For decades, I have noted that the evangelical churches today are in theological error as much or more than the Roman Catholic church that they started out protesting almost five hundred years ago.  They have come full circle replacing the pope and clerical hierarchy with a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the authority of the local pastor to interpret.  In many ways, the evangelicals and the Roman Catholic churches are polar opposites, and neither may be capable of leading Christianity beyond the devastating abuses we read in the news every day.

I have followed the latest culture wars over the appointment of Sarah Jeong to the New York Times editorial board.  When I first heard about the appointment, I was upset about the apparent double standard and Ms. Jeong’s tweets about white people that would be judged racist or worse if any other race group were to be substituted for “white.”  But then I read what she said and realized that, very often, her writings were in response to even uglier words hurled by her detractors.  Not a great strategy for a response to ugliness, but understandable if you are not a member of the dominant power group in North America that is white.

According to that wizard of the web, Google, epistemology is “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.”  Reading a National Geographic article about India recently, I reached a new understanding of how we come to know things – it is often culturally dictated.

Warning: This note contains references to human practices that are seldom mentioned in public.  While other countries were mentioned in the article, India was the most developed nation of the group.  So, we have the very odd situation of urban and rural residents of India who pay good money for cell phones with Internet service, defecating in open fields.  The global health term for this practice is “OD” and the first word is “Open.” 

Our Daily Office scripture today includes a passage from Isaiah that may be relevant to our national political process.

For the Lord spoke thus to me while his hand was strong upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying:  Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what it fears, or be in dread.  But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.          (Isaiah 8:11-13)

Wikipedia makes a useful distinction between “fear of the Lord” and “fear of God.”

Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam lived during the century of the American Revolution, 1703-1792.  This of course was also the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.  Rationalism was all the rage across the globe.  One can now see the seeds of today’s globalism in this nascent intellectual development.  Hindu clerics in the jungles of Malaysia as well as Muslim clerics in the deserts of what is now Saudi Arabia feared this movement.  It could undermine their totalitarian control over the people.

How many of you expect to go to church every week for a pumped up, high energy, spiritual motivational talk? Do you want your church to be the equivalent of one of those high caffeine, high sugar “energy drinks”? That can be a formula for short term growth. Some preachers profit handsomely by taking the motivational speaker approach to the pulpit, but let me tell you a true story about a particular Episcopal parish.

This parish had a reputation for an elaborate Palm Sunday passion play put on year after year complete with costumes, staging, dramatic acting and so forth. The part of sentencing, flogging and crucifying Jesus was particularly dramatic. The whole church got involved and quite a few people from the community attended on Palm Sunday as well as Easter.

One year the role of Jesus was played by a gentleman whose passion was acting in local repertory theatre and he had a marvelous, resonant tenor voice. Two days before Palm Sunday the man playing the role of Jesus came down with flu like symptoms and laryngitis. For a while there was great confusion with the passion play troupe. Should they cancel? What should they do?