I read your article and would like to share the following link because I feel very important about it: http://barnabasnagy.com/2009/05/26/pope-benedict-the-second-beast-16-666/

Jesus’ words of love one’s enemies refers to personal relationships. The context exempts a national one, for Romans 13 to the founding fathers grants bearing the sword within the nation for it’s security, and obviously outside the nation to secure its existence and stability.

What? You’re a deeply committed Christian? Since when was murdering babies and homosexuality not condemned in the Bible? Have you heard of the Christian Founding Fathers?

I appreciate your comments on calendar, they are right on the mark. I wonder if James K.A. Smith will cover some of these aspects of calendar in his forthcoming book on worship.

I am a closet high church Presbyterian (closet high church out of the closet Presbyterian) so here is my take on the Presbyterian church calendar:

We are suspicious of saints days because they are extra-biblical (though plenty of us will honor MLK in a few weeks and Reformation Sunday tends to be self-referentially incoherent if this is in fact the Reformed position). Like I wrote earlier, my high church tendencies make it hard for me to defend this view but I do think there is something to basing the church year on the life of Christ: (strictly speaking this would eliminate Advent and Pentecost). So we could say salvation history centered on Christ and honoring the Triune God.

I am not sure where to begin or end with saints if we did put them in the calendar, though I like your point about God’s continual work in history. There is a place for prudential judgment here: what saints do we need to remember these days in order to be formed & fortified to live in these times? I would suspect that a few early martyrs would be instructive for us as we negotiate life under empire. I guess some modern martyrs would also be appropriate (I’ve been thinking of Romero and King). My congregation would be content with a non-penitential, Christmassy Advent, A Christmas without a mass (or eucharist), Maundy Thursday, Easter, Pentecost and the 4th of July. I think that is typical of folks over 50 years old who see the calendar as ancient religion, and love the casual, informal, one day is as good as any other, Jesus wants us to be relevent and contemporary (meaning let’s sing the songs we loved when we were in our invinvible 20’s).

I came to understand the value of the church calendar (Presbyterian style: advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Baptism of Lord, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, trinity while doing field education in seminary. It was the sort of thing that grew on me after a few months. I love the emphasis on salvation history and have pondered and continue to ponder liturgical time: why is Christmas 12 days? Why is Lent 40? Why don’t we move Christmas earlier in the year, closer to Pentecost which would give us more time to look at the life of Jesus between Christmas and Good Friday?

I do believe that Baptism of the Lord and Ascension are two underrated items that deserve more prominence on our calendars. i will end with that assertion. I have a sermon to write.

The Nightline piece is full of inaccuracies, and small wonder — they didn’t talk to anyone who had been involved with the U2charist in its first year. It was created NOT to replace traditional services or to try to pack the pews, but as a traditional (everything I’ve done with it has always followed the rubrics for the Eucharist in my tradition, which is Anglican, though others are free to adapt it to their context), prayerful, and Christ-centered gathering — a service of the Eucharist offered with particular intention for the world’s poorest, and along the way showing the versatility of U2’s music (e.g., the many places *a* U2 song could work in a service). I as surprised as anyone to see it spread internationally, and to hear that some were seeing it as a pew-packing measure.

In any case, please feel free to give me a shout via the U2charist resources page if you have any questions, comments, or criticism (yes, there’s a category of posts just for criticism) you’d like to offer.

Thanks for your thoughtful reflection, and I’d love to hear more from you!

Blessings,

Dylan

My personal relationship to U.S. politics is rather ambivalent. Any election, in my opinion, is a choosing of the lesser evil. In this particular election, my choice for Obama over McCain and Palin is based on Gov. Palin’s explicit Christian Nationalism. Speaking as a deeply committed Christian, I’m far more terrified by an American Christian Nationalist than I am by an unbeliever who seems capable of making fairly careful decisions for the country. Particularly in the U.S., there is an idolatrous wedding of the Republican Party with many Evangelical Christians, primarily due to the typically Republican stance on the issues of abortion and homosexuality. Through this wedding of beliefs what takes place is the advancement of Republican ideology (which i recognize isn’t all bad, nor is Democratic ideology all good) with divine sanction. Whenever any religious belief is wedded with a nationalist ideology it creates a surefire recipe for disaster. While i’m sure that Palin is probably a great person in everyday life, my desire, which I feel compelled by because I am a Christian, is to not support such a ticket, and spare the world of the events that would take place, in Jesus’ name.

As a final comment, In all fairness the “rational/bias” distinction is a bit assumptive. We all operate according to biases of one form or another, whether they are good or bad ones, and very rarely, if ever, does anyone operate purely from a bias without some rational justification. However, just because something is rational doesn’t mean that it is true. This was one of the major pitfalls of the Enlightenment era that equated rationality with truthfulness, assuming that since the world had a Rational order (which I’m not sure it does, at least in this sense of the word), then the methods of science (i.e. using the capacities of Reason) when applied by a detached (unbiased) observer could lead to Truth. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Nobody, though, ever makes decisions based solely on reason and rationality. There is always an underlying commitment or bias.

I like your blog! Thanks for stopping in at http://returngood.com. I’m adding you to the blogroll.