Syria... here we go again. Apparently the word quagmire has not had enough use in the last decade. And the US of A is poised to pin on the tin star of world's sheriff once again and go riding to the rescue. And we probably should, because chemical weapons are nasty and even the war mongers of the 20th century pretty much agreed we shouldn't use them, except for things like Agent Orange, which wasn't technically a weapon because Monsanto said it wasn't, but I digress.
The thing that's so darn frustrating about all this is that we've been on this ride, pretty much constantly, for over 12 years. It goes like this: there's a bad guy, or group of bad guys, and when I say bad, I mean bad, I don't mean objectively good or even ambivalent, but just bad from an American perspective, I mean bad in the sense that the people who look like them and share their geography and culture also think they're bad: the Taliban/Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein/ actually not Al Quaeda, and now Bashar Assad / about three dozen rebel groups that may or may not be worse than Al Quaeda.
We've been sort of crossing our fingers and hoping that Syria would play out like Egypt or even Libya, where the people would overthrow their own dictator, but it's not working out. On top of that Egypt, Libya and especially Iraq have taught us that power vacuums don't always get filled by the good guys, maybe they've even taught us that there really aren't any good guys, or perhaps rather that power, especially the kind of power that is generally associated with the Middle East and North Africa, is rather adept at corrupting people. Actually, I don't really know what we've learned from the whole mess and I guess that's sort of the problem.
We haven't learned that we can't fix what's wrong in the Middle East with bombs and troops. There's a whole sub-branch of ethics that deals with something called Just War theory, which accepts the reality that violence is sometimes necessary, but prescribes rather narrow and specific parameters that define when that sometimes is now. A summary of the rules is as follows (From Biblical Ethics and Social Change, S.C. Mott):
1.The cause must be just.
2. It is the last resort.
3. Force is used by a lawful public authority
4. There is a reasonable hope of victory
5. There is a due proportion between the good that may probably be accomplished and the probable evil effect.
6. The action/war is rightly conducted through the use of right means.
These rules require quite a bit of unpacking and thought to fully wrap your mind around them, however, you don't have to go very deep to see that most of our modern conflicts have violated one, and most often several, of the "rules" of just war theory. Numbers 5 and 6 are particularly troublesome, as most definitions of "right means" abhor the massive collateral damage that is inevitable in large scale aerial bombing. Sometimes the definition of "right means" is wrongly brought into conflict with the cost-benefit analysis that is required by number five. Five is not meant to abnegate the responsibilities of six, it is a different consideration entirely. "Probable evil effect," is mostly thought of in terms of the casualties of war, in terms of injuries and deaths among combatants and the destruction of property. The death of a soldier is one thing, the death of an innocent child is another ethical category altogether. People had started to examine these premises concerning warfare well before the death of women, children and other bystanders became in any sense "inevitable," and it is that inevitability in modern warfare that perhaps gives the final blow to the idea that war can be justified.
Another reality we have not grasped is that, even if our cause is just, even if we fulfill the requirements and act with complete honor and adhere to the codes of battle, the people we have just "rescued" will probably not be in the slightest bit happy to see us. There is deep anti-American sentiment in that part of the world, largely thanks to the fact that we have been meddling in their business for decades with rather blatant self interest and not always the best or wisest tactics. We are rather ill suited to play the sheriff in other words, because the townspeople hate us. It's like when the crooked cattle baron has bought off the law and the sheriff's in his pocket. Well, it's not too hard to change cattle for oil, and the old west for the Middle East in this little metaphor, and it's not too hard to see that we might very well be a villain, even if we have the right intentions.
Evil works that way sometimes... actually it pretty much works that way all the time.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Whys and Wherefores
The old saying goes: sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees, but it's also true that you can see the forest and forget that it's a complex system of living creatures that includes individual trees, animals, fungi, and thousands of different sorts of micro-organisms, all contributing to the "big picture." In the ongoing dialogue that I have been tracking on the interwebs, some people have come around to asking a rather poignant question: do we need church?
While it may trigger some immediate negative responses among those who have found real value in a religious community, the question is valid all the same, and I think we, who are invested and intend to continue to invest in church, would do well to give some consideration. Why do we need church? Most of us trees in the forest will immediately leap to talking about spiritual matters, how our faith gives shape and meaning to our lives, but we will begin to equivocate when it comes to offering some justification of the physical institution of the church. We feel a little guilty about our big fancy buildings and paid staff, we feel a little more guilty about our bureaucracies and hierarchies, we are downright sullen when it comes to considering all the ways that the actual human form of the body of Christ so often fails to glorify it's head.
And yet, somehow, in God's ineffable nature, there is no plan B.
Jesus did not say to his disciples: "try your best, but if this doesn't work out we'll go back to the drawing board." In fact, it is a reality of the covenant with Noah, symbolized by a rainbow after the flood that God is done going back to the drawing board. In the Incarnation, which is at the center of Christianity, God has committed to a plan of action that is rather foolproof, meaning that human brokenness and sin can no longer mess it up.
We would do well to remember that, as we consider whether there is a place in the current world for religion, and the institutional expressions of humanity's quest for God. Each tree in the forest might feel as though it has no need to be connected to the larger ecosystem, but that feeling is not a reality. Feeling independent and disconnected only proves that the individual does not understand their place in the ecosystem. They may think that they do not need the other trees, they may think they can stand alone, but they are forgetting the millions of microbes that break down nutrients to be used by their roots, they are forgetting their ancestry that planted the seeds, they are forgetting the birds and critters that might have played a part in their existence.
I have read several individual, therefore consumer-based, analyses of the question: do we need church (or religion in general)? What I have not seen is a "ecological" analysis of the question. Of course, I cannot begin to offer an "objective" framework, because I believe that the forest has a specific purpose, and is designed rather elegantly and graciously to be something particular, and moreover that the One who is behind that plan and purpose, has built in to the creations an inherent drive to seek the Creator.
Many religions seek a higher reality, but the specifically Christian understanding of God, tells us that that higher reality is also seeking us. In fact, the God who reaches out offering to be understood by creation is a rather important theological assumption.
Anyone who has engaged in a journey of faith will be aware that God certainly does not extend handfuls of easy answers, and I think searching for philosopher's stones and holy grails is a rather pagan pursuit at it's core. The place of theology and religion is not in finding one secret, but in appreciating the mysteries and the wonders that exist everywhere (which is why the perceived conflict between science and faith is a stupid thing, but that's for another day). Pantheists sometimes come very near to the truth, but they misapprehend the mechanics. God is present in everything, but not everything is God. The fingerprints of the creator are in the soil and the roots as well as the leaves and the branches, and the breath of God moves over the face of the deep, but the understanding and appreciation of that fact has been left to humans.
And that's why we need the church, because to start from ground zero, imperfect and self centered as we are, we would never begin to appreciate the deep mysteries of God's revelation. The traditions of the church, even though they may seem stodgy, antiquated and sometimes misguided, are like the textbooks that tell us of the discoveries made by those before us. Just like a high school chemistry student is not required to re-discover Bohr's law or Planck's constant in order to apprehend their effect on reality, so we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn more and new things about God, year after year, century after century.
It is certainly valid to ask questions. Deconstruct away, but be a responsible forester, and don't just slash and burn, you may lose something valuable and irreplaceable. Do you understand the collective "spiritual ecosystem" well enough to be sure that we just don't need God? Or that we should just stop looking? Or that worship of something greater than ourselves is not important?
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Paradigm Shifts
Sometimes it's good to know you're not alone. People who are suffering through hard times often need to know that there is someone else there with them. Sometimes, as in the case of a lot of country and blues songs, just hearing a ballad about someone else having problems can soothe your angst. Germans call it schadenfreude: rejoicing at the misfortune of others, I love Germans they've got words for just about every twisted impulse of the human soul.
Thus it is with some glee that I observe other large institutions having the same sorts of problems adapting to the world as the church. Especially, since one of the institutions is one of the biggest idols of the modern age: television.
Recently, a dispute between Time Warner and CBS caused certain cable systems to black out CBS's coverage of the US Open Golf Tournament. Oh the tragedy! Just imagine all those traumatized golf fans having to miss out on the drama... or they could just go on the interwebs and follow/watch there. Which brings me to the subject of paradigm shifts. There have been a lot of them over the centuries: hunter-gatherer to agrarian, agrarian to industrial, analog to digital etc. However those shifts seem to be happening faster these days, and we barely have time to amass a decent collection of DVD's before Blue Ray comes along and sends us into a new binge of consumerism.
Big, ponderous institutions like the church, and TV networks, have some trouble adapting to changes that come on quickly. Some have credited the invention of the printing press with starting the protestant reformation; the Roman Catholic Church, by virtue of being the only ones with access to expensive, hand copied Bibles, had virtually cornered the market on the Word of God, then Gutenberg's little stampy thing gave certain industrious folk the ability to mass produce the whole thing and then distribute it to every Tom, Dick and Harry who could read. Then it started to get translated into other languages by ne'er do wells like Erasmus and Martin Luther, and people seemed to like it. They liked to read all these stories they had heard so much about, but it created a certain problem for the Church, because apparently they had grown attached to doing a bunch of things that weren't in the book.
This oversimplifies the situation quite a bit, but it illustrates the danger of ignoring or underestimating paradigm shifts: there comes a point when a lot of people will see behind the curtain and realize that they don't have to buy your nonsense any more. Oligopolies like Time Warner do not like it when people knock over their sandcastles and they will go so far as to lobby for actual laws that protect their hegemony. There are many such laws that "protect" those poor, vulnerable, global media conglomerates from all those nasty people who want to take their stuff away.
Funny thing about the interwebs though; they were more or less started by people who didn't much care for rules. Contrary to popular belief, notorious stuffy white guy Al Gore did not invent the internet. It was rather a collective of scruffy nerds who would rather spend hours on things called BBS's arguing about whether Han shot first or playing D&D with people in Turkey, or chatting with people they thought were girls, but were probably not. When the digital infrastructure improved to the point where it could handle graphics and sound, pornography took over and pretty much ensures that the interweb will always be a thing.
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, other people started discovering the non-pornographic potential of the internet. Amazon, Facebook (which is really just a BBS updated and used by a bajillion people), and Google have become forces of nature. The free exchange of so much data eventually gave people the idea that they could just share stuff, and thus get things for free. Napster was the first big fish in that pond and it wasn't too long before someone, namely the heavy metal band Metallica, started crying foul.
Now, as a child of the punk/heavy metal era, and as someone who once owned an astonishing collection of copied cassette tapes, piracy is sort of a way of life. When I went to a Metallica concert in high school, part of the appeal was that they were dark and bad and angry, to have them all of the sudden become spokesman for the recording industry and start whining about how these nasty file sharing villains causing them to have to sleep on smaller piles of cash, I was a bit disappointed. Napster was like shangri la to a music loving twenty something with no money and a high speed internet connection.
I understand that artists are entitled to make a living, rather than just giving their stuff away, but the regulation of file sharing just basically gave big media conglomerates a way to get their fingers in more pies. I really don't think that it did any good for the struggling musicians out busting their butts to make a living. It did, however, mean that Lars Ulrich got even richer and Time Warner (there that man again) got even more richer.
At this point you're probably wondering how I got from Gutenberg and the reformation to Napster and Metallica via computer nerds and porn, see how disorienting paradigm shifts can be?
Imagine then, if you're an institution that has experienced major success in an old paradigm, whether we're talking about the RC church in the middle ages or Time Warner in more recent years. All of the sudden it seems like people are increasingly suspicious of your motives, when all you want to do is keep them out of hell/ offer them quality family entertainment, which are pretty much moral equivalents.
Alright, let me take my tongue out of my cheek now, because I could really go on being sarcastic about the corporatocracy for quite a while. What I want to say about all this is that everything changes, except human nature. No matter how awesome our technology gets, someone is always going to figure out how to get insanely rich off of the next new thing. Unless we get to a point where we cross the Star Trek line, where humanity finally decides to get it's act together, scrap the whole use of currency and pool our resources to start building awesome spaceships, we will always have to deal with the old gods and idols making a ruckus about the new gods and idols moving into their turf.
Actually, that's rather more amusing than watching Tiger Woods lose another major isn't it?
Thus it is with some glee that I observe other large institutions having the same sorts of problems adapting to the world as the church. Especially, since one of the institutions is one of the biggest idols of the modern age: television.
Recently, a dispute between Time Warner and CBS caused certain cable systems to black out CBS's coverage of the US Open Golf Tournament. Oh the tragedy! Just imagine all those traumatized golf fans having to miss out on the drama... or they could just go on the interwebs and follow/watch there. Which brings me to the subject of paradigm shifts. There have been a lot of them over the centuries: hunter-gatherer to agrarian, agrarian to industrial, analog to digital etc. However those shifts seem to be happening faster these days, and we barely have time to amass a decent collection of DVD's before Blue Ray comes along and sends us into a new binge of consumerism.
Big, ponderous institutions like the church, and TV networks, have some trouble adapting to changes that come on quickly. Some have credited the invention of the printing press with starting the protestant reformation; the Roman Catholic Church, by virtue of being the only ones with access to expensive, hand copied Bibles, had virtually cornered the market on the Word of God, then Gutenberg's little stampy thing gave certain industrious folk the ability to mass produce the whole thing and then distribute it to every Tom, Dick and Harry who could read. Then it started to get translated into other languages by ne'er do wells like Erasmus and Martin Luther, and people seemed to like it. They liked to read all these stories they had heard so much about, but it created a certain problem for the Church, because apparently they had grown attached to doing a bunch of things that weren't in the book.
This oversimplifies the situation quite a bit, but it illustrates the danger of ignoring or underestimating paradigm shifts: there comes a point when a lot of people will see behind the curtain and realize that they don't have to buy your nonsense any more. Oligopolies like Time Warner do not like it when people knock over their sandcastles and they will go so far as to lobby for actual laws that protect their hegemony. There are many such laws that "protect" those poor, vulnerable, global media conglomerates from all those nasty people who want to take their stuff away.
Funny thing about the interwebs though; they were more or less started by people who didn't much care for rules. Contrary to popular belief, notorious stuffy white guy Al Gore did not invent the internet. It was rather a collective of scruffy nerds who would rather spend hours on things called BBS's arguing about whether Han shot first or playing D&D with people in Turkey, or chatting with people they thought were girls, but were probably not. When the digital infrastructure improved to the point where it could handle graphics and sound, pornography took over and pretty much ensures that the interweb will always be a thing.
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, other people started discovering the non-pornographic potential of the internet. Amazon, Facebook (which is really just a BBS updated and used by a bajillion people), and Google have become forces of nature. The free exchange of so much data eventually gave people the idea that they could just share stuff, and thus get things for free. Napster was the first big fish in that pond and it wasn't too long before someone, namely the heavy metal band Metallica, started crying foul.
Now, as a child of the punk/heavy metal era, and as someone who once owned an astonishing collection of copied cassette tapes, piracy is sort of a way of life. When I went to a Metallica concert in high school, part of the appeal was that they were dark and bad and angry, to have them all of the sudden become spokesman for the recording industry and start whining about how these nasty file sharing villains causing them to have to sleep on smaller piles of cash, I was a bit disappointed. Napster was like shangri la to a music loving twenty something with no money and a high speed internet connection.
I understand that artists are entitled to make a living, rather than just giving their stuff away, but the regulation of file sharing just basically gave big media conglomerates a way to get their fingers in more pies. I really don't think that it did any good for the struggling musicians out busting their butts to make a living. It did, however, mean that Lars Ulrich got even richer and Time Warner (there that man again) got even more richer.
At this point you're probably wondering how I got from Gutenberg and the reformation to Napster and Metallica via computer nerds and porn, see how disorienting paradigm shifts can be?
Imagine then, if you're an institution that has experienced major success in an old paradigm, whether we're talking about the RC church in the middle ages or Time Warner in more recent years. All of the sudden it seems like people are increasingly suspicious of your motives, when all you want to do is keep them out of hell/ offer them quality family entertainment, which are pretty much moral equivalents.
Alright, let me take my tongue out of my cheek now, because I could really go on being sarcastic about the corporatocracy for quite a while. What I want to say about all this is that everything changes, except human nature. No matter how awesome our technology gets, someone is always going to figure out how to get insanely rich off of the next new thing. Unless we get to a point where we cross the Star Trek line, where humanity finally decides to get it's act together, scrap the whole use of currency and pool our resources to start building awesome spaceships, we will always have to deal with the old gods and idols making a ruckus about the new gods and idols moving into their turf.
Actually, that's rather more amusing than watching Tiger Woods lose another major isn't it?
Thursday, August 22, 2013
The Love Supreme
And now, these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.
-1 Corinthians 13:13
I had a funeral this morning, I've got a wedding on Saturday and I've got a sermon on Sunday, and all three of them center somehow or other around love. That could not be a coincidence, even if there was such a thing. The wedding is pretty obvious, even if you're not using 1 Corinthians 13, you are still going to end up talking about love some way or another, but the other two came rather as a surprise. As I was talking about the resurrection, the thought occurred to me: why do we have to go through this? If we're really, truly destined for eternity, why bother with the whole mortality angle in the first place? Ecclesiastes 3: 11 says: "God has put eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end." Quoheleth looks at the whole idea of eternity as a sort of cruel joke, a "burden" that God has placed on our hearts. Indeed our awareness of time and mortality does prescribe some limits to our lives and our ambitions.
Can you imagine if we had limitless time? Some fiction writers have spooled out the consequences for us, and usually it's not a pretty picture. That's why Paul says: "The mortal cannot inherit immortality..." The two things just don't jive; a temporary body, subject to age and decay would be rather a curse if there was no way out. I'm pretty sure I don't want to hang around this place forever, but I do have this craving, this sense of wanting to be somewhere, to be something, and that's eternity in my heart.
But eternity is not good in any a priori sense. For eternity to be heavenly and not hellish, love is required. Love that forgives sin, love that conquers death, love that makes the journey and even eternity worthwhile. Love is the reason God said, "let there be light," and it is also the reason why there is darkness. It is the reason that we care deeply for one another and the reason why we hurt so much when people we care about go away.
It's easy to get our wires crossed when it comes to God. Judging by behavior, you might think that the primary goal of people trying to know God is so that they can somehow get into the eternal party, but that's getting it all wrong. The reason we should get to know God is because of love, because of God's love for us, because of the fact that if we orient ourselves towards loving God, everything else falls into place rather more pleasantly. Faith and hope, which both make life more bearable and meaningful, are really just feeder streams to the river of divine love.
You can't force it, you can't grab a hold of it, it is something inherent in the fiber of the universe, it's what we're made for.
Love makes eternity bearable.
Love sparks our beginnings.
Love binds our lives together.
Love greets us at our end.
Love is for weddings, funerals and random Sundays. John says to the early church, "God is love," and that is really all you need. All you need is love, dah dah dah da dah.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Journeys
If it's worth the going,
It's worth the ride...
-Tom Waits, A Little Rain
The really interesting thing is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the destination, it's the journey for which I yearn. I can still remember vividly the sights, sounds and smells of the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago, I'm not dreaming about getting there, I'm dreaming about being on the way there. I'm dreaming about the singularity of purpose that pilgrimage entails. I'm dreaming about the human pace and limitations of walking that I extolled in my previous post. I'm dreaming about little chapels and wayside crosses and thousands of yellow arrows and scallop shells. I'm dreaming about the hardening of a body and the softening of a soul, wearing out boots and renewing my spirit.
When I got back from Spain at the end of May, I sort of figured that I would be processing and summarizing things for a few months. I didn't really count on feeling this pull to go back, like there is unfinished business. I partially blame my Dad, he's even more wound up than me, but it's not just his enthusiasm rubbing off on me. It's the nature of pilgrimage. We met an older man from Australia on the train platform headed back to Madrid, he had just finished the Portuguese Camino, and he had done the French Camino two years before that and he was already planning another trip two years from now, which means I might run into him again. The point is that this happens to a lot of people, they go once and it's just not enough, it gets in their blood like it has gotten into mine.
It's an infection, but it's not bad, it feels healthy, it feels like life has a direction.
It makes me wish I had discovered this twenty years ago.
It makes me want to tell people about it.
It's in danger of making me the sort of annoying proponent of an idea that you would dread getting stuck with in a corner at a party. It's rather fortunate for everyone that I'm as much of an introvert as I am, which predisposes me not to corner people at parties, or rather, not to go to parties in the first place.
It has reminded me of the feeling that I had when I first came to real, adult faith in Jesus Christ, and I think that is perhaps the biggest pull of the whole thing. As a discipline, it is a physical analog for a spiritual experience, and thus it becomes a sacred journey.
I feel like it has become, and should continue to be, a part of my life. A reminder that life is a journey, for me a journey towards God, along the path of Christian discipleship. It's worth the sacrifice and the discipline, the struggles and the climbs, but not just because of the destination. That's a theological truth that I had been sensing since Seminary and has finally been driven home with the sledgehammer of pilgrimage: the life of faith is not just about the destination it's about the journey.
I am increasingly saddened by the sort of approach to faith, all too prevalent in modern Christianity, which emphasizes the destination, not because it's wrong, or because I don't believe in Heaven and eternal life, but because it's just not all there is, because eternity starts now. Our journey towards God is the most important movement of our existence, why wait until you die to start?
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Walking
A couple of years ago my doctor told me I had diabetes. It wasn't out of control, I wasn't really having many symptoms and, as it turns out, I have been able to control it by watching my carbohydrate intake and walking, a lot of walking. My relationship with walking had a rough start, it was the middle of the summer, it was stinking hot, I put on my mp3 player and went up onto the old railroad bed above my house with my dog and I started walking, and sweating, and trudging up hills and waddling down, and counting the steps until I was done and could sit down. After a few days I noticed that the steps were getting easier, the hills getting less traumatic, the time spent seeming more pleasant. After a month, I could jog a little, but not too much because I want to stay on speaking terms with my knees. After a year, I started to seek out hills rather than avoiding them. After two years, I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago and walked 75 miles in four days, God willing, after two more years I'm going to go back and walk over 500 miles, and maybe a few years after that I'm going to walk it again, I don't know.
But I do know that I love walking, and not just because I have to, not just because it has saved me from insulin injections and gotten me into smaller pants. I love it for the thing itself. I love having my feet on the ground and having to pay attention to the weather and the ground under my feet. I love the pace, where you can notice things around you and talk to people with you. I haven't put my mp3 player on in months, I listen to the birds, or my wife, or my kids.
On a beautiful day like today, I think I could just walk forever. In fact, that's one of things that draws me to things like the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail, the idea that all you have to do, all day, every day, is just walk. Maybe that seems like work to some, maybe it seems like torture to others, but to me it seems like shangri-la.
As much as I like my cars, as much as I "need" my cars, I also have this little voice that sings a delightful song of what the world would be like without them. I don't mean just that I didn't have one, rather I mean that no one did, that the entire nature of our society was changed back to a world that was governed by the distance one could reasonably walk. Where pleasant footpaths replaced crowded bands of asphalt and you actually had to talk to your neighbors as you went about your business.
Maybe I've just been immersed in too much Tolkien, but I seriously wonder whether all this range and so-called freedom we enjoy in the world of the automobile is honestly making people happier and healthier. I think of Huxley's dystopian vision of A Brave New World, quite a bit. In the end it seems he was much more correct than Orwell about exactly how things were going to go awry: medication, entertainment and mechanization, have become our oppressors rather than a totalitarian state and endless war. For Ford's sake, he even used the inventor of the mass produced automobile to replace God, it's just eerie.
Walking is an act of rebellion against the machine. It reminds me, if only for a short time each day, what human beings are made for, how we're supposed to move through the world, how we're supposed to pay attention to things rather than just whiz right by them.
I started walking because it is good for my body.
I keep walking because it is good for my soul.
But I do know that I love walking, and not just because I have to, not just because it has saved me from insulin injections and gotten me into smaller pants. I love it for the thing itself. I love having my feet on the ground and having to pay attention to the weather and the ground under my feet. I love the pace, where you can notice things around you and talk to people with you. I haven't put my mp3 player on in months, I listen to the birds, or my wife, or my kids.
On a beautiful day like today, I think I could just walk forever. In fact, that's one of things that draws me to things like the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail, the idea that all you have to do, all day, every day, is just walk. Maybe that seems like work to some, maybe it seems like torture to others, but to me it seems like shangri-la.
As much as I like my cars, as much as I "need" my cars, I also have this little voice that sings a delightful song of what the world would be like without them. I don't mean just that I didn't have one, rather I mean that no one did, that the entire nature of our society was changed back to a world that was governed by the distance one could reasonably walk. Where pleasant footpaths replaced crowded bands of asphalt and you actually had to talk to your neighbors as you went about your business.
Maybe I've just been immersed in too much Tolkien, but I seriously wonder whether all this range and so-called freedom we enjoy in the world of the automobile is honestly making people happier and healthier. I think of Huxley's dystopian vision of A Brave New World, quite a bit. In the end it seems he was much more correct than Orwell about exactly how things were going to go awry: medication, entertainment and mechanization, have become our oppressors rather than a totalitarian state and endless war. For Ford's sake, he even used the inventor of the mass produced automobile to replace God, it's just eerie.
Walking is an act of rebellion against the machine. It reminds me, if only for a short time each day, what human beings are made for, how we're supposed to move through the world, how we're supposed to pay attention to things rather than just whiz right by them.
I started walking because it is good for my body.
I keep walking because it is good for my soul.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Fear and Loathing in Government
I am not a hard person to please. I feel like I have an appreciation for people who try their best and make a sincere effort. When my kids bring me an object of self-created art, I do not critique their form (sometimes their spelling, but only for didactic purposes), I accept, appreciate and value what they have done. As a Pastor, when someone has an idea, a talent or a passion for some project, I usually say "go for it," and I consciously avoid trying to micromanage them out of the picture. I am pretty easy-going, by no means a perfectionist and I generally appreciate the grace that abounds when people bring different talents to the table.
That being said, if my children were in the United States Congress I would send them to bed without dinner (not something I have ever done to Jack or Cate by the way). No one ever said democracy was an easy thing, and so I don't expect miracles, but a reasonable expectation might be to actually do something (like pass a budget so that important programs don't get hamstrung). If Congress was the Session (the local governing board of a Presbyterian church) of a congregation where I was the pastor we would be going on a retreat so that we could learn to act like grown-ups.
I'm no political expert, CNN isn't calling me up asking for my opinion on much of anything, but from a distance I recognize a system that is gridlocked by fear and loathing. Right now, the balance of power is such that idealogues on both sides of the aisle can basically hold the whole assembly hostage. That is a sign of institutional disease, a cancer of the system. The framers of our Constitution created a system of checks and balances so that something as easily manipulated as a simple majority could get very little accomplished. Which is a good idea when the "ideal" society you envision is basically a confederation of wealthy, land-owning, white men. In that case you all understand each other and can usually come to mutually agreeable compromises.
As of right now, the rich, white guys are still in charge, but they're scared, because the nation they are trying to govern is rather different than the homogeneous agrarian society that produced our esteemed Constitution. Frightened people generally do one of two things: fight or flight. Congress is not going to run away, because they're too rich and too powerful, so they're going to fight. Who are they going to fight? Each other? Maybe a little, but they've sort of got an understanding among themselves, they're all in the club and they have a vested interest in the gravy train not stopping or even slowing down.
Corporations and rich folk line their pockets come election time, and so they're not going to want to go after the CEO's at JP Morgan unless they absolutely have no choice (which consequently tells you how really bad things have gotten).
No they're not going to go after their fellow rich, white guys. They're going to basically use the poor and the middle class and the aliens in our midst as the battleground, and they're going to make sure that we sustain the most collateral damage. They're going to assuage their fear by stoking ours, they're going to promise us that they know how we can join their club, but they're going to take away any real chance that we can do it.
The Prophet Isaiah says this: "Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land." And that's not actually an isolated sentiment, it's a rather large theme in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus' teaching: if you take everything for yourself and don't leave enough for the weaker, more vulnerable people in your world, God is not going to be happy with you.
I don't often talk about who God is going to be angry with, but I'm pretty sure he's going to be angry with people who were immensely successful and didn't use their blessings for the good of the world. I'm pretty sure God will not be smiling on those who gain wealth, power and influence and then begin stepping on those they should be treating as neighbors.
What then should we say about people who were elected "democratically," who refuse to think about the best interest of the "common man?"
What should we say about those we have trusted with the duty of leading our society, who then refuse to make the simple decisions and implement the most common sense measures to improve our nation?
I suppose, in the final analysis, what should we say about a nation of people who re-elect them year after year?
That being said, if my children were in the United States Congress I would send them to bed without dinner (not something I have ever done to Jack or Cate by the way). No one ever said democracy was an easy thing, and so I don't expect miracles, but a reasonable expectation might be to actually do something (like pass a budget so that important programs don't get hamstrung). If Congress was the Session (the local governing board of a Presbyterian church) of a congregation where I was the pastor we would be going on a retreat so that we could learn to act like grown-ups.
I'm no political expert, CNN isn't calling me up asking for my opinion on much of anything, but from a distance I recognize a system that is gridlocked by fear and loathing. Right now, the balance of power is such that idealogues on both sides of the aisle can basically hold the whole assembly hostage. That is a sign of institutional disease, a cancer of the system. The framers of our Constitution created a system of checks and balances so that something as easily manipulated as a simple majority could get very little accomplished. Which is a good idea when the "ideal" society you envision is basically a confederation of wealthy, land-owning, white men. In that case you all understand each other and can usually come to mutually agreeable compromises.
As of right now, the rich, white guys are still in charge, but they're scared, because the nation they are trying to govern is rather different than the homogeneous agrarian society that produced our esteemed Constitution. Frightened people generally do one of two things: fight or flight. Congress is not going to run away, because they're too rich and too powerful, so they're going to fight. Who are they going to fight? Each other? Maybe a little, but they've sort of got an understanding among themselves, they're all in the club and they have a vested interest in the gravy train not stopping or even slowing down.
Corporations and rich folk line their pockets come election time, and so they're not going to want to go after the CEO's at JP Morgan unless they absolutely have no choice (which consequently tells you how really bad things have gotten).
No they're not going to go after their fellow rich, white guys. They're going to basically use the poor and the middle class and the aliens in our midst as the battleground, and they're going to make sure that we sustain the most collateral damage. They're going to assuage their fear by stoking ours, they're going to promise us that they know how we can join their club, but they're going to take away any real chance that we can do it.
The Prophet Isaiah says this: "Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land." And that's not actually an isolated sentiment, it's a rather large theme in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus' teaching: if you take everything for yourself and don't leave enough for the weaker, more vulnerable people in your world, God is not going to be happy with you.
I don't often talk about who God is going to be angry with, but I'm pretty sure he's going to be angry with people who were immensely successful and didn't use their blessings for the good of the world. I'm pretty sure God will not be smiling on those who gain wealth, power and influence and then begin stepping on those they should be treating as neighbors.
What then should we say about people who were elected "democratically," who refuse to think about the best interest of the "common man?"
What should we say about those we have trusted with the duty of leading our society, who then refuse to make the simple decisions and implement the most common sense measures to improve our nation?
I suppose, in the final analysis, what should we say about a nation of people who re-elect them year after year?
Monday, August 12, 2013
Concerning Hobbits...
There is a distinct advantage to being childlike when it comes to raising children. For years I wondered if it was really a bad thing to hold on to so many of the imaginary worlds of my childhood, but the other day I had a moment where I realized why I'm glad I have. We were walking the dog on a trail that goes through the woods and for some unknown reason we just broke out into a run. The dog on his long retractable leash, pulling the slow human (me) behind him, and my son, Jack, right behind me. After we had run about 100 yards, which is about the distance I can run without serious side effects, we slowed down and I said to Jack: "running behind Zeke (the dog) is like driving a pod racer." To which replied in a most matter of fact tone, "Yep, I can see that."
I realized that we inhabit very similar worlds of imagination, we share a contextual framework, and I thought of how great a gift that really is for a father and son to have the same odd frame of reference, in this case, Star Wars. Later in the afternoon we sat down to watch the first movie of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I have the extended editions, so watching these movies is a rather significant investment of time. I have read The Hobbit, to Jack and so he has had something of an introduction to the world of Middle Earth, but I have not undertaken to read LOTR out loud, it would just take waaay too long. As we watched, Jack was absorbing and Cate was asking lots of questions (that really is a microcosm of how they learn). I realized that I have a rather in depth knowledge of Middle Earth. I have read The Hobbit and all three Lord of the Rings books, several times. I have seen the movie adaptations, and I have even read The Silmarillion, the rather exhaustive history/mythology of Tolkien's fantasy universe.
The thought occurred to me that, at one point in our history, human beings shared all their stories and all their knowledge in the telling of stories. The importance and the blessedness of simply sharing my geeky fascination with Star Wars, LOTR, Star Trek, and Dr. Who with my kids is a rather sparkling example of why this is a pretty great way of going about things. At seven and nine, they have not reached that age where cynicism begins to creep it's way into their souls. I can share with them the rather wonderful ethos of Tolkien's stories before they are completely enveloped by the technological/industrial monstrosity of modern America. It probably won't keep them from wanting an iPhone sooner rather than later, but at least they will have some base appreciation of why it is that Tolkien chose "the least of these" to be his heroes.
Caitlyn particularly has been puzzled by the reason why Frodo had to be the only one to carry the ring, after all Gandalf or Aragorn seem like much more suitable characters to undertake such a perilous and difficult journey. I have explained again and again that the ring, because it is treacherous and evil, would overcome the strong, and twist their efforts to do good into evil. By the end of The Two Towers, I think she finally understands. And that's no small thing: to understand something of the nature of sin and the corruptibility of the human soul, and to see how it is that it's not always the most impressive people who are called to be the heroes, those are fairly important truths to grasp a week before you turn eight. They are things that might just actually stick with her. These are things that spring from an imagination that is structured by a very mature Christian faith, and the stories of Hobbits and rings of power are powerful allegories for the spiritual journey.
I realized how much I have been able to teach my children through my own geeky infatuation. Whether it's the humanist morality tales of Star Trek, the Buddhist ideas of balance between good and evil from Star Wars, the Christian allegories in LOTR and Narnia or one of the spectacularly large and beautiful ideas behind Dr. Who's adventures, I have given them a rather broad foundation in philosophy, just by exposing them to stories.
Which is how it began. With stories like Genesis, The Iliad and the Odyssey, stories of heroes and villains, God, gods and goddesses, angels and demons, Hobbits and Jedi.
Don't ever say it's only a story...
I realized that we inhabit very similar worlds of imagination, we share a contextual framework, and I thought of how great a gift that really is for a father and son to have the same odd frame of reference, in this case, Star Wars. Later in the afternoon we sat down to watch the first movie of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I have the extended editions, so watching these movies is a rather significant investment of time. I have read The Hobbit, to Jack and so he has had something of an introduction to the world of Middle Earth, but I have not undertaken to read LOTR out loud, it would just take waaay too long. As we watched, Jack was absorbing and Cate was asking lots of questions (that really is a microcosm of how they learn). I realized that I have a rather in depth knowledge of Middle Earth. I have read The Hobbit and all three Lord of the Rings books, several times. I have seen the movie adaptations, and I have even read The Silmarillion, the rather exhaustive history/mythology of Tolkien's fantasy universe.
The thought occurred to me that, at one point in our history, human beings shared all their stories and all their knowledge in the telling of stories. The importance and the blessedness of simply sharing my geeky fascination with Star Wars, LOTR, Star Trek, and Dr. Who with my kids is a rather sparkling example of why this is a pretty great way of going about things. At seven and nine, they have not reached that age where cynicism begins to creep it's way into their souls. I can share with them the rather wonderful ethos of Tolkien's stories before they are completely enveloped by the technological/industrial monstrosity of modern America. It probably won't keep them from wanting an iPhone sooner rather than later, but at least they will have some base appreciation of why it is that Tolkien chose "the least of these" to be his heroes.
Caitlyn particularly has been puzzled by the reason why Frodo had to be the only one to carry the ring, after all Gandalf or Aragorn seem like much more suitable characters to undertake such a perilous and difficult journey. I have explained again and again that the ring, because it is treacherous and evil, would overcome the strong, and twist their efforts to do good into evil. By the end of The Two Towers, I think she finally understands. And that's no small thing: to understand something of the nature of sin and the corruptibility of the human soul, and to see how it is that it's not always the most impressive people who are called to be the heroes, those are fairly important truths to grasp a week before you turn eight. They are things that might just actually stick with her. These are things that spring from an imagination that is structured by a very mature Christian faith, and the stories of Hobbits and rings of power are powerful allegories for the spiritual journey.
I realized how much I have been able to teach my children through my own geeky infatuation. Whether it's the humanist morality tales of Star Trek, the Buddhist ideas of balance between good and evil from Star Wars, the Christian allegories in LOTR and Narnia or one of the spectacularly large and beautiful ideas behind Dr. Who's adventures, I have given them a rather broad foundation in philosophy, just by exposing them to stories.
Which is how it began. With stories like Genesis, The Iliad and the Odyssey, stories of heroes and villains, God, gods and goddesses, angels and demons, Hobbits and Jedi.
Don't ever say it's only a story...
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Faith, Faith, Faith
My wife's middle name is Faith. I mention this because she loves to be part of my blog and because there's a reason she has that name. She was born three months premature, in a time when there wasn't much hope for kids born at that point, but she survived and her parents gave her Faith as a middle name. I also mention it because faith is the theme of this week's lectionary text from Hebrews, and the theme of a movie we watched with the kids last night: Rise of the Guardians. Because sometimes the universe conspires to put something so glaringly in your path that you just can't avoid it. The ancient Greeks called it fate, I call it the Holy Spirit, because I have faith.
Faith is one of those words that gets used a lot, but not always in exactly the same way. Faith can mean belief in the context that I just used. Keeping the faith means being rooted and steady. Acting in good faith means being trustworthy and true to your word. Hebrews says, "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." I think that's a pretty good definition.
You don't need faith in things you can see. I don't have to have faith that there's a big pine tree outside my window, but I do need to have faith that there is a God. There is a theological concept called Deus Absconditis, which means Hidden God. It's a rather important concept because it explains a lot of the stories in the Bible, and for Christians has an impact on our understanding of the person of Jesus. In the Bible God desires to be known, but there is a certain limit to our ability to understand God. There is also the rather peculiar insistence on mystery and seeing God only in part. You have to think it would be a lot easier for God to keep people focused if She regularly showed up and made a PR stop. We humans are wired to believe what we see, to the point where we're real suckers for illusion and sleight of hand. However, God does not like to make personal appearances and leaves it mostly up to our faith.
This is good and bad, because while are wired to believe what we see, we're also wired for faith, we are prone, in fact, I would say we need to believe in things. In one of my favorite TV shows, The X-files, (try to contain your shock) Agent Mulder has a poster with a UFO on it that says, "I want to believe." We don't just want to believe, we need to believe, it's part of what makes us human.
It's a rather glaring weakness, because it opens us up to all sorts of nonsense. Faith can be easily abused, and it often is. Faith can lead people to do terrible things, and it often does. Faith, in fact, is such a glaring weakness that many people have chosen to try and live without it. I want to emphasize the word try, because it's not something you can really get away from. If you choose not to believe in God or gods, you inevitably replace them with something, you can't really help it, there's a part of you that needs filling.
Which brings me back to Christian faith and the notion of deus absconditus. God has remained hidden because He can fill that empty space in us, in fact He's the only thing that can, but like most solutions to humanity's problems, it works a lot better if we think it's our idea. God has made us with this peculiar independent streak, and we like to think that we're in control, so instead of overwhelming us with both barrels of God's majesty, She peeks out and says, "Hey, this is what I'm like, wanna hang out?"
That peek is Jesus of Nazareth.
In Jesus' life, death and resurrection we found out a few things about God:
God loves children.
God cares for the sick and the broken.
God forgives the sinful.
God gets mad at the legal and religious authorities who like to tell people that God is different than God actually is.
God calls really ordinary and unimpressive people to follow him around and do stuff with him.
God likes to tell us about the Kingdom, but leave it up to us to take it or leave it.
Oh yeah, and God loves us... a lot... enough to keep the power that created the universe under wraps so it doesn't fry our circuits.
God deals with our empty space, not by filling it up with majesty and overwhelming it with omniscience but by giving us the gift of faith.
That's what faith really is, a gift.
A gift that pulls us through the fear.
A gift that doesn't always chase away our doubts, but lets us know that we can trust what we cannot know.
For all of God that remains hidden, there is enough to believe, if you want.
Faith is one of those words that gets used a lot, but not always in exactly the same way. Faith can mean belief in the context that I just used. Keeping the faith means being rooted and steady. Acting in good faith means being trustworthy and true to your word. Hebrews says, "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." I think that's a pretty good definition.
You don't need faith in things you can see. I don't have to have faith that there's a big pine tree outside my window, but I do need to have faith that there is a God. There is a theological concept called Deus Absconditis, which means Hidden God. It's a rather important concept because it explains a lot of the stories in the Bible, and for Christians has an impact on our understanding of the person of Jesus. In the Bible God desires to be known, but there is a certain limit to our ability to understand God. There is also the rather peculiar insistence on mystery and seeing God only in part. You have to think it would be a lot easier for God to keep people focused if She regularly showed up and made a PR stop. We humans are wired to believe what we see, to the point where we're real suckers for illusion and sleight of hand. However, God does not like to make personal appearances and leaves it mostly up to our faith.
This is good and bad, because while are wired to believe what we see, we're also wired for faith, we are prone, in fact, I would say we need to believe in things. In one of my favorite TV shows, The X-files, (try to contain your shock) Agent Mulder has a poster with a UFO on it that says, "I want to believe." We don't just want to believe, we need to believe, it's part of what makes us human.
It's a rather glaring weakness, because it opens us up to all sorts of nonsense. Faith can be easily abused, and it often is. Faith can lead people to do terrible things, and it often does. Faith, in fact, is such a glaring weakness that many people have chosen to try and live without it. I want to emphasize the word try, because it's not something you can really get away from. If you choose not to believe in God or gods, you inevitably replace them with something, you can't really help it, there's a part of you that needs filling.
Which brings me back to Christian faith and the notion of deus absconditus. God has remained hidden because He can fill that empty space in us, in fact He's the only thing that can, but like most solutions to humanity's problems, it works a lot better if we think it's our idea. God has made us with this peculiar independent streak, and we like to think that we're in control, so instead of overwhelming us with both barrels of God's majesty, She peeks out and says, "Hey, this is what I'm like, wanna hang out?"
That peek is Jesus of Nazareth.
In Jesus' life, death and resurrection we found out a few things about God:
God loves children.
God cares for the sick and the broken.
God forgives the sinful.
God gets mad at the legal and religious authorities who like to tell people that God is different than God actually is.
God calls really ordinary and unimpressive people to follow him around and do stuff with him.
God likes to tell us about the Kingdom, but leave it up to us to take it or leave it.
Oh yeah, and God loves us... a lot... enough to keep the power that created the universe under wraps so it doesn't fry our circuits.
God deals with our empty space, not by filling it up with majesty and overwhelming it with omniscience but by giving us the gift of faith.
That's what faith really is, a gift.
A gift that pulls us through the fear.
A gift that doesn't always chase away our doubts, but lets us know that we can trust what we cannot know.
For all of God that remains hidden, there is enough to believe, if you want.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
In the Coliseum
We're wasting our moral outrage people.
My dear wife always groans whenever my morning Sportscenter viewing includes whatever scandal is currently rocking the world of fun and games. Today it is Alex Rodriguez and the Biogenesis "scandal" that has led to some fairly prominent baseball players being suspended for the rest of the season. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I'm increasingly asking myself: "who cares?" I mean isn't there enough real tragedy in the world? Do we really need to spend so much energy trying to catch guys who cheat at a game? Think about it: there have been congressional hearings and a major federal trial over if and when some guy injected something into Roger Clemens behind. The nation stood transfixed as Lance Armstrong finally admitted to Oprah that, Yes indeed, he was every bit as much of a doper as just about every other cyclist from of the last 40 years.
Every once in a while our gladiators get themselves in real trouble, Michael Vick, Aaron Hernandez, Rae Carruth, Plaxico Burress and a host of others spring to mind, but this fixation we have with performance enhancing drugs (PEDS) is really getting old.
These are grown men, professional athletes, who probably fully understand the risks and are willing to roll the dice. Why in the world did congress ever get involved in this mess? Shouldn't they be trying to stop human trafficking, fight poverty, or just get some basic government accomplished? Don't they have better things to worry about than Roger Clemen's nether regions?
The outrage expressed by the sporting community is maudlin indeed and I can't help but feel it's also somewhat disingenuous. I remember the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and all the swooning about history being made and how it brought baseball back from the brink of irrelevance after an acrimonious labor dispute between the millionaire players and the billionaire owners. And now those same hacks are wringing their hands about asterisks and how it all seems tainted.
Does it surprise anyone that people cheat?
Did you ever play Monopoly as a kid?
If the answer is yes, you almost certainly cheated, or made up rules as you went along, or had crooked side deals and usurious practices in place.
Why then, does it shock and offend us to find out that people who are so driven, so focused on becoming the best, that they finally make it to the highest level of sport, are willing to take it a little over the top?
Because we want heroes really bad.
Because we need supermen and superwomen.
We want to look at something and say, "Wow!"
Because we are idolaters in our hearts.
We don't even hide it anymore, we say that we idolize our star athletes, we "enshrine" them in Halls of Fame. And when we find out that they're not worthy of our worship, it hurts a little... to some it hurts a lot.
Nobody likes to have their heroes fall, that's why David cut off Goliath's head and paraded it around and the Philistines ran away.
That's where idolatry puts you: in danger of having everything come crumbling down.
Sports are modern idolatry. We devote ourselves to them wholeheartedly, we sacrifice our health, our leisure and sometimes our children on the altar of fun and games, and we find, as with all false gods, they end up betraying us. They betray us because, for all their strutting and claims to greatness, they are little more than empty amusements. They betray us because the heroes they parade before us do not often have the moral fiber to accompany their physical prowess. They betray us because they were intended to be fun and we take them far too seriously. They betray us because we are willing to sink our time and treasure into their coffers and because we expect them to carry our hopes and dreams, but they can't.
Because they're just games.
Because they're played by just men (and women).
Because winning is not the only thing, it's not even that important, but it's something that our sinful nature craves like nothing else.
My dear wife always groans whenever my morning Sportscenter viewing includes whatever scandal is currently rocking the world of fun and games. Today it is Alex Rodriguez and the Biogenesis "scandal" that has led to some fairly prominent baseball players being suspended for the rest of the season. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I'm increasingly asking myself: "who cares?" I mean isn't there enough real tragedy in the world? Do we really need to spend so much energy trying to catch guys who cheat at a game? Think about it: there have been congressional hearings and a major federal trial over if and when some guy injected something into Roger Clemens behind. The nation stood transfixed as Lance Armstrong finally admitted to Oprah that, Yes indeed, he was every bit as much of a doper as just about every other cyclist from of the last 40 years.
Every once in a while our gladiators get themselves in real trouble, Michael Vick, Aaron Hernandez, Rae Carruth, Plaxico Burress and a host of others spring to mind, but this fixation we have with performance enhancing drugs (PEDS) is really getting old.
These are grown men, professional athletes, who probably fully understand the risks and are willing to roll the dice. Why in the world did congress ever get involved in this mess? Shouldn't they be trying to stop human trafficking, fight poverty, or just get some basic government accomplished? Don't they have better things to worry about than Roger Clemen's nether regions?
The outrage expressed by the sporting community is maudlin indeed and I can't help but feel it's also somewhat disingenuous. I remember the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and all the swooning about history being made and how it brought baseball back from the brink of irrelevance after an acrimonious labor dispute between the millionaire players and the billionaire owners. And now those same hacks are wringing their hands about asterisks and how it all seems tainted.
Does it surprise anyone that people cheat?
Did you ever play Monopoly as a kid?
If the answer is yes, you almost certainly cheated, or made up rules as you went along, or had crooked side deals and usurious practices in place.
Why then, does it shock and offend us to find out that people who are so driven, so focused on becoming the best, that they finally make it to the highest level of sport, are willing to take it a little over the top?
Because we want heroes really bad.
Because we need supermen and superwomen.
We want to look at something and say, "Wow!"
Because we are idolaters in our hearts.
We don't even hide it anymore, we say that we idolize our star athletes, we "enshrine" them in Halls of Fame. And when we find out that they're not worthy of our worship, it hurts a little... to some it hurts a lot.
Nobody likes to have their heroes fall, that's why David cut off Goliath's head and paraded it around and the Philistines ran away.
That's where idolatry puts you: in danger of having everything come crumbling down.
Sports are modern idolatry. We devote ourselves to them wholeheartedly, we sacrifice our health, our leisure and sometimes our children on the altar of fun and games, and we find, as with all false gods, they end up betraying us. They betray us because, for all their strutting and claims to greatness, they are little more than empty amusements. They betray us because the heroes they parade before us do not often have the moral fiber to accompany their physical prowess. They betray us because they were intended to be fun and we take them far too seriously. They betray us because we are willing to sink our time and treasure into their coffers and because we expect them to carry our hopes and dreams, but they can't.
Because they're just games.
Because they're played by just men (and women).
Because winning is not the only thing, it's not even that important, but it's something that our sinful nature craves like nothing else.
Monday, August 5, 2013
Nahala
"Well never mind, we are ugly, but we have the music."
-Leonard Cohen, quoting Janice Joplin in Chelsea Hotel
Some people inherit money, others get titles or property, I get guitars. Not a bad inheritance all things considered. My first guitar was an old Wasburn that I inherited from my Dad, because he basically didn't want it anymore and I "needed" a guitar. When my brother died I got his Ovation, which I use mostly for worship, because that's what it does best and it's what I really need to use it for. I have only ever bought one guitar, my Gibson electric, but now I own five thanks to my latest inheritance a Martin 12 string that my Dad gave me for my 39th birthday.
This was the real kicker. I made a joke in a sermon about the prodigal son, mentioning that the prodigal demanding the inheritance from his father while his father was still alive was a real slap in the face. I used my Dad's 12 string as the object lesson. It was his prized possession for many years, he bought it from a friend in 1971 for $700 (you could buy a car in 1971 for $700). I have always admired that guitar and I basically knew that one day I would own it, but probably on the day that I buried my Dad, so I wasn't exactly eager for that to happen. In the sermon, I was making a point, not trying to needle my Dad, but apparently the Lord did some needling afterward.
See, Dad hasn't really played the Martin very much lately, and for good reasons, he's got a Guild six string that is an absolute joy to play and twelve strings are high maintenance. What I mean by that is that, if you're going to play a twelve, you'd better get it out every day or nearly every day and play it, or else your hand and fingertips just aren't going to cut it. There are six extra strings to contend with. Six more taut bands of steel and wrapped brass wire that you need to pinch between your finger and a hard ebony fretboard. Playing a twelve can hurt a bit, if you don't toughen your calloused fingertips and strengthen the muscles in your hand.
The result is a richer, fuller voice that just rings out like a choir, but it comes with a price. I'm in the process of paying the price, even though the guitar was a gift, developing myself to be able to play it is a process. This is the way it should be. In A River Runs Through It, the narrator's father, a Presbyterian Minister and fly fisherman, hands down his love of fishing to his two sons. There's this line that goes something like: "Anyone who doesn't have the skill to catch a fish the right way has no right to disgrace a fish by catching it." I feel pretty much the same way about the guitar, I feel the same way about people who generate their "sound" using all sorts of gimmicks and electronic effects with soft, low action, low tension electric guitars, as fly fishermen feel about people who use canned corn and balls of dough to catch fish. Don't get me wrong, I love electric guitars too, but I think you ought to pay your dues driving the old pick up truck before you get the sports car.
But the Martin 12 string is no old pickup truck, she's a classic car, she needs attention and demands some discipline. This guitar is, in many ways, a perfect symbol of a birthright. My Dad can take it out of the closet and say, "Happy Birthday," but I don't really own that guitar until I do the work to honor the instrument. I knew it was quite a moment, when he made the decision to part with it, even though he wasn't using it the way it deserved to be used, it has still been with him even longer than I have, it has a lot of history, they've been through a lot together, and I knew it said a lot about how Dad felt about me that he would give me this particular piece of my inheritance right now.
I want to honor the gift and the instrument, but that's going to take work.
Just like you can take the lessons you learn from a parent or teacher, and you can hear them, but the only way to truly honor the giver is to put them into practice.
When most people hear the word inheritance they think of a passive incident, where someone gives you something because you're kin to them or because they think you deserve it, but that's barely half of the equation. To truly inherit something you have to grow into it, you need to become worthy of it. It may be given in love, but there's also a trust that you will handle it the right way.
Thanks Dad, I'm going to do my best.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
What's Fonzi Like?
I was on vacation, but this wasn't one of those off the grid sorts of vacations. While I was in NJ/PA attending a wedding, my iPhone kept me all caught up on the blogosphere and other such techie sounding things. One of the things that buzzed like a fly caught in the interweb was an article by Rachel Held Evans about why Millennials are leaving the church, and why they might come back. You can find it here: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/27/why-millennials-are-leaving-the-church/
And there have been several good responses, one of the best is right here: http://www.bishoponabike.com/blog/2013/7/27/is-rachel-held-evans-right.html.
There is a lot of hand-wringing being done in my congregation and in the larger church about how to keep/get back the younglings, and it usually at least glances by the notion of coolness. To be "cool" or not to be "cool" that is the question. Rachel says that the young folks don't want the church to be cool, and that large numbers of Millennials, or at least the subset of Millennials that was raised in the evangelical branch of American Christianity, are turning back to the "high" liturgical traditions, which are not cool or rather are cool because they have held on long enough to become cool again, like vinyl records.
Then I read this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/christianity-pope-francis-gays_b_3671060.html
Which threw me another curve in the whole consideration of being cool. The pope is cool? Does he know that this is going to drive away all those Millennials who were just beginning to poke their nose in the doors of his Roman Catholic churches?
Or maybe it won't because they like it when you're okay with the LGBT folks. Except if you really think about it, maybe the Pope isn't exactly inviting the Village People into St. Peter's just yet. See, he's okay with gay men being priests, still no women gay or straight. He's okay with gay men being priests because one of the requirements of the RC priesthood is celibacy. See Leviticus and the Apostle Paul agree on one thing when it comes to homosexuality, it's all about the action not the inclination. It doesn't say that you shouldn't be attracted to members of your same gender, it just says you shouldn't "lay with them as a man lays with a woman," so see, celibacy clears the whole mess right up, right?
Right?
But I'm still confused about this whole coolness thing...
Maybe it's because I've always been such a geek. I always wanted to be cool like Fonzi on Happy Days, where I walk into a room and girls just instantly glom onto me and I smack the jukebox and it plays just what I want, but I never have been that guy. I can't really claim to be an authority on cool, so I have tried to think of people who are largely accepted as cool, here's my top five:
1. Frank Sinatra
2. Elvis Presley
3. David Bowie
4. Prince
5. Frank Zappa
They're all musicians for some reason. Sinatra and Elvis really have to top the list for reasons that are pretty obvious, but I think that Bowie, Prince and Zappa really start to get to the core of coolness. Sinatra's famous song was "My Way," but musically Sinatra didn't really innovate like Zappa, or bend the boundaries of style and substance like Bowie or Prince.
Prince changed his name to a symbol, and is one of the few people who can wear ruffles, high heels and makeup and still look like he has come for your daughters.
Bowie has defiantly been cool for almost 40 freaking years. Bowie is so cool that Trent Reznor, Mr. "head like a hole, black as your soul, I'd rather die than give you control," fawns over him like a 13 year old girl fawns over Justin Beiber.
Zappa made the music he thought was interesting to the point where he alienated even the literati of the music world.
Based on my understanding then, one of the major ingredients of coolness is just not caring what people think about you. Which is the exact opposite of the way that most people try to be cool. It is painfully true of the Church, when we try to bend to consumerism, when we try to be hip and relaxed, when we try to say that "it's all good," we totally lose our identity and let the spirit of the age steal our face. Which is why the whole "cool Pope" thing really strikes my fancy, see he wasn't self consciously trying to be cool, he was just being honest and authentic and true to his interpretation of Christian theology and ethics. He wasn't trying, he just was.
See when grown ups try to be cool, they usually fail. When you "try too hard" you are like that creepy old guy who shows up at a frat party or a rave and tries to "jive talk the groovy babes," it just doesn't work.
At this point in history, the Church is a grown up, we can't go back to being teenagers, we need to address the reality that being cool now involves going to bed at a reasonable hour, getting enough fiber in our diet, and trying not to be "too boring."
Morgan Freeman is a total grown up, and he's in his 70's and he is as cool as the other side of the pillow. It is possible to be grown up and be cool, but it's not cool for a grown up to act like a 15 year old, I think we can thank sit-coms for proving that to us ad-nauseum. What will it take for the Church to be cool?
And there have been several good responses, one of the best is right here: http://www.bishoponabike.com/blog/2013/7/27/is-rachel-held-evans-right.html.
There is a lot of hand-wringing being done in my congregation and in the larger church about how to keep/get back the younglings, and it usually at least glances by the notion of coolness. To be "cool" or not to be "cool" that is the question. Rachel says that the young folks don't want the church to be cool, and that large numbers of Millennials, or at least the subset of Millennials that was raised in the evangelical branch of American Christianity, are turning back to the "high" liturgical traditions, which are not cool or rather are cool because they have held on long enough to become cool again, like vinyl records.
Then I read this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/christianity-pope-francis-gays_b_3671060.html
Which threw me another curve in the whole consideration of being cool. The pope is cool? Does he know that this is going to drive away all those Millennials who were just beginning to poke their nose in the doors of his Roman Catholic churches?
Or maybe it won't because they like it when you're okay with the LGBT folks. Except if you really think about it, maybe the Pope isn't exactly inviting the Village People into St. Peter's just yet. See, he's okay with gay men being priests, still no women gay or straight. He's okay with gay men being priests because one of the requirements of the RC priesthood is celibacy. See Leviticus and the Apostle Paul agree on one thing when it comes to homosexuality, it's all about the action not the inclination. It doesn't say that you shouldn't be attracted to members of your same gender, it just says you shouldn't "lay with them as a man lays with a woman," so see, celibacy clears the whole mess right up, right?
Right?
But I'm still confused about this whole coolness thing...
Maybe it's because I've always been such a geek. I always wanted to be cool like Fonzi on Happy Days, where I walk into a room and girls just instantly glom onto me and I smack the jukebox and it plays just what I want, but I never have been that guy. I can't really claim to be an authority on cool, so I have tried to think of people who are largely accepted as cool, here's my top five:
1. Frank Sinatra
2. Elvis Presley
3. David Bowie
4. Prince
5. Frank Zappa
They're all musicians for some reason. Sinatra and Elvis really have to top the list for reasons that are pretty obvious, but I think that Bowie, Prince and Zappa really start to get to the core of coolness. Sinatra's famous song was "My Way," but musically Sinatra didn't really innovate like Zappa, or bend the boundaries of style and substance like Bowie or Prince.
Prince changed his name to a symbol, and is one of the few people who can wear ruffles, high heels and makeup and still look like he has come for your daughters.
Bowie has defiantly been cool for almost 40 freaking years. Bowie is so cool that Trent Reznor, Mr. "head like a hole, black as your soul, I'd rather die than give you control," fawns over him like a 13 year old girl fawns over Justin Beiber.
Zappa made the music he thought was interesting to the point where he alienated even the literati of the music world.
Based on my understanding then, one of the major ingredients of coolness is just not caring what people think about you. Which is the exact opposite of the way that most people try to be cool. It is painfully true of the Church, when we try to bend to consumerism, when we try to be hip and relaxed, when we try to say that "it's all good," we totally lose our identity and let the spirit of the age steal our face. Which is why the whole "cool Pope" thing really strikes my fancy, see he wasn't self consciously trying to be cool, he was just being honest and authentic and true to his interpretation of Christian theology and ethics. He wasn't trying, he just was.
See when grown ups try to be cool, they usually fail. When you "try too hard" you are like that creepy old guy who shows up at a frat party or a rave and tries to "jive talk the groovy babes," it just doesn't work.
At this point in history, the Church is a grown up, we can't go back to being teenagers, we need to address the reality that being cool now involves going to bed at a reasonable hour, getting enough fiber in our diet, and trying not to be "too boring."
Morgan Freeman is a total grown up, and he's in his 70's and he is as cool as the other side of the pillow. It is possible to be grown up and be cool, but it's not cool for a grown up to act like a 15 year old, I think we can thank sit-coms for proving that to us ad-nauseum. What will it take for the Church to be cool?
"Be still and know that I am God..."
-Psalm 46: 10
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