Potters for Peace

February 20, 2011

San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua

Very few potters in the world can make a living at it.  Rather most are domestic crafts persons who in fashioning functional ware for food preparation and storage have found a means of self-expression.   The techniques are passed down generations.  Each will take to the clay either as chore or passion.  Some are good.  Some do the minimal.  All extend this ancient and very human art form.

What could be more artistic than adding the symbols of nature, tradition or faith to the form and decoration of the cup that will hold the drink that nurtures, the bowl that serves the meal that will sustain, the lidded jar that will store something as precious as holiday wine or next season’s seeds?

Whether consciously or not potters transform the most common materials…..earth, water and fire….into useful and at times beautiful instruments of transformation and in so doing offer us the user the chance to touch and taste the life grounded in the living earth.

While on a medical assessment team to Nicaragua we ran into and learned about Potters for Peace (PFP).

 Potters for Peace is a U.S. based nonprofit, a network of potters, educators, technicians, supporters, and volunteers. Founded in Nicaragua in 1986, PFP works with clay artisans in Central America and worldwide on ceramic water purification projects.  PFP is a unique organization devoted to socially responsible development and grass roots accompaniment among potters.  Its goals are to offer support, solidarity and friendship to developing world potters; to assist with appropriate technologies sustained using local skills and materials; to help preserve cultural traditions; and to assist in marketing locally, regionally and internationally. The vast majority of potters in Central America are rural women and the core work for Potters for Peace has always been assisting these hard-working people to earn a better living.

 Every day 5,000 children die due to unsanitary water (WHO 2005). Since 1998 Potters for Peace has traveled the world teaching the fabrication of a low-cost ceramic water filters that can bring clean, potable water to those who need it most. PFP does not make, store or distribute ceramic water filters nor does it operate filter production facilities. Instead, PFP assists responsible local partners to set up filter production and distribution facilities, now in 33 countries in the tropical world. (www.pottersforpeace.org).

It should not be surprising, although it was, that potters across the borders of culture and language would work together to empower local artists in developing communities by transforming earth, water and fire into the means of health and healing.  They’ve been doing just that for millennium.

For this pastor/potter PFP inspires me once again to consider God at work when our hands create and reach out. 

Dead Wreaths

February 10, 2011

To my neighbors with their Christmas Wreaths still on the front door….”I feel ya!”….

Too harried to get the chores done…

Too exhausted to remember the Holidays just days past….

Too locked into the present crisis to bother…

Or…..could you still be waiting for Santa?

Basking in the echoes of Carols?

Still kneeling in adoration at the manger of Bethlehem?

In counter cultural rebellion do you insist that Christmas is a yearlong intention to worship the incarnate divinity?

As the wreaths degrade to dust, their plastic gathering grime, and their colors fading, will they sentinel your fortress until the Visa is paid off?

I, an agent of suburban angst, a long time disciple of bourgeois capitulation, I salute you!    Whatever the motivation…sloth, neglect or statement …I am the fool who prides himself by putting Christmas away, neat and tidy, boxes labeled, a few days after New Year.

A pride as empty and decayed as a wreath long brown.

Egypt and the Birth of Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda and the eventual atrocities of 9/11 were born in the jail cells of Egypt, according to Lawrence Wright, author of his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage, 2006).

 In the 1950’s and 60’s Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned and tortured in Egyptian prisons for writing and organizing against Gamal Abdul Nassar’s post-World War II government.  Qutb founded what would become the Muslim Brotherhood and argued that the modern values of secularism, tolerance, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the genders and materialism was infecting Islam through the agency of colonialism (Wright p 28). He envisioned an Egypt governed by Sharia, Islamic law.  Qutb would apply an obscure Islamic concept of takfir or “excommunication” to justify and encourage violent resistance against the Muslims supporting the regime of Nassar which Qutb insisted betrayed the faith.  (Wright p. 34)  Qutb was hanged a martyr to his cause in 1966.

“Takfir”, considered a heresy by most Muslims, evolved out of the concentration camps in Egypt to its current form to fuel the suicidal violence of modern extremists in direct contradiction to The Koran which forbids violence against another Muslim, non-combatants and women and children. (Wright pp. 142-43, in confusing contrast to many citations justifying war and violence against the non-believer, also note that the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190-192) and advocates compassion towards non-hostile non-believers (Surah 60:8)) 

Ayman Al-Zawahiri was one of the thousands educated, middle-class Egyptians who adopted the writings and philosophy of Qutb  as a result, in part, of their frustration with the brutality, corruption and privileges of the ruling class of Egyptian secularists.  A leader in a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood he would be swept up in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assignation by elements of the Brotherhood in 1981, although he had no direct involvement in the killing.

One line of thinking proposes that American’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt….torture created an appetite for revenge….the main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as enabling force behind the repressive regime.   They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society.  Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage.  Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution, they called it justice, was all consuming. (Wright p. 61) 

It would be Al-Zawahiri  in partnership with Osama bin Laden who would conceive of and organize the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi Kenya, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and  the 9/11 attacks on mainline USA.    

When our Presidents Bush and Obama insist that we are not at war with Islam they are right.  Religion may have given Al-Qaeda and the extremist Jihadists the philosophical framework to justify their violence, after much theological manipulation.   But Islam is not the enemy.  Social class, economic and political oppression and the corruption of autocracy, which we now see confronted in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, are the ground out of which such violence has grown.  

Not that that offers any excuse.

There is no excuse for terrorism, even in the name of retribution, even in the name of victimization and especially in the name of God.

"Washington has been very anxious about what's happening here, but it shouldn't be. It should be happy. This will reduce terrorism. When people have their voice, they don’t need to explode themselves."

--Mohammed Fouad, an Egyptian software engineer. (The Washington Post, 2/2/11)

What to do about atheists?

The parishioner looked shocked when I recommended "my favorite atheists".   We were speaking of the hypocrisy so evident in church life when the subject came up. 

Since 9/11 there have been a number of best-selling books from atheist authors reflecting on the power of religion to do harm.  

That violence by religious institutions and individuals of all persuasions has been done in the "name of God" is evident throughout history and continues today.  Flying airplanes into buildings, the perpetuators committing suicide and killing thousands of innocents in the process, can only be justified by a gross theological manipulation of the tenants of Islam.1   Yet such thinking, even when held by a small minority, has been the occasion for many others to question the value and purpose of religion itself.  

Unfortunately, we don't have to look far for other examples; clergy sexual abuse of children, the religious justifications for segregation and violence  based on ethnic, gender and sexual orientation differences, the public face of North American Christianity as represented by those willing to attribute blame for hurricanes and earthquakes on those they don't like.  Terrible things have been done and said in the "name of God".   Few can deny that.  Since 9/11 it has been grist for the mill of atheism.

Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have been the most popular of these authors selling millions of books and generating scores of rebuttals in print.  Harris' A Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage, 2008) and Karen Armstrong's The Case for God (Anchor, 2010) would be my two favorite examples of this debate.

Is it shocking to learn that a Christian pastor has a favorite atheist author?   It doesn't mean that I agree with or am thrown into doubt and confusion by such writing.  Neither should we be afraid to listen and learn from other points of view.  After 35 years of pastoral ministry, during which God's existence and relevance have been constantly questioned by those I seek to serve, it is comforting to address a rational argument for atheism when it is so often presented in the context of pain.

The spouse of the shooting victim, the teenager diagnosed with cancer, the returning soldier from a tour of what is worst about humanity, all cry out "how can there be a God when there is so much evil in the world....how can a God of love allow such atrocities....where is God now that I feel so alone..."?  Such moments are rarely times for academic discussion!  At such moments all one can do is to listen and embrace with compassion those on the journey though grief.   As a pastor many times my first concern is the heart, the head will come later.

Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation is short, articulate and thought provoking.  I'll take that any day over a parent burying a child who has wrapped himself and a car full of friends around a tree, crying out "....where was your God when Bobby needed him!...."

Such agony is different than atheism per se.  Ironically, it assumes a powerful divinity which for some twisted reason has chosen not to act benevolently or has chosen to "allow" tragedy for pedagogy or punishment.  "The god in control of all events" has been worshipped since the beginning and remains a popular deity in a variety of religious traditions, including my own. In times of tragedy we seem programmed to project our blame or rationalizations onto this deity.

Any god that would cause or allow a 9/11 should be rejected and denied.  In part because such a god is incongruent with the Divinity found in scripture that watches Adam and Eve choose to eat the fruit (Genesis 2-3); the God that does everything it Its power through the witness of the Hebrew prophets to warn the 'chosen people' from their apostasy as they hurtle towards self-destruction as a nation; because that same God hangs incarnate butchered on a Roman cross.

The power of the Judeo-Christian God is the creative force of transformation, the lure to that which is best and possible in each moment, not in divine control or coercion.  God shares the journey with us.  God doesn't dictate it.

There is an ironic comfort suggesting that "God has a plan" for each and every moment however terrible it might be, which may be one reason that "the god in control of all events" remains a popular idol even today.  The notion of "free will"...the doctrine suggesting that in each and every moment the choice is always our....gives little comfort and lots of frustration in the face of broken reality to those who would be faithful.  Yet if "determinism" is our stance then we either deny the reality of evil or we worship a deity that would inflict 9/11s on innocent people. 

"The god in control of all events"?  Is that the God Jesus prays to in the garden of Gethsemane asking three times to take away the "cup of crucifixion" and in the end chooses his fate? (Matthew 26:36-46)  If God determines each moment why would Jesus need to ask?  Why would Jesus need to choose?

What to do about atheists?  People of faith don't need to be afraid to read them or listen to their derision.   The atheists poke at the hypocrisy of religion and its history of harm with insight and righteous indignation....as we all should.   We may have something to learn in the process.

Far more significant for the faithful is the self-imposed agnosticism born of disappointment, betrayal and tragedy for such isolates us from each other and the heart.  The old preaching punch line may be trite but it’s still true; "If God seems far away…guess who moved?"

1          for example the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190

What We Say

"The President is an apostate...an imposter...he is ruining the country....he is aiding our enemies....the President is a traitor"   So said the newspapers of our first President George Washington.1

During the Civil War the media said of President Abraham Lincoln, he was "an ape....a baboon...a buffoon...a clown....a usurper....a traitor....a tyrant....a monster....a charlatan...a bully.  His home town newspaper the Illinois State Register wrote, "How the greatest butchers of antiquity sink into insignificance when their crimes are contrasted with those of Abraham Lincoln."2

In recent weeks there has been a lot of concern about how we talk about and to each other in this country.  And there should be.  There has been much soul searching about our choice of words and the demeanor of our conversation about those with whom we disagree.

It’s easy and convenient to bash the media's passion for sensational conflict.  The print, television, radio and internet outlets are full of opportunities for pundits and prognosticators to yell at each other, not just disagreeing but questioning the opposition's worth as human beings.   Considering what our heroes Washington and Lincoln faced from the media of their day should we take comfort knowing that such language is nothing new in America?

Or….as my father would constantly remind me as I railed against the programing on the radio and television stations he would manage over a very successful 50 year career in broadcasting, "Mark you need to look in the mirror.  You the viewer determine what we put on the air.  You the viewer have all the power and it is there at the end of your fingertips.  If you don't like what you're hearing or seeing, turn it off or change the channel.  If people don't want to see or hear what we are programming we will know right away and change for we make it our business to broadcast what people want."

If that is the case what does the popularity of media conflict programming say about us and our desire to listen to and watch people yell at each other and put each other down as human beings?

More than a political or civic issue, the Christian tradition would suggest that how we talk to and about each other is a spiritual matter; "...let everyone be quick to listen and slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness…” (James 1:22-23) The old Arabic saying echoes this theme; "We were born with two ears and one tongue.  We should listen twice as much as we speak!"

Jesus insisted that how we treat each other is how we treat God; that's true in our families, that is true in our communities, that is true in the church.   How we speak to and about each other has everything to do with our spirituality; about the kids at school that don’t have friends and are unpopular; about the rumors and gossip we pass between ourselves at work, at school, at church or at home; about other members of our family.

Such an ethic might never make in in the media climate today but imagine what it would do for our families....our church...for our country.

1              George Washington's Legacy of Leadership,  A Ward Burian, Morgan James, 2007, p. 252

                George Washington, William Roscoe Thayer, Nabu Press, 2010, p. 219

                George Washington and the Origin of the American Presidency, Rozell, Pederson & Williams, Praeger,

                2000, pp. 189-190

2              Presidential Anecdotes, Paul F. Boller, ed., Penguin, 1981, pp. 122-146

The List

Richard Lawrence (1835 attempt on President Andrew Jackson)

John Wilkes Booth (1865 assassinated President Abraham Lincoln)

Charles J. Guiteau (1881 assassinated President James Garfield)

Leon Czolgosz (1901 assassinated President William McKinley)

John Schrank (1912 attempt on President Theodore Roosevelt)

Carl Weiss (1935 assassinated US Senator Huey Long)

Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola (1950 attempt on President Harry S. Truman)

Richard Paul Pavlick (December 12, 1960 attempt on President elect John F. Kennedy)

Lee Harvey Oswald (1963 assassinated President John F. Kennedy)

Norman Butler, Thomas Johnson and Talmadge Hayer (1965 assassinated Malcolm X)

James Earl Ray (1968 assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Sirhan Sirhan (1968 assassinated US Senator Robert F. Kennedy)

Arthur Bremer (1972 attempt on Presidential candidate George Wallace)

Samuel Byck (1974 attempt on President Richard Nixon, with hijacked plane to crash                into White House)

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (1975 attempt on President Gerald Ford)

Sara Jane More (1975 attempt on President Gerald Ford)

Dan White (1978 assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk)

John Hinckley (1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan)

Casey Brezik (2010 attempt on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, with knife)

Jared Lee Loughner (2011 attempt on US Representative Gabrielle Giffords)

The list is long.  Our nation has a long history of violence against its elected leaders, not to mention threats of violence and intimidation which are a daily occurrence for many of them.   Whether motivated by politics or insanity the assassins are mostly male and almost always use a gun.  

The events on January 8th, 2011 with the murder of 6 and the wounding of 14 during Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' "meet and greet" at a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona will occasion lots of soul searching. There will be all sorts of theorizing and analysis of this violence and there should be.  Does it reflect something wrong in our nation or our times?  Is there something we can change to prevent such mindless violence in the future?   Is there something wrong with us, inherent in our system, in ourselves?

Yet "the list" would suggest such a tragedy is not unique to our times.  Expanding it across history and national boundaries "the list" would be much, much longer.   Compared to much of the rest of the world our political process in the USA is extraordinarily peaceful and just.   This is not to diminish this most recent attack, nor to suggest that our political system is perfect.

Which may be why the assault on Representative Giffords so grieves the vast majority of us.  This is not the way it’s supposed to be in America.  We are better than this.   We resolve our politics with debate and at the ballot.   We've learned from our past.  Right?

We may have a long way to go to reach the dream of America, "land of the free, home of the brave".  There is no excuse for political violence but the power-mad, greedy and twisted seem always to find one.  

Where is God in such a world? 

We find God in the commitment to service, the faith and the courage of the three strangers who wrestled Jared Lee Loughner to the ground as he reached for another magazine of bullets; in Christina-Taylor Green the nine year old killed at the scene who recently elected to her student council wanted to learn more about public service; in Dorwin Stoddard (76) an active church leader who died protecting his wife from the bullets; in the emergency first responders, police, paramedics and Emergency Room personnel who saved lives that day and are dedicated to doing it again and again, each and every day.

For those of us who follow the teachings of a crucified God....assassinated by the political processes of Empire and religion...we know that the violence inflicted by "the list" and the agents of power and greed who continue to use political violence will never get the last word.    There are 2.2 billion followers of Jesus today.  How many even remember Pontus Pilate?

In our grief and anger over the events in Tucson let's not forget the thousands of average citizens who serve this nation in elected office who put themselves out into the public they serve with the desire to make our communities a better place.   Their politics may be right or wrong.  We may agree or disagree with their ideology and goals.  If we don't like them we can always vote them out of office.   Regardless, every one of us needs to pray for their success, health and safety.

Non Judgmental God

For those of us whose favorite Bible verse is “God is love” (I John 4:16) we tend to see the entire Canon of 66 books of the Protestant scripture through it as if the lens of a set of eyeglasses.  In so doing we ignore or dismiss a host of texts that suggest anything different than the unconditional, unqualified love of God.  Such as….

“Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” (Luke 2:14)

“For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him…”  (Psalm 103:11)

 “….if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”  (Romans 10:9)

“The Lord watches over all who love him but all the wicked he will destroy.” (Psalm 145:20)

Does every person receive God’s blessing and favor (salvation) or only those who believe (fear)?   Does God love some people more than others; “whom he favors”?   Is God’s love unqualified?  And if it isn’t what disqualifies you?

Most of us wrestle with these questions at some point or another as we get to know the Bible.

The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17) would suggest that God does not approve of lying, stealing, adultery or murder to name a few things.  Much of the Hebrew scripture will go on to define all sorts of behaviors that God finds offensive from shaving your beard (Leviticus 19:27) to sex with animals (Leviticus 18:23) to using false weight scales in the marketplace in order to cheat the buyer (Proverbs 11:1, Amos 8:5).  But then the New Testament ends with a list of those who will not get into heaven but will be thrown into the eternal fires of hell (Revelations 21:8).  The “God of wrath and judgment” isn’t only found in what we call the Old Testament. 

Based on verses in the Bible not everyone gets into heaven. (I Corinthians 6:9-10) That certainly doesn’t fit into our contemporary and commonly held theology of an all loving, all inclusive, all tolerant Divinity.  In the Biblical tradition sinners are punished (Exodus 32:25-28, Acts 5:1-11) and the evil destroyed (I Kings 18:20-40, Mark 13:19-20) In the Biblical tradition there are plenty of suggestions that we are going to get exactly what we deserve.  God destroys the earth with a flood (Genesis 7-9).   At the end of time we shall be held accountable for our actions in life (Revelations 21:12).  The apostle Paul concludes “You shall reap what you sow” (Galatians 6:7-9).     

But there is a parallel tradition as well throughout the Canon; you are not going to get what you deserve; mercy.

Abraham and Yahweh bargain over the fate of Sodom, God willing to bend his punishment if Abraham can find a few good men (Genesis 18:22-33, unfortunately he can’t!).  God sends Jonah to prophecy to the evil city Nineveh a word of judgment but holds out the possibility of forgiveness if they repent.  Just the thought of God sparing the evil Ninevites makes the prophet run away on a ship, through the belly of a whale, out into a desert to die.   When a merciful God spares the city “and all its animals” it drives Jonah to despair (Jonah4:8). 

In Hebrew scripture and New Testament we encounter a God looking for any excuse to forgive and begin the relationship over again; “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  He will not always accuse nor will he keep his anger forever.  He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.”  (Psalm 103:8-10).  The ultimate expression of which is found on the cross “Father forgive them for they know not what they do…” (Luke 23:34).

As well as making the case that we are going to get what we deserve in and after life, it would seem that the Biblical tradition also asserts that we are not going to get what we deserve.  Even more confusing, if not amazing, is that the same source insists we are going to get exactly what we don’t deserve; grace.

Esau forgives Jacob (Genesis 33).  Elijah feeds a starving gentile widow and her son (I Kings 17:8-24).  Having betrayed every aspect of the Covenant with Yahweh God offers Israel a new one, a Covenant of the heart (Jeremiah 31:31-33).  Jesus preaches that the farmer should pay the worker a daily wage even if the worker has only been there an hour (Matthew 20:1-f).  Jesus heals without condition, prior to any confession of faith (Luke 13:10-17, John 9:1-F).  Jesus teaches that an insulted father welcomes the wayward son home with open arms (Luke 15:11-24).   Jesus insists that a gentile harlot so shamed that she gathers water in the hottest time of day rather than meet her peers at the well, a woman still living in sin, is offered eternal life (John 4).  Women and children, considered second class citizens and little more than the property of the male head of household, are honored as examples of faith (Matthew 19:14, John 12:1-8).  Samaritans dismissed as unclean by the pious of the day are held up as the true righteous (Luke 10:25-37); if we would love God we would love neighbor and it turns out everyone is a neighbor even the ones we’ve been taught to hate and exclude.

Judgment, mercy and grace run throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. Which thread compels our attention, frames our interpretation and is the focus of our application probably says more about us than it does about God.  It would seem that from the Biblical tradition at least God is willing to hold those three themes in tension at the same time.   Which says a lot more about God than it does about us who so often seek to land on the theme of our choice to the exclusion of others in order to win a debate or justify a bias.