The pitfalls of piety, the dangers of mercy

I have sometimes thought that Jesus' resurrection and Ascension was made evident to Mary and the other disciples in their ordinary lives in part to demonstrate that there is no real dividing line between the Kingdom here and now and the the Kingdom there and then. Think of the Kingdom of God as a house. The death of our present bodies is simply a door leading from one living room of the Kingdom to another. But they are rooms in the same house. 

After all, Jesus could have been raised from death and he could have returned to the Father with no witnesses to either event. The Holy Spirit could still have come and if Gabriel had appeared before the disciples and announced Jesus raised and ascended I think they would have believed. 

But instead, Jesus died and was raised in "this room" of the eternal House of God. He lived, and lived again, in this time and this place - and the same Jesus who did that then ascended bodily to the "other room" of the House of God. There is a distinction between the two rooms, but it is a weak distinction. What they have in common is far stronger. 

That said, I think that Dallas Willard overstates his point. I know one danger is to be so heavenly minded we will be of no earthly good. But I disagree that the Gospels are "less" about eternal salvation than right living now. I do not think that Jesus made that distinction. It is one, single Kingdom and he preached to live it in starting now. But he never said that "getting to Heaven" was less important than right living now. In fact, I think that such a statement would have struck Jesus as nonsensical. 

I would have us bear in mind what C.S. Lewis said in "The Problem of Pain," 

We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning Heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about "pie in the sky," and of being told that we are trying to "escape from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere." But either there is "pie in the sky" or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or not.

And from "Mere Christianity:"

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation along as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more. 

It may be argued - and in fact, my colleague Joey Reed does so argue - that Lewis also overstated his case. As Joey wrote, 

The Kingdom of Heaven is rich enough to extend from the past to the present to the future. Those who relegate it to one or the other have chosen chocolate or vanilla or strawberry when the box clearly says "Neapolitan".

It's all one box of ice cream. In Joey's and my Wesleyan tradition, we avoid over-concentrating on which room of the house we are in by staying on balance in Christian discipleship. I did not originate this diagram, but is captures what healthy discipleship is:

Discipleship is not either-or one side or one level, but not the other. It is both-and. If we overemphasize piety, we risk morphing into "I got mine" Christians, whom Jesus quite specifically said in Matthew 25 he would eject from his presence. If we overemphasize works of mercy, we risk developing a messiah complex of our own, thinking that the Kingdom can be realized here and now in its entirety and that society can be perfected by ourselves - especially by politics apart from God-Christ-Church. And good luck facing Jesus with that. 

John Wesley said that we are obligated to move on to Christian perfection in this life. He never thought he had done so, although in his journals he named a handful of persons he thought had. He cautioned that perfection in this life is not perfection's end state, but just the best we can do in this life. He defined it as reaching a point at which one does not consciously sin. 

I rarely argue with Wesley, but I think he missed it there. I believe German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer proved it in the great dilemma he faced in opposing Hitler. His dilemma was not whether to oppose him at all, that was a no-brainer. The dilemma was by what means, namely whether to actively be part of a plot to remove Hitler from power, even killing him to do it. 

To murder someone even as evil as Hitler, Bonhoeffer thought, was to sin. But to be passive against someone as evil as Hitler was also sinful. Which was the greater sin, or did that question even make sense? This problem illustrates the potential conflict between piety and mercy. 

Finally, Bonhoeffer concluded that he would be judged for following either course. He chose to be judged for trying to end Hitler's terror reign early rather than wait for it passively. Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 and was finally imprisoned at Flossenbürg concentration camp, Germany. There he was hanged just two weeks before American soldiers liberated the camp. 

Bonhoeffer's decision is the reverse of Wesley's description of Christian perfection. Bonhoeffer came to realize that this life presents us with irreconcilable problems. There was no "unconscious" sin for Bonhoeffer to commit. There was only a deliberate, conscious decision to sin either by passivity or by action. 

He recalled Martin Luther's admonition, “Sin boldly. But believe even more boldly in Christ, and rejoice.”  Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship,

This gospel seeks us and justifies us exactly as sinners. Admit your sin boldly; do not try to flee from it, but ‘believe much more boldly.'

In this he realized that no course of action was judgment-free. He was going to sin either passively, by doing nothing, or "boldly," by becoming an active co-conspirator to kill Hitler. All he could do was admit his sin at least as boldly fully and trust in God all the more. 

The pitfall of American Christianity is that it is easy. The pious among us are almost never tested in our piety and the merciful among us are over-tested in our mercy. Christ's grace is cheap when we feel no cost to ourselves to live it out. The over-pious put themselves outside the fray and the over-merciful let themselves be consumed by it. Either position increases human suffering both in this life and the next.  

We must not be so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good. But we must never be so earthly good that we omit ourselves and others from the eternal kingdom. 

Why there is no such thing as a corporate tax

 

Corporations Don’t Pay Corporate Taxes. People Do.

First, corporations do not pay any corporate tax — individuals do. That is because companies pass on their costs. Some of the tax is paid by consumers, who pay higher prices. Company employees pay some of the tax through lower wages. And investors’ retirement accounts pay some of the tax through lower returns. ...

 

In a 2020 study by Scott R. Baker of Northwestern University, Stephen Teng Sun of City University of Hong Kong, and Constantine Yannelis of the University of Chicago estimate that 31 percent of the cost of an increase in corporate taxes is borne by consumers, 38 percent by workers, and 31 percent by shareholders, or about a third each. Other studies have found different ratios. A 2020 Tax Policy Center study, a joint effort between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, estimates an 80–20 split between investors and labor. The Tax Foundation’s Stephen J. Entin estimated in 2017 that labor pays 70 percent or more of the corporate tax. Differences aside, these studies share a common conclusion: Ultimately, corporations themselves pay no corporate tax.

And you know what? There is no way to make them. I do not mean the government should not make them pay it, or must not make them pay it. I mean that the government cannot make them pay it for one simple reason: corporations have no money of their own. Every dollar they pay in corporate taxes has to come from somewhere. Unlike the government, corporations cannot print their own money. 

This is not where Amazon gets its money:

This is:

When the administration says it will raise corporate tax rates, what it really means is that it will raise your personal tax rate through indirect means. Make no mistake, this is not a tax on Amazon or Kroger or Tesla or Apple. It is a tax on 

• all of us who shop there or anywhere else, paid through higher prices, 
• everyone who works for any company subject to the tax, paid by lower wages and salaries,
• any retiree whose retirement funds include those companies from lower returns (which means every retiree with a 401(k) or any other private pension fund),
• every American regardless of age or income because the effect will also lead to higher inflation because higher consumer prices will not be matched by higher supply of consumer goods.

But we voted for it last November, so all is well, right? After all, "Democracy is the idea that the common folk know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard" - H.L. Mencken.

The White Supremacists who run the MLB

Now we know that the MLB All-Star game, having been canceled in Atlanta, will be played in Denver.
 
I will skip over the fact that Colorado's voting laws are more suppressive of minority voting than the new Ga. law that was the putative cause of the MLB game being yanked from Georgia.
 
To be blunt (and yes, I am serious about this): moving this game is white supremacy in action.
 
Slightly more than half of Atlanta's residents are black. Less than 10 percent of Denver's residents are black. Denver is one of the whitest major cities in the United States.
 
Who will suffer the estimated $100 million loss of revenue in Atlanta? Even Stacy Abrams and the Atlanta Braves organization were clear on that when they urged the MLB not to move the game: thousands of black Atlantans who staff, operate, supply, and retail the game venue itself and all the city's related business operations.

And who will be the new beneficiaries of that largesse? White Denver people, that's who.

So, tell me this: anyone who thinks the move to Denver was not racially motivated needs to explain just what the MLB would have done differently if it had been racially motivated. Anything?

For the record, I do not think it was so motivated. But that is quite irrelevant according to the tenets of Critical Race Theory. Intention does not matter - CRT holds that whites are not even aware of their own intentions regarding race.

The fact is that MLB effectively decided to take enormous revenue away from People of Color in Atlanta and give it to white people in Denver - who are already privileged to begin with simply because they are white.

Welcome to the world of White Woke.

Update: Gerard Baker in the WSJ:

The men who run Major League Baseball, Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola and other giants have been quick to mouth the required antiphony of the modern liturgy. After long careers in which they seemed happy to let their talents propel them to unimaginable wealth, they’ve now discovered that the society that elevated them was founded in evil.

 

But instead of doing the honorable thing, and stepping down in favor of some less-privileged underling, they demonstrate a commitment to the faith by denouncing others. Here you have the essence of the new faith and morals of the woke classes, the truly privileged people in our society: I’m not to blame, you understand; it’s all those other white folk.

Easter Zero: Mary Magdalene and Peter on Easter Morning

Easter Zero: Mary Magdalene and Peter on Easter Morning

The Gospel of John, chapter 20:

1Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

 MARY:

My name is Mary Magdalene. I am a devoted follower of Jesus of Nazareth, later called the Christ. I knew Jesus very well. I owed my life to him - he cast out seven demons from me, serious disorders that would have killed had Jesus not intervened. When he healed me I decided to serve him for the rest of my life.

After Jesus healed me I became deeply aware and remorseful of my sins, which were many. Jesus told me that my sins were forgiven. It was outright blasphemy for Jesus to say that because only God can forgive sins. I started to protest, but then my entire mind and body was transfused with a sensation of holiness I had never known before, and all at once I knew my sins really were forgiven.

Looking back at Jesus' ministry I can see that his conflict with both the Jewish and Roman high authorities was almost inevitable. By the time Jesus went to Jerusalem, he could gather large crowds with no difficulty. After Jesus raised Lazarus from his tomb after Lazarus had been dead for four days, you can bet that large crowds were routine.

Everyone knew that the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, was deeply suspicious of large crowds of Jews. He had already sent his cavalry riding through crowds with swords swinging. The high priest and most of the Jewish high council became alarmed that Pilate would conclude that Jesus was a budding insurrectionist and the crowds would become Jesus' mobs. If Pilate then acted like, well, Pilate, his troops would kill thousands of Jews.

Because Jesus was so popular with the people, the council tried to figure out how to silence him without causing a riot. So they arranged for him to be sent to Pilate under accusation as a political insurrectionist, so that Pilate would have him executed. However, Pilate simply sentenced Jesus to receive forty lashes. Then the Council stirred up their own followers, gathered outside, to threaten to report to Caesar that Pilate was disloyal to him. So Pilate sent Jesus to Golgotha to be crucified.

I was beneath the cross when Jesus died. Several of us women disciples were there, including Jesus' mother. I have never known greater despair. Imagine how his mother felt. After Joseph of Arimathea got custody of Jesus' body and laid it in his own tomb, we women had to wait until sundown Saturday to prepare the ointments for Jesus' body and so we went to the tomb very early Sunday morning to finish the burial rites.

We wondered along the way how we would remove the very heavy stone sealing the tomb. So we were very surprised to discover the stone was gone. When we went inside the tomb Jesus' body was not there. I ran to see Peter, whom I found with the disciple named John, whom Jesus loved.

I told them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

 

The Gospel of John:

3So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. 8Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9(They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

PETER:

I am Peter. I had a well-deserved reputation of being one who usually didn't look before he leaped. On the night when Jesus was arrested by the Temple police in Gethsemane, I had a sword. I drew it and cut off an ear of a fellow named Malchus, a servant of the high priest. This was rather foolish – we disciples had only two swords among us, certainly not enough to make a stand against the Temple’s troops.

Jesus told me to put my sword away and said that if he chose, he could summon thousands of angels to protect him. Then he let the Temple troops lead him away while the rest of us ran away. After a while I screwed up the courage to follow. I knew that they were taking Jesus to the High Priest's house for arraignment. That was routine, but I didn't know he would face a mock court there right away.

There were a lot of people outside. I did not dare risk being identified as one of Jesus' disciples. I was not afraid of being arrested myself. If that had been true, I would not have gone to the high priest's house in the first place. Only John was with me because he had the other sword. We hoped that we would have a chance to grab Jesus from his captors and make a run for it.

That was why it was crucial for us not to be recognized and why I denied three times that I even knew who Jesus was when someone said that I was one of Jesus' followers. My Galilean accent had given me away.

Jesus had told me early that very evening that I would deny him three times before a rooster crowed near dawn, and right after I denied him the third time a rooster did crow. It was like being hit with a hammer. I wept bitterly because I had failed to rescue my Lord, but mainly because I suddenly realized what a worldly man I was. Jesus was Messiah and knew it, but he was a suffering Savior, not a conquering one. He never called for an army, he never tried to raise any troops. The idea that he wanted to overthrow the Romans by force was idiotic. But all night I had been acting as if I was a foot soldier in a worldly “Jesus army.” I had failed to rescue Jesus and I had failed to live and act according to his standards rather than my own.

So when Mary told me that Jesus' body was missing, John and I stared at one another a moment and then we ran to the tomb. John was faster and got there first, but he stopped at the entrance. I bounded right by him into the tomb and then John followed. Jesus' grave wrappings were lying there just as if they had collapsed when his body was taken, which was very odd. The cloth covering his head was lying where his head had lain. Why would someone disrobe his body before stealing it? It made no sense.

Mary had said that Jesus' body was gone and so it was. We had to believe her. Frankly, it did not occur to us that Jesus was raised because we didn't understand the Scriptures about that yet. Later we did, but not that morning.

 

The Gospel of John:

10Then the disciples went back to their homes, 11but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

13They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

15“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

 Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

16Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

17Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

18Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

MARY:

After Peter and John saw that the tomb was empty, just as I had told them, they went home. But I couldn't take it anymore. I just broke down and cried. I peered into the tomb again, tears falling down my cheeks.

And there were two figures seated on the stone platform where Jesus' body had lain, each sitting on one end. They were dressed in pure white. I just stared because I could not figure out how they could have got inside without Peter, John or I seeing them. We had been standing either inside the tomb or right at its entrance. It was only later that I realized they had to have been angels.

They asked why I was crying and who I was looking for. Well, obviously, I was looking for Jesus. Why else would I be looking inside his tomb? But a direct question deserves a direct answer. So I said, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” They said nothing more.

Peter and John had gone home and I thought I should, too. I turned away and saw a man there who looked like one of the groundskeepers. Maybe he knew why Jesus' body was gone. "If you have taken him," I implored, "tell me where and I will reclaim him."

And then the man spoke to me. "Mary," he said.

My heart melted. It could not be possible! I had helped prepare Jesus for burial! I had handled his battered body and had seen the holes in his hands and feet and the deep gash in his side made by a Roman spear. And yet there Jesus was, standing before me! I could hardly breathe. I could only gasp out, "Teacher!" and reach out to him before I fell from shock.

Jesus pulled back a little. "Don't hold on to me," he said, and then told me to go tell the disciples that he was returning whence he came, to the presence of the one God of us all.

I felt I was about to burst! I ran back to Peter and John.

 

PETER:

Mary came blowing through the doorway out of breath, face flushed, eyes glistening and with a face utterly transformed from infinite sadness to stunned, radiant joyfulness. We didn't move for a moment and then thought that someone must be chasing her. She placed her hand on her throat and exclaimed, "I have seen the Lord!" and then told us what had happened at the tomb after we had left.

Well, we didn't really believe her. We didn't exactly disbelieve her, mind. Mary had always seemed level headed. But her story was just too incredible. Dead men, you see, do not ordinarily rise from the dead. But then, we'd seen Lazarus do it by Jesus' command. So we could not dismiss Mary's tale out of hand even though we knew that women generally were not reliable witnesses. That's why their legal testimony was worth only half of a man's.

On the other hand, she had just before then told us that Jesus' body was missing and it proved true. So we reserved judgment on her claim she had seen Jesus risen from the dead. But it certainly was the main topic of our conversation for the rest of the day. That night all doubt was put to rest. We were all together except for Thomas. Later, Jesus appeared to us and showed his wounds.

We were overjoyed!

Does God have a plan for your life? Well, not really. A Maundy Thursday Reflection

Well, not so fast. Is this claim actually supported by Scripture?

The Thursday before Easter is called Maundy Thursday by Christians around the world. The word Maundy is derived from the same Latin word as the English word, "mandate." Maundy Thursday reminds of Christ's commandments and our obligation to obey them. 

Immediately after the Day of Pentecost and its empowerment of the church by the Holy Spirit, Peter and the other disciples began preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem. Acts records that "great numbers of both men and women" were converted to faith in Christ by their preaching. As a result, the Jewish high priest and some allies on the Jewish high council had the apostles arrested and locked in prison.

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought them out, and said, 20 'Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.' 21When they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and went on with their teaching" (Acts 5:19-21).

When the council discovered it, they had the Temple police bring Peter and the others to stand before them.

Acts 5:27-32:
27 When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, 28 saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.”

   
29 But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. 30 The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. 32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

“We must obey God,” the apostles said. I have to tell you, I am not impressed by those words. God commands it! That was what Osama bin Laden declared before 9/11, when he said that it is the duty of every Muslim to kill infidels wherever they are found. Since then al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and other such groups have made grisly work of what they insist is divine duty.

  
Now, it's easy to point fingers at Muslim terrorists. In fact, it's required, but it doesn't get us Christians off the hook. When I was a boy, I worked a couple of summers in the now-gone Woodlawn Market in Nashville. The owner, "Pappy," was the staunchest racist I ever met in person. He was absolutely ironclad in his belief that God's will was that black people be oppressed. He was convinced beyond persuasion otherwise that black skin was the mark of Cain. Cain was the first murderer in the Bible, whom God sent to exile with every hand against him. Racism was to Pappy literally a holy duty.

   
I am guessing that most of us can think of someone who was convinced he or she was obeying God in things we thought were disturbing, even shocking. So I read Peter's retort to the high priest as potentially troubling. "There's what you want and there's what God wants," Peter is saying. "And we obey God, not you."

   
That's real in-your-face stuff, and following verses explain that the officials there were so vexed at Peter's defiance they wanted to kill the apostles.

I am going to take the high priest's side here, at least for a moment. I don't defend his desire to have Peter killed. But the high priest and I have something in common. We're both clergy of well-established religions. When something upsets the apple cart of proper religious order, we get our hackles up and immediately set about trying to bring it under our control.

   
Of course, this makes us no different from business managers or most parents. But what makes the issue especially nettlesome for clergy is that we formally recognize that the Holy Spirit is supposed to be breaking in and upsetting our apple cart. In fact, I often think that one on the main reasons the Holy Spirit came to enliven the church on the Day of Pentecost was to stir things up and keep believers on their toes.

 
Nonetheless, there are some issues for all of us, the church assembled, to consider.

   
One is that if it is unacceptable to excuse sin by saying like Flip Wilson's character Geraldine, "The devil made me do it," then it is equally unacceptable to use a claim of divine mandate as an excuse for doing what one wants to do to begin with. Cathy and I knew a woman in Virginia who told us that she knew it was God's will for her to win the lottery because she would give more than a tithe of the jackpot to the church. True story.

 
"God requires it" has been used to justify everything from simple murder to mass murder to tyranny and oppression. So the claim that one is acting from divine authority deserves to be regarded with deep suspicion at least at first.

On the other hand there is a real chance that someone really might be acting under God's command, and therefore we must leave the possibility open. 

So how to tell?

I think a crucial key is found in what Peter went on to say: “We are witnesses,” he said, to what we testify. Which is to say, God did not reveal Christ to me privately, but publicly, with others, all of whom attest to this truth.

This is important because the unambiguous testimony of the apostles in the New Testament is that Christian faith and practice are not solitary ventures. Everywhere the apostles went they did two things, never separated from one another: they brought people to confess faith in Christ as risen Lord and organized the new believers into churches.

The apostle Paul explained more than once that the body of Christ present in the world today is the aggregation of Christ's present disciples organized as the church. I have found no evidence in the New Testament that people can live Christian lives apart from the church belonging to Jesus Christ.

 
More than thirty years ago my pastor in North Carolina put it this way: "I won't tell you that you can't be a good Christian outside the church. I'll tell you that you can't be any kind of Christian outside the church." That statement struck me as pretty stark at the time. We Americans are stiff-necked individualists. We pretty much think that whatever we want to do we should be able to do on our own, but that's not how the New Testament sees it.

Anyone can be religious outside the church, but Jesus did not minister, teach, suffer, die and rise just to make us religious. Religions are a dime a dozen. Founding another one sure didn't require God's incarnation, or Christ's passion, death and resurrection. We are not called to be merely religious, but to be transformed and made anew in Christ's likeness – to be a new people, a new kind of community. So when we think God has some special demand for us, or someone makes that claim to us, we need to discern whether its context is related to the present body of Christ. Who does the command serve, Christ or self?

 

 And that leads to the second way to assess a claim that “God commands it.” It is the famous lawyers’ question, “Who benefits?” The apostles gained nothing from preaching Christ but severe tests of their character, their faithfulness, perseverance, and fortitude. All were killed but one for insisting that they had to obey God rather than human authority. They might have been killed the day of this passage had not a wise rabbi spoken against it. So, who benefited? By the standards of the world, none of the apostles did. 

The experiences of the apostles and other devoted Christians through the centuries is that God play his cards pretty close to the vest. God’s commands often do not make sense to us and frequently do not appeal to us. God generally leads us only one step at a time. So, I am leery of visionaries with grand plans, all filled in from start to finish, because I don't see in the Bible where God explains that he has a lifelong plan for each person who follows him. He does not lay out a plan to those he calls. God did not give Moses a plan. He gave him a command: "Go tell Pharaoh to let my people go," and that was that.

When the Lord spoke to Paul on the Damascus road, he did not lay out Paul's apostolic mission to him, culminating in being crucified in Rome. Christ simply told him, "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do" (Acts 9:6). 

Even Peter, in today's passage, shows no sense of grand mission. He didn't tell the high priest, "God wants me to be the foremost of all his apostles and become the first bishop of Rome, founder of what will become the worldwide Roman Catholic Church." All he understood that God wanted him to do was preach the Gospel. He started out a street-corner preacher and there is no evidence that on his own account that he thought God wanted him to be anything else. 

God's commands are pretty simple, at least at first. Often they do not make a lot of sense and leave one wanting to ask him, Why? But enlightenment is not the point; we leave that to the eastern mystics. Obeying God is the point. 

Speaking of obedience, there are some basic commandments of Christ that are obligatory of all Christian people and churches wherever found. These commandments are not mysterious; they are clearly stated in the Scriptures: pray, give, love, forgive, help, worship. Bear one another's burdens, esteem others more highly than oneself. Love God, love neighbor. Be baptized. Consider our lives lost to the world and gained in Christ. Use all that we have to the glory of God and the building up of the kingdom of Heaven. These are the foundational commands God give us. 

The story is told of a star college football player whom we will call Eddie. Almost every week the school paper had a photograph of Eddie leaping across the goal line for a touchdown or jumping high into the air catching an impossible pass. Oh, Eddie was good! The cheerleaders loved him. Eddie loved them back.

One day, Eddie went to the coach and said, “Coach I’m not coming to practice anymore.” The coach said, “Eddie, are you quitting?” Eddie replied, “Oh, no, I’m not quitting. I’ll still dress for the games on Saturdays. But you know Mondays? Mondays you make us to do wind sprints. And Tuesdays are grass drills and strength training. Wednesdays are full contact practice. Thursdays are special team drills. I don’t like all that. I’m not going to do any of that anymore. But come game time, Coach, you can count on me. I’ll catch those passes, I’ll make those touchdowns, I’ll get my picture in the paper. And after the game I’ll go out with the prettiest cheerleader. I like all that! But man, I’m not going to suffer through your practices anymore.” 

Now ask yourself whether come Saturday the coach sent Eddie into the game. 

So, another test of discerning whether we are given a particular command from God is to ponder whether we have been faithful in carrying out God's general commands. If God cannot trust me do the basics, why would he command me to accomplish the special?

Jesus said, "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much" (Luke 16:10).

 
But suppose you work through all those things and conclude that God indeed is giving you a special command or laying upon you a special obligation. What then? Then Peter's courage is a model. Peter had to know the tempers flaring at him and his fellow disciples. Before the council, recognizing the danger, Peter and the disciples stood their ground precisely because they were under God's mandate.

 
The pressures and excuses the world lures us to turn from following Christ are innumerable. They are also hard to resist because to say yes to Christ we must say no to something, or someone, else – for example, Sunday morning league sports (but now I’m meddling). To obey God, we must first disobey ourselves, and it is disobeying ourselves that makes us think obeying God is hard. But remember that Jesus said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." 

Staying on course is the only faithful option. Only coincidentally will the world at large approve of our faithful service, but that's okay. The world's applause is far more spiritually dangerous than its jeers.
_______

New Testament scholar Robert Wall wrote that Peter’s “heroic retort to the high priest" served “missionary ends.” Peter was a “witness to God’s salvation of Israel. He [was] not the leader of a movement of protest but a movement of God."

 
And that is what we are under God's command to do: proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. We should be satisfied with God's direction for each day, not for our sake, but for the sake of those who know him not.

Vaccine passports are white supremacist

The Biden administration has proposed Covid-19 "vaccine passports," according to multiple news reports. (Update, May 24: the state of Oregon has now announced that these will be required to go unmasked in any indoor, public-access gathering.)

The Biden administration is working on creating a set of standards for people to prove they've been vaccinated against Covid-19, according to an administration official.

The official said they're currently working with a range of companies on the standards, including non-profits and tech companies, adding that they are likely still weeks away from being finalized, the official said.

Multiple government agencies are engaged in conversations and planning, coordinated by the White House, as this kind of system will play a role in multiple aspects of life, including potentially the workforce, another senior administration official told CNN. [Link]

Implementing vaccine passports would be a white supremacist measure. This does not require a long explanation, so let's get straight to the point: poor people are much less likely to be vaccinated than higher-income persons, such as in these states:

But racial demographics are not spread evenly across income deciles.  

Any gap in vaccinating rich versus poor inevitably exacerbates racial divides. Black and Latino people are far more likely to live in poverty than white people, and despite having died at higher rates throughout the pandemic, they are receiving fewer vaccines than white people.

According to the long-set standards of Black Lives Matter and other critical-theory advocates, whether racial disparities like this are intended or not is irrelevant. These disparities are the results of racial discrimination and white privilege baked into the social-legal-medical networks for centuries. Therefore, it does not matter that this gap in immunization is not intended. It does not matter that the men and women managing the vaccine program and distribution, or administering it to the public, do not discriminate at the vaccine sites by the race of persons who come for the shots. (For clarity's sake I emphasize that I have not found any statement by BLM on vaccine passports; I am not quoting BLM here specifically on the passports, but using their long-established criteria to address the topic.)

Lack of deliberate intent does not excuse systemic racism. The fact that matters is this: "Black and Latino people are far more likely to live in poverty than white people, and despite having died at higher rates throughout the pandemic, they are receiving fewer vaccines than white people." 

Furthermore, a Research Letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that even among health-care workers, 

... health workers in all ethnic groups were more likely to accept vaccination than were the same groups in the general population, but large disparities nevertheless persisted, the largest being between whites and blacks. Among the health workers, for example, about 35 percent of blacks said that they were not likely to accept the vaccine compared with about 10 percent of whites. The corresponding figures for the general population were about 60 percent and 24 percent, respectively. All other groups fell somewhere between blacks and whites.

"But such disparities exist mainly because blacks are simply deciding to refuse vaccination at higher rates than whites," is one response. "Everyone has the opportunity and so if more blacks than whites decline the shot, then it's their own fault." 

Of course, such a response can come only from a position of privilege. It concretizes rather than addresses the white supremacism of vaccination processes and passports. The passports will obviously be issued only to persons who have completed the vaccination shots. And that means that a vaccine-passport system will be just as racially unjust as vaccine administration. 

Passports will inevitably privilege white people over people of color. Whites will be advantaged for travel, for attendance at sporting events or even government functions open only to passport holders. And as CNN's report above indicates, whites will be massively over-privileged also for employment and job assignments. Jim Crow could not have thought of a better way to widen the income and social inequality gaps between whites and POCs. 

But at least there are no more mean tweets, so all is well. 

Update: A reader has pointed out another white supremacist aspect of this plan, namely that the vaccine passport's main means of distribution will be electronic. And that will require passport holders to have a smart phone, an app, full internet service and online accounts. Guess which economic and racial demographic is less likely to have those things? Although to be fair, the digital divide between whites and blacks is small for smart phones. See here.

It is also worth remembering that in the former slave states, manumitted blacks were required to carry with them at all times their certificate of manumission. If they didn't and so failed to produce them on demand, they could be (and were) returned immediately to slavery. So there is a certain history of "show me your papers" for black people that whites do not have. A lot of criticism by whites of the vaccine passport has been to compare it to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Fair enough. But for black Americans, a more apt comparison would be to compare it to the Confederate Home Guard, described by some historians as the Gestapo of the Confederacy. 

Update: Are we seeing a pattern emerge from this administration? 

[A]ccording to a Thursday report in the Washington Post, the White House is being warned that too much focus on “physical” infrastructure could lose the bill support among minorities, because such a focus would represent “nostalgia” for an era where “working class whites” benefitted from government welfare, and could be considered both “racist” and “sexist.”

 

“Some people close to the White House said they feel that the emphasis on major physical infrastructure investments reflects a dated nostalgia for a kind of White working-class male worker,” the Post noted Thursday.

Racist and sexist in the same bill. Quite an accomplishment.

Update: The Appeal of the New Totalitarians

Update: The ACLU says, "There’s a Lot That Can Go Wrong With ‘Vaccine Passports’."

And as someone commented elsewhere, will Oregon require vaccine passports to be presented at voting stations? 

Shutting down the Suez Canal

By now I assume everyone knows that the Suez Canal is closed because of the container ship Ever Given ran aground while transiting:
 

Yep, it is blocked all right!

(The ship is operated by by the Taiwanese shipping line Evergreen, but the vessel is owned by a Japanese company, Shoei Kisen.)  

But the canal's operations were slowed (though not stopped) 10 years ago because the service workers linked to the waterway went on strike. At the time, about 2.1 million barrels per day (MBD) of oil and oil products were trans-shipped through the Canal in both directions. There is also the Sumed pipeline, running from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean coast, that has a capacity of about the same (crude only, though) which can easily pump 1 MBD.

Market speculators say that the canal's closure will cause the spot price of crude oil to rise. That is very possible, and near-certain if the closure lasts more than the two weeks initially estimated. Suez-transit costs are far below costs of sailing all the way around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, but this is mainly because ships' fuel oil ("bunker oil") is priced so high right now.

In 2011, shippers said that bunker fuel oil prices would need to fall to $370 per tonne to make the Africa Cape route economically attractive. It was priced about $100 more. Today, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) fuel oil prices are ranging between $454-485. 
 

Adding to total costs of Suez transit is the added costs of sailing the piracy waters off Somalia, although these risk costs are much lower now than in years past. At present, cost about $10 million more per year for a single Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC, the second-largest crude-oil tanker afloat) to sail around the Cape rather than the Canal. "Need for rethinking about when to sail around the Cape of Good Hope?" explains the implication of routing through the Canal compared to sailing around Africa. A summary:

1. "... a fully laden VLCC cannot go through the Suez Canal without a partial discharging of cargo to the Sumed Pipeline at Ain Sukhna Terminal in the Rea Sea before picking up an equivalent shipment at Sidi Kerir Terminal on the Mediterranean Coast." The reason for the stop is that the Canal has a maximum depth of 66 feet; VLCCs cannot transit the Canal fully laden. And the offload/onload stops costs money.

2. "One important issue that has changed the picture dramatically is the potential repercussions for ship owners of the executive order issued by US President Obama." The order is still in effect. It is called, "Executive Order Blocking Property of Certain Persons Contributing to the Conflict in Somalia." For shippers, the order lay additional compliance requirements before they can deal with pirates who capture a vessel and/or crew. For example,

... the shipping company whose vessel is captured off of the coast of Somalia, in addition to determining whether to negotiate with the pirates, will also have to determine whether any sanctioned pirates are involved anywhere in the chain of events. Out of an abundance of caution, one would expect that a U.S.-based shipping company would presume an SDN is involved and would work with his insurance company and its financial institution to obtain the necessary authorization from OFAC before dealing with the pirates. One also would expect that OFAC will institute expedited licensing procedures to reflect the danger and urgency of pirate hostage-taking situations. Where a non-U.S. shipper is a victim of piracy but a U.S. insurer, reinsurer or financial institution is involved, the compliance burden is likely to shift to those parties.

Passage into out out of the Suez Canal in the south unavoidably entails sailing through piracy waters. The executive order raises compliance costs of the risk, though in a rather fuzzy way. However, these costs are part of the total costs of Canal passage, which are also affected by:

3. Bunker fuel oil prices, as discussed, plus daily charter rates and ship values for container vessels in relation to totals shipping costs of Suez transit.  

What matters the most in the cost calculations?

For a liner company it is primarily a question of higher bunker expenses due to the large consumption of fuel oil for the very powerful engine, while a tanker company primarily is concerned with the added capacity costs even though the fuel consumption also plays a significant part.

4. Comparing costs of the Canal versus around Africa:

The costs incurred from going round the Cape is related to the extra fuel consumption but also to the extra capacity required and related insurance premium increase in order to lift the same quantum of cargo in the same amount of time. Conversely, the costs incurred in going through the Suez Canal consist of canal tolls, extra insurance risk premium and the use of services such as tugs, pilotage and mooring. 

Bunker fuel today is about the same price as 10 years ago. But freight markets are low because of the pandemic. This makes the Canal option much less costly than sailing around the Cape. If bunker fuel's price drops below $370 per tonne, the Cape route becomes more economical even though much longer. But no one is forecasting that. 

The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Costs of Canal transit would have to increase very sharply to make the Cape route more economical for crude and container ships. For example, piracy insurance premiums would have to more than quadruple.

One month ago, before the Ever Given problem, container ship charter prices reached a 13-year high of more than $21,000 per day for a one-year term, reaching into the $30s for a three-year term. There was already a shortage of shipping containers driving costs up, and now the Ever Given's capacity of 20,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) is stuck going nowhere. However, there are a large number of other container vessels sitting dead in the water in Suez approaches on both ends of the canal. They and their container capacities are off the market also. 

The depressed oil markets because of Covid drove down VLCC charters costs to about that of container ships. However, VLCCs are much more fuel efficient than container ships, so total daily costs from all sources have to be compared. Dry bulk vessels have an altogether different calculation since they are chartered for each voyage, so total revenue weighs more heavily than costs, per se.

Here is a handy Excel calculator of comparative costs of sailing the Cape or the Canal that informs just how complex and assumptive the decision can be - click here.

My assessment:

Oil spot market prices will rise not long from now (they are up today) because of the blockage. Even when the blockage occurred, oil prices fell, but that was because EU countries had just announced stricter pandemic-lockdown-type measures, depressing economic activity forecasts. 

For those who are adventurous enough, buying "long" oil ETFs such as USO may pay off. (I am not so buying, however.) 

Related:

-- a primer on the world's oil-transit choke points.

More divided now than ever

I used to believe that the USA is as divided now as it was in 1860, and as the 1860 electoral map shows, the country was very divided then. But I think we are far more divided now than then. 

Born and raised in the South, I was taught the mythologies of the South's secession and of the Civil War, especially those of the "Lost Cause" of the South and what I came to call "Noble Lincolnism" in the North. But after I decided to do my own research of the era, I discovered that almost all I thought I knew was simply Bravo-Sierra. 

I learned that not only was slavery the focal point of the country's disunity, it was in fact the only meaningful point of the nation's disunity. That is, in 1860 the South and North were not really in dissension over anything substantive but slavery, not even on secession. (After all, there was an active secession movement among state-level politicians, including the governor, in Wisconsin in 1860!)

On almost every other principle of America's founding and the structure and purpose of government, there was practically no disagreement between North and South. By 1860, though, all the areas of basic commonality were fully overshadowed by the slavery issue with all its moral and political implications, but both the USA and the temporary CSA were established as representative republics with governments of limited powers and authority. 

But today, the American Left and Right share almost no commonality of political world view. I am an ordained United Methodist minister, now retired, and I suggest that what is happening to the country is well illustrated by what has happened to the United Methodist Church, the third-largest religious denomination in the country.

The UMC began grappling with homosexuality in the 1976 General Conference of the church. In our polity, the GC, as it is called, is the only body that can set rules and regulations for the whole denomination. The GC meets every four years for two weeks and does not exist in between. 

Beginning in 1976, advocates for full inclusion of homosexuals in all offices of the UMC began their fight. Then and in each successive GC until 2016, they fought for the GC to approve ordination of homosexuals and to include officiating of same-sex marriages or unions as part of all pastors' ministry, to include such services in UM churches' sanctuaries. 

They never succeeded. Finally, 2016's GC set a special GC for 2019 that would have the sole task of resolving the issue once and for all. All the delegates agreed that the 2019 GC would determine the final answer and that neither the advocacy nor traditionalist side would raise it again. That GC met in February 2019 and voted to retain the status quo and in some details to strengthen it.  

Of course, it did not "resolve" the issue at all. The advocacy side doubled down and reorganized while the traditionalists stood around and patted themselves on the back for winning. As the result, the liberal-progressives dominated elections for delegates to the 2020 General Conference. In the meantime, an ad hoc commission was established to find a way forward. It announced that secessionism was the only answer for 2020 (although of course it was not called that) and with the Council of Bishops' approval, the first order of business for the 2020 GC was to be a vote on the dissolution of the United Methodist Church into at least two denominations. 

The 2020 GC did not take place because of Covid. It was rescheduled for this year, then rescheduled to begin in late August 2022 (update: now rescheduled again to 2024). Even so, there are no voices anywhere calling for reconsideration of dissolution. That die has been cast even though the vote remains 18 months away. 

It took from 1976 to 2019, but both sides finally realized that they each understood all matters of the issue and that no new arguments, no new theology, no new insights, and no more debates were going to go anywhere. No one's mind was going to be changed. No compromise was possible because the fundamental tenets of each sides' beliefs and religious world view had been pared down to their core. There was nothing left for either side to give that did not equal full surrender. And no one was going to raise the white flag. 

So secession. Sorry, I mean, "Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation." 

Welcome to America today, the UMC analogically writ large. Like the UMC, the coming dissolution of the United States began long ago. I think it actually began in the Civil War, which IMO is when the "imperial presidency" really began, though the seeds did not sprout until Wilson's disastrous presidency. But then they did take deep root and have grown ever since. 

Just as Lincoln's election brought secessionism into the fore in 1860, the one-two punch of Trump-then-Biden are the levers that are fracturing the country now. There simply is no compromise even possible between Left and Right any more because there is no common ground or understanding on how the country should move into the future. By "no," I mean zero. 

No common ground at all on these matters; there is no longer any "centrist" position:

• Limited government
• Size of government
• Scope of government
• Authority of government
• Reach of control by government
• Global warming - climate change - environmental policy
• Who controls election processes in states
• Who gets to vote
• How voting is done
• How votes are secured
• How votes are validated
• What is the meaning of citizenship
• Immigration
• Use of technology
• Meaning of privacy
• Meaning of human rights
• What does the word, "unalienable" mean
• What does federalism mean
• Control of the judiciary
• International relations
• Energy policy
• Federal spending
• Abortion
• Identity politics
• The right to keep and bear arms
• What is "truth?"

I could go on, of course, but I think that gets the idea across. I do not see how a dissolution of the country is avoidable. Avoidance will require sincere and enduring compromises of politics from both Left and Right, compromises that are not actually possible because they would require the surrender of fundamental tenets of political belief. That is not going to happen. 

So what will be the tripwire for us? I think it will be the 2022 mid-terms. No matter which party comes out ahead, the result will be soundly rejected by the other side. I pray that the aftermath will be peaceful, but I am not going to bet any money on it. But the United States as we have known it until now will begin dissolving then. 

God, I hope I am wrong. 

Related: The Priesthood of Politicism Offers Only Damnation

Update: As to be expected, Angelo M. Codevilla gets more to the heart of the matter than I, although his paper and my essay do not disagree. He is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University. Read, "American Exodus."

Update: "America never more politically divided than under Biden." 

The latest Gallup research shows that under President Joe Biden, the partisan gap has reached its widest point, surpassing the gulf under former President Donald Trump and likely making Biden the all-time leader of partisan approval.

In Biden’s first months, the gap between approving Democrats and Republicans has been 86 percentage points. That means Biden is approved by 96% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans. He easily beat his former boss, former President Barack Obama, by seven points.

By comparison, Trump had 87% approval among Republicans and 10% among Democrats. While he bragged about his GOP approval, former President George W. Bush had a higher (89%) rating with Republicans in his early days. ... 

The survey is the latest to show the political division in America growing after the heated 2020 election. It follows another from Rasmussen that found bipartisan agreement that "cheating" helped Biden win the election.

 Update: The Univ. of Virginia: "New Initiative Explores Deep, Persistent Divides Between Biden and Trump Voters."

— Majorities of Trump and Biden voters express support for several elements of the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills being debated in Congress, but there are marked differences in their levels of support. (see Table 1 below)

— Majorities — often large majorities — of both Biden and Trump voters express some form of distrust for voters, elected officials, and media sources they associate with the other side. A strong majority of Trump voters see no real difference between Democrats and socialists, and a majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that there is no real difference between Republicans and fascists. (see Table 2 below)

— Significant numbers of both Trump and Biden voters show a willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms if needed to serve their priorities. Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters strongly agree it would be better if a “President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts,” and roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union. (see Table 3 below)

City Journal: The New Secession Movement | City Journal (city-journal.org) 

Washington Free Beacon: "The Sense of an Ending" Dec. 3, 2021.

Whatever happens, I find I cannot escape the sense that America has reached an impasse, that it has arrived at a moment of transition, and not just on the matter of abortion. Whether one looks at politics, economics, or the world, one sees a realignment of forces, a shuffling of players off and on the stage, to prepare for the next act in the drama. The Trump presidency seems less like the harbinger of a new beginning than a spectacular climax to a historical epoch. If so, we are living through a sort of denouement, a working through of conflicts left unresolved. "It feels like the order we have all taken for granted since the end of the Cold War is badly decaying, and has gotten so fragile that it might well shatter soon," wrote Damir Marusic of Wisdom of Crowds last month. Question is: What replaces it?

The U.S. is Heading Toward a Second Civil War. Here Is How We Avoid It --  The author offers no guarantees, but his prescriptions at minimum can do no harm. 

Self-hating elites are destroying our commonwealth, by Mackubin Owens, a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia