The Supremes are in the news again. Their latest decision to reach deep into the lives of the people is their interpretation of that eternally challenging second amendment to the Constitution.

It is only one sentence long, but in the ways we govern ourselves it seems one of the most puzzling statements of all. It says simply, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It is beloved of the NRA. It is a daemon for the ACLU. Yet it is the law of the land.

Nobody is above it, we insist. The judiciary ranks on a par with the executive and the legislative in our system of balanced authority — the framers, the enforcers, the interpreters. But when push comes to shove as it often does, the courts are the system to which we turn to set things straight, to remind us that even they are not above the very laws they themselves make and implement.

This is at the heart of what is so often called the American political experiment. It is the greatest gift we can give to the rest of the world. We give it best, of course, not by force, not by breaking it and wrangling over it and being underhanded with it, but by show and tell, by the authority that comes by minding it and showing how it work for us. Thus can it become a major source of our confidence.

The proper lections this Sunday are in their way about that confidence. The prophet Zechariah cautions Israel about placing its weary confidence in temporal rulers (Zech 9.9-12). With the strangest of irony, he even calls them “prisoners of hope.” Paul warns Jewish Christians about placing absolute confidence in the law (Rms 7.15-25a). Even its most careful keeping hardly liberates us from sin, he counsels.

Matthew reminds us not to romanticize the historical Jesus (Mt 11.25-30). If the law veiled this with a reverence for ordinances and stipulations to protect our frailty, the incarnation of the Word tore that veil away once and for all.

Further, the confidence of the faithful community is of a kind that binds friends together, no longer the kind that binds lawgiver and subject together. Such confidence finds wisdom in loving, not killing one’s enemy. The faithful community’s confidence is robust from within and based on the Christ. It makes nothing relative but the irrelevant. Jesus turns the common tradition of the Judaic yoke of legalism through his own offer of gentle leading. “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Where, then, is our confidence? Many claim us to be a Christian nation. Many more confirm that it is our religious pluralism that is the better source of our strength. We pledge to be one nation under God, but even that is often questioned. We’re never quite sure exactly when and where prayer and the location of the Ten Commandments is really appropriate.

As Christians, where, then, must be our confidence? If, as Jesus so calls us, we place our confidence in him and accept the offer of his gentle yoke, we then become agents and servants of his love for God and neighbor and self, implementing that in our lives.

Once again in this season of our Declaration of Independence and for better or worse, we live in this land and in such a system by God’s grace. We pledge the kind of citizenship that makes it work. Might the law by some strange turn incarnate grace, be motivated by the Great Commandment as it takes shape in justice and peace for all? Might that be our mandate? Might that be where we place our confidence?

Pent 7/8A (Mt 10.40-42)

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Mt 10.40).

So far as Jesus is concerned, the last thing card-carrying Christians need is a card to carry. If, indeed, there are any credentials required at all, love and justice will do jes’ fine. And according to Matthew’s take on the Good News, Welcoming.

Welcoming one another is not only what makes us disciples, it’s what makes being a disciple about. It’s what makes us who we are. No amount of grandstanding, breast-beating, ecclesiastic gerrymandering, confessions, or decades of evangelism can take its place. Wellcome and welcome all and thass all.

So what does it mean for us to love one another in this welcoming way? And how on earth will anybody, presuming they should much care one way or the other, ever know whether we do or don’t? How can you tell a disciple from a devil without a program?

Our founders were mighty smart to separate out the religious and the secular institutions in our nation, to make them — and to insist that they remain — unbeholden to one another. Church is not state and vice versa. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to the both of us.

And they were smart, as well, not to talk a lot about love. What they were after for a welcome change was a just and open and fair society and a government that could pull it all off and keep it that way. Even a welcoming church was welcome to help out, but all the same, was also welcome to stay out.

We churchers would look a long way before we’d ever find a political system more conducive to or nourishing of our own self-understanding. We’d also look a long way before we could embrace such an experiment with the full empowerment of our stewardship, both to enable and coax it along whenever it wavered and to indict and admonish it with something like the Isaiah two-step whenever it erred and strayed.

But the best way and, indeed, the only way to embrace this herculean ministry, of course, is to be such a society ourselves, then to do it, to model it, to make it so attractive folks simply have to have a piece of the action for themselves. It is to take this ministry far more seriously than we take ourselves. It is to realize that loving and welcoming one another in any kind of institutional or even communal way is to practice justice and fairness and civility and respect in our own common allegiance and worship.

So all the while this grand experiment in justice our founders imagined and birthed has come upon what may be the worst of times in its two centuries, where’s the church? Championing justice? Loving one another? Modeling fairness and acceptance and inclusiveness? Calling the hands of our nation’s leaders back to the premises of our founders, but tending to our own, as well? Welcoming?

Where are these disciples when we need them the most? How can one tell a disciple from a devil?

“Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting.

“Well, for example, the other day I went down town and into a shop. I was only there for about 5 minutes and when I came out there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. I said to him, ‘Come on, man, how about giving a retired person a break?’ He ignored me and continued writing the ticket. I called him a ‘Nazi.’ He glared at me and wrote another ticket for having worn tires. So I called him a ‘doughnut-eating Gestapo.’ He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he wrote a third ticket.

“This went on for about twenty minutes.

“The more I abused him the more tickets he wrote. Personally, I didn’t care. I came downtown on the bus, and the car that he was putting the tickets on had a bumper sticker that said ‘Vote Republican in ‘08.’

“I try to have a little fun each day now that I’m retired. It’s important to my health.”

Note: I’m not all that sure Louie did this, I just hope so and maybe wish I had.

He is writing a novel and is currently up to 200 pages. It has a scene where a young man who rarely if ever attends church goes, instead, and hears a sermon that enables him to make a difficult and productive decision about a crisis. The young novelist asked me to talk with him about such a setting and to suggest a possible text a preacher might use that could so affect the hearer. We did that.

He doesn’t go nor has he ever himself gone to church anywhere, nor does his father, a single parent. I asked him if he has a Bible for the text I had suggested and had read to him. He said Yes, that he reads it daily, is now in Matthew, had started last Christmas with Genesis. I refrained from suggesting to him perhaps better ways to read the Bible. Maybe one day when I start reading it more often myself, I will.

It recalled for me a time many years ago when a student where I was a college chaplain said to me, Reverend, I want to be saved. I gave him in response a short discourse about the proper use of the word Reverend. We never talked about his salvation. In the meanwhile, something like what I suspect may be maturity has crept up on my blind side.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will… Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Mt 10.29,31).

There are the pictures at the end of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Soldiers, marines, men, women, usually smiling, some of them made at graduation or commissioning, others, less formal, many more than likely made to send home from war to the family, to the local newspaper. Surely, at the time, without much thought of dying. Yet, always the pictures “as they are made available, and as their deaths are confirmed.”

In its denial, the Administration, to put it mildly, takes exception to the pictures being shown in this way. Neither do they approve of the pictures of the flag-draped caskets. The president — the one who sent them all there in the first place — does not attend the funerals, but sends “condolences,” which is to let those who grieve know that he “feels with them their pain.” It makes one wonder, considering that when he had his chance, he found a way out and apparently felt no pain about that. He must take us for fools, as if to say that all wars are red, white, and blue bunting and never black crepe.

It is common knowledge that enlistments in the military are falling off noticeably, recruiting is getting more desperate, and quotas have not been met for some time. Perhaps it is one of the more hopeful signs of our times that just as we get into these patently pointless wars does the willingness of Americans to serve in the armed forces decline. On the other hand, to meet these declines, the Army hands out more and more seductive sales pitches to high school undergrads, most of whom are too immature to make informed decisions about killing and being killed. Only to be followed by the more candid message recruits get once they’re in. A staff sergeant asked a group of 150 infantrymen-in-training, “Does anybody know what posthumous means?” A few hands went up, but he answered his own question. “It means ‘after death.’ It means some of you are going to get medals, but only that way.”

The seeming inevitability of war as an alternative in the human scheme of things is a brutal reminder of our failure. It is not only a failure in our human relations, but a failure, as well, in our individual vocations as human beings. It is an insult and an impediment to God’s imagining of who we are and who we are to become. It is also the symptom of our loss of any sense of personal worth. Perhaps we go to war, and even claim to justify war as clearly some do, to compensate for that loss, to try to restore our ego by identifying ourselves with the glorious banners of our country. It knows no national boundaries.

These conditions are even more especially a sign of our failure to assume the true ministry of peace and justice to which we are called. To be sure, we set aside national holidays to remember the millions of us who have died in our wars, let alone the millions of bystanders and the enemies whom Jesus loved equally and also told us to love. And then we settle by defining peace in terms of the absence of war thus furthering the tragic irony of enslaving our lives that we might be free.

We can surely do more than that. We churchers might first of all cease our own internal wars and reenlist all that energy with the passion of Jesus in service to his gospel of the sanctity of life. We can unilaterally relinquish our political privileges and exemptions so to disentangle ourselves from the not-so-subtle stroking of our so-called “faith-based initiatives.”

Perhaps then we can assume our rightful sacrifice by standing in prophetic indictment against a culture whose very nature is to make war. Perhaps then can we more faithfully align ourselves with the God who created us and who grieves not only over our reckless abandon with human life, but even over each sparrow that falls to the ground.

This was Tim Russert’s signature for his weekly program of inquiry and truth-telling. He often knew as much or more about his guests than they knew about themselves. This became the consistent and refreshing magnetism that drew not only his program’s large audiences, but, I suspect, contributed to the impressive outpouring of grief at his death.

The recurring theme throughout the reflections of his colleagues and friends has been the affirmation of what a student he was of the American and international political scene, how devoted he was to his family and his church, and how committed he was to truth.

It calls for me the Pauline triumvirate of faith, hope, and love. Russert’s faith, shaped through his churchmanship and honed by his Jesuit teachers, gave him a kind of secure self-esteem invaluable as he confronted leader after leader in our society. His hope for and commitment to these United States and our balanced system never seemed to waver in the face of many who’d behave in such a way as to undermine it. His love for his family and friends and the peace and justice which is its social counterpart yielded a strong and enduring fabric so essential to all the rest.

Faith, hope, and love, in a way that Frederick Buechner rang changes on grace, have after centuries of mishandling, become so shopworn that nobody’s much interested any more. But the unique thing about Tim Russert was not only his bringing them to the fore in all his personal and public persona, but even more, his harnessing them in stewardship to truth.

In a political ambiance poisoned so consistently by dishonesty in these immediately recent years, truth has become almost unrecognizable. Suddenly to see it become flesh and face to face in our retrospect of his life is a startling reminder that the catharsis of grief can truly heal and refresh us to our own introspection and renewal.

“If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.”

The old church militant has become the new church irritant and probably for all the wrong reasons. Paul Tillich said that the Incarnation is the peculiarly Anglican heresy. Maybe it was because we talk about it so much and always seem so uncomfortable with it. We get all precious with John’s brilliant insight that the Word became flesh. But inevitably, we do so at the risk of overlooking the rest of the saving miracle — that the flesh allowed it to.

Humanity — even Jesus’s humanity — keeps on surfacing in one form or another, and every time it does, we panic. It’s like the English Don sat looking at his supper, saying, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.” We make biblical authority the stalking horse, when the real issues are about humanity — race, women, sex in one facet or another. Maybe the one thing that keeps Anglicans together is that for us, anguish has become a second language.

The charm — and frustration — of Anglicanism, like love and faith, is that just as it gets out on the cutting edge of risk, somebody always wants to turn back, forgetting that the less you bet, the more you lose when you win.

Alcoholics Anonymous was seventy-three years old June 10. It got started in Akron, OH, by a stock broker and a proctologist who found out that the best way to keep from drinking was to spend time with other people who wanted to keep from drinking and to talk about it. Through the both of them together with an Episcopal parson, they developed the Twelve Steps and the main traditions of AA — anonymity, confession, and mutual support.

AA is said by some to be the only truly indigenous American religion. It is said by others not to be a religion at all, indeed, to be anything but. If the question ever comes up, and believe me, it does, the notion of what is a religion is about as ambiguous — and tendentious — at an AA meeting as it is in society as a whole. It’s no wonder. The difference is that AA pretty much knows about ambiguity a lot better than does society as a whole. The difference is that AA is about as unorganized an organization, sometimes even disorganized, as you could ever imagine. And that’s surely one reason why, whatever it is, it works.

A while back, I spent a few years as chaplain for a big long-white-coat major-satrap medical center addiction treatment program with more than its share of psychiatrists nosing about. They were mostly psychopharmacologists, whatever that is, doing “research.” Their residents were required to rotate through our service but always, they avoided the group twelve-step meetings like the plague.

Their researchers were working on perfecting a pill you could take so you could drink all you want. Most of us had already tried that and even more. Nobody ever seemed to ask why drinking all you want was so important as to deserve a federal grant. Lewis Thomas, the physician-philosoper, wrote that the only thing worse than calling a scientist’s work anecdotal was to call it trivial. The shrinks in our program openly called the Twelve-Step Program anecdotal. Sometimes, we had to use it on the sly, anonymously.

My name’s Lane, and I’m an alcoholic. AA is just now seventy-three years old. I was twenty-nine about the same time. I got a late start. I’m catching up one day at a time, anecdotally, please.

The DNA people take their intriguing double helices and make up a language with only a four-letter alphabet. It’s these “words,” they say, that when parsed a certain way for each of us not only become our flesh, but make us human, as well. Further, and probably much to the disappointed amazement of some, they now claim it’s pointless for us to lay so much stock by something called race.

Sure hope they leave sex alone, or else there won’t be anything left for us to make a fuss over. We churchers would simply have to get on with words full of grace and truth, and leave sex to the fig leaves of our imaginations.

It was only a graffiti, but being a trumpet player, I took note. I could use a gig, but not that one, thank you.

Then, the other day the news reported that a device has been invented that not only replaces humans, but also lays them to rest. It’s a bugle discretely fitted with a battery-operated conical insert in the bell that plays the twenty-four notes of taps at the flick of a switch. All you do is hold it up to your face, the mouthpiece end, not the bell, turn it on, and try to look like a bugler — no chops, no breath, only hands.

What brings all this to pass is the plethora of us WW II vets reaching our 80s and dying at the rate of 1,800 per day. By law, we’re all entitled to a funeral with a flag, two flag-bearers, and a bugler. But there’re only 500 official buglers in the entire American military, most of whom are attached to busy post bands. Bugling, once an art for the dying, has become a dying art.

The digital device was developed under Pentagon guidance by a firm now mass producing it at $525 per. The music reportedly sounds fainter and less crisp than the real thing, but has a haunting faraway quality appealing enough to cause a few to dab their eyes (a sometime accomplishment of my trumpet playing).

Sixty-plus years ago on a naval air station, the PA system woke us up with the scratches of a 78-rpm record about to play reveille that got us out of bed and almost to the flight line before it even started.

Sixty years ago!? Maybe I should re-up as a bugler and, in turn, release a real one before the fake bell tolls for me.