ADESTE FIDELES

Monday, May 13th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Introducing the single creepiest tweet that I have ever seen.

OBAMA’S RAZOR

Sunday, May 12th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Ad Orientem may be on to something:

After four years of desperately looking for a scandal to pin on the Obama Administration, the GOP appears to have just been handed the real deal. No, I am not talking about Benghazi. As scandals go that one is fairly garden variety. Basically it was the keystone cops running crisis management and then they tried to cover up their incompetence. Lots of knavery but I don’t see anything criminal.

Not so today’s announcement by the IRS that they targeted conservative political groups in 2010 and 2012 for special scrutiny. That’s not just unethical, its illegal. And not just in the administrative sense. This could (big word there) be a major scandal involving the politically motivated use of one of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the country against the opposition party.

AO’s suggestion has a lot going for it.  Of the two, the IRS scandal has the potential to be the most politically lethal for both Obama and the Democrats.  The Associated Press engaged in actual journalism and exposed IRS lies while the Washington Post commented:

A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.

So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation.

TIME’s Joe Klein, certainly no friend of Republicans or conservatives, observes, “Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.”

ABC’s Terry Moran described this as “A truly Nixonian abuse of power by the Obama administration,” while even panelists on some show on Barack Obama Is The Bestest US President Ever Channel were horrified.

On the bright side, the IRS seems to be an equal-opportunity Gestapo.

While they are at it, the committee might want to ask the IRS whether their list of targets extended beyond political party discrimination. There is evidence the IRS also targeted pro-Israel groups whose positions were potentially inconsistent with the administration’s.

For example, in 2010, the passionately pro-Israel organization Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS, claiming it had been told by an IRS agent that because the organization was “connected to Israel,” its application for tax-exempt status would receive additional scrutiny.  This admission was made in response to a query about the lengthy reveiw of Z STREET’s tax exempt status application.

In addition, the IRS agent told a Z STREET representative that the applications of some of those Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

Z STREET’s lawsuit claims the IRS activity constitutes viewpoint discrimination and a violation of its constitutionally protected right of free speech.  The organization is seeking, among other things, complete disclosure to the public regarding the origin, development, approval, substance and application of the IRS policy to treat pro-Israel organizations differently than it does other organizations.

And at least one purely religious Jewish organization, one not focused on Israel, was the recipient of bizarre and highly inappropriate questions about Israel.  Those questions also came from the same non-profit division of the IRS at issue for inappropriately targeting politically conservative groups. The IRS required that Jewish organization to state “whether [it] supports the existence of the land of Israel,” and also demanded the organization “[d]escribe [its] religious belief system toward the land of Israel.”

Is impeachment in play?  It could very well be considering that, among his other crimes, Richard Nixon was charged with the following:

[The President] has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

Obama needs to get ahead of this situation right now.  If this keeps going into next year and the Republicans hang it on the Democrats, galvanizing the Tea Party and costing the Democrats the Senate, many Democratic congressmen may finally figure out that Obama only cares about himself and would throw them under his bus without a second thought.  Consequently, whatever’s left of Obama’s own party may not make all that much of an effort to stop the GOP from, say, skinning and gutting ObamaCare.

If this thing metastasizes, an Obama impeachment is a possibility (although removal from office isn’t; that bar is set much higher and the Republicans are unlikely to have enough votes to pull that off even if they control the Senate after the 2014 elections).  At the very least, Obama will accomplish nothing for the remainder of his term and will have to impotently watch what little he has accomplished be whittled away.

While I agree with Ad Orientem’s premise that this is the more serious of the two scandals (qualified only by the phrase “based on our current knowledge”), I don’t mean to suggest that Benghazi is unimportant.  Far from it.  Even with what little we now know, Benghazi ought to scare the crap out of every American.

Incompetency is a part of life.  But which of the following scenarios is the most plausible?  That an ocean of foreign policy incompetencies happened at exactly the same time and concerning exactly the same subject?  Or that the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton or both used the incompetency excuse to paper over the deaths of four Americans at the hands of terrorists to save their political asses?

Right now, I could go either way.

COMES THE DAWN

Friday, May 10th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 54 Comments

I don’t want to alarm anyone but the Emperor appears to be naked:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community.  They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012.  “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya.  These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?  Concerned …”

Join the American people, Vicky.

UPDATE: When even The New Yorker isn’t buying it…

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID…

Friday, May 10th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 10 Comments

…doesn’t mean that the Internal Revenue Service isn’t targeting your group for entirely political reasons:

The Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday for subjecting Tea Party groups to additional scrutiny during the 2012 election, but denied any political motive.

Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, said organizations that included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status were singled out for additional reviews. Her remarks, which came at an American Bar Association gathering, were first reported by the Associated Press.

Lerner said the practice, initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati, was wrong.

“It was an error in judgment, and it was not appropriate, But that’s what they did,” Lerner told reporters afterward. She declined to talk about how many employees were involved and whether there would disciplinary action. “I think they were insensitive, or less sensitive than they should have been.”

Kevin Williamson points out that the IRS statement concerning this matter doesn’t actually include the term “tea party.”

Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS saw the number of applications for section 501(c)(4) status double.  As a result, local career employees in Cincinnati sought to centralize work and assign cases to designated employees in an effort to promote consistency and quality.  This approach has worked in other areas. However, the IRS recognizes we should have done a better job of handling the influx of advocacy applications.  While centralizing cases for consistency made sense, the way we initially centralized them did not.  Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale. We fixed the situation last year and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system.  To date, more than half of the cases have been approved or withdrawn.  It is important to recognize that all centralized applications received the same, even-handed treatment, and the majority of cases centralized were not based on a specific name. In addition, new procedures also were implemented last year to ensure that these mistakes won’t be made in the future.  The IRS also stresses that our employees – all career civil servants — will continue to be guided by tax law and not partisan issues.

The response you’re looking for here is, “My ass.”

UPDATE:  How big of a scandal is this story.  Even the Administration’s personal cable TV channel thinks heads need to roll.

TOUCH ‘EM ALL

Thursday, May 9th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 42 Comments

For two reasons, I haven’t had anything to say about the recent hearings on Benghazi.  I haven’t followed them as closely as others have.  And whatever I might have to say can’t possibly be said any better than Jeff Goldstein says it here:

I have very little I wish to say today, so sick to my stomach am I from hearing yesterday’s testimony on Benghazi, wherein career civil servants were very obviously, and oftentimes visibly, working to restrain their anger, outrage, and outright disbelief at what their own government had done (and hadn’t done) to secure the lives of Americans.

In short, the subtext of yesterday’s testimony was precisely this:  it does matter.  And those Democrats who have spent the last 24 hours trying to dismiss or diminish or deflect the testimony as a non-story — a tack that the mainstream press has aided them with, failing for the most part to even mention the hearings, much less provide any in-depth coverage of the revelations, save for the occasional story informing us that there were no revelations — are no better than any third-world goosestepping apparatchik whose job it is to provide cover for a Dear Leader.

They sicken me in a way I cannot even put into words — and that’s saying something, given my occasionally-documented facility with the language.  These people are monsters of a sort, but even that appellation can do their rank cynicism and their easy disregard for conscience no real justice.

And the media, without doubt co-conspirators in what is a major scandal — and an even more major cover-up — are so committed to progressive activism, and to their own self-styled righteousness and compassion (which, relying on a surreal tautology and the anti-foundationalism at the heart of their ideology, they presume to claim is a function of their progressivism: they are good, so therefore what they do is good; and what they do is good because it’s being done by good people), that they have found a way to convince themselves that their biases, be it by omission or by massaging of the facts to report that there’s nothing new to report, are somehow noble and are in the service of a Greater Good.

Needless to say, read the whole brilliant thing.

I’ll just add this.  If you genuinely think that all this is nothing more than a political stunt on the part of the GOP, ask yourself what the reaction of the Democrats and the American “news media,” if you’ll pardon the redundancy, would have been if Benghazi had happened on George W. Bush’s watch.  And try not to lie to yourself.

UPDATE: Iowahawk, ladies and gentlemen.

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013

TANTRUM

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 25 Comments

I’ve got three words of advice for Canadian Anglican Bishop Michael Bird.  Grow a pair:

Bishop Michael Bird of the diocese of Niagara has filed a defamation lawsuit with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice against blogger David Jenkins.

The suit alleges that, in his blog Anglican Samizdat, Jenkins has published comments about Bird that were injurious to his “credit, character and reputation…in his office as spiritual leader and Bishop of the Diocese and in his occupation as priest…” 

Hamilton lawyer Graydon Sheppard, who is representing the bishop, told the Anglican Journal that the lawsuit was a last resort measure from the bishop. “He, and to some extent, his wife, have been under constant attack for more than two years by this blogger…” Jenkins, he added, “has gone beyond fair comment and debate about doctrinal matters.” 

According to Sheppard, bloggers are subject to the same libel laws as journalists or other writers when it comes to publishing material. “The basic law of the country is that you can’t hold somebody up to hatred, ridicule and contempt, and that’s what we say this blogger has been doing,” he said. “So the bishop put up with this for as long as any human being…could do and finally resorted to the only weapon he has to stop it…the primary goal is to stop the personal attacks.” 

Douglas Simpson, the Hamilton lawyer representing Jenkins, declined comment; however, the statement of defence filed with the court denies “in all cases…that the words, pictures or sounds of said broadcasts or postings were libelous or defamatory.” It goes on to state that Jenkins “was exercising his right to freedom of religion and expression, and that the statements of the Defendant were either true or they constituted expression of opinion and were fair comment.”

DEMONIZATIONISM

Monday, May 6th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Barry Snell on why this country’s never going to have an honest gun debate:

I’ve come to realize after the Sandy Hook shooting that the reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it. Without accepting that guns are bad and supplicating themselves to the anti-gunner, the pro-gunner can’t get a word in edgewise, and is quickly reduced to being called a murderer, or a low, immoral and horrible human being.

You might think that’s hyperbole too, but I’ve experienced it personally from people I considered friends until recently. And every day I see it on TV or in the newspapers, from Piers Morgan to the Des Moines Register’s own Donald Kaul, who among others have actually said people like me are stupid, crazy or should be killed ourselves. YouTube is full of examples, and any Google search will result in example after example of gun-owning Americans being lampooned, ridiculed and demonized by the media and citizens somewhere.

Traditional Christian Anglicans above a certain age will recognize that mindset since they’ve dealt with it twice in 40 years.  The first time, of  course, was over the issue of women’s ordination.

(An aside.  Please don’t bring up the merits of this issue, or lack thereof, in the comments because I will quite likely pull any I happen to run across.  We’ve been over this and over this and over this and we will quite likely be over this many more times before the LORD calls me home.  For the purposes of this post, I’m not interested in women’s ordination per se as much as I am interested in how the issue was handled.  Thank you).

Was a theological/historical case for women’s ordination ever made?  It was simply declared an issue of “justice.”  How or why didn’t matter; if you oppose an issue of “justice,” you are, by definition “unjust.”

Which no one wants to be.  So when women’s ordination became official in 1976, most “conservative” bishops stayed where they were.  A few, like Jack Iker, held on to their principles until the very end.  The others accomodated.

Because preserving a 500-year-old Protestant tradition was important, don’t you know.

Fast forward to 2003.  A few hundred New Hampshire Episcopalians decided that they wanted homosexual Gene Robinson, who is a homosexual, to be their next homosexual bishop and, well, screw the rest of the Anglican Communion.

Was a case ever made?  Later on and, well, as ineptly as any “case” can possibly be made.  Which is probably why guys like Jim Naughton break out the “bigotry” blast as often as they do.

TIP OF THE ICEBERG

Sunday, May 5th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Get this straight.  Kermit Gosnell is not an outlier:

Planned Parenthood of Delaware has temporarily halted surgical abortion services. This action makes Delaware the first state to be free from surgical abortions for any significant period of time since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision decriminalized abortion.

The Planned Parenthood clinic in Dover has temporarily suspended surgical abortions while the Wilmington affiliate has closed completely for cleaning and re-staffing, according to Planned Parenthood statements to the media and on their website. At least three employees, one thought to be troubled abortionist Eric Schaff, have quit or been fired since dangerous conditions at the facilities were exposed.

In recent weeks Planned Parenthood of Delaware was the subject of a hard-hitting series of exposés by one of the nation’s leading pro-life advocacy groups, Operation Rescue.

In February, Operation Rescue was the first to reveal an alarming trend of abortion-related medical emergencies at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Wilmington. In March, the group also released video footage of an attack on a peaceful pro-life grandmother at the same location. Events cascaded quickly for the abortion provider, and now, Planned Parenthood of Delaware is under state investigation after Operation Rescue filed numerous complaints and organized its supporters to email and call Delaware authorities.

Operation Rescue assisted with ABC Action News investigation that documented the Wilmington clinic’s conditions. The shocking news report proves the unsanitary practices at this Planned Parenthood were no different than those inside Kermit Gosnell’s squalid “House of Horrors” in Philadelphia. Gosnell is currently on trial for 5 counts of murder and a host of other abortion-related crimes.

The allegations that shuttered this clinic’s surgical practice include: filthy conditions, use of unsterile medical equipment, over-medicated patients, and failure to wash hands between surgeries. In addition, several former employees and patients are in the process of filing lawsuits against the abortion giant for health code violations and medical malpractice.

ZZZZZ…

Saturday, May 4th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Here’s something interesting and by “interesting,” I mean boring.  Three heads of some ecclesial entities that don’t matter in the slightest to much of anybody anywhere have issued a Really Important Statement^TM on the environment.  I wonder what it’s going to say.  Let’s take a look:

The Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Church of Sweden (Lutheran) meet in Washington, DC this Easter season to celebrate our commitment to hope in the face of climate change. 

Well that sucks.  In the last year and a half, I’ve learned more about despair than most of you will discover in your entire lifetimes.  Not to brag or anything but I do more existential angst before 9:00 AM than most people do all day.

As Christians, we do not live in the despair and melancholy of the tomb, but in the light of the Risen Christ. Our resurrection hope is grounded in the promise of renewal and restoration for all of God’s Creation, which gives us energy, strength and perseverance in the face of overwhelming challenge.

Some wiseass blogger might make fun of us, for example.  But we’re ready to face even that terrible ordeal since WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!

We must be clear: the scientific data is stark, as even today we experience the effects of climate change with catastrophic floods, lengthy droughts and historic rainfalls. Scientific research shows that climate change affects nearly all aspects of life.  This includes the world’s food security and humanity’s ability to grow crops to feed a growing world population.  Likewise, biodiversity is being destroyed and ecosystems undermined in many parts of the world as species become extinct. Water will continue to become scarcer, causing regional conflicts. Indigenous people will be forced to leave their traditional lives, as the poorest among us will bear the greatest burdens of the changing climate.

We’re not blaming anybody, mind you.

Our goal as Christians is not to ascribe blame but rather to examine our own actions and how they relate to God’s will for us and for the created order, and to challenge our communities to a new way of being.

Ah, who are we kidding?  Of course it’s all the fault of the United States.

We are painfully aware that those of us living in the northern hemisphere are responsible historically for the majority of greenhouse-gas emissions, the major contributor to climate change. 

So we’re going to do what we usually do.  Pretend to repent.

We confess that, even as God has entrusted the care of the world to human hands, we have treated this sacred trust as a license to consume rather than build up, to reap rather than to sow.

We confess that we have placed the interests of our own comfort and lifestyle before the good of creation and the wellbeing of others, particularly the most vulnerable among us.

We confess our own indifference to the wellbeing of the countless future generations who will bear the brunt of the choices we make today.

For these things and all else we have done to contribute to the desecration of the world God so loves, we repent and ask forgiveness.

As you may remember, “we,” in LibProt jargon, actually means “you.”  Cold day in hell before we give up our barns and worship anywhere we can find the space as if we were common Protestants or something.

At the same time, we draw hope – and a grounding for amendment of our own lives – in the growing body of evidence that a transition to a low-carbon society is both feasible and economical, and may help foster a good life.

Sell your car and your house, move your family into an apartment, depend on public transportation to get to school, work or to the market and we’ll see how it goes.

Specifically, we commit to:

1) Advocate for national and international policies and regulations that enable a swift transition from dependence on fossil fuels to clean, safe, renewable energy, and for economic systems that are fair and just.

ANNNNNNNNNND there it is.  I guess that’s the good thing about leading ecclesial entities like these.  Since nobody anywhere gives a damn what you say or do, you can advocate the stupidest crap in the world.

HOW TO WRITE AN EPISCOPAL SERMON

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013 | Uncategorized | 81 Comments

Thank you for your interest in “Writing Episcopal Sermons,” a new online homiletics course recently developed by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.  We here at the Episcopal Church feel that your sermons will be greatly enhanced by the simple principles laid down here by our beloved Presiding Bishop.  Let’s begin:

We’re here today to breathe new life into a dying body – the body of God’s creation.  It’s going to take the breath we have in us, and the breath of many, many others.  Breathe in the breath of God, of life, and give it back – now, breathe!  We’re going to need all the confidence we have that the act of breathing in and breathing out will continue – and we’re going to have to use as much hot air and vehemence as we can muster.  Are you ready?

What the Presiding Bishop illustrates here is that in great Episcopal sermons, emotion pretty much trumps everything since emotional people obviously are more serious than people who merely state facts.

Jesus’ raising of Lazarus begins with several kinds of breathing – the calls for Jesus’ attention, then the sighs and sobs of the grieving, and hot words of reprimand:  ‘if you’d only been here and paid attention…’!  And then many more words trying to understand, more tears, and the charge to take away the stone.

While this may seem a bit odd, the choice of Biblical text upon which to preach really isn’t that important.  The Presiding Bishop, peace and blessings be upon her, could just as easily have used the encounter between Ezekiel and the prophets of Baal, Saul and Samuel at Endor, the fall of Jericho, Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, Paul seeing the risen Lord on the Damascus Road or any number of others.  If you can make it fit, however much you have to rhetorically strain, it’s entirely appropriate.

There are stones in our shoes that cripple those who would run to heal.  There is stone in the hearts of those who won’t hear the cries of fellow creatures, or see the growing chaos of a warming earth, or learn that stony hearts are killing the whole living system.  There are little stones in our tear ducts that keep us from weeping, and specks in our eyes, and misplaced otoliths in our ears that block our hearing.  Take away all the stones, O Lord, and give us hearts of flesh and organs of compassion, for your creation is suffering.

Every great Episcopal sermon has one purpose.  To not directly communicate anything useful.  Three of the best ways to accomplish this are as follows: (1) Metaphor, (2) Metaphor and (3) Metaphor.

Let’s give thanks that the stones are beginning to be removed.  That is still a work for divine breath – as Jesus acknowledges at the tomb, “thank you, God, for listening!”  We know that God is always listening and breathing a response over the chaos around us.  Resurrection and creative innovation are continually engaging the stuff of earth, bringing forth new life in spite of the tombs within us and around us.  This city knows something about that, as so many hearts opened to strangers in recent days – may we all learn to listen and see and hope for healing and new liveliness in human communities and other parts of God’s creation.  God is always delivering the dead from the tomb.

Did we happen to mention the importance of metaphors?

The body in the tomb is still called Lazarus.  It means “God has helped.”  God has always helped.  We grieve the illness of the body of God’s creation, yet if we look at the long history of this body, we can see healing of the body in ages past, long before human beings were more than a dim glimmer in the DNA of creatures without backbones.  The great extinction events caused by asteroids, shifts in planetary oxygen levels, or vast quantities of atmospheric dust give evidence of enormous and wide-ranging death, yet each time God’s creativity eventually brought forth new life.  It was not immediate or sudden, but in God’s good time, the earth again knew riotous and flourishing diversity.  The difference today is that we’re causing massive death through our own greed.

This next bit is key.

Creative breath has been displaced by a giant sucking sound, the vacuuming maw of our own emptiness.  We seek to feed that desperate, gasping and grasping hunger with SUVs and more coal-fired power plants, and the latest imports of gadgets and gewgaws (and the 500 year history of that word is a reminder that this craving is not new).  We feed ourselves out of season foods from far away, forgetting the delightful surprise of the first asparagus of spring or the first corn of summer.  We crave houses so large they shut out the neighbors – with stones that block the sun from back yard gardens.  The protection and prediction we insist on and strive for in all that accumulating frenzy ends in friendlessness, for we have no time to spend cultivating the earthy companionship for which we were created.  That dying body is further burdened by our useless treatment of our own bodies – not just excessive food intake, but vain attempts to mold and remake the clay in others’ images, and remove every microbe from every surface and crevice.  We are made in the image of God, uniquely gifted, beautiful, beloved, and profoundly social.  What we think is human in ourselves is only a tenth of the cells in this communal organism – and the microscopic life within us feeds and nourishes and regulates our lives, until we meddle with its healthy balance.  And then, quite literally, all hell breaks loose as one part of the whole exceeds its place and we find our guts revolting against us.  That sick body, community that it is meant to be, is an apt reflection of the larger body of creation today.

Once again, any sort of useful or helpful communication in Episcopal sermons should be strenuously avoided.  But anyone reading that might very well forget the fact that Episcopalians worship whatever it is that they worship inside these large, expensive barns in groups of 30 or so who could be quite comfortable worshiping inside my apartment.  So when an Episcopal minister says “we,” he or she really means “you people in the pews.”

The body in the tomb is still called Lazarus.  It means “God has helped.”  God has always helped.  We grieve the illness of the body of God’s creation, yet if we look at the long history of this body, we can see healing of the body in ages past, long before human beings were more than a dim glimmer in the DNA of creatures without backbones.  The great extinction events caused by asteroids, shifts in planetary oxygen levels, or vast quantities of atmospheric dust give evidence of enormous and wide-ranging death, yet each time God’s creativity eventually brought forth new life.  It was not immediate or sudden, but in God’s good time, the earth again knew riotous and flourishing diversity.  The difference today is that we’re causing massive death through our own greed.

There’s that “we” again.  It’s very important to make this stuff sound more complicated than it actually is so scientific angles are always a nice touch even when they’re strained or completely ridiculous.

Creative breath has been displaced by a giant sucking sound, the vacuuming maw of our own emptiness.  We seek to feed that desperate, gasping and grasping hunger with SUVs and more coal-fired power plants, and the latest imports of gadgets and gewgaws (and the 500 year history of that word is a reminder that this craving is not new).  We feed ourselves out of season foods from far away, forgetting the delightful surprise of the first asparagus of spring or the first corn of summer.  We crave houses so large they shut out the neighbors – with stones that block the sun from back yard gardens.  The protection and prediction we insist on and strive for in all that accumulating frenzy ends in friendlessness, for we have no time to spend cultivating the earthy companionship for which we were created.  That dying body is further burdened by our useless treatment of our own bodies – not just excessive food intake, but vain attempts to mold and remake the clay in others’ images, and remove every microbe from every surface and crevice.  We are made in the image of God, uniquely gifted, beautiful, beloved, and profoundly social.  What we think is human in ourselves is only a tenth of the cells in this communal organism – and the microscopic life within us feeds and nourishes and regulates our lives, until we meddle with its healthy balance.  And then, quite literally, all hell breaks loose as one part of the whole exceeds its place and we find our guts revolting against us.  That sick body, community that it is meant to be, is an apt reflection of the larger body of creation today.

By now, you’re probably figured out that this sermon has something to do with the environment.  But it is vitally important to remember that in truly great Episcopal sermons, concise expression should be strenuously avoided.  Never say in ten words what you can say in five or six hundred.

The dead Lazarus may emerge, yet there will still be work to do in unbinding and turning the body loose to function creatively once more.  The set points and equilibria have already moved, and it will take God’s time and divine creativity to establish new ones.  Species have disappeared; others will emerge, over millennia, to take their places in the society of creation.  The atmosphere has absorbed vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping molecules.  Some will be removed to ocean waters and plant tissues, but the whole system will be warmer than before, probably for geological lengths of time.  The ocean creatures that live with carbonate shells and supports – like corals and some kinds of plankton – are already struggling to lay down those structures.  They, too, may disappear into the fossil record, and the bigger creatures that feed on them – fish, shrimp, whales, birds – may not survive either.  Something will undoubtedly evolve to replace them, but it will take more than the three or four days of Lazarus’ entombment.  It will take something on the time scale of the days of the first Genesis creation story.  God’s time is not our time, nor God’s ways our ways.

Give or take.

The gaping maw of our greed is already making life harder for our human sisters and brothers, as weather patterns shift and food crops repeatedly fail in traditional growing places.  Deserts are expanding, water is evaporating, and there is less health and healing power in parts of this body.  Disease organisms that have been in reasonable equilibrium will emerge with new virulence, as will pests afflicting our food crops.  The results will cause suffering, want, anxiety insecurity.  We know what will almost inevitably follow:  conflict, violence, and war.

Your sermon can never have too many leftist bumper stickers.

Well, friends – friends of Jesus and of one another – we like to profess that we are his hands in this world.  There is abundant healing work to do.  It begins in discovering that our neighbors are far more numerous and diverse than we have heretofore imagined.  From the microbes on our skin and in our guts to the yet-undescribed insects of tropical forests to the denizens of undersea thermal vents and the bacteria of Antarctic subglacial lakes, we are one body of creation.  The health of the human part of God’s body of creation depends on all the members – we are created as a society, and we are created for productive and creative relationship with one another.  We are meant to be friends.  Unbinding Lazarus, and setting all the lazars free, is about restoring each to community and the possibility of redeeming friendship.

Or lame metaphors.

Friends – lazars!  All hands to the lazarette!  The storm is upon us, and the body may be threatened, yet we know there is also abundant possibility of new life.  Let the wind of life blow in us, remove every stone, and call forth the dead and dying body.  Open us to God breathing new life in us and every part of creation.  Now!  Breathe!  Blow, bellow for Lazarus, bless and unbind that body, that it may be set free to renew the face of the earth.

Or fake emotion.

JOHN BROWN’S BODY’S ROLLING OVER IN ITS GRAVE

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 | Uncategorized | 41 Comments

Add Lee Siegel to those lefties who think that Jefferson Davis had a valid point:

DEAR KERMIT GOSNELL

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 27 Comments

When your mouthpiece plays this card, you can pretty much count on the needle:

Defense lawyer Jack McMahon delivered his closing argument on behalf of abortionist Kermit Gosnell on Monday, accusing  prosecutors of “manipulating” the case to engage in an essentially “racist” prosecution of the man charged with four counts of first-degree murder, killing babies born alive during abortions by snipping their spinal cords with surgical scissors.

“Never have I seen the presumption of innocence so trampled on, stomped on,” said McMahon in court today, adding that the Philadelphia district attorney’s office “tried to manipulate everybody” and was pursuing an “elitist, racist prosecution.”

“Dr. Gosnell is not the only one doing abortions in Philadelphia,” McMahon said, “but he was an African American singled out for prosecution.”

“We know why he was targeted,” he said.  “If you can’t see that reality, you’re living in some sort of la-la land.”

I’ve got only one piece of advice, K.  Repent.  Because however this trial plays out, your time on this Earth is a lot shorter than you think it is.

One of the better Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes concerned a movie entitled Warrior of the Lost World, a film that aspired to be a post-apocolyptic, Mad Max-type thing and which starred Donald Pleasence, Persis Khambatta, the Indian actress from the first Star Trek movie (she had hair in this thing) and that guy, oh, what was his name?  Tip of my tongue.  You know, that guy from the Paper Chase TV series.

Anyhoo, the plot of this thing was basic, a bunch of freedom fighters doing battle against evil fascists and stuff.  But WOTLW had one of the strangest images I’ve ever seen on any movie screen.  One of the heroes was this black guy who wore an SS jacket complete with Nazi arm band.  No joke.

I’m not sure why I thought of that just now.

AND NOW…IDIOTS

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 19 Comments

I’m just going to come right out and say it.  I got nothin’.

SYA

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 29 Comments

A while back, a guy named Jason Collins, who plays for the NBA’s Washington Wizards, decided he was a homosexual.  And much of this country’s left, whose historical memory goes back about a month, started making Jackie Robinson noises.

Which is all kinds of stupid.  Jackie Robinson was, well, good.  But if you look at his statistics for this season, Jason Collins is, well, pretty close to the worst player on the Washington Wizards basketball team.

So I guess you can either say that Collins is being honest with himself or he’s trying to salvage what’s left of his basketball career in any way that he can, figuring that Washington will never cut the openly-gay guy because they’re absolutely terrified of having the media hammer drop on them. 

Both explanations seem to work.

AND NOW…IDIOTS

Monday, April 29th, 2013 | Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein hates Christians:

Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces. Oh my, my, my, how “Papa’s got a brand new bag.”

Really hates Christians.

What’s Papa’s new tactic? You’re gonna just love this! These days, when ANYone attempts to bravely stand up against virulent religious oppression, these monstrosities cry out alligator tears in overflowing torrents and scream that it is, in fact, THEY who are the dispossessed, bereft and oppressed. C’mon, really, you pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers? It would be like the utter folly of 1960′s-era southern bigots howling like stuck pigs in protest that Rosa Parks’ civil rights activism is “abusing” them by destroying and disenfranchising their rights to sit in the front seat of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Please, I beseech you! Let us call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.

Really REALLY hates Christians.

Queasy with the bright and promising lights of the cultural realities of the present day, those evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures and their spiritual heirs have taken refuge behind flimsy, well-worn, gauze-like euphemistic facades such as “family values” and “religious liberty.” These bandits coagulate their stenchful substances in organizations such as the American Family Association (AFA), the ultra-fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL). The basis of their ruinous unity is the bane of human existence and progress: horrific hatred and blinding bigotry. However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others correctly characterize them as “hate groups,” they all too predictably raise a deafening hue and disingenuously bellow mournfully like the world class cowards they are.

Mikey’s screed goes on like that for several more tedious paragraphs.  Aside from marveling at the Huffington Post’s piss-poor editorial judgment, it’s hard for me to get all that worked up about this.  After all, how seriously should you take anything crapped out by an alleged adult who refers to himself as Mikey?  What, you didn’t want to go with “Spider-Man” there, slugger?

But do you know who thinks that this sniveling little douchebag actually has something important to offer?  Barack Obama’s Defense Department:

“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.