Yesterday Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua, proclaimed that by way of the current financial crisis God is punishing the United States for trying to impose its economic principles on poor countries.  This is reminiscent of certain TV evangelists seven years ago as they confidently announced that 9/11 was God's way of punishing America for allowing abortion and disallowing prayer in public schools.  In both cases the would-be prophets misunderstand God's ways.
          God does indeed take sin seriously.  And God does judge.  But the Judge is our Savior.  This is the Bible's central message of good news.  As the Bible expounds it, God does not judge in order to punish, but  to save or, in the short term, to reform.  As the Gospel of John has it, "God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."
          The Hebrew word for judgment is mishpat, which carries the connotation of sifting -- as in baking a cake or panning for gold.  What we are experiencing today is a sifting.         
          During the past decade it has been not only Wall Street executives who have been greedy. We all have been so.  Many, perhaps most, American Christians have been living beyond our means.  We have pushed our credit cards to their limits.  We have bought houses we could not afford.  We have become consummer crazed.  What God requires now, as John Wesley, in his famous Sermon 52, saw clearly, is a "reformation of manners."
          The current crisis is not punishment.  It is God's way of saving us, both as families and as a nation.  God is giving us an opportunity to come to our senses, to destroy the idol of consummerism, and begin living within our means.  Only then will the American system of free market capitalism be worthy of export to poorer countries.

          "If you wander into an American religious bookstore today you will find many self-help books but very few on St. Paul's epistles, and fewer still worth reading.  But if you stroll the aisles of a secular university bookstore you will discover a surprising number of works about him...Twenty-five years ago, conversation would naturally drift to Michel Foucault's views on corporal punishment; today you are more likely to hear a debate on the Epistle to the Romans as it bears on globalization and the war on terror."  So writes Mark Lilla, professor of Humanities at Columbia University in an article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, citing books such as Jacob Taubes' The Political Theology of Paul; Giorgio Agamben's The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans; and Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.
         The article focuses on the way  scholars are using Paul's ideas on the universalism of the Good News to expound certain contemporary philosophies of revolution. They find this in Paul's establishment and legitimation of a new people of God in the face of established Jewish and Roman law.  Paul wrote, "We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law."  And also, "Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love." But, as Lilla points out, there is no love in the new postmodern Paul -- just hope for a secular transformation of the human condition and faith that can be brought about by revolution, violent if necessary.

          With only a month to go before the u.S. presidential election, our pastor began a series of sermons this morning on what the Bible says about some of the critical political issues our nation faces.  He begain with immigration -- something neither of the presidential candidates has really addressed during this election cycle, but which is a major concern to Patersonians.  During the past decade the population of Paterson has morphed from African-American to Hispanic.  This has prompted a palpable increase in tension in the city.  It has also prompted soul-searching among Christians as to how to react.  Of course, the Old Testament is very clear about how we are to respond to the strangers in our midst: we are to treat them with sensitivity and compassion.  The New Testament story of Jesus just as clearly show how sensitively and compassionately he related to resident aliens. The problem many Christians in Paterson grapple with, however, stems from the fact that many of the newly arrived immigrants have entered the country illegally or overstayed their permits.  And Romans 13 explicitly urges Christians to obey the law.  To care for these illegal immigrants frequently means disobeying or subverting the law. Christians feel they are caught between a rock and a hard place.  For me, the answer lies in re-thinking our nation's laws as they relate to immigrants.  As I mentioned earlier, neither Obama nor McCain are talking much about immigration, but when they do, both call for reform -- and that's a good sign.  Whichever political party wins, we are likely to see some reformation.

          The failure of the government's financial rescue bill yesterday took me by surprise.  I knew that conservative members of Congress were opposed to it but I assumed most members would vote for it even as they held their noses.  I also knew from media reports that the majority of Americans also opposed the bill, or what they thought it represented, but I figured this was a knee-jerk reaction that would be rectified by their representatives in Congress.  I was mistaken on both counts.  The public's opposition strikes me as a classic demonstration of ignorance and undisciplined emotion.  The opposition by conservative members of Congress, many of whom are fearful they will lose their seats in the upcoming election, reflects pure selfishness. And the idea that for reasons of ideology members would allow millions of ordinary citizens to lose their life savings is incredible to me.

   


           This young lady is about to die and be re-born, rise up cleansed of bad karma and ready to make a fresh start in life.  So I learned from a report in this morning's New York Times.  The dying and resurrection and second birth are metaphorical, much like the Christian rite of baptism.  The young lady lies down in a coffin for a few moments while Buddhist monks chant a dirge.  "As I lay there and listened to the chanting of the monks, I felt relaxed," she said later. "When I got up, I was thinking of good things. I felt released." The resurrection rite is offered daily at a Buddhist temple not far from Bangkok.  On weekends as many as 700 people a day pay a little more than $5 for the ceremony. A professor at Chulalanghorn University observes that "people are looking for their own expression of Buddhism that could be relevant to their lives."

         
          I have lost patience with John McCain.  He has "suspended" his campaign (you can be sure his aides have not!) and wants to postpone the public debate with Barack Obama scheduled for tomorrow evening, so that he can return to Washington and help solve the financial crisis.  He's not even on the Senate banking committee that is the primary group charged with working with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve on the issue! From my point of view, this is pure grandstanding.  More than that, it reveals the erratic, impulsive character of a man who would like to manage the affairs of a nation involved in two wars and a host of other challenges. According to news reports this morning, the two political parties are close to an agreement with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve -- and this before McCain even arrives back in Washington after missing nearly 500 votes on the Senate floor so far this year.

           Who is the unluckiest fella around today?  We can't be sure.  We won't know until November 4th.  But we do know it will one of the two men presently contesting the presidency, Barack Obama or John McCain. For whoever wins will inherit a government that will allow for little or no opportunity to fulfill the aspirations and promises of either man -- not to mention the American citizenry.  The U.S. administration has amassed a debt of 700 billion dollars for the war in Iraq.  And now, in the wake of this past week's economic meltdown, is preparing to impose another 700 billion dollar bailout of the financial system.  This means, as nearly as I can tell, that there will be no money available for either Obama or McCain to deal with the "change" both men have been touting.  Instead, they can only leave an intolerable indebtedness to our children and grandchildren.  In an earlier day President Lyndon Johnson tried to wage a "war on poverty" and a war in Viet Nam at the same time and failed miserably.  The next president will have his hands full trying to figure out how to deal with a nearly one and a half trillion dollar debt.  There will be nothing left over for infrastructure, health care, education, and energy/environmenal issues -- the very issues that cry out for change.  There is a verse in the Bible that goes something like this: God gave them the desires of their hearts, but sent bitterness into their souls.  I'm afraid that Obama or McCain face four years of bitter frustration. So does the American public.  We the people can blame the government, or the greed of Wall Street, but at bottom we have ourselves to blame.  For we are a people who spend but do not save.  We amass person credit card debt in order to aquire "things" beyond our means. Wall Street and the U.S. government are merely the profligate extension of ourselves.

 

          The worst of the financial crisis seems to be over. President Bush hasn't had much to say about it, but the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank have provided energetic leadership.  But the hard part is still ahead: developing a long-term fix.  I can't imagine any Republican administration being able to do this, not even one led by a self-proclaimed reformer.  And it is debatable whether the Democrats are up to the challenge.  Meanwhile, many of us ordinary folk have been hit rather hard.  For Georgia and me, times are difficult now because Georgia has had to retire, so both of us are now living on very fixed incomes, and rather meager ones at that.  Home values have fallen, so it is a bad time for us to be thinking about selling our house and moving to a cheaper area like Virginia.  And Wall Street has shrunk our IRA significantly.  On the other hand, one has only to look around to realize that millions upon millions of people on this planet are in financially worse shape than we are.  So we thank the Lord for our blessings and pray for those who live in abject poverty.

          On a completely different issue: ABC News tonight had a story on Angels.  It appears that two-thirds of all Americans (Pew Foundation poll) believe in angels and demons.  I do not.  The reasons are too lengthy to outline here, but some time ago I wrote a brief article not on angels but on the devil, entitled, Why I Don't Believe in the Devil.  I think you can access it, if you wish, at http://waldronscott.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/thedevil.2.doc

          
 

 

          Georgia's daughter Lynn is up from Miami, visiting us for a couple of days. We'll go out to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner tonight, God willing. Nothing beats Lebanese cuisine.

          There can be no doubt that the USA is in the midst of a financial meltdown -- surely the most serious since the Great Depression of 1929, the year I was born.  It amazes me how ineptly our leaders have handled this -- slapping one band-aid after another on Wall Street's follies. And of course it doesn't help that we are spending tens of millions of dollars a day on a foolish war in Iraq. Meanwhile in Afghanistan the Taliban grow stronger day by day and America ends up killing scores of civilians in the tribal areas of Pakistan in a futile effort to "get" Osama bin Laden.

           

 

          Even through seven years have passed, commemorating the 9/11 attack on the two World Trade Center buildings in lower Manhattan is still a major event here in the New York metro area.  I sympathize with the families who lost loved ones that day, for their pain is never lost.  At the same time, I continue to be appalled by the decision our government made in the aftermath of the attack, to seek revenge by waging war in Iraq. More than 4,000 American troops have been killed -- one-third more than the loss of life on 9/11. At least 94,000 Iraqi civilians have died, and more than four million Iraqis displaced, now living is starkly reduced circumstances in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, not knowing when they will be able to return home. Finally, I note that America has spend one trillion dollars so far on this war.  A trillion is one thousand billion! It is almost impossible to comprehend such waste -- funds that could have been expended on education, health care, infrastructure, and job creation here at home -- or just as usefully expended on combatting poverty and disease in many places around the globe.