Monthly Archives: April 2014

Torture, execution, and murder

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There’s a pathetic irony that I posted yesterday about Sarah Palin’s outrageous equating of torture and baptism, and today we learn that the State of Oklahoma “botched” the execution of an inmate for murder.

The description of that travesty is here

There’s been a lengthy legal tangle about Oklahoma’s execution plans, centering on their use of previously untested drugs.

It’s easy for us in other states to pass judgment on Oklahoma’s efforts but I think their (and other states’) efforts to find an acceptable means of capital punishment says a great deal about our national culture. There are methods that are effective: hanging, the electric chair, the guillotine, even firing squads. The Romans used crucifixion. But apparently state governments find such tried and true methods repugnant, so they want to use a cocktail of deadly drugs. But pharmaceutical manufacturers have refused to allow the use of their products. I suspect the governor of Oklahoma and the courts would be reluctant to use a more effective form of capital punishment, for the Supreme Court might deem it “cruel and unusual.”

Most of us would want to deny our own culpability in Oklahoma’s actions today but it is our legal system, our Supreme Court, that allows this sort of of inhumane actions to take place in the name of the people of our states and nation. We are all to blame.

Torture, Baptism, and the Cross

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Over the weekend, Sarah Palin succeeded in outraging Christians on both left and right with her statement that “waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” That her comments brought about a round of applause at the NRA convention is evidence of the complete moral bankruptcy of conservative politics and the profound lack of understanding of Christian history and theology.

It just so happens that today, April 28, is the tenth anniversary of the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That ten years later, some Americans still believe torture is morally acceptable and consistent with American ideals is repugnant. That people who call themselves Christian can advocate its use and compare it to the rite of initiation into Christianity is beyond belief.

Less than two weeks ago, Christians remembered the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Crucifixion was execution by torture, excruciating painful, done for no other reason than to strike terror in the hearts of Roman subjects.

Others have written about Palin’s sacrilegious statement. What’s particularly ironic is to think about torture and baptism in terms of the New Testament:

Therefore we have been baptized with him into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so that we too might walk in newness of life–(Romans 6:4)

Our Savior, Jesus Christ, was a victim of torture. For Christians to applaud, to laugh, at a comparison of torture and baptism is to be like those Roman soldiers who mocked and scorned Jesus.

Even if our President, Department of Justice, and the Court of Public Opinion refuses to bring to account all those who committed or advocated torture, we as a nation, we Christians will have to account for the evil that was perpetrated.

The Nation wonders whether we’ve learned anything in the ten years since Abu Ghraid

Easter–Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Easter

Break the box and shed the nard;
Stop not now to count the cost;
Hither bring pearl, opal, sard;
Reck not what the poor have lost;
Upon Christ throw all away:
Know ye, this is Easter Day.

Build His church and deck His shrine;
Empty though it be on earth;
Ye have kept your choicest wine—
Let it flow for heavenly mirth;
Pluck the harp and breathe the horn:
Know ye not ‘tis Easter morn?

Gather gladness from the skies;
Take a lesson from the ground;
Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes
And a Spring-time joy have found;
Earth throws Winter’s robes away,
Decks herself for Easter Day.

Beauty now for ashes wear,
Perfumes for the garb of woe.
Chaplets for disheveled hair,
Dances for sad footsteps slow;
Open wide your hearts that they
Let in joy this Easter Day.

Seek God’s house in happy throng;
Crowded let His table be;
Mingle praises, prayer and song,
Singing to the Trinity.
Henceforth let your souls alway
Make each morn an Easter Day.

Easter Wings–George Herbert

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Easter Wings

By George Herbert

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
      Though foolishly he lost the same,
            Decaying more and more,
                  Till he became
                        Most poore:
                        With thee
                  O let me rise
            As larks, harmoniously,
      And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

 

My tender age in sorrow did beginne
      And still with sicknesses and shame.
            Thou didst so punish sinne,
                  That I became
                        Most thinne.
                        With thee
                  Let me combine,
            And feel thy victorie:
         For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Easter: George Herbert

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Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or since all music is but three parts vied
And multiplied;
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to straw thy way:
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th’East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred3, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

Seven Stanzas at Easter–John Updike

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Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960.

A garden of grief and resurrection: A Homily for Easter, 2014

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Yesterday morning, my wife and I came downtown at about 8:30 am. I was coming to participate in our brief and moving liturgy for Holy Saturday. Corrie was going to participate in one of Madison’s annual rituals: the first Dane County Farmer’s Market of the season. As we were driving, I remarked to Corrie as I was looking at the bare trees and the few signs of new life in people’s yards and gardens, that it was hard to believe it was April 19. After a long, hard winter, it’s still not quite clear that spring has arrived. Perhaps by tomorrow the bulbs will be begin to bloom. But who knows? It might snow, too. Continue reading →

Mortals, Can these bones live? A Homily for the Great Vigil of Easter, 2014

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“Mortal, can these bones live?”

It’s a wonderful passage of scripture, powerfully evocative of resurrection and new life, full of earthy and eerie images. The reading from Ezekiel 37 practically shouts itself out and as a lector, it’s hard not to succumb to the temptation to add one’s own dramatic effects. We imagine ourselves Lawrence Olivier, or Maggie Smith, or Morgan Freeman declaiming it from the stage. Continue reading →

Today there is a great silence over the earth

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What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam’s son.

The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, his cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: ‘My Lord be with you all.’ And Christ in reply says to Adam: ‘And with your spirit.’ And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.

‘I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise.

‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.

‘For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden.

‘Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.

‘See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one.

`I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you.

‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.

‘The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages.’

–From an ancient homily preached on Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday

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“… does the precise locus of this Saturday, at the interface between cross and resurrection, its very uniqueness as the one moment in history which is both after Good Friday and before Easter, invest it with special meaning, a distinct identity, and the most revealing light? Might not the space dividing Calvary and the Garden be the best of all starting places from which to reflect upon what happened on the cross, in the tomb, and in between? The midway interval, at the heart of the unfolding story, might itself provide an excellent vantage point from which to observe the drama, understand its actors, and interpret its import. The nonevent of the second day could after all be a significant zero, a pregnant emptiness, a silent nothing which says everything.” Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans, 2001).