Take that, Pat Robertson!

When the airplanes struck the Trade Towers, when the earthquake struck Haiti, Pat Robertson had a ready explanation: Americans had lost their moral bearings, Haitians had made a pact with the devil.

OK, so now the blizzard of the century has hit Pat Robertson’s home town square on and if he doesn’t have an explanation, I do: Pat Robertson has offended the Almighty by claiming to know God’s mind and God has sent down a blanket of snow to silence him. The true prophets spoke about such people long ago.

Ah, you who are wise in your own eyes, and .. in your own sight!. . . Therefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them; the mountains quaked, and their corpses were like refuse in the streets. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still.
(Isaiah 5:21, 25)

I could say more, but Amos has a warning for those who think they know too much:

Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time. (Amos 5:13)

Hear that, Patrick? Better keep quiet ere worse things befall you!

Scholarship

“Scholarship” is a musty word, redolent of ancient manuscripts stored on dark shelves in obscure libraries. It is best experienced, I believe, in a library at Yale known as the “Mudd Library” in which the “stacks” are - I love it - the Mudd Stacks.

I well remember my first entrance into those hallowed precincts. The document for which I was looking was said to be on the fourth floor. I showed my “affiliate” card to the guard, passed through to the elevator, and rose to the fourth level. The door opened and I stepped out into a realm of darkness. Shadowy stacks were visible ahead but no light switches were evident. Uncertainly, I stepped forward - and the lights blazed on. Motion sensitive lighting in this ancient realm!

I found the shelf and the number, lifted down the box, untied it, opened it, and took out a package tied with a pink ribbon wherein was the crumbling document for which I was searching.

Now that’s scholarship. Had the motion sensitive lights been replaced with guttering candles, it would have been perfect.

More recently I have been pondering the word “scholarship” again since a publisher to whom my agent submitted a draft of my current project responded that he wondered whether “the scholarly underpinnings were strong enough.”

My agent responded by inquiring whether the 45 pages of end notes had been lost in transmission.

And I responded by narrating another day of scholarly endeavor in stark contrast to the Mudd Stacks.

I have been attempting to establish the date of death of James W. C. Pennington’s second wife. If, as I suspected, she died in 1867, this would explain why he left the work he was doing in Mississippi, sold the house they had lived in on 26th Street in Manhattan, and took charge of a congregation in Maine. But no record of Pennington’s life so much as mentioned her death.

I spent a day at the New York Public Library and found no record of her death prior to 1866 or after 1870, but the records for 1866-1869 were not in the NYPL. I would need to go to the Municipal Library downtown on Chambers Street.

Last week I made that journey by train and subway and found my way to Room 103 of the Municipal Archives. Why is it that government offices of this sort are so shabby? A clerk dressed like a janitor told me to sign in and pay him $5; a copy of any record I found could then be obtained for $11. He directed me to a file cabinet crammed with thin microfilms in battered boxes. I found 1866. There were two films for ordinary deaths (A to M and N to Z) as well as one for “cholera deaths” and one for “coroner deaths.” I searched them all without result. There was, oddly, only one film for 1867. I scanned through to P and there it was: Pennington, Almira; date of death: April 6; cause of death: peritonitis. The lines for “name of parents” was blank, but I don’t really need to know that. I thought the laconic response to “occupation - wife” was somewhat inadequate since she had played an active role in Pennington’s work, but I had the date and it made sense of many things. I saved eleven dollars by copying it out in longhand on recycled paper.

I then added up the “cost of scholarship:”
Train $19.50
Subway 4.50
Parking 3.00
Research fee 5.00
TOTAL $32.00
And all that to find one date!

The next day I sat down at my computer hoping to learn what it was like in Vicksburg, Mississippi, when Pennington was there and hoping I wouldn’t need to go to Mississippi to find out. In a matter of minutes I had downloaded sections of a splendid book published in 1960 that provides reams of information. For free!

What is scholarship? It’s the crumbling Mudd Stacks and the shabby Municipal archives, the Connecticut highways that take me to Yale and the city subways - and the internet. They say that someday it will be only the last of these. If so, life will be less interesting.

EARTHQUAKE

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St Paul’s Church Bantam Connecticut on January 17, 2010

At around ten o’clock in the morning of November 1, 1755, a powerful earthquake, estimated to have been Force 9, hit the city of Lisbon in Portugal, a city of 200,000 people. Forty minutes later a tsunami swept into the city and after that fires broke out that raged for five days.

Perhaps half the population of Lisbon died. The tsunami also swept the Mediterranean coast and drowned some 10,000 more in Morocco. A ten foot tsunami hit the coast of England and the earthquake was felt as far away as Finland.

The physical impact was bad enough - the king of Portugal lived in a tent the rest of his life - but the cultural impact was greater. The 18th century had seen an enormous upswelling of human confidence. Isaac Newton and others had begun to map the scientific structure of the universe and create unprecedented confidence in the power of human reason. They called it “The Enlightenment” and “The Age of Reason” and said it was “the best of all possible worlds.” Reason and logic was so universally respected that one leading English theologian wrote a book called: Christianity Not Mysterious.

You see this mood reflected in the classic New England Meeting House painted white and with clear glass windows where hour long sermons explained the logic of God’s world. Not for them the stained glass and dim light of a gothic cathedral. Not for them the sense of mystery of the ancient liturgy of the church. The world was reasonable and logical and good.

We know better. We live after the holocaust and 9/11. The Eighteenth Century learned from the Lisbon earthquake.

Over the next century there was a revival of gothic architecture and a renewed interest in liturgy. But the Age of Reason’s confidence in human reason inspired the thought that human beings might be able to govern themselves. John Locke and others began to write about the rights of man and over the next 50 to 75 years three great political revolutions set out to test his theories.

The first of these revolutions, in 1776, less than twenty years after the Lisbon earthquake, took place right here where English colonists had created a society of independent minded farmers and businessmen who created town meetings and local legislatures and learned how to govern themselves before the Revolution even began.

The second revolution took place a decade later in France where peasants living in medieval serfdom rose up against a corrupt and arrogant aristocracy and created a Reign of Terror that led to the dictatorship of Napoleon and collapsed back into a restored monarchy.

The third revolution took place in Haiti where the same French aristocracy had imported slaves to work their plantations in what has been described as “one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies.” One-third of newly imported Africans died within a few years.” But by sheer weight of numbers, the slaves were able to rise up and overthrow their French masters in a bloody and violent revolt that left the slaves in charge but without any experience of self-government or any of the education or skills required to govern themselves or create a successful society.

France eventually recovered from its disastrous revolution but Haiti had nothing to work with. The French sent a force to recapture the country but settled for a huge indemnity that left Haiti free but deep in debt.

After that, corrupt governments rose and fell often selling out to foreign investors and in 1888 the US Marines were called in to put down a revolt against the system. From 1915 to 1934 the United States occupied the country, put down a peasant revolt with ruthless force, and left the country with an enormous debt to American banks.

From 1957 to 1986 the country was run as a brutal dictatorship by the Duvalier family often with military and economic assistance from the United States. Inevitably many of the best educated and most ambitious Haitians emigrated to America leaving the country even poorer in human resources.

One of the few bright notes in a dismal picture involves the work of the Episcopal Church which began in 1864 when an African American priest, James Theodore Holly, from Bridgeport. Connecticut took a hundred members of his congregation to Haiti and established what is now the largest diocese of the Episcopal Church. There are half again as many Episcopalians in Haiti as in Connecticut and that church has built schools and hospitals in a country too poor to build them itself. The centerpiece of that church’s work was the cathedral built in the 1950s in Port au Prince and embellished with spectacular murals painted by Haitian artists that covered the walls and showed the life of Christ in Haitian scenes – the wedding at Cana (see above), the crucifixion and resurrection – all with Haitian figures against a Haitian background. The Clintons, Bill and Hillary, went to Haiti on their honeymoon and have never forgotten sitting in that cathedral stunned by the brilliance of those murals. I’ve never been to Haiti but I have seen pictures of those murals. That cathedral with its murals was completely destroyed last week. All that work, all that imagination and artistic skill wiped out in a moment.

As I thought about it, I realized that I was feeling the loss of that cathedral more than the human death toll. And then I thought about the way St Paul told the early Christians that the human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and you, he told them, are that temple. You are, he might have said, God’s living cathedral and, yes, thousands of those human temples lie dead but hundreds of thousands survive without food or water or housing or work and before we worry about the murals in the vanished cathedral we need to concern ourselves with those still living human temples of God. Perhaps 150,000 human beings according to the latest estimates each one as unique as you and I, each one made in the image of God.

There’s an old rabbinic statement I’ve always valued that says, “Whenever a human being walks in the street angels attend him and a herald proclaims ‘Make way for the image of God.’”

The image of God, the temple of God, with what our Declaration of Independence called “certain unalienable rights.” That part of the American heritage and the Enlightenment’s legacy is dead on because it has its roots in the Bible. That’s where we learned “that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and that among those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

That’s our foundational document and it has, because it is a Biblical truth, implications far beyond our borders: “all men - all human beings - are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I sometimes think that statement is forgotten in the health care debates in Washington where the pharmaceutical companies have lobbyists who outnumber the members of Congress and are concerned not for those unalienable rights but for their undiminished profits. And over the years we have sent the marines into Haiti more often to defend the profits of international corporations than the life and liberty of the image of God.

Does it, I wonder, take the worst earthquake since Lisbon to get our attention, and might this tragedy focus our attention in a way that changes our culture and ways of thinking as radically as Lisbon’s earthquake changed the western world two hundred fifty years ago?

I didn’t start from a text but I think today’s gospel may be more relevant than you might first think. The wedding at Cana; the miracle of water changed to wine. Think about this first sign that Jesus did and how he did it. I think this may be the one miracle in which Jesus is not really at the center of the picture. He goes as a guest to a wedding and he sits at the side with his disciples and his mother and the attention is focused - well, today it would be on the bride, but not then - in those days the focus was on the groom and providing the wine was his job and the catastrophe was his failure.

The wine ran out and Jesus’ mother noticed and mentioned it to him: “They have no wine.” But Jesus held back. Unobtrusively, he told the servants what to do and they did it and the situation was saved and the groom and steward of the feast probably never knew what had happened.

Isn’t that a parable of the role of the Christian church? I think we are like the servants at the wedding. We see the disaster that comes about because of bad planning - a typical human failure - and we might ask the classic question: What would Jesus do? Well, what did he do? He didn’t directly intervene but he sent others, working behind the scenes, not with great fanfares, but quietly and effectively, to do what needed to be done to save the situation.

I think that’s our calling: to do what Jesus did to bring the gift of life in the midst of disaster. And yes, our supply of water is weak stuff and never good enough but it becomes transformed as Jesus works with us and it becomes all that is needed and more.

We don’t dare ask Cain’s ancient question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” or the Pharisees question: “Who is my neighbor?” Because we know the answer. Our lives have long been intertwined sometimes for better, often for worse, with those of the people of Haiti.

I didn’t ask to be born here with all the privileges and opportunities that brings nor did the Haitians ask to be born there with all the burden of two centuries of exploitation, but we are interdependent human beings and the ills of one affect us all. Whether it’s the unemployed auto worker who has lost his health insurance or the child pulled from the rubble in Port-au-Prince, he or she is my brother, my sister, my neighbor and I have not so much a responsibility as a privilege and an opportunity to act as Jesus’ eyes and hands to bring the gifts God has given in response to the need we see.

Marriage is about . . . .

They are having a trial in California about the right of same sex couples to marry – and they’re off to a slow start. Here’s some of the New York Times report of how it went on the first day:
“In cross-examination, the lead counsel for the defense, Charles J. Cooper, focused on the rights of heterosexual parents to protect their children from discussions of homosexual marriage. In his opening statement, Cooper also argued that same-sex couples could not satisfy a basic requirement of marriage. ‘[The] basis of marriage is procreation,’ he said. ‘It is a pro-child societal institution.’

Why go on with the case? “A basic requirement?” Where is that written? Has Mr. Cooper never met a couple who married with no expectation or desire for children? I remember celebrating a marriage years ago for a woman 80 years old who was marrying for third time having buried two husbands. I am certain she did not marry for children!

Has Mr. Cooper ever looked carefully at the wedding service of a church or justice of the peace? In the midst of the “have and to hold, for better for worse,” there is no promise to have children or even to try to have children. A prayer for children may be included, but it is optional.

I remember an incident some years ago in Ohio in which a Roman priest refused to marry a couple because the man was paraplegic and unable to have children. He was quickly set straight by higher authority.

And what about people like me and my wife? We wanted children, and had some, but that phase is long over and we are still together and don’t feel that our relationship is diminished.

Marriage is about love. Ask any couple. Some certainly want to have children, but some certainly shouldn’t. To reduce marriage to a biological function is to miss the whole point. Many do, but to build the whole case for “traditional marriage” on that basis is to make marriage much less than God intended it to be. Adam and Eve, as I remember the story, were condemned to have children because of their disobedience, not as a bonus.

Marriage is about love. Tell the lawyers and justices before we get handed a decision that diminishes us all.

Move the Line!

As the news reports came in over the last 24 hours, it became increasingly evident that the United States had, once again, fallen victim to a vast international liberal conspiracy to destroy this country and abrogate its rightful place in the world. Where did coverage of the New Year begin? In Australia! At the bottom of the world and as far from here as you can go! How could anything possibly begin in Australia?

As time wore on, the anomalous situation was rubbed in further with pictures of fireworks over the Kremlin. Russia was celebrating New Year’s Day and we were not yet allowed to do so in America! Then we were shown Paris and London, old world capitols! How could a new year begin in an old world? Clearly sinister forces were at work.

A little research reveals that the so-called International Date Line was established by an Anglo-French Treaty in 1917 and has never been agreed to by any formal action of the United States government. Countries are quite free to establish their own time zones and even move the International Date Line for their convenience. Kiribati, for example, moved the line – or itself; it isn’t clear which – in 1995 to make itself the first country to begin a new year. Kiribati! If they can why can’t we? Look at the squiggles in the line below and ask yourself whether that's geography or politics!

There was a time when the New Year could have begun in America. Alaska used to be west of the line, but when the United States bought Alaska from Russia the Russians outfoxed us as usual by moving the line west and keeping New Year’s Day for themselves. If Sarah Palin had been governor at the time, that wouldn’t have happened. She could have seen for herself what the Russians were up to over there and frozen them in their tracks.

Obviously the Unites States is where time begins and it’s time for Congress to say so. There might be some trouble from New Hampshire wanting the new year to begin there so they could always have the first primary but obviously the line could be drawn to place Maine in a time zone further west. Aside from a few people in Maine, who would notice? Nebraska might be more difficult but Congress could include a codicil paying off Nebraska with another health care subsidy.

Liberals can be expected to make a fuss because it will make Barack Obama’s time as president one day shorter. But how much longer to we have to put up with the Liberal-leftist assault on American values? Today ought to be January 2, one day closer to the next election. Let’s make it so. Start today to put things right: postdate all your checks and other documents by one day starting now. Eventually the government will have to conform its records to the popular will - and we will save money doing it!

Send this message to ten other people and before you know it things will change!

Move the line! Move the line NOW! Put America where it belongs!

The Joy of a Savior

One of the greatest of English preachers was Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626 head of the committee that produced the King James Version of the Bible. He was often asked to preach before King James I and especially at Christmas time. Here then, as a Christmas gift, is an extract from one of those sermons: "The Joy of a Savior."
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But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see--I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. (Luke 2:10-11)

I know not why it is that when we hear of saving or of a Savior, our mind is carried to the saving of our skin, and other saving we think not of. But there is another life not to be forgotten, and the dangers and destruction there are more to be feared than those here, and it would be well sometimes to remember that. Besides our skin and flesh we have a soul, and that is our better part by far, and it also has need of a Savior. It has a destruction out of which and a destroyer from which it should be saved, and this should be thought of. Indeed our chief thought and care should be for that: how to escape the destruction to come, to which our sins will certainly bring us.

Sin it is which will destroy us all, and there is no person on earth who has so much need of a Savior as does a sinner. There is nothing so dangerous, so deadly to us, as the sin in our hearts; nothing from which we have so much need to be saved, whatever account we make of it. From it comes all the evil of this life and of the life to come. In comparison of that last, the evil here is not worth speaking of. Above all then we need a Savior for our souls, and from our sins, and from the everlasting destruction which sin will bring on us in the other life, which is not far from us, not even from the one who thinks it furthest away.

Even in joy there are many degrees. All joys are not one size. Some are smaller; some greater, as is this. The joy of a shepherd when his ewe brings him a lamb is not like that when his wife brings him a son; yet news of a lamb is a joy, such as it is. Then if that son should prove to be "the chief shepherd in all the land," that would be somewhat more. But then if he should prove to be a David, a prince, certainly that would be another kind of joy, great joy indeed. If the benefit is great, then the joy is great. And here the benefit is great, none greater; as much as the saving of us all, as much as all our lives and souls are worth. And if the person is great, so is the joy, and none so great as this: it is the Lord himself. This goes beyond them all; this joy puts all others down, so that none of them may be mentioned with it. Therefore the angel said well, " I bring you good news of great joy.

You may say what you will, but surely there is no joy in the world like the joy of one who is saved; no joy so great, no news so welcome, as to one ready to perish when they hear of one that will save them. Imagine the joy of one in danger of perishing by sickness, when they hear of one who will make him well again, or the joy of one about to die by sentence of the law, to hear of one with a pardon to save their life, or the joy of one with enemies, to hear of one who will set them in safety. Tell any of these, assure them of a Savior, and it is the best news they ever heard in their life. There is joy in the name of Savior, and this child is a Savior also.

It may be that we need none of these; we are not sick at present, in fear of the law, in danger of enemies. It may be, if we were, we fancy that we can be relieved in some other way. But that which he came for, that saving we all need and none but he can help us to it. We all therefore have cause to be glad for the birth of this Savior.

Logic: A Losing Battle

The end of civilization as we know it has frequently been identified in recent years, but today’s New York Times (December 20, 2009) provided additional evidence that the end is near. Writing about the Senate health care bill, Times writers Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn informed us that
“Should Democrats prevail, it will put an exclamation point on an eventful first year of their control of Congress and the White House and leave Republicans on the Napoleonic side of what one predicted could be President Obama’s Waterloo.”

Could you parse that, please? For those as uninformed as Times writers, Wikipedia confirmed my recollection (though I wasn’t there) that: “The defeat at Waterloo put an end to Napoleon's rule as the French emperor, and marked the end of Napoleon's Hundred Days of return from exile.” Thus “Waterloo,” my dictionary tells me, has become a synonym for “a crushing defeat.”

So if Republicans are on “the Napoleonic (i.e. losing) side,” how could “Obama’s Waterloo” be “a crushing defeat”?

But logic and language drift ever further apart. A “man on the street” interview on today’s radio news (CBS) reported that his suburb had gotten a lot more snow than the city, which, he said, “never happens that way usually.”

Go figure!