The Coming Season

Classes start tomorrow.  I am taking Orientation to Old Testament Studies, New Testament Greek Exegesis, Minister and Mental Illness, and a speech course.  I also am doing a field placement at a mental hopsital nearby where I will lead spirituality groups, do pastoral counseling, and lead worship.  I feel healthily unprepared to be doing this, and I suppose maybe it should be so.  

I am looking forward to being a little bit busier as I have read too much news in the past two weeks.  Karl Barth says we should read the Bible alongside the newspaper, and for good reason, so that we don't let the church become co-opted by the government.  When the government claims the Christian God as a tribalistic God in order to justify killing other tribes of people, it makes for bad politics and even worse religion.  Barth protested such a course while in Germany and Switzerland during the 30's.  Apparently we haven't been reading our newspapers or our Bibles, or maybe just not the two of them together...

Politically, I am a Christian, which means in electoral politics, I am rather apolitical since I don't see the world changing drastically through any single election.  My hope lies elsewhere, and my call to be political is much more bound up in whether or not I live as a Christian rather than vote as a Democrat or a Republican.  However, I am particularly excited for this coming election in which, we might just be able to vote to get our God back, a God that doesn't bless our government's rampages.  And if God isn't found in our army, then I feel that less people will die.  I'll vote for that combo.

Imagine if God wasn't on our money...