Socialism Meets Capitalism

Chris Matthews finds a clip of delicious irony as multimillionaires come to Washington in their private jets to ask for a multimillion dollar handout.




I don’t understand how so many Christians can assume the superiority of capitalism while simultaneously holding the conviction that socialism is evil to its core. Personally, I think that that they both can be employed and lived out in such a way that can be either prosperous and peaceful, or oppressive and unjust. Isn't it ironic that while capitalism in its fullest has led this economy to the state that it is currently in, we are looking for a socialist solution to deal with this problem?

Are these two approaches commensurable? Can a socialistic approach be used to solve a problem that capitalism created? Or, are we creating an even bigger problem, which is being portrayed here in this video – that is, the wealthy are only going to prey on this multibillion dollar bailout not as an opportunity to address this problem, but as an opportunity to make yet another profit.

Christian or not, all would be wise to consider that Darwin based his theory of evolution on capitalism. Dr. Gerry Lower makes an interesting observation in his article, Religious Capitalism's Embrace of Social Darwinism:

In ideological terms, religious capitalism rejects evolutionary theory in favor of faith in Biblical creationism and "intelligent design" (which is truly not intelligent because it provides no meaningful insight into design or purpose). In operational terms, however, and despite all loathing of evolutionary theory, religious capitalism begins and ends by following an agenda explicitly defined by post-Darwinian political theory, i.e., "Social Darwinism"

International Relations?

I thought this was an interesting clip. Bush is at the the G20 summit with other world leaders and while everyone else is shaking each other's hands, he passes by like an ex-husband.

Ulysses

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Wine from These Grapes

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.
Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.


Reflections on the poem
Stephanie A. Hart

This is one of my favorite poems, but why would the author, a wildly promiscuous woman living in bohemian Greenwich Village at the height of the roaring 20's, care to write something which seems to evoke such a powerful image of Christ. Perhaps, Edna never meant it to be Christian, but in reading her work, I often discover religious themes coming through the pages.

Yearly around Easter time, this poem pushes its way to the foreground of my thoughts. This year, my books boxed away, I searched four libraries and the internet to find a copy. When I finally found it on a dusty shelf and turned its brittle pages, its words hit me again with their rich themes.

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

Christ was in the business of redeeming the ordinary, of taking on the hard, messy work of transformation. He did not shy away from the pain and stain of the labors that he knew would ultimately produce something wonderful. Christ was a true winemaker, from his first miracle in Cana to his last days, Christ was working in large ways and small at turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. No time for rest, his work goes on morning and noon and night.

If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Christ was in the business of transforming people, his work was in the vineyard. We are all welcome, but if we seek his council, we must be careful, Christ is in the business of transforming the ordinary. If we ask for advice, we must come to where the work is, and we may find ourselves spattered and stained and changed by it. Be careful, Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary morning and noon and night.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.

In death, his body bore the physical markings of his work. With dirt under his nails and wounds in his flesh, he could not be washed clean of all that this world had done to him. Christ was stained by his work, and as much as it transformed the ordinary around him, it also transformed his body. That body became a sign pointing to the extraordinary work of his life.

Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.

And then there is the resurrection. The duping of death who comes to find only bedclothes where a broken body should have been. This master of re-creation and transformation finds himself the ultimate example of the transforming power he came to show us all.

It is a beautiful tale for the Easter season. That Christ was in the work of redemption and resurrection of taking the ordinary and making it holy should seem an odd theme for the poetical meanderings of this wild woman of words, but maybe that is precisely where his story is best told. After all, it was a woman of ill repute that Christ met at the well, a sinner that washed his feet with her tears, a tax collector in whose house he dined, a betrayer, a doubter and a denier with whom he shared his last days and it is to us, the broken, unfaithful, dispossessed, lost, wandering, stumbling souls that he continues to come and work his redemption, looking into our lives and seeing us lost, seeing our disobedience, the searching and seeking and sulking for pleasure. It is the self-entitled rantings with which we justify our selfish actions to which he listens, as exhausted as to Peter's persistent missteps and mis-theology, continuing to offer his measured and long-suffering way to peace each time we return to him unchanged.

Christ is in the business of redeeming us, of trampling us into wine. We drift along unaware of the forces shaping us, we glut ourselves on the wrong kinds and wrong minds of thought we turn from instruction that would heal us and play the physician to our own ailing souls. And yet he is there morning and noon and night treading grapes into wine, waiting for us to join him.

I imagine that if we were to come, to lean over the Savior sagely, hoping to avoid getting spattered by this messy work of transformation, we might seek his council for a time and might even find him attentive, but eventually he would need to get back to work and eventually we would need to either join in or leave him to his labors. Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary in us all—morning and noon and night. But we are not invalids in this process, not helpless. Christ waits for us to join the work, which is daily transforming our ordinary into something divine.

We find ourselves at Easter going to the Lord's house again and again and again, to eat and be fed by this transforming, resurrecting power. We find ourselves scurrying around following the Savior, trying to keep up, trying, by our mere presence, to glean the wisdom and worth of the season without getting messy in the process. But more often than not, Christ does not transform us in this way, at least not in the long-haul. Christ has very little interest in hearing our sob stories again and again or having us trail along, trying to parse out the mundane meaning of our day-to-day, because Christ is about transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, of engaging us in the hard and often messy work of transformation.

It happens when we feed the poor or heal the sick, it happens when we listen to the lonely and comfort the dying, it happens when we visit the prisoner and pray for the struggling, and it happens when we bite our tongues of selfish words, and keep our path from selfish ways and die to ourselves for the sake of our friends, our families and even complete strangers. It happens when we take on the passion of Christ and learn to walk the way of the cross each and every day, to take the pieces of us that are ordinary and trample them into the extraordinary. It happens when we decide to stop tiptoeing around the border of Christ's work, roll-up our pant legs and step in.

From his first acts of public ministry to the final footwashing, Christ was getting dirty doing the hard work of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary morning and noon and night. The lord of the harvest, the lord of the labor and the lord of the rich reward beckons us to become a part of that service. To descend into the winepress and to arise transformed by the work. Christ longs for us to surrender ourselves to the work of the church, not because we are martyrs who thrive on discomforting ourselves, but because we are Christians, followers of Christ, and that is where Christ is leading us.

We know that Christ led a full life, we know that he had friends he held as dear as family, we know that he suffered for the Lord, and ultimately received the reward for his labors and is seated at the right hand of the Father in glory, and yet, we are still reluctant to follow in his footsteps and engage in the work he started, not because we doubt who he was, but because we are unwilling to risk the discomfort of change for the reward of transformation. We are too scared to inconvenience ourselves with the poor to receive the redemption it would bring, and we are too greedy to give up our own personal vices of hatred, of excess, of secret sin in exchange for the life altering transformation we might find. And because we live in this fear and lazily wait in the shadows for Christ to leave the vineyard, we remain unchanged—morning and noon and night.

We are content to lean sagely over the savior, allowing Christ to do the real work, gleaning anecdotal stories of service and sacrifice to continue rubber-stamping our sorry secluded and sepulchered lives, instead of joining Christ on the trampling floor and staining ourselves with work. Lord save us from the complacency of self that keeps us ordinary, save us from the complacency of the poor that keeps us unchanged and save us from the complacency of your sacrifice that keeps you in the grave all these many years.

May we join Christ where the grapes are grown, may we learn to take up the hard task of changing the ordinary into extraordinary, may we learn to daily tread grapes into wine—morning and noon and night.

Ash Wednesday

It’s about at this time of year when we become disgusted with ourselves for not being able to maintain our New Years Resolution… again. It is so frustrating to continually go through the cycle of failure, hitting rock bottom, wallowing in it for a while, wondering if there is any hope for us to be something other than we are. We then get the courage to get back up and try to overcome ourselves, usually around New Years, only to slowly slide back down the slimy slope into the slop of our miserable lives. Well…that might be a bit of an exaggeration.

For some of us our lives can often times seem like a cycle of despair, ever turning on its axis, always repeating the same things, encountering the same things, and being the same thing. As the Godfather once remarked “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” Sometimes I wonder if it is easier to get out of the mafia than it is out of some of our sinful, despairing, and sometimes even destructive cycles of life.

It is the very cyclical nature of our lives that make us sometimes wonder how we can even hope for anything else. Hope is the belief that things can and will be different. But a cycle seems to doom us to turn around to the very thing we were going away from.

How often do we let the current of the world turn us in its direction? On a global scale, we are constantly reminded of the cycle of violence in which the nations perpetually spin. On personal level, our daily lives rub up against children, coworkers, and employers who turn out the hate that has been turned into them. Racism and oppression seemed to be passed down from generation to generation as if it were as established as DNA. The cycle of violence seems to turn under a flood of ignorance and hate. Love, forgiveness and peace seem only to be a mist that is lost in the tidal wave of coercion.

How can we turn the tide that turns the wheel? How can I stop one violent act in the Middle East? How can I stop the poor from being oppressed? How can I keep parents from abusing their children?

This is the cycle in which the world has always been.
This is the cycle in which many of us have always been.
This is how our lives turn. This is how the world turns…

…this is how the world turned.
As the world turned,
Jesus turned into it,
turning the world into something new.

The old cycle, that turns off of violence and hate, is loosing power and passing away. The new cycle is gaining momentum. We do not turn the world, nor do we turn our own lives. But we place ourselves in one these two cycles: either the one that is a cycle of death, destruction, and despair, or the one that is the cycle of birth, resurrection, and new life.

Lent is a time when we show the world that our lives turn by a different flow. And of all the Christian observances, lent is the one that goes against that flow the most.

In Lent, and in other traditions of our worship as Christians, we place ourselves within a different cycle. Every year we come to remember an aspect of Christ that has already happened. Today in particular, we use ashes to help our cycle of remembrance.

These aids to remembrance are already a part of our every day lives. We use all sorts of things to aid our remembrance, as well as to aid in making a past event a present reality: fireworks in remembering a countries birth, cake and singing and gifts to remember a person’s birth, a black arm band to remember the death of a loved one, a flag at half-mast to remember the death of a political leader, a yellow ribbon to remember soldiers on foreign soil.
We even remind ourselves of things that have not yet happened: a yellow sticky note to remember an appointment, wedding invitations to remember an upcoming day in the community’s life, all sorts of electronic gizmos that hold our future of where we are to be at what time and the things we are going to do.

And so the cycle of lent turns us around to remember Jesus’ call to repentance and discipleship; a call that leads through the cross. And the cycle also turns us forward towards the resurrection and the coming of our Lord, and the braking in of the kingdom of God. These remembrances of past and future events turn around our present reality.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. At first glance this seems bleak. Indeed, all of Lent seems to be depressing. The Lenten themes are usually things that most people would want to forget. So why do we go to such great lengths to remember it? Because buried under the ash on our forehead is the reality of the life of Christ. In celebrating our death and mortality, we set the contrast by which resurrection may be seen in our lives so that the world may know it is not us that live, but Christ who lives within us.

It is a reality of our faith that is with us all year, every year, but now is the time where we allow our lives to cycle through this aspect of Christ at a slower pace. This cycle, unlike the cycle of our lives, is a cycle full of hope because it is always turning towards resurrection. There can be no crippling despair when the wheel will always turn towards resurrection.

It is also important to note that we are not the axis on which everything turns. The texts that we read on Ash Wednesday makes sure that our lives are not only being turned in the right direction, but that the turning is doing something. Our acts of worship, and the symbols we use, from the waters of baptism, to the table of Christ, to the ashes on our foreheads, are acts and symbols that are to enable us to see the reality of the kingdom of God. If these acts aren’t turning within us the desire to serve the homeless, visit the lonely, speak out and stand up against oppression, then we had better think twice about doing them. Jesus disciplined himself, Jesus gave things up, Jesus fasted, all to enable him to faithfully live out the kingdom and administer justice.

During lent, many of us alter our lives in small way, so as to help bring a particular reality of Christ into our lives. These alterations, the things we may give up, or take on, are usually things that are not in themselves bad things. In fact they are everyday common things, sometimes mundane, things that are a part of our every day life cycle. But when we give these things up, or take these things on, the cycle of our lives hits a slight bump, jarring us out of cruse-control and making us think, reminding us of Jesus’ words, Remember me? Remember me.

Unlike New Years resolutions that seem to remind us that no force of our own will is able to transform our lives, Lent teaches us that only the Holy Spirit is able to bring about any substantial transformation in our lives. While major themes of lent are discipline, repentance, and confession, these are not acts that remind us of our cyclical failure. Rather, they remind us that all of our past and future failures are followed by God’s grace and Christ’s resurrection. Lent prepares us for Easter.

The Holy Spirit moved Jesus to fast for 40 days in the wilderness to prepare himself for acts of justice, mercy and power that ultimately led to the cross. As we give up and take on during lent, we remind ourselves not only of Christ’s giving up the goodness of heaven to take on the brokenness of humanity, but that Christ’s call to confession and repentance enables us to give up our brokenness in order to take on his divinity.

Christ gives new birth to our cyclical journey through our cyclical lives, so that, as T.S. Eliot wrote,

…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

May the symbol of the ashes bring about a better awareness that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Blurring Borders in a Nation that Fears Its Neighbor

or, The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

Every year the National Wildlife Association faces the challenges of regulating the rules and guidelines of deer hunting. It seems that the prospect of getting that 8 point buck is so tempting that many hunters are willing to break the law in pursuit of this great prize.

But back in 1942, something happened that caused a dramatic drop in deer hunting. You know what it was…Bambi. That’s pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? How in the world is Bambi going to cause some big burly deer hunter to not go hunting? Two possible explanations, either they just couldn’t bring themselves to putting Bambi in the cross hairs of their thirty-alt-six, or little Jonnie Jr. wouldn’t let daddy out the door with the knowledge that he intended to blow Bambi’s head off.

It is so intriguing that one story, could so dramatically transform the way people see deer, that it would even transform a deer’s greatest enemy? But that is power of story, Bambi being the more ridiculous example. But think of the ways in which stories transform not only the way we see, but many times the way we act. Think about how stories like Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced the ways whites viewed African Americans. Think about the way in which the Movie Philadelphia or the play Angels in America helped to transform the way many American’s viewed Aids and even Homosexuality. We could all mention stories that hit us at certain times and quite literally transformed the way we see things.

It is this transformative power of story that Jesus harnesses in his parables. Jesus is not interested in giving rules and regulations, Jesus is interested in transforming the way we live and understand our lives, and more importantly, how we understand our neighbor.

Rules can prevent us from doing certain things, and force us to do others, but this is not what God desires. God does not want to prevent or force, God desires us to live a certain way because it is life as God intends it.

But the problem is, we often times like rules. We want to know exactly where the boundaries are, so that we can go just to the threshold without going over. We often want to know what the bare minimum is, because we see this life as a matter of abiding by rules so as not to be panelized in the afterlife.

And so it is no surprise that an expert of the Law comes to Jesus asking him what he must do to inherit eternal life. This lawyer believes that life is wrapped up in laws, and in the borders those laws create. Eternal life is attained by following certain rules, and this man wants to boil the laws down to its bare essentials. Out of all the laws, which ones are vital? Jesus, in typical Jesus style, leads the man to the right answer without directly stating it himself. Well, what is written in the law, what do you read there?

“Love the lord your God…and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus’ response, “do this and you will live.” That’s an interesting response, because the lawyer didn’t ask what he must do to live, but to inherit eternal life.

While I’d be done for the day if I gave the right answer in class, this lawyer still wanted to push the issue. There were no parameters laid out, no dos and don’ts, and so in his search for the boarders of the kingdom of God, he asks Jesus to define a neighbor. It is as if he cannot do anything until the borders are set up. If life, and or eternal life, is wrapped up in loving my neighbor, then I need to know who my neighbor is, right.

This is an interesting situation created by the lawyer because once you define who your neighbor is, you also define who your neighbor is not. But Jesus flat out refuses to use these categories; the categories of who’s in and who’s out are boundaries in which Jesus doesn’t play.

And so Jesus takes some of the categories of this man and completely flips them around, and puts them in a story. Why a story? Because stories have the power to transform how we see others, and possibly even how we interact with them.

And so to this Jew who is very concerned about what to do, Jesus tells a story about a Jew who did nothing. Jesus continues play with the given categories by placing the enemy as the hero who is doing the action. And then places the awkward question back in the lap of the lawyer – Who is the neighbor? Here we see Jesus not creating a border that clearly defines who’s in and who’s out, but Jesus is blurring the borders. It’s not about who’s in and who’s out, it’s about mercy.

And this characteristic of the very law in which Jesus came to fulfill. Even the law as articulated in Deuteronomy was set in place to blur certain boundaries between neighbors for the very purpose of showing mercy. In chapter 24, they are told not to harvest to the very edges, and not to take all of the olives from their trees, or grapes from the veins. Why? It is for the widows, orphans, and aliens. But it’s private property, right? Even the lines between public and private property are blurred if you obey the torah. But this is not a law to be obeyed out of blind obedience, the law, like Jesus’ parable, are to be followed because they transform the way we see our neighbor. If all during harvest time I am taking much of the harvest to feed my family, how am I going to understand the food I’m leaving? I’m probably going to start associating those widows, orphans, and aliens as my family.

How is it that so many people can see the imaginary border between Israel and Palestine as border to be defended, but cannot see it as the blurry line where mercy can be shown? Who is my neighbor? How is it that so many people can see the imaginary border between the United States and Mexico as a threat to our freedom, and not as the blurry line where we find life in providing the outpouring of our abundance? How is it that Christians can utter the words illegal and alien in the same sentence, when our law emphasizes our dependence upon welcoming aliens into our lives in order to remind us that we are all living as strangers and aliens in this world; and reminding us that just as we give shelter to the stranger, so to did God give us shelter in his body.

We are in need of practices and stories that transform the way we see each other. And that is part of what is at work when we worship together. These are no mere stories of Christ that we hear, but stories that transform the way we understand life and each other. The songs we sing are not for sentimentality, but for declaring the glory that is due God’s name. And the words that are spoken at his table are no mere words, they are words that redescribe the world. And it is an action that redescribes us into the body of Christ. So that we see no distinction between ourselves and our neighbors, but only one in Christ

And just as we are transformed by this story, may the world see us and be transformed by the lives we live, and the mercy we grant.

Sailing to Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.