Easter Notes

I hope everyone had a joyous Easter. Here are my notes from yesterday. I read from Luke 24.

Luke 24 has always been my favorite Easter scripture. Luke preserves a unique resurrection account. Both in terms of the names of the women present and especially the Emmaus story. My one footnote today from biblical scholarship concerns the verse that says that Peter ran to the tomb and looked in, saw the linen clothes and went home amazed. This is a disputed verse because it doesn't appear in all the early manuscripts, and many scholars believe it was added later under the influence of other traditions which had Peter at the tomb.

But it is the Emmaus story that captures my imagination. Two followers of Jesus, not from the inner circle, are travelling along a road when they are joined by a stranger. They strike up a conversation and discover that the stranger has a gift to offer them. He is able to explain to them the meaning of the death of Jesus and of the women's vision at the empty tomb to them in light of Hebrew scriptures.

It wasn't until they invited the stranger to stay with them and share a meal that they saw him for who he was. Why? Because in welcoming the stranger and sharing a meal they did what Jesus did. When they did what Jesus did, he was there.

And this for me is the heart of resurrection faith. It isn't what a person believes about Jesus that matters. Do you believe in this doctrine, that literal understanding of a story? It is not what we believe about Jesus but what our faith compels us to do. That is what matters. This is how we know that Jesus is alive in us. How do we live? As an old camp song taught me as a child, "They will know we are Christians by our love." When we love as he loved, he lives in us.

It is the person who is walking along the road to Jericho and sees the man who was beaten and binds up his wounds, even though he is the enemy. It is the person who doesn't care whether someone is rich or poor, leper or clean, gay or straight, Muslim or Christian or Hindu or athiest, but treats that person with dignity and sees in them the divine spark, and knows that in the very way they treat that person, they can help grow that spark into a fire. It is the person who reclines at table and shares meals with friends and strangers and celebrates the presence of God's realm here and now. It is the person who simply trusts that God will provide, and who takes joy in the presence of birds and flowers and the joy of being alive.

That is what he did. And I am convinced that it was what he did that brought his friends and followers back. They remembered what it was like, how they were alive in his presence, and they came to realize that it was now their turn, and that they had the same capacity for giving life and sharing love as he did. And they did, and so do we. And this is the choice that we can make day after day in our lives. We can make him alive and present in our midst. And when we live as he lived and love as he loved, he is alive. Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed. When we live as he lived.

Chosen by Judas

There is no doubt about the authenticity of the recently published Gospel of Judas. But there seems to be some doubt about the integrity of the woman who stands to prosper most from its publicity:

In National Geographic's narratives, the manuscript takes a long journey through the antiquities trade. Those stories describe Ms. Tchacos Nussberger efforts to sell the Gospel of Judas privately soon after buying it and her subsequent role in its restoration. She is portrayed as driven by religious conviction to save the document.

"I think I was chosen by Judas to rehabilitate him," Ms. Tchacos Nussberger, 65, is quoted as saying in one of the society's books, "The Lost Gospel," by Herbert Krosney. Mr. Krosney is also an independent television producer who brought the gospel project to National Geographic.

Missing from the book is any mention of an incident in 2001 when Ms. Tchacos Nussberger was detained in Cyprus at the request of Italian officials, who wanted to question her as part of a broader investigation into antiquities that had been illegally taken out of Italy and sold elsewhere. Paolo Ferri, the Rome-based prosecutor in the case, said she was charged with several violations involving antiquities but was given a reduced sentence that was suspended because she had, among other things, previously agreed to return an artifact claimed by Italy.

I am not sure it is a good thing to be "chosen by Judas."

Sad Turn in Local Immigrant Story

Francisco Serrano became a local and then national celebrity after it was discovered that he had been hiding for weeks in a local high school. He just wanted to stay in America and get a job and become a citizen. But a court ruled that he had to go back to Mexico and enter the United States legally. He left the area with lots of local support and then dropped out of sight, apparently never boarding the plane that was to take him back to Mexico. He was found this week in Massachusetts:

Two weeks ago, police arrested him after finding him with a knife in an apartment in Boston's North End, struggling with the tenant, who was unharmed, The Boston Globe reported Thursday. He remained in Suffolk County Jail facing home invasion charges and eventual deportation.

Fortunately for him he has no criminal record and the charges will likely be reduced. But this won't help his efforts to live in this country - outside a jail cell.

Same-Sex Families are Here to Stay

The Judiciary Committee of the MN Senate voted down an effort to bring to the Senate floor a bill in support of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The Star Tribune editorial page tells us why we need to continue to fight any effort to amend our constitution in this way:

Hence the sense in remaining wary -- and in worrying. Minnesotans should oppose any constitutional amendment that snubs the principles of equality and liberty, as does every scheme to make marriage and civil unions exclusively heterosexual privileges.

Thousands of gay and lesbian couples are raising children in Minnesota. Using the Constitution to deny such families social and legal protections is more than merely unfair; it's destabilizing, demeaning, emotionally damaging and costly -- to parents and kids alike.

But some forms of discrimination are more harmful than others -- which is why it's worth looking hard at the language lawmakers employ to distinguish between the "worthy" and the worthless. As it happens, the proposed amendment shot down by the Senate committee on April 4 would do far more than just keep same-sex couples from sending out wedding invitations. As sponsor Sen. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, noted with pride, the amendment would also prohibit any creation of its legal equivalent.

Indeed, the ultimate goal of Bachmann's broadly worded plan seems to be wholesale sabotage of the welfare and security of gay couples -- and, for that matter, of anyone who falls in love but doesn't marry.

Depending on how courts interpret its language, the amendment could dismantle existing programs that extend employment benefits to both members of a couple in a domestic partnership -- possibly even programs run by private companies. And if experience in other states with similar amendments is any guide, Bachmann's measure could even keep an unmarried couple from enjoying the protection of domestic violence and other basic laws.

What's the point of all this? What problem would it solve, and whom would it help? Minnesotans hold many views about the propriety of same-sex unions -- and they're free to think what they like. But whatever their sentiments about marriage, surely they don't want the state Constitution used as a political weapon or a discriminatory bludgeon. Surely they don't yearn for a society that ostracizes small children just because the two adults who love them most both happen to be women -- or men.

In truth, such families already exist -- and will always exist. What use is it to pretend otherwise?

Christians Doing Seders

It is part of the tradition of the Church of the Brethren to hold a "Love Feast" on Maundy Thursday. This service is a loose re-enactment of the last supper. It includes a meal, bread and cup communion and a service of foot-washing. At my church we do it every year but in untraditional ways. We don't, for instance, separate men and women for the service of footwashing, which is traditional. This year, though, we are doing a seder, and adding a service of footwashing.

Not everyone thinks this kind of thing is a good idea: Some Jews See Trespass in Church Seders

Darfur Worse and Worse

Maybe the greatest tragedy of our war in Iraq is the way it has consumed our resources and attention at a moment when there is an awful crime against humanity unfolding before our eyes. From the Wall Street Journal this morning (subscription required):

Too bad for the TV networks in the U.S. and Europe, but the event of the moment is neither the crisis of regime in France nor Berlusconi's defeat. It is not even the latest casualties and the latest vicissitudes of the war in Iraq. Rather, it is the news coming from Darfur indicating that the war there, already three years old, and nearly half a century old in the whole of Sudan, is on the verge of the utmost savagery and horror.

We already knew that villages are being leveled by planes from bases in Obeid and Port Sudan. We knew that the Janjaweed ("armed men on horseback") come, after the bombers, to finish off the survivors by hand. We also knew -- as I myself attested in 2001 after a stay with John Garang's guerrilla army -- of the use of mass rape, as in Bosnia, as a weapon of war and conquest.

Finally, we were not unaware of the racist, purely racist, nature of a conflict that no longer has the "excuse" of a religious war -- since the Zaghawa and Massalit tribes rebelling against Khartoum are also Muslim -- but simply offers the image of a war whose sole motive is the hatred, on the part of the North's Arabs, of a population whose crime is having skin that is too black.

But there are new elements that we do not know so well: the way the Khartoum regime at the last minute banned a visit by the top U.N. relief official; the harassment of European NGOs, especially the Norwegians, who were keeping the humanitarian pipeline open against all odds and have been forced to pack their bags; the cynicism with which the militias enforce the Feb. 20 law prohibiting any "foreign organization" whose activities constitute an "interference" in Sudan's "internal affairs" and thus encroach upon the "sovereignty" of a state that claims the right to exterminate as it pleases.

The new development, in short, is the frightening warning from Juan Mendez, the U.N.'s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, that this policy of the forced withdrawal of NGOs could signal that the regime has embarked on the last stage of its plan, where there cannot and must not be any witnesses.

And this is when there are those who, faced with the atrocity of a massacre and perhaps genocide, denounce the very principle of an intervention which they condemn in advance as "neocolonial": Such is the case this week of the Arab League.

There are those who are plainly uninterested in this war at the end of the world, this war of faraway peoples, that does not pit the rich wicked West against the impoverished meek of the Third World. Ah, these neoprogressives who are so talkative when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! Ah, these anti-imperialists who have nothing at all to say when it comes to a war with 500 times more deaths but where neither Israel nor the West has the least role!

Unfortunately the French author of this commentary is trying to chide liberals for their inaction in Darfur. But in America, at least, the liberals are not in power in any branch of government. And the Bush Administration is doing nothing about Darfur. Why? Iraq.

Local Lay Leader Blames Gay Sub-Culture for Priest Sex-Abuse Scandal

Its the gays and feminists who are at fault:

On Tuesday night, the leader of a group of orthodox laymen called the Defenders of Church Society told about 150 people at a meeting in St. Paul that the archdiocese is violating canon law by tolerating sexual activity by gay and straight priests and covering up a gay subculture that Pence blames for the priest sex abuse scandal.

The archdiocese has adamantly denied the group's claims.

During his impassioned two-hour speech, Pence asserted that "a fraternity of Catholic men" must confront church leaders about "a culture of deceit" that does not respect priestly celibacy and other church laws.

The audience was sympathetic, laughing at Pence's frequent jokes about psychologists, feminists and gays. Those present also readily complied with his request that the men sit in front, the women in back. That, Pence said, "is because men are defenders and protectors."

It's not the first time Pence, a Mankato physician, has stirred controversy. Two years ago, he led a group that tried to block gay Catholics and their supporters from receiving communion at the Cathedral of St. Paul.

In the past few weeks, the society has created a buzz by posting its criticisms of the archdiocese on its website (www.docsociety.org). Its supporters have spread them via an e-mail network.

On Tuesday, Pence named three priests whom he said he has confronted in person and asked to step down. Most prominent among them is the Rev. Kevin McDonough, vicar general of the archdiocese, who Pence said has failed to enforce canon law. Others include an elderly priest he says has had relationships with young men and a priest who "argues openly that homosexuality is just another form of love," Pence said.

Pence said his group wants to "signal to priests, deacons and seminarians that we believe the archdiocese should abide by its own laws."

"We keep hearing that the abuse crisis happened because Catholic priests are all men, in effect blaming it on the church's purity codes," he said before the meeting. "But the purity codes are sound -- we've just got a group of guys in the priesthood who don't buy it, and feminists who don't believe in the patriarchy of God and male priesthood. Those aren't Catholic arguments."

Keeping women in their place at the back of the church was a nice touch.

School District Stops Distribution of Fliers

A local school district has clamped down on the distribution of fliers to students after a Christian group was barred from distributing their fliers and threatened a law-suit:

In October, the district received a request to distribute fliers from the Good News Club, a Christian group in Savage whose mission is to "evangelize boys and girls with the gospel of the lord Jesus Christ," according to its website. After the district declined, an attorney representing the Good News Club contacted the district.

This is an issue that cuts both ways. Some schools have decided not to distribute literature rather than allow literature that promotes gay/lesbian support group activities. Others have had to stop distribution because Christian groups committed to proselytizing want their literature distributed. My own view is that student-run groups, whether they are evangelical Christians or glbt friendly groups, should be allowed to organize and promote in the school. But outside groups should not have access, apart from community run sports/arts programs that have broad appeal.

Dwindling Numbers of Christians in the Holy Land

A Washington Post report notes that Christians in the Holy Land find themselves in an increasingly unfriendly place:

A 76-year-old Greek Orthodox monk is beaten up by villagers, his carefully tended olive trees are uprooted and his isolated West Bank monastery is defaced with graffiti depicting nuns being raped.

The land of Jesus's birth is not always an easy place for Christians to live in 2006.

The population of Christians in the Holy Land, particularly in the Palestinian territories, is dwindling as more and more leave for a better life abroad, turning the community into a tiny minority squeezed between Muslims and Jews.

The traditional merchant class, heavily dependent on tourist money, has suffered a recession since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000 and Israel walled off Bethlehem with a barrier.

The Israelis say it is designed to stop suicide bombers and Palestinians call it a land grab.

"(Christians) are suffering from both Islamic extremists and Israeli security concerns," said Canon Andrew White, a former Middle East envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Anglican Church.

While incidents as violent as the harassment of the Greek Orthodox monk are rare, life for Christians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has become more precarious in the past decade.

The Christian percentage of the population has dwindled markedly:

At the time of the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christians were a majority in the Holy Land. Until a century ago, they made up about 20 percent of the population.

Migration by the educated, middle-class Christian population was precipitated by Arab-Israeli wars in the 20th century and intensified in the past few decades as violence grew.

Today, there are about 50,000 Christians in the Palestinian territories -- about 1.5 percent of the population -- and about 100,000 Christians in Israel -- approximately two percent.

Another One Bites the Dust

How many former generals criticizing Rumsfeld does it take before he is gone? I predict he will be gone before mid-term elections. From the Washington Post:

A recently retired two-star general who just a year ago commanded a U.S. Army division in Iraq on Wednesday joined a small but growing list of former senior officers to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

"I believe we need a fresh start in the Pentagon. We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows how to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation," Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Germany-based 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said in an interview on CNN.

In recent weeks, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton and Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni all spoke out against Rumsfeld. This comes as opinion polls show eroding public support for the 3-year-old war in which about 2,360 U.S. troops have died.

"You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense," Batiste said.

"But when decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations, sound military decision making, sound planning, then we're bound to make mistakes."

Batiste, a West Point graduate who also served during the previous Gulf War, retired from the Army on November 1, 2005. While in Iraq, his division, nicknamed the Big Red One, was based in Tikrit, and it wrapped up a yearlong deployment in May 2005.

Critics have accused Rumsfeld of bullying senior military officers and disregarding their views. They often cite how Rumsfeld dismissed then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's opinion a month before the 2003 invasion that occupying Iraq could require "several hundred thousand troops," not the smaller force Rumsfeld would send.

Many experts believe that the chaos that ensued and the insurgency that emerged just months later vindicated Shinseki's view.

Batiste told CNN "we've got the best military in the world, hands down, period." He did not say whether he felt the war was winnable.

...

Batiste said he was struck by the "lack of sacrifice and commitment on the part of the American people" to the war, with the exception of families with soldiers fighting in Iraq.

"I think that our executive and legislative branches of government have a responsibility to mobilize this country for war. They frankly have not done so. We're mortgaging our future, our children, $8 to $9 billion a month," he said, referring to the cost of the war.

He defined success in the war as "setting the Iraqi people up for self-reliance with their form of representative government that takes into account tribal, ethnic and religious differences that have always defined Iraqi society."

"Iraqis, frankly, in my experience, do not understand democracy. Nor do they understand their responsibilities for a free society," Batiste said.

Newbold, the military's top operations officer before the Iraq war, said in a Time magazine opinion piece on Sunday that he regretted having not more openly challenged U.S. leaders who took the United States into "an unnecessary war" in Iraq. Newbold encouraged officers still in the military to voice any doubts they have about the war.

The second most disgraceful thing about this war is the fact that the President has never called on the country to sacrifice for the war effort. Could this be because the man doesn't know the meaning of the word? The most disgraceful thing about the war is the lies we were told by the Administration to justify going to war in the first place. But it is all coming out now.

Lethal Injection is Not Humane

The New York Times reports on the growing scrutiny of the use of lethal injections to execute prisoners:

Judges in several states have started to put up potentially insurmountable roadblocks to the use of lethal injections to execute condemned inmates.

Their decisions are based on new evidence suggesting that prisoners have endured agonizing executions. In response, judges are insisting that doctors take an active role in supervising executions, even though the American Medical Association's code of ethics prohibits that.

...

"When prisoners first started making these challenges," Ms. Fellner said, "the courts gave them short shrift. They thought these were stalling tactics. And there was not a lot of evidence."

The recent decisions, by contrast, rely on accounts of witnesses, post-mortem blood testing and execution logs that seem to show that executions meant to be humane have, in fact, caused excruciating pain.

There is no such thing as a humane execution, and a country that really cares about human rights doesn't execute anyone.

Paul Newman's Cookies Get Him in Trouble

It's not easy being green. Paul Newman's food company makes an organic cookie that features an advertisement for the fact that it uses palm fruit oil, which is not a trans fat. This has landed him in trouble with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group:

...Last summer, the Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a report called Cruel Oil. In it, the group said that crucial tracts of tropical rainforest were being destroyed and turned into palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, which account for more than 80 percent of the production of the world's palm oil. Orangutans live only in Sumatra and Borneo, and the campaign said they and other endangered animals, including tigers and rhinoceroses, were in danger of "dying for a cookie."

Here's where Paul Newman comes in. Mr. Jacobson and the report's other authors accuse Mr. Newman of "bragging" on his labels for cookies and microwave popcorn that palm oil is free of trans fat and is less saturated than palm kernel oil.

"These statements are literally true, but mislead people into thinking that palm oil is positively healthy," the report said. "Palm oil is not a health food."

For Ms. Newman, who contributes a large amount of time and money to sustainable farming and other environmental causes, the move against her family company seemed unfair. Her father was even angrier.

"It really upset Pops," said Ms. Newman. He became obsessed with proving that the form of palm oil the company uses is a healthier alternative to trans fats and that Newman's Own Organics isn't misleading its customers.

The company uses palm oil from trees grown organically in Colombia, which has no orangutans, said Neil Blomquist, former chief executive officer and president of Spectrum Organic Products, which sells Newman's Own its palm oil. The company's oil is harvested with practices that exceed principles set forth in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a group whose members include growers, processors and environmentalists, Mr. Blomquist said.

Mr. Jacobson's group recently took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with a picture of a baby orangutan surrounded by orangutan skulls. Palm oil production, the ad said, "is killing orangutans." The Malaysian Palm Oil producers responded with a big ad of their own. Jacobson wants the Newmans to change their advertising to this: "They may be environmentally sound, but don't eat these cookies if you really care about your heart." He's obviously a marketing genius.

Jesus, James, and the Kingdom of Christ

It must be holy week. It seems like every year now during holy week we get a spate of stories about Jesus and Jesus scholarship. US News and World Report has a feature-length article about a new book that suggests Jesus intended to create a family dynasty with his cousin John the Baptist and Jesus' brother James:

The investigator in this case is James Tabor, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. And his provocative new book, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity, takes the search for the historical Jesus to a bold--some would even say fanciful--new level. According to Tabor, Jesus, in partnership with his cousin John the Baptizer, saw himself as the founder not of a new religion but of a worldly royal dynasty. Fulfilling ancient prophecies, the dynasty, descended from King David, was destined to restore Israel and guide it through an apocalyptic upheaval culminating in the Kingdom of God on Earth. And all of this was to happen not in the distant or metaphorical future but in the very time in which they lived. Although their message was one of peaceful change, Jesus knew that he and John had aroused the suspicions of the native Herodian rulers of Palestine as well as their Roman overlords. To carry out his work, Tabor says, Jesus had established a provisional government with 12 tribal officials and named his brother James--not Peter, as traditional Christianity holds--as his successor. And indeed, according to Tabor, James later became the leader of the early Christian movement.

Hidden story. This alternative story of the birth of Christianity--including Jesus's quite worldly dynastic ambitions and the crucial role played by James and other members of Jesus's family--survives in the shadows of the New Testament, Tabor argues, but it was obscured in the version of Christianity that ultimately prevailed. Now, though, partly thanks to important archaeological finds, Tabor believes that this hidden story can be recovered. "Properly understood," he writes, "it changes everything we thought we knew about Jesus, his mission, and his message."

One thing that becomes obvious in reading this article is that the research that is being done about the historical Jesus is leading many scholars and lay readers to think creatively about Jesus and his life and purpose. Tabor is being very creative.

Tabor is certainly right to suggest that Jesus needs to be located firmly within the Jewish tradition. It was never Jesus' purpose to start a new "Christian" religion; he was a Jewish reformer. There is also no doubt that James had a role in the Jesus movement after Jesus death and his role was eclipsed in Christian tradition by Peter and Paul.

Tabor is weak, though on a number of historical facts. There is no historical evidence to support the notion that Jesus was really a cousin of John the Baptist. There are virtually no scholars of any stripe who believe that the New Testament book of James was really written by James, the brother of Jesus, as Tabor suggests. Tabor buys into the notion that Jesus was an eschatological prophet announcing the end of the current age and the beginning of a new one. As I mentioned yesterday, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar believe that by acknowledging the parables of Jesus as his genuine form of speech there is little support for calling him an eschatological prophet.

Still, the article is a very good read and gives us another perspective on Jesus and the state of Jesus research.

Faith-based Program vs. County Non-Discrimination Policy

The Star Tribune has a story this morning about a church that participated in a county-run program to feed seniors until it refused to serve a woman who was once a man:

As far as the Rev. John Maxfield could tell, everything was fine between his church and Anoka County until that Friday the 13th.

The county social services department was sending disabled seniors and other vulnerable adults needing care during the day to Trinity Lutheran Church in St. Francis. Trinity's members were bringing in hot dishes for lunch.

Then the county brought another client to the conservative Missouri Synod church: a woman who had begun life as a man.

The church refused to let her in. The county refused to send any more clients.

This is one of several problems with our current love-affair with faith-based programs. Many churches and religious non-profits have jumped at the chance to fund and expand their programs using government money. But this means they may be required to compromise some of their religious tenets in order to meet the requirements of government policies.

I also wonder what happens to the prophetic message of a church when it is feeding at the hand of a "power" that it often needs to be critiquing. On the other hand, it troubles me that the government is potentially funding programs that aim to proselytize participants. Its a sticky wicket all around.

Jesus and the Parables

When I went to seminary in the early 1980's, I was taught that if you wanted to know about the essence of Christianity, you studied Paul. Why? We knew for certain that we had Paul's letters and could say with the same certainty what this very early Christian witness had to say about Christianity, so if one understood Paul one understood the essence of Christianity. Paul, of course, said virtually nothing about the life or teachings of Jesus. He focused on the death and resurrection. This, we were taught by the great biblical scholar of the last century, Rudolph Bultmann, was the kerygma, the kernel, the key to it all.

What about Jesus? My 1980's seminary education was still under the influence of the humanitarian and biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer's early 20th century analysis of Jesus and Jesus scholarship. In a book entitled The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer criticized the late 19th century attempts to find the real historical Jesus, and demonstrated the way those quester's liberal picture of Jesus mirrored their liberal political and social agendas. Schweitzer said that the best we can say about Jesus was that he was an eschatalogical prophet who announced the end of the current age and the beginning of a new age, and for this Jesus was crucified.

It is difficult to imagine the profound impact this book had on biblical scholarship. But Schweitzer's work became well-known just as the world was about to be plunged into the darkness of World War I, and the prevailing liberal, optimistic view of human nature that dominated the religion and politics of the end of the 1800's was about to take a profound hit. The war and its aftermath gave rise to the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth and the neo-orthodox biblical scholarship of Rudolph Bultmann. Taking sin and the fallenness of human nature was now in, and so was the study of Paul's message of salvation from that sin and human nature. Jesus scholarship took a back seat.

That began to change in the 1960's as a few biblical scholars turned their attention to Jesus and the study of the parables. Twenty years later when I was in seminary, the 1960's works on parables by C.H. Dodd and John Dominic Crossan were required reading. They were important but not essential in my seminary education about Christian origins. Paul was still much more important and essential.

But as the tools of biblical scholarship grew, as more and more ancient scriptures were discovered, and as the findings of other scientific disciplines were brought to biblical scholarship, more and more scholars began to turn their attention to Jesus with a renewed confidence that it was in fact possible to discover the real historical Jesus. And in that renewed quest, attention to the parables of Jesus has been most important.

In Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk says:

The parables, and to a lesser extent the aphorisms, came to be understood as speech forms characteristic of Jesus. In the case of the parables, it was a form Jesus had not borrowed from his predecessors and a form not easily replicated. Very few sages have acheived the same level of creativity with the particular genre of discourse. Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges are among the few who have mastered the form.

The parables are ostensibly about the kingdom of God or God's domain, but in fact they are pictures and stories about baking, dinner parties, shrewd managers, vineyards, lost sheep and sons, and other everyday topics. (But none about carpentry, which makes one wonder about the historicial reliability of the legend that Joseph was a carpenter.) Jesus did not explain to his listeners how these stories were related to God's imperial rule; he left it to them to figure that out for themselves. As a consequence, the parables are enigmatic: it is difficult to specify what they mean, what they actually teach.

...

Of the twenty-odd parables that are probably authentically from Jesus, the strange thing is that not one says anything about the end of the world or the apocalyptic trauma that is supposed to accompany the event. And this body of Jesus lore is by volume the largest part of the surviving Jesus tradition....

The parables are authentic Jesus. They give a window into his vision. And contra Schweitzer, they do not give us a picture of an eschatological prophet announcing the immanent end of the world, but of a wisdom teacher proclaiming the presence of the realm of God already in our midst... for the one who has eyes to see and ears to hear.

Christians Sue for Right to be Intolerant

From the Los Angeles Times:

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.

The Rev. Rick Scarborough (J: of the War on Christians Conference fame), a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."

Rick Scarborough appears to be in the running to take over from Pat Robertson the mantle of the religious leader who brings the most disgrace to the name of Christianity.

Christian Coalition Falters

The Christian Coalition has fallen on hard times:

In an era when conservative Christians enjoy access and influence throughout the federal government, the organization that fueled their rise has fallen on hard times.

The once-mighty Christian Coalition, founded 17 years ago by the Rev. Pat Robertson as the political fundraising and lobbying engine of the Christian right, is more than $2 million in debt, beset by creditors' lawsuits and struggling to hold on to some of its state chapters.

A mirror image of today's Republican party -- saddled (us, unfortunately) with debt and mired in corruption.

A Pro-life Nation

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine has a sober look at what one pro-life nation, El Salvador, looks like:

In this new movement toward criminalization, El Salvador is in the vanguard. The array of exceptions that tend to exist even in countries where abortion is circumscribed — rape, incest, fetal malformation, life of the mother — don't apply in El Salvador. They were rejected in the late 1990's, in a period after the country's long civil war ended. The country's penal system was revamped and its constitution was amended. Abortion is now absolutely forbidden in every possible circumstance. No exceptions.

There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal.

El Salvador's Catholic church was once led by the murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero and known for its liberation theology and commitment to economic and social justice. But now the church is led by an Opus Dei member, Archbishop Fernando Lacalle, who has steered the church in a rightward direction and actively promoted the anti-abortion policies.

Sadly, this is the direction some of our political and religious leaders are working to take us.

Elaine Pagels on Judas

Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels made a good point today in a New York Times about the Gospel of Thomas:

Many scholars who first read these gospels had been taught that they were "heretical," which meant they were the wrong gospels. When I was introduced to them as a student, we called them "Gnostic" gospels, the name given to them nearly 2,000 years ago by Irenaeus, one of the fathers of the church, who denounced them as false and "heretical."

Yet those early Christians who loved and revered such texts did not think of themselves as heretics, but as Christians who had received not only what Jesus preached publicly, but also what he taught his disciples when they were talking privately. Many regarded these secret gospels not as radical alternatives to the New Testament Gospels, but as advanced-level teaching for those who had already received Jesus' basic message. Even the Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus explained things to certain disciples in private, entrusting to them alone "the mystery of the Kingdom of God."

...

Irenaeus, however, insisted that Jesus did not teach any of his disciples secretly; such secret revelations, he said, were all illegitimate, and those who revered them heretics. Knowing many such gospels circulated among early Christian groups, Irenaeus wrote that "the heretics say that they have more gospels than there actually are; but really, they have no gospel that is not full of blasphemy."

Many of these secret writings, however, were still read and revered by Christians 200 years later when Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, an admirer of Irenaeus, wrote an Easter letter to Christians in Egypt. He ordered them to reject what he called those "secret, illegitimate books" and keep only 27 approved ones. The 27 he named constitute the earliest known list of the New Testament canon, which Athanasius intended above all to be a guideline for books to be read publicly in church. The New Testament Gospels, which contain much that Jesus taught in public, were the most obvious books to put on that list. The secret books, which contained paradox and mystery akin to the mystical teachings of kabbalah, were not considered suitable for beginners.

These recently recovered gospels were not just being read by non-orthodox groups. Some of them were being read by members of orthodox churches. They saw the "secret" teachings as a deeper path to Christian spiritual growth. The problem, of course, with these teachings was that they not only freed those members from their earthly concerns, they also freed those members from a need to listen to orthodox authority.

Wedding Day

I performed a wedding at Faribault prison today for an inmate/client of a friend who is a defense attorney. Sentenced to 20 years, served 10, with 3 to go. I was there on the day of closing arguments ten years ago and happy to be there today to do the wedding. Hope the happy couple stay happy.

Gospel of Judas Again

A conversation I had yesterday with someone about the Gospel of Judas discovery leads me to say more about the significance of this gospel's discovery. The discovery and publication of this gospel is significant for what it adds to the picture of early Christianity.

There was a time when we only had the polemical writings of the early church "fathers" who told us about some of the "heresies" that challenged the orthodox understanding of Christianity. But with the discoveries of the various gnostic scriptures over the last 75 years, including now the Gospel of Judas, we can actually read the texts themselves and get a less biased picture of what they believed. We know now that there was real diversity and there wasn't only one obvious and "true" understanding.

But what will we find out about the historical Jesus when we read all of these newly discovered texts? That depends. For example, John Dominic Crossan has written that it is quite possible Judas didn't even exist as a real person, but that he was a creation of the early Christian community. Judas the betrayer was created to represent the Judeans who the early Christians felt "betrayed" Jesus by not accepting him as messiah. But even if Judas did exist, the Gospel of Judas still might not tell us anything real about Jesus and Judas.

This is where biblical criticism helps. Over the last couple of hundred years biblical scholars have developed a method of reading and analyzing the texts that allows them to say "these are the words of Jesus" and "these are the words of Mark" or one of the other gospels. Or this is history and this is myth. Or this is the apostle Paul writing and this is someone writing in his name.

Once the Gospel of Judas is in the hands of more scholars this process will begin in earnest for this particular gospel. My hunch, and it is only a hunch as I have only seen the snippets released to the media, is that we won't learn much from the gospel about the historical Jesus. Our best sources thus far for the real Jesus remain the four gospels in the Bible and the Gospel of Thomas.

Feingold Supports Gay Marriage

Sen. Russ Feingold has publicly stated his support for gay marriage:

Sen. Russ Feingold said Tuesday he supports giving gays and lesbians the right to marry, becoming the fourth U.S. senator to take that position, according to a gay-rights advocacy group.

Feingold, D-Wis., issued a statement saying he was asked about his views on the subject at a listening session with constituents Sunday night in Kenosha, Wis.

In an interview Tuesday with the Associated Press, he said he decided to express his support for gay marriage at the session in response to what he called a "mean-spirited" Wisconsin constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and civil unions, which will appear on the state ballot in November.

"I will be voting against the harsh amendment that's been proposed in Wisconsin, and I thought it was an appropriate occasion to indicate my feeling that if two people care enough about each other to get married, that it probably is a positive thing for society," he said.

"Gay and lesbian people in our country are fighting a mean-spirited movement to harm them and to discriminate against them," he added. "I stand with them against that movement, and I'm proud to stand with them."

Little by little the tide is turning. Churches that don't want to perform gay marriages shouldn't have to. But same-sex couple should be allowed to have civil unions with full legal rights and the opportunity to be married in religious ceremonies in churches that welcome them. Feingold's statement helps move us closer to that day.

Gospel of Judas

The Gospel of Judas, referred to in early Christian literature, has been found. Actually it was found in the 1970's in a desert in Egypt and then circulated around for several decades among antiquities dealers, eventually making its way to the United States. The "rescued" codex was studied and translated under a grant from the National Geographic Society. You can read more about the discovery on their website. It is written in Coptic and is dated in the 300's C.E. But the gospel is mentioned in early Christian literature dated at 180 C.E.

Here, from the New York Times, is what is so interesting about the Gospel of Judas:

The most revealing passages in the Judas manuscript begins, "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover."

The account goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.

Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus' teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.

The Gospel of Judas is one more example of the wide diversity of understanding about Jesus that existed in early Christianity:

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was."

The Gospel of Judas is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics.

The Gnostics' beliefs were often viewed by bishops and early church leaders as unorthodox, and they were frequently denounced as heretics. The discoveries of Gnostic texts have shaken up Biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs and practices among early followers of Jesus.

As the findings have trickled down to churches and universities, they have produced a new generation of Christians who now regard the Bible not as the literal word of God, but as a product of historical and political forces that determined which texts should be included in the canon, and which edited out.

This last paragraph brings me to two quotes from Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus. The first is by biblical scholar Helmut Koester (from Ancient Christian Gospels):

For the description of the history and development of gospel literature in the earliest period of Christianity, the epithets "heretical" and "orthodox" are meaningless. Only dogmatic prejudice can assert that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin and thus to historical priority.

The second is Funk himself:

The canon of the New Testament was developed, along with the creeds, as a way of excluding political enemies, so regarded because they deviated from institutional opinion or practice; the primary interest was to build a fence around right doctrine and heirarchical privelege. This also had the effect of consolidating ecclesiastical power. The scholars of the Bible in the twentieth century--at least those who call themselves critical scholars--should have as their aim the desire to lay bare that process. The power we seek is the power of information that we can share with a literate readership.

What does it all mean? Well, first of all it means that there was a wide diversity of opinion and belief about Jesus among early Christians. More than any of us ever realized growing up in Sunday School. What is exciting about this moment in history, is that we -- as Funk says not just scholars who specialize in dead languages but the average interested person on the street -- can actually read these other gospels and learn about the people who wrote them. We can also more clearly see the issues that divided them, and understand how there came to be an "orthodox" Christianity. Most of us who grew up in churches grew up believing that what we know as Christianity was really the only game in town, the one true option, initiated by Jesus and the first disciples and fixed in the Bible all according to God's plan. We now know this is a vast oversimplication of what was a wide open and messy process.

What is perhaps even more exciting for many of us is that the question of the canon of scripture is once again an open question. I have no interest in changing the Bible as we currently know it; but I also have no interest in limiting my learning and teaching about Jesus to just the Christian Bible. I want to know what all of the gospels have to say about Jesus and the Christian life. The goal is to see behind what we have been given to believe about Jesus as the orthodox truth, to see who Jesus really was and what he said and did, and to perhaps then be able to see more clearly what he saw -- the realm of God in our midst. As others have said, our faith is too often a matter of pointing at Jesus when we should be casting our vision in the direction he himself was pointing.

Jesus Was Walking on Ice

This is what a couple of scientists have suggested after studying air and water temperatures during the time of Jesus:

Combining evidence of a cold snap 2,000 years ago with sophisticated mapping of the Sea of Galilee, Israeli and U.S. scientists have come up with a scientific explanation of how Jesus could have walked on water.

Their answer: It was actually floating ice.

The scientists acknowledge that the Sea of Galilee, in what is now northern Israel, has never frozen in modern times. But they say geological core samples suggest that average temperatures were lower in Jesus's day, and that there were at least two protracted cold spells in the region 1,500 to 2,500 years ago.

In addition to chilly weather, their explanation depends on a rare physical property of the Sea of Galilee, known to modern-day Israelis as Lake Kinneret. It is fed by salty springs along its western shore that produce plumes of dense water, thermally isolating areas that could freeze even if the entire lake did not, they assert.

"I don't know whether the story is based on someone seeing Jesus walk on ice," said Doron Nof, an Israel-born professor of oceanography at Florida State University. "All I know is that during that time, a freeze could have happened -- and it could have looked like someone was walking on water, particularly if it rained after the ice formed."

Nof apparently made a few headlines some years ago by suggesting that strong winds had possibly lowered the water level of the Red Sea, allowing the Israelites to cross as they fled Egypt and Pharoah's army. Then the wind stopped, the waters returned, and the army was swallowed up.

Sure. This just proves that some scientist's can be as naive about religion as some religious folks can be naive about science. Both the Jesus story and the Moses story are myth. Water symbolized mystery, danger, and power in pre-scientific cultures. It still does in ours. Who has the power to part the seas and walk on water? Only God and God's divinely empowered emissaries. These mythic stories are there to tell us that Moses and Jesus were chosen by God. It doesn't help science or religion to try and find a scientific explanation for them.

Missing Evolutionary Link Found

From the New York Times:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.

In two reports today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago say they have uncovered several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish in sediments of former streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

Some scientists quoted in the article think this is another nail in the coffin of creationism and ID:

Dr. Shubin's team played down the fossil's significance in the raging debate over Darwinian theory, which is opposed mainly by some conservative Christians in this country, but other scientists were not so reticent. They said this should undercut the argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind.

... "We've got Archaeopteryx, an early whale that lived on land, and now this animal showing the transition from fish to tetrapod. What more do we need from the fossil record to show that the creationists are flatly wrong?"

I think he doesn't know these folks very well.

Cool Eagle Cam

I just discovered this eagle cam here. You have to sit through a 30 second commercial and then watch a great sight.

Before there were Four Gospels

There were no eye-witness reporters to the life of Jesus, writing down his every word. His words and deeds were remembered and re-told in the oral tradition, meaning that as word went out about Jesus in different directions, different stories and deeds were remember, retold, and embellished to suit the needs of the story-teller and audience.

Eventually, someone began to write some things down. Scholars have known for many years that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source for their gospels. Most scholars also recognized that Matthew and Luke had another written source at their disposal. This source has long been known as Q, for the German word quelle. Q appeared to be a collection of Jesus sayings. There was no way of knowing if there was anything else to Q, and its very existence was doubted by some because they couldn't imagine a "gospel" without narrative of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

Then in 1945, the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in upper Egypt. Among the findings in the library was the Gospel of Thomas. In Honest to Jesus, Funk says:

Of stunning importance for the study of Christian origins was the appearance of a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas. Three Greek fragments of "an unknown gospel" had been published in 1897... When Coptic (ancient Egptian language) Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi, those fragments were recognized at once as part of the same gospel. Coptic Thomas is a fourth-century manuscript; the Greek fragments can be dated about two hundred years learlier, thus placing them among the very earliest fragments of any of the gospels surviving from antiquity.

Thomas was a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. There is minimal dialogue and virtually no narrative. Thomas lacks a passion narrative; it has no appearance stories, no birth and childhood stories, and it provides no narrative context for the various sayings and dialogues. Indeed, Thomas looks very much like the hypothetical Sayings Gospel Q, now embedded in Matthew and Luke. There is an approximately 40 percent overlap between the sayings found in Thomas and those found in Q. Many of the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar believe that Thomas represents an early version of Jesus' sayings that is independent of the canonical gospels.

First there were the sayings, and the Jesus communities who wrote them down, read them, and perhaps sought to live them out.

If It Can Happen Here

A Hindu country, a communist run state supported by Muslims. Christian children attending Islamic schools and everyone learning to get along:

Indian schoolgirl Julita Oraon, a devout Christian, never misses Sunday mass, but the rest of her week is spent studying Arabic and Sufi literature among other subjects at an Islamic religious school, or madrasa.

Oraon is one of tens of thousands of Hindu and Christian students in the state of West Bengal now attending such schools, considered breeding grounds for religious intolerance and even terrorism in much of Asia.

In this part of India, madrasas are emerging as beacons of tolerance. While a predominantly Hindu state, a quarter of West Bengal's population of 80 million are Muslims and one percent are Christians.

Thousands died in communal violence before and after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. There was more violence in the 1960s and 1970s after the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims and Hindus from what was then East Pakistan and became Bangladesh.

But there have been no major communal clashes for decades in the state, which has been ruled by communists for most of independent India's history, and who have gained at the polls from policies designed to boost Muslim employment.

They have been handsomely rewarded with Muslims overwhelmingly supporting the left at the ballot box.

Community policing and street plays stressing religious harmony play their part as the state's leaders constantly push a message of tolerance.

But in the wake of the violence in the 1960s and 70s, officials also moved to reform the state's schools and especially its madrasas.

In 1977, they started reviewing the Islamic schools, introducing history and social science to the staple of Koranic study.

And after 2002, on the recommendation of a specially appointed committee, students had to study science, geography and computing. There are plans for foreign languages soon.

The changes have been credited with bringing about a change in the social outlook of the state's various faiths, and have attracted both teachers and students from other religions to the madrasas. School boards have recruited non-Muslims in a bid to find the best tutors for their students.

Now about 25 per cent of the 400,000 students who attend madrasas, and 15 per cent of their 10,000 teachers, are non-Muslims, officials say.

"In the 1970s, the mistrust grew and Muslims were thought to be friends of Pakistan and mostly spies," says Ahmed Hasan Imran, the general secretary of the Muslim Council of Bengal. "But that perception gradually changed with the reforms in the madrasas as well as other education institutes."

Immigration Divides Evangelicals

Hispanic evangelicals are not too happy with the rest of the evangelical community:

More than 50 evangelical Christian leaders and organizations voiced their support yesterday for an immigration bill that would allow illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens without returning to their native countries.

The statement marks a deepening split among evangelicals over immigration. It was signed by a mixture of Hispanic and white church groups. But most of the nation's large, politically influential evangelical organizations either back rival legislation that focuses on border enforcement and the deportation of illegal immigrants, or have been silent on the issue.

Hispanic evangelical leaders said yesterday that they have received support from Roman Catholic, Jewish and Muslim groups, but have been bitterly disappointed by the response of most of their fellow evangelicals, both white and black.

"This is the watershed movement -- it's the moment where either we really forge relationships with the white evangelical church that will last for decades, or there is a possibility of a definitive schism here," said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which serves 10,700 Hispanic evangelical churches with 15 million members.

...

Polls show that about two-thirds of white evangelicals consider new immigrants a burden on society, compared with about half of all Americans who hold that view. On the other hand, Cizik said, most evangelicals realize that Latino immigrants are the fastest-growing part of their church.

"Evangelicals are a lot more sensitive to the plight of immigrants than outside observers might think," he said. "When you put together the biblical mandate to care for the alien and the receptivity of the Latino community to the evangel, to the gospel, you have a sensitivity factor that almost outweighs the traditional evangelical concern for law and order."

Some predominantly white evangelical groups, such as the Christian Coalition and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, have strongly opposed the Kennedy-McCain bill, labeling it an "amnesty" package. They support a House-passed measure that would concentrate on sealing U.S. borders and enforcing existing immigration laws.

I'd like to see the biblical passage used to support this quote:

"We think our national boundaries should be respected. That's a biblical principle also," said Christian Coalition lobbyist Jim Backlin.

Pagan Alleges Bias in Lawsuit

If there is religious discrimination here, then it is against the law. The court will have to sort it out. But this Star Tribune article references one of the more bizarre announcements by a prospective gubernatorial candidate, even more so than Jesse Ventura's:

Complaining that her ex-boss couldn't tell a witch from a pagan, the former companion of a self-proclaimed vampire who announced his candidacy for governor in January has accused a school district of religious discrimination in pushing to have her fired.

"They're the ones that gave me the witch name," said Julie Carpenter of Princeton, an avowed pagan who said she lost her job driving a bus for the Princeton School District.

Carpenter denied school district claims that she had identified herself as a witch to co-workers. She has filed a charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) claiming she has been discriminated against because of her beliefs.

While federal law protects pagans against employer discrimination, the outcome of Carpenter's case could depend on whether the school district can show it had reasons other than religion for seeking to have her removed from the job, said Stephen Befort, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in public employment issues.

Carpenter's lawyer, Samuel Glover, released a letter Tuesday from school superintendent Mark Sleeper in which he urged the school's bus company to relieve her of her duties.

"... Ms Carpenter does not serve as a role model nor is suitable to perform transportation services for the Princeton School District," the letter, dated Jan. 13, said. It cited media reports about her companion, Jonathon (The Impaler) Sharkey, and his claims to be a vampire, and Carpenter "informing other bus garage employees that she is a witch."

Sleeper was unavailable for comment Tuesday.

Glover said Carpenter later received a letter from the company terminating her employment.

"It's one thing to say you're not a proper role model because you're a vampire or a witch, and another thing to say it's really based upon a religious belief," Befort said.

Carpenter denied ever identifying herself as a witch. She says she wore a pagan pendant but otherwise didn't promote her beliefs or discuss them with children on the bus. She says that as a pagan she once belonged to a group of fellow believers similar to a congregation.

"I believe in a god and goddesses and their names can change for any given moment," she said. "This has been my belief since 1989."

In announcing his run for governor in January, Sharkey claimed he was a "satanic dark priest" and the leader of the "Vampyres, Witches and Pagans Party." In an e-mail description of himself, he wrote, "I sink my fangs into the neck of my donor (at this time in my life, it is my wife, Julie), and drink their blood."

Sharkey and Carpenter were not legally married. Sharkey was jailed on an outstanding warrant from Indiana shortly after he announced his candidacy, and Carpenter says she no longer sees him.

She says her job performance was beyond reproach.

"I didn't even have one fight on my bus," she said.

Same-sex Marriage Ban Voted Down

This was the best news yesterday. Supporters of a constitutional amendment will now try to bring it to the floor of the MN Senate, but because it failed to get out of committee, it will take the support of 41 Senators to act on it. It won't happen.

Universal Healthcare in Massachusetts

I think this is the best news of the morning. Its heartening to see a state tackling this problem at all. I still think getting business out of the business of providing healthcare and making it a government and taxpayer funded program is the best solution, particularly because it would allow the government to negotiate better prices for drugs and medical care. But this plan, which mixes government and business responsibility, is probably the best we can do in the current political climate. It is definitely a step in the right direction:

Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to provide nearly universal health care coverage with a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature Tuesday that Gov. Mitt Romney says he will sign.

The bill does what health experts say no other state has been able to do: provide a mechanism for all of its citizens to obtain health insurance. It accomplishes that in a way that experts say combines methods and proposals from across the political spectrum, apportioning the cost among businesses, individuals and the government.

"This is probably about as close as you can get to universal," said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. "It's definitely going to be inspiring to other states about how there was this compromise. They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help."

The bill, the product of months of wrangling between legislators and the governor, requires all Massachusetts residents to obtain health coverage by July 1, 2007.

Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not purchase it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will allow more of the working poor to buy insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. Businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed up to $295 per employee per year.

All told, the plan is expected to cover 515,000 uninsured people within three years, about 95 percent of the state's uninsured population, legislators said, leaving less than 1 percent of the population unprotected.

Tom DeLay and the Crucifixion

A few days ago I mentioned the War on Christians conference in Washington DC. Tom DeLay was a special guest at the event, and now that "the Hammer" has announced his premature retirement I thought it would be good to hear what the conference organizer Rick Scarborough said about the indicted congressman:

"I believe the most damaging thing that Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously into public office, which made him a target for all those who despise the cause of Christ," Scarborough said, introducing DeLay yesterday. When DeLay finished, the host reminded the politician: "God always does his best work right after a crucifixion."

The Text of the New Testament and the Words of Jesus

Today's quote from Robert Funk's book Honest to Jesus helps us understand one of the obstacles biblical scholars face in trying to determine the actual words of Jesus:

The original manuscripts of the books of the New Testament have disappeared. The earliest fragment of any part of the New Testament is a scrap from a papyrus codex of the Gospel of John. It has been variously dated from 125 to 160 C.E., roughly one hundred years after the death of Jesus. More substantial pieces of papyrus manuscripts have survived from the end of the second century, but the earliest surviving copies of complete gospels come from the third century. And we have no copies of the complete Christian Bible that can be dated earlier than the fourth century. To put the situation in a nutshell, we can say that, in all probability, only a very few ever read the original of one of Paul's letters or one of the gospels--copies were made almost immediately as the letters and gospels were circulated among congregations; meanwhile, the originals wore out or were lost.

To add to the problem, no two copies of any of the books of the New Testament are exactly alike, since they were all handmade. It has been estimated that there are over seventy thousand meaningful variants in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament itself. That mountain of variants has been reduced to a manageable number by modern critical editions that sort, evaluate, and choose among the myriad of possibilities. The critical editions of the Greek New Testament used by scholars are in fact the creations of textual critics and editors. They are not identical with any surviving ancient manuscript. They are a composite of many variant versions.

Settling on an accurate text of the New Testament is one challenge in trying to figure out the words of Jesus. As we will see in a later post, distinguishing between what Jesus said and what might have been added by Mark (or the other gospels) or the oral tradition that preceded the writing of the gospels is another.

NCC 2006 Yearbook Shows Growth and Decline among Denominations

The National Council of Churches 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches has just been published. The press release notes that the fastest growing denomination in America is the Assemblies of God. The Mormons and Roman Catholics also posted increases over last year. Mainline denominations including ELCA (Lutheran), Southern Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and UCC all posted declines.

Foot Washing Gains in Popularity

Ever since I became a member at age 12 of my home Church of the Brethren congregation in Pennsylvania, I have participated in the yearly ritual of foot-washing. The Church of the Brethren always took literally and seriously the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus commanded the disciples to wash one another's feet as he had washed theirs. I can't say it is a ritual I have ever come to enjoy, but that is precisely the point. Spiritual practice and spiritual growth calls us to enter into uncomfortable territory, and in particular it calls us to move beyond superficial ways of relating to our friends and neighbors. Washing a person's feet certainly does that.

In today's Washington Post there is a lengthy article about the growing interest in footwashing among Christian congregations and service ministries:

As they prepared for the holy ritual, the churchgoers had all the essential items: latex gloves, nail clippers, chlorine and antibacterial soap. The only things missing were the feet, and soon enough they poured into the church by the dozen.

Many were callused and cracked from cold nights spent on the streets. Some were sore and infected. What they needed was some old-school -- we're talking centuries here -- Christian doctrine in action. So volunteers at Centenary United Methodist Church in Richmond got down on their knees and scrubbed.

The practice of foot-washing, rooted in the biblical account of what Jesus did for his disciples, has ebbed and flowed throughout church history, abandoned at various times for reasons of dogma or embarrassment. But in recent years it has grown in popularity as an act of submission, both at Easter season services and in many other settings.

Homeless shelters from Berkeley, Calif., to Atlanta to Virginia Beach have added foot-washing to their services for the poor. Men and women wash each other's feet in wedding ceremonies and marriage counseling. In Congress, a U.S. senator once washed the feet of an aide in a show of gratitude.

The action is as soul-wrenching and relevant in today's culture as ever, theologians say, especially in a place such as Washington, where a good dose of humility couldn't hurt.

Modern-day foot-washers, however, still must overcome age-old issues of awkwardness, hygiene and, occasionally, odor.

"There are a lot of things you don't think about at first, like the logistics," said Polly Chamberlain, 51, who began the foot-washing ministry in Richmond last year.

...

According to the Gospel of John, Jesus shocked his disciples at the Last Supper by getting up from the dinner table, wrapping a towel around his waist and washing their feet in a basin. "I have set you an example," he said, "that you should do as I have done for you."

Ever since, scholars have debated whether he meant it literally.

In the Catholic Church, the ritual fell out of favor until it was restored in 1955 by Pope Pius XII, who said it should be practiced on Maundy Thursday, three days before Easter. In most other Christian denominations, foot-washing was similarly sporadic and never achieved the sacred status of such rites as communion and baptism....

Except for mine.

The Legacy of a President

In the Washington Post Richard Cohen notes that President Bush is starting to look beyond his presidency to his legacy. But after commenting on the still empty crater where the World Trade Center once stood, the poor response to Hurricane Katrina, the fact that Osama bin Laden remains free, and the mess in Iraq he concludes:

Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. The imagination can provide a fitting memorial to those who died. "We dig a grave in the breezes," Paul Celan wrote in his Holocaust poem "Death Fugue." We can dig ours as deep as the World Trade Center once was tall. The ugly emptiness will remind us always to be wary of the grand schemes of politicians. They can't build a building. They cannot capture a mass murderer. They cannot wage war in Iraq. This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George Bush's presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.

Huge Coalition of Christian Churches to Fight Hunger

As a follow-up to the last couple of posts about hunger-relief efforts, I just noticed this post on the blog of the Religious News Service:

In Monday's RNS report Kevin Eckstrom writes that the largest-ever church unity group was launched on Friday: Leaders of 34 U.S. church bodies have officially launched the broadest-ever Christian unity organization in American history, and said fighting poverty will be its first priority. Christian Churches Together in the USA was formally inaugurated on Friday (March 31) after a three-day meeting outside Atlanta. A public kickoff is scheduled at the group's scheduled meeting next February. The looseknit group brings together five Christian "families" who have long been divided by historical and theological differences, including Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals and Pentecostals, historically black churches and Orthodox churches. Together, the five "families" represent more than 100 million American Christians. The nation's largest Protestant body, the Southern Baptist Convention, has said it will not participate.

Too bad about the Southern Baptists. Can't even agree to work with other Christians on hunger relief.

The Limits of Celebrity Activism

In the most recent issue of the Christian Century, University of Richmond Professor Douglas Hicks takes a look at the activism of Bono. Bono was named a Time Magazine person of the year for his highly visible work on behalf of world debt relief and more recently his One Campaign, which seeks to sign up millions to lobby their political leaders to do something about world hunger. The One Campaign is supported by Church World Service, Bread for the World, a host of other hunger relief agencies and celebrities, and Bill Gates and his family foundation. Bono talks about it at every concert and encourages his fans to sign up. Hicks wonders how effective it will be:

Signing the pledge of the One Campaign requires very little. It is possible that Bono et al. will not be able to sustain the momentum to make a political difference. This is the point at which celebrity leadership can become a vice. At some point, the celebrity leader must motivate citizens to the point that they, in turn, motivate their political leaders.

This raises the question of how much motivation and how much commitment are needed to eradicate extreme poverty. In the grand scheme of things, the relative amount of money needed is small. The United Nations has asked industrialized countries to give 0.7 percent of their gross national product to fight poverty. This money, some $200 billion, would be far more than what is required to meet the basic human needs of the world's poor. The point: the level of commitment needed to address extreme poverty is not itself extreme. This stance is in sharp contrast to many past moral arguments, such as those of Peter Singer, which imply that the affluent must make drastic lifestyle changes in order to meet the needs of the poor.

There are really two issues here. One is the question of whether Bono can actually mobilize the masses to follow through. I suspect that if a particular effort was targeted, Bono could get the word out and members of Congress would be inundated with calls and letters. And if it was joined by a united front by religious leaders and a high visibility campaign of Bono visiting politicians and making commercials, it would work.

The other issue, though, is that it isn't just money that is needed to eradicate poverty. It is political stability, and that is the real obstacle to ending the suffering in places like Darfur. They desperately need food, but they also need political order and an end to the genocide. On the other hand, as I mentioned in an earlier post about Great Britain's nationwide effort to eradicate childhood poverty, we could do some real good in this country if Bono could help rally the American public to do something similar.

Hicks also raises a question about the moral message that Bono, who is an incredibly wealthy man, is sending:

Does staging a benefit, such as the Live 8 shows last summer, send not one but two lessons to concertgoers? Although fans may learn to show concern about extreme poverty and sign up for the One Campaign, they may also receive the message that an economically privileged lifestyle, in which they buy CDs (promoted shamelessly by some of the performers) and enjoy expensive iPods, is morally acceptable. What if material excess is as harmful to us spiritually as absolute material poverty can be for the poor? Bono cannot lead that fight.

I don't think it is Bono's job to lead that fight. If he can use the power of his celebrity status to raise awareness and get thousands if not millions involved in an effort to do something about hunger, that's a start. And you never know when that economically priviledged Bono fan is going to take a look at that website, become motivated to learn more, and begin to think hard about what it means to have so much when so many have so little. All you can do is plant the seeds, and that is what Bono is doing. But Hicks is right to wonder if and how the names who have signed up for the campaign will be mobilized to act.

Funk on why the Quest is Important

Why is the quest for the historic Jesus important? Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus:

The aim of the quest of the historic Jesus is to set Jesus free, to liberate him from the prevailing captivities... When Jesus manages to escape from our creedal and experiential dungeons, he asserts his preemptive right to the use of his name and may want to object to the title we have assigned him... There are some, to be sure, for whom the liberation of Jesus spells the liberation of the spirit. For them an encounter with Joseph's son is relief, release, and reclamation. The historical truth about Jesus is no more a threat to their faith than a dentist is a threat to teeth, as one pastor put it.

Count me among the liberated. I want to know what it is that Jesus said and did that made some people happy to be in his presence and others want to kill him. I don't want to be captive to the theological formulations and creeds that focused on who he was and defined Christianity as having right belief.

We Can End Childhood Poverty

Jared Bernstein and Mark Greenberg wonder why we aren't doing anything in this country about childhood poverty:

For anyone interested in reducing child poverty, there was heartening bad news out of Britain last month. In 1999 the Blair government introduced an initiative to end child poverty by 2020, with an initial goal of cutting it by one-quarter by April of last year. Recently the government reported that it missed that target: The number of children in poverty dropped by "only" about 17 percent -- some 700,000 kids over the past five years.

If only we could have such problems in this country.

Since 2000 the number of American children living in poverty has risen 12 percent -- to 13 million. The initial growth was due to the economic downturn. But since then, despite the ongoing expansion, the poverty rate for children on this side of the pond keeps rising, largely because the benefits of the recovery have flowed so disproportionately to families at the top of the income scale.

But in the United Kingdom, the policy-driven focus on reducing child poverty has helped to ensure that economic growth is reaching those at the bottom of the income scale. Yes, they've missed an interim target, and some parts of the plan need rethinking, but they're making progress while we're backsliding.

This all started back in 1999, when Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech in which he set the goal of eliminating child poverty by 2020. As we learned on a recent trip there to see how things were unfolding, the officials at the relevant agencies don't claim to know all the answers. But with a directive to end poverty in 20 years, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

Members of Parliament and the Blair government built, and continue to build, a comprehensive system designed to boost the incomes of working parents, mainly through subsidies to low-wage earners. They raised the minimum wage and have continued to push it up regularly.

They're in the midst of implementing a 10-year national child-care strategy designed to help parents get access to affordable, high-quality child care (to make it easier for them to hold down a job), and they instituted programs to develop healthy and school-ready preschoolers, teens and young adults.

They launched a cabinet-level government agency, the Social Exclusion Unit, to deal with the combination of problems that interact to keep families poor: a lack of marketable skills, chronic unemployment, poor housing in high-crime areas and so on.

As revealed in the recent reports, there have been problems. One critic pointed out that with 11 agency departments responsible for the initiative, efforts have been too diffuse. Getting the right tax credits to the right workers hasn't always gone smoothly, and some parts of the program, such as access to reliable child care, need expanding.

But what's amazing about all this is that elected officials in a major advanced economy decided to try to do something about a trend they viewed as unjust and ultimately harmful to the prospects of their society.

As we learned in our meetings with those whose job it is to hit these goals, opponents initially warned that investing significant national resources in ending child poverty was incompatible with global competition. We asked one politician about this. His response: "How can the U.K. compete globally if a third of our children grow up poor?"

What if you don't end child poverty by the targeted date of 2020, we asked. The question didn't really interest them. The target, they argued, focused the minds of the politicians, the agencies and the public. Without it, they would never have gotten as far as they have. In fact, upon release of the news about missing the target, John Hutton, a Blair cabinet secretary, promised to "redouble" the government's efforts to hit the target.

The more you learn about this initiative, the more you realize just how far off track we've gotten. It's hard to imagine that anyone in high office in this country would get near an idea like this right now. Yet it's exactly the kind of idea that might revitalize government as a positive force for making a lasting difference in the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.

McCain Makes Nice With Falwell

Paul Krugman comments on Sen. John McCain's decision to be friends with Jerry Falwell, who he once denounced for his intolerance:

Well, I'll be damned. At least, that's what the Rev. Jerry Falwell says. Last month Mr. Falwell issued a statement explaining that, in his view, Jews can't go to heaven unless they convert to Christianity. And what Mr. Falwell says matters — maybe not in heaven, but here on earth. After all, he's a kingmaker in today's Republican Party.

Senator John McCain obviously believes that he can't get the Republican presidential nomination without Mr. Falwell's approval. During the 2000 campaign, Mr. McCain denounced Mr. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." But next month Mr. McCain will be a commencement speaker at Liberty University, which Mr. Falwell founded.

On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Mr. McCain was asked to explain his apparent flip-flop. "I believe," he replied, "that the Christian right has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason is because they're so active and their followers are. And I believe they have a right to be a part of our party."

So what has happened since the 2000 campaign to convince Mr. McCain that Mr. Falwell is not, in fact, an agent of intolerance?

Maybe it was Mr. Falwell's TV appearance with Mr. Robertson on Sept. 13, 2001, during which the two religious leaders agreed that the terrorist attack two days earlier was divine punishment for American immorality. "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," said Mr. Falwell, who also declared, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "

Or maybe it was Mr. Falwell's appearance on "60 Minutes" in October 2002, when he declared, "I think Muhammad was a terrorist." Muhammad, he said, was "a violent man" — unlike Mr. Falwell, I guess, who said of terrorists that we should "blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

This should clear up any confusion about whether McCain is really a moderate, and it should make it clear what it takes these days to become a Republican Presidential contender.

Abortion Rights has Religious Support

A New York Times article reminds us that religious leaders played an important role in securing abortion rights:

Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, drew clergy members in the early 20th century by relating the suffering of women who endured successive pregnancies that ravaged their health and sought illegal abortions in their desperation, said the Rev. Thomas R. Davis of the United Church of Christ, in his book "Sacred Work, Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances."

In the 1930's, Jewish and mainline Protestant groups began to voice their support for birth control. In 1962, a Maryland clergy coalition successfully pressed the state to permit the disbursal of contraception. In the late 1960's, some 2,000 ministers and rabbis across the country banded together to give women information about abortion providers and to lobby for the repeal of anti-abortion laws.

"The clergy could open that door because the clergy had a certain moral authority," said Mr. Davis, who is chairman of Planned Parenthood's clergy advisory board but whose book is not sponsored by the group. "They balanced the moral authority of the critics."

An Atheist in the Church

Awhile back I called attention to an article in Alternet by a man who joined a progressive Presbyterian church in Texas even though he is an atheist. It is a great article. Today Alternet has an article by the pastor of that church Jim Rigby, explaining why he welcomes the atheist in his church. It is also a great article. It is also long, so I am not going to post it all here, but this is an excerpt:

After years of advocacy for progressive causes, I am used to angry mail -- often from fellow Christians -- when I take a political or theological position that challenges conservative or fundamentalist views.

So I wasn't surprised when many were unhappy about the decision of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, where I am the pastor, to let a self-professed atheist become a member. But the intensity and tone of the condemnations were surprising; this wave of mail feels different, more desperate, like people have been backed against a wall.

Ironically, the new member, a longtime leftist political activist and professor in Austin, has been getting mail from fellow atheists skeptical of his decision.

"How can you do this?" both sides are asking.

To me they ask, "How can you let someone join the church who cannot affirm the divinity of Christ? Does nothing matter to you liberals?" To Robert Jensen they ask, "How, as an atheist, can you surrender your mind to a superstitious institution that birthed the Inquisition and the Crusades?"

Neither the church nor Jensen views his membership as surrendering anything, but instead as an attempt to build connections. Such efforts are crucial in a world where there seems not to be a lot of wood to build the bridges we need. And the shame is, while we fight among ourselves, the world is burning.

In my ministry, I have had to live in two worlds. I have spiritual friends who are trying to celebrate the mystery of life and activist friends who are trying to change the world. Somehow these two enterprises have been separated, but I don't believe either option represents a complete life. Apolitical spirituality runs the danger of giving charity instead of justice, while atheistic humanism runs the danger of offering facts instead of meaning. This divide between spirituality and activism is a betrayal of the deeper roots of both.

...

Is there still room in the church for Thomas? Doubters are an essential part of the team. The atheism of Ingersoll and Kropotkin is very much like the mysticism of Schweitzer and Dorothy Day. In fact, I cannot help but imagine they would all join in common cause to serve our world had they lived at the same place and time.

"Whoever has love has God." That's what the Bible says. So the question before my church was not whether Jensen could recite religious syllables like a cockatiel, but whether he would follow the core teachings of Jesus and learn more and grow more into Christ's universal love of which the creeds sing. This he pledged to do.