Scott Freeman

• Joseph Lieberman picked the wrong time to act like a Republican.  His staunch support of the Iraqi war may cost the 3 term senator his party’s nomination in two weeks.
• Speaking of two weeks, it’s just 13 days to the first NFL exhibition game of the season.  Can you smell the Steelers in the air?  Football is what it’s all about.
• I’ve lost 7 pounds in the last five days.  I miss pizza. But I can fit into some of my “preaching” clothes again.
• There should be some sort of law severely curtailing the amount of time a governor or senator can spend campaigning for president.  Actually, it should be outlawed altogether.  Finish the job you have before you start working toward another one.
• Reading Sam Walker’s Fantasyland (see sidebar) makes me miss my old Cool Papa Bell fantasy league.  Although I typically stunk up the joint, the draft was one of my favorite days of the year.
• I’m impressed by the blogs that stay continually on topic.  I’m too scattered to do that.  Everything I write doesn’t have a deep thought or devotional thrust. No great theological insight about my trip to Wal-Mart. I like to talk about faith, music, TV, books, politics, family and sports.
• I’m fairly confident that I will not vote Republican again anytime in the near future.  This last hit was too much (more on that later)
• Whoever said home ownership was a good investment never bought a money pit without the requisite handy-man skills.
• My 3-year old is winning the battle of the wills.  Forget regularly scheduled meals and snacks.  I’m installing a buffet line that she can graze at all day long.
• Two movies I’ve started watching in the past week that were too bad to finish: The Upside of Anger and White Noise
• It’s tiring being the only minister on staff.  I’ve been the sole minister of a congregation for 4 and a half years now.  I’m spent.

What’s on your mind?

Until I get that stupid (insert voice of Chloe and Cassie, “Daddy, you don’t say stupid”) sidebar to work here is my current reading list:

From the Library:

The Left Hand of God by Michael Lerner–Worth the read for his proposed Spiritual Covenant With America

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation by Jon Meacham
Field Notes from a Catastrophe:  Man, Nature and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert–Can we keep ignoring this?

Coming this week from Amazon:

The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder –Funny, all the stuff I have read by Yoder, I have not read this, his definitive work.

Simply Christian : Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright–Wright is one of today’s greatest living theologians.  I look forward to this latest offering.

After the Locusts: How Costly Forgiveness Is Restoring Rwanda’s Stolen Years by Meg Guillebaud

Kingdom Come: Embracing the Spiritual Legacy of David Lipscomb and James Harding by John Mark Hicks and Bobby Valentine.  The message of David Lipscomb is one that greatly intrigues me.

This should keep me busy for a couple of weeks.  Is there anything better than a good book?  Don’t answer that.

What about you?  Have you read any of these offerings?  If not, what are you reading right now?

I know this quote is long but I encourage to reflect on what is said. Don’t just react if you disagree, but prayerfully consider our need to reassess our faithfulness. It is from Michael Lerner’s tremendous, insightful and indicting book, The Left Hand of God:

When Jews were enslaved by Egyptian imperial power, they were subjected to genocidal measures on the part of Pharoah (who sought to kill all the male children), constant physical oppression, material deprivation, and religious repression. It was in this context that they responded to the death of the Egyptian army sinking into the waters of the sea by celebrating God as “a man of war: and proclaiming, “Your Right Hand O Lord, is Mighty in Power” (Exodus 15:3–6)

Yet history often shows that this is a difficult balance to maintain, because once one justifies using violence and domination over others in some circumstances to overthrow oppressive rule, one can develop a psychological proclivity for using violence to solve one’s pressing problems.

What the prophets saw, and what has happened once again in contemporary Israel, is that the Torah tradition could be used to justify a social order that was in many respects the exact opposite of the loving message of God. When the message of the Right Hand of God, developed for the powerless, is adopted instead by the powerful, existing inequalities and systems of oppression are ignored and calls for social justice, peace and nonviolence are dismissed as pretty thoughts about some future messianic era (for Jews) or a Second Coming (for Christians). Arguing that the “real world” is too dangerous for the demands of the Torah, the Prophets, and Jesus to be taken seriously, the powerful insist that the only path to peace and social justice is to impose their own religous vision on the whole world, and to accept cruelty and injustice as inevitable until that apocalyptic transformation has taken place. The purveyors of this distortion can always refer, as they always have, to external threats as evidence that the world is not yet ready for the transformative call of the Left Hand of God.

Jesus railed against the Jewish establishment of his day, like other prophets had done in their own time, and once again highlighted a commitment to the poor and the oppressed. Jesus insisted that people not duplicate Rome’s oppressive rule in the way that they treated each other. His followers and many early Christians understood this message clearly–understood, as did the powerful in Rome, that it was a revolutionary message calling upon the faithful to reject the power of tyrants and embrace the power of love, which would ultimately be more forceful than anything Rome could deliver. Just as the message of Torah was tragically turned into its opposite by “the religious” and their establishment, so Christianity, taken over by Constantine, became its opposite, a system that provided justification for the powerful while ignoring or even actively subverting the needs of the poor and the powerless…

These perversions of Judaism and Christianity took place in the name of the original vision, drawing on the texts and the justifications that could be found there because at one point those triumphalist texts had provided needed empowerment for the poor and the downtrodden, and had been a psychologically necessary buttress against despair.

In the United States, the powerful have appropriated God and religion to justify imperial rule around the globe. They are not intent on using power to rectify the situation of the powerless. On the contrary, as their domestic moves make clear, they redistribute wealth upward from the poor to the rich. The global system of capital that they have created has had that same impact, increasing the suffering of the powerless while empowering a small class within each society to act as the guardian of the interests of Western capital in third-world countries.

The Religious Right allies with and provides much of the ideological cover for this development. It allows the powerful to worship their own power and then, taking the work of their own hands, declare it the God to be worshipped by all. This is pure idolatry. It allows America, the most powerful and arrogant of all the arrogant and powerful nations that exist today, to identify itself in its own mind with the oppressed children of Israel and thus to imagine that its use of force is divinely sanctioned.

It is long past time that we re-examine the prophets for what they have to teach us about Kingdom, Idolatry and chosenness.

This is rattling around in my head right now.  If you have the conclusive (or even a good guess) let me know.

• At what point do we, in the church, get truly serious about weighing all scripture through the person of Jesus Christ? Isn’t He the resting place for all of our conclusions and approaches to living and loving?
• Will we ever break away from our proclivity to proof-text our rationales for war, propagating poverty and elevating our spheres of concern over above the needs of those who fall outside of those spheres? God commanding war in the OT is not a good enough reason for me to blindly embrace armed conflict today.
• What moral obligation do I have to reduce poverty and be a voice for the least of these?  How far-reaching is that?  How much does that affect what I buy, where I shop, etc?
• Could it be that we have completely blown Romans 13 out of proportion and twisted it completely into an unrecognizable form from its original intent?
• What does a true ethic of life consist of?  How can I be pro-life and accept the needless death of any individual?
• When did faith get confused with certainty on every moral question?
  
• If the greatest commandments are all that, shouldn’t we be focusing a whole lot more on what it means to love God and love people?
• Can we lay aside our personal disgust on sins that particularly rankle us to have an open discussion about the true make-up of sinful behavior?
  
• Have we so marginalized women in the church that they have no outlet for their gifts and talents? If so, when do we emerge from our patriarichal stone-age?
• Is there a cure for the frustrations I feel? I’m not getting much sleep right now.

Maybe you can see why I’ve steered more toward humor and such lately.  I have to get out of my head.

Any thoughts?

My sermon was not recorded yesterday.  It really bums me because I thought it was a timely treatment of humanity that led into our discussion of stem cell research last night.

I was incredibly pleased with my congregations handling of the discussion last night.  They appeared to take a much more scientific, pro-technology stance than I anticipated.  They quickly seized on the emptiness of the “playing God” critique, the chasm between “potential human” and “actual human,” and the responsibility we have to those who are with us now.
May our ethics have the time necessary to catch up with our technology.

All of you who participated in the discussion were acknowledge at the beginning.

My next subject is Intelligent Design: or why we are so bent on being at war with science.

Give me your thoughts on this.  What do you think about the intelligent design debate? Why do we bump heads with science so regularly? How do we overcome that?

If you haven’t been following the discussion from the “Stem Cell” entry.  I want to bring some thoughts to the forefront.  Jeff Richardson argues that we need to acknowledge the inevitability of our direction and develop consistency on some important issues:

Unrestricted personal freedom – no matter how much governmental oppression it requires – is our destiny. It is a Dickian dystopia approaching quickly where personhood will become a highly subjective classification unless moral voices can somehow reverse the trend of personal choice and the veneration of human life (as opposed to its sanctity).

Christians, to be “successful” with issues like abortion, stem cell research, GMH, cloning, etc. are going to have to go back to the drawing board and develop a consistent position on human life (biology), personhood (theology) and freedom (policy). Otherwise, little by little, we will continue to lose ground on what I believe to be a “high view” of humanity.

So, I ask you, wise reader: What does it mean to be human?  How do we live as salt and life in this world?  In what ways do we best love God and love His people?

This Sunday night our topic will be Stem Cell Research.  Honestly, my knowledge on this subject is extremely limited.

What are your thoughts?  What are our moral obligations to the sick who would benefit from this?

How do we proceed and maintain a consistent ethic of human life?

What the heck is it, in the first place?

Give me your thoughts.  If I use your stuff, I’ll give you a shout-out in the podcast.

…but I deleted it.

Therefore, I will not blog today.

I was going to blog about the anger I feel about the injustice, hatred and mean-spiritedness I witness all too often in the world today.

But, I removed it, because it seemed too angry and mean-spirited on my part.

So, I’ll just keep quiet and lay low. I’ll remain quiet out of the fear of offending. I’ll still my voice in order to avoid stirring the waters of public debate and frustration.

Nope, no blogging today.

I’m probably wrong anyway.

• I’m probably wrong to care less about the USA than I do the Kingdom of God.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that war is wrong and violence is never the answer.
• I’m probably wrong to view children of Iraqi’s to be as precious as my own.
• I’m probably wrong to want my children to go to public school (even though I support Private education and have benefited from it) so they can learn at an early age to be salt and light.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that laws are often misguided and the health of a nation depends upon dissent against civil rights abuses. Maybe Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr shouldn’t be heroes of mine.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that it means something that the one time Jesus talked about judgment He did so in regards to how we treat the poor and the forgotten.
• I’m probably wrong to interpret grace into Old Testament laws of dealing with sojourners and aliens.
• I’m probably wrong to worry about genocide and AIDS in other lands when there is so much here to be concerned about like Brangelina’s baby.
• I’m probably wrong to want to love more than I judge.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that hatred runs deep into the fabric of American society–against gays, illegal immigrants, the French, Democrats, Republicans, minorities, or whatever group catches our ire at this particular point in time.
• I’m probably wrong about worrying about having too much “stuff.” I should just suck it up and buy a new car since the one I’m driving doesn’t have air conditioning in this Texas heat.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that the words of Jesus should propel us to make peace, love enemies, and deny self.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that political parties cannot be champions of the Kingdom due to differing agendas.
• I’m probably wrong to feel so discontent with the state of the church’s compassion, love and humanity for the lost, disaffected, poor and foreigner.
• I’m probably wrong to feel so much regret for all the times I’ve harbored hatred, hurled ethnic slurs, branded sinful people with vitriolic names, and supported agendas that suited me at the expense of others.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that being stewards of God’s creation means care for the creation and not just domination of it.
• I’m probably wrong to believe the greatest terrorist threat is not one of flesh and blood.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that it is a travesty that so many cannot afford insurance.
• I’m probably wrong to believe that liberals can be Christians despite what some might say.

So, instead of blogging today, I’ll just keep my mouth shut.  I’ll not unburden my heart.

Cause, I’m probably wrong.

Although I sure don’t feel like I am.

In fact, I feel like I’m getting closer to the heart of Jesus.

And I really pray I’m not wrong about that.

There are far too many people who have given their lives nobly on a day such as this.

Today, I will choose to remember these people:

Jesus

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gandhi

Tom Fox

Steven Biko

Dorothy Day

Rosa Parks

Mother Teresa

John Howard Yoder

Oscar Romero

Their contributions will not be forgotten.

“Only love can make the lion lay down with the lamb.”