Creeds codify and inform our faith, but in the Methodist tradition we do not equate creeds with faith.  Creed, of course, comes from the Latin credo, “I believe.”  For example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Whoever says ‘I believe’ says ‘I pledge myself to what we believe.’ Communion in faith needs a common language of faith, normative for all and uniting all in the same confession of faith.” In the UMC, as was established by a retired UMC pastor in our group, we affirm the Apostle’s Creed upon baptism and as part of the membership vows. He advocated the position that the UMC is a creedal church. The Apostle’s Creed, however, is not for the UMC “normative for all and uniting all in the same confession of faith.”  The UMC teaches on its web site: “While the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Faith are considered foundational documents, they are not legalistic or dogmatic creeds that do not allow for differing interpretations. They are guidelines that themselves require continuing reflection, interpretation and expansion in light of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.”

This snippet from Interpreter in 1999 explains well why we use the creeds.  Rev. Peck wrote, “Unlike some churches that require affirmation of a strict list of beliefs as a condition of membership, The United Methodist Church is not a creedal church.”  The 19th century German Reformed theologian, Philip Schaff, understood well that the Methodists were not creedal: “John Wesley … sought Christianity more in practical principles and sanctified affections than in orthodox formulas, and laid greater stress on the ecumenical consensus which unites than on the sectarian dissensus which divides the Christians. The General Rules, or recognized terms of membership, for the original Methodist ‘societies’ (not churches), are ethical and practical, and contain not a single article of doctrine. They require ‘a desire to flee the wrath to come and be saved from sin,’ and to avoid certain specific vices.”

Finally, John Wesley clearly considered the creeds and creedal assent as non-essential in Sermon 7, “The Way to the Kingdom:”

For neither does religion consist in Orthodoxy, or right opinions; which, although they are not properly outward things, are not in the heart, but the understanding. A man may be orthodox in every point; he may not only espouse right opinions, but zealously defend them against all opposers; he may think justly concerning the incarnation of our Lord, concerning the ever-blessed Trinity, and every other doctrine contained in the oracles of God; he may assent to all the three creeds, — that called the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian; and yet it is possible he may have no religion at all, no more than a Jew, Turk, or pagan. He may be almost as orthodox — as the devil, (though, indeed, not altogether; for every man errs in something; whereas we can’t well conceive him to hold any erroneous opinion,) and may, all the while be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart.

Does the UMC use historic creeds? Yes, clearly. Do the creeds inform Christian faith in important ways? Yes. Are the creeds, namely the Apostle’s Creed, integral to the membership vows of the UMC? Yes. All of these things and more are true, but they do not determine the UMC as a creedal church in the sense described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example. I suppose, in the end, it depends on what meaning and theology one wants to pour into the word “creedal.” If we mean by the word creedal that “the UMC is a creedal church” in that creedal acts as an adjective to simply describe one facet of the UMC, that is that the UMC uses and highly values the creeds, then the answer is yes. On the flip side, if we assert that “the UMC is not a creedal church” for the reasons I have given here and to communicate and properly emphasize Christianity as a “religion of the heart,” as did Wesley, then the answer is no. This is why I assert the UMC is not a creedal church because I believe most people have some conception of the phrase “creedal church” along the lines of the Roman Catholic Church’s understanding.

If you want a lengthy explanation and defense of why the UMC is a creedal church, read this essay.  From the first paragraph: “[T]he dividing issues in the church are theological not sociological in nature, and much more serious than issues of human sexuality.  As will be explored in this essay another issue, less emotional but more significant is the question as to whether or not the Methodist Church is a creedal church as are all other branches of Christianity. This essay will answer the question in the affirmative.”

In response to Claude Mariottini‘s post “Left Behind,” I releftecd a bit:

What infuriates me most about Camping and the ridiculous media attention devoted to his crackpot theories is that the Bible as the “Word of God” has failed again in the eyes of popular culture.

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” –Matt 16:28

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. –Rev 1:1

You see, the entire Bible is “false,” then, because the “Son of Man” did not come “in his kingdom” within that generation, and the events described in Revelation did not take place “soon.” This also means Jesus was a “false” prophet because the things he predicted did not come to pass when he said they would.

Playing these ridiculous games with the Bible as a kind of divining rod or a Ouija board comes from an utterly false and destructive view of the Bible as the “Words” of God. If we start with the particular view of God as a perfect and remote King somewhere “out there” who can do no evil, is all-knowing and all-powerful, and who perfectly inspired the words of the Bible and that some kind of pure crystalline “Truth” is captured therein with no contradictions, etc., then the Bible, and by implication God, will fail us miserably over and over.

The simplest metaphor I can think of for Christians to understand the Bible as the “Word of God” is that it is the Word of God because it reveals Jesus Christ as the Logos, the Word, of God.

So what, then, is the cause of income inequality? The jury is still out on that.

Really? It seems clear to me that many thousands of years of biosocial evolution have created within humans a “hoarding” drive to protect against the rough times. Flash forward 200,000 years since humans branched off on the hominid tree and developed an economic system known as “capitalism,” which thrives on the accumulation and investment of wealth, and then you’ve got a pretty good explanation.

Economists do not agree and policy wonks are equally divided on corrective steps.

I suggest there are essentially three options, the first one is not corrective, in my opinion:

1. Do nothing and allow capitalism to increasingly aggregate wealth into the hands of a few and suffer periodic exacerbated booms and busts in the financial markets as the merely rich push vast sums of money around to get a return on the investment of the super rich.
2. Somehow convince / mandate wealthy people to share much, much more of their wealth to promote the common good.
3. Increase taxes on the wealthy and “re-distribute” (oh-no!) the wealth to promote the common good through investments in social welfare programs, education, infrastructure improvement, etc.

#3, while prone to corruption and wasteful spending, is probably the most practical option.  And, it seems to me, that this is what “we” (modern liberal welfare states) have been doing since the Great Depression, which has made life livable for untold millions of people who otherwise would have lived miserable lives and died prematurely.

I am still an idealist with #3, that through imperfect democracy the people will actually vote for what’s in the best interest of everyone.

Almost totally unrelated to Douglas’s post:

“For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me” (Mt 26:11).

“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

So what is it, Jesus? We will “not always have you?”  Or you’re going to be with us until “the end of the age?”

That’s the subject for another blog post.

Companies in the S&P 500 paid about 20% versus the statutory rate of 35%.  About 1/3 of the 500 companies paid higher than the 35%.  Guess who those companies are?  Some of the highest tax payers?  Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips both paid more than 40% in taxes.  So much for all those allegedly ridiculous tax breaks the oil companies get.  Whirlpool hasn’t paid taxes in three years.  AT&T paid nothing.  GE paid nothing.

Look at the chart based on CBO numbers for 2008.  Only 12% of federal tax revenue came from corporate taxes.  I recently heard on NPR the number for 2010 was 8%, if I remember correctly, in the wake of the Great Recession.  Two seconds looking at that chart will reveal to anyone with common sense what we need to do to solve our budgetary issues.  Forget tinkering with corporate taxation.  Set it at 20%, eliminate loopholes, and forget about it.  We need to increase the wages of common folk, which will increase the payroll tax piece of the pie and thus get us on the road to keeping Medicare and Social Security solvent, and we need to redistribute the income tax burden to be more fair based on wealth.

Ignoring deductions, etc. it’s ridiculous that a single person making $106,800 a year pays 22% versus a single person making 200% MORE at $320,400 a year pays only 6% more at 28%.  Now let’s throw in the payroll tax that gets capped at $106,800.  Forgetting the 2% reduction in 2011, the $107k employee pays an additional 6.2% in FICA, thus the $107k employee pays 28% to the federal government.  How about the $320k employee?  That person pays the same FICA, of course, and thus in total only pays 2% more at 30% to the federal government. The first person has about $77k to live on and the other person has $224k to live on.  I haven’t even touched the subject of taxation on the ultra-wealthy who “live off of” dividends and long-term capital gains.  What about retirees, you ask, and dividends, etc.?  Simple, exempt below a comfortable level such as $52k (median household income level).  If someone is making hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions a year by selling off portions of a huge estate, it’s totally ridiculous they only pay 15% capital gains.  Warren Buffett has repeatedly pointed this out, that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does for this reason.

True, but I think we are now morphing from the good old biploar days of the USA vs. the “evil empire” USSR or even the “War on Terror” to something even more sinister.  At least in the “us vs. them” model the (im)morality of warfare was fairly well-defined along ideological boundaries, i.e. democracy and market-based capitalism are better than soviet polit bureaus and state-controlled five-year plans.

Now we’re selling our military might as a “Global Force for Good.”  If you haven’t seen any of the latest commercials for the Navy using this marketing slogan, I suggest you watch this two-minute commercial that looks and feels more like a movie trailer for the next Tom Clancy story than a tool for recruitment.

How else do we justify attacking Libya?  Who’s the “them?”  Just a few years ago, President Bush held up Qaddafi as the exemplar of being a reasonable dictator in halting his WMD programs, allegedly because the war in Iraq scared him into doing so.  No rogue terrorists have attacked us or anyone else from Libya, though the Lockerbie bombing is still within memory. Bush had to brainwash us into thinking Iraq could attack us at any moment with aerosol cans of mustard gas or whatever the heck they allegedly had, which was, however, still an exercise of “us vs. them” logic.  Now we’re attacking Libya because, why?, because we’re a “Global Force for Good.”  Um, as far as I can tell, a bunch of disaffected military leaders from non-Qaddafi tribes looked to seize the moment of “rage” sweeping the Middle East to usurp Qaddafi.  Based on the facts, the uprising in Libya is an armed rebellion, not a peaceful revolution as in Egypt.  I suppose if the rebels succeed in Libya (and who knows what we’ll get in Qaddafi’s place), then they will write their history books about their great “revolution,” just as the Americans did about their rebellion against the British, excuse me, revolution.

These Navy commercials and this new slogan are seriously disturbing developments in the evolving control of our culture, already an Orwellian mix of perpetual warfare and “truth” decay.

First, I think we have to scale the language barrier.  The word “Allah” in Arabic is simply the generic word for “God.” All three religions use numerous words and phrases to refer to “God,” with Christianity perhaps using fewest, such as the Trinitarian “names:” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Occasionally Christians sprinkle in words like “Almighty,” “Creator,” “Redeemer,” “Sustainer,” etc.  Jews and Muslims are more expressive, IMO, with their diverse names for God.

Second, all three religions have as their primary tenent that there is only ONE God and that there are no other gods.

Judaism (Deut. 6:4):
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Christianity (Mark 12:28-30):
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Islam (Holy Qur’an 112:1-4):
Say: He is Allah, the One and Only! Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not nor is He begotten. And there is none like unto Him.

Third, we should not confuse various monotheistic theologies of “idolatry,” ie. giving devotion to a “false god” instead of or in distraction from devotion to the “One God,” with the idea that members of the other two major three monotheistic relgions worship a “different God.”  I may disagree with Islamic theological conceptions of “God,” but who am I to somehow “know” God more than they do?  Because I am a card-carrying member of the “Jesus Club,” does that mean I have the “Truth” about God?  No.  (I refer the reader to the Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine and her imagined story of entering heaven after death, which ends in Jesus interpreting John 14:6.)

Fourth, 1 John 4:16 says, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”  That’s clear, isn’t it?  Again: “Whoever lives in love lives in God.” Verse 7: “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”

Fifth, the Bible contains many, many teachings from diverse circumstances and theologies that developed over approximately 1000 years and thus does not contain a perfectly harmonious witness to one simple view of God, ethics, salvation, etc. as we think it should according to our modern sensibilities about “truth” and “logic” and “scientific reasoning” that we have been inculcated with in the West for centuries. For example, in the same letter of 1 John the writer states in 2:23: “No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.” Given our modern evangelical zeal for a Christocentric view of salvation, it’s easy to take this one verse out of context and say, “See, if you deny Jesus you deny the One True God!” Yet, in chapter four we encounter something quite different.

Sixth, Jesus was a servant, not a dictator.  To use the contemporary parlance of today’s youth, Jesus came to ask us a question, “Are you going to be a ‘hater’ or a ‘lover’?”  Do we “love” Muslims by saying they worship a “different God?”  Do we “love” them by telling them they’re going to hell if they deny Jesus as their Lord and Savior?  Are we “loved” when some Muslims claim we Christians commit the one unforgivable sin of shirk (polytheism) by believing the Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, ie. God is Three, and thus deserve “Hell-Fire?”

Seventh, Matthew 7:21: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”  What’s the will of God, then?  Well, many things, and God’s will likely changes depending on the circumstances, which is the resounding witness of the Scriptures.  But as for a simple conception of the will of God?

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

–Micah 6:8

That’s it, that’s enough, yet there is always more in acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God.

As the great art rock singer and lyricist David Byrne of the Talking Heads sang three decades ago in “Crosseyed & Painless:”

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them

Please allow me to “twist the truth around” some more. My response follows (snippets of original email in bold).

Claiming “deindustrialization” as a “national crisis” and thus impying “reindustrialization” as a solution to unemployment, poverty, etc. is a red herring.  The United States is still the world’s largest manufacturer with more manufacturing output than China, India, and Brazil combined, while the U.S. has just 11% the population of those three countries.
________________________________
Sent: Sun, January 2, 2011 5:48:06 PM
Subject: Bottom of Hole–Stop Digging

This is a lot of food for thought, interesting–some disgusting.
.
.
.
How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?

What’s the “very, very serious problem on our hands?” Unemployment? Poverty? Losing wealth? And “whose” hands are we talking about? The USA need not worry about “losing wealth” when it is still by far the wealthiest country on this planet.  If the problems at stake are unemployment and poverty, then let’s reorient our priorities to educate our children better than every other country on earth so we can increase the US’s share of high-paying “service” jobs like engineers, computer programmers, financial services, professional scientists, medical technicians, doctors, nurses, and so on …  The answer to unemployment is “reindustrialization?” The forces of global capitalism are only going to bring back manufacturing jobs if the wages are low enough.  Is that what “we” want?  Paying minimum wage to people to manufacture T-shirts for Walmart and toys for McDonald’s Happy Meals?

How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?

Total red herring. US GDP has remained fairly consistent for 40 years at around 27% of global GDP and retains the highest per capita GDP of the populous countries, some 30% higher than #2 among the populous countries, Germany, and SEVEN TIMES the productivity of China.

How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national economic suicide?

We must first recognize the latent racism in this question since more than 80% of the city of Detroit is black (e.g. Buffalo, NY, has a comparably high total crime rate to Detroit, a similar history of “deindustrialization,” though 80% of Buffalo is white; why not use Buffalo as the example?). Second, we must recognize the fallacy of correlation with causation when talking about cities as “rotting war zones,” i.e. places of higher than average violent crime rates; even the libertarian, free-marketeer Thomas Sowell recognizes this fallacy in his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. Third, violent crime in Detroit has actually decreased in the last three years during the Great Recession. Fourth, while it’s true that a significant chunk of the manufacturing base of the U.S. has left the country, before the globalization trend picked up there was the redistribution of manufacturing capacity from cities to rural areas and collar counties where corporations got tax incentives, access to more land, and where wages were lower. Why not bemoan the deindustrialization of rural America as leading to the surge of meth labs, pot farms, drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, and depression?

The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis. It needs to be treated like one.

Got it … though “deindustrialization” is still a red herring crisis.

If you disagree with this article, I have a direct challenge for you.  Can anyone explain how a deindustrialized, mortgaged America has any kind of viable economic future?

Anyone?  Sure. How about history’s most successful allocator of capital?  Warren Buffett: “This country will solve its problems. We’re not so good at avoiding problems but we’re pretty good at solving problems. In the early ’80s we thought Germany and Japan would be eating our lunch and we’d all just be working at McDonald’s and cutting hair to keep busy. We’ve added tens of millions of jobs. We do come up with things you can’t predict; we’ll have a software industry or a great aircraft industry; those things come along. To the world right now 12% of our GDP is going to export and 35 years ago only 5% was. So we’re making make things the world wants. I agree with you, governor [Ed Rendell], you’ve really got–you’ve got to count on the potential of people that you and I don’t even know coming up with new things to do that the world wants. Historically we’ve been very good at that and I think we’ll be good at it in the future.”

America is in deep, deep trouble folks.  It is time to wake up.  Do you have the courage to do something/anything about it?

Yes. Stop whining about massive shifts in global capitalism and do something to make the system work better for everyone. In the end, it’s entirely possible robots will manufacture everything, so then what will we humans do? What happens to the massive energy sector when humans create viable commercial fusion reactors with Helium-3 from the moon, thus displacing countless millions of workers employed in jobs related to the processing of fossil fuels for energy? If we need to “wake up” to realize anything we need to wake up and realize we need to stimulate societal valuation and esteem of “humanitarian” jobs in the arts, social services, education, health care, hospitality, etc.

Who would have thought just twelve years ago that a feisty little start up in a Bay-area garage would today be a $200 billion juggernaut–Google–that does not manufacture anything!  Recently a private equity deal values Facebook at $50 billion.  What does Facebook manufacture? Nothing! Disney is a $73 billion company. What do they manufacture? Answer: essentially nothing but “dreams” and “happiness.”

This morning we heard one of the most famous passages in the Bible, Isaiah chapter 11, a passage often called the “Peaceable Kingdom.” In this passage the prophet envisions a peaceful, harmonious world where animals that are normally predator and prey lay down with each other in a world where their former natures have been transformed into a new life-giving reality. Isaiah chapter 11 has been the subject of many artistic interpretations throughout the centuries. One of the most well-known depictions is by the Quaker painter Edward Hicks in the early 19th century. He depicted children in intimate repose with the transformed animals while off in the distance by the river is William Penn making his treaty with the Native peoples. In one version of the painting called “The Peaceable Kingdom and Penn’s Treaty,” Hicks portrayed Penn, according to one art historian, as carrying a “flowing banner inscribed with lines from the book of Luke telling of the coming of the messiah.”

In the representation of American artist John August Swanson, he included a broad and diverse array of animals—many more species than are mentioned in Isaiah chapter 11—in his trademark style that he describes as “influenced by the imagery of Islamic and medieval miniatures, Russian iconography, the color of Latin American folk art, and the tradition of Mexican muralists.” What I find particularly inspiring about John August Swanson’s version are the people making their way up a trail meandering through the mountains, holding candles on their way up to the peaceable kingdom, which has Isaiah’s child in the center holding his or her own candle.

Master watercolor artist Will Bullas who, in his words, “makes fine art fun,” plays on the Isaiah 11 motif by portraying the lion and the lamb sitting at a bar together drinking martinis in his painting titled, “Peaceable Kingdom with Two Olives.”

And last but not least, we have the artwork of our five-year-old son Tim Walters in our living room. After arranging his VeggieTales Nativity, Tim laid down his precious plastic snakes he bought in Yosemite Valley this summer on vacation by facing them around the baby Jesus, his family, and their visiting entourage. Tim inadvertently suggests—with some imagination—that we can see the crushing of the serpent’s head in Genesis 3:15 transformed into the child nursing where poisonous snakes live in Isaiah 11:8.

All of these works of art interpret Isaiah 11 through their own unique inspiration and imagination. Isaiah 11 is the culmination of human hope for a transformed world, a world when and where, in the words of John in Revelation 21, “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” This is the inauguration of the transformed world that we celebrate in the birth of Christ, God’s redeemer, on the day of Christmas. But I get ahead of myself. We are currently in the season of Advent. This is the season we wait expectantly for the transformed world. And this is the season that we hope… for many different things and desires of our heart to be fulfilled. Our hope is not grounded, however, in the comfort of familiar yearly patterns of consumerist preparation for the “holidays” with Black Friday and Cyber Monday as our starting points. Our hope is grounded in the transformed reality of Isaiah 11, a reality that is yet future but is also past and present, especially in the birth, work, death, and resurrection of Jesus … and his followers … and in us. Without the visions and missions, sacrifices and interpretations of all the believers that have gone before us for millennia, our aspirations for and imagination of God’s peaceable kingdom would be greatly impoverished, if not impossible. This realization and appreciation is what the apostle Paul was getting at in his letter to the bands of Christians in Rome that we just heard spoken here among us: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” It is fitting that Paul, in culminating his argument in chapters 14 and 15 and, indeed, of the whole of Romans, recalls the words of Isaiah 11:10, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.” The “root of Jesse,” of course, is a direct allusion in Christian terms to Jesus.

Christian faith, whether it is weak or strong—as Paul wrote in Romans before the text we heard this morning—is rooted in history, in the historical unfolding of God’s transforming and perfecting grace in creation. “Faith” in Christ is not simply mutual consent that “Christians” do certain things or eat certain foods or worship in certain ways, in contrast to people who are not “Christians.” Paul wrote in Romans 14:17, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christian peace and joy are rooted in the hope for an Isaiah 11 transformation of the world, and the scriptures testify to that transformation through which “we might have hope” so that we may “live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus.”

The artwork of Edward Hicks and John August Swanson with their unique technique and the playful art of Will Bullas and even Tim Walters can intrigue and inspire us to appreciate their visions and interpretations of Isaiah 11. But if we do not imagine for ourselves how we may contribute to the building up of the peaceable kingdom and then persistently act upon our hopeful imagination in that kingdom, then we do not have hope at all. True hope cannot be experienced vicariously or attained through a vision. I suppose it is possible for the awesome hope of another to create in us feelings of joy and peace and, perhaps, even feelings of faith, but unless we generate within ourselves the Isaiah 11 hope for a radically transformed world, then we will be chronically disappointed in the world as it is and further delay the realization of the future reality of Isaiah’s harmony by not participating with each other in ways that encourage a “spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord justice,” in the words of Isaiah. “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”

I started by showing you some artistic depictions of Isaiah Chapter 11 and the peaceable kingdom. In conclusion I would like to introduce you to one more artist that I recently discovered in a brief mention in Leadership Journal and that I think had a strong vision of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom. He is James Hampton of South Carolina. Mr. Hampton’s artwork is displayed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Despite this recognition, Mr. Hampton was almost completely unknown by anyone as an artist while he was alive as he lived an isolated life likely fraught with mental illness. He left home at age 19, joined the military during World War II, and then worked as a janitor for the government in Washington D.C. for many years upon exiting military service. Every night after work for years and years he would enter a garage he rented in a D.C. neighborhood to work on what he called, “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly.” Inspired by personal religious visions and his obsession with the Bible’s apocalyptic material, such as Daniel and Revelation, Mr. Hampton created what is arguably one of the nation’s premier treasures of American folk art by transforming common consumables and garbage into his gold and silver masterpiece of God’s throne room. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Assistant Curator, wrote in 1976 of Mr. Hampton’s artwork:

An ingenious selection and use of materials and an innate feeling for design characterize Hampton’s radiant work. A poor man, he applied his imagination to the transformation of discarded materials. Merchants in the used-furniture district near the garage remember that Hampton would browse, inquire about prices, and sometimes return with a child’s wagon to carry away his purchases. All of the objects are covered with different grades of gold and aluminum foils removed from store displays, bottles, cigarette boxes, and rolls of kitchen foil. Hampton paid neighborhood indigents for the foil on their wine bottles, and he walked the streets with a croker sack in which to carry his finds. He also gathered used light bulbs, cardboard, insulation board, construction paper, desk blotters, and sheets of transparent plastic, probably from the trash of the government buildings where he worked.

An adage found on his bulletin board is telling: “Where There Is No Vision The People Perish.”

As with the vision of Isaiah 11 metaphorically transforming wild predators into playmates with domesticated animals and even children, Mr. Hampton’s artwork transforms materials many of us would casually see as waste, as the disposable products of exhausted lives and exhausting lifestyles.

Mr. Hampton was truly a man of vision, but I do not think I can call him a man of hope in the sense as I have expounded it this morning. Mr. Hampton’s artwork is a transformation, yes, and Mr. Hampton is the transformer. But it is unfortunate that Mr. Hampton was caught in the spiral of self and subjectivity. He was almost completely alone in his artistic endeavor and he did not allow or was, for whatever reason, incapable of allowing others into his life in ways he surely deserved and in ways that may have transformed him into a healthier and more whole person. Despite what I may think about Mr. Hampton or how I may judge his meager and troubled life, his artwork lives on and reflects the vision of Isaiah 11. It is my desire and prayer that we do what James Hampton apparently could not: to allow ourselves to be continually transformed and perfected by each other and to work to transform and perfect others according to the hope that reaches its pinnacle in our Lord, Jesus the Christ.

Through Mr. Hampton’s artwork and that of others that reflect the Isaiah 11 vision of transformative hope, we also hopefully see ourselves as the already transformed artwork of God and Jesus Christ as the transformer. This is the Advent message I would like you to take with you today. We should not be fooled by the messages of the world that deceive us into thinking of others or ourselves as incomplete or, worse, as merely consumers of ultimately useless items. We are already transformed works of God, and we should always be aware of this present reality and act to further perfect and multiply ourselves in this expression by encouraging all others to see themselves, too, in this light. Only then will Isaiah’s and our hope be fulfilled in the actualization of the peaceable kingdom.

There’s no denying the genius of his musicality and virtuosity, both of which are classically trained and delicately poetic. The volume was too low for my liking, especially when his piano had to compete with the occasional Excel XLERATOR hand dryer in the bathrooms in the back of the theater and down one level. At first I thought some idiot was running a vacuum or something in the bar areas and then realized after the show when I went to the bathroom the sound was coming from the hand dryers. Totally annoying. Three-to-four people went to the bathroom during the show and used the hand dryers. It’s not their fault. I fault The Vic. They need to rip those suckers outta there and put in paper and deal with the cost and clean up. For these quieter, artsy performances the hand dryers are a total buzz kill. And then there were the few people coming and/or going from the theater and letting the doors bounce closed. Argh! I was so annoyed.

There weren’t many people there, and there were only general admission seats, i.e. folding chairs on the main floor. The balcony was closed. The cool thing about his performance was the set up of two Yamaha grand pianos. Most of the pieces were just him playing the grand with periodic, deeply low-pitched, rumbling, pink noise-ish, wave-like sound effects, barely audible, that served as atmospheric connective tissue among all of the pieces. He was also accompanied by minimalist, abstract video run from an iMac. There were two pieces, IIRC, that he played as a “duet” with the other grand controlled by a digital Disklavier, which played Sakamoto’s pre-recorded performance including all of his nuanced pedaling and key pressure, i.e. the other grand was a very sophisticated player piano. In a very real sense he played duets with himself. All three encore pieces were duets using this method.

This is turning into a disaster. I’m starting to wonder if this will prompt some type of legislation on oil rigs. Perhaps the black swan for ATP or any gulf operator is closer than we think.

To which I replied:

If it can be imagined, then it is not a black swan.  IMO, while this is truly a disaster, the history of offshore drilling in the last three decades has been one of continued worker safety improvements and continued success in the prevention of these kinds of disasters. It’s remarkable, actually, that these types of events don’t happen more often, but it is human nature to freak out over the spectacular tragedy and then somehow think we must do something radical to prevent the next one from happening.  The perfect example is 9/11.  Spectacular tragedy and devastation. Response: WMD in Iraq is a threat to us all of sudden, never mind they got rid of all of their WMD, as they agreed to do, and never mind we were the ones who armed them in their conflict against Iran. Result: Invade Iraq, thus instigating the death of 100,000+ people, including thousands of our own soldiers.