Zealot

A member of my congregation gave me Reza Aslan's latest book, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, as a Christmas gift.  It was interesting, because that meant that I was reading a book about the actual historical evidence that we have concerning Jesus, at precisely the time of year when we are most immersed in the decidedly non-historical birth narratives.
Let me start with what I appreciated about Aslan's book: he does a wonderful job of presenting the cultural context of Jesus of Nazareth, he gives a visceral portrayal of Jerusalem and the Temple, and brings some of the fervor and turmoil of first century Palestine to life.  He is also very vulnerable and honest in his prologue about his own involvement and eventual disenchantment with evangelical (American) Christianity.  In that journey, I am with him, I have also experienced a "get saved or go to hell," version of Christian faith as a teenager.  I have also spent years discovering that Jesus of Nazareth is perhaps a much more inspiring and, dare I say, "likeable," character than Jesus the Christ.  I have also been often frustrated by how little Christianity seems to have to do with Jesus.
The difference for me comes in the fact that I do, in fact, believe that Jesus of Nazareth was also Jesus the Christ, and making a distinction between the two is simply splitting theological hairs.  Aslan's entire argument essentially hinges on the self understanding of the man Jesus of Nazareth.  His suspicion is that the divinity of Jesus, which has become so central to much of Christianity, would actually be shocking, even scandalizing to a Nazarene Jew.  I agree, it probably would.  The Gospels tell us that Jesus was highly uncomfortable with people who would elevate him to royal, let alone divine, status.
Aslan is highly suspicious of the Gospel writers agendas, pointing out that all of the Gospels were written in Greek and most likely date after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, which consequently means that they were probably not "eyewitness" accounts of Jesus life.  Indeed, biblical scholarship generally acknowledges the chaotic temporal separation between Jesus' life, death and resurrection, and the beginning of what we know as Christianity, and that the Gospel writers had a certain story that they were telling about Jesus of Nazareth.  For instance, Matthew and Luke include a birth narrative, which they include presumably to emphasize the exceptional nature of Jesus life from it's very beginning and present him as a fulfillment of prophecy (especially in Matthew's Gospel).  However, the birth narratives are a definite chink in the armor for skeptics to begin their assault on the truth of the Gospels.
Believers who have a strong sense of biblical infallibility are going to have a hard time with Zealot. When you strip away two thousand years of tradition and theological evolution, you are left with very little to hang your hat on.  What history tells us, absent the witness of the Gospel, was that Jesus was a Jew from Nazareth, who was executed by Rome for sedition (claiming to be King of the Jews, which represented a threat to Roman authority).  After Jesus' death a movement, headed primarily by his brother James, continued to proclaim him as the Messiah, until that movement was destroyed along with the rest of Jerusalem in 70 CE.  After 70 CE, the teachings of Jesus were primarily left in Gentile hands.  Most of the New Testament was written in Greek, by people who had never actually seen Jesus in the flesh.
So that's the "historical" reality.  If you want the long version, read Zealot for yourself, it's entertaining and well written, and pretty accurate in most ways that matter.
But, if you don't want to lose your faith in Jesus the Christ, let me tell you a little secret: Jesus is more than a historical figure.  I won't argue with Aslan's assertion that Christianity has almost certainly become something that would have been shocking to Jesus of Nazareth.  What we need to understand is the nature of the incarnation, when God became a man, he became an actual man, he was not just pretending.  When Superman is "disguised" as Clark Kent, he still has the powers, and often there are funny moments where Cal-el uses his powers while not in costume, but is careful to hide them.  We can often think that this is what God did in Jesus: he really had powers, he really knew everything, he really understood exactly what was happening all the time.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus certainly had the ability to do miracles, but they also tell us that he learned, that sometimes he was corrected, that sometimes he was uncertain, afraid, surprised and even cranky, all things that we would not expect a supreme, omniscient God to be.  The "secret" agenda of the Gospels is actually to tell us about the Incarnation, not necessarily just about Jesus of Nazareth.  He is where it starts.  If Aslan had not decided to drink the hater-ade about the Apostle Paul and been dead set on labeling him an unstable deviant, who essentially decided to start his own Jesus cult over and against Peter, James and John, he might have noticed that Paul actually started to understand how God was working, despite all the "evidence" of defeat.
What Aslan admits, several times over the course of the book is that he cannot see how anyone continued to call Jesus the Messiah after his death, and after all that transpired in Jerusalem over the next fifty years.  The Messiah was supposed to save the day, the Messiah was supposed to be the superhero, but Jesus "failed" in that mission.
Yes, he did.
But he called others to continue to "do the things that he did."  The Incarnation goes on, in James, Peter, John and yes, even Paul.  It went on at Nicea almost 300 years after Jesus died, it went on in the Reformation, it goes on in Churches all over the world right now, where people believe and follow Jesus.  I agree, that we sometimes get a little too tied up in our own stuff, and we definitely do forget that Jesus really, really wanted us to protect the poor and vulnerable, and we perhaps become far too much like the Temple that Jesus railed against, but when we remember our Savior we can repent, because he called us to it.  When we die we can be resurrected, because Jesus showed us that it was the Way.
The Incarnation was not an historical event, which happened at a specific time and place.  It is something that happens and continues to happen.  Thus, it's no surprise that it gives historians fits.  You can't write history until it's finished.  Zealot, is useful in telling us where the story began.  It tells us what Jesus may have thought about the Kingdom of Heaven, and his identity as the Son of Man, but what it entirely misses, perhaps because it is part of the "agenda" of the Gospel writers, is that Jesus may have actually understood that one man, even a God-man, cannot change the world, he needs help, he needs others to have faith and follow his path.
Maybe it's true that Christianity isn't "pure" in the historical sense, maybe it has been shaped by people who hear the Word, and learn the Way, but I think that's what makes it a living, breathing practice of Incarnation, not a dead set of doctrines.  In fact, I would say one of the things that Jesus definitely wanted to challenge was the notion of purity as a prerequisite for a relationship with God...
But that's a really long story.

What the Duck?

Phil Robertson has been suspended from the television show Duck Dynasty, for stuff he said about his opinions regarding homosexuality in GQ magazine.
A couple questions spring to mind:
1. Why on God's green earth was Phil Robertson being interviewed by GQ magazine?  Isn't GQ a men's fashion magazine?  I think every piece of clothing Phil owns is camo, and while that is in some senses a fashion choice, it's not generally the image that GQ is all about.
2. Why is GQ magazine asking Phil about sin?  Isn't GQ a men's fashion magazine?  Wait, I already asked that question.
3. Why is it surprising to anyone that a guy who looks like Phil, and lives in very rural Louisiana, and makes duck calls for a living, and prays simple earthy prayers before every meal he shares with his enormous family, doesn't exactly have the most cosmopolitan opinions about homosexuality?
4. Why is it that A&E seems hell bent of making a martyr of Phil Robertson?  A while back it was the "threat" that if they didn't stop praying before meals, the show would be discontinued.  Folks were full of righteous indignation over that one, even though it turned out that the real issue was the Robertson clan wanted more of that filthy Hollywood cash than A&E was really wanting to shell out.  It went away as soon as the network realized they were about to shoot the cash cow, and the Robertsons are still allowed to pray to Jesus at the end of every episode.
Now there are already outpourings of support for Phil Robertson, and a predictable backpedaling (but not all the way) apology and an affirmation that he would never treat anybody disrespectfully, no matter how wrong and sinful they may be.
I have to admit, I have very mixed feelings about all this.  On the one hand, I owe a debt of gratitude to Duck Dynasty, because when I spent three days in the hospital, there was apparently a marathon of DD on A&E, and not much else on the TV.  Granted, I was on morphine most of the time and so coherent thought was not really a necessity for amusement, but then, I got to like those bearded goofballs.  Sy and Phil especially, I would really like to hang out with those two, and maybe shoot some things.
Maybe it's just the moderate, rationalist Presbyterian side of me, but Phil's statement in GQ, did not strike me as particularly hateful, or unusual for a man of his ilk.  I think he was expressing some fairly honest (if somewhat incoherent) thoughts on an issue that is complex and controversial.  Reading it, my opinion of him remains entirely unchanged.  And I think, TV show or not, he should have a right to say it, and stand by it.  You can hear vastly more offensive and bigoted opinions on almost any talk radio program that broaches the subject.  I would much rather see A&E, which stands, I believe, for Arts and Entertainment, defend free speech than become the sort of censorious "liberal" instrument of devil that some red state types are always sure is out to get them.
The progress of civil rights for LGBTQ people in this country of ours is moving at a pretty good pace for such a deeply controversial subject as S-E-X.  It would be a mistake to start making victims out of people like Phil Robertson.  He's not a victim, he's a man who has done quite well marketing the ideals of Americana, and the way things used to be.  But if you stand him up next to a faceless TV network who boots him off of his own TV show for stuff he said about homosexuals in a magazine article, I can tell you who most of the people who are avid, camo-wearing, gun-toting, Duck Dynasty fans are going to side with.
I like Phil, if I were his pastor I might talk with him about developing a more coherent and consistent theological perspective on sin, and perhaps counsel him that homosexuality is not the best case study to use in a GQ interview.  I might talk to him about how sin can twist our words and make us sound like bigots, even if we're not.  I might talk to him about how the world is always going to misunderstand and misrepresent the followers of Jesus Christ, and so we should always be circumspect in our words and deeds so that we do not become a stumbling block, even to pagans and other non-believers.  I would talk to him about how the saving grace of Christ, which apparently he has experienced first hand, is for all those who are lost, no matter who they love.
I would certainly encourage him to use the voice that he has to truly represent Christ to the world, if he does it half as well as he makes duck calls, the Kingdom of Heaven will draw nearer to us all.

Ten

Ten years ago, I was 29.  I was nervous.  I knew my life was about to change.  I had no idea how much.  My son, Jack, will turn ten tomorrow, and I will have been a father for a decade.  It's a little hard for me to wrap my mind around that, to tell you the truth, I don't remember too much about how it felt not to be a Dad, because it has become such a part of who I am now.  In preparing my sermon for Sunday on the text from Matthew's Gospel, I came across a quote from theologian Stanley Hauerwas: "You want to learn how to welcome a stranger?  Have a kid."
We like to think of parenthood as this blessed, shining thing, but the truth is, it's terrifying and messy, and you do lots of stuff wrong, and sometimes you wish it never happened... and then your child does something amazing.  The amazing thing is not about some talent they have, it's not about some funny line that they spit out without even realizing how hilarious it is.  The amazing thing is that they just look at you and call you Daddy (or Mommy), they do it with their eyes before they can even talk, they recognize that you are someone they can trust for everything.  It can seem daunting to be sure, having another person rely on you so completely, but there's something about the trust in their eyes that strengthens you for the task.
I love the story of Joseph for the same reason so many women love the magnificat and the story of Mary, because it shows me a father's place in the story of God.  Joseph doesn't get a lot of attention any other place in the story, but he has an important role in the birth of Jesus.  Let's take away all the distractions from the story and look at it in purely human terms: he's engaged to a woman, and she's pregnant, and it's not his baby.  He has every right, by the Law of Moses, to publicly accuse her and have her stoned to death, but he doesn't.  He plans to not make a fuss, break the engagement and send her home to her father, presumably clearing the way for the baby's actual father to take responsibility.  Stuff happens you know, no one needs to get killed.  Besides it may not have even been her fault, she could have been raped or abused, who knows, all Joseph knows is it's not his baby.
Until he has a dream.
It must have been some dream.
He wakes up and decides to be a father.
He decides to give Jesus a name, and a family, and security.
He decides to go beyond just not harming Mary, he decides to accept her, and her baby.
He welcomes two strangers; one being a woman who very well may have betrayed him.
He becomes the man that Jesus can call Abba, Daddy.

I feel deeply sorry for people who didn't have a Joseph in their life, that is a man who was willing to welcome them.  Sometimes things work like they should in the biological sense, it was like that for me, and I'm trying my best to make it that way for Jack.  But human beings have the potential to transcend biology, and so sometimes we get adopted, sometimes another person takes responsibility, and I think it's entirely appropriate that God included such a person in the life of Jesus.
Joseph's presence in this story is very much a part of the incarnation.  He is a very necessary component, without him Jesus would have never been able to do what he did, he would have been an utter outcast.  We talk about how he was poor, and somewhat of an outsider, but being of a low station was nothing compared with being "illegitimate."  I hesitate to even use that word, because I think it's a travesty to call a child something like that, but it is something that many children were labeled and that burden followed them through their whole lives.  In those days, it would have been a curse like almost no other.
Joseph provides legitimacy to the life of Jesus. Joseph illustrates some of the characteristics of God that are going to be revealed in the life of Jesus: welcoming the stranger, forgiving when it's really hard to forgive, accepting responsibility when he bears no fault, being convicted to follow a difficult path for the sake of love and love alone.
I know how important he was when my kids look at me.  I'm not perfect, but they trust me.  Joseph probably got tired and irritated, even with a sinless child.  But he was the one that modeled fatherhood for the man who would one day teach us to pray: "Our Father..."
He didn't have to take it on.
He could have walked away.
But he became a father, who had a son named Jesus.

Bread of Tears

In 2005 I learned what lament has to do with Christmas.  So now, when things like Psalm 80 pop up in the lectionary around this time of year, I don't think it's weird anymore.  2005 was the year we first tried to celebrate the season of joy and togetherness with a hole in the middle of our family. It was almost exactly six months after my brother died, and it was the first real attempt we had made at being together as a family since IT happened.

Thinking back on it, the worst idea in the world was to try to go on like nothing was missing.  Michele and I packed up on Christmas day and drove across Pennsylvania with a two year old and a five month old baby, a day earlier than we planned just to surprise my Mom.  And it was a surprise.  And it was a happy moment.  But it was just a drop of light in a vast emptiness.

Because no amount of presence could fill the absence.

Because we were trying to deny the need to lament.

Because we were trying to sing Joy to the World, when there was no joy in our hearts.

I think that's the worst thing about the holidays for people who are living with loss: everybody seems so oppressively happy, and they like to tell you about it.  And no amount of gifting or gluttony can really even distract you for more than a moment from the massive black hole in your life, and you just wish that somehow you could feel a different way, but you don't, and every reminder of how out of phase you are with the rest of the world just feeds the void.

This will be the eighth Christmas living with the presence of an absence, eating the bread of tears.  Honestly, you kind of get to like the taste.  You actually come to appreciate the difference for what it is, and I think that's the place of lament in a season of joy, to remind you of how empty the glitz and materialism that have overshadowed the birth of Christ really are.

Here's a weird thing: one of the things I wish I could do at Christmas time is get into a rip-roaring, rum-soaked argument about something ridiculous with my brother.  I don't want a perfect Christmas, I don't want to sit around quietly reflecting on the blessings of family, I want to call him a bunch of names and have him call me some.  I want to be mad at him, amused by him or annoyed at him, I want something, anything that would mean his presence instead of his absence.

I want everyone who has the luxury of living with their actual, annoying, messed up, ridiculous, spiteful, jealous, conniving, gossiping, rude and otherwise repugnant family, to take a minute to appreciate them.

Because they're there, and they're what you've got.

I'm getting to a point, where I'm glad that I know the difference.  I'm not sure I'm all the way to peace and acceptance, but it might just be on the horizon.

It is a testament to God's grace that it is possible to transmute the poison of grief and loss, and turn it into a gift of awareness.  The refrain of Psalm 80 is: "Restore us, O God of hosts: let your face shine, that we may be saved."

That is the prayer of people who have faced the void, and felt the emptiness.  That is the prayer of people who are walking in darkness, yearning for a great light.  Maybe we'll never really get the "real" meaning of Christmas until we live through a few dark holy days.

White Christmas

It snowed in Jerusalem... and Egypt... and in a bunch of places it doesn't usually snow very much.
The kids are practicing for their Christmas pageant, where they will play shepherds, magi, Mary and Joseph, all Middle Eastern type folks, who despite being connected to all sorts of Christmas carols were probably not at all accustomed to Sleigh bells and Jack Frost.  In fact, we need to remember that Jesus may or may not have been born in winter, we don't really know, and for most of the history of the Christian faith we haven't really cared.
As I have stated before, and will gladly talk about with anyone who wants to listen, so many of the things we associate with Christmas are profoundly pagan things: winter solstice, evergreens, feasting, gift giving, and figgy pudding (actually not too many people really do the last one anymore, because well... yuck).
I'm not trying to be a Grinch, because I like those things (actually I kind of even like figgy pudding, if you put that sugary butter stuff on top of it).  I have a Christmas tree and we let our kids believe in Santa (at least Cate, Jack has scientifically debunked the mythology).
However, I think it's important that, as modern people of faith, we know what mysteries to hold tightly, and what myths to hold lightly.  As we proclaim the startling reality that God became a man, we need to understand that that alone is enough of an amazing truth. As Christians we should not get bogged down defending the mythological elements of the story and/or traditions, because that simply confuses the issue.
As the Daily Show points out so wonderfully, when people try to defend things that are logically and obviously not true, they just look ridiculous.
The idea that our celebration of Christmas really has that much to do with Jesus' actual circumstances is problematic.  As it is that we think Jesus looked like this:

Instead of this:

Of course, I know that the second image is every bit as speculative as the first.  Since folks didn't have cameras, and since Jesus was not rich enough or famous enough for anyone to actually paint his portrait, we really don't know what he looked like.  But given what EVERYBODY else who lived in that part of the world looked like at the time, I think the second one is a better guess.

Yet what everybody knows is that the first one is Jesus, because of tradition.  Just like everybody knows there were three wisemen (even though the Bible never says so).  Just like everybody knows that Mary and Joseph were cruelly cast out into the cold, because they didn't make proper reservations and ended up in some God forsaken cave with the animals (actually they were probably staying with relatives who had been put upon by far too many out of town family members who had to come to Bethlehem for the census.  Joseph and Mary getting their own stall was most likely a profound act of hospitality, everyone else was probably doubled up or crowded into the common living area.  And I guarantee you, when the baby was being born there were gaggle of womenfolk bustling around, keeping Joseph and the other men far away.  And I guarantee you the baby Jesus cried... a lot.

I also suspect that when a bunch of shepherds showed up in the middle of the night, there were some questions that needed answered before they ever got near the baby.  And when some Persians (read Gentiles) showed up with expensive gifts, there was more than a little consternation among Jesus' Jewish family.

But we don't hear much about any of this, because the really important thing is that something unprecedented had happened: Emmanuel, God with us.  I don't mind doubting or re-evaluating, or re-envisioning any of the details, and I'm not threatened by people who want to tell me that things didn't go down just the way the songs say.  Most of all, I'm not worried or upset when the world gets it all wrong, because that, for me is and important part of the true story of Christmas: when nobody expected it God showed up.

Questions and Faith

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday.  As is often the case with such revelations, it began with a question from one of my kids.  My daughter, resident question asker and philosopher, posed a question about how long the earth was around before people lived on it.  I thought she had just been watching the Science channel or something so I simply said, a really long time, and proceeded to offer what I understand about the process of planet formation (which is not that much, so it only took a minute).  Then she asked her follow up, "so how come the Bible says it was only a few days?"  Then I remembered  that she is reading her new Bible that the church gave her for going into third grade, it's a "real" Bible, not an illustrated, clipped into stories, kids version.

It's always fun when, as a seminary educated, professional Bible interpreter (aka Pastor), you try to communicate the vastness of creation to an eight-year-old who just read Genesis 1.  They really ought to have a class like that in Seminaries.  I understood, in that moment, why people always want to take the literal route in understanding Scripture, you do open the door to all sorts of doubt about what you know and what you don't know about God.  Maybe it's just my opinion, but the idea of a God who would work for billions of years on a burning hunk of rock hurtling through a frigid vacuum, to create a primordial goo, where a few organic chemicals can eventually coagulate and form amino acids and where those fairly basic chemical structures could eventually, by some happy accident, begin to self organize and replicate into proto-life forms that would then slowly, through a mysterious process, called evolution, begin to variegate into multiple life forms, and within a relatively short period of time you had a staggering variety of these life forms, ranging from the extremely simple to the fairly complex, all fitting into a purposeful creative vision...

Well that's just amazing, and holy, and every bit as glorious as the six day version.

But back to my daughter, miracle of God's creative will that she is, sitting there with all her complex cellular processes happening, having evolved a large brain capable of processing verbal and written language and formulating questions about the formation of the universe, at eight years old.  She is wondering, given the special place that this book has in her life, and in the life of our family: is it true?

I understood why it's so tempting to go the easy way and forget about the billions of years, and the primordial goo, and amino acids and dinosaurs and all of that and just make up stories that fit into a simpler vision.

Then I remembered that even though her brother has logically built a rather ironclad legal case against the existence of Santa Claus, based on keen observation and sound deductions.  Even though he has presented her with said ironclad arguments, my daughter still chooses to believe.  Her faith is strong enough to assimilate the facts and keep knowing the real truth.  Eventually she's going to give up her childlike belief in fairies and flying fat men, but I want to start to build a solid logical ground for faith in God before that happens.  I want to be clear about the difference between reality and fiction. I want to take God out of the realm of fiction in her mind.  She needs to hear now that there is more to truth than just facts, and that stories are not just means of conveying information, they provide structure and meaning to our lives.

Unless I help her start to grow in faith that is rooted in reality, rather than fiction, her faith is going to get ripped away from her.  Unless I help her understand that stories can be true in more than one way, she's going to learn eventually that nothing is really trustworthy.

By helping her appreciate the wonder of life, where a few slimy molecules can eventually become a person who can imagine God saying "let there be light," I hope I'm helping her to realize what a miracle she is. And how her questions teach me more than my answers teach her.

Strange Brew

Religion has become weird.  It has always been strange; the quest for God or gods.  Religion has always been at least marginally concerned with the transcendent.  When I say weird though, I'm not talking about mystical or otherworldly, for those things are merely inevitable side effects of searching for the holy and the eternal.  What I mean by weird is disjointed and confusing, I would almost say schizophrenic, but that would be insulting to some fairly wonderful and interesting schizophrenics I have known.
If you follow the world of religion, as I do, you are subjected daily to a wide range of opinions, rants, and rhetoric.  The interweb gives one a wonderful resource for experiencing the weirdness of modern religion, you can read fairly thoughtful commentary on the life of faith from so many perspectives, but what you're likely to draw out of the whole experience is not clarity, far from it.  You will find that sorting through the mess is far from easy.  You will probably be astonished by how bound and conflicted people can be about sex, and politics.  You will read racist, misogynist and otherwise bigoted opinions from people who claim to follow Jesus of Nazareth.  You can find people who would like very much to kill you in the name of Allah.  You can find people who proclaim that we should use nuclear weapons in the name of Zion, and those are just the big three.
You can encounter all sorts of strange, inbred perversions of the major world faiths up in the hollers and in the backwaters off the major streams.  What you probably have to look fairly intently for is the truth, or some semblance of it.  You find a terrible number of people who take themselves awfully seriously.
But here's why I stick with this strange brew:
Yesterday, the kids of GSPC decorated the Christmas tree in the sanctuary (yes, we have a tree in the sanctuary, and yes, I know it's a pagan symbol that was co-opted by Christianity).  We decorated it with Chrismons (monograms of Christ), little white and gold symbols in the shapes of crosses, doves, crowns, Greek letters, and even a butterfly (a symbol of resurrection, and yes I know it's technically a metamorphosis).
The process was frenetic to the point of chaos.  We were "talking" about what each symbol meant, but mostly kids were just jumping at the chance to put the symbols on the tree.  They were using their imaginations, they were thinking, and most importantly, they were having fun.  Some of what I was telling them may have sunk in, some of it may not.  I don't really think I care very much, because in that moment the kingdom of heaven was there.  Hanging a white and gold triangle on your tree doesn't mean you really understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but I'm pretty sure God: Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer was pretty amused by the utter glee with which it went up
I guess I know it can't all be children's sermons, there are lots of grown up type things that we need to sort through as we grow in faith, but once in a while I think we grown ups ought to try and have that much fun in worship.  That's not too weird is it?

Yihla Mojo

You can blow out a candle...

But you can't blow out a fire.

-Peter Gabriel, Biko

I was in middle school when I first heard the song Biko.  At that phase of life, I knew about Apartheid, but it seemed like a nightmare fairy tale of something that happened a long way away.  It inspired a feeling of vague fear and a sense of injustice, sort of like learning about the Nazis or the KKK, or stories of antebellum slavery.  Honestly, at that age you just don't have much of a sense that there is even a world beyond the school  you go to and the community that you live in.  All that stuff that happens on the news sort of seems like fiction, and not very nice fiction at that.

The one thing that really mattered to me though was music, and when I heard Biko, something broke open.  I became aware that Apartheid was not something that happened years ago, before I was born, like WWII or JFK being assassinated, it was happening right now.  Stephen Biko had been killed when I was 3 years old, but Nelson Mandela, Madiba, was still in prison.  I'm guessing that I heard Biko in the late 1980s sometime, because that's when I was into artsy music like The Cure and Peter Gabriel.  Madiba was released in 1990 and by that point I had become much more aware of the reality of Apartheid thanks in large part to musicians like Steve VanSant and U2 that sort of kept it out there.

Madiba's story to that point was awe inspiring.  He had been in prison since before I was born, and now he was free and Apartheid was ending, and he and all the silent martyrs of the cause were finally able to step into the light.  You want it to end there, with the evil broken and the long-suffering people rising up to take their rightful place at the table.

But it's not that simple.  Some things are entrenched and embedded in our souls.  South Africa was a mess, black and white still hated and feared each other.  Mandela became the first democratically elected President of post Apartheid South Africa, and the vision he had spent 27 years behind bars dreaming about was burning before his eyes.

I can't imagine how he did not rise up in anger.  After that much injustice had been done to him.  He had gone into prison a young man, full of violent passion for change, and I think no small amount of justified rage against the system of oppression that firmly gripped South Africa.  He came out of prison an old man, with white hair and smiling eyes.  That was the thing I remember about Madiba in 1991, his serious, but smiling eyes.  How did those eyes not lose their shine in those long years of persecution?

How did he not harbor profound bitterness towards his white neighbors?

They had taken most of his life, they had taken all the life of some of his friends and colleagues.

How was he not overwhelmed by hatred?

I don't know, but he wasn't.  I don't think I can ever remember seeing a person who was so conscious of the fact that they were a symbol.  Everything about his bearing spoke of calm and peace.  He was not the man he was when he went into prison, full of revolution and violence.  He was now precisely the man that his people, both black and white, needed.

As a teenager I watched several things that had seemed impossible only a few years ago happen before my eyes.  The Berlin Wall crumbled and the Soviet Union fell.  Apartheid exploded, but South Africa was not destroyed, thanks in large part to one man, who understood the power of symbolism in the human heart.  Maybe he knew what Peter Gabriel wrote in his song about Biko: "The eyes of the world are watching now."  He knew that things like sports could draw people together, he knew that he needed to be the symbol of change and peace.  I can't help but stand in awe of a man like that.  No wonder so many South Africans called him Tata (father).

Madiba has passed from our community into the cloud of witnesses.  He was 95, he had lived through the process of becoming a symbol.  Others, like Biko, had become stories and songs and legends and inspired people in a different way.  The Xhosa words Yihla mojo, are a part of Peter Gabriel's song about Biko's murder.  In Madiba's native tongue they mean something like "descend spirit," which sounds like a plea that we all should be making in difficult times.

Descend Spirit and strengthen those whose freedom is trampled.

Descend Spirit and change violent and angry hearts into peaceful and wise ones.

Descend Spirit and heal your broken children.

Descend Spirit and cast out our fear.

Descend Spirit and remind your people that no injustice is impossible to overcome.

Descend Spirit and remind us of the joy in Madiba's eyes that his people were free.

Yihla Mojo!

Overflow.

I just, more or less, finished writing my sermon for Sunday.  It's about John the Baptist (see also previous post).  But it's one of those texts that just has too much for one sermon.  One of the things that makes a bit of an appearance on Sunday, needs to be fleshed out a little more, so here goes, sermon appendix 1.A.
The Brood of Vipers.  Who were they?  Sadducees and Pharisees, two groups, who as a general rule disagreed profoundly, and didn't usually hang out together.  When they do get mentioned together, it is usually as a conglomerate group of religious authorities who are doing a bit of what I like to refer to as butt sniffing (you know that thing dogs do to one another that pretty much grosses humans out, but tells the animals quite a bit about their new acquaintance).  They are, together or separately, scoping out the competition.  In the text this week it's JBap, soon enough it will be Jesus.  In this case they don't do much, they just kind of show up to see what's up with this crazy dude in the wilderness.  John drops the people's elbow on them with great vengeance and furious anger.  The question is, why?
We know why after all, because we've heard all the other stories about them, we see them trying to trap Jesus and we know that they team up to get rid of him in the long run, but why does John go after them with such venom?
Several possible explanations:
1. John was actually one of the early travelling companions to Doctor Who and thus had been into the future to see what they did to his cousin, and he was really upset about what they were going to do.  While I personally like this one, it's not very likely, although John would have made a pretty awesome companion for the Doctor (think Leela from the Tom Baker years, except hairier).
2. (slightly less fictional) John was a member of the Essene sect who lived a spartan existence in isolated communities because they believed that the "secular" world  was going to pollute them.  (Think a combination of fundamentalist homeschoolers and doomsday preppers, actually it's not that hard to imagine).  John was really just reacting out of conditioned hostility to "them big city religious types."
3. The religious establishment had failed the people of God.  They had become too invested in protecting a Temple that God didn't want in the first place.  They had made alliances with Herod, who most people thought of as the devil, and by extension the Romans, who everyone knew were the devil, in order to keep their golden calf alive and well.  They had become, despite widely disparate doctrine, and profound disagreements among themselves, the owners of a thriving business in selling God.
Hmm, that does sound familiar.... where might you find that sort of thing happening now?
As my daughter would say: "Poop."
It's established religion at its worst, that's who the brood of vipers are.
As you may have read earlier, I really like John the Baptist, he's who I want to be.  I certainly don't want to be the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  But I do like the perks of the Temple.  I like my office, and my salary, and my pretty little church building, but I need to remember that those things are not what make us into the people of God.
What makes us the people of God is the reality that the kingdom of heaven has drawn near to us.
I think I envy John for his simplicity and his clarity.  He was able to be so bold and even bombastic, because he didn't rely on anyone for anything, he was utterly self sufficient, and also rather alone.
The one he was preparing for was not.
We learn elsewhere that John had a few adherents who might qualify as disciples, but frankly we don't hear much from them, while the men that Jesus took under his wing, end up doing quite a lot.  Jesus had his "brood of vipers" moment with the same band of folks (see Matthew 23) and he goes into a lot more detail.  He talks about how their religious practices actually shut the door of heaven in men's faces.  There's a whole chapter of Jesus just railing against the religious authorities.  Rather than indulge myself in a moment of  "you get em Jesus," I am conscious of the need to avoid becoming "them."
I like John, because I need to get in touch with my desert wild man sometimes.
I like Jesus in Matthew 23, because bureaucracy, particularly religious bureaucracy makes me angry.
But I know that the big question and the big warning here is the reality that we don't get own God.  We are not God's gatekeepers, we don't even have a secret handshake.
I get the temple thing, it's easy to imagine God's presence in an ornate, silent, sacred space, but God is also out there in the dust and the dirt in the wilderness where a bunch of ordinary people are repenting and being baptized in a muddy creek.  I'm sure it was not very decent and in order and I'm sure the Presbyterians.... I mean the Pharisees and Sadducees, probably did a whole lot of tongue clucking about how random and wild this John character really was.
Just wait til they get a load of Jesus.

Prepare the Way

It's the Monday after Thanksgiving and I am exhausted.  I am exhausted by all the festivities of the weekend.  In order to give thanks for life's blessings, I have engaged in the sin of gluttony on a rather epic scale.  Because I'm so grateful for family, we had a houseful of them for several days, which was a happy thing, but draining nonetheless.  By the time church was done yesterday afternoon, all I could do was passively absorb several football games and drag myself (and my family) out for Mexican food.  But by somewhat cruel happenstance, Advent is upon me, which means, in the life of an introverted pastor, more dinners and parties and "extra" church stuff.
Quite frankly, I'm rather wishing it was Lent instead (yeah, I really just said that, that proves how tired I am).
Thankfully, when I opened up my Bible this morning to read the lectionary passages for this week, I found John the Baptist.  I love me some JBap.  Truth be told, he's the guy I want to be when the Presbyterian side of me wears a little thin.  I want to be the wild man in the wilderness, making a ruckus that brings folks from far and wide.  It's John the Baptist, harbinger of doom, crazy guy in the wildlands, who really sparks my imagination of what I would like to be as a preacher.  But I know that he wasn't the main attraction, and I know that there's not much of a future in that sort of adventure.
But for a minute he's the thing.  He challenges the hypocrites, he baptizes people and he is a beautiful messenger of God, a prophet, the last of his kind.  I think it would have been really easy for him to get a little to full of himself.  When you look around the world of the church you see the danger inherent in preaching a powerful message, you become a brand, not Jesus, you.  The scripture mentions those who came to consider themselves John's disciples and it doesn't take too much imagination to guess that maybe there were moments when the Jesus camp and the John camp butted heads, because their methods were rather different.  John emphasized the "Repent" part of the phrase.  Jesus emphasized "the kingdom of God is at hand."  But it the message was remarkably consistent for two distant cousins who only seem to meet once.
What I think I really need to identify with in John is the fact that he knows his place in the whole story.  Despite the success and the crowds, he understands that he's not the one, his wildness is something that simultaneously attracts attention and keeps people at arm's length.  He understands that he can be what he is called to be because another is coming.  He can emphasize one half of the equation because another is coming to solve it.  He can build a highway of diamonds, clear and shining and straight, because another is going to walk down it towards the cross.
I think I really love John, because he gives the preacher in me a kick in my circumspection.  He challenges the balanced, think everything through four times, Presbyterian in me a vision of holy wildness.  He speaks to the part of me that wants to leave my comfortable suburban home and walk the Appalachian trail and the Camino de Santiago.  He cries in the wilderness and points out all the excesses and the sins, which are after all, painfully obvious.  But he's not the destination, he's not even the road, he's a signpost, and he points clearly, powerfully and certainly to the one who is coming.
No wonder I love him, he's what I want to be, he's what I should be.  I want and I need to remember that I'm not Jesus, but I'm pointing to him, I'm proclaiming him, I'm preparing the way.
And now I don't feel so tired anymore.

Harsh Words

One of the dangers of the Interweb is that you have access to so much stuff, that after about a week you forget where you saw things.  And so it is with the article that got me thinking about heretics and apostates.  I know I didn't just randomly start thinking about the difference between the two, because they are not words that one runs across with any frequency in common conversation, even if you are a pastor.  For those who do not know, a heretic is a person who proclaims a belief that is outside the bounds of what is acceptable by the community (usually a faith community, but any community that has doctrine can also have heretics).  For some reason, the word heretic brings forth in my mind a colorful image of a wild and dangerous person.  As a point of historical fact though, most heretics were not wild or dangerous, they were rather just people who pointedly disagreed with a particular idea.  The most famous heretic in Christian history, the man who was actually anathematized by the Council of Nicea, was named Arius.  He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a wild-eyed debauchee proclaiming outrageous ideas, he was a priest, whom many in the church admired greatly.  Which was part of the problem when it turned out that his doctrine of Christ was a bit off.  He thought that Jesus was pretty great, but just couldn't bring himself to fully sign on to the doctrine of the trinity and accept that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, was really and truly of the same substance as God the Creator.  Jesus was special, no doubt, but saying he was actually God was just not acceptable to Arius.
The fact that Arius was well spoken, and rather influential, meant that his words and ideas had a lot of weight.  By contrast, one of the main voices contra arius  at Nicea was a young and relatively unknown Bishop named Athanasius, who insisted that Christ was of the same substance with God the Creator.  It was a really long argument, which to this day makes very little sense to anyone outside the church, but which resulted in the Nicene Creed, the one creed that unites almost all Christians, saying:

We believe in One Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light form Light,

True God from True God, begotten, not made,

 of one Being with the Father...

Arius wasn't a bad guy, he was just theologically wrong, and declared so by the church as a whole, which is what being a heretic is all about.  As an interesting post-script, Arius actually managed to become best buds with the Roman Emperor Constantine and ended up wielding a lot of influence in this new thing called the Holy Roman Empire, so you know, being a heretic can't be all bad.

On the other hand, being apostate is what I think most people really think about when they hear the word heretic.  An apostate is one who has cast off, not just the doctrine of the church, but the mores and ethics as well.  An apostate has lost or broken faith, they do not just disagree with some point of doctrine, they come to despise the whole system. The example that springs to mind are folks like Alastaire Crowley and Anton LaVey, who actually decide that they like the character of Satan better than the character of God.  Strictly speaking, they are not heretics, they are apostate, because they don't proclaim a different faith, rather they are faithless.  While most of these things proclaim some sort of allegiance to a biblical character (Satan, the accuser or the adversary), they actually consider God to be a mythology, so rather than rallying to the rather austere banner of atheism, they figure why give up on all the good religious fun, let's just take up with the enemy.  It's really nothing more than secular humanism with pentagrams and capes.  It certainly doesn't deserve to be considered heresy, that would be insulting to heretics.

That is, of course, an extreme example.  Most forms of apostasy are much more subtle, and far more destructive to the life of the church.  Apostasy is simply not caring, and deciding that it really doesn't matter.  The church, through it's councils and doctrines, has learned to deal with heresy rather well.  We haven't tortured or burned anyone at the stake for centuries, we just argue it out, in long drawn out ways that no one on the outside understands or cares about.

Apostasy on the other hand really seems to have our number, it pushes all the right buttons, and can really get us wound up.  Even though it can be silly and cartoonish at times, it gets us on its' own turf so easily we barely know what happened, and pretty soon we're holding up signs and spouting slogans, and doing things that quite frankly probably make Jesus cry.  Our arguments with heretics may not always be our finest hour, but our futile struggle with apostasy is just about our low ebb.

We can debate the finer points of doctrine with great eloquence and, in our best moments, inspired grace.  What we can't do, especially in the modern world, is force a willful apostate to care that Jesus loves them.

That doesn't stop us from trying, and it certainly doesn't stop it from being true.

I Want to Believe

It will come as no surprise that one of my favorite TV shows was The X-files, a show about two FBI agents assigned to investigate paranormal activity.  The main character was Fox Mulder, a true believer in the phenomena that had been assigned to the X-files because he was absolutely obsessed with UFOs and alien abductions.  He was a sort of pariah within the bureau, stuck in a basement office amid stacks of filing cabinets with a large poster of a UFO on the wall with the mantra: "I Want to Believe."
Agent Dana Scully was assigned to be his babysitter/debunker.  She was the voice of science and reason, a medical doctor and a "by the book" agent.  Scully had to report to the assistant director about the activities of her partner.  I think what gave the show a certain seriousness was the fundamental question of what we believe and why.  There were dark dealings, sci-fi and political paranoia, gruesome and fanciful creatures, aliens and secret government agencies in the show, but the basic premise of every episode was centered around the conflict between Mulder's "belief" and Scully's skepticism.
I will admit, as strange as it may seem for someone in my line of work, I usually find myself as more of a Scully than a Mulder.  I prefer to question things.  I like it when there is hard proof and a solid foundation.  But what the X-files did rather skillfully is bring the facts and the truth into question.  One of it's taglines was: "The Truth is Out There."  I believe, indeed that the truth is out there.  I believe in objective reality, namely the proposition that some things are true regardless of your point of view or personal biases.  However, as any first year philosophy student will tell you, the number of these absolute truths is rather small.
One of the reasons that I do what I do, is because one of those absolute truths I believe is God.  It's a foundation piece of my whole framework of truth.  And it's an entirely subjective belief, meaning that it is something that I believe basically because I want to believe.  I can't prove it, but I also have become convinced that no one can disprove it.  Scully and Mulder went back and forth over this basic issue, Mulder wanted to prove, Scully wanted to disprove, and neither one of them ever succeeded.  Over the course of the show, Scully grew in faith, but she did so only inasmuch as she came to question the validity of what she thought she knew, in other words: she grew up and learned to admit that maybe, just maybe, the "facts" weren't as ironclad as she had thought.
One of the difficult challenges that face people of faith in an increasingly scientific and skeptical world, is allowing for that same sort of growth.  Dogma is rather unhelpful in a search for truth.  If you think you know the answer, you are unlikely to even ask the right questions.
The thing that Jesus did so effectively in his interactions with the religious authority types who were pretty sure that they had all the answers, was to ask the right questions.  Do you notice how often his parables beg a question rather than answering one?  Do you notice how often people are "afraid to ask him more questions?"  It's not because he was angry or terse with them, it was because they realized that they were asking the WRONG questions.
Yes, there is a such thing as the WRONG question.  True believers and skeptics are both vulnerable to asking the wrong questions.  A question that you already know the answer to and are asking as a rhetorical technique, unless of course you're on your high school debate team, is the wrong question.  A question that you are going to use as some sort of litmus test for judging another person worthy of your acceptance, is probably the wrong question.  A question asked out of genuine curiosity and a desire to know more, live in the light of the truth, and expand your mind, is probably the right sort of question.
Question everything, but make your questions good.  Search for the truth with diligence and an open mind.  Remember that the truth is out there, meaning it may not always be in your grasp.  Be humble, but persistent in your pursuit of the truth, and never be afraid to ask the right questions.

Turn and face the strain

I'm doing something Sunday that is perhaps the most dangerous thing I have to do on a regular basis: changing the order of service.  I'm not talking about a drastic or permanent change, just adjusting a few things to incorporate a little Thanksgiving into our worship.  We will be inviting people to bring things forward for the offering and for a food collection rather than passing the offering plates.   Like I said, it's not major surgery, but it produces anxiety nonetheless.  I am anticipating complaints, and perhaps that's the real issue: my own anticipation of complaints.
It's a major gumption drain.
Those of you who are not intimately acquainted with the life of a spiritual community probably have no idea how much complaining God's children actually get up to.  It made it into the Bible though, in many places, notably in the story of the Exodus when the people grumbled and murmured against Moses.  Jesus also had his share of people at the edge of the crowds griping about his behavior, his teachings, his followers, even his dinner company.
The anxiety I feel about minor changes, and the likely complaints I will hear about them, goes a long way towards explaining why the church changes so slowly, and usually only out of absolute necessity.  From a leader's perspective, peace and the status quo is a good thing, it usually means the grumbling and murmuring is at a minimum and the machine is running smoothly.  Unless you need to change in order to pursue a vision there is very little motivation to rock the boat.  The assumption of leaders, particularly church leaders, is that people don't like to change and that if you're going to get them to change you're going to have to have a pretty compelling reason.
Diversity and variety are not generally compelling reasons.
It may come as a surprise to some, but people who are trying to lead generally don't like becoming the complaint department.  That's why most CEO's have several tiers of yes and no men insulating them from customers and low level employees.  Pastors have no such luxury, at least I don't.
I'm not pointing fingers here.  I don't think any of the churches I have served are particularly unusual in their general level of grumbling, in fact, if I judge by purely anecdotal evidence from colleagues, they may actually have slightly below average levels of malcontent.  The point is that, for change to be worth the effort, it had better be important.
Even minor grumbling has a profound effect on pastoral leaders.  After all we care about the people and the organization we are serving, and we tend to take criticism sort of personally.  For instance, you may think that saying the sermon is too long is a constructive criticism, but what it sounds like is "I don't care what you think or what you're trying to teach me, there's a football game coming on in half an hour and that's way more important than the worship service you have spent the week putting together." You may think that criticizing the hymn selection or the music in general, is just exercising your God given right to voice an opinion, but the fact of the matter is that someone selected, prepared and led that music, and in doing so they are giving glory to God.
So much of the complaining and strife is founded on a consumerist mentality that serves us well when dealing with economic realities like where to buy a car.  With so many different styles, sizes and shapes of church out there, how can we not look at church the same way?
How indeed.  It's destroying congregations in this country much faster than any sinister secular agenda or godless political cabal.  The enemy has found his weapons of choice, and we are them.
Think before you grumble.

Confession after a Presbytery Meeting

Forgive me Lord, sometimes I just don't get it.
I confess: I hate name tags.
I confess: the coffee is terrible, but I drink it anyway, with very little thankfulness.
I confess: what I believe the Church really is just doesn't connect with what I see in front of my eyes.
I confess: I cannot get on board with the "new" or the "creative" or the "revival of an old tradition."
I confess: I often use the word cheesy, in relation to something as sacred as the corporate worship of your people.
 I confess: I've got preacher's disease something awful.  I can get so terribly judgmental of what others are saying from the pulpit, or how they are saying it, that I easily miss the truth it contains.
I confess: I cringe at the phrase: interpretive dance.
I confess: I really do prefer singing songs I already know.
I confess: I inwardly mocking people who wear jeans and sport coats at Presbytery meetings, but I mean come on, make a decision already.
I confess: I am a bit bemused by the number of clergy-people with hyphenated last names, not for any good reason, just because I think it's weird.
I confess: I tune people out rather quickly if I think they're an idiot.
I confess: I think a lot of people are idiots.
I confess to not so secretly deriding the parliamentary procedure that keep us from throwing rocks at each other.
Because I also confess to wanting to throw rocks at others rather more often than would be prudent.
I confess to being too much of an introvert to go mingle and make small talk.
I confess to being a bit disgruntled that no one notices I'm even there.
I confess to wishing several people would just shut up and vote.
I confess to wanting to get out the door as quickly as humanly possible
Lord, I confess to not seeing how any of this is really a glory to your kingdom, and I'm asking you to forgive my blindness, because I'm sure they're all doing their best to serve you.
Amen.

Something to Believe in...

I was walking the dog with the kids in a beautiful park near where I live this afternoon.  It was a sunny fall day that can really only be described as perfect.  We had gotten past the complaining and had swung on some vines and now the kids were walking close to one another sharing some deep conversation (probably about flatulence).  I was struck simultaneously by a deep feeling of gratitude and a profound sense of guilt.  Now guilt is generally something that doesn't trouble me very much.  After all, I'm a good reformed Christian, Presbyterian type, I know I'm a sinner and I also know I'm forgiven, and I believe, to paraphrase John Calvin: God wants us to accept forgiveness, stop whining and get on with life.
But this was a different kind of guilt.  This wasn't guilt because of something I did wrong, or something I should have done differently, or even something I didn't do at all.  This was guilt about how I, as a fairly affluent American, am tacitly complicit in a system of massive injustice, and there's not a whole lot I can do about it.  Maybe it was because of the typhoon that hit the Philippines, maybe it's because I was thinking about all the homeless people who are staying at GSPC this week for the local Safe Nights program.  Maybe it's because I knew that, even as I walked free and peaceful on a beautiful afternoon with my kids who are content and well cared for to the point of being spoiled rotten, there are people in the world being tortured, children being used and abused, bombs falling on families, people being impoverished, enslaved, incarcerated and otherwise broken on the wheel of modern "society."
Maybe it wasn't actually guilt that I was feeling at all, maybe it was helplessness...
Actually it was definitely helplessness, which I think is actually much worse than guilt.
I know that if I gave up everything I have, all I would really do is impoverish four more people, I would subject those two little people who were walking along so carefree in the afternoon sun, to the same kind of desperation that I wish didn't exist in the world.  I can really only protect those two, I don't have the resources or the gifts to take on any more.
I generally do the good that God puts in front of my nose.  Like now, I'm spending the night in my office so that a local charity can use our church building to house about 30 folks.  Our church has this week, other churches have weeks and together we get through the cold months.  Various congregation members are preparing meals or taking a shift sleeping on air mattresses in a Sunday School room.  It's really not much of a sacrifice, but you see all these people, some of them little kids, who have food and a warm place to sleep through the winter and you feel like you might actually be doing some good.  But you also feel really sad that they need this in the first place.
But it's not a solution to the problem of poverty, it's just treating a symptom.  What I really wish I could do is make it so people don't need to sleep on cots in church basements in order to make it through the winter.  I really wish I could make it so people would no longer need to think of church as a place to come for help with an electric bill.  I really wish we didn't need food pantries, and social services offices.  I really wish that we would just learn how to initiate a truly just society where people had what they needed, and everyone could just enjoy a beautiful afternoon walk with their spoiled kids.
I choose to believe that God wants that for us too.
It's not logical, and it's not realistic.  It's a matter of faith.
If you want to know why I'm a Christian that's all there is to it.  I think Jesus shows us who God is, and of all the options out there, I like what he shows me the best.  A God who turns away the angry mob of people holding stones, a God who shames the religious hypocrites, a God who shares meals with really messed up people and crowds of random strangers, a God who heals the sick and casts out demons.  A God who generally does the good thing that is right in front of his nose, and a God who feels those pangs of helpless sadness at all the suffering that comes from human sin.
So I'm sleeping in my office, as an exercise in incarnational ministry.  It's not as big a deal as it sounds, it's just a presence that means the doors are open and the heat is on, and someone is here doing the good that is front of their nose.

Incognito was just too obvious

Okay, so I'm falling in love with the ironic potential of a guy with the name Incognito, cut me some slack.  As it turns out, my gut feelings about this not being such a clear cut case of one bad guy riding one of his teammate into a nervous breakdown are proving to be rather accurate.  In my last blog post, I said that Richie Incognito was a scapegoat, which means he is being used as a symbol of the sins of many.  In Hebrew it is called azazel, a goat that carried all of the sins of the people into the wilderness (Leviticus 16: 20-22).
It's a very old practice to try and keep the community functioning in times when their depravity seems to have gotten the best of them.  Now we are hearing that the coaches may have instructed Incognito to "toughen up" Jonathan Martin, which sounds like a very martial, football kind of thing to do.  It's the Code Red that I mentioned from A Few Good Men, it's the blanket party from Full Metal Jacket, it's savage, man stuff, and it can break people.  In the latter movie, did it surprise anyone that "Private Pyle" ended up snapping on the drill sergeant?
As it turns out, Incognito isn't thought of as a bully or a racist by his other teammates, in fact, they seem to like him.  They like him enough to say so, when he is being cast out into the wilderness by an authority structure that is in full Public Relations Panic Mode.  Black players, are saying that they are not offended by Incognito using the N-word, and I don't mean in the sort of forbearing the stupidity of a drunk guy way that the other Eagles did for Riley Cooper, I mean that they genuinely think he was "allowed" to use it, like he was in the Wu-Tang Clan.  Incognito apparently has enough non-racist street cred, to be able to use that word among his black teammates and not get the beat down that most of us think would be coming to him.  Most of us white folk have probably not heard of being an honorary black guy, but apparently that's a thing that happens.  And that, if it means what I think it means, changes the dynamic of Incognito's interaction with Martin.  Without the racial element, the bullying is much more run of the mill, even if it is still vulgar and crude and barbaric.
The world these guys live in, is by nature vulgar, crude and barbaric.  They get paid to be huge and push people around.
But the other thing that is sort of emerging from the haze of this mess is a nuance that most soldiers, athletes or frat boys would probably have seen a mile away: Incognito may actually have been trying to help Martin.  Maybe Martin is one of those unmotivated, "soft" guys who just didn't seem to be willing to work and play as hard as the team wanted and needed.
The purpose of boot camp and hazing and such rituals is to break down the individual and replace them with a team player.  The suffering and degradation of recruits is meant to destroy the ego that looks out for number one and replace it with a loyalty to the group that will overcome the fear of death.  That's a tall order and you can see how some people just might not be able to handle it.
That being said, football is not war, all metaphor and hyperbole aside, nobody's life is hanging in the balance when the Dolphins play, and so perhaps we should not apply the same ethical standards to training for a game that we do to training for war, but we do.  Listen to the words and the descriptions, there is a lot of blood lust in the game of American Football, which is probably why we love it so.

Bully

The world of sport is proving to be rich fodder these days.  The latest kerfuffle: some very big bullies.  The Miami Dolphins have a situation on their hands.  Last week Jonathan Martin, an offensive lineman (read really big guy), left the team facility after some sort of meltdown.  As it turns out, Martin was being bullied, harassed and otherwise tormented by one (or maybe more) of his teammates.  The reaction, as the apologists for the gladiatorial atmosphere of professional sport try to get the spin under control, has been rather interesting, to say the least.

Luckily, they have been able to find a scapegoat to carry the sins of the community out into the wilderness: Richie Incognito.  He is the perfect bad guy.  He looks like everyone's idea of a bully; he's a hulking, blonde guy with lots of tattoos and a permanent bad attitude.  He looks like Biff, "hello Mcfly," attempted date rapist, from Back to the Future.  He's got look of a bully from some after school special all grown up.  He's got a record of unsociable behavior going back to college, he was named "the dirtiest player in the league," he's demonstrated that he's a vulgar racist and probably a deplorable human being, and he's probably not that different from people you are bound to run across in any given sector of the "real world."

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, they're not always as obvious as Incognito (by happy accident that is a really funny statement).  Bullies are everywhere, I don't know why everyone is so shocked that one existed in the Miami Dolphins locker room.  Locker rooms breed bullies like fungus, and a big part of the phenomenon is that the world of sports, with it's martial qualities, encourages "leadership" by the strongest members of the team.  Challenges to the hierarchy take place all the time.  It's animal behavior that we learned all about from Wild America: climb the ladder, get power and keep it by violence.  Mike Ditka on ESPN this morning seemed mystified why someone on the team didn't take Incognito "outside."  In other words, why didn't physical violence step in and solve the verbal and emotional abuse that Incognito was apparently inflicting on Martin.

The answer is sinister and also rather obvious.  To quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, "You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall."  Incognito probably wasn't picking on Martin out of the blue.  There was probably something about him that just begged for the bully to push him down.  Maybe it's that he was a little passive, maybe it's because he was a Stanford grad, maybe it was racial, maybe it was a combination of lots of things.  I'm not blaming the victim here, what I'm getting at is that the reason why this didn't raise eyebrows and draw out some noble defender of humanity, is because it happens all the time, it's part of "how things work," in sports, in the military, in offices and yes, even in churches.  You establish your place in the society by proving where you belong in the hierarchy, and it rarely has to do with pure talent and ability.  The nail that sticks up gets pounded down in most cases.

It seems rather hypocritical, at this late hour, for the talking heads of the sports world, to act all shocked and appalled at what has apparently happened in the Dolphin's organization.  Players are standing in the bright lights saying things like: "I don't know if I call it hazing, it's more like a right of passage."  They are referring to common practices like making rookies buy food for the team, taping them to goal posts and generally demonstrating that they are the low men on the totem pole.  My question is, when the system accepts "a certain amount" of bullying, hazing and humiliation, why is it so shocking when members of the system get out of hand?

In elementary schools all across the nation, like the one where my kids go, they have assemblies that talk about bullying.  How to spot it, what to do about it, and how to keep it from happening in the first place.  None of the strategies take the Iron Mike Ditka approach of "taking him outside and, you know, taking a shot at him."  Violence perpetuates violence, and while "we" do need to stand up to bullies, "we" really means we, all of us, the system, the other players the coaches, the students, the teachers, the parents.

The presence of bullies is an unacceptable failure of the system.  I am really hoping that this example helps us learn something about that reality.  I hope the fact that a massive offensive lineman, a Stanford graduate and a man who achieved in sport at the highest level, can be driven to a breakdown by the actions of a bully, helps us as a culture realize that this has to stop.  Because the system has to fight back, not just one person.  Trust me, I know from experience, standing up to one bully won't solve the problem of bullying in general, you have to change the culture that accepts bullying as "the way it is."

That means no more turning a blind eye when someone is being harassed, even if that someone "seems like they deserve it."  That means no more using the system of violence and hierarchy to maintain order, even if it wins championships.  That means no more tolerance of bullies, because "oh that's just how they are."

Call me a skeptic, but I don't think we talking monkeys are quite evolved enough to pull it off.

Cliche Away

The 2013 World Series is in the books, and it looks like the curse is still broken.  It has become more or less a given that sports have come to define the "faith" of our nation more so than any particular brand of actual religion.  People speak in reverent tones about the "integrity of the game," about the triumphs of the human spirit.  Even in a year when a seemingly mediocre team can be world champions (let's face it, this wasn't exactly a bloody-sock sort of series), there is still a lot of sacred language bandied about with regard to the fall classic, and millions of people participated in the sacrament, even though the teams were: meh, and the play was: meh, and unless you were a Red Sox fan you probably turned off Game 6 after the flyin' Hawaiian did his RBI thing.
I have noticed another way in which sports have become like religion, in addition to claiming the adoration and devotion of millions of people and dividing us into tribes (or denominations) based on our personal preferences: sports are now over-ridden with cliches.  Watch any postgame interview, you will hear things like "the will to win," "giving it our all," "playing the right way," "holding together as a team."  Welcome to the family sports, you have climbed your way from being a diversion, to being an obsession, and now... now... you shall experience the pit of dogma.  Where your own sense of self-importance keeps you from really thinking or saying anything honest and meaningful.  The Theologians will be glad to have some company after all these years.
Don't worry, there will still be sycophantic sports reporters around to nod and record your drivel verbatim, and overall the people won't care much about what you say, as long as you keep providing them with the entertainment they crave.  I suppose, being men of action, you probably won't start to feel the sting of existential emptiness as quickly as we "spiritual" types, but believe me, cliches will suck out your soul sooner or later.  I'm speaking as an expert, the church does cliches like nobody's business.  Here are some of our greatest hits:
"Too blessed for stress."
"His pain, your gain."
"If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it."
"My boss is a Jewish carpenter."
"God is my co-pilot."
And I'm not even going to go into the ones that express some sort of heresy, in fact, I've purposely narrowed my field to things that aren't theologically or scripturally untenable, but some of the above are just downright vomit inducing.  We can take the best idea in the world and make it into a lame cliche: "saved by grace," and then use that as a talking point to illustrate how right we are compared to all those other wrong people.  We can adopt cliches in other languages and sound really awesome: Sola Scriptura, Reformata semper reformanda, which are really great, and true on levels we don't even fully understand.
Basically, I think we religious folk have so thoroughly mastered the art of sloganeering that I wonder how anyone even feels a little bit good about saying: "we gave a 110 percent," I mean come on, that's not even mathematically possible.
So sports, enjoy your massive popularity and your status as cultural and economic juggernauts, but take it from the Church, you need to learn how to say something... anything... that's really true.  Ditch the cliches, I know it's dangerous, and actually really difficult when you get down to it.  You know, come to think of it, how about we make a deal, you keep running fast and doing neat things with balls, and we'll handle helping people find meaning in the universe.  You can keep your "will to win" and we'll help people with the "will to live."
Why compete?  There's certainly enough emptiness to go around.  And all your athletes are always giving a shout out to God anyway.  We should work together!  There's no I in team.  We could be a well oiled machine!  We could be a dynasty!  Let's get the job done!  We could be number one!

Running in a Pinch

I stayed up later than I should have last night watching game four of the World Series.  I haven't watched too much baseball this year, probably because the Phillies are back to being terrible.  I find that if I'm not "following" baseball, it's kind of hard to watch without falling asleep.  But last night was a good game, albeit between two teams I don't even care enough about to dislike.  It was 4-2 Boston, going into the bottom of the 9th inning.  A St. Louis  player with a bum wheel got on first base and was promptly replaced with a pinch runner.  It was a no-brainer for the manager, the tying run was at the plate, and a little extra speed could make all the difference.  That is, unless the pinch runner gets picked off and makes the last out of the game.  The best laid plans you know.

I really felt kind of bad for that guy, a bench player, whose only job was to run the bases.  I could hear it: "you had one job..."  But I also felt bad for the manager, who had made the "right" move, who had put his team in a position to fight back and tie o win the game.  Who could have known that the runner would stumble just a little trying to get back to the base?

It's pretty well established that sports are a metaphor for life.  I think one of the reasons we take them so all-fired seriously is because they help us understand our place in the universe.  I think that has a lot to do with why football is out-competing religion for the hearts and minds of Americans pretty much every week from late summer to the middle of winter.  Sports show us the struggles of humanity against weakness and sin played out in high definition, and incarnates those struggles in games, where there's a lot less gray area, and fewer people get really hurt.

I also think that sports show us something about how God treats us: putting us in the place we need to be and then relying on our very fallible efforts.  If we slip, if we drop the ball, it's not the end, the plan remains the same, and we were supposed to be there, and maybe somehow, our failure becomes a strength.  It's really hard to imagine that making the last out of the game could be part of the plan, but sometimes it is.

As we know all too well in Philly, there's always next year.  There's always more to come, defeat is never final.

Jesus has shown us that forgiveness, redemption and even resurrection are all parts of the plan.

As John Calvin points out, the fact that there is grace and mercy in the plan sets us free for joyous obedience.  It sets us free to take that lead off of first, to strive to do our best.  Sometimes we mess up.  That doesn't mean the plan was bad, it just means that things don't always go according to plan. Faith gives us the guts to go back again and keep trying.  Not just our faith, but the faith that God has in us, to put us in the right place at the right time, again and again, knowing that sometimes we'll fail and sometimes we'll succeed but we'll always be in the game.

New and Wonderful Words

I absolutely love it when we come up with new words that work.  Granted there are some (twerk springs to mind) that I wish weren't things, but by and large, when we language using monkeys come up with a new word, it seems to me like a triumph of the human spirit.  So I celebrate today, the birth of "nontroversy."  Which I first encountered here.  I was vaguely aware of who Nigella Lawson was, and absolutely oblivious to the nontroversy that had surrounded her, but the article explains out who she is and what has befallen her in recent days (as well as several other obviously British cultural references), as well as explaining the phenomenon of a twitterstorm and doing a fairly good job of telling us why, in the name of all that is holy, it matters.
I think a good place to start is with the following excerpt, for those of you who didn't choose to read the whole thing:

One problem is that the media landscape is structurally hostile to nuance, whether it's the gladiatorial debate format favoured by the likes of the Today programme, the pressure to generate kneejerk opinions at short notice, or the sheer volume of websites recycling unsourced, out-of-context and even mistranslated quotes. Subtlety doesn't sell. But bad habits aren't imposed from the top down. Across blogs and social media you can see how the internet amplifies and facilitates the impulse to think the worst of people you have never met and to ignore any facts or context that might take the wind out of your indignation.

I spend more time than is probably good for me reading about politics and more time than is definitely good for me trying to keep up with pop culture.  I have noticed that structural hostility, not just to nuance but to logic and reason.  The point about it not being a top down decision is also insightful.  The reason why Fox News and Bill Maher are both popular is because they give certain segments of the population something they want to hear.  Fox News tells people of a conservative bent that the world is teetering on the brink of socialist, amoral, cultural collapse and that the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are some of the last, desperate prophetic voices of truth, justice and the American way.  "Liberals" are the people who want to infringe on your rights and create a nanny state where individual freedom is sacrificed on the altar of "social justice."
Liberals have their propaganda too, and speak with decidedly uncharitable bile about the Tea Party and Ted Cruz.  They blame the Fox News contingent and "big business" for everything that's wrong with the world, and claim that if the darn conservatives would just get out of the way things would be all hearts and flowers
Being a moderate, I believe that the truth lies somewhere in the nuanced positions between the extremes.  I believe that someone does need to make sure that we don't give up our freedom for the sake of safety, but I also believe that we need to work a hell of a lot harder to create a just society where the deck isn't so stacked against the poor and disenfranchised.  I have almost entirely stopped paying attention to television news.  I thank the Lord for the interweb because it means that I can read and watch, research who is saying what and check the facts, and check the checking of the facts.  But sometimes I wonder if it's just too darn hard, then I remember that the truth is never easy, and if its "obvious" it stands a rather good chance of not being true.
I'm a skeptic by nature, and so this makes sense to me.  I have never trusted authority, and am generally suspicious of people who are too shiny (which includes most, if not all, TV news personalities). It seems to me that human community, real human community, sorry twitterverse, you don't really count, is necessary to combat the worst angels of our nature.  We must be exposed and learn to care about people who are different from us.
As I was driving into work this morning thinking about the nature of dialogue in our society I was struck by an abiding thankfulness for the diverse characters that God has put into my life, people I am related to, people I call friends, people I consider adversaries (I almost said enemies, but I think adversaries is a better description).
I have relatives who are:
White, black, bi-racial, conservatives, Tea Partiers, liberals, a heroin addict, alcoholics, people who believe that we're all going to be raptured into heaven any day now, creation scientists, mild racists, conspiracy theorists, welfare recipients, bourgeoisie, Protestant, Catholic, Atheist, profoundly agnostic, messianic Jews and some who are entirely non-religious.
I have friends and acquaintances who are:
Young and Old, Atheists, hipsters, anarchists, Universalists, survivalists, Zionists, observant Jews, secular Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, Native Americans, Asians, Irish, British, Mexican, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Russian, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Wesleyans, Mennonites, and Quakers, hermits, schizophrenics, bi-polar, Punks, head-bangers, Hippies, folksie people, dance club types, even people who listen to the worst music you can possibly find, mildly eccentric and profoundly dysfunctional, addicts (recovering and active), drug users and teetotalers.
And I won't even get into all the people I deal with at work.
The thing is, while this list may seem somewhat derogatory in some directions, I am profoundly thankful for all of them, because they teach me things.  When we talk, argue, or yell at each other, we are in community and in dialogue.  I have no desire to segregate my life into the ghetto of people who agree with me.  I have come to hate the term "like-minded" with a righteous hatred.  What could you possibly learn from someone who totally agrees with you?  Come to think of it, where would you find someone who totally agrees with you?
We need nuance, we need to learn to really see each other.  It's sometimes useful to classify people, I had a blast rifling off those lists I just made, but you need to know that each one of those categories has a name and a face, and I'm glad they are or have been a part of my life.
Controversy or nontroversy can be a great thing as long as we talk to each other, I mean really talk, and a world that is drained of all our differences and the variety that makes so all fired interesting, would really be hell indeed.

More Fun with Myers-Briggs

I just came across an interesting infographic that gives a breakdown of Myers Briggs personality type indicators to socio-economic position.  I am either an INTP or INTJ, depending on what day I take the test, though I think I'm leaning more and more towards the P (perceiving) as I get older.  What you might notice is that I fall into a group of personality types called rationalists, and that, as a percentage of the population, I'm in a rather drastic minority (10.3% of the American population).
Over the years, I have been through a couple different wrasslin' matches with the MBTI, usually I come away with some slightly new information, and a renewed question of whether or not the thing is anything more than a psychological parlor trick.  Being a "rationalist" though, I love things that seem science-like, and when you start breaking down something as seemingly complex as the human persona into four descriptive continua, I can't help but get a little geeked up.
Funny thing though, if you look at my dominant personality traits in my case the NT part of my Myers-Briggs type, you will find that I am probably not very well suited to the clerical vocation.  You may think, "well duh," being a Pastor doesn't really seem like a very good thing for a 'rationalist' to be doing."  And the career counseling/psychological evaluation that I had when I was in seminary would agree with you, but here I am.
The test indicates that I would be better off as an architect or something of that nature, but life is funny, and often times human beings end up confounding all the fancy instruments and indicators that supposedly tell us what to be and do.
MBTI is interesting though, because it explains a lot of things that are prolifically verified by my experience.  For instance, being an Introvert and also being a statistically rare personality type leads to feeling like an outsider rather frequently.  Some people experience the feeling of exclusion from the majority based on race, gender or sexual orientation, I experience it as an ontological condition that has nothing to do with my physical nature.
Despite an almost genetic predisposition to feelings of alienation, despite a profoundly skeptical nature, despite the fact that I generally do not accept things that cannot be proven, I have somehow wandered into a vocation that revolves around faith and, probably even more difficult: people.  The very core of what I do for a living is a mystery, not a sound and reasonable proposition or even a logical hypothesis, but a massive, and I would say intentional, void in our ability to comprehend our existence rationally.  It's somewhat like the the black holes that some astronomers suspect exist at the center of galaxies.  The hold clusters of stars by their gravitational force, but we can't directly study them because even light cannot escape the event horizon.  We only know they're there because of their effect on everything else.
To me, God is sort of like that.  I can't prove God's existence, but for some reason I can accept it, because I see evidence of it in so many other places, and I do see evidence.  The evidence is everywhere, truth, beauty and love confront us in just too many places.  The purpose behind things seems way too elegant to be random.  Theology tells us that God is ineffable and unknowable, like that black hole that cannot be directly observed.  We can only know about God because the effect God has on things we can see.  Like God changing Saul: murderous zealot, into  Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles.  Or God calling a rationalist malcontent, who always feels at odds with the world, to be a pastor.
I wonder what type of personality does that sort of thing?

The Center Holding?

So the government is back.  Huzzah.
I read the summation of the end of the latest shutdown this morning: absent the House of Representatives actually doing their job, the Senate did an end run around the increasingly splintered GOP and got a resolution approved by the Democrats and enough Republicans who were tired of being in the same boat as Ted Cruz.  The Washington Post published an article about how the conservative factions, who had been doing a lot of chest thumping about their ability to stall the entire empire, were sort of glum this morning.  They had played hardball against the Democrats.  They suspected that those bleeding heart liberals were just too soft to stand up to them, they were wrong.  They lost.  And it may be a sign of things to come.
Democracy works, eventually.  Yeats and Walker Percy have both said, "The Center Cannot hold," and that often has the ring of ominous truth, but the center usually does hold.  It's not always pretty, and sometimes things seem pretty grim, and then you wake up one morning and guess what?  It held.
In the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, where he says the center cannot hold, he also says, "The best lack conviction and the worst work with passionate intensity."  You find passionate intensity on both extremes.  Extreme radicals and extreme fundamentalists both have incredible intensity, and the moderates seem phlegmatic to the point of being lugubrious (I like words, get a dictionary).
So here we are.  The vocal minority has been defeated by the silent majority, because they finally pushed the moderates too far.  They committed political suicide because they thought they were in the right.  It may seem that the Democrats and moderate Republicans all of the sudden grew a backbone, but the fact of the matter is that it was there all along.  They knew something, which was perhaps invisible to the right-wing zealots, the American people are, in the vast majority, a compassionate, reasonable bunch.  Most of us actually want to see the government function to protect the vulnerable and put some restraints on the worst demons of human nature.  Unchecked greed is not an American virtue and is in fact not a requirement for a free market economy.
Those that, perhaps out of left over Cold War sentiments, or simple dogmatic thickness, think that laissez-faire is still a good idea, after over a century of abuse by the robber barons of the world (whether they are Andrew Carnegie or Bernie Madoff), are trying to defend a vacant citadel.  Most of the world has moved past the conflict between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and have found that there is something besides an apocalyptic wasteland.  But there are some who still want to fight that battle, some for whom communism is still the "ism" of the "evil empire," even though the actual empire part went poof around 1989.  Capitalism has proven it's flaws as well, and maybe (though this is a moment of uncharacteristic and probably unfounded optimism): we can finally structure our society in a way that is not beholden to a rigid ideology, but in a way that makes the most sense for the people of our nation.
Oh wait... we're going to have to go through all of this again in three months.
Turning and turning the widening gyre.