My friend Dorothy sent me a news item about the discovery of ruins of an early Christian Church in Hirbet Madras, Israel, which was active from approximately 500 to 700 A.D. (check out the WEB site below) An accompanying photograph of a mosaic floor sent me to Google where I learned that the rooster is a symbol of the passion of Jesus, who correctly predicted that Peter would deny him three times before the rooster crowed on the following morning. When Peter heard the crowing, he “went out and wept bitterly.” In the early church the rooster and its crowing became a symbol of remorse and repentance over failure to represent Jesus and his teachings. What a powerful symbol! Some of my clearest associations with morning and dawn include unseen roosters out there somewhere crowing. The house where we lived in Singapore was near a Malay kampong, so every morning we heard roosters crowing. As a child growing up in Arkansas, my trips to visit grandparents included a chorus of roosters crowing in the morning. Even now when I am out early in the morning on my bicycle at the edge of San Diego, I occasionally hear roosters crowing, and the sound is strangely comforting.

A couple of weeks ago at coffee with a friend, the conversation turned to the troubles in the Middle East and then to a particularly stressful situation in the workplace for a mutual friend... and my friend said what I have heard him say before, “Why can’t we just all get along?” It would happen if we could manage to extend into daily practice the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha and other great spiritual teachers. Oh, I know, some people will wonder why I include “others” When I think of important people in history who have been the models of moral living, there are actually quite a few who come to mind, Jesus foremost among them. The point is that most of the citizens of the world have plenty of information about what we ought to do. Not knowing what to do is not the problem. People in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions share a body of literature from the ancient Middle East. Contradictions abound in the literature, but the most consistent advice from prophets and other religious leaders from the ancient world urges people “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly” presumably with God and with each other. Recently the lectionary for Methodists and many other Protestant Christian denominations included a passage from the Old Testament book of Micah. Micah was one of twelve minor prophets who have books named for them in the Hebrew and Christian Bible. He lived in a small town not far from Jerusalem approximately seven hundred years before the time of Jesus. Micah was a contemporary of the more familiar Prophet Isaiah. Isaiah gets quoted at Christmastime. Micah seldom does. I am interested in both of them as much because of how they used language as I am in what they said. Their speeches are lyrical without ever being frivolous. Take for example the sixth chapter, eighth verse of Micah. The prophet is obviously telling people that they already know how to live. He is urging them to just do it. “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Twenty-first century people who call themselves Christians are very good at picking and choosing which of the Bible’s requirements for right living they wish to embrace. Shopping around in the Bible is a common strategy for going right on doing whatever it is a person wants to do. If a man wants to physically abuse his wife and children and feel he is doing what God requires, he can find justification in the Bible. If sons and daughters want to ditch parents who complicate life, there can be found a “Biblical” way to do it. You can name what it is you want to do, and with loose, uncritical reading, you can probably find some passage in the Bible that can make you think you are being given the nod to go on having it your own way.
I continue to believe the world can be a better place... for everybody... not just for those who manage to climb to “a better place” by stepping on others. I refuse to subscribe to a belief in the divine right of the wealthy, those who assume God has blessed and affirmed them by giving them wealth and power. I am at a loss for words to explain to my European friends why a tax cut amounting to millions has been extended to the wealthiest citizens of the United States while many Americans grow even more desperately poor. And I don’t know how to explain that the same people who insisted on the tax break for the richest Americans are insisting on dismantling a program that extends health care to all Americans. The hardest part of all to understand, much less explain, is that the majority of those who want to annul the health care program and cut back on social programs that give “public” aid to the poorest Americans are Christians. As my “once-upon-a-time” students would say about the situation, “Go figure!”