A New Kind of Patriotism

The Gospel passage (Matthew 11:16-30) begins with an accounting of accusatory and threatening statements. Descriptions are made of John the Baptist and Jesus…John was regarded as the ascetic, pious, self-denying prophet and ethical high-roader when it came to people’s general impressions, yet he was labeled by the religious leaders as a nut (they said he had a demon). Jesus joined in on the social scene and was labeled as a drunk and glutton, being repeatedly accused of hanging out with the wrong kind of company, particularly tax collectors and sinners.

So whether it was in the context of feasting or fasting,austere surroundings of the wilderness or the lavish homes of the well-to-do…whether in geographic isolation or in the midst of the city….these who were declaring the message of God to the world were the fodder for after-dinner conversations and to put it lightly, were chewed up and spit out by their critics. They were described in terms meant to diminish them and their message…They were made the target of language meant to undermine their message and to lead others to disregard the messenger.

Jesus said…the best comparison was to note that these people were behaving like children…playing wedding and funeral…. They complained that the others weren’t playing the right pretend game at the right time….
We played the flute…you didn’t dance…(like at a wedding); we wailed…you didn’t mourn (like at a funeral).
All along it seems… we find ourselves being like children…selfish…self-centered…and yet like children jumping from one thing to the next seamlessly …carelessly…playfully…
But when our attitudes and actions turn from play to viscious,malicious, contentious words of willful intent meant to destroy…to kill…to murder the reputation and character….It is something far different than child’s play. It is soul threatening.

Jesus responded by saying simply: Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. (or Wisdom is proven right by her actions.) The invitation to wise action is called for in Jesus’ reminder to those who are rejecting wisdom in favor of their own false opinions.

It was said that the Roman Empire fell when free food and games became the greatest distraction of the masses. Parallel our generation of sports fanatics with those of ancient Rome: The Romans had chariot races, gladiators and Olympic style games…and we have armchair quarterbacks overseeing Monday night football, we have the weekend golf widows waiting for absentee fathers and husbands to share time with the family, we have afternoon baseball prognosticators quoting the stats of players a decade ago, we have soccer moms racing to make practices and get game pictures and picking up the shin guards before the meatloaf burns, and Olympic hopefuls of every type lining up for lessons and coaches and camps and competitions and region and state and nationals and time trials and a media industry that exploits every sport on any occasion for rebroadcast, for the pleasure of sedentary gamers and addicted gamblers and predatory advertisers, for individualized re-dispensing in pay-per-view formats on widescreen high-definition screens with digital surround-sound at anytime, anywhere. We put Caesar’s spectacles to shame. And we stand up and applaud heroically for the athletic few as they parade before the obese masses who are eating $5 hotdogs.

We have multitudes of people who begin each day with expectations of what they think they deserve. Entitlement thinking is everywhere. Some do deserve much more than they will ever receive. Others deserve exactly what they are getting. Still others are failing to show any reason to deserve much at all because they are not, in light of their abilities or capacities, making any effort. Someone recently asked me to tell them where it was, in the Bible, that said, those who could work and would not, shouldn’t eat. It’s found in 2 Thessalonians 3:10.

We have many who are working the systems. Some work the welfare system, or the benevolence system, some work to exploit farm subsidies to their best advantage, some work to establish corporate write-offs by disguising profits with paperwork loses made possible by acquiring larger assets credited as corporate expenses with fast depreciation options. Why are there so many 6000 pound vehicles on the road? It was a favor to the big SUV and pickup manufacturers, not to mention the oil companies that supply the gas. It is standard procedure to play the tax reduction game…for everybody. And to play it to the highest advantage. But look at those with average to low incomes…they have many fewer options for reducing their tax burden.

It seems that we have this sense that we deserve better and should be getting it sooner, faster, more frequently. Almost like television commercials…instead of once every 30 minutes, now they may go on for 3 or 4 minutes every 7 or 8 minutes apart. We have lost our ability to concentrate any longer than that. We’ve stopped reading. The average young adult in America hasn’t read a book in a year and does no reading except for work. Teens phone and text and facebook one another ad infinitum…using code and abbreviations and many can’t write a clear sentence in the language of their birth with correct spelling. At the same time all college graduates in India speak English. And soon China will surpass the US for being the country with the most English language speakers in the world. Who will be teaching English to your grandchildren?…hopefully someone who knows how to speak it, read it, and write it. But they may not be Americans.

The workplace is now dehumanized almost beyond recognition. Corporate decisions are made every day without thought for personnel or families or communities…only the bottom line. And while profitability is the expectation of those who invest in a business…it is only a single factor in what will ultimately bring that business success.

By world standards, many American towns and cities are in rapid decline. We have less educated citizens, less healthy children, less stability in families, less effective infrastructure. Even our churches are declining, it now takes an average of 47 Baptist church members to see one person baptized in a year. We have moved progressively downward in stewardship so now we average giving 3% of our income and call it a tithe and pretend the $5 for PTA membership is just as much an offering to God.

We are fulfilling our own selfish interests at a pace that will bring us to ruin… lickity split. And you can tell everybody is happy to take what they can while they can. We will buy cheap before we will buy quality. Or we will pay a premium for junk if we think it has the right label. We have lost our ability to discern the truth, to see the truth, to live by the truth or to value the truth. We will make choices for today and utterly disregard the needs of others or the needs of the generation that follows us.

America has lost its edge. We stopped working together to build a nation. Instead, we decided to be satisfied with what others can provide for us. More people are looking to work an angle than to angle for work. They want to work smarter and not harder…or just less… like a neighbor we knew a long while back who just never could bring himself to accept a job that payed less than what he thought he was worth. His saintly wife ended up providing most all the family income working as a nurse.

Its an ego problem…it’s a spiritual problem…its a mindset problem…it’s a relationship problem…it’s missing the guiding force...lacking an attentive relationship to God problem.

A teacher can’t inspire a parent to read to their third grader if that parent has no heart to love that child enough to spend the time and take the effort… and to discipline themselves enough to want to teach that child. That is a love born in a life by the presence of God and the light of his hand and the desire that He gives to engage and teach the values important to be taught by example…as much as by words.

We spend so much time in institutional settings, colleges, universities, and graduate schools these days teaching ethics because people thought we had lost them. And we have in our midst so many trying to rewrite their own ethics that they have forgotten that God had already given us a set. And he sent his Son to teach us how to understand and apply them.

There is wickedness in high places…and low places and a lot of inbetween places. We complain about “pork barrel” spending by Congress ( putting hidden special interest projects under the banner of larger more clearly required legislation). But we can just as quickly sight the local group that fails to disclose information freely, or the court case that was thrown out for lack of a witness appearing, or the failure of an injustice to be overcome because a capable person neglected their responsibility at a critical juncture in time. More evil has occurred when those who might have done their duty stepped away from it, than ever when the challenges were difficult and engaged.

We have created “privacy” for each citizen. Privacy that has trashed our mailboxes with notices and unnecessary paperwork and legalese of every sort and has not improved our real privacy at all. It has created a monstrosity of expense for nothing that benefits any of us. Who are we hiding from and for what reasons? What ever happened to the idea that what a person says and does should be something regarded as important enough and worthy enough to be respected and valued rather than hidden and privatized. What happened to the idea that we could mean what we say and say what we mean and our word was our bond?

These days, our entire society operates on a presumption of deceit. That is where we start. We presume others are out to do us in. We assume others will be trying to cheat us, we assume we are the targets of deception; we assume something is hidden in the fine print. We have lost our capacity to trust, our ability to relate to one another in positive ways. We have lost our ability to care about one another. People are so deceptive with such frequency and with such apparent ease of conscience or lack of one that we can’t count on much of anything in regards to someone’s word. What makes that acceptable? It is because we allow it. It because we say it is O.K. by our refusal to say otherwise. How will we find find justice in our society when that depends upon truth for justice, truth for relationship, truth for trust and truth for shared endeavor?

Some of the largest financial institutions in the nation have conspired to deceive those who regulated their industry only to create credit crises for thousands due to their misrepresentations and anything-goes attitude in order to close a deal. Living under the illusion of “no consequences” continues to plague the thinking and the attitudes of people everywhere.

This nation is more than in financial crisis, and it is not a crisis of politic so much as it is a crisis of integrity and the unwillingness to take hold of responsibility and to fulfill it. Is duty the word I am searching for perhaps? Do we have a sense of duty anymore? Have we forgotten about respect for one another as fellow human beings? Do we have respect for ourselves enough to value the work we do, the words we utter, the relationships we enter into? Is there faithfulness any more?

Today we find assaults on the pocketbooks of every citizen, from hundreds of billions spent behind the curtains of “national security measures” and the exploitive fear-mongering generated by the profiteers of war to the tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens and the disproportionately higher percentages demanded from families with much lower incomes.

When we consider the abuses of power, the flagrant greed, the menacing actions of many in high places, will we consider the need for a new patriotism of integrity, generated by the common citizen, shared by the day laborer and the corporate executive, inclined to pursue the good for all in the midst of self-interest?

We have often heard proclaimed that our need is leadership but the answer is not a lack of leadership, but ultimately a lack of followship. That’s follow-ship.…or in another word… servanthood. We have failed to be servants of the Lord our God and in doing so have failed to find an ethic for life and living that benefits and blesses our service to others. In pursuit of our own way, we have failed to follow the way of Jesus. And that is the way of His love.

Can we find sufficient will in the hearts and minds of people in this generation to bring about a new birth of freedom? Or have we sacrificed our freedom on the altars of laziness, ignorance, intolerance and fear? It is time to stand up in this nation and to participate in ideals of wisdom and to share the ideas of those who would serve and work and labor with honor and strength of character and mind to build a stronger, better, and more respected nation.

Take our addiction-laden, psychosis-driven, fear-plagued, stress-loving, mind- numbed, dumbed-down and diseased populace and consider the necessity of some new directions. Might we consider the renewal of our minds in Christ Jesus? Might we consider prisons and treatment facilities with education and work requirements before release? Perhaps we could propose a national medical care system with integrated medical reporting and treatment, that would have a chance of eliminating the system abusers on the giving and receiving ends while improving health in general as effectively as fighting disease. What about changing property insurance systems that insure properties built on flood plains, beaches, and environmentally unreliable building sites, and then also stop using the government as the default insurer for those who do put themselves in such situations frivolously in the first place, much less repeatedly.

Could we not encourage city planners to exercise in design and development sound efforts to integrate transportation, housing, and services into multi-generational communities in which people can once again engage in safe and enjoyable and upbuilding community life? We have segregated ourselves by age too often. We warehouse our college students in dormitories of their age group, pack senior citizens into retirement communities that don’t allow children, and send the wealthy into gated strongholds that imprison them as surely as anything else. We are missing out on the richness of shared relationships across the spectrum of ages, rich in knowledge and wisdom and insight worthy of learning and being shared. We need such for the fabric of our nation to heal and for the strength of our homes and communities and nation.

Where have our values for respecting times for worship gone? What happened to family time? When did teaching our children become only the province for professional educators? Have we forgotten the role of parents as teachers of their children? A child looks to parents for modeling every behavior and action. And they are learning exactly what we are teaching them by our example -- good or bad. It is a necessity that we reengage one another… personally… face to face, in trustworthy and instructive human contacts of concern and guidance and sharing.

Has the time come for a new kind of patriotism? Is it time to reconsider that the government of the people, by the people and for the people must entail the participation of the people with the best possible effort applied to work for positive outcomes for the greater good, not the exploitive benefits for the few? Is it not time to consider the necessity of hard work and anticipated labor in order to be rewarded with income and the benefits of that effort? Is it not time to afford the common working man or woman the dignity of a living wage? Is it not time to consider the task of labor as a worthy enterprise for each person in light of their gifts and abilities. Can we not rebuild the fast disintegrating infrastructures of our nation with the valuable labor of many now unemployed? Should there not be opportunity for basic education available to all, but advancement dependent upon proficiency and progress? Motivation is missing in the minds and the hearts of many today. There is a lack of expectation…and a lack of personal will. Reward and achievement have been watered down to mean getting recognition for something less than one’s best effort. All are clear signs of spiritual needs in the lives of many. Until a person recognizes their own worth, they often fall into the place where the culture in which they engage pushes them. For good or bad, that destroys the will of many to pursue positive dreams and goals. To lack a vision for the future prevents many from helping to promote or sustain a healthy family or community or in the larger sense, a healthy nation. Adding to the problem, when the policies and practices of a community include deception, deceit, and presenting less than the truth, the people suffer in wholesale fashion.

Will we keep on seeking something for nothing? Will we sell our souls to the highest bidder? Will we play games and beg for free food until there is nothing left of our spirit or minds? Will we numb ourselves physically and neglect ourselves spiritually and ignore the truth and excuse ourselves by claiming it is not our fault? Will we constantly aim for mediocrity or less because we just don’t believe it is worth it to do more?

It is a time for discernment, and prayer, and repentance. We are overdue giving proper attention to the things God has for us to hear, to know, and to do.

Wise actions are proven by the powerful results of those actions. The wisdom of obedience to God was more important for John the Baptist than pleasing the crowds or winning the popularity contests for the minds of the people. What mattered was the truth of what was said and done and lived before God.

After these critics brought forth their malicious attacks… Jesus pronounced words of woe upon three cities, Woe to you Chorazin! Woe to Bethsaida, … and you Capernaum. He said if the mighty works that they had seen had been done at Sodom, Sodom would have remained to this day. These cities had in large measure turned away from the words of Jesus…words calling for repentance and faith. What would our Lord say about us…our nation…our city?

Then Jesus offers a prayer of thanks… I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants;

The intellectually entrenched were bewildered by the message…while the least of those with knowledge or experience could understand...The love of God is not hidden from children, but so often has been rejected by those who think they know so much.

To make it your mindset to out-know God…
That’s an ego problem.

The Old Testament has a wonderful passage that speaks to this in Jeremiah 9:23-24.
It says, “Thus says the Lord: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord.”

Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
(It was God’s will for children to be able to understand his love.)
The uneducated knew and received more than the brain-trust of the time.

Jesus came with a clear message: Come to me, take my yoke…learn from me…my burden is light. Who is invited? You who are weak… You who are heavy-laden… you in need of rest.

Learn from Me…(be teachable…receptive…willing to apply your senses to the task of receiving knowledge and understanding and truth) He said, “I am gentle… and humble in heart”…(approachable). Jesus was not a teacher without answers nor a teacher unwilling to help. He readily extends to us his wisdom and guidance…if we will receive it.

“Take my yoke,” he said…You won’t chafe under this yoke…it is easy…it fits you…it is made for you…it is customized for your abilities and strengths and capacities. It is in turn enabling you to take the load…the responsibility…the work…the duty…the labor…and handle it without difficulty…because the load…the burden is not heavy, but light.

For all the wisdom of the world, there is a great sense of burden to hold on to it, to take it, to absorb it, to value it, to be able to make use of it…and while this wisdom may be good… in comparison…We are called to take the Yoke, not of wisdom, but of Jesus…whose capacity to bring us what we need is ever more promising…it is a light load…a paradoxical statement we might think, but not if we understand what Jesus is trying to open us up to understand…

Jesus said in Matthew 6:33 NRSV “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Jesus invites us to join with Him…true Wisdom personified…An easy yoke…shaped and fitted by one who invites you to share each responsibility…each weight of life’s challenges…with HIM.

In finding him…you find rest…not the kind that puts you in passive, inactive mode, but rest in the sense of completeness, wholeness…fullness of life…That kind of rest renews you…sustains you …and equips you to find fulfillment in your God-breathed-into life.

Come to him today…come to life in Him…come to Jesus…and know Him as your Lord and Savior.