Wake Forest University School of Divinity – Page 3

Humble power

Here in the People’s City, the one where our government tries to function as best it can. We went to the the National Museum of the American Indian which tells the long history that is a useful lense through which to view the radicalism of white greed in the place called the United States. Here we see the long trajectory of shameless bullDOGEing any idea, perspective or fact that stands in the way of taking. Here we see the highly inconvenient truth of a people who decided democratically to “remove” another civilized people who were in the way. White people are charmingly surprised. Even liberal like me are embarrassed. People of color, not.

Eisenhower monument in front of the Department of Education. He second inaurgural: “We look. upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose the building of peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails.”

Do facts matter in this raw play of power, taking, suppressing, denying? Do facts matter? Does theory matter; ones that allow us to see and act on patterns of fact? Does thought matter; the capacity to move close enough to see and far enough for perspective? That’s what academic institutions are for and why a radical minority must distract and instill fear into them.

For such a time as this to be with the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) talking about the Leading Causes of Life with the one who basically invented Obamacare, Dr. Howard Koh and Soma Saha of We In the World (WIN)

We had shared in the writing of the Handbook of Religion and Health, edited by Jim Cochrane, TC and me, who also wrote a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health. That’s a lot of typing in the midst of a catastrophic meltdown of democracy. Shouldn’t we be in the streets?

Power rests on facts, which is why any usurper of authority must suppress the facts, the story, the rhyme and reason they find unpleasant. They usually think that power rests on money so they round up some billions and billionaires and expect their way. But watch how the usurper spend that money to gain power. They spend first on suppression of reality to comply with the way they wish it was.

Facts are so inconveniently sticky. Just when one thin they are safely squashed them, they pop up again. Congress actually forbade disclosure for a half century the treaties with the Native Tribes. Now there is a museum on the National Mall about them.

Smithsonian museum pictures of Native children forced to pray to the christian nationalist god in the government boarding schools.

Fact: there really is too much carbon in the atmosphere to sustain human civilization. There really is way too much sexual diversity, which is why we have so many shades beyond pale pink in the human array. There really is more to life than buying stuff on Amazon—spiritual, family, neighborhood—so can’t be bought or sold. Life is too complex for rich people in a hurry to be richer.

Sorry.

How do we live in such a time? Focus on discerning the truth and then living in its light. TC, me and Jim Cochrane wrote in the American Journal of Public Health about crating deeper partnerships between faith-driven and public health networks. We hoped to move beyond simple project-oriented collaborations of convenience (parking the medical van in the church lot) to a deeper sense of shared mission for the people God so loves—the messy public. Deep partnership is slow. It grows from intellectual humility about facts, not unlike that underneath the museums on our national Mall.

Our book grew mostly in the brilliance and energy of Africa. “Carrying out this work on the ground in Lesotho confronted researchers with a problem: Similar to other Nguni languages, there is only one Sesotho word, bophelo, to cover both health and religion. It refers to a total ecology of the household, encompassing the person, family, clan, nation, those who have gone before (ancestors), the land on which one lives, its animals, and its crops, all honored in the hearth of the household. Hurt or harm one element, and you harm the whole.

“This respectful, curious engagement in Lesotho is important, not just for the uncovering of the word and concept of bophelo,…but because that process modeled three key factors in successfully navigating the relationship of faith and health. First, the learning came from an intentional approach in which we assumed we (the experts) might not know something important. Secondly, we moved in humility born of respect for the people, partly because two of our research team had grown up in the region. Thirdly, we took their language seriously and did not try to translate for the people into our language, which could not express the most important insight: English encourages the separation; the Sesotho language makes it impossible. These three principles are relevant even—maybe especially—when the cultural divide is less obvious, as when a public health practitioner looks the same, but is not the same, as the local public.”*

We are told change happens when power “moves fast and breaks things.” Not a fact. Instead, we get broken things, people, ideas and emptiness. Actual power moves slow and builds things…..on facts, properly understood in a theoretical framework that accords to reality. Took a while to make it through that sentence, didn’t it? Doesn’t quite fit on a bumper sticker?

Sorry.

Facts matter. Theory matters, or you won’t know what to do with the facts. And vision—seeing clearly– matters, or the people will die.

Dr. Stacy Smallwood of Wake Forest School of Divnity speaks about religion and health at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. @WakeDiv

Inconvenient Jesus

As institutions and norms we thought solid melt, we all have to figure out what reality grounds our lives. It is ultimately money, power, violence and the grab? Does my family’s life depend on me wearing a red hat while being silent as park rangers, doctors and elected allied leaders are humiliated? Is that how it works? An unknown number of Americans think so; about half are silent.

The current administration have had an impressive 5 weeks ploughing through the American institutions like the Germans through Belgium. That Reich, expecting 1,000 years, disappeared in five. But it took a global war, Holocaust and vaporizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end it. The revulsions produced the United Nations, World Health Organization, Marshall Plan, NATO, the European Union, liberating colonies around the world and a hundred other laboriously wrought agreements.

But if all those agreements are just undergirded by overwhelming US military force, why bother pretending otherwise? If we want “rare earth minerals,” why not just kick Ukraine to the Russians and take them? Is reality just that way?

Raw power isn’t just “over there.” I’ve never been mugged over my politics or faith. But the same thugs who attacked our Capitol are disrupting policy meetings in Washington now. Some time this Spring tens of thousands of normal Americans who miss democracy (or their Medicaid check) will be marching. They will vastly outnumber the thugs, but so was the Klan, and people got hurt.

It takes a vast outpouring of coordinated civil resistance to overwhelm the violent outliers. It works. As Tutu said, “anything war can do, peace can do better.” But this isn’t a video game. Some of the non-violent folks get injured; some die. So, you’d better be sure you want to bet your life on a loving God who guarantees mercy, justice and decency. Or go find a hat.

Most bands of thugs claim to have God on their side. The Klan burned…crosses. Putin has an obsequious Bishop. The Afrikaners had Christian Nationalism, as does MAGA.

This brings us to Jesus, the most inconvenient figure in all history; a vexation to every king, and pretender to royal privileges (I’m looking at you Bezos). Jesus has always tripped up bullies coopting the name “Christian.” The actual Jesus had a very inconvenient idea about power—don’t use it for yourself.

After an earlier blog, an actual Gideon told me that I needed a better Bible. They have warehouses full of them; I’ve only got a few dozen. But I have read mine, so let me be clear about three exegetical moves I am recommending in this radical moment:

First: Read Jesus before you skip to Christ. The latter is a nuanced theological construct that may or may not have anything to do with the Jewish Jesus who taught and was killed in Palestine. There is more than one “Christ” found in the New Testament, much of which was written a century or more after he walked. We’ve had hundreds of conclaves across millennia to sort this out. Most of those meetings ended up taming Jesus to be more useful to the Emperor Constantine or another one like him at the time. Every wannabe king has not only a chaplain, but a customized Christ.

Jesus life has cosmic implications which take a lot careful theology to figure out. Hence, seminary professors of different sorts.* That’s not blog work. And it doesn’t go fast.

My point is that, as important as it is, Christology and all the other -ologies can distract us from the basic call to follow Jesus’ Way of non-power, non-violence, pro-compassion healing.

Second, if your mental Jesus looks like you, you’re wrong (unless you’re a Palestinian Jew). He was from Nazareth, which was barely on the map of ancient Israel; rubble at the moment. Barn-born among the sheep, remarkable for all the privileges he did not have. Good news to the poor because he exposed the powerlessness of power. So, the King wanted him dead and slaughtered every boy under two to get him; his canny parents believing a dream about a different kind of power ran across the border.

Why bother with this old history? Jesus actually looked like the ones Christian Nationalism wants us to fear, despise, humiliate and, in the end, allow to be slaughtered in silence.

Third, the Jesus in the Bible wants it all. No to violence, but also to possession (one cloak for decency, but not two). Makes me a little nervous about my life. But it’s totally impossible to justify a violent kleptocracy on him. That’s why they talk vaguely about “Christian,” not Jesus.

This Jesus has implications for the movement now rising up to restore the damage to norms of modern constitutional democracy, checks and balances and law. Jesus didn’t enjoy any of those things. But he did pay taxes and ate with an IRS employee. So, he was ok with functional government as long as it wasn’t perverted to serve the rich. What make him angry were those who sold out the Temple to steal from anyone God so loves.

Find another god, if you must. But those who follow Jesus–even in a soft modern American kind of way—will stand against you without fear. Because love drives out all fear when you believe, as Jesus showed us with his life, that love of all is the ultimate power.

—–

*I am part of a Divinity School with some very smart colleagues, if you want one.

Rising

I don’t think I’ve I’ve ever seen the church awake, but I’m only 70-ish. This week makes me think that I will soon. It’s a long blog because of all the signs of the rising.

Students lead chapel at Wake Div School on Tuesdays which never fails. Afterward I went to a secret meeting of local clergy organized by Forsyth Sponsoring Committee of the NC Industrial Areas Foundation, which traces back to Saul Alinsky. We had to use an encrypted “Signal” app to disclose the location and met in an actual upper room, which has a long history in the Church.

The times force IAF to reverse how its normal focus on highly public events to hold local government accountable. But now those potential friends are highly vulnerable. And we can’t expect local government to do anything the faith folks are not. So, we focused on the churches can do nitty gritty tasks to protect our Spanish-speaking neighbors. The church is really good at practical collaboration: lining up lawyers, using our vans to move kids to school, training moms. Our hospital was and still is involved in the “Faith Action ID” which for years gives people without US documents a picture ID so the police can validate identity (and avoid arrest for petty things). It’s all underway.

Later the same evening Ardmore Baptist hosted Christians Against Christian Nationalism. I expected a couple dozen activist friends. Not so. Four hundred middle class, middle age, middle everything white people organized by the youth minister were in aflame about what is being done by MAGA Christians. Normal, normal, normal, even the beige fellowship hall. I even liked that the group wasn’t great at organizing. This is the what the rising of the middle of the long-slumbering church looks like after decades of rust. There will be 800 next time and we’ll walk somewhere (a “march”).

The next night I watched the A team online as Paul Rauschenbusch let a webinar of the Interfaith Alliance in a crisp, info-loaded practical deluge of encouragement. Asked if we are in a Bonhoeffer moment of radical resistance in small cells of disciples, Paul noted that we’re in the majority; we simply need to act like it. . You can watch it here along with the thousands who saw it live. This is not just IA, but a web of collaborating networks. A-team.

The next day Hold.Health posted “Purple.” Although I am bright blue, Hold.Health is more complex with many who care about health more than politics, so it took some editorial help to get it closer to purple. Not unlike a church committee, come to think of it. In these days we are leaning into our faith way more than operational health care Purple is a sacred color, especially now, but not just for chaplains. Faith-health folks view the work of health science researchers, community health centers and policy wonks as sacred, too.

Other national networks are tuning into the faith channel in different ways. Winston is working with We In the World to host a regional gathering the first weekend of May. In these parts working on justice so that we can be better ancestors is all about Spirit and sweat. We may start in Raleigh at Shaw University which was started by White abolitionists after the war to end white supremacy. It began training clergy but those students quickly turned to building the medical school because healing the soul, body, mind and community are the same thing. We’ll drive back to Winston to stand on Happy Hill which once—and still is—a place where you can see the whole city—soul, body, mind and community and imagine what God might want us to do. We’ll pray and sing at “Rising Ebenezer” at the top of the hill where prayers do rise.

Another one: David Docusen is a voice of hundreds—maybe thousands—of younger clergy embracing Neighborliness in a purple kind of way. They sound like evangelicals because they really like Jesus; but have no time for anything coopted, dumbed down and stripped of compassion. He calls ike Nehemiah to rebuild the broken walls of the city, with each of us focusing on our part. Right here on Patterson Avenue.

Thursday was “Founder’s Day” at Wake Forest University, which, like most liberal arts universities is trying to be invisible, terrified at losing federal funding. We met in Wait Chapel named for our slave-holding founder, which is awkward. But we took the occasion to name another campus building after the Hopkins’, two African American alumni doctors. Larry was fierce for justice, but nobody even alluded to anything timely until Corey Walker, our Div Dean at the very end channeled Dr. King’s voice, rhythm, cadence from Memphis the night before he was assassinated: “all we are asking is for you to live up to what you put on paper.” (skip to 1:26.21 mark.)

The week ended with stern instruction from our local Ministerial Association:

“A 24 hour BLACKOUT has been scheduled as the first of multiple counter measures to the attack(s) on Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

“TURN IT OFF Fri, Feb 28 from 12:00a to 11:59p.
WHAT NOT TO DO:
• Do not make any purchases.
• Do not shop online, or in stores
• No Amazon
• No Walmart
• No BestBuy
• No McDonalds
• NOWHERE!
“DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON FOOD:
• Fast Food
• Gas
• Major Retailers
• Do not use Credit or Debit Cards for non essential spending.
•If you must spend, ONLY support small, local businesses.
“WHY THIS MATTERS: Corporations and banks only care about their bottom line.
• If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.
• If they don’t listen, we make the next blackout longer.
• This is our first action.
• Our numbers are powerful.
• This is how we make history.”

////

No idea how. this bee found pollen in February at 40 degrees. But the babies needed it.

It finally got above freezing today. As it rose past 42 the tougher honeybees took flight. The queens had started laying eggs around the inauguration, so there will soon be tens of thousands of new bees ready for the rising of life and power in a couple of weeks when the maples bloom.

All they—and we—need to do is be who God made us.

Illustration by Phillip Summers about the obvious fact Jesus and his family were immigrants fleeing from an overreaching despot..

Good idea

We bottled 8 gallons of mead last night, which seems more relevant to our times than honey for tea. The bees must wonder if it was all worth their trouble. One bee gathers enough nectar for 1/12^th of a teaspoon of honey over their whole life, flying 500 miles, visiting tens of thousands of flowers. This is about the output (and the itinerary!) of the average writer, professor or pastor. They contribute to the strength of the human hive in tiny increments that are even less predictable than the bee which probably didn’t intend the mead. The human system lives on ideas that prove to be good and bad over time as they help or hurt our need to adapt to reality It is hard to tell with ideas.

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” The internet attributes this to Ilya Prigogine, but it is hard to tell where even the best ideas originate. Of course, every writer thinks their 1/12^th teaspoon of typing is that crucial small island of coherence as soon as it is typed. It actually takes a couple decades for a thought to stick and then another dozen for the speck of coherence to join many others to make even a small island.

*Not sure the bees envisioned the need for 8 gallons of mead. I think they would be okay, if we share.*

One of my own idea-specks was the about strengths of congregations in Deeply Woven Roots written at The Carter Center in 1997. It was useful enough to be used in many seminaries. Twenty one years later they found their way into the National Academies of Sciences workshop on how those strengths contribute to community health. We’ll see if that small island of coherence survives the cultural storm tides now raging.

A slight plurality of citizens turned the ideas in their gut to elect someone certain to knock our systems even further from equilibrium than they ever. Some of them like Bannon think they are the new island but I think not. We’ll see. The week after the voting I happened to be on an actual island built on granite and ideas now called New York. TC and I were tending to the grandsons as their mom gave birth to yet another play this one about the ultimate New Yorker, Billie Jean King. Lauren rarely passes an unscripted morning, so we trundled through the streets of the Lower East Side to the Tenement Museum—a living archive of the many waves of immigrants that became us.

I picked up a copy of The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, which flipped my history-major mind upside down. He dives deeply into the revolutionary scholarship of Charles Gehring who translated thousands of pages of 17^th century Dutch records of the New Netherlands to find us—the Americans. His main point buried under two centuries of self-serving English mythology is that New York is New Amsterdam and our core culture and politics Dutch, not English. The English colonial built their “city on a hill” filled with the spit and venom of Christian nationalism. The Dutch had a different idea: us.

The Dutch didn’t mean to plant us; but they put a trading depot on the tip of Manathans (Manhattan) in 1608. The company director launched a stupid war against the Native Americans in spite of the counsel of the settlers which set off a battle of ideas still underway. One of the settlers, Adriaen Van der Donk, was the the sole lawyer who wrote their petition to the West Indian Company and eventually carried the battle right to Amsterdam. He was deeply influenced by the new Dutch idea of “natural law”—which overruled royalty and the rich. They also adopted the odd Dutch idea of religious and ethnic tolerance—which was the absolute opposite of the English and pretty much everyone else in the world, at the time. “Something was happening that was quite unlike the unfolding of society at the two English colonies to their north, where rigid Puritans…and even more rigid Pilgrims maintained, in their wide-brimmed piety, monocultures in the wild.” (p61). Bannon and his tribe know the narrow-minded city they mean to build on our hill—Plymouth, not Amsterdam. It was bad history and worse two centuries later.

*Brooklyn has always thrived because of its welcome sign (over the right in red).*

This Dutch embrace of human complexity is the foundation of what became the United States. That idea has always seemed vulnerable to fear baiting. It is the taproot that feeds our radically adaptive capacity to find the next new way which we need urgently. The test of our adaptive ideas is not on TV but in the real reality of our ecosystem, the slowing of the Gulf Stream and a 3 foot rise of New York Harbor. We need the best of intelligence, spirit, gut and grit, not just the fragile brittle ideas of Christian nationalism. It’s really Puritan nationalism which failed, as all brittle ideas do. The Dutch one thrived and we will, too.

A good idea doesn’t stay on an island. The revolutionary Dutch ended up infecting the English, Welsh, Scots and South Africans just as they did New Amsterdam. There are a few pretend kings around today tolerated for amusement like poodles. The rich who admire their pomp have missed the tale of time confusing work and show.

When TC and I are in Glasgow or Cape Town people wonder what happened to the Americans. They ask “when did you become mean and narrow?” I didn’t know what to say, as I barely recognized my people.

Adriaen Van der Donk knew that there is no such thing as an American, Dutch, Scot, or African. We live on the same tiny blue island of coherence built on ideas that proved worthy of their times and may yet again.

Being here

*Cagn Cochrane, for the book, Prayers for God and the People, Prayers for a Newer New Awakening*

No, I’m not over it yet. So I went to the honeybees, who are Italian immigrants technically. They reminded me that they had seen way worse—their social structure has survived dinosaurs. I’m bottling mead this week from last year’s honey, which should help in these days.

I thought this week about my hospital episode few years ago. A squadron of doctors tried to discern why I was bright yellow with disabling chills and night sweats. All the labs had run off the rails so they said I was experiencing a “cytokine storm”.* The numbers made no more sense than white women voting for a convicted rapist, or a Hispanic for mass deportations. The doctors didn’t know the why of my body’s storm any more than I do Tuesday’s convulsion. They released me home thinking the blood work would sort out over the next few months. The body—and I pray our body politic—sorted things out.

Most of the world sees us Americans more clearly than we do ourselves. They see not just our quaint trappings of hometown democracy, but our military troops stationed in 170 other people’s countries. We are an empire every day that sometimes votes. The voters hardly notice, as all of those young men and women we send are “volunteers,” mostly poor. But at the Wake Forest football game we watched a handful of students get sworn into the army right on the Jumbotron; everyone clapped. Earlier when the helmeted gladiators had jogged onto the arena they headed right to the end zone, kneeled and prayed. I don’t know why or what for. The prayed up, hyper-patriotic Wake Forest team succumbed g to the California tofu eaters, 46-36. I don’t know what it all means except that politics, education, sport, military and public religion are in more of a blender than I thought.

Bill Foege said that “you don’t have to know where you are to be there. But if you want to go somewhere else, it is the very first thing you need.” Where are we?

God still matters here. Amanda Tyler, author of How to End Christian Nationalism, spoke in our library a couple miles from our Jumbotron. She runs the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, dating to the days when Baptists believed in separation of church and state (the same Baptists that started our Div School, which still does). She expects the MAGA people, unleashed by the clean electoral majority, to accelerate, not moderate. One facet of the attack is explicitly theological: Jesus as captive, not lord. The Christian nationalists are wrong theologically. But so have we been in allowing our Jesus to be so emeshed with empire, which is not new. The National Council of Churches (bastion of mainline liberalism) was opened by President and General Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952. Empire fits Hulk Hogan, but not Jesus.
Humans live here. Normal people think of politics roughly 25 minutes a year, maybe every four years. Don’t assume your neighbor’s vote tells you much about them. They might really like eggs, are too old to worry about an abortion and don’t quite make the connection with democracy. And they may already be embarrassed. So don’t treat them as if they have married some hussy. Just one bad vote in a bar, which happens. It is crucial that 23 months from now that they are quietly able to change their minds. We must not let these lines harden.
Intellectual humility matters here. The fruit of a decent education is the capacity for self-criticism with intellectually grounded humility. The better the education, the more fruit of a humble spirit. How so? It is only100 generations since the Greeks built Epidaurus for social, political and bio-medical healing when they were sick with war spirit. They applied all they knew and then left room for mystery beyond what they knew. They wove highest arts of theater and theology with such reverence that you can hear a denarius drop in its 14,000 seat amphitheater now. Did they know something we need now? Yup.
“Here” is the whole world. Empires sees the world as their (our) supply line. The Romans needed African grain and gold; we prefer oil, copper, lithium (and still gold). This is why every empire goes away, as will ours. We don’t need empires anymore. We have better tools for connection, communications and exchange. Their imperial claptrap and its Jumbobotron Jesus is simply unnecessary. We can do better than Elon and Donald picking up the phone like Caesar and Brutus. The UN is as flawed as twitter, but both are clues to another way that 7 or 8 billion people can share a planet. The train wreck about to happen may open a chance to figure it out.

I didn’t like this week.

But I like being here.

///// *A cytokine storm, also called hypercytokinemia, is a pathological reaction in humans and other animals in which the innate immune system causes an uncontrolled and excessive release of pro-inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines.

Potbound

Sometimes a houseplant will get too large for its clay pot. You don’t notice at first but it slows its growth as the roots circle sideways around and around in a futile strangle. Even in a new a new pot the roots will keep circling and hardly notice the new soil. Not really dead; a withered version of itself that lost the plot.

I’m talking about hospitals here, most of which were created a hundred years ago by faith and community groups who saw that the simple science of their time could benefit their communities by providing healing and justice at large scale. Hospitals were uncomplicated enough for church committees by the dozens to consider starting one with donations, led by pastors and nuns, linens sewn by congregations. Today, these roots circle inside massive brick pots, out-scaling every other local non-profit organization by a quantum; way beyond the capacities of pastors and nuns to keep them on task.

Non profit hospitals are supposed to be kept on mission by a legal tool called “community benefit,” which works about as well as a fig leaf in the Arctic. The idea of “benefit” dates from when “mission” meant giving away urgent care instead of the goal of community-scale well-being that health and social science now make possible. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences makes the missed opportunity painfully clear (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Population Health Funding and Accountability to Community: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/27258).

Kimberly DiGioia, a program officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, provided an overview of findings from her research on the effects of Medicaid expansion on community benefit (DiGioia, 2022). About two-thirds of hospitals in the U.S. are nonprofits, spending between 8 and 9 percent of their total operating expenses on community benefits, which seems impressive. But she explained that the vast majority of community benefit spending goes toward charity care, and unreimbursed Medicaid services while a small amount of this money goes to community health improvements. This includes educating its own health professionals, subsidized health services, medical research, and smallest portion, cash and in-kind contributions to community organizations.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act, DiGioia said, raised optimism that hospitals would report more revenue and less uncompensated care and thus spend more on community health. Indeed, the evidence has shown that the more Americans are covered, the more hospitals reported increased Medicaid discharges and decreased uninsured discharges. There was indeed a decline in uncompensated care, but this was offset by an increase in unreimbursed costs associated with caring for Medicaid patients. They charged more for less care and as a result, “community health improvement spending did not increase as expected.”

Pot bound.

Instead of growing into the rich soil of community health science, health system roots just circled the pot. This is a failure of hospital governance and timid government policy, not lack of science or administrative skill. Boards never fire a CEO for bad community health; the government settles for health fairs and a mobile van.

Thousands of highly skilled administrators and staff came to the profession expecting to grow like an oak in deep soil (they don’t mention the pot in school). These are honorable people trapped in doing small things. At a recent medical school reception honoring TC and I, Dough Easterling reminded us of when we traveled across the country in a Winnebago testing the idea that “everything we hope for is already happening.” He quoted us back to ourselves:

“We traveled with the sharp awareness that we are among the privileged class, linked to institutions among the most privileged of all—academic medical centers. It is striking how little is asked of these vast organizations. In most every community the healthcare organizations are pretty much busy with running the hospital. The staff might be kind in the ER and diligent on its wards, but not likely to cross the sidewalk in solidarity with the poor and suffering. There are exceptions in every hospital, but as institutions, the expectations remain low for a reason.” (Road Trip, Stakeholder Health, 2019)

Jim, TC and me in Wilmington NC —our 29th stop 2,600 miles after leaving San Diego. Everything we hope for is happening, but often trapped in small pots.

There are three ways to approach this withering, this tragic failure to fulfill our missional DNA.

One is to ramp up community benefit regulations. Not many hospitals have the internal capacity to know how to do that kind of work, so give local public health authorities power to get intimately involved in deploying hospital funds into serious programs of prevention, social determinants and chronic condition management. Don’t count “loss” on Medicaid and Medicare or training their own medical providers. The political screaming will be deafening as the ones that own the pots resist.

Two is to simply let non-profit hospitals remain inside their acute therapy pot, but give up the pretense that their efforts have much to do with community. Treat them like banks with some, but minimal, expectations of community good. Banks have to invest actual cash in the communities they previously damaged by redlining. Hospitals should do the same in the same communities as well as providing decent access for urgent services.

Third, create a special legal category for mission-driven hospitals. The 21^st century work of advancing health at community scale needs a whole new pot. These hospitals would be like Community Health Centers (FQHC’s) that get preferential reimbursement for services that make them sustainable once they are built. Hospitals would need what they once had—preferential and protected access to borrowed capital so they could have modern technology. Treat them like missional utilities with no advertising permitted and community people on their governance Boards. True accountability is needed for meaningful integration with public health and social services, both governmental, private and faith. Restricted pay disparity between highest and lowest staff. Built for mission.

The National Academies report notes that Community Health centers offer much of this logic, but built for primary care, not acute hospital services. But why not? Every one of the major hospital systems have some hospitals they don’t actually want, that won’t ever make much money. Why not flip them to this different model?

We could do so much more with what we have. But our communities have almost given up:

Contrasted with the high enthusiasm when the hospitals were created, “the low expectations of (of hospitals) were striking—maybe for more health fairs, slightly kinder financial assistance policies, or free parking for clergy. We didn’t hear any calls for transformation, hardly any for solidarity. Yet those of us inside the institutions know how much more might be possible.” (Road Trip: Soundings. USA: Stakeholder Press, 2019).

We’ve been circling the pot. We need to break it, point the roots to deep soil and get to work.

Soul sick

Lisa Lumb, artist. In dialogue with her twin sister.

I am not sick to my stomach. I am sick to my soul.

The first job of any religious person is to try to make their own religion safe for the world. Every religion has a dangerous side which has at various times in the evolution of the tradition provided cover, sometimes even encouragement, to the most obviously horrible facets we humans are capable of doing to each other. Every king, thug, despot, gang leader and e-gazillionaire has a chaplain willing to cheer them up when they are sad and encourage them when angry. Every castle had a chapel, even when it did not have flush toilets.

As a follower of a Jewish man named Jesus, I am sharply aware that people have done, in the name of my religion, some of the same repulsive things done in Israel this week. Hamas didn’t do anything that the Crusaders hadn’t wraught a millennia ago on the very same land.

My daughter is married to a Jewish man, with both my grandsons raised to respect and participate in the rituals of Jewish life. We just built a Sukkah shelter together that we bought on Amazon. They are San Francisco moderns, sophisticated and proud of lots of things no longer believed. They let a Baptist sit in the Seat of Elijah for the circumcision. And those kids are more likely to go to Burning Man or a trance music festival in Israel one day than church.

I am sick to my soul.

This weekend a couple dozen authors and scholars from Africa, Europe and the US will gather at Wake Forest University to blend our thinking toward a book published next year about religion and health. We meet in sharp awareness that many would wish for no religion at all.

I can’t blame anyone who looks at history and concludes that we should try a culture with no religion of any kind. I thought we were heading that way, as rational secular science-based logic was all the rage way back at the end of the 20^th century. It turns out that there is something in the human being that simply must tether beyond ourselves to ultimate meanings. Call it Spirit. Homo sapiens spiritus. We all have an ember that will flame for good or evil beyond all imagination.

Any of us brave enough to accept identity with one of the great traditions is responsible to see that the others of that tradition do not use that religious cover for heinous actions toward people of other religions; or those who are simply going about their life down the street in Hroza, Gaza or Winston-Salem. We say clearly that any religion—especially our own–that is comfortable with gross inequity in the distribution of things God intends for everbody should be rejected by the larger world as fraudulent. If one’s religion is not good for the whole world it obviously is not linked to the God who created the human species with nearly infinite variations of thought and imagination. Any religion that is not good for the whole world is dangerous to our small planet. Let us not leave that to secular people to say; it is our responsibility.

Practically, only a Christian can engage a dangerous Christian. Same for every other religion. This is not without risks, as some of the most virulent emotion is between people who share the same religious identity. But only an older white male Baptist can deal with the leadership of the minority group of older white male Baptists showing dangerous tendencies in public toward people within punching range. No Muslim, Jew or Sikh can sort out a crazed Baptist. That’s on us Baptists. And I’ll count on y’all to keep your extremists away from my grandsons.

The heinous savagery degrades all religion. Every faith favors humility, hospitality, kindness, generosity and peacefulness—especially toward strangers. And every religion violates every one of those time and again when it fails to hold itself accountable to its own teachings.

Today a kind of prayer beyond words lives in my soul, sick with sorrow.