Brother Roger Murdered

Brother Roger, of Taizé, has been stabbed to death.

Frère Roger has entered the life of eternity

During the evening prayer on Tuesday 16 August, in the midst of the crowd surrounding the Community in the Church of Reconciliation, a woman - probably mentally disturbed - struck Brother Roger violently with knife blows. He died a few moments later.

In its sorrow, the Taizé Community thanks all those who are supporting it by their affection and their prayer. On the morning of 17 August, after Brother Roger’s death, the following prayer was read in the church:

“Christ of compassion, you enable us to be in communion with those who have gone before us, and who can remain so close to us. We confide into your hands our Brother Roger. He already contemplates the invisible. In his footsteps, you are preparing us to welcome a radiance of your brightness.”

The funeral of Brother Roger will take place on Tuesday 23 August at 14.00.

Each afternoon, from 15.00 to 19.00, his body is placed in the church of Taizé, so that all who wish may go and meditate close by him.

Eight years ago, Brother Roger designated Brother Alois to succeed him, as the person in charge of the community . Brother Alois has entered straightaway into his ministry as servant of communion at the heart of the community.

I am shocked and dismayed at this development. Anyone who knows of Taizé knows the passion and faithfulness which Brother Roger brought to his unique calling. We are all diminished, but can take comfort in the knowledge that he is with God.

One of the things I find really frustrating about events like this is the way in which they are treated by the press. The New York times has nothing more than an editorial in its international edition. Yet, if this sort of hate crime were perpetrated against any of the "in groups" (gay, African-American, whatever) they would be fairly frothing at the mouth about persecution, discrimination, and prejudice.

Once again, it seems that Christians are the only group in our society against whom it is okay to be bigoted.

Windows? We don't do Windows!

This is perhaps a bit far afield from my usual content, but I can't resist. Today's Wall Street Journal contains the following:

Rival computer hackers exploited a newly disclosed flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system to attack dozens of companies in what security experts said was an Internet-crime turf war.

Among the companies hit hard by fast-spreading computer worms were a number of media outlets, including Time Warner Inc.'s CNN unit, New York Times Co. and ABC, a unit of Walt Disney Co. Computers crashed at Kraft Foods Inc. yesterday afternoon and United Parcel Service Inc. reported that a "very small" number of computers in various locations were affected by a worm.

I can't help but wonder: when are people going to learn? Windows is a poor, poor operating system, and there are much better alternatives available, particularly in the server space. Even in the client space, no matter how computer-clueless you might be, Mac OS X is clearly superior. So, why are so many people still running Windows? IT'S A PEACE OF JUNK!!!

(Mouth frothing. More later.)

Cindy Sheehan

I've been kind of following the Cindy Sheehan story for a week or so now. (If you've been living in a cave and haven't seen it, here ya go.)

I'm a bit conflicted about this. I'm usually not a big fan of protesting. It seems to me that most protests are about far too little, far too distant—the protest is about something that probably doesn't really matter, it rarely accomplishes much, and it is far too far away from something we really care about. Put another way, most protesters seem to me to protest for the sake of protesting.

On the other hand, I'm not thinking that this is the case with Cindy Sheehan. What could be closer and more personal than the loss of one's son? I don't get the sense that she's on a power trip, but that she is acting out of her own deeply felt sense of loss. Put another way, love is what's making this protest happen.

One reservation I still hold is that I am genuinely unsure what to do with Iraq at this point. "You break it, you bought it." Can the U.S. really pull itself out of Iraq entirely at this time? Wouldn't that be an even deeper violation of Shalom that staying? I am simply not convinced that the continued presence of U.S. troops is what's causing the violence in Iraq at this point. I'm afraid that a too-fast U.S. withdrawal will cause much greater suffering than not. The U.S. never should've gone there in the first place, but now that they're there, it seems to me they have to finish the job.

Aggravation

I have to confess that I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the "peace scene." It seems that every organization or fellowship even considering the issue of peace is doing so from an unabashedly liberal perspective, and I'm just not that liberal. I don't think "justice" will automatically lead to peace, and I'm convinced that justice, whether "restorative" or "retributive" is a piss-poor standard to work for.

At the same time, I have no home in the church. The church I pastor is one where, too often, I am asked to pray for "our" troops who are risking their lives for "us". This is civic religion at its worst: we are so identified with the nation-state that we cannot conceive of a different. Liberal churches are no better. They too confuse the church with the society at large, and I simply can't enjoy their style of biblical interpretation.

So... where do I find a home? I've thought about starting an "evangelical peace fellowship" or somesuch, but I have to suspect that no one will come. Am I the only evangelical out here who thinks that Jesus meant it when he told us to forgive and turn the other cheeck?

Gay Rights and All That

The BPFNA list has heated up once again, and as usual the topic of dissension is gay rights. To me, this issue is crystal clear, and I find it incredibly frustrating that so many people seem to get so confused on it. I think the problem is complicated by a lack of clear thinking about what exactly the issue is, so let me start there.

The issue is not "orientation." No Christian should claim that someone who experiences temptation to homoerotic behavior has sinned on that account. The unfortunate fact, of course, is that some worthless bumps on the Christian log have done exactly that. That is sad, and let me state my condemnation of that attitude very clearly: if you have taught that God rejects people based upon their homosexual orientation, then you have sinned grievously against the gospel of Jesus Christ, and must repent. The opportunity of justification through the grace of Christ is available to everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, past sins, or present temptations. This specifically includes those who experience homoerotic temptations, the gay, the lesbian, the bisexual, the transgendered, but also each and every human on the planet. There is only one unforgivable sin, and misplaced sexual attraction is not it. (Something for which I am quite thankful!  If misplaced sexual attraction were the unforgivable sin, then any man who ever felt even a momentary attraction to a woman not his wife--including me--would be condemned!)

But, to leave it there may be to offer cheap grace. The grace which we receive on account of the covenant faithfulness of Jesus demands change -- it demands discipleship. The question before us is not whether God can accept someone who is of gay orientation, but whether Christian discipleship requires us to resist homoerotic temptations. If discipleship does demand that we resist homoerotic temptations, then (obviously) the church should do nothing to legitimize the fulfillment of them—"gay marriage" is right out.

This is where the waters get muddy. We are told that homosexuality is not a behavior, but an orientation. On those grounds, we are asked to believe that God has made gay people the way they are, and that we should bless them in that. However, this argument is seriously complicated and possibly moot if homosexuality is either not innate, not changeable, or (even if it is innate and unchangeable) if it is not created by God. Let's take these one at a time.

I have a good friend who claims—and I believe him—that he was gay and that he has not experience an homoerotic temptation in decades. I have also had the opportunity of meeting many gay people who claim to have successfully changed their orientation. Over against this appeal to counterexample, the gay rights movement offers their own set of counter-examples: people who have tried unsuccesfully to change their orientation. It is reasoned that, if so many people of gay orientation have tried and failed to change, then change must be impossible.

I don't find the arguments of the gay activists convincing. First of all, if the argument is that change of orientation is impossible, then it only takes one success to prove it wrong. Since I know personally many who claim to have changed their orientation, this is already proved wrong for me. Worse, members of the GLBT crowd have a grand time slandering the reputations of those who claim to have successfully changed their orientation. We are told that these are "torture systems" and that there is no one who claims to have changed their orientation who does not make money off reparative therapy. Yet, each of these claims is found false on the basis of my own knowledge, and are furthermore ad hominem in their force. Thus, the argument fails entirely.

However, this leaves the possibility that for some people, change is possible, but for others it is not. My counter-examples prove that change is possible for some, but not that it is possible for all. However, we are still left with another, even greater problem. Persons who experience homoerotic temptations claim that God made them this way. This is frankly unproven: this world is not the world as God wanted it to be. God meant for us to have a world with no sickness, no death, no cancer, no adhd, no autism, and no homosexuality. Each of the last three is (arguably) an innate disorder, impossible to cure, that can only be palliated, and not part of God's Shalom intention for our world. However, this deck is loaded: both ADHD and Autism can lead to violence, just as homoerotic temptation can lead to fornication. Are we then to say that violent is how God made some people and that they are therefore to be blessed in their violence? Hardly. I see no distinction—sin is sin.

I think that the most important point in this mess may be that we cannot set the disasterous precedent of allowing something which would otherwise be considered sinful to be tolerated on the basis of a claimed genetic predisposition. Are we to give up the church's witness against alcoholism, or drug abuse, or domestic violence because each of them has a genetic component? Are we to allow unlimited promiscuity because (demonstrably) the human male is genetically predisposed towards it? What is really happening here is that, based on the individualistic ethics of the enlightenment, some have decided that homosexuality is not sinful and that, therefore, it is not sinful. It's status as innate or unchangeable is irrelevant, because the decision to tolerate it has already been made.

So... What does the Bible say? "Gay theology" has done much to obscure this question. We are told that certain words in the New Testament that would seem to refer to homosexuality in fact only refer to sexual immorality or pedophilia. I'm not going to waste a lot of space dissecting these arguments, as they've been dissected by far more capable exegetes than me. However, I think it is fair to say that these proposals are convincing only to those who are already convinced that homosexuality must be legitimized and are seeking a way to do so. If you happen to buy the logic of these arguments, I urge you to look again, more deeply, and ask you whether you do not believe them because you want to? Could anyone honestly have gone to the Bible and found these interpretations if they were not desperately seeking an interpretation to validate the behavior they were unwilling to change?

So, what to do? Well, I think that the church needs to maintain a clear witness that homosexual orientation is changeable, and offer that opportunity to those who want it. At the same time, we must not bless or bind gay couples—their relationship is not one we can bless, as much as we might like to. Instead, as a matter of compassion, we must hold out to them the opportunity of changing, and decline to bind them in a permanent covenental relationship that would make change all but impossible. This doesn't mean that we should go back to the bad old days of stigmatizing homosexuality. As I said above, sin is sin, and homosexual behavior is a sin like any other. We should exercise church discipline with regard to homosexual behavior precisely to the degree that we exercise church discipline for adultery, divorce (which in our culture is usually just adultery legitimated), theft of all kinds, gossip, slander, bitterness, and anger.

One thing I don't understand is when sexual satisfaction became a right. There was a time when Christians taught that sex was something to be carefully moderated. Now, we seem to have followed our culture in saying that sex is something to be endlessly indulged, without boundaries.

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about and reading about economics. This is because I've come to believe that right action and our capacity to perform it is more often determined by economic factors than anything else. This is true both at the macro-economic and micro-economic levels: whether you're talking about nations or individuals or even churches, it's hard to do the right thing if you simply can't afford it.

As an example, consider a couple of our founding fathers: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Setting aside the hagiography that surrounds these figures, it has to be acknowledged that they both had significant ethical problems. Jefferson was the grand idealist: he believed in virtually unlimited freedom, and caught the Republican vision of individual liberty perhaps more than any other of the founding generation. This vision of liberty presented a problem for Jefferson, as he was a slaveholder. How could he claim the rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, when he himself held other humans in bondage? This internal conflict led Jefferson to argue against slavery (at least sometimes) and one of the original complaints in his draft of the Declaration of Independence was that King George had foisted the slave trade on the American people.

Washington, in contrast, was apparently comfortable with slavery until quite late in life. He was a wealthy man who had earned much of his wealth himself, and was strongly inclined to protect that which was his by law and custom. Long after the revolution, when he was president in Philadelphia, he had a slave runaway, and he pursued every option to recover his lost property. In short, he was not the advocate for Liberty that Jefferson was.

However, as he grew older, he apparently became less and less comfortable with the institution of slavery, and when he died, his will freed all his slaves (but not all the slaves owned by his wife--long story), and provided for their continued welfare, education, and support. Jefferson, on the other hand, did nothing for his slaves, because he couldn't afford to. Jefferson was broke, Washington was wealthy. What is interesting about this is that Jefferson's wealth was lost through wild living and Washington's wealth was made through frugality. Early in his life, Washington realized that the mercantilist system by which the planters marketed their crop and got their luxuries through factors in England was bankrupting him, so he swore off it. Jefferson, did not, and died broke.

Good intentions are no match for bad debt.

This plays out at the level of a nation state as well. Let's suppose, for a moment, that we wanted to provide universal health care. I think it's a lovely idea--but how to pay for it? Well, many will point out correctly that both Canada and Europe have managed it. But at what cost? In September, 2004, The Atlantic published a snippet entitled "Alabama, France of the South." This article points out that, if the EU (with it's socially conscious economies) were a US state, it's per capita GDP would place it 47th in the nation. That is, the residents of the EU are on a par, wealth wise, with Mississippi, West Virginia, and Arkansas.

So much for European sophistication.

The sad fact is that Adam Smith always laughs last. When you look at the wealth of nations, a free market system is the best way to accomplish it. Endless taxes, tariffs, protectionism, Unions, Medieval Guilds, mandatory 35 hour work weeks, over-reacting over-reaching environmental regulations, and a gigantic social safety net do not serve to enhance the wealth of your nation. All they do is seek to redistribute smaller and smaller slices of a stagnant pie. There's a reason that the US economy grows at 3-4% and the European economy is glad to get 1-2%, and the reason is that our economy is business friendly. This is why I regard the "Socialism Lite" of the Christian left as untenable.

On the other hand, I'm not comfortable with the laissez faire, support big-business at all costs attitude of much of the Christian right. What is needed is a way to harness the power of market forces to encourage growth while still doing something to make sure that the rising tide really does lift all boats. Currently, America's spectacular growth is benefitting mostly the top 20% of the population. The Middle class is more-or-less keeping up with inflation (and that's about it), and the bottom 20% is worse than stagnant.

Most legislative attempts to solve this problem have proven unhelpful. If you raise the minimum wage, you increase unemployment and contribute to inflation. If you tax the rich, you encourage them to do dumb things with their money and reduce the efficiency of the economy (not to mention reducing government revenue.) If you foster trade unions, you foster quite a bit of overhead, corruption, and lax competition. (The trouble that Ford and GM are in currently be attributed more or less entirely to the rapacious demands of the UAW.)

Ultimately, this is an ethical problem: you don't bind the mouth of the oxen that tread the grain. One solution would be for the truly wealthy (say, anyone who makes over a few hundred thousand a year) to forgo some of their wealth for the benefit of the poor. But somehow, I doubt that will happen.

Which brings us to the only solution that, in my opinion, doesn't try to jigger the system and doesn't create unbearable ethical difficulties: instead of pontificating about the economic value of individuals with undeniable spiritual value, we need to focus on increasing their economic value. How does on do that? In a word: education. Instead of "tax the rich" plans, or increased funding for welfare programs, or whatever the current liberal orthodoxy is, why not focus on education and training programs to raise the value of this bottom 20% of American workers?

Just a thought.

Today I talked to my mentor (who maintains a weblog here) and he gave me a hard time about the fact that I wasn't blogging. The truth is that I just haven't had much energy for any sort of writing or analysis lately. That's not to say that I shouldn't write—just that writing seems like way too much work.

This is pretty unusual for me--I'm strongly opinionated, and usually interested in expressing my opinions. I think the problem may really be that all of my intellectual energy has gone into sermon preparation of late. Between pastoring my church and my full time job, and my four small children, what's left? But, I will try to do better. I should probably warn everyone at the outset that my major interest at the moment is centered on economics--so get ready for some long, boring, technical posts.

So, today I'm in class, and somewhat bored. This class is "Leading in a Culture of Change", and its more or less a rehash of all the corporate "leadership" rhetoric from the 80's.

Truly, I find it somewhat discouraging and disturbing that the church is training its leaders using materials from the corporate world. Is there really no diference between church leadership and corporate leadership? Obviously, there is a huge difference.

I can't help but think that the time spent in this class would be much better spent on spiritual development, in prayer. I suppose its a necessary function of what a seminary is, but why must they focus so much more on knowledge transfer? I don't know that knowledge transfer is of any help in leadership

It's a weird feeling when you discover that someone is quoting you. In this particular case, someone known only as 'Vinnie' posted a copy of a newsgroup message I wrote about a year ago at http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-79598.html:

Stipulating (but not necessarily conceding) that the gospels are notbasically historical, the crucifixion is unlikely to be fabricated. The problem is this - Jesus is described as Christ from the beginning of the Christian movement. The Christ - or Messiah - was in Jewish expectation the king of Judah who would finally overcome foreign overlordship and restore the people of YHWH to their rightful place of glory.

Crucifixion at the hands of the Romans would present a prima facie case that Jesus was *not* the Messiah. It seems grossly improbable to suppose that any Christian would have made it up.

The guy actually calls me a scholar! Anyway, the message he refers to can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15248".