Wandering Elder

One of the things I do when I have to drive long distances is to listen to evangelical Christian radio on AM stations.  I do this sometimes to hear the theology (or lack thereof), or to hear the direction apologetics have taken (apologietics means the arguments in defense of particular positions of faith).  I sometimes find them interesting and thought provoking.  I mostly find them troubling and find that the "reasonable" arguments they put forward are not quite as strong as they think. Which, of course, makes me very careful in my own preaching.  I don't want to make the same kind of straw man arguments, or to base an argument on "logic" when it is, in fact, based on "tradition" or, worse, "emotion." So today, as I was listening raptly, I heard the radio teacher say, citing Romans, that the believer is one who "truly believes" in Jesus.  (the individual was speaking about Romans 3:21-26 among other passages like Ephesians 2:8)

I went to see the movie "Ferdinand" yesterday and, after the movie was finished, I felt it was a great movie to have seen on the day dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. It is a movie about strength and power and force and asks the question, "What makes someone great?"  The answer for several of the bulls in the movie is, naturally, force.  Violence.  Fighting.  But not for Ferdinand.  There comes a point in the movie where the bulls recognize that there are two choices for them.  Fight in the ring or die in the slaughter house.  Ferdinand comes to the realization that they are tantamount to each other.  Ferdinand as a character and as a movie points to a different option. You don't have to fight to be masculine.  You don't have to fight to be somebody.  You don't have to embrace violence.  There are other options.  And the movie also demonstrates well how violence can be misinterpreted, how someone reacting to a bee sting can be viewed as monstrous,

With the terrible story of the woman thrown out of the hospital into the freezing cold, there comes the cries of those watching: "What is happening to our compassion as a country?"  Have we lost our way?  Have we gone completely out of our minds? I wouldn't go that far, but we do seem to have lost sight of what it means to be a compassionate people.  That may go part and parcel with the increasing attitude of greed that seems to be swelling in the country.  Have you noticed when we talk about health care reform it has to do with making insurance affordable?  What about making health care  itself affordable?  Like lowering the costs of medicines, procedures, tests, and doctor visits?  Of course that can't come up too often because then people would stand to lose a lot of money.  And affordable insurance only goes so far - especially when it doesn't cover  anything once you get really sick. We want to increase business wealth.  We want to make America great ag

I find that I miss George Carlin.  Over the years, I have found that his insights and comedy had a depth to them that wasn't fueled by a desire for a cheap laugh or for some kind of promotional deal.  He had a cynical view to life as well as an honest and straightforward approach to the world that made him wickedly funny in that he could point out some of the habits (good and many bad) of humanity that made us the perfect source material for his routines. I find that in the various eras of Carlin's act, there is something to be found in all of them.  His early "hippy, dippy" weather man routines were great, but so were his much later scathing criticisms of politics and  the American psyche.  Especially airport security.  That one, which aired just a few years before 9-11 in his special "You Are All Diseased" has an eerie ring to it in retrospect.  So much so, you can hear Carlin himself sounding a little unsure about his opening remarks in the next sp