If you want to comment on the presidential candidate debate while it’s hot on your mind, do so here. I’ll give you my verdict tomorrow.

Over at Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds is taking place an illuminating discussion of vocations. vocation. (Thanks to Neb for alerting me to this in his comment to our short break from politics.) A pastor asks for help in filling his different callings as pastor, father, and husband, feeling that they are pulling him in different ways and that he is not fulfilling his various vocations as he should.

Pastor Peter Bender jumps in:

Let me say this, first, to you: You are a free man in Christ! There is no condemnation for you, for you are in Christ Jesus and His righteousness covers all your sin and inadequacies. Furthermore, you were called to be a husband and a father by the grace of God and not because of any merit or worthiness on your part. Therefore, it is going to be God’s free grace in Christ alone that sustains you. You have also been called and ordained to the Office of the Holy Ministry by grace alone and not because of your talents, abilities, or merits and it is the grace of God in Christ that shall sustain you in that calling or you won’t be sustained at all.

When we speak of our vocation as Christians we almost always look at our calling in terms of the Law–What I am supposed to do, my responsibilities and obligations. This is NOT the foundation of our vocation. Vocation is first and foremost a reference to the call of the Gospel and how each of us is called to live by faith in the grace of God in Christ wherever He has placed us in this world. This means that the strength of our vocation is in the call to live by faith in the Gospel, rather than a call to live by faith in the Law or in how well I am living up to the “obligations and responsibilities” of my office.

The truth is, we all fall short daily. Our joy, comfort, strength to persevere, and freedom come from the Gospel alone and never from the Law or our own accomplishments. What this means, practically, for you is that if your congregation supports you in love during this difficult time (because of their faith in the Gospel I might add), God be praised! Serve, therefore, as you are able with no pangs of conscience. And, if your wife, also, supports how you are able to tend the flock, watch over the children, and see to her needs while she lays pregnant in Fort Wayne (something that she, too, is able to do because she believes the Gospel), then God be praised! Serve your wife and family as you are able.

The bottom line is this: the Gospel sets us free to do what we can within our vocation and to commend the rest to God. Indeed, we commend it all to God in Christ since He is the one who has placed us into our respective offices in the first place. Vocation is chiefly about where God has called us to live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself to us. For your comfort and encouragement I urge you to reread Luther’s, “The Freedom of a Christian.” I don’t think we can reread that little tract enough. Finally, give thanks to God that He gives you the opportunity to live by faith in His grace in the midst of seemingly unbearable circumstances. When you get home at the end of a day, or return in the evening after visiting your wife who is pregnant with three little babies that you don’t deserve, drink a beer and give thanks to God for His mercy and grace by which you stand righteous and by which you lack nothing.

Then Pastor William Cwirla adds something:

I would add the following thought. Vocation is the offering of our bodies in the form of our work, worship, and play as a spiritual sacrifice to God, holy and acceptable through His mercies which are in Christ Jesus (Rom 12:1-2). We are called to serve our neighbor in a variety of capacities, whether husband, father, pastor, son, citizen, etc. What we are given to do at any particular moment, and whom we are given to serve at that moment, is our calling. And it will be most fulfilled as we give that task, that person, our undivided attention and energy. Everything else can wait, trusting that the Lord will provide.

So when you are with your family, at that moment, forget about your congregation. They are in the Lord’s hands, and you are not their Savior. When you are working to provide for your family, you are doing your vocation as husband and father; put everything else out of your mind. The Lord will take care of the rest. When you are visiting a shut-in or preparing a sermon, put everything else out of your mind and enjoy the moment for the blessing that it is.

One of the tricks the devil plays with us is guilting us into thinking we should be doing something else. I should be doing this, I should be reading that, I should be visiting so and so. Fie on that! Don’t let the devil rob you of the joy of the task at hand.

Read the whole discussion, which is full of wisdom and good counsel to all of us.

I don’t evaluate candidates on how well they spew out facts and statistics. That’s a common tactic in many debate leagues, but being able to do that tells me little. Presidents have staffs that tell them the name of the president of Nicaragua and garner various facts. Nor do I expect candidates to come up with some brilliant idea to solve our nation’s problems. Those problems are generally too complex for simplistic solutions of the kind that can come off the top of someone’s head. Those are matters for in-depth research, collaborative thinking, and lots of counselors.

What I do care about are the candidate’s political philosophy, his character, and his judgment.

How are the candidates measuring up in my mind? In philosophy, I worry that John McCain does not have much of one. He is pragmatic rather than ideological. He leans conservative, but does not seem to be governed much by that philosophy. He does have principles that he fiercely defends, which I respect, and he is pro-life. For me, being pro-life trumps just about everything in a politician. It tells me that he believes in moral absolutes, recognizes evil when he sees it, and believes in transcendent human rights that go beyond the state and the culture.

In philosophy, I want to know more about Barack Obama’s ideology. Specifically, I want to know if he is a political radical, such as I knew in my college days. I want to know more about his ties to William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Saul Alinsky. I’m going to be posting about this, starting today. Not because I want to pursue guilt by association, but I want to know about what the possible, even likely, future president of the United States believes. Nothing in this campaign is more important to me than that. I do know that he is liberal, pro-death, and has an essentially secularist worldview.

In character, I respect hugely McCain’s military record and his five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp–especially his refusal to be released until his comrades could also be released. But I am bothered by how he divorced his wife and remarried when he returned. I’m also worried about his temperament and his temper.

In character, I appreciate Barack Obama’s projection of calm, restraint, and self-control. I’d like to know more about him.

In judgment, I cannot understand how McCain would push that campaign finance bill that regulates political speech in a way that seems flatly unconstitutional. Some of his judgments seem good, while others seem bad. The man is decisive, though. He is definitely principled.

In judgment, we do not have much of a track record to go on with Obama. I need more information.

If any of you could help me out with any of the above–correcting me if I have something wrong or giving me additional information–I’d be much obliged.

When Obama says that he was only 8 years old when Bill Ayers and his even scarier wife Bernadine Dohrn were active terrorists, he is calculating from the founding of the Weather Underground. But that group continued to exist decades later and did its greatest mayhem in the 1980s. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia then. Ayers was also at Columbia at that time. Obama and his campaign will say nothing about his Columbia years, not even permitting his transcripts to be released. To clear up questions about his ties with members of the Weather Underground, it would help to know about his college days and what inspired him to go to Chicago to Saul Alinsky’s radical organization to work as a community organizer. Did he have radical ties at Columbia? From Ayers-Dohrn-Obama Tie Shouldn’t Be Dismissed:

Though the mainstream media has been curiously uninterested in Barack Obama’s undergraduate years, Obama spent two years at Occidental College developing into an activist and then transferred to Columbia University, graduating in 1983. Little more is known about Obama’s time at Columbia and he seems to avoid mentioning it as much as possible. . . . Obama has also turned down repeated requests to release his academic transcripts. What happened during his time at Columbia that caused Barack Obama to be so secretive and hold the school conspicuously at arm’s length? . . . .

The big question unasked by the media is if Barack Obama met Bill Ayers during the time both were in the Columbia University community at the same time that a splinter group of the Weathermen was still actively planting bombs. While the possibility has been suggested in blogs, there does not appear to be any record of any media directly asking Obama if he met Ayers in New York and if such a relationship spurred Obama to travel to Chicago to begin his career as a community organizer.

Barack Obama’s first known meetings with Bill Ayers would occur three years after Obama graduated from Columbia, in Chicago in 1987. Ayers was an activist in the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools. Community organizer Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project was a member of that Alliance.

Barack Obama was not eight, but a 24-year-old community organizer in Chicago at the time of the Weathermen’s last attacks, and 29 when many of the last remnants of the Underground in the offshoot May 19th Communist Organization were sentenced to prison in 1990. (Former Weatherman Elizabeth Ann Duke is still a fugitive and wanted by the FBI.)

BarackObama.com, the campaign’s official website, offers up a “fact check” that Obama was just eight years old when the Weathermen were active in 1969. The Obama campaign has tried to use the founding date of the Weathermen as a touchstone, claiming that the acts of the group were something that happened “40 years ago” when Obama was a child. Far closer to the truth is the December 6, 1990, sentencing date of Weathermen Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, when the last of the Weathermen were sentenced for their role in a string of bombings in the mid-1980s, including bombs that detonated at the National War College, the Washington Navy Yard Computing Center, the Washington Navy Yard Officers’ Club, New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, New York City’s South African Consulate, and the United States Capitol Building.

That the Obama campaign refuses to talk about these things and gets so indignant about anyone daring to bring it up just increases the suspicion. If Obama used to be a radical in these circles but has since tempered his views and no longer believes all that rhetoric about a socialist revolution, let him say so. But these are important charges and they deserve to be answered.