Author: Alan Bean

Join us on Saturday!

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By Alan Bean

You are invited to Broadway Baptist Church, 4:00 pm on Saturday, April 20th for the second convening of our Common Peace Community.  There you will catch your first glimpse of JustFaith, a we-ain’t-playin’-games study that will help you look at the world through the eyes of the poor and ask why.  Here’s the way the program is described on the JustFaith website.

JustFaith is a 30-week Scripture-based adult formation program that looks at poverty and compassion for the poor through the lens of the Christian call to compassion and justice. JustFaith empowers participants to develop a passion and thirst for justice, and prepares them for the work of social ministry.  Through prayer, experiences, books and videos, participants encounter the face of poverty in such a way that they experience transformation and are drawn to respond to the needs of our broken world.  The JustFaith program is about opening people to the Spirit of God, who is at work transforming people to transform the world. The intent is to provide a tapestry of learning opportunities that emphasize and enliven the healing work of God’s compassion found in scripture, church history and teaching, and faithful witnesses.

JustFaith is a rigorous program that asks people for their time each week.  It is a deep spiritual journey that offers an opportunity to experience conversion of hearts and minds in the context of a small faith community of 10-15 people.  During the 30 weeks, participants learn the value of dialogue, sacred listening, and one-on-one encounters with those living on the margins of our communities. JustFaith grads emerge from the program with a new level of understanding of the systemic issues of poverty, those families living in poverty, and a discerned compassionate response to the world around them. As a result, these graduates are more engaged in their church and in the communities.

Although JustFaith was originally produced by Roman Catholics for Roman Catholics, they have introduced a Protestant-Ecumenical version as well.  We will be watching a 15-minute introductory video and there will be plenty of time for questions.

We will also be singing, reading Scripture and pondering Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail written exactly fifty years ago in response to concerns raised by moderate white clergymen (don’t worry, we won’t be reading the whole thing).  Since many of us are white folks who identify as “moderate” I thought we should listen to Dr. King with fresh ears.

A Common Peace Community starts when you look at the world through the eyes of the poor and ask why.  If you have any questions please call me at 817-688-6765.

Alan Bean

 

The other Tulia Tragedy

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Church Abuse Religious Order Priests
Former priest, John Salazar

By Alan Bean

The painful story Gillian Flaccus tells in this AP story unfolded while Friends of Justice was fighting a bogus drug bust.  I didn’t say anything about the sexual abuse scandal revolving around “Father John” Salazar in my Tulia book because it had little bearing on the drug sting and, to be honest, because I was personally close to virtually all the primary actors.  Father John Salazar, whatever his alleged crimes, was beloved by his congregation and identified closely with the poorest members of his largely Latino congregation.  Salazar cared about social justice and served as an advocate for the most vulnerable members of his flock.  I can still see him dancing joyfully with his people at the weddings and Quinceañeras Nancy and I frequently attended.

But the young man Salazar is accused of molesting was a family friend, and there was nothing the least bit just, redemptive or joyful about the sexual counter between priest and parishioner recounted in the AP story below.

Can a single man be a dedicated priest and a pedophile at the same time?  So it appears.

Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, the man who placed a priest with a history of sex abuse in the Tulia parish, was also a close friend and supporter.  “Bishop Matt” (as his friends called him) was a courageous cleric with the courage to preach against the arms race in the back yard of “the bomb”.     (more…)

Abbott in Waco: How Low Can You Go?

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By Alan Bean

Is Greg Abbott the Attorney General of Texas or is he a flak for the National Rifle Association and the GOP?  He can’t be both.

If Abbott is Texas Attorney General (and in the picture to the left, he certainly looks the part) he represents and speaks for all Texans, not just those who voted for him.  His public rhetoric should reflect that fact.

But on Monday night, Abbott told a partisan crowd in Waco that a group of Democrats working to turn Texas blue is “far more dangerous” than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

It’s okay for the crowd to be partisan; but Abbott came to town as a representative of the state of Texas.  In theory, at least, he should be speaking for all Texans and to all Texans (unless an election in the offing).  Associating the state democrats with the crackpot leader of a failed state suggests that Texans are either Republicans or they’re the enemies of all that is good and decent.  This comes perilously close to denouncing the democratic system, in particular, and political pluralism in general. (more…)

Our fraudulent “debt crisis” debate

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By Alan Bean

We have been hearing a lot of wailing and teeth gnashing about the federal debt.  If we keep spending our grandchildren’s money, the logic goes, the future will be bleak.

But how bad is the debt crisis, really, and how did it get that bad?  Where has the tax money gone, and why isn’t there enough of it?

You will notice that the debt Cassandras rarely talk about the balanced budgets of the late Clinton era.  Nor do they have much to say about the scandalous cost of fighting futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Nor do they want to discuss the unbridled profligacy that defined the financial and real estate sectors until the great collapse of 2008.

Instead, they focus on the temporary spike in government expenditure sparked by the Obama administration’s stimulus spending.

The debt Cassandras want us to believe that nothing can be done about poverty and that well-intentioned attempts to make life easier for poor people just make things worse.  They further suggest that “entitlement” programs like Social Security and Medicaid are the primary contributors to the debt problem.  In other words, nothing can be done to help old people and sick people and any attempt to do so will drive the nation straight into the poorhouse.

And then we read that the rich people of the world have collectively stashed an estimated $32 trillion in offshore tax havens.  I can’t wrap my head around a figure that big, but I suspect that if this money had been taxed at conventional levels, the European debt crisis would dissolve and America’s “debt problem” would evaporate.

Of course that would leave the rich folks a bit poorer.  Forbes magazine argues that if we don’t like the idea of rich people stashing their money in offshore accounts we should lower their tax burden.  That’s a lot like arguing that if you tax us at reasonable rates we will intentionally drive the nation into debt (and there’s nothing you can do about it because wealthy people live above the law).

Unfortunately, there is a lot of money to be made telling wealthy folks what they want to hear, and not much left over for those who value the truth.  In fact, considering the incentives wealthy people have at their disposal, it is amazing that we ever hear the unvarnished truth about anything.  But we do.  Sometimes even wealthy people come clean (I’m thinking in particular of Warren Buffet).

But most of the time the media are handsomely paid to prevaricate and dissemble, about money and practically everything else.  These dismal facts don’t preclude truth-telling altogether, but it is wise, nonetheless, to view the evening news as primarily an entertainment medium, a vehicle for well-heeled advertisers to maximize profit.  Most of what we hear on the news is true, so far as it goes.  Its what we don’t hear that is killing us.

And we aren’t hearing much about the $32 trillion.  And we aren’t hearing much about the obscene cost of fighting wars.  Nor are we hearing much about how the financial sector brought us to the brink of chaos.  Which explains why so few banking executives  currently reside in prison, why life for poor folk just keeps on getting harder and why the debt crisis debate focuses on 23% of the vital facts.

Maggie and Martin

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By Alan Bean

In one of those odd quirks of history, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shuffled off this mortal coil just as we were remembering the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and his great “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” delivered a half-century ago in April of 1963.

I wonder what King and Thatcher would have had to say to one another had history arranged such a meeting.  I suspect they would have liked and, perhaps grudgingly  respected one another, but have two people ever looked at the world through such different lenses?

Bleeding hearts like me remember Thatcher for her “families and society” comment.  Let’s be fair and consider her words in full context: (more…)

Why seek the living among the dead?

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By Nancy Bean

Easter IS the Common Peace Community IS the Resurrection

The Common Peace Community is our expression for what Jesus refers to as The Realm or Kingdom of God. The Common Peace Community is the resurrection and the life that Jesus talks about. Debating the resurrection as physical or literal or spiritual or metaphorical distracts from the meaning of Easter morning. The resurrection is communal. The resurrection is social.

In Luke, Jesus is revealed in the breaking of the bread at meal with his disciples. In John, Thomas intimately fingers the wounds, the frailty, of Jesus in order to experience the reality of the living Christ.

In his parables and in his ministry, Jesus invites his disciples and the crowds to participate in God’s life of community: the Common Peace Community where the dishonorable is honored, where the least is greatest, where the outcast is the cherished child, where the blind see, where the deaf hear, where the sick are made whole, where the prisoner is free, where the hungry is full, where the stranger is welcomed. (more…)

Is the war on drugs a make-work project?

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By Alan Bean

Ripple effects from the sequester continue to proliferate.  Now it is local and regional narcotics task forces that are feeling the pinch because federal Byrne Grant funding has been ever-so-slightly reduced.  The article below appeared in Stateline, a daily news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts and it is essentially a scare-piece designed to pump up concern about the sequester.  But if you check out the chart a few paragraphs down the page, you will notice that Byrne Grant funding took a big hit in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis and then rebounded heroically in 2009 thanks to President Obama’s stimulus spending.  That funding has retreated a bit from these record levels is hardly surprising, sequester or no sequester.

Maggie Clark’s article is significant for what it doesn’t say.  It doesn’t say that the war on drugs is primarily a federal make-work project for hard up counties and municipalities.  But it is.  The Obama administration didn’t pump millions of fresh Byrne Grant money into the drug war to get drugs off the street; it was all about saving jobs and under-girding fragile rural economies that have little legitimate job-creation potential.

I have no problem with job-creation programs since I don’t think the for-profit economy, by itself, can prevent the kind of mass unemployment we have witnessed in recent years.  But sending the big bucks to narcotics task forces, for-profit prisons and incredibly wasteful projects like Operation Streamline is a radically inefficient and fundamentally dishonest job-creation strategy.  Why not sponsor violence reduction programs in poor communities while hiring potential gang-bangers to beautify their own neighborhoods; why not shore up a crumbling infrastructure that has become a national embarrassment?  Make-work programs can make the world a better place; but the war on drugs and the booming border security industry just recycle misery.  Sure, they provide some jobs and a few fat cats get fatter; but our culture is debased in the process.

I was glad to see that Clark mentions the Tulia fiasco, even if she did get most of her facts slightly askew.  Tulia explains why George W. Bush (governor of Texas at the time) didn’t like the Byrne Grant program and worked hard to scale it back.  Tulia embarrassed Texas and led to the virtual disappearance, at least in the Lone Star State of the kind of unaccountable and counterproductive narcotics task forces that depend on the largess of the DOJ.  Drug abuse is a big problem in every sector of American life, but the drug war is fought almost exclusively in poor, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods.  The real sickness is rampant poverty and unemployment, and so long as we focus exclusively on a symptom of that disease (drug abuse and drug dealing) we are tilting at windmills. (more…)

Football stadium won’t be named after for-profit prison company

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By Alan Bean

It was just a matter of time before this headline appeared.  First the student of Florida Atlantic University protested naming their school’s football stadium after GEO Group (the for-profit prison company) and then the tenured faculty, at the close of a contentious meeting, voted to protest the plan.  Seeing the writing on the wall, GEO executives decided to withdraw their $5 million gift and let the dream die.

I still say that the student who coined the term “Owlcatraz” (in honor of the FAU fighting Owls) drove home the final coffin nail.  But as this HuffPost article shows, GEO’s real problem was its well-documented record of prisoner abuse.  Too many courts had tossed out too many damning quotes for reporters to leave alone.  We can thank the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Mississippi ACLU for exposing the abuse at the Walnut Grove prison. (more…)

As Jesus Loved

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Brent Beasley preached this sermon on Maundy Thursday at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth

John 13:1-17, 31-35

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.  Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.  He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”  Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”  Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

. . . Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

There is actually nothing original or brand new in these words of Jesus that we are to love one another. The commandment to love one another goes back much, much further than Jesus himself. It is one of the themes that is cited again and again all through the Old Testament. And Jesus had certainly repeated those words again and again as he walked the ways of the earth during the days of his flesh.

So, what, then, is the special nuance that made this final mandate at the last supper so special and so memorable, as it is, right down to this very moment?

John Claypool, in preaching on this text, said that he believed what made Jesus’ words unique and special was that qualifying phrase that Jesus added: as I have loved you. Not just Love one another but As I have loved you, love one another. (more…)