Joe Biden said a couple of days ago while encouraging people to get vaccinated, “You don’t have to die!” Of course what he meant was, if you get vaccinated your risk of dying of Covid is greatly diminished. “You don’t have to die!” makes a better sound bite, but it’s just not true.

Now I am that rare bird, a conservative vaccine advocate. I think the evidence is in and these vaccines actually perform as advertised. In fact, if you’re an old person like me (over 65), you should get the Shingrix and the Pneumovax as well. Having shingles or choking to death from pneumonia are not all giggles, so why run the risk when a few shots will cut the odds in your favor?

But that’s not where I’m picking a fight with Mr. Biden. He said, “You don’t have to die!” And that’s just flat out wrong. You and I do have to die. Maybe not today, and maybe not from Covid, but we’ve got to die and for some of us it is sooner rather than later. Hebrews 9:27 says, “. . .it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” (ESV)

Adam (and Eve) sinned. That is, they refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Creator of the universe. They chose to shove him – or try to anyway – off his throne and take his place as rulers of their lives. That’s what sin is, by the way. Sin is not just breaking some law. Sin is rejecting the lawgiver and claiming to be a law unto oneself. Well, with sin came death. If God is the One who breathed life into dust, kicking his hand away is bound to turn out badly. And badly it did! Every child born of Adam (and Eve) has felt death drag him into the grave. (Yes, there are two exceptions listed in the bible, I say so for the nitpickers who might read this, but Enoch and Elijah are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Death is the collective, universal result of insurrection against the Sovereign.

The bible, however, tells us of TWO deaths we might have the “pleasure” of experiencing. There is this universal experience that come to all the children of Adam as his rebellious nature is passed from father to son, and there is the more dreadful and individual experience of death that comes to the rejectors of the Sovereign’s second chance. The gracious gift of God is eternal life through the blood of his Son, Jesus Christ. He says, “Come to me everyone who is burdened by their sins and bowed down by their rebellions and I will give you rest.” By his blood he has bought and brought back every child of Eve who looks to him for healing.

Jesus said, whoever believes in me will never die. He wasn’t talking here about this death we share with Adam and all humanity. This is him sparing us from the Second Death.
I am one who believes the Second Death is just that: a second death that comes after God raises the dead and pronounces judgment upon all those who kicked his hand away when offered the second chance. I have dear Christian brothers and sisters who believe this Second Death will an eternal dying away from God’s presence. We’ll see soon enough. I think I’m interpreting the scripture correctly, but we’ll all know the truth when the time comes. What’s important to know either way is that life is given to all who believe on the Son, and death is given to all who turn away.

So, Mr. Biden, you’re wrong. We all have to die – if not from Covid then from cancer or heart disease or any of the myriad ways that will come to the some 3 million Americans and 60 million men, women, boys, and girls worldwide this year. But we don’t have to die forever. We can look to the Son and live. I choose to look.

My bible reading this morning was about Jesus’ trial recorded in the gospel of Matthew. And it struck me – one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter!

To the Jewish power structure Jesus was a terrorist. He was a threat to everything they held dear. His revolutionary theology drawing from the pure water of the prophets instead of the polluted stream of rabbic interpretation highlighted the corruption that kept them in power. He had to go!

Barabbas on the other hand was just a common insurrectionist. They knew how to deal with men like him. A few shekels here, a few skekels there. A seat on a board, a place at the table and a man like Barabbas could be managed.

So on that fateful morning the powerful sealed the fate of the Jewish nation and guaranteed its destruction by the Romans by stirring up the gullible to demand Pilate rid the nation of that pesky preacher and healer once and for all. Crucify him! Crucify him! Give us Barabbas!

It may sound crazy, almost sacreligious, but this telling made my mind jump to the federal charges and trials of the folk who broke into the Capitol on January 6. These people get no sympathy from me. I wasn’t any happier with the outcome of the November election than they, but I believe/believed that Trump threw the election through his tweets rather than Biden stealing it from him. And sensible citizens start planning for the next election rather than rioting over the last one. And riot it was, no doubt about it. (It only take a few to manipulate a crowd into rioting. I don’t think most of those people even thought they were in a riot – they were on a lark.)

These January 6 folk are not the major insurrectionists in this country. That title goes to the Black Uprising. But the Black Uprising is a known quantity. Politicians have been tossing shekels at its leaders for generations. Men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton from uprisings past have become wealthy off the crumbs dropped from the tables of the powers-that-be as are the current mob of historical revisionists and BLM leaders. Give ’em a few cities to govern (but give them terrible schools and abortion mills to keep their population down) and a few grants to their non-profits, pander to their demands, play the Black National Anthem at football contests, remove a statue or two, but promote the most outrageous of them in the media. Let the majority of the citizenry see them as charactures. Portray them as thieves, murderers and whores. Give ’em crumbs but keep them on a short leash. They may be insurrectionists but they are manageable.

The discontent behind January 6 is not so easy to placate. It is revolutionary. The governmental principles behind the riot, divorcing it from Trump, doesn’t want a seat on the board. It wants the board to dissolve. It wants less government, not more. And no politician who has gone to DC poor and finds his purse filling wants to see the board dissolved. He just wants the seats rearranged around the table. Hence these people must be taught a lesson! Small government with clearly defined parameters is in no politician’s interest.

What was, to me, an unexpected result of the Black Lives Matter and People of Color movements is that I can no longer think of myself as a generic American. Just like those whose ancestors crossed the Bering Straits onto this continent during the last Ice Age, and just like those whose ancestors were an intermingling of Spanish Conquistadors and descendants of the earlier immigrants (those who crossed the Bering Straits) and who settled places like Florida and the American Southwest, and just like those who were sold into slavery by their neighbors and brought to this land as chattel, I have ancestors.

Having ancestral roots is important. Matthew’s gospel opens with the genealogy of Jesus stretching back 1800 years (more or less) to Abraham. And Luke’s gospel takes in back even further to God’s shaping of the dust and imparting his Spirit to Adam. Jesus had roots! (Just as an aside, but an important one, my ancestry joins with that of Jesus at Noah – and so does yours! Yes, the human race fragmented at Babel but we are still but one human race regardless our tribal affiliations now.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The most devout BLM advocates have renounced their “slave” names and taken names from the various peoples of Africa. They fill their spaces with African art and artifacts and celebrate their “otherness” as Africans and not just generic Americans. And as well they should! When their neighbors sold their ancestors into slavery they were stripped of their identity and cut off from their roots. Like a plant cut off from its roots, a person deprived of his shrivels. They may not be able to connect with the actual tribe from which they were stolen even though modern genetics increases the possibility of doing so, but they can connect with the broad expanse of that continent.

So too with the descendants of the first settlers. While most American Indians are by genetics more European than Indian, in their identity, their sense of self, they are Puyallup or Cherokee or Iroquois or Apache or any of the other myriad tribal groups that make up the “native” landscape. And who’s to blame them? From the landing of the first European migrants at Jamestown in 1607 until 1924 when Congress “bestowed” birthright American citizenship on the native population, the original occupants of this land were enemy aliens to the European migrants. Essentially a state of war existed between the two peoples for 300 years! Three hundred years of hostility is reason enough to remember the past. They have roots and it is only right to celebrate that foundation.

But back to me. For most of my life I’ve just been an American. If you asked where I was from, I could tell you about Oklahoma and Indian Territory, about Arkansas and the western migration out of the Carolinas, but that was about it. I was immersed in the thought and culture of Western Europe but I never thought of it as the definer of who I am. But then came the ancestral reawakening in the People of Color movement and I awakened to mine.

I am a child of the British Isles. My ancestry is Scots, Irish, and English, with some Scandinavian and German thrown in for good measure. The religion of the Puritans and Knox, the theology of Augustine and Aquinas and Huss and Wycliffe and Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, the science, the philosophy, the art and architecture of the Middle Ages and the renaissance, the music now called classical, the literature of Shakespeare and Milton and the King James Bible – all that encompasses Western Civilization (the good and the bad) stretching back to Athens and Rome and into the Enlightenment and modernity is my heritage and has shaped my understanding of self.

And this identity continues onto this continent. To the best of my knowledge my earliest ancestors in the Americas landed at Jamestown in 1619 and Plymouth in 1621. I can trace my philosophical ancestry to our nation’s founders from Jefferson to Madison and all who signed the Declaration and forged the Constitution. There were a few slaveholders in my lineage but very few. We were the people who kept pressing west in the search of liberty and a piece of land to raise a family. My forefathers fought the French, the British, the Indians, the Yankees and the Rebs. I’m not just a generic American. I’m not even a generic White American. I am a rooted American.

I am more than happy to share this place with men and women from every other tribe and people on earth. We can all trace our family line back to Adam. Not one people is superior to any other even though the culture that is informed and shaped by 2000 years of Christianity brings the best to the world. And we can all share in that even as we celebrate the individual cultures that have shaped us.

The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs are correct when they say we have a big problem in our military services because soldiers (and their other service brethren) who identify as members of the African Diaspora are disciplined at a higher rate – I don’t know how much higher – for criminal behavior than their fellows of the dominant and other ethnic tribes. They are right about the problem but wrong about the solution. And they are looking in all the wrong places to find it.

Members of the literati like Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist), Nicole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project), Robin D’Angelo (White Fragility), and others of their ilk insist that the depravation and criminal prosecution of the Black underclass is the result of institutional and individual racist attitudes and actions of the majority ethnic group and its culture. These are the sources the Secretary and the Chairman are turning to identify the root causes. They will not find the truth there.

No one in their right mind will deny that ethnic prejudice exists. Every ethnic group thinks itself unique and special – superior even. If you listen to Coates and Hannah-Jones sing the praises of going on faculty at “The Black Harvard” (Howard University) and speaking of the necessity of maintaining HBCUs (Historic Black Colleges and Universities) in order to perpetuate and indoctrinate a Black understanding of history, music, arts, and culture, you understand that America is tribal with every tribe having its own story, social structures, and culture. They do not want Black as an identity to be absorbed by and replaced by the majority culture any more than the Indian tribes want to disappear into the majority. And please understand, identify is not a matter of blood titer. The Vice-President identifies as Black even though she is less than 50% of African descent and has no historical family connection to slavery in the United States. Rachel Dolezal is as African as Bruce Jenner is female, yet she thinks herself Black.

European majority is not the reason 7000 Black men, women, and children were murdered last year by other Black men (and a few women). The descendants of European migrants are not the reason over 100 Black people were shot in Chicago over the 4th of July weekend. There is something very wrong with the Black way of life in America and blaming it on the majority will not fix it. And more importantly, the majority can fix it either. This must be corrected by other members of the tribe. And it will be if they reject the above “experts” and turn to the time-honored and proven ways of thinking and being the faith that knows no ethnicity has revealed.

If General Miley wants to understand “White Rage,” I’d be happy to tell him all about it. I am outraged that some little Black girl is gunned down in front of her house and the mob attacks the police when they arrive to investigate the shooting. I am outraged that WAP is the song being sung to 12 year-old girls as the model for appropriate and healthy sexual behavior. I am outraged that rappers are making millions encouraging those young Black soldiers the General is so concerned about to arm themselves and shoot anyone who disses them. Yes, I’m White and I’m enraged! And he wants to blame that soldier’s criminal behavior on me and on my ancestors? Sorry, I don’t accept the blame.

I hate war. No one hates war more than those called upon to fight them, and as one who has worn the uniform of both the Navy and the Army, I hate war with a passion.

Having made my point, I know that wars are sometimes necessary to defend citizen and nation. But wars should only be fought when absolutely the last resort and then they should be fought with absolute brutality to discourage their resumption. I am one who believes the Geneva Conventions produced by the victors of the Second World War make war more and not less likely by making them less costly to life and limb.

The war in Afghanistan is a case in point. On September 11, 2001, Saudi Islamists, having formed a military force called Al Qaeda and trained in unconventional war in Afghanistan, attacked the United States by flying commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. America was at war with Islamism whether it liked it or not.

Early on, the then President, George Bush, determined to eliminate the training camps in Afghanistan and overthrow the Afghan government under the Taliban for their complicity. America’s unconventional forces did a masterful job in assisting in the overthrow of the Afghan government and its replacement with one more to our liking. And for the next twenty years we dallied with the Taliban like a cat with a mouse. We never sought to crush them, so like poking a stick in a hornet’s nest we only stirred them up instead of eliminating them as a threat

If you are a student of world history you understand that a war is over when the loser says it’s over. And the loser will lay down his arms when the cost of fighting on is far higher than the ignominy of defeat. And how do you convince an enemy like the Taliban he’s lost? By killing him and all that is dear to him village by village.

We understood that as we fought the Second World War. We bombed civilian centers mercilessly. The woke crowd that is busy rewriting history are quick to condemn the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they do so out of a complete ignorance of history and the necessity of crushing the spirit of the enemy in war. Our ancestors cut off the heads of their defeated enemies, not because they just delighted in mayhem, but in order to convince those yet alive to give up the fight.

Endless wars are a horror, and wars that are fought in such a way that the enemy can replace its soldiers faster than we are willing to kill them will last endlessly. Or, as with Afghanistan and soon Iraq and Syria, we furl our flags and slink off in humiliating resignation. A nation that is unwilling to exterminate those who would make war upon it will eventually find itself confronting an enemy that is quite willing to exterminate it – probably sooner rather than later.