Koine Community in Portland.

Lord Save Us

2012-02-16T08:17:00.001-08:00

At Operation Nightwatch Bible study this month, we've been viewing and discussing Dan Merchant's 2008 documentary film "Lord, Save Us From Your Followers--Why is the Gospel of Love Dividing America?" In one segment, Merchant looks at the culture wars and our efforts to assign blame to things like "Hollywood".

At one point, local screenwriter Mike Rich (Finding Forrester and others) comments that people ask him frequently
"Why doesn't Hollywood make more (wholesome) movies like____(fill in blank)_______?"

His frank reply? "Because people don't go to see them, that's why."

Merchant's work is quite timely because one of the prominently featured Christians on screen is now a serious contender for the GOP nomination... And so far, some of his campaign sound bites seem set to ignite a culture war all over again. http://www.lordsaveusthemovie.com/

I can't tell you how many adults and elders I have met--people in positions of leadership in churches and community institutions--who say they no longer read or subscribe to our state's largest newspaper "because there's never anything good in it."

Secretly, I wonder if their TV and cable viewing patterns would be consistent with that. Those same folks would have missed this story this week by a local secular journalist (also in the documentary film, BTW) who also cares passionately about people: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2012/02/and_some_christians_believe_in.html
So, yes, indeed. Lord, please do save us from your followers (ourselves) if we aren't humbled and inspired by these stories only because we have refused to look. Every dollar we spend, every hour we devote, shapes the community and the world we live in, for good or for ill.

As Christians, we are by definition good news people. Sometimes, it's right under our noses just waiting for us to be part of it.

Shalom,
Pastor Roger

Speaking in Tongues

2012-02-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Acts 2:3-4 NRSV

What happened back there in Jerusalem among these first believers during the festival of Pentecost?

This passage has always given me the "willies", mostly because I don't trust the experience of the people who insist that they've genuinely had it. Or that it did any good.

Apostle Paul cautioned that unless it could be made sense of by another person (interpreted) for the good of the community, the practice of speaking in tongues should mostly be shut down.

Paul gave much more weight to prophecy. Somebody needed to speak on behalf of God in a way that helped the whole faith community to do the work of God in the world.

That would inevitably mean overcoming their own internal and external obstacles.

She was as wound up as the main spring of a grandfather clock that has stopped running... when the attempt by everyone to restart it has been to wind the spring a little tighter rather than oiling the bearings and washing out the gum deposits that have brought the movement to a halt.

She spoke in fluent English. Heavily tinted with the accent of another language, her mother tongue.

She had much emotion to unload. So many disparate details that I could not begin to hold them all. She has obviously experienced some trauma in her life. How much real, how much imagined I will never know. Regardless, it's what she carries.

I listened to a ton of it. I hope it helped her to expend and release this energy. Maybe her internal pressure gage dropped a few PSI. I hope so.

It reminds me of a time when my daughter had a lot to unload. Nobody would have accused her os "speaking in tongues" as we imagine some highly spiritual and churchy experience. But she sure had a tongue of fire. And at that point in time, it was my job to hear and absorb as much of it as she could unload.

I hope the firey tongues I experienced recently from another person helped her. I know what I heard is only a portion of what she has at times experienced in life. And she carries it with her.

Maybe instead of seeking to speak in tongues as evidence of a spiritual experience we should seek to "listen in tongues". That is, can we be spectacular listeners and observers?

God help us to listen when the fiery tongues around us open up a bit. God help us to be calm in a storm.

Shalom,

Roger

Halftime in America

2012-02-07T09:19:00.001-08:00

Halftime in America...

The rusty voice of Dirty Harry stirred up the dust at the big football party. I guess. I wasn't there to see or hear it.
A video replay is available at:
http://www.oregonlive.com/playbooks-profits/index.ssf/2012/02/clint_eastwood_portlands_wiede.html

Truth be told, I sure don't miss Nixon. I also don't miss the amnesia of President Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" feel-goodism.

Same President Reagan who answered the most difficult questions concerning some presidential conduct (Iran-Contra, arms for hostages in Iran, no less) with the immortal words,
"Uh... well... I don't recall."

Truth is, he may have been telling the truth.

But long before his sad descent into Alzheimer's disease, one of his White House speech writers said that Reagan had "this marvelous ability to reinvent reality." You could play back to Reagan a recording of what he had just said 10 minutes ago, and Reagan could insist passionately and sincerely that he had never said such a thing.

His own speechwriter said that...

It may explain how President Reagan could be seen as a fiscal conservative yet embark on a $5 trillion defense buildup while never proposing one balanced budget during his eight years in office. Years later, V.P. Dick Cheney took that fumble and ran with it, crowing, "President Reagan proved that budget deficits didn't matter." Maybe not at the time...

But it's our fault as a free people, because we chose not to make deficits matter to us. If somebody could make us feel good... RR did that for some of us. For a while.

We have so much to do in this country. Amid a tsunami of negative political campaigning with tidal waves more yet to come, I found the replay of the Clint Eastwood pep talk an absolute breath of fresh air.

Next best thing was that I read that Karl Rove was "offended" by it. Really? SWELL!!!!

Personally, I've always been pretty offended by Karl Rove. He was not alone by any means, but if any one person in the USA helped steer us to the negative polarities and stagnation we are at now, it was Mr. Rove.

Here's something from Mr. Rove's bio. I read a few years ago that Mr. Rove had attended six colleges but had degrees from none of them.

There are people who are geniuses who don't need degrees. I'll grant that. And Mr. Rove was indeed a master of his craft in the same way that Bonnie and Clyde were masters of theirs. For a while.

But there are also people whose work ought to be peer reviewed. And as Apostle Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians who believed that grace had made all things "lawful" for them, even incest and feasting on idol's food, "Not all things are helpful." (1 Cor 6:12)

We might ponder this. On Sunday when the two teams were in the locker rooms, were their coaches hammering them with 99.5% negative ads?
Not all things are helpful.

Shalom,
Roger

Dreamboat II

2012-02-04T09:18:00.001-08:00

Let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming, and lay up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to befall the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine. Genesis 41:35-36.

Joseph, sold by siblings in that early record of human trafficking, becomes the voice like the one in the Simon and Garfunkel song, "Sounds of Silence."
"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls..."

That's happened more than once in history. But you can have prophetic writings all over the place to no avail if the decision makers of society never go out to read them, never ponder them in their hearts.

Pharaoh had dreams. Joseph, the foreignor of the slave-worker class, had the key. "Seven fat years," Joseph told Pharaoh, "and then seven lean ones after that." Pharaoh built a safety net. At God's direction.

How about that? World superpower, construction giant. Inventors of paper and beer, metal smelters, irrigators, sculptors, artists, scholars, historians, medical rearchers and surgeons... That's who the Egyptians were. Their legacy is still world-renowned.

But God doesn't set them up for extinction by giving them seven fat years so that they over-build, over-spend and over-consume, only to die off when they are totally unprepared for the seven years of famine. God gives them the safety net through Pharaoh's dreams and Joseph's interpretation.

Pagan privilege or wisdom of the ages?

Mitt Romney says he's not concerned about the very poor because they have "the safety net." If it's in need of repair, he'll fix it. So he says.
If he becomes president of these Divided/United States of America (read 99:1), I intend to nail his unsoiled lapels to the wall holding him accountable.

"The" safety net. Boy, I'd give my last dollar to have him define that for me. "The" safety net is a monolithic, universal, one-size-fits-all glove that absolutely fixes everything for everybody in need?

Probably how he sees it from his perch. Goes around in $100 ironed blue jeans, pressed shirts and manicured hair trying to look like one of the rest of us. Sure.

Complains about needed defense budget cuts and troop reductions (gotta rein in that gov't spending, right?)... Wants to add 100,000 to the numbers of troops in uniform. Says nothing about dollars. Sure. Maybe he'll pay them out of interest earnings from his blind trusts and offshore accounts. Sure.

Just witnessed over a decade of war on two fronts, 85K American troops still in Afghanistan, complains about government spending without talking about how to finance wars, yet has five healthy sons, not ONE of whom has spent a single day in uniform in service of this country.

Yet there are thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and their families who have seen two, three, four, five or more deployments. One deployment for every one of his kids...

Nice that these military familes without jobs have "the" safety net. Nice that he and his family have had these underlings to serve as the Romney family's safety net in a decade of having our nation at war on two fronts.
It ain't too late for any of 'em to enlist. The election doesn't happen for nine months yet.

I must confess disillusionment. For years, I've heard it again and again and again. All the business of wasteful spending on poor people. Wasteful spending on mental health services, treatment for addictions, housing, infrastructure that would help people without cars get to jobs--if they existed, wasteful spending on schools and such frills as arts and music, as if man could live by math and science alone. All the ways we cut off the hands and fingers of God... I've heard it. And I get it.

There are people who believe that every last dollar ever spent by government is a wasted dollar and that the way to fix any safety net is to so thoroughly cut holes in it that anything in the net falls completely through it and into the abyss.

Then, to use the succinct description of H. Ross Perot, "problem solved!"
COMMENT: H. Ross Perot would never advocate what I've just said; but many talking heads today would. And do. And in all fairness to them, I actually believe that Mitt Romney really is a moderate by comparison.
I suspect that wealth can blind us, though. I don't know for sure because I'm not wealthy. And God knows, I never will be. So I don't know. Just living out my own prejudices, I guess.

But this much I do know. If Pharaoh ran on the platform of a seven year safety net that included the people of Matthew 25:40, I'd vote for that dude. In a heartbeat.
He'd be my dreamboat.

Seven years of holidays, and all I see is the sea...

Father, give us leaders who can really see.
Father, give us leaders who haven't spent their whole lives in prosperity.
Father, rasie up for us prophets like Joseph and Jesus.
And, Father, give us leaders who can walk a cubit in Pharaoh's sandalprints. Amen.

Shalom,
Roger

Dream Boat Afloat

2012-01-31T10:54:00.000-08:00

"Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet..."

So went the all-American jingle of radio commercials for Chevrolets perhaps 15 years ago. Even then, nobody cared to say how many of the parts in a Chevy were actually made here.

But the baseball metaphor hit home during the dog days of summer.

Metaphors are a tool for us to understand and describe things by their similarity to other things we know.

A popular one trotted out a few years ago by the politics-of-scarcity machine was this one:

"A rising tide lifts all boats."

It's another way of saying that if the economy gives rich people (big boats) a lift (more money, more stuff), it will surely do the same for poor people (little boats). Hey, they all "float", right?

Yeah, but what if you don't have a boat? What if you are about exhausted and treading water?

What if you are standing on the muddy bottom right now on tippytoes and just barely able to point your nostrils above the waves and ripples?

A rising tide may indeed lift the boats. But if you have NO boat, buddy, you just might drown. Oh, well...

He let the H2O get above his ears, ya know? Or....?

Our human nature is corrupt, sinful. Unless modified by God's grace, our default position is too often that of blaming the poor.

It reminds me of the cartoon I saw many years ago in a humor magazine published in the Soviet Union. Even the Commies sometimes hoped to distract people's attention from their grim existence by poking a little fun. And criticism. And blame.

The cartoon went like this. A man with a beer gut and a red nose (clearly a vodka addict) is standing in his baggy trunks on a lake shore. Just offshore there is a sign that reads:

"Depth 20 meters. Persons unable to swim should not permit the water to come past their necks."

People with no boats should not permit the rising tide to come past their necks. OK. That's the "hope" of people who have had their measly little leaky tubs taken out from under them so that the materials can be used to build bigger yachts for the boat owners?

Good luck with that, non-swimmers.

The Bible is all over the policy of having boats so big that we can't see over the side to notice the people drowning for lack of flotation. Unequivocally so. It ain't God-like. Not according to Amos, not according to Isaiah, not according to Leviticus, not according to Paul, or Jesus or James.

The Bible takes the upside down view of things. Everyone first needs a boat. Then, the same tide that lifts the small ones will in turn lift the larger ones. It has to. By definition. The God of Creation who invented physics, gravity, specific gravity and flotation by displacement made it so. In the beginning.

Our task is to get everybody into a boat: ours, their own, or someone else's. Whatever it takes. Then, the tides won't matter so much. God doesn't think much of drowning, wants the water to come no higher than anyone's armpits. Ever.

Ain't much praise in a drowning victim. Ain't much glory there either.

But a new boat owner might just sing for joy. And folks might even hear the pleasant music of that aboard the adjacent yacht with the champgne, caviar and white table cloths up there on the sundeck. Might be the sweetest music they (we) ever heard.

Dream boat afloat.

Whatever it takes....

The baseball metaphor has us looking for the home run most days. Only the home run. Seems like unless we're absolutely sure we can hit that grand slam homer, we're afraid to swing at anything. Maybe we need a thousand singles instead. Millions of 'em. Maybe...

Just get on base. Drive in one run at a time. Nobody left in the dugout. Nobody struck out. Nobody called out. Safe at home. With a boat.

Time to think outside the batter's box, outside the boat, outside the metaphor.

So that the boatless among us get in on the flotation.

Dreamboat. Afloat.

"Someone's singing, Lord, kum ba yah..."

Shalom,
Roger

An Epiphany and a Sign of the Times

2012-01-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's a sign of the times. Churches have all kinds of signs, many they don't recognize as such. Often the ones most in need of repair and renewal aren't the ones with paint, lights and materials.

They are the ones with legs and a voice. Or none.

Pastor Rob Bell founded a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's called Mars Hill Church.

Same name except no relation to the multiple campi in Washington and now in Portland. No relation except that both proclaim Christ.
Albeit quite a bit differently at times. Yeah, quite differently.

Funny thing about the church in MI. It never had a sign. Skeptics of Jesus asked for signs to know who he was.
Jesus appeared on earth with no man-made signs. Signs in the heavens, for sure; but they became very sparse right away. But the most ubiquitous and out-of-his-control signs Jesus depended on were the simple signs on a few people's lips:
"Come and see."

Rob Bell's church never had a sign out front. When people asked why not, he always replied, "You found it, didn't you?"

? !

In announcing his decision to leave so that his church could trust its beginnings and its identity by trusting God, Bell answers quite succinctly for all time what the church is. Who the church is. How to find it.

It's in a very short paragraph on page 8 of his letter to Mars Hill. http://marshill.org/teaching/files/2011/12/dear-mars-hill.pdf
It's his anwer to that nagging question about why the church has no sign. His more direct answer here begs that we pay attention to it.

Has the church ever needed any other kind of sign?
I don't think so. But read Bell's little essay and see what you think.
Could be a sign of the times.
Could be an Epiphany, our celebration of God's appearing on earth.
In US, for God's sake!
Yes, in us. For God's sake.

Shalom,
Pastor Roger

Holy of Holies

2011-12-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

Partly because I know the landscape and the sights and smells and weather, the juxtaposition of salt water and fresh in modern day Istanbul, I pause about many things we still take for granted in our worship and practice of the Christian faith in churches today. For it was in Istanbul, formerly Byzantium, formerly Constantinople, that the worship life of the Christian faith got itself tangled up with the trappings of royalty, the processional grandeur of the imperial court.

Hagia Sofia, the church begun by Emperor Justinian in AD 536, still stands on one of the city’s hilltops. If there was a place where the deadly prosperity gospel may have first reared its ugly head to become the official iteration of the church, perhaps it was here in this maritime city that is more like Seattle than Phoenix--our usual impression of anything and everything in the Middle East.

Hagia Sofia was a Christian church for over 900 years before it became a mosque. The minarets were added much later. One at a time. They don't match. It was a mosque for twice as long as the United States has been a country. It's been a state museum for nearly a century. I know what it looks like and feels like and smells like inside, how worn many of the stones are in the floor and doorways.

That fascination with pageantry, with clerical robes and vestments, bejeweled artifacts, "sanctuaries" veiled behind screens, became the order for worship that was supposed to trickle down to the provinces. How ironic that when Jesus on the cross yielded up his spirit, the veil in the temple was rent asunder, from top to bottom, from one end to the other. Completely. Totally. Irreparably. It was torn "ANOTHEN", according to the Greek.

Jesus opened the Holy of Holies. The Imperial Church with its grandeur seemed to close it off again in so many ways.

Anothen... That's the same adverb Jesus used in his conversation with Nicodemus when he told him that he must be born "from top to bottom". How utterly poor our translation "born again" in this passage! Jesus was hinting at something that defies description in human experience, leaving us almost tongue-tied. It should.

It's not something that I think Jesus would ever have said needed the special protection of a sanctuary, a closed circle of special practitioners with special Gnostic knowledge and initiation.

Conversely, what the church and its worship became here in Constantinople, thanks in large part to its unholy alliance with Constantine--even its celebration of the passsover meal of the brand New Covenant--seems to have become the polar opposite of the "breaking of the bread" by which the Emmaus travelers recognized the risen Christ on Easter evening.

It takes two or three gathered, not a cathedral...

When the church became royal and imperial, it also became territorial hierarchical. Bloodily so. Oh, God, bloodily so! The most troubling book that modern Christians could ever read would not be the work of atheists, Communists, Nazis, racists, libertarians, the KKK, or space aliens.

It just might be our own story, The Story of Christianity, a masterfully researched and unemotionally told tale by Cuban-American scholar Justo Gonzalez. It's required reading for many seminary students. Might help if a few more folks in the pews had cracked the covers.

The book forces us to take a long, hard look at what we have been. At what we have done. In the name of religion, in the name of an establishment, in the name of hierarchy, and fiefdoms, and property and cathedrals, in the names of kings and queens and princes and thrones.

The Desert Fathers were apalled by what they saw going on in Constantinople. They fled to save their consciences. Unfortunately, that was no solution either. Most of the people in the cities, towns and villages had families and crops to tend. They could not go out to the wildernesses to find healing and guidance. Those tasks were always the responsibility of the church from the get-go. But too much of that mission got lost when the church became royal, imperial, territorial, wealthy and addicted to itself.

How many sectarian wars? How many denominational splits? How much abuse of vulnerable people in monastery, convent, college, church bathroom, priestly quarters or at youth campout? How much of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was built on the fear-induced offerings of souls held hostage by a tyrannical and corrupt priesthood?

To be sure, even in dark times, much good work has always been done. Even clerics holding the power of life and death in their hands could not stop the humble spirit of Christ in the hands and feet of his true servants.

Still, huge tragedies persisted. Modern ones do, too. How many modern worship wars over liturgical style, hymn books, the color of carpet in the narthex, paint on the walls, the volume and tempo of music played?

Kind of like the tragic life of a gifted artist who is also a drug addict.

As Augusutine said, "The church is a whore but she is still my mother." Yeah, a whore and a druggie both. Often, by choice, it seems. Still, our mother.

Today, some friends bemoan in their Christmas messages the dearth of creches and Nativity displays. I wonder... They see the change as empirical proof that we live in an anti-Christian age. As if Christmas decorations could change that. Or should. I wonder...

As a child I memorized Luther’s Small Catechism. It was required. I still recall this explanation of “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, the third petition of the Lord’s prayer: “The good and gracious will of God is done indeed without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that it may be done among us also.” It doesn’t depend on plastic decorations made in China, nor on constructions cut locally from plywood.

If we want to be strictly biblical, it doesn’t seem that the Eastern astrologers bearing gifts were ever there side by side with the shepherds. The infant in the manger was not born to have a life apart from the cross. The serenity of the supposed “silent night” cannot be savored apart from Herod’s slaughter of children and the little family’s recapitulation of flight into Egypt without which there could be no Exodus from it.

If there’s a model of where and how God works, we might consider a refugee family today. The homeless man, self-medicated and asleep in the doorway...

We can have perfect and comprehensive knowledge of what happened in events past, or at least convince ourselves that we do. But unless we know what these events mean, we really have little more than an empty symbol. In every time and every age, the Lord reigns, and Christ’s church needs renewal. Resurrection is possible only when there has been a death. Whatever we mourn as a death is passing, however, because re-birth is going on regardless. The church, ironically or perhaps not, has had its most vibrant life in times of severe adversity. Angels call to us today to look about for that re-birth. It is always ahead of us, never in the past.

The good and gracious will of God is done indeed without our prayer… even without our decorations. It is always done first, if Scripture and the Incarnate Word are at all reliable witnesses, among poor, hungry and lonely folks carrying burdens larger than themselves.

Instead of asking where the creches and Nativity displays have gone, perhaps this season and any season we'd do better to ask ourselves this question:

Whom do I know by name and life story that I otherwise would not know, were it not for the fact that I know Jesus of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Calvary and Emmaus?

That may be all the decoration we'll ever need in life. God works anothen. The undecorated Gospel is anothen, not sentimental.

Shalom,

Pastor Roger

Occupy ONW 10/23/11

2011-11-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

Occupy ONW 10/23/11. . .

Sunday afternoon on the way to Operation Nightwatch worship, I stopped by Occupy Portland again. Talked with a pair of guys holding signs and waving to cars at the stag fountain in the middle of SW Main Street. One remarked on the ironic location right between City Hall and the Justice Center jail. “I think,” he said, “that’s why Jesus told us to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.” He said we needed to stick together to change some laws. The other young man added, “We need to stick together to change some hearts.” We all agreed we needed both.

I thought about the demonstrator’s words as I drove up SW 13th Avenue to set up for Sunday worship. The words on the demonstrator’s heart came right out of the gospel text for the evening: Matthew 22:34-46. It was an easy lesson to preach. The evening brought us folks with some extra cares weighing on their hearts. There were some extra things to pray about. And there were some extra opportunities to do what the scripture reading said: to love those around us in prayer and the excellent meal we shared, thanks to Judy and Dave.

The picture on the worship bulletin came out of the Occupy PDX camp. A boxboard sign taped to a canopy reads “TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER”. I’ve seen people doing that for years at Operation Nightwatch. It was our mission of hospitality before it ever became a movement. Occupy ONW! Yeah, we do that! Amen.

Flying Leap

2011-08-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who want to lose their life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:25

After the torrential floods in Pakistan last year, the famished and thirsty refugees nearly overwhelmed the first aid helicopters to arrive. Hang enough hungry bodies on the landing gear or the basket for carrying litter patients, and you could probably pull it right out of the sky.

One of my favorite collections of music is by Canadian poet/sing/songwriter/social conscience Bruce Cockburn. On one of his songs from many years ago, he is taking the International Monetary Fund to task for lending money to nations as a stop-gap measure, not enough to turn things around without massive outside planning and management, but keeping them on the hook for the debt:

"IMF, dirty MF, takes everything it can get; always making sure that there's one thing left: keep them on the hook with insupportable debt..."

Mild. Cockburn's harshest words are in the song "And They Call it Democracy". I won't print 'em here. Go look 'em up. Take a listen. Cockburn says we don't give a "flying leap" about the people in misery. Except he dosen't call it a flying leap. Another word with four letters.

And think about how our country has partnered with the most bloodthirsty tyrants in the past to forward our "national interest" and "national security" and "economic growth" (aka cheap oil). These include Manuel Noeiga, the Shah of Iran, Pervez Musharraf and Saddam Hussein, among others.

This past weekend they were supposed to dedicate the memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm glad we were forced to wait. Maybe give us some time to think about what he stood for, what he was able to think, and what he had the guts and the divine call to say out loud: We don't really give a flying leap about the people in misery.

And we think we have democracy.....

And we think the church we see around us isn't part of the scam...

Only if WE keep it from being so. Only if WE drag it, kicking and screaming in another direction.

More on the Matthew passage in the next post.

There are some new developments in that cross Jesus calls us to take up as we follow.

Dog Tags: Summer of 42 Years

2011-08-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

August 15. 1969.

Date of enlistment. Got up while it was dark, had a quick bite of breakfast, then drove to downtown Omaha, NE with Mom and Dad in their '62 Ford Galaxie 500 4-dr sedan.

Couple of hours later, after being poked and probed and prodded for the second time by military medics, I was the proud owner of these. Dog tags.

They say "NO REL PREF". No religious preference. Such was or were the times. I also have on the chain the little Lutheran cross given me by Rev. Carl Hellmann a few days prior. It would be a long day of waiting before a bus took us to Eppley Airfield in Omaha where would would board a flight for Dallas, Texas. We would land at Dallas Love Field, then board a second flight (Boeing 707, as I recall) that would fly us through a Texas thunderstorm before we finally landed in San Antonio.

I'd flown a whole bunch the summer before to Europe, all over Europe, and back. Had flown to San Francisco and back Christmas '68. No big deal. We arrived on Lackland AFB close to midnight, as I recall.

Then the yelling began. Were herded off to the "Hell's Kitchen" midnight chow hall for a meal, then herded to the barracks building in the 3708th BMTS Squardron, bay B8, Basic Training Flight. The yelling continued for the next six weeks.

All began 42 years ago today.

How time flies.

2011-08-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

August Recession, maybe...

Been a tough couple of months. Lots of things in the way of getting work done. FAA obstacles. FAA shutdown because Congress is reflecting the blindness and polarization around us. Except in Washington, DC it's all imprisoned in the endless quest for campaign contributions and the prospects for the next election. It can't possibly be about doing the work at hand and actually going somewhere.

A friend wrote this morning that he thought things are the way they are because God wants them that way. I don't think I can agree. I wrote back:

An old Air Force buddy maintains that people don't change when they see the light. They change when they feel the heat. He also says he believes in social Darwinism. It's kinda scary because it's a short hop from his view to Hitler's master race. The persistent cry of the prophets and Jesus himself was justice and compassion for the poor. Unfortunately, well-to-do folks can insulate themselves pretty well and let or force others take the heat. Our leaders today are using the wrong approach. One the one hand, they have disparaged the wealthy. It made me ill to hear the number of times President Obama invoked the phrase "corporate jet owners" in recent days.

At the same time, people are enraged by what they often perceive as a government-operated redistribution of wealth, meaning from have to have-not. At the same time, the haves control the power of regulation and politcial decision making at nearly all levels. So they will always act in selfish self-interest, meaning the system will be rigged so that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor--unless the hearts of the rich are formed to another kind of self-interest that says "I'm not doing well unless my neighbor is; none of us does well unless we all do".

Trickle down economics didn't work in the time of the prophet Amos. They don't work today. They never will. I'm nothing but dumbfounded that Bible toters today can't see this. Looking around can be discouraging. I'm certainly discouraged. But I don't believe the prophets said that the poor are being screwed over because God is in control and God wants it this way. They said the opposite. So the preachers and prophets and leaders of today have a responsibility, indeed, a divine calling, to point another way and call the people to repentance. What has been completely lacking in our national discourse is a sense of direction, a place to go. It's as though Moses expected to sway Pharaoh with name-calling and mud-slinging and then expected the people to follow him into the wilderness with no sense that their destination was the Promised Land, or that there even was a Promised Land.

I won't blame God for anything until my fingernails are gone and my fingertips bloody from clawing at the obstacles. As one of my inspirations, Canadian songwriter/poet Bruce Cockburn, sang years ago, "You've got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight." And Crosby/Stills/Nash sang during the Vietnam War, "The darkest hour is always just before the dawn".

Pretty dark. Maybe we're about 2:30-3:00 AM here. A little while to go yet. People have to start being honest, they have to get real. In order to close our budget gap, there needs to be universal sacrifice. It must be shared but it can't be shared equally. Those who have more ability will have to do more, not because we hate them but because they are the only ones who actually have the resources to do more. Things like the mortgage interest deduction on income taxes will probably have to go. Tax rates for the wealthiest will have to go up. Spending will have to go down.

Health care costs will have to go WAY down. The spears of war spending will have to be beaten into the pruning hooks of peace spending. Farm subsidies for things like corn that gives us obesity and diabetes and heart disease will have to go down or end. People will all have to take more responsibility for their own health and fitness, walk more, drive less, play more sports, watch less TV/video. Not because these things are evil, but because there is a better place to go, a much better way to live.

We will have to make more of what we need here, not bring it in from China on the cheap. Walmart will have to go back to its red-white-and blue roots. And so will we. We will have to pay a little more, but the result of doing so will pay us back many times over. And we'll have sto stop worshiping the god of war and start following the way of Jesus.

Until we have leaders who can speak courageously that this is not the coward's way but in fact the most courageous way and the way of Christ, we'll continue to wander in the wilderness and be beset by poisonous serpents. So we'll have to grow a whole new generation of spiritual leaders who have a clue about how the world works, who know how poplitics work, who can actually follow the money, and aren't afraid to call Caesar to account the way Jim Wallis has.

To have listened to the ridiculous efforts of Christian leaders over the past 20 years or so, you'd get the idea that God was obsessed with one thing and one thing only: sex. Maybe it says that the Christian leaders themselves were obsessed with sex--as many of their personal lives so agonizingly revealed. God is self-sacrificingly obsessed with the care and redemption of all that he has made. That involves justice for the poor, liberation from our exploitative, consumptive, war-directed lifetsyle. God's way is not an austere way, not a way of misery. It is a way of blessing and a way of abundance, a way of life that is the only way to be about what he created us for, LIFE itself.

It's life that is not full of stuff but full of meaning. Conservatives don't get this or they would be at the very forefront of conserving God's creation instead of steadfastly denying that we are selfishly, hoggishly killing it. Liberals don't get this because they seem to be too weak and inarticulate to stand for and fight for anything. One has the god of stuff. The other has the god of self. Maybe they both have both.

They could not have given us a broader opening. As followers of Christ, we are called to be something entirely different. We are called to be salt, to have a flavor, to actually taste like something beneficial and useful and necessary. We are not called to turn the whole world into salt and nothing but salt. Nothing grows in a salt desert.

And we are called to be light, the kind of light Jesus was and is. 2:30 AM. Maybe 3:00. The clock is not standing still.

R.

The Grieving that Lingers for Life

2011-06-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day and Veterans Day are special times of grieving for me. It happens on many levels. First, I grieve the loss of good friends. Second, I grieve the burden borne by their families and loved ones–as well as countless others. It is these endless stirrings that led me years ago to write and produce a 2-hour drama as a tribute and a fundraiser. Preparation for that production led me to Washington, DC, for three days to take photographs on the National Mall, some of which I would use in production.

While I was there over that period, something unexpected happened. By that time, the trilogy of the Vietnam memorials (the Wall and the two bronze sculptures) was in place. It didn’t take long for a person with half an eye to see that something was different about the Vietnam memorials. They spoke of war with an entirely different vocabulary. The glory was gone. The classical allusions to imperial power of Greece and Rome were gone. There were no screaming eagles with bared talons, no chariots, no horses in full gallop with fire-breathing nostrils. Perhaps for the first time, the memorials created to give expression to the experience of Vietnam put a human face on war.

To prove to myself I wasn’t imagining things, I took the better part of a day getting to every other piece of bronze and marble sculpture I could get to on foot and by Metro, including Arlington. The only thing that comes remotely close (that I found) is the Iwo Jima bronze, but its focal point is more the flag than the figures themselves.

Going back to the Wall, then, and to the Women Veterans of Vietnam sculpture, cemented what I had come to see and the role I have played ever since in giving verbal expression to the human experience of war and its costs.

When we speak today of freedom and the human costs of war we are always walking in occupied territory where objectivity and subjectivity have been put into a blender along with the deepest human emotions. The going must be slow and careful.

As each year I seek to give voice on behalf of the Vietnam generation, and now the Iraq/Afghan generation, I find the reality of the human experience, not how we may have idealized it or politicized it, to be the genuine article.

I think of my boyhood friend Wesley who, with less than three weeks to go, gave his life to retrieve the body of a mortally wounded medic he likely did not even know. Wes died for a set of remains and thus became remains himself. His family could only take small comfort that Wes had been so unselfishly loyal to a fellow soldier and his unknown family back in the States, but they could never convince themselves that Wes’ sacrifice had been for the cause of freedom.

And my late friend Jack who had countless human lives on his hands from the ordnance fired from his Cobra had absolutely no way of differentiating “the enemy” from the elders and the children who might have been inside those grass-roofed houses that went up in flames. He struggled with how to think of himself as a moral human

being all his days. Talk of fighting for freedom could enflame him because there was such a chasm between the rhetoric of the time and what he saw and did.

It’s true, of course. Freedom is not free. The price is high, indeed. But for me, we essentially had that fight back in the American Revolution. And for me the Civil War was not primarily about state’s rights or slavery but over the definition of humanity and citizenship–and we didn’t come close to settling it with 600K lives lost. Since then, WWII included, I think America’s wars have been primarily about security.

And security from attack by another nation state or from terrorism by a homicidal ideology is very different from freedom as established by the Constitution and the laws of our nation. Security is maintained by vigilance always and by fighting occasionally when and where we must. But freedom, for me, is maintained only by the full exercise of citizenship by an educated and invovlved people who in their hearts and minds are willing to take the effort and pay the price of doing so. That’s not free either, and it certainly does not happen unless WE do it 24/7/365.

Karen Zacharias is right. The Congress is tasked with having the discussion and making a DECISION about where and when and how and what for to send men and women of the armed forces into harm’s way. But Congress are not our rulers. They are our servants. It comes back to us.

For me on Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and other days, the mourning returns not only over the loss of life but more frequently over the loss of discussion and sense of the bigger picture of citizenship here. One of my spiritual mentors once admonished to “watch our language”. I think he’s right. When we use the term “freedom” in place of “security” it tends to close the door to discussion. To question then seems disloyal. When responsible discussion stops, freedom ceases. When our nation’s alliances and interventions in the world in the name of security or freedom are colored by narrow economic interests that control the debate, we become both less secure and less free. The military cannot and will not fix this. It’s not their job.

Only the locus of freedom, “we the people”, can fix this. We do this by using our eyes and our heads and our voices. As the most empowered people the world has ever seen, the opportunities we have are nearly limitless–unless we choose not to excercise them at all. Or unless we think it’s only the job of the military “over there somewhere”.

The British churchman Tarney once observed that “the church that ceases to think ceases to count.” Seems like it’s true for our nation--or any nation. We only get one chance to do that while we're on the sunshine side of one of these.

This has been my attempt to think out loud, not for my benefit but for the benefit of all.

May the next person now come along to help us all think better than me. Amen.

Heaven and the World

2011-05-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

Heaven and the World

In the World. . . all girls look like high school sweethearts
voices all the song of angels
their touch the breath of God, back there
Back home in Heaven and the World...

Back in the World, fireworks fan only Fourth of July fun, not fear
doors slammed by the wind ignored
dreams all end in restful sleep
In Heaven and the World.

In Heaven, mothers always arrive there first
not long years after their young sons
they shed no tears on sunny days for seemingly no reason
Dads don't go for long and longer drives alone, oblivious of the season
in Heaven.
Girls have grown up to be women never leaving
homemade notes on distant granite walls
collages, plastic covered photos of a youthful man in uniform
posters asking, "Did you know my Dad?"
Boys today are men who never wondered, "How much am I like him?"
And children never grew to celebrate first years of life
synonymous with their fathers' last
In Heaven and the World...

In Heaven, gold stars are simply local scenery galore
not adjectives describing mothers, families, wives
no logo on the door of households changed forever
In Heaven, no memories of things you cannot tell your soul
come hell, high water, enemy all about
nothing there unutterable, unspoken, unresolved
In Heaven...

and in the World today
Pray God keep these names we number
Pray God grant them rest in Heaven's grace
Pray God keep alive a dream that slumbers
of life beyond a world at war with all that gives us life.
Pray God keep alive that peace
surpassing human understanding,
healing all our weariness here assembled.

Pray God multiply this grace
Pray God ever sanctify this place
And pray we live and die to see His face
In Heaven and the World.

© 2007 by Roger D. Fuchs, Portland, OR 97230-6151. All Rights reserved. 701120

Heaven and the World. For those serving overseas when I did, especially those in Vietnam, the World, capital “W”, was back home, the idealized version of home so unlike Vietnam that it was practically heaven.

As John Ketwig, author of “And a Hard Rain Fell” wrote, the World was a 396 Chevelle with cheater slicks. The World was the back row at the drive-in movie on a summer night with your girlfriend and her sweet perfume. The world was cold beer, hot coffee and just about everything you and I so easily take for granted on a daily basis. The World was populated with round-eyed, energetic young girls like the ones above who on 5/21 helped to prepare the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Living Memorial for the ceremony tomorrow. The World, that dream, kept many a soldier alive and sane and still does today.

Perhaps instead of discounting this dream that kept the soldiers going we would do well to make their dreams our goal and destination. Perhaps our task is to make the world a little more like heaven so that heaven is more like the world.

Today, I dedicate this poem to Jim and Marilyn Weisenburg of SE Portland. Their son David J. Weisenburg of the 2/162 Oregon National Guard was killed by an IED in Taji, Iraq on September 13, 2004. The Weisenburg Family has carried on with grace and faith through the loss of a beloved son but far, far more. They are a shining example of the ordinary and extraordinary Oregon families that make “the World” worth living and dying for.

Sounds of Silence, Part II

2011-05-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Hello, darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again..." (Simon and Garfunkel, from the Sixties)

Heard anything about soldier suicide lately? Divorce?

If the journalism of today is the answer, what is the question?

I maintain that we get exactly what we pay for in terms of the dollars or hours we spend. While the nation has gone nuts over the failed Judgment Day prediction for May 21, and its current replacement date in October, lives and families are being shed by the stress of war and repeated deployments. How many of us have actually asked "the media", any form of it, for different content? Better yet, how many of us have contacted advertisers and asked them to pull their dollars?

We are the most empowered people the world has known but exercise little of it. I'm 64 years old, and I have yet to meet one of my peers or any member of my extended family who ever bothered to write a single letter, either pro or con, re the Vietnam War. Postage was only 6 cents back then, and you'd think that over the span of 15 years most would have written multiple times, given the cost and the omnipresence of that war. So much for government "of the people and by the people".

Here are some now old stats from Chuck Dean's 1988-90 book "Nam Vet" in which he describes his journey to healing for self and help for other vets:

*Of vets married before going to Vietnam, 38% were divorced within 6 months of returning.

*Divorce rate for all Vietnam veterans is in the 90th percentile.

*40-60% of all Vietnam veterans have persistent emotional adjustment problems.

*Accidental death and suicide rate for Vietnam vets was (then) 33% above national average.

*While 58K+ actually died in the war, over 150,000 had (as of 20 years ago) committed suicide.

*500K had been arrested or incarcerated; between 100 and 200K were in prison or on parole.

*D&A abuse problems ranged between 50 and 75%.

*40% were unemployed and 25% earned less than $7K per year.

From the current wars, we are now beginning to see them on the streets: young men self-medicating on more than marijuana and alcohol of yore. Their decline on meth is stunningly rapid.

Recently, author Karl Marlantes was on public radio here to talk about his Vietnam novel "Matterhorn" now out in paperback. One statement was sobering. At a book signing recently a young couple came up. As he signed the book, the young wife started to cry. Her husband was shipping out again soon. Marlantes asked the young soldier, "Your second deployment?" "No, sir," the soldier replied, "my seventh."

While somewhere around 80% of the names on the Wall in DC were men not old enough to vote, I once took slight comfort in the ages of the KIA's reported regularly in the paper: usually in the mid- to upper-20's. Very small comfort, really. Maybe with only one tour under their belts, these later 20-somethings would do a little better upon return than the 19- or early-20's vets of the Vietnam War. But with multiple tours for nearly all of them, I see nothing at all to be encouraged about.

It's mostly too late now, but I will suggest this in writing to the local newspaper editor (after I get my daughter's car fixed today): in addition to name, age, rank and branch, hometown, unit and casualty info, I'd like to know this number for EVERY reported casualty: NUMBER OF DEPLOYMENTS.

http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/northwest-passages-karl-marlantes/

Pray for our invisible soldiers and their young families. Nobody you talk to this week will honestly know the current rate or total of solider/family suicides.

And the numbers reported above for Vietnam vet suicides are two decades old and way low. WAY low.

No way? I could only wish.

Practicing Resurrection

2011-05-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

During prayer time at our worship last evening, a guest from Hawaii asked that we pray for those whose predictions had yet again proven wrong. We prayed for humility, for the wisdom to leave to God the things that are God's. I read some words a while back that have proven very useful: "It seems that some believers have been saved from death without being brought to life." Amen. What good is my life unless it is filled with life each day?

A story. On Saturday, I sat in on the second installment of a 90-minute intverview/dialogue at the downtown Central Library. The series is called "A Mile in my Shoes." Each week, a different guest is interviewed by Emily Harris, formerly with NPR, now back home at Oregon Public Broadcasting. What's it like to be Muslim? What's it like to be homeless? What's it like to be a victim of sex trafficking? These questions...

The homeless man (he prefers to say "I sleep outside") is a very intelligent and articulate man with rather severe bipolar disorder. I wish everyone had heard him. He's a felon with a record with some drugs in his past; needs legal drugs to help manage his condition and stay right side up. His dreams? Go back to college and finish his degree in psychology, specifically eco-psychology and start a D&A rehab program outside the city where residents can plant, nurture and harvest the crops whose bounty they will enjoy and be healed by. He has an integral view of living in the Kingdom of God, although he might not call it the KoG.

I don't give the prophets who expropriate God's domain a second of my time because there is so much living to do. Now. And the man with BPD shows us what it means to be both saved from death AND brought to life.

As Simon and Garfunkel wrote so many years ago, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls." We'd do well to pay attention. They are right before our eyes. God put them there.

Have a blessed life. Live.

Amen,

Roger

May 21--and beyond... South Sister and Heaven

2011-05-19T12:26:00.001-07:00

If May 21 is "Judgment Day", so be it. Been ready since January 12, 1947, the day I was baptized as an infant. Meanwhile, I've been to the mountaintop a time or two. Gives me a climpse of heaven... Or heaven's garbage dump. Ha!

Imagining Heaven

I cannot imagine heaven
unless there are mountains in it
Cannot imagine majesty beyond
Jagged rock and snow against the sky.

What sound would ever be heard from
quickened mighty winds
Unless they blew against the rocks and trees
That reach into the clouds?

Whenever I am blessed, or someday glorified
Whenever I am lifted to eternal life
Oh please, oh please let there be mountains!
Such places for the soul to soar!

For I could not imagine heaven
If mountains were no more.

- -Roger Fuchs
above Golden Lake/South Sister

© 1995, 2003, Roger D. Fuchs, Portland, OR 97230. All rights reserved. 598180

Happy MSHD!

2011-05-18T07:56:00.000-07:00

Three decades plus...

It's only been 31 years since the moderately sized eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

We thought it a big deal. It was. People died. The landscape changed. The economy changed a bit.

I even wondered at the time whehter the company I worked for then, AAR Western Skyways, would be able to continue to overhaul and sell aircraft engines.

Who would want an engine that had been test run on a diet of air laced with volcanic ash?

We didn't really have a tangible sense of what volcanic ash even was. When we think of ash, we typically think of flakes of sooty gray or black carbon. That's what we get when we burn paper and wood. When mountains burn, we get rock dust. Silica. Glass powder, essentially.

The mountain I love to spend time on, South Sister, is a volcano. There's a crater at the top, now filled in with snow and ice. But the whole thing, and everything around it, are piles of rock that was once molten foam, piles of dust, and piles of volcanic glass known by the exotic term "obsidian".

South Sis is a recent little gem on the earth's surface. She got there by the violent birthing process of eruption. She's part of the young Cascades. There are older Cascades buried and reburied underneath. Life goes on. Creation goes on. The earth shapes and reshapes itself. That's how it works.

We sometimes think things are more violent today, that stuff like quakes and tsunamis are indicators of the end of time, the end of the world. No, we are living in a quiet time now. Really, we are. It's just that there are more of us two-leggeds in more places on the face of the earth. We have more of our stuff in the way of earth's movements, so we think things are more violent.

Life goes on according to God's time, not our evaluations of it. My prayer is to leave a little of me in the people around me for a time, but to leave as little as possible of me on the earth itself when I am gone. After all, I need to leave as much room as possible for those still to come on this planet.

I thank the One who made it and makes it. I thank those who left room for me.

Amen,

Roger

Folding the Flag

2011-05-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Folding the flag is taking care of the nation.
Folding the flag is putting it to bed for the night.
I'm falling through a hole in the flag...
--lyrics from the 1968 Broadway musical "Hair"

When word broke a week ago that Osama bin Ladin had been killed, a demonstration broke out across from the White House.

Cool. Ever since back in '68, we haven't been able to get very close to the White House. It may have been during the Vietnam War demonstrations that some of the barriers went in. We couldn't have mobs getting too close to the seat of power where they might actually be heard.

After 9/11, things really became hardened. Barriers in front of U.S. Courthouses across the land. You know about all the airport stuff. Kids today don't even know that at one time, a non-passenger could walk right up the airport concourse and actually greet arriving passengers as they stepped off the jetway into the terminal. Or walk with them and give them an embrace and goodbye kiss just before they boarded the big bird.

Back during the 'Nam War, protesters sometimes desecrated the flag. Sometimes they flew it upside down. 'Cause it seemed like things were upside down. About 80% of the 58,200 names on the Wall in DC are people who were considered capable of giving their lives in battle but not old enough or responsible enough to vote. Upside down alright.

Sometimes the upside down situation led protesters to burn the flag. They weren't usually people who'd saluted the flag or seen it folded at the funerals of loved ones. But sometimes those folks, sometimes those veterans who'd seen the discrepancy between what the war was supposed to be and what it actually was, sometimes those folks did other things. Like throw their medals back at the White House. Or demonstrate for health care and benefits for disabled veterans.

Lately, we've seen other mobs of people demonstrating. In Cairo. In Syria. In Bahrain. In Lybia. In Afghanistan after a Florida pastor insisted on burning a Quran/Koran.

Then came the demos on May 1 when bin Ladin was pronounced dead. I hardly knew how to take it as I heard people chanting "USA, USA, USA!" at something other than an Olympic medal victory when a gazillion Nike sponsorship dollars had finally turned to gold and a mega-gazllion dollars' worth of incidental advertising and expected sales.

At the spontaneous demo, some held the flag and wrapped themselves in it. Some waved it around like a pom-pom at a high school pep rally. Some practically stuck it right up the lens of the news cameras.

In many ways, it felt like being given the finger. The flag turned into a fabric form of the finger.

Legitimate manifestation of pride? Relief? Or a desecration of the flag?

Whether it's celebrating the death of a terrorist murderer or the women's 4 x 400 relay, wrapping oneself in a flag is desecration in my book. Pure desecration. Not of the piece of fabric itself, but of the intangible ideal behind it

That's why the flag is not supposed to touch the ground. It's supposed to FLY!

It's supposed to fly over all of us, to remind us that the ideals of our Constitution are of value only when lived out in our daily lives and when upheld through the rule of law. Such things are not honored when the flag is used as a beach towel over a sweaty or intoxicated body. They are not honored and actualized in a hopelessly gridlocked Congress or a hopelessly (almost) gridlocked populace unable to pay attention to where we are going.

Over the past several years I've heard that rallying cry "Take our country back!"

From whom, for God's sake? From ourselves, I conclude. From our inattention to it and what the flag stands for: our duty to pay attention to it.

The vacuum our inattention and non-participation have left has been backfilled with planet-sized bags of campaign money. The ideal over which the flag must fly is us, not money.

I hope we have a resurgence of citizenship. I hope the flag never again becomes a fabric form of flipping off friends, enemies or neighbors

Long may it wave.

Roger.

If We Build It, They Will Come: Field of Dreams

2011-05-03T21:00:00.001-07:00

They came once. So they built it. They kept coming for a few decades. Maybe even a century. Then fewer came. Then the ones who were left began to age.

Soon the ones aging were the vast majority of the ones who were left. Look around at many older mainline churches, and the sign on the fence for special parking will seem like a redundancy. Because, aren't all church-goers elderly? Don't they all carry some disabilities?

In the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 58% of the congregations have an average worship attendance of 100 or fewer, the size considered the minimum in order to employ a full-time pastor. Oh, and those were 2008 numbers.

Here in the Oregon Synod, 12 of 118 congregations are growing. The others are holding steady or declining. And with churches and the mission of the gospel, holding steady IS declining.

In 1969 I was shipped off to San Antonio, Texas, for Air Force basic training. On a weekend pass, I attended church with two other buddies, both Lutherans from Iowa. St. XXXXX Lutheran in the heart of San Antonio, was an American Lutheran Church congregation, I believe. Church was packed that Sunday. Nearly all were white folks looking and dressed much like those I'd grown up around in Nebraska.

Less than 20 years later, that church was gone. Closed. The neighborhood around it was becoming increasingly African American and Hispanic. "Our people" (at least, not enough of "our people") didn't see "those people" as God's people. Well, maybe they were God's people. But they weren't St. XXXXX people. Not those people......

"Those people" were never made them feel welcome. "Our people" never went out to invite them or get to know them. Instead, "our people" clung to a vision of who they were that matched the neighborhood of 25 years ago. Or more.

The etched glass on the window pane is aside the main entrance to the church of the SE Asian Vicariate along NE Sandy Blvd in Portland. Look closely at the outlines of the three nation states represented: Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia. The map is superimposed over the cross.

Or the cross surrounds the map. It's a large and growing congregation: tons of young people, people we were once at war with. Refugees and immigrants built this church into what it is today: a house of God and a vibrant center of community life.

That's how churches of European immigrants started out. It's the way they all start.

Whether or not they remain such has entirely to do with how churches hear the gospel and see their mission:

A) stability and preservation in a changing world

OR

B) outreach and rebirth in a perpetually changing and challenging world.

I'm betting that Jesus is betting on option B.

What do you think?

Roger

PS: The sign in the first picture? It's in the parking lot of another church right across the street from the one with the etched glass window.

Living Remains

2011-05-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

The young men above never knew their Grandpa. His own kids barely knew him, if at all. He died young. His two kids were very, very young. But something of him lives in his grandsons, both of them serving in the United States Air Force. I've met all the survivors in this family. I wish I'd met the one who left us at age 24.

Osama bin Laden has been taken out. Someone's sons had to do it. America wants to hug these highly trained, secretive young men who did this work for us. Mostly, because of their work, they will have to remain anonymous to us. They could not do what they do as celebrity idols.

But they will carry something of this work with them for life. It may never be something they are able to discuss with family and loved ones. We owe them a lifetime of gratitude. But we also owe them our prayers for health, healing and wholeness.

They have taken life to avenge its loss. They have taken life to save life. They have done so at our call. They have done our work. Living remains to be done. For them. For us, too,

Living Remains

"Grandpa, were you in the war??
question rarely asked by sons and daughters
of their Dads.
Mamas often warned them not to
Mostly, they just somehow knew.
Sons and daughters may not ask
unlike the way that grandkids do…

He who talks of it openly most days
has likely never seen it
never carried sounds of rounds,
sweaty smell of fear,
bloody mud beneath his fingernails, or else
He has a mission to see that others never do
Mission to unpack the things old warriors carry still
In Grandpa bellies, feelings in the gut that never feel
more than the age of twenty
inside a body graying now on every edge.

"Grandpa, were you. . ."
If I say “yes”, what will you do?
If I concede these keys to me, where will you drive me to?
What will we do when we arrive there, will we ever?
And will we ever leave?

In places overgrown with trees and vines,
grasses taller than a man
where annual floods bring fields of rice to bloom
They are finding them in bits
and pieces, remains of stories never told
Lives that filled their quotas long ago

I may have let the jungle grow awhile
Because there are human remains in earth
and me
remains in heart and mind and memory
Remains of war live on forever, so they are forever
living remains
And in these things, all things
Living remains for us to do.

"Grandpa, Grandma, were you in the war?
Was war inside of you?"
You tell me so. You tell me true.
While living remains for you.

--Roger Fuchs

The Color of My Soul

2011-04-22T08:20:00.001-07:00

Eight years ago in the march to war, Jean and I were more than apprehensive about the outcome.

War is eating our country alive financially, morally, imaginitively.

For all the talk lately about big government / "waste, fraud and abuse" / spending, nobody has really owned up to the cost of war and the fact that we've been doing two on borrowed money for the better part of a decade.

Big question that looms is this: Has all that spending and loss of life actually achieved the conditions for peace and progress? Jury is out on that one. Was the revolution in Egypt the result of regime change in Iraq or the inevitable result of a world of Facebook and Twitter that not even the Commies and the dictators can entirely shut down?

Don't know for sure. But I do know this. Greg Mortenson offered a different path to peace that looked much more like the way of Christ. And I believe he has done an untold world of good. But has has some "issues", and they aren't small one.

And now, yet another hero has proven to have a ton of baggage. Was the fame virus at work here too, or was it just ego?

Mortenson's work is not all fiction, but it's now under a huge cloud. Nick Kristof's recent NY Times piece was well thought.

A young (34) woman served with me on a key committee a few months ago. "Sarah" (not her name) repeatedly brought up the fact that her generation has a lot of trust issues. I've wanted for the longest time to get her to sit down and just talk at me for 45 minutes or so. I grant that she's got a case to make. Her generation has seen a lot of heroes fall, a lot of religious leaders prove to be corrupt sex addicts and liars.

But I also told her a while back to not feel like the Lone Stranger. After all, how much truth did an entire generation of us get about the Vietnam/American War? Jade is not just a carvable stone or a plant with waxy, thick leaves. It's often the color of my soul.

These "grave stones"? Part of a neighbor's Halloween yard display last October. I wonder whose grave they will mark this year?

Meanwhile, we await resurrection. God knows, we need it.

He lives!

Roger

For all the people...

2011-04-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

The nursing students from Linfield College do much of their training at Good Samaritan Hospital, aka "Good Sam" up in inner NW Portland. As many young people do these days before settling down into families and careers, they travel in their downtime. They see parts of the world where their parents or grandparents never traveled--except during time of war. Several years ago, a group traveled to Southeast Asia. They spent time in Thailand and Cambodia. They spent a lot of time in Vietnam. They took a lot of pictures, brought home many more in their heads. At one of the Linfield/Good Sam buildings there is a small space for art exhibits, often photography. This group took one of their photos with the sun at their backs and casting long shadows on the street to make a composite collage. Over 10,000 pictures. Most contain people. The students themselves. Or the people they encountered. From these images they reconstructed the one street photo on a large panel measuring approximately 4 x 5 feet. If your computer can do so, zoom in on either of these shots. See the people. All the people... As April 5 came and passed this year, I thought again about Wes and how few days he had left in his one-year tour in Vietnam. 5 April 1968. His last. I live. He doesn't. Most of the people in the photos were not alive when Wes lived. And died. None of the people who took the pictures were. For all the people, Christ came. He lived. He died. He lives... Amen. Roger

In Memory of Jack

2011-03-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

Two years ago on March 29 it was a Sunday. The phone rang in the morning. Early, but not too early. It was Nila. "We lost Jack this morning," she said. I can't believe he's been gone that long. I remember beers at the Ramada Inn on Dallas Love Field in 1977. I remember a flight over north Texas in a Piper Cherokee 140, N6341W. I remember dinner at a cafe across the way from the Hooters in the Atlanta Underground. I remember the conversation we had there. How Jack told me he was doing after the war: the imponderable implications of having taken human life. Perhaps quite a lot of it. Jack flew a Cobra. He also flew Hueys when he wasn't on a direct combat mission. He flew all he could to stay out of base camp where the drinking was non-stop. People didn't have to think so much about what they were doing that way. I remember the conversation we had a few years later at an Applebee's in Fayetteville, or thereabouts. Jack told me what he would do if he were in my situation where a family member had been wounded by another person in ways we can't talk about. I remember a rainy night in Georgia in a restored '67 Valiant convertible with an intermittent electrical system. I remember Jack's love of books, flying and his friends. I remember Jack's skepticism about religious types but his trust and honor of me. We could talk about anything, and we did. In his last e-mail to me a week before he died, Jack wrote that knowing me was one of the highlights of his life. It's one of the best things anyone ever said to me. I'll never forget it. Ditto, my friend. Ditto. Rest well. I remember. I miss you, Jack. Roger

Three In A Row...

2011-03-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

Here we go again.

By my count, it was March 19, 2003 when President Bush sent U.S. forces into Iraq.

We're still there, of course. We'd been in Afghanistan since October 2001, although we diverted most of the effort in Afghanistan to Iraq.

We're still in Afghanistan.

Of course.

Anybody want to place bets on how this will go?

First, we cheered as Libyans revolted and took control of half the country.

Next, we waited, thinking that Gadhafi (remember when we called him Kaddafy??) was toast.

Then, we watched as his forces began nibbling away at the poorly armed and organized rebels' gains. Cities and towns got taken back, retaken, retaken again.

Now, with practically nothing left as a haven for rebels except Benghazi, we decide to move.

Must have been a few neighbor-against-neighbor episodes in there. Quite a few.

And what comes next?

I got two things to say: 1) Where's the money for this coming from? 2) Whose sons and daughters are going to be there to police up the mess when the Libyan air defenses are crushed, the military dispersed and neighbor-against-neighbor clashes erupt as the Libyan economy further collapses and the blame thing starts to set in?

Another question. If Libya were buying U.S. debt the way China has been, would our response have been different? How? I wonder.

Pray for peace.

Roger

If you're the Son of God, jump.

2011-03-12T20:33:00.000-08:00

That's what the ol' guy with the pitchfork told Jesus up there on a high place on the wall of the Temple in Jerusalem.

This was after Jesus had gone without food and water for 40 days, 40 nights and had already been tempted with food and fame.

"Jump," the devil says.

"Just do it. Just DO it. If you're the Son of God, angels will never allow any harm to come to you."

But then, if he's the Son of God, why does he need angels in the first place?

Lots of unanswered questions here.

But the biggest one of all is this one: Who are you, Jesus?

As in, "WHO ARE YOU?"

Just between you and me, if I'd been there, I'd probably have said the same thing: jump.

'Cause if he jumps and doesn't get hurt, or if a flaming chariot comes out of the sky... well, then that proves he was never like us in the first place and always had this "ejection seat" capability to punch right outta here.

But if Jesus does jump as the devil asks, and if he gets hurt or dies... well, then that proves that he was just plain silly to listen and has wasted his life for nothing.

I don't want a God who can't go where I am, who can't go with anybody who might climb up onto one of the fire escape landings or a bridge railing and decide to jump and just end it all. I don't want a God who can't be underneath piles of earthquake rubble or who can't be underneath the muck and debris of a tsunami bigger than a Hollywood disaster flick.

I don't want a God who either can't die at all or who dies stupid.

We ordinary human beings, we seem to have a lock on that latter category. We die stupid all the time. Yep.

Nope, I need a God who dies real. I need a God who gets real. I need a God who looks the devil's choices in the eye and says, "I'll see your shortsighted, self-serving choices and raise you all I have. I'll raise you life. Life is of God. Death is what you are all about, Mr. Devil."

I need a God who says to me or anyone else climbing up on the railings above, "Come down. Don't jump. You leave the fixing of things to me. Don't harm yourself or anyone else. Leave the death and sin business to me. I came to raise you from that. And I'll show you how by going first. "

Jesus says, "Trust me on this. I won't lead you to harm. I'll lead you to life. Trust me on this."

In Bondage to Sin: Ashes to Ashes... Lent

2011-03-10T08:11:00.000-08:00

According to Matthew 4:2, Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. THEN, famished and weak, he met ALL EVIL face-to-face. It came in a condition of weakness, not strength.

Moses went up to the mountain 40 days w/o food, only the presence of God. Elijah went into the wilderness and lived on the strength of his last meal for 40 days. They both knew the legend of Noah and his family and the onslaught of being tossed about after 40 days of rain (and nights).

In Reformation times, the practice of doing penance went seriously out of whack. The Basilica of St. Peter in Rome was essentially built on the fundraising efforts of paying a monetary sum as a demonstration of true contrition. But the church detoured from being discipling agent to dispensing agent.

Along the way, a very important and beneficial practice got lost or disarmed. The step back to consider the seriousness of one's sins and doing something different in life as a reminder, that got turned into the purchase of forgiveness--with advance ticket sales offered for a nice price.

No coach I know would consider scrapping the entire practice of taking a time-out. The team needs it. He/she needs it. And so do we. It's more than our little foibles, the unkind word here and there, the lustful thought, the alms not given, the prayer not said, that constitutes our sin.

It is our whole condition. Our whole broken relationship with God and with each other. As my church says in corporate confession, "We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves..." This rift is not repairable by self-help, a six-week diet, or a makeover at the spa. It is by the grace of God. Grace is a very dramatic story. It never hurts to take a time-out. Any discipline or ritual that serves as a mnemonic device for that time-out time is helpful. It can open the heart and mind just like prayer.

And I think sometimes the best prayers we can ever pray are not the ones that ask for what we don't have. They may be those that for once do an honest job of saying who we are, what we are, what is--without a pre-fab answer in mind.

We all need time for that.

Thank You, Fran

2011-03-06T21:08:00.001-08:00

Fran. . .

Frances Roselee Wagner Rauschkolb was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 10, 1922. During World War II, Fran served at Ft. Knox, Kentucky as a member of the Women’s Army Corps.

She met Frank Rauschkolb, a flying officer of the United States Army Air Corps, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for great heroism in the rescue of 17 downed U.S. airmen. Fran and Frank were married in 1945.

After several years, Frank returned to military service, serving as a commissioned officer for more than 20 years in the new United States Air Force. Together, Fran and Frank raised five sons. Fran was preceded in death by her loving husband Frank and by their son Jan who was killed in action in 1969 while serving in Vietnam with the United States Marine Corps.

Fran was called to eternal rest on March 2, 2011, at the age of 88 years, 10 months and 2 days. She is survived by her sons Frank, Jr. (Fairview, OR), Barry (Parker, CO), William (Oklahoma City, OK), and Fred (Tigard, OR) as well four grandsons and eight wonderful great-grandchildren.

As veterans and Gold Star parents, Fran and Frank, along with many other dedicated souls, worked tirelessly to bring our community, our state, and our nation the treasure of the Garden of Solace, the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Living Memorial. In lieu of flowers or other gifts, the family requests memorial gifts be given to the Vietnam Veterans of Oregon Memorial Fund, Inc., 1750 SW Skyline Blvd., #15, Portland, OR 97221.

It's been a great honor to know you, Fran. It was indeed a privilege to lead your memorial service today.

Thank you for your service, and welcome home.

Amen.

Pastor Roger

Oaths, Vows, Pledges, Promises and Creeds

2011-03-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

Allegiance.

Knowing the etymology of that word in the feudal system and its connotation of owing everything to your liege lord, including your family and your life, I reserve it for God alone as do my Mennonite friends. Most Americans today, I'd bet, would probably tell you that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by our nation's founders along with the Declaration and the Constitution. Hardly. I've wished for many years we could replace it with something I wrote for myself and say in its place when others say the pledge:

"I recognize and I accept the privileges and the responsibilities of citizenship in the United States of America, and I pledge my very best efforts in the faithful exercise of both my whole life long."

For me, it ends the confusion of national idolatry, the confusion of symbol with its antecedent. I place my hand over my heart when the flag is presented and the national anthem is played, not because a piece of cloth is there but because the flag calls to mind the abstract ideals of an empowered, self-governing people living under the rule of constitutional law (as opposed to tyrannical plutocracy and autocracy). It is this ideal that commands my respect and my best efforts to translate from concept to concreteness.

Words matter. They must matter. They have to matter. That's why as a 24-year-old Airman First Class with a brand new 22-year-old wife on my arm I made a vow as we walked from the altar down the aisle to greet our guests. We had memorized our traditional vows so that we said them to each other as complete statements from our hearts. My new silent vow to myself was that I would remember that wedding vow and repeat it verbatim to my wife on our 25th anniversary. I did so when that day came 15 years ago. I can still say that vow verbatim. Over the years it's been a superb and humbling reminder to me what I promised 40 years ago. Words matter.

One of my greatest conflicts of conscience was the oath of enlistment. I didn't promise to uphold the country, a party, a president or an ideology. I promised to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to faithfully execute the lawful orders of my superior officers. Since I considered the Commander-in-Chief at the time to be a formidable domestic enemy of the Consitution and the war we were engaged in to be illegitimate, there would have been things that I would have had to say "No, sir!" to, had I been ordered to do them.

Fortunately as a Cold Warrior with real and numerous enemy nuclear, chemical, biological and conventional WMD under our purview, I could comply with what I was asked to do without a violation of both oath and conscience. Again, words matter. If not so, we would never have written the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, numerous laws. We would not have courts to decide exactly (well, maybe somewhat approximately) just what all those words mean and how to apply them.

It might be really good for us to take a time out in our churches and coffee klatsches to consider the words that define our lives. I was ordained into the "holy catholic church", the church of the whole shebang, on January 29. More words. I take them as seriously as all others. As the bishop said before placing his hands on my head, for this office I am accountable to God. It doesn't go any higher than that. At my age, that accounting will come sooner rather than later. Soon and very soon...

Yes, it would be good for us to review our vows, our promises, our oaths, our pledges. And before we ever presume to send another person to lay down their life in our name, we first ought to be completely clear ourselves just what their oath of enlistment requires of them and what citizenship requires of us. Yes, they can be ordered to lay down their lives--provided that a legal test is met from stem to stern. Convenience has nothing to do with it. And no laws or legalisms are legitimate unless they are first on the side of the right. Strange that we task our soldiers with making that interpretation with every order when the responsibility and the authority both clearly rest with us. Our job.

That is, after all, what we said this country was about when we built it. Words mattered then. They still do. They are all we have to give definition to the ideals that I hope always fly overhead like a flag that never touches the ground over which those ideals reign under the dominion of God.

Remembering America's Heroes: Frank Buckles

2011-02-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

America's last World War I vet, Frank Buckles, has died. He was 110. Over a decade ago, his nephew, Ken Buckles, started something called Living History Day at Milwaukie High School (Milwaukie, Oregon--yes, that's how we spell it here) as a way for vets to tell their stories and as a way for high school students to meet and learn the history of the vanishing heroes all around us. Ken's high school group raised more money for the WWII Memorial than any other school group in the country--by far.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41821018/ns/us_news-life/?gt1=43001

I was at Living History Day in November 2007 when Frank, then 106, took his place on the stage at the USO-style celebration that ended the day's events. He was still a sharp and admirable man. Just a week ago yesterday, nephew Ken was at the annual dinner for the Vietnam Veterans of Oregon Memorial Fund and brought us the latest news of Frank who was still "with it" according to Ken. Through Ken's tireless efforts, Frank Buckles' body will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda and be esorted by one of the longest honor guard processions ever amassed to his temporary resting place in Arlington National Cemetery. Temporary, that is, in light of 1 Corintians 15:42-49:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is rased a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will aslo bear the image of the man of heaven.

On the 19th after Ken had finished bringing us the news of Frank and what the nation's tribute to this venerable and timeless hero would be like, I asked Ken if any of us would still be alive when that day came. It wasn't any impertinent question then. It isn't one today. Are we alive in the freedom and the life we have been given by our Creator, by the work of Christ, by our founding fathers and mothers, by the once-young Americans who would not take "no" for an answer in order to serve?

My half-staff flag will go out today when the weeping skies dry out enough to allow it. I'll continue until Frank's body reaches Arlington.

And while I have lunch today I'll crank up the volume when I play that Crosby/Stills/Nash & Young song "Almost Cut My Hair". It's that one line in the song that always gets me: I feel like I owe it to someone. Yep.

Pray for peace. Work for peace. Be at peace. Thank you, Frank, and all others already gone home.

Amen.

Roger

As the Citizen Among You

2011-02-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

The alien who resides with you in your land shall be as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord. Leviticus 19:34

President Obama was at my daughter's workplace yesterday. She took these pictures herself, the one below just after he reached out to shake her hand. The President is out acting as Cheerleader-in-Chief attempting to rally our country out of the doldrums.

Lord knows, we do need a rally.

There is a place for hoping that our high-tech sector can help put more people here back to work. That would be a mega hope.

Mini hope needs exist all around us. Here are three examples from real life of the past three days:

Tom and I met for the first time at Tuesday evening’s Bible study. We always have soup and bread before we launch into Scripture and, for the past few weeks, Rob Bell’s wonderful little short films that I just can’t diminish by calling them DVD’s or videos. He sat at a table by himself in his black jacket with extra hardware, keys, bicycle lights and jeans about 6 inches too large and bunched at the waist. Wet spot on the seat of them… Since he was new to the group, I asked if I could join him with my bowl of noodles and bread. “Sure, no problem,” he said. He had lots to say, but it came out in a kind of mumbled stream which I did my best to decipher. As we ate, a little yellow bug ran out of his stocking cap across the table at me. I smashed it as promptly as I could without making a scene. Little yellow bugs are Tom’s closest companions. He was very attentive during Bible study, enjoyed Bell’s film. After a smoke on the patio, Tom went back out into his world and I to mine.

A woman I know named L. was going to Salem this past Monday to testify at the Legislature about the need to maintain services and housing for mentally ill folks. Knowing how L. gets trapped inside of sentences that she enters but can’t seem to exit, I can only wonder what message she could have brought them, though none more powerful than her own honest presence. Intelligence and chaos rule her life.

What were Tom and L. like when they were school age? What got them to where they are now? How much money are we saving by keeping Tom homeless, and how much would we “save” if we made L. that way?

An insurance company has told a mother of two students at my wife’s school that they will no longer pay for the meds these little kids need in order to be something other than nearly asleep with depression or else unable to sit still and be quiet for more than 5 seconds. An insurance company wants to “save” money by helping to manufacture replacements for Tom and L. when they are no longer with us.

Letter after letter to the paper complains that Portland is a homeless magnet because we are too kind and the police not aggressive enough even as incidents of suicide by cop and murder by arrest are up. Stories from my writer friend Karen Zacharias http://www.patheos.com/community/karenspearszacharias/ affirm what we must know if we open our eyes: that people living tough lives are all around us and within us. They are still in NYC even if people who visit Disneyfied Times Square no longer see them there. They are in rural Nebraska, small towns in the South and in Eastern Oregon, in this small city we call home.

And so is the kingdom of God.

Roger

Signs of the Times

2011-02-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

I have to hand it to the graffiti artist. He's learned how to quickly pull the spray can away from his "canvas" in order to make the paint fan out and thin while making stunningly beautiful calligraphic curves.

It's a sign of the times when such anonymous decorators are able to think more imaginitively than the highly educated, trained, experienced and so-called leaders of the world.

Sometimes, the signs of the times tell us that what we took to be the shape of things has become overgrown, obscured by having hung around long enough to deceive us into the notion of permanence.

As if the way things are is the way they always were. Or will be...

I remember when the communist regime of the former Soviet Union was falling apart under Mikhail Gorbachev. Mr. Gorbachev probably had a truer vision of real transition and change than anyone surrounding him at the time. But it wasn't speedy enough for folks. So they ran over him, and his ability to lead and influence collapsed all around him.

As things were rapidly coming apart, one of Gorbachev's one-time underlings and allies, Boris Yeltsin, had his foot on the accelerator of change without having much understanding of how to steer the democracy bus. Yeltsin was pushing things that Gorbachev thought unwise. Gorbachev pleaded with Yeltsin in the most personal way one does in Slavic tradition: by using a person's first and middle names.

"Boris Nikolayevich! Boris Nikolayevich! Boris Nikolayevich!"

Gorbachev called out again and again but to no avail. My older sister used to scold me at times when I was a youngster. "Roger Dennis," she would call. But if Gorbachev began by scolding, he ended by pleading, begging.

But he could not stop the momentum. The people were clearly with Yeltsin who would go on to become the head of a new non-communist government. Unfortunately, he hadn't a clue.

Unfortunately, most of the people were equally clueless. Given their history, how could it have been different? Many perhaps thought that simply by ending communism there would suddenly be store shelves full of STUFF like in the West. That they would have pockets full of money to buy all this stuff. That, slam-dunk!, all their problems would be solved.

It's no wonder that Russia today suffers from sham democracy, very high rates of alcoholism, drug addiction and HIV. Democracy is too weak to overcome systemic corruption in a time of shortage. There really is never the breathing room for this kind of turnaround. Corruption in Russia today has its hands on way more money than it did under communism. Way more. Most Russians today probably care not a whit for democracy. They want stability, order, a chance to grab some STUFF. Stuff motivates us, it seems. Ideals, perhaps not so much.

Egyptians are understandably euphoric. I understand. It will ebb. Reality will reappear. The economy, in all likelihood, will get worse, not better, over the next several years. Tempers may flare, patience may evaporate. And the technology for making car bombs, human bombs and IED's is now as widely known as how to rip music from CD's. It won't be smooth sailing. I pray for patience in the storms and swells ahead for Egypt and for the region.

Meanwhile, here in the USA, we'd be wise turkeys to pursue tasks we should have undertaken years ago, not only as a matter of national and economic security, but as a matter of doing the right thing for creation:

ENERGY CONSERVATION. ENERGY INDEPENDENCE. LAND CONSERVATION. FOOD SECURITY. RESTORING DOMESTIC PRODUCTION OF BASIC ESSENTIALS LIKE FOOD AND CLOTHING AND TOOLS. AS IN, EVERYTHING ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC. SHOES. HIGH SPEED TRANSPORT THAT DOESN'T INVOLVE MUCH COMBUSTION OF FOSSIL FUELS.

We can't get there by either of the following:

1) spending our way into oblivion

OR

2) cutting our way back to the Stone Age.

We worship what our dollars say we do. We can't afford war. Literally. Figuratively. Morally. Fiscally. Honestly. Any more.

We can't.

And we can't afford to not help Egypt go the right way as much as possible.

These are the signs of the times. Interesting days ahead.

I call 'em as I see 'em.

Roger

When You Come to a Fork in the Road...

2011-02-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

When you come to that fork in the road, take it!

The people of Egypt have come to that fork in the road. If only it were as simple as the the choice between these two very similar ones.

So much hangs in the balance. Nearly 40% of the people of Egypt cannot read and write. A vast number, however, are aware that life is different in some places in the world. They want things to be different where they live.

Moneyed interests will react to change with fear. Fear of losing what they have now. Fear of reduced wealth and power in the future.

Unless tamed by a humble and generous heart, such interests will be a powerful obstacle to overcome.

Corrupt elements such as the police and government bureaucrats will see change as a direct threat, not only to their income but perhaps to their very lives. They probably won't be out there saying "Yea and amen!" to the anti-government demonstrators unless it becomes the only way to save their own skins.

The now vast number of people without such power and wealth are out of patience. Food prices are outrunning them. The chance to keep up and better their lives is eluding them. They want education. They want elections. They want a job.

They want freedom. So they say. It's something we have but often can't be bothered to exercise or give thanks for.

Some know what they want. Others are just plain naive. Things are never all just one way. But changes are coming. The balance of power in the entire Middle East is in flux.

Israel is affected. Everybody is affected. There could be war, civil war, or stalemate. There are many forks in the road.

Here in the USA, we may find this new development in Egypt oddly remote from daily life and concern for our economy. But wait...! We're smack in the middle of it.

Our country had given vast amounts of military and economic aid to the government of Hosni Mubarak in order to help maintain this Arab nation that has a peace treaty with neighbor Israel. That stabilizing influence leaves our fingerprints all over a government that did not do much to trickle things down to the ordinary people. Human rights, freedom of speech and the press, freedom from torture--these things did not go forward under the three decades of President Mubarak's rule.

That's a problem for us.

I can still hear the voice of Judy Collins on a track of one of the vinyl LP records of her songs that I have from about 1969. It's the chorus of the theme song from the musical Marat/Sade. The full title of the story is something like "The Incarceration and Execution of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Prison at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." It's a story of the struggle of peasants and a few noble folk for basic human rights during the French Revolution, one such movement led by Jean Paul Marat who was executed:

We've got nothing, always had nothing.

Nothing but holes and millions of them.

Living in holes, dying in holes,

Holes in our bellies and holes in our souls...

Marat, we're poor, and the poor stay poor.
Marat, don't make us wait anymore.
We want our rights, and we don't care how.
We want a revolution......now!

Pray for the people of Egypt. Pray for the people of Israel. Pray for the people of Palestine.

Pray for peace, freedom, justice. Pray for hope. Pray for grace.

Roger

Love It Or Leave It!

2011-02-01T08:33:00.001-08:00

Things have been in turmoil in the Arab Republic of Egypt for more than a week. Many people have said they want freedom, democracy, the right to elect their leaders.

I wonder if they have any idea how expensive that is, how confusing when campaign promises are made but not kept, when candidates will say one thing but do the bidding of those who have bankrolled the campaigns?

Bless their hearts, they want to try.

I applaud their dreams and aspirations, because some of these young voices have been clamoring for precisely the things we have told ourselves are the hallmarks of the United States of America and why we think of ourselves (rightly or wrongly) as exceptional.

But I also remember a time when a whole generation of us felt unheard and disenfranchised by the very system we would be compelled to serve through the military draft in a time of protracted war that had devolved into a horrendously costly stalemate. Sure, some protesters chanted things that sounded like anarchy. But not all. Some simply wanted the system to function in practice as it was designed and legally bound to function on paper.

80% of the 58,000+ names on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, "the Wall", were not old enough to vote. They could be trusted to fight and die for the flag and "freedom" (the freedom, possibly, of another nation; America's freedom was never in doubt in the Vietnam War), but they could not be trusted to vote until age 21.

My daughter's eyes bulged a couple of weeks ago when I told her that. She had no idea the voting age had not always been 18.

Some spoke out. Others watching assumed that those speaking out did not love their country, that speaking out and demonstrating were inconsistent with love of country. As though the first Boston Tea Party had never happened--or had not been illegal.

So the response of some became:

America--Love It or Leave It.

I wonder if any of the ruling class in Egypt are out on the streets of Cairo today yelling "Egypt--Love It or Leave It" at the masses wanting change.

How do we best love our country?

How do we best love God and our neighbors as ourselves?

...and He began to teach them

2011-01-31T08:07:00.000-08:00

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and He began to teach them. He said: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn...

Matthew 5:1-4a

OK. Let's hold it right there. We'll never know how many in the crowds heard Jesus' words. Was it a real mountainside, or was it simply up a little hill where only his closest followers got their first instructions from the rabbi who had newly called them to follow him?

It was probably quick, on-the-fly instruction, not a nice spiritual retreat in which the new students got spiritual enlightenment in splendid isolation, far from the pressing crowds with their needs, the obvious afflictions, and their endless hopes for something better in life.

Jesus talks about being blessed. Blessed in times that don't look like blessing. Blessed in situations that are precisely the ones we are trying to pry ourselves out of or feel hopelessly trapped in. Trapped by poverty, by circumstances, by events way beyond our control, by afflictions and conditions and diseases. By the undying opinions and judgments made about us by those who have their hands on the levers of real power in society.

Hands that finally grab those levers seem as rigid as the steel in the levers themselves.

Under all these weights, how is it that people feel blessed?

Jesus' disciples would have to wrestle with these questions themselves. These would be the questions on the faces and on the hearts of the people they had not yet met, people whom they would be called to serve.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. If the kingdom of heaven is of God, how can Jesus say it will be something akin to feeling poor in spirit? Shouldn't it leave us leaping like a deer in fresh spring grass after a dismal and hungry winter? Shouldn't we literally be dancing with the stars?

There are 10 statements in the Beatitudes, the "blessed are" statements. Like the 10 words, 10 commandments that Moses came down the mountain with. These weren't all dumped on the whole population of Israel enroute from bondage to freedom. They came to Moses first. His was the task of giving them to the people in ways that were truly blessings of God, not more of the whips and rods of Pharaoh's labor bosses.

There is room for a lifetime of exploration in the Beatitudes of Matthew. They culminate in the example set by the prophets. We may not ever come to envy the life of a single prophet. Prophets' tasks were difficult, costly, filled with hardships. Life threatening. Yet nobody in their right minds would look back and regard the prophets as anything but priceless treasures.

Prophets, it seems, fit the description Andy Kerr once coined for environmentalists: hell to live with but they make great ancestors.

Maybe because the work of the prophets extended far beyond them as God's priceless and necessary work in the world.

Our lives of being blessed, of knowing that we are blessed, do extend beyond us in ways we cannot and will not see in this life. The promise from Jesus is that life in him and because of him is life that involves blessedness. The disciples cannot ever describe or exemplify this blessing to anyone unless they first know it and live it themselves. Neither can we.

As one of my very astute professors once said, "A word from the prophet must first of all be a word to the prophet." That's worth a great deal of thought.

A little story: On the night of October 6, 2008, I put Jean to bed, tucked her in, kissed her and said, "Good night, best wife in the world." We got about four hours' sleep that night after putting the house in order, taking care of dishes and laundry and all those mundane things.

We awoke somewhere around 4 AM in order to get to OHSU to check in for neurosurgery. Jean had a large brain tumor that an incredibly brave team of surgeons were willing to tackle. It was a grueling day. First the surgery got delayed by about two hours so that an earlier and more pressing one could be completed. Then the expected four-hour surgery for Jean dragged on. And on.

All they would say at the four-hour point was that things were progressing. They promised hourly updates.

An hour came and passed with no word. Then a second hour came and passed with no word. We knew the tumor was right up against the left carotid artery. Had something gone wrong? Would Jean live? Would she come out of surgery a brain damaged vegetable, aware but unable to see or walk? What?

By the time the day of the surgery came, our energy was at an ebb. We had already been all over the emotional map on this and now simply walked ahead to face whatever was there. I prayed with Jean and Hilary before they took her away. At that point, I said, "We are in God's hands, and that's all we know. It's all we need."

Empty. Emotionally flat-lined. Nothing. Dead. That's how it was up in the surgery waiting room with no word and no end in sight. If that's poor in spirit, then I know it. I was so poor I felt as lifeless as crushed rock. Like I was not only dead but had never lived. I knew that God was attending to things. That's all I knew.

It was the kingdom of heaven. It was enough. It was the silence of death which must come before resurrection. The "resurrection" finally came at 6 hours, 35 minutes, in a phone call from the assisting surgeon: "Normal resection. We're now actively trying to wake her up."

The kingdom of heaven.

Jesus was right. He knew what he was talking about.

In this whole process we had been blessed all along. We were blessed when we had nothing give. We continue to be blessed by what we have received. And we can't even see most of it.

Jesus was right. He still is. We have living proof. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Roger

This Thing Of Ours...

2011-01-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?"

Jesus replied, "Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness." Then John consented.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:13-17 NIV)

So, it's this thing of ours. We apply water in one form or another. Some folks pour it. Some folks sprinkle it. Other folks put you in it. That's what the Greek word behind "baptism" implies: dunking. As in a river or a lake or fountain.

They quit doing the dunking thing in Europe around Luther's time because too many infants caught their death of cold when they got dunked 3X in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

It's this thing of ours, this thing we do. Just like Holy Communion. Another thing we do.

The bread and fruit of the vine. We do them because of that other thing we do: Baptism. That's where it starts. With this thing of ours as followers of Christ.

If I were talking Italian, I'd say it was "la cosa nostra", this thing of ours.

Kinda got started in a new way with Jesus there in the Jordan River. John is calling people to open up their hearts and minds to the nearness of God's new thing: the kingdom of God. "As a way of showing you are ready, wash up and make a clean start!"

Then Jesus shows up and says, "I'm in. OK, let's get wet."

John won't have it. He knows that when God's Messiah arrives, he, John, will be the one who needs to clean up his act. But Jesus persists. "We have to do this to fulfill all righteousness," Jesus says.

Righteousness is kinda off-putting. We hear the word and think: goody two-shoes... holier-than-thou... me better than you.

Not exactly its Biblical sense according to Paul in his letter to the Romans. Per Paul, God is righteous because he justifies. In other words, God is righteous because God makes things right. Not simply that God is righteous because God is sinless perfection (who God is) but also because of what God does: makes things right, makes us right. God is righteous because God "righteousnesses" us. That's what justification means.

"John," Jesus says, "we have to do this to begin the work of setting things right--my work. We have to begin at the beginning. In order for me to take what's wrong and have it nailed to the cross with me, I have to begin where you and every person is: in need of new birth, a resurrection."

John concedes. Jesus gets wet. Heavens open...

A dove-like form of the Spirit descends on Jesus and alights. The same voice to be heard on the mountain of Transfiguration declares the same thing here: My Son. I am deeply passionate about what my Son is doing."

It's a Theophany, a God appearance there at the Jordan. We go with Jesus to the Jordan in this season of Epiphany because now, after the birth at Christmas, we contemplate what on earth it means for God to appear, to show up upon, to shine upon, to appear here, on earth.

So we also begin where Jesus begins. 'Cause Jesus takes that beginning and makes way more out of it. Once he begins, it kicks off his ministry of proclaiming, teaching and healing. Yeah, the same work he's actually turned over to us. And when we do those things, we're supposed to do this thing of ours, this washing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It's more than just an attitude adjustment. It's a God appearance. God shows up in that Baptism to stake a claim on us. Ain't no solvent can dissolve that glue. Ain't no rite of the church called "unBaptism".

When you been washed, you done been washed. As in, forever. You belong to God. And the sign says:

Devils Keep Out!

So it's this thing of ours 'cause Jesus gave it to us and he said to do it. That alone, his words, would be enough reason for us to do it. But there's something more. He promises to show up there. He not only forgives our sins there, he takes 'em away to the cross. He stays in their place.

Which is also why we do this other thing of ours, Holy Communion. Yeah, he's promised to show up there, too. Bread and wine = body and blood. By promise, by faith. By Spirit, not by chemical analysis.

"Given and shed for you for the remission of sins" was the translation of Luther's words I learned.

This thing of ours, la cosa nostra...

Epiphany. Theophany. Jesus said. I believe. Amen.

Thanks be to God!

Pastor Roger

PS: Just between you and me, I'd rather get dunked in Wallowa Lake than that public drinking fountain in Northwest Portland with the built-in doggie dish at the bottom. Not to mention what mighta been floating in the ol' Jordan... That's just me. But the water doesn't matter. It's the getting wet in the name of the ThreeOne that counts.

1:10 Ratio Ain't Bad

2011-01-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?" Luke 17:15-17

Some years ago at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, I played with an exhibit made of sprockets and chains enclosed inside a large case of clear plexiglass. There was an exposed crank that viewers could turn. The crank turned a shaft with a very small sprocket connected by bicycle chain to a very large sprocket on a second shaft. Adjacent to that large sprocket was another small sprocket which was in turn linked to large sprocket on a third shaft. And so on.

Each ratio was 1:10. That is, the first small sprocket had 10 teeth. The first large one had 100 teeth. If you turned the crank 10 turns, the second shaft would turn once. It would turn the third shaft 1/10 of a turn. Which would turn the fourth 1/100th of a turn. Which would turn the fifth shaft 1/1000th of a turn. And so on up through 10 stages.

Of course, most people tired mentally long before they had turned the crank 25 turns. Their efforts seemed to disappear into nothing. You could have stood there cranking for a half hour without seeing any perceptible movement of the tenth shaft. Ten-year-old boys would be the exception. They'd stand there cranking, determined to will the laws of physics into a new order until their families tore them away to get lunch.

Jesus had to cleanse ten lepers to get thanks out of one. Atcually, this is another way of saying, "Only one out of every ten people is going to accept my witness--and that's on my very best day when an extraordinary act of healing has taken place in front of God and everybody. And they will very likely be the people y'all don't like."

One out of ten.

Not a ratio to write home about. But still something...

The young woman prostrating herself before the gravestone above?

She is Mary McHugh, the fiance' of Army Sgt. James John Regan who was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Google his name and read about his story in his hometown newspaper (Manhasset/Mineola, New York) or any of the many online stories about him.

Here in America today we are running a 1:49 ratio. Only one out of every 49 families has someone like James John Regan serving in our armed forces or a grieving young woman like Mary who never got to spend her life waking up next to the fine young man she loved with all her heart.

She never even got to wear the title "widow". Her grief is officially unrecognizable to the government and almost the entire nation.

Not a ratio to write home about.

Except that it will never improve unless we all write home about it.

Pray for new things in this new year. Peace would do. So would life.

Roger

the Life was the Light of all people

2010-12-27T10:05:00.000-08:00

It's Evangelist John's version of the Christmas story:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being. John 1:1-3a

"Word" in this passage is "logos" in Greek. Logos can be loosely translated into English as "word". Not simply those little clumps of letters separated by spaces--the ones I'm typing and that you are reading now. And we also shouldn't think of it as we often do in a modern sense when we talk about "the word of God" and mean our favorite illustrated, hard-bound, annotated and copyrighted version of the Bible. No, this logos is a living, Divine Agent that welds together words, thought and activity.

What has come into being in him was life, the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:3b-5

Logos in John begins with the same root as the second half of the compound terms we are so familiar with today. For example, the term psychology. Literally translated, psychology means "that which is known, said, thought and taught about the mind/soul continuum".

John tells us that this logos was there at "the beginning". That means, at creation. As if eternity could have a beginning. But we say and believe that the stuff that exists has a beginning.

This creative mind/soul continuum not only made all things but illuminates all things and has entered the created order of things with light. Light that is life. Life that is light.

Light by definition cannot do other than shine or it isn't light. Where light is, darkness cannot possibly be. Light is, by definition, by action, by illumination, the destroyer of darkness. Light is not absence. Light is presence. Darkness doesn't have to do anything. It can't do anything because it is the absence of everything.

Light has to be the presence of something. It has to do something. It has to shine. It has to be. It is. Therefore, what else could you call it but life?

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. John 1:6-8

Testify... Witness... English words with the same Greek antecedent: martyreo. Yes, one who testifies to or witnesses to is one who "martyrs" self to... In other words, one who demonstrates by their whole being what their psyche, their body/mind/soul continuum is about, what it is animated by, energized by, what it lives for. And by whom it lives.

The true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world. John 1:9

According to John, this logos, this light, this life, is Jesus of Nazareth, the One God present in Jesus of Nazareth. Not only God made flesh, but God permeating and imbuing everything with something that does what light does. (See above discussion of the contrast between light and darkness.)

That photograph above? We took it on a short weekend at Cannon Beach, OR. August 2008. Jean knew something was not right but did not yet know that she had a brain tumor. Kiwi fruit-sized brain tumor.

In the days and weeks after the photo was taken, we would not so much remember the photo itself but the incredible, surrounding presence of the light that afternoon. After I had taken the shot, I looked back at Jean. She was in tears. "So beautiful!" she sobbed. "It's just so beautiful!"

That's what the Evangelist John is bringing with his symphony of basic Greek words: a witness to light that is life all around us and in us and through us.

Where darkness can no longer be because the Light has shined. Here. Arrived. Shining....

Merry Christmas, and thank you, John.

May the Light be with you all!

Roger

P.S. The word photography? Yeah, Greek too. It means "writing with light". Cool, huh?

Of the Father's Love Begotten...

2010-12-24T15:32:00.001-08:00

Of the Father's love begotten,

Ere the worlds began to be

He is Alpha and Omega,

He the source the ending He

Of the things that are, that have been

And that future years shall see

Evermore and evermore.

The lyrics are by one ancient church father named Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, dating to the fourth century. In our Lutheran hymnals, the beautiful five verses are set to stunningly simple and flowing music, a plainsong from the 13th century. It's one of the oldest liturgical pieces we have. It's by far one of the most beautiful.

It's not about the cuteness of a baby, the quietness of a night that wasn't quiet--what with displaced people scrambling for shelter before darkenss left them at the hands of robbers or raping Roman soldiers extorting protection money.

No, "Of the Father's Love Begotten" is actually one of the most beautiful Christian creeds we own--if we would choose to see it as such. It tells God's story. It's not about what we humans have projected onto a single night or a few days surrounding it that we really have no way of knowing a whole lot about. It's about what God has been doing eternally.

And, no, unlike every children's pageant and program, unlike every courthouse/church lawn nativity scene, unlike every creche on living room mantles, the shepherds, the eastern astologers and the newborn child were not all there simultaneously.

If the world had not been very imperfect, the Perfect would not have needed to enter it so intimately.

The gospel text for this Sunday, the day after Christmas, is from Matthew 2. The Holy Family is on the run, escaping to Egypt. On the run for the life of their child, on the run for their own lives if they had been caught defying Herod's order. A paranoid megalomaniac who does not hesitate to murder siblings, spouses, children will not bat an eyelash wiping out a couple of fleeing peasants who might constitute a threat to Herod's power.

Here God begins. Or continues... Here God chooses to crawl inside of human flesh that can't even walk, talk or feed itself. Here God forsakes "lording it over" and chooses to live under the world that so desperately needs hope, help, healing and a whole host of things besides redemption.

So God begins where God always does: with nothing, or next to nothing. In weakness, not strength. In vulnerability, not supremacy. In flesh, not just spirit.

In life, not in death.

In order to spend time with us for all time.

It's begotten in love. Always was. Ever shall be.

Fall on your knees. Hear the angel voices. Where you least expect to find them.

Christmas blessings!

Roger

From Hanoi With Love: a New Messiah Chorus

2010-12-20T09:03:00.001-08:00

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6-7 NIV)

Josh Butler and a couple of other church members arrived about two hours before the 9:00 AM worship yesterday morning at Imago Dei Community. They were bearing gifts from the East.

As in, the Far East.

As in the "East" that we on the West Coast of North America have to travel west to reach.

As in Southeast Asia.

As in Hanoi, Vietnam.

As in, yes, the same Hanoi our country engaged as a blood adversary for 16 years, deployed 3.5 million Americans to serve in, shed the blood of over 58,000 of our own, over a million of theirs.

We cannot begin to tally the cost of war.

We left behind thousands of maimed, orphaned Asian children, thousands of Amerasian children conceived by the union of American GI sperm with the eggs of Asian prostitutes and abandoned "girlfriends".

Thousands of square miles of Vietnam were tainted and poisoned with Agent Orange. Over 30,000 Vietnamese have died since the end of the American War in 1975 as a result of one cause: accidental detonation of unexploded mines, bombs and other ordnance that are the inevitable byproducts, whether accidental or intentional, of war.

While we sing the "Alleluia Chorus " of Handel's Messiah in churches, civic auditoriums and via flash mobs in shopping malls, we may in the midst of our celebrations, wrapping paper and debit/credit slips forget the verses of Isaiah 9:2-5 that come immediately before the familiar verses Handel set to music:

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as soldiers rejoice when dividing the plunder. For as in the day of Midian's defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor. Every warrior's boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire.

The "gifts" Josh Butler and the others presented at Imago Dei's worship yesterday were these church bulletins printed in Hanoi. They were printed at a growing community business started by Imago in Hanoi in order to give work and dignity and worth and community to people with disabilities who are often hidden by their families who consider disabled people a shameful disgrace. Some of these workers and their families are so moved by this act of grace and kindness, this new view of life, this new beginning, that their hearts and minds are ready and eager to hear a message of steadfast love and hope.

We call it the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I call it taking the words of Isaiah 9:2-5 seriously because we have taken the words of Isaiah 9:6-7 seriously.

For once.

In Southeast Asia.

Or wherever we are.

Christ came not to sanction the economic growth of the righteous but to break the rod of the oppressor and to burn forever the boots, the armaments, the instruments and the uniforms of war. Including those that say: Made in USA.

Cleberate and get to know this Christ whose birth we proclaim. Get to know Isaiah first. Then be ready to unwrap the package of Jesus' birth by asking the question, "What does this call me to?"

The peace of Christ be with you all,

Roger

PS: The crooked cut on the bulletin? No, it wasn't done by the disabled person in Hanoi who ran the copies. Josh Butler himself took full responsibility for that.

Q: And where did the money come for this project?

A: Imago Dei's alteration of commerical Christmas known as Advent Conspiracy: http://www.adventconspiracy.org/

Give The Mall!

2010-12-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

Well, they've got it all figured out.

Jesus is coming back on May 21, 2011. Guess we don't have to worry about 2012 anymore.

This group has it all figured out. Down to the day. But they wouldn't do the hour, I suppose, cuz that might actually be stepping into God's turf.

Have a gander:

http://www.ajc.com/lifestyle/billboard-campaign-claims-jesus-771570.html

"The Bible teaches that. . .", etc.

So it has to be true. Only people who "interpret" the Scriptures can be wrong. Those who simply read it know the full truth. So they can't be wrong.

Funny, I've never heard that line of reasoning from a native speaker of ancient Hebrew, ancient Aramaic or Koine Greek. Just so you know, the last "native speaker" of Koine Greek died at least a thousand years ago when common Greek had already transformed into something between it and modern Greek.

So if Jesus is a'comin', might as well run up the credit cards to the max. Give the Mall this Christmas. But why stop there? Go whole hog, hog wild. Since we won't even see Memorial Day 2011 according to these folks, might as well have a Holly, Jolly Christmas.

And then some... Foreclosure and garnished paychecks move so slowly you won't even be homeless yet by May 21. Go for it.

Bible teaches. . . Or not.

Roger

R U the 1 We've Been Waiting 4?

2010-12-09T07:52:00.000-08:00

Now when Jesus had finished instructing his disciples, he went on from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities.

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus asnwered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me." Matthew 11:1-6

Advent is quite a ride. Last week we see John at the Jordan warning people that God's chosen anointed ("Messiah" in Hebrew, "Christ" in Greek) was upon them. Messiah would shake up the world, gather the grain into the bin and set the waste products (unprepared, unrepentant people???) on fire.

Messiah's winnowing fork is the equivalent of being run through a combine. Or a hay baler. Any farmer who has ever run either of these machines has at one time or another seen the unfortunate snake, rabbit or pheasant go through the machine. As a kid, I don't know how many rats and mice I saw hop into the feeder and go through the corn sheller.... Never saw any recognizable pieces come out with the corn, the husks or the cobs.

John is expecting action, unmistakable action. No person on earth can confuse fire with no fire. One burns. The other doesn't. And people know they'd better pay attention to John. He looks, dresses, eats and sounds like Elijah. And they know when Elijah shows up again it will be to inaugurate something like the Day of Yahweh. God gonna DO somethin' big!

So when John gets tossed into the slammer for having called murderous, immoral Herod on his behavior and liftestyle, he expects Jesus, the one whom he, John, had personally "anointed" with water there in the Jordan, to at last begin the campaign. "Let the conflagration begin! Nuke 'em, Big Guy!"

In a first century jail you don't get a cell with bunk, toilet and three squares. If you don't starve, it's only because your friends come to feed you--and bribe the corrupt guards every step of the way to do so. You're lucky if even crumbs get through.

But John has friends and followers. They come. John wants to know, "What's going on with Jesus? Has the revolution begun yet? Anything on fire?" They don't have anything like that to report, so John gets to the point. "Go ask Jesus himself. Are you the one, or are you going to turn out to be just like every other self-appointed false Messiah before?"

"I preached fire back there at the Jordan, Jesus. I was sure I had it right. I expected to see a clear/hold/build plan in place in the first weeks of your campaign. I expected to see a strategy to kick the Romans out of Judea by Passover and clear out of Galilee by Succoth next hear. I expected to see the heathen pagans and idolaters burning at the stake and the direct rule of Yahweh from center court of the temple. I expected fire, but so far I ain't even seein' any smoke."

"Are you the one, Jesus.....

or ain't you?????"

Jesus tells John's friends to report back what they hear and see. It's the same fulfillment of Isaiah 29:18-19, 35:5-6, 61:1 that got Jesus into such trouble in his hometown synagogue (Luke 4:18-19). They were about to kill him... Yep.

What upsets us so about a Messiah of grace and mercy as opposed to a Messiah of war? Why is it that Jesus inherits the titles Messiah/Christ and, in the words of Isaiah 9:6, "Prince of Peace"? Not Prince of War, Generalissimo Jesus.

Is it true that we believe so strongly in our ability to save and perfect ourselves that we would rather die, would rather kill, would rather go to war, would rather burn up the world and all of creation rather than see someone else get a break?

As my professor of Old Testament studies said once, "Our primal fear is that someone who doesn't deserve it will beat the system and get into heaven anyway."

We ought to ponder that statement a long while, especially in Advent, especially with John's questions echoing in our ears. Especially with Jesus' answer.......

Advent blessings,

Roger.

Swept Away...

2010-11-29T08:04:00.000-08:00

...things will be just as they were when Noah lived. People were eating, drinking, and getting married right up to the day that the flood came and Noah went into the big boat. They didn't know anything was happening until the flood came and swept them all away. That is how it will be when the Son of Man appears. Two men will be in the same field, but only one will be taken. The other will be left. Two women will be together grinding grain, but only one will be taken. The other will be left. (Matthew 24:37-41 CEV)

Swept away... If you've ever let your eyes stray to the covers of the romance novels on sale in the grocery store, the cover art says it all.

Studly man with Greek god hair and physique to die for (either no shirt on or already unbuttoned to the waist) is holding woman in his arms with her clothing shredded like that of the eyesore women's costumes of Dancing With The Stars. She's swooning in his arms.

She's being "swept away".

Yeah, right. Until the divorce lawyers get involved.

**********************************

One minute the two guys were standing on top of this peak on the east edge of the Wallowas in NE Oregon, their hang gliding chute on the ground. The next minute, their wing was aloft on the breeze and they were flying. Swept away.

Their world changed instantly, you better know!

We've often heard this passage, the first gospel text we read in the season of Advent, as a prediction or description of the end of the world. At least, talk about "End Times" to people and they'll always, always, always come up with end-of-the-world scenarios of tribulation, calamity, and blood up to the bridles of the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

That solo understanding of biblical End Times is flat out "corpus abuse" of the text. No, the man in the field who was taken, the woman grinding who was taken, were not raptured out of the evil world into heaven while the ones who were left suffered horribly.

No, the ones TAKEN were overcome by life. Their lives were completely thrown off track when life changed, when the world changed. They weren't prepared.

The ones who were left were prepared. They stayed on the job, continued to serve and get the work done in radically altered conditions.

The Noah reference informs us if we are ready to shove rapturous misinterpretations out of our minds and actually hear what Jesus has to say.

Noah and family weren't swept away. The others were. Noah and family lived in, on, with and through the worst natural disaster imaginable--and they saved God's living creatures along with them.

How? The big boat didn't fall out of the sky. They didn't pick it up at 75% off on Black Friday. It wasn't imported from China. Didn't steal it on e-Bay. They spent years building it.

They were preparing and so became prepared to serve when the whole world changed.

We live in the times between our Lord's first appearance and earthly life and our waiting and expectation of the next. We are not living daily looking for the end of the world but its New Beginning. Actually, we are already living its new beginning.

In the best of times and the worst of times, we are on the job and prepared to serve because we are prepared with Jesus' durable word that outlasts earth and sky.

And happy landings, all you hang gliders out there!

Blessed Advent!

Roger

In Flower Years...

2010-11-25T21:13:00.000-08:00

Iris After Veterans Day

The iris did not expect

autumn's chill so soon,

shivers in the rain,

in vain awaits the sun

among the casualties of war,

roses and the wilted red carnations.

Cut tulips skyward reach

for a helping hand

an entire week after Veterans Day,

too weak to lift their wet winged leaves

from the cold gray granite.

Frost and snow failed their fight for life

somewhere in its prime:

Age nineteen in flower years.

Angels Among Us

2010-11-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

Steve Hanks is our favorite living watercolorist. His rendering of the human form has a draftsman's precision. But his shading of skin tones has to be a gift of the Creator. You have to be born with it, I think. Gosh, he's good.

This painting is titled "There Are Angels Among Us".

OK, which one is the angel? Woman walking the dog? The dog? Guy walking away? Guy in the background with his kid? Couple way in the background?

The woman in black?

Guy wearing the hoodie?

Kids would be willing to hazard a guess. Probably won't get a peep out of adults. Too afraid of being "wrong".

"Pastor wants me to say it's the homeless guy in the hoodie." That's what we might think.

"Or maybe it's the gal in black... Do angels really wear black? Could they?"

How might your answer about the angel question change if I asked this:

"OK, hold the answer to who the angel is. Meanwhile, ask this question: Who is the Christ?"

While you ponder, ponder another question. Is there someone else in the picture you haven't seen yet?

How about the person whose eyes are seeing this picture? How about you?

Rob Bell in his breathtaking short film DVD "Open" poses this thought. Maybe God wants to involve you in the answer to prayer. Then he gets to the meat. "Don't ask God to feed a hungry person if you have plenty of food."

We have no idea what act of kindness and grace anyone in the painting has just performed--or is about to. Even the person behind the eyes that see the scene before us.

There are angels among us. And so is Christ. So are you.

Amen.

Roger

Far Greater Generation

2010-11-15T08:23:00.001-08:00

Tom Brokaw may not have coined the title "Greatest Generation", but he certainly gave it a permanent place in our psyche.

I don't contend a single qualification of the Americans who lived and served and experienced the sacrifices and the decisions of World War II.

They deserve all the thanks and honor we can give them.

But as my fellow Nebraskan, Dr. Mary Pipher observed in her book The Shelter of Each Other--Rebuilding Our Families, when the wolf is at the door and the enemy is external, coming together is so much easier to do.

When the wolf is inside, it's a totally different deal.

I fought the Cold War in the Vietnam era. I've actually heard WWII veterans say in front of Vietnam veterans, "I fought the GOOD war." I found it gracious of the Vietnam vets that they kept their silence and didn't shout, "Excuse me, but we didn't get any more of a choice than you did."

I've had it stuck in my face for much of my life that I'm a "baby boomer". As if I had a choice. I'm supposed to be one of America's first worthless generation, a generation that lost America's first war, the generation of free love and no morals. The generation of Americans that expected the government to do everything for them. Totally spoiled. Well...

I've got a beef with a few things. The Greatest Generation did great things in WWII. But it was also that generation that got us into Vietnam and then could not figure out what the hell to do with it or how to be honest about it. A guerilla war for national unification was constantly fought with the mentality (on America's part) of a traditional European land war with fronts and opposing powers wanting to annex adjacent territory. It was none of those. Greatest Generation was not great enough to see that or to make an appropriate course correction if they did. Political calculations colored everything but were colorblind to the color of blood--my generation's blood.

Even greatness has limitations.

Our country, our culture, our families, our political system and our economy and our churches and our entire way of life are threatened today by insidious enemies from within even as our way of life threatens the entire planet without. So far, we are not responding well at all. We are mostly like the grumbling Israelites longing for "the flesh pots of Egypt." We're looking back. We still like Ike and wanna go back there.

We haven't found our Moses to show the only way: forward.

I don't know who the parent was who left their child's note at the Oregon Vietnam Memorial in May. I wonder if the adult(s) involved had any more of an idea how to spell, construct a simple declarative sentence or to reason than the child who made these letters in crayon. At least the kid had the wisdom and the courage to say something, whatever it means.

So here's my response to the accusations that my boomer roots and birth date have made me a substandard American:

1. We've never bounced a check.
2. We've never been in jail.
3. We've never been in credit card trouble.
4. We've been married to only each other for nearly 40 years.
5. We've raised a daughter who has been employed and self-sufficient since she graduated from college over 8 years ago.
6. Our house is old and paid for.
7. Our cars are old and paid for.
8. We pay our taxes.
9. We inform ourselves and vote.
10. We have never collected a dime of unemployment compensation.
11. We have household income at the poverty level.
12. We go to church and actually provide church and meals for people who are homeless and mentally ill.
13. We've never sued anyone, but I have helped to defend others wrongly accused and sued in court.
14. We've both interrupted education tracks and careers to serve our country and live overseas at well below poverty level.
15. We've never expected the government to provide for us.
16. We've let our elected representatives know repeatedly what we think is right and necessary.

None of this deserves an award or a certificate of achievement. It's simply the minimum standard we should expect of everyone who lives here.

We've got serious problems here in the USA, and they are bringing the nation to its knees. We have actually glorified war over responsibility.

These problems will not be solved by entertainment and thinking no deeper than 140-character tweets. They will not be solved by spending even more money on election campaigns.

"Getting the message out" is not the impediment to moving forward. Being clueless or careless is.

Crushing burdens have been handed to Americans under the age of 35, burdens which Jean and I have decried in every way we could because we foresaw them. We are not ready to quit, but we are discouraged. VERY discouraged.

And here's my take on things. If Americans under the age of 35 can figure out how to salvage the mess that's been left to them, they will far, far exceed the Greatest Generation in imagination, courage and sacrifice. They will indeed have earned the title "Far Greater Generation".

By comparison to what today's younger Americans face, the challenges of WWII were flat out idiot-simple.

Younger Americans, we're here to help. Let's talk.

Time we got going. Waiting makes none of the tasks ahead easier or simpler.

Prayers accepted and appreciated. Thanks!

Roger

With Alcohol He Built A Wall...

2010-11-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

Veterans Day...

We're supposed to fly flags and be patriotic today. Whatever the "being patriotic" part means... For the record, I AM flying my flag today but only at half staff. In fact, I never fly my flag at anything but half staff. Flying the flag should humble us. "Pride goeth before a fall." We've had enough pride, and falling is a distinct possibility now.

Time to check out the humility side of the aisle.

Well, Veterans Day 2010...

The newspapers have been full of Biggest (Christmas) Sale of the Year flyers already.

Ain't even Turkey Day yet.

I was supposed to donate blood at the Red Cross today. But I'm recovering from a cold and will shed the red stuff another day when it's healthier. I gave them a triple unit of platelets just a week ago today. My veteran's gift to life.

But on this day I'm remembering so many things, and I know there are so many unshared memories and untold stories. Please read a few of these and share with friends: http://www.patheos.com/community/karenspearszacharias/

And on this day I can't help thinking about Wes. And what he told Ron just before he shipped out for Vietnam in '67. Wes didn't expect to return. And he didn't. Almost did, but he didn't. You can only wish all soldiers would return alive. Most did return alive, of course.

Not all were well.

I saw first hand the life and death tightrope that many walked daily when many years ago I visited the counseling groups for veterans and their families at the Klamath Falls office of (then) Lutheran Family Service of Oregon. LFS was saving countless lives with tools other than surgery, IV's and antibiotics.

Let's say Wes had returned. What kind of life would his have been? I don't know, and no one but God does. Years later my late friend Jack, an 1800-hour Cobra pilot, would tell me point blank:

"When you have killed other human beings, it can be hard to think of yourself as a moral person again."

I learned in the vets' groups at Klamath Falls just how many returned vets and their loved ones were struggling to make it. Not all who made it, "made it." For those who did not, for those who still struggle today, these words:

Vet

The time never stopped

though it seemed to come and go, inverted

Nightmarish nights of terror, unnerving days between

He died in the spirit at nineteen

too wounded to feel the pain--injury went unseen

And a youthful dream was left to rot

stillborn in muddy fear.

His body returned, warm and breathing

though the eyes told pale death within

Never certain if it ended,

if anything else had been...

With alcohol, he built a wall

Held together with pills and pain

People never got near, let alone inside

They never cared to once they'd tried

And somewhere the fog would close again,

remind him of the rain...

Chills and sweat and pain, bloody mud and rain

The fog would close...

Sometime between his childhood

and early Friday afternoon

The fog came in...

And he walked off the edge of the World.

God's eternal peace to you today, brothers and sisters.

Thank you for your service, and welcome home!

Roger

Swords Into Plowshares, or Back Again?

2010-11-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah 2:4

I traveled to my hometown of Arlington, Nebraska last month to visit my Mom. She's lived her whole life in this county until the past two months in neighboring Dodge County, the county where I was born.

Arlington has a little VFW Hall, now headquarters also for the American Foreign Legion, or what's left of it. They have burger barbeques regularly and post honor guards at funerals of veterans, plant flags on veterans' graves on Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

Outside the VFW Hall is, of course, a flagpole. But there's also the mandatory piece of non-functional armament. In this case, it's a 155mm model M1A2 Howitzer.

It's been brush painted with several coats of olive drab paint that are now badly oxidized again. The military tires have actually been replaced since a previous visit, but they are not faring and aging well in the heat and sun of Nebraska summers and the cold of Nebraska winters.

In the few minutes I spent around the artillery piece last month, I probably looked more closely at some details than almost anyone in town. It's kinda like that with things we see every day and take for granted. Kinda like veterans whom we see every day assuming that we know what's there.

Within the length of two football fields from this big gun, one can be standing in my cousin Verdel's soybean or corn field, depending on what he's planted that year. Farming is now an industrial process limited exclusively to two heavily genetically modified crops: corn and 'beans. It wasn't always so, but things are always changing in this technologically driven world of ours.

Illinois blacksmith John Deere gave the world the steel plow. It worked so much better than its cast iron predecessor because the steel would polish up nice and smooth and scour much better as it turned the soil. It tilled better. The horse could pull it more easily. John Deere's peer named Oliver accomplished the same thing using chilled iron.

And with the growth of the iron and steel industry, American manufacturers were able to bolt and rivet together huge 10-bottom plows to break up the prairie sod when pulled by monstrous steam tractors burning coal and wood. Hello, Dust Bowl, a few decades later!

As with all things that rise rapidly, an apex is reached, then a fall. At the height of intensive tillage, turbocharged diesel farm tractors pulled 6-bottom plows, mostly 16-inch bottoms unlike the smaller 12- or 14-inch bottoms pulled by the steamers. Some of the better ones were made by the Oliver Corporation of Chicago, Illinois. Zip code 60606.

Chi Town. Also home of International Harvester, successor to the McCormick-Deering Company that grew out of the reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick. Among Chicago, Moline, Waterloo, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Coldwater (Ohio), you had over 90% of the farm equipment manufactured in the United States.

The Oliver Corporation went belly up long ago. IH had to merge with Case to stay afloat. There is no Minneapolis-Moline. No Massey-Harris, no Cockshutt (Canada), no Ferguson, No Allis-Chalmers, no Avery. Thankfully, farmers no longer use plows. No-till farming has begun to save a lot of fuel and topsoil, and none to soon. But we've replaced plowing to some extent with genetic tinkering and massive amounts of chemicals. How long before we figure out that doesn't work in the long haul either?

I wonder how many of the farmers or farm rooted people in Arlington know that the gun carriage for the big Howitzer was made by The Oliver Corporation? 1955. Says so right on the barely legible data plate. It's a composite piece, this big gun. Barrel came from the Watervliet Arsenal, 1984. Breech has been welded shut. So has the muzzle.

Sometimes these big guns took lives. Sometimes they saved them. Sometimes they took friendly lives on our side when we put expired Korea era shells into them: short rounds that exploded near the gun, not the target.

A friend's father, David Paul Spears, was killed that way in July 1966. He left behind a young widow, Shelby, and three little kids. Years later, David Spears would also have a granddaughter named Shelby. And since we're talking about iron and steel, how about this irony: The Oliver Corporation manufactured carriages for the 155mm Howitzer at its Shelbyville, Ohio factory.

And sometimes the big guns took lives even when they weren't present. Because they existed and we sold them to others, munitions were made and stockpiled. Sometimes, as the Saturday Night Live Coneheads used to say, "in mass quantities."

Decades later a whole new technology of asymmetric warfare would emerge. The shells would be pilfered "in mass quantities" after the fall of Saddam because we went in with too few troops to actually occupy Iraq and then naively dismissed the entire armed forces of Iraq.

Can you say "Improvised explosive device?"

Proclaim this among the nations:

Prepare for war, stir up the warriors. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, "I am a warrior." Joel 3:9-10.

Seems so many things are becoming obsolete all around us. The military draft has become obsolete. But war hasn't yet. I wonder when we'll figure out that we can't afford war. Philosophically or financially...

Funny how much the M1A2 on the Howitzer's data plate looks like MIA2. I wish war would go MIA, too. I wonder if we could grow to embrace that thought?

Peace,

Roger

P.S. In case it looks insignificant, the inside diameter of the welded shut Howitzer muzzle below measures 6.1 inches.

Here Come da Judge!

2010-10-19T08:29:00.001-07:00

Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told them a parable to show them that shey should always pray and not lose heart (give up). He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who niether feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in the town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.'"

The Prinveville Bible Fellowship meets in a building that had a former life. We hope. We notice that the "Payment Slot" has been disabled with screws. That didn't disable someone's imagination in altering the text, however.

Some churches have worked that way. Many so-called justice systems around the world have never worked differently. Justice is given to the highest bidder, the one with the most power.

When Jesus sets the stage of the parable by introducing the corrupt, unjust judge, the one who decided not on the basis of his faith, public pressure or the human community's constitution and laws--but apparently on the basis of how he felt or how well he was paid by the powerful--I imagine someone in the crowd piped up and said,

"Yo, Rabbi, name me a judge that doesn't work this way!"

Point taken.

And imagine the widow going up against this kind of bullheadedness and corruption. What's she got going for her? Nothing. Total zip.

In Jesus' day, and still in our day in many places, you are the bottom rung of the ladder if you are female and without a family, without male power brokers. 'Specially if you got no bucks.

But the widow does not give up. She won't take no for an answer. She wears out the crooked, corrupt judge. Nags 'til the cows come home. Good on her!

So Jesus says, "If the most powerless person you can imagine can prevail against the most corrupt system you can imagine, what's keeping you from taking advantage of your much more favorable conditions?"

For the widow, the system is completely stacked against her. But it eventually crumbles her way.

For us, the God system is completely stacked in our favor. Do we have faith enough to ask? And keep at it? At all?

Do we have faith enough to ask?

If we don't, here's a piece of advice: Act as if we do.

Pray anyway. Pray until it hurts. Pray until it feels better. Don't give up. Don't quit. Don't lose heart.

Pray for what you really need. Which is the same thing God really needs. God can't be unfaithful to God's self. So, doggone it, ask for it!

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven...

Amen.

Pastor Roger

EIA, not MIA

2010-10-09T12:51:00.000-07:00

Mom is 103. Actually, 103.5. I brought her three yellow roses on her half birthday on Tuesday. It was humbling to see my sweet little Mom, carrying on the noble fight for her life with grace, peace and a little humor not common to the general lot of us.

Mom might not ever be able to walk much or very far again. A bum knee she's had for 50 years is really acting up now. That saddens me because it limits her so.

We shared some deep and wonderful time for four days this past week. We can talk about almost anything. Her mind is there still. She doesn't have the latest information on things. Who does? But she's willing to talk about what she knows.

She and I can talk about the war. Wars, actually. We can talk about Iraq and how we got there. We can talk about Afghanistan. And how we got there. And where we're going. We can talk about what it means to go to war and what following Christ calls us to do.

I deeply love and respect my Mom for this. Always have. She's an EIA, elder in action. On the life and death subject of war, she's willing to talk and use all the mental faculties she has left--which are quite a lot.

In her lifetime, Mom has seen the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, a bunch of Middle East Wars, the Cold War, the Iran-Iraq War, civil war in Yugoslavia, the First Gulf War, civil wars in Lebanon, the Chechen War, the Iraq War, nearly endless war in Afghanistan--and a pile of "ethnic cleansing" genocial wars in places like Cambodia, Rwanda and Kosovo.

Then, of course, there are the 11,000,000 human beings exterminated by our own ethnic blood brothers and sisters. (6 million were Jews; 5 million more were not.)

That's just the short list.

Mom stands in sharp contrast to a horrifyingly large number of Americans with far fewer years, far more energy, far more information and far fewer limitations but who are strangely MIA, missing in action, when it comes to talking and thinking and doing something about war.

Unwilling to volunteer for service, unwilling to buy war bonds and pay a tax surcharge, unwilling to send their own into harm's way, too many Americans are also unwilling to use their minds, their voices and their words--their practically unlimited opportunities--to think or talk about this war. These wars...

Oh, and what about using their faith? What about working feverishly to prevent war?

Too many are MIA, and I'm sad about that. That's not making very good use of the so-called freedoms which our so-called appreciation for veterans claims we are undyingly grateful for.

Freedom to be silent is what not what they fought for. Freedom to be inert is not what they served and died for. Freedom to be uninvolved is not what we live for. It's not why I gave four years of my life.

Let's give up being MIA, missing in action. Let's come home. Let's become CIA, citizens in action.

Afraid to start talking and listening?

"Every time I start talking politics, it simply leads to a blow-up and friends storm off in anger," you say?

Who said anything about talking politics? The subject is war, not politics. War has us by the throat, so we kinda sorta oughtta talk it out and talk it through. Isn't that what the Constitution we swore we would preserve, protect and defend requires of us?

Fear of possible verbal conflict is never an excuse. Not when violent conflict that sheds blood, ends lives and engulfs a nation's future well-being is done in our names.

Here's a helpful hint. Don't begin the conversation with any of the following:

"The Democrats..."

"The Republicans..."

"Obama..."

"Bush and Cheney..."

Use this starting point instead: "Christ calls me to..."

Yeah, He does. As in "Blessed are the......."

Something about peacemakers in there. Yeah, those guys. And Moms.

I'm inspired by one little EIA, an elder in action: my Mom.

Pray for Mom, our country and one another. And end this pall of silence. Make peace, for God's sake. It's war.

Thank you. Amen.

Roger

"Increase our Faith."

2010-10-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

Luke 17:5 The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"

It comes like kind of a curveball amid Jesus admonitions about stumbling blocks and their implications. Something about putting a millstone-sized piece of ballast around our necks as we go swimming.

Not much forgiveness in that! But what do we think Jesus was talking about as a cause for stumbling or offending? Not saying please or thank-you? Talking out of turn? Dumping all over someone's favorite sports team, alma mater, style of worship, taste in music?

Could Jesus be talking about pedophilia, sexual abuse of minors, fascination wtih (additcion) to porn, cheating on our spouse?

All that... and more.

Trusting anything more than God. Putting anything in the place of God. That kind of thing.

Then Jesus goes on to talk about inexhaustible forgiveness, makes it sound as though one allows oneself to be completely ripped off, taken advantage of, in giving out forgiveness. Well... OhhhhhKaaaaaay.......

Then what about the spouse beater who has a five- or ten-day orbit cycle? Every time it happens she/he swears sorrow, that it won't happen again?

We have to mince words and protect the vulnerable, say that this kind of cylical behavior does not meet the standard of repentance (turning back) that is called for in order for forgiveness to be granted.

Jesus says that faith the size of a mustard seed could uproot mulberry trees. He talks about doing the servant's duty in coming in from the fields and then preparing our master's meal before we tend to ourselves.

In other words, be faithful and trust that we will be faith-filled in the course of doing so.

We should not pretend as if, act as if, we were the master. And we are well advised to not wait around until we have enough faith in order to set to work making the Master's meal--or anyone else's, for that matter.

Our Vietnam POW's held up very well considering. They might not have considered themselves strong enough to do so before finding themselves in the situation.

Odd thing about faith. It's not quantifiable or directly comparable. It is really only given in the doing of something that seems behond us before we do it. Kinda like comparing the size of the mustard seed to the full-grown mulberry tree.

The tree started from a seed even smaller than the mustard seed.

May we have and be given the life and faith to grow each day.

Amen!

Pastor Roger

No Minors Allowed!

2010-09-14T08:13:00.000-07:00

Patriotism runs deep in most communities in this country, especially in our smaller towns and more rural areas. We don't always have the bucks to keep things in tip-top shape in many of these places.

Paint peels a bit, especially where the full sun shines all day long most days. The wood trim is often a bit dried out and cracked.

The red-white-blue is at home here under the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds and the frequent red sunsets.

Sometimes we take for granted the things in front of us. And we don't see them.

Like the fact that if you're a minor you can't go to the Vets Club in this town...

You can already have served a tour in Iraq, another in Afghanistan and been lucky enough to come home physically intact. Or not completely.

But you can't go to this club for a beer or a game of darts.

Then maybe we shouldn't have sent you to war either until you were 21.

But at least you can't smoke here. We're lookin' out for your health.

We got your back.

I hope.

I pray.

Amen,

Roger

Burn That Thing Down! Or not...

2010-09-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

Lotsa folks wouldn't let anyone build this in their town. "Burn that thing down!" they'd say.

Or blow it up.

Sometimes we forget how time passes, how young and recent our experience and understanding of the world is, we Americans.

For us, like 1803, like the Louisiana Purchase, that's really... like... OLD! Practically the Stone Age.

And 1776, that hall with powdered wig guys and a hot, muggy day in Philly when it was barely more than a glorified cow town on the edge of the woods.... Paleolithic, Old Stone Age. Right?

This building with the four different minarets... It didn't always have them. It's the third church by its name on the site in modern day Istanbul, formerly Byzantium, Constantinople before that.

The name? Aya Sofia in Turkish. Hagia Sophia, transliterated from Greek. It's the Church of Holy Wisdom. The first church on the site was begun by Constantine himself and his son Constantius between 325 and 360 AD. Fire destroyed it in 404 AD. A second church was consecrated in 415 AD and destroyed during riots in 532 AD. 29 days later, Emperor Justinian ordered the construction of a new church that would surpass Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. It was consecrated December 27, 537. I've stood inside under its 55-meter dome, an absolute engineering marvel not only 1500 years ago, but even today.

It has suffered from earthquakes, fires and wars, has been repaired and rebuilt numerous times.

On May 27, 1453, Sultan Mehmet II entered the city after conquering the armies of the dying Byzantine Empire. Muslim worship and prayers were conducted here from then until 1935 when it was declared a museum of the Republic of Turkey after Kemal Ataturk ordered repairs between 1926 and 1930.

So, let's see... A Christian church for 916 years with already two centuries of Christian worship under its belt on that patch of land.

Then, a Muslim house of worship for 482 years.

Then a museum for the lifespan of the average American in the age of fast food and lack of exercise.

Nearly 1473 years old. 6.3 times as old as our independence from Great Britain if we use that '76 event in Philly as our starting date.

What is America's long-term role in the world? How will the events of September 11, 2001 be regarded 100, 200, 1473 years from now?

Way too soon to tell. Meanwhile, do we know our neighbors in this world?

Have we learned to love them as ourselves?

Have a blessed day in prayer for all who mourn and work for a better world on this day.

Amen.

Roger

Peace Is At Hand... Question is, whose hand?

2010-09-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

First Day of Peace
(for our nation and all who mourn on the first day that US combat units have not been in Iraq since March 19, 2003.)

The first day of peace brought showers,
then a touch of sun, change of season
No sense of battle won, lives lost,
a mother's quiet tears,
child's dreams still folded
Like the flag in a wedge of stars
that will never fly.

The nation had already withdrawn its sense of urgency
and purpose
battle lines pawned in polls and surveys
No goals came to the surface more than once
per day.
Piece by piece they came undone
in threes like WMD, IED, MRE...
Up-armored Humvee's gave their place
to Strykers, MRAP's, Predator drones and more
GOP! DEM! USA!
Us and them. At war. Sort of...

Disappointment did not fall on the first day of peace.
It came early on and left soon after, numb
Passion should not fail us when our young lives are lost
sacrificed with seemingly no notice.

That could never happen in a war,
real war like The Good One!
Would never be allowed among us on these shores
Unless a demon in the cloak of pride
denied our knowing,
stole our seeing, our giving of a care
citizen share of duty, honor, country, cost
Courage of knowing why,
why not
And what is lost that cannot be won militarily.

What will these families, loved ones tell their children
someday, one day,
soor or late
About why this was, what this was
What winning does when it does not happen
on the first full day of peace?

Copyright 2010 by Roger D. Fuchs, all rights reserved.

From all I can tell, there is no way that US troops will be out of Afghanistan by next year. Or Iraq. Yet America has long since moved on in our minds because we never really moved into these wars. We rail against budget deficits while we leave the things that are really killing jobs here (the cost of health care and insurance) and our failure to have infrastucture and energy policy for a brighter future unattended, unresolved. And we seem incapable of doing the math of what these wars have cost financially and the calculus of what they are costing and will cost in the future by having changed the world in a way that moves it toward more violence, not peace.

I hope I'm wrong. God, let us all pledge our best efforts to make me out to be completely wrong on this one. Help us, Lord.

Amen.

Roger

In Praise of Samuel I. Berek

2010-08-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

It was a big old frame building along the Union Pacific tracks on East Factory Street in Fremont, Nebraska. That was before Fremont had the ZIP Code 68025.

The building was painted a dark forest green although a bit dilapidated. Just below the eaves in big white letters was painted "JAKE BEREK IRON AND METALS".

Sam was the son who had taken over the scrap metal business from his father Jacob who had died before I ever got to go there. The office was dingy and littered, but there was a coal burning stove that kept it toasty warm in cold weather.

And inside near the window to the street was a big old stuffed chair of a color that defied description. On the one armrest of that chair sat an old round woman with gray hair. Jake's widow. Sam's mother. She said little. And when she spoke, it was with a heavy foreign accent.

Sam and his mother were Jews. My family, Lutheran to their DNA, had inherited much of Luther's animosity toward Jews. I won't attempt to describe it here. It wasn't overt, but I could sense it in my Father's speech and manner. That's the subject for another time.

And in our vernacular, we never called the Berek business a scrap metal business. The term "recycling" hadn't been invented yet. No, the Bereks ran the "junk yard". The scrap metal we sold them, old iron from obsolete farm machines, the guts of old cars scrapped out for the running gears to make farm wagons, old radiators and plumbing, water tanks, etc., that was all junk to us.

I liked going there and unloading the junk from the Ford pickup. We'd first pull onto the scale to get weighed, then unload. It was such fun to toss everything off and hear the clang as it landed on the pile with other people's junk. Then we'd get weighed again and go into the office to get paid. The Bereks always gave my brother Robert and me a candy bar, often a Baby Ruth bar. We liked that, of course, and said a shy "Thank you". Sam and his Mom always fawned over us as kids, almost more than relatives did.

I'm sure my Dad thought it was their way of making the stingy (in his eyes) prices for scrap metal more acceptable. Ingratiate the kids, chisel the parents. That's how everyone I knew regarded the modus operandi of Jews, be they jewelers, clothiers, furniture sellers, car dealers or junk dealers.

Sam always wore a top hat with a narrow rim. It was a way of keeping his head covered as a Jew that would not offend his entirely Christian customers had he worn a yarmulke. I didn't know that then. I didn't know about the Holocaust of Jews, the Showa, back then either.

World War II wasn't a decade behind us then, and I didn't know. Maybe it was because we were ethnic Germans. For that very reason, we should have known, even as little kids.

Sam was a community fixture in Fremont, and he did a bit of public speaking whenever he got the chance. He loved to talk to high school students and recognize them for academic achievement. Independence Day was one of his favorite days of the year. For decades, he organized the Fourth of July parade and fireworks display at the Moeller Field ballpark where the annual Fremont 4-H Fair was also held.

Sam loved to praise America for her freedoms. Sam saluted and respected the flag more fervently than anyone else I had ever met. To say that Sam was patriotic would be a gross understatement. For years I regarded Sam as a bit of an eccentric, somewhat of an extremist in his loyalty to America. He was in awe of this country but not the fanatic kind of flag waver I've since come to know in America.

DUH!

I wasn't astute enough or informed enough to observe whether Sam had a serial number tattooed onto his forearm. Or whether his mother did. But one was certainly tattooed onto Sam's heart. He knew his people's history, the horrors of what my German blood relatives had done to his people, what Stalin and his Russian Communists had done. Sam knew he lived in a different place, a promised land of sorts, where he and his family had freedom and could never be treated this way.

And he thanked God for the soil he lived on, free of persecution and protected by the Constitution of the United States of America and its First Amendment. He wasn't ever going to take that for granted, and he would do his best to prevent his fellow Americans from ever doing so as well.

I think Sam, God rest his soul, would be appalled at the timidity, flawed vision and fear that Americans seem to exude today. He would be aggrieved at our lack of understanding of the U.S. Constitution, the things we take for granted, the trust we have in weapons and lack of trust in the strength of our own freedoms. He would be mortified at our cynical attitude about voting, our indifference to human and civil rights.

And if he'd heard someone say "they hate our freedoms" as a justification for war, he would instantly have countered, "Perhaps they do hate our freedoms. But do we actually love them?"

And Sam would not stand for America's rush to judgment of the Islamic Center planned for New York City. Sam would see that hysteria as the thing long visited on his people now taking root here.

He would not stand for it. And he would wave the Stars and Stripes, read the Constitution aloud on street corners, and send fireworks into the night sky until America awoke.

Thank you, Sam. Thank God for you. I'm proud to have met you and heard you speak. Thanks you for all you did there in Fremont, Nebraska. I will never forget. Never. Nie wieder (never again).

Amen.

Roger

Bar Hopping... Or, What's Church For, Anyway?

2010-08-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

When Jesus saw her, he called her over and sid to her, "Woman, you are freed from your disability." Luke 13:12

Jean and I often go for walks in Portland's West Hills. The area is a bit unique and intriguing because of all the public stairways. There are plenty of private ones that lead from the street or the tiny garages carved like grottos in the rocky hillsides. But many are public, put there so that residents have a much more direct way to get downhill. Or uphill.

Sometimes the stairs are elevated for a portion before coming donw to earth, like the upper landing of this one on SW Vista Drive.

At one time, it probably served as a place for teenagers to go and drink, smoke and make out. In fact, a girl nicknamed Priscy signed her name in lipstick along with a heart to state that she and Roger loved each other.

I wonder how long ago that's been and how it's gone for them since.

Probably long after Priscy and Roger exchanged passionate kisses under this concrete shelter, somebody thought it looked like a more permanent one and started camping or living there. That would be when the neighbors said "No way!" and ordered the City of PDX to have custom made bars installed.

Bars can either keep us locked in or locked out. Sometimes, they aren't even made of steel.

Jesus was teaching in the temple. His teachings were often refreshing and not infrequently stirred the pot of the establishment in uncomfortable (to the official dudes) ways.

That's when he saw the hunched over, crippled woman. She didn't get in Jesus' face and demand a miracle. He called her over and set her free from her disability. She could stand up straight for the first time in 18 years. Maybe she was no older than that. We don't know.

The ensuing ruckus turns around healing on the Sabbath, something the higher-ups in the Jerusalem Temple considered work. The rules prohibited work of most types on the Sabbath. There were exceptions. Domestic livestock could be untied and led to water. That would involve less "work", fewer steps, than carrying the water to the animals. Hence, closer living within the law.

A miracle, a sign of God's power, was accomplished, no question. The woman could stand up straight. But Jesus knew there was more to the story. So he set the woman free.

It seems like a minor nit-picking detail until we consider this. She would need to change how she saw herself. If, though able to stand straight and tall, she continued to see herself as stooped over and crippled, she would never see herself and never live as someone not disabled.

More to come.

Setting Fire to the World

2010-08-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! Luke 12:49-51

Jesus said he wanted to set fire to the world. Burn this stinkin' place down. Or maybe burn it up. Never could figure out which way that should go. It's like going downtown. Once you get there, are you really uptown?

What? Was Jesus some kind of pyromaniac? Wanting to put a torch to creation, set the earth on fire?

I thought God had made everything and pronounced it "Tov!" (very good).

Even the stuff we humans have stuck onto the surface is at times unable to get in the way of the beauty and wonder of God's creation.

Maybe Jesus didn't really want to physically set the earth ablaze. Maybe he wanted to do what my Uncle Obert used to say some of the neighbores needed with their farm work. They needed some fire in the pants.

That is, they needed to get something done.

Jesus said that kind of thing wouldn't sit well with everybody. In fact, it might split families down the middle. Might turn fathers and sons against each other. Might set the women to a-hair pullin' cat fight. Even the in-laws would bust up over it.

Considering what we bright, intelligent humans with all our satellite and space station diagnostic tools, all our climate data, all our computing power already know about what lies ahead for us in the way of consumption spikes, extinction spikes, greenhouse gas spikes and population spikes, you'd think we'd actually be burning the candle at both ends to get something moving to help head off the damage.

We aren't doing that. At all. Seems like we're still looking for the Jesus that's like a big novacaine shot. Or maybe a big general anesthetic.

We're afraid we won't all get along anymore if we actually get to work doing what we are supposed to do: love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. That would sorta include future generations as well as the people who right today are impacted by the consumption we consider to be our right. Our right and privilege as Americans. Because we are the good guys.

Oh, don't worry. I'm not leaving out our all-out opposition to sin, death and the Devil. That's 'cause I haven't forgotten that Jesus has already handed us the victory there.

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y! That's what life is to be lived in the knowledge and the power of.

So why do we trust in war and weapons to deliver the goods?

Why do we trust in fear? Still...

Why?

Jesus would say, "For God's sake, open your eyes! Get to work! Get moving! Stop standing there dying and get busy living!"

Forget the fear.

Oh, and last time I checked, mothers and daughters-in-law and fathers/sons don't always get along so hot as it is.

Only thing that needs a match put to it is our reluctance, our fear, our foot-dragging, our blindness.

Take a look around. God didn't give us this to destroy but to give glory through life, not through ashes.

Peace,

Roger

When Mountains Cover and Hills Fall...

2010-08-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

The high places of Aven, the sin of Israel, shall be destroyed.Thorn and thistle shall grow up on their altars.

They shall say to the mountains, "Cover us,"

and to the hills, "Fall on us." Hosea 10:8

In Luke's account of Jesus' death march to Golgotha, Jesus quotes Hosea and directs the weeping women to turn their thoughts to what may lie ahead for them, not for him.

What does lie ahead? Something to ponder on a level that has less to do with the apocalyptic and eschatological than with the practical.

Here in N. America and elsewhere around

the globe, wheat prices are going up. Russia has banned wheat exports for the remainder of 2010. They are experiencing the worst heat wave on record. Heat and drought have brought massive forest fires. Worst on record.

The drought and heat may further stress forests, bring insect infestations that kill whole forests--inevitably leading to more fires, more drought, more heat. It's a feedback loop that can and will accelerate.

Oh, by the way, the wheat crop got hit hard by the same conditions. Some of it literally burned.

In Pakistan, always ripe for a disaster due to the poverty, population density, tribalism and corrupt government, the monsoon rains have been the worst on record. Self-sufficient communities in the north of the country have been completely wiped out, bereft of food, water, shelter, roads, bridges and the means to support themselves.

At last report yesterday, 12 million people were directly affected by the rains and floods. The only way to get in any relief was by helicopter--and yet more rains had made it too dangerous to fly.

So far, 2010 is shaping up to be the warmest year on record. Climate change deniers continue to deny. Response from the developed world, the part of the world with actual choices and actual power, has been far too meager to qualify as anything but an insult and a charade.

I sometimes think of it as ripping creation's gifts right out of God's hands and spitting back in his face.

In Luke's quotation from Hosea (Luke 23:30-31), Jesus follows it up with this observation:

For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?

People experience a snowy winter in one region of the US and use it to deny climate change, anthropogenic climate change, specifically. Never mind years of average temperatures for the whole planet, averages that have been trending up.

OK, so we can't completely make the case for global shifts out of the record heat in Russia or the record monsoons in Pakistan. But we can't fool the melting point of ice and the nearly universal retreat of the world's glacier systems.

So if the disasters in Russia and Pakistan are "normal" and not the result of changes wrought to the climate system by human activity, then you really wouldn't want to see what REAL CLIMATE CHANGE would produce, now would you?

What is REAL CLIMATE CHANGE? I define that as what even Republicans can't deny because it has cost them their homes, their land, their jobs, their drinking water, their food, their paycheck, their politcal power, their talk show, their tea party, their family members, their money.

I define is as when even Republicans are forced to ask the mountains and hills to bury them, to give them an escape from the consequences of thier actions. Or lack of it.

That goes for Democrats, too, and for all of us you's and me's out there.

If what we are seeing this year ain't the real stuff, then we surely don't want to see the real stuff.

Might be worth considering this: God does not recognize private property or private property rights. God gave and gives to the whole of creation and calls the whole of creation to steward for the good of the whole, aka to the glory of God.

Whatever else we believe, perhaps we could agree on this: Never has the planet been in the grand experiment of supporting nearly 7 billion of us. Seven billions warring and using and consuming like there is no tomorrow.

Time to get moving. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

And putting the finishing touches on the gilded invitations to the mountains and the hills... Not much God glory in that.

I like what Joseph Sittler wrote years ago. Talking about this is not stepping away from grave theological issues. It is stepping right into the middle of them.

Theology always lives between the rocks and the hard places. Otherwise, what good would it be? That's where all the God glory is.

Roger

The Ultra-High Price of Arrogance

2010-07-26T09:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, if you read the previous post, I was hauled into court. Not as a defendant but on behalf of a defendant. It's an experience I will not forget and have no plans or desire to repeat. However, it's now on my curriculum vitae as life experience. I should quit now since I'm batting a thousand: one win, no losses.

The leadup to the trial baffled me. I expected to be deposed by the other side. I wasn't. The only possible explanation for this unseized opportunity by the other side is arrogance. They thought that they had such a qualified, credible expert witness that they didn't want to give me even the experience and OJT of a deposition before getting me on the stand in court. I'm sure they expected to blow me away like a few dandelion seeds.

They grossly overestimated their own position and grossly underestimated what I knew and could show the jury--and I didn't even get to do a third of it in court.

They were seeking tens of thousands of dollars in damages. They spent several tens of thousands of dollars in getting to the trial. They left without a penny. It was a sad waste of time and money that could have been invested in the businesses on both sides of the conflict.

Lose-lose situation for everybody.

Arrogance. Flat-out arrogance. Well... maybe some ignorance mixed in with it.

Now comes the WikiLeaks.org report of 92K secret U.S. reports on the war in Afghanistan that confirm a similar arrogance and ignorance on the part of our country in this soon-to-be nine-year-old but forgotten war.

It's not news to me, however. I've heard the same thing from a number of guests on Terry Gross' (best interview show in the business IMHO) program "Fresh Air". Two weeks ago at Powell's Books in Portland, Jean and I heard the same in person from author Jere Van Dyk. JVD spent 44 days as a captive of the Taliban. Hence, the title of his book Captive. JVD essentially said:

1. The U.S. has bloody poor intelligence.

2. Ethnic and tribal loyalties rule the day and the territory.

3. Afghanistan is the most corrupt "government" on earth.

4. Making any kind of gunny sack purse out of the sow's ear we have made of Afghanistan will take far longer than both the purse strings and the patience/attention span of current Americans will allow.

We can't stay, and we can't leave. It's become a Humpty-Dumpty deal.

How did we get into such a mess in the first place? Well, you'd probably have to waterboard half the Bush Administration to find out. But maybe we should have been waterboarding ourselves before we ever started the mess in the first place.

Van Dyk pointed to the work of Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute in building schools in some of the most impoverished areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan as being the only real way forward.

Now comes the word that even the wives of some of America's top generals have read Mortenson's story in Three Cups of Tea and have asked their spouses essentially this question: Wouldn't this be a better way than bloodshed, drones and loss of life?

If I had to describe Mortenson's way succinctly, it would be with these words: the way of Christ. I challenge you to read his book and disagree with that assessment.
Several years ago in a home community group of young Christians, I asked this question:

Suppose that after 9/11 instead of essentially calling the U.S. to war, President George W. Bush had gone on national television and radio and read the Beatitudes and called the nation to a campaign of education and an end to poverty among our enemies. What would have been the reaction of the country?

A young woman didn't hesitate a second before replying "outrage".

So I guess the Jesus we profess and have at times been willing to kill for is really a fraud and a fake? Or not... I guess we'll never know until we are for once willing to try, to actually follow the way of Christ and the way of the cross.

But we might have to first declare war on our own arrogance. And ignorance.

I think we call that repentance.

Practice resurrection. Create peace. Amen.

Roger

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury...

2010-07-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

Last week was the week of no sleep.

It started over a year ago, June 15 to be exact. That's whenNorm, a friend of mine, received a letter alleging defective workmanship in the repair of an aircraft engine that later developed recurring problems that led to further very expensive repairs. No accident, no crash. No damage to the twin Cessna. No one hurt. Just a trashed engine.

The owner hired an "expert" to investigate and do a failure analysis. The expert did a shoddy job of investigating and documenting, then wrote a report based on jumped-to conclusions. It was a terrible report with confused words, sentences that did not logically follow, conclusions not based on a systematic cause-effect relationship. Worse, the so-called expert alleged that the engine damage resulted from an out-of-balance crankshaft but misunderstood the readings and units of measure from the balancing machine that derived the numbers.

My friend asked if I could help. I had expertise in all the required areas. I wrote a preliminary report. The case turned into litigation, a civil suit for damages, $91,000 to be exact.

I wrote a second, much longer and more detailed report. I documented everything, set it out as I would in an engineering report, did computations. The other side didn't give my report the time of day. They didn't even bother to depose me before trial.

"He's never given testimony in court before," they must have thought, "we'll blow him away in minutes."

Last week was the trial. It went 2.5 days. I was the last witness to be called. On cross- examination, the plaintiff's attorney tried to demolish me, not on the basis of my report but on the basis of my not being a pilot with 7,000 hours of flying experience. As if that had anything to do with whether I understood the guts of engines. I do. I take the job of fixing them and giving FAA approval to repairs very seriously.

As if lives depended on it. They do. Those lives could be mine. They could be yours or those of someone you love.

It was an exhausting weekend before trial, inspecting parts on a Saturday in the lawyer's driveway instead of in a shop, parts we should have seen weeks earlier. Sunday, I had three worship services to be a part of. Monday was trial preparation. Tuesday the trail began. I slept little the night before the first day of trial. After some fallacious testimony by the other expert witness, I did not sleep at all before the second day of trail. I was the last witness to be called at the end of the day.

I was exhausted. There were many things I wanted to get done during my testimony that it seemed we did not have time for. I left the stand, after being attacked by the other attorney, feeling defeated.

But I had shown the jury something, something they could understand. They understood. They got it.

There was more back and forth on the final day. There was rebuttal testimony by the other expert in which he did not refute what I had shown but only dug his hole deeper.

Then, closing arguments, jury instructions and waiting. The plaintiff needed to have the jury accept their case as a preponderance (at least 51% of the evidence), and the jury of nine would have to be unanimous.

I was exhausted and dozing on the MAX train when the word came back from my clients:

WE WON, 9-0!

I came away with a whole new understanding of the story of David and Goliath. I had gone into the courtroom against a giant, dead tired and without so much as my slingshot. So I thought.

Our side went in as people of integrity, people telling the truth. We left the courtroom the same way. Even if we had lost the case, we would still have had that.

But the jury saw the truth and rewarded it. Justice was done. Sweet justice.

Best of all, my friend who is 68 is retiring. He had just sold the business to his younger brother before the trial. Tomorrow morning, he and his wife leave on a five-week vacation across this country, seeing our beautiful land, visiting aviation colleagues from coast to coast and many places in between.

Norm hired me 32 years ago. It was 32 years to the day this past MOnday that I first arrived in Oregon and pulled into the parking lot a Troutdale Airport. What a sweet fulfillment that Norm and his wife are able to embark on this vacation truly free of the ill-founded lawsuit and its mental and financial burdens.

Many people were praying for us and for me. Only one thing to say to that:

Thanks be to God!

Roger