Cromey Online

The writings of author, therapist, and priest Robert Warren Cromey.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

IT'S ALL OVER


Here is the way I see it:

No government or business has the willingness or charity to stop global warming, racial hatred, homophobia, war, murder, sickness, disease et al.  We will just go on doing what we do until the planet destroys itself.

Being a simple minded Christian and believe the kingdom of God will come at the end of history and then the lion will lie down with the lamb etc., I have expected the end will come sometime.  Meanwhile being a follower of Jesus, I choose to work to serve others. Many others and I work for an end to global warming, promote racial justice, LGBT rights, end war, murder, sickness, disease et al. I do all that because I feel better when I do and it may even serve some others. I have a good life, wife, family and friends. I have had a life and work that I both loved and enjoyed.


If others find joy and fulfillment by worshipping money, power, sex (tried that), science, I wish them well. My bet is those pursuits will not bring much real joy. But, who knows?

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Lecture on Jesus to Stanford Medical Students


May 15, 2014    (a draft)

Your Patients have a wide variety of religious and spiritual values. I am going to give you some ideas about what some Christian ones are.

The doctor is pastor sometimes just listening to the patients. That is basically what I do as a priest and pastor. I listen. Help them make their own decisions.

I had a small stroke earlier this year. Neurologist and internist lead my wife and me through a decision making process about whether or not I be given the stroke preventer – TPA. 6%. They were presenting us a values examination. Since the stroke symptoms had subsided they mentioned that there is a 6% chance the TPA could cause another stroke or death. The doctors listened and watched me. We decided not to take the drug. I am fine now.

Attitudes toward religion include people who say, “Religion is bunk” are not making a responsible statement. He/she does not know enough about religion to say that.

“I” think religion is bunk is responsible statement. Here the person takes responsibility for her or her statement.


Jesus

Sometimes I cringe when I say his name. The ignorance and superstition that surrounds his name is often embarrassing to me.

“Have you found Jesus?”
“Is Jesus in your heart?”
“Have you had a personal experience of Jesus?”

“What would Jesus Do”

Jesus as a rabbit’s foot. I’ll pray to Jesus that this plane won’t go down or that the Giants will win.

Jesus is the butt of many jokes. On Easter there is hunky Jesus contest in SF’s Dolores Park.

Jesus on the cross. Jesus is “hung up.”

Jokes about Jesus walking on the water, having sex with Mary Magdalene and scoffing at the myth of the Jesus’ mother being a virgin.

Then there are the followers of Jesus, who have distilled his teachings into:

No birth control
No abortions
Homosexuality is evil

Who is Jesus???

John Dominic Crossan, Biblical Scholar has said of conservative Christians and many non-believers:

“What bothers me is not that ancient people told literal stories and we are smart enough to take the symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and now we are dumb enough to take them literally.”

Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Jewish teen girl who married Joseph her betrothed. The story is that he lived with his parents; perhaps trained as a carpenter or cabinetmaker. In about 30 AD he began an itinerant life, homeless, no visible means of support. Preached about helping the poor and needy and talked about the Kingdom of God. The Roman rulers in Jerusalem abetted by the Jewish temple leaders, crucified him because he appeared to be a threat to Roman rule that they were the only kingdom. After his death and burial, his followers said that he had risen from the dead.

The earliest writing about Jesus was by St. Paul who told some of the Jesus story in the 50s AD. Twenty years after his death. The biographical writings about Jesus began in about 60 AD, thirty years after Jesus’s death in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the 90s A.D.

The only outside historical record of Jesus was a mention by the Josephus, a first century Jewish scholar and historian. The mention is fleeting and much argued about his significance.

Jesus was a storyteller – The Good Samaritan and The Prodigal Son are two great many layered stories of compassion and forgiveness. Many other parables-mustard seed, unjust ruler.

The story is that Jesus was a healer. Blind were made too see, the lame walk and the dead raised.

The story is that Jesus was a social prophet. He called for the hungry to be fed, peace to the world, healing to those that were sick. Matthew 5 and 6.

Jesus inspired people to follow him. Paul organized the church and led the followers to bring the message of Jesus throughout the Mediterranean world.

The liberal branches of Christianity have taken the words of Jesus for healing, social justice and peace. I can say I am a follower of Jesus because I want to dedicate my life to working with the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised, the homeless and the social outcasts.

Martin Luther King, Jr. A follower of Jesus excited the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the laws discriminating against people of color were erased from the law books.

As a follower of Jesus, I worked for the Civil Rights movement and marched in Selma, Alabama in 1964. I helped found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual also in 1964. In the 1980s Trinity Church where I was rector, we ministered to the gay men sick with the then unknown disease of AIDS. We held 72 funerals for young men from 1984-1990. Friends, lover, family, children, grandparents of men who died of HIV disease. Our church was first host to project Open Hand, which provided thousands of meals for sick gay men. Since I retired I have been on a Thursday Vigil outside SF’s Federal Building against war.

The new Pope Francis chiding his church to emphasize caring for the poor and the hungry and work for peace heartens us liberal followers of Jesus.

Social Worker vs. Follower of Jesus.
 The difference between the most honorable professions is that followers of Jesus gather for worship. We pray, sing and take bread and wine together as a remembrance of Jesus.

We go to churches where all people are welcome. No one can be turned away. We do not get to vote on who are our members. It is not a private club.

We worship means we give our ultimate worth and value to God in the name of Jesus.

The mass is the most honored command of Jesus. He said eat and drink this bread and wine whenever you gather together. He said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

At every minute of every hour of every day somewhere in the world a Christian priest is saying mass or the Holy Communion. It is Jesus’ most obeyed commandment.

We Christians are called to service in obedience to the will of God. That is our purpose in life.

How did Jesus become the Christ or God in the flesh?

The early church battled for four hundred years arguing as to the nature of Jesus.

One groups said he was not really a man, but a spirit
Another said he was half man and half God
Another said he was mostly God and but a small part was a man.
Some said he was a great prophet only.

In 325 AD, The Emperor Constantine got the Christian Bishops and scholars together. Constantine hoped Christianity would unify the decaying Roman Empire. The Bishops came up with the formula that Jesus was truly God and truly man. This is the doctrine of the INCARNATION.

Now of course that is a paradox, which the Christian churches have wrestled with ever since.

I am not here to convert you. In fact I don’t care what you think or believe. But, I do hope I have put the man Jesus in an historical perspective that will help you think past stereotypes and clichés, jokes and sentimentality. Like it or not Christians are here to stay and many of us see that the Jesus we follow led us to be concerned for justice, poverty, healing and peace.

Christians certainly differ tremendously.  Roman Catholic Representatives Boehner and Ryan don’t thin the government should be in the business of health care.  Protestant liberals like President Obama; the Clintons believe like I do, that only the government can be rich enough and strong enough to care for all the people in our country in need of health care. In this case the leaders say they are Christians and followers of Jesus.

Compassion and forgiveness were a basic message of Jesus. Forgiveness. A compassionate person forgives those who have hurt or maligned them. Forgiving one’s self is the hardest thing to do. One can forgive one’s self but, the guilt may remain forever.

A Woman can commit adultery and finally be forgiven by her spouse. She may even forgive herself. But, the guilt persists, perhaps for life. Learn to live with it, as my doctor said to me thirty years ago about the pain in my neck.
Doctors – and chaplains “need to help the dying to review their achievements as well as resolve their failures, to suture again with those they have loved, to realize they have tried.” (Zaroff?)

This what we in religion call confession and forgiveness.

All of us are spiritual. Spirituality is very popular today.
I am spiritual but not religious is an expression that a great many people use.

I chatted with a woman at an airport recently and she told me she was Spiritual by not religious. I asked her to tell me what she meant by spiritual. She said she was a journalist and thus inquisitive:

Ecology
Civil Rights and social justice
A sense of the transcendence in life.
Healing – She was pregnant.
Science

These values are in fact the same values of most Christian Churches – at their best. Judaism and Islam. Of course there are some people in all religions that eschew some of these values, like science, birth control, abortion and the creation of the earth.

All people worship something. Worship is the activity in which you place the things that are worth the most to you. We all have those basic values or ideas of what is most important, most worthwhile.

Money, Science, Medicine, Family, God, power, work, Law  – what else? Combinations of all these are what people worship. I choose the God as expressed in the teachings of Jesus.








Friday, May 16, 2014

MORE RUNNING AWAY FROM DEATH

The new pages, Life Tributes, in the SF Chronicle are the newest way to not refer to death. Obituaries and death notices are gone. Celebrations of life are the new funeral. We hate to be sad and reminded about how will miss our family members and friends who have died. Mourning is a bad word.

What happens to a person after they die is unspeakable. There is either a life of some kind after death or oblivion. Gatherings after someone dies should be places where people may mourn and share their sorrows. A good party is the place to tell the stories, celebrate a life and have good food. As for me I prefer a big old funeral service in church with music and prayers, tears and a proper looking at death and suffering in the face.


It is sad for a newspaper to contribute to society’s unwillingness to face the reality of the sting of death.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

ANTI-SEMITISM AGAIN

A friend again called me an anti-Semite. Here is my replay:

Ann told me that you called me an anti-Semite. Please call me any name you want. I continue to be appalled at the way the Israeli government treats the Palestinians. I align myself with the aspirations of the Palestinian people. No matter what. I love you and you are always welcome to break bread in our home.

The Israel government still allows building to take place in disputed territory. Their Palestinian neighbors are among the poorest people in the world. Israeli luxury homes and pools are built overlooking poverty stricken neighbors in disputed territories. Israeli soldiers constantly harass Palestinians. Efforts at peace talks are constantly interrupted by Israeli recalcitrance and self-righteousness.

An article in the NY Times recently said that even Liberal Israeli citizens don’t talk about the Palestinian question much anymore. Many American liberal Jews are hard pressed to say anything against Israel. Many American and Israeli Jews are also incensed by the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians.


I am also annoyed that American politicians have a hands off policy toward Israel for fear that the Jewish lobby will attack them for any critical view of that country.

Friday, May 02, 2014

JOHN UPDIKE - A REVIEW OF A BIOGRAPHY

May 2, 2014

Updike
A Biography by Adam Begley
Harper 2014

I am a long time fan of John Updike, novelist, critic, poet and contributor to The New Yorker. Couples and the four novels about Rabbit are favorites of mine. I am reading the collected short stories put out by the Library of America in two volumes. Born in 1932 a year after I was, his fiction depicts the same life span as mine. The issues of love, marriage, adultery, divorce, children, politics and history are what our generation lived and live through.
His ability to show the pain and sorrow and the love and joy of living bring those emotions to our lives.

Adam Begley’s biography brings Updike alive and human to our immediate attention. Updike's great talent as a writer is presented in a way that makes us want to read the novelist. Begley takes many of the stories and events in the novels and relates them to Updike’s personal life. Many stories and poems reflect the joys of married life and the sad fate of Updike’s own marriage adultery and divorce. Begley does this with consistently and accuracy throughout the 558 pages of his book. I sometimes did get lost between the characters in the book and novelist’s real life. On the whole Begley keeps us interested in the stories and the real life. Updike said very clearly that most of his fiction was based on his own life and that of his two wives and families. Many of the characters in his books are also fictitious versions of his friends and colleagues as well as his and their children.


This biography is a wonderful way to get to know Updike the wonderful flawed human being, just like the rest of us, only he got really famous rich and successful. The book is also a wonderful introduction and advanced way to enjoy the work of John Updike.

RWC