It is very hard to swallow yet another Lutheran church body in America but that, following a two-day August 26-27 convocation in Columbus, Ohio, is what America has: the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). “North America” sounds rather expansive and that is only because some few congregations of Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada will be part of the new denomination.

And I say “yet another” because in 1930 there were perhaps twenty to twenty-four Lutheran groups in America. Following nearly seventy years of fervent consolidation and church merger leading to the 1987 formation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Lutherans have successfully reduced their synodical groups down to, hmm, some twenty to twenty-four church bodies.

Every merger has left a splinter, a micro-synod among the ruins, and some of the micro-synods have in turn spawned their own splits. One split occurred within a synod comprising maybe some twelve congregations on whether the King James Version is the only translation properly used in public worship. I forget whether it was the larger or smaller portion that went off with the KJV under their arms, not that it much matters. It is hard keeping an exact count of Lutheran church bodies because not that many people—Lutherans included—really bother. But it does say something about Lutherans, if not about their nature then at least about how seriously they take their finer points of doctrine and practice.

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I grew up with public school prayer and my fourth grade tyrant, Mrs. Earing, not only made us pray daily but also made us sing Faith of Our Fathers every Friday morning (though we never included the original verse praising the Virgin). A choir we were not. I really dislike that hymn. Best I can remember the morning sequence was a Scripture verse, prayer, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It is a strange conviction to develop at fourth grade, some of it doubtlessly owing to my dislike of Mrs. Earing and her hymn, but I knew it was wrong.

I have always liked the so-called Lemon Test, arising from Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). Any practice within a public school or a state facility must have a secular purpose, must neither advance nor inhibit religion as its primary effect, and must not result in an excessive entanglement between government and religion. When it comes to state-sponsored religious observance, I’m against it.

So we move to my daughter’s recent high school graduation, a huge class of three hundred and forty some seniors, held in a large Baptist church auditorium. It was the only space available in our school district that had any promise of actually accommodating the anticipated audience. Students were restricted to eight tickets for family members. After both sets of grandparents, a younger sibling, my wife and I, we had one left for a family friend who wanted to tag along. (A friend indeed is a friend attending a high school graduation.)

Last year Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., filed a federal lawsuit in an attempt to stop Wisconsin’s Elmbrook School District from holding its high school graduation ceremonies at local church. Americans United argued that holding a public ceremony in a space dedicated to Christian observances was “unfair to non-Christian members of the student body.” “Not fair” is what the press reported, but I gather it actually involved something of the Lemon Test, a bit of a stretch, really.

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Last year the ELCA reported a loss 76,000 members and 52 congregations. Earlier this year church officials eliminated thirty-five staff positions at the denomination’s Chicago headquarters, and were forced to cut $2.4 million from the budget. Informed observers—uh, that would be me—foresee a possible loss of 300  to 500 congregations over the next three to five years as a result of the convention action.

This is one person’s suggestion for fixing the economy. It appeared in a Florida newspaper that had asked readers to send along their best economic ideas:

Patriotic retirement: There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. . . . Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

They leave their jobs. Forty million job openings — unemployment fixed.
They buy new American cars. Forty million cars ordered — auto industry fixed.
They either buy a house or pay off their mortgage — housing crisis fixed.

The Lutheran World Federation provides one of the sorriest examples of a press release I’ve seen in, oh, perhaps a week. 

The lead sentence (rambling on for thirty-nine words) starts off:

A group of theologians, ethicists, anthropologists and staff working on adaptation and mitigation measures related to climate change, are calling for the Lutheran communion’s global solidarity with vulnerable communities that are acting to address the impact of climate change.

I can see news editors everywhere straining to get this in print ahead of a competitor, betcha. 

The entire release has 583 words. “Climate” and “change” take up four percent. Combining “climate” and “change” with such phrases as “victims of,” “analyses of,” “redress of,” “redressing,” “impact of,” “affected by,” “effects of,” and “related to” constitutes nine percent of the release, a soggy cliché-ridden piece of eww-yuck journalism. 

Besides, the whole thing reads like a socialist-workers-paradise formula story, where all the right words must all be fitted in exactly the right order.

I’m just taking it apart from the vantage of one news writer looking at another’s work. But as to content, reacting only as a reader, well, honest, if there is anything that scares me more than climate change, it’s a group of theologians, ethicists, anthropologists, and staff getting together to work on climate change.

This looks like it might be, as the phrase has it, a smart comedy: NBC’s  Community, coming for the 2009-2010 season. The show brings together an eclectic band of community college students, albeit thoroughly and more than likely unfairly stereotyped. From the NBC website:

It’s been said that community college is a “halfway school” for losers, a self esteem workshop for newly divorced housewives, and a place where old people go to keep their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity. Well, at Greendale Community College . . . that’s all true. Community focuses on a band of misfits, at the center of which is a fast-talkin’ lawyer whose degree has been revoked (Joel McHale, The Soup). They form a study group and, in “Breakfast Club” fashion, end up learning a lot more about themselves than they do about their course work.

I doubt, though, it will bear much relationship to real-life community college experience. And if it has been said that community college is a “halfway school” for losers et. al., I don’t know who is saying it. Certainly nobody at my house would dare say that.

My wife is a community grad. When she decided to pursue a teaching degree, community college was not only a convenient option it was clearly the smartest. She received two years of college, essentially free thanks to grants, low tuition, and generous scholarships. And as her GPA became known, she also received admission offers from Cornell, Stanford, and some other impressive places I can’t remember.

When talking about community colleges, we’re speaking of 1,195 institutions that in any given semester enroll just under fifty percent of all America’s undergraduate students. For other revealing statistics, see here.

Much, too much perhaps, is being made of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s move from the Republican Party to the Democrat Party.

There is a lot to be said of it, of course, but it is probably best to let Specter speak for himself. A month ago he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “To eliminate any doubt, I am a Republican, and I am running for reelection in 2010 as a Republican on the Republican ticket.” That was then, this is now. Yesterday he told CNN, he had “surveyed the sentiments of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and public opinion polls . . . and have found that the prospects for winning a Republican primary are bleak.” That means bleaker than in 2004 when he won the primary with only fifty-one percent of the vote.

Watching his Republican primary poll numbers go south in potential match-ups with possible GOP opponents can be said to concentrate the political mind wonderfully. His poll numbers with GOP voters have been hovering around twenty-one percent. Being the only Republican senator to vote for the Obama administration’s bailout, hugely unpopular with Pennsylvania Republicans, singled him out as a marked man. Unwilling to let his twenty-nine years in the Senate undergo electoral scrutiny in a Republican primary, he has wisely decided that Democratic primary voters might be counted upon to render a judgment more to his liking.

Fair enough. As a past Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, once put it, “All politics is local.” The short story is: What it is is getting re-elected. I see very little else to it.

But that is not the story going around. The story line for Specter comes out something like “mean old GOP right wing drives out warm-hearted Republican moderate.” The sidebar says, “this spells doom for Republican Party as a national force.”

Oh, pish. There was no similar trope for Democrats when Senator Joe Liberman lost the 2006 Democratic primary. His support for the Iraq war was his undoing among liberal Democrats. He declared himself independent and successfully mounted a third-party reelection campaign in Connecticut, defeating both the Republican nominee and the official Democratic nominee.

The Republicans have a lot of party building to do, no doubt. So did the Democrats in 1994 when Republicans swept the House.  There’s just not much new under the sun.

A South Carolina woman claims she sees Jesus in her cheese toast. There’s something very charming about that, in its way, but I think I’ll wait for the Sunday Eucharist all the same.

The last of the “UCC Firsts”—highlights in the history of the United Church of Christ dating from 1620—listed at the church’s web site is from 1995, fourteen years ago, marking publication of the New Century Hymnal. Nothing much apparently has happened since, except for the continuing loss of membership.

Oh, and the policy of distributing condoms at, among other places, “faith-based educational settings.” I think that is what was once called Sunday school. And at worship, too, on selected occasions, like World AIDS Day. “Praise the Lord and pass the. . . .” Well, maybe that’s not actually said. So all that is new, sort of. Condom promotion has been part of the UCC way of life for a number of years, at least since 1995—certainly that was only coincidentally coincident to the new hymnal.

But the UCC decided March 20 to highlight its condom distribution ministry (that’s what they call it) by capitalizing on the supposed gaffe uttered by Benedict XVI a few days before, on March 17.

The UCC HIV and AIDS Network went off on the pope after his remarks in Cameroon, Africa, where he said that condoms are not effective at preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. “You cannot,” he told the Africans, “resolve [AIDS] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

The UCC response was to suggest the pope, at best, was out of the loop. The Reverend Michael Schuenemeyer, the UCC’s executive for health and wholeness advocacy, put it out instead, “The availability of condoms as part of a comprehensive approach to HIV prevention sends the right message and more importantly, it saves lives.” He also suggested the UCC condom, uh, ministry, represented “a more scientific and compassionate approach to the prevention of HIV.”

In point of fact, there is no evidence the use of condoms does prevent or has ever prevented the spread of AIDS in Africa, and there is a considerable bit of evidence exactly to the contrary. Leading HIV researcher, Edward C. Green, interviewed in Christianity Today (March 20, same day the UCC blasted Benedict), said flatly that condom usage by Africans simply hasn’t worked. Green argues that African churches and religious bodies have always been right about where to put the emphasis in preventing AIDS—namely, on marital fidelity and abstinence.

In an earlier First Things article, Green further notes:

Consider this fact: In every African country in which HIV infections have declined, this decline has been associated with a decrease in the proportion of men and women reporting more than one sex partner over the course of a year—which is exactly what fidelity programs promote. The same association with HIV decline cannot be said for condom use, coverage of HIV testing, treatment for curable sexually transmitted infections, provision of antiretroviral drugs, or any other intervention or behavior. The other behavior that has often been associated with a decline in HIV prevalence is a decrease in premarital sex among young people.

The UCC’s Schuenemeyer is somewhat to the opposite. “The [UCC] message,” he says, “is rooted in the belief that loving carefully is a moral responsibility. The practice of safer-sex behavior is a matter of life and death. People of faith make condoms available because we have chosen life so that we and our children may live.”

The UCC people of faith using condoms will soon reduce the UCC’s already reduced birth rate, but that’s been happening with or without condoms so it hardly matters, in any case.

But with all the free condom distribution going on, one might expect to see some reduction in the rate of infections. That hasn’t happened, not in the United States at any rate. There were 22,472 new cases of AIDS/HIV among MSMs in 2007, according to the Center for Disease Control. MSMs? CDC does not use the word gay or homosexual, but instead refers to “men having sex with men,” or MSMs, regardless of sexual orientation. Regardless, the number reported continues a troubling up-tick in the rate of infection-between 2001 and 2005 cases involving MSMs went up eleven percent. Gay men make up sixty-eight percent of all men presently living with AIDS, and seventy-one percent of all new cases involving male adults and male adolescents. The gay community remains the single highest source for new infections.

In Africa specifically, the one nation that best reduced high infection rates, Uganda, has seen a slight increase in rates. The moral campaign launched by the Ugandan government, cooperating with Ugandan religious bodies, slackened as donor nations insisted on emphasizing—guess what—the use of condoms. The two nations presently with the highest rates—Swaziland and Botswana—recently have launched fidelity and abstinence campaigns, and there has been some early reported effect in reducing the rates of infection.

Here is a considered judgment: The pope is right; Schuenemeyer is wrong. And the UCC—passing out free condoms instead of arguing hard for chastity and abstinence—is actually helping spread HIV and AIDS infections. The UCC’s “scientific and compassionate approach” is killing people with kindness.

John H. Thomas is the general minister and president of the United Church of Christ. He recently completed a trip to the Holy Land and penned his reflections about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

As is often the case, [Muslim] men under the age of forty-five were not permitted to pray [at the mosque] on this Friday, denied access to holy places that would be unthinkable for Christian and Jewish residents and pilgrims in Jerusalem. Apparently only Muslims are security risks in the Holy City.

Given the pesky troubles Israel has had with Christian, Jewish, and pilgrim suicide bombers, it does seem unfair.

Scientists announced that for the first time they have successfully detected and tracked an asteroid as it collided with earth. It was a very small asteroid and what was left of it after passing through earth’s atmosphere landed in the Sudanese desert, having posed no danger to the United States Congress.

An ideological preoccupation with stem cells blocked President Bush from giving his full attention to an intelligence briefing warning of an attack by Bin Laden. This—more or less—is what Frank Rich, the New York Times op-ed columnist, suggests in “The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off”:

Someday we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject-which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time”-was stem cells. For a presidency in thrall to a thriving religious right (and a presidency incapable of multi-tasking), nothing, not even terrorism, could be more urgent.

And thank God, too, for the present financial crisis in America. It is sure to keep the “religious right” at bay, and maybe for the next forty years or so. Unemployment, frozen credit, and sinking stocks will force America to avert her eyes from the low spectacle of conservative ideologues, and upward to the beckoning vistas offered by President Obama’s left. In short, “Culture wars are a luxury the country . . . can no longer afford.” Oh, goody.

Besides, now that “Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America . . .” the nation can settle back to the happy business of celebrating the coming “forty-year exodus for these ayatollahs”—uh, that might include me. Anyway, that “can pass for an answer to America’s prayers.”

I like ideologues—left and right. May their tribe increase. I can’t think why Mr. Rich is so eager to do away completely with one set, but perhaps that is part of his ideology.  Ideas make the world go round, and ideology—even the sort Mr. Rich doesn’t like—serves the purpose of altering us to the location of the center. But I don’t think Mr. Rich would know the center if he saw it. Just a hunch.

Jan in a Pan is the street-smart title of a 1959 black and white B-grade, science fiction/horror film (released in 1962). I happened to watch it a few nights ago, utterly fascinated by the issues it raised. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (the actual but only marginally more serious title) stars Jason Evers and Virginia Leith. Evers plays Dr. Bill Cortner, a brash, abrasive, and thoroughly demented surgical genius. The guy has developed a method for transplanting body parts—legs, arms, heads—and a “serum” to block tissue rejection.

In an episode of reckless driving, his automobile flips and his beautiful fiancee Jan Compton (played by Miss Leith) is decapitated. Dr. Cortner saves the head and we thereafter see it, animated and talking from, well, a pan. (Miss Leith’s scenes thereafter are pretty much limited to headshots.) Dr. Cortner goes in search for a body to which he may attach his fiancee’s head. If you think it’s tough finding organ donors, try conscious body donors.

Movieland’s first transplant physician is a ghoul—visiting strip clubs, seeking just the right female body for his main squeeze. For being a respected surgeon and all, Dr. Cortner has an unusually seedy side. The strippers all seem to know him, but what they don’t know is that he has no qualms about murdering a no-class stripper for his better-class girl friend. He simply chalks it up to the glory of medical science.

Malpractice of this sort cannot go unpunished, and it does not. But I can’t give away the movie’s ending, now can I?

You should notice, though, that where science walks, sci-fi has already trod. Dr. Cortner’s medical ethic permits him—encourages him—to plot the medically induced death of one human to save the life of another, based on a judgment of relative worth.

The similar willingness of the medical research establishment to kill human embryos for stem cells, promising me a cure for my diabetes in exchange, sounds like a remarkable B-grade instance of been there, done that.

CNN expressed confusion this morning on when Administration officials—specifically, Secretary of the Treasury Geithner and President Obama—knew AIG would be paying out bonuses to its failed executives. Geithner says he didn’t know until Tuesday; the president, not until Thursday. CNN is suggesting, instead, the Administration did know of it long before the bonuses were formally announced. The anchors played a news clip from way back on January 28, which reported that AIG would be handing out their usual bonuses this year. CNN darkly speculated, “What did the Administration know and when did they know it?” This is a polite way of asking, is the Administration lying?

Which, for a Lutheran like me, brings up Martin Luther’s explanation of the Eighth Commandment in his Small Catechism, the ban on bearing false witness against one’s neighbor: “We should fear and love God that we . . . put the best construction on everything [our neighbor does].”

Neighbors include, surely, Giethner and Obama, right? So, my best construction: Neither the president nor the secretary of the treasury ever watches CNN, and they don’t know anyone who does. So, naturally, they never got the word from the January 28 broadcast.

There is David Goldman’s blog on Benedict XVI’s “Williamson incident,” and there is the web article for today by Fr. Oakes, who refers to it as well. All of which prompted me—as it should prompt you—to look up the text Pope Benedict wrote on the whole thing March 10.

I had been thinking, though, a twenty-second google search beforehand might have prevented some of the troubles re: Williamson. So too had Benedict, in hindsight:

I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the [Williamson] problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.

Reminds me, I should not make fun of the elderly woman who asked me, “How do you rewind a CD?”

Fr. John Jay Hughes’ very fine piece at today’s First Things web site, “Proclaiming The Good News,” has many good things to say to preachers. Being one myself, I found much to appreciate in his remarks. What especially struck me though was what I take to be a yet distinctive difference between Roman Catholic and Lutheran styles of preaching. We do it backward.

He cautions preachers against exposing listeners to an exhortation to goodness and morality before first having laid the groundwork of reassurance that God loves them beyond their failures. Exhortation from the pulpit “belongs at the end [of the sermon], when the overwhelming message of God’s unmerited love and goodness has prepared the hearers’ hearts and minds to respond to his love through grateful obedience and worshipful self-sacrifice.”

Talking Lutheran, uh-uh. We never think too much of exhortations to goodness. A classically wrought Lutheran sermon begins with the law, the exhortation on failure, if you will, finely detailing how “all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God”—especially those listeners within hearing of the preacher. There is no “grateful obedience” being sought because there is none that can be offered. Exhortation in this use is the task of exposing the willful disobedience in which these worshippers have indulged over the past week.

The positive—the Gospel’s good news—comes in the second half of the sermon, and always as declaration: “You don’t deserve it, but here’s the good stuff God has done for you because of Christ.” There’s the love that reassures, after having been first informed they need it, badly.

I’m not a pastor who believes that the “message of God’s unmerited love and goodness”—whether it comes at the front or at the rear of the sermon—necessarily produces “grateful obedience and worshipful self-sacrifice,” but, shoot, I’m always willing to give it a try.

One of the most remarkable things about President Obama’s race is the difference it made both before and after the election. It made some difference before the election. It has made little difference since.

I take this as a sign. A mere 143 years from the abolition of slavery, an African American has received the nation’s electoral endorsement for our highest public office. When I say “a mere 143 years,” I mean exactly that: the blink of an eye in the American political experience. Those living today have personal histories that tightly intersect with earlier generations. I have known black Americans whose grandparents were enslaved. A girl I dated in college had a great-grandmother who had been owned by her great-grandfather.

In 1964, at the age of seventeen, I traveled through the South on a Boy Scout jaunt to Florida. Two of our company were black, and the Public Accommodations Act was not yet law. Once we left Missouri, our friends were unable to enter restaurants along the way or use the same toilets and water fountains as the rest of us. In an Atlanta bus station I saw signs declaring “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” for the first time outside of photographs. I remember feeling angry, humiliated, and ashamed. These are events that shaped my life while I was grow up.

What happened, then, with the election of Obama is nothing short of amazing. Though Booker T. Washington back in the 1890s predicted a black man as president, I never thought I’d live long enough to see it. I cannot look at Obama’s inauguration as anything but one of America’s best moments, and certainly it generated a lot of national self-congratulatory commentary about Americans rising above racial interests in the run-up to Inauguration Day.

But since then, the most remarkable thing about a black president is how unremarkable it has become. As of March 5, the stock market has experienced a 20 percent loss in value since Obama took office. That’s not a racial thing. That’s an economic and political thing. So far, market reactions reveal that his presidency has failed to stabilize our economic mess.

But even this is good. It means a white guy like me can judge him not for the color of his skin but for the content of his policies. That’s the kind of America we all want.

There were three things I wanted to get done before I left Kansas City for twelve weeks in New York for work at First Things. I wanted my sixteen-year-old daughter, Joanie, to get her driver’s license. That would be a help to her mother in my absence and insure getting the younger girl picked up from school. I wanted the bedroom toilet to flush and refill in one smooth mechanical action. And I wanted that lizard dead.

None of it got done. Joanie failed her first examination. “By the time we count thirty points off for driving errors,” the examiner explained, “it’s pretty much a wash.” She’ll try again, soon, after a bit more instruction from her mother.

I am not a plumbing shaman. Leaning over my wife, still abed, as I departed for my 5 a.m. flight three days ago, she dreamily murmured, “I love you. I’ll miss you. Does the toilet work?”

The lizard disappointed me, too. That would be my younger daughter’s green anole. Hattie’s had several of these small and undemanding animals in the past and she and I can always detect the signs of impending mors.

So on this, my second morning in New York, the girl sent a text message—which arrived buzzing on my cell phone some while before my alarm clock went off. Liz—named for her eldest sister; the lizards are all named for her eldest sister—is gone. I feel quite sad I wasn’t there to say anything. She replies saying nothing of my absence but does say the lizard died happily green. Green, for anoles and other things, is good.

I walked to work with a small prayer of thanks for the small lives that enrich the bonds between fathers and daughters.