Collateral Damage?

I’m not opposed to guns. In case you missed that, I’ll repeat it: I’m not opposed to guns. Period.

I like Beto O’Rourke; but he shot himself in the foot (sic) at the Presidential debate: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used on fellow Americans anymore.”

He should have stopped with his set-up: “If it’s a weapon designed to kill people on a battlefield; if the high-impact, high-velocity round when it hits your body shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield so that you wouldn’t be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers. When we see that being used against children. And in Odessa I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15, and that mother watched her bleed to death, over the course of an hour, because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa, in Midland, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time.”

In the first place, “we” can’t take away people’s guns, unless the 2^nd amendment is rescinded. As I’ve said and written many times, there’s no possibility—NO POSSIBILITY—of that happening. It would take a two-thirds vote of both houses of congress even to present a proposal for rescinding. That proposal then would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states! Count them. Use your fingers if you need to: 13 states could defeat the proposal to rescind the 2^nd (or any other) amendment of the Constitution. In your wildest fantasy, do you think that fewer than 13 states would vote against rescinding the 2^nd amendment? And that question presupposes prior approval by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress! In your wildest fantasies, do you believe that could happen?

And, about that “slippery slope” the NRA keeps talking about: it’s hypothetical presumption—the rhetoric of conspiracy and paranoia, “based on the theory that too many firearm regulations could ultimately result in the loss of Second Amendment rights entirely. Take one type of weapon designed specifically for maximum killing impact off the shelves and next thing you know all our guns are gone.

“For me, the larger issue is not whether AR-15s or AK-47s will be confiscated; they won’t be in my lifetime, and maybe not ever, largely because that’s logistically and legally impossible. California alone houses at least a million assault weapons. American firearms are not on a slippery slope to confiscation.”[1]

Your guns are safe! Barak Obama nor Beto O’Rourke nor anyone else is coming to take your guns. So, relax. Breathe.

I think I’ve I addressed both sides—pretty much the entire spectrum—from Beto to the NRA. At least that’s been my attention. There already is too much attention paid to one side to the neglect of the other.

To my friends to the left: relax. Breathe. Nobody—NOBODY—is happy about the 302 mass shootings in the United States this calendar year. Nobody believes it’s OK for slobbering maniacs to shoot large groups of people, whether innocent children in schools or festive music fans attending a concert, or unsuspecting shoppers at a mall. Senator Chris Coons (D) from Delaware said, “I respect [O’Rourke’s] passion. Anyone who has had to sit with the parents of victims of gun violence, parents who have lost their children, as I have, after the Sandy Hook shooting, after the Tucson shooting. ...To sit with a parent who has lost a child and have no answer about how we’re going to make the country safer is a very hard experience.”[2]

My concern is that “to have no answer” status. As a nation, we’ve made it a guns-vs-no-guns issue, while that’s not the issue!!! The people who support unrestricted gun ownership point to mental illness and/or sinfulness as the problem. The real issue is that everybody is pointing to “the problem,”[3] but there is no cooperative effort, nor any apparent initiative or desire, to find a solution!

Bill Leonard, continuing from the above quote, wrote,

“No, the real tragedy of the frenzy over O’Rourke’s remarks is that the national conversation they sparked seems more intent on saving guns than on saving human beings.[4] …

“Other than Coons, and of course O’Rourke, I’ve not heard anyone else on cable television or social media give serious attention to “a 15-year-old girl,” her body shredded by gunshots, whose “mother watched her bleed to death” waiting on an ambulance.

“Responses to O’Rourke’s comments are, I think, confirmation of where we are as a nation in the year of our Lord(?) 2019. The American Republic seems so bound by the Second Amendment as a ‘God given, sacred right,’[5] that mass shootings increasingly seem a regrettable kind of collateral damage, the sad reality of non-negotiable weaponry.”

Leonard concludes that congress “could at least fund more ambulances.” It’s a pitiful reality check for a nation that is too focused on guns, pro and/or con, to attempt to find solutions to the bloodbath that seems increasingly acceptable as “collateral damage.”

That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

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[1]  Bill Leonard, “Beto O’Rourke’s Debate Invective And The New ‘Back To School’ Video Are The Jeremiads Of Our Time,” Baptist News Global, September 20, 2019. This blog is but an extension of my resonation with Leonard’s column, and his “larger issue” will be discussed below.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Even though we can’t agree on what the problem really is!

[4] I would add, “or restricting guns in some way”.

[5] A direct quote from our President.

Transformation--My Testimony

I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church during the 1940s and 50s. I cherish and honor that heritage, even though I have moved a considerable distance from it, theologically, politically (sic), and biblically. My passion for the faith and for the teachings of Jesus came from that background. I literally do not remember a time in my life that I didn’t believe and accept that “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.”

Undeniably, my dependence upon the Bible as the standard of measure (canon is the official word for that) for matters of faith and Christian living came also from that legacy.

Ironically, it also was the study of the Bible that began my shift away from my native church. I have an inquisitive mind. It’s in my DNA; but it proved a liability in my early years in the Southern Baptist Church. From my earliest memories I had questioned specific applications of Scripture; but those questions were discouraged. I was even told, “There are just some things we’re not supposed to know.”

I didn’t accept that then; and I don’t accept it today. During my last year in high school and through my undergraduate years, I frequently said, “I’m not fully a Southern Baptist; but, I’m closer to them than anybody else.” The truth was that I really didn’t know much about what anybody else believed.

It has been said, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” Well, I’ve never been close to being an atheist; nevertheless, when I was sent to Vietnam by the Unites States Marine Corp, my dependence upon my faith was at perhaps it’s highest level.

I took it upon myself to “be in the Word” as much as possible, and since I was assigned to headquarters company, headquarters battalion, 3^rd Marine Division, I had time and some level of security in which to do so. I decided to begin with Paul’s epistle to the Romans: you know, where Martin Luther found such discrepancies between what he had been taught and what the Bible says.

Well, I was letting the Bible speak to me because that’s what my preachers and Sunday School teachers had told me to do; but very early I began to note that what I thought was in the Bible, really wasn’t there. I even found some things that actually were counter to what I had been taught. The more I read the Bible, the less I could reconcile everything I had learned with what I found in the Bible.

At first it was a troubling experience—even frightening. After all, I was supposed to believe what I was taught, wasn’t I—not to question God or the Bible? What I came to realize was that the real message I was taught was to not question what I was being taught about God or the Bible. There is a difference.

But, in the Epistle of Romans I discovered that my relationship with God is not dependent upon believing right doctrine. It is dependent upon my accepting Jesus’ teaching that God already loves me and wants to make my life full and complete, regardless of—sometimes in spite of—what I believe at any given moment. Faith, then, is not a set of beliefs or doctrines, but is the willingness to live as if I truly believe what I say I believe.

Indeed, those moments of anxiety began to be transformed into a sense of comfort as I began to realize I had been trusting correct doctrine instead of trusting God as the basis of my relationship with God. Out of a fear of hell I had been driven to cling to doctrine—to put my faith in it rather than in the God revealed in Jesus. That realization is both freeing and motivating. In recalling that transformative time in my life, I am reminded of John Gillespie McGee’s poem, “High Flight:”

 Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

It was in reading the Bible that I slipped the surly bonds of my faith culture. And, time after time, it has been in reading the Bible that I have discovered new understandings of God’s unlimited, unmerited grace in contrast to the restrictive, legalistic, and exclusionary doctrines that are born out of human fear and lack of trust in that same grace.

That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

Rantings After a Road Trip

Jo Lynn and I just returned from a 2850-mile road trip to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I love mountains, from Pinnacle Mountain in Little Rock to Turkey Mountain in Tulsa; from the Boston and Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas to the Appalachians to the Rockies to the Sierras. And when I leave, it’s always with a touch of grief that I watch in my rear-view mirror as they sink below the horizon.

It was a great trip: an escape from the oppressive heat and humidity in Arkansas. We drove through Rocky Mountain National Park, past the highest point on Trail Ridge Road (elevation 12,059 feet according to our GPS).

Columbine Lake ~ Arapaho National Forest (My Photo)

I hiked from the trail head (elevation 10,095 feet) to Columbine Like, sitting beautifully in a glacial cirque at 11,060 feet above sea level. The air was crisp and cool and dry; and thinner than the air in Arkansas.

It was a tranquil time of peaceful appreciation of God’s creation.

But then we had to come home. Home, of course, is not the issue. To channel the late Joan Rivers, “Can we talk?”

Speed limits are a joke. Virtually everybody ignores them: most drivers (and, yes, that includes me) and the police officers charged with enforcing them. It’s universal knowledge that there are two speed limits: the posted one, and the enforced one. On Interstates and major highways, the latter is generally 8 – 12 mph faster than the former, depending upon the traffic conditions, road conditions, the weather, and the current mood of the enforcing officer.

Inconsistency of enforcement is my primary gripe. We’ve all driven through radar at 80 mph and been ignored. On the other hand, my last traffic citation (in 1969) was for speeding. I was driving 58 mph in a 55-mph zone. Decades later, my nephew was cited for impeding traffic. He was driving 58 mph in a 55-mph zone. Inconsistency! It’s difficult—it’s impossible—to know what to expect from other drivers, as well as from those who are charged with enforcing the traffic. Still, we all think we know what we can “get away with”.

I generally set my cruise control around 5 mph over the posted speed limit. By actual count over several decades (I’m a statistics nerd), when I set my cruise at 75 in a 70-mph zone, I’ll be passed by 22 vehicles for every vehicle I pass. That puts me in the slowest 5% of vehicles on the road—when exceeding the posted speed limit—breaking the law!

When the posted speed limit is 55, and I set my cruise at 60, I’ll be passed by 9 vehicles for every vehicle I pass. That puts me in the slowest 12% of traffic.

A rule of thumb offered publicly and frequently by law enforcement representatives is to “go with the flow” in traffic. But, which flow? On Interstate highways the flow in the right lane is usually slower than the posted speed limit, while the flow in the left lane may well exceed it by 15 mph—or more! How often have you been trapped in the right lane behind a vehicle driving 68 mph, and had to wait while a line of cars in the left lane blast your doors off at 85 mph?

And the timing! You’re in the right lane as you’re supposed to be, approaching a slower vehicle, and in your rear-view mirror you see the rabid race driver wannabe bearing down on you. You try to judge; you have to decide: is there enough time to pass the vehicle ahead without impeded the driver bearing down behind? Do I speed up? Do I simply touch my brakes, disengage the cruise and wait for Dale Jr. to pass ? Or, do I change lanes to pass and let the speedster behind me deal with it?

An apparent sense of entitlement is assumed by many drivers. Yesterday on I-40 I was completing a pass of an 18-wheeler when a pickup roared up behind and tailgated within five feet of my rear bumper! The vehicle had been about a half-mile behind me when I began the pass, and there was no other traffic on the road at that point. It’s not an unusual experience. Am I obligated to speed up to get out of his way (which I did in this case)? Is he entitled to travel at 85 mph while everyone steps aside and bows as he passes?

To some degree I don’t think the mph is the issue. The issue is “Get out of my way!!!” I know frustration runs rampant on the highways. I get more frustrated than some. The extreme, of course, is road rage. I certainly don’t want to be the source of frustration, because frustration leads to traffic mishaps. Frustrated drivers become aggressive and dangerous. So I must choose: do I accept the frustration and deal with it; or do I forget that driving is a team activity that requires coordination and cooperation, and simply do what I want to do and to heck with the rest of those sharing the road? The latter is the choice of too many drivers. 

There’s nothing that ruins the tranquility of a mountain vacation quite like having to share the trip home with entitled wannabe road racers on the verge of road rage.

Like I said, speed limits are a joke.

Anyway, that’s my whine for the day. Would somebody please pass the cheese.

That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

Ain't it a Shame to Work on Sunday...

Walter Brueggemann is among the preeminent non-Jewish American scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures. For many years I regularly have referred to his work in exegeting the Scriptures for preaching and for leading Bible studies. Over the past several weeks I have read and re-read, pondered and meditated on the his more devotionally focused book, A Gospel of Hope. That book, which is a collection of snippets and vignettes from his other writings, led me to yet another of his writings, Sabbath as Resistance, which I have just begun.

In the first few pages—scarcely 100 words into the book—the concept of sabbath took on new meaning and intensity for me. Brueggemann had made numerous references to sabbath in A Gospel of Hope; comments in which sabbath took on, in my mind, a vaguely healing and restoring quality. I began to hold it in juxtaposition to the stress-filled, manic pace of the competitive scramble for … whatever it is that we’re scrambling for in life. That scramble is laden with road rage commutes, rigid ideological self-assertion, and an illusion of perfection.

And then comes sabbath.

In my earliest memories my dad was a tenant farmer with dreams of owning his own farm. He worked hard, long hours; but, come Sunday, there would be no work. I remember riding into town for church, and passing a farmer working in his field. My mom, without fail, would sing a little jingle, “Ain’t it a shame to work on Sunday, ain’t it a shame?”

Sunday in my early memories was, aside from going to church, a day filled with rules about what we couldn’t do: we couldn’t play cards or go to a picture show, and we couldn’t go to the store because all the stores were closed on Sunday.

A similar kind of restrictive observation of sabbath can be found in the Jewish commentaries. The third commandment in the Decalogue reads:

“Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. ⁹Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁰But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. ¹¹For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” (Exodus 20:8-11 NRSV)

Of all those words, what grabbed the attention of the ancient scribes was, “work: don’t.” So, since it’s a commandment from God we’d better take it seriously. Don’t work. Avoid work. So, what is it we’re supposed to avoid? And thus began a process—a virtually unending process—of defining work. I don’t recall how many volumes of the Talmud were devoted to the definition of work.

I do recall one specific definition of work: carrying more than a cup of honey more than six steps. That was defined as work, and it was prohibited. So, the Jewish homemaker would make sure honey was within six steps of the table before Sabbath began.

I also recall reading about a man who was stoned to death for violating the Sabbath. His crime: dragging a chair across the dirt floor of his home. It was considered plowing.

Of course, the Sabbath had to be defined. At first it was from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. When watches were invented, sabbath was defined as beginning at 6:00 PM on Friday and ending at 6:00 PM on Saturday.

I remember Sandy Koufax, ace pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 50s and 60s. He was Jewish, and one year refused to pitch the opening game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish New Year. Not exactly sabbath; but a similar application. Avoidance of work. Restriction.

And so the rigid observance of sabbath restriction passed from generation to generation: “Ain’t it a shame to work on Sunday, ain’t it a shame.” And in the process, the intention of sabbath has totally been missed. The word, sabbath, means to stop or to cease, and in the third commandment it is tied directly to rest.

Rest. A time for restoring energy and strength. A time for refreshing and healing and refocusing. A time for renewal of one’s whole being (soul): body, mind, relationships, and spirituality.

The rigid observance of a command, when observance means to avoid what is prohibited, becomes counterproductive and produces more stress, rather than healing.

Think of a small child resisting a nap or bedtime. The child doesn’t realize that rest is a human necessity—if not for herself, then for her exhausted parents. It’s not a luxury. It’s not an entitlement. It’s built into the human DNA, and to ignore it or deny it is to do harm to the very soul of humanity.

What if we took a break—declared a moratorium—from the whole legalistic, pharisaical rigidity that becomes common in so many faith expressions? What if we focused instead on the grace that undergirds the whole idea of sabbath?  

Rest. What if it’s not a prescription, but a description? What if it describes the will of God for God’s people: that they should have regular times of rest and restoration and refreshing? What if it’s more invitation than commandment? On that basis, might we give ourselves permission to take a regular sabbath?

And what if we took a sabbath from our petty social media pontifications and personal insults and intolerance? Just give it a rest.

That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim