Tag: Faith

Not Even God Gave Unconditional Support to the Jews –And None at All to Their Imperial Backers

Readings for 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time:Isaiah 45: 1, 4-6; Psalm 96: 1-10; 1st Thessalonians 1: 1-5b; Matthew 22: 15-21

During Apartheid-Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine, we’re privileged to be confronted each week with readings from the “holy books” of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Muslims of course also consider those sources as divinely revealed.

Since Apartheid-Zionists invoke that shared tradition to justify their policies, let’s examine them closely.

This week’s selections are particularly relevant to the current ongoing slaughter inflicted by Apartheid-Israel because they raise questions concerning God’s so-called “chosen,” and of their relation to imperialism and colonialism – all concepts that figure prominently in what’s unfolding today in Palestine.

The central idea in today’s readings is that those who side with empire cannot pretend to belong to Israel’s God. There can be no dual citizenship simultaneously in empire and God’s Kingdom.

That simple idea applies both to Apartheid-Zionists and their American supporters whose imperial identity and unconditional support for Zionism makes them Apartheid-Americans.

Instead, today’s readings reveal that it is non-Jews who because they liberate captives from empire, qualify as God’s “chosen” – even as messianic.

They are the ones who belong to the Kingdom proclaimed by the Jewish Prophet Yeshua whose program (as he put it) was to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, liberty to captives, and a Jubilee Year centralizing debt forgiveness (Luke 4: 18).. Being “chosen” was not a question of ethnicity, he said, but of doing the right thing in favor of the oppressed and poor.

Today’s Gospel selection from the Jewish Matthew is also strongly anti-imperial as well as anti-hypocritical. It deals with the question of paying taxes to Caesar.

Let me show you what I mean by (1) recounting the most relevant shocking facts unfolding in the Middle East while the whole world is watching; then (2) sharing my “translations” of the readings for this 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time; (3) pointing out their relevance for Apartheid-Israelis and their U.S. enablers as together they ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, and finally (4) drawing some conclusions about the entire situation.

Israel-Palestine Today

Thursday night U.S. President Joe Biden pledged unwavering, unconditional support of Apartheid-Israel.

Assuming his leadership of NATO colonial powers (against the rest of world opinion) he proclaimed that Apartheid-America is:

  • What holds the world together,
  • Is universally loved,
  • Exceptional,
  • Indispensable,
  • All-powerful,
  • And unconditionally allied with Apartheid-Israelis,
  • Who in the face of Hamas’ pure evil,
  • Are admirably strong and resilient.

The president made these claims just after having:

  1. Claimed (without any investigation or citing any evidence) that Hamas (“the other team” as he put it) not Apartheid-Israel was the one responsible for the war crime of destroying a large Gazan hospital at the cost of at least 600 Palestinian lives, not to mention the seriously injured,
  2. Rejected (according to Alexander Mercouris) proposals to empower an independent investigation into that claim,
  3. Been slapped in the face by Arab leaders who refused to meet with a U.S. president.
  4. Vetoed a UN Security Council proposal calling for a humanitarian pause in Apartheid-Israel’s bombing campaign which had already claimed 3000 Palestinian victims, more than half of whom were women and children.

In the face of such hypocrisy, Mr. Biden’s claims about Apartheid-America appear pathetic, out-of-touch, and almost laughable. The aging president appeared to “protest too much.”

But over-protest is what declining empires have always done. Before their fall, they routinely divinize themselves, claim omnipotence, and pretend to be interested in peace.

That’s what the Roman Empire did. Or as Tacitus put it: “They create a wasteland and call it peace.” Romans even minted coins identifying the counterpart of Mr. Biden – Mr. Caesar – as God himself.

Imperial subjects have always seen right through such idolatry, drivel, and tired slogans. In response, they laugh, or cry, or like Hamas kill those who sympathize with or cooperate with apartheidism and its imperial supporters.

In today’s Gospel selection, Yeshua takes the humorous approach. He tricks his opponents into admitting their own hypocrisy. Going against their own rules, they’re exposed as bearers of idolatrous images on the occupiers’ coins.

Let’s look at the readings. What follows are my “translations” in the light of the remarks I’ve just made. Check out the originals here to see if I got them right.

Today’s Readings

Isaiah 45: 1, 4-6

600 years before Jesus, the Christ,
The LORD chose a non-Israelite,
Cyrus, king of Persia,
As His Anointed!

Yes, He tapped Cyrus,
As his “Christ,”
Because that non-believer liberated 
Israeli captives
From their Babylonian Captivity.

And this 
Though Cyrus 
Knew nothing of “The LORD,”
But merely did the right thing,
By freeing the enslaved.

This means that 
The all-powerful
Divine Parent 
Doesn’t care 
About “nationalities”
Or nation states
About “Israel” or “Persia,”
But only about justice and liberation
Of the downtrodden!

Psalm 96: 1-10

For such holy Carelessness
Because the Divine One
Loves us all,
Regardless of our origins
Or intellectual beliefs,
We are all grateful and happy!

1st Thessalonians 1: 1-5b

For instance,
Paul’s community in Thessalonica
Found location in Greece,
Not Israel.
It housed both Jews and Gentiles.
Their identity was based
On commitment to peace,
And on faith expressed 
By sharing solidarity 
With the poor
Identified by Yeshua
As God’s favorites
And liberating them
As the whole point
Of his prophetic work.

Matthew 22: 15-21

Jeshua's opponents
The populist Pharisees
And Roman puppet Herodians
Knew nothing of 
God’s universal love.
While denouncing idolatry,
They hypocritically
(And against their own law) 
Carried Roman coins,
Identifying Caesar
(Not the Divine One)
As God.

So, the trickster Yeshua 
Turned the tables on them all,
Charging
That such hypocrisy
Meant that they
Belonged to Caesar,
Not to God!

For Yeshua,
Paying taxes wasn’t the issue.
Religious hypocrisy was.

The irreverent 
Construction worker
From nowheresville Nazareth 
Was so funny,
And such a smart debater!

Conclusion

The title of this homily is meant to highlight what I’ve just said. It underlines the fact that no nation – not Israel, not our own, not anybody’s – deserves “unconditional support.”  

That’s because nation states are just fictions. Think about it. They are devices used by the rich and powerful (who often have stolen “their” land from indigenous people) to artificially separate a single people for purposes of dividing, ruling, and self-enrichment by way of practices like the taxation Jesus refused to endorse.  Here by “single people,” I’m talking about humanity itself.

As for the indigenous themselves, every tribe believes it was divinely chosen (and in some sense, I guess they are). All indigenous people believe that the land their ancestors originally inhabited is exceptional and directly given to them by some Divinity.

And of course, in the case of Israel-Palestine, Apartheid-Israelis are not “the indigenous” and never were. They arrived in Palestine in 1948. They were European colonizers from places like Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia (and lately) from the United States. And as Chomsky points out, any ownership claims based on 2000-year-old religious mythology can have no serious political standing in the modern world. To claim otherwise borders on the superstitious and ridiculous.  

Moreover, even Zionists’ Exodus traditions admit that more than 3000 years ago, invading Hebrews from Egypt took part of Palestine from indigenous Canaanites and others by force of arms. I’m referring to Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, Geshurites, Maacaathites, and Philistines. All of those represent the indigenous ancestors of the Palestinians whose presence in the Holy Land long predated the arrival of Hebrews.

The bottom line is, however, that In the end, God or Source, the Ground of Being, the Divine Mother, Truth, or Life Itself (however you understand Ultimate Reality) doesn’t give a damn about ethnicity or race or national identity – except when they are used by imperial agents to divide and rule.

In fact, the Holy Books of the Judeo -Christian tradition make that point again and again. Most of the Bible’s books record the infidelities of Israel’s leadership and God’s punishment for their routine infidelity. This morning’s readings are no different. Neither are the events unfolding in Apartheid-Israel today.

Does Apartheid Israel Have A Right To Exist?

Readings for 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 25: 6-10a; Psalm 23: 1-6; Philippians 4: 12-14, 19-20; Ephesians 1: 17-18; Matthew 22: 1-14

One of the often-repeated memes justifying Apartheid Israel’s oppression of Palestinians was repeated yesterday by presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson. In an otherwise admirable statement (see below) “On the Israeli-Hamas War,” and in reference to Hamas’ surprise attack on Jewish settlements Ms. Williamson wrote:

“Hamas is a terrorist organization, and this was a terrorist attack. The aspirations of Hamas have nothing to do with striking a peace deal with Israel; their stated goal is the complete eradication of the state of Israel, and they will settle for nothing less.”

Of course, we’re all familiar with such perceptions, even though Hamas is much more complicated than Ms. Williamson allows.

Nevertheless, what if Hamas’ position as alleged by Williamson is correct? What if Apartheid Israel has no right to exist and as such deserves to be eradicated?

That might be a shocking idea for most. But what if it’s correct?

That’s a thought I’d like to explore in today’s homily which will try to relate it to today’s Gospel selection. There the Jewish author Matthew attempts to explain why Israel actually did cease to exist as a nation and was driven from the Holy Land after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The words Matthew attributed to Yeshua also suggest a rejection of Israel as God’s “Chosen” in favor of the socially marginalized who more resemble today’s Palestinians. Read them for yourself here.

My reflection will also include candidate Williamson’s wise and highly practical recommendations for ending the current conflict in Palestine.

Finally, I’ll add a call for truthful reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians who are actually brothers and sisters according to the religious traditions of both peoples.

Apartheid Israel

Begin by briefly thinking about apartheid and state legitimacy.

Did apartheid Rhodesia have the right to exist? What about apartheid South Africa? And Nazi Germany?

I’d say NO in each case. Apartheid systems are abhorrent, immoral, and always terroristic. And according to Amnesty International, Israel’s version represents an egregious crime against humanity.

Yes, Israel’s system is illegal. To begin with, it flies in the face of UN Resolution 242 which mandates return of all Palestinian lands seized since 1967.

This means that every one of Apartheid Israel’s settlements on the West Bank and its incursions into East Jerusalem and Gaza are illegitimate. So are its periodic bombings of Palestinian neighborhoods, and its associated and regular mass killings of Palestinians including women, children, and members of the press.

As a result, Apartheid Israel is an internationally criminal nation. International law condemns it in no uncertain terms. As an apartheid system, it has no right to exist.

The same international law, while prohibiting Hamas’ acts of terrorism, accords to Palestinians the right to take up arms against its oppressors.

Today’s Readings

As I said, I bring all of that up this Sunday because the day’s central liturgical reading has the Jewish prophet, Yeshua of Nazareth, condemning the leaders of his people for going along with a Roman system of discrimination. They cooperated with the foreign occupiers and hence refused to share the land’s abundance (its God-given “banquet”) with the poor and oppressed whose welfare is centralized in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Yes, the Jewish high priests and elders cooperated with the Roman occupation forces in repressing poor Jews, Samaritans, Canaanites, and resident aliens while neglecting such rejects who were always the favorites of Yeshua and Israel’s Divine Parent.

Today’s Gospel selection responds to such refusal and cooperation with an apartheid system.

It is the familiar parable about a king who throws a wedding party for his son. But the ones originally invited to the feast ungratefully refuse to come. They’re all too busy with selfish pursuits. Some even kill the king’s servants who bring the invitation in person.

In response, the king destroys the murderers themselves and reissues his invitation to the poor and marginalized.

But what does the parable mean? Historical considerations help us answer that question.

The story represents the reflections of a Jewish author called “Matthew” writing for Jews at least a half century after Yeshua’s death. Matthew knows that Jerusalem was completely razed to the ground by Rome in the year 70 CE. As a nation with its own homeland, it ceased to exist. His question is why?

The answer Matthew puts in Jesus’ mouth explains Jerusalem’s erasure in terms of karmic punishment meted out to its “leaders” for refusing God’s abundant gifts and not sharing the abundance of the Promised Land (referenced in today’s first three readings) with those Matthew describes as mere street people – outsiders, “the good and bad alike.”

In other words, Matthew’s judgment is that the land of Israel belonged to all its inhabitants not just to Jews, Israel’s political class and the rich – and certainly not to the Romans. Refusal to share God’s banquet for all led to the death of a nation.

Moreover, the parable suggests the Jewish Matthew’s new understanding of “chosen people.” God’s “chosen” are (and always have been, Matthew realizes) the poor and oppressed in general. They are people like today’s Palestinians — rather than a single arrogant, rich, and self-satisfied ethnic group represented by the “priests and elders of the people.”

Applying the Parable

The question for us today is how can Yeshua’s prophetic vision of a new chosen people and a motherland shared with the poor and oppressed be applied to Israel-Palestine now?

The answer is: By ending all systems of apartheid and recognizing humanity itself (including both Jews and Gentiles) as God’s Chosen.

Here’s where Marianne Williamson becomes more helpful and articulate than Joe Biden or anyone else in our country’s vengeful Uni-party. In today’s context, she advises:

  • Establishing a U.S. Department of Peace as a cabinet level office.
  • Making peacebuilding not war the cornerstone of American foreign policy.
  • Standing firmly not only with Israel, but “no less” for the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.
  • Beginning a deeper dialog on the current situation by meeting not only with Jewish American leaders (as President Biden has done) but with Arab-American leaders (particularly Palestinian).
  • Ending the siege of Gaza.
  • Immediately restoring power there and access to food, water, and medical supplies.
  • Establishing humanitarian corridors offering Gazan civilians and foreign nationals safe passage.
  • Changing U.S. policy towards Israel so that while continuing to support it militarily, the changes emphasize the need for justice towards the Palestinians.
  • Moving the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv.
  • Demanding justice for the American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was shot dead by the Israeli Defense Forces.
  • Strongly opposing Israeli occupation of the West Bank, illegal settlements there, and the blockade of Gaza.
  • Demanding that no military assistance to Israel be used to support any of those policies.
  • Supporting all efforts to create the resurrection of plans for a two-state solution to the problems of Israel-Palestine.
  • Working assiduously with Middle East peace builders both in Israel-Palestine and in the United States.
  • Using American power to side with our highest ally: humanity itself.

To Ms Williamson’s list I would add for the sake of clarity: Never referring to Israel without calling it “Apartheid Israel.”

Conclusion

In faith perspective, what is really needed to solve the current problems in Israel-Palestine is a genuine process of truth and reconciliation. Israel-Palestine needs a Truth and Reconciliation Process like that implemented in South Africa after the end of apartheid there.

To begin with, truth demands that both parties recognize the fact that they are cousins at least, if not brothers and sisters. Both Jews and Palestinian Arabs are Semites. In that sense, both have been guilty of anti-Semitism.

Both peoples also share horrendous histories as victims of prejudice and persecution – both communities at the hands of Christians for centuries, and Palestinians by Jews since the beginning of the 20th century and especially after 1948.

Both Jews and Palestinians must also confess and repent of their acts of terrorism. Jews must face the fact that they have unrelentingly terrorized Palestinians on a daily basis since 1948. And despite their internationally recognized right to take up arms against their Jewish occupiers, Palestinians must admit that nothing can justify responses like those we all witnessed last week.

Such facts and admissions alone should provide bonds of honesty, humility, empathy and shared identity that can soften hearts and open the way to any peace and reconciliation process.

As candidate Williamson would put it: “humanity itself” demands such fellow-feeling, confession, repentance, and open hearts. So does the entire Judeo-Christian tradition – which, of course, is shared by Muslims as well.

Tedpills & Jeremiads: Embracing The Unabomber’s Prophecy

Readings for 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Jeremiah 20:10-13; Psalm 69: 8-10, 14, 17, 33-35; Romans: 5: 12-15; Matthew: 10:26-33

Today’s readings about convicted criminal-prophets like Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul of Tarsus raise a question for me. The question is, can the recently suicided and convicted criminal, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, be considered a prophet – i.e., an important messenger from the Source of all life? And can we look past his crimes to hear his stark warning?

Please don’t be shocked. I’m serious. Hear me out.

Of course, you remember Kaczynski. He was the anarcho-terrorist responsible for a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others.

Two weeks ago, he was found dead in his North Carolina prison cell. At eighty-one years of age, he had been suffering from late-stage cancer and allegedly committed suicide.

The point here is that during his life, Kaczynski fancied himself a type of prophet. He did.

He thought he was a champion of truth chosen to awaken the world to the destructive forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.  Its technologies, he charged, have enslaved us all. They have turned us into commodities and cogs in a dehumanizing machinery that is destroying the entire planet.    

He documented all that in his 35,000-word manifesto published in the New York Times and Washington Post. There the Harvard graduate and brilliant mathematician alleged that the disaster he perceived was reversible only by anarchistic revolution which his bombs (sent through the mail) were intended to precipitate.

The deaths they caused were necessary, he argued, to call attention to the truths contained in his manifesto which otherwise would have gone unpublished. According to Kaczynski, antinomian revolution was required because the main function of our country’s laws (like most legislation) serves to protect the real criminals whose murderous policies always go unrecognized and unpunished. By any measure, he implied, the results of those policies absolutely dwarf any havoc a “Unabomber” might produce to highlight his points.

Prophets & Jeremiads

I bring all of this up because despite Ted Kaczynski’s indefensible tactics, his shock value illustrates the power and impact of Jewish Testament prophets including those featured in today’s liturgy of the word. I’m speaking of Jeremiah of Judah, Jesus of Nazareth, and Paul of Tarsus. Remember, all three of them were considered state enemies. Like Kaczynski in relation to U.S. empire, Jesus and Paul were seen as terrorists and criminals by Rome – every bit as reprehensible as Kaczynski. 

Even Jeremiah, though himself not a victim of capital punishment, offended his mainstream contemporaries as profoundly as any. In the 7th century BCE, he was vilified for boldly and repeatedly asserting that Israel’s infidelity to the God of the poor and oppressed would bring the entire nation to its knees. The prophet was especially critical of Jerusalem’s temple leadership for distorting Sacred Scripture to favor the rich and powerful. As a result of his denunciations, even his family members disowned the prophet.

To get a flavor of what I’m saying about Kaczynski’s relevance to the biblical prophetic tradition, please review with me today’s readings. What follows are my “translations.” (You can check the originals here to see if I’ve got them right.)

Jeremiah 20: 10-13

Like the prophet Jeremiah
Those who speak truth
Against their own nation
Are surrounded by critics
Who constantly terrorize them.

Even their friends and family
Turn against such truth tellers,
Digging up their failings
While ignoring their own.

In this,
The prophet’s only refuge 
Is the Great Goddess,
And her unalterable law of karma.
Assuring that everybody
Will get their just deserts.

Arrogant “patriots”
Will inevitably experience 
Shame and confusion,
While prophetic truth-sayers
Will be rescued
By the One
Who alone deserves
Their thanks and praise.

Responsorial Psalm 69: 8-10, 14, 17, 33-35

Sadly, Great Mother,
Your faithful prophets
Are routinely 
Despised and insulted
By mainstreamers
Even though 
You are Mother
To both.
Despite that, 
You are unfailingly
Accepting, 
Loving, generous, 
Kind and helpful
To those of us 
Committed to Truth.   
You never fail
To answer our prayers.
Despite appearances,
We are therefore
Confident
You will continue
To favor us.
Thank you!

Romans 5: 12-15

None of us is perfect.
Yet laws invented
By defenders
Of the status quo
Make it seem
Like the world’s poor
Are uniquely guilty
And deserving
Of punishment
The poor man
Jesus of Nazareth
Reversed all of that
On behalf of
The planet’s
Impoverished majority.

Matthew 10: 26-33

Yes, the Master
Revealed 
That deep dark
Secret
About the injustice
Of human laws.
He shouted
From the housetops
The Truth
That despite legalities,
The world’s
Smallest and weakest
Are recognized,
Worthy, and highly valued
By their Divine Mother. 


Conclusion

It's been 25 years since the Unabomber’s arrest and conviction. Over that period, his observations turn out to be more than the screed of a violent terrorist and unhinged conspiracy theorist. They have been proven prophetic indeed.  

Our children’s (and our own) addictions to cell phones and social media, the threatening “promise” of AI, the likely human causes and freedom-curtailment of the Covid pandemic, and the recent unprecedented wildfires unleashed by technology-induced climate change, all support the Unabomber’s warnings about technology’s menace. 

No wonder, then, that more than a quarter-century removed from his terrorism, Ted Kaczynski has been transformed for many into a kind of edgy, radical guru who by returning to the wild himself is celebrated as having walked his talk. 

His “Tedpilled” followers are waiting expectantly for his further vindication that would witness the complete collapse of modern society hastened by its own “success.”

Surprisingly then, the bottom line here might be for us to listen to “criminals and terrorists” like Jesus, Paul – and perhaps Ted Kaczynski. They often speak and embody the truth about our inherently violent culture that lionizes and rewards wholesale murders by the state, while registering surprise, shock, and self-righteous horror at its petty retail counterparts. 

Yes, the indefensible crimes of terrorists like Kaczynski (who paid his debt to society) are petty in comparison to those causing forever wars, starvation, and ecocide. Yet today’s terrorists underline what’s wrong with our lives. Their actions can even be seen as perversely salvific.

Besides Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul, the insightful criminals who come to mind include Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Berrigan Brothers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.  

In fact, Kaczynski’s truths (regardless of their source) have led many Tedpillers and others to change their priorities to embrace:

•	A widespread “Great Refusal” to (where possible) accept meaningless, poorly paid jobs.
•	A contemporary labor movement championing unions and living wages.
•	Support for a Green New Deal.
•	Caution about accepting unregulated AI until its possibly disastrous threats can be further   studied and evaluated.
•	And the simple wilderness life Kaczynski himself had adopted.

Nevertheless, we are still waiting for the prophet’s antinomian and implicit anti-war penny to drop. 

However, at the very least, Kaczynski’s suicide prophetically reveals the same slow-motion necrophilic process that currently involves and enthralls us all.

Marianne Williamson Should Go for Broke As The Peace Candidate

Readings for the Second Sunday of Lent: Genesis 12: 1-4A; Psalms 33: 4-5, 18-22; 2nd Timothy 1: 8b-10; Matthew 17: 1-9

On this Second Sunday of Lent and in the context of the Ukraine conflict, I want to return to the topic I addressed in last week’s homily – Marianne Williamson’s apparent sell-out to western warmongers in her position paper called “The Tragic Conundrum of Ukraine.”

Since then, Ms. Williamson has become the first Democrat to declare her candidacy to unseat Joe Biden as President of the United States. Yes, it’s official; she’s running again for president.

My point in what follows is this: For Williamson to have even the least chance of achieving her goal, she must go for broke. She must reverse her position on the Ukraine war and declare herself in no uncertain terms THE PEACE CANDIDATE.

Doing so would not only separate Williamson from Biden and the others who will eventually enter the 2024 race. More importantly, it would align her more securely with the principles of her own spiritual guidebook, A Course in Miracles (ACIM). As well, it would embody the example of Yeshua (the voice ACIM claims to channel) as reflected in today’s Gospel reading. There following what we’ve come to see as his “transfiguration,” Yeshua too decides to go for broke in his opposition to imperialism.

My point here is that to garner any meaningful notice as a candidate, Williamson needs to spiritually transfigure as well.

To show what I mean, let me (1) address Williamson’s candidacy as it relates to the war in Ukraine on the one hand and to ACIM on the other, (2) recall Yeshua’s adoption of a “go for broke” strategy in opposing Roman imperialism, and (3) recommend a similar strategy for Williamson if she truly wants to be a player in 2024.

Williamson & ACIM

First, recall who Marianne Williamson is and how easily she will be dismissed if she continues endorsing business as usual by adopting “the official story” and conventional wisdom about Ukraine as expressed in her “Conundrum” statement: She’s the one:

  • Dismissed by many as a “vanity candidate” intent only on selling books.
  • Characterized as “new agey, soft, and unrealistic.”
  • Portrayed by SNL’s Kate McKinnon as “woo-woo,”
  • And as one who would address political problems by burning sage and manipulating crystals.
  • Ridiculed for alleging that “a dark psychic force” has made us all victims of collectivized hatred advanced by Donald Trump.

This time around, the same accusations will inevitably surface again unless Williamson does something authentic to distinguish her from Biden and the neocons and their bellicosity on Ukraine.

Instead, however, her statement on the war aligns itself with the largely white “West” (13% of the world’s population) as if it rather than the world’s mostly non-white majority “knows better.” She says, for instance,

“I believe there is legitimate justification for military support for Ukraine from Western allies, including the United States.” And “. . . Vladimir Putin’s actions today are a threat to which the Western world must now respond.” (Emphasis added).

One wonders why this emphasis on the largely white west. Again, does it somehow know better than mostly non-white cultures (e.g., in China and India) that have developed insights, wisdom, and spiritualities based on experiences thousands of years older than our own?

Does this western centrism represent an unconscious hangover from the colonial past that has enriched “the west” and impoverished the rest?

But more especially, how explain Williamson’s apparent rejection of the most obvious teachings of A Course in Miracles, which she has championed for decades?

Here’s what I mean. According to A Course in Miracles:

  1. Its teachings are basically Christian mysticism that finds the root of all problems in a skewed relationship with God – or Source, the Ground of Being, the Great Spirit, the Tao, Brahmin, Allah, Life, Cosmic Consciousness, etc.
  2. That mysticism also reveals that “America” is not an exceptional nation. (Or as Ms. Williamson is fond of putting it “No one is special, and everyone is special.”)
  3. Instead, all of us are living in a pseudo-reality reminiscent of Plato’s Cave, where prisoners mistake shadows manipulated by their keepers for reality far removed from the real world.
  4. Consequently, what the dominant culture accepts as “reality” is actually 180 degrees opposite the Truth.
  5. Its upside-down “reality” is rooted in fear, greed, dishonesty, and violence.
  6. This means that while the prevailing culture would blame our problems on others (like Russia), the Truth is that we (the United States) are 100% responsible for our own “conundrums.”
  7. Facing and correcting our own behavior are necessary first steps in solving any dilemma or conflict.
  8. Such inventory and rectification reveal that no one is attacking us. Instead, we are the attackers.
  9. Recognizing all of this is the key to peace.  
  10. It embodies the miraculous in the ACIM sense of “a radical transformation of consciousness.”

Now, imagine if Marianne Williamson’ presidential campaign emphasized those ten points. It certainly would get attention. It would separate Williamson from the homogenized gaggle of candidates. It would raise the essential questions that no one dares raise. It would mark Ms. Williamson as a true leader worth following.

What I’m saying here is that unless Williamson finds the courage to go for broke by embracing the principles that she has taught for so many years and by identifying as The Peace Candidate, she’ll be lost in the shuffle. She’ll be ridiculed and dismissed once again.

Yeshua Goes for Broke

Today’s Gospel reading presents Jesus as setting an example Marianne Williamson would do well to follow. By resolving to take a leading part in a Passover demonstration against Jewish cooperation with imperial Rome, Yeshua risks it all.

Think about it.   

Today’s reading finds the young construction worker from Nazareth on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows something extremely risky is about to happen. Yet he’s determined to be part of it. The risky action has to do with the temple and opposing the collaboration of its leaders with the Roman Empire.

The temple has become worse than irrelevant to the situation of Yeshua’s people living under Roman oppression. What happens there not only ignores Jewish political reality. The temple leadership has become the most important Jewish ally of the oppressing power. And Jesus has decided to address that intolerable situation despite inevitable risks of failure.

Everyone knows that a big demonstration against the Romans is planned in Jerusalem for the weekend of Passover. There’ll be chanting mobs. The slogans are already set. “Hosanna, hosanna, in the highest” will be one chant. Another will be “Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Hosanna” is the key word here. It means “save us!” (The Romans won’t notice that the real meaning is “Save us from the Romans.” “Restore an independent Israel – like David’s kingdom!”) It was all very political.

Yeshua has heard that one of the main organizers of the demonstration is the guerrilla Zealot called Barabbas. Barabbas doesn’t call what’s planned a “demonstration.” He prefers the term “The Uprising” or “the Insurrection” (Mk. 15:6-8).

Barabbas has a following as enthusiastic as that of Yeshua. After all, Barabbas is a “sicarius” – a guerrilla whose solemn mission is to assassinate Roman soldiers and their Jewish collaborators. His courage has made him a hero to the crowds. (Scripture scholar, John Dominic Crossan compares him to the Mel Gibson character in “The Patriot.”)

Yeshua’s assigned part in the demonstration will be to attack the Temple and symbolically destroy it. He plans to enter the building with his friends and disrupt business as usual. They’ll all loudly denounce the moneychangers whose business exploits the poor. They’ll turn over their tables.

As a proponent of nonviolence, Yeshua and his band are thinking not in Barabbas’ terms of “uprising,” but of forcing God’s hand to bring in the Lord’s “Kingdom” to replace Roman domination. Passover, the Jewish holiday of national independence could not be a more appropriate time for the planned demonstration. Yeshua is thinking in terms of “Exodus,” Israel’s founding act of rebellion.

And yet, this peasant from Galilee is troubled by it all. What if the plan doesn’t work and God’s Kingdom doesn’t dawn this Passover? What if the Romans succeed in doing what they’ve always done in response to uprisings and demonstrations? Pilate’s standing order to deal with lower class disturbances is simply to arrest everyone involved and crucify them all as terrorists. Why would it be different this time?

So before setting out for Jerusalem, Yeshua takes his three closest friends and ascends a mountain for a long night of prayer. He’s seeking reassurance before the single most important act of his life. As usual, Peter, James and John soon fall fast asleep. True to form they are uncomprehending and dull.

However, while the lazy fall into unconsciousness, the ever alert and thoughtful Yeshua has a vision. Moses appears to him, and so does Elijah. (Together they represent the entire Jewish scriptural testament – the law and the prophets.) This means that on this mountain of prayer, Yeshua considers his contemplated path in the light of his people’s entire tradition.

According to the Jews’ credal summary in Deuteronomy 26, their whole national story centered on the Exodus. Fittingly then, Yeshua, Moses, and Elijah “discuss” what is about to take place in Jerusalem. Or as Luke puts it, “And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Yeshua’s Exodus!!

It is easy to imagine Moses’ part in the conversation. That would be to remind Yeshua of the chances Moses took when he led the original Exodus from Egypt. That might have failed too. Nevertheless . . .

Elijah’s part was likely to recall for Yeshua the “prophetic script” that all prophets must follow. That script has God’s spokespersons speaking truth to power and suffering the inevitable consequences.

Elijah reminds Yeshua: So what if Barabbas and those following the path of violence are defeated again? So what if Yeshua’s nonviolent direct action in the temple fails to bring in the Kingdom? So what if Yeshua is arrested and crucified? That’s just the cost of doing prophetic business. Despite appearances to the contrary, Yeshua’s faithful God will somehow triumph in the end.

Conclusion

Is there a message in today’s reading for Marianne Williamson, who is undoubtedly the best equipped public figure to take on the essentially spiritual role of Peace Candidate?

I think there is.

The readings call her to:

  • Insist that we’ve indeed all be grasped by a “dark psychic force” that ignores shared humanity and sees war as a first option rather than as a last resort.  
  • Be transfigured into 2024’s Peace Candidate by heeding Moses, Elijah, and Yeshua, the champions of her native Jewish faith.
  • Be transformed as well by listening to the world’s non-western, mostly non-white majority and their reluctance or downright refusal to endorse U.S. insistence on controlling the world far from its own shores.
  • Recognize that in line with the teachings of A Course in Miracles, the U.S. and NATO are 100% responsible for the Ukraine crisis.
  • Call for an immediate ceasefire and diplomatic negotiations to end the war.
  • Go for broke by ignoring those who will characterize her opposition to the war as naïve and unrealistic – as if risking nuclear annihilation were more sophisticated and mature.
  • Truly embrace the teachings of A Course in Miracles that identifies the source of peace in its refusal to be frightened by non-existent threats and attacks.
  • Or as The Course puts it: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the PEACE of God.” (Emphasis added)

Christmas: When Religion Is Capitalism and Market Is Our God

Recently I got involved in a debate about the relevance of religion. A fellow contributor to OpEdNews took the position that because its myths can be interpreted to support either right or left-wing political positions, the myths themselves are meaningless and so is religion itself.

Accordingly, the latter, he said, should be rejected entirely in favor of 18th century rationalism like that expressed by Thomas Paine. For my debate partner, a world without myth is a richer, more peaceful (!), less problematic one.

I can’t get that argument out of my mind especially at this Christmas season.

The position in question ignores the fact of class struggle and that any document worth its salt be it the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the writings of Paine himself will be subject to conflicting interpretations by forces of the left and right. Far from rendering meaningless the documents just referenced, the conflicts only underline their importance and power.  

Nowhere does that become clearer than in the cases of mythology, poetry, and art. No holiday better underlines the power of myth and the battle over its interpretation than Christmas.

Capitalism’s Christmas

Of course, right-wing interpretations of Christmas have carried the day in America for well more than a century – perhaps always. I’m talking about the holiday’s commercialization. It unveils the true religion of America. It discloses the fact that ours is perhaps the world’s most prominent religious fundamentalist culture.

That’s hard for many to see because America’s religion is a masked capitalism that pretends to be secular. However, capitalism’s God is real and all powerful. It’s called Market. In the Freudian sense, it’s a fetish – a human creation treated like a conscious subject with an infallible mind and will of its own. Market decrees who’s rich, who’s poor, who lives, and who dies. It directs our holy wars. For true believers to transgress its decrees for instance by advocating socialism is heretical and punishable by war, death, and excommunication in the form of economic sanctions. (Cuba is a case in point.) 

Market’s accompanying supporting myths are powerful too. All of them, of course are unprovable and unfalsifiable. They involve tales of a guiding “Invisible Hand,” Natural Order, a basically competitive Human Nature, Bulls, and Bears, free markets, trickle-down, democracy, the richest country in the world, and “America as leader of the free world.” No amount of contrary evidence can disprove such fairy tale convictions for Market’s faithful. That means that despite protests to the contrary, it’s all religion. It’s all myth.

Even those who insist on “the reason for the season” routinely reduce the religious meaning of Christmas to maudlin reflections on cute babies, mangers, shepherds in bathrobes, and church services that do nothing to challenge capitalism, commercialization, and the God called Market. Popular Christianity’s silence on the point ends up endorsing the whole embarrassing mess and its entrenched superstitions.

And so, Christmas is dominated by Market’s epiphanies such as Black Friday, “shopping days till Christmas,” special sales, plastic toys, meaningless gifts, and the deity’s final decree whether the season was economically successful or a flop. It’s all about Santa Baby, Rudolf, and Jingle Bells. Not a mention here of the Jesus Myth and its fundamental challenge to all of that.

(By the way, that the Bible’s Christmas story is a myth says nothing about its truth. In fact, from time immemorial, humans everywhere have employed myth to express the deepest truths about life that would otherwise remain ineffable – arguably the most important ones that escape our five senses. They’ve used mythological markers like those appearing in the Christmas story – divine signs, virgins conceiving, angel appearing, special stars shining, sorcerers perceiving hidden meanings, symbol-laden gifts, dreams, evil kings, and narrow escapes.)

Christmas Truth

And so, what’s the truth of Christmas? For those of us who recognize class struggle, as well as the truth and power of mythology, it’s about:

  • A houseless working-class family
  • Living in an insignificant country (maybe like Yemen)
  • Under a hated occupying empire (certainly like the United States)

It’s about:

  • An unwed teenage mother
  • Driven by state violence to seek refugee status in Egypt
  • Whose son grows up to become a poor street preacher
  • Without home or visible means of support
  • Announcing a Kingdom without Caesar
  • Where the poor will and rich will exchange positions
  • And all debts are forgiven

It’s about:

  • The child growing up to be an enemy of the state
  • And of its supporting religious establishment
  • To become a victim of torture
  • And capital punishment
  • But the founder of a renewed Jewish community
  • Where there are no poor
  • Or private property
  • But where everyone holds all things in common
  • Until that community too is destroyed
  • By the reigning imperial state (in 70 CE)
  • Only to be co-opted by that empire (in 325)
  • To become its most enthusiastic supporter
  • Down to our own day.

Conclusion

Sometimes I feel myself almost hating Christmas. Even within my own family, I can’t mention the meanings just listed without eyes rolling in my adult children’s heads – without being accused of negativity and politicizing an otherwise happy holiday. Let’s keep Christmas meaningless is the unspoken injunction.

It’s like the debate I mentioned at the outset. There the unspoken imperative is to close our eyes to the reality of class struggle. It is to surrender the most meaningful language we have – that of myth, poetry, image, art, and history – to the forces of the right to support their own capitalist religion, their own Market God, and their hideous distortion of one of mythology’s most powerful stories.

But I’m reluctant to do so. Like the entire Jesus story, Christmas is about a new political reality (the Kingdom of God). It’s about a coming Great Reversal where the rich will be poor and the poor rich. It’s about debt forgiveness, and about living a communal ideal that is far closer to what capitalism treats as the heresy of communism than to the masked religious creed supporting the destructive idolatry of the Great God Market.

Christian Dominionism, White Supremacy, and Yeshua’s Law of Love

Readings for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: DT 30: 10-14; PS 69: 14, 17, 30-31, 33-34, 36, 37; COL 1:15-20; LK 10: 25-37

Recently, Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and current Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley published an article called “The Ideology of Christian Nationalism.”

The piece reviewed the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference held in Nashville in June. The meeting promoted the theology of Dominionism which (ignoring American pluralism) holds that Christians have a duty to take over all aspects of government, culture, and society.

According to Reich, speakers at the convention including Donald Trump and Florida senator Rick Scott, promoted not only a union of church and state but the promotion of “gun violence, the subjugation of women through forced birth, and strongman authoritarianism.”  

It all represented, Reich said, an effort of white supremacists to “hold onto power in the face of massive demographic shifts: toward women (who now constitute 60 percent of all university enrollees, and therefore the future power structure) and people of color, and away from formal religion.”

Of course, over the long term, such denial of irreversible social realities is doomed, since (to repeat) it ignores our culture’s religious pluralism and the widespread secularism.  

It also runs contrary to the simple message of the selections in today’s liturgy of the word on this 15th Sunday in ordinary time. Their emphasis is not on the culture wars around abortion (which is nowhere mentioned in the Bible) and gun rights but on love even for enemies (which represented, of course, the heart of our Great Master’s teaching). Much less is the emphasis on the values of the dominant culture.

Promoting love and even admiration of enemies, today’s liturgy presents the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan – the religious and socially rejected outsider whose generosity and compassion put to shame the Jewish dominionists of Yeshua’s day.  

(Samaritans were considered enemies of the state, because their ancestors back in the 8th century BCE, intermarried with Assyrian occupiers of the Jewish homeland. Intermarriage rendered Samaritans unclean. They were simply sub-human.)

So, Jesus’ making a Samaritan the hero of his challenging parable and contrasting the outcast’s compassion with the “couldn’t-care-less” attitude of professional holy men – the priest and the Levite – also connects directly with the hypocrisy of Christians who lack understanding and compassion towards those who don’t share their identity politics or faith.

In doing so, they’ve actually criminalized God’s law of love as described throughout today’s liturgical readings. Read the descriptions for yourself here. For what they’re worth, what follows are my “translations” of their main ideas:  

DT 30: 10-14
  
 The Great Liberator, Moses
 Exhorted the former slaves
 To return to LOVE
 The most obvious, uncomplicated 
 Reality
 In the world.
  
 PS 69: 14, 17, 30-31, 33-34, 36, 37
 
 Love is all we need
 From Life Itself.
 It is always kind 
 And helpful
 Overflowing with gifts
 And ready to protect 
 The poor, the imprisoned,
 The exiled,
 And those in pain.
 Yes: All we need is Love.
  
 COL 1:15-20
  
 Jesus, the Christ 
 Shows what Love means – 
 That absolutely everything
 Was created for Love,
 The bond, the glue
 That holds us all together
 In complete at-one-ment
 Transforming the human race
 Into a single body
 Despite resistance
 And crucifixion
 By a hostile world.
  
 LK 10: 25-37
 
 For Jesus (like Moses)
 Love of God and Neighbor
 Is the only law
 Promising fullness of life.
 The two laws are one.
 
 Being “neighbor”
 Means rejecting 
 The ignorance of 
 Professional holy men
 And politicians,
 Adopting instead
 The compassion of
 The very minorities 
 We’re taught to hate
 Who provide
 Health care, transportation, 
 Lodging, mercy
 Follow-up,
 And money,
 For those they have every reason
 To hate.
 
 That’s what it means
 To love Our very Self!

So, Moses was right after all: Love is really all we need. It couldn’t be clearer. Yeshua was right too: Love is God’s only law. There is no other.

Consequently, the theology of Christian Dominionism is wrong. It disrespects not only the Constitution’s separation of church and state, but the religious and moral convictions of human brothers and sisters not sharing their beliefs in the context of a pluralistic culture.

Most importantly however, for the followers of Moses and Yeshua such disrespect violates their teachers’ supreme law of love.

The Truth behind “Great Replacement Theory”:Capitalism, Imperialism, & Regime Change Are at Fault

Readings for 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 66: 10-14C; Psalm 66: 1-7, 16, 20; Galatians 6: 14-18; Luke 10: 1-2, 17-20

You’ve all heard of the “Great Replacement Theory,” right?

It’s the analysis holding that white mostly Christian males have recently come to constitute an oppressed class. They are being “replaced” in the U.S. economy and culture by interlopers – immigrants, women, non-whites, and non-Christians. As a result, white Christian males suddenly find themselves unemployed or working in dead-end jobs for much lower wages than before.

Proliferation of the theory has led to widespread animus against the apparent replacers – non-males, immigrants, non-whites, and non-Christians.

Just another right-wing conspiracy theory, no?

Not really.

The Truth of Replacement

In fact, according to my favorite economist, Richard Wolff (see above video), there is more than a grain of truth in that way of thinking.

According to Wolff, the replacement theorists are correct: white Christian males have indeed experienced substitution by others in the neo-liberal order organized by capitalists over the last 40 years or so.

But the ones responsible for the tragedy are not immigrants, women, and non-Christian people of color. Instead, the fault is systemic. It lies with capitalism itself. That system’s pursuit of profit has capitalists freely choosing to substitute previously high-wage earners with robots, policies of offshoring, and (far less often) by employment of desperate immigrants.

And there’s more (something Professor Wolff doesn’t note). U.S. policies of imperialism and regime change themselves end up being all about replacement of people’s governments with pro-elite puppets. It has removed socialist leaning governments throughout the world (closest to home in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala) and put in their place regimes that favor rich landowners, multinational corporations, drug cartels and gangs. Such replacement has spawned generations of desperate impoverished peasants anxious for a better life even if it means leaving the homeland they love.

Actual imperialism then and regime change (along with the normal dynamics of capitalism) are not just about theory. They are long-standing practices of the United States.

Identifying others as the culprits purposely distracts from the real problem – deregulated capitalism as administered by our own government.  

Today’s Readings

I bring that up in this Sunday’s homily because its readings (translated below) once again focus on the ways the biblical God favors the victims of empire and regime change – the very ones vilified by white Christian males who feel that their previously advantageous position in society is currently being usurped by those displaced workers who are overwhelmingly Christians too. The readings call people like us to re-identify our oppressors.

As suggested by Isaiah, the biblical psalmist, Paul, and Yeshua, the immigrants and refugees that our politicians want us to hate are exiles very like the ancient Hebrews in Babylon. They are the victims of the rich and powerful as were the Jews in Jesus’ day, when Rome occupied his homeland aided and abetted by the Temple clergy.

Put otherwise, today’s biblical selections say that the poorest and most vulnerable among us are God’s own people. The readings call us who live in the belly of the beast to acknowledge that hidden fact. Implicitly, they summon us to replace the true oppressor of white Christian males – the capitalist system itself – with a new order favoring the truly oppressed. Yeshua called that order the Kingdom of God.

Additionally, we’re asked to recognize that the homelands of Christian exiles and immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are the very countries whose economies our government purposely and permanently crashed in the 1980s and subsequently.

Then, the Reagan and Bush I administrations used drug money to finance illegal wars that ended up killing hundreds of thousands while replacing governments and social movements whose primary beneficiaries would have been the parents of those at our borders today. The latter have been substituted by the drug lords we established and supported during the ‘80s and who today are doing the same things they did 40 years ago – marketing drugs while terrorizing and murdering the innocent. I’m talking about the generals and other military officers who are now the drug kingpins.

To repeat, it’s been that way from biblical times and before – rich foreigners oppressing poor locals for the benefit of the “Mother Country.” Listen to today’s readings. Or, rather, read them for yourself here. My “translations” follow:

IS 66:10-14c
 
These are the words
Of Isaiah’s prophecy
To exiles re-placed
By Powers
Foreign and domestic:
“Your time of desperation
Is nearly over.
You will soon
Rediscover a home
Like starving infants
Returned to
Their mother.
With hunger satisfied
And incredible
"Prosperity
Along with joy
And comfort, comfort, comfort
At last!”

PS 66: 1-7, 16, 20
  
Our liberator
From exile
So kind and powerful
Is the answer
To the prayers
Of replaced people
And a source of joy
For the whole
Human race
And all of creation.

No obstacle
Can impede
Our Great Parents' destiny
Of liberation
Joy and freedom
From oppression.
  
 GAL 6: 14-18
 
Yes, our true inheritance
Is an entirely
New World!
Where distinctions
Between rich and poor
Oppressor and oppressed
Are meaningless.

Anticipating
This New Order
Now
Will bring
Everyone
Compassion and peace.
However empires
Might crucify us
For this belief.

Nonetheless,
We are called to
Bear their torture
And scars
Gladly
As did Yeshua himself.

LK 10: 1-12, 17-20
 
Paul’s words
Agree with the Master
Who sent
Thirty-six pairs
Of “advance men”
And women
To announce
(Like Isaiah)
Liberation
From oppression
By powers imperial.
Like lambs among wolves
Like monks
With begging bowls,
They healed and proclaimed
God’s Great Cleanup
Of a world
Infested by demonic
Imperial oppressors.

And it worked!
Every one of those 72
Cast out evil spirits
Just like Yeshua.
(Despite powerful opposition
And crucifixion.)

Conclusion

Today’s readings should awaken those attracted by right-wing replacement theories. The selections call for a shift of blame for job loss and low wages from capitalism’s victims (both here and abroad) – from non-males, people of color, women, and immigrants. Instead, we’re reminded, blame for replacement belongs to the dysfunctional system that impoverishes all but the imperialists and regime change artists themselves.

In other words, the Great Replacer is the deregulated capitalist system of globalization that victimizes all concerned. The vilification of immigrants, people of color, and women is meant to distract us from that fact.

Today’s readings remind us that it has always been thus. Ancient Israel under the Babylonians and Yeshua’s Palestine under the Romans both had their governments replaced by imperialists. The result was predictable: impoverishment of empire’s victims, rebellion, and revolution.

In sum, the liturgy of the word for this 14th Sunday in ordinary time represents a prophetic reminder that imperialism and regime change despite their banal normalcy are not part of our Great Parents’ plan. The readings call us to join a band like Yeshua’s 72 emissaries who accepted, proclaimed, and lived according to the New Order the Master envisioned – a borderless world with no despised outgroups, but with room and abundance for everyone.

When They Ask : “Why Do You Hate America?”

Readings for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time: I Kings 19: 16b, 19-21; Psalm 16: 1-11; Galatians 5: 1, 13-18; Luke 9: 51-62

I’m taking this Sunday’s readings quite personally. They’re about prophets leaving behind family and tribe for the sake of the divine order Yeshua called the “kingdom of God.” In the Master’s parlance, that referred to a world with room and abundance for everyone.

The readings are personal for me, because lately I’ve been feeling abandoned by my tribe – the people in the world I hold dearest – my own family. Especially in the context of the Ukraine war and my refusal to accept our culture’s official story about it, most in my tribe has decided that I’ve gone off the deep end.

I wonder how many readers here are experiencing similar rejection.

Tribal Abandonment

More specifically, my tribe’s abandoned me because I refuse to parrot the simplistic narrative: “Russia bad; NATO good.” Instead, as I’ve written here, here, here, here, here, and here, I find the truth to be much more complex.

NATO, I’ve concluded, started the war. Putin is only acting according to the same logic of self-defense and sphere of influence that the United States has used repeatedly to justify its illegal wars of aggression for more than 200 years. (See the above short list of such heinous interventions.)

Moreover, Putin is even more justified in using that tired logic because he’s responding to threats on Russia’s very border – not to those represented by Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan thousands of miles away.

In fact, Russia’s experience is even closer to home than the Soviet menace “we” perceived during the Cuban missile crisis. In that case, the U.S. government was prepared to incinerate the world itself – to end it all – rather than allow communists to install weapons of mass destruction on an island 90 miles distant from Florida.

But my family doesn’t get all of that. For most of them it’s still “Russia bad; NATO good.” It leads some of them to ask me the pointed question, “Why do you hate America?”

Of course, I don’t hate America, although I sometimes find myself saying that our planet would be much better off without the United States. At the same time I dearly love the American places where I’ve spent so much time studying our nation’s crimes — Cuba, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama.

But anyway, here’s what I tell my folks.

Hating the U.S.   

It’s all very simple, I say. The United States has 4.6% of the world’s population. Yet, it consumes something like 40% of its product. As George Kennan noted years ago, it wants to keep things that way by occupying the very position of world domination to which Adolf Hitler aspired in the 1930s and 40s.

As cited repeatedly by Noam Chomsky, here’s what Kennan said:

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…. We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

In other words, since the Second Intercapitalist War (1939-’45) U.S. policy has been about preventing the world’s majority from acquiring its fair share of the world’s resources. It bullies the world.

Meanwhile, Russia occupies the largest land mass on the planet. China has almost 20% of the world’s population. So does India and Africa. Yet those countries and the African continent have traditionally been controlled by the U.S. and its NATO allies, the most powerful of which (as colonial powers) have looted their treasures for more than a century.

Currently, the Global South countries (sometimes called “The Group of 77 and China”) continue as victims of an imperial order administered by the United States and enforced by nearly 800 military bases scattered across the globe. In summary, though nations of the Global South constitute most of the world’s population, they have until recently wielded little political influence on a global scale.

Of course, all of that is changing now. The world’s white minorities, led by the United States, are being pressed by the world’s non-white majorities to yield them political and economic powers commensurate with their populations, land mass, and resource wealth.

However, United States policies enforcing unipolarity, its forever and regime change wars, NATO expansion, and “full spectrum dominance” (including in Ukraine) are still intended to shove minority white control down the throats of all those non-whites.

That’s arrogant, illogical and morally repugnant.

And in the context of this homily, it’s quite contrary to the prophetic tradition of the Judeo-Christian tradition as embodied in great prophets like Moses, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, and Yeshua of Nazareth. The latter lived under imperialism and hated it.

As shown in today’s readings, all of those prophets (and many more) knew the loneliness of tribal abandonment for the sake of a human family much larger than that of their parents and remote ancestors.

For yourselves, please consult the selections here. Then look at my “translations” below to see if I’ve got them right.

Today’s Readings       

I Kings 19: 16b, 19-21

Thankfully,
We will never
Be without prophets
Who renounce everything,
Even family and nation
(For God’s sake!)
Without counting the cost.

That’s God’s honest truth
Exemplified, they say, 
In Elisha’s succession
To Elijah,
The prophet whose
Fiery chariot famously
Whisked him away
From death’s dread gate
To immortality.

“Come follow me,”
Elijah said  
To the young plowman.

Elisha replied,
“Yes, but let me first
Say goodbye 
To mom and dad.”

“There’s no time 
For such triviality!”
Elijah growled.
“Instead, burn your plow
Here and now!
Roast your oxen
Over its fire
And feed the poor
With their flesh.”

Elisha obeyed,
Charred everything
Leaving it all behind
Never once looking back.

Psalm 16: 1-11

Indeed, prophets 
Like Elijah and Elisha teach
That our real inheritance
Is neither silver nor gold,
Nor the equivalent
Of fields, plows, oxen,
Or family ties
But the Source of life itself –
(What some still call
“God”)
The Font of all nourishment.

Source makes us 
Calm and wise
Even when surrounded
By rejection,loneliness, 
Terror and darkness.

Source renders us 
Joyful and confident
Saving us from the abyss
Of the world’s contradictions

Showing instead 
The true path
Of life and joy.

Galatians 5: 1, 13-18

Yeshua, some claimed,
Was Elijah redivivus.
(Or was it John the Baptist?
I forget.)

No matter, Paul said.
The Master’s example
Has burnt away
Oxen’s yokes
That once bound 
Our bullish
Slave-stiffened necks.

Instead, Paul proclaimed:
Everyone’s free
From the culture’s 
Selfish, all consuming
Fools’ “wisdom”
That devours everything
And spits it out again.

We can
Love others
Without restriction
(Because they are 
In fact
Our true family
Our very selves!).

That’s the wisdom
Of Expanded Consciousness
(Aka the “Holy Spirit”)
That never agrees
With the world’s “truth” 
Or its elite-serving law.


Luke 9: 51-62

“Worldly wisdom,”
(What Paul called “flesh”)
Counsels revenge
And even violence
Simply for hurt feelings. 
(All in the name of God!).

“Don’t be like that,”
Yeshua laughed,
“Just forget it, 
And move on.

“Instead, follow me
Like Elijah’s Elisha.
Leave behind
Even your parents and family
Without bothering
To say goodbye.

“Choose to be homeless
(No better than birds and foxes)
For the sake 
Of Cosmic consciousness
And the order it dictates – 
Our only home
That truly matters.”

Conclusion

Do I “hate America” as my tribe alleges? Not really, if you’re asking about Yosemite or the Grand Canyon and certainly not about its heroes like Dorothy Day, the Berrigans, Malcolm, King, Liz Theoharis, and William Barber.

But if you’re asking about the system now controlling the world, Ms. Day’s words capture my own thinking inspired by today’s readings.

She said, “We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists ‘of conspiring to teach [us] to do,’ but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.”

Those are the sentiments my tribe finds so hard to accept. Yeshua, I believe, would not find them so.

Buddhism and Catholic Belief in Eucharistic “Real Presence”

Readings for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110: 1-4; 1st Corinthians 11: 23-26; Luke 9:11b-17

This Sunday Catholics celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Before the Second Vatican Council (1962-’65), it was called Corpus Christi (Latin for “the Body of Christ”).

It’s a day when restorationist priests will preach “Catholic” fundamentalist and literalist notions of Jesus’ “Real Presence” in the “Blessed Sacrament” that even St. Augustine rejected way back in the 4th century. He wrote: “Can Christ’s limbs be digested? Of course, not!”

Most thinking Catholics have come to similar conclusions. But rather than see the beautiful symbolism of the Eucharist’s shared bread, many of them have simply rejected the ideas of “Holy Sacrifice” and “Real Presence” as childhood fantasies akin to belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

To my mind, that’s tragic. That’s because such rejection represents a dismissal of Jesus’ insightful and salvific teaching about the unity of all creation. In an era of constant global war, that teaching is needed more than ever. It’s contained in the Master’s words, “This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . Do this in remembrance of me?”

Let me explain.

To begin with, according to contemporary historical theologians like Hans Kung, the Great Reformers of the 16th century had it right: The Eucharist of the early church was no sacrifice. It was a commemoration of “The Lord’s Supper.” The phrase however does not refer to “The Last Supper” alone. Instead it references all the meals Jesus shared with friends as he made meal-sharing rather than Temple sacrifice the center of his reform movement, from the wedding feast at Cana (JN2:1-12), through his feeding of 5000 (MK 6:31-44) and then of 4000 (MK 8: 1-9), through his supper at the Pharisee’s home (LK 7:36-50), and with the tax collector Zacchaeus (LK 19:1-10), through the Last Supper (MK 14:12-26), and Emmaus (LK 24:13-35), and his post-resurrection breakfast with his apostles (JN 21:12). Jesus treated shared meals as an anticipatory here-and-now experience of God’s Kingdom.

But why? What’s the connection between breaking bread together and the “salvation” Jesus offers? Think about it like this:

Besides being a prophet, Jesus was a mystic. Like all mystics, he taught the unity of all life.

“Salvation” is the realization of that unity. In fact, if we might sum up the central insight of the great spiritual masters and avatars down through the ages, it would be ALL LIFE IS ONE. That was Jesus’ fundamental teaching as well.

That was something even uneducated fishermen could grasp. It’s a teaching accessible to any child: All of us are sons (and daughters) of God just as Jesus was. Differences between us are only apparent. In the final analysis, THERE IS REALLY ONLY ONE OF US HERE. In a sense, then we are all Jesus. The Christ-Self (or Krishna-Self or Buddha-Self) is our True Self. God has only one Son and it is us. When we use violence against Muslims and immigrants, we are attacking no one but ourselves. What we do to and for others we literally do to and for ourselves.

That’s a profound teaching. It’s easy to grasp, but extremely difficult to live out.

Buddhists sometimes express this same insight in terms of waves on the ocean. In some sense, they say, human beings are like those waves which appear to be individual and identifiable as such. Like us, if they had consciousness, the waves might easily forget that they are part of an infinitely larger reality. Their amnesia would lead to great anxiety about the prospect of ceasing to be. They might even see other waves as competitors or enemies. However, recollection that they are really one with the ocean and all its waves would remove that anxiety. It would enable “individual” waves to relax into their unity with the ocean, their larger, more powerful Self. All competition, defensiveness, and individuality would then become meaningless.

Something similar happens to humans, Buddhist masters tell us, when we realize our unity with our True Self which is identical with the True Self of every other human being. In the light of that realization, all fear, defensiveness and violence melt away. We are saved from our own self-destructiveness.

Similarly, Buddhists use the imagery of the sun. As its individual beams pass through clouds, they might get the idea that they are individuals somehow separate from their source and from other sunbeams which (again) they might see as competitors or enemies. But all of that is illusory. All light-shafts from the sun are really manifestations emanating from the same source. It’s like that with human beings too. To repeat: our individuality is only apparent. THERE IS REALLY ONLY ONE OF US HERE.

In his own down-to-earth way, Jesus expressed the same classic mystical insight not in terms of waves or sunbeams, but of bread. Human beings are like a loaf of bread, he taught. The loaf is made up of many grains, but each grain is part of the one loaf. Recognizing the loaf’s unity, then breaking it up, and consuming those morsels together is a powerful reminder that all of life — all of us – are really one. In a sense, that conscious act of eating a single loaf strengthens awareness of the unity that otherwise might go unnoticed and uncelebrated.

Paul took Jesus’ insight a step further. In his writings (the earliest we have in the New Testament) he identifies Christ as the True Self uniting us all. Our True Self is the Christ within. In other words, what Jesus called “the one loaf” Paul referred to as the one “Body of Christ.”

All of Jesus’ followers, the apostle taught, make up that body.

Evidently, the early church conflated Jesus’ insight with Paul’s. So, their liturgies identified Jesus’ One Loaf image with Paul’s Body of Christ metaphor. In this way, the loaf of bread becomes the body of Christ. Jesus is thus presented as blessing a single loaf, breaking it up, and saying, “Take and eat. This is my body.”

And there’s more – the remembrance part of Jesus’ “words of institution.” They are connected with Paul’s teaching about “The Mystical Body of Christ.” His instruction is found in I COR: 12-12-27:

“There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body. It is the same with Christ. We were all baptized by one Holy Spirit. And so, we are formed into one body. It didn’t matter whether we were Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free people. We were all given the same Spirit to drink. So the body is not made up of just one part. It has many parts. . . You are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of it.”

Here it’s easy to see the beauty of Paul’s image. We are all members of Christ’s body (Paul’s fundamental metaphor for that human-unity insight I explained). As individual members, we each have our functions – as eye, ear, nose, foot, or private parts. However, the fact that we live separately can lead us to forget that we are all members of the same body. So, it helps to RE-MEMBER ourselves occasionally – to symbolically bring our separate members together. That’s what “re-membering” means in this context. That’s what the Eucharist is: an occasion for getting ourselves together – for recalling that we are the way Christ lives and works in the world today.

In the final analysis, that’s the meaning of Jesus’ injunction: “Do this to RE-MEMBER me. And then afterwards – as a re-membered Christ — act together as I would.”

Do you see how rich, how poetic, how complex and mysterious all of that is – ocean waves, sunbeams, bread, Christ’s body, re-membering?

It’s powerful. The Eucharist is a meal where the many and separate members of Christ’s body are re-membered so they might subsequently act in a concerted way in imitation of Christ.

That’s why it’s important to recover and make apparent the table fellowship character of The Lord’s Supper. It is not a Jewish or Roman sacrifice; it is a shared meal.

The world our grandchildren will inherit needs everything symbolized by all of that. The Eucharist is not childish fantasy. It’s a counter-cultural challenge to our era’s individualism, ethnocentrism, and perpetual war.

Keep that in mind this Sunday, when your priest lectures you on “the real presence.”

The real presence is us.

Sexual Morality and Social Control: Yeshua Preaches a Silent Liberating Parable about Sex

Readings for 5th Sunday of Lent: Isaiah 43: 16-21; Psalm 126: 1-6; Philemon 3: 8-14; John 8: 1-11

Did you ever wonder why religious leaders seem so preoccupied with sex?

I have.

I bring the question up, because today’s reading from the Gospel of John presents Yeshua as confronting that clerical obsession. I’m referring to the famous case of the woman caught in the act of adultery.

Before I get to that, however, think of the preoccupation itself.

Clerical Preoccupation with Sex

We witness it all over the place, don’t we? Clerics, it seems, constantly worry about a long list of cringe-worthy and curious topics that include abortion, contraception, transgenderism, homosexuality, pornography, masturbation, artificial insemination, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests, and (I guess) pedophilia.

Moreover, the clergy’s own sexual failings never inhibit their volubility on those topics. I mean, the record shows that Catholic priests have rather regularly sexually molested little boys. Famous evangelicals have consorted with prostitutes of both genders. Yet, Catholic or Protestant, both continue to pronounce on the topics just listed as though they retained their long-lost moral authority to do so.

 Why?

I think it’s all about the social control that over centuries religious “leaders” stumbled upon with increasing clarity and emphasis. Here’s what I mean focusing on the Catholic tradition with which I’m most familiar and which, of course, also shaped Protestantism:

  1. To begin with, religion is a very powerful means of social control. That is, if religious authorities can convince people that the clergy’s understandings of life and morality are shared by God, they’ve won the day in terms of power over “the faithful.”
  2. This is where sex comes in. As the second most powerful (and arguably the most enjoyable) drive shared by human beings, there is virtually no human being who can refrain from sexual activity.
  3. Therefore, making all sexual acts sinful outside of marriage (and “mortally” sinful – i.e., deserving of hell) the church guaranteed that every church member would sin and need absolution (which only the clergy was empowered to give.)
  4. Without that absolution, the church taught (infallibly) everyone who thought sexual thoughts or performed sexual acts (looking, touching, fornicating, committing adultery) would be tortured eternally in hell’s Lake of Fire.
  5. Even married couples would suffer such fate if they engaged in contraceptive acts.
  6. And since only the clergy and their Sacrament of Penance (confession) could save people from that horrible fate, the clergy possessed God-like power over the lives and fates of believers.

Incredibly, within my own lifetime, Catholics believed all of that – literally! Consequently, Saturday nights in any given parish would find long lines of people waiting to confess their sins in order to receive the absolution necessary for them to “save their souls” from a vengeful sex-obsessed God. Wow!

Yeshua & the Adulterous Woman

In Yeshua’s day, his religion’s clergy played a similar game. They had established themselves as the sex police. Only, instead of sending sexual transgressors to hell, Jewish law punished adultery with death by stoning.

That was a biblical requirement. However, the Jewish patriarchy applied that law differently to men and women. A man, they said, committed adultery only when he slept with a married woman. But if he slept with a single woman, a widow, a divorced woman, a prostitute, or a slave, he remained innocent. A woman, on the other hand committed adultery if she slept with anyone but her husband.

Yeshua calls attention to such hypocrisy and double standards in today’s gospel episode. You probably remember the story.

The Master is teaching in the temple surrounded by “the people” – the same outcasts, we presume, that habitually hung on his every word. Meanwhile, the Scribes and Pharisees are standing on the crowd’s edge wondering how to incriminate such a man?

As if ordained by heaven, an answer comes to them out of the blue. A woman is hustled into the temple. She’s just been caught in flagrante – in the very act of adultery. What luck for Yeshua’s opponents!

“Master,” they say, “This woman has just been caught in the act of adultery. As you know, our scriptures say we should stone her. But what do you say?”

Here Yeshua’s enemies suspect he will incriminate himself by recommending disobedience of the Bible’s clear injunction. After all, he is the Compassionate One. He is especially known for his kindness towards women – and others among his culture’s most vulnerable. He is the friend of prostitutes and drunkards.

But instead of falling into their trap, Yeshua simply preaches a silent parable. He first scribbles on the ground. Only subsequently does he speak — but only 18 words, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

A wordless parable . . .

What do you suppose Yeshua was scribbling on the ground? Was he writing the names of the guilty hypocrites who had cheated on their wives? Was he writing the laws the Scribes and Pharisees were violating? Some say he was simply drawing figures in the dust while considering how to reply to his opponents?

The first two possibilities seem unlikely. How would this poor country peasant from Galilee know the names of the learned and citified Scribes and Pharisees? It is even unlikely that Yeshua knew how to write at all. That too was the province of the Scribes. The third possibility – that Jesus was absent-mindedly drawing figures in the dust – is probably closer to the mark.

However, it seems likely that there was more to it than that. It seems Yeshua was performing some kind of symbolic action – that mimed parable I mentioned. By scribbling in the dust, he was wordlessly bringing his questioners down to earth. Was he reminding them of the common origin of men and women?

Both came from the dust, Yeshua might be saying without words. The creation stories in Genesis say both men and women were created from dirt and in God’s image – equal in the eyes of God. “In God’s image God created them. Man and woman created he them,” says the first creation account (Genesis 1:27). By scribbling in the dust, Yeshua was symbolically moving the earth under the feet of the Scribes and Pharisees. He was asserting that they had no ground to stand on. They were hypocrites.

If this is true, then Yeshua’s 18-word pronouncement offers his own standard for judging the guilt of others even in the fraught field of sexuality. According to that standard, one may judge and execute only if he himself is without sin. This, of course, means that no one may judge and execute another.

Conclusion

The conclusion from all of this seems clear to me. Human beings don’t need sex police. To regulate the field, it would be enough to simply say “Don’t use your God-given gift of sexuality in any way that hurts another. After all sex is a precious gift from God. Enjoy the pleasure it gives but never in a way that hurts someone else.” 

That may well have been Yeshua’s attitude too. His final comforting words to the woman in today’s Gospel episode indicate that.

Yes, I believe today’s story ended with the words, “Neither do I condemn you.”

And here I’m basing my judgment on one of the criteria used by The Jesus Seminar for separating Jesus’ words from the creations of the early church and evangelists like Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

For Seminar participants, the more radical the pronouncement, the more likely it is that the words belong to Jesus himself. By the same token, the more conventional the words, the less likely they are to have come from Jesus’ own mouth. The words, “Go now and sin no more” seems pretty conventional to me.

What I’m saying is that the addition “Go now and sin no more” bears all the fingerprints of community elders (those clergy we’ve been focusing on) who were scandalized by the radicality of Yeshua’s response to the woman’s “sin.” They needed to tone down Yeshua’s words for fear of losing social control.

Meanwhile, “Neither do I condemn you,” is beautifully radical and characteristic of the Compassionate Yeshua.

Now that is Good News for us sexual beings.