Christian Church visit to the White House

On November 1st we heard that a Christian delegation visited the White House, the Church of the Brethren was included which is a pretty neat opportunity for such a small denomination. When I try to explain what the Church of the Brethren is to my friends, I tell them we are kind of a cross between Mennonites and Baptists (originally German Baptist Brethren so I figure they could maybe grasp that connection). The next question is “what is a Mennonite?” I guess if you aren’t part of the larger US based denominations you can get lost in the Protestant shuffle, if the church of the Brethren even qualifies as a Protestant denomination. This small group formed in the early 18th century was really after what it meant to be the church in the original sense, to follow Christ’s commands in a way that brought us back to the early church of the 1st century.
As I read the excerpt from the White House visit, I could not help but think how far we have strayed from our beginnings as a faith community. Founded as a counter-cultural response to the State Church’s control in Western Europe, our early Brethren found their way to America and “freedom” to worship as they pleased. Think of how hard it must have been; to pick up everything you owned and leave the area that your family had lived for as long as you could remember, in order to escape the oppression that existed. Just the thought of the 30-day passage in open seas would have been enough to give me pause.
The Church of the Brethren is not alone. I appreciate ecumenism in the sense that many of our faith traditions based on the saving message of Jesus Christ have common foundations. Many acknowledge that Jesus Christ as the gateway to a relationship with our heavenly Father, made possible by His sacrifice on the cross and resurrection. This sacrifice allows His “life example” the power to both show us a better way to live and provide for the erasure of our sins. When we boil down our similarities, we often find them more numerous than our differences, but these differences are often what we tend to focus on. Some of these differences are rather comical, like learning when to say the right words at the right time so you don’t look silly in a worship service. Others like how to “properly” baptize a new believer take on more weighty concern, but in the end we are all searching for the appropriate response to the gift that Christ has given to His people, the church.
The White House meeting was hailed as a “substantive” meeting that discussed issues of strengthening our country’s “fraying” safety net, extending unemployment benefits, job creation, education, Middle East peace and the travel ban with Cuba; all in a non-partisan environment. I can hail the non-partisan part, even if it sounds like the topics were not an indication. What I want to know, is what makes these Christian churches…Christian? We seem to have settled in to this mentality that our mission is to serve people’s needs, and those needs are related to physical well being only. Our churches are not competing with our spiritual adversary for souls, but with the United Way for funds. We have settled for taking care of financial hardship, basic human needs, peace between nations, improving our educational opportunities…all great and worthy things. But not the best thing.
As Jim Collins pointed out in his book, Good to Great, the enemy of great is the good that we do which distracts us from our core reason for being. The Church of Jesus Christ; whether you consider yourself Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, yes even the little Church of the Brethren group mainly in Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Church based on the Gospel message of Christ was only called to do a few specific things. Under Christ’s authority, we are called to go, make disciples, baptize and teach. In short, we are to proclaim the mystery and majesty of the faith that dares to make the outrageous claim that God came down in human form in order to walk around in our shoes, save us from our sinful ways, and be able to have a personal relationship with our Creator. When the veil was torn in the Temple in Jerusalem, we stopped looking for a God that lived there, and started looking for one that resides in our hearts.
When we take the mission of the church to mean, “feed the hungry,” we are perverting the very Gospel message we are called to preach. We are made of spirit, soul and body (1 Thess 5:23); and we ignore the needs of spirit and soul in favor of the body at our peril. Jesus said that the poor would always be with you, but you will not always have me. Just as the State Churches of Europe allowed their human interpretation of Christ’s message to manipulate the Church structure in a way far removed from Christ’s message; through involvement in political control rather than community support, participation on murderous crusades, purchase of indulgences to save family members from purgatory, I could go on and on, but we are allowing the same thing to happen to us today. It is easy to look back several hundred years and point to what the Church of that day did wrong, it is a much harder task to point to what we are doing wrong today, as we are guilty of the same human manipulation of Christ’s message.
Our message should always focus on Christ first, in telling the Gospel story to anyone that will listen and expecting a response that only God can provide, through the working of His Holy Spirit. Since we humans can’t do miracles apart from Him, we settle for the things that occupy our own feeble abilities. Our outreach to the poor should only be based on our response to Jesus Christ through His Spirit, not as an end to itself. That does not mean that we should not support the physical need we see around us, but that we should frame a response to that need based on our relationship with Christ. We have an individual spirit that reveals our conscience, which also reveals our response to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Why are we so ashamed of this story that we find it easier to do a little good with our own hands, eschewing the very great that could be done with God’s hands? I am embarrassed at our “Christian” Church leadership that settles for treating only one area of human existence with dignity, which only allows the body to be served while we ignore the spiritual connection that is possible with our Creator through Jesus Christ.
The greatest evidence of this refusal to embrace the message of Christ in our lives and in our communities, is the abdication of our responsibility to help our neighbors. That’s right, the one thing we think we are doing OK with, serving human needs, is the greatest area in which we as the Church are failing. We have abdicated our responsibility to our neighbors by allowing a government mechanism to serve those needs. Not only are we allowing basic human needs to be served absent of the saving message of Christ, we are content to structure ourselves so that our tax money goes to a central authority, then to an anonymous citizen that could be right next to you. It is certain that pooling our resources can have a multiplicative effect, but we are not even seeing a return there in a system fraught with corruption. What did we expect to happen?
It is a hard thing to identify a need with a neighbor, to take a personal interest and walk around in their shoes as Jesus did for us. It is a lot easier to text our friends about their dire circumstances and direct them to the local welfare office. It is an even harder thing to admit that we may need help, to ask our neighbors for support that may involve risking a closer relationship. It is much easier to send in an anonymous form, to receive an anonymous check in the mail. God’s way is not easy, it forces us to see things face to face, then deal with them in a very personal way. That is His way toward relationship with Him and each other, and one we have attempted to circumvent.
This is the system we helped to create, in the name of Christ, to serve those in need. What a weak and twisted structure we have built with our own hands. Our entire society is suffering, the results of this failure to embrace God’s plan that existed at the founding of our nation is now met with ballooning deficits, more people taking out of the system than paying in, and retreating neighbors that lob anger at each other instead of love. These results are just that, they are results of a broken system that human hands have tried to improve from a Godly one, yet we now only respond to the results as needing to be changed. The calls to lower the deficit, stop the spending, clean up the corruption…those calls are only addressing the results of the problem and will also fail, doomed to create an even larger rift between our people. The only true answer is falling back to God’s plan, to develop Christian communities where we have a genuine, personal care for each other that begins with our sharing a Gospel message that can save not only the human, but the spiritual side of us as well.

The Core of Oppression in America

When people hear the word "oppression," they generally think of traditional examples such as slavery or heavy handed taskmasters to define it. The connotation here, however, is much more to the core of the word as it exists in our country today. Oppression has been used most recently to describe acts associated with the financial leaders in our country and the recent Bailout Bill that passed both houses of Congress. It seems that the "Greed is Good" mantra of Gordon Gecko in the 1980's has come home to roost, while greed may be good as it represents the core of capitalism the results can certainly be less than desirable when taken to extremes.

Oppression has also been used by some on the liberal left to describe the lack of compassion shown by conservatives on issues of equality that include social, financial and racial issues. This view represents a philosophical difference between the two schools of thought, and while neither side is always right or always wrong about any individual point of contention, the trend is toward equality in all areas of society. That phrase in itself sounds proper, after all, the rights of life, liberty and happiness for all men who are created equally by our Creator (words of the Declaration of Independence, not mine) are the bedrock of our nation and the foundation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. While it all "sounds" appropriate, the issue of equality in the sense that it is being represented by the liberal left today is far from foundational thought. The Founders considered self-determinism to be the strength of an emerging America, where each would prosper through their efforts and be picked up again by their neighbors when things didn't go quite right.

Recent comments by Barack Obama concerning the Constitution bring us to the core of the issue at hand, which conservatives including John McCain are totally missing as the focal point of the upcoming election. The issue is not whether Obama is a closet Muslim, or a Socialist, or associated with the wrong people, I believe that Obama is as committed as McCain when it comes to the direction of the country and the common good of its citizens. They both believe their direction is the right one, I can see the passion of both points of view, so this type of attack will only enflame the passions of each side and turn off those in the middle. The current attacks on Obama's character are ineffective because they do not get to the core issue. 

The real issue is much closer to the foundational tenets of our country, and miles away from the peripheral attacks on Obama's character. His questionable associations are a result of his beliefs, not the cause that should actually offend Americans. The more immediate cause of my concern rests in the core issue that Obama and liberals in America believe that the Constitution is a "flawed document" that reflects the "blind spot of our founders that continues in our nation to this day." That is a quote from a 2001 radio interview with Obama when he was commenting that the liberal court under Chief Justice Warren did not go far enough to establish equality outside of social issues evident during the Civil Rights movement. The Warren court was too conservative for Obama, and the apparent intention of the comments was to say that the Constitution had its day but is outdated and in need of reform. I can only assume that his true intent is to "correct" the document to include the basic rights we all are due, including access to health care, retirement and jobs that cannot be taken away. The courts would become a mechanism to accomplish this reform, instead of focusing on the law of the land and ruling on points of law, the court would extend the definition of equality to correct the blind spot of our Founders in all areas of our society.

I have the feeling of a Star Wars movie character, when the Senate voted all powers to the Chancellor the comment was made, "So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause." To continue the movie motif, the true heroes of our society (Jedi Knights) are made into villains by the oppressive Emperor who is squashing the rights of all in the name of equality while our individual rights vanish. We will see this evident in the future as we are made to report our personal habits to the Health Care police, any smoking, drinking or obesity will be against the rights of others covered by Universal Health Care and therefore you are not doing your fair share. Expect to have the plug pulled as the government makes decisions on your life based on your importance to them, not your family and friends. That is one example, consider the current financial mess as a result of political manipulation of market forces, and then consider what the effects have been. What will happen when we attempt to manipulate health care markets, and take over 401-K programs and replace them with "safe" government programs that pay 3%? The results will be disastrous.

The real oppressors in our society today are the liberal left, who would rather place government in the rightful position of the community and the church, manipulating people's care for their neighbors into government run programs. We will give people a fish instead of teaching them to fish, squash individual determinism and personal rights in favor of societal equality, giving no encouragement to job creation through business growth and innovation as we take money from those who pay taxes and give it to those who don't through financial equality, all ultimately to move us toward a society that is as far from our Founder's vision as we could possibly be. Even the media will be a part of this oppression, and those who do not participate will simply not be allowed access to the throne room. 

In the most simple illustration, the tax returns of our candidates reflect this difference, McCain and Obama both made a few million dollars last year (subject for another time), McCain and his wife gave over a million to charity and Obama and his wife gave $3000 or so. Obama believes that his taxes should be used for charity since government should take care of those issues, McCain believes it is the responsibility of other people to intervene in situations that need our attention and get personally involved in the solution. The wealthy in America have a different agenda in this election. While the wealthy will support McCain, the super-wealthy will support Obama. I often wondered why this was the case, but now I understand, the super wealthy liberal elite are interested in maintaining a class structure where they have control, by keeping the majority in a situation where they rely on government that is under the control of those super-wealthy. The mere wealthy are interested in getting ahead through ideas and innovation, creating jobs for people and opportunities for the next go-getter to become wealthy. I hope there are a few more Jedi Knights left that can recognize this, before the Emperor begins to consolidate his authority behind the oppressive ideas of his supporters and allow the Harvard Law Review to re-write the Constitution of the United States.  

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting a class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves"-Abraham Lincoln