Liar Liar II

Come let us reason together.  Do you remember the Jim Carrey movie a few years ago, Liar Liar? The little boy blows out his birthday candles and wishes his dad, who was a lawyer and always broke promises to his kid, would have to tell the truth.  Carrey’s character then finds himself compulsively telling the truth.  Hilarious and embarrassing.  That’s what this last week’s Gruber tapes and Pelosi getting busted about Obamacare looked like.  Now if only we could figure out what made them do it, we could give the truth serum shot to Obama and Hillary and Chuck Schumer. What would they say?  That could really be funny! “If you like  your Democrats, you can keep your Democrats.” “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Democratic party, I hope.” “I told Michelle, if you want to run for Senate in 2016 just remember by that time there will be a lot of hungry kids old enough to vote.”  “Screw it.  I’m going golfing.”

            But he claims a mandate from the 2/3 who didn’t vote.  Um, is he wearing a tin-foil hat?

            R’s won 24 out of 36 Senate races (well counting LA yet to come).  Had the whole Senate been up for election and the same proportion have gone this way, the R’s would have 67 seats. All you Republicans who think you accomplished this need to understand that you didn’t entirely build that. Obama did. Thanks Barack for making OK see red.  So he thinks he’s big stuff because he has a pen and a phone?  Well, we showed up with a pen and a ballot.

            Hey how do you like that interpretation from Harry Reid?  He said, “The results of this election are clear.  The voters want us to work together.”  Old Har’ has 352 bills on his desk that were passed by the house.  98% of them had bipartisan support and exactly 50% passed unanimously. The House can supply you with another copy if you happened to shred yours, Harry. 

            It’s the artwork I keep thinking of.  Remember that expressionistic painting called “the scream”?  Just imagine Harry or Hillary’s face superimposed on it.  Or do you remember that Obama  poster with the HOPE written under his picture?  Maybe we should make some with NOPE. Or maybe we just need KFC to change their logo to “Kentucky Fried Obama” with a picture of Mitch as the colonel.  Or maybe the R’s need to show that USA map of congressional districts that are red vs. blue and compare it with Verizon's map.  “We now have more coverage than Verizon”.

            Ah, it is going to be fun!

Killing Obamacare

            This shouldn’t be hard.  Several steps.  Step 1. Have the House just pass funding far less than necessary to give everyone a hefty subsidy on their policies.  I would shoot for about half.  So when you see your policy has gone from $5000 to $7000 with a $4000 deductible (instead of $400) most people hit the ceiling.  But then Uncle Sugar comes to the rescue by providing $2000 of subsidy and the people quiet down.  But what if Uncle Sugar could only pay $1000 subsidy or $500?  People would still be enraged and demand repeal or vast changes. (One way the House could do this is just to pass the exact same subsidy budget item as last year.  This year the number of people signing up triples.)

            Step 2. Repeal the penalties. If a lower middle class guy has $35,000 per year in income and can’t afford insurance, he  has to pay a 2% or $700 penalty.  "I paid 700 bucks and still don’t have insurance!"  It’s pretty hard for Dems to defend this story.  So the R’s should press to repeal the tax penalties. 

            Step 3. Repeal the 30-hour rule on full time employment and put it back to 40 hours.  Why are part time people losing hours and livelihood due to Obamacare?  Hard again for the Dems to defend this.

            Step 4. Repeal the devices tax which is a 10% tax, not on profit, but markup.  Think about this.  A business often makes 10% profit on 20% markup, but what this tax does is to basically remove all profit from a medical devices manufacturer.  A huge business and jobs killer. If this were explained well to the public, Dems could not defend it. 

Step 5. Repeal the business mandate.  Requiring businesses to pay $4000-$14000 on employee insurance causes them to just drop coverage and opt to pay the $2000 penalty.  So the boss paid $2000 per employee, making it advantageous to have fewer employees, yet employees lose their insurance. Everybody is hurt. What good did that do? Try to defend that, Dems. 

Step 6.  Repeal the individual mandate.  So why are we forcing people to buy something?

It seems to me that Obamacare becomes unworkable at Step 1.  By Step 5, the groundswell against Obamacare would override a Presidential veto.  Take the law apart populist step by step and make the Dems suffer all the way through the story.  Happy days are here again!

Vets and Heroes

Vets and Heroes

We passed a couple holidays, Veterans Day and German Re-unification Day and both have an untold Christian story.  In the case of the Germans, Nov. 9 marked the 25^th anniversary of the falling of the wall. Oddly enough, the historic story is not what Americans—either left or right—often believe.  Mary Sarotte, history prof at USC has written a book that absolutely confirms what our German exchange kids remembered.

            There are two American myths.  The one on the left attributes Gorby and perestroika and glasnost with the credit.  The trouble with this myth is that none of the governments of the communist countries went quietly.  All resisted but the mass of humanity overwhelmed their staid defenses.  Myth of the right is that Reagan told Gorby to tear down this wall and what with the inevitability of the bad economy and longing for western lifestyle brought down the Wall.  The trouble with this story is that E. Germany had the highest lifestyle of all the eastern block countries and most of the people did not know what they were missing.

            What brought down Honnecker’s government was faith, determination to be free, and the conduct of provincial actors—pastors, students, artists, journalists, information smugglers, farmers and miners.  Sarotte says that the myth is that the opening of the wall brought freedom.  Events show it to be the other way around, “First we fought for our freedom; and then, because of that the wall fell.”  The Monday Marches occurred in Leipzig, a town of 500,000.  4 churches started the habit of prayer meetings followed by marches to the center of the city where these Protestants sang that famous Reformation hymn,Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God). This went along placidly, attended by old folks and poor people for ten years.  The communist government came to accept it as “a lame tradition.”  But by 1989, two other groups began to attend.  First ordinary citizens who longed for freedom and wanted to uphold the the fact that no matter how bad things get, God is still in control.  Secondly, dissidents began to come to the churches and use the meetings as a mild protest.  By the time September rolled around over a thousand participants were gathering in the city square.  Now the communist secret police were closely monitoring the meetings, but how do you arrest a pastor who leads a prayer for the community leaders, for peace, and forgiveness.  On October 9, 1989, the communists had resolved to stop the gatherings in the square.  They posted 50,000 army soldiers in and around the city, 3000 police and another 600 members of the communist paramilitary organization.  They were expecting 10,000 marchers, but 100,000 showed up.  The streets were clogged, the soldiers were given votive candles and asked to sing. And perhaps the local communists did nothing because they expected Honnecker to abdicate and a new guy, Ergon Krenz was in line.  And on October 16, almost 500,000 people turned out to march, an estimated 95% of the population.

            The Monday Marches were copycatted all over Germany.  In Berlin, the new Krenz government decided to strike a conciliatory note and they asked West Germany for a loan in return for opening the border.  This was a visceral issue with Germans, many who had relatives on the other side.  Again the communists and police intended to stop the marches, but on Nov. 9 a lowly official named Schabowski made a gaffe and announced that the border was to be opened right away.  Tens of thousands flooded the Brandenburg gate, demanding it be opened.  The guards didn’t know what to do, and eventually capitulated when they received no orders.  The rest was an enormous storming of the wall and sledge hammers came out of houses to accomplish the task. 

            It has been said that the left has little moral certainty and that is why they don’t like wars.  To fight you have to have that certainty that you’ll defend your beliefs.  If you have relative morality and don’t know the difference between right and wrong, you won’t fight.  That was also a factor in the fall of the wall.  And of course the economy and political intrigue were factors too. 

            Thus it is that the left in USA hates patriotism and flag-waving.  The still remaining a few Christian leftists say the bible forbids war. “Thou shalt not kill”. Yet this seems an odd stance when Jesus told Peter to buy a sword.  The OT lionizes warriors like David who killed “ten thousands” in defense of Israel.  The first Gentile to become a follower was a soldier at the foot of the cross, and Cornelius, a Roman centurion and his whole household became followers.  Nobody told Cornelius he had to quit the army.  “No greater love hath he than to lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus said. Common sense at work there!  And now that our archeology is uncovering the fact that soldiers were instrumental is spreading the gospel far and wide in the empire, we realize that even though the state made them swear allegiance to Caesar, they kept a higher power in their hearts.

            “We support the troops,” mantras the left.  But they don’t support their job or their mindset—a dishonor to our veterans.  A soldier would be home if he could but he volunteered to defend the United States and the Constitution.  It is more important that America be free and free to worship God without fear.  That’s why they do what they do.

The Maker

Guest speaker at our Reformation festival was Dr. Bill Weinrich, one of the grand old guys at one of our seminaries, a former native Ponca Citian.  One of the other speakers at our fest gave a speech on evolution and how Christians can talk about controversial topics.  I asked him why pastors don’t speak much about some of the strong political issues of our time, not the politics, but the issues and what a Christian should think. 

Weinrich got up and did just that.  Here’s my notes. 

In the early days of the church, Bill said, the Greek philosophers thought of the origins of the earth as created by a god who found some amorphous matter and formed it into the earth.  Why did they want to believe that?  They wanted to think that the god was subject to limits and rules which they could find out.  If they found the rules, they could plan.  But the Christians argued that God simply created the universe.  The Greeks hated that thought.  Why then, God was arbitrary and chaotic, and it was no good to plan or think logically.  Which came first, the nothingness or the god?  No, the Christians continued.  He didn’t create from nothingness.  He spoke His word and brought it into being.  “And God said, ‘let there be light…’” This means that there are two central questions.  First who is this God and what is he like?  Second, what did He intend by creating things?  The answer according to Christians was that He was the living God, the God who imparts life.  He “makes” things and gives them life.  And His word says He made us in His image.  Why?  Well, that is what He does.  He is living and gives His life to the universe and to us.  He doesn’t just make things like a carpenter makes things (adding order to the matter).  He brings them forth from nothingness and makes them live. 

So? We are to love the Lord with all our heart and soul and mind, says the Shima. But sin entered the world.  And so God made His Son.  He is a Father because He made a Son.  “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son.” “And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver (Greek word is “maker”) of life.” God gives us life and asks us  “be fruitful and multiply”, i.e., to give life and procreate.  That is His intent for humanity.  So when people say that gays should marry, they don’t do so to give life.  The relationship, no matter how loving, is sterile and barren. It doesn’t do what God asked us to continue.  It ain’t from God.  We have this thing called marriage and Jesus insisted that it was instituted by God of one man and one woman (Matt. 19:5).  And so we have that as a definition of marriage and society also deems it has to be of an adult consensual age and not between close relatives.  All that is make it procreate successfully. 

God is merciful.  Though we don’t deserve even a second look because of our sin, God came after us.  The Jewish first commandment is “I am the Lord thy God who has brought you out of the land of Egypt.”  God saves through His mercy and comes after us in love.  Jesus, we confess, was true man, but in fact he was the only true man.  He was what we are supposed to be.  Trusting and humble and completely attuned to His Father’s will.  And with a mercy big enough to save the whole world.  On the cross, Jesus didn’t just save our sins like some sort of cash transaction, but they became part and parcel of who He was. He took our sins upon himself.  And yet staring death in the face at a point blank distance, He did not waver but confessed his trust, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Only a God begotten, true man would speak that way, because that is a mercy and humility that only God could fulfill.  And so the God of Life gave His Son life and raised Him from the dead. Please note, it ain’t God the Father if there is no resurrection. It would have to be some other nature. And so too, we must strive to look death in the face and commend our spirit to God. 

Hence Luther objected to indulgences as fundamentally against God’s nature of Grace.  People in Luther’s day were saying that man was made in the image of God, had great talents, could speak the words of God unlike animals and all sorts of other wonderful things.  Humanism. Luther countered, “and they all died.”   If you are incapable of something, if you are flat on your back and someone comes and lifts you up, what do you say?  You say, “It was done for me.” And so God has saved you, not from your deserving it, but it was just done and you accepted it in faith.  Grace alone.  And He put faith in our hearts to say “It was done for me!” Faith alone.  And then it relies entirely on the living God who speaks.  Scripture alone.  It all follows from the nature of who God is and what was His intent.

Losing America, Getting it back

Somehow the Supreme Court has managed to not just legalize same-sex marriage, but to force it on all of us.  Two ordained ministers in Cor d’Alene, Idaho are being fined by the state for refusing to marry gays in their chapel.  From there it isn’t much of a leap to demand pastors marry gays in their churches. Yeah, except that it violates Matt. 19:4-5 and Leviticus 18. 

Two things bother me.  One is that Christians aren’t upset.  To have government force belief and practice upon a faith—if that’s not a violation of the first amendment, what is?  Instead, Christians are apathetic or worse, they side with the secularists.  It’s not that this trend hasn’t been observed.  Barna measures poll respondents of many Christians.  There are 9 articles (Barna uses 8) that are known as orthodox Christianity—those principles taught by just about every Christian church in existence—salvation by grace, virgin birth, existence of hell, etc.  Yet in the polls, Barna notes that only 9% of respondents agree with these orthodox views.  A lot of people are more swayed by the Kardashians and the NFL than  our Lord, Savior and Friend, Jesus the Christ.

Maybe that’s my problem!  I can’t keep up with the Kardashians, nor do I care to. I’m a Norman Rockwell guy in an Entitlement World.  A Dietrich Bonhoeffer guy in a soft-Nazi world.  Or as Bonhoeffer asked a fellow pastor who came to visit him in prison, “Why aren’t you in here too?”  And the way I answer the Christian Apathy mystery is that I suspect that most folks haven’t crashed and burned as many times as I have.  Thus, there is little fear of God and besides, “do we still believe in a burning hell?!”

The second bothersome thing is that America no longer cherishes the Constitution.  We become just another nation of the Americas without our Constitution--another Argentina or Peru.  Our soldiers need swear on nothingness, let alone our politicians.  We scoff at property rights, and think that government rules over the people rather than “We the people, in order to form a more perfect Union.”  Buried at the core of this insolence is our loss of faith. For in the formative age of our Founders, it was considered that all men should be free to pursue their own relationship and destiny with the Almighty.  To step on another’s freedom risked challenging God.  Such a sense of destiny, known as the America Dream, made us work.  We truly did “ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Now it’s just trying to find out what they qualify for.  The American Dream just means ease and money, not destiny.

The Constitution lost its luster when our schools began to teach ambivalence.  High school government classes went from being year-long to only part of a semester.  D’Tocqueville observed an America where everyone was talking politics.  Today, a lot of people refuse to vote or pride themselves in not voting.  You hear talk about how independent they are because no one running agrees with their hallowed points of view.  (That ought to tell you something is amiss with your views, right there!)

And so we lose our faith and our founding and descend into fascism of government dictates, multiplying rules and special privileges for the well-connected.  Then, we lose our economic luster and go from 3.8% growth from 1982-2000 down to 1.8% since.  This is but a symptom of the destiny we have lost.  But there’s a way out of this mess.  We must educate those who never bothered with the faith or the Constitution, a monumental task.  Revitalize our economics by de-regulating and reorganizing government bureaucracy, a monumental task. And we must reform entitlement with responsibility, a monumental task. 

But we have had big jobs before.  We are still the people of the self-evident truth.  And many of us find that here in our senior years we have yet another challenge to bring back America.  

Inadvertent Rabble Rouser

We sometimes laugh that our careers have been lived on the edge, a couple of Rabble Rousers.  Of course these days, I just try to stay out of trouble.  But as I led a Bible Study the other night a name reminded me how I once roused a rabble rather humorously and without meaning to.  Stuff follows you around. 

We were reading about Dionysius a 3^rd century bishop of Alexandria who wrote about how Christians rushed into a plague to nurse the sick while the pagans rushed the other way.  And then I remembered that weird teenage thing that happened to me.  In 1973 I saw old friend Ted Mayes who put his grin on and his finger in my chest and said, ‘So here’s the guy who got societies abolished at St. Johns.’  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then he explained and we both had a laugh. 

In 1969 I was a freshman at St. Johns College.  Missouri Synod Lutheran colleges didn’t have fraternities since LCMS frowns on secret societies in a big way.  Instead they had Societies where you just joined and raised money for good causes, etc.  There were six societies at SJC, three for men and three for women.  Only one, the Demosthenians, was by invite only.  They were a group of big studs on campus, and I wanted to be invited like my roommate had been.  No such luck. So in a fit of sophomoric spite, I proudly declared myself GDI, an independent.  What I didn’t know was that the Demosthenians were a huge barb in the side of the faculty and staff of the college.  They had named themselves after a non-Christian, a failed Greek orator who committed suicide and called themselves “Demons” as a nickname.  Often they played practical jokes which bordered on vandalistic and they had a lot of beer parties down along the river.  Everything a rebellious teen loves and adults hate. 

I was vice president of our class and Ted was Prez.  Our Treasurer, I think was Pam Ochs, heard me proclaiming my independence and she decided she wanted to be one too.  But, she told me, everyone knows that GDI stands for “God Damned Independent” and the other girls didn’t like this label.  Did I know any early church father whose name started with a D.  “Ugh—Dionysius?” “Good, then we can be God’s Dionysian Independents,” she chuckled.  And so that year, the whole campus which normally divided itself into 3 groups, had about 40% of students who stayed independent.  And after that year I left to go to Kansas State and pursue a degree in physics. 

But, Ted related, the faculty, chagrinned over this rivalry and the Demons, decided it was the time to outlaw all societies—with almost half the students uncommitted.  “And you are the guy whose example gets thrown around all the time,” Ted said. “A promising Lutheran School Teacher who got discouraged over the atmosphere at the college.”  Whoa! That was hardly true, but good for an argument by the adults. Weird thing was that I learned about it ex post facto.  An absentee Rabble Rouser, no less!

Maybe this stuff runs in the family.  My seven-generations ago great grandfather was General Dan Morgan in the Revolutionary War.  October 7, 1777 marks the second battle of Saratoga at Freeman’s Farm.  Dastardly Dan re-wrote the rules of warfare. Prior to this, women were non-combatants and nobody shot at them.  But the women of the Hudson valley were tough women. [If the man of the house was felled in an Indian raid, the women grabbed the rifle and started shooting.] When British General Burgoyne brought merciless Hessian mercenaries with his army, rumors rose that the Hessians carried small pox. The women were ready to fight to the death for their families and farms.  So Dan posted them as sharpshooters and snipers behind trees and rocks.  The dumbfounded British and Hessian troups didn’t know how to handle this.  Burgoyne surrendered against an army that seemed to just rise out of the ground at Saratoga.  Subsequently, the French joined the war on America’s side, declaring us an independent country and the rest is history.

Okay, so once you get on Medicare, it may be cheap but not too smart to jump off a cliff.  I just need to learn to behave myself.

Gay marriage and then what

So the Supremes let stand the appeals court decisions about gay marriage, meaning it stays a state issue.  However, the upshot was that states with a gay marriage ban (over 30 of us) can’t say there can’t be gay marriage.  But since the state supremes and others rule that gay marriage is the imputed law now, we MUST have gay marriage.  Evidently you can no longer choose tolerance—“I don’t agree with you but go ahead and live your own life.”  Instead we MUST agree to gay marriage. And thus Appeals Court Judge Wiseman here in OK performed the marriage of the first two lesbians.  To not do this "would have been cowardly," she said.  Am I hearing this right? I always thought courageous stands were to do what you believed right, not to follow the crowd or notion of the moment.

And to me, the courage is to follow what my Lord, Savior and best friend, Jesus, said in Matthew 19 about marriage and what God said in Leviticus 18.  So why didn’t the Judge just say, “why don’t you guys find a Unitarian preacher or some other person to do this.” 

Okay, so do you have to perform gay sex to have one of these same gender marriages?  Can two brothers say they just want the tax advantages and thus get married?  Can three sisters?  Two women and a dog? You see where this is headed is that we no longer have a definition of marriage.  Is it love?  I love my boat! Is it just two people?  Those Mormons who hide in Utah canyons are cheering. Perhaps since boats and corporations can have personhood under the law, we could just marry all the ships in Carnival Cruises.  The bottom line is that we used to have a definition of marriage as two people, one man and one woman (recognizing that it was instituted to procreate) , mutual consent, and unrelated (recognizing that we don’t want inbred kids) and of legal age (to avoid child abuse).  But if all this goes out the window, we have nothing that really amounts to a marriage at all.  Which of course, is about where we are de facto with all the kids who have no dads.   America is slipping over the cliff and the people are just going to the mall or watching football.

Worse still, is what happens when the government imposes religion on us.  If a gay guy gets insurance with a family plan so his partner has coverage, does that have to be honored?  If so, does it have to be honored, contrary to beliefs, when my church carries the insurance?  I once thought the first amendment protected against such things being rammed down our throat.    Worse still is the silence of the churches on politics, who dare not offend members (contributors!) who are carnal Christians and think loosely about how we should support all the gay folks by agreeing with them. 

Why aren’t we in the middle of what could be called a faith war?  There certainly is a War on Faith.