Retired Pastor Ruminates

I am a big sports fan, but I often feel guilty about it (so it’s OK). I recognize in NFL football or the fever of Red Sox Nation some of the same scary crowd impulses that are present in big nationalistic rallies (think Leni Riefenstahl’s movie Triumph of the Will, with a difference to be sure.)

I recall Karl Barth’s critique of big sports under the term chthonic, relating to the earth deities of ancient Greece whose cults often practiced ritual sacrifice.  And as a guy with a head injury, I am especially alert to the dangers placed on the NFL gladiators we send out week to week to do battle for us to enjoy vicariously.

For many, sports takes the place of church, in some cases quite literally.  The church management guru of a generation ago, Lyle Schaller, once commented in my presence that in America, NFL football was a significant problem for attracting men to Sunday worship, especially on the West Coast, where the 1:00 Eastern Time game was shown at 10:00 Pacific Time there.

It's true, there is a lot of chaff in the various theology blogs I follow, and I am sure my own blog has its share, but there are also many engaging and useful posts.  So here are three of the recent ones in the “wheat” category from my blogroll:

At Australian Ben Myers substantive blog, Faith and Theology my former teacher and friend George Hunsinger has a guest post, a terrific letter which addresses the perennial question, “Are The Gospels Reliable? A Letter to a Young Inquirer.”

Speaking of reliable, on his reliably thoughtful blog, “What's John Thinking,” my friend and fellow ruminating retired pastor, John McFadden  talks about the problem of well-meaning folks trying to help in tough situations like Haiti, and why it is always more complicated than we might think, in his post “Good Intentions are not Always Enough.”

And finally, Halden Doerge at Inhabitio Dei has put into words better than I could one of my biggest problems with the thought of the always intriguing and equally exasperating Stanley Hauerwas.  I have for a long time thought that Hauerwas’s hybrid Methodist/Catholic/Mennonite sensibility was essentially sectarian.   Halden lays it out in “Why Can't Hauerwas just be a Witness?

So keep an eye on my blogroll.  There is often good stuff there.

Some of you may be old enough to remember 1972, when Richard Nixon took every state in the union except Massachusetts against George McGovern, and many of us proudly (and somewhat self-righteously) displayed bumper stickers declaring “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts!”

Well, you can all blame us now for the election of Scott Brown if you want to because it happened here yesterday, and we’ll see if it is the end of the Republic, the death of health care reform, the downfall of the Obama administration, and various other apocalyptic political predictions. Just what it means is unclear, although I doubt it will be good.

Ah, but there is a symbolic silver lining. My local newspaper the Berkshire Eagle, is reporting that my own Berkshire County, the lovely strip of land on the far western side of Massachusetts, went solidly for Martha Coakley. In a high turnout special election she carried 31 of our 32 towns (all but Otis).  Here in Pittsfield she beat Brown with 8,900 votes to his 3,803 with more than a 45% voter turnout.

None of this is too surprising since she is a native daughter of our fair county. She grew up in North Adams and graduated from Williams College. So we are now the bluest of counties in a now purple state.

So all you graphic designers fire up your computers.  I want to see t-shirts and bumper stickers (although I won't put one on my car.)  You heard it here first: “Don’t blame me, I’m from Berkshire County.”

Last night I turned the television off after CNN called the special Senate election for the Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley, with Brown getting 52% of the vote to Coakley’s 47%.

This morning I am trying to get my head around what happened. In this traditionally bluest of blue states Republicans are not supposed to be elected senator. The last Republican United States senator from Massachusetts was Edward Brooke, who left the senate in 1979. But Brooke was unlike any Republican you will find today. He was a moderate Republican, who co-authored the 1968 Fair Housing Act. He was staunchly bi-partisan and was the first Republican senator to ask for President Richard Nixon’s resignation after the post-Watergate “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Brooke was also the first African-American to be elected to the Senate since Reconstruction, and the only African-American in the Senate in the Twentieth Century until Carol Mosely Braun was elected in 1993. To younger Americans living in the Obama era, it is hard to conceive of the symbolic significance of Brooke’s active presence in the Senate in those days, and Massachusetts’ voters re-elected him by 62% to 34% in 1972, and he served until 1979.

We haven’t had a Republican senator since. My grown children haven’t known one in their lifetimes. But they have one now, Scott Brown, who is not a moderate, but a pro-life, anti-tax, anti-immigration politician who opposes health care reform among other things. He fills the seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy, and he gets two years before he has to run for re-election. That’s right, Ted Kennedy, the “Lion of the Senate,” who championed health care reform his entire career, is now replaced by someone who has vowed to vote against the current bill. His election deprives the Democrats of their 60 votes in the Senate that preclude a filibuster.

So what happened? There is already a lot of finger pointing, but there is plenty of blame to go around the Democratic Party.  And Brown gets credit for running an energetic campaign. Coakley had a nearly 30% lead in an early poll, and as late as last week was still predicted to have a double-digit lead.

Here’s my take on it. First of all, as President Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, said last night on the eve of the defeat, “Elections matter.” That’s why we have them, just like why we play the games to see who wins rather than relying on the predictions.

There was a perception by many that Martha Coakley and the Democrats were arrogant and entitled. In one of the debates Coakly said something about Kennedy’s seat and Brown retorted, “It is not Kennedy’s seat, it’s the people’s seat.” That moment crystallized a populist resentment toward the establishment. As things were sinking fast Coakley brought in Presidents Clinton and Obama to campaign. That may only have reinforced the view that the elites were behind her. Brown, on the other hand, has popular sports figures like Doug Flutie (of the Miami miracle pass), and Curt Schilling, the Boston Red Sox pitcher (of “bloody sock” fame.) To me, nothing sums up this election more than that contrast, the smart attorney general supported by two Presidents versus the truck-driving state senator supported by sports icons.

So Brown tapped into class resentments against the powers that be in this scary economic time. Ironic that many of those who voted for Brown were suburbanites, a usually well-off and typically liberal crowd, but who now seem to fear that the American Dream may be slipping from their grasp. Many have lost jobs, or fear they will. Some have lost their homes or their mortgages are now bigger than the worth of their home. These concerns are real and some of the anger about these things seems to have accrued to the President and those in office.

Others have interpreted the vote as a referendum on the Health Care Bill, but that is too simplistic. For one thing, Massachusetts has a near universal health care system already. What the vote more likely signals is a fear of big government spending, as people watch dizzying deficits being piled up in Washington. It is, of course, unfair to hang that on President Obama, since it was actually George W. Bush and Henry Paulson who launched the early big bailouts to keep the whole financial system from crashing in the fall of 2008, but many people have short memories.

And on the other side many liberal Democrats think the health care bill is so compromised that it is not worth passing, especially with the elimination of the public option. So did they stay away from the polls yesterday? If they did it is yet another example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

So the perfect storm that nobody predicted took place. Coakley ran a safe and lackluster campaign designed not to lose. Brown ran to win and captured something that is in the air. I happen to think that a good deal of what is in the air is pretty ugly. I don't want to hang this on Scott Brown.  I wish him well, and hope he can appeal to “the better angels of our nature.”

But to do so he will need to distance himself from some of the rhetoric of his supporters, especially the hate-mongers on the airways. Some of what I have seen in on-line and TV discussions, and heard on the radio, is truly scary. Some of it, sad to say, is clearly sexist and racist. There is a strong anti-immigrant impulse along with a derisive attitude toward the poor and disadvantaged. We have seen this before in American history when economic times were tough, but it doesn’t bode well for us, especially coming so soon after Barack Obama’s large-hearted campaign rhetoric and historic electoral victory that inspired so many people, many of them young and voting for the first time. It was just a year ago, but things move quickly in politics, and in Massachusetts yesterday the audacity of hope lost out to the resentment of fear.

NBC has provided lots of drama about their late night line-up for a week or so, and as a long-time insomniac I have watched with interest. I have always loved the Tonight Show, and I am old enough to remember Jack Paar. Johnny Carson was always a favorite of mine. Over the years I developed a slight preference for the goofy David Letterman over the more mainstream Jay Leno, but I watched them both now and again.

And I was pleased when Conan O’Brien, who I always thought was very funny, was given the Tonight Show last fall, bringing his edgy manic physical comedy to the show, and we stayed up to watch the monologues fairly regularly for the first week or so.

I wondered what would happen when NBC gave Jay Leno a 10 o’clock show. It didn’t seem like a great idea to me, and to tell you the truth, we never watched it. So I wasn’t suprised when a number of NBC affiliates started complaining that Leno was killing their ratings (which lead into their 11 o'clock news shows, which advertisers still like).

I got a call from Barack Obama yesterday afternoon, so I knew something was up. True, it was a robo-call, and every other Democrat in Massachusetts most likely got one. Still, it was a rare occurance, because usually nobody is interested in my vote unless it is a primary or a local election.

Here in the Bay State, where even the dogs and cats are Democrats, our votes are taken for granted. It is true that we had several moderate Republican governors before our current Democratic one, Deval Patrick, was elected. I have always thought that was because even Democrats know that there is a high rascal factor in our state politics, and a moderate Republican governor reassured us that the henhouse wasn’t entirely under the watch of the foxes.

Then last night I got a call from an old dear high school friend from New Jersey imploring me and my family to be sure to vote in Tuesday’s special election to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy last year.

I voted in the special Democratic primary awhile back, and had assumed that the winner, state Attorney General Martha Coakley (photo: above left), was the heir presumptive, this being Massachusetts. That was “the conventional wisdom.” But apparently too many people, perhaps including the candidate, thought this, and now it looks like her opponent, State Senator Scott Brown, has closed the gap and the polls are saying the race is too close to call.

This is a dramatic development and has Democrats in a state of high anxiety. Bill Clinton is already here campaigning for Coakley, and the President is coming tomorrow (after earlier saying he wasn’t.)

The stakes are pretty high for Democrats, not just here in the Bay State (we call it that so we don’t have to keep typing in Massachusetts, which nobody really knows how to spell.) First of all, Scott Brown is not a moderate Republican like former governors Bill Weld or Jane Swift, or even Mitt Romney, who didn’t get in touch with his conservative inner child until he ran for President.

Brown is an unabashed conservative, pro-life, anti-taxes, and, most decisively for national politics, anti-health care reform. He has vowed to vote down the current health care bill, and, if he wins, he takes away the Democrats' 60 votes they need to pass the thing. Now the bill will be far from perfect, but it is better than nothing, and nothing would be a blow for the country and a real defeat for the Obama administration. It is possible that the failure of this bill would mean we'd go another generation with our immoral and inefficient health care system, which would be, quite literally, a shame.

A Brown win could also be interpreted as a changing of the political winds, putting the fear into some of the wavering Democrats that aren’t too excited by the health care bill anyway, and maybe encouraging other vulnerable Democrats in unsafe seats to retire.

The great irony of it all is that if Brown wins and Coakley loses, the seat of Ted Kennedy, the iconic “Lion of the Senate” will become the vote that brings down health care reform.  That would be sad.

Special elections are funny things. With nothing else on the ballot they have low turn-outs and can be swung by the zealous and the angry. Brown has channeled populist anger at the banking bailouts, and has galvanized a coalition made up of the few remaining reasonable Republican party loyalists with an assortment of Tea Partiers and other “were mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” types, all fired up by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and talk radio. It’s not pretty.

So it all depends on who turns out to vote on Tuesday. Coakley should beat Brown in Massachusetts, but then again, the New England Patriots were supposed to beat the Ravens in Foxboro last weekend in the playoffs. So stay tuned.

My son gave me a bottle of single malt Scotch for Christmas, as is his custom.  This year it was a mysterious bottle called Smokehead that he had picked up at Heathrow on a trip from London.

Smokehead is an independently bottled whisky from one of the eight Islay distilleries, but Smokehead is coy about saying which one.  Islay (pronounced Eye- la) is a small island off the west coast of Scotland about the size of Martha's Vineyard.  Their malt whiskies are famous (or to some notorious) for their highly smokey character.

My son made me guess which one of the Islay malts was in the bottle (the clerk at Heathrow had told him that a friend of his knew which one it was).   The pressure was on.

I tried my first taste on Christmas night.  It was clearly an Islay malt, lots of peat, big smoky nose, and that briny quality that comes from aging in porous oak casks near the sea.

I was pretty sure it wasn't Laphroaig (not smoky enough) or Lagavullen (not complex enough and too young), which have such unmistakable tastes. They are also the ones I know best.

It seemed a youngish malt (with no age statement). I guessed Ardbeg (my second guess was Caol Ila), and my son told me that Ardbeg was what the clerk told him it was.

A trip to the internet whisky sites confirms that Ardbeg is the most popular guess, but there are vehement dissenters.  It's a lovely malt, but then they all are, really.

Smokehead just released an eighteen-year old in December that I have yet to try.  Maybe next Christmas!

When I was a small boy I thought that if you were able to go back in time to meet Jesus and the apostles they would have had visible haloes around them, as they did in the pictures I saw in books.  I later learned that this was an artist’s depiction of something called “glory.”  Glory meant a person’s honor and reputation. The glory of the Lord was understood to be visible, a kind of radiance that surrounded God and was reflected in God's messengers the angels, and even in those who came close to God, so for example Moses was surrounded by a glow when he came down from Mt. Sinai.  Jesus himself is referred to as the glory of God as in the verse from Hebrews where it says that, “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” (Hebrews 1:3)

But there is more to glory than the visible; glory is a power that makes things happen.  In John's Gospel glory means both the “radiant brightness” of God and the “powerful activity” of God.  So how do the disciples see Jesus' glory in the miracle at Cana and come to believe in him?

In John's Gospel we see a distinct pattern in which Jesus shows by actions and words that he is the fulfillment and replacement of Jewish institutions and views. So now Jesus is the real Temple; the Spirit he gives will replace the necessity of worshipping at Jerusalem; his teaching and his flesh and blood will give life in a way that the manna associated with the Exodus did not; at the Feast of Tabernacles, no longer the rain–making ceremony but Jesus himself supplies the living water; not the illumination in the temple court but Jesus himself is now the real light; on the Feast of the Dedication, not the temple altar but Jesus himself is consecrated by God.” (See Raymond F. Brown, John, p 104)

In each of these cases, Jesus himself replaces the former practices.  And not only replaces them in an adequate manner but in an abundant manner.  But what about the wedding feast of Cana, where Jesus performs his first miracle, one of the three traditional Epiphany events (along with the Magi and the Baptism of Jesus)?  What institution is Jesus replacing in the miracle of turning the water into wine?  Recall that the water that Jesus turned into the finest wine was there for the purification rites.  The miracle is a sign of that Jesus is the one sent by the Father who is now the only way to the Father.  Not just the purification rites but all previous religious institutions, customs and feasts lose their meaning in Jesus' presence.

The disciples would have recognized some of the rich symbolism in the episode.  First of all, it was a wedding, which in the Old Testament was often used as a symbol of the messianic days. And Jesus himself frequently used both the wedding and the banquet to talk about himself and the kingdom of God.  Indeed, Jesus often spoke of himself as “the bridegroom.”

The disciples would have had understood the miracle of the wine as a sign of the end time, for the Old Testament employed the figure of abundant wine as a symbol of the final days. We see this in Amos, Hosea and Jeremiah.  And in Second Baruch we find a lavish description of this abundance: the earth shall yield its fruit ten-thousandfold; each vine shall have a thousand branches; each branch a thousand clusters; and each grape about 120 gallons of wine. It is an oenophile's idea of heaven.

The disciples then would have seen this miracle as a sign of the messianic times and the new dispensation.  The disciples knew that when the messiah came, he would reveal his glory.  They would have been well-acquainted with verses such as Psalm 102:16 which says, “For the Lord will build up Zion; he will appear in his glory” and Psalm 97:6 which says, “The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all the people's behold his glory.”

But John is not only interested in our seeing that Jesus' first miracle is to be connected to all that will follow; he also wants us to see how it relates to what has come before, chiefly the calling of the disciples and their decision to follow Jesus.  After all, the reason that Jesus' glory is revealed is that people may believe in him, that they“ may have life and have it in abundance.”

In the previous chapter in John before the story of Cana, two of John the Baptist's disciples heard John say of Jesus, “Behold, the lamb of God” and they followed him.  And in the story of the calling of Nathanial, Jesus promises Nathanial “You will see greater things than these.”

I think John's Gospel is particularly helpful to us who live in a time of widespread disbelief, because for John, “seeing” Christ's glory is by no means a universal event.  John gives us an interesting cast of characters who have trouble with believing: Nicodemus, the Pharisee who comes by night to interview Jesus, the woman at the well, Thomas the empiricist who wants evidence before he will believe, and Mary Magdalene, so caught up in her own grief that she mistakes the risen Christ for the gardener.  These are people like us, men and women for whom belief comes hard.  So in John's Gospel many people do not see, and even in this story the miracle is not a public event, so that the wine steward clearly regards the miracle as the bridegroom's social ignorance in serving the good wine after the inferior stuff.

In Luke's Gospel, which so dominates the Christmas season, the shepherds see the glory of the Lord shining round the angels.  The other evangelists report various transfigurations, glimpses of the divine glory in Jesus before the resurrection, an elevation of Jesus into some heavenly mode of being.  But in John we can only see the glory with the eyes of faith for now.  And why is that?

Because John takes the Incarnation so seriously that the veil of the glory is never removed, and the divine glory of Jesus is never seen except by the eyes of faith.  The direct view of Jesus divine glory, that is, his heavenly brightness, is reserved for the future, to the time when the believer will be there where Jesus has gone before.

Which reminds us that we walk by faith and not by sight, and even Jesus' glory, so often defined as visible radiance, is seen only by the eyes of faith.   Someday the glory will be visible to all, so much so that it will be the new light which will replace the heavenly lights of sun and moon in the city of God.  So St. John the Divine says:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.  Its gates will never be shut by day —and there will be no night there.  People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. (Rev. 21:23–26)

That's pretty glorious. “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”  I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to miss it! Amen.

(I delivered this homily at the closing Service  of Word and Sacrament for the annual meeting of Confessing Christ in the United Church of Christ, held at First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on January 8, 1998)

They sought him by a star
  they followed from the East.
We know him in his Word
  and eucharistic feast.
For those who look to him for bread
  will find their souls are daily fed.

The nations need his light
  against the darkened hour.
Their hate and fear and might
  betray his gentle power.
But those who seek by word and deed
  will find he meets them in their need.

We walk on paths unknown
  through days of doubt and fear.
We face each day and frown,
  we struggle each new year.
But those who follow in his way
  will find his light for each new day.

And when he comes at last
  his glory will shine forth.
The world that moved so fast
  will stop to mark his worth.
And finally see the great “I Am”
  and join the Supper of the Lamb.

© 2001 Richard L. Floyd

(Photo: R. L. Floyd, “Wise Men from Ecuadorian Creche”)

Happy New Year everyone.  I was just reading the New York Times 5th Annual Pogie Awards (by David Pogue) for the best new tech ideas, and came across one that is actually useful to those of us who read a lot of text online.  It's called Readability, and it is free and easy to install.  You just go to their site and drop the app into your browser's bookmarks bar.  Here's Pogue's description:

The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.

You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.

You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

Try it, you'll love it, or at least I do.