St. Mark’s Lutheran

This article from the WSJ is not surprising but eye opening. The jumping off point is President Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama and the Chinese response.

But China’s angry response to the news that Mr. Obama will meet with the Tibetan spiritual leader tomorrow in Washington goes straight to the point. “If the U.S. leader chooses this period to meet the Dalai Lama, that would damage trust and cooperation between our two countries,” said Zhu Weiqun, a Chinese Communist Party official at a Feb. 2 press conference. “And how would that help the United States surmount the current economic crisis?”

The background is that the US owes China a bucket-truck full of money, and China is one of the few places that has the ability to buy more of our nation’s debt. As a nation we like to support things such as religious freedom and self determination, we also like to spend more than we make. When confronted with the choice of reduced spending, or quietude on freedoms, which path does the nation choose?

The Bible and specifically the Gospel of Luke is pretty clear both what it would expect Caesar to do, and what Jesus asks us to do. Luke 16:10-13 – you can’t serve two masters. Luke 22:24-27 – gentiles and great men lord it over their people.

The lord was a patron – “the friend of the people” – and his clients were obliged to him. In the west, under the teachings of the church, that kind of vassalage, while not going away, had to be hidden. Read the quote from the Chinese official again. That kind of vassalage is coming back. He is shockingly blunt – a patron state telling a client state to look where its bread is buttered.

The message of freedom in Jesus is that we have no real Patron but the Father in heaven. Instead of serving the things of this world – serve God first. Serve the God who came to serve us. Serve the God who adopted us into his family. In the church we are all heirs and children of God. That is a much different status than a client. It recognizes the true differences between creator and creature.

You can’t serve two masters. Either it’s the hierarchy of Caesar and money or it’s the household of God. We owe Caesar and money respect, but they should not be our master. We should also not be surprised when the American Ceasar chooses to protect client relationships. If I were the Dalai Lama, I would not expect more White House visits.

Tags: Culture, Luke, economics by Parson Brown
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Full Text

The gospels present everyone as recognizing the authority of Jesus. They all knew he was different. What they didn’t all do is react the same way. Luke portrays a difference in the Synagogue resposne and the response of people gathered in the house.

Our society places a high worth on work and money. So high that we have been willing to destroy or at least seriously lame our communities and social stuctures. We work 12 hour days away from where we live. When we return we don’t have the energy to do anything. So we make up words like quality time. Leaders are divorced from those ruled. Children from parents, neighbors from neighbors, family from family. All of this in the name of making a living.

If we are being honest, unless the peak oil scenarios are right and we are all forced closer to home by just being energy poor, this isn’t going to change any time soon.

Being the church will mean operating within those constraints. It also means pointing out the consequences of certain decisions. The distinctions that Luke calls out in the responses of two groups to Jesus are paradigmatic. The synagogue sits in wonder and makes reports, but fundamentally does nothing. Way too many of our churches are really synagogues. The houses respond in service and bringing all the wounded to
Jesus.
A world divorced and divorcing itself from community creates a lot of wounded. The house has the cure. It may look like many of the churches are dying, but that is how God works. Things die, so that he can take the glory in bringing them back. The real choice for churches is do they want to rise, do they want to act like the house, or are they content being the synagogue and burying the dead?

Tags: Culture, Luke, Sermons, economics by Parson Brown
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Daniel 5:1-12 (The setup)
Daniel 5:13-30 (The reveal)

The title of this post is a phrase you hear in English, often shortened to the writing’s on the wall as in the writing’s on the wall for Chrysler and GM. The implication is that the end is near and that it is obvious for everyone but those very close to the party.

The source is Daniel. The new Neo-Babylonian King is having a party and commanded that all the stuff from Solomon’s temple be brought to it. They proceed to use it for debauchery. A ghostly hand appears and writes on the wall. This is obviously not a good sign, but nobody in the court can read the message.

The queen, who for some reason wasn’t at the debauchery, reminds the new king that Nebuchanezzer had someone who was good at this stuff – Daniel. Daniel appears and tells the King: 1) Your days are numbered, 2) You have personally been found wanting and 3) Your kingdom is going to fall. Daniel reaps the reward as “3rd ruler in the kingdom”, but the kingdom falls that night as the king was was slain.

As sinful humans we have an amazing capacity to not read the handwriting. I’d bet old Daniel wouldn’t have even needed the words on the wall to deliver that message. God drops us notes all the time in our lives. Coincidences might be one of those notes. If there is a personal God who cares about his people and the world, don’t you think he’d send a warning or a wake-up call every now and then? Now if he just sent an angel, or the hand appeared every time, it wouldn’t exactly be our actions. But the next time you hear a sermon that you think is aimed at you, or your mother calls at just the right time, or you find yourself talking with an old friend you haven’t contacted in years, ask yourself – is the handwriting on the wall for something? What might God be trying to say?

Tags: Daniel, Meditation, Repentance, economics by Parson Brown
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I’ve got it in the blog-roll on the right – a web site dedicated to a critical look of media coverage of religion called Get Religion. One of the contributors, a long time major newpaper religion beat writer, talks about the blind spot or the religious/theological ghosts in news stories. Reporters who don’t “get religion” often miss key drivers of the stories they are writing. They attempt to fit a type of secular framework that just doesn’t fit.

This article is by a very good columnist in the Wall Street Journal (just in case the article is behind a paywall here is a mirror). In it he is starting to make some connections, although he has probably missed the source in the Presidents thinking. This chart is in the President’s budget.

Mr. Henninger goes on to write that, “Whatever its merits, their “Top 1%” chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.” And right there is the Theological Ghost. He also writes that “Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer’s was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.” The key question to ask here is why has this 1% chart become an obsession, and why is it a moral argument? Mr. Henninger even says, “What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.” What is that something deeper? The theological ghost.

Read Luke 4:16-21 and then read Isaiah 61 and finally Leviticus 25:8-55. That is the scriptural basis for the theological ghost. Those passages are the core of liberation theology. Liberation theology has been and largely remains the theology of the religious on the political left. And please don’t take this as the negative it might read as, but President Obama was listening closer to Jeremiah Wright than he might want you to believe.

The religious left reads those passages in a very “this worldly” economic way. The religious right tends to make them “otherworldly” or spiritualize them. The left views it as a Christian duty to work to correct the economic imbalance here and now often through governmental means. The right tends to read liberation as freedom from sin, and that the left’s readings are dangerous and miss the main spiritual point.

Many people probably don’t think: 1) that they have a theology, 2) that if they do it influences them in any solid way and 3) ignorance of theology is dangerous, or knowlege of theology is helpful in understanding our world and our existence. The above is an example of a theological debate. It just looks like an economic and budgetary debate. If you don’t know what you are debating, how do you even know what a good outcome looks like?

Tags: Culture, Isaiah, Luke, economics by Parson Brown
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