Words Matter

Ah! The Minimum Wage!

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Victor Chininin Buele

Let us not oversimplify the issue.

Earning less than fifteen dollars an hour and trying to live a life on that is very, very, very difficult.  We don’t need to look very far to see overextended Americans working two or two and a half of such jobs and still be unable to keep up.

So, let’s understand that while some may get irritated about having highways closed in protest, something is wrong.

And let’s also understand that McDonald’s is not rolling out self-service kiosks just for fun.  They will replace the labor force if the cost of labor goes up past a certain point.

I would like to start with Proverbs 30, for instance.  You may not believe the Bible is true or is the word of God.  But regardless of what you may think here, the Proverbs are often referred to even in the secular realm as a source of wisdom.  We read there:

Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?”
or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.
(Proverbs 30:7-9 ESV)

There is a balance.  Too much leads to complacency, laziness, idleness.  Too little leads to dire need, hunger, problems, even theft.  In relation to God, too much leads to a denial of our need for God.  Too little leads to insulting God as saying He is unable to provide for us. So, we either ignore His provision or we yell at Him for not providing according to our standards. Our view of our needs gets distorted.

There is also nothing inherently wrong with wealth per se, but a self-centered love of wealth is another story.  Or biblically, the love of money is the root of all evils, not money itself.  We can do all sorts of things with money.  And that’s why the minimum wage argument is a very important one. It’s a matter of stewardship – of management of the resources given to us.

Here is the question the politicians are not so quick to want to discuss.  And the question everybody else seems to also ignore.

Why are we being poor stewards/managers/caregivers of the U.S. economy?

My point is this:

  1. We must address the number and nature of the jobs that pay minimum wage in the United States today.  Basically – why are so many people working jobs that pay minimum wage?  We must address the underlying causes that resulted in cyclical jobs becoming permanent jobs for many Americans.
  2. We must address the intricacies that made this discussion a decade late.  For years the contribution of undocumented immigrants softened the blow of the problem.  When Americans had jobs that paid above the minimum wage and nobody wanted the cyclical jobs, American kids and undocumented immigrants were happy to have the opportunity.  When the higher-paying manufacturing jobs left the country, competition rose.  Immigration, free trade, and the minimum wage are all connected.
  3. What will happen to the nation’s poorest?  When McDonald’s changes the ordering system and the competitors do the same to keep up, our food deserts in America will have a significant impact.  The situation is bleak already.  What happens when these sources of employment dry up in our poorest neighborhoods and towns across the country?  That will also have an impact on racial relations already at a boiling point.  The minimum wage and poverty and race are all connected.
  4. Why have we become less entrepreneurial, creative, and innovative?  Yes.  Innovation remains to move us forward, but why is it that we see new shopping malls instead of new start ups?

Is it that in our abundance we became complacent, and while we were asleep, now we have a huge problem of being unable to react to the changes in the worldwide economic matrix? Kids have their eyes glued to tablet screens without wondering for a second how it is that the image they are seeing is being created.  We are all looking at the stuff that we buy at the stores, always on clearance, and never wonder the logistics that make such an impossibility possible.  Let’s wake up.

The solution is not to make the minimum wage 100 dollars an hour.  (Why stop at 15?)  The solution is deeper than that, and it requires a lot more of all of us.  It’s going to be hard. But it must be done.

There are things that are no longer as they were.  Manufacturing.  Energy.  Information technology.  Asia.  Competition.  Free trade.  Immigration.  We can sit and fight each other to death over it.  We can bicker and argue to death.  Or we can face the circumstances and move forward.

It’s a time for creativity.
It’s a time for hard conversations.
It’s a time for meaningful protest.
It’s a time to stop asking others for change but to embrace and own change.

Forgive Me, Father – A Word to Father Dotson

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Victor Chininin Buele

A quick background paragraph must go first.  I woke up this morning, thanked the Lord for a new day of life, and while catching up on the latest episode of the reality TV adventures of President-Elect Trump, I noticed a news story about the pope which CNN summarized as pope Francis granting the right to forgive abortion to every Catholic priest. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/21/europe/pope-francis-absolve-abortion/index.html.  Such a story sure woke me up.  I published the following on my Facebook account after reading the whole article:

deskto

Father William Dotson, Associate Pastor of St. Patrick Catholic Parish in Wentzville, Missouri, and a long-time and dear friend of mine, was very kind to respond to my comment to shed some light on the subject.  This longer response comes from a need to work through how words matter.  Especially when we are dealing with the word forgiveness.  He explained the story behind the reported story.  For that I’m thankful.

“This story is a huge misunderstanding.”  I thank Father Dotson for shedding light on the subject.  It turns out that the media did not find a good way to summarize what actually happened in a way that actually would get someone to click on it.  “Pope: Abortion Forgivable” makes for many more clicks.  About a year ago I protested about a similar story where the Year of Mercy was announced by the pope about the same subject.  Just like before, the pope was not addressing forgiveness of the sin but forgiveness of the ecclesiastical consequences, the ecclesiastical penalties of a sin like abortion (i.e., excommunication, etc.)  Only bishops could forgive those penalties before the permission has been granted, and now your friendly neighborhood Roman catholic priest can extend this permission to forgive the ecclesiastical penalties of such a sin to anyone coming to confess this.

So, my temptation would be to summarize this as: “Pope says absolutely nothing of substance about healing after an abortion.”  “Media takes advantage of obscure statement.”

But that would just contribute to the climate of non-meaningful dialog.

I have not taken my original post down as I would with an apology if I would have found my original statement to be wrong, unhelpful, or incoherent to the conversation.  While CNN has been proven to be inaccurate in this story, my point was well summarized by what I read shortly before encountering that story in Tim Keller’s Hidden Christmas and quoted in my Facebook post.  Nothing in Father Dotson’s response to my comment or in his own post about the subject have changed my original point.  So, let me interact further with this.

While we both are starting at a point where we both acknowledge the sinfulness of abortion, we appear to diverge greatly on everything after that.  But I do need to affirm this point of initial agreement lest we think this does not matter at all.  Let’s say that Rosita walks into the St. Louis Planned Parenthood clinic and exerts her legal right as a United States citizen to have an abortion.  On the way out she sees this short guy standing on a step ladder named Pastor Victor, and their eyes meet.  And she does not get a look of judgement but one of compassion.  It’s not an “I told you, so you filthy, ugly sinner.  Now you are going to pay for not ‘choosing life,’ and I’m going to make sure you know it” moment.  She just went through an incredibly difficult historical point of her life, and I don’t have any clue as to what lays before and after this moment in her life.  The fence keeps her from further contact, but the boyfriend did not go in.  He stayed outside listening to his loud music.  As she walks to him she says hello to my children and my wife who are there praying.  We don’t have funny signs nor are we seeking to violate the law.  We are not in her face.  But she loses it.  It all becomes real.  And she is broken.  While she may have had a choice to do this, the consequences of this kick in.  She believed the counselors and the literature that advised her that she had disposed a blob of tissue.  But there she finds herself alone.  Her feelings don’t match up with a mere biological disposal. You know, that loneliness that is not overcome just because she is sitting next to the man who paid for the procedure.  The sadness she carries is an indescribable sadness. So she gets out of the car, and she finds Pastor Victor and Father Dotson standing by each other.

My priorities in such an encounter would be:

  1. To get my wife there to hold Rosita and comfort her.
  2. To listen to her.  To take her away from there and give her a place to collect her thoughts and her emotions.
  3. To offer actual help.  We will have to sort out how we can be a blessing to her as the church.  We would find ways to welcome her and care for her.  The Lord Jesus has taught us to have compassion on those who are lost–like sheep without a shepherd.
  4. To preach the gospel to her.  Acts 8:35 gives us a model here of the loving command to tell her the good news about Jesus starting with this circumstance in her life.  How does Jesus make you whole.  How does Jesus carry you in his arms.  How does Jesus through His church lead you to repentance and healing.  How does Jesus give you hope, actual hope, of restoration.  In other words, we are to preach of the calling and consequences of forgiveness of sins.  We all, not just those who are in this situation, have sinned and fallen short.  How could we not offer the same forgiveness we have experienced!
  5. Regardless of her response to the call of the gospel, to love her sacrificially, generously, and lavishly.  We are not peddlers trying to see conversion as a financial transaction.  It may be we are the only people in the world who are talking to her at the moment.

I would say that Father Dotson would say that these are his priorities as well.

The challenge is that he comes to the game with a very complicated ecclesiastical set of rules on his back that make such an invitation very difficult.  If I am not misrepresenting him, forgiveness can only come through a Roman catholic priest (but Jesus did away with the need for a priesthood with the once-and-for-all sacrifice of his perfect life at the cross). Forgiveness cannot be separated from this Roman catholic structure.  His response to my question implies that, though we have Vatican II trying to bridge this gap, we are still as far away as we were five hundred years ago.  And what the pope is doing here is allowing for the local priest to do this rather than only the archbishop of St. Louis in our case.

So, I’m beyond thankful for his clarification and for not wanting to take a Facebook thread into the realm of confession, what the roman church calls the sacrament of confession. There are a number of verses from the New Testament as well as a plethora of teachings from Roman church history that will make his point for Father Dotson that there is a special gift and command to the Roman church to forgive sins.  There are a number of verses from the New Testament that plainly make the point that the call of repentance and the forgiveness of sins are unmediated and are on the basis of Christ’s work alone.  That discussion is a worthy one.  It matters because the essence of the gospel is at play.

But today my point is a narrower one – every news outlet in America is going to report that (by implication):

  1. Christians did not think abortion was forgivable
  2. The good pope Francis has changed this and now the church is changing its bad ways and granting this forgiveness
  3. Since abortion is not bad according to our collective cultural norms, this is a giant leap forward for humankind in accepting abortion
  4. (Perhaps), see, abortion is not that big of a deal!

That will only increase this perception that Christians are idiots and need to get on with the times.  Reality is that abortion, like every sin, is forgivable.  But not because some guy in Rome says so.  But because Jesus died for it.  And he never leaves us there and alone to pick up the consequences on our own.  When Matthew the evangelist reports the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, he says, “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.””  There was no ecclesiastical structure or stack of rules.  Just a plain call to repent.  And real forgiveness is at hand. I remember tricking all these priests while growing up.  For academic and family reasons, partaking in communion at the catholic church was always a must.  So, I, the clean-cut, goody-two-shoes rebel-who-pretended-to-be-a-good-boy always looked at these priests and delighted in saying, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  It has been x weeks since my last confession.”  I would list the respectable sins: skipping church, lying to my mother, not praying enough.  And then I would deliver my carefully-crafted line, “And forgive me, Father, for any sins I may have left out in my examination of conscience, either by neglect or nervousness or whatever reason.”  This line was always delivered to sound like an afterthought, a very humble and pious afterthought.  This line hid the ugliness of my sin for many years.  I knew it was detestable.  It was so bad that I couldn’t even say it to the old priest who was hard of hearing.  If I were waiting for a priest to deliver me from that, I would still be broken and actively destroying my life.  Maybe I wouldn’t even be here anymore.  But when that tall dude in college led me to actually pray in the Spirit, “Forgive me, Father,” to the Father in heaven through the merits of Christ alone and not my own, only then was my freedom found.

I cannot and will not stand by anything that puts obstacles in the way of forgiveness. And I will not stand quiet while people are led to believe that forgiveness is pointless.

Father Dotson himself writes, “This is not about forgiving sins but about ecclesiastical penalties, and is mostly a symbolic gesture, as priests generally already had this faculty.” That is the most scary thing I have read his month.  And knowing that “President Trump” has been written this month, that should say a lot.  Let’s be done with symbolic gestures and get to the real gritty business of seeking the lost and welcoming them.  Jesus did not keep his holiness to himself.  He radically affected every sinner who came to him.  They were never the same.  There is no mediator but Jesus – the separation between God and man has not been in place for 2000 years.  Let’s get on with the times.

Healing is messy.  Let the full, clean, crisp gospel shine forth have its right effect.

And I might just go see my friend Father Dotson after one of his morning masses and continue to talk.  It’s good for the soul.  Thank you for the comment.

You Might Be More Like a Jehovah’s Witness That You Would Like to Admit

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Victor Chininin Buele

It’s Saturday.  I’m up in my office reading through Galatians 1, agonizing to see if this is the right section of scripture to share with a dear friend today to encourage him, to point him to Jesus. I’m questioning for the fifth time the song choices for tomorrow’s service. Will these songs help the congregation acknowledge their need for God and allow them to freely show that they love Him?

It’s also the day when I have a higher probability of being interrupted by that typical knock at the door.  Knock, knock.  Who’s there?  Are you ready for Armageddon? Oh, my dear friends, come in, come in…  And I do let them in.  It is both a hoot and the saddest thing.  The Holy Spirit confirms that I love Jesus, and I do love Jehovah.  And I am supposed to be a witness of what God has done for my soul.  So, why not?

My purpose with this is to show you how might be more like a Jehovah’s Witness than you would like to admit.

Who Says?

You know it.  You hate that knock on the door.  You practice your best line.  You open the door naked (well, maybe not).  It can become quite the fun game, “How to get rid of the Jehovah’s Witness?”  A few years ago, a dear friend of ours in Loja answered the door.  She came in after quickly dismissing our visitors.  I asked, lifting my head from the production problem of the moment, “Who was it?” “Oh, some people talking about how to have a better family,” she said.  I answered, “Who says what?”  And two things simultaneously hit me:

  1. It’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses!  Open the door, I must go chase them and talk to them.
  2. This is the one issue that matters for the whole Jehovah’s Witness system of thought–“Who says what?”

Allow me to explain.  The Watchtower Society is the only way one can understand what the Bible says.  That key statement is the most important belief in their system of logic.  It really summarizes it all.  They believe that nobody can ever understand the Bible without somebody from the organization explaining it to them, or at the very least, without using one of the officially-sanctioned publications available to you as a gift from them right there on the spot or available online in more than N number of languages.

The Christian needs not to tangle in heavy theological arguments about whether birthdays can be celebrated, whether Jesus is God, whether the Trinity is an invention of men, whether blood transfusions are allowed, whether we should vote for president. It all breaks if this key principle is false.  The entire Watchtower “theology” hinges on the belief that you are incapable of finding out the truth of the Bible without help.

How, then, might I be more like the Jehovah’s Witnesses than I would like to admit?

This is not an article about the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Books could be written about that.  The focus here is on ourselves.  How are you like the Jehovah’s Witnesses?  I want to leave you with these questions/points to consider:

Why do you actually believe what you believe? (Don’t say you don’t believe in anything, please, because you do.  You truly do.  Even if it is “I don’t believe in anything.”)  Do you believe because others tell you?  How do you go about confirming or denying what somebody tells you?  As Abraham Lincoln said, “Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.”

Let’s take a perhaps controversial example–

Let’s say that you believe that the economy is recovering because of the numbers you hear on the media about unemployment and GDP growth.  How do you go about knowing if that’s true?  I remember that in my first economics class in graduate school, the professor kindly asked if we really understood what unemployment figures really mean.  Very few of the students knew what I had learned from my father’s books-that the number is based on the number of people actually actively engaged in the economy.  So, if you quit looking, you’re no longer counted.  That’s skewed.  (And so are all statistics to one degree or another).  Has the number improved?  Yes, but asking why is very important.

The other day I drove through Hazelwood, MO, home of the once vital St. Louis Mills Mall, an outlet mall.  The area surrounding the mall is dead, economically speaking.  Last week I was at the Chesterfield St. Louis Premium Outlet Malls.  I thought to myself, “Hey! That’s where everything went!”  So, aren’t we going to report that they numbers look great for the region because perhaps the gain in Chesterfield surpasses the loss in the other region? Does it matter what kinds of jobs are being added?  Do you actually call it a recovery if we see a larger percentage of retail jobs being added compared to high tech jobs?  How do you know if I’m messing with you, like I did with the Lincoln “quote” above?  How do you discern truth?

Because if you aren’t watching you may just be believing something because you heard your favorite talking head say it.  Or because you read it on the Internet.

And you are doing the same level of proselytizing that the Witnesses do:

– Fritanga is a great restaurant.  We were just there last night!
– My company is a great place to work.  You must join us.
– My children are great, like our picture on Facebook.
– Stay out of my body.  It’s my choice!
– Defend the sanctity of human life
– Keep your hands off my guns
– Protect the vulnerable children of schools from gun violence
– Don’t bully
– Friends don’t let friends vote for Trump
– Down with Crooked Hillary
– and on, and on and on…

We are evangelists by nature.  It matters what our message is.  It matters how we know it’s true because we will be passionate about telling others about it.  It’s in our design.

Judge. Or Not?

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Victor Chininin Buele

I was preaching last Sunday about the question of why would one of the ways God chose to reveal Himself would be through a list of laws–do not murder, love your neighbor as yourself, do not cover your neighbor’s wife, do not lie. You get the point.

I mentioned to the congregation that we have been observing the development of an interesting legal framework where approval and celebration are being enacted into popular law.  I said we are all lawyers eager to defend ourselves and to make excuses for our behavior. I should add that we are also professionals at passing the blame to others.

If you call yourself a Christian and dare to not celebrate and give your seal of approval to something with which you may profoundly disagree, then the words of Jesus that were spoken from the mount and recorded in Matthew 7 are thrown at you–“Judge not, lest ye be judged!”

The inference is that the higher moral ground (for it is moral after all) is one of non-judgment on such matters.  The evolved mind is one that never judges.  Thus, the admonishment to you, lawbreaker, is to go and judge no more.  Says who?  Well, we all do.  And Jesus, too.  Get in line!

For a while I’ve been quite saddened by this because everyone judges, and moreover, that section of the gospel of Matthew that gets quoted incompletely is actually about the carpenter of Nazareth teaching us to judge rightly while highlighting our natural bend towards passing judgment on another quickly and without cautiously judging ourselves first.  Take off the gigantic piece of wood out of your eye before you go attempt to remove the piece of sawdust out of your neighbor’s eye.

Your neighbor needs you to judge him.

If I were breaking my promise to my wife to love and care for her, to cherish her and provide for her, I would need you to judge me.

If somebody hits me over the head and takes my keys and drives my van away with my girls inside, I need you to judge this person and help.

If you have squandered God’s financial gifts to you and buried yourself in debt, your neighbor who is defaulting on 20 past due credit cards needs you to see your own situation rightly, get your act together, and help him to not do that again and to honor his creditors.  You both need to judge each other as you walk through that difficult path together.

I have wanted to write this for quite some time because I don’t like words to get redefined.  What kind of a friend would you be if you walk around whistling while I sin and throw my life away?

And then a decade-old tape makes its way through the media, perfectly timed before a presidential debate.  I still feel filthy for having read the NPR report of it.  So, my first reaction in social media was to try to take the gigantic piece of wood out of my eye.  You think Donald Trump is bad?  I would be terrified if you were to have full access to everything I’ve thought or said.  I am no better.  But God, being rich in mercy, changed it all.  And I have to hope and trust in the BIG God who is the Creator and Sustainer of this now-broken world to actually be so merciful that He can change this man to the core were repentance to be sought by him.  That this heart of stone can be changed, to use the biblical imagery.  And after mourning for my own sin that required Jesus’s death, I am able to start talking about that issue.

While you weren’t watching, you got caught judging.  We all did.  The whole affair is so filthy. So disgusting. So appalling. And I am glad got caught.

And it is right that we judge.  Do we really think that we don’t have a way to push for this man (who everybody has known all along was like this) to get out of the race?  I read a very good article on The Washington Post by Collin Hansen about how this highlights the long overdue need for the death of the Religious Right.  One comment asked a very good question for the person was sick and tired of articles like this not really telling us a solution, an action we can take.  So, we can go there now.  We have judged.  Let’s get past only writing on electronic walls, and let’s make this happen. As my pastor is prone to remind us – when is the last time that we actually had the faith to pray for a miracle?  I understand that we only have a month left. But is our faith and our industriousness so weak and laughable?

But I digress.  My point is an invitation to transparency and honesty.  Please ask, “I would want for you to approve of me and to celebrate my choices.”  Don’t say, “Don’t judge me.”  A faithful friend needs to have access to encourage and lift up your soul.  The kind of friend we all desperately need can’t be closer than a brother to us if we don’t let them in when our ideas need to be challenged, refined, or rebuked.  We need words to mean what they do.  The last thing that everyone would like me to do if I were to tell you I have made the choice to become a thief would be for me to tell you not to judge me.  That closes the door to any further discussion.  I have clicked to close the window on you.  I am done.   Let’s not do that.  Because we must.  Joy is at stake.  Life hangs in the balance.

Words matter.