It’s Christmas. The time of year when Christians celebrate the arrival of God on earth in the person of a tiny baby. Odd, isn’t it, how this incredible (read: unbelievable) story has been elaborated: Angel announcements. Miraculous star. Amazed shepherds. Kings with gifts. These and other colorful details dress up the festivities we Christians play out year after year. The Nativity Story collects several different versions of what may or may not have actually happened into one seamless pageant. It brings to children, and to childlike hearts, a sense of wonder and joy.

Meanwhile, it stirs up a great deal of controversy, among Christians and non-Christians, too. God coming to earth in person—in a person?

Christian scriptures tell us: “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” As one hymn puts it, “Immortal, invisible God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.”

God is not a person. What is this thing about Christmas?

In the beginning, something (call it Spirit) prevailed over nothing and everything began to take on substance. Sound and hearing, light and eyes, breath and life. One wouldn’t exist without the other, right? The universe was made for people, and people for the universe.

Furthermore, as the story goes, “In His own image, created he them, man and woman.”

Wait! In his own image? What image?

Conventional pronoun aside, God doesn’t have eyes, ears, hands, or feet, or any other physical qualities. God isn’t a body, doesn’t have a body.

But how could people comprehend the Spirit God except through our senses and our stories? How could we get past the limitation of our bodies?

To my way of thinking, Christianity is a kind of reverse engineering.

Jesus, born human, is the consummate expression of who and how we were created to be as human beings in the image of the image-less God. We, like Jesus, are creatures of both body and Spirit. Associating ourselves with Jesus in the sacramental framework of religion is a pretty good way to discover and appreciate the wonders of our universe and the meaning of our lives within it. Human beings as spirit are connected to each other as a single body is connected, to protect, enable, activate (feed, clothe, heal, educate) every member of our being.

As another hymn affirms, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord…and we pray that our unity may someday be restored….They will know we are Christians by our love….”

Children, it’s that simple.  May it be so.

November 28, 2020

WASHINGTON The Justice Department is quietly amending its execution protocols, no longer requiring federal death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection and clearing the way to use other methods like firing squads and poison gas.

Now that the turkey is cooked, picked, and packed away as leftovers, we can get on with normal life in the United States of executions.  That is, after seventeen years of holding condemned persons in a hellish stay, the Justice Department has proceeded with killing them under the aegis of the outgoing administration.  I mean, why wait another second to murder these criminals, after seventeen years of anticipation?  And why not use poison gas?

Eighty million citizens (so far) have agreed that the current administration has failed.  Eighty million Americans want somebody else to be responsible for agencies like the Justice Department.  Eighty million people realize that monsters are running amok in Washington, and not just in the White House.  Eighty million of us stand aghast as the incumbent pardons a person who egregiously lied to us and our federal legislators and the FBI, while at the same time authorizes the death of prisoners whose cases he probably never heard of, let alone thoughtfully considered.

But let’s not argue the details of the present moment. 

Let’s get ahead of the fundamental issue:  the death penalty itself.

Presbyterian theology, which I nominally ascribe to, hangs its hat partly on doctrines laid down by the sixteenth century French theologian John Calvin.  Among these was his description of human beings as utterly depraved.  Unfortunately, this theology has infected American consciousness since the Pilgrims, those folks who allegedly brought us Thanksgiving and, probably, the death penalty for things like witchcraft.

Isn’t it time we applied a more godly view to our assessment of humanity?  The God I worship declared all creation “good” to begin with, including people.  When the original pair screwed up, according to the story, they did not die.  They got a second chance, with the “punishment” of working out how to live in a world of suffering.  Can we not find a way to apply this redemption to our fellow human beings, no matter the “screw-up” involved?

When it comes down to it, who has caused more death in our country: the person convicted of murdering another person, or the persons responsible for the deaths of millions by hunger, hopelessness, and lack of health care?

Eighty million Americans have decided to kick out a death-dealer in the White House.  Now let’s see about reworking our judgments concerning the real criminals against our civil life.

Let’s begin by eliminating the death penalty for lesser offenders.

Think we’ve got a few issues on our collective plate these days? In the community, the nation, and the planet, conflict and catastrophe prevail. I don’t have to enumerate the disasters, some generated by nature and many by human obstinacy. We’re all grieving night and day.

Now that the holiday season has arrived, a traditional time for gratitude and charity, the mailboxes, e-and snail, bring loads of daily reminders that suffering begs a response from me–generously, immediately, AGAIN if I happen to be on their donor list already. I’m glad to say that not so many of these pleadings have to do with politics anymore. That’s suffering of a different order.  No matter how much I give and to what, I still have those drop-in-the-bucket misgivings.

This morning’s Celebrity Cypher, a decoding puzzle I like to figure out, triggered the reflections that follow. Here’s the quote, from revered musician B. B. King: “I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women…women are God’s greatest gift to the planet.”

Talking bad about women. Yes. And how about abusing, subjugating, enslaving, ignoring, buying and selling, devaluing, disenfranchising, and (you name the way) by which all cultures of the world (I won’t say men) relegate women to secondary-human status. You think the idea of “the weaker sex” no longer exists?

In today’s Kansas City STAR, I learn that my state, Missouri, has the second highest number in the nation of women murdered by men, half the time with guns. Many of these murders occur within a domestic relationship. Efforts to deprive abusive men of their weapons have been thwarted by the state legislature. Thompson and Willis [advocates for protection for women and children in Springfield] said “legislators in Missouri have been reluctant to move toward stricter policies out of a misguided belief that victims exaggerate and lie about their abuse.”

Talking bad about women? Yes, that is still fully accepted in the Men’s Club, which often includes legislatures, courts of law, executive suites, and neighborhood bars. Do women talk trash—and worse—against men? Oh yes. But where’s the power?

I’ve been on the planet for only 74 years. In that short time, my experience holds evidence that progress has been made: huge things like being able to get a credit card in my own name, even though married. I made a pretty big stink about that with a major department store back in 1970. Bigger issues, however, still prevail, such as workplace compensation and health care equity. Women have made considerable progress in politics where our votes and the ability to give money advance our power. What about the economic discrepancies revealed in caregiving professions, education, and child care roles traditionally relegated to women?

Deep down in the innards of human nature, a flawed separation continues in effect around the world. Evolution is too slow. If I could claim one God-like power, it would be this: Make men and women in the same image, undivided, created as one for the ongoing advancement of the universe. By some lights, that’s how things were supposed to be.

Talking bad about women. If ever there was an Original Sin, that’s it.

What are they feeling, the people who voted for the incumbent?

Those of us who did not, if I may be an example, felt at the moment of “victory” a great weight of despair lift from our hearts–the very light, if not a lightning strike, of hope in the darkness.

But look. According to the vote count, my group of “we the people” is only a few million more than half the voters this time. Nearly equal millions of my fellow citizens believed that the incumbent represented their best hopes for the country, and perhaps the deepest values in their hearts. I find this beyond troubling.

This is a time to listen to them, I say to myself. But I don’t want to.

I don’t want to hear that transparent lying is acceptable from the nation’s executive. I don’t want to hear that criminal self-dealing is no big deal in the White House. I don’t want to hear that ignorance is somehow more honorable and sincere than science, or that violence has a place in our political process. There’s so much I don’t want to hear from people who seem to embrace a worldview so different from mine.

What am I not hearing? What do “they” want?

This huge nation, never imagined by the so-called Founding Fathers, has divided itself into countless categories of self-interest: urban v rural, white v black, women v men, coastal v central, college v high school, liberal v conservative v progressive, and libertarians besides, religion v other religion v no religion.

Then, because what it comes down to is not just “What does everyone want?” but more significantly, “Who’s going to pay for it?” we must add haves v have nots.

Finally, from my Christian perspective, I observe yet another division: Love thy neighbor v Hate thine enemies.

In the past four years, we’ve learned, if nothing else, that the loudest. meanest, most outrageous voice can win. Will the quieter, kinder, compassionate voice have a chance? Even better, will the many, many voices that have never been heard before stand forth now and become the family of a better, greater nation?

We are not all alike. But we all need to go back to the kindergarten lesson of sharing. With all its resources and opportunities on the table, the United States of America has more than enough for everybody.

Is that something all of us can ever agree on?

Is it going to be about love or hate? Facts or lies? Everything for a price or priceless values? The choice of leadership before us breaks down clean and clear just like that.

I’ve always lived by the admonition, “Whatever you own owns you.” Obviously that applies to things: homes, cars, digital devices, clothing, and anything else that requires maintenance and, eventually, replacement. It may also apply to other kinds of commitment: to people (friends, spouses, children) and to social relationships (religious or spiritual affiliation, organization memberships). Each and every one of our commitments owns us. It’s important to choose mindfully.

Of course, nobody gets to choose their birth family. Some of us get better options right from the beginning. For those people, the menu of possible commitments at first appears vast and confusing. Later on, part of maturity is realizing that choices do not remain endlessly open. With every commitment we make, the menu gets smaller and the chance to change our minds diminishes, until we run out of time. For me, an early commitment never to give birth changed the menu for the rest of my life. Enhanced or diminished? I have no way of knowing for sure.

With all this choosing available in our so-called free country, I have come to resist, and even resent, one particular feature of American life: What is actually up for sale is ME. My heart breaks at the amount of money spent on advertising, on the algorithms aimed at capturing my eyeballs and my brain. This marketing of me is almost inescapable, no matter how many ways I try to shut it out. All sources of information, all social affiliations, seem to come with a DONATE button. My power as a person resides, it seems, in being money that someone or something wants to lay claim to. Without money, I might as well not exist in this milieu of owning and being owned.

What owns me today? Who owns me today? Conspicuously, as election day looms, my country does. My entire life is on the block. And so is yours.

I have an obligation to my country and to my fellow citizens to resist being bought, and especially to being sold, by the U. S. Government. Government is commanded by the Constitution to “promote the general welfare,” not to sell our common needs to the highest private bidder. Clean air, accessible water, energy, communications networks, transportation, health care, nature preserves, bridges, and roads are all part of the general welfare we support with our commitment to each other as a country. So is military defense. None of this should be for sale to some entity less than all of us together.

A government that works for all of us together must be built on nothing less than love: love for humanity, for justice, for the opportunity of choice. A government that works for all of us must be built on facts, data, investigation, research, honesty, transparency. A government that works for all of us asks the question What is right? not Who can profit? A government that works for all of us does not discard any of us.

Is that kind of government “too expensive”? What about a government owned by entities other than “we the people”? If that were to happen, citizens like you and me would become persons to be bought and sold, another name for which is…