Traveling in Place

Narrow and Cheap

Last week, Alexandra Judd, a waitress at a restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, served a group of ladies who had met for lunch. After they left, she went to clear the table and discovered there was no tip. That happens sometimes. It’s disappointing, but unfortunately just part of the unpredictable work of an underpaid food service provider. But then, she looked at the copy of the ticket left on the table. In the line next to the word “tip” was scrawled, “Lev. 20:13.” And at the bottom of the ticket was written, “Praying for you!”

The Bible verse that substituted for a monetary tip is the Levitical pronouncement that “if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death.” Alexandra is gay. It’s not clear how the women knew this. Perhaps they recognized her from her participation in recent rallies for LGBTQ equality, including one the night before against the North Carolina house bill that bars transgendered people from using the bathrooms of their preferred gender.

Why Christians ever quote the Levitical holiness code as a binding law is beyond me. These same people surely learned the basic teaching that in Christ, we are justified by faith and not by works of the law, but when that same law buttresses their own prejudices, they selectively quote it as though Jesus never came. (And besides that, the statute they cited says nothing about two women lying together!)

So what do we learn from this episode? Only that Christians are narrow-minded and cheap.

A Slow Cup of Coffee

This morning, I ordered coffee and a breakfast sandwich at a local coffee shop. I wanted my sandwich on a plate so I could eat it there, so I told the cashier I was staying. She not only put the sandwich on a plate, but also poured the coffee into a mug. I started to say, “No, I want that it a paper cup,” because I knew it would take a lot longer to finish the coffee than to eat the sandwich, and I was feeling the typical Monday morning pressure for time. But something made me stop. When she passed the filled mug to me over the counter, I said, “Thank you.”

I sat down with my plate and mug. Once I had finished all of the sandwich except for a few flaky crumbs, I still had a nearly full cup of hot coffee.

I stared at it.

And kept staring.

The swirling steam reminded me of all those times smoke and fire represented

Nostalgia Leads Nowhere

In this over-analyzed, talked-to-death political season, it’s hard to find insightful discussion of current affairs by people who know what they are talking about. Once in a while, however, I’m pleasantly surprised. This morning, I was listening to the car radio and was intrigued by an exchange between seasoned political observers about the presidential election. Here’s the gist of their conversation: The portion of the “white” American electorate that has become so energized this election cycle is primarily motivated by anger over forty years of economic stagnation. Since the 1970s, wages for people with less than a college degree has declined. In the decades following World War II, when college degrees were not required for upward mobility, the American economy boomed. Wages steadily increased, unemployment was consistently low, home prices rose and interest rates were low. The great suburban build-out created a lot of new jobs in construction and retail. Factory jobs spiked to keep up with rising consumer demand, and an increase in huge government defense contracts provided additional long-term employment opportunities.

People who lived through those boom days, or whose parents and grandparents still fondly remember the 1950s, want to turn back the clock, and are searching for scapegoats to explain why the economy is not as robust today as it was then. Trouble is, those post-war years were the exception in American economic history, not the norm. From colonial days up until World War II, the American economy bumped along between growth and decline. About every two decades, there was a “panic” when huge amounts of wealth were lost, and of course the economy collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite this history, many people today regard the upward mobility of the 1950s and early 60s as a sort of entitlement, as though every generation of Americans up through that time had gotten wealthier than their parents.

As I listened to this discussion about nostalgia for the 1950s, I thought immediately about how churches within the formerly “mainline” American denominations have suffered from a similar misreading of history, mistakenly