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by Rector John Graham

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Thursday, February 2, 2012

The Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple; the elder Simeon, seeing the child, said, “Lord, you now have set your servant free, to go in peace as you have promised.”

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote of “the cunning of Reason,” while Psalm 18 characterizes God as “wily.”

President Lincoln was wily. He maneuvered the South into firing first, on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. But then the cunning of cosmic Reason, or of God, made itself known. With his usual eloquence, Frederick Douglass went to the heart of the matter: “The Government is aroused, the dead North is alive, and its divided people united … Any attempt now to separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the Government … will be labor lost.”

“The Almighty has his own purposes,” Lincoln said four years later. God roused the nation to put down a rebellion, then channeled the fervor of nationalism into the struggle for emancipation. White America would not have rallied to the cause of a war to free slaves. Their freedom, though, turned out to be indispensable to the Government's victory.

God often shows us only a few of the cards in a much larger deck, because God knows us better than we know ourselves. We persuade ourselves that we can handle the whole truth, but God knows we sometimes do better with one piece of it at a time.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

What’s fair?

It looks like the 2012 elections will include some vigorous discussion of this question, and we should all hope it does. There are several answers out there, all worthy of attention and a forceful and principled defense. Conservatives stress that fairness means equality of opportunity, but by no means equality of outcomes; in fact, the possibility of getting ahead, even way ahead, spurs the discipline, enterprise and productivity we need to create jobs, and government should not interfere with this necessary dynamic. Liberals contend that extreme disparities of outcome often result from acute inequality of opportunity, revealing a fundamental unfairness that discourages initiative, consigns many to avoidable suffering and demands public sector intervention.

Recently, the Tea Party and Occupy movements have, for all their differences, focused our attention on a rising and shared concern that the “game,” so to speak, is rigged. Together they seem to point to an unholy alliance of government and the corporate sector, alleging that these forces, together, mock our aspiration to fairness. Dismantle large swaths of government, some say; others that we should break up the big banks and corporations and send some lenders to prison; still others, a pox on both houses.

So let’s have at it. What’s fair? How can we make things more fair? These are vexing questions, and the more straightforwardly our candidates debate them, the better off we’ll all be.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

In the Chicago neighborhood of Logan Square, where I served before coming to Grace, all of us mainline Protestant churches presented ourselves as being “open” to, as our prayer book says, “all sorts and conditions” of people.

Sadly, none of us had significantly integrated congregations (I served two separate congregations, one overwhelmingly Anglo, the other overwhelmingly Latino). But Armitage Baptist Church did. Southern Baptist in affiliation, leaning towards fundamentalism, they drew black, Latino and white, poor, middle-class and well-to-do, in roughly equal measure.

Faithful to the Biblical witness as they understood it, clear, simple, precise and driven by faith and conviction, the message Armitage conveyed in preaching, teaching and ministry drew the “all sorts and conditions” the rest of us mostly just talked about.

I admire our new Bishop for her history of seeking out and learning from pastors like Rick Warren and churches like Armitage Baptist. Her theology differs markedly from theirs, as does mine, and we believe that, in some respects, it’s done serious harm. But they’ve figured out something that we haven’t. We’re in the middle of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, running from the Feast of Peter’s Confession on January 18 through the celebration of Paul’s conversion on the 25th. Walking the middle way—willingness to learn from other traditions, while remaining faithful to our own—would help us get closer to realizing Jesus’ hope, that "we all" (Christians, and the human race itself) “might be one.”

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Regarding slavery, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “… we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” He could have written the same about Guantanamo, opened as a prisoner of war camp ten years ago this week.

Were we engaged in a conventional war, we could readily justify holding enemy combatants without trial until the cessation of hostilities. But the “war on terror” is not conventional, and we lack clear and precise criteria for defining “cessation of hostilities.”

As a result, we’re holding another wolf by the ear. If we let go, close Guantanamo precipitously, we might end up freeing people who pose a threat to us, especially because their resentments have had ample opportunity to simmer. But the framers of the Constitution, taught by Biblical and classical wisdom alike to shun open-ended authorizations of the use of power, contemplated detention without trial only in the narrow circumstances of a declared and limited war. So if we hold on, we cast an ever-longer and deeper shadow on the Constitution’s authority, just as slavery, the longer it continued, cast the promise of the Declaration of Independence into ever-deeper doubt.

I hope our leaders feel the urgency of shutting down Guantanamo with all deliberate speed. Just as important, I hope all of us together can tackle the difficult task of squaring the framers’ intent with the circumstances of modern warfare. When there’s a wolf at the door, we should try to find ways to defend ourselves without grabbing it by the ear.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

My close friend Eric, in Seattle, has a reasonably thick skin, but every once in a while something gets to him. He’s in the process for ordination as a Vocational Deacon and, not surprisingly—it’s the church, after all—a person with authority over this process said something that hurt his feelings. He told me about it last summer when we visited. The person’s remark, to my ear, betrayed an almost complete ignorance of Eric as a person.

So I shared with Eric a gem I’d gotten from my friend and mentor Rev. Rex Bateman: “Take everything as a compliment.” “Consider the source,” in other words; “If that guy spoke well of you, then you’d have something to worry about.” Immediately, Eric’s face brightened. “That’s just what I needed to hear—says it all,” he exclaimed.

Father Bateman died 25 years ago this Saturday. I miss him in a million ways, but in none more than in his ability to say just the right thing in very few words (he was as adept at taking the wind out of your sails as he was at bucking you up; it depended on what he thought you needed to hear, and his assessments on this score were scarily on-target). About five times a day I wish I could talk with him. I think of his aphorisms often, use them when I think they’ll help, and always try to give him credit.

Archive

Recent reflections are grouped by month and available as PDF files.

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2009

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