Thanks to my colleagues, this blog has been hitting its stride in the last two weeks (IMHO), day after day taking on challenging, serious topics with admirable insight and forcefulness.

So it’s time for something silly. 

I’ve been out in my yard lately, enjoying this flawless May weather and waging the annual battle for beauty and order against chaos. And I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ agricultural parables, and how he might tell them a little differently today, in American suburbia, than he did back in the ancient Near East. Maybe something like this… 

Matt. 7:24-27

Therefore everyone who hears these words and puts them into practice is like the wise woman who followed the instructions on the internet when she built her retaining wall. She dug a deep trench and used gravel sand for the base. She patiently leveled the bottom row and used blocks with integrated setback. She created a vertical layer of landscape fabric and gravel for drainage as she backfilled, and even sealed the caps with construction adhesive. When the rain came down and the water table rose, that wall had beautiful drainage and it did not budge even an inch. 

But everyone who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like the neighbor who just slapped down a stack of blocks on Saturday morning and spent the rest of the day watching the game and slurping brewskies. When the rain came, the water soaked in behind the wall and the whole thing bulged and the blocks tumbled every which way. It looked like a dumped-out bucket of Legos, and all the neighbors laughed.

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Just a week or so ago, Frederick Manfred would have celebrated his 100th birthday, had he lived. He didn't.  He died in 1994, from the complications of a brain tumor.

Manfred was a Siouxland original, a CRC boy, Calvin grad, a giant of a man—6’9” when he descended on the Calvin campus and was recruited post-haste for the Calvin basketball team.  He didn’t do well in freshman English that year, but no man I know was so purposefully devoted to calling at Feike Feikema, the name with which he was born.  By life’s end, he’d written a couple of dozen novels, some of them almost biography, others what we might call Western history.  He was as generous a man as I’ve ever known, someone others have frequently called “a force,” like the wind on the plains he loved.  Once he told me one day, when he was a boy, he sat down on the back step of his house near Doon, looked out at the open fields all around, and just wondered what the story was of the land where he was born.

I miss him. He certainly was a force in my life, a man so immensely passionate about what he did and what he loved doing that he couldn't help becoming an inspiration to others.  I used to bring gangs of students up to his place, and every year they’d pile back in a van in a kind of stunned silence, even awe. Like no one else, he urged me to take an interest in writing--and he did so long before he ever knew me, or I him.

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Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you--that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Luke 24:44-53

Today is Ascension Day. As such I thought I might ponder something ascension-ey. Reformed Church folk, in my limited experience, don’t do a whole lot with Ascension Day. We certainly believe and think stuff ascension related; it’s part of our theology. It’s in our creeds and may be incorporated into our worship language. But otherwise, we don’t do much with it.

That is why in the local church setting I have appreciated working with neighboring congregations. For the last couple of years the good people of Trinity Lutheran Church in Middle Village, Queens have welcomed the good people of Trinity Reformed to worship with them. And this year, I had the opportunity to not only preach but also preside at the Lord’s Supper. 

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Confession

I feel a bit awkward in writing this post. It is probably because I feel insufficient to be the one writing on this topic. I hold views about which I could easily get polemical...but I don't, or at least I try not to. I am committed to speaking my truth as through my experience in this world and in conversation with the Word of God (this is what I call self-responsibility).  I am committed to voice. Voice meaning the proclamation and bearing witness of God experienced through my sense of agency. I give myself permission to take up space in this world. My feminist lens reminds me that many women and people of color often do not feel empowered to take up space because the dominate voice controls the landscape. In some sense I am aware that my very,  - nephesh (body, soul, mind), can initiate conflict by my mere presence.

Speaking Your Truth 

I yearn for people to offer their truth and experiences in the public discourse just as much as I expect it from me. When people offer themselves there is bound to be tension, disagreement, and a difference of opinion. It can be uncomfortable and sometimes we don’t know what to do when we feel uncomfortable. Thus when someone offers their perspective that differs from ours we internalize this as someone attacking us thus we sometimes fight back with words that are quite mean and downright degrading of the image of God in the community around us.

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Perhaps not all readers of "The Twelve" will be aware of it but in some circles within the Christian Reformed Church these past ten days there's been some serious dust-ups surrounding "The Form of Subscription." The Form is the document CRCNA pastors, elders, deacons, and also Calvin College and Seminary professors sign to indicate their ascent to the version of the Reformed faith that gets taught in the Confessions: The Heidelberg Catechism, The Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort.   The most immediate conversations were sparked by an editorial in the Banner by editor Bob DeMoor to which former "The Twelve" blogger Jamie Smith fired off a very impassioned response.   Since then the Facebook page for Christian Reformed pastors has been lit up with multiple posts--usually very long posts (including my own, I confess!)--as pastors from all over North America have shared thoughts. Curiously, although this by no means counts as scientific evidence, my own observation on this conversation has confirmed Smith's contention that it's mostly Baby Boomers with a 1960's hangover who chafe under the allegedly constricting nature of signing on to 400-year old Confessions whereas the younger set of Gen-X and Millennials are far more willing (even happy) to embrace a confessional position. Indeed, just about every former student who graduated from my seminary since 2005 and with whom I am friends on Facebook has embraced Smith's position over against DeMoor's editorial.

Interesting. But as I have been caught up in these conversations, I've been struck by the number of people who tend to refer to signing the Form and having these guiding Confessions as being mostly all about a distasteful matter of coercive force.  

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Anyone but me notice the death of the religious right last week? Apparently, the religious right had started feeling poorly after Mitt Romney took Ohio on Super Tuesday and had been declining steadily since Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum quit the Presidential race. But the death announcement didn’t come until last Thursday, when Barack Obama was chatting with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America and said his position on gay marriage had evolved and he now thought that same-sex couples ought to be able to get married. (Do you think he chose the word “evolved” on purpose?  But I digress.)

Obama proposed no legislation or action. He simply said this is where he is personally. But what Obama’s statement says to me is that the religious right as a political force is dead for the time being. Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and the social conservatives didn’t just lose the primary battle; they completely lost the election war. The upcoming presidential election is going to be about the economy, and even more than that, it’s going to be about the issue of whether or not the US government can and should be managed like a business.  The defining issues are not going to be social questions, but whether or not the auto companies should have been bailed out, what the government’s role in health insurance should be, how responsible the President is for the unemployment rate and similar economic concerns.   “Issue” voters are irrelevant.

According to a Gallup Poll cited in this week’s issue of The Economist, 50% of the American population supports same-sex marriage. My hunch is Obama and his advisers looked at those numbers, added in another 25% or so of the population that is undecided and said, “The other 25% isn’t going to vote for us anyway, so the smart thing to do is to bolster our base instead of pandering to conservatives.”

Four years ago Obama waffled on gay marriage.  Not so now.  What’s changed?

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by Linda Gregg

There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over
the length of Tomales Bay that the herons
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

Stacey Midge is the Associate Minister for Mission, Outreach, and Youth at First Reformed Church in Schenectady, NY. On the side she is also a songwriter and musician who performs regularly solo and with her band, In Flux.

Watch Where Soldiers Come From - Trailer on PBS. See more from POV.

Why don't presidents fight the war,

Why do they always send the poor?

System of a Down - BYOB

Where Soldiers Come From is a PBS documentary that was aired last year chronicling the plight of a group of high school friends in Michigan who join the National Guard. They joined because they needed work, they needed money, and the National Guard offered $20,000 to sign on - plus money for college. They all ended up in the middle of war. The film focuses upon the difficulties many of them had fitting back into society upon returning home. Substance abuse, PTSD, abusive relationships - war had radically changed them.

I come from a family that has military experience.  My grandfather was in WWII and at my request he sat down and recorded himself talking about his his time in France and Germany. He hit the beaches of Normandy the day after D-Day.  He talked about the bodies and the carnage, not in heroic terms, but with sad resignation. Later in life he refused to participate in Memorial Day parades. "That's for the soldiers who had desk jobs," he'd say. My dad was in Vietnam and he still won't talk about it - I've tried. He just tells me "I don't have to talk about that with anyone." When I was a kid I remember my dad didn't want anything to do with my friend's dad who was a doctor. He came from money and he got out of going to Vietnam. My grandpa was drafted, and my dad enlisted because he knew he was going to get drafted. They didn't have money, they weren't going to college.  So off to war they went.

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Charles Colson’s death last month prompted a chorus of praise from his evangelical supporters. Praise for his enduring conversion to Christianity. Praise for the change of character it wrought in him. Praise for the compassion that galvanized him to build his Prison Fellowship into the largest prison ministry in the world. Praise, sometimes followed by sad sighs that the mainstream media had too much remembered the Watergate felon and not the prison reformer.

Problem is, in the big picture the secular critics might have been right. For the impressive statistics of Prison Fellowship are engulfed by a far larger—and appalling—reality that lies all around them. Yes, Prison Fellowship ministers to some 200,000 inmates in nearly 1400 facilities. Yes, it advocates for better rehabilitation for ex-cons. Yes, it tries to keep family relationships active while inmates are serving their time. But, no, in its policy advocacy and programming, in Colson and Co.’s daily radio programs, in the resources compiled by the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, there is little attention to the simple and haunting question that lies dead-center in this domain of his professed expertise: why is it that the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, accounts for 25% of its prisoners? Why does it lock up a greater proportion of its population than any other nation in the world? Forty percent more than the nearest competitor? More than the USSR did under the police state of Joseph Stalin? More tragically (or is it pathetically?): how is it that this zeal for jail rose most dramatically—five-fold—exactly in the three decades after Prison Fellowship was founded in 1976?

American incarceration rates might themselves amount to a crime. They are certainly an outrage and more certainly a folly. They are also deeply racist.

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Any self-reflexive preacher knows that bearing the Word of God with her or his human words is a weighty matter. Scripture and experience teach us, all too well, that words can be used for good or for evil. Pulpits can become platforms for passive-aggressive speech, for attempting to control others’ behavior, for dehumanizing particular persons and groups, and for attempting to meet one’s own needs through inappropriate self-disclosure. These human tendencies are addressed by professors of preaching and pastoral care alike as part of formation for ministry.

Yet sometimes these kinds of misuses of the pulpit seem minor. Sometimes preaching violates others' personhood and tears apart communal bonds. Preaching may not only be sexualized (in terms of its content) but it may also sexualize its subject and its hearers. Worse yet, a sermon may even deify rape.

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