THE RED HORSE OF THE APOCALYPSE (part 2 of 4):

The Book of Revelation is not about predictions of the future. Rather it describes how empires destroy life, hope and the possibility of renewal. Chapter 6 symbolically reveals the mechanisms of empire. The Red Horse wields a great sword that takes peace from the earth resulting in people slaughtering one another.

This is most certainly a core strategy at the heart of American empire. Our history as European invaders began with our own slaughters of the native population, and then evolved into a strategy that exploited differences between tribes so that they would slaughter each other. When African slaves began to make alliances with poor whites a strategy was devised creating the movement of white supremacy known as the Ku Klux Klan. Later when Civil Rights began to organize into a poor peoples movement a new strategy called the "war on drugs" emerged which functions as a mask to imprison millions of black and brown folks. It is known as the new Jim Crow, a form of population control and enslavement in full view for anyone with eyes to see.

Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan show this strategy on full display as we continually arm all tribal sides in a perpetual war of all against all. As benevolent peacekeepers we can claim to be the voice of law and order even though we have become the primary source of violence. This is what the book of Revelation reveals: the inherent warring blood thirstiness which is characteristic of all empires, including ours.

The Red Horse is constantly turning people against each other while acting as a source of authority and control. We most certainly see this within our own city in the rise of homelessness, and hopelessness. The homeless are not poor because of their own character defects. The homeless are poor because the system in which we live is a system that is set up for winners and losers. At the top are fattened pigs whose appetites are insatiable. At the bottom are emaciated once-humans who stagger through our streets ghost-like no longer knowing who they are, whose they are, or why they are. Empire, like a vampire, has sucked them dry of lifeblood. They are zombies, economic refugees, the living corpse of capitalism.

What is needed is the power that can resurrect the dead. This is a power so full of life and community that it overcomes fear, freeing us from empire's illusions and threats. Freeing us to become maladjusted to what is thought of as normal. We need a movement that restructures society so that a ceiling is put on wealth ending forever aristocracies of power. We need a floorboard through which the poor cannot fall, so that generational poverty might perish from our land. We need the resurrection of a new insurrection, a revolution of a new socialism. This is the path towards hope.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE WHITE HORSE OF THE APOCALYPSE

Many people think the Book of Revelation is a script that predicts the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no predictions in this book, nor is there in the Christian faith, a fatalist perspective that the future is already written. Rather, the Book of Revelation is an attempt to describe how to live in an empire that persecutes Christians and other groups that were suspected of treason and dissent. Over my next four articles I want to look at the text found in chapter six: the four horsemen of the apocalypse. These four symbolic horsemen reveal the cruelty and injustice that lies at the very core and center of all empires including, and this is my point, our own American empire.

The first horseman rides a white horse and is given a crown, and a weapon to conquer. The white horse is important because both then and now it is a symbol of authority that assumes benevolence. All empires craft the illusion that they exist for our own good. All empires propagate the lie that peace with justice will reign and prosperity will rule if only we submit to the empire's demand of loyalty.

America is no different. The empire both then and now are ruled through tiny elites that have accumulated great wealth and military might. Indeed, in our country of 300 million citizens, well over 90% of the wealth is under the control of 1% of the population. Since the Reagan revolution the gap between the top and the bottom has remarkably increased alongside of today's gutting of the middle class. The next scene set to play is the pillaging of the commonwealth through draconic cuts in our social security, Medicare and Medicaid insurance programs. We are like fish being filleted for consumption by ravenous sharks. In other words, nothing new is emerging in history. We are stuck in the repeating cycle of economic plunder and perpetual war. Without novelty, the inbreaking of creative revolution that redistributes power throughout society, history itself becomes repetitious: a repeating scenario of pillage and slaughter. This is what the Book of Revelation actually reveals. The good news, of course, is that in the end, empire self destructs, and all the people rejoice. History opens up once again to novelty and possibility.

America is riding the white horse today. We assume that our invasions of the Middle East, our provocations toward China, our threats of war with Iran, our military escalation on the Columbian border, our increasingly global colonization of the planet all arise out of our benevolent motives to bring peace with justice and prosperity for all. The reality is that we are in full death spiral, consumed with our own madness that we are gods, and doomed to destroy those we love the most: ourselves.

What we need is the dissenting treasonous hope of a new socialism.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

HE WHO HAS THE GOLD RULES

Have you ever given much thought about money? It seems to be taking on a mystical, magical, otherworldly mystique. Where does it come from? It used to be pretty simple. I had a crop of apples and you had a bunch of grapes. So we traded. Wealth was physical, sensual. You knew what you had and what you didn't have. You knew what your neighbor had. And you even knew your enemy: that was the guy with the weapons that could simply come in and plunder your wealth in an act of physical violence and brutal intimidation.

Today it's all more subtle. Weird actually. It's all in electronic digits. The whole system is maintained through an ideology that assumes that those who control the weapons can be trusted to keep account of our digits and give us this day our daily bread and wine. But the digits aren't reflective of any "thing". You can't see my apples and I can't see your grapes. All we have is digits on a print out, and the debt certificates we carry in our pocketbooks that themselves are rooted in the mysterious, magical digital economy of financial speculation. I mean, what keeps the system from erasing my digital wealth tomorrow? What keeps the system from saying that my $100 is now worth 2 cents? Why is it that we simply couldn't contemplate the possibility of national health care but suddenly conjured up hundreds of billions for bankers? That's what I mean by weird. Does anyone really have a handle on this stuff?

I keep glancing at the stock market and notice how my pension goes up and down as I awaken to the reality that whatever money I'm socking away might or might not be there when I come of age. I keep thinking about the unemployment rate, and I hear the president talk about reviving an export economy but then it dawns on me --- export what? It's not like America produces stuff. All we do is serve hamburgers from cows raised in South America and butchered in Mexico. All we do is create designs for other nations to use as they build things. Indeed, basically most of what we export is information which has a certain value but a very limited labor base. No wonder so many are unemployed, we've got no apples to sell to each other right here in the neighborhood.

Of course we do have surplus bodies for use by military corporations and imperial plundering. That's our role in the magical digital global economy. We're the muscle. This means we've become the pirates, the bad guys, the ones everyone else hates. Such a rep is good for business but pretty devastating for family and community, and all that which makes life good. But who can afford goodness in an economy made worthless by the rule of money?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

Business As Usual

Our nation has spent one trillion dollars on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that number goes up everyday. Can anyone tell me what we've accomplished for that massive plundering of our nation's wealth? Is anyone anywhere any more secure, any healthier, or any happier? Did our dead die for a noble cause? Did our victims die for any other reason than the profit of a wee tiny elite of demonic death-eaters who control our nation's sovereignty?

One trillion dollars! Here's an experiment. Try to count to one trillion. If you start right now, assuming it takes one second per number counted, you would finally reach the goal 32,000 years from today. Don't believe me? Ok---go.

One trillion dollars! Robert Greenwald tells us that for one trillion dollars we could hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year, we could fund the clean up of the Gulf oil plague, we could provide health care and build affordable housing units for four million people, provide health care for an additional five million children, hire seven million teachers, fund Head Start for three million kids, generate renewable energy for one million residences, provide university scholarships for one million students and still have $516 million left over to do --- whatever.

One trillion dollars but Congress won't extend unemployment benefits. One trillion dollars but no jobs bill, no real renewable energy program, no more sharing of commonwealth with the states to fund education, health care, social welfare and infrastructure. One trillion dollars for war, for plunder, for rape, for murder, for trauma, for lies, deception and the continual despair of a wounded and weary planet that is dying rapidly before our eyes. One trillion dollars to make the banksters happy. One trillion dollars to bribe both political parties. One trillion dollars to drive we the people further into debt slavery. One trillion dollars wasted, squandered, evaporated for nothing but dust and death.

This insanity will only end when we organize with such intensity that the war budget gets slashed, our overseas military compounds get dismantled, and the Wall Street debt cartel is sentenced to life without parole. But that revolution is far from even beginning. In the meantime, we can move our personal assets out of banks, we can shop local, partner with area farms and drill into our kids consciousness that war is a racket that only benefits the obscenely wealthy and soulless.

In the meantime the Church can start speaking about systemic sin and the need to dismantle empire. The Church can start preaching and practicing the identical message that put Jesus on the Cross and Paul in chains. In other words, the Church can give content to love with a persistent clarity spoken to the military to stand down and disarm because this war is nothing but sin. And to the nation the Church can preach, "repent".

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

We Need the Water of Life

Recently my wife Cathy and I went for a hand in hand stroll around Green Lake. I love public spaces where people gather, whether it be the Lake or the Market, or the great festivals that bring this city alive throughout the summer. I delight in watching us, in chatting with us, in feasting and playing and creating together. I'm basically a happy person that finds great renewal in simply being with people. I love this city. I even like the weather. An overcast day is always good to dive into a book. But, as Cathy and I talked my end of the conversation was full of worry and despair, full of troubles and gloom about the political and cultural environment. I truly think our nation is in the beginning of an emerging catastrophe. I'm having an almost impossible time trying to imagine real political hope, or hope in a spiritual and cultural renewal. It's like we are the embodiment of a house of cards whose inevitable collapse is one small touch away.

The problem is that we've become absorbed into empire. We've lost our national and cultural sovereignty to a global empire ruled by a wee tiny elite of financial overlords who care not at all about real human beings. Empires are destructive, demonic manifestations that despise the simple ways of people feasting and playing and creating together. Empires live for only one purpose: absolute dominating control of others. Otherwise known as the death of freedom. Biblically speaking we live in the time of the hard-hearted Pharaoh and increasingly we are being asked to make bricks without straw. But our Moses is nowhere to be found. It is a time before the movement of freedom. It is the time of groaning, of weeping and gnashing of teeth, the time before God hears the cry of the crushed and moves into history to change it. It is the time when everyone does what is right in their own eyes because community coherence, community conversation, community connection has fallen apart. We are each now on our own, alone. We have become weakened caribou for the ravenous wolves of global military capitalism. And there is no political party to save us. There are no spiritual movements with the imaginative capacity to transform our consciousness. There is no artist or poet who inspires our courage with vision of new creation. Even the earth is dying of open wounds that fade in and out of the news cycle.

We have become slaves to those who would build a Tower of Babel with which to storm Heaven and become gods. How do we defeat such gods? How do we escape from empire? How do we change the world when we don,t have the capacity to embody the change we seek? I keep holding Cathy's hand but I know our love is not enough.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

We're Yankee Doodle Dandies

We don't even think about it. It's completely irrelevant to our daily lives. And, even if we thought about it there's really nothing we can do about it. I'm talking, of course, about the cultural commitment to being an empire engaged in permanent war. Currently our focus is on claiming the oil, water and mineral rights of the Caspian Basin and Middle East. We are involved in a crusade for Corporate profit that lines the pockets and promotes the stratospheric lifestyles of a wee tiny elite that are turning our nation into a feudal society. The human cost is of no consequence because those who become the muscle for the military-corporation are irrelevant. They are just chumps, numbers on a page, collateral damage, necessary losses. It doesn't matter that there have been 91,000 causalities in the Iraq-Afghan crusade. Nor does it matter that the Department of Defense warned that up to 20% of veterans (360,000) suffer traumatic brain injury from IED blasts. You never hear in the news that 508,152 Iraq and Afghanistan vets are patients in the VA system. Nor that there are thousands of Vets who wait over a year for treatment stemming from mental health issues. We are publicly deaf to the stunning reality that every day 18 vets attempt suicide, and that the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan has doubled in the first quarter of this year. We never heard that in 2009 alone there were 3230 reports of sexual assault: soldier traumatizing soldier. And, of course, homeless vets are now simply part of the scenery in every city. All of this we shrug off as normal, nothing to get too concerned about. Over 2 million soldiers have been deployed in the Iraq-Afghan crusade, with over 40% deployed multiple times. Currently we have 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan alongside another 100,000 tax-paid mercenary corporation employees. Some day, those who physically survive will return to our towns and cities, each emotionally and spiritually wounded. But so what? They did what they do and we do what we do. We work hard at forgetting the connection. And completely uninteresting is the massive civilian body count inflicted by us on the indigenous population. In Iraq, figures range from 655,000 to over a million with an additional 4 million displaced. In Afghanistan, we're talking tens of thousands slaughtered and over 2 million displaced. Nobody cares. It's in our cultural DNA. Who remembers our original sin with the Indians? War, rape and pillage is what we do, it's who we are. Like a fish in water, we know no other reality. Nor do we care to. The latest word is that the empire is bankrupt so there will be a great propaganda onslaught to convince us to shred our commonwealth and social security networks. The military budget, of course, will not be touched. Welcome to America: a friendly fascist state.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

LIKE OILY BIRDS

I've been wondering whether or not we are capable of comprehending the will of God in our culture. Biblically speaking there are sacred stories told that speak of God withdrawing from the scene, and certainly within the individual spiritual journey of the soul, even Mother Teresa talked about "dark nights" and occasions of feeling abandoned and deserted by an absent God.

For believers we affirm that the power of love and affection, of compassion and kindness, the striving for justice and the kind of peace that produces reconciliation and mutual forgiveness, the kind of peace that is inclusive of the least and last and even of one's enemy, we believers affirm that this form of power is God's activity in the world. So my question is: is God still alive and active in our current culture of corruption?

And our culture is corrupted. We're in bad shape. We're in trouble. Like the Gulf plague the more you look the worse it gets. It isn't just the compromises of Obama, or the capitulation of both parties to serve Corporate interests, or financial swindle of the banksters, it isn't just the left over horrors of the Bush administration, or the systematic deregulation of business, or the buying off of public offices, the militarization of our police forces, the hardening of our prison system, the papers-please mentality of border states, the increase of government and military surveillance, it isn't just the continued madness of building global military bases or the $1 trillion poured into our crusade through Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It isn't just the rise in mortality rates, the lowering of our standard of living, the enormous gap between the filthy rich and dirt poor. It isn't just the apathy and bewilderment and frozen "deer in the headlights paralysis" of the American public, nor the gutting of unions, nor the irrelevancy of the environmental movement and the invisibility of the peace movement. It isn't just the hardened hearts of neighborhoods against services and shelters for the poor. It's the whole damned system of selfishness, deceit, treachery, and bloodlust. Like gulls in oily water we are all soiled and in need of care and protection. No one of us is immune to the dying of American idealism, or the atrophying of our core value of "give me your poor, tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

It seems that we are living in a time of confusion and always impending tragedy. We yearn for a Gandhi or a King or the advent of a movement to shake off our slumbers and give us hope. But what if we are living in a time before the "movements", a time before the heroes, a time the Bible refers to as the absence of God's Word when everyone does what is right in their own eyes resulting in violence and the withering of hope?

Repentance anyone?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE STORM IS JUST GETTING STARTED

Steven is in his mid 50's, having worked all his life he now finds himself unemployed. He is married with kids, one still at home. He is, like so many, a victim of the Great Recession engineered by Corporations and their banksters. Neither political party speaks for him or really cares whether he lives or dies. He is one of thousands facing the end of unemployment aid.

Meanwhile business is booming in the armed services, and their partner, the private mercenary Corporations. Killing others, particularly those with darkened skin, is still an expanding market opportunity. This coming year our war budget escalates up past $800 billion. Troop levels in Afghanistan go up past 100,000 with an additional 100,000 drawn from Corporate-mercenary services. And, if you can play video games you might even land a job killing dark-skin people from the luxury of your own private cubicle in some office building here in the good ole USA. The great thing about Drone warfare is that we can demonically slaughter without guilt or shame: the perfect soldier.

Of course, occasionally somebody that supposedly matters, one of our own, will die. Over 5000 have given their lives for the Corporate cause. Some 320,000 have suffered traumatic brain injuries, suicide rates are up, mental health hospitalizations are way up, and well over 100,000 veterans patrol our streets at night homeless and betrayed. But they have served their function and are of no importance anymore. Heck, most of them are poor and have darkened skin --- maybe we can send a drone or two to eliminate them from the public square. A new improved way to clean the streets of panhandlers and riff-raff.

Recently Marine General Jim Cartwright let the cat out the bag and confirmed that Cheney's Long War will continue through and beyond Obama's militarism. Yes indeed, war is a long term business strategy. Lockheed Martin CEO, Robert Stevens loves it as he personally rakes in over $72 million these last three years. Boeing loves it even though CEO James McNerney had to settle for the chump change of $51 million over the same three years. Stockholders love it, politicians love it, the media love it, the Pentagon loves it. War is good. War is great. War is America.

Meanwhile Steven is scared. No homeland security for him. This past Memorial Day he bowed his head, thanked God to live in a country so free, and hoped for a brighter day tomorrow. But Steven doesn't know how to connect the dots, he doesn't realize that he has become a surplus person, a drain on the economy, he doesn't understand that his country has died and that he is just collateral damage. But even if he did know, there isn't anything he can really do about it. There is only one future left for him: rage, and the chaos it will unleash.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

MEMORIAL DAY SADNESS

As we observe Memorial Day this week I find myself increasingly sad. It used to be that the rational for joining the military was that it was an opportunity to sustain and defend the great freedom and liberty our citizens enjoyed by legal right.

A couple months ago the Supreme Court ruled that immortal Corporations were legally persons and therefore can funnel all the money they want into the political process. In other words, our freedom and liberty, the basis of our sovereignty, the basis of our capacity to enforce law, is now in competition with an entity that will outlive us and can certainly outmuscle us at will. A couple weeks ago in Arizona racial profiling was made legal. As Sarah Palin says, "we're all Arizonians now". What that means specifically is that in Sarah-world we now live in a country when any day, anyone of us might be asked for our papers please. Of course we all know that the law is intended only for brown skin people but how long before folks who like brown skin people become suspicious? Last week the Supremes did it again with a legal decision that empowers Congress to make laws that allow the indefinite detention of certain criminals: in this case sexual perverts who prey upon children. Now, to be sure everyone detests sexual perverts. But what does it mean for Congress to be able to overturn judicial court decisions and decide that criminals who have been convicted and have served their sentences, may upon the end of their sentence be held forever in prison because they constitute a threat to others? I wonder how long it will be until the crime of dissent is thought to be a continual threat to society? What these three moves add up to is a slow but steady increase in the erosion of the civil liberties and freedoms that were once at the core of what made America great.

So tell me again why it is that we are sending young troops to become psychologically and spiritually traumatized in countries where our freedom and liberties are not at stake? What specifically are we fighting for and against? We know that Iraq was based on fraud for which no one was held accountable. Indeed, having illegally attacked and destroyed the country, the only ones facing the consequences are the troops. And Afghanistan is utterly incoherent. Once again only the troops face the consequences.

What really made this country great was our moral idealism, our sense to do right making amends when we did wrong. Such a country is worth sacrificing for but that idealism and that country no longer exists. We've become bullies raging out of control. And, as with all bullies, the end is foreordained, having destroyed others we will destroy ourselves. And that, more than anything, is at the heart of my sadness.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

DON'T LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

We are in deep fecal matter and the smell is getting worse. Perhaps you've noticed the oddity of a mysterious thousand point drop in the stock market, followed by a rapid response to reassure everyone that everything is fine, just don't look behind the curtain. Perhaps you've noticed the economic bankrupting of Iceland and Greece. But in the magic world of finance suddenly new funding appeared out of thin air and we are all being reassured that everything is fine, just don't look behind the curtain.

If we did look behind the curtain we'd see hideous monsters, blood sucking heartless soulless creatures consuming flesh and bone. These monsters take on the appearance of human beings, indeed sometimes as beings of light, full of grace and ever present niceness and smiles. These monsters are the filthy rich, those who sit at the top of the food chain making more money in a day than most of us ever see in a lifetime. These are the folk who could care less about the struggles of the working class, the lack of health care, the failing schools, the oil gusher that is killing the Gulf, the increase in homelessness or the papers please Nazification of contemporary American culture. These monsters are not our friends. They are not good people.

The truth is that we give them their power through our own lust to be just like them. We really do think that money and its toys create happiness and bliss. If given the opportunity we'd sell our soul (worthless as it is) to whatever highest bidder who could offer us bucks. But most of us never have that opportunity so we transfer trust and adoration to them that do. And they always betray us. They always use their wealth for their own interests, tossing crumbs so that we don't organize and burn their homes down, butcher their babies and blow up their toys. Instead we transfer our rage into negative addictions and right wing political fantasies. The wealthy laugh at us and go on with their party.

We give them their power through our idolatry of the military. Although we could care less for the actual chumps that fight the eternal wars, we orgasm over the abstraction of support our troops, we applaud the technological cowardice of drone warfare, we ooh over stealth bombers, and we consciously refuse to take notice that America is the primary source of violence in the world today. We willingly submit to the coming budget cuts of our social security even as the military budget will streak upward. We willingly submit to the pillaging of unregulated business even as we march in lockstep to the erosion of our Constitutional rights.

My point is simple: America no longer exists. It's only a facade. But don't look behind the curtain, you won't like the mirror that you see.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE REPTILE CHRIST

Trying to find a church can be confusing. Many are drawn to the universalism of the compassion of Jesus but each church seems to have it's own twist on how to embody such a lifestyle.

For example in my own neighborhood there is a gigantic church that packs them in by the thousands. It is so big that it has expanded to several locations throughout the city. Each congregation has its own pastor and infrastructure, but just like any business, the product retains its consistency through the projection of an identical message: in this case the messenger beams his image into each congregation every Sunday morning. Yep --- that's right. Folks go to church and have embodied experiences with each other but then, at the appropriate time, all turn their attention to the screen to be taught by the Head Honcho himself. It reminds me a bit of the TV series V with the head reptile seductively entrancing all her crew.

The message basically boils down to this: we humans have screwed up the world and God is pissed. We either get ourselves straightened out by following the rules or else we're going to fry in Hell forever. Right rules begin with men reasserting their mannishness. You see the problem is that men have become weenies unable to make commitments or maintain responsibilities. But if we re-wire men back into a benevolent patriarch who will establish a household, marry a wife, raise children and impose discipline then law and order will return to society. This message makes sense to young men who feel like weenies blown hither and thither by materialistic impulses and undisciplined desires. This message makes sense to those who want something more from their life but lack the courage to join nonviolent Christian Peacemaker teams, or the heart to resist Empire.

Unfortunately such an image has nothing to do with the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus was a washer of feet, he was humble and hung out with what today we know as the homeless, the undocumented, the drunks, the day laborers, the queers, the crushed and the used, abused and totally screwed up. Jesus never married and certainly didn't take over society. Jesus never adapted to society. He just didn't fit in with those who got all orgasmic over dominance, power and control. Actually, Jesus wasn't all that macho --- he was just a run of the mill weakling who got himself strung up by the law.

Who would go to a church that preached that? Who would follow such a leader? There's no power or glory or fame in that. All there is, is the difficult daily grind of caring for lepers and losers. And that's why it is so confusing to find a church because so many of them could care less about the compassionate Christ. Actually, such a Christ is bad for business.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE PANHANDLERS

Before the events of September 11, 2001 many of us used to wonder how could good German citizens allow the rise of the Nazi movement into power. But after eight years of Bush we've all learned that people are easily herded and controlled by relentless propaganda and economic scarcity. Anyone even half awake now knows how vulnerable democracy is, how malleable the Constitution is, and how probable it is that those who desire power will attempt to seize it.

Scholars who study the rise of Nazism basically understand it as the frog in the kettle syndrome. If you put a frog in water and slowly turn up the heat the frog will stay in the kettle without much protest until finally boiled to death. In other words, the demonic is most effectively employed slowly, step by step, inch by inch. Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor, reflecting on Christianity's and his own compliancy in the rise of Nazism put it this way:

"First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me."


Which brings me to my point. Have you heard about what's happening in Arizona? Seems they have passed a new get tough on panhandlers, ummm, I mean illegal immigrants law. Sounds like anyone suspected by any police officer, for any reason, can be stopped and asked for proof of citizenship. Those without proof will be subject to arrest. Those who are with the offender can also be arrested. Those who might be driving an illegal immigrant to a job, or to church, or home, or a party, or to the clinic or school or hospital, they can be arrested.

Given the context, in Arizona a border state, my bet is not too many white middle class folk will be asked to identify themselves. My bet is that lots of brown skinned people will be made suddenly suspect. Right here in America. What's next, yellow stars on one's back?

To say the least this is disturbing. It doesn't matter who is to blame for this cultural hardening of the heart, and clinched fist toward the neighbor. What matters is what you and I will do to stop this cancer from developing and spreading. What matters is to stop this madness because first they came for the panhandlers but I did not speak out, then they came for the illegals but I did not speak out, then they came for the liberals and at some point they will come for you and me. Unrestrained power is evil.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

WHY ARE CHRISTIANS anti-CHRIST?

If it weren't for Christians, the actual message of Jesus might get a better hearing. Seriously. Think about Jesus for a moment. Here's what everyone agrees that he was all about. Mercy towards sinners, a healer of disease, inclusive of the poor in both his friendship and welfare, a friend to children, and a very vocal opponent of greed and wealthy elites who were also religious. Jesus was tolerant with people but brutal towards unjust systems. Nevertheless, given countless opportunities Jesus himself preached and practiced nonviolence. But a goodly number of his followers today are the mirror opposite of his vision and values. It's not just the apocalyptic nut-jobs like the Huttaree terrorists, but it's also the neighborhood self-called Bible believing Christians.

Why have these Christians become so anti-Christ? Let me offer three hints.

The first is really bad, and very stupid theology. For example, Christians are still playing a game called literal interpretation of scripture. The pretense is that the Bible is God's unchanging instruction to us. It doesn't matter that one scripture contradicts another. It doesn't matter that the 66 books that make up the Bible were chosen from hundreds of candidates, each of the books written for its own time and situation. It doesn't matter that no one currently alive has ever seen even one original manuscript of the Bible. Nor that the original language was Greek and Hebrew, not English. In the irrational universe of fundamentalism, fact and reason are irrelevant. Just do what I say or I'll kick you out of the club, and maybe even kill you seems to be the basic mode of operation. These self called Bible-believing churches have screws missing in their cranium, and holes in their hearts. Hint --- follow Jesus not your preacher's interpretation.

The second is those wonderfully sweet Christians who are absolutely convinced that they are living in the last generation before the utter destruction of planet earth. Can you imagine being their kid or grandkid? Here's the good news son, you have no future. Should it surprise us that Christianity is becoming a crusade of purifying the world given the fact that we've had over 100 years of this kind of theological slop sloshed into the minds of Christian children. As a pastor I call this spiritual abuse. But many in the church think of it as happiness. Hint --- follow Jesus, not your quest for glory.

And third, Christians really don't like Jesus. He was too much of a wuss. All he did was get himself crucified. Today's Christians want a muscular Christ of kick-ass, take no prisoners vindictiveness. Basically today's Christians are terrified of death, and have no real experience of resurrection. They think that if they put the fear of God into others, that they themselves will be feared. Hint --- follow Jesus, not your own lack of faith.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

KEEP ON TRUCKIN'

About a month ago I was part of a group that toured the port of Seattle. Over a million containers worth over $33 billion dollars of goods filter through our port on their way to other destinations. To move the container from the ship to the railroad requires the agency of a trucking company. And that's why I was touring the Port. I wanted to meet some of the truckers who do the infrastructure work that facilitates this massive $33 billion dollar a year business.

What I found was depressing. The truckers, originally full of the idealism of owning their own business, many of whom are immigrants to our country, are caught in a trap that is holding them into poverty both materially and spiritually. Essentially the issue is this: big trucking companies hold the contracts that move the freight from ship to rail. These trucking companies refuse to enter into serious negotiations that would share profits with the truckers. Rather, they sub-contract the work to independent contractors who compete against each other in a downward economic spiral at a time of increasing costs. The trucking companies are fat and happy. The truckers are emaciated and close to death.

As independent contractors truckers are living the dream of owning their own business. They own their own trucks, provide the upkeep and maintenance, hold their own health and vehicle insurance, and hustle their own jobs and rates. But the dream is becoming a nightmare because their business, while necessary and potentially profitable, takes on a form closer to indentured servitude rather than independence.

When I think of truckers I think of hard work rewarded with big bucks. But that is not the case for the 1800 truckers of the Port. The hard work is there but most of the truckers are driving old vehicles that are high polluters in need of constant repair. Making an average salary under $30,000 they cannot afford to upgrade to a newer low-emission vehicle at costs well into six figures. They cannot afford to even maintain their aging trucks. This then becomes a health concern for the entire city. What is needed is quite clear. The trucking companies need to hire truckers as employees, and the employees need to be able to build power so that they can stand on their own two feet rather than walk stooped over.

In other words, right here in our profitable Port, we are witnessing the ongoing class struggle between capitalists and labor. We are seeing the results of the obese squashing the undernourished. Some eat at tables overloaded with abundance, while others beg and receive only enough crumbs to keep alive to beg once more.

There are spiritual issues here. As a City we need trucking companies and we need truckers. Justice requires that both be treated with dignity, that both be well fed so that both can thrive.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

Silly Ole Beck

A couple weeks back Glen Beck created quite a media bubble with his comments about social justice churches. Basically, he said that if your house of worship uses that term then you ought to flee as fast as you can, otherwise you will be consumed into the vast left wing socialist plot to take over the country. It was another brilliant stunt of self promotion. Ole Beck does know how to drive ratings. Alas heart hardened, brain dead viewers eat such drivel with ravenous delight. They crowd around the television shouting "crucify" with absolute giddiness.

I write this column at the start of Holy Week, a Christian tradition that remembers the last seven days of the life of Jesus. On Easter Christians will celebrate that Jesus was more than a dead man walking. Christians will gather to retell their core story which centers around a crucified peasant, tortured and killed by Empire, but then, something odd happened. Essentially, Christians believe that through the life of Jesus, God won a victory over death and all its friends.

A question that Mr. Beck doesn't raise is this: why was Jesus tortured to death by Roman empire? After all, if Jesus was just a preacher of love, what did he do that caused the crucifiers to detest him so deeply? Anyone that even pauses a moment to contemplate that question will inevitably stumble into the forbidden socialism of social justice. For indeed, Jesus like Gandhi and King and Romero and Chavez, and Dorothy Day and Fannie Lou Hamer along with countless others was all about deconstructing the social order of oppression through a new better vision of social inclusion.

Basically what Jesus both taught and role modeled was that every person is welcome in the heart of God, every person is cared for by God who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust, Jews and Gentiles, the clean and the unclean. Jesus was dismantling the barriers, tearing down the walls of segregation. His message was that there shall be no more divisions between us. In the community of God there will no longer be nations, no slaves and free, no male and female, no Gay and straight, no religious and non, all are welcomed into the compassionate embrace of the Creator. Follow me, follow my example and do likewise!

Or, in other words, Jesus was a spiritual anarchist with a vision of something far more radical than social justice, or socialism. Jesus preached and practiced an entirely new way of life, an entirely new social order of radical hospitality, extravagant generosity, and absolute subversion to all forms of dominance and control.

It was no wonder that all those who love power got together and crucified Jesus. It is no wonder that Beck hammers with verbal nails his followers today. But God, not the Becksters, will have the final say.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

TIME TO BUILD AN ARK

So, is there anything constructive we can do that might help tilt the balance of power behind the class war currently being fought by the filthy rich against the rest of us? Or is democracy over? Is the idealism of America finally bagged and trashed and currently rotting on the ash heap of history? Is there any real hope one can have?

For indeed hope is hard to find these days. Whether one becomes absorbed in the politics of health care or financial reform we all know it's just smoke and mirrors. There will be some small, good and decent crumbs thrown to the masses, but in the real world, both efforts at reform will strengthen Corporate power and the fatty cash deposits of the obese. Our times are governed by the politics of betrayal with every indication that the end game will be a military dictatorship either imposed, or, more probably, elected by a bewildered, fear-soaked populace. After all, in a time of chaos when every institution crumbles who best to create law and order, and cultural discipline than the military? And if the military is backed by a goodly religious cry for personal character like honor and duty with loyalty toward flag and faith, well then, Petraeus in 2012 anyone?

But I digress. There are a few things we can do that make for life even in the face of a relentless class war. We can, for example, get more deeply involved in our relational networks so that we can support each other through the storm. We can partner with Community Supported Agriculture both for biological health, the health of the land, and an alternative to Corporate food. I think we can move our money out of Corporate banks into credit unions, and most certainly, get behind the movement to create a Washington State bank. I think we can buy local as often as we are able. We can make our next car an electric car. We can, little by little, re-engineer our homes towards solar power. We can try and develop an alternative to the Corporate Republican and Democratic parties (good luck with that). We can start planning how to build a network of health co-ops. We can continue to lobby churches to use their buildings as homeless shelters. We can gradually disconnect from our addictions to cable and computer, therefore freeing up time to entertain locally with our friends, and friends of friends. We can create small spaces in our lives to simply talk with others, and to get out into nature. Perhaps hearing what it has to say.

The bottom line is that even if our fate is to be swept away in a flood of the logical consequences of unfettered capitalism, at least let's be swept away on our own terms, sustaining life even in the rain. Think of it as ark building.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THREE DOTS

There are three dots we should spiritually connect. The first dot happened last week when the House voted 189 to 60 to continue the escalation of war in Afghanistan. As we move pass 1000 dead soldiers, countless civilian slaughters, a deepening financial sewer hole of war graft, and a basically unconscious, uncaring "la-de-da" nation, we move ever closer to the closing down of our American soul. But stay tuned, the bloody promised invasion of Kandahar proceeds on course, perhaps just in time for our summer entertainment. Go red, white and blue!

The second dot is the great betrayal of the American people by President Obama. Remember the once promised, muscular $266 billion jobs bill to put America back to work? Well, the actual slop shoveled out from the political outhouse turns out to be $15 billion, about enough to create 250,000 of the eleven million jobs needed. At least when Bush was pres we knew everything was a lie, but Obama keeps teasing us, flirting us up and then dropping us for his real love: military capitalism. He is Lucy, we are Charlie Brown, but I keep wondering if behind close doors does he laugh at us because we are so gullible, or does he laugh at us because we are so pathetic?

The third dot is the stratosphere folks. We basically know who they are, we know their names, you can look them up on lists of the Fortune 500, or the membership registrar of the Business Roundtable. Locally, you can take a Sunday drive and see where their segregated compounds are located. They are folks who really enjoy life, they laugh a lot, they feel good, they tan well. They make tons of money whether or not the job they do has any social benefit, or even if the job is done well. For example, your tax dollars bailed out the failures of Wells Fargo but their CEO still made $21 million dollars last year. Their other four top executives each made over $11 million dollars. Not bad for a failing business. I wonder what those fired teachers in Rhode Island think about that?

But it's not just Wells Fargo, it's the whole corrupt system. GMAC, the financial arm of bankrupt General Motors, paid its CEO over $9 million despite the company losing $10 billion in 2009. And the list goes on and on and on. When it comes to the stratosphere there is no accountability, nor morality. The stratospheric folks really are the enemies of the people. They really are the financial terrorists gutting our country, and leaving us quivering like the last gasps of a flopping fish.

These three dots, the war in Afghanistan, the betrayal of those who believed, and the amoral lifestyle of the stratospheric folks, reveal a situation fit only for painful lamentation. I keep wondering, why do they hate us so much?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE REAL WAR

Ok, here's what I don't comprehend. The richest four hundred Americans have more wealth than 155 million Americans combined. And had we taxed those 400 Americans at the same rate as they were taxed in 1995 an additional $18 billion would have come into the federal budget. I don't understand why we the people cannot grasp that the real war is the class war.

The Tea Baggers know on a gut level that we're all being screwed big time by the big boys that run the country. But they don't seem to grasp that behind the government, behind both political parties, there exists an ownership elite. They don't seem to understand that the government works for those 400 Americans and their friends.

Meanwhile, good, decent, liberal minded moderate folks have seemingly lost all capacity for emotional outrage. It's as if we've become just like those morally numb security guards that stood around while a girl was beaten, not interfering, not intervening, not even caring about the girl after the beating was over. It's like we are "la-de-da" throughout our whole life.

The problem, of course, is the consequences. Recently President Obama announced that deficit reduction was now about to take center stage in our financial priorities. It's time for a deficit diet. But the first thing our Nobel peace prize winning president did was take our war budget off the table. No cuts there despite the well documented massive billion dollar frauds that are constantly foisted upon the American people. Did you know that 96 of our major weapons programs have cost overruns of 295 billion dollars? But if you try to track the waste you run into a perpetual problem: the Pentagon has never (I repeat NEVER) been able to pass an audit. Not that anybody with responsibility cares too much. Right there in the 2010 budget the ever generous Congress granted $2.5 billion for ten C-17 cargo planes that the Pentagon never even requested.

But we won't touch the war budget. We won't make cuts there. We will continue our global role as the military muscle for those 400 obese Americans who want to rule the world. Instead we'll cut money for education, housing and food stamps. We'll put civil society and social stability on a massive weight loss plan. And no one, no politician, no major media, no religious leader, will cry out that we are being terrorized in a class war, we are being crucified in a vice-gripped cross of greed.

I don't comprehend our reluctance to name this wicked evil. I don't grasp why it is that churches will educate their kids with mission trips to Mexico but won't send their kids across the lake to Hunts Point or Medina to ask why foreclosures and unemployment doesn't affect them. Why no homelessness there? And, what are all those surveillance cameras? Why are they so afraid?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE REAL ENEMY OF AMERICA

I come from the working class. My parents were factory workers with unions that offered a living wage, family health care, vacation pay, and a pension that helped form a sustainable life. We lived in decent neighborhoods, and had access to decent schools. We lived in a world where the sun shined.

But my people, those factory workers, the men who worked with their hands, the stay at home moms who helped run the schools and made the neighborhood safe, my people have been terminated by economic policies that crushed their unions, and shipped their jobs out of the country. Today when I see the homeless I see my neighborhood. If my mom were young today she would never have risen out of poverty, out of being one of ten kids raised by a single mom whose dad had abandoned the family. My father, rather than working low-end jobs that paid a living wage, would have been chronically unemployed. Many of the neighborhood folk would today be one of those pathetics who stand on street corners with a sign reading help put me out of my pain.

Today over 50 million Americans use food stamps to eat. About 45 million have no health care. Officially ten percent (realistically 17+%) of our work force is unemployed. Over two million Americans are in prison. Over five million Americans have already lost their homes and every day 10,000 more fall into foreclosure. And on and on it goes.

Today I am the pastor of a professional congregation in a solidly middle class section of a prosperous global city. But even the architects and engineers and lawyers are beginning to feel the temperature rise. Even the suit and tie folks are stressed to the max and worried, deeply worried about the future. And they should be because they are the current target for termination by the enemies of our nation.

Of all the wars we are fighting, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or increasingly throughout South America, of all the impossible difficulties we have to overcome, a bloated military, a media of propaganda, a politics of betrayal, an increasing police state, of all these problems, the one most difficult yet most crucial to name and to strategize against, the most evil, cruel and relentless enemy facing the American people today, are the people we most lust after. It's the millionaires. It's the folks who live in the stratosphere and could care less about those of us living on the ground.

The real war is the class war and until we get that clear we will never make any political process. It's the class war, and the predatory stratospheric millionaires are organized and winning ruthlessly. They want a return to the master-slave economy. Meanwhile we liberals keep hoping the Democrats will save us. But that ship is sunk. We need a more radical alternative.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

What Does Justice Require of us?

Although our daily life goes on with our various routines there are some places in the globe where life is simply a continuous outbreak of the brutal. One might think of the war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan as examples. But picture yourself as a Palestinian Christian living in Israel. Sometimes fellow Arabs and neighboring Muslims don't trust you because you are Christian. At other times the Israelites don't trust you because you are Arab. Meanwhile the universal Church rarely recognizes your existence. How are you to live?

Israel as a nation is a mess. Within its own borders it practices a ruthless and relentless apartheid alongside an utter disregard of world values. Through its intelligence agencies it continually inserts itself in the business of other nations. It plays a huge role in brokering arms deals throughout the Middle East, and was pivotal in our invasion of Iraq. It has an overwhelmingly militaristic influence on our foreign policy, and has crafted a diabolical alliance with right-wing Christianity to culturally influence our political structure, and undermine any notion of compassion towards the other. In other words, Israel and America are hand in glove.

This Friday and Saturday (February 19-20) Sabeel, an organization founded by Palestinian Christian theologian Naim Ateek, will host a major conference, "What Does Justice Require of Us?" at St. Mark's Cathedral (cf: www.fosna.org). The conference will focus on relationships between the United States, Israel and Palestine. It will include workshops on theology alongside the thorny political issues of water rights, civil rights, the role of the media, and the increased militarism of the entire region.

Ateek is a liberation theologian whose passionate desire is to see both Jews and Palestinians sharing the land in peace. Although the conference will have various points of view the primary goal is building a network of courageous and compassionate friends who are no longer afraid of being smeared with the propaganda of being anti-Semitic whenever one voices a plea for justice. For Christians this conference could function as a significant gathering to find our voice, rooted in Hebraic scriptures and the faith of Jesus, so that we can combat the heresy of Christian Zionism.

For far too long we have allowed the end-times fear-mongers to distort Christian hope, and to pervert Christian congregations. And for far too long we Christians have been complicit in damaging the reputation of the God who hears the cry of the poor, and liberates the oppressed. Although Biblical Israel is the spiritual mother of the Christian Church, the contemporary political nation of Israel is not identical with the movement of God in history. As a faithful child of our beloved mother it is time for the kids to intervene in order to help her see her destructive behavior. That will require courage, and as Annie Dillard once said, "you can't test courage cautiously."

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

WE NEED A JUBILEE

Debt is as fine a description of damnation that I can imagine. To be in debt is to be enslaved, it is to live with a ball and chain attached to your every movement. I always counsel people to get out of debt: tear up your credit cards and start living within your means even if the consequence is no more cell phone, cable TV, and pub crawling on Saturday night. Debt puts one into bondage to someone or something else that has little if any care for your well-being. When you are in debt you are only as valuable as your ability to continually produce a shekel here and there, once the shekels stop coming you become less than zero, expendable, worth-less.

Debt is the condition of our nation. The Banksters have recently swindled us out of a trillion dollars of wealth. But they are not done with us. Now comes phase two. Even as President Obama calls for increases in military spending, the foundation is laid to cut domestic spending as preparation for cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Or, in other words, the Banksters are beginning to bleed us dry, to gut our infrastructure, and undermine our homeland security. The Banksters are revolutionizing our economy turning us ever more deeply into a 21st century military-corporate feudal society.

Recently in Colorado Springs (the Mecca of evangelical Christianity) budget cuts have gutted the basic infrastructure of what keeps a city alive. Streetlights are going dark, firefighters and police are being laid off, police helicopters are for sale, the parks are losing their trash cans, water usage is being cut back, and on and on. Get the picture? That which supports life is being killed.

Meanwhile, as the punditry pontificates on these political matters, nary a word is heard, nor is there any, I repeat, any political debate on the ever increasing billions being given to the military. And given to the military means being given to privatized armies, to privatized police forces, to privatized support services. Given to the military means the manufacture and maintenance of well over 800 military colonies spread throughout the earth. It means more saber rattling towards Iran, Somalia, Venezuela, and China. Forget all the speeches of this Nobel Peace Prize winning President. He's head over heels in love with military imperialism. Blood is on his hands, in his heart and mind, and all over us, particularly those of us who so desperately wanted him to be something he is not.

Our goose is cooked and there is really nothing we can do about the inevitable dismantling of democracy, and collapse of liberty in these once united states. The only cure for debt is a Jubilee. That's what Jesus was all about, and look where that got him. For those of you who are Christians, are you really sure you want to follow?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

REVOLUTION

The revolution starts first in our heart, moves up through our head, outward through our hands and embodies itself in community.

The revolution starts in our heart as we feel compassion for those around us who are suffering. One can begin with the homeless whom we see everyday. One can also begin by noticing the wounds of creation. One can extend compassion into one's family and friends and networks. If we can start to feel, then we can start to heal and become healers ourselves.

The revolution moves up through our head as we begin to upload creativity, and delete cynicism. The revolution starts with practical baby steps. Action leads away from despair. Having realized that we are now slaves of empire, and having given up trusting that the politics of Corporations can save us, we are free to unleash the power of our imaginations. To help awaken this freedom a first baby step would be to join the Move Your Money campaign (www.moveyourmoney.info) and take a step away from Corporate servitude. Secondly, as much as possible, again a baby step, move towards the building of a local, sustainable economy. Start with food. Abandon global or national chain stores, and move toward co-ops and community supported agriculture. Such activity leads out of empire, and into life.

The revolution moves outward through our hands. The Real Change Organizing Project is a decent baby step towards creating the larger political empathy that shifts public priorities from the interests of the millionaires towards the interests of commonwealth. I also recommend attending the re-organizing of the Green Party this Saturday, January 30th at Trinity United Methodist Church (6512 23rd Ave NW in Ballard). To come out of empire we must create non-Corporation funded political parties. The great gift of President Obama's election is the clear exposure of how empty the Democratic Party is of vision and courage. Like the Republicans they serve the interests of global corporations, they serve the interests of death.

Empire can only be resisted through the creation of an alternative society, a parallel culture that will grow up under the radar of empire's arrogance. The revolution requires a practical embodiment in a community that role models what the alternative is. And for those who start leaving empire, those who take the first baby steps, we will need each other for encouragement, companionship and continual reminders that life is good, and goaled towards happiness. Otherwise we will be like lambs led to slaughter.

So, where is your community that refreshes your spirit and teaches you to take baby steps away from empire? You need not despair. There are many faith communities throughout Seattle that birth hope and vision, and many political groupings that embody the change that is needed. The important thing is to start, with baby steps, to leave empire today. This is how the new birth will begin.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

LOOKING FOR A REVOLUTION

What would you do if you lost your job today? Will your savings and assets hold you through hard times? Is a six month financial reserve big enough to maintain your housing, food, shelter, and transportation expenses? Today the average unemployed person is out of work for 29 weeks, an increase from an average 16.5 weeks just two years ago.

How would you survive for 29 weeks? What would you do? When unemployment hits most folks hit the ground running whipping their resume into shape, pounding the pavements looking for work to keep money flowing until one's real job comes into focus. Folks will call family, friends and networks knowing that it's who you know that will get you past the long, and growing line of others just like you looking for work.

How long is that line? Official statistics claim around 10% of the workforce is unemployed. The truth, after one counts those that have given up looking for work or are stuck in part-time work, is closer to 17% of the workforce. Indeed, the recession that momentarily hit Wall Street is a great depression for those living in the residential areas behind Main Street.

So what do you do after a month of looking for work? Do you go and flip burgers for minimum wage? Do you hang out at the day-labor places? What do you do after two months? What happens to your psyche? What happens to your marriage? What happens when your kid needs a new pair of shoes? What happens after four months?

What happens when you run out of ideas and places to send your resume? What happens when you are filling out applications against competition from 16 year olds? After five months how you holding up? How's your spirit? Can you look at your spouse with pride, does your spouse still look at you with respect? When's the last time you kicked back and laughed, howling at the moon and rejoicing that life is good. And where, in these sorrows, is hope?

After six months let's say you get a nibble but who will the employer hire: the fresh face looking for entry into the labor pool, or the one who hasn't worked in half a year? The trends are scary. The trends reveal that we are stuck in an economy of a permanent underclass, perpetual employment insecurity, and a collapse of cultural morale.

Where do you go for support? Who really has your back? Who really cares for you, long term, in season and out? Now that the unions are crushed, now that political parties are united under corporate control, now that churches offer therapy but not justice, now that families are strained and networks stretched, now that I have your attention, maybe now we can start the strategy sessions for revolution. Maybe now God is calling for an exodus from empire.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

DISCERNING THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Think about this for a moment. Let's suppose that China, without evidence, just accusation, unleashed a military assault into Vietnam for no other reason than they suspected that Vietnam posed a threat to their national security. Having tasted blood they then crush the government of Taiwan reclaiming the island as their property. As the world began organizing its protest China then announces a policy to undermine and bring down Japan's government through a policy of covert operations and financial aid to opposition parties. And finally, under the guise of protecting the security of the entire region, China announces a new military agreement with North Korea. What do you suppose would be the reaction of the Obama administration? What would be the reaction of the West in general, and the United Nations in particular?

What really could be our reaction if China, like a bully on the playground, suddenly started acting tough? It's not as if we could bomb them back into the Stone Age. It's not as if we could isolate them economically. Bottom line, we'd be up the creek and the entire earth would be staring down the barrel of a loaded gun known as World War 3.

So think about that for a moment. Now tell me how is that scenario fundamentally different from our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, our saber rattling towards Iran, our covert operations in Pakistan and Yemen, our building up of Columbia's military bases aside Venezuela's borders, and I haven't even mentioned those 800 plus military colonies spread throughout the earth, or our annual $700 billion plus war budget?

Seriously, how is it fundamentally different? My point is this: how do we keep on living as citizens, no longer of a nation, but of an empire that is goaled towards total global domination? What happens when the nation we were once part of, the nation whose ideals we were once proud of, the nation that once birthed the audacity of hope throughout the world, what happens when that nation becomes the source of violence and insecurity spreading throughout the world?

What happens when the beloved country unhinges from its moral base and turns toward evil? One might suppose that the Church, followers of one crucified by empire, might at least peep from their pulpits. But I challenge you, go to church this week, and all you will hear is the prattling of "peace, peace" when there is no peace. It's as if we are living in normal times.

And so I wonder, what happens when the clergy claim sight when they cannot see, claim to listen when they cannot hear, claim to speak when they have no words? What happens when the clergy bend the knee before the gods of paycheck and career? What happens to a nation whose clergy, the spiritual leaders, become themselves seduced by the spirituality of the imperial Beast?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

PROPHECY 2010

I will prophesy.

The homeless are the canaries in the American coal mine. They are the economic refugees of gangster capitalism. They are the present face of the future of our country. As this year closes, a year begun with so much irrational hope that a black/white man might save us, the new year looms ahead ominously.

The war over there has already become the war over here. It began with Reagan's redistribution of wealth into the hands of the top 1% of our nation. The war matured with the Bush-Supreme Court coup, and deepened with the mysticism of two buildings free falling into their own footprint, and an inexperienced, incompetent pilot conquering the most heavily armed building in the universe. Oh, how innocently we gave our power to leaders unworthy of trust. And now, the war over here has come to its end game with the great swindle of the banksters, and the election of a friendly faced step and fetch it president carrying the moneybags of the elite.

This year troubles will increase as we continue that long, lonely journey downward into the valley of shadows. Shadows that hide the light of what we once were. Today we can see more clearly that corruption has shattered all hoped for political solutions. The whole system is corroded and no one is coming to save us. And, like a final nail in the coffin, we the people are incapable of organizing against the Beast. The coup is complete.

The religious will continue to mass into fascist churches that will tell them how to walk, talk, vote and whom to kill and hate. Other religious will escape into emotionally ecstatic tongue speaking, wildly flapping arms, the casting out of demons, surrounded by the spectacle of loud, pounding music and incessant digital images with preachers who tell them whatsoever, but let's make sure we pass the plate. A few will portal deep into themselves lost in the spirituality of I am Thou, yet willingly oblivious to the beggar on the corner seeking a piece of bread. Oh, the webs we weave.

This year our presence in Afghanistan will soar, our army in Iraq will stay, our covert operations in Pakistan will increase, we'll keep expanding our new military bases in Columbia (Hugo here we come), our taxes will fund the killing, and that top 1% will be protected from all the blowback of chickens coming home to roost.

But the homeless know. They carry the sins of the nation on their bodies. The homeless know that we are complicit in their crucifixion. And the homeless know one other truth --- we are only at the beginning of the birth pangs. The shadow grows darker even as we move closer to the anguish of gnashing teeth, a nation that will not repent blindly falling into its own collapse. Oh, the webs we weave.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE CHRISTMAS REVOLUTIONARY HOPE

Christians believe that the Creator of all life, the source of compassion and goodness, the standard through whom we discern justice, the power that gives courage for heroic adventure, that this Creator when dressed in the clothes of human flesh looks like Mary's child, Jesus. Mary herself was a bit of a firebrand calling for the mighty to be tossed off their thrones, and challenging God to do justice and reverse the economy so that the poor might thrive, and the wealthy might learn humility. This holy twosome, the woman whom God loved, and the child that resulted from their union, is what is celebrated throughout the Christmas season.

When this child grew up he took on the identical titles used by Roman citizens concerning Caesar. Like Caesar, the child was called by his followers, God, Son of God, Redeemer, Liberator, and Savior of the World. But Mary's child would practice his "divinity" a bit differently. Mary's child would practice the art and craft of nonviolence as his strategy to win the peace.

Jesus learned it from the Jewish midwives who undermined Pharaoh, Gandhi practiced it in India, King in the south, Tutu in South Africa, Dorothy Day through the Catholic worker, Francis and Clare in Italy, Mother Teresa and Oscar Romero on the edges of empire. Nonviolence brought down dictatorships in the Philippines, Chile, and Serbia, it led the Velvet revolutions throughout Eastern Europe, it shattered the Soviet Union, and is the driving pulse behind the reform that will one day lift the Israeli boot off the Palestinian throat.

The way of Jesus is the way of mustard seeds like soup kitchens, shelters and free health care clinics. It brings together rich and poor, liberal and conservative, religious and secular, Christian and all faith traditions. It unites around a vision of compassion that cares for the earth, and affirms the divinity of all.

In contrast, the Nobel peace of Obama will increase destruction, displacement, hunger, terror, torture, repression, and the anguish of collateral damage in the midst of the lawlessness of permanent war. It will leave our nation bankrupt without resources of a moral foundation capable of renewal. But the way of Mary's child offers a new orientation: if your enemy is hungry, feed her, if she is naked, clothe her, if he is homeless, house him, if he is wounded, bandage him. Do to everyone else, what you would want done to yourself. Care for the earth as the sacred lifeline that it is. Be willing to live a heroic life, unafraid of those pretenders who assume they are kings.

Christmas reminds us that the thrones of the mighty are rotting from within. Some day soon a new world order will arise. Mary's son and all his friends will be dancing and happiness will spread throughout the land.

Mary will be so proud. No wonder God loved her.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

INTO THE DARKNESS OF ADVENT

Within hours of President Obama's speech his warlords took to the media to reassure us that the 2011 withdrawal was a word-game that didn't mean what we all thought we heard. Indeed it is clear that our role in the global order is to be the muscle that ensures Corporate pillage of earth's resources. We are no longer even pretending to live under the ideals of freedom and justice encoded by law. Rather we are just like imperial Rome doing what it pleases and crucifying its enemies.

However, if you are a member of a faith community, or if you pride yourself with the spiritual but not religious label, what is held in common by all is the massive and intentional denial and avoidance of the reality that our American culture and character has changed, our hearts have been hardened. What you will not hear, nor will you be taught, is how to live as a maladjusted citizen in an empire of permanent war. What you will not hear, nor will you be taught, is how to cultivate spiritual resistance to a culture of institutional violence that has made sacred its way of life.

Instead, faith communities will tell you that there is still hope, there is still goodness, there is still the possibility of inner peace with outward holiness. But what if all of us spiritual leaders are wrong? What if we have all been seduced by our paychecks and are too afraid to engage our congregations with the truly fearful news that God is no longer for us, but against us? What if we leaders spiritually discerned that our lives are complicit and soaked in the blood of the poor, and in the slaughter of the earth itself? What if America, having left behind goodness, has become an enemy of God, an enemy of earth's welfare, an enemy of the destitute, an enemy of persons who simply want to live outside the domination of free market capitalism? What if our only future is the humiliation of defeat, followed by our self inflicted collapse and destruction?

Have you ever heard a spiritual leader voice such thoughts? Ever been part of a spiritual community struggling with such thoughts? Ever wonder if our spirituality is deceptive, helping us lie about the Truth? Or let me ask it this way: do you really think that the times in which we are living merely need a small adjustment, a reform here and there and everything will bounce back to normal? Or, are we living in a time of the great turning, a time of tremendous pain and agonizing sacrifice when what was crumbles into dust, and that which comes to birth is a radical reorientation from that which we've once known?

Maybe we have become like that sick man whom Jesus asked, "do you really want to be healed?" Maybe we really don't.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE MASK IS OFF

The pretense is over. President Obama has taken on the mantle of an official war presidency. Unlike his predecessor who spoke to us with a perpetual smirk on his face as if all of life was a game, which for him, it was, President Obama speaks to us with a slippery tongue, forked with deceptions and equivocations that mislead us into thinking of nobility and higher purpose.

What the President didn't say with his latest troop surge is that the already psychologically strained military we all supposedly care about, will be either forced into multiple tours of duty in the war zone, or somehow, somewhere new fresh bodies will need to replace them. The promise that our troops will be given 18-24 months on the home front after a tour of war will either be broken, or, fresh bodies will need to be created. Where will these troops come from? Isn't it just grand that official unemployment is 10%, with the actual unemployment closer to 17%? Isn't it grand that the economic recovery is a new financial bubble rather than a recovery of actual jobs? We won't need a draft because there are plenty of grunts around to kill and die for Obama's noble cause.

The President also didn't acknowledge that his war morality is continuous with the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. In other words our military is no longer fighting actual wars of defense against active threats to our national security. Rather, we are now fighting wars that we think might possibly one day maybe be a threat to our national security "interests". That is, we will kill for the right to plunder the world for strategic economic gain that will enhance the bottom line of the Corporate-military government that runs our nation. The grunt that does the killing is just collateral damage, a useable asset of no account after his function as a soldier is over. Don't believe me? Then why is veteran homelessness increasing? Why the silence about the suicide rate and divorce rate of our veterans? Why the lack of urgency to put people back to work? The truth is that none of us care too much about supporting the troops. We are all collectively guilty in the blood they shed, and in the immorality of their cause.

The President also did not acknowledge that Afghanistan itself is a false-front masking the covert, internationally illegal invasion undertaken by the CIA and the Corporate-privatized armies (think Blackwater/Xe) that are actively engaged in Pakistan. This is what our nation has become: as bullies we go into countries and break them, then we have to fix up the consequences of what we have broken. We are a nation of permanent war with no greater meaning, nor higher purpose than the financial profit of a few.

I feel like Jonah whose only hope was to say, "yet forty days".

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

Christians Must Stop Going to War

As the long war continues I become more convinced that all who claim to follow the way of Jesus must increasingly confront the empty morality of the military establishment. There is, I believe, a moral argument for force. I affirm that the military, to the extent that they use limited violence, is a moral necessity given the lawlessness, greed and brutality of the real world within which we live. Essentially, I affirm the traditional case for the right of self defense, and defense of the neighbor. I can certainly understand how military usage can stop genocides, preventing the bursting forth of the demons of revenge and bloodlust. I can grasp that the military response to Nazi Germany had moral foundations.

But we no longer live in a world where we are even pretending to abide the constraints of a just war tradition, or offer the pretense of defending ourselves, or our neighbors against imminent danger. Our invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan are no different than any other imperial quest for dominance. We are there for the oil, gas and water. We are there for the same reason that we now have well over 800 military franchises spread throughout the earth. Our military is the muscle behind the immorality of Corporate pillage. It's fairly plain and simple. Our wars are market wars. Those who participate in the military are now servants of no greater cause than the financial benefit of a very sliver-like, snake infested, wee tiny elite of stratospheric wealthy whores of Hell. The nobility of being over there for the advance of democracy, liberty and justice, the nobility of standing up for those who cannot stand up for themselves, is simply the puffs of public spun propaganda. Follow the money and the dots get connected. I say this not out of cynicism but as a religious observation. The god of our nation, the only thing holding us together, is our allegiance to the almighty dollar. Our troops serve the interest and fight under the banner of this god.

It is in this context of religious symbols, loyalty to the God of Jesus versus loyalty to the Almighty Dollar, that I have come to the growing conviction that the Church has a moral responsibility to confront the deceptions of our military expansion. Politically, what this means is advocacy for military budget reductions along with the dismantling of our global bases. Pastorally, the Church should increase its therapeutic care for veterans even as it increases its commitment to counter-recruiting. But on a deeper, more intimate level, the Church must begin to withdraw its support of the military through an insistence that Christians no longer serve in the armed forces. We must insist that it is not acceptable to offer bread and wine with one hand, while killing for corporate profit with the other. That would be step one.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

LET HIM RISE!

Recently it was my privilege to preside over a funeral for a stranger who didn't attend church, and never really talked about spiritual matters much. Usually when I'm asked to do these types of funerals there is a embarrassed background, often unspoken, mostly just hinted at, that the person I'm burying was basically good, not religious, but a good person. It's as if folks are trying to check in and see whether or not I might say, "o God, have mercy on this sinful wrecked soul, release him from the fire pits of Hell that he so worthily deserves." Or, something of that nature. It's as if folks are worried that I might articulate the logical implication of the media preacher's version of Christianity: that all are born sinners who fail to measure up to God's standards and therefore are only worthy of God's anger and wrath.

But I wonder. Do folks really, actually, truly believe that our Creator would torture us forever and ever just because we couldn't stomach going to church, or affirm a litmus test of dogmas that are often incomprehensible? Are we really that unreflective about ultimate matters? If so, no wonder then, on everyday matters, that we've become a nation that can wantonly invade and slaughter other nations, torture at will, target people of color, and turn away from our own citizens in their time of need whether it be health care, housing or a job. Folks who unreflectively affirm the demonic cruelty of God will inevitably start to unreflectively live in that image. It will all seem so perfectly normal.

But what if we started affirming that life is born under an original blessing not an original sin? What if we thought of God as a nurturer whose desire is to help life evolve? What if we understood that our life is a journey of discovering our affectionate connection with each other? What if it dawned on us that living inside our bodies is a fun-filled adventure? How might such thinking heal our fears, calm our anxieties, and turn us toward creation as gift to be shared, rather than treasure to be hoarded? How might such religion tame the violent selfish frenzy of our current politics?

Now, more than ever, we Christian preachers need to take Jesus off the Cross, and let him rise into resurrection. It is never the violence of empire that has the centering or final word. Rather, it is always the amazing surprise of solidarity, redemption, and renewal, it is the embodied creation of all things made new that becomes the guiding image of hope. For indeed, what we image we become.

And just in case you were wondering, that guy in the grave, we welcomed him with thanksgiving into the eternal community of God complete with all us sinners and saints. It just seemed so perfectly normal.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: (Part Five in a series)

At the center of Christian Zionism is the conviction that contemporary Israel is identical with Biblical Israel, with whom God gave an offer of land that would be their possession forever. Politically what this has meant is that there is a growing Christian militarism that justifies all of Israel's national policies of expansion including its apartheid policies directed at Palestinians. It is the Christian Zionist theology that is most intimately associated with advancing war against Iran, as well as teaching that we are living at the end of history.

Christian Zionists have, in effect, a death wish for our nation as well as planet earth. What brings a Christian Zionist joy is the thirst for the cleansing of the land of Israel because when that happens Jesus will return as a warrior seething in rage to exterminate all the unclean, unwashed sinners that refuse to convert others in his name.

Such savagery is now a commonplace in much of media Christianity. Long gone are the days when Jesus disarmed his followers, associated with the poor and outcast, and defended those caught in moral embarrassments. Today Jesus is muscular and mean, ready not merely for a fight but for annihilation. At the heart of much of the Religious Right culture-war against all things Obama, whether health care reform or international diplomacy, is a growing resentment against all things pluralist, all things scientific, all things ambiguous, and all things complex. The Right wants a simple world of obedience and conformity. And they have no qualms against taking over the political realm by hook, crook, or flat out force. After all, they affirm a God who is quite willing to order the extermination of all those who fail to live by God's rules. They affirm a God who is quite willing to torture eternally the reprobate who refuses to acknowledge that Jesus has saved them from their sins.

At the heart of all this is the notion that the Bible is a supernatural communication dropped from heaven to earth. Rather than understand the Bible as a historical testimony of a changing interpretation of who God is, and how God acts in the history of first the Jews, and then, within the New Testament, the life of the Church, Christian Zionists pervert metaphor into historical literalism and attempt to embody the Bible as a manual of arms that, if followed, will eradicate evil from the land.

Such bloodlust is the source of much of the violence that is pushing up all across this country. It is the chickens coming home to roost from America's original sin: the refusal to confess and atone for the European invasion and extermination of native peoples. An invasion and extermination justified by the belief that America was itself a New Israel, true Israel, a light to the nations. An invasion and extermination duplicated by contemporary Israel against Palestinians.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: (Part Four in a series)

A foundational tenet of the Hebrew Scriptures is the proclamation that the earth belongs to God alone. We human beings are given the responsibility to care for God's earth. But early on in the story the reader learns of the human foibles of lying, cheating, and deceit resulting in the breakdown of family, and its inevitable corollary, the breakdown of society into warring factions. The notion of God's ownership, as well as the notion of the beloved community, is quickly swept away in a flood of violence that destroys that which was once dreamt of as a harmonious whole.

As the Hebrew story progresses we learn of a man named Abraham who is chosen by God to be a blessing to all nations restoring the harmony through the generation of a particular nation that will role model justice and righteousness. Through the blessing bestowed on Abraham comes a promise of land, a promise that is at the root of the political crisis characterizing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Christianity emerged initially as a Jewish renewal movement. The earliest followers of Jesus were all Jews, they continued to worship in the Temple, they continued to maintain the dietary laws and customs of the Jewish way of life. The difference was that the Christian movement claimed that God had begun a new creation through the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, in his death and resurrection, had become Israel's Messiah. That is, the followers of Jesus began to tell their fellow Jews that True Israel was following the way of Jesus rather than Torah. In other words, the Christian movement became a hostile takeover of the Jewish religion. All those promises to Abraham were interpreted as fulfilled in Jesus, and later, as the Jesus movement spread throughout the world, the promises were interpreted as belonging to the Church. Inevitably, having high-jacked Jewish identity, the Church took to outright persecution climaxing in the ovens of Nazi Germany.

The holocaust sobered Christians to the reality of what they had done in Jesus' name. Today we see evidence of a true repentance, and in some cases, amends making by the global Church towards the Jewish people. An example of this is that Biblical scholarship has given Jesus his Jewish identity back, and has rooted his teachings into their Hebrew scripture roots. There is a lot more dialogue between Jewish and Christian theologians, clergy and congregations than perhaps ever before in history.

Christian Zionism is most certainly part of this movement of repentance and amends making. Christian Zionists proclaim and practice that God's blessing of Abraham, the gift of the land, is not fulfilled in Jesus, rather it is an eternal blessing for the Jewish people alone. This view, new in Christian history, has added fire to the flames currently destroying any hope of peace in the Middle East. To that view I will turn next week.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: (Part Three in a series)

Christian Zionism is a movement within Christianity that insists on the Jewish right to seize the entirety of the land of Israel including the West Bank, Gaza, and for some, all of the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq. What this means concretely is that for a growing number of Christians there can be no peace between Israeli's and Palestinians. Justice, for Christian Zionists, is the removal of all Palestinians from God-given Jewish land.

The Christian Zionist movement is deeply embedded in contemporary Christian culture. It is the dominant expression of media Christianity, and is prominent amongst military chaplains and Christian military. In other words, this is no small irrelevant theological trivia. This has major life-altering political significance.

At the root of much Christian Zionist dogma is the notion that the Bible contains predictions of how the world will end. These predictions are found throughout both the Hebrew Scriptures and apostolic writings but they are most pronounced in the Book of Revelation. In a nutshell the theory states that one day Jesus will return to earth and slaughter all those who oppose his iron-rod rule. Where Israel fits into this scenario is that the Jews must be living in their land. The Jews are God's chosen people to reveal the wisdom and will of God. Right before Jesus returns several thousand Jews will acknowledge that Jesus was indeed the incarnation of God on earth. All of this happens in the midst of global catastrophe and chaos, and the rise of an antichrist (kind of sweet Jesus in reverse É ironically, kind of like the Jesus who comes back and slaughters everyone).

The theory assumes that the Creator is basically pissed off at us. Like a drunken father who beats his wife, abuses his children, and kicks the dog, the God of Christian Zionists is heavy into dominance and submission, which trumps the kindness and mercy of love. Such a God can choose the Jews one day, and when they act-out, this God can abuse them the next, eventually obliterating them entirely. Similarly, Christian Zionists, on the one hand bend over backwards to honor the Jews and empower the state of Israel. But, on the other hand, all of this done so that Jesus will return to slaughter all the disobedient, including the Jews who won't convert to Christian Zionism.

Here's the point. We're in the midst of a culture war yet we are ambivalent about religious teaching thinking it has no political manifestation. Child evangelism outreaches rent space in our public school buildings yet we think that exposing our children to such word and deeds will have no cultural effect. Christian Zionism has an agenda that desires to shape the politics of this nation. Beginning in righteousness, it ends with the blood of the unclean shed. In the words of Jesus, "keep awake".

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: (Part Two of a series)

Christian Zionism is a movement within Christianity that insists on the Jewish right to seize the entirety of the land of Israel including the West Bank, Gaza, and for some, all of the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq.

The roots of Christian Zionism are tangled up in the thicket of a family squabble two thousand years old. Christianity began as a renewal movement within Judaism itself. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish. They continued to worship as Jews in the ancient Temple, continued to abide by all the dietary laws and customs, and continued to be fully Jewish in all their ways up through the destruction of the Temple by Roman empire some forty years after the death of Jesus.

The messiness started early on when the messengers of Jesus opened up the club to those who weren't Jewish. It didn't take long before those who had once been outside to boot out those who were inside. Through a combination of racism and arrogance Christianity basically said that everything Jewish now belonged to them, that they were the true Jews, the most favored of God.

We are all aware of what devolved after that. Horrible, unspeakable violence has been done to the Jewish people at the hands of the followers of Jesus. The twisted irony at the core of Christianity is that the followers of a nonviolent revolutionary (a Gandhi-type) became violent crusaders robbing, raping and pillaging their way into the power of imperial conquest.

The Christian quest to conquer was rooted in a theology, found in the Book of Revelation, that assumed that the nonviolent Jesus would one day return to life, but this time, as an avenging warrior who would rule the nations with an iron rod. This contradiction at the heart of Christian faith has twisted its proclamation into incoherence. For every Romero, and King there are hundreds of others who, in the name of Christ, affirm that militarism can produce a redemptive good. Christian Zionism is rooted in this twisted double-bind of a violent/nonviolent Jesus.

On the one hand, Christian Zionism is a movement of profound penance toward the Jewish people. It is a movement willing to sacrifice for, and serve the interests of the Jewish people as first priority. But, on the other hand, the end game of the Christian Zionist movement is that once the Jewish people have reclaimed the entirety of the land, Jesus will return and kill all the unclean, including the Jews.

This bloodlust, and desire for the end of the world, and for the end of America, is at the heart not only of our alliance with Israel, it is also at the heart of the craziness of the Republican Party, driven as it is, by right-wing holy war Christianity.

I'll look at the Book of Revelation in the next column.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: Part One

Today's column is part one in a series of articles concerning a very intimate, and controversial subject: Christian Zionism. Zionism is the movement that evolved out of the continual sufferings and persecutions of the Jewish people. Zionism is a movement goaled towards securing a Jewish homeland through which to revive Jewish national life, culture and language. After 1800 years of exile Zionism became a global political reality in the 20th century with the emergence of the State of Israel. Over the course of the last fifty years Israel, no longer a suffering slave of the nations has become instead a major broker of military and political power both here in the United States and throughout the Middle East.

Christian Zionism is the dominant belief of media and cultural Christianity in America. A Christian Zionist is a fully committed supporter of the Jewish right to the entirety of the land of Israel including the West Bank, Gaza, and for some, all of the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq.

The belief emerges from a peculiar interpretation of the Bible that assumes that the scriptures contain a hidden code revealing a detailed prediction of events that will lead to the end of life as we know it. The good news of such an end becomes the advent of an entirely new creation purified of all the unclean and unrighteous. Christian Zionism affirms that the Jews must reclaim its own purified land before the end-times clock can start. Most (but not all) Christian Zionists believe that today the end time clock is about to start ticking. One implication being that those kids we all sent to school last week, are, in fact, the last generation before the end of time.

The theology of Christian Zionism has major implications for the political, economic and military policies of this nation. Whether or not you give a rip about such esoteric theological pontifications, the reality is that such pontifications have deeply influenced the right-wing of this country. Such pontifications are, for example, deeply embedded in the theology of many chaplains who serve in the armed forces, and who have indeed helped twist the minds and hearts of our military apparatus in our current undeclared holy-war against Islam.

Christian Zionism is a movement of spiritual despair. It has political implications that justify violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing in a celebratory fantasy that such an ending will glorify and please the Creator. In the months ahead I will continue this series with growing specificity concerning the theological heresy of Christian Zionism. I will attempt to make the case that such a Christianity is the antithesis of the spirit of Jesus, and the Jewish tradition in which his teachings are rooted. Such a theology, I will argue, imperials the well being of our nation, and the political and economic health of all creation.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

HOPE TO BELIEVE IN

The kids are returning to school this week. Throughout the city books fly open, papers get assigned, sports start up, after-school activities kick in, friends are reunited and another year of helping our children grow into responsible citizenship begins.

The older I get the more I affirm that schools made a huge mistake when Civics was dropped from the curriculum. Civics was the class that attempted to teach us how our government works, what democracy is all about, even how to behave and perform citizenship. It taught us how and why to vote, how to be active in the community, how to participate in dialogue with those with whom we disagreed. It was in Civics that I first encountered a real engagement with those who enacted their citizenship through dissent. I still remember my teacher explaining what happened at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. I can remember learning about the anti-war movement, the farm workers grape boycott, and the protests against Viet Nam. It was in Civics class that I first encountered the teachings of civil disobedience. It was in Civics that I first made the connection between citizenship and courage.

On September 15th two courageous women from Israel will come to Seattle and I'm hoping a huge wave of High School students will come out to meet and greet them, to learn from them the meaning of moral courage, and true patriotism.

Maya Wind and Netta Mishly both signed the 2008 Shministim Letter: a declaration by Israeli high school students that they would not enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces to occupy Palestinian territories and rule over Palestinian life. In other words, they refused to rule over an occupied people. They refused to re-cycle violence and revenge towards their neighbors. They refused to confiscate land, to demolish homes, to detain Palestinians without charge. They refused to guard checkpoints, to enforce a siege, and to participate further in the sin of apartheid.

They have paid a price -military prison- for their refusal to be conscripted into the Israeli army; and they decided to pay this price while they were still in high school. Unlike our nation, military service is mandatory for Israeli Jews upon completing high school. Maya and Netta are among dozens of Shministim, Israeli youth who have signed a letter of refusal, and many have paid a similar price for following their principles. So young yet so principled, so young yet so full of hope, so young yet so wise, so young yet ready to build a future worth living.

On Tuesday, September 15th (7pm) at the University Friends Meeting Room (4001 9th Ave. NE) Maya and Netta will share their story. It will be an evening of learning about moral and civic courage which are the building blocks of democracy and the pursuit of justice. This is a teaching we could all use.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

HAS GOD ABANDONED THE NATIVE PEOPLE?

This summer my family drove to South Dakota. The drive took us through several Native Indian reservations. For the most part all we could observe was the reality of desolated, isolated rural poverty. The ethnic cleansing and land theft policy of our American history has taken its toll and moves the heart beyond sorrow. There is, as far as I can imagine, no realistic hope for the resurrection of the Native peoples. Although, there are small pockets of optimism, and an occasional success story, Native culture, and a Native contribution to a reconciled and restored future, barring an act of God, seems to be historically, and humanly impossible. Theologically speaking it appears that the Great Spirit has abandoned Native Americans.

When I talked with family members, admittedly all white folk, mostly farmers, what I heard was a resigned refrain that if Native Indians were to have any hope of a future they would have to create that hope for themselves. No amount of government funding would create new pathways. Indeed, according to my family members, government money was now part of the problem. They insisted that a welfare mentality had eroded Native motivation to work and produce. They were quite vocal that government funds rarely funneled down into the budgets of actual persons in need. Instead the money was disappeared in bureaucratic corruption, and within the territorialism of the tribal council itself.

I don't know. All I know was that the areas looked forlorn and desolated. All I know is that gang culture is sweeping the Pine Ridge reservation. All I know is that here in Seattle alcoholism, homelessness, and chronic financial dysfunction is characteristic of a way of life that discourages all of us who want to see a restoration of Native accomplishment. Indeed, relationally speaking, few churches have any real connection to Native persons. And those few who do are not able to assist the renewal that is needed, and the revival that much come if Native peoples are to experience a resurrection from death.

I am haunted by the notion of God's apparent abandonment of Native peoples. Five hundred years of relentless oppression have not generated new light for Native peoples. How long until the darkness passes? How long do we have to wait until an authentic saving movement of liberation and restoration is created? Is such a hope too much to ask of the God who boasts that Pharaoh is nothing, and that even the dead can be raised? Is such a yearning for justice beyond the capacity of God to inspire and to empower?

Of course Native Americans are not alone in this theological conundrum. One could look at the Palestinian people and ask the same questions. One could examine the long misery of the Congo and despair equally. Where is God, when God alone is the only hope? The question unnerves me.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

JUSTICE NOT CHARITY

The poor do not need our charity as much as they need justice. The primary focus of the Bible, the notion of salvation, is, concretely speaking, about justice, the restoring of the outcast back into community. The Bible is concerned with this world, and its core message is justice for the poor as the sign of salvation.

Within the Bible is the message of Jubilee, a blueprint of what economic justice looks like. The Jubilee was a legislative process that put a cap on wealth, and a floorboard under poverty. Every fifty years debt was forgiven and wealth redistributed. In the agrarian culture of that time the economic center was the family group, and the source of wealth and sustainability was land. Even if the family fell into debt and lost their land, every Jubilee the land would be returned to the family.

The early Jesus movement, as evidenced at Pentecost, practiced Jubilee amongst its members. Later, John Chrysostom (347-407) wrote, "This is also theft, not to share one's possessions. Not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor." Basil of Caesarea (329-379) wrote, "That bread which you keep belongs to the hungry; that coat which you preserve in your wardrobe, to the naked; those shoes that are rotting in your possession, to the shoeless; that gold which you have stored away, to the needy. " Thomas Aquinas said, "In cases of need all things are common property, so that there would seem to be no sin in taking another's property, for need has made it common."

Or, in our context, if the City of Seattle has property belonging to the commonwealth of its citizens, for example Port property, but a group of homeless poor need land to organize shelter then it is a God-given right for the poor to use the land for their survival. In other words, Nickelsville is a living sign of God's salvation at work right in front of our eyes.

To be fair I say the same thing about church property. If church buildings stand empty at night, but the homeless poor have no place to lay their head, they have a God-given right to break in for shelter. For Christians the poor are of sacred wealth, and we are accountable for how they are treated in society.

The salvation message of the Church is about justice in this world. And justice is always about reconciled relationships so that each person has a place at the table, a name that is known, and assets that are to be used for the common good. Nickelsville is simply seeking an opportunity to survive, to become members of the larger community. In this they are embodying the will of God. The question for both Christians and citizens is basic: do the poor have a right to life? Whose side are you on?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

ANYONE HAVE A MATCH?

The fireworks are over, at least they are for those cities that could still afford to put on a grand patriotic display. Many cities cancelled the festivities due to lack of funds. Sometimes, for those of us who have jobs and money, it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of the economic depression that has settled over the nation. We read that the employment rate hovers around 10%, that California is bankrupt and will soon send out IOU's instead of checks, and even that our own state will have to cut back on education and public welfare but we can't really feel the pain. After all, it's July and that means vacation time. At least it does for those of us with money and jobs.

The fireworks are over, and all the beer is drunk, but now in the aftermath of our hangover we keep seeing evidences of the shredding of our national fabric. We elected the party of change but what is clearly obvious is the change is cosmetic. The Democrats rolled over to the bankers and screwed over the believers who put their trust in them through their vote. The Democrats have increased the military budget, and have opened up a new front in what is now Obama's perpetual war. Obama himself, although with far greater eloquence, nevertheless speaks with forked tongue. His rhetoric is always sweet but his, behind the scenes implementation, is dirty and foul, compromised and corrupted by his capitulation to those who own our government: the military-corporate state. Our nation continues to torture, continues to operate a government of secrets, continues to turn a blind eye to Israel's belligerence, and continues to wink and nod over yet another financially friendly Central American coup.

And what can we really do about it? Vote for the Greens? Vote Socialist? Republican? Or, shall we vote with our pocketbooks for fundamental change? Does my Prius signify a new world is possible? Will my organic consumption really alter Monsanto's corporate rape of the earth? Seriously folks, I see no political hope on any horizon. I see nothing but utter, absolute catastrophe coming our way. Our nation is economically, spiritually and politically bereft. The fireworks are over because our passion for revolution, for a true turning towards justice faded from our bellies long ago. The fireworks are over because our inner voice was silenced by our own hedonist materialism, and now there's nothing left inside. We are hollow and empty. Like sheep we are being led to slaughter by wolves disguised as shepherds.

Someday, but only after more military disaster, and a severe surge of double digit unemployment for the professional class, someone will rise up with a new word. And that word will kindle a flame and the fireworks will start up again. Reform has failed. It is time for revolutionary words and courage. Is it in us?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

BUILD NICKELSVILLE

The homeless are bums and should get a job and get a life! That is the opinion of many throughout the country. But what kind of job are the homeless suppose to get? Occasionally a burger-flipping job comes open. Sometimes there are day-labor opportunities, Every once in a while a construction job is offered. And every blue moon or so, a job with a future emerges along with the waiting list of several hundred applying for it. So what job is it that the homeless should just go out and get?

And what kind of life? Are we talking an apartment and a spouse? Are we talking kids and coaching Little League? Are we talking the kind of life that can put away surplus for a rainy day or a vacation or the dream of the great big purchase of a house? What kind of life do we expect the homeless to get?

Mayor Nichols says that the homeless should follow the rules. When you're homeless the rules go something like this: get in line for a shelter space, and hope to make the nightly cut-off. Be given a mat and sleep in a room full of fellow distressed strangers with various medical and mental health needs. Get up in the morning, seek out breakfast and a shower, hopefully your clothes, smashed in a backpack are not too wrinkly, nor too smelly, then go forth to seek out that job that everyone wants you to have. But don't look for swing shift jobs because by the time you get off, the shelter spaces are gone. Don't take a graveyard shift because there are no day beds. And, to be blunt, once you find a job, flipping burgers, day labor or some sort, good luck saving enough shekels to save up for the security deposit, first and last month rent, and, of course, a bit of surplus for a few furnishings, like a bed.

My point is this: Nickelsville, constructed with buildings not tents, on permanent public land not a mobile nomadic lifestyle, is about the safest, sanest, most responsible, most creative and courageous approach to solving homelessness that Seattle has. It offers the vision of a house, humble yes, barely sustainable yes, but a house, a private space, a sanctuary in which a person might breathe, regroup, and come out of death into life. And, best of all, the community is self managed which means that the residents must get to know each other, and communicate. From homelessness to neighborliness is a recipe for revival. What's the down side?

Public land is our land. If you, like me, want to step forward with a positive solution for the homeless, let us join hearts with minds, voice with vote, get on the horn and insist to our politicians that they support Nickelsville as a permanent home for persons of sacred worth.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

IMAGINING GREATER SHELTER

Homeless folk live hard, frustrating lives. For churches that work with the homeless a common phenomenon continually experienced is the plumbers nightmare. First, you discover a small leak but in your attempt to repair it another leak develops, then another, and another, fix those, and several more pop open, fix those and another leak will start to seep until finally a total blow out and flood. This is what it's like trying to move one off the street into housing, health and hope.

Churches that provide shelters and food kitchens truly walk their talk. Such works of charity strengthen the soul of both the faith community, and its surrounding neighborhood. But there is a deep hunger to go beyond charity. There is a desire to go beyond mere survival into actual transformation. Indeed, religion has a power greater than charity, and offers a hope beyond mere survival. We need to unleash that power and possibility.

One way to do that is through a renewed focus on four basics. Basic number one is accountability, a tough love approach that doesn't tolerate abusive or addictive behavior. If someone isn't ready to move out of the gutter, climb up the ladder, and get to higher ground, then, that person isn't ready. Homeless providers like SHARE, using churches as host-sites, are very good at creating shelters that open doors, teach responsibility and offer a first step out of homelessness. Unfortunately, a SHARE shelter is where most churches stop.

Basic number two partners the one who is homeless with an encourager. An encourager is someone who will walk up the ladder with the one who is ready. An encourager is a friend who will simply, continuously check in on a person's life, offering hope and a friendly face. This is basic human stuff and is most often missing in the loneliness of a homeless life. To have a safe, sane, sober friend who wants nothing from you but your own well being is one of the keys to emotional and spiritual health.

Basic number three is to create a team offering counsel and guidance. Having a friend helps to stabilize the climb but friendship isn't enough. One needs a network. One needs help in navigating the labyrinth of social services, of training opportunities, of the long, crazed waiting and disappointments of hunting for housing, and looking for work. Cut off from family, the homeless need a team, and I think that the team can be found inside faith communities that desire to go beyond roofs over heads, and food in bellies.

Finally, basic number four is a welcome into a community of care where one's name is known, and one has become significant to another. This fourth basic is what churches do best. If only they would open their doors wider and see that Christ comes to them disguised with rags but carrying riches.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

SECOND VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST

I've been preaching through the Book of Revelation this year. That's the book that end time charlatans use to scare folks into thinking that God is so pissed off that any day now wrath, judgment and hellfire will reign down on us all. Well almost all. A few, an elect, the great washed righteous, they get to beam up out of here before all hell breaks loose. Yet another example of Christian cowardice.

But Revelation is not about predictions of the end of the world. Rather, it is very much an analysis revealing the horror of Roman empire. Those are the guys who marched into Israel, crucified 20,000 bodies outside of the walls of Jerusalem, and then burned the whole town down. Revelation reveals the dynamics of empire while encouraging a young Christian movement to endure because this too will pass away. Empire will sow the seeds of its own destruction and fall.

Preaching through this book I can't help but think about American Empire. We too are a nation red in tooth and claw. We're stuck in a script we don't know how to rewrite. The sinfulness of Bush's war has now become the sinfulness of Obama's war. The one we hoped would restore American idealism into foreign policy turns out to be very similar to the one who turned our nation into an enemy of the world. He just talks better. Or, in other words, he is a more effective manipulator.

Obama's war escalates into Pakistan, the military budget increases, torture is subcontracted to other nations, a secret-ops commander is put in charge of the next phase of slaughter, and more civilians die with no end in sight. In short, we are a nation that doesn't know how to repent.

We're like an alcoholic who keeps repeating the same behavior expecting different results. We keep thinking if we hit them harder we can crush them. But the harder we hit, the more they endure and grow. Who are the "they"? No one knows. It's just them.

What we do know is that we won't offer bread, we won't build bridges, we won't fund schools and electrical grids, we won't send an army of engineers to listen and build what is needed for prosperity. Rather we build bases, we send troops, we offer drones, we kill the innocent, we treat everyone as if they are insignificant.

And what for? It's the pipelines stupid. Our troops die for nothing more than Corporate profit and a way of life that crucifies creation. I wouldn't blame God for being pissed. But here's my question: How do Christians pray for the defeat of our nation so that our troops can come home and we can finally repent of empire?

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

WHAT THE MARTYRS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN

How can it be that Christians support torture? A couple weeks ago there was a report that stated that the more often one attends religious services, the more likely one is to say that the use of torture against suspected terrorists is at least sometimes justified. To say that this is a stunning, horrible, no good bit of news is too little of an understatement. The irony is almost incomprehensible. After all it is Christians who claim to worship a God whose flesh was itself tortured for political reasons. How can Christians be anything but militant against the use of torture?

The answer, I think, can be found in the Christian notion of atonement. The theory goes something like this: we human beings have pissed God off, and in God's anger there will be hell to pay. God needs revenge. But Jesus is God's good boy who calms the angry daddy down. Jesus the good boy makes a deal with angry daddy. He takes the punishment intended for us. So angry daddy kills him through torture and is somehow calmed down and ok after that. This morbid picture of Christian perversion was all the rage a couple years back in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ. The theology concludes with the affirmation that we human beings can be assured of God's good favor if we just say the magic words, "come into my heart Lord Jesus".

The older I get the more abhorrent I find the Christian obsession with the crucifixion of Jesus. Rather than to see that Jesus was a political prisoner slaughtered by empire, Christians jump up into the spiritual realm and pretend that the assault on Jesus was somehow God's plan of renewal. The notion that God needs human sacrifice, the spilling of blood before God will act mercifully and with compassion ought to cause every Christian to renounce their faith. I know scores of people, both Christian and non who have far greater depth of moral capacity. Why bother giving honor to such idiocy and vengeance? Why can't Christians see that their theories reinforce the rule of empire's reign of death?

God's violence against Jesus is at the root of Western civilization's embrace of the myth of redeemer nations, full of benevolence invading other countries for their own good. This notion of sacred violence is at the root of Christianity's historic crucifixion of the Jews, and in our own country, the Indian people. Sacred violence leads inevitably to a theology that justifies torture for a greater good.

The true basis of Christian hope is not the crucifixion of Jesus. Rather it is the empty tomb. It's emptiness signals that God's nonviolent persistent quest for justice and compassion will ultimately transform the horror of both empire and torture. Something new enters history. If only Christians would trust and embody the truth of that newness.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

RECONCILIATION TRAINING

Now I know that the July 4th week-end is still a long ways a way but life is not just about the present moment, it is also the yearning for a brighter tomorrow. And today is a good time to start thinking about, and planning for tomorrow. I want to recommend a different way for you to rest, and refresh over the July 4th weekend this year.

Every July 4th weekend I get caught in a bit of a funk. On the one hand I like to celebrate the birthday of the nation. I'm proud of a lot of our American history. I'm grateful for a government created as a secular state with freedom of religion, and a commitment to checks and balances against the accrual of too much power into any one sphere of authority. I'm proud of our American idealism. But quite often the uber-patriotism of July 4th makes me crazy. The morphing of our idealism into pornographic displays of militarism, coupled with a hyper-pontification of the glories of our freedom often cause me great anguish. Simply put I can't stand being around the masses who fall into patriotic trance without, evidently, any self reflective thought of how our idealism has been used, abused and subverted by elites whose agendas are right in line with Biblical Pharaoh. In other words, every July 4th, I wish I were hanging around with folks who had a clue.

And, ta-da!, there are those kind of folk. And those folk, about 200 strong, get together every July 4th weekend over at Seabeck for the annual Fellowship of Reconciliation Regional Conference. This year, the radicals are gathering under the theme, Building a Just and Sustainable World. Speakers include Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil, more than 20 workshops including West Seattle's own Deborah Lawrence with Citizen Artist Collage (she's the artist whose ornament was banned from the Bush Christmas tree last year), music, free time, fun, great food, and the best collection, young and old, of patriotic radicals this side of left wing Jesus!

The Fellowship of Reconciliation, in case you didn't know, is a 94 year old global peace organization that has nurtured and strengthened inspiring peace activists including Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, A.J. Muste, and scores of others. They focus on training and organizing peaceful alternatives to militarism and economic injustice. Whether one is talking about Bosnia or Columbia, the deep American south in the 1950's or reconciling the Abrahamic faiths in Asia today, the Fellowship is there, working and birthing new possibilities.

So, why not hang with folks that change the world for the better this July 4th weekend? You want the scoop then check it out at www.wwfor.org/seabeck

Instead of fireworks why not gather with folks who light candles in the darkness, saying, "we beg to differ".

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

SANCTUARY

Towards the end of every month I observe that our weekly soup kitchen serves an increasing number of people, and our church office receives an increasing number of folks asking for assistance. Like most churches we do not have gobs of cash lying around just waiting for the needy to emerge with their requests. Indeed, within our own congregation there are several who struggle heroically to make ends meet. When they have surplus they give, and when they are in need, they receive. But then the stranger appears with a story that may or may not be true. Given limited resources, does one give first to the stranger or to the friend?

Not knowing the one in need is the crucial factor. Let's face it, if the one showing up in need were a member of the congregation it would be almost impossible to turn them away with a prayer, a wish of good luck, and a sheet of paper with resources written on it; resources that we both know are futile. If the one showing up in need participated in the weekly Bible study that shapes moral character, or prepared last week's Soup Kitchen lunch for others, or handed out bulletins on Sunday, if the one in need had a name that was known, a face that was recognized, and a shared memory of good deeds done together, then that person would be exceedingly difficult to turn away empty. After all, it is not for nothing that the Bible recalls story after story of God showing up in the middle of the night to disturb our dreams. Most of us want to sleep well at night. Most of us want to like the face in the mirror that greets us every morning. Basic decency has as a minimum the insistence that you take care of your own.

Which brings me to my point. Economic times are not good. Even the up and coming well paid Seattle professional is a bit nervous these days about whether or not their job will be around come September. It's not just the homeless who are in need, it's not just the retail clerk, or the grocer, or the taxi driver. We're all in need these days. The occasional sunshine does not take away the dread that more showers are forecast for tomorrow.

Who and where is your community of care? Who or where do you go to know that someone actually gives a rip about your life? Who and where do you go to experience affection and the knowledge that your back is protected, and folks stand on each side of you? Who and where is your community of mutual aid? Not to have sanctuary in times like these is like, well, like trusting your 401K to save you.

To those with ears to hear, let them listen.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

EMPIRE IS A SEDUCTIVE WHORE (Rev. 17)

There is a pattern emerging from within the Obama administration. First the proclamation of the great ideal: "we will not torture!" Then the reality that we will overlook the prosecution of the torturers. First, the rhetoric of reforming the financial system. Then the reality of putting some of the very thieves that created the crisis into positions that will supposedly free us from it. First, the talk of ending the Iraq war. Then the reality of expanding the war into Pakistan. First, the talk of restoring constitutional law. Then the reality of retaining and expanding the secrecy abuses of Bush-Cheney.

In the Bible justice is a consistent standard clearly defined through the legislation known as the Jubilee. The Jubilee was an attempt to undermine the accumulation of power into an elite. The Jubilee sabotaged attempts to form an aristocracy through its insistence that every fifty years the wealth of the entire economy be redistributed. This was great good news to the poor who were released from slavery, and given the means to become productive partners in commonwealth. It was, of course, bad news for the elite who lost power and were forced to share.

The prophets of Hebrew Scripture used the Jubilee as the criterion upon which they discerned and condemned the spiritual and political morality of their day. Jesus, in the tradition of the prophets, lifted up the Jubilee as the core and center of his teachings. Indeed, in his teaching on prayer, he insisted that heaven could only come on earth as the debt of the poor was forgiven. These were financial debts not little character flaws, or sleights, or disagreements we have with each other. Jesus was talking about, like he almost always did, the spirituality of public, political matters.

This brings me back to Obama. Many of us were so full of hope and happiness that the Bush-Cheney nightmare was over. We thought that one of our own had ascended to the throne. We refused to take seriously what Obama was actually saying during the campaign. We refused to look at who he was surrounding himself with, and who he was consulting. Simply put, it looks like Obama has no intention to fundamentally reform the American way of life. He will not reign in the military, nor will he return us to pre-Bush constitutional standards. He will not face down Wall Street because he is a well packaged, very slick, marketing tool of Wall Street. We will be given symbolic feel-goods but without the substance of justice that removes the mighty from their thrones.

Liberal Christians got suckered because we thought that Obama (secretly) affirmed the Social Gospel of Jeremiah Wright. What we failed to see was that he was using Wright, building power with appearance. This is the name of his game, and woe is us if we continue to be seduced.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

RESISTANCE IS RESURRECTION

To light a candle in the darkness is to say, "I beg to differ". This week Christians celebrate Easter, the foundation of trust in God's goodness, and faithfulness. Easter symbolizes God's victory over the power of fear and death. Christians celebrate that despite the grim reality of much of life, nevertheless a new world is promised, a new hope is given birth, a new possibility is emerging.

Easter faith is found whenever Christians act in their face of their fears. Cesar Chavez devoted his life to protecting farmworkers even in the face of death threats and intimidation. Martin Luther King poured out his life in a continual affirmation that nonviolent persistence could change the cold-hearted nature of apartheid and militarism. Dorothy Day opened a house to serve food and offer hospitality to whosoever because she understood we are all God's children.

Every person who serves in a soup kitchen practices holy resistance to those powers that would have us think that segregated wealth is better than commonwealth. Every person who works on behalf of the homeless exhibits the power of resurrection in the face of those powers that would have us cower and become afraid of the almighty law, and the priestly status of property owners.

To resist fear and death is living proof of Christ's resurrection. To incorporate into one's life the holy practices of positive maladjustment to society is living proof that Jesus keeps popping up from the grave in a brand new disguise.

On Easter Sunday many churches will use religious words that have no meaningful content. They will praise Jesus and glory in his rising from death. But the reality is blunt and basic, even if the dead man Jesus walked again through walls, so what? Good for him, but what does that have to do with us? Even if the Creator of the universe reanimated the dead corpse of a first century peasant, so what?

The real truth of Easter is not about a dead man walking. Rather, it is about people like you and me standing up to our fears and frustrations. Easter faith is to, with firm backbone, resist those forces that try to grind some people up, turn some people into victims, squash some people's dreams, while all the time benefiting from other people's misery. Easter faith is resistance to the power that would segregate us into categories of status, like housed and homeless, and then turn us against each other.

This Easter true worship will happen in congregations that build a bridge between the haves and have-nots. True religion is the actual practice of sharing wealth and assets, networks and time, talent and treasure so that all not only survive, but thrive. True Easter faith resists religious rhetoric through embodying the simple practice of sharing. Let us bury the words, and raise up actions.

This week light a candle and resist.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

ENDING SHAME

Within the Christian tradition idolatry occurs whenever one submits to the influence and shaping power (persuasive power Ð the power that offers one an identity, that gives one a feeling of significance) of another source than God who is both love and truth. As part of my seasonal Lenten spiritual reflections I've been thinking about idolatry and its root causes. This week I've been thinking about shame. Guilt happens when one knowingly does something wrong, or willfully refuses to do what one knows is right. The cure for guilt occurs as one makes amends and repairs the damage done. Guilt is healed through reconciliation. Shame, on the other hand, is about self rejection. It is not about behaviors or attitudes, rather it is the conviction that I myself am wrong. It is the conviction that I am less than zero.

Shame is submission to a script written by others. It is an internal code that sets one up to serve obsessions or agendas of others. The coded script shapes ones identity as a less-than, as unworthy, as a loser. This burden of shame weighs one down in life, causes one to live removed from ecstasy, an unwillingness to be swept up into beauty. The shamed walk with head down not noticing the sunshine and bright blue sky. The shamed seek punishment and rejection as proof of their less-than character. Often this is through overtly negative behavior such as public drunkenness, aggressive violent behavior, foul speech, and filthy appearance. Sometimes the shamed become secretive and hidden with addictions to porn or self punishments that literally inflict physical pain that proves oneself as an object of loathing. Shame carries a heavy spiritual cost as one feels unworthy of God, of friendship, and of love, thus continually rejecting and sabotaging all experiences of affection and grace. Most of the homeless I have met are plagued with shame.

If we as a community want to end homelessness we will need to go beyond putting a roof over heads, and food in bellies. Those acts of charity are great steps towards freedom but they can take us only so far. We will need to go beyond political advocacy for more low income housing, and greater access to mental and physical health care. These are necessary and foundational but they cannot complete the mandate and desire of justice.

Homelessness is healed as we integrate within our acts of charity and political advocacy, the relational power of community. It is of utmost importance to cultivate a disposition of encouragement, an affection towards others, a willingness to accept the other, to listen and welcome the other, and, very important, to invite the other to simply be with you in various times, places and circumstances. It is, I think, friendship that heals shame thus opening the door to a community of no more homelessness, only hospitality for all.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

HUNGRY FOR CHANGE

Here's a typical scene. A church in a neighborhood opens it doors to serve free food to those who are hungry. They do so because they know, deep down in their interior spiritual DNA, that every person is sacred, a carrier of Christ, worthy of hospitality, worthy to be a recipient of grace. As the faith community, through the gift of food, enters into conversation with the hungry a friendship is formed. The hungry are transformed from being an object of pity into a person with whom one can share the bond of affection. The church discovers that despite the rough lifestyle, despite the often-vulgar mouth, despite the uncleanness, almost all who gather for food are grateful, cooperative and capable of basic human civility. This in itself is astonishing given how mean the streets can be for those who live on them, and how stressful life can be for those who need the meal. The Church in attempting to simply practice what it preaches discovers a deeper world of hope and possibility, they begin to see the vision of a world healed and transformed.

Here's another typical scene. The neighbors who live close to the church building are increasingly angry and resentful towards those who receive the food. The neighbors are becoming frightened because their own security has become at risk in our current economic upheavals; they are frightened that the affluent way of life that they are accustomed to is at an end. When they see the hungry in their neighborhoods, when they see long lines forming outside Food Banks, they are both seized with pity but also with fear, and most often the fear becomes hostility. In a city of limited resources, those at the bottom become a target of that resentment. They become a scapegoat upon which to pour out blame.

How do we build a bridge between the faith of the church and the fear of the community? How might the church welcome its neighbors to participate in the bond of affection that can grow from the seed of conversation? One way is for the local church to gather neighbors together to discern the root causes of hunger, and its sidekicks poverty and homelessness. The church can help organize conversations about what constitutes community, what values are to be promoted, what stereotypes are to be confronted. The church can offer an opportunity for the neighbors to meet the hungry, and vice versa. Through conversation the fears of the housed can become transformed into neighborliness towards those who are hungry. Through conversation the hungry can become transformed into trusted friends who add value to the neighborhood.

There will be, of course, some who say such thinking is foolish and na•ve. But I say such thinking is the faith of the church that becomes a bridge connecting hope to a future worth living.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

SHARE-ing the Mission

If you want to see human primate behavior at its worst I can think of no better place than at another in the never ending series of neighborhood explosions as soon as SHARE opens a shelter in yet another host church.
The SHARE neighborhood gatherings almost always descend into an outbreak of hysteria fueled by fear that the homeless will plunder our houses, burn down our garage, steal our children, abuse our spouses, and pee in our bushes. In Seattle one also witnesses the agonizing descent of progressive, eco-friendly, really nice neighbors morphing into belligerent, bullying, arrogant, selfish, "not in my backyard" hypocrites who haven't a clue as to how shallow their character truly has become.

But my beef isn't with them. Those nice neighbors, nice mostly because they are relatively secure, are trapped like slaves in Pharaoh's empire by a political process that caters to the appetites of the massively wealthy who care little at all about the common good. It is a great sadness that the middle class identifies with the agenda of the obscene rather than focusing on housing for all, living wages, and limits to wealth. It was the wealthy who destroyed low income housing in this City, and it is the wealthy who set the political agenda that creates homelessness.

But my beef isn't with the wealthy. After all they are only being true to their nature as exploiters. They only care about profit, their own benefits. My beef is actually with SHARE, an organization that evidently has only one tool in its box, and is seemingly incapable of adapting and evolving with the changing of time, and circumstance.

For example, SHARE's routine is this: locate a host for shelter space, inform the neighborhood that it is moving in next week, call together a community gathering for neighbors to vent, march up a hapless, ill-trained motley crew of homeless targets that sit passively through a two-three hour mauling of whatever dignity they might have left, and then move the shelter in as the neighborhood temper tantrum dies down into resignation.

It works for SHARE but it damages the host and it brings an unnecessary provocation within the neighborhood. It seems to me it might be more fruitful for SHARE to first bring an education forum into the neighborhood, complete with a political organizing strategy to help the neighbors direct their anger at the place it belongs: the Mayor's office and City Council. But this would mean that SHARE, with limited resources, might have to first learn how to become an equal partner with other homeless advocates. They might have to learn to depend on allies to help them. That would mean that SHARE might have to grow up out of adolescence into adulthood as a movement of real change. It would mean that SHARE might have to, well, share the mission with others.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

TAMING THE WHIRLWIND OF LIFE

On Wednesday February 25th you might notice a bunch of folk walking around town with black ashes on their forehead. The ashes signal the start of the Christian spiritual season of Lent. The season of Lent is a time for deep personal introspection while taking a fearless moral inventory of one's life.

The season begins with the imposition of ashes upon the forehead of the Christian. The ashes are a reminder that we are, each of us, mortal, we are but dust, and to dust we return, except by the grace of God. Lent then moves through a forty-day period of purging. The Church remembers the forty days of wilderness temptation in the life of Jesus, which was, in turn, a remembering of the forty years of wilderness wandering of the newly freed imperial slaves as they moved toward a land of promise. During Lent, followers of Jesus focus on releasing negative habits, addictions, and dependencies. Christians are encouraged to give up pleasures, and privileges in an attempt to experience freedom from habit and need. The season of Lent becomes a time of faithful resistance to accommodating the American imperial way of life.

I'll spend these 40 days in a small group spiritual pilgrimage learning ways to release shame and anger, to face my anger and hopefully transform it. I will be part of a group that together will seek ways to forgive and to reconcile and to receive God's blessing of life. Along with the group experience, I'll spend isolated time journaling, praying, fasting, and simply soaking into silence. In this way I'll descend down the stairs into the basement of my life and start cleaning out the cobwebs, sweeping and sorting, opening up the windows to let resurrected spirit air back into my life. I hope to learn the secrets of taming the whirlwind that so often threatens to spin out of balance and control.

The Church rhythmically practices these disciplines as a pedagogy that teaches its participants to experience freedom, to pierce the vale that separates flesh from spirit. Lenten disciplines teach the participant to overcome the temptation to simply let life happen. Rather, the Lenten disciplines assist the Christian to challenge and change whatever addictions or habits or daily routines that prevent one from experiencing new growth and development. The Church, at its best, is all about evolving the spiritual consciousness of the believer from one merely focused on self survival, towards one focused on collective connectedness. These disciplines, in other words, grow Christians up into Christ, into a more mature expression of the image of God.

Every spiritual path is a pilgrimage getting us from here to there. Complete with smudge mark on my face, and speaking from the fragility of my own mortality, I lift up a voice of encouragement to you the reader saying simply, "don't waste your life, go deeper!"

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

DO THE HOMELESS ALWAYS NEED A HANDOUT?

I often hear the complaints of housed people toward the homeless. The refrain goes like this: "I live a responsible life, I sacrifice, I set priorities, and boundaries, I plan ahead, I take care of myself and my own, why can't they!" Such animosity turns the housed against the homeless, and indeed if the homeless are only takers who are always mooching a handout then I think such feelings are justified.

But I don't think the homeless always need a hand out. Rather, I think the homeless, like the housed, need friendship. It is through friendship that transformation occurs. It is through friendship that stereotypes are discarded, and real life begins. It is through friendship that the housed can meet the homeless as equal partners mutually created in the image of God.

This is at the heart of why I feel so strongly that every faith community should be housing somebody who is homeless. I think faith communities have the relational capacity, and most certainly they have the sacred summons, to move into transformational friendships that bring authentic hope, healing, and new possibility into the lives of both the housed and the homeless.

Anyone who hangs around homeless folk for any length of time knows that the problems they encounter, from the mundane like where to go the bathroom, where to keep warm, where to sleep, to the more complex, how to sustain and repair relationships, how to keep a job, how to remain healthy, any one of these daily trials can overwhelm not only the homeless but those who are their friends.

That's why it takes a community of friends. When homeless Joe is out on the streets he is merely a statistic and an object for charity. But when my friend Joe is out on the street then I don't sleep as well in my warm bed. When my friend Joe needs a helping hand, and I know I have limited resources, that's when I become politically active. When my friend Joe suffers so do I, and when my friend Joe triumphs I too am fulfilled. But just like in my marriage and in my parenting I need a community of support, so too with Joe. We are not created to be lone wolves. We are created to be part of each other, a mutual interdependence whose radiance glows brighter as we knit together tighter. Faith communities know this. They talk about it all the time. But the time for talk is long past. The only message worth hearing is the living example of application.

If you are a member of a faith community then start making noise, start agitating your leadership, help your community live its light, don't stop until your house of healing has at least one who is wounded living inside it. In other words, become worthy of your housing, become worthy of your blessings.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

A SILENCE IN HEAVEN

My mom is dying. She grew up in Chicago in a family of ten, abandoned by her father, emotionally brutalized by increasingly alcoholic older brothers. It shouldn't surprise that she married six times, and had four kids by the time she was 22. She never really had a chance to untwist the psychic garbage dumped into her own childhood. Financial poverty is hard enough but the real brutality is the gnarling of emotions, the retarding of one's capacity to build and sustain relationships, the dulling of imaginative creativity, the atrophy of confidence in one's own potential. Poverty is the poisoned water that some have no choice but to drink. Having consumed it the toxins pass through their bodies into the next generation.

My mom got lucky. She came of age in the days of strong unions so that even an uneducated, 16 year old new bride could get on at a factory and bring home a living wage. With financial stability came self esteem. With a sense of self she learned boundaries. With boundaries came a sense of dignity, significance and the promise of a future.

Despite the condemnation enforced upon my mom, through her birthplace in poverty, she nevertheless managed through hook and crook, through marriages and hard work, to escape the stranglehold of financial scarcity. But not without cost. Not without divorce, not without broken family, not without wounds and scars and lost potential. Even at her deathbed the toxins she consumed live on through her twisted, relationally dysfunctional, emotionally stunted children. The family will gather around still trying to figure out if it's safe to love and trust and care. The family will struggle to say good-bye while struggling further to say hello to sisters and brother. My mom was born with, in her words, "a hand full of nothing". But through her turbulent life she did manage an occasional ace-high straight. She did a better job with her kids than what had been done to her. I think there is something of the heroic in that.

My mom was neither sinner nor saint. She took a script that fated her for failure and rewrote it into a story of survival, and in small ways, transformation. She never fulfilled her potential but she did create some possibilities. I both inherit what she started, and am the continuation of her work. Her life has always posed for me the intimate question of what I will do to further rewrite the script and create possibility. Her impending death challenges me to rewrite in such a way that the poverty that afflicts becomes transformed into the healing that equips both myself and others to move toward a world without poverty, a commonwealth of abundant care and significance for all. Death teaches us to not settle for less. Life responds with a hunger for more.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

DO NOT BE AFRAID

Hard times are coming. Although we have not yet felt the full weight of the financial and political tsunami that is heading our way we can feel the wind that is picking up steam. Layoffs at Boeing and Microsoft are signs of the times. As are the closing down of retail stores, the increase in unemployment, and the ever present deeds of darkness promoted by the Powers who would have us build a city jail in a time of crisis.

Within the Bible there are two different notions of time. The Greek word chronos, from which we get chronology, is the ticking of the clock time. Moment follows moment inevitably leading to the preordained fate of death. No one escapes the grip of chronos. But side by side in the Biblical mythology is another Greek word, kairos. Kairos is God's time, unpredictable novelty, intrusion from the outside into the inside. Kairos is when the Artist who stands outside of the canvas reaches in to insert a new mark, a new touch of paint that entirely alters the meaning of the portrait.

Over and over within the Biblical story, Kairos intrudes into and alters the direction and meaning of chronos. In other words, our life of chronological randomness becomes transformed into resurrected purpose. A time of crisis is, through the eyes of faith, a time of opportunity, a time of possibility, a time that changes the script giving birth to a whole new world.

During this time of crisis it is important that we are sustained by hope. A crisis drains us of imagination and strength. A crisis tempts us to turn away from others as we focus only upon ourselves. A crisis causes us to forget that our destiny is greater than simply becoming worm food for maggots. Rather, our life is bound up within the lives of others in a far greater matrix of mutuality from which the future emerges as an always open possibility.

A liberal spirituality rejects the despair of predetermined fate. A liberal spirituality is all about enlarging imagination, developing creativity, expectant of novelty, and open to the gifts and presence of the other who is not the same as me. A liberal spirituality is a hopeful temperament that transcends the fear that crisis provokes. In hard times it is wise to be part of a network, a community that seeks the future even through the present time of whirlwind changes. We get there from here together.

Much that we have taken for granted will die away. The American way of life will die away. But the good news is that the dying of the old offers room for the new. That which was will not be, but that which will be arises from the roots of what was. It is a kairos moment. Let us seize it and turn the world toward the good.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

JESUS THE HOMELESS ONE IS KNOCKING

Every church in Seattle ought to be providing some form of housing for people in crisis. There is no good reason, and most certainly no reason of faith, that church buildings stand empty at night when over 2000 folks seek shelter.

Churches can do better than that. The public ought to demand it. After all, church buildings don't pay property taxes. Why? Because the State assumes that churches will help and assist people in crisis. Seattle has a housing crisis that the 2009 budget cannot fix. But churches have buildings to offer that can protect and care for those in crisis. One would think this would be a core value of those who gather weekly to celebrate the God of Jesus, himself homeless. One would think churches would be eager to shelter others in time of need.

I think the public has every right to apply pressure on churches to open their doors and buildings for the benefit of those in crisis. Indeed, it would be a blessing for the churches if the public did that very thing. One of the dynamics that has led to the near collapse of many moderate and liberal churches is that they have abandoned their primary calling to be useful towards the outside other in crisis. Too many churches live simply for themselves. Even the energetic, more conservative churches are guilty of this abandonment. They get themselves all worked up into spiritual ecstasy but forget that the visitation of the Spirit is for the concrete, specific benefit of the poor. In other words, worship without an outward expression of relationship with the poor, worship without binding the wounds of those outside your own community of faith, is hideous in the eyes of God, and most certainly hypocrisy in the eyes of the public. The tepidness of the Church in fulfilling its public responsibilities to care for those in crisis causes others to scorn the God proclaimed as love. The tepidness of the Church causes the public to lose faith, hope and heart.

Currently the Mayor refuses to sit down and talk strategy with the Church Council concerning the crisis of homelessness. But even if he did all it would amount to is verbal farting in the wind. I think the public should go right to the practitioner of faith, that is, the local clergy in the local neighborhood, right down the street. I think the public should insist that the church building be used to house at least one person who is homeless. Not merely house the person, but get to know the person housed, and to use the resources of the congregation to nurse the wounded back into health. If the public would help the churches find their way back to God, perhaps then the churches could again become useful for the public, and truly glorify the reputation and name of their God.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL PASTORS

Let me begin with the obvious. Through the sweat and sacrifice of those who went before us, and through the sustained faithfulness of those currently with us, most of us clergy preside over congregations housed inside buildings that sit mostly empty every night. Meanwhile, a couple thousand folk will seek out some form of roof over their head tonight. Some of these folk are permanently homeless, some are in a temporary crisis, some are currently housed in their cars, some are single, and some have children. But homelessness in Seattle is not simply a matter of those currently seeking shelter, it is also a story about overcrowded shelters, shelters so dangerous and dirty that we wouldn't let our pet rat sleep there, much less someone whom we might get to know as a friend.

As clergy I want to plead with you to confidently assert your congregation's responsibility to be our brother and sister's keeper. I want to encourage you to preach the themes of generosity, hospitality, compassion, and holy boldness week in, and week out until your congregation insists that the church become 24/7, and a house for others. I want to challenge you to make 2009 a year of freedom from mediocrity.

At Trinity in Ballard we have done that. Our story isn't much different than many. Nine years ago Trinity was a nice place, with nice people, an elderly small congregation that wanted to do good but was smothered by their fears. But then Tent City came knocking at our door and the elders realized that giving up a parking lot for six weeks so that a self organizing community of homeless could find safe space and protection from winter rains was a small something we could do.

Through conversation with our guests one thing led to another and today, Trinity has an indoor apartment for one homeless man, a shelter for twenty men and women, a soup kitchen serving local homeless and hungry, an increasing advocacy ministry on behalf of the poor, a resurrected understanding of God's promise of joy with justice, the beginnings of a prison ministry, and a complete renewal of the congregation. From 60 mostly elderly folk we now average over100 in worship, with 23 kids, 17 families, a bunch of 20 and 30 year olds, and great hope for our future in partnership with the God of the poor. Plus we pay our bills and have surplus, further proof of the old adage, "money follows mission".

Friends, here's my point. A church with closed doors is a manifestation of Hell on earth. A church of open doors rips open the heavens and is filled with courage, compassion and care. Do you want to fulfill your calling as a pastor, and renew your congregation's ministry? Then, by all means, open the door to a 24/7 church building. God will do all the rest.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE WORLD IS ABOUT TO TURN

Every new year brings with it possibilities of hope and promise. Every new year the world turns. How it will turn is largely up to the good work we choose to do, Or, conversely, neglect to do.

After eight miserable years of being bullied by our government, many are looking forward to the return of diplomacy in international relations, to civility in domestic politics, to respect for Constitutional law, to compassion in our economic policies. Many have enormous expectations that we are being given an opportunity to begin again as a nation. Indeed, the malfeasance of the Bush administration has clearly demonstrated that their values bring only death and destruction. Their cruelty and incompetence has given birth to a renewed desire to walk a different path, to live for a better hope. As we enter this new year many feel that a new world is really, truly, possible.

But, of course, realizing the possibilities takes hard work, and much courage. The Democrats, although far less fascist than the Republican Party, are still, nevertheless, lackeys that carry Wall Street's water. Although they do not deserve our trust we, nevertheless, must continue to work within to re-form the values of the Party. The bottom line reads that until the Democrats take up, with vigor, creativity and passion, the cause of worker unionization we are stuck with a Corporation party that simply uses us, then abuses us. Until the Democrats embody in their policies a commitment to earth care, all we really have is a facade of change.

Despite Obama's lofty rhetoric he will be under intense pressure to serve the same financial and military interests as the Bush administration. If, and that is a mighty big if, but if we are to rebuild our country it will be "we the people" who give backbone to the political parties to legislate the morality we seek for our nation.

We the people come in all shapes and sizes with many gifts, abilities and talents. Each of us doing our best in our own work for justice and reconciliation is the greatest New Year's resolution we can make. For me, doing my best work means continuing to love my wife faithfully, guiding my children respectfully, caring for my neighbor in need, and recognizing in the face of the other a friend not a foe. As a preacher my best work will be to continue to build authentic community, to warn against building empire, to promote care of the earth. It will mean continuing to do my own inner work so that my outer work for justice is truly revolutionary and therefore a birthplace of hope.

This new year we are being given an opportunity to turn the world. It is my hope that each of us doing good work will turn the world with wisdom, and turn it towards affection and care.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

THE HOLY FAMILY JOURNEY

When Joseph and Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem they did not journey alone. The journey from Galilee was made with family, and friends. It would simply be too dangerous to travel alone where, at any given bend in the road, one might encounter bandits who preyed upon travelers. Or, even worse, one might encounter soldiers in the employ of the occupying army of Rome. It was always best to travel in groups.

During this Christmas Eve week many of us will remember the Holy Family's journey. Like them we also live in dangerous times. There are still bandits who prey upon us. Too be sure there are still thugs and thieves in everyday life. But the bandits I most often think about wear nice looking suits, and well manicured faces. These bandits sit in Corporate suites, they hang out in insurance offices, they smile at us behind their desks in bank buildings, and quite often they pretend to actually represent us within government. These bandits deal in corruption, they are out to make a buck, they bend honesty into twisted distortions of self interest, and they continually take advantage of our trust. They make it difficult for us to remain calm, and to hope for better days ahead. There are also, then as now, the dangers of encountering the soldiers of Empire on the road we travel. Whether in TV, movies or computer games the spirituality of militarism is all pervasive throughout our society. The media hypes the glorification of battle, they feast on violence, they drool when blood is spilled. Holy families need to protect themselves from such bandits.

During this Christmas Eve week I want to lift up the benefit of traveling together on the spiritual roadways of life. I want to encourage you to think again about your life, your values, your goals, and your dreams. I would hope that what you desire is wrapped in the clothes of peace, reconciliation, justice, compassion, and a willingness to mix and match outfits with others. I want to encourage you to use this season to dare again to enter a community of faith. Within Seattle there are many faith communities that embrace liberal family values. There are many faith communities that teach us how to spot the bandits, and escape from their grasp. There are many faith communities that wrap us within the folds of communal safety.

During this season which opens us to a lifestyle of wonder, generosity and gratitude, I simply want to encourage all of us to come out of our isolation and dare to believe that there are, really and truly communities of faith still out there and who want nothing from us except friendship. With the Holy Family let us pilgrimage forth together towards a world without bandits, towards a world that can still amaze us with splendor.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org

TIME FOR LIGHT

What everyone knows has now been confirmed. Our country is in an official economic recession. The Bush administration, dark souls that they are, have almost completed their work. Everything they have touched has broken. On one level they have evidenced what will one day become known as legendary incompetence. But mostly their destructive power has been the logical consequence of their greed, the drunkenness of arrogance, the cruelty of an insatiable appetite for dominance, spiritually known as idolatry. The result is an emotionally, relationally, intellectually and economically bankrupt nation.

Our immediate future is not bright. The coming year will be one of great hardship. Many will lose their job, their health care, and their housing. Many will suffer the loss of their honor, their self respect, and the intimate relationships that give one hope. As a Pastor I know that I will spend more of my time being present with my congregation, encouraging them, and reminding them that if we hang together we'll get through the storm. If we share our resources, if we open our homes, if we deepen our friendship with each other, then our community, our little slice of Seattle will get through the storm.

We know that the poor will bear the greatest burden. Those with low-end jobs will lose them. Those without jobs, or who work only occasionally will cease to work at all. Given the contraction of our economy, and given the dull heart of this Mayor, (combined with a disturbing loss of courage and vision by our City Council), what we also know is that human beings will not be the first priority of government. More Tent Cities will be erected, and more civil disturbance will be unleashed. It is not for nothing that a new city jail is pushing itself up the economic priority list.

The immediate future looks to be a frightening storm that will test our character as a people. Thankfully we will have new federal leadership to help our nation through its time of crisis. Hopefully the new administration will actually love our people, and affirm our core values embodied in the words of our Constitution, and Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, it will still take time to bring order out of Bush's chaos, to bring life from the Bush administration's culture of death.

In the meantime my encouragement, particularly to the poor, and to those on the margins of society, is to invest your time and presence in a faith community of liberal values. Capitalism hangs us out to dry all alone. A faith community weaves us into a new society of solidarity, a reminder that we are each one of us an asset, and that together we become the light that banishes the darkness. We have survived eight dark years, now is the time to let our light once again shine, and shine brightly.

Rev. Rich Lang is Pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, and a member of the Real Change Organizing Project. He can be contacted through www.tumseattle.org