Articles – Page 39 – Religion Online

Jacob’s Ladder (Hebrews 1:1-4; 5-12)

What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor... (Hebrews 2:6,7)

An incredible respect for life wove together the disparate humanity that worked the edges of New York abyss. Iron workers, emergency fire department rescue teams, volunteers sharing coffee and backrubs, chaplains bending low to listen, gawking tourists, stricken loved ones hunched over pictures and lit candles -- all were woven together in the solidarity of citizenship of those regarded by God as "for a little while lower than the angels."

As I arrived one November day to conduct the memorial service for fireman Vincent, all the streets were blocked by fire engines and police vehicles. Vincent had finished his shift at Ladder 35 on the West Side on the morning of September 11 and was on his way home when the first plane hit. He returned and worked on "Jacob’s ladder" in the smoky stairways of the towers, ascending and descending as part of a human chain of rescue, suffering and death. The pastoral task in these latter days has been to grasp the vision of God at each end of the ladder, bearing with us on earth, bearing home those who ascended.

"But we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone."

The writer of Hebrews gives us a glimpse into the pastoral life of the early church, living at the far side of the Ground Zero of the paschal mystery: Christ has died, Christ is risen. Christ will come again. On that November day we plumbed the mystery of death and resurrection. As over 1,000 people arrived, the modest parish in Middle Village, Queens, was suddenly in the public eye, handling press, protocol and immense crowds of distraught people And this was only one of thousands of memorials held in that season throughout the metropolis.

Many were not accustomed to being in church. Those of us who could sing sang the liturgy on behalf of those who no longer knew the words or were too numb with grief to sing. But that is our theological task. We have been ordained and baptized for these latter day saints or a time such as this. How shall we speak and act "in many and various ways"? Pastor Longan remembered the heroic way in which Vinnie lived and died, then moved from Vinnie to God, whose rescue of the world from sin, death and the evil one was accomplished by the cross and the laid-down life.

"Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son."

How do we make the great "hand-me-down" of the tradition of faith relevant? After 9-11 people aren’t only asking, "What, really is a Muslim?" They also want to know what a Christian is, and a Christian community. Who is my neighbor now? What does a life worth living look like? Where is true security? What happens when I die? I sense a true desire to learn how to talk to our Maker.

Paul Tillich reminds us that "theology as a function of the Christian church, must serve the needs of the church. A theological system is supposed to satisfy two basic needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation."

Vinnie’s father got lost in the eulogy. He was fully engaged as he mentioned one memory after another, but then he would not get out of the cul-de-sac of memory. Every time he began to conclude he was unable to face the terrible truth. Vinnie died. And there was not even a body in the church, only the memories.

"As it is we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus . . ."

Like Vinnie’s father we cannot see the outcome of all things. But at the Eucharist we could see and taste Jesus. At the table the truth is told. Christ has died. Vinnie has died. We say it and face it. Christ has risen. Vinnie has been buried with Christ by baptism unto death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the power of the Father, so Vinnie will again walk in newness of life. Christ will come again. And bring us home where Vinnie waits "with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven . . . in every time and every place."

Two months after the memorial service they found Vinnie’s remains. Silence washed over Ground Zero. Hats were removed, bodies waited reverently as they lifted him from the wreckage and carried him out. Several days later I attended the liturgy which centered on Good Friday and a performance of Bach’s St. Matthews Passion. The church was overflowing, and when the congregation sang, "Lord, let at last thine angels come," we knew that once again in these latter days God had spoken to us.

"It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For the one who sanctified and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters."

Confirming Erick (Hebrews 5:1-10)

When Erik confessed his faith on the festival of Pentecost, the entire family of believers watched and strained to hear his confession. His chubby fingers were surprisingly dexterous as he signed the words, although he also spoke, as if what he was signing was bursting through the silence of his deafness. This is what he said on the day of his confirmation: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not die but have life forever."

He paused, fished a card from the pocket beneath his robe, glanced at it and put it back. Then he continued in his combination of sign language and garbled verbal speech: "What does this mean to me? It means that Jesus died for my sins. It means God loves me. It means when I die I will go to heaven."

He smiled nervously and returned to his place in the line of confirmands. Then he looked at me, passed his hand over his head and rolled his eyes in a sigh of relief.

The moment bore witness to the grace of a God who brings "light from darkness, life from death, speech from silence."

We call the process of forming Erik’s faith catechesis . The partnership between the home and the church, the sheer effort by all involved in Erik’s catechesis is a parable of confessional witness in a culture indifferent or hostile to an active and living word. The Book of Hebrews gives us a glimpse into the pastoral and evangelical life of another confessional witness. What was the organizing principle in the early church? What was expected of converts? What sustained their faith? What was at the center of the early Christian movement?

Several years ago Erik was slipping into a lifetime of silence, becoming progressively more morose and combative as his isolation deepened. His mother began to fight for her son, first against a local public school system that takes a cookie-cutter approach to children, then against the county and state. She won on many fronts through her persistence. Erik entered appropriate programs and began to learn. He learned sign language. He learned to read.

She enrolled him in a Sunday school for the deaf in an Episcopal church, and found materials that gave appropriate sign language for religious concepts and vocabulary. How many mothers like Erik’s, in the time of the early church, became models of the great high priest, whose solidarity with us in all things human inspired bold witness and teaching of the paschal mystery?

When it was time for Erik’s catechesis, his mother and I worked out a home tutoring schedule. Each Wednesday we sat around the dining room table. His mother interpreted. I learned some sign language so that we could communicate the chief parts of Luther’s catechism. We had to match theological concepts to Erik’s signs, and our catechesis was filled with analogy, story, wild gestures, his mother’s manual continuo as she translated our efforts into Erik’s language. I traced the looks of consternation on Erik’s face until they reflected the joy of recognition. When he grasped a concept he would read it back to us in sign and agitated verbalizing. Sin was "bad things" or "bad relationship." I taught the sixth commandment as "Don’t have sex unless you are married." The ninth and tenth commandments became "Be happy with what God has given you." You get the idea.

Erik’s catechesis was a communal matter of greatest importance. His father would come home from work and join us at the table for a report of his son’s progress. His brother would watch the dog and do his homework. On Erik’s big day, family, Sunday school teachers and neighbors joined him at church.

The catechesis of Erik is an example of what Stanley Hauerwas calls a "truthful community" or "community of character," a community capable of hearing the story of God and willing to live faithfully by it. Catechesis is immersion in the narrative that shapes the life of the church. The story of Israel the story of Jesus and the story of the church become Erik’s story.

What is instructive here is the passion of those Involved. Our church needs to see itself in the role of Erik’s mother, as a relentless advocate for the faith formation of its people. I think of the pastor in Jersey City who walked the streets of his neighborhood before the opening of his confirmation classes to visit families. When one child did not show up for liturgy and Sunday school, he went to the housing project where the child lived and walked into the middle of a dope deal. One of the men whirled, pistol in hand, ready to shoot, then saw the pastor’s collar and blurted out, "Jesus Christ, Father, I almost killed you!" The pastor nodded, walked up the stairs and completed the call. We need to believe that the upbuilding of the faith of the people is a task worthy of giving our lives.

When pastors from our synod gathered with our national leaders after the September 11 tragedy, I told them that we had been ordained and baptized for this moment. I meant the immediate ministry of comfort and renewal as we attended to this tragedy among us. But I also meant the continuing work of our great high priest, helping to provide meaning to this altered world from the depths of our faith and the biblical drama. It is a priestly ministry of liturgy, articulation, peacemaking, programs of comfort and renewal justice-seeking--and a ministry of word and sacraments that embraces other faith journeys and a world hungry for a communal story.

Order in the Court

Americans are locked in an intense conflict over the role of federal courts. Conservatives are deeply aggrieved by Supreme Court decisions in the past 30 years that have struck down laws against abortion, laws on homosexuality and certain laws and policies promoting religion in the public square. In a 1996 symposium, "The End of Democracy?," the journal First Things protested "an entrenched pattern of government by judges" and raised the possibility that "conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."

Another round in the judicial wars began in June with the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas invalidating laws in 13 states prohibiting private, consensual adult sodomy. The case involved a gay man having sex with another in his apartment. Lawrence contributed, at least to some degree, to the Massachusetts state supreme court’s decision in November that the state must recognize same-sex marriages. Simultaneously, a backlash against Lawrence added momentum to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which would bar (among other things) court decisions, federal or state, that confer "marital status or the legal incidents thereof" on any relationship other than a male-female couple.

The conflict has also polarized the confirmation process for the judicial nominees of George W. Bush (himself declared president only after an intensely controversial Supreme Court decision). Conservatives, angry that the key Supreme Court votes for abortion and gay rights came from Republican-appointed justices, have vowed to ensure that Bush’s nominees will be solid conservatives like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. On the other side, Senate Democrats have blocked several lower-court nominees, largely (though not solely) because the nominees were viewed as hostile to abortion rights. A Supreme Court vacancy, which is likely within a couple of years, may spark the mother of all confirmation battles.

The critics of the court have some valid points -- though I do not endorse their sky-is-falling rhetoric. It’s helpful first to define the popular term "judicial activism," which is often used in the debate, though in varying ways.

If "activism" is a bad thing, then the term should not apply simply when a court invalidates a state or federal law. Some laws are unconstitutional and ought to be struck down. An activist decision is one that invalidates a law or executive action without a solid basis for doing so in the text, history or structure of the Constitution.

The power of a court to invalidate unconstitutional laws – "judicial review" -- has been a feature of our government from the outset. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the great Chief Justice John Marshall laid out the classic rationale. "We the people" of the United States as a whole have power to set rules that constitute and limit our government, superseding ordinary legislation and executive action. Thus, in a lawsuit where a constitutional rule conflicts with a statute or executive policy the court hearing the case must follow the Constitution and ignore the conflicting act.

This rationale explains why judicial review is consistent with a commitment to representative democracy -- that is, a commitment to subjecting government to the consent of the governed -- even though federal judges are unelected and hold office for life. In rejecting a law as unconstitutional, the judge is not making her own decision but is simply applying the will of the entire people expressed in the Constitution. Courts are insulated from elections precisely so they can adhere to this "supermajority" will in the face of actions by current majorities.

The problem is that the Constitution is an open-ended document. In arguing that judges must follow the constitutional text, Marshall chose clear examples like the requirement that no one may be convicted of treason without "the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act." But many of the most important rights-protecting phrases "due process of law" "equal protection of the laws" -- are far more broad and general. If interpreted expansively they can involve huge areas of life and put numerous public policy decisions in the hands of judges. Lawrence v. Texas holds that "liberty" in the "due process" clause gives adults the right to have consensual sex in private. Does it also give a right to take illegal drugs in private? To take one’s own life? To run a private business free from excessive government regulation (as the court held until the 1930s)? If not, how does sexual activity differ from taking drugs or committing suicide or running a business?

A second problem is that when a court strikes down a law, any error in that ruling is very difficult to correct. The Constitution can be amended, but securing passage by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states is (and was meant to be) a high hurdle, as is dramatized by the failure of the popular Equal Rights Amendment. New presidents may appoint new justices, but that project also is long and uncertain: even after 12 years with President Reagan and the first President Bush, both committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, the key votes to reaffirm Roe in 1992 came from the Republican appointees Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. In contrast, decisions of legislatures and executive officials can be reversed by majority vote -- a much easier process, notwithstanding inertia and entrenched political interests.

Finally, a heavy reliance on courts can undermine energy to protect rights through the political process and to convince fellow citizens of the Importance of those rights. Members of Congress can argue for a bill without worrying about constitutional concerns: "Leave those to the courts." Social reform movements that turn to lawsuits devote time and money that could be spent on grass-roots activity that might establish their goals more firmly among the people.

The experience of the pro-choice movement is instructive: many pro-choice legislators were elected in the late 1980s when the court was hinting that it would overturn Roe and return abortion to the political process. Conversely, the court’s reaffirmation of Roe in 1992 galvanized the pro-life movement politically.

Judicial review remains crucial to ensuring the status of constitutional rights as supreme over the majority’s decisions. But the concerns cited above show why it is important that judicial decisions be disciplined, based on sources of law other than the judge’s own view of political morality.

Although the courts strongest critics are often conservatives, the prospect of judicial activism should concern liberals and progressives too. The first two times that the court identified constitutional rights not explicit in the text, it served decidedly unprogressive causes. The notorious Dred Scott decision (1837) asserted that because slaves were their masters’ property Congress could not ban slavery anywhere in the United States -- a holding that ignored the Framers’ compromise of tolerating slavery temporarily but allowing eventual measures against it. Lochner v. New York (1905) incensed unions and progressives by reading a laissez-faire theory of economics into the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of "liberty," striking down laws that protected industrial workers and ignoring their lack of effective bargaining power in contracting with employers.

Some decisions by the current court can fairly be characterized as "activist" with politically conservative results. It has severely limited affirmative action as a remedy for past discrimination against minorities, even though the post-Civil War Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment also enacted race-targeted benefits for black soldiers, schools and relief agencies. Several decisions have severely restricted the power of Congress to protect Fourteenth Amendment liberties from action by state officials, even though the amendment’s framers saw congressional enforcement of rights as crucial. And the court has given states broad immunity from being sued in any court for money damages -- for example, for infringing a patent or discriminating against older or disabled state employees -- even though the Constitution limits this immunity only to suits in federal court by a citizen of a different state.

Then there was Bush v. Gore, in which the court, in halting the Florida recount, announced a novel and potentially far-reaching requirement of equal vote-counting standards across districts, a theory unsupported by the Fourteenth Amendment’s original intent. Although the theory and result can be defended, the court took several highly questionable steps, including staying the recount ahead of time (as the clock ran against Al Gore) and refusing to let the Florida courts remedy the lack of counting standards. Gore immediately deferred to the court’s decision -- and liberals thereby reaped the consequence of having established the court as the last word on so many major questions. Unfortunately, the episode seems to have provoked in liberals not a caution about judicial power, but rather an intensified determination to ensure that judges exercise power in liberal ways.

One common answer to the complex question of how to interpret the Constitution is that courts should read each provision, however broad or general in the light of the principles that those who drafted or ratified it, or the general public at the time, understood it to embody. This explains how a judge gets authority to override democratic bodies -- he or she is following the decision of the Constitution’s enactors. And It constrains judges by telling them to look not just at a bare, open-ended phrase like ‘equal protection," but rather at the historical record surrounding its enactment.

But there are reasons why the original meaning should not be the sole constitutional touchstone. The breadth of many constitutional phrases implies a potential for growth beyond the precise principles that the framers had in mind. Indeed, there is evidence that the founding generation itself expected later generations to apply provisions through a process of interpretation broader than just reliance on the original understanding.

At the other end of the spectrum, one might treat phrases like "equal protection" and "free speech" as an invitation to judges to fashion whatever rules best serve the general values that the phrases suggest: equality, free expression, and so forth. Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, for example, says that to interpret a constitutional phrase, "thoughtful judges" must "decide on their own which conception does most credit to the nation." This "moral reading" of the Constitution calls on judges to act as moral philosophers: "equal protection of the laws" should mean what best promotes "equal concern and respect" for all humans; "liberty" in the "due process" clause should mean autonomy in matters important to personal development, and so forth. This approach raises the greatest dangers of excessive judicial power and discretion.

Another source of meaning for broad constitutional language Is the well-developed traditions of the nation. Phrases such as "due process of law" and "the privileges and immunities of [U.S.] citizens" suggest the protection of rights that were fundamental historic4 or that have come to be regarded as fundamental. Tradition as a source allows constitutional rights to expand over time in the light of new circumstances; but the expansion is measured by the widespread views of the people rather than by the moral reasoning of Judges. As scholars such as Alexander Bickel and Michael McConnell have remarked, reliance on widespread traditions is also the characteristic method of the common law, the chief form of judicial decision-making for both English and American courts.

What does Christian thought bring to the issue of judicial review? Christians have tended to concentrate on whether the court reached the right result (according to their view) on a particular issue, whether it’s abortion rights or school prayer. But Christians also should think theologically about the overall institution of judicial review, its promises and dangers.

Many Christians of various political and theological stripes will be attracted to the "moral reading" approach. The notion that constitutional-moral ideals, like equality and liberty, are ones that reason can analyze and apply comports with the notion of a natural law that is accessible to all people of good will ("written on the heart," in Paul’s words). But it does not follow that it’s good for judges to decide cases based on such ideals without constraints from other sources, such as constitutional history,tradition or widespread public consensus.

Even if a broad principle is obvious, its application to specific cases frequently is not. For example, the principle that all people are created equal does not spell out whether a state university may ever treat minority applicants differently to add diverse viewpoints or redress past discrimination. Individuals should have some zone of privacy and autonomy for important decisions, but that does not logically entail the right of a terminally ill person to get assistance in purposefully ending his life.

If the Supreme Court invalidates laws in such cases, the result is a moral decision for the whole nation made by nine lawyers, drawn from a relatively narrow professional class, who face a crowded docket that limits their ability to reflect seriously on complex moral Issues. Christian realism about human nature suggests that legally enforceable determinations of natural law should not be made in this way. Again, the court’s errors in such cases are difficult to correct, whereas leaving decisions to various legislatures allows for varying solutions and ongoing debate: states can serve as "laboratories of experiment," in the words of Justice Louis Brandeis.

This relative "openness to revision and correction," as constitutional scholar H. Jefferson Powell calls it, should be appreciated by Christians. Powell a Christian, points out in The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism that constitutional rhetoric "is a language of permanence, of settled decision, of absolute political value". It is prone to becoming idolatrous. In contrast, electoral politics -- though obviously highly imperfect -- at least proclaims "its openness to revisions by the citizens’ exercise of the vote" and thus can serve to prevent "elevation to supreme status of a worldly or material interest capable of masquerading as spiritual." The danger of idolatry is sharpest when judges issue rulings based on moral philosophizing about broad ideals without being restrained by history or tradition.

Christians may also he attracted to an approach advanced by former Harvard professor John Hart Ely who argues that courts should not themselves choose substantive constitutional values, but should issue rulings that keep the processes of political debate and decision-making open to all. This approach -- keeping the process open to unpopular groups and viewpoints -- explains many of the modern court’s rulings supporting racial equality, voting rights and free speech. It holds appeal for the wide range of Christians who emphasize the importance of responding to the most vulnerable and despised in society.

But construed broadly, this approach also gives judges tremendous discretion. For example, to assert same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, a court would have to conclude that same-sex couples are denied marriage rights simply because irrational prejudice makes the public devalue their interests. The court would have to dismiss the moral argument that marriage as an ideal should be aimed toward the raising of children with male and female parents. There is an argument that prejudice, rather than real moral and prudential concerns, motivates the bans on same-sex marriage. But that characterization is not obviously true, and for a court to adopt it is an aggressive exercise of judicial power.

Looking to text, history, tradition and widespread consensus does not make judicial review a mechanical process. Sometimes these sources point in different directions -- as when a right not recognized in the past becomes widely understood as fundamental -- and a court has to make a judgment between the two lines of argument. But constitutional method does constrain judges, and some decisions can be rightly labeled as activist.

For example, the right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade is not well founded in the sources of constitutional reasoning, as even politically pro-choice observers such as the New Republic have remarked. The provision on which Roe relied -- no deprivation of liberty "without due process of law" -- seems inapplicable to a law that has been enacted by a valid legislative process. (Roe’s theory of "substantive due process," which was also the basis for Dred Scoff and Lochner, has always landed the court in trouble, because it strikes down properly enacted laws that interfere with whatever the justices conclude is an important "liberty")

Even If the due-process provision calls on the court to protect rights recognized by tradition or widespread consensus, there is a problem with Roe: it involved neither Antiabortion laws were decades old, and although a few states had partly decriminalized abortion, Roe went much further and struck down laws in virtually every state. One might be concerned that antiabortion laws ignore and devalue women’s interests, but if the unborn are full persons -- and the court in Roe never really confronted that central claim -- they surely are the most voiceless and vulnerable persons of all. Only by adopting a highly debatable moral argument pitting women’s rights against fetal rights could the court give abortion rights constitutional status.

In Lawrence, the invalidation of the Texas law is defensible under the traditional sources of constitutional law. The law prohibited sodomy only when committed by a same-sex couple. Only four states had such a law, and in Texas and elsewhere sodomy laws in general were seldom enforced. That does not amount to a long tradition of treating sodomy as a right, but it does suggest a widespread (although not unanimous) consensus that the state should not criminalize such private conduct in the home. And although I have argued that moral reasoning under general concepts like "liberty" is a very uncertain business, we can still note that Texas and elsewhere sodomy laws in general were seldom enforced. That does not amount to along tradition of treating sodomy as a right, but it does suggest a widespread (although not unanimous) consensus that the state should not criminalize such private conduct in the home. And although I have argued that moral reasoning under general concepts like "liberty" is a very uncertain business, we can still note that Texas presented a case of criminalizing only same-sex private behavior. The treatment of sodomy in Texas did not mesh well with any version of traditional or familiar morality. The state essentially allowed any sort of sex -- anal sex, adultery, one-night stands -- between men and women, but forbade almost any intimate acts between same-sex couples.

But some of Lawrence’s reasoning cuts much more broadly suggesting there is a constitutional protection for all noncommercial private sex between consenting adults -- a rule that, for example, would seem to declare incest between adult family members a right. And although the court said that Lawrence did not involve any question of "formal recognition" of homosexual relationships -- thereby distinguishing its ruling from the issue of same-sex marriage -- some passages point in the opposite direction.

Ordering states to recognize same-sex marriage would be a dramatically larger, and more activist, step than striking down the criminalizing of private sex in Lawrence. Every state limits marriage to male-female couples, and 34 states reaffirmed this do in the 1990s in stating that they would not recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states. The analogy between these laws and southern laws against interracial marriage, which were struck down in the 1960s, may or may not be strong as a moral matter, but it is not strong as a constitutional matter: those laws were aimed at maintaining white racial supremacy, a practice that had clearly been identified as a constitutional wrong by virtue of the amendments following the Civil War. Although there certainly are serious moral arguments in favor of same-sex marriage, there are also serious moral and prudential arguments against it. The federal courts should not preempt this developing moral and cultural debate. (A decision for same-sex marriage by a state could as in the case of Massachusetts, preempts the debate in that state, but it is less far-reaching because it leaves other states to arrive at a different conclusion -- unless, as some same-sex-marriage proponents have claimed, other states are required to recognize such marriages under the Constitution’s requirement of giving "full faith and credit" to other states’ proceedings.)

In the end, sound constitutional interpretation is ensured not so much by principles on paper as by judges with certain virtues. A judge must have vision to apply the core meaning of a constitutional provision to new circumstances, and courage to apply that meaning when popular will opposes it. But a judge also must have humility to seek his primary insights from outside his own moral reasoning: from the text of a constitutional provision, its historical background, the nation’s widely recognized traditions, and the democratic body that passed the law that the judge is reviewing.

Healed, Not Cured

After my husband, Hyung Goo, discovered he had AIDS, the question of healing came up repeatedly especially after we began to tell people about this illness. A lot of his relatives, in particular thought that what you should do about AIDS was pray for healing. Hyung Goo wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this. He would have liked nothing more than to be healed, and prayed himself for healing, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to trail around to Korean Pentecostal faith healers, which seemed to be what his family members had in mind.

We broached the subject with the minister who had married us. Had he prayed with people for healing? Had he been invited to do so, or had he volunteered? what had happened as a result? David told us that he had been asked to pray with sick people for healing on various occasions. He had done so, and some had been healed and some hadn’t. As he understood it, the initiative rested with the sick person -- It was up to him or her to ask for such prayer, or not.

Hyung Goo found this enormously freeing. It made him feel that he was in charge of his own response to his illness. Other people could pray privately that he would be healed – that was fine and he welcomed it -- but he could make his own decisions about whether to seek out formal prayer specifically for healing, and not feel that he was being delinquent if he didn’t expend a lot of energy doing so.

By the fall of 1994, Hyung Coo had been seriously ill for a year. He had had pneumonia off and on since the spring, along with chronic anemia, nausea, pain and an eye infection for which he was taking IV medication once or twice a day. In October I received a summons to jury duty in federal court. I wrote a letter requesting to be excused on the ground that there was serious illness in my family. Hyung Goo practically dictated the letter to me, and it came out sounding like he had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. "These people aren’t rocket scientists," he said. "you have to make it very clear that you have to be at home to take care of me."

I found it unsettling to realize that there were, in fact, many days when Hyung Goo would have found it very difficult to take care of himself, even if that were construed to mean nothing more than getting his own meals. It wasn’t that he needed to be waited on hand and foot all the time; it was that he simply didn’t have the energy to do the regular everyday things that most of us spend a lot of time doing, and that I had become accustomed, of necessity to doing for both of us.

In that same autumn, Hyung Goo began to be more joyfully engaged with life than almost ever before. I noticed the change increasingly as Christmas approached. The year before, he had been exhausted and in pain from starting chemotherapy at too high a dose, and miserably depressed from having to leave work. The only reason Christmas happened at all was that I made it happen by sheer force of will. But the next year Hyung Goo was eager to get the tree, to do the shopping, to send the cards. I arrived home one day to find that he had just written the Christmas letter -- something I had had to beg and plead with him to do the previous year. And he started talking about wanting prayer for healing.

I found this very disconcerting. We had spent the previous eight months planning the funeral, meeting with the funeral director and ministers, buying a cemetery plot -- and now we were going to pray for healing, now that we were ready for him to die? And how was it that, as his health continued to deteriorate, he could be so happy, at least at those times when he had enough energy to feel something other than tired? I spelled out my puzzlement to a friend over the telephone. "Well," said Allan, "we’re all going to die. That means that any prayer for healing is essentially a prayer for more time. It makes sense that as Hyung Goo realizes how seriously ill he is, and how short his time may be, he would be specially in love with life, and would want more time."

It did make sense. Hyung Goo spoke with our pastors about his desire for healing prayer. They planned a service for a weekday night in February and invited the elders of the church, the members of our Bible study group, and any others of our friends who wished to come.

The road that Hyung Goo had traversed to that request was long and circuitous. His family had been Christians since soon after the arrival of Western missionaries in Korea. Hyung Goo’s father was a pastor, and both his parents worked hard to instill Christian faith in their children. Hyung Goo went off to college considering himself a Christian, and became involved with the college-age group at Park Street Church in Boston. But as his life fell apart so did his Christian faith. Much of his behavior was all too obviously at odds with his Christian confession. Increasingly it seemed to him that, far from being a source of strength and encouragement for living, God was a convenient scapegoat whom he blamed for the state of his life. Perhaps God’s consistent failure to come through with the blessings he prayed for -- deliverance from sin, spiritual joy to replace his deep unhappiness -- was evidence that God did not exist after all. Perhaps it was time for him to start running his own life, rather than hoping for someone else to give him good things.

"I needed to stop blaming God and others for my own misfortunes," Hyung Coo wrote in his memoir. "I was the only one who had the power to make my life into what I wanted it to be."

Never one to do things halfway, Hyung Goo stood up at a meeting of the college-age fellowship, announced his renunciation of the Christian faith, and walked out. He decided that reality was purely material, the result of countless random events. Since there was no God and no moral authority he could do as he pleased. and bear full responsibility for his own life. For a while, this seemed to work: he re-enrolled in school, he did well in his classes, he terminated his psychotherapy. Then all the wheels fell off again. A failed relationship reactivated all his old insecurities. He found himself unable to do any work and withdrew from school again, very late in the semester. "So much for my self-improvement program," Hyung Coo wrote. "Now my self-image was shattered."

His materialistic worldview was shattering, too. He met several people who claimed to be psychic, including a middle-aged taxi driver named Swifty whose spiritual pilgrimage was being directed, so he said by Carl Jung and the ancient Egyptian architect Imhotep. H~g Coo became persuaded that he was psychic, too, and set about reading all the books related to paranormal phenomena in the Cambridge Public Library He studied with a psychic who encouraged him to develop a supposed gift for telepathic communication. He joined the Society for Human and Spiritual Understanding, a pseudo-church that met on Sunday mornings in a small sanctuary-style room to practice meditation and listen to the pronouncements of a trance medium through whom, it was claimed, spoke the voice of an Egyptian priest who had lived 3,500 years be-fore.

"Through my involvement in the world of psychics," Hyung Goo wrote, "I began to notice a consistent world-view all these people held. It was subjective and egocentric. The world had been created purely out of the imaginations of human beings. Gravity, the mass-energy equilibrium, trees and mountains, as well as pain and suffering, love, joy and hate existed because human beings had individually and collectively decided upon a world in which they were necessary. This being the case, so the reasoning went, humans also had complete power to influence and change both small and large details of their world. We had power over illness, life and death. If we thought correctly we could be immortal, as well as find a better job, greater financial wealth, the ideal life partner, and so on. It was completely up to me.

"The good thing about such a world view," Hyung Goo observed, "is that it gives a certain sense of empowerment to people who feel generally disenfranchised. The power of positive thinking has been amply demonstrated. The more we act on the belief that we can influence the course of our lives, the more likely that things will turn out as we had hoped. Taken to its logical extreme, however, it seeks to make gods of us all; and when it runs up against the objective world outside our imaginations (being hit by a truck, for example) it is proven inaccurate and inadequate."

Now Hyung Goo was in a quandary. His materialistic view of the universe had been superseded by one that had a palpable spiritual dimension, yet the worldview of his fellow psychics appeared increasingly flawed. Then providence intervened. His family received a visit from some relatives who lived in England. Aunt Eun-Ja and Uncle Charles were devoutly charismatic Christians who were horrified to hear of Hyung Goo’s involvement in the world of psychics. Did he not realize, they asked, that this was in fact the realm of the occult? They provided him with several books that Hyung Goo read while his relatives spent two weeks traveling in other parts of the United States. By the time of their return, he had become persuaded of the truth of the gospel and his need of the good news it offered. At Easter of 1982, three years after he had walked out of church, he walked back in.

It was at Park Street Church that I met Hyung Goo. I had been brought up going to church, but had not been taught to believe. Eventually I realized this made no sense, and stopped going. When the college choirs of which I was a member sang for chapel services, I participated in the anthems (because that was performance) but refused to join in the hymns (because that was worship). Toward the end of my college career, however, I became less persuaded of the adequacy of a purely secular view of the world, and more persuaded that perhaps the Christian version of reality was the true one. Around Easter of 1982, I, too, came back to church.

A few years later, I moved to Boston, where I began attending Park Street because it was the only church in Boston I had heard of. I joined the post-college-age young people’s group, and participated in their meetings and retreats. Hyung Goo had by now graduated to this group as well, and at one retreat we were members of the same discussion group. I retain a memory of him from that occasion, an image at once vivid and tiny, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope: Hyung Goo, very slight and sober, talking quietly and deliberately about his father’s absence from the family when he was young. When we moved to Durham, North Carolina, we ended up at Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church, a congregation that drew its membership largely from the academic and medical communities associated with Duke University. About the only person in the church who knew how to fix a dishwasher was the pastor, who could often be found at congregants’ homes doing just that. On the other hand, if you needed heart surgery, there were half a dozen surgeons to choose from, and one of them was probably a member of your Bible group.

Our Bible study group included the inevitable doctor -- a medical student, actually -- along with a veterinarian, a house painter, an attorney a secretary or two, a teacher, a dental student, a campus ministry staff person, an employee of the sewer department, and assorted mothers of young children. We had been placed deliberately in this group by one of the pastors of the church. We had explained our situation to him when we joined the church, and he thought of a group that he hoped could rise to the challenge of enfolding a couple like ourselves, who were going to be very needy in the years to come,

There were five or six other couples in the group, and one or two single people. Some of them had children and some of them didn’t. None of them was particularly like us. They certainly weren’t living with terminal illness, and most of them knew no one else who had AIDS. We learned together that you don’t need to share another person’s precise circumstances in order to be supportive. You need only a willingness to share your own life and to share the life of another. You need to want to know what is really going on, even if you have no idea what to do.

Hyung Goo’s illness and decline were not the only things happening in that Bible study group. In the time that we were members of it, there was a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a couple of children and the adoption of another, several hospitalizations and a couple of surgeries, along with all the everyday challenges of home, work and school. We talked and listened and cried and prayed through it all. In that group, Hyung Goo got to care for others, as well as be cared for by them; he got to share their lives, to play with their children, to be part of the family of the church,

As the date of the healing service drew near, both Hyung Coo and I wondered how we should approach It. Hyung Coo found himself caught between faith and doubt He wrote to a friend, "I ask myself" Do I really believe that miraculous healing Is possible? There is a skeptical side of me, and there is also the side that desperately wants to believe and hope." For me, the tension was between faith and anger. If God really desired our good, why hadn’t he kept Hyung Goo well in the first place? And did I really want to ask for healing from a God who had already proved callous enough to let Hyung Goo get as sick as he had already gotten?

And what would it mean to approach prayer for healing with "faith"? What exactly were we hoping for? For reversal of Hyung Goo’s HIV status? For him to feel better? Live longer? Be affected in some more spiritual or personal way? Did we honestly believe that he could or would be healed? What would happen if we prayed for healing and no healing was granted? Would Hyung Goo lose heart and die sooner than he might have otherwise?

How ought one to pray for healing, anyway? Church historian David Steinmetz, lecturing in a class for which I was a teaching assistant, offered a description of the difference between conventional Protestant prayer and the psalmists’ prayers. The Protestant prays, "O Lord, we’re not worth much. We have these people we want you to heal. We don’t think you’ll do it. Thy will be done. Amen." The psalmist prays. "O Lord, remember the deuteronomic law code? It says you will vindicate the righteous. Well, I’m righteous, and I’m a little short in the vindication department. Hello? hello? Is there anybody there?" The psalmist’s prayer certainly seemed the more robustly faithful, but I wasn’t sure I was up for such prayer.

Perhaps, we decided, what we could hope for, in the most basic sense, was good: that whatever happened, God still had good things for us. "After all," I wrote to a friend, "we’ve been married almost four years now, under circumstances that most people would think pretty lousy and we have received wonderful gifts of companionship and love and comfort. So suppose we pray for healing and Hyung Goo’s health continues to deteriorate at its present rate, or faster. Does this mean there can be no good for him or for us, in the midst of this? I don’t think so. But I’d rather he just got well."

The healing service was attended by 30 or 40 people. All the members of our Bible study group were there, along with other friends from church and elsewhere and most of the elders of the church. Everyone prayed for him and for us. It was obvious what Hyung Goo’s role in the event was: he was the reason we were all there. It was less obvious what my role was. Was I there to pray, or to be prayed for? That night I had a dream in which someone had died, and a crowd of people were praying around the casket while I looked on, not sure how much a part of the scene I should be.

That service of prayer for healing bore fruit in a variety of ways. Hyung Goo did not wake up the next morning without AIDS, and he took that as an indication that his time really was short. That realization spurred him into doing some things that were important to him in the time he had left. He wrote down memories of his childhood and youth and adult life. He corresponded with friends. He listened to music. He talked with me about the years we had been married, thinking over the ground we had covered and rejoicing in it.

The service also brought together most of the friends and other church members who were to be important to us in the last months of Hyung Goo’s life. We were used to thinking of our friends as people who lived elsewhere, as indeed all our friends of many years’ standing did. We hardly realized how many friends we had gained during our few years’ residence in Durham until we saw them all together at that healing service. Hyung Goo died about six months later, and that prayer service came to seem like the inaugural event of that final trajectory the point at which all these people came together to see us through to the end.

Most fundamentally, however, those prayers for healing took place in the midst of a work of healing that was already well under way. Bruce Cockburn sings, Two thousand years and half a world away, dying trees still will grow greener when you pray." Even as Hyung Goo died, he quickened. In the weeks and months before the prayer service, I had begun to see it happening, and hardly knew what to think. Hyung Goo seemed to be undergoing the same sort of transformation that happens in sentimental Victorian novels when somebody dies young. It was as if he were glowing. Every time he looked at me, all I could see was how much he loved me, and it made me feel he was not long for this earth.

A friend mentioned in a letter that she had been reading Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians: "We, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory" Oh, I thought, with a start of recognition. Maybe that was what I was seeing when Hyung Goo looked at me and all I could see on his face was love. I was not succumbing to sentimental imagination. I was living with an Icon, with a person whose face had begun to shine like Moses’ did when he came down from the mountain.

The weirdly preternatural glow didn’t last, or else I just got used to it. Either way, it was a relief. Experiencing Hyung Goo as if he had an aura around him had been awfully strange. But the transformation continued. I had always thought him a person of fine character, which seemed remarkable enough, given how screwed up and miserable he had been for much of his life. Increasingly, though, it seemed that Hyung Goo was at peace in a way he hadn’t been when we met or when we first were married. And I could see that peace, and share in it, in part because the depression that had enveloped him to a greater or lesser extent for so much of his life had lifted. I had wondered sometimes if I would ever really know Hyung Goo apart from that depression and the way it muffled his voice and blurred his outline. Now, free from its smothering shroud, he was present and open, able to love and to be loved, even on days when he was exhausted and in pain and grieving over the losses he had suffered thus far and those yet to come.

In a way as undeniable as it was mysterious, Hyung Goo was more whole when he died than he had been at any other time in his life. It was not the sort of healing that we had hoped or asked for. How could we have asked for it, when we couldn’t even imagine it? But It was real, more real than the shabby appearances that are so easy to mistake for reality, as real as new green leaves on a dying tree.

Reservations About Gay Marriages

We have a bumper sticker on our car: "Keep Vermont Civil." The sticker is a bit tattered, since it goes back to the controversy about "civil unions" -- the Vermont law passed in 2000 establishing various legal equivalencies to marital rights for gay and lesbian couples. The legislature had been forced to take action following the 1999 ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court holding that denial of marital rights to such unions violated the Vermont constitution’s "common benefits" clause.

In a neat bit of Solomonic judgment, the court both rejected the gay and lesbian plaintiff’s claim that they were entitled to marriage licenses and declared that they were entitled to the benefits "incident on the marital relation." The court ruled that those benefits could be established by granting a marriage license, but that there might be other legislative means to assure proper benefits. The matter of specific statute was handed over to the legislature. The result was "civil unions."

A ruling in November, 2003 by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts similarly affirmed "marital" rights for gay and lesbian couples and handed the matter on to the legislature of the Commonwealth. The tone of the 4-3 decision of the Massachusetts Court appears, however, to push toward an unequivocal affirmation of "gay marriage." That would seem to be the hope and expectation of gay activists. Perhaps "gay marriage" will finally emerge as the statutory provision as it has in Canada and in various European jurisdictions. The heavens will not fall, the republic will not totter if that is the direction of public policy, but I am not enthusiastic about such a result. I prefer the "civil unions" approach.

Anyone who writes on this topic must do so with something akin to despair. Rationality is not on broad display in our discussion about sexuality, from homosexuality to abortion rights and back again. Advocates on all sides misstate their opponents’ views and overstate their own to the point where careful discourse disappears. Nevertheless, I think it is worth trying to explicate some of the central claims and key issues that swirl around the discussion of gay marriage. I choose four topics: nature, education, culture and law as relevant to framing moral concerns and public policy.

First, nature: One of the dominant views both within and without the gay community is that sexual orientation is a given, a natural determinant -- perhaps the expression of a "gay gene." In his judicious exposition of the arguments for gay marriage, Bruce Bawer states the point succinctly:

One can approve or disapprove of somebody’s actions or it is meaningless to speak of approving or disapproving of another’s innate characteristics. To say that someone approves or disapproves of somebody’s homosexuality is like saying that one approves or disapproves of somebody’s baldness or tallness.

I think that the gay community puts all too much weight on the notion of natural sexual orientation. In the first place, it just may not be true. If one were to assess sexual orientation by behavior rather than biology, one would be more inclined to Freud’s view that our sexuality is polymorphous: heterosexual and homosexual and what all, through a fascinating range of fact and fantasy. Unipolar sexuality may be a strange outlier, not the rule.

The second problem with the idea of a "gay gene" is that it simply bypasses the value of homosexuality. How do we decide that the gay gene is not a defective gene like the gene for sickle cell anemia? Given access to abortion or gene therapy the decision could be made to eliminate this fault of nature. Indian villagers have traditionally sought abortions for female fetuses; perhaps parents and societies will seek to abort fetuses with a gay gene. Gene therapy may lead to "designer children" who are handsomely tall, definitely not bald -- and certainly not gay! If one believes, as I certainly do, that it is immoral to abort gay and female fetuses, that must be because there is some value in the expression of such a sexuality or such a gender. It would be much better for the gay community to argue that homosexuality enriches the range of human values in a way that being bald does not.

The third problem with resting the case on natural sexual orientation is that it needs a middle term to justify sexual behavior. This is as true of heterosexual behavior as of homosexual. The human gene pool is full of behavioral urges that may or may not be worthy of expression. Priests who choose celibacy or couples who choose an active sexual life claim that certain values are being expressed in their abstention from or participation in sexuality.

The standard Catholic position on homosexuality does not condemn homosexual orientation; it does condemn homosexual behavior. Thomas Aquinas is correct, I think when he says that all human acts are moral acts. Sexual, acts and behavior are distinctly human acts in that we can choose to engage in them or not. Not engaging in them may be difficult, but so is checking my anger and all too many other urges. We do not act sexually by automation as animals do when biologically triggered. The gay community has been so exercised to deny that homosexual orientation is chosen that it runs the danger of draining homosexual behavior of its human dimension as a chosen act or life.

The real issues about sexuality are choice, life style and cultural value. On the basis of genes or Freudian polymorphous sex, sexuality in many forms is a fact. The question is, How should society assess and shape various sexual expressions? Is America now more morally sensitive, more well structured in its laws and practices insofar as it accepts publicly avowed homosexual behavior; constructs laws that protect homosexuals from the criminal penalties formally attached to homosexual acts; and allows for civil unions or even gay marriages? On the whole, I am inclined to say that getting gay sex out of the closet and legally protected is a moral and political advance. But that is not because homosexuality is natural but because something of value emerges from it.

Education: If one holds that sexual orientation may be polymorphous, one should then face the problem of the sexual education of children and young adults. Admittedly educating for sexual direction is somewhere between unclear and utter mystery, but to whatever extent parents and educators can give advice and cues for sexual orientation and behavior, one must ask: Are some kinds of sexual lives to be preferred?

Having worked with late adolescents most of my career, I am inclined to think that sexual confusion is as much a fact of life as sexual determination. One of the reasons to be concerned with the notion of natural, genetically determined sexual orientation is that it assumes that inclination is destiny. If a young person flirts with homosexuality, sexual-orientation-by-nature confirms gay identity. Maybe not.

What then should a parent, educator or society in general say to a young person caught in a mixed stew of sexual inclinations? Would it be proper to advise a confused teenager that heterosexuality is a preferred sexual life? And if so, what are the grounds for such advice? Difficult and complex as assessing various sexual lives may be, I want to resist the notion that it is a matter of indifference. "I don’t care. Any sexual life -- heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual -- is OK. It’s all the same. You choose whatever you want."

I am not denying that there can be deep determinations toward differing sexual lives. Though I am skeptical that sexual orientation is genetic, it certainly can emerge as "second nature": a pattern of desire, circumstance and culture that is virtually ineradicable. And so I am equally skeptical about the possibility (or morality) of persuading or treating mature homosexuals in order to change their sexual direction.

The issue is not with the mature, stable homosexual (or heterosexual); it is with the immature, whose sexual orientation may well be relatively open. Is it legitimate morally politically or spiritually to commend one or the other sexual orientation? I don’t necessarily want to prejudice the question toward heterosexuality; I can imagine a sensitive male homosexual commending the unusually close bonding and intense sexuality of that relationship as the preferred life choice. The educational problem I want to raise is whether any conversation commending this or that sexual life pattern is legitimate.

Culture: One of the confusions in the sexual polemics of the day is the blurring of the line between natural orientation and chosen behavior. If you have the orientation, then of course behavior should follow and is fully morally legitimate. Sexual libertarians argue that the repression of sexual urges of whatever sort is psychologically disastrous and culturally stultifying. I like this argument because it shifts to issues of moral choice and social values. Repression is bad for you and your society.

Just how far should the value of nonrepression be taken? One of the byproducts of the sexual revolution has been the emergence of bisexuality -- presumably a natural given. Advocates of marriage, heterosexual or gay, would both have to agree that bisexual orientation must be repressed in the interests of marital fidelity. One cannot be faithful to a sexual partner if one is having sex with someone of a different sex. Gay marriage advocates are, as they often say, conservatives on the issue of sexual fidelity.

Returning to my sexually confused adolescent: If I am in favor of the spiritual and moral value of sexual fidelity, then I am going to commend traditional marriage. A bisexual life or an "open" marriage is judged as an unacceptable choice, natural inclination to the contrary notwithstanding.

Of course, one can then go on and question the value of sexual fidelity both for partners and the social good. The least negative comment I would make here about "open" sexuality is that while it may be compatible with a large range of other social goods like justice and friendship, it is not clearly conducive to those broader social values. (I credit the distinction to the late Victor Preller.)

Can one go any farther in advising the young about sexual life choices? If there is genuine sexual polyvalence and confusion, I would be inclined to commend heterosexuality. Why? Given the drift of this essay, it would have to be because the moral and spiritual values that can be realized in heterosexual life are either impossible or difficult to realize or sustain in homosexual life. At this point, any gay friend will ask how I know about the values of gay life since I haven’t lived it!

To be sure. I grant the argument and reinforce it. I suspect that there are deep values that can emerge in certain homosexual lives which are unique to that life and which cannot be replicated in content or depth in heterosexual life. A commitment to heterosexuality obviously attenuates male-male relations from the wilder, deeper passions and revelations of mutual sexuality. That is the price one pays for heterosexual life choice.

Any argument for heterosexuality as a preferred sexual choice does not rest on how this or that heterosexual life works out. Heterosexual marriage can be a human disaster -- the divorce statistics attest to that! Homosexual bonding may be deeply valuable and, as noted, reach ranges of the human heart that heterosexuality cannot. Any argument for heterosexuality must deal with broad cultural and spiritual realities.

Having said that, it is obvious that constructing the case for heterosexuality must be as complex and nuanced as the cultural and spiritual trajectories of the human spirit. To short-circuit that long argument, I would say that it comes down to the ancient belief that men and women are different. Luce Irigary puts it well in An Ethics of Sexual Difference: "man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted for one another."

Why heterosexuality? Because the human spirit can expand as it moves toward the different. It can; it may not. Certainly some homosexual (or celibate) life choices arise from a fear of the different in women (or men). On the other hand, in a society that devalues heterosexuality and marriage through a mix of sentimentality and sexual titillation, the choice of homosexuality may be the choice of the different which is revelatory. So be it. But the final fact is that the bodily, biological difference between men and women is the urtext of the heterosexual narrative. Writing that sexual script is inherently difficult -- that is the reason that sentimentality and fantasy are so popular: they conceal the pain of difference and the lessons of loving across that pain.

Law: One might well conclude that commending heterosexuality as a preferred sexual life is educationally legitimate, and then ask: But what about the law? Just because one may commend one life choice over another -- being a social worker over being a stock broker -- does not mean the preference needs to be legally enforced (there is no law against being a stock broker). Perhaps the issue of gay or heterosexual direction should he left to the subtleties of parental or church guidance. Whether that is the final conclusion or not will depend on how one views the role of law.

For classical philosophers law had an educational function; it was set up to structure individual and communal life in order to produce certain human virtues. In Aristotle’s work, The Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics are mutually supporting. One needs certain virtues like courage, temperance and justice in order to realize human good, but those virtues are also necessary to be a good citizen. The state, in turn, is bound through the enactment and enforcement of proper laws to educate for virtue both for its own sake and for human prospering.

The educational role of law is at best recessive in the American understanding of law. We tend to view law not as aimed at creating individual or common good but as a means of mediating dispute and keeping civil peace. In so far as that is the dominant view of law in America, "gay marriage" says nothing about the morality of homosexuality one way or the other, it simply guarantees that all "domestic partnerships" (an alternative term considered for "civil unions") are treated equally. All well and good. But I am not certain that one can ever completely erase the educational effect of law.

The law may not deliberately create culture, but it certainly becomes a sign within the culture. Giving legal status to gay marriage does appear to suggest that the difference between gay and heterosexual partnerships is a matter of irrelevance. It will surely make it more difficult for parents or the churches to argue a preference for heterosexual marriage (which I hope they will wish to do). Thus I remain in favor of "civil union" as a concept more in keeping with our restrained sense of law and less tilted toward the equating of gay and heterosexual unions.

Seeing Things (Mark 9:30-37)

Start seeing motorcycles," said the bumper sticker. I didn’t know I wasn’t seeing motorcycles, I thought, then realized that that was the point. How do you begin to see something you didn’t know you were missing?

"Start seeing the resurrection," says Jesus, as he walks with the disciples to Jerusalem. He Is teaching them about his death and resurrection, but they don’t understand. They are confused and reluctant to ask for clarification. Perhaps they’re afraid of looking stupid again. After all, the last time they thought they understood what Jesus was talking about, he was warning them about the Pharisees and Herod, and they were thinking about bread (Mark 8:14-21). Oops. Or maybe they are frightened into silence by the words "betrayed" and "killed." Whatever the cause of their fear, they do not respond to Jesus when he describes the end of their journey.

Instead, as the walk progresses, the disciples find their way into a discussion about which of them is the greatest. They are graduate students comparing GRE scores. They are ministers discussing how many they worship each week, as in "We worship about 430 at both services." They are anyone who has ever written a memo containing the words "measurable outcomes." Which of the disciples is the star pupil? Who is the greatest?

It is easy to portray the disciples as self-involved here, but maybe that is unfair. What if the outcome the were trying to measure was faithfulness to their teacher? ’What if they were arguing about who really understood Jesus, including what Jesus was saying about his death? We know they were confused by his passion predictions. We know, too, that they are not the only followers to wonder what exactly is required of one who seeks to remain faithful to Jesus. Maybe the conversation about greatness grew out of a conversation about what it really meant for them to stay beside Jesus all the way to Jerusalem.

The way of the cross is no less confounding or frightening today. Because of this, It is fashionable in some circles to speak of Christianity as a set of skills that one learns to practice, the way one learns the skills necessary to be a woodworker or a research chemist. New pastors are advised to find the masters of Christianity in their parish and apprentice themselves to these giants of Christian practice. And if we are going to apprentice ourselves to a master, we must learn who is the greatest.

Which brings us back to the disciples on the road. Unfortunately, inside the house in Capernaum, Jesus is unimpressed by the disciples’ tidy argument about their need to know who is the greatest. He looks around for help to make his point. He sits down, calls his pupils to sit around him and begins to teach by bringing a child into the group. We don’t know if the child was a girl or a boy (The Greek word for child is gender neutral.) The vocabulary echoes the culture’s view of children. To almost all adults, and certainly to adult male disciples focused on their alpha male teacher and their measurable likeness to him, children were of no consequence. Children were invisible.

In Luke 7, a Pharisee is scandalized when Jesus allows a woman, a known sinner, to wash his feet and anoint them with ointment. Jesus asks him, "Do you see this woman?" Something similar is happening when Jesus stands a child up in the midst of his disciples, then takes the child in his arms the way Simeon had once embraced baby Jesus and says, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me (Mark 9:37). The disciples want to know who is the best at following Jesus, and Jesus says, "Do you see this child?’ As Pheme Perkins observes, "This example treats the child, who was socially invisible, as the stand-in for Jesus."

In one of Sue Grafton’s mysteries, the murderer turns out to be a 60-year-old woman who is 30 pounds overweight. After the mystery is solved, the detective reflects that the woman nearly got away with murder simply because no one would remember seeing someone like her. Nothing about her made her noticeable. She was, for all practical purposes, invisible.

So it was with a child in antiquity Jesus sees something the disciples do not even know they are missing.

This gospel text’s bumper sticker might be, "Start seeing the invisible." Start seeing the invisible, not because it is virtuous to do so, not so that we can congratulate ourselves on being the greatest at seeing. Start seeing the invisible because to receive the invisible one is to receive Jesus, and to receive Jesus is to receive the one who sent him.

Where is the invisible Jesus who will teach you the way of the cross? Will you learn to pray from the "masters," the saints in your community the old faithful ones? Probably you will. But there is also that panicked woman in the ICU waiting room who has never prayed, and who teaches you to pray when she clenches her hands to her forehead and says, "God, please!" Do you see her?

You may learn to preach from the tapes of great preachers, and refine your theology by reading the writings of seminary professors. But a teenager near you could be a preacher too, one with a talent for testimony that you’ve never seen. The most solid sacramental theology you hear this week may come from the five-year-old who tells you she thinks she is ready to receive communion because, simply, "I can eat." If you see them, you see Jesus.

Lesson Plan (James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38)

With fall education programs getting under way and Sunday school teachers beginning another year of teaching, it may be disconcerting to hear this reading from James: "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness."

In this chapter James is warning his listeners that it is difficult to guard the tongue. But the link between the first verse and the rest of the chapter is not self-evident. Why begin this section by addressing teachers? Is self-control with respect to words harder for teachers than others? (No fair answering if you are in academic administration.) Or is it just that teachers, like preachers, make their living with words, and so the likelihood of error is greater for them? With access to so much rope, it is only a matter of time before we professional speakers hang ourselves.

Yet I wonder if both of these answers aren’t beside the point that James is making. In the first two chapters of the letter, James points out instances of hypocrisy When we say we have faith but do not care for the widow and orphan, what kind of faith are we confessing? Who exactly are we saying we believe in? Surely not the God of Abraham, Rahab and Jesus (James 2:23-26). It is hypocrisy when our speech and actions are not in sync. When we show favoritism to the rich and send the poor away empty, we are falsifying any statement of faith we make in the God of our Lord Jesus.

It is also hypocrisy when speech and speech are not in sync, and this is the problem James addresses. If we bless the Creator God and then curse someone created in the image of God, we not only, say something unfavorable about another human being. We also say something untrue about God -- namely that God makes junk. We are professing a theology of creation opposed to the testimony that "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." One element of our speech gives the lie to the other, and in the end we are not just lying, we are lying about God. Hence the strict judgment. The warning James gives is especially for those who -- by virtue of praying, praising, preaching or just talking about God -- are teachers of divine things.

Maybe this is why Jesus becomes so angry with Peter. When Peter rejects Jesus’ teaching that the Messiah must be crucified, Peter is beginning to fashion a lie about God. Surely, Peter is suggesting, there must be an easier way.

I would very much like for Peter to be right, for I have never understood why God needed the bloody sacrifice of an innocent victim In order to forgive sin. Why couldn’t Jesus have just kept on healing people and telling parables and blessing children until, at an advanced age, he died in his sleep? Or aged gracefully as a teacher, spending summers at the lake, sporting a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, and greeting class after class of ever younger, fresh-faced disciples every fall? "Consider the lilies of the field . . .," he would say, and pens would start scribbling across the pages of notebooks.

"Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again" (Mark 8:31). Peter doesn’t agree. Surely there is an easier way!

But although Peter’s teaching career starts out innocently enough (according to Matthew, Peter says, "This must not happen to you!"), look where it leads. Before long, Peter is face to face with the prospect of his own great suffering, which he averts only by his passionate testimony, I do not know the man!" There is an easier way and Peter finds it, but only by lying about his association with the one he has known and confessed to be God’s anointed.

Perhaps, then, Jesus "must suffer" because he will not lie about whether and how he knows God. The Son of Man must suffer because he will reject every compromise with the authorities, the crowds, the Romans and even with his own beloved Peter. Although it is true that "with God all things are possible," it is hard to speak truth to power and then spend summers at the lake. Jesus will speak truth to power, and power will squash him like a gnat.

I was recently part of a small focus group that offered feedback on a newly designed Web site for the seminary where I teach. We talked for a while about the colors, the graphics, the menus and submenus, and then one of the group members said, "Nowhere on these pages is there a cross," She was right. I was surprised, but even more stunned and chastened by the realization that I had not even noticed its absence. I wondered where else we were not clearly saying, "Look, you need to know this man died. He was tortured and executed. It was awful."

Where else -- as congregations, as schools, as teachers -- are we not saying this? As we manage to tell the story of Jesus without the cross, we have learned what Peter was teaching as he took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him. As we follow Peter’s teaching and repeat it, Jesus may find a way to say to us, as he said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." This is the strictness with which teachers will be judged.

Muslim Visitors Question the American Way: Puzzled by Pluralism

Since the 9-11 terrorist attacks the U.S. State Department has sponsored a number of study programs that bring Muslim scholars from around the world to the U.S. with the aim of showing off the American way of separating church and state, and demonstrating how American society is able to both nurture faith traditions and support religious diversity. The implied intent is to promote an American-style separation of mosque and state in Muslim countries.

After being an academic director for two of these programs, however, I am acutely aware of how appealing a religiously aligned state is for Muslims, especially for those who live in countries where Muslims are the majority. This may particularly be true in Iraq where Saddam Hussen’s brutally repressive secular regime is viewed by some as a cautionary tale of what happens when religious influence is absent from government.

We held the first Fulbright seminar in September 2002, almost exactly a year after the 9-11 attacks. It attracted 13 religion scholars, roughly half of whom came from the Middle East, including the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt and Bahrain. The others came from Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. The majority had never traveled to the U.S. before, and they confessed to us later that they feared that they would be attacked in the streets for being Muslim.

We went to great lengths to try to make our visitors comfortable. We determined the direction of prayer (toward the qabah) and the correct prayer times for the dates of the seminar according to the longitude and latitude of each day’s location. We scheduled the program so as to allow for the prescribed five times of prayer each day. We located halal caterers to provide food at receptions and provided facilities for ritual washing prior to prayer. Still, we were continually reminded that most of our visitors had very little idea of what to expect outside a Muslim country.

Upon arrival they asked to be taken to the nearest mosque to pray. When told that it was a 20-minute drive away they were shocked. "In our country there is a mosque on almost every corner. When it is time to pray you simply walk into the nearest mosque," explained Ahmed Al Dawoody of Egypt. Religion is woven into everyday lifein their countries, incorporated into innumerable daily practices and behaviors from the moment they awake to the time they go to bed. They had difficulty understanding how we could claim to be a religious country and yet keep our religious practices separate from our work and public life.

A large portion of the seminar was devoted to showing off the religious diversity that flourishes in the U.S. and Americans’ great tolerance of diverse faiths. Rather than appreciating the benefits that religious pluralism offers to the larger society, some of our guests were clearly puzzled. On the second day of the program, Munib Ur Rehman, a Pakistani cleric, asked me, "If you believe your religion to be true, and you believe it is your duty to share this truth with others, then why would you think that religious pluralism is a good thing?" I realized that the religious tolerance that we celebrate in the U.S. could be perceived by someone from a religiously homogeneous country as a lack of religious conviction or, worse, a shameful hypocrisy.

I also gained insight into why, in many Muslims’ view, religious forms of governance are preferable to democratic regimes. Ibrahim Maibushira, a Nigerian scholar, explained that the Nigerian government has a constitutional democracy that exactly replicates the American model. Despite this form of government and despite being the world’s fifth-largest supplier of oil, 98 percent of Nigerians live in abject poverty.

Government officials are so corrupt that Nigeria’s northern states, where Muslims are a majority, decided in a democratic election to adopt Shar‘ia law and to create Islamic councils to govern local communities. Leaders chosen by Shar‘ia were less likely to be corrupt, and laws that enforced standards of moral practice in daily life would help resist the corruption and lawlessness that infected society.

When asked about the Nigerian woman who had been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery, Maibushira and the other Muslim scholars observed that according to the Qur’an conviction for such a crime requires an unusually high level of evidence -- there must be four eyewitnesses to the actual act of adultery -- and punishments are almost never carried out. They also explained that punishments are intentionally horrific so as to deter people from committing such crimes. (Eventually the death sentence in this case was overturned on a technicality.)

The impregnability of the Muslims’ worldview was evident in the case of the Jordanian legal scholar who insisted that the suicide bombers in the 9-11 attacks could not have been Muslim because violence against innocents is condemned by the Qur’an. Besides, he added triumphantly "it is reported that one of them was seen drinking at a nightclub the night before the attacks. So how could they be Muslim?"

It was difficult at times to feel that our dialogue was making headway. Attempts to discuss social issues often ended with one of the scholars quoting from the Qur’an or its commentaries, while the others remained silent or nodded in agreement. Only one or two scholars openly discussed issues of interpretation or the relevance of social context to the understanding of the Qur’an.

Textual literalism is an important part of Islamic culture. Most Muslims believe that the Qur’an holds the greatest truth both because it was the last revelation from God and therefore a correction of the Old and New Testaments, and also because Muslims have received this scripture in the original language of Mohammad -- Arabic. Unlike other sacred texts, it has not been corrupted by translation. For this reason, the traditional Muslim practice is to learn the Qur’an in Arabic through rote memorization.

Interestingly, Muslims do not learn Arabic in order to read the Qur’an, but rather learn Arabic by reading the Qur’an. This means that a traditional religious education provides no independent language skills with which to read the text critically. This makes issues of interpretation difficult, if not Impossible. to discuss.

After the program ended, many of the Muslim scholars wrote to say that their visit had convinced them of the basic kindness of the American people. They were also surprised in some cases to find that Americans were not as irreligious as they had thought. Still, the differences in perspective remained large.

In the days before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials spoke of a "democratic domino effect," by which the installation of a democratic government in Iraq would set off a wave of pro-democratic regime changes elsewhere in the Middle East. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, argued that the transition of Iraq to the "first Arab democracy" would "cast a very large shadow starting with Syria and Iran, across the whole Arab world."

My experience with Muslim scholars makes me skeptical that a "democratic domino effect" is about to unfold. And as I look at the current turmoil in Iraq and remember my conversations with Muslim scholars, I have a better understanding of the popular appeal of theocracy in Muslim-majority countries that have been ruled by brutal and repressive secular rulers. I can also better understand that in times of uncertainty It may be easier for people to trust a learned religious leader than a democratically elected elite put in place by dubiously motivated political constituencies.

Pulpit Supply

When denominational officials look at the number of empty pulpits in their churches, they worry about a shortage of pastors. Some have strategized about new ways to recruit candidates for ministry. "The clergy shortage is impacting me at every turn," says Bishop Ted Gulick of the Episcopal Diocese in Kentucky. "The bishops and seminaries woke up about two and a half years ago, and realized we have to start recruiting younger people to fill the ranks."

Yet from the perspective of clergy, the situation appears quite the opposite. They see a crowded job market, with few attractive positions and even fewer chances for promotion. Denominational statistics show that there are twice as many ordained ministers as there are pastoral positions to fill. Jack Marcum, head of research services for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), sees "little evidence of a literal shortage of ministers . . . We are training more than sufficient numbers of ministers of word and sacrament in the PCUSA to pastor mid-sized and larger congregations and fill other traditional ministries."

The data supplied by denominations to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches confirm that there is a clergy glut. Whereas data in the 1950s showed slightly less than one pastor for every church, in 2000 there were almost two pastors for every church. This trend appears across liberal, moderate and conservative denominations, across large and small denominations, and across fast-growing and slow-growing denominations.

If there are so many unemployed clergy, why are denominational leaders wringing their hands about a clergy shortage? The answer is that denominational officials are focusing not on the total number of clergy but on the number of vacant pulpits, and on this score many denominations are indeed facing a crisis. In the denominations often designated as liberal -- the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) -- roughly 20 percent of churches lack clergy (according to Yearbook data). The "moderate" mainline denominations -- including the United Methodist Church, various Lutheran denominations, the Disciples of Christ, the American Baptist Churches and the Reformed Church -- show a 10 percent vacancy rate. The conservative denominations, which have among the highest numbers of clergy per member, also have the highest proportions of employed clergy per church. The data from these denominations -- including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Church of the Nazarene and the Assemblies of God -- suggest that there are 1.4 working clergy per church. (Anecdotally, however, officials in these denominations believe that there are still empty pulpits out there, and they estimate the percentage to be between 4 and 6 percent.)

How can some denominations report both a surplus of clergy and a large percentage of empty pulpits? Because the empty pulpits are mostly in small, rural churches, which aren’t very attractive positions; they are isolated geographically and they don’t pay much in salary or benefits.

In the PCUSA, one of the few denominations that keeps data on ministerial vacancies by church size, the vacancy rate in congregations with fewer than 100 members has grown from 39 percent in 1990 to 44 percent in 2000. Among churches with fewer than 50 members, the vacancy rate has grown from 71 percent to 77 percent. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America reports a similar trend, with half of its pastoral vacancies occurring in churches with fewer than 175 members.

The problem of filling ministerial posts in small churches cannot be ignored, for most churches are small. A 1999 study of American congregations reported that 71 percent have fewer than 100 regularly participating adults. The median size of a church is 75 active members. In other words, half of all American congregations have fewer than 75 members.

Why don’t pastors want to serve small churches? Many pastors would say that it is deeply satisfying to work in smaller churches. As one pastor who moved from a large church to a small church commented, I would never go back to a large church . . . Administrative tasks kept getting in the way of doing what I wanted to be doing, . . .[which is] serving a congregation and making a difference in people’s lives." Nevertheless, for many pastors the position of senior pastor in a large multistaff church remains a symbol of professional accomplishment.

Visions of success aside, several factors make pastors hesitant to take a call to a small church. First of all, seminary graduates these days tend to be older and are embarking upon a second or third career. They are also more likely than in the past to be women. These factors introduce personal and family demands that limit choices. As more and more women have entered the workforce, male pastors are increasingly constrained by the needs of their wives’ professional lives. And female pastors are also often constrained as to where they can serve by a husband’s career. For these people, serving in an isolated community away from other employment opportunities may not be an option.

A study published in 2000 by the ELCA revealed that of the cohort of newly minted pastors, 71 percent placed constraints upon where they could move due to the needs or desires of a spouse; 58 percent restricted their first call to a location in or near a large city; 36 percent were opposed to serving in a small congregation; and 32 percent were opposed to serving in a rural setting.

As for financial concerns, a 1998 study of first-call candidates in the ELCA showed that roughly half were called to churches with average attendance under 83. These churches had an average operating budget of less than $63,300 from which they had to pay not only the pastor’s salary but also the mortgage, along with such expenses as maintenance of the church building, supplies, equipment, utilities and educational materials. It may not be surprising that 25 percent of the first calls ended within the first three years and 45 to 50 percent ended within five years.

Ministers’ sense of the financial burden of serving small churches should not be taken simply as evidence of a weak commitment. One former pastor told me that he decided to leave the ministry and find secular work when he saw his parents go hungry. They had served the church as missionaries all of their lives, yet when they retired they had neither health nor retirement benefits. He said the denomination offered them no financial help, and at that point he decided to quit the ministry in order to gain medical and retirement benefits for his family. In his denomination, pensions were available only to those clergy who worked for churches that had made contributions to the pension fund over the course of their careers -- something small churches have fewer resources to provide.

Since job opportunities are primarily in small or rural churches, which offer lower wages, clergy who look to move to larger and larger churches are inevitably going to be frustrated. There are simply not enough large churches for clergy to move into. Only 10 percent of the nation’s congregations have 350 or more active members. Not only are clergy likely to start out in small churches, they are likely to stay there throughout their careers.

These realities have affected the pattern of clergy employment. The Hartford Study of Ordained Men and Women, conducted in 1993, found that many pastors drop in and out of ministry. They may take a job in a secular field and then return to ministry. They may experience occasional periods of unemployment. Many work as part-time clergy while also working in secular occupations to support themselves and to gain medical and retirement benefits. Many report being subsidized by a spouse -- which often means that they are the ones able to take jobs in small churches that cannot otherwise offer a living wage. Yet those being subsidized in this way are also most constrained by a partner’s job and lifestyle.

As denominational leaders consider the increase in part-time clergy, and the high unemployment figures for clergy combined with high rates of pastoral vacancies, they often worry about the "decline" of church leadership. They think nostalgically about a time -- actually rather short -- when the brightest college graduates sought a career in the ministry. They wonder how to make a theological vocation attractive to these kinds of candidates once again.

Historically, however, the idea of the ministry as a middle-class, white-collar profession is more the exception than the rule for most American denominations, and in many traditions today it is still a relatively unfamiliar concept. The rapid growth of the Baptists and the Methodists in the early 19th century was fueled by itinerant lay ministers with little or no training and who were sometimes largely illiterate. Yet they were willing to sacrifice their families and their health to ride through the wilderness and proclaim the word of God. African-American churches have long flourished with clergy who work at one job during the week and preach on Sundays. And it is perhaps not a coincidence that many clergy in the fastest-growing denominations today -- those in the Pentecostal tradition, for example -- follow the same model, supplementing their ministries through other work.

Mainline Protestants have been waking up to the reality that the nature of ministry is changing. Increasingly, the available opportunities do not match the traditional career as aspirations of someone who has spent three years in seminary and is loaded down with family responsibilities and student loans. Says Robert Kohler an executive with the United Methodist Church: "Instead of a [clergy] shortage or crisis, I see a changing profile in pastoral ministry with an intentional use of more full- and part-time local pastors to address the needs for clergy."

Researchers in the PCUSA and the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod have reached a similar conclusion. A 1999 study conducted by Alan and Cheryl Klass concluded with the suggestion that the LCMS use licensed deacons, supervised by a local pastor, to fill the more than 1,000 vacant ministry posts. "Virtually all of organized Christendom," they argued, "is embracing the concept." Jack Marcum, denominational researcher for the PCUSA, says that "general efforts to recruit more inquirers and candidates for ministry seem misguided. . . . It’s not going to solve the twin problems of tiny congregations that are not economically viable and ministers who are tied to a particular city or region. . . . Making more use of commissioned lay pastors, a practice already under way in several presbyteries, seems like the best option of those currently available."

The number of unemployed clergy and empty pulpits is alarming to those who measure success in traditional terms. But rather than Interpret these numbers as indications of institutional failure, they might be seen as a call to reexamine the yardsticks of success. Members of small churches served by part-time lay ministers are not necessarily worse off spiritually than their counterparts in large churches -- and perhaps they are better off. Small churches may be more likely to create strong interpersonal bonds, forge vibrant communities and create a stronger witness to the community. It may be that church life occupies a more significant place in the lives of people in small churches.

In that case, perhaps small churches with part-time pastors should be embraced for their special gifts and the contributions they make to the vitality of the denomination. For denominations to discount congregations on the basis of size and physical resources may be to discount their own future.

Roll Call (Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69)

Of all the questions in scripture, the single most poignant one may be recorded in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus has just finished giving what is regarded as one of his difficult sayings (though a friend once asked which of Jesus’ sayings is not difficult). This one spoke of the need for people to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and the difficulty involved for anyone who wanted to follow him.

Because of this, the writer says, "many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him." It is striking that John uses the word "disciples" for those who turn back; these are apparently not just casual listeners, not the folks who show up only at Christmas and Easter. These people have been teaching Sunday school and working in the nursery and when longtime pillars start leaving the church we get a little restless; people want to bring in consultants and do focus groups to diagnose the problem.

So Jesus called the Twelve together and put the question to them with unsettling directness: Do you also wish to go away?

I wonder how Jesus asked the question. I wonder if there was an edge to it -- was he issuing a challenge? I sometimes imagine that he asked it sadly. Maybe he asked it with a sigh, his shoulders sagging a little. Maybe it was hard to see people who had been counted on as followers leave -- to see many followers leave. There is something humbling about having to ask such a question.

Do you also wish to go away? I wonder sometimes how I would have responded to the question. Because at times the truth is I do wish to go away. I don’t like thinking this about myself. But in times of temptation, in times when I deceive other people to avoid trouble or get what I want, in times when I deliberately close my eyes to the sight of those who are poor or marginalized because I don’t want to feel guilty or bother to help. I too am one of the ones who wish to go away.

Do you also wish to go away? Peter’s response is striking. He doesn’t say yes, of course, but he doesn’t quite say no either. Instead, in good Jesus-style, he answers back with another question: To whom else can we go? It is not, perhaps, the most flattering answer in the world, but it is honest. It’s a little reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s famous description of democracy as the worst form of government except for every other form that has ever been tried. Following Jesus may not always be easy or pleasant, or even totally comprehensible, but when it comes to the eternal-life business, to tell the truth there’s not much out there in the way of alternatives.

As ethicist Lewis Smedes said, "This is where the trolley stops. . . Without Jesus we are stuck with two options: utopian illusion or deadly despair. I scorn illusion. I dread despair. So I put all my money on Jesus."

Do you also wish to go away? The young church at Ephesus is struggling to maintain Its existence when the worship of Artemis or Caesar or Mammon are so much more attractive alternatives. Paul ends a letter to the Ephesians with an extended metaphor that sounds violently unattractive in our day: "put on the whole armor of God, so that you maybe able to stand against the wiles of the devil."

Apparently Paul did not expect following Jesus to be easy. He talks about the life of those in the church as if its going to be a kind of war. Ben Patterson writes that no soldier ever exclaimed in hurt tones during a battle: "Hey -- they’re shooting at me." Getting shot at is more or less what you expect when you sign up.

Paul, however, knew that the citizens of Ephesus saw helmets and breastplates, shields and swords, every day. Rome did not always speak softly but it carried a big stick

Paul tells everyone to gear up for battle, but it is a different kind of battle. It is marked by truth -- which is the first casualty of war. Its advance is marked by salvation – healing, wholeness, rather than body bags. Its gospel -- its good news, the headlines of the PR department -- is peace. Walter Bruggemann has written that the ancient texts of scripture can be read as subversive material, as a way for those without power to undermine and conspire against the damage being done by the "rulers and authorities." Few texts are more subversive than Paul’s words at the end of this letter.

Do you also wish to go away? Jim Wallis writes that when the South African government canceled a political rally against apartheid, Desmond Tutu led a worship service in St. George’s Cathedral. The walls were lined with soldiers and riot police carrying guns and bayonets, ready to close it down. Bishop Tutu began to speak of the evils of the apartheid system -- how the rulers and authorities that propped it up were doomed to fall. He pointed a finger at the police who were there to record his words: "You maybe powerful -- very powerful -- but you are not God. God cannot be mocked. You have already lost."

Then, in a moment of unbearable tension, the bishop seemed to soften. Coming out from behind the pulpit, he flashed that radiant Tutu smile and began to bounce up and down with glee. "Therefore, since you have already lost, we are inviting you to join the winning side."

The crowd roared, the police melted away and the people began to dance. Don’t go away, Paul says. Put on your armor and dance. I am inviting you to join the winning side.