Teachable Moments and What You Know

The Skip Gates-Jim Crowley-BHO dust up has been instructive about how Americans can't even agree on first principles and assumptions -- how we view events with just a few facts depends a lot on our life-history/life-experience (I'm sure the Germans have a better expression for the idea). Does, the NYTimes recounts, knowing what the 911 caller Whalen says happened:

Police officials stood by the report in interviews over the weekend, but on Monday, Ms. Whalen’s lawyer said she had never mentioned race to Sergeant Crowley.

“She didn’t speak to Sergeant Crowley at the scene except to say, ‘I’m the one who called,’ ” said the lawyer, Wendy J. Murphy. “And he said, ‘Wait right there,’ and walked into the house. She never used the word black and never said the word ‘backpacks’ to anyone.”

So she never identified the two intruders as "black" adds a fact that may change how I view whether Gates or Crowley was more in the "right" in this embarassing episode -- will a shared beer at the White House make things all better? The article on the different worlds the different worlds lived in by Yalie and Harvard Prof. Skip Gates and Cambridge Police Officer Jim Crowley is interesting in how these two would seem to be unlikely participants in this "teachable moment."

I tend to be wary of law enforcement on the mainland when I'm traveling.

I also got called back to Airport security during the Legislative Session when flying from Maui to Oahu -- someone (I assumed a haole) identified me as the person who had taken a live bullet round out of my pocket and put it in one of the containers at the security line. The head security person skeptically questioned me about whether I had ever seen the bullet before -- muttering that he would be checking the video and see about that when I indicated I had not seen it before. I suppose I could have pulled a Skip Gates but I wanted to make my flight to Oahu and didn't want to cause a scene (the two Airport police officers watching nearby included the husband of a fellow Good Shepherd parishioner and a DOCARE officer I'd spoken to a few weeks before). So I just assumed that the head security person would have treated any traveler the same way and it wasn't because I wasn't profiled as a goatee'd bald, and brown skinned.

But I do admit being skeptical of TSA now.

An Emergent Church

FUNDA-MERGENT: Here's another strain of American Christian-ism (as opposed to Christianity) from a Christian Century post by Chad Holtz -- there's a big tent for this Christian-thing.
I'm intrigued by this movement and whether it really can define itself:

One of the differences between these fundamentals and those of “fundamentalists” is that these 5 fundamentals result in an ethic – a way of life. They develop a Christian in such a way that the way of Christ is lived experientially, and as such, truthfully.

Here's how Holtz reinterprets a healing story from Acts:

The question facing all of us is not whether something or someone will be our lord but rather, what or who will?

Christians have from the beginning confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord. We might say that fundamental to being a Christian is the rejection of all other claims upon our allegiance and worship apart from Christ. Christians are people in the business of actively snuffing out and excluding pseudo-lords – lords that often promise salvation but really serve only to undermine our wholeness, our peace, our freedom .

As the church was dawning and waking up to the realization that Jesus Christ is Lord they began to see that the old lords would not and could not give life. In the book of Acts, shortly after Pentecost, Peter and John make their way to the temple to pray. Laying around one of the temple gates, a gate called Beautiful, was a man crippled from birth. Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that people would lay him at this gate daily so that he could ask for alms, or offerings, from people as they entered the temple to pray.

Stop for a moment and consider the irony at play within this story. A lame man from birth begging for money outside the house of God at a gate called, of all things, Beautiful. There is nothing beautiful about this picture. It’s rather tragic. I think Luke is reminding us, the church, that we often call beautiful what is in actuality sucking the life out of us. Far too often we accept the reality around us and dress it up rather than living into the reality that Jesus has inaugurated and empowered us to proclaim. Consider the rest of the story…

Peter and John come upon this lame man at the “Beautiful Gate” where they are solicited for money. Just a few coins, the man requests. Won’t you show compassion on me by giving me some of your silver and gold? He is hoping for anything to maintain his present reality if not make it just a bit more cozy. What more is there? Daily he has been lying outside this place of prayer, asking for one of the world’s most seductive lords – money. He cannot imagine any other way to live. Each person that drops a coin in his needy hand gives him one more day to live and one more reason for everyone to look around and say, “Beautiful.”

But not Peter and John. They tell the crippled man that they do not have any silver or gold. They do not have any of the old ways and means of salvation to offer. They will not placate him with pseudo-lords and in the process conceal the hope found in the one true Lord. So while they will not give him the lords he requests they give him something far better, something they have the freedom to give – salvation in the name of Jesus Christ.

“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk.”

Peter and John tell the man the truth about himself. They tell him that Jesus is the Lord of life, that he no longer has to live this way, to get up and walk. They tell him he is saved. Now walk.

In a flash the man’s identity is changed. He is no longer a cripple. It has nothing to do with who he is or what he is willing to acknowledge at the moment. It has everything to do with Jesus and what he has done on his behalf. The command to get up and walk is our command as well. Peter and John look at us and tell us to get up and walk. Why? Because we are saved. Because Jesus Christ is Lord and we no longer have to sit under gates we name as beautiful but are really barring us from true fellowship with God and others.

Being a FundaMergent is to be a person who, like Peter and John, looks intently into the face of oppressive systems, powers and idols and insists they are not beautiful but crippling. We insist that Jesus Christ is Lord and that the abundant life Jesus promised is available when we walk in such a way that dismantles the gods that would keep us lying on a mat, outside the house of prayer.

But the gospel is not just about freedom. It is also about slavery. As we confess Jesus Christ as Lord we are also confessing our allegiance to a person who had a particular, and peculiar, Way about him.

The Deputies from our parish just returned from the Episcopal Church Convention in Anaheim and gave a short report after service -- they also set up a table with all the materials collected and chatted during the coffee hour (one of the band members calls this the "Happy Hour"). I could see an Episcopal Priest talk about the Acts passage in the same way. . . .

Consistency in Virtue

The renewed battle over extending State benefits and rights (and official recognition) to same sex couples, while a favorite topic for the media watching the Capitol, it was really a minor skirmish in a session where budget shortfalls dominated the debates and discussions. Some well-covered rallies of red-shirted advocates may have given the impression that no other bills were moving. One of the arguments made by supporters of the proposed Civil Unions bill was that public opinion had shifted since the vote a decade ago authorized the legislature to define "marriage" as involving only opposite sex couples.
And the events in other states -- not just liberal New England but also Iowa -- seemed to reflect that history was moving against those who strongly expressed qualms about gay marriage in the late-20th Century.
Evangelical opponents are already looking at what underlies the "change."
Mark Gatti, a senior editor at Christianity Today, surveys the
state of the same sex marriage cultural war . One of his most telling observations is how the particular strain of Christianity growing in our country cuts against the "best" argument to be mustered against same sex marriage:

We are, of all Christian traditions, the most individualistic. This individual emphasis has flourished in different ways and in different settings, and often for the good. It has challenged moribund religion (Reformation), prompted revival (Great Awakenings), ministered to the urban poor (Salvation Army), abolished slavery (William Wilberforce), and led to explosive worldwide church growth (Pentecostalism). But it is individualism nonetheless, and it cuts right to the heart of one of our best arguments against gay marriage.

We cannot very well argue for the sanctity of marriage as a crucial social institution while we blithely go about divorcing and approving of remarriage at a rate that destabilizes marriage. We cannot say that an institution, like the state, has a perfect right to insist on certain values and behavior from its citizens while we refuse to submit to denominational or local church authority. We cannot tell gay couples that marriage is about something much larger than self-fulfillment when we, like the rest of heterosexual culture, delay marriage until we can experience life, and delay having children until we can enjoy each other for a few years.

In short, we have been perfect hypocrites on this issue. Until we admit that, and take steps to amend our ways, our cries of alarm about gay marriage will echo off into oblivion.

Gatti has a point. When I raised Jesus' comments about motes and logs in the eye with one Pastor of a large, conservative Church during the Session, the response was to denounce my godless reaction. Christians protesting the proposed bill seemed awfully focused on NOT extending the same benefits to one class of citizens as currently enjoyed by another; it was pointless to suggest that arguments simply based on their religiously-grounded values was not going to convince legislators and staffers who didn't share their assumptions about interpreting scripture. Screaming that a bill is an abomination simply gets tuned out -- the Bible says that believers may be the only model for God that others will see. We saw a rather intolerant, angry God and self-righteous God displayed during the session which for folks who instinctively want to help the "little guy" and the "persecuted" reflects why Lucifer was more sympathetic to humans in "Paradise Lost"; as in John Milton's cosmos, the better way seemed to be "better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven."

Miss Hawaii Filipina 2009

My prominent Honolulu FBI lawyer pal emailed the results of the 2009 Miss Hawaii Filipina pageant at the Hawaii Theater -- he made sure to secure good seats since he grew up with the mother of one of the contestants from his home island of Maui and home parish of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Wailuku. Miss Maui Filipina Celina Macadangdang Hayashi swept the pageant judging and I played a small part by attending one of her mock interview practices (her mom embarassed me by mentioning that in an earlier interview session for the preliminary event, when asked for a role model, she apparently included me -- when I hear someone refer to me as a role model, I feel pretty old).
While it sometimes seems like there's a different Filipino beauty and scholarship pageant every weekend, in the 50th year of the United Filipino Community Council of Hawaii, this might be a fitting end to the Miss Hawaii Filipina contest -- there's talk that the Miss America folks may add cultural pageants as preliminary events to the Miss Hawaii Pageant as early as next year.
Celina's mother Agnes and her aunts, I believe, all participated in the various cultural pageants while we were growing up.
Celina's grandfather, I believe, arrived on Maui the same year as my dad, a member of the Sakada generation. Agnes, now the Deputy Finance Director at the County, has now been in public service under the last three Mayors (Kimo Apana, Alan Arakawa and current Mayor Charmaine Tavares) after working in corporate finance and accounting after college.
Celina will be going to either Scripps (or an Ivy League school which has her on its wait-list). She wants to be a doctor and participated in so many high school activities I wonder when she time to sleep.
I sometimes think that my own generation -- the one immediately following the Sakadas -- limited our dreams somewhat. Our parents' goal was to at least spare us from working in the fields -- a nice office job or teaching or, if we were really ambitious, a professional degree (so we would received the honorific of being addressed as "Doctor" or "Attorney" or "Engineer" at gatherings). The children of Filipinos who came after Statehood didn't limit themselves in the same way.
I get the sense that Celina's generation doesn't necessarily self-edit their aspirations at all.
And I think that's a good thing that even role models can think about.

Unity Is Not In the Vocabulary

I accepted an invitation to offer some remarks at the United Filipino Council of Hawaii (UFCH) Convention later this month. The annual event rotates around the state and the host this year is the Molokai Filipino Community Council (Ben Piros, President). I spoke with Ben briefly last week and he asked that I address why Hawaii's Filipinos (plantation workers, oldtimers, local-born, newcomers) are not more united. I was working on a brief so I mumbled "okay."
When I told a prominent middle aged Honolulu Filipino attorney about the topic (he was on Maui to teach Filipino folk dancing), he turned to a longtime Maui community leader and asked her whether "unity" was in the Filipino vocabulary. She chuckled and wished me luck.