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.