It happens time and time again. A minor story gets blown out of proportion, the media drones on incessantly for a week or longer (sometimes much longer) and then someone inevitably asks, “Why are we still talking about it?”

It’s one thing when you or I ask that question to a loved one or a friend or a co-worker. It’s quite another when a member of the media, the very same media that blew the story up in the first place, either on TV or in print, asks:

“Why are we still talking about it?”

Well, why are you still talking about it? You want to stop talking about “It” (whatever “It” is) then just stop.

I'm not part of the media, but I can't complain if I'm not willing to do something myself. So starting now, I'm banning the following topics from this blog:

1. Any summits involving beer and not involving me.
2. The former governor of Alaska and future right wing radio and TV personality.
3. Unlicensed plumbers with imaginary businesses.
4. Birth certificates.
5. Hiking the Appalachian Trail.
6. Dead celebrities or celebrities whose careers are dead.
7. The latest You Tube sensation.
8. Any Twitter feeds not from Iran.
9. The 2012 Presidential Campaign (this ban expires January 1st, 2011).
10. Young Earthers and/or Flat Earthers.
11. Michelle Bachman (see 10, add tin-foil hat).
12. Theories on who may or may not be the Antichrist.
13. Michelle Bachman (see 12, add tin-foil helmet).
14. The next pointless drivel the media blows out of proportion.

You have my word on this (until the next time Michelle Bachman says something really, really stupid).

Today I sent the following letter to Senator Wyden's office:

Dear Senator Wyden,

I have lived in the state of Oregon since 1995. My first vote cast after moving here was for you in the January 1996 special election.  I voted for you again in 1998 and 2004.  Overall, I have been very happy with your service to our state.  Until now, that is, and that is why I am writing this letter today.

I wish to express my extreme disappointment in your decision to co-sign Senator Ben Nelson’s letter urging a delay in a vote on Health Care Reform. My family and I are fortunate. We have health insurance. But our coverage decreases each year as our premiums continue to rise at ridiculous rates. I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to be able to afford it. At the same time, a close family member, diagnosed with both M.S. and diabetes, is currently uninsured. She simply can’t afford the premiums given her “pre-existing conditions”.

Americans need help and they need it now.  More and more people are losing their insurance. More and more people with insurance are struggling to pay premiums and deductibles. More and more people with serious medical conditions are being shut out of the system.  This is all happening, during an recession no less, as health care costs and health insurance profits both continue to increase at an obscene rate.

If we were like any other advanced country in the world, we would have single payer universal health care, and we would have had it decades ago. But I know that Single Payer is at best a long-term goal and at worst a pipe dream. Instead, we need to find a solution that gets all Americans insured, lowers costs, and helps the sick instead of shutting them out. And we need it now.

We need a public option, non-profit and ultimately self-funding, that can compete with insurance companies and force them to lower their prices and change their practices. Three quarters of Americans (and probably a higher percentage of Oregonians) want a public option. The insurance companies don’t because they know that they can’t compete while still making outrageous profits off their customers.

What we don’t need is delay. Most Republicans want delay because they want to kill reform. They don’t care about Americans; they only care about bringing down the President. Your colleague, Senator DeMint, said as much: “If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

My question to you: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of Oregonians whose interests you were elected to represent and of Americans whose rights you swore to defend? Are you on the side of your President and all those who supported him in November in part because of his pledge to give the American people the same access to affordable health care that you as a Senator take for granted? Or are you on the side of insurance companies like my family’s provider, who has increased our premiums by nearly 40% in less than three years?

My vote in May 2010 depends on your response. Please note I wrote May and not November, for if you stand against the people and our President on this, you will be challenged in the Democratic Primary and my wife and I will actively campaign for your opponent.  We worked hard for President Obama.  Don’t underestimate how hard we’ll work for your opponent should it become necessary.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Right Reverend Katherine Jefferts Schori, is in the center of another controversy, which is nothing new, of course, for the first female primus in the Anglican Communion. This controversy however has nothing to do with either sexuality in general or her gender in particular.

This controversy cuts to fundamental Church teaching. I quote from her opening address:
 “ . . . the great Western heresy (is) that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.”

That sound you hear is something rather unpleasant (and unmentionable in polite company) hitting a fan. The reaction, of course has been overwhelming on both sides with liberals seeing an affirmation of the social gospel and conservatives seeing an attack on personal conversion.

Both sides got it wrong: really wrong. What Jefferts Schori is criticizing is the belief that salvation is strictly between God and each individual—no church necessary. Yet this is a very recent idea that goes against nearly two thousand years of consistent teaching in the church. In 1st Corinthians 12:12-26, St. Paul describes the community of believers as the Body of Christ and insists that no part of the body can function alone.The early Church Fathers, as well as later Catholic theologians, consistently speak of salvation in corporate terms, often refering back to St Paul when doing so. Even the 16th Century Protestants spoke of reforming the Catholic Church, hence the term “Reformation.”

So Jefferts Schori is absolutely right on this count. My objection lies elsewhere: namely in her use of the term “heresy.” The Episcopal Church is, in all honesty, both incapable of persecuting heresy and unwilling to do so. If someone as genuinely heretical as retired Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose “twelve theses” from his book A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born denies the existence of a personal God, along with the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, cannot be considered a heretic, then who can? At least the evangelicals in the newly formed Anglican Church in North America can still say the Creed without crossing their fingers. Well up to the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church" part anyway.

So my advice to the Presiding Bishop (not that she’ll ever read this): as the Lord said, take care of the plank in your own eye before looking for the speck in others. Or to put it another way: that’s a nice glass cathedral you’ve got there. Are you sure you want to start chucking rocks?

I wish I were making this up, but I saw this shirt in person yesterday at the Valley River Center Mall. At first, I was just offended by the bad pun (I hate puns) and the crass parody of commercial mass marketing passing as evangelism. What does it say about our faith when we treat the Incarnate Word of God as we would a disposable luxury item? After all, isn't the Bread of Life a far more significant source of nourishment than a peanut butter cup?

Then I got past my initial distaste and began to think about the theological implications of the shirt. Peanut butter and chocolate united together without losing their distinctive flavors? Why it's a brilliant allegory of Chalcedonian Christology!

Two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.
— Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D., Act V (reprinted on p 864 of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer)

Or to put it another way: Taste and see the two great tastes that taste great together!

Then I began to wonder: Does the chocolate represent the divine nature? Given the ecstatic, almost religious experience some people have when eating really good chocolate I would say yes. So then the peanut butter represents the human nature? That makes sense given peanut butter's humble origin as a high protein food for people with poor teeth.

But where does that leave someone like me who hates peanut butter? I don't want my pure wonderful chocolate contaminated by yucky sticky peanut butter. I don't even like fudge with nuts because the nuts take up space that would otherwise be filled with more fudge.

So I'm left with one of two conclusions:

1) In rejecting peanut butter I am rejecting Christ's humanity and material creation in general making me a closet Gnostic.

or

2) It's a really dumb shirt.