city.   But more than that, let us not forget the context-the long game-which has gone on since the founding of this nation, through the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of the Obama era, to whatever comes next, for the advancement of equality and justice for every person, regardless of what makes them who they are.  

Epilogue

                What is happening in Charlottesville must not draw attention away from acts of intentional terror and murder, as when Dylann Roof killed nine at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  American history has too many examples of this premeditated evil.  What makes Charlottesville different is that death is no longer a targeted action of evil upon another, but an assumption that deathly violence is now, somehow, a ‘reasonable’ expression of our disagreement with somebody else.

Rev. Peter Hofstra

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[1] https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Charlottesville_During_the_Civil_War

[2] Let me note here that I am not a historian, nor a journalist, I am not a sociologist nor an anthropologist, I am a pastor.   The citations are efforts to fact check what is currently happening.  The historical, mythological, and cultural observations and integrations are, wrong or right, my own conclusions.

[3] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/charlottesville-faces-its-own-dark-past-after-rally-turns-deadly-n792166

[4] Ex-general Jubal A. Early  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/making-sense-of-robert-e-lee-85017563/

[5] www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=446

Aliens: Covenant: A theological reflection based on way too little...

Having only seen the trailers, there was an interesting piece that caught my attention.  It may be in the movie, or it may be edited so as to have nothing to do with the movie.  So, there are no spoilers here, only prophecy, for good or for ill.

The one line was about finding a planet that was habitable and 'all ready' for humanity.  If I am right, I believe that is the lure for the humans who eventually start the dance with one of my favorite scifi monster franchises.

What I like in the title is the word 'covenant'.  That speaks to my pastoral nature because it is such a bible word.  I use it to talk about the promises that a married couple are making to one another.  But it is reflective of another relationship, that of God to humanity.  That is a theme across the bible.  In the Old Testament (or Covenant!!), it is with the Hebrews.  In the New...Covenant (or Testament), that is broadened under Jesus.

What business has Aliens with that term?  I think (prophecy, NOT spoiler) it has something to do with this tempting planet.  Someone or something is trying to play nice with the humans so that they have breeding pods for the Alien eggs.  I wonder if it is the same someone or something that pulled together predators and humans on that 'battle world' episode?  If that has already been explained in the mythology, I beg your pardon.

Frankly, there are so many franchises and so little time.

So it is not so much a God-given covenant as a semi-divine set up, wrapped in the cloak of a covenant.  Or is it the covenant of a God who is viewed as nasty, depraved, and disconnected from humanity?  That will require a trip into the theological psychology of Ridley Scott, too much for this post.

I may have the whole premise of the movie wrong because I am overthinking the trailer.  But it has already been established that a "god" presence was set up for the Aliens so that humans would become willing, worshipful breeder eggs in A vs. P (if memory serves).

It will be interesting to see what is behind the aliens.  Something chains up the mother beasts to make the eggs.  Something builds a pyramid so that they are cannon fodder for Predators (seems to be a little too much for the predators to do themselves).  Something created the perfect planet as a lure for humanity.

Or I really stink as a prophet.