By Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church, Church of the Saviour from Inward/Outward/Together, June 25, 2022
Most of us will admit that there are parts of the Bible we skip over – all the “begats,” particularly dry parts of Leviticus, the confusing imagery of Revelation. But I pay pretty close attention to the gospels, which is why it was surprising that this brief vignette at the beginning of today’s passage* was totally unfamiliar – I can’t recall a single sermon about Jesus scolding James and John because they want to rain fire down from heaven on the inhospitable Samaritans.
It’s one of those passages that we just skip right over because… well, why? Because James and John seem almost silly in their disproportionate lust for vengeance? Because surely good Christians know this is not the way to treat your enemies?
But these reasons probably wouldn’t hold up if I could read this story with a genuine understanding of the enmity between Samaritans and Jews, if I could feel it in my body the way I do things that enrage me: white supremacists with their guns, billionaires playing fast and loose with our democracy, politicians who insist on letting people suffer and die. While I’ve never suggested firebombing anyone, I certainly had complicated feelings about certain leaders contracting COVID. If I’m honest, the desire for revenge is not at all foreign to me; it frequently simmers right under the surface. Recently at Seekers, a few folks wondered aloud whether they would assassinate Vladimir Putin if they had the chance. It was honest and uncomfortable and, like most uncomfortable conversations in polite company, ended quickly.
We don’t know how to talk about our enemies; it’s strange and disconcerting to even use the word. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I work my way through Melissa Florer-Bixler’s How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace. Florer-Bixler argues that we must learn to properly identify and name our enemies in order to rightly go about the work of loving them. Like James and John, we need to air our hostility so that Jesus can help us think rightly about it. As Florer-Bixler says, “…my prayers of wrath, seething with demands for punishment and revenge, revealed that my own incoherent and blistering rage would do nothing to set me and others down in the renewed order of God’s creation.”
Our anger and enmity can point us towards the world we are longing for, towards the one who promises to make all things new – but only if we are brave enough to face them.
*Luke 9:51-54 … he set out for Jerusalem and sent messengers ahead. They entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him, but they did not receive him. When James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” He turned and rebuked them.
I customarily write on national security matters. This, actually, is one, and it matters.
I had two seminal exposures to Catholic teaching: one in the 50s and one in the 80s. I am grateful that in 1986, when I earned a Certificate in Theological Studies at Georgetown, educated Catholic theologians had been empowered to discuss abortion and what Jesus said about it (zero) in an honest, non-fundamentalist way. My professors – some of them just back from places like El Salvador, focused on things that Jesus DID talk about – like humility and justice (check out Matthew 5:1-12).
The Preferential Option for the Poor
THIS is what Jesus talked about – not things like abortion or homosexuality. The key tenet of most paying-attention Catholics is summed up in Catholic social teaching: the preferential option for the poor. (Some wags have called Catholic social teaching the best kept secret of the Church. The more reason to bring it up in today’s context!)
In 1986, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a formal statement on the economy, calling for a fundamental “option for the poor.” I shall quote just one sentence: “The more fortunate should renounce some of their rights so as to place their goods more generously at the service of others.”
Yes, U.S. Catholic bishops issuing a solemn call for the redistribution of wealth. A radical idea, indeed (in the original sense of radical — rooted in the core of Abrahamic faith). Another way to express this is that no one is entitled to accumulate still more of what they don’t need, while others are deprived of the necessities of live.
If that sounds downright un-American, that’s because it is. The biblical approach to “justice” does not square with the American concept of justice. No blindfolded “even-handed” lady here; rather, one who looks for the poor and gives them preference. I tried to spell this out on New Year’s Day, 2020, in “Biblical Justice: It’s Not What You Think”
So today the question is how does the Supreme Court decision on abortion square with the biblical insight into the core of justice? Whom will it affect most?
Christian Theologians on Abortion
Truth be told, the Supreme Court’s approach does not square with most Catholic theologians either. (Sorry, most bishops are pastors and administrators and not professional theologians.) One theologian and professor of moral philosophy from whom I’ve learned a lot is Daniel C. Maguire. Here are excerpts from a Letter to Editor that he got published by The New York Times on June 29, 2007. (Adult content: discretion advised.)
Re “On Abortion”…
… Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas both favored legalization of prostitution even though they thought prostitution evil. Their thinking was that “greater evils” would result if prostitution were banned and this outlet for aberrant sexuality energy were unavailable.
In so doing, St. Thomas Aquinas said, the “wise legislator” is imitating God who, though all powerful and supremely good, tolerates certain evils lest greater evils ensue.
Similarly, today’s legislators who think abortion immoral could vote to keep it legal since greater evils, multiple deaths of women (especially poor women) from botched abortions as seen before Roe v. Wade, would follow.
…Feminist scholars have documented the long record of men’s efforts to control the sexuality and reproductivity of women. Laws showcase our biases….
After all, canon law excommunicates a person for aborting a fertilized egg, but not for killing a baby after birth. One senses here an agenda other than the simple concern for life. What obsessions are operating?
A person could push the nuclear button and blow the ozone lid off the earth or assassinate the president (but not the pope) without being excommunicated. But aborting a five-week-old precerebrate, prepersonal fetus would excommunicate him or her.
May we uncritically allow such an embarrassing position to posture us as “prolife”? …
Earlier speakers at the on-line Schiller Institute international conference “The Insanity of Politicians Threatens Nuclear War” took an informative but somewhat traditional approach, so I decided it might be time for what Germans call eine Denkpause, a pause to think about ‘what fools we mortals be’.
I suggested giving some thought to broader questions: Might there be another way? Why can’t we all just get along?
To put some gravitas behind this approach, I called on a bunch of old friends — an unlikely congeries of ‘Denkers’, who influence my own thinking.
To set the tone, I borrowed an insight from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; namely, human connections are what matter most; that it is only with the heart, not just the eye, that one can see rightly; that most adults have difficulty doing this. And I added the reality that people with little pigment in their skin still tend to see themselves as exceptional.
Included among the dramatis personae I enlisted to expand de Saint-Exupery’s insight:
— Presidents Biden, to Xi, to Putin — Humanist Kurt Vonnegut, to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount — Daniel Berrigan, to Theilhard de Chardin
Concluding, I chose a line from Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy written in 1785, at the same time our Founders were declaring — like Schiller — that all men are created equal. Even then, of course, with their limited vision (and crass economic interest in preserving slavery, plus the subordination of women), the Founders’ declarations and behavior were far from inclusive.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent speech on China yesterday reminds us that, in the view of Washington and the U.S.-led White West, people of color who comprise some three-quarters of the world’s population are, in effect, still not deemed to be “brothers” (or sisters) of whites today.
Ironically, the way that the “world correlation of forces” has evolved, the White West has become “exceptional” indeed — but in a wholly new and detrimental way. Hubris-tinged exceptionalism has reduced the lily-white West to a distinct minority — a minority that, short of nuclear war, is no longer able to work its will on the rest of the world, as was the case ‘back in the day’.
President Biden needs to invite into the room some adults able to see this, and to tell him how exceptionally (no pun intended) dangerous it would be to proceed as though nothing has changed.
In any case, Schiller (and Beethoven) had the right idea:
Alle Menschen werden Brüder — All men are brothers (from An die Freude)
Bipartisanship is a rare and endangered species in today’s bitterly divided Washington. Except when it comes to one thing: the Pentagon budget.
From Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow House Democrats to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans, all agree that the Defense Department — which already boasts a budget higher, in comparable dollars, than its levels during the Cold War, and bigger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest-spending countries — must have more. The only argument is how high the “top line” should go.
Ironically, this lone area of bipartisan consensus is a tribute not to the wisdom of the center but to its folly. Even as the military budget keeps going up, Americans are growing less and less secure.
The pandemic has taken the lives of more than 1 million Americans. With much of the world still lacking vaccines, as well as serviceable public health systems, the global toll keeps rising. And neither the United States nor the rest of the world is even close to prepared for the next pandemic, which, given our global economy, is certain to follow.
Meanwhile, last year, the United States alone suffered 20 climate catastrophes that wreaked over $1 billion in damage. Drought now endangers much of the West. Floods threaten the heartland. Hurricanes are predicted to be ever fiercer. Yellowstone National Park, with its recent drastic snowmelt and subsequent devastating floods, is only the most recent victim of a warming climate’s destructive effects. And yet, the Pentagon will get more money while efforts to kick-start investments to address catastrophic climate change are blocked by the Republican opposition in the Senate.
What is all this new defense spending for? Part will go to building up bases and weaponry in Asia to counter China. But the Chinese are competing most effectively not with military forces but with successful economic mercantilism. They are focused on capturing markets, locking up access to resources, and investing to dominate the emerging industries and technologies of the future. The Pentagon’s new weapons and bases won’t substitute for our failure to invest in cutting-edge R&D, in a modern and efficient infrastructure, and in a trade policy that serves Americans rather than multinational corporations.
The other target is Russia. Some of the most popular arguments for more military spending have been exposed as weak while the Ukraine war reveals the limits of the Russian military and Germany and other NATO allies pledge to increase their military spending dramatically. And yet, somehow, the Russian threat, as manifested by its invasion of Ukraine, remains the excuse for more Pentagon spending, not less.
The core of the argument is both logical and absurd. The United States maintains more than 700 bases in some 80 countries around the world. The Pentagon has carried out counterterrorism operations in at least 85 countries, nearly half of the world’s nation-states. It’s now gearing up to be able to take on both Russia and China. If the United States is committed to policing the world, the military budget will always by definition be inadequate. The mission, however, is absurd — and ruinous, if we want to rebuild and secure a healthy and prosperous democracy at home.
What powers the bipartisan consensus on military spending isn’t, of course, logic or even security. Pentagon spending is armed and armored by the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 60 years ago. Eisenhower was prescient but too optimistic. Now we have, as former intelligence official Ray McGovern dubs it, “MICIMATT”— a military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex that is the most powerful lobby of all.
OpenSecrets, the authoritative, nonpartisan source on campaign financing and lobbying, reports that the weapons industry has spent about $300 million on campaign contributions and $2.5 billion on lobbying during the Pentagon’s post-9/11 spending surge. In any given year, the industry employs an average of 700 lobbyists, more than one for every member of Congress. The Pentagon virtually invented the revolving door: A recent Government Accountability Office report identified 1,700 generals, admirals and Pentagon procurement officials who went to work in the 14 major arms contractors after leaving the government. According to a 2020 report, contractors and the Pentagon contributed more than $1 billion to the nation’s top 50 think tanks, another source of sinecures for former military officials, from 2014 to 2019.
None of these, though, are as powerful as the defense industry’s political contracting and production process, which systematically spreads jobs to key congressional districts nationwide. As William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, recently reported, the website for Lockheed Martin, a leading defense contractor, includes a map showing the state-by-state impact of the 250,000 jobs it claims are tied to its work on the troubled F-35 fighter jet. The company claims to have subcontractors in 45 states and Puerto Rico.
As Congress completes work on the defense budget authorization, bipartisan support will likely lift the top line higher even than the Pentagon or the president have asked for. But as the military grows, Americans will become less secure, battered by real threats that more weapons won’t address.
By Jordan Url, June 20, 2022 https://popularresistance.org/congress-lets-school-lunch-program-expire-as-it-ratchets-up-military-spending/ If we cannot take steps to ensure disadvantaged children have enough to eat, what good are we! MICIMATT profiteering on war in Ukraine and on tension with China amounts to THE MOTHER OF ALL OPPORTUNITY COSTS. And our earth is suffering, along with our children. (Yes, poor children ARE our children.)
Ray provides an example of the merits of WikiLeaks’ ‘Cable-gate’Interview with RT International, June 17, 2022 (9 minutes) https://disk.yandex.ru/i/XY0Ujdw3laRQ7w
