The Leader I'd Like to Have

In thanksgiving for the leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 

                                                            because I have been anointed

to bring good news to the poor,

to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to those without vision,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

I would not like a leader so presumptuous as to say this when proclaiming her or his candidacy, nor giving an inaugural speech. Only Isaiah and Jesus could get away with that, in my book.

But I would like a leader who repeated this privately as a prayer at the beginning of every day in office, and before every meeting and every decision. It’s good for leaders to be reminded, not just of their prophetic and pastoral roles, but of their responsibility to do what’s right and best.

Note that Jesus left off God’s vengeance from Isaiah’s declaration, a sign not only of good editing, but of good politics. We’ve had too much vengeance and not enough favor from our politicians, as well as those who provide political commentary. True of religious leaders as well.

Of course only Jesus could dare to tell his listeners that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Or maybe these words reflect the later judgment of his followers. Only history can vindicate any leader’s judgment, so humility should be expected. Over my six and a half decades I have witnessed leaders with messianic pretensions fail even their avid fans. And here I mean leaders of every stripe: political, religious, moral, economic, you name it.

A similar humility is called for in the electorate. Our leaders reflect our own civic harmony or our own civic disarray. In reflecting on every candidate for office and every issue on the ballot, we may remind ourselves of our limited perspectives and grasp, seeking wisdom from our deepest thinkers and most experienced practitioners, not just our loudest and most commonly available opinionators. Above all, we must be guided by the compassion proclaimed in every faith and by many philosophies.

We too best begin every Election Day prayerfully meditating on the words of Isaiah read approvingly by Jesus so long ago:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because I have been anointed

to bring good news to the poor,

to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to those without vision,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Today and last Wednesday I am revisiting two posts relevant to the upcoming U.S. elections. This post appeared on Nov. 2, 2016. 

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Perfection

“Be perfect as your God in heaven is perfect.”

Easy for Jesus to say! But as a fundamentalist Christian kid, I believed this was my goal. It made perfect sense to me. Except there was one area of my life in which I would never be “perfect”: I had these feelings for other boys, not just of attraction, but of love. And such tender feelings had no place between boys in the 1950s.

A recent study verifies “the best little boy in the world” syndrome among gay men, according to a New York Times op-ed. To make up for our “deficit,” we had to be the best somewhere else—in studies, sports, stage, spirituality, social action, or service, to name a few that alliterate nicely.

Long before I learned that the term translated “perfect” actually suggests “complete” as in “mature,” I had exchanged my childish goal of perfection for a spiritually mature goal of integrity, to the benefit of my spiritual, mental, and physical health and well-being.

Integrity itself is a lofty goal, of course. And it is a lifelong process. Perfection has the feeling of having arrived, being complete in and of oneself. But integrating your beliefs, thoughts, feelings, experiences, speech, and actions is a daily process that is never completed. I like to say that, in the spiritual life, there is no “finish line.”

It was not until later that I paid adequate attention to the alternate version of Matthew’s “be perfect as your God in heaven is perfect.” I don’t know how I overlooked Luke’s version, “Be merciful as God is merciful” or, in another translation, “Be compassionate just as God is compassionate.”

That to me would have been an attainable goal even as a kid. Needing compassion myself for my “flaw,” I readily offered compassion to others. Even adults felt encouraged to share with me their most deeply felt feelings. I had a good ear. Intuitively, I was Henri Nouwen’s “wounded healer.” That’s one of the reasons why I felt called to ministry.

Listening to—at first, dozens, and by now, thousands of—people gave my call to ministry a prophetic edge. I just wanted to be a pastor, but now, I had a mission. Or, better said, a passion. Nouwen liked to parse words, and pointed out that “compassion” literally means “suffering (passion) with (com).”

At first my passion was largely expressed in the movements for Civil Rights, Peace, and LGBT inclusion and equality. But it was always felt for ALL those excluded and diminished by the church and culture, those made to feel that they were not “perfect,” but who nonetheless struggled for integrity, and struggled to be compassionate. I imagine most readers of this blog know that experience.

I believe that’s what progressive Christianity does in its finer moments: gathers outsiders as “a mother hen gathers her brood under her wing,” just as Jesus wished.

Related posts:

“Colored on TV!”

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Wounded Healers

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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How to Fight

Today, Wednesday, Oct. 24, 10:30 am to 12 noon Eastern Time zone, you are invited to watch the webcast of a panel moderated by Chris Glaser on “Religion in the Public Square” at Yale Divinity School.

“Because church people tend to think they should not fight, most of them are really bad at it,” Barbara Brown Taylor rightly observes in her book, Leaving Church.

I think this applies not only to congregations. Couples, families, colleagues, coworkers, communities, citizens, elected officials, liberals and conservatives (the latter two for different reasons) do not know how to fight in a way that is mutually beneficial. Winning is more important than compromise, scoring points is worth more than mutual growth, attacking individuals has more traction than evaluating and even understanding another’s positions.

Many of us liberals and progressives fear conflict, and thus bend over backwards to accommodate opposing views, sometimes to the detriment of what is right. Many conservatives and neoconservatives enjoy the fray, as if going to holy war, sometimes to the detriment of what is just. Liberals by definition are to be open to all viewpoints; conservatives by definition are resistant to progressive views.

In high school, one of my least favorite extracurricular activities was debate club. The research involved, the requirement to argue each side of an issue, the inherent public speaking as well as the evaluation of the judges all made it undeniably challenging. And the topic that year was “socialized medicine,” hard to believe less controversial then than it is now but difficult nonetheless.

What I learned, though, was that attacking an individual rather than his or her facts lost points. Attacking an opinion rather than its underlying bases lost points. Attacking an idea rather than cogently presenting an alternative idea lost points. Lack of humility and lack of an ability to “see” the justifiability of the other side’s position lost points, as well as the understanding required to refute those justifications. Winning the debate was as much about remaining agreeable as it was about being right. (Presidential debates are closer in form to raucous wrestling matches than debate formats we were taught!)

That’s why I both loved and was challenged by the television series The West Wing.  Though fictionally based on the administration of a liberal president, it nonetheless tried to show divergent opinions on a wide variety of subjects, and the bases of those opinions. I remember one episode in particular that felt like a slap in the face, when a conservative staff member said to a liberal staff member, “It’s not that you just want to regulate gun safety. It’s that you don’t like the people who like guns.” And I had to admit, that at least for me, this was somewhat true. The gun aficionado to me was of a different class—my classism revealed.

Today I moderate a panel for my Yale Divinity School reunion on the subject, “Religion in the Public Square.” Fittingly, it will be held in Niebuhr Hall on the campus, named for famed YDS theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, who taught and wrote of the need for “the prophetic strain” in Christianity. Two more recent books come to mind. One is Yale professor Stephen L. Carter’s book, a favorite of then President Bill Clinton, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, about how religious values have a place in the public square. The second is University of Massachusetts professor Glenn Tinder’s The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance, about the role of Christianity standing over against popular culture as loving critic. I recommend both of these books as guides to fighting for what is right and just.

Many of our parents encouraged us to stand up to bullies when we were kids. Jesus stood up to the religious and political bullies of his day, unwilling to kill but unwilling to yield in the fight for what was right and just. While more humbly asserting what is right and just (given that we are not Jesus!), I believe we need to do this as well, “armed” with truth, passion, understanding, and compassion, just as Jesus was. As our YDS liberation theology professor Letty Russell once wrote, “We join in God’s work of liberation by reflecting on the meaning of that liberation in the lives of those who find themselves dehumanized.”

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Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal devotions, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  Please click here to learn more about this ministry and/or make a donation!

"Bad Theology"

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

Liberals should not allow ourselves to be bullied by self-styled conservatives who accuse us of “bad theology.”

“Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the ‘haves,’ oppression cannot be far behind,” Old Testament seminary professor Walter Brueggemann wrote in The Prophetic Imagination.

The frequent mistake of liberals in our politics of justice and compassion, Brueggemann suggests, is that we fail to claim our theological basis in God’s freedom to identify with the “have nots” over against the status quo. So, “Social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions.”

On the other hand he says, “A case can be made that unprophetic conservatives [do] not take God seriously enough to see that our discernment of God has remarkable sociological implications.”

From Moses through the prophets to Jesus, the biblical witness is of a God who cares about the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, the alien, the poor, and the religious outcast. Unless we are caring for “the least of these,” we are not taking the theology of the Bible seriously. And yet those who oppose caring for “the least of these,” from social security to health care to immigration reform, are the most likely to claim our theology is “bad.” (BTW, Jesus said nothing about contraception or homosexuality, the frequent litmus tests of “good” theology, and more than once he affirmed the rights of women.) In preserving the biblical tradition, liberals are the true conservatives.

Religious freedom is not freedom from responsibility to provide for the underserved or underprivileged. It is rather freedom from the gods and the demagogues that prevent us from doing so.