Wednesday April 28, 2010
Unsuitable candidates
By Jim Taylor
There’s a satiric piece circulating on the Internet, about President Barrack Obama nominating Jesus Christ for the current vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
It notes that if accepted, Jesus would be the first non-American immigrant appointed. Also, being immortal, Jesus could serve forever, thus saving future presidents the chore of finding an acceptable replacement.
The story, naturally, is less about Jesus than about U.S. politics.
The unknown author suggests that the Republican party would fight the nomination, on the grounds that “Mr. Christ would radically move the court to the left.”
Apparently the nominee had been widely quoted in published documents, supporting the poor over the wealthy.
Republicans would also object to the fact even after 20 centuries, “Mr. Christ has never revealed his position on abortion… [and] is expected to oppose the death penalty in all forms.”
The article attributes statements to several real Republicans. For example, Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota is quoted as saying, “We’re not even sure where he was born. Why is he afraid to show us his birth certificate?”
And Sarah Palin is supposed to have said, “God-fearing Americans…are seeing more and more that Christ is a community organizer. We don’t need another community organizer in the White House!”
And, of course, there’s the inevitable quote from Rush Limbaugh: “Christ doesn’t know anything about free enterprise. This is part of the Obama conspiracy to drag us to socialism.”
I’m surprised no one mentioned his criminal record!
Employment handicaps
That, of course, was penned by someone with little sympathy for the religious right. But it brings to mind another apocryphal story about contemporary attitudes. There are various versions of this story, including one published in the Dear Abby column. In my version, a church committee considered applications for a new minister.
They came across a resumé which listed the applicant’s many successes, but that also acknowledged a few potentially negative qualities:
- disbarred from his association of professional lawyers
- subject to violent and unpredictable headaches, sometimes characterized by flashing lights and imaginary voices
- survived five plots against his life
- spent 14 years living with no registered address
- had difficulty getting along with religious leaders
- arrested on trumped-up charges, tried in five separate courts, pursued his appeal to the highest court
- imprisoned more than four years in various jails
- never stayed at any church for more than three years.
“Well,” declared the committee unanimously, “we certainly wouldn’t want that kind of troublemaker in our church!”
“By the way,” asked one curious member, “who was that from?”
The secretary retrieved the application from the wastebasket. “Someone called Saul of Tarsus,” he said. “Wait, there’s a P.S. under the signature – ‘You may know me better as St. Paul.’”
Neither story is true, of course. But both contain an element of truth. The most adamantly Christian members of North American society would probably find it very hard to accept the people who first established the faith they so adamantly profess.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
Finally, a few responses to Chris Duxbury’s plea for lectionary resources from a liberal perspective.
Janice Clubb wrote, “Hi Jim, have your readers check out Laughing Bird Liturgical Resources on the Internet, particularly the sermons of Nathan Nettleton. It is a resource of the Australian Uniting Church, very similar to the United Church of Canada. Nettleton even does some great paraphrasing of the psalms and other scriptures as you do.”
And Jeff Johnson wrote from North Carolina, “I just read the request from Chris for liberal writers like Ralph and you. I’m a Baptist from Southern USA, so what do I know, but if Chris means lectionary writing like you guys did in Rumors, I would suggest taking a look at the website www.textweek.com. It’s good because it offers readers a choice of weekly lectionary writing from many different Christian traditions. Many of them I would consider liberal. They don’t, however, have the healthy dose of humour that Rumors served.”
Eva Stanley recommended two of the addresses suggested at the bottom of this column: David Keating’s “SeemsLikeGod” webpage, and the page for the Centre for Progressive Christianity.
Sonja MacCrimmon liked last week’s column, entitled the “Rites of Spring.” She wrote, “I agree that friendship and even acquaintanceship is important and I think that separating spouses in the name of efficiency is unfeeling and wicked.”
David Wood had these thoughts: “Your comment on Loneliness got me thinking about research Robert Sapolsky did with baboons. He found that when male baboons got older, they would be harrassed by the younger male baboons in the troop. When he examined why some of the older males stuck around rather than look for a friendlier troop to live with, he discovered it was because the older male had developed a close relationship with an older female in the troop. That non-sexual friendship was worth suffering the attacks from the younger males!
“As for the coot and the goose, many birds fly around in mixed flocks, but I have never heard of a coot and a goose!”
Bob Stoddard commented that the Internet abounds with pictures of “odd couples” – “The numerous sets of pictures… that show two young ‘oddly matched’ animals maybe illustrate the same thing. These paired youngsters are dogs & cats, dogs & monkeys, dogs & deer, dogs & moose, cats & rabbits, cat & rats, etc.”
A friend up the lane from me got some pictures of a rabbit standing on its hind legs, getting nuzzled by a deer, both of them wild.
Joan McConnell wanted me to know about one instance where the social system did NOT separate an aging couple: “My mother was in a nursing home in rural Manitoba from 2003–2005. This was a bright sunny caring place with individual rooms and wonderful staff. Across the hall from her were a couple, in their 90s and very frail in body and mind. Between the two rooms assigned to them a door had been cut in the wall so that they used one room as a sitting room and one was their bedroom. When I asked one of the staff if these rooms had always been designed for a couple, she told me that all rooms in the home had originally been built as individual. However when this couple were moving in the staff decided that after 70 years together it would be totally unfair to place them even next door to each other where they would be unable to share the same bedroom at night or a place to sit during the day The sight of this couple sitting together looking at old albums in their sitting room was reward enough for those folk who had hassled the ‘powers that be’ until that door had been cut in the wall.”
John Shearman put in another plug for his currently favourite book: “It is not surprising that ‘the individual’ was not highly regarded in ancient or biblical times. The OED says that the word didn’t exist in the English language until the 15th century. The concept did not develop fully until the 15th to 17th centuries. John Locke and Rene Descartes appear to have been the first to introduce ‘individualism’ per se into philosophical discussions. Granted that it reached its high point in the rampant individualism of the 20th century.
“If Jeremy Rifkin is right in his new analysis of history (The Empathic Civilization, Penguin Books, 2009), we are steadily moving toward the more communal approach to living in the rapidly developing global society based on universally available means of communication. The alternative is self-centred destruction of civilization as we know it, by letting environmental disaster and conflicts for food and water overwhelm us. Rifkin’s book is well worth the time spent in grappling with his massive tome.”
Nan Erbaugh had these comments: “I’m a pastor in the Church of the Brethren. The older I get — I’ll be 60 this year — I am convinced of the value of community. I like to think you can’t be a Christian by yourself. I can’t begin to understand scripture by myself; I need others to bounce ideas off of. We truly need the companionship of community, not to mention the accountability community can provide.”
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About My Books
This is a special note to the several hundred readers who subscribed after Ralph Milton shut down his Rumors e-newsletter. Every week, Rumors printed a psalm paraphrase, written by me. Some of you used them regularly in worship, either as a substitute for or in parallel with the regular lectionary psalm reading.
Those psalms are still available, even though Rumors is not. They were published in book form by Wood Lake Books in 1994, and republished in 2005. The book is called Everyday Psalms. I have a few copies of my own, but you’re better to contact Wood Lake Books directly. The cover says $19.95 Cdn, $15.95 US, but Wood Lake often has sales.
Contact them at
info@woodlakebooks.com
www.woodlakebooks.com
1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-888-841-9991 (Pilgrim Press) in the US
by mail at 9590 Jim Bailey Road, Kelowna, BC, Canada, V4V 1R2
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. Or, if you wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Wayne Irwin’s “Model T Websites.” a simple (and cheap) seven-page website for congregations who want to develop a web presence
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
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