All posts by Wayne

Out of Control By Tom Ehrich

November 13, 2012

When Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” (Mark 13.3-4)

After my recent surgery, I peppered my surgeon with questions. When will I be back to 100%? When can I resume doing this or that?

I didn’t have a calendar to manage. I just wanted a sense of control. Surgery had put me out of control, and I wanted control back.

The doctor wisely said, Who knows? It depends. Weeks, maybe months. In other words, non-answers to nonsense questions.

Bodega_02Now, in the strange ironies of a strange year, he could be asking the same question. For his hospital, one of the city’s finest, was clobbered by Hurricane Sandy and might not reopen for months.

As the disciples of Jesus dealt with the realities of their master — not the imagined benefits, not the romance of a new David, not the grand procession to power, but a suffering servant whose trajectory was toward tragedy — they, too, sought a sense of control.

“When will this be?” they asked. “What will be the sign?”

Christians have been asking those questions ever since. Every time we glean the truth about Jesus, we reach for the control switch. Make the enterprise about us, we say. Satisfy our desires. Build our edifices. Crown our kings. Anoint our prejudices. Soothe our fears. Make us right.

Then we turn our assurances into what we really want: power, wealth, comfort, admiration. We claim to be seeking the glory of God. But there is nothing in the Jesus story that requires grand cathedrals, well-attired clergy, fights over doctrine, property disputes, budget battles, or divisions along every conceivable line, from race to tenure to taste in music.

That is all us, all the time. That is our addiction to control. That is our delusion: if we knew exactly when and what and how, we could rule the world. Or at least sleep well at night.

Following Jesus has always meant stepping beyond self-interest and safety, and following one who hurries toward danger, not away from it, whose heart is fundamentally oriented toward the victim and the outcast, not toward the righteous.

Then and now, following Jesus means uncertainty, not certainty, and conflict, not peace as the world knows peace. Following Jesus means going out to serve, not staying inside to enjoy. It means forming odd alliances in pursuit of justice, not wrapping ourselves in the mantle of tribe. It means constant change, not carefully measured change. It means responding to needs, not scheduling meetings to talk about needs.

In Jesus’ company, there is no control. There is only a journey onward to a land that God will show us.

Mystery Unraveled: How a white, moderate, churchgoing, middle-class, middle-aged woman could vote for Obama

Mystery Unraveled: How a white, moderate, churchgoing, middle-class, middle-aged woman could vote for Obama

‘We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin

If there’s one word that seemed to characterize Romney supporters’ immediate reaction to Obama’s victory, it’s “shock.”

A conservative Facebook friend posted this status: “For the first time in my life I am at a loss for words…absolutely baffled by the electorate and the election results, especially considering the current state the country is in.”

A radio reporter interviewed a woman at the Romney campaign party in Denver shortly after the election was called. Her response simmered with anger as she pondered the reality of how more than half the nation had voted: “What don’t they see?? It’s mind-boggling!”

What they don’t see are people like me.

I’m a 50-year-old white woman who lives in the swing state of Colorado. I’m married, I’m a mom, I have a PhD, and I’m a Christian. In Boulder. I can’t imagine trying to explain the world without faith and science. I’m upper middle class, but I come from blue-collar stock. I believe in capitalism, but I also believe its inevitable excesses must be tempered with regulations – you know, Genesis, original sin, the human propensity for greed and all. I’m pro-life in the fullest sense of the term. I’m happy for my gay friends who want to marry – I’m all for commitment when it comes to sustaining the social fabric. My evangelical grandmother, whom I treasured, was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I’m a Democrat who likes hymns and red wine. Try squaring all that when it comes to putting me in a political box.

Like a great many voters who helped tip the election to Obama, I see social complexity that the poles refuse to acknowledge. I’m a reasonable centrist. And I think Republicans write us off at their own expense.

If one had spent the campaign watching only Fox News, following only conservative pundits and pollsters, it’s no wonder the election results seemed so inscrutable. Daniel Larion, doing some Wednesday morning quarterbacking in The American Conservative, observed that the entire Romney campaign was organized on “flawed assumptions.”

“Romney and his allies not only didn’t understand their opponent, but they went out of their way to make sure they misunderstood him, and in any kind of contest that is usually a recipe for failure.”

Likewise, Romney supporters misunderstand many of us who sent Obama back for four more years. Why on earth, given this economy, would tens of millions of Americans choose to do that?

The right-wing radio blowhards think they have it figured out: we’re dupes of the mainstream media, a giant liberal-elite faction engaged in a conspiratorial embrace with the Left; Hurricane Sandy and turncoat Chris Christie joined forces in an eleventh-hour PR move for the president; or – and this is emerging as the dominant narrative – we simply want more stuff that we don’t have to work for. We’re takers, not makers. Romney was right when he talked about the 47 percent, only it was 51 percent – apparently there were more slackers in the country than he counted on.

All of those explanations are as wrong as they are offensive.

I would like for my bewildered Republican friends to know how I could possibly have voted for Obama without being a far-left ideologue who is simultaneously blind, immoral and lacking in patriotism.

Here are five reasons. And I’m pretty sure I speak for the bulk of the moderates who broke for the president on Tuesday night.

1) I don’t believe Obama is a closet Muslim with a radical socialist agenda to undermine America. I don’t believe he has a false birth certificate and a fake Social Security card. I think he is a deeply sincere, smart, principled man who is far from perfect but deserves a chance to continue what he has tried to begin.

2) I’m more comfortable taking a risk on Obama’s economic agenda than Romney’s. The numbers are starting to look up. I’d rather hedge my bets with Keynes than Adam Smith. Mitt wants to cut spending and slash taxes, and give most of those tax breaks to the richest Americans. That doesn’t square with my sense of what’s rational or what’s just. We’ve tried that before, and that Kool-Aid does not trickle down for me.

3) I’m willing to take a chance on Obamacare. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than a system that excludes millions and is dedicated to lining the pockets of insurance companies whose primary mission is not to cover care but to deny it. The Affordable Care Act is not “socialized medicine” in which the government dictates my health care. It’s a hybrid system that worked in Massachusetts; I’m ready to see how it goes in the rest of the U.S.

4) I care deeply about protecting this planet, our home. How could we elect a president who is so cavalier about God’s creation that he wants to dismantle the EPA? Really? The clean air and clean water acts established under Richard Nixon aren’t important to keep for our kids? I can’t imagine a world leader not grappling with the problem of global climate change. Solyndra was a debacle, but to suggest that we ought not to pursue green energy isn’t just short-sighted, it’s grave foolishness.

5) I believe a graduated tax system is the most moral means of structuring an economy. I think that rich folks who benefited so disproportionately from a wildly deregulated Wall Street need to return to shouldering more of our shared burden. Luke 12:48 says, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Now, plenty of wealthy business owners are going to argue, ‘This wasn’t given to me, I built it.’ Yes, you did, with a public infrastructure supporting you. But until we have genuine equality of opportunity in this country – including equal pay for equal work – some people can build a lot more than others.

There are parents who hire me for $50 an hour here in wealthy Boulder to coach their kids on college application essays. They fly to visit schools so their kids can interview in person. You think that teenager of a single-mom Wal-Mart clerk struggling to pay her rent has the same crack at a premier college education and the connections that come with it? Where is the equal opportunity?

And don’t tell me that working woman is a sponger. Don’t tell me that Diego who painted my house or Beatriz who sometimes cleans it is a freeloader. As a Christian, I am told to care for the least of these. When I vote, their self-interest should be as important as my own. “Sink or swim,” or “Go home even though you’ve lived here since you were two” is no more a path to economic autonomy than a government check is.

The fact is, we are all in this country together, and we have different needs and means, and we have a lot in common when it comes to teaching kids, fighting fires, cleaning up after storms or caring for our national parks. Those who have more need to do more, as we work to give the rest not a handout, but a hand up. As for me, I went to college on Pell grants, work-study, scholarships and summer jobs. That combination of my own hard work and a little help from a society that supported my potential is what got me a college degree. That powerful model – public and private in synergy – remains most compelling to me and is the most fundamental reason I voted for President Obama.

Clearly, the Right and Left perceive the role of government differently. We may ultimately be captives of a postmodernist analysis that says there is no way outside our own subjectivity to view the world through another’s eyes. If that is so, then empathy is a casualty and our divisions rigidify.

I refuse to concede that. I’d rather share the prophetic words of Abraham Lincoln, speaking to a deeply divided America in his 1861 Inaugural Address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

May we each appeal to the better angels in one another as we start healing the wounds of this election season.

Maine 100 mile hike

 

http://sectionhiker.com/at-section-hike-100-mile-wilderness/

 

http://sectionhiker.com/inov-8-terroc-330-trail-running-shoes/

http://sectionhiker.com/inov-8-roclite-320-trail-running-shoes/

http://sectionhiker.com/long-distance-hiking-trails/

http://www.backpacker.com/mountain_goat_kills_hiker/blogs/daily_dirt/1918

http://www.backpacker.com/october_2001_destinations_best_backpacking_missouri/destinations/2576

http://www.citrusmilo.com/zionguide/transziontrek.cfm

http://www.backpacker.com/national_parks_secret_hikes_zion/destinations/14311

 

http://www.pcta.org/

http://www.pcta.org/pdf/2011-PCT-Map-Brochure.pdf

Needing to Receive

September 25, 2012

Needing to Receive

By Tom Ehrich

Jesus said, “For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” (Mark 9.41)

Jesus told his followers that they would need water and that others, sometimes the most unlikely souls, would bring them cups. They wouldn’t be self-sufficient, above the fray, at a safe distance from personal, emotional and spiritual destitution.

They would fall and need to be helped up. They would go blind and hungry. They would suffer for their faith and would need — not just dispense in noblesse oblige but actually need — help in their travail.

Humility, you see, isn’t just stooping to give. It is also raising one’s broken heart to receive.

Submission by Tom Ehrich

The answer lies in Mark 8.34. If we had truly wanted to follow Jesus, we would have had to deny ourselves, accept , and follow Jesus on his road: away from home, out among the needy, speaking truth to power, and sacrificing everything.

From:  http://www.morningwalkmedia.com/news-oaj_meditation.php?nav=n-27657

September 13, 2012

Submission

By Tom Ehrich

Jesus called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8.34)

After all this time — after two thousand years of Christian history, millions of sermons preached in millions of churches, countless study groups and institutional consortia, after the expenditure of billions in church budgets, the ordaining of clergy and canonizing of saints — you would expect the world to be a better place.

Cozad_02Progress, however, has come mainly from science, technology and philosophy. With some notable but rare exceptions, Christianity has been either an obstacle or a bystander. Our wars have stained the ground red; our arguments have sent seekers elsewhere.

Why is this? The answer lies in Mark 8.34. If we had truly wanted to follow Jesus, we would have had to deny ourselves, accept , and follow Jesus on his road: away from home, out among the needy, speaking truth to power, and sacrificing everything.

Instead, we have approached religion as one more avenue to meeting our needs and saving ourselves.

“Does this faith agree with my views and interests?” we ask, when we should be asking, “Have I given up everything for Jesus?”

“Do I like the new pews, the new pastor, the new music?” we ask, when we should be asking, “Shall we praise God together on our knees?”

“Am I getting what I want and meeting people I enjoy?” we ask, when we should be asking, “Am I doing your will, Lord? Am I standing in solidarity with people whom you chose for me?”

When Christianity becomes, for us, a path to self-fulfillment, carried out among like-minded people, bounded by traditions we savor and practices we favor, aimed at winning our loyalty, what could God possibly do with us?

When the Gospel is used to justify whatever we want justified, to win whatever battle we want waged, and to celebrate our tastes and wealth through handsome facilities and pleasing words, what have we to say to anyone?

Jesus made it quite clear what faith in him would mean. There’s no mistaking his call: serve with me, suffer with me, die with me. Until we try that call, the world is unlikely to get any better. That’s the long and short of it. Christianity has had little impact on the world, except for some handsome buildings and lovely art, because Christians haven’t yet, in most places, given Christianity a try.

I teach church development. But I recognize that better practices can only do so much. Our future as people of faith, our future as faith communities, and the future of our troubled world depend entirely on submission.

Will we continue to satisfy ourselves, or now, at long last, can we deny ourselves and follow Jesus on his road?