labor day reading...

A few insightful writers have already observed that the farewell events for the late Senator John McCain were carefully crafted liturgies of resistance. They were not a summons to radical or even revolutionary action, mind you, but rather reminders of what our better angels look like and how we might strengthen them. Susan Glasser wisely stated it like this in The New Yorker:


McCain’s grand funeral—the Obama adviser David Axelrod called it an exercise in “civic communion”—underscored a fact that is often lost about Washington these days. The city is much more bipartisan, in some respects, than it has ever been, (and) more united than it may currently seem, in its hatred of Donald Trump... (Without every mentioning his name) the funeral service for John Sidney McCain III, at the Washington National Cathedral, on this swampy Saturday morning, was all about a rebuke to the pointedly uninvited current President of the United States, which was exactly how McCain had planned it.(https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/john-mccains-funeral-was-the-biggest-resistance-meeting-yet?mbid=social_facebook)

Another wise soul, Eliot Cohen writing in The Atlantic, was equally pointed: the meticulous funeral liturgy was McCain's final invitation to the United States to reclaim the greatness of American ideals currently discarded by bullies and demagogues:  

McCain’s funeral was intended to remind his fellow citizens, as all the speakers said but as the ceremonies conveyed even more powerfully, that the United States is about the greatness of its ideals; that when it falls short, as it inevitably must do, that should occasion not cynicism but a drive to repair wrongs and build anew; that American patriotism is, as McCain warned us, the very opposite of blood-and-soil nationalism; that when America fails to lead abroad, darker forces gather and gain force, and minorities can be massacred with impunity, and dissidents can be safely strangled in underground chambers.

(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/john-mccains-last-gift-to-his-nation/569200/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2018-09-02T12%3A50%3A24&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo)

As the Reverend Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite has suggested it was a memorial service for the nation. And Charles Pierce of The Nation spoke of it as "a council of war just as McCain intended."This was a funeral with more than one purpose—to celebrate the passing of John McCain and to summon a rebirth of politics that did not so much reek of grift and vodka."

Make no mistake. Those are not patriotic banalities any more. The current president* has made them dead serious again. They are no longer frothy paeans to the greatness of America. They are compass points on a battlefield. They are no longer heard with half an ear and then forgotten. They are fighting words now. The president* knew it. That's why he spent the morning rage-tweeting and the afternoon playing golf. In dying, and in carefully planning his funeral in the way he did, John McCain has opened a second front.

(https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22893069/john-mccain-funeral-service/)

If you have a chance this Labor Day weekend, read these articles. They capture the essence of what this moment in history means for those who seek to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Lord. You don't have to be a fan of the late Senator to know that the US is wildly off course. We are "waist deep in the Big Muddy" of fear, dishonesty and naked greed. Bigotry and boorishness are the rule of the day. But McCain's wisdom, even in his dying, saw through the current haze to new possibilities rooted in our history and calling.