Entitlement

St. Paul writes, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” [Rom 7:19, NRSV]. This familiar tension is sometimes represented in popular culture through the image of two tiny angels, one God's, one Satan's, whispering into the opposite ears of a conflicted soul. God's angel calls us to do what we should do, to act accordingly to God's will. Satan's angel is too wise to call us to act according to Satan's will, but instead preys on our sense of entitlement, our self-serving belief that we deserve the things that we want, and that we should have them despite the consequences. Satan's angel does not have our best interest at heart.

We do not often have angels whispering into our ears, but there are many voices in our culture telling us that we are entitled to this, or deserve that. Articles have been written about how the language of advertising has shifted from need, to want, to deserve. The science of persuasion has found our sense of entitlement to be the weakest part of our defenses.

I find it disconcerting when someone says that I'm entitled to something, and am immediately skeptical. I've internalized the language of our confessions, know that I am a sinner, and that the wages of sin are death. That's all I'm entitled to. That's all any of us are entitled to. Remember this when someone tries to appeal to your sense of entitlement. Don't live in fear, though. It is our good fortune to know that our judge is also our savior, who we know loves us, and will judge us on the basis of his love for us, not on the basis of our sin. As Jesus has loved us, we should love one another.

America, the Beautiful

 A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited our daughter’s family. Along the way, we saw farms and forests, rolling plains and majestic mountains, corn fields and cattle ranches, grain elevators and stockyards. 

In Colorado, we visited Paint Mines, a natural wonder that I’d never heard of before. You might google it, and look at the photographs. It is a place of stunning beauty, comprising multi-colored layers of clays that have eroded into canyons with fantastical spires, caves, and other formations. As we were leaving the Paint Mines, in the afterglow of encountering this majestic beauty, we saw a pickup truck, decorated with decals unambiguously proclaiming the white supremacist beliefs of its owner. The conversation changed.

America is a beautiful, and complex place. As we walked through Paint Mines, we encountered many other groups of visitors. They all appeared perfectly civil, and the closest thing to anti-social behavior we observed were people climbing on the formations in defiance of the signs and potential for damage, in search of the perfect selfie. Most of the groups were white, but there were groups of Hispanic visitors and at least one African-American couple. Except for that truck, there was no visible indication of racial animosity. But the truck was undeniable witness to the animosity held by some.

The extent to which white supremacist views have become normalized over the past few years shocks me. Perhaps they were kept in check by the World War II generation, who understood Nazism as politicized white supremacy and wouldn’t abide it. I remember the sense of shock when KKK leaflets began to appear in local south-side communities a half-dozen years ago. Now, such things hardly raise an eyebrow. I believe we have a particular responsibility to stand against the rising public manifestations of white supremacy. 

Our faith calls us to believe in “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” We remember the story of Acts 8, that the first Gentile convert to Christianity was a black man. Black lives matter.

One in Six

I write an occasional article for my congregation's weekly news email. Here's today's:

On World Refugee Day this past June 20th, the ELCA tweeted this message from the Lutheran World Federation: “At the end of World War II, 1 in 6 Lutherans were refugees.” It's a statistic intended to strip away the veil that divides us from today's refugees.

Those Lutheran refugees were among the ethnic Germans expelled from East Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia under the Potsdam Agreement. These were areas from which the Nazis had intended to expel Slavic people, creating “Lebensraum” (“Room to live”) for their own. The one-in-six statistic cannot help but also remind us of the fraught history of Lutheranism in Nazi Germany, and of the complicity of many German Lutherans, and of the active participation in the Nazi movement of more than a few Lutherans.

As Lutheran Christians, we prefer to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other saints of the Confessing Church, who opposed the Nazis at grave personal risk and sacrifice. But the sad truth is that the anti-Semitism that Hitler tapped into was latent in Luther's later writings, and so was in the Lutheranism of his day. We have unclean hands as a denomination, but have tried mightily in the years since to redeem ourselves from the sins of that era. We have told ourselves, with a conviction that comes from never having been tested, “It could not happen here,” and joined others in saying “Never again.”

Our test has come. There are concentration camps in our country today, where people demonized by our country's political discourse are imprisoned. It is happening again. It is happening here.

And if today's camps are not the industrial death camps of the Third Reich, they are places where basic sanitation is neglected, and where people are crowded into pens with too little water, too little shelter, and too much heat. They are places where death is invited and places where death comes.

And we, as American Lutherans, must speak. “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:34, NRSV)

“The Bishop's Cross”

Former readers of Lutheran Surrealism may remember Wendy Hoke, a.k.a. “WW.” She is in the process of writing a book describing her experience of sexual abuse, of the silence of those who knew, and of her subsequent healing. It promises to be a powerful book, of interest to many. For more information, please consult her site on Publishizer, and consider supporting her work.

In as much as the rhetorical question has been asked...

Yes, I do care.

A World Passing Away

One of my early memories is wandering around the Haverford Township Library. In those dark, dusty stacks, I found and read a biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Sun Yat-Sen, and Ed Jablonski's then recent history of the B-17. My grandfather Swartz had a bookshelf behind his easy chair, where I found and read Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny." I can remember it as if it were yesterday, but it's been a half-century.

And it's not as if there weren't books at my parent's house, there were plenty. Part of their allowance to me was a book a month. By the time I was 10, I had a complete set of the Hardy Boys, and had moved on to natural histories. They were great, but not enough. I read.

And then, as I oriented myself in life, there were and are the great stacks of Wells, Altgeld, Eckhart, Regenstein, and Crerar, and their seldom visited archives, in which I found the copies of Mathematische Annalen that contained Richard von Mises's original, flawed definition of randomness.

But life doesn't end at thirty. My wife and I recently downsized, moving from the five bedroom house in which we raised our kids to the two bedroom condo we hope to spend the next twenty years or so. I've had to cut down to 75 linear feet of shelf space, about 60% of what we had in the old house, not counting the boxes in the basement that date from my undergraduate years. It's been a hard cull, and it's not entirely done. Almost all of the paperbacks are gone, along with most of the cookbooks. Goodbye, Bernard Cornwell; goodbye, W.E.B. Griffin; goodbye, Frugal Gourmet. I knew you well. Thank you.

Harder culls lie are ahead.

In my office at work, I have about 100 linear feet of shelf space, and these aren't trade books. They're Elsevier, North Holland, Springer-Verlag, including many hard cover mathematical texts set by hand in the era before Donald Knuth and computerized typesetting. Fifty dollars an inch, conservatively valued. It sounds crazy, but a couple hundred dollars a month over the course of more than thirty years of faculty life adds up. I set no records. There is not so much sticker shock as resignation. I expect to retire in a decade, give or take, and that 175 total linear feet will have to culled down to the 75 feet I have here. The rest will be divided into two parts, the marketable to be sold at O'Gara and Wilson Booksellers in the traditional UC faculty capitulation, the rest to be simply given away, stacked if need be on the radiators of Ryerson Hall for those who will have them.

But what of the next decade? Even if my acquisitions have slowed down from six inches a month to three, that's another three feet a year, another thirty feet over that last working decade. Or is it?

I think it is not. I love paper books. I love their heft, their feel. But I've been slowly moving from preferring digital editions only if they're cheap, to preferring digital editions. Old eyes prefer larger type, and old shoulders prefer a lighter backpack. And digital books don't face that hard, hard cull, which grows closer with each passing day.

I don't think that books are passing away, but I do think that paper books are passing away. Today's libraries are morgues, and today's librarians know it. They're preparing for a very different world. And with great reluctance, so I am. The world of bound, physical books is passing away. Look at it, love it, and ultimately, remember it, for our successors will not. Their world is still being borne.

Peace

A Lutheran's Prayer on the Election of a Pope

Dear Lord, For your servant Francis, That through the continued development of the values by which he has ordered his life, He might become a symbol of the unity of your church, and not of its divisions. Amen