An

Epistle
from the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ
to the Americans
I:1 Grace and peace to you from God our Creator and Jesus Christ our Saviour. We are
moved to write at this time because of your recent choice of a new leader, which has
brought about a kind of fruition of hundreds of years of your witness to the world. That
this witness has been significant to all of humanity hardly needs to be said, but like the
great civilizations of the time of Christ, significance has a way of passing into history and
all but disappearing unless it is written down.

2 So many of you have remained faithful in contrast, in your own words, to the “empty
churches of Europe”. After the heartbreaking events of September 11, 2001, great
crowds of you went to church, drawn by an irresistible tug you may not have entirely
recognized.

3 Now, after a long period of mourning and reaction, the latter to some extent excused by
the former, you have transformed yourselves into a new kind of nation with a new kind of
leader.

4 There are so many sects and factions among you, it may seem pointless to write,
because who will read it? But there remains in your collective spirit a yearning for unity
—you saw this in your new president. Rest assured that unity is not a requirement for
faithfulness. There are so many stops on the journey of faith that there needs to be
innkeepers at each one, ready to nourish and sustain the faithful as they go.

5 So, remember the last book of your canon, the greetings to the seven churches, the
laudable and the regrettable at each one, and the universal warnings that followed. Since
some time has now passed, we can see how those warnings have become a part of your
history.

6 The secret message of that book has been revealed so many times. In the persecutions
of Nero, in the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition and the counter-reformation.
The ancestors of the founders of your nation, some burned at the stake for translating the
Scriptures, did not die in vain! We can still receive its core message: the world is fooled
by religiosity and the appearance of piety into following, not Christ, but His opposite.

7 Your spiritual founders, and I specifically mean the ones who fled Europe in search of
religious freedom, knew that Jesus had truly conquered Rome. Rome had gone from
being his executioner to becoming his earthly embodiment in 400 or so years. Then, as
interpreted by some, propagated a thousand years of rulers in His name, the growth of
corruption, and an inevitable reformation.

8 They saw themselves as the inhabitants of the New World, under the New Heaven,
though few dared speak this aloud. Still, the evidence of their sense of self-fulfillment
lives on in the very name of your birthplace, Philadelphia, named as we know, by
William Penn for the most praiseworthy of the churches in the Revelations.

9 Their legacy is every church that ever held a Sunday night lay-preaching service or a
mid-week prayer meeting. And their biological descendents now number at least ten
percent of your population.

10 These descendents became your leaders and your citizens, the Adams, the Roosevelts,
the Bushes, all direct descendents of the first colonists at Plymouth. All claimed, in one
way or another, to rule in the name of our Saviour, but their application of the Word was
not always accepted or even perceived and these three families were deemed by most to
be in stark contrast to each other.

2:1 But, if you had to summarize the entire scriptures in one sentence surely it would be:
religion and goodness are in constant tension and conflict. From the prophecies of Amos
and Ezekiel, through to the anti-Pharisaical teachings of Jesus, the stultifying practices of
religion must be periodically identified and purged.

2 What we so fervently believe gets etched in stone, perpetuated in ritual, and the
deviates get punished, exiled and excommunicated. What had been good, as the times
change, becomes evil itself. But praise to our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer Who are
timeless and unchanging in their perpetual help.

3 So you have wisely separated church and state and discovered the principle that
indoctrination works only until it is discredited, then causes revolution. But a nation of
people who have found their own personal truth is a nation of ideas that cannot be
defeated.

4 You have some contentious factions to be sure. Not all can be correct at a given
moment. Your election season proved this out. As your two final candidates sat for
sequential interviews with a “religious” leader, one directly contradicted the only parable
of Jesus that Jesus himself explicitly interpreted, and this went unmentioned by anyone.
But, in your wisdom, you selected the other one.

5 Clearly, in your collective hearts, you knew and recognized the folly of human beings,
no matter how powerful, attempting to do the work of God in purifying the world.
Constant warfare against evil is not the will of God for any nation and it is those nations
that are constantly at war that eventually must be removed from the Earth, no matter what
their good intentions may have been. But you have chosen another course.
6 To review that course seems silly, but perhaps this rare moment of clarity should be
preserved in a document since nothing remains self-evident for very long.

7 You began as colonies, spiritually and metaphorically. The factions of Europe labored
and gave birth to rebels in such a way that the rebels, exiled each in their own coastal
wilderness, were natural enemies of each other, yet of a kindred. Eventually that kindred
united into a commonwealth with a common enemy.

8 But not before the loyalists had to be expelled or exiled to yet a further wilderness.
Each faction could quote from Holy Writ in support of their cause, yet those who chose
the course of Revolution got the glory because it was the moment in history when “being
subject” to leaders was not the will of God.

9 But with time, your founders realized that the doctrines that separated them from
monarchy also separated them from each other, that the enforcement of any doctrine by
the power of the state was self-defeating. The Unitarian controversy had to be settled by
schism. The two churches, Unitarian and Congregational, side by side in Plymouth today
embody that history and that final separation of earthly and heavenly power.

10 So, your people may come to the truth through Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad
or Confucius but will still submit to the sovereignty of the One who said they would
ultimately be judged by their actions.

11 So much of your wealth was built by the sweat of slaves and again, Scripture was
quoted to defend this peculiar institution. And children of God somehow became three-
fifths of a child—a fraction more than Solomon’s half-a-child but still so much less since
it has taken eight score more years for this child to be truly claimed as your own.

12 You tore down your barns to build bigger and filled them with every sort of wealth
and extravagance, but some remained faithful to the poor and organized them and
educated them and each economic bubble that burst showed which ones had been on
God’s side all along.

13 Your women prayed and read the Word, seeing a fulfillment of the promise of
equality in the sight of God who made man and woman in God’s own image. The
parades and the demonstrations and the declarations were resisted by some who relied on
other verses but missed the big picture of God’s deep and abiding commitment to end
oppression in every form.

14 Even now, there are those seen as misfits, as sinners, like the lepers of Jesus’ time,
who patiently wait for full recognition. Their oppressors quote the Bible but fail to
remember that Jesus loved John. They fail to consider that to love one another was his
greatest commandment. They have not foreseen that at the last judgment there may be
only one question for each man who oppressed these children of God: who was the man
that you loved?
15 There are those who have devoted their entire lives to the welfare of the unborn. But
God has already made it clear, only a few holy lines following the ten commandments,
that fetal life is not fully human, that killing fetal life, though punishable, is not murder.
Ethics is not arithmetic, it is calculus. Those who seek the solution to only the simplest
of equations can lose sight of the big problem: men continue to oppress women through
sex.

16 Until men stop lying to women in order to have sex with them, women will need a
corrective for the pregnancies that result, if society is just. Who would argue that surgery
of any kind is pretty? Shall we leave tumors in place just because they have the potential
to be immortal? Indeed not. God has personally directed the faithful scientists and
physicians who have solved this problem. Those who oppose them and seek to punish
them or banish them from their states, are worshipping human life as if it were sacred.

17 And this is the greatest of all idolatries. There is not one shred of holiness in
humanity on its own--lower than the angels, one-third of whom have declared war on
God in Heaven. The commandment to be fruitful, multiply and subdue to Earth has been
manifestly fulfilled. Have their been no further commandments since that one?

18 But these are just silly “proof-texts” compared to the total unanimity of the ancient
writers that the life force was in the breath—whether nephesh or pneumos, these pre-
scientific, God-inspired scribes agreed that individual life begins with the intake of
breath, from the first creation of humans to the mighty wind on Pentecost.

19 The consequences of ignoring this consensus have been made clear: the assassination
of physicians, bombings, the continued mutilation and oppression of women.

3:1 And so your sects and denominations and factions and their conflicts have become
the image of Jesus in your country. But Jesus was one Person. The body cannot be at
war with itself for very long.

2 So we are writing to you to offer congratulations on this most public fulfillment of

your creed that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights. Since there is continued dispute about other parts of that creed and for
believers to dispute in public is strictly forbidden, let us try to reach a consensus.

3 Jesus was born the head of a faction that believed his earthly father Joseph was the
rightful heir of the crown of David. Both the blood lines given in the gospels of Matthew
and Luke cite the first and last kings of Israel in His lineage. That rightful kings may be
born poor is borne out in our own recent history—where are the Romanovs? Where are
the Bourbons?

4 That there were other factions in Israel was immediately shown by the great crowd that
appeared in Bethlehem—indeed a thousand years after King David, what Israeli could
not trace lineage to that royal person?
5 That Jesus was well-educated is without dispute. To shame her accusers, he could
summon at will and write in the dust the obscure reference to the illegality of bringing an
unclean woman into the temple. At age twelve he could impress the scholarly class of
Israel with his insights and questions.

6 That Jesus was Hellenized to some degree is also apparent. He believed in the soul and
its mystical union with the mind. He believed in belief as an entity in itself. He had an
agape friend, among all others. That he extolled love above other human capacities
certainly does not come from the old covenant in which the love stories can be counted
on the fingers of one hand.

7 That Jesus incorporated aspects of Zen Buddhism is clear. He advocated an unworried

acceptance of God’s generosity, unlike his spiritually penurious forbearers. Abundant life
through the acceptance of good and bad as random acts of nature rather than the
ministrations of an interfering deity was the messages of his citation of the rain that falls
on the just and the unjust and the victims of the tower of Siloam and the man born blind.

8 The descriptions of the Kingdom of Heaven we now understand do not advocate

monarchy as much as King James may have wished. King James could not erase God’s
initial skepticism regarding Israel’s first request for a king. That Jesus was using coded
references to what government should be like in order to critique the ruthless Roman
occupiers is now revealed in the political structures of Christendom—where no monarch
now rules, and none could ever again be accepted as anointed of God.

9 Governments that serve—he that would be first being the slave of all—a citizenry with
the innocence of children in their expectation of simplicity and clarity in the formation of
government: these things have been brought largely into being now that the polity of the
Christian world has been democratized.

10 People ruling each other, first in Iceland, Switzerland, but then you—the first self-rule
empire, large enough to impose the idea of self-rule upon the world.

11 But all this came with warfare. Could this ever be the will of God? What have we all
learned about war from this “brief interval” since the Reformation in which the Evil One
has been allowed to roam free? That only the military and political leadership of the
attacking country is a legitimate target for death.

12 Even the rank and file soldiers who may have been oppressed or brainwashed into
service should be exempt, if possible, from the just retribution of peaceful societies.
Now, through the God-given gift of technology, it is entirely feasible to target only these
true perpetrators of warfare. So let the leaders of belligerent nations beware. Only you
shall die if war is commenced. And rightly so.

4:1 And why does there remain any enmity between science, technology and faith? Can
you not see that renaissance, enlightenment, science, industry and technology were all
God’s gifts to Christendom? How could they be in conflict? God promised through
Isaiah that infant mortality would cease and everyone would live out a lifetime—and God
will not be mocked.

2 Does anyone now doubt that these promises pertain to this Earth and not the next?
God has written four testaments: the Old, the New, the fossil and geological record, and
the Book of Life, written clearly in every gene of every cell in every living thing on the
earth.

3 Fortunately, the message of these four books is the same: you are one family, the
product of one creation, and you must care for each other and your home, the New Earth.

4 By His death, Jesus performed what continued life could not accomplish—becoming
the Word for all time. An example for each generation to contemplate of the futility of
powers, principalities and property and the timeless sovereignty of God alone.

5 Because God’s Word said that people were not best ruled by kings, but by ideas,
demonstrated by other people in love and in mutual submission.

6 So, with these shared doctrines now stated, it is easy to congratulate you to the extent
that you have lived them out faithfully. Your taxes now go mostly to people in need, as it
should be. Nearly a tithe of every income now goes to charity by law, and this is to your
credit. Your war implements are mostly defensive, and targeted better and better at the
fewest possible instigators of war—as befits a peaceful nation.

7 Your industry is becoming more and more sustainable, its fruits are being more
equitably distributed. Corruption and scandal are still newsworthy, but what constitutes
scandal and corruption is becoming more accurately defined—not so much the outward
display of biological urges to which all humans might succumb at various times, but the
willful harming of others for selfish purposes.

8 You take voting for granted, and your history has been very slow in making suffrage
truly universal—but universal participation is within your sights and must be pursued.

9 Other aspects of your system of justice are great. Your attorneys take a great deal of
abuse, but truly, the more attorneys there are, the more justice there is. Those who don’t
believe it should try finding legal representation for a just but unpopular cause in a
country where there is not a lawyer on every corner.

10 Your economy has been chastened—over and over. Yet each boom or bust teaches
some lesson about fairness. And slowly you approach that divine realization that
currency is one of the God-acknowledged creations of governments. How long did
peasants labor in the dank past to supply their aristocratic rulers with commodities those
rulers could not produce on their own? How much more creditable to have a currency
that consists of nothing but the mutual trust of the citizens in God and his presence in
each person?
11 But is your distribution of wealth truly just? There is a natural order to human affairs
—the strong and the cunning and the aggressive accumulate wealth and power to
themselves—but God opposes this “natural order”. There must be immutable systems to
protect the weak, the exploited, the enslaved, the intimidated, the infirm the deranged and
yes, the lazy, the criminal, the undeserving and the rebellious because these are all part of
the same “natural order”.

12 Left on its own, the natural order leads to oppression, crime, unrest, protest,
revolution and the end of prosperity. Perfect justice includes injustice because, as so
many of our Saviour’s parables illustrate, mercy and fairness are not the same thing.

13 But why tax incomes? Why tax retail? The ancient model was to tax wealth. Not
punitively, but with required service, in kind. If you are a shipbuilder, then your tax is six
ships. Homebuilders—public housing, and the greatest of the homebuilders will make
their public housing the very best product possible—not the minimum. Could not many
industries perform with less uncertainty if they were not-for-profit or employee-owned?

14 Why do you still allow rental of property without the accumulation of equity? Can
this ever be just, as if ownership were a holy and permanent state for certain persons and
the lifelong efforts of their tenants amounts to nothing? This is one of the last remnants
of the aristocratic paradigm and should be disposed of.

15 You praise competition, but you don’t actually enjoy being the victim of it. With
products and services, there is a natural progression from invention and innovation to
refinement through competition, and then the elimination of competitors. Then, many
goods and services actually become more like utilities, and necessities are best provided
through industries with regulated profit margins. Who wants to compete for necessities?

16 And when the cycles of life bring around an economic crash, the ancient solution was
to declare the Acceptable Year of the Lord and a Jubilee—the forgiveness of all debts
public and private. Everyone start again with a clean slate. Certainly, some lenders
would be harmed by this, but a good government could work this out in a fair way.

17 But what is most unfair is your current definition of “deficit”. Look at your tax code
—fifty shelf feet of books excusing this or that business or individual from taxes. Your
currency has not been linked to a commodity for forty years, yet you insist on limiting the
spending of government to what is justified by tax revenues—most of which are excused.

18 So the working poor end up paying doubly for their exploitation. Here is a simple
question you must answer: your nation has had the highest productivity and productivity
per capita of any nation for decades, yet your people do not get the best benefits. Why?

19 When your nation has so many people in need and so many worthwhile projects to
accomplish, the only moral definition of “deficit” is the difference between what the
government now spends and how much it could spend without being, of itself, a cause of
inflation.
20 Set your economists to work estimating this, and then do it. If you have ears, you
better listen. From here, it looks like your working people have been underpaid for
almost a lifetime, while capitalists have accumulated so much wealth, there is nothing of
true value left for them to invest it in.

5:1 Every generation wants a sign and this generation received a mighty one, although
little noted. August 28 of 2007 brought a lunar eclipse visible over your entire country. I
witnessed this spectacle with my own eyes. The skies still carry a message to the
dominant society of any time, because God’s wisdom ordained these things from the
beginning of time itself.

2 The eclipse became total as the moon culminated, and remained total until the moon
set with the dawn. What a vision—to see the noble moon setting in shadow, glowing red-
orange like wounded prey. This was clearly the fading of a female American leader for
all to see, because the moon has been a female symbol throughout human history. So,
clearly, the leading female politician would not achieve her goal, but would be eclipsed.

3 But, then in the east, (and slightly north!) Venus shown brightly as the dominant object
in the sky—one female symbol supplanted by another! To whom could this refer? The
answer was clear exactly one year from that night, when your first political convention
ended foreclosing all possibility of a female candidate—but the very next day, the other
party nominated a woman! But, as the visage of Venus slowly faded in the advancing
dawn, this became an ephemeral display—but written large on the page of American
History one year later to the day and hour.

4 Signs may reinforce superstitions and lead to all kinds of mayhem and misdeeds, but
God will not be mocked. God is still speaking to those who can hear. A just society
remains the righteous hand of God on this Earth. History has confirmed the prophecies
of God.

5 I say these things to get your attention. It is your in-fighting that must cease. Why did
Paul’s letter to the Romans culminate with the admonition, in the fourteenth chapter, to
follow the lesser commandments in such a way as to minimize discord and maximize
faith?

6 How could Paul overtly and famously countermand one of the three commandments of
the church in Jerusalem, leaving it up to the locals? Because this factionalism is the law
of God. In one place, homosexuality is sinful, but in another discrimination against the
homosexual is a sin. God’s people must be seen as righteous, although they know they
are not, by a world that cannot agree on what is right!

7 So, if human righteousness is just for show anyway, which we know it is, since our
righteousness is filthy rags to God, why dispute about it? Get along with each other, you
Americans! Tolerate your differences, which are small, so you can spread tolerance to a
world in which social differences are still great. Do you not realize that the Holy Spirit is
now speaking to people of all kinds? Can the uneducated farmer teach the university
professor? Only in so far as directed by the Holy Spirit, in Truth.

8 And so, fellow followers, resolve to not hinder each other’s witness. The journey of
faith is long and the stops along the way are many and varied. Each stop must be tended
by humble workers who take the needs of the pilgrim as their only calling. If all the
workers were the same, what is the use of the journey?

9 You Americans--what promise there is in your history, but what disaster lies in the
wrong application of the teachings of Jesus. How do you know what is right? Anyone
can read the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles and understand the
basics of the reformed church.

10 But not everyone can understand the esoteric arguments of Romans or the depth of
intellect in James. Do not worry about this, but learn to recognize your fellow workers
by their demonstrations of love for the lost, the wicked, the lonely, the poor and the
oppressed.

11 Much has been made of American exceptionalism. That such a concept could even
arise is hubris in the eyes of God who makes civilizations and Capitols appear and
disappear like mushrooms after the rain. Take care that your pride in your
accomplishments does not blind you to the vast amount of work to be done to make your
own society fair and just to all persons—the criminal, the undeserving, the unproductive
and the impaired among them.

12 Few of you now, thank a merciful God, are true conservatives, who believe in their
hearts that luck is the manifestation of God’s blessing, and wealth and health are His seal
of approval. Every schoolchild can see the fallacy of that argument and so did Jesus.
Misfortune is the opportunity to display God’s mercy through you, his hands on this
earth.

13 The Creator will continue to hide behind the seamless curtain of the randomness of
creation. For this life is a test. As our Saviour said on the night of his arrest, my
kingdom is not of this world and entry into that kingdom is through faith alone, not logic,
reason, science, proofs or arguments.

14 So, may God’s perfect plan be reflected in your own! And may you reap the harvest
you have sown. May justice now roll down like might waters and its source be praised as
God alone! Amen.