Health care for the universe?

I just watched Barack Obama's presentation/interview at Google, and I'm very impressed. There may be other decent candidates out there, but since our electoral system is screwed up, and Clinton and Giuliani aren't decent candidates, I think Obama has to be our next President. He seems to have a very reasonable head and empathetic heart.

He mentioned universal health care in his opening remarks. I chased that concept down some neural pathways. Before I get to the end of that rabbit trail, I'll note that I grew up "conservative" and often hear people say, "We don't want to end up like Canada," (a valid critique) or "I'm no Commie!" I have a historical mental stigma towards this kind of health care.

Now for the chasing. Who are the people who don't get adequate health care? Low- or no-income wage earners. Who gets the good stuff? People who are working at companies which are making enough money to pay good salaries and provide good health care. Who's scared of universal health care? The relatively rich. (Canada critique works here—people who are getting good care don't want that watered down.)

Now since my bias is that the only people who dislike universal health care are Christians, let's talk about what Jesus would do. He'd provide health care to the poorest and most disenfranchised. To my recollection, almost all of Jesus's healing signs were directed at the mostly down and out. Lazarus was possibly middle class. The centurion whose servant was healed was relatively well off. Jairus, the synagogue leader, was probably well off. Other than these, we're talking about Jesus providing health care to the lower classes.

Many of us don't have faith that Jesus is still bringing about his kingdom today, so we believe that doctors are the only way to go. But if we have the heart that Jesus did toward the disenfranchised, we must work toward providing quality health care to the poor. Maybe that's not the government's job? Fine. The church needs to step up.

Sermon illustrations

This morning, I became aware of something quite ironic in the realm of homiletics. I remember the old adage of three points per sermon with a supporting illustration or two per point. Now why on earth do we need sermon "illustrations"? If we're propounding God's timeless truths from Scripture, shouldn't that be sufficient? Or do the homiletics teachers realize something about lowly lay people? That maybe we aren't sufficiently developed enough to engage timeless truths?

There's something very valuable in telling stories to congregations. Namely, stories are what carry worldview; a well-told (and hopefully true) story can subvert someone's thought patterns in the way that telling them they are wrong definitely won't. For instance, "The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
   “Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.”
   David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”
   Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man! This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. Why did you despise the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’
   “This is what the LORD says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity on you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight. You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel.’”
   Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD” (TNIV).

History doesn't share with us what would have happened if Nathan had strolled in and said, "King, man, you're a sinner!" Knowing how monarchies ran, he probably would have been killed or imprisoned immediately. But the story found its way into David's heart and broke it when Nathan deftly drew the parallel.

So, sermons. Why do we denude the Scripture's stories to turn them into timeless truths, only to turn around and say, "Oh, when people hear sermons they need to hear stories. It's what makes sermons interesting."

An idea: Tell the Scriptural stories, whether in their original context or with a modern cast of characters, and let the stories do the work they've done for centuries.

Yahooooo?

I heard yesterday that Yahoo! is being censured (or prosecuted, yelled at, sued or otherwise settled with) over their release to the Chinese government of the identity of a couple of dissenting bloggers in China. While I agree that it's not in the best interest of free speech to give such information to an oppressive regime, I'm having a really hard time seeing how this is different from what is happening in the US government's request for phone records of calls made by suspected "terrorists" outside the US. (I'll grant that there are threats of violence from the latter.)

But seriously, so-called Islamists are making phone calls to organize opposition to a government that is creating perceived injustice in their countries. Chinese bloggers are posting pro-democracy or anti-government thoughts to fuel opposition to their unjust government. These two scenarios resonate too well with one another. Yahoo! is being lambasted! for their response to a sovereign government's request for information related to national security since the handing over of said information resulted in torture. Our own government is asking for very detailed communications information in the interest of our national security and we've not heard any assurances that these won't result in torture. It's quite interesting that the phone companies are asking for immunity if they comply with a US law that may be shown to be unconstitutional, and they're not being given it. The phone companies are in the same boat as Yahoo!. There are proposed laws making it very nasty for companies who turn over information to torturing governments (a la Yahoo! and China), but I don't see any efforts by the US executive branch to defend democracy by being self-evaluative and recognizing the unconscionable similarities here.

Okay, I know there are major differences here. China is a brutal Communist regime that tortures dissenters, and 'merica is a democ . . . I dunno; I give up.

Google, please don't sell me out.

I didn't know they made containers for these . . .

We hold these truths to be self-evident

I'm reading Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis right now, and in Movement Two, he makes a fascinating point about how people interpret the Bible. A parishoner of his spoke up in a meeting saying, "There are so many commentators and opinions out there about the Bible, but I've decided to just read the text for itself" [paraphrase].

I've been working on a theory for a while about knowing and (the lack of) humility. (Turns out Anne Lamott thought of it first and was referenced in Bell's book.) The idea is that you either have to be psychotic or really, really un-self-aware to say, "You know, I have some opinions, and I know they're wrong, but I'm just not going to bother changing my opinion." I decided at that point a couple of years ago to be semi-humble and say, "I'm right until you give me information that I need to know to change my opinion." I think true humility would be a learning posture that doesn't assume rightness at all—because the humble know that they don't have all the information. That's an ongoing need of reformation in my mind.

This leads me to understand something about how I have viewed the Bible for much of my life, and what is now so frustrating when I hear other people talking about the Bible. Though the words just came to me this morning via those Founding Fathers, it is the perfect assessment of how people read the Bible. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." There is a complete lack of humility in most modern hermeneutical discourse (which may be too generous a phrase to describe how individuals study the Bible). The attitude seems to be, "I know those people have PhDs, but how can they be so dense? It's so obvious!"
(Thanks to Micah for pointing out the lines from Ladykillers:
- Allow me to present myself, um, formally. Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D.
- Like Elmer?
- I beg your pardon, ma'am?
- Fudd.
- No, no, Ph.D. is a mark of academic attainment . . .
I think this is how many see PhDs.)
We tend to read the Bible centered exactly around our culture and experience (another point wonderfully expounded upon by Bell), such that we think it's totally obvious. No wonder there are so many denominations; we've taken seriously the charge to study the Bible for ourselves, but we've forgotten to come back to the community to moderate views that go outside the bounds of orthodoxy. All you need is an isolated exegesis and a strong personality, and you can create your own denomination! Either that, or you can lead a denomination astray so that the more orthodox among you will start a new one.

Bell's point about the Bible and my thought about life in general is that we need to see truth as becoming evident through solid inquiry within community, not as self-evident.

The democratization of music

I've long been fascinated by the idea that the way we experience music today has very little to do with they way our forebears experienced music. Let's start, say, forty years ago and take a meandering journey through music history. 8-tracks. They were the rage! You could easily control your musical selection in your car, a first since the radio music was still at the mercy of a dj. Then came cassette tapes, a more compact way to tote music. Walkmen started showing up. Let's not forget ghetto blasters as some sort of paragon of portable music. Then we moved into CDs, Discmen, mp3s, mp3 players, and the mass popularizer of the last item, the iPod. This progression shows that music has become more and more portable, and at the same time, more and more private.

Before 8-tracks, there were records, which were played in a more stationary setting. Before that, you pretty much relied on live performance. Over the last several hundred years, live music with instrumentation was most often found in the church, as chamber music for the noble class, or with cruder minstrel instruments. Celebrations such as weddings found live music, but again, this was more of a luxury. Without instruments, communal singing occurred in the setting of work (or religious chant, but that's beside this point). Chain gangs or plantation workers sang together. Women sang in the kitchen or over the wash. Perhaps a couple of people with a banjo or harmonica played on a porch on summer evenings, a la the minstrel.

The point is, technology has brought about a democratization of music. Just about everyone in America has some form of personal music player. What's more, these devices are giving us an unprecedented amount of control over our music selection. I can choose the very song I want to listen to and almost instantly access it. Contrast this with how instrumented music happened all the way up to the early 1900s. Outside of church music, people rarely heard highly trained and talented musicians playing music. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most of the population. I call on Cake to give us the picture, in their song "Commissioning a Symphony in C." An Austrian nobleman puts on a symphony. "With money you squeezed from the peasants/To your nephew you can give it [the symphony] as a present." Part of the subplot is the nobleman's self-consciousness and his attempts to impress people. "You enter the room with great caution/Though no one in the hall is even watching/They are transfixed/They are forgetting just to breathe/They are so taken by your symphony in C." Most of the people in attendance could only experience this kind of musical mastery once in a great while. The nobleman probably had a chamber orchestra to entertain him at regular intervals. But the common folk are mesmerized by the beauty of the performance.

So the question is this: Were we meant to enjoy music in rapturous once-in-a-lifetime moments? Or on a completely on-demand basis? Somewhere in between? We still have the "Symphony in C" moments. People listen to U2 for years and years and have every one of their songs memorized. Then U2 comes to town. An individual will drop hundreds of dollars to be in attendance to hear well-produced songs they've memorized be performed imperfectly. But live. Those are the moments we grab for. We can relive them only in our minds. There's no way we can experience the frenzy of the crowd (at the rock concert) or the delicate harmonics (at the orchestra) again, or at least till we go to the next event. We savor those moments that we've shared with our fellow concert goers. But in the meantime, we come back to our well-produced albums in the (dis)comfort of our earbuds to listen to the same songs over and over again.

Think about how special music was before electronic technology went all crazy and made it accessible to everyone all the time.

Zorro psychology

I've begun discovering more about "masks" that we as people wear. I've known for a while that people (including me) put up these fronts ("Why you frontin', man?") to portray an ideal self, when there may be no truth to it at all, or at most, a very little grain of truth. But I've also been wrestling recently with the idea of the true self and how much we can change it.

My current operating theory is that we can become what we want one of two ways. One way leads to the true self (because it is itself the true self), and the other way leads nowhere, because it is a shortcut. We can become the ideal self to other people by wearing masks. That works fine for a while, and it may work really well for a really long time, but there will come a point where the pressure of pretense is too great, and the ensuing explosion blows off the mask. The better way to become the real ideal is to know or have an idea what you want to become and, having that goal in mind, grow into it.

I characterize it in a very simplistic way: The kid who dreams of being big but doesn't want to wait finds a kid who's smaller than he is and bullies him. The kid with a longer, more healthy view will dream the same dreams, but will eat well, exercise, get plenty of sleep and drink lots of water. He will actually grow into a big person rather than frontin' with a bully mask.