Last Sunday I preached a pretty stirring message, I think, on the fact that we all have demons and that part of the process of repentance involves knowing our demons, calling them out by name, and then kicking them our of our spiritual space.

I wish it were easy to do.

All my life I have struggled with insecurity. Part of it is due to the fact that I was adopted into a family which didn’t particularly care for me, and before that, was a foster child in homes where I was taken care of but was always aware that I just “didn’t belong.”

I went into myself, and, frankly, have stayed there …which does nothing to help rid myself of the demon of insecurity.

The craziest thing is that I know the demon is there. I can and do call it by name. I invite it out.

At best, it leaves by bits and starts, but, as I admonished my members last week not to do, I leave the door ajar, and the demon seems to come and go at will.

Why in the world would any of us hold onto something that is not good for us, especially when we KNOW it isn’t good for us?

I think it’s because we get comfortable with who we are and who we have always been. It is a stretch, and a scary one at that, to push a demon out, slam the door and bolt it, and begin making a new life for ourselves.

I am writing this today, because my demon is sitting next to me, whispering “sweet nothings” in my ear, playing to the sore spot which absorbs the nuggets “insecurity” always deposits into me. I am determined to get this one out of me, to send it into waiting swine who could then run into a lake and drown, my demon with them.

In the Bible passage I used to preach last week, I noted that it was the demon who spoke to Jesus, begging to be saved, not the man in whom the demon rested. The demon said its name was “Legion, for we are many.” The demon within, or this demon within me, is like a glioblastoma, a tumor with many parts, inoperable, spreading everywhere so that it cannot be pinpointed, isolated, and extracted.

So, the work of getting it out is more difficult.

But if I am to do what I was sent to earth to do, I have to get this thing out of me. Yesterday is gone. I have today, and prayerfully, tomorrow as well. I feel like I am in a battle for my spiritual life. But I want to be healed. I want the tumor out, so that I can pour water on it and watch it disintegrate, like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz.

I don’t know if anyone else understands what I just wrote …but for me, it was a candid observation…about me.

Either Donald Trump is wrong or I’ve used illegal documents for myself and my children for years.

Trump said on CNN today that all President Barack Obama has produced is a “certificate of live birth” as his birth certificate, and, Trump said, “everybody knows that a “certificate of live birth” is not a birth certificate.

Trump’s statements made me curious, so I pulled out my birth certificate, as well as that of my son and daughter. They all say at the top “certificate of live birth.” They are notarized documents, and I have used them as legal documents to get our passports since forever.

So, what is Trump talking about?

It seems that “the Donald” is way off the mark. In his passion and zeal to reach for the presidency, it seems that he has lost his way.

The birth certificates I have for myself and my children were obtained from county clerk offices in Ohio, Illinois and Connecticut, states in which we were born. I wrote those offices asking for birth certificates, and those offices sent certificates of “live birth.”

So, I am confused about what Trump is saying, and I resent him making a big deal out of something which has been refuted over and over. The hue and cry of Barack Obama not having been born in America has never been silent by the “birthers,” who to me seem to be nothing more than a group of people determined to get President Obama out of office “by any means necessary.”

But maybe I am wrong. I urge you all to please look at your birth certificate and see what it says. Does it say “certificate of live birth?” If so, can you please post that information (not your private information, but just what your birth certificate says) on Facebook or Twitter or both, so we can address Trump intelligently, and tell him, again intelligently, that he is just wrong?

It seems like a contrived issue, one born of ignorance, arrogance and a couple of other things as well. If Trump is right, then I need to get official birth certificates for myself and my children. If he is wrong, then “we the people” ought to call him on it and ask him to, mercifully, shut up about it.

That is a candid observation.

You know, there are things that are true that nobody wants to talk about.

I found myself furious this morning listening to reports about Lindsay Lohan. Someone took a picture of her as she came out of a bar, cigarette in hand, and on the ground. The report said she had apparently fallen.

And I kept thinking, “If she were anyone else…”

Lindsay is using her celebrity and her race to do exactly what she wants. Sorry, it’s true.

While she is awaiting trial, on burglary charges and, I think, violating her parole, she is doing exactly what she wants to do – and kind of daring the world to do or say anything about it.

People of privilege know how to use it, and they do. Think of the men who are police officers but who also beat their wives. They say to them, “Go on, call the police. Nobody will believe you.” Or think of how easy it is for a white person to commit a crime and blame it on a black person, and the world is all to ready and eager to believe the false charges.

If anyone says anything about things that are just, well, wrong, they run the risk of being labelled or using a “card” that is convenient. So, if you don’t like something that a lone Jewish person has done, you run the risk of being called anti-Semitic. If you give commentary on the injustice of this justice system as concerns African Americans, especially black men, you are said to be playing the “race card.” If a man passes over a woman for a promotion because she is truly not qualified, he is a sexist, and if you dislike something that your country is doing, something that is truly wrong, you are called “unpatriotic.”

I am struggling to understand how to cope with what I see. Lindsay Lohan should be in prison. People, especially African American men, are serving life terms for far less; because of mandatory sentencing laws, so many African American men have been ruined for life, and yet, Lindsay runs on.

I have been reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The content is excellent, though what I am learning is sobering. My walk away or take away is that, in spite of slavery having been outlawed, a slavocracy still exists here in this country, with prisons being the new plantations.

And on the plantations, or getting to the plantations, there is no justice for the poor or for African American men. It is so painful a realization.

I couple that realization with the thought that for many politicians, the fate of “the least of these” is not priority. I do not understand how people can think that big business is better than big government; surely they both share the same berth. The one thing about big business, though, is that it is not concerned with “the least of these.” Business is about making money and profit, on the backs of and at the expense of, “the least of these.”

So, as I watch Lindsay Lohan flitter about, doing what she wants, with chance after chance being given her, and I watch GOP governors and lawmakers push for spending cuts while turning their heads and saying nothing about General Electric not paying a penny of income tax while scores of American people are suffering, I shake my head. I think I understand, but I do not like what I am understanding.

Life “ain’t been no crystal stair,” as poet Langston Hughes wrote. Clearly…and it’s not meant to be.

That is a candid…and painful …observation.

Sometimes, I wish I wouldn’t think so much, but I do …and with all of the issues supposedly having to do with morality – or a lack of it – because of homosexuality and abortion, primarily, I have found myself thinking a lot about morality, what it is and what it isn’t.

And I have come to believe that America is not very moral, and neither is the world, for that matter, if morality is defined according to holy scrips and not human opinion.

By that, I mean that every holy book – torah, bible, koran – list as a direct command from God that we are to 1) love God with all our hearts, all our minds and all of our strength, and 2) we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We do not do that. We don’t even think about doing it. In fact, if the truth be told, we as people thrive on contention and conflict, we think nothing of treating our “neighbors” as though they were objects, and in spite of going against what the God of all of us says we are to do, we think we are qualified to talk about morality, and decide who is and who is not in the right.

There is a reason the order was given to love each other – and to treat them as we would want to be treated. It’s because “love works.” I cannot help at this moment but think of Jennifer Hudson, sporting her new body that has come because she has adhered to the Weight Watchers regimen. Do it, she says, try Weight Watchers … “because it works.”

So does God, and what God says to do.

It is hard for me to watch us disrespect and disregard each other, and we all do it, myself included. It’s hard to watch kids bully each other, nations bully each other, parents bully kids, husbands bully wives and visa versa…while we act religious and decide that the actions of others, and not ourselves, are immoral.

Why am I thinking that God could not possibly be pleased with how we live out of healthy relationships with each other?

I shudder to think of the upcoming presidential elections. I shudder for a couple of reasons. One, while the nation is choking for air due to the recession, these politicians will spend literally millions of dollars on their campaigns …while people are still losing their homes, unable to get medical care and going hungry … and the other reason is because they will, without abandon, rip each other apart. The attacks on President Obama will be vicious, the racism carefully hidden so as not to be overtly offensive, but it will be there.

Surely, that is not being moral.

I once had a discussion with a very devout pastor who said that if I could not and did not denounce all other religions other than Christianity, I was not fit to preach.

I didn’t preach while I was at his church.

I couldn’t understand how it was loving or right or moral to put down all other religions and the people who practiced them, seeing as how there was and is one God, who made us all.

Likewise, I lost some credibility when I said I could not and would not denounce homosexuality or homosexual people. How could I do that and be moral?

I cannot even denounce white people who are rabidly racist. I can and do stay away from them, but the direction from God is to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

I remember reading that the late Sen. Jesse Helms once acknowledged that the imperative to love one’s neighbor was certainly Biblical, but that we had the right to choose our neighbors! He was defending his defense of segregation.

But that’s not what the Bible says. It doesn’t say that a neighbor is one who looks like us or thinks like us. Our neighbor is anyone with whom we are in contact. Go figure.

So, it seems to me, as Americans defend their fear of Muslims, and Muslims defend their hatred of Americans and politicians defend their waste of money on nasty, name-calling campaigns while the people they say they want to represent suffer …that a crucial commandment is all but lost and/or ignored …and that is the command for us to love and respect each other, no matter what.

The world is immoral, religion notwithstanding.

That is a candid observation.

I had hoped that, in light of the devastating tragedy in Japan, that nobody would come up with a “divine punishment” angle, basically blaming innocent people for what someone deemed “bad behavior,” saying that the suffering was God’s will.

My hope has not been realized. While no American cleric has, at least to my knowledge, come out with such an indictment, the governor of Tokoyo, Shintaro Ishihara, has said that the horrible earthquake and tsunami was divine retribution for the egoism and populism of Japanese people. He has since apologized, but the damage has been done. God, once again, is seen as a vengeful God who selectively punishes people for behavior certain people do not appreciate, agree with or understand.

Ishihara isn’t the only one. Cappie Poindexter, who plays basketball for the New York Liberty, has said via Twitter that the tragedy might be because of Pearl Harbor, and Glenn Beck has offered his opinion that maybe, perhaps, this storm is God’s doing, God’s way of saying He’s not pleased with the way the Japanese are doing things.

It happened after Katrina and it happened after the earthquake in Haiti. Certain religious voices said that in both instances, the tragedy was God’s doing, as punishment for the “evil” in those two places.
They smugly decreed that God, being just, had wrought justice in those two areas, essentially holding the people to the fire for their dastardly life-styles, and, in the case of Haiti, for the actions of a revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the world’s most successful slave revolt.
I cringed when I heard these people blame God for the horrific pain of so many people. Would God really have acted that way? And if so, why doesn’t God act in that way toward of all of us, punishing us for the ways in which we fall short of His expectations of us?
Surely, it’s not just the Japanese, or the Haitians, or the people of New Orleans who are the bane of God’s existence?
A colleague of mine, Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes, is wrestling with an intriguing question – and that is, who is it that gets grace? Are there limits of grace, or does God mete it out to all of us? And, since it is not deserved, do any of us have the right to decree who can get it and who cannot? Aren’t we overstepping our bounds and aren’t we being presumptuous to decide for God who gets grace and who does not?
Elnes is using the Book of Galatians, illustrating how the apostle Paul realized and taught that God has no favorites. Grace, Paul seems to say, goes to everyone. That concept would seem to negate the perception of a God who so selectively “punishes” people who do not fit a certain, human definition of “good” or “right.”
Elnes uses the term “abrasive grace,” a term with which I am wrestling in terms of its meaning, but I think we as human religious types are confused when it comes to grace. We don’t give grace and we cannot take it away; we cannot determine who gets into “heaven” and who does not. That decision, like it or not, is God’s and God’s alone.
It chips away at the notion of a loving God to think that God would wipe out, as in the case of Haiti, the people of the poorest nation in the world because of something someone did years ago that was not in line the Christian dogma of some.
Likewise, even if God were unhappy with the “lifestyle” of people in New Orleans, this God we say is love would not allow a people to suffer so unduly and be so terribly mistreated in the rescue process because of that.
So, now we have Japan, a nation which is not predominantly Christian, a nation for which many Americans have no love because of Pearl Harbor, and again, the pronouncements of deserved punishment and suffering have come, from their own and from outsiders. While people are suffering horribly, arrogant and insensitive people are in effect blaming them for their plight. Amazing.
The God they reference could not be and is not my God. Sorry. My God is a source of hope and mystery, who is egalitarian in His/Her actions. My God has no favorites; my God does not punish some and ignore others, seeing as how “all” have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory!
I wonder what these same people would say about all of the Christian people in America who are now being devastated by floods. What have they done? What is God punishing them for? Or does “American exceptionalism” contain within it a divine pass for certain Christians who live in certain places and believe a certain way?
When it comes to bad things happening to good people, I do have a lot of questions, most of which center around my idea that God is omnipotent and in that omnipotence, I think He or She ought to be able to wave a divine arm and stop some of the misery of the world.
But I in no way can sanction this ignorant and arrogant pronouncement of a divine intention in the suffering of the Japanese people, any more than I could sanction the horrible comments made after Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti.
I hope the suffering do not get wind of the ignorance flying around. I hope, rather, that they are touched, helped and inspired by those who understand God to be “a very present help” in trouble.