On the Wrong Side of History

I have dedicated this blog page over the years to my musings on topics of spiritual life and growth.  I think this posting fits into that criteria in that it is about the relentless march in this country from a predominately Christian Worldview, to a predominately secular worldview that is mildly tolerant or appreciative of the contribution the Christian Worldview, to a now a thoroughly pagan worldview(1) that sees and thus opposes Christianity as standing in the way of a "Progressive" future for this country.  Proof of this, in my mind, cannot be more clearly seen than the expression of the classic Christian virtues are noticeably more rare these days in American politics, and we now only nominate and elect pagans to the highest office in the land, the Presidency.  People ask, "How can you possibly vote for ... ?"  My answer is that I don't; I vote for the political philosophy and form of government that I believe will prosper this country and most benefit the middle and poverty-line class in this country.

I have tilted this posting "On the Wrong Side of History"(2) because the future belongs to the younger generation (younger than me anyway), and apparently most of the younger generation have become convinced that we need to shift left (toward socialism and away from capitalism- more this below).  The normative belief is that capitalism creates wealth disparity and is therefore evil, even in spite of the fact that the controlled capitalism of our  economic system has created the wealthiest country in the world.  Most in my generation understand that capitalism is not perfect but it works better that anything else.  The younger generation does not agree with this.  For the life of me, I do not know what they base that upon; nonetheless, it places us on the wrong side of history, because, if we don't fall off Progressive cliff this election, we probably will the next, barring any significant change in thinking of our young people.

America has always been on a continuum between liberal socialism and conservative free-market capitalism, between high taxes and low taxes, between wealth redistribution and wealth creation,  between big government that enforces wealth redistribution and small government that allows and incentivizes and provides people the opportunity to create their own wealth.  The liberal movements of the 20th century created much needed safety net program, but the Great Society movement of the 60's also created a permanent poverty class.  In theeh last half of the 20th Century, we threw trillions of dollars at poverty only to have poverty stay at or about 13%.  The 20th Century did not find the sweet spot between socialism and capitalism and, it seems to me, went too far to the left.  We act like we cannot learn from our past.    

With all that said, where does that leave me this election cycle.  Progressivism has the goal of fundamentally remaking America, when what I want is to find that sweet spot on the continuum, and it does not lie further to the left.  I want a government that gets out of the way and allows the economically deprived and the middle class grow and prosper, while watching out for those in need and those who cannot take care of themselves.  I think progressivism is more the problem than the solution.  The champion of progressivism is Kamala Harris: so, I don't think she is the answer.  The Democrats do not even talk about how to help the economy thrive; and I am not sure the new Democratic party can any longer help people prosper, given their platform priorities.  The Republicans have had some success with that in this recent administration, and I think the Republicans at least have a "get out of the way and let people prosper" attitude.  I think the Republicans have the best answer for the future of this country.   So, as far has Trump is concerned, my only choice is to do what I did during the last presidential election, which was to hold my nose and vote.  It is a decision on which "pagan" is best for the people of this county. 

 

(1) My thanks to Fr. Ross Guthrie who in a recent sermon helped me understand this transition from simply post-Christian to full-blown paganism and what that really means to us.  

(2) Barrack Obama was the first one I heard to who say that Conservatives were on the wrong side of history.  He also said that he was going to fundamentally change America.  I think that was his objective but was checked by the checks and balances of our system.   

Homily- Memorial Service for Pat Hartley, November 13, 2023

 Needless to say, I am honored to be the homilist today. Dan and Peyton, thank you for inviting me to do so, and thank you, Father Duvall, for your graciousness in allowing me this pulpit.   

 For Christ Church to have this memorial service here at St. Andrews, Mt. Pleasant is a special blessing for Dan, Alice, and me.  Four pews from the back on the Epistle side is where my siblings and I got our start on our Christian pilgrimages.  On Sundays we were sandwiched between our father on our right and our mother towering over us on the left.  What I remember most vividly about those early years was how effectively any excessive squirming or inappropriate noise was dealt with by our mother, and this is when I first received some idea of what the "fear of God" was all about. 

I spent much of this past week with my brother Dan and niece Peyton grieving, enjoying memories, sharing with friends and family, and hashing over the realities of life that come to the front of our thoughts at times like this. 

 Speaking of family, it is quite an experience to see all my family all lined up, packed in, sitting still, well-behaved… with little doors to keep them confined… A picture I’ll always remember.  That is not how I am used to experiencing my family.

 To all of you here today, you honor Pat with your presence, and you honor the family.  To Dan, Peyton, Carsten, Marylin, who feel Pat’s absence the most acutely, our hearts continue to break along with yours.  We all know, however, that our sadness is mixed with celebration, because we have much to celebrate: 

·        We celebrate Pat’s 77 years among us.  

·        We celebrate God who gave Pat to us for these 77 years.

·        And to celebrate the rest of Pat’s story, which is her inheritance as a child of God of eternal life with her Father in heaven.

To be in union with God forever is the reason God created Pat in the first place. This is God’s desire for Pat before the beginning of the ages. Pat was created out of love, to be the object of God’s love, with the divine ability to Love God in return desire even before the ages. 

 But as the human race, our sin, rebellion and neglect of God gets in the way of this love-relationship with our heavenly Father. We are powerless to overcome our fallen human nature, but God can do for us that we cannot do for ourselves. This is what Jesus the Messiah is all about.

 A few minutes ago in our processional anthem, Father Ted recited part of Jesus’ conversation with Martha, the sister of Jesus’ friend Lazarus who had died, and Martha is in deep grief, and frankly, puzzlement, about it all.  This story is recoded in the Gospel of John, chapter 11: Let me read it to you:    “23 Jesus said to Martha, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection; I am life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes [that is, trust] in me shall never die. Jesus goes on to ask Martha a question, “Do you believe this, Martha?”  She answers, “Yes, Lord, I believe.”  This has been Pat’s answer also.  I pray that this is the answer or will be the answer for all of us here to today.

So, here is a bedrock fact about our God: He did not create Pat to live 3 score and 10 years, as Psalm 90 puts it, and then simply return to the dust from which she came, as Genesis 3 puts it.  Pat answers Jesus’ question to Martha with a yes, and therefore the curse of Genesis 3 for Pat is broken.  The curse is death and eternal separation from God, but for Pat, death no longer has the last word in her life, God does.  

 In the 52 years I have known Pat, ever since Dan and Pat’s courtship and marriage those many years ago, she has pursued this of salvific love-relationship with God, and moreover, God has pursued her, forgiven her, redeemed her, and now, gathered her to himself.  We heard a few minutes ago Caroline read from 1 Corinthians 15 these Words, “O death, where is your victory; O death, where is your sting… thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

 Finally let me say, Pat’s relationship with her Lord is reflected in her relationships with all of us.  I have seen it in her kindness, generosity, servanthood, hospitality, and sacrificial giving.  We have seen the light of Christ shining through her

 So, we have much to celebrate today.  Let’s pray:  Almighty God, creator and sustainer of us all, our hearts of full of thankfulness and joy for Pat but be close to us as we deal with our separation from her, albeit for only for a little while.  I pray this for us all, but in particular for my brother Dan.  Continue to cover Dan and all the family with the richness of your grace bestowing upon all of us your joy and peace.  We pray this in the holy name of our Lord and redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen

A Christian Response to Homosexuality

 

We see people these days responding to homosexuality in a broad spectrum of ways from total and affirming acceptance to gay bashing and gay violence.  The former (far left of the spectrum) comes out of an “enlightened” modernistic creed of individualism and a lack of transcendent authority concerning human sexuality.  The latter stems from a fallen human instinct to abhor and reject what is different.  Neither response is Christian.

The Christian response is wisdom, grace, and unconditional love.  Paul writes in Colossians 4:6, "Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity.  Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned, as it were, with salt, so that you may know how you should respond "  In other words, the Christian response to homosexuality is to be God’s kind of love- the same Agape love Jesus showed toward the Samaritan woman at the well while she was still in her aberrant lifestyle, or toward Nicodemus still in his confusion about Kingdom truths, or Matthew while he was still deep in his greed and extortion as a tax collector.

The Church should allow the love of Christ to flow through us such that those caught up in homosexuality may turn to Christ and not away from Christ.  Speak Truth, of course, but allow the Holy Spirit to lead the person into a new life in Christ.  The Holy Spirit will do all the convicting that needs to be done to bring this about.  Our role is to be inviting, supportive, encouraging, and most of all, loving.

"Under God's Umbrella"- from Chapter 7, the Amazing Indian Land Years

We lived in Indian Land Community, Lancaster, SC and our beloved home there for most of the thirty-one years of my career Duke Power Company and Duke Energy, Charlotte, NC.  This was the home in which our sons, Rob and Jimmy, grew into adulthood.

In our early years in Indian Land, my focus was on my career and providing for our family.  It became a rather self-focused and myopic time for me. It was in 1980 that the Lord changed all that. 

We were attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fort Mill, although we later attended Christ Church in Lancaster. One Fall Sunday morning I was in Saint Paul’s churchyard awaiting the start of the adult Sunday school.  It was a beautiful morning with the large oak trees of the churchyard full of color.  Nancy was off doing one of her ministries, and the boys were already in Sunday school. 

God and I had a talk about things that morning.  Our conversation (don’t worry—no audible voices) that morning was about the convenient form of deism that I had adopted which had kept God compartmentalized and uninvolved in most corners of my life.  As a lifelong Christian, I knew that was not what my faith was supposed to look like.  I knew His place was at the center of my life, and He was supposed to be Lord over all of my life.  That was where I had placed myself, and I figured it would get a bit crowded if God also moved in.  

In my arrogance, I made a deal with the Lord about a trial period to see how things went.  If one could make a deal with the devil, then I guess I thought I could make a deal with God. Looking back, I’m astounded at my condescension before God.  Perhaps the towering oak trees protected me from a much-deserved lightning strike at that time.  But it was, nonetheless, a surrender of sorts, and God used it.  From that point on, the Holy Spirit began to set my feet on a proper Christian path.  I would have never guessed what that was going to be like.

This conversation with God was not happening in isolation. Nancy’s brother, Jim, and our dear friends and fellow parishioners Tom and Gail shepherded Nancy and me during this time. I would describe this as my born-again moment, as Jesus describes it to Nicodemus in John 3.

This is the time in my life when Christianity began to make sense of this nonsensical world in which I was living.  Christianity offered me the answers to the first-order questions of life such as:

·         Who am I?

·         Whose am I?

·         From what (or from whom) do I derive my identity?

·         For what purpose was I created?

·        What does real human prospering and thriving look like? ( i.e. What’s really important in life?)

·         What is my ultimate telos and destiny of my life?

I was coming to understand that Christianity is about turning this upside-down world right-side up, and this changed the trajectory of Nancy’s and my life:  My career was blessed by it; my marriage was blessed by it; my being a father to Rob and Jimmy was blessed by it.  I was brought joy, peace, and purpose in a newer and fuller way.  I began the long journey from self-absorption to self-giving, a journey I’m still on to this day.  

Let me add that Nancy and I made and are this journey together into a more mature Christian faith, but my sense is that she has always been out front and leading the way. I am hugely grateful to her for that.

The 1980s were, therefore, a time of remarkable growth in my knowledge, love, and service to God. Tithing became an honor as I began to learn how to give back to God. Cursillo (a three-day weekend retreat) taught me about being intentional and disciplined in my pursuit of God and about the indispensable aspects of Christian community in that endeavor.  My Cursillo small group, a small clutch of men at Christ Church, Lancaster, were center stage to this spiritual growth.   This small group, of which I was a part of for twelve years, taught me the value of mutual support and accountability with my fellow pilgrims.

This Cursillo men’s group eventually became involved in Kairos Prison Ministry in the South Carolina state prison system from which I learned an enormous amount about working in the power of the Holy Spirit and that The Holy Spirit was the key to making a difference in people’s lives.

After a few years I was asked to be the lay rector of a Kairos weekend at Manning Correctional Institution.  There were thirty inmates and fourteen volunteers as part of that weekend, and I found it to be one of the most challenging yet rewarding undertakings of my life. That weekend taught me immeasurably about trusting God by simply stepping out and doing what He was calling me to do.

In the early 1990s, a soon-to-be close friend, Doyle, was released from state prison, and he returned to Lancaster County where he had grown up.  Doyle had a rocky upbringing which led to his being incarcerated in the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) in Columbia and again later as an adult in the South Carolina Department of Corrections.  Doyle had attended Kairos in the Department of Corrections and through one of our Cursillo group members at Christ Church he was invited to be part of our men’s group.  

Doyle wanted things to be different in his life, and God helped him do just that.  He became a solid and mature Christian in those years, eventually becoming part of the core leadership at Christ Church.  He sought ways to give back to his community, to his new church family, and, most of all, to the incarcerated youth in the Department of Juvenile Justice where he had once been a resident.

Doyle, along with a few others in the state, had a vision of starting a ministry in DJJ modeled on the Kairo ministry in the adult prisons.  It was called "Epiphany." On the first Epiphany weekend in the DJJ, Doyle was the lay rector, and I was his coordinator (the person who took care of logistics and other details).  I was the lay rector of the next Epiphany weekend a few months later.

What was extraordinarily special about that second Epiphany Weekend was that my sons, Rob and Jimmy, and a group of their friends from across our diocese, all college age or above at that time, joined us to minister to these incarcerated and street-hardened boys of DJJ.  

The effectiveness of my sons’ and their friends was enhanced by their being only a few years older than these incarcerated teenagers.  The greatest gift they conveyed to the residents of DJJ was hope—that is, the reality their lives were not over but just beginning.  Their lives could be different from what they had experienced in their young lives through a relationship with the God who created them.  It was an amazing thing to watch. ...

Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life

Jesus says in John 14:6, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."  To believe such a thing in this age of intolerance, shaming and name-calling is a risky thing.  But I do believe it.  Let me list the reasons.

First of all, I understand all too well my fallen human nature.  I know the futility of any of us finding our way back to God on our own efforts and through our own resources.  Jesus is God doing for us that which we cannot do for ourselves.

Secondly, I know the only thing I can do is respond to His grace with trust and belief, for as it says in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." Even then, my faith requires God's grace working in me. 

Finally, it is Jesus alone, through His death, resurrection and imputed righteousness onto my life, who re-unites sinful me with my perfect Father.  Christ does this even while I'm still embroiled in my sinfulness, for as St. Paul writes in Romans 5:8, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." What's more, Jesus has sent His Holy Spirit to reveal, convict, and guide me into a more perfect way, to become what I already am in God's eyes.  

Yes, I know Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life.  How about you?

From Chapter 2 of My Autobiography- Under God's Umbrella

From Under God's Umbrella: A Journey through Life, ISBN: 979-8-8229-0047-9 

An institution that was formative in my growing up years was Kanuga, a church conference center in the mountains of North Carolina near Hendersonville. Our family regularly rented a cabin for a week in the mountains at this beautiful place which Nancy’s and my children and grandchildren all know well. At an exceedingly early age, I remember cane pole fishing with my older brother and father in Kanuga Lake just below Kanuga Lodge. We used poles given to my brother and me by my Aunt Alice (Alice Randolf Hartley Pane, one of my father’s sisters). This was in the early 1950s, and I’m amazed how vivid this memory is to me to this day.

I attended other camps and conferences over the years, but Kanuga was the closest to my heart. I attended the Young People’s Conference for a series of years and eventually worked as a kitchen helper at Kanuga in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. Interestingly, our son Jimmy also worked in the kitchen at Kanuga between his junior and senior years in high school.

The tradition continued with Nancy and me taking our boys to Kanuga summer after summer. Jimmy and his wife, Caroline, are continuing the tradition to this day, and we have been renting a cabin at Kanuga with them in recent summers. That makes four generations of Hartley's who love Kanuga. Great memories there for us all!

Kanuga became for me what the ancient Celtic church called a “thin place,” which is where the fabric between heaven and earth is drawn so thinly that one can almost reach through and touch the face of God. 

For years, I have used Kanuga as a spiritual retreat. On the far side of the lake sits a bench on the edge of the trail behind the large, iconic Kanuga cross (visible in the picture below). The bench is peacefully and beautifully shrouded in a tunnel of mountain laurel, and it became a special place for me to commune with God and offer up both my joys and struggles.  I have come to call it the "God Bench."

Today, my favorite thing to do at Kanuga is to rise at dawn, walk to the God Bench and visit with the Lord, inviting one of grandsons to come with me; hopefully, I can do the same with Sinclair, my granddaughter, when she is older). Amazingly, my grandsons almost always would say yes to my invitation. My discussions with them in that place have always been deep, insightful, enjoyable, heartwarming, and mostly about God. There is another bench we come to before reaching the God Bench that the grandsons now call the Devil Bench. They throw sticks at it as they run past it to get to the God Bench. There is something delightfully metaphorical about this.  Kanuga will always have a special place in heart because of these times.

Jordan Peterson Podcast with Eric Metaxas- Wakeup Call to the American Church

I recently listened to this podcast.  Doing so led me to reevaluate how I am living the Faith and how the Church should be interacting with our contemporary secular culture.

I often tell myself, "I can't expect non-Christians to act like Christians."  This has allowed me to respect people where they are and seek to serve and love them just as they are.  This has rarely involved challenging their behavior and beliefs.  Many Christians are where I am because it avoids conflict, and we all (well, almost all) of us want that.

Metaxas challenges this way of being a Christian in his book, A Letter to the American Church.  I think he is right.  His book brings to mind one of my favorite Bible stories, the Samaritan woman at the well in John's Gospel.  I love its gentleness, but at the same time, Jesus is unequivocal in challenging the Samaritan woman's lifestyle.  I seldom do such things.

In today's climate, it is more than just avoiding conflict; it is trying not to get cancelled, censored, or censured.  Metaxas' thesis is, however, if we have faith, we will do the right thing, stake our lives on the Truth, live with the courage to stand against what we know is evil, and trust God to deal with the consequences (shades of Dietrich Bonhoeffer).  As Christians, our silence in the face of evil can and will be a catastrophe.  The Church is in a battle we all need to fight.  We are called to speak up for those caught up in the extremes of our contemporary pagan culture.  

Eric draws the parallel between our silence and the silence of the Church in Nazi Germany in the 1930's, a very uncomfortable parallel indeed.