By Alan Bean

Do not worry about you life.”  Matthew and Luke received this teaching from the same source, which explains why the two versions are almost identical.  In both Gospels, the teaching begins “therefore” which means that what follows is dependent on what came before.  The teaching that we shouldn’t worry about our lives is predicated on the assumption that we have chosen God over wealth.

Earlier translations referred to “mammon” instead of “wealth,” partly because the original Greek uses  a variation of the word “mamona”, but also because “you cannot serve God and mammon” is slightly less jarring than, “you cannot serve God and wealth.”

If we serve God instead of financial security we will be free from anxiety. 

That’s what Jesus says, but can we believe it?  Financial security is the chief source of our anxiety?  Access to money allows us to put food on the table, drive shiny new cars, live in nice homes, send our kids to good schools and take a relaxing vacation now and then.  If we have enough money, our worries disappear. 

Few of us have enough money to test this theory; that’s why we’re so worried.

Jesus says we shouldn’t worry about where the next meal will come from or about whether we will have anything to wear.  Do ravens and roses worry about such things?  Of course not! Then why should we?

Because we’re not ravens and we’re not roses (I know the text refers to lilies, but tomorrow is Valentines Day, so I’m going with roses).  We must sow, we must reap, we must gather into barns.  These activities provide us with food, shelter and self-respect.  Our culture looks down on people who live like ravens and roses; they are the lazy, unmotivated, louts the people on talk-radio are always complaining about.  Who wants to lumped in with the losers?

Jesus isn’t talking about that kind of loser; he has a different kind of loser in mind.  Jesus is looking for men and women who are ready to lose the trappings of temporal security for the blessed insecurity of God’s kingdom. 

The teaching about ravens and roses was addressed to disciples who had left everything to follow Jesus.  From 0ne day to the next, these people had no idea where the essentials of life would come from.  They were utterly reliant on God. 

Disciples need food, drink, clothes and shelter just like everybody else; but disciples don’t waste time worrying about these things.  Disciples trust the God from whom all blessings flow.

We want to be disciples; but we also want the stuff that protects us from a harsh and unforgiving world.  We want to be disciples; but we also want to be respected as hardworking, conscientious workers who provide for our families. 

We want to seek the kingdom, but as a second-order priority.  First, we’ll take care of our personal security; then we’ll follow Jesus.  Reality first–religion second, that’s our motto. 

Not only do we think this way; we can’t imagine thinking otherwise.  Meaningful work and family life compete for first and second place in our lives; religion and community service run a distant third and fourth.  In our world, that’s what a good life looks like.  Bad people give little thought to a meaningful career or sustaining family life, to say nothing of church attendance, voting or volunteer work.  Compared to the baddies; we’re doing great.

But Jesus doesn’t compare us to the baddies; he compares us to the ravens that never sow nor reap nor gather into barns; he compares us to the roses that “neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you,” Jesus says, ”even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”   

We can’t follow Jesus until we abandon conventional ideas about the good life.  The first step is to admit that our moral thinking is thoroughly conventional.  The second step is to drift, gradually yet resolutely, toward the ravens and the roses. 

That’s what it means to seek the kingdom and the righteousness of God.

By Dr. Charles Kiker

For I was hungry, and you fed me. Jesus     

A woman in the church I attend, who works for the Tulia Independent School District, gave a presentation at our Wednesday fellowship dinner this week regarding a venture she is involved in: a privately funded program to send weekend snack packs home with kids who were showing up on Monday mornings with symptoms of hunger.

The school provides breakfasts and lunches, but the kids are not in school Saturday and Sunday. She told us that 77% of the almost 1100 students in school in the Tulia Independent School District qualify for free or reduced cost meals. Tulia is the county seat and well over half of Swisher residents are served by the Tulia school district.

The unemployment rate as of November, 2011 in Swisher County is only 6%. That’s not a typo. The unemployment rate in Swisher County as of November, 2011 is only 6%, yet 77% of the students in TISD are eligible for free or reduced cost lunches, based on their families income.

I do not know the correlation between SNAP eligibility and eligibility for free or reduced cost school lunches, but I think it’s safe to assume there is some correlation, since both are family income based.

A paycheck does not necessarily eliminate the need for food assistance. I am not disparaging a paycheck. I am for as near as we can get to full employment. But people on minimum wage employment still need food assistance. At least in Swisher County.

By the way, the weekend snack packs program is not seeking to serve the more than 800 kids who qualify for reduced cost or free lunch, but only those who manifest hunger when they come to school on Monday morning. They are currently sending home weekend food for 75 kids. And since the snack pack program has been instituted, there has been a verifiable reduction in school nurse visits on Monday mornings

May God bless these angels of mercy in their efforts and in their compassion.

A meditation by Nancy Bean

Such simple and familiar words.
Mild in our mouths and easy to our ears.
And yet what path shall we have chosen to be able to pray these words in earnest?
And where shall we find the junction of such a path along the one we travel?

Give us:
We are the ones with salaries and pensions rather than the one who begs for bread.
We need not ask for handouts. What step of faith is ours to take?

This day:
We have arranged our lives for security; we have paid our dues in advance. We need not live day to day. What adventure lies before us?

Our daily bread:
We have built storage barns and bonds. We have grown obese with excess. What sacrifice awaits?

“Give us this day our daily bread” are words given to those who have dropped their nets, sold their possessions, emptied their bank accounts, abandoned their reputations, left their families to follow Jesus.

To pray these words in earnest means that we are choosing paths of risk for the building of God’s Kingdom. To choose paths of risk means that we will have no recourse but to pray these words.

By Charles Kiker

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when you are through, you have made him twofold more a child of hell than yourselves.” Jesus

Proselytizing is dangerous, both to the proselytizer and the one proselyted. It is one of the many activities/attitudes for which Jesus berated the scribes and Pharisees in the 23^rd chapter of Matthew’s gospel.

The scribes and Pharisees as pictured in Matthew were obsessed with technicalities which seem to us as nitpicking. They were obsessed with purity as prescribed by Torah and Mishnah, and devised hundreds of rules as a hedge around the law, lest they inadvertently stray and become unclean.

In a sense they must have “loved” their unclean neighbors, for they wanted to clean them up. And Jesus says that when they get them cleaned up they are twice as much like the scribes and Pharisees as the scribes and Pharisees are. And Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees children of hell?

What is the dark side of proselytism to lead Jesus to such a stern conclusion? Is it the obsessive opinion of the proselytizers that “I am right and you are wrong” thus transforming the whole world into us and them, the good guys and the bad guys?

Often a new convert/proselyte has a twofold misdirected zeal, seeing everyone who is different as in need of conversion, and thus setting out with twofold zeal to remake his neighbors into his own new image.

I have had personal experience with this, having been “proselyted” from one Christian denomination to another. Paradoxically, I became a legalist in my zeal for  grace. It took me several years to get beyond that. (Even as I write, I am in danger of becoming judgmental of proselytizers.)

How does this relate to evangelism, with proclaiming the Good News of the Coming Kingdom? We best be sure we are proclaiming good news, freedom from oppression, freedom to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Maybe Jesus came to save us from ourselves, to save us to live among our neighbors as themselves without the need to remake them into our own image?

Now what doth the Lord require of  thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

By Mark Osler

Should we consider a candidate’s religion when we vote? For many of us, the instinctive answer is “of course not!” To do so seems somehow contrary to the idea of separation of church and state, or prejudiced, or something like that. Examined more closely, though, that instinctive reaction may not be the best answer. Faith influences action, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise when we go to the polls.

The American repulsion to considering faith when voting is in large part rooted in a famous speech given by John F. Kennedy when he was running for President in 1960. Addressing a convention of Baptist ministers in Houston, he defended himself from the accusation that his Catholic faith would lead him to “take orders from the Pope.” There is no doubt that what Kennedy was addressing was prejudice against Catholics. It was a masterful speech, of the sort that makes one wistful for that time. However, it is important to recognize what Kennedy did and did not say.

What he did say, forcefully, was that he would not take orders from the Church, and that he would make his decisions “in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”

What he did not say, even in referring to his religious views as “his own private affair,” was that those personal religious views would have no influence on his conduct in office. In other words, President Kennedy artfully established that outside forces would not force his hand, while reserving the ability to have his own personal faith remain a guide to principled action.

Sadly, this fine distinction between the unallowable (a church dictating policy) and the inevitable (personal faith influencing decision-making) has been lost, in part because of Kennedy’s clumsy and inaccurate description of the separation between church and state as “absolute.” Americans now expect a President who lives in two spheres: A private life, where religion is allowed, and a professional life where faith can have no influence.

The problem with this two-spheres construct is that it lacks integrity, if we understand integrity to be the integration of belief and action. What kind of faith is it that has no influence on the most important decisions we make? Why would we accept as a leader someone who divorces her deepest principles from her actions?

In the current election, all of the Presidential candidates (in either party) are Christians who seem to take their faith seriously, which makes the question posed here an important one. Would Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith affect the way he conducts himself in office? I certainly hope it would, because I believe that faith (for those who have chosen to follow a faith) should be an animating principle that does direct action, not something that a leader drops at the doorway as he enters the oval office. It seems that Romney agrees, too: In a speech at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in December, 2007, Governor Romney echoed the distinction (between external influence and personal faith) that Kennedy implied. While recognizing that “no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions,” Romney went on to explain that “I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers — I will be true to them and to my beliefs.”

Imagine this: There is a grave national crisis, perhaps an escalating conflict with another nation. The President must make a tough choice on how to respond. As a Christian, he reflects on this decision in prayer. If we tell ourselves that the experience of prayer, that deep and solemn reflection, really has no influence on the decision he then makes, we are fooling ourselves. The connection between faith and action, even in the absence of external pressure from a church, not only is real but should be real. We are better off knowing a candidate’s personal faith and the effect it will have than continuing to pretend that there is no connection between faith and action. We need to press for honest answers from our politicians as to how their faith influences their work.

In a January 8 op-ed in The Washington Post, Baylor University President Ken Starr correctly observed that “the litmus for our elected leaders must not be the church they attend but the Constitution they defend.” He is right, but that is not the end of the story. We should not limit the path to leadership based on the church someone attends (or doesn’t), but on the personal beliefs they hold and how those beliefs influence action. If Rick Santorum’s personal faith somehow dictates that the legal marriages of gay men and lesbians should be annulled by the government… yes, I am going to consider that when I vote against him, regardless of his church membership.

To people of faith, religious belief profoundly influences our professional lives. If it does not, it is only a shadowy outline of what faith should be. As voters, we should not pretend otherwise, and with overtly Christian candidates we should support those who reflect prayerfully, live with integrity, and whose faith guides them to positions we support.

Professor Osler’s column originally appeared in the HuffPost

By Alan Bean

This talk was originally delivered as an address at an MLK program at the Department of Veterans Affairs Dallas Campus on January 12, 2012

I was thrilled to be asked to speak to you today.  For one thing, it gave me a chance to reflect on what Martin Luther King’s understanding of justice can teach us about leadership in the twenty-first century.  There is a big picture of King in my office.  “The ultimate measure of a man,” the caption reads, “is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

As we will see, Dr. King knew whereof he spoke.

When I arrived at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the summer of 1975, I entered a new world.  There were more Baptists in a single Dallas church than in all of Western Canada.  I had come south because my denomination was too small to support a seminary.  There were 3,000 men and women enrolled at Southern, and there were five other Southern Baptist seminaries stretched across the southern half of America. 

I can still remember waking up my first morning in the dorm.  “Gol-ly!” a preacher boy down the hall was bellowing.  He sounded exactly like Gomer Pyle.  I had never reckoned with the possibility that real people sounded like Gomer Pyle. 

“I want to preach so bad I can taste it,” a young seminarian told me later that day.  Then, he asked what struck me as an odd question: “Who’s your favorite preacher?”  I had been asked about my favorite football team or my favorite rock group; no one had ever inquired about my favorite preacher. 

I had never given the matter a moment’s thought, but when I did, the answer was readily apparent.  “Martin Luther King,” I said.

The young seminarian gave me a quizzical look.  “King?” he asked.  “Isn’t he supposed to be a communist or something?”

He didn’t say it in a mean way.  I realized that no one in his life experience had ever made a positive reference to the great civil rights leader in this man’s presence.  King was the man who wanted to destroy “our way of life”.  He wasn’t one of us, so he must be one of them.  That made him a communist or something worse.  And you couldn’t be a preacher and a communist at the same time, could you?

I had grown up in a very different world.  My first awareness of Jim Crow segregation came in the third grade.  A letter arrived from a third grade class in rural Mississippi.  My family was moving in Yellowknife, a little mining town on Great Slave Lake, fourteen hundred miles of the Montana border.  The letter assumed that we were Eskimos.  “This is a picture of one of the houses we live in,” the letter said, “Could you send us a picture of one of the igloos you live in?  This is a picture of one of the cars we drive around in; could you send us a picture of a dog team?”

My negative impression of white southerners deepened when two of my teachers swung through the southern states while on vacation.  They had been told that black customers could purchase food from the restaurant kitchen but were not allowed to eat with the white patrons.  When the Canadian tourists objected they were asked if they had ever eaten with Negroes, the assumption being that no self-respecting white person should be subjected to such an indignity.

The teachers informed us that Canadians aren’t like that.  Yellowknife had just hired a black man as the town’s new dentist, a sure sign of right thinking. 

Later that same year, a couple from Yellowknife’s Calvary Baptist Church participated in a civil rights march and returned to share their amazing story with an admiring congregation.  I grew up thinking of myself as a “good” white person, easily distinguished from those bad white people south of the Mason Dixon line. 

I can’t remember where I was when Martin Luther King was assassinated.  I recall being deeply moved by the song “Abraham, Martin and John” released in the wake of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.  The closing lines were particularly effecting: “Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?  Can you tell me where he’s gone?  Think I saw him walking up over the hill, with Abraham and Martin and John.”

And I remember the television documentaries released after King’s murder in Memphis.  The focal point was always his iconic “I have a dream” speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963.  Gradually, a place was being made for Martin King in the great American pantheon of fallen heroes. 

But, for me, Martin Luther King was a preacher.  Not just any kind of preacher.  He was the kind of preacher I wanted to listen to every Sunday morning.  He was the preacher that set the standard for all the polite, reserved, cautious preachers I encountered in real life.  That’s why I answered my preacher friends’ question the way I did.

Fast forward to 1980, a few years before President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the first Martin Luther King Day.  I had graduated from seminary a couple of years earlier and was waiting for my wife, Nancy to graduate.  The seminary administration kept hinting that Nancy should transfer to the Christian Education program since, they said, “Our churches don’t ordain women preachers,” but Nancy politely refused.  As I waited for my renegade wife to graduate, I took a job delivering coffins and caskets to funeral directors in little towns throughout Indiana and Kentucky. 

One day, I rented an audio tape featuring Dr. King’s sermons from the seminary library so I would have something to listen to as I made my deliveries.  Forty miles from Louisville I slipped in the tape.  I can’t remember what King was saying, but the sermon had been recorded in Birmingham when King was being pressured to back down.  He wasn’t having any of that nor was his audience.  The room was electric with fear, emotion and hope.

My chest began to heave.  Tears were coursing down my cheeks.  I am not an emotional person, but I was so completely overcome with emotion that I was forced to pull to the side of the interstate.  Half of me was embarrassed by the loss of self-control; the other half was in awe of something (what I wasn’t sure) bigger and better than myself.  The experience was deeply spiritual . . . in the best sense of that much-abused word.  My spirit was stretched to the breaking point.  Something big, bold and beautiful welled up within me.  But it wasn’t just big, bold and beautiful; it was also terrifying.

What does Dr. King teach us about justice and leadership?  In 1957, shortly after a successful bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama, the pastor and civil rights leader talked about the principles that guided his work.  A decade of civil rights leadership lay ahead of him, but he never wavered from his guiding principles.  Here’s the first thing he had to say:

From the very beginning there was a philosophy undergirding the Montgomery boycott,” King said, “the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. There was always the problem of getting this method over because it didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning. We had to use our mass meetings to explain nonviolence to a community of people who had never heard of the philosophy and in many instances were not sympathetic with it. We had meetings twice a week on Mondays and on Thursdays, and we had an institute on nonviolence and social change. We had to make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist.

Non-violent resistance is the only road to justice.  Let me make a bold statement . . . see if you agree. The civil rights movement succeeded wherever the principle of non-violent resistance was conscientiously employed and failed whenever this principle was rejected. 

Non-violent resistance is a thundering NO grounded in love.  The emotional avalanche that drove me to the shoulder of a Kentucky highway was a manifestation of the same power principle that drove Jim Crow to his knees.

Non-violent non-resistance was counter-intuitive for most people in 1957, and it remains so today.  It had to be taught back then, and if we do not teach it today the spirituality of the civil rights era will not and cannot return. 

After introducing the foundational principle of non-violent resistance, King turned to the second justice principle leaders must understand.  No one wants to be maladjusted in the sense of being neurotic or emotionally unstable, King acknowledged:

 But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted.  I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, “Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, “All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

We all like to fit in, don’t we?  What could be more natural?  But only maladjusted leaders can take us to a new and better place.  True leaders are gripped by a holy discontent.  We’re willing to work for justice in society and in the workplace so long as it doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable.  News flash: the pursuit of justice ALWAYS makes us feel uncomfortable.  A few years ago, Paul Simon, a sixties folk singer who just slipped into his seventies, worked these words into a song:

You cannot walk with the holy,
If you’re just a halfway decent man.
I don’t pretend that I’m a mastermind
With a genius marketing plan.
I’m trying to tap into some wisdom,
Even a little drop will do.
I want to rid my heart of envy
And cleanse my soul of rage
Before I’m through.

Every true leader feels that way.  Getting by is never good enough.  There must be a passion for something better, something higher, something beautiful before real justice can blossom among us.  To avoid conflict at all costs is to become complicit in evil.  Evil doesn’t just wrap itself around isolated individuals, evil invades and permeates social systems. That is why every leader working for justice must experience the same holy discontent, the same creative maladjustment that drove Dr. King.

Martin Luther King wasn’t divine and he wasn’t an angel; he was a flawed human being just like you and me.  His life was transformative because he refused to adapt or adjust himself to the injustice he encountered in the world.    

Finally, King cut to the heart of the matter.

The nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community.

We are often told that to focus on a single leader to the exclusion of all the great men and women who sacrificed for justice in the civil rights era is an unfair distortion of reality.  The Great Man theory of social change is deeply flawed; like they say, it takes a village.  But in one important respect, Dr. King did stand out from his peers: he refused to think, feel or react like an enemy. 

The natural human tendency is to segregate the world into two camps: those I can trust, and those I can’t.  One groups we call friends; the other group is the opposition and we treat them accordingly.  Our adversarial political system easily devolves into a zero sum poker game in which you must lose if I am to win.  Rather than sifting through the various political philosophies for good ideas, we embrace one side of the argument and work for the destruction of our ideological rivals.

This is a natural, intensely human tendency, but it is the death knell of true justice.  Dr. King could be excused for creating an enemies list.  The FBI bugged his phone and worked tirelessly to undermine his integrity; the state of Alabama launched a non-stop campaign to convict him on bogus tax evasion charges; law enforcement failed to protect his movement and usually sided with the Jim Crow establishment.  His house was firebombed and death threats were a constant fact of life.  Things weren’t much better closer to home.  Well established black organizations like the NAACP and the National Baptist Convention were threatened by the non-violent resistance movement.  Impatient leaders in his movement resented King’s stature, referring to him dismissively as “Do Lawd”.  When King arrived in Jackson for the funeral of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, local black leaders refused to let him address the congregation.

Yet King consistently refused to become anyone’s enemy.  He welcomed the involvement of Jewish rabbis and white Catholic and Protestant pastors and was more than happy to work with people of no faith so long as they were committed to the principle of non-violent resistance.  He stayed in contact with representatives of the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement.

He didn’t do these things because he was a nice guy; his vision of the common good (he called it The Beloved Community) gave him no alternative.  Justice can never be about just-us.  Only a vision that works for everyone works for anyone.  And that remains true even when the people in your workplace are uncooperative, ungrateful, obstinate and downright dismissive or your good intentions.  We must confront evil; but if we ever stop reaching out to the opposition we become complicit in evil ourselves.

And that’s what was wrong with the smug “thank God we’re not like those nasty white folks down South” righteousness in which I was raised.  We Canadians were trying to make ourselves look good at the expense of people we neither knew nor loved.  We were making southern whites look bad so we could look good.  We were concerned about just-us, not justice.

Dr. King was all about the common good; a just society that works for everybody.  That, I suggest, is his greatest legacy.  A song written by some young white boys who call themselves the Old Crow Medicine Show comes to mind when I think of brother King.  I leave you with these simple words:

All we are is a picture in a mirror
Fancy shoes to grace our feet
All there is is a slow road to freedom
Heaven above and the devil beneath

We’re all in this thing together
Walkin’ the line between faith and fear
This life don’t last forever
When you cry I taste the salt in your tears

 ”I had always thought about that story from the position of Jesus,” said Mark Osler. “I realized that I’m not Jesus. I’m one of the people with a rock in my hand.” Mark Osler

Two law professors, Mark Osler (University of St. Thomas Law School) and Jeanne Bishop (Norwestern University School of Law) will soon be criss-crossing the nation putting Jesus on trial.  Osler, a former Assistant US Attorney, will play the role of prosecutor; Bishop, a working defense attorney, will represent the Savior.

The brief description below provides a little background to the Trial of Christ.  If you think you would like to attend one of the scheduled events, a complete itinerary appears at the bottom of the post.  (I am hoping to attend the Maundy Thursday presentation in Oklahoma City.) 

The event is an enactment of the sentencing of Christ, in which Osler will play the prosecutor arguing that Jesus should be killed and Bishop will play the defense attorney. Volunteers will play the role of judge and witnesses. During the Lent season, Osler and Bishop are also presenting the trial at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Richmond, Va. There the presentation has been expanded into a three part series that includes other phases of the trial of Jesus and discussion. Osler noted the first event in Virginia was powerful, and he suspects that the event at the School of Law will cause others to look differently at the crucifixion and its meaning. “I had always thought about that story from the position of Jesus,” said Mark Osler. “I realized that I’m not Jesus. I’m one of the people with a rock in my hand.”

Osler is the author of Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment, and has worked on sentencing issues for most of his career. He comes with the courtroom experience of a former federal prosecutor.

Bishop is a board member of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights. She is the sister of Nancy Bishop Langer, who was shot to death along with her husband and their unborn child in 1990. This season marks the twentieth anniversary of those deaths, and Bishop brings that perspective with her along with her many years as a public defender in the State of Illinois. Bishop recently attended the signing of the bill stopping capital punishment in Illinois and was presented with the pen used to sign that legislation by the governor.

Both Osler and Bishop hope that, by presenting a familiar story in a new format, attendees will reconsider and reexamine the take-away messages. “It’s important sometimes to challenge ourselves in a different way, and that’s what we’re trying to do here,” said Osler, who noted that too often Christians view the death penalty in isolation from their faith. “By mashing [political issues and our faith] together, we’re hopefully forcing people to confront those two things together.”

“I’ve been reading the Gospel really closely in preparing for this, and I’m noticing things I’ve never noticed before,” said Bishop. “I think the people who come to this will experience a similar blessing. If we call ourselves Christians, then what we’re saying … is that we’re followers of Jesus Christ, and if we’re going to be that, we need to look at what he said and what he did and the way that he lived and died.”

Upcoming Dates and Locations:

• January 15—Trial of Christ, Fourth Presbyterian, Chicago, 12:30 pm.
• February 7—Trial of Christ, Episcopal Divinity School/Harvard, 7 pm.
• February 24—Osler/Bishop Death Penalty presentation, Belmont University, Nashville
• February 25—Osler/Bishop presentation to Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty conference, Nashville
• February 26—Osler/Bishop presentation at St. Henry’s Catholic Church, Nashville
• February 27—Trial of Christ, Carson-Newman College, Jeffersonville, TN
• March 18—Trial of Christ, St. Henry’s Catholic Church, Nashville
• April 5 (Maundy Thursday)—Trial of Christ, Crossings Community Church, Oklahoma City, OK

Bill Leonard was my church history professor when I arrived at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky in 1975.  He was a rookie professor at the time, fresh from grad school at Boston University. In 1989, Leonard became my faculty adviser when I returned to the seminary for doctoral work.  He was one of the most gifted lecturers I have ever witnessed.  

In 1991, Leonard (like everyone else in the church history department) was driven into academic exile when a resurgent fundamentalist movement in Southern Baptist life took control of the seminary.   That may be why Bill feels the plight of the alien–he’s been there . . . well, almost.

Law professor, Mark Osler, writes about Jesus Christ, capital defendant.  In this reflection, which was published by the Associated Baptist Press a few days before Christmas, Bill Leonard introduces us to Jesus Christ, illegal alien.  The Bible doesn’t speak with one voice when addressing the issue of the alien in our midst; we encounter more of a debate than a consistent teaching.  On the whole, Leonard suggests, the message tilts toward compassion–especially when Jesus himself joins the conversation.

Jesus Christ, Illegal Alien

Bill Leonard

As Advent turns to Christmas and the reality of a New Year looms, we revisit that often overlooked post-nativity saga portrayed by innumerable artists as “the flight to Egypt.” Matthew 2:12-14 says that after the Magi left town, Joseph dreamed of an angel who tells him: “‘Get up, take the child and his mother and escape with them to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’ So Joseph got up, took mother and child by night, and sought refuge with them in Egypt.”

As the Holy Family crossed the border into Egypt, “by night,” did they become first century undocumented immigrants? Illegal aliens? Political refugees? Asylum seekers?

Whatever else, Joseph, Mary and the babe were clearly “strangers in the land,” an ancient designation that elicited multiple responses from the people of the Bible.

In biblical text and culture the stranger is: 1) An outsider, not of the tribe; 2) An other, not like “us”; 3) A sojourner, merely passing through; 4) An alien, from some other place; 5) An enemy, who threatens culture, religion, and security; 6) An unexpected presence, sometimes divine, sometimes demonic; 7) A “sign of the Kingdom,” revealing God’s activity with the people on the margins.

The Bible offers various, sometimes contradictory, ways for dealing with the stranger that include exclusion, fear, hospitality, rejection and genocide, as well as rules for engagement, negotiation of boundaries, evolving relationships and continuing debate.

Regulations for responding to strangers appear quickly in the biblical text: “This is the stature for the Passover: No foreigner may partake of it.” (Exodus 12:43) “And you must not procure any such [sacrificial] creature from a foreigner and present it as food for your God. Their deformity is inherent in them, a permanent defect…” (Leviticus 22:25).

The category of “resident alien” describes a non-citizen who lingers in the land and is not simply passing through. In the Hebrew bible such persons often receive a special response from the “reputable” community in such rules as: “do not oppress the alien, for you know how it feels to be an alien; you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9) “These are the words of the Lord, deal justly and fairly, rescue the victim from his oppressor, do not ill-treat or use violence towards the alien, the fatherless and the widow” (Jeremiah 22:3).

At other times the stranger/other is an enemy to be confronted: “Thus Joshua took the whole land, the hill-country, all the Negeb, and the land of Goshen…. It was the Lord’s purpose that they should offer stubborn resistance to the Israelites, and thus be annihilated and utterly destroyed” (Joshua 11: 16, 20).

Sometimes the stranger is a messenger of the divine, as in Genesis 18 when “three strangers” show up at Abraham’s camp and one of them predicts that Sarah, his spouse, will have a child within the next year. Sarah laughs in his face, realistically, “because I am out of my time and my husband is old.” Turns out that the stranger is actually “the Lord” who asserts that a pregnancy will indeed occur. Sarah gets serious and denies laughing, but the stranger/Lord insists, “O yes, you did.” Sure enough, a child is born and they name him, what else, Isaac (Laughter), and Sarah says: “Everyone who hears this story will laugh with me.”

Strangers can be prophetic and ironic all at once. In fact, Hebrews 13:2 advises: “Do not neglect to show hospitality, by doing this some have entertained angels unawares.”

Jesus confronts the problem of the stranger in his famous sermon in the Nazareth synagogue: “In Elisha’s time,” he says, “there were many lepers in Israel, and not one of them was healed, but only Naaman, the Syrian. “These words roused the whole congregation to fury” (Luke 4:27-28).

Yet on another occasion, he rebukes the Gentile woman, “a Phoenician of Syria by nationality,” who asks him to heal her daughter. “It is not good to give the children’s bread and give it to dogs,” he declares, but she answers back: “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” Jesus melts under the stranger’s stubborn faith and the child is healed (Mark 7:26-27).

Might these biblical clues inform contemporary dilemmas caused by the strangers in our midst? All societies have “resident aliens” and “others” whose presence raise questions about culture, tribe, identity and security. For members of the Body of Christ, radical love demands radical response, evident in Jesus’ profound one-liner? “I was a stranger, and you took me in” (Matthew 25:35).

On the eve of a New Year, could any of these “hard sayings” inform our own struggles with the stranger in our midst? Who knows? Surely they are worth considering on the “flight to Egypt” with Jesus, then and now.

Bill Leonard is James and Marilyn Dunn Professor of Church History and Baptist Studies at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University.

This ground-breaking op-ed by Mark Osler and Randy Potts appeared in the Christmas Eve edition of the Dallas Morning News.  Historically, opinion leaders in the Christian conservative and social progressive camps have viewed one another as ideological opposites and, regrettably, frequently bolster their fundraising efforts by attacking the other side of the culture war stand-off.  Having worked with folks from both sides on both sides, Osler and Potts see more similarities than differences.

Law professor, Mark Osler, will be familiar to our readers.  Randy Roberts Potts, a former social worker and middle school English teacher, is a freelance writer who wrote about his coming out experience as the grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts in the recent book, It Gets Better.

There’s hope for reconciliation between religious right, progressives

Some people see the occupy Wall Street and tea party movements as a manifestation of that divide, but such an analysis (though true in part) obscures the fact that that both sides of the culture wars now feel ignored by a power structure that most values the rich and large institutions. Within this truth lies an opportunity for reconciliation between two groups that in many ways are natural allies. Like estranged relatives who find themselves welcome again at Christmas dinner, we need to drop our guard and open our hearts.

Why should we have hope that such reconciliation is possible?

First, that sense of alienation is real and justified. Even as they have rejected one another, progressives and religious conservatives have been rejected by a political structure that responds to big money, not the moral conviction both groups stand upon. It is no wonder that so many have turned to the tea party and occupy Wall Street in their efforts to be heard.

Second, changes in the media make productive discourse easier. Media has become decentralized, and this has brought to a close the era of powerful televangelists and others who have dominated these conversations. With 350 channels, a figure like Oral Roberts becomes a part of the crowd.

Third, in the midst of war and economic hardship, our nation is crying out for what churches offer at their best. Progressives tend to ignore the fact that conservative Christians are very often the ones who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and even visit those in prison. They welcome soldiers back from war, they create community in isolated places, and they offer hope to those who suffer from our nation’s economic problems. If we, as social progressives, want to do some of those same things (as we should) we must engage with those already on the ground.

Finally, there is a generational change going on in conservative Christianity that is seeing the rise of new leaders who are looking to connect in new ways to the broader society. We must seek them out, as well. These new leaders are seeking ways to make their faith relevant in modern society, and we can help them do that.

In working on the death penalty we have found that conservative Christians are very often principled, even when they disagree with us. When we talk about Christ as the subject of an unjust execution, or about the Eucharist as the last meal of a condemned man, they listen and consider it fairly. The discussion is worth it.

Even on the politically charged issue of gay men and women, we often find common ground. When we talk about reducing things like drug and alcohol abuse, suicide and homelessness in gay teenagers, we find that many pastors, youth ministers and lay people share our concerns. While many conservative Christians do not believe that the Bible permits same-sex marriage, they do agree that concepts of grace and charity as taught in the New Testament argue for a more loving, affirming approach to gay men and women.

Christmas is a season of reconciliation, and this could be one of the most significant reconciliations of all. Both social progressives and conservative Christians are fellow travelers who care about something more than money, who seek deep meaning, and who take joy in the uplifting of others.

Jesus broke bread with a man he knew would betray him, and another he knew would deny him; the least that any of us can do is seek the same with those who have opposed us.

Mark Osler is a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minnesota and serves as the head of the Association of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools. His email address is Mark.Osler@StThomas.edu.

Randy Roberts Potts, a former social worker and middle school English teacher, is a freelance writer who wrote about his coming out experience as the grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts in the recent It Gets Better book. His email address is randyrpotts@gmail.com.