"Do Not Worry"

Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” was all about the “Kingdom of God” and what it takes to be a committed citizen of that kingdom – in other words a disciple. Nowadays we have the peculiar modern anomaly of dual citizenship. For most of history, however, people instinctively understood citizenship as one’s highest earthly loyalty, something which by definition precludes dual allegiance. Likewise, when it comes to citizenship in the kingdom of God, Jesus is equally exclusivist: “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other” [Matthew 6:24]. No surprise there! Nor should we be surprised when Jesus singles out material wealth as the great alternative that can most effectively undermine our commitment to God. “You cannot serve God and mammon,” Jesus asserted, without qualification or nuance.

Now obviously Jesus understood that we all need material things – just to live, let alone to live well. Jesus lived in a world of scarce resources. In pre-capitalist societies, most people are poor and have to focus most of their energies on just making a living. Jesus himself depended on the generosity of others. Luke’s Gospel specifically mentions a number of wealthy women who provided for him and his disciples out of their resources [Luke 8:3]. And any number of Jesus’ parables praise hard-working people, whose industriousness Jesus proposes as a model for his disciples to adopt in their religious life as well.

At the same time, we all know well how corrupting wealth – particularly the preoccupation with wealth - can be, both personally and socially. The class tensions that increasingly seem to be tearing at the fragile fabric of our own American society certainly serve to remind us of that. Nor is there anything new or novel about that. As Adam Smith observed back in the 18th century: “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Jesus’ words of warning were not addressed abstractly or theoretically. They were addressed to individuals directly and personally.

But notice: Jesus didn’t tell his disciples not to work, not to be personally productive, economically and otherwise. What he said was “do not worry.”

We all know what worrying can do to a person, how it can completely capture and immobilize a person. In extreme form, worry becomes obsessive, a compulsive disorder that practically paralyzes a person, totally distorting one’s perspective, the proper perspective that comes from being able to set proper priorities in one’s life and keep one’s priorities in order. (A peculiarly religious variation of this is what we call scrupulosity, an obsessive worry that everything one does is a sin, a total distortion of what our relationship with God is supposed to be about, leaving one feeling as forsaken as Zion in today’s first reading [Isaiah 49:14]).

Jesus challenges us to focus on what is important – to keep our concerns about material things in some sort of perspective. We do this all the time – or at least try to, if we are reasonably sane and focused – in our ordinary, day-to-day decisions – distinguishing what we can and cannot control, what’s of real importance from what is a sideshow, what’s of long-term value from what is short-term. Jesus wants us to do the same with what is most important – to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

“The miser,” Isaac Hecker wrote in 1843, “is an outward example of what the Christian should cheerfully do from the spirit of God living within. What does not the miser do for his God Mammon? … Do for the establishment of Christ’s kingdom upon Earth what he does for money.”

Homily for the 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN,

February 27, 2011.

Unions

Comparisons between the anti-government protests in Wisconsin (now seemingly spreading to other states as well) and the anti-government protests spreading around the Arab world are undoubtedly overblown – whether one sees them both as popular expressions of authentic democratic values or whether one judges Midwestern attempts to frustrate the program of the democratically elected government as ultimately somewhat anti-democratic. Either way, the situations are sufficiently different to argue against trying to draw too many parallels or any too easy comparisons. That said, however, what is happening in Wisconsin and elsewhere may be almost as important for the future direction of American society as some of what has been happening in the Arab world is there.

The Wisconsin situation seems to invite ideological extremism. Either one is for public-employees’ unions - or not. Either one is for getting the deficit under control - or not. And, of course, the ideological divide is mirrored in the positions of the two political parties – the Democrats in general siding with the unions, the Republicans in general against them. In actual fact, of course, as in most real-world situations, both ideologies – and both parties - have valid points to make.

I grew up in the post-war “Baby Boom” years when the propserous American economy exceeded anything most people had ever previously experienced. Labor unions had contributed notably to this incredible elevation in the living standards of the “working class.” In fairness to organized labor, it is only right to recall that what we now look back on almost as a “golden age” for ordinary American workers was also the period when unions were most powerful. (That prosperity, incidentally, also coincided with significantly higher tax rates than today, but that is another discussion). Of course, the labor market has changed radically since then, radically altering the situaiton of organized labor.

All the attention being focused on public employees’ unions highlights the fact that labor union membership in the United States has been declining in recent decades and that the one area in which unions seem to have (until now) maintained a powerful position has been among government employees. No doubt there are multiple factors contributing to this, but one seems especially obvious. The decline of unions has corresponded to the movement of jobs away from the traditional bases of union power, in the first place, to other jurisdictions in the United States (e.g., “right to work” states) and more recently to other countries. “Globalization,” “free trade,” etc., have all been characterized by the movement of jobs away from the high-cost labor market in the US (and from the union-friendly states within the U.S.) Government employees are in contrast one group of workers whose jobs, for the most part, cannot move to cheaper foreign labor markets at home or abroad.

So the rise of government employees’ unions is in reality a commentary on the changed character of the global labor market – and the consequent decline of organized labor’s power. At the same time, it highlights how different is the position of government employees’ unions vis-à-vis private sector unions. In private industry, unions have an incentive to see companies make a profit. High Wages, benefits, and “job security” don’t count for much in the end if they help put a company out of business. But governments generally don’t go out of business. Unions have less incentive to moderate their demands, while the politicians on the other side of the bargaining table likewise have less incentive to alienate workers (who vote, after all, and whose unions endorse candidates and contribute to campaigns).

The latter point highlights yet another – specifically political – factor. Unions in general (and the teachers’ unions in particular) are notoriously pro-Democrat. Given the obscene amount of money that nowadays goes into political campaigns, unions represent one solidly Democratic constituency that can be relied upon for help at election time. Just as many Democrats (at least in theory) would like to eliminate or reduce the influence of corporate money in politics, many Republicans would just as logically like to do the same with organized labor. This particularly political dimension of the controversy seems especially evident in Wisconsin where it seems to be primarily the more reliably pro-Democratic unions that appear to have been targeted.

Some elements on the right have long disparaged public employees as somehow less deserving than private sector workers. While this may be largely unfair, it has worked. And then there is the special case of teachers’ unions, which are even more particularly unpopular because of the widespread perception (probably justified to a considerable extent) that teachers’ unions represent a major obstacle in the way of meaningful educational reform.

So there is plenty of right and wrong on both sides of the current shouting match.

As for the deficit, again there is plenty of blame to go around – in both political parties.

Holidays

In the 1942 film classic Holiday Inn, Bing Crosby buys a farmhouse, intending to retire, but soon turns it into an Inn (complete with lavish entertainment) that’s open only on holidays. That was when holidays were still something special.

When I was growing up, the term “spring break” was foreign to us. (If we heard it at all, it was in the annual news coverage of misbehaving college students in Florida – nothing that had anything to do directly with us). Of course, we had our “Easter Vacation,” a substatial "break" beginning at mid-day on the Wednesday of Holy Week and continuing through all of Easter Week. But in addition to our “Easter Vacation,” we also had a whole bunch of holidays.

The “spring term,” which began officially on or near February 1 (thus inadvertently replicating ancient Celtic seasonal consciousness), included several such holidays. February gave us Lincoln’s (February 12) and Washington’s (February 22) Birthdays. March 17 was St. Patrick’s Day – not a legal holiday, of course, but a holiday for Catholic school children in New York, whose “rightly constituted principal patron” St. Patrick is. May brought another religious holiday - Ascension Thursday - and a big legal holiday, Memorial Day, which we typically observed (as the holiday was originally intended to be observed) by visiting the cemetery.

Whatever still lingered of the properly civic meaning of those legal holidays was eviscerated in 1971, when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 went into effect. This law moved four federal legal holidays (Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans Day) from their proper dates to designated Mondays – in order to create four fixed 3-day weekends for federal employees (and by extension others as well). Veterans Day was soon moved back to its traditional date (November 11), but none of the other holidays has had a comparable constituency sufficiently concerned about its essential civic meaning to get its traditional date restored.

In a sense, none of this matters much anymore. Along with the loss of the civic significance of days like Washington’s Birthday, has come the loss of any real sense of “holiday” at all. More and more people have to work on the holiday. Schools and even banks are now open in some jurisdictions. Even the parish office is open today!

Of course, it also used to be the case that there was a weekly holiday called Sunday, to which these occasional extra holidays were wonderful additions. When Constantine the Great declared Sunday a legal holiday in the Roman Empire in A.D. 321, he did a true service to humanity (not quite, but almost, as significant as his legalization of Christianity). It is obviously no accident that with the decline of public Christianity in the West has come the decline of Sunday as a real holiday when people don’t do ordinary activities and instead worship God and enjoy life. Sunday may still appear printed in red on our calendars, a vestigial relic of our once Christian culture. Likewise, Washington’s Birthday may also still appear in red, a relic of our once vibrant civic culture. With Sunday the ur-holiday now diminished almost beyond recognition, is it any wonder Washington’s Birthday now seems so insignificant – both diminished along with the world which produced them?

Be Perfect

“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Matthew 5:48].

Sounds pretty demanding, doesn’t it? Not just “be good,” but “be perfect” – just as our heavenly Father is perfect.

And demanding it is. No question about it! Extreme as it may sound, however, there was in fact nothing new really in Jesus’ demand. We just heard the Lord tell Moses: “Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them: Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy” [Leviticus 19:1-2].

God is holy. So his people should also be holy. Holiness describes who God actually is and must likewise describe who we are if we are actually God’s people – and must also then have recognizable consequences for the kind of person I am and the kind of person I am becoming as a member of God’s community.

St. Paul picks up on the same theme: Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you … the temple of God, which you are, is holy [1 Corinthians 3:16-17].

Now the way this translates from God to me is revealed in how I behave in relation to others. Listen again to Moses:
“You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.”

“Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against any of your people.”
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” [Lev. 19:17-18]

But again it is not a case of translating an abstract ethical proposition into its concrete applications. It’s how God behaves, because that is who God is. It’s how we actually experience God behaving. Our heavenly Father, Jesus reminds us, “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” [Mt. 5:45]

That the scorching desert sun afflicts the good as well as the bad and that the life-giving rain, which makes the land livable, benefits the unjust as well as on the just was something perfectly obvious to Jesus’ contemporaries – as it should be to us.

Demanding indeed is the challenge Jesus poses to his disciples – and no less so for being already familiar from the Old Testament. It represents a real challenge to our ordinary common sense. If it’s super demanding, it is because it goes against so much of what our ordinary experience identifies for us as common sense. For the reality is that it is the most natural and seemingly sensible thing in the world to bear hatred in one’s heart, to take revenge, and to cherish grudges. Going that extra mile and loving one’s enemies don’t make much sense – at least not in the immediate term. On our own, none of us would likely get beyond the ever-tightening circle of anger, hatred, and resentment. It’s only when we get beyond ourselves – or more precisely are taken beyond ourselves by God’s grace – that we recognize what my local Paulist superior, Fr, Charlie Donahue, has called “the rippling damage in not living a reconciling life.”

Becoming the person God is calling one to be involves much more than just getting over our anger and letting go of our resentments. It means making God’s holiness my own, letting God’s holiness take over my life, letting God’s perfection make up for my imperfection.

Homily for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, February 20, 2011.

The President's Religion (Again)

Like the really dumb debate about his birthplace, the President's religion remains an issue that just won't seem to go away. According to the Pew Research Center, 18% of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim, only 34% claim to know that he is a Christian, and 43% say they don't know his religion.

The President's birthplace, of course, is a confirmable fact. That my not matter much to those to whom facts don't matter. There are always extremists at both ends of the spectrum, for whom ideology inevitably trumps facts - whether it's who killed JFK or whether the world's climate is really changing or whatever. When I was a grad student, I remember reading and quoting (probably approvingly in some particularly benighted moment) the claim that there is something "conservative" about the very notion of a "fact." There are conservatives and there are conservatives, of course, but one of the more charming characteristics of traditional conservatives (not the radical and destabilizing movements that pass for "conservative" in contemporary politics) is a certain respect for facts - for the inherent givens of human nature, history, etc.

But I digress - back to President Obama's religion! That the President did join a church at a certain point in his life is - like being born in Hawaii - an historical fact. What that may actually mean in terms of his belief system today is, of course, another matter, more open to legitimate interpretation. Therein may lie the problem, inasmuch as the President does not so frequently display the predictable external markers of Christian identification that Americans have been accustomed to. expect in their presidents. That may be unfortunate for a whole host of reasons, but still it is quite a leap - a most unjustified leap - to jump from that observation to refusing to accept the President's repeated assertion that he is a believing Christian.

And now along comes Bill Maher - a self-appointed anti-religious zealot - who has declared that he too does not believe President Obama is telling the truth about his religion. As Brent Decker of The Washington Times put it, "With friends like Mr. Maher, Mr. Obama doen't need enemies."

I don't know how much of a "friend" of Obama, Bill Maher actually is. I'm guessing he likes Obama. Perhaps he's the sort of ideologue who expects that other smart people really agree with him, because what else would really smart people believe? I really just don't know. (But I guess Maher would really like it for the President to be in reality a skeptical, secular humanist - like himself).

Apparently, the issue came up in the context of Maher's also not believing that the President is politically a centrist. Being a "centrist" is certainly an even more malleable identity than being a Christian. So there is certainly room for legitimate debate about what that means and whether it is a reasonable description of the President's policies. Extremists at the other end from Maher routinely imply that the President is some sort of "socialist" seeking to impose a "socialist" (or at least a "European") style agenda on America. Intentionally or not, Maher oddly seems to be adding more plausibility to that interpretation.

(My own view, for what little it may be worth, is that the President may perhaps be more culturally liberal personally than any of his predecessors, but that his political ideology is indeed on the whole centrist.)

But I'm digressing again!

In the end, it was left to my one-time Princeton classmate Cornel West to defend the President's Christian self-identification, which he did very effectively.

Way to go, Cornel!