What I'm Leaving Out of My Sermon:

The sermon I just finished writing is all about asking better questions.  The rather long Gospel reading for this week was filled with people asking questions.  Some were right some were wrong, some weren't actually even questions.  But there's something that I'm not going to talk about on Sunday.  It was tempting, it was current, it is appropriate, but it's also a hot potato, and I think too many people already have burnt fingers.
The story of what has gone down this week with regard to World Vision, a mission agency that primarily deals with supporting children living in poverty around the globe, has some strong connections with the story of the Pharisaic inquisition into Jesus' healing of a blind man in John 9.
Early in the week, World Vision released a statement that said they would employ people who were in homosexual relationships, including marriages in states where it is a legal possibility.  They were careful about how they said it, they were clear that they were not endorsing, nor condemning the practice of marriage between homosexual people, but they felt that it would be wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation and domestic situation.
The immediate reaction was pleasure from the left and anger from the right, and the ensuing "discussion" (to use the term extremely loosely) was filled with the standard rhetoric pitting "biblical" values against civil rights.  To make a rather long, unpleasant story short, enough conservative folk squawked and pulled their money, while sanctimoniously lamenting all the starving children who were now being neglected as a result of World Vision's "caving in" to the godless culture.  World Vision then retracted their decision, causing the progressives who had recently applauded the decision to lash out, not so much at World Vision but at the folks who had essentially bullied them back into the closet, so to speak.  No one likes to have a recent "victory" snatched away from them, especially using the "take your ball and go home" strategy of resistance.  It's hard not to look at that kid like he's nothing but a spoiled brat, and probably shout names after him as he smugly walks away.
All things considered, not a glorious moment for the body of Christ.
World Vision reminds me a bit of the formerly blind man's parents.  The Pharisees haul them in for questioning about their son who is running around as blatant evidence that Jesus is something really special.  They want the details, they want to know if this guy was really blind, and if he was born that way.  The parents immediately try to avoid getting sucked into the quagmire that now exists between their own son and the religious authorities.  You would think they would be happy about their son actually being able to see, but they can't be because they're worried that they're going to be accused of heresy at any minute, and so back and forth and round and round we go.
As I have tried to steer a moderate, and I hope reasonable, course through these sorts of issues I feel the pain of an organization that was really just trying to do the right thing by actual people and keep their focus on doing the work they are called to do: help poverty stricken children.  The backlash from what amounts to a fairly minor company policy is extremely disturbing, and it reeks of idolatrous devotion to the rules.
It illustrates what has been a driving force in my own thought process on this whole issue of homosexuality: you shall know them by their fruit, no pun intended.  I look at the behavior of those who are fighting for civil rights and marriage equality. Recently, Fred Phelps the founder of Westboro "God hates Fags" Baptist Church, passed away.  The response from the LGBTQ Christian community has been not to hate, not to protest, but to express sympathy.  What? That guy was a fear-filled hatemonger, and you don't have at least a little gloating in you?  Not really, at least not that I saw.
So when the evangelical folks start bad mouthing World Vision and pulling their support, and mouthing off about what the Bible says, it looks bad.  It looks bad just on it's own, because I think Jesus really really cares about starving children, but it looks even worse compared to the gentle, thoughtful and grace-filled response of a community to the death of a man who made himself one of their most vocal enemies.
I'm saying this on my blog, because I think it needs to be said.
I'm not saying this from the pulpit, because I'm not sure everyone is ready to hear it.
I'm saying this on my blog, because I THINK it's a prophetic word.
I'm not saying if from the pulpit, because I am aware that my own personal feelings are making the prophetic edge of this whole thing entirely too blurry.
The bigger issue is allowing our own answers to get in the way of asking the right questions.  The Pharisees ask rhetorically: "Surely we're not blind are we?"  To which Jesus answers: "If you were blind, you would not have sin.  But now that you say, 'we see,' your sin remains."
We need to be aware of our blindness before we can be healed.  I need to examine my own blindness a little more carefully before I can preach about this stuff.  So, for now, here's the blog, on Sunday we'll just talk about asking the right questions.

Step by Step

I'll admit, some of my favorite fiction tends to be a bit on the nihilist side of the spectrum.  I enjoyed Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) with it's Ecclesisates sounding: "Everything that is, already has been, and everything that has been will be again."  I liked the recent show True Detective, and the idea that "time is a flat circle."  But ultimately in most of these works there must be a way out of the desolation and meaninglessness, in Ecclesiastes, which is one of my favorite non-Jesus containing books, the way out is the sovereignty of God over the vanity of human existence.
I think it's true that history tends to repeat the same sorts of arcs and narratives, but I wonder sometimes if the repetition is more a result of the persistent and rather un-creative nature of human sin.  Empires rise and fall, and each one, at some point, claims the blessing of whatever god they happen to like the most.  Most gods do not outlive their empire, except one: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Maybe it's because the God of the Bible was never particularly impressed with empires, or even with worldly success.  Maybe it's because that God persistently picked the underdog, the least of these, the last in line.  Maybe God actually understands the nature of mortals; makes sense for the Creator to know how we work right?
There's this root on the trail where I walk regularly, I know exactly where it is, yet somehow, more often than not, I trip over it. It's in my groove, the place on the trail where I just sort of naturally walk.  I just catch my toe, mind you, I don't go sprawling off the trail into the lake, but it's just enough of a stumble to be annoying.  The only way I avoid it is to consciously think: watch that root, and actually move out of my "usual" track.
Sin is a lot like that root, in that it's usually not a surprise, once you've been around that block a time or two, you know exactly where you're going to trip, and the only way to avoid it is by an act of willpower.  I think we can learn from history that way too, looking at the roots others have tripped over in the past.
The danger of believing too enthusiastically in human progress is that we fool ourselves into thinking the roots have moved, but honestly they don't.  The roots are always the good old deadly sins: lust, greed, pride, sloth, gluttony, vanity, and envy.  They can bring down individuals and empires alike.
However, when one looks at the arc of history more optimistically, you see that we are in fact making some headway.  We generally acknowledge things that certain things are bad: slavery, racism, torture, etc. even if we are a long way from stamping them out of existence, we at least name them as evil.  We also develop a more consistent global idea of what is good: freedom, equality, human dignity, even if we don't always live into the ideals.
In order to make meaningful and lasting change, you must capture both the heart and the mind.  You can legislate behavior and force people to act a certain way, but unless they internalize the values behind the change, they will probably break rules whenever they can get away with it (think speed limits).  The roots really don't move much, so you have to instill an awareness of where they are.  It doesn't mean we can't learn though, it's just that we learn very slowly.
We move so glacially slow that sometimes it seems as though human progress is a myth.  Progress defined as overcoming sin in general?  That certainly is a myth, but if you look at specific examples you see places where the ice is cracking apart.
Look at the place of women in our society now, compared to a century ago.  While true equity in all aspects of life is still a ways off, we have certainly come a long way baby.  We have more work to do on a global scale, but here in Western culture I can honestly tell my daughter that nothing is going to be out of bounds for her because of her gender.  She will be able to fully participate in society as her skills and gifts allow, she will be able to live a full and rewarding life, even if she never "finds a man."  Do you realize what a radical step forward that is?  Even though there is still progress to be made, we are so far ahead of where we were that it's hard to deny that there is some sort of movement.
The progress we've made is certainly tenuous.  As I mused yesterday, we're probably only a few malfunctions away from being thrown back into the dark ages and probably consequently back into tribalism, feudalism or some such older system, in fact there are significant and dangerous forces at work in the world which seem to yearn for those bad old days.  In fact, it's probably naive to think that we're not in for a pretty big stumble sometime soon.  The odds are not in our favor.
Then I remember that God loves a long shot...

Not How This Works...

Remember "Where's the beef?"  If you lived through the 1980's, I'll bet you do.  Since the advent of television and radio, commercials have become part and parcel of our cultural dialogue.  With so many special channels and a vast array of different niche markets, perhaps commercials are one of the few things that unite our postmodern experience, which is a shame, because most of them are stupid.
Some of the commercials have even begun to reference the stupidity of commercials in general.  The direct TV ads that employ various absurd chains of causation to encourage you to switch from cable.  They let you in on the joke, rather than simply insulting your intelligence, and thus you feel more inclined to buy their pitch with little or no data to back up their claims.
One of my favorite commercials on TV right now is for some insurance company (I can't even remember which one right now, even though I can virtually the whole commercial verbatim, soyouknow, maybe not great as an actual advertisement), which has streamlined their quote process down to seven minutes, which halves the "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance."  The particular one that I'm talking about is several older ladies sitting around listening to one of their friends describe how she is saving time by  posting pictures to her wall, literally her living room wall.  That's kind of funny, because we all know some people (even some not so old people) who have absolutely no idea how facebook even works.  The ladies get into a dispute about whose car insurance quote was faster and the wall poster, says to the other lady, "I unfriend you."  (there's a term facebook is adding to our lexicon "unfriend")
The unfriended lady then says, "That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works."
I have come to love that phrase, I use it with my children all the time.  Example: Cate says, "I want desert!" after not eating her dinner, I say, "That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works."  This morning, Jack didn't want to zip up his coat in the snow and wind, because "the inside of his coat was cold now," you know, from being open to the cold air, to which I respond...
You get the idea.
But I have also been observing for quite some time that a great many people are woefully misinformed about a great many things.  The recent disappearance of that Malaysian airliner exhibits the general ignorance that many people have about the sheer size of the world and the relative capabilities of our technology.  A plane is a large thing, and generally a large thing that we keep pretty close track of, however, if certain things malfunction, one of those large things can simply go bye-bye.  Yes, the Indian Ocean, even though it's one of the smaller oceans, is still an ocean, which means it's a very large body of water, and deep too, with currents.
They'll find it eventually, but it's not going to be a simple thing, you can't just send a submarine to go "looking" most big subs don't have windows.  That's a big example, but we're surrounded by an astounding number of techno-things everyday, which we rely on, which we will be lost without, computers, cell phones, cars, televisions.  Most of us have very little idea about how they work, and forget about being able to fix them if they break down.
Honestly, it's unreasonable to expect that everyone know how everything works, things are just way too complicated.  But 200 or so years ago, your average person knew most of the ins and outs of just about everything they owned.  Granted they owned a lot less, and most of what they owned was not what we would call technologically advanced, but if their plowshare got broken or dull, they knew what to do about it, if they broke a shovel or an ax handle, they knew what to do about it.
Life now, because of all these things we don't know, is much more precarious than we realize.  We are probably a few well-placed malfunctions away from major catastrophe.  People have speculated at various points over the past several decades, about nuclear war, climate change, asteroids from space, artificial intelligence and alien species as the end of the world as we know it.
I wonder if it might not be a much more obvious thing that brings us down: our own ignorance.
Maybe not, maybe our civilization will win the balancing act, maybe we will continue to divide up the tasks well enough that someone, who knows how to fix things, will always be in the right place to prevent things from falling utterly apart.  Maybe we can prevent the self-interest and corruption of our species from blindly hurdling us towards catastrophe, although the "debate" about climate change, and our neglect of our own infrastructure, would seem to indicate that this is already problematic.
Maybe we'll just get lucky and this technology will save us rather than destroy us.
Is that how this works?

Diagnosing to Death

As part of my pastor-type duties, I often get to sidle up next to medical science and technology real cozy-like.  I am in emergency rooms, intensive care units and hospital rooms on a pretty regular basis, and I care for people with a wide range of ailments and malfunctions.  Sometimes I can even help translate the medical jargon for someone who is a little too scared or intimidated to ask questions of the medical staff, or just doesn't think fast enough to ask the doctor when they flutter in during rounds.  I joke about the old commercial, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV."
It's actually pretty easy to explain most medical procedures, many of them amount to little more than some basic plumbing repairs.  Once you've talked to four or five people who are having a given procedure, you're pretty clear about what's going on.  I always try to be clear about where my expertise ends though, I do not dispense medical care or advice, and I never make diagnoses.
Of all the things in medicine, diagnosis can be the trickiest part.  There are so many things about how our bodies work that we don't really fully understand, and oftentimes things happen that have no obvious cause.  The process a hospital is really a thing to behold.  In the ER they stabilize, treat obvious trauma and try to alleviate as much pain as possible, then they pass you on to an intensive care unit or a regular care unit, where attending physicians start to try and really figure out for sure what's wrong.
In the ER you are a piece of meat, and their job is to keep you breathing until someone can figure out what to really do with you.  The ER burns through doctors and nurses who aren't cut out for it in a big hurry, because not everyone can deal with everything being an emergency all the time.  They want quick, obvious answers and have no time for the nuances of medicine, if you have chest pain, they're going to assume you're having a heart attack until they can prove otherwise, it's just the way it works.  A lot of the time, the diagnosis is obvious and the ER folks are all over it, sometimes it takes longer.
That's what the rest of the hospital is all about.  Things get a lot slower in the rest of the hospital, nurses care for patients and doctors make their rounds, tests are ordered and performed, impressive amounts of data are collected on each patient, and here diagnoses are more carefully guarded.  Here nurses know better than to try and tell you what's wrong before the doc is on the scene, even if they know.  Here protocols begin to rule the day and here things get much more frustrating.  Here you just have to lay there and wait for things to happen, and no one seems quite as upset about you being sick as you are.
There is a lot of diagnosing of the church going on these days.  Everybody is pretty sure there's something wrong: we're shrinking, we're struggling, we're arguing and fighting among ourselves, we're not what we used to be.  But the diagnoses are all over the place: we're too liberal, we're too conservative, we play stodgy old music, we play shallow happy-clappy music, we're not relevant, we're trying too hard to be relevant, we're stuck in the past, we have forgotten our roots, we're not welcoming of outsiders, we're too clingy and desperate whenever new people pop their heads in the door, we get it wrong about women, homosexuals, abortion, economic policy, politics, worship style, heaven, hell, salvation...
Breathe.
I've been through it a thousand times (not hyperbole) in the past ten years.  I will read a book, an article, a blog, about what is wrong.  I will say to myself: "Wow, that really does describe our dysfunction and malfunction pretty well!"  Then I'll keep reading, and the hope and relief that you can sometimes feel when you finally know what's wrong, begins to fade with each sentence.  The good, smart and faithful doctors that have made the diagnosis have no idea what to do about it.  What's worse, sometimes they think they have an idea, but you begin to see a pattern.
The prescriptions are one of two things. The first group of prescriptions are all forms of: Try Harder.  These, while they may be clever, and might even produce some short term gains, are truly doomed.  Most of the time, we pastor-types are beguiled by them, because we feel like we NEED to do something.  We are ER docs at heart, crises can stroke our ego, and make us feel needed and even kind of godlike in our quick diagnoses and responses.  We love a new program, a new ministry, some kind of flashy "technological" fix, something that promises to get the church "on the right track."
Second, and probably more biblical, is to take care of the little things, one factor at a time, trying to achieve healthy equilibrium in key systems.  It's frustrating, but often there is nothing to but wait, and maybe just re-evaluate your attitude, learn to trust God with all this out of control stuff.  This is pretty good advice, and it may alleviate some of the anxiety, and it may actually treat the underlying disease (which is, I think, an obsession with worldly success), but it feels too slow and not commensurate with the severity of the crisis.  It can feel like you're giving up, like you're just calling in hospice and going for palliative care, maybe sometimes that's what it is.  But at it's best it is simply the only way to take the deliberate steps to treat a very persistent and often mysterious condition called being human.

Nothing But Flowers

As things fell apart,

Nobody paid much attention.

-The Talking Heads, Nothing But Flowers

As I creep towards 40, I am aware that I am becoming old.  As a Pastor, I am privileged with the perspective of regularly interacting with people who immediately laugh when I refer to 40 as old, but hear me out.  The world is changing really quickly these days, and things get dated really fast.  The music that I listened to growing up is now considered "classic."  Like The Talking Heads, a band who made waves in the early days of MTV, when it still had something to do with actual music (see, the MTV comment?  It's basically my generation's version of "hey you kids, get off my lawn!" or "pull up your pants junior!" I'm cranky because things aren't like they used to be in the good ol' days.)

Now I pull up the Talking Heads on Pandora (okay, so maybe I'm not letting the world completely pass me by), and I am treated, courtesy of computerized magic, a selection of songs that I really, really love: The Cure, David Bowie, Queen, The Cars, The Police, and The Ramones, I never have to use one of my skips!  By way of contrast, if I set Pandora on a newer band that I like: say Arcade Fire or Passenger, or even Coldplay, I may hear some stuff I like, and some stuff I could live without, but I hear almost nothing that I can sing along to without thinking.  I find that the latest I can go and still feel really "at home" are the Radiohead and Pearl Jam channels (so 1990s, maybe early 2000s for those of you who are thinking, "who the what?" and probably still chuckling that I referred to 40 as old).

The stark reality now is that all of my musical heroes are either decidedly middle aged and some of them are eligible for medicare.  I can listen to the youngins, and even enjoy the music but it doesn't grab my soul like listening to David Byrne's quirky tenor.

As I was listening the other day to The Talking Heads song, Nothing but Flowers, I was struck by the satirical lament of a man who misses the "honky tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11's" that have been reclaimed by nature as human society reverted to an agricultural way of life.  We experience progress, or regress as favorable or deplorable depending on our perspective.  The song ends with "I can't get used to this lifestyle!"

Nothing but Flowers, is a sort of counterpoint to Joni Mitchell's song: Big Yellow Taxi, (you paved paradise and put up a parking lot).  And while The Talking Heads are certainly urbophiles, they are not seriously criticizing nature or agriculture, they are examining the human response to change, and our innate longing for the familiar.  If things are familiar, no matter how shoddy, cheap or unhealthy they may be, you will find their presence at least vaguely comforting: think McDonalds.

There is nothing inherently wrong with desiring familiarity, but one needs to be aware of the danger of becoming stuck in a narrow perspective: for instance, since we're talking about music, I'll tell you about a journey of mine regarding a certain Alanis Morrisette.  When I was in college Alanis was on major over-rotation on the MTV (again, back then they did actually still play some music) and on the radio, and I was not a big fan.  Actually that's wrong, I was filled with the most righteous of hatred for Ms. Morrisette, because I thought she was shrill and vulgar and cynically using the anger and disenfranchised feelings of "my people" for commercial success.  That and the fact that she made this song called Ironic, which actually had not a single example of irony in it, which made the title and the chorus: "isn't it ironic?" rather annoying to someone who fancied themselves literate, but apparently not to the general public, because the song was super-popular and on the TV and radio all the time.

But the core reason why I hated Alanis, was that she represented the commercialization of something that I had held very dear: alternative music, going back to the Talking Heads and The Cure, and going all the way up to Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, I was, and am, a fan of "alternative" music.  And Alanis was a Nickolodean child star trying to crash the grunge party, and I was just kind of like, "GRR, get off my lawn you crazy... girl."

Then she played God.  Literally, in Kevin Smith's movie Dogma, and it was really good, and I have to admit, playing God can't be an easy thing to do, especially for a young woman, when usually that part is reserved for guys that look like George Burns.  Then, I guess, at some point, when I was feeling pretty crappy, I happened to hear Thank You and also saw the video, which is visually striking and mirrors the rather startling vulnerability of the lyrics.

It was also in the waning days of music videos as a true expression of popular art.  In a medium that had so massively marketed sex, here was a video that had a nude woman (the blurs were always there, it was for TV after all), but it wasn't about sexuality.  The song and the video tread a very fine line between being powerful and being sappy, but in my opinion, it holds that tension rather well.  Something that doesn't happen very often in the age of mass-market entertainment.

We live in tensions like that, we need to learn to be open to new things, even if they make you a little uncomfortable.  The reason I think we become most attached to the music of our youth is because we invest our feelings in it when we're young.  It becomes a part of how we grow, but at some point we start to learn to make ourselves less vulnerable, and thus we stop growing, and perhaps even think that it's okay to stop growing, stop trying new things, stop being vulnerable.

And that's when things fall apart, because there's nothing else for them to do.

Defending my Homie...

So yesterday this got passed around the churchy parts of the interweb.  And I have to say, as a Presbyterian, and one who is speaking from inside the stream of reformed Christianity that John Calvin kind of founded, I agree with a lot of the critiques of Calvinism. However, there's a bit too much hater-ade being passed around.  Jesus said something onetime about logs and splinters in people's eyes.  Modern Progressives, like Ben here, can sometimes get so focused on the narrow-minded, self-righteousness of those they are criticizing that they jam a big old log right in their own eyes.  They say things like: "Out of all of the theologies in the world, I find Calvinism among the most offensive. And frustrating. And irritating."  Really, of all the theologies?  Even the one that convinces people to fly planes into buildings in the name of Allah?  Even the many that allow us to treat human beings like property? 

Hyperbole has it's place, but perhaps theological arguments are not that place.

I was fortunate to study Calvin's Theology with Charles Partee, at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and he was the first to point out to me (and other students in the class) that Calvin's theology is a lot better than the "theology" of Calvinism.  Dr. Partee emphasized showing Calvin a little grace, because despite his sometimes cranky persona, Johnny believed in the grace of God towards humans very deeply.  Deeply enough to challenge a thousand years of church teaching and write an exhaustive and audacious summation of Christian Theology called The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which most "Calvinists" and critics of Calvinism have not read.  There are two big thick books, where Calvin expounds on every aspect of faith and theology, and he finished them when he was 26 years old.  I could barely formulate a coherent thought at 26.  That Calvin has been used and abused and misunderstood, and sometimes even properly chastened for going too far is just a fact of history.
There is no better example of this than the doctrine of election, sometimes wrongly called predestination.  When you read chapters 21-24 of book III of the Institutes, you find Calvin, sometimes rather crankily discussing the doctrine.  Right off the bat though you find that he was aware of the fact that the very discussion of the doctrine was going to cause problems, he spends most of those sections responding to objections to the doctrine.  In point of fact, he didn't make most of it up, he was drawing heavily on Augustine, which any student of Christian theology will find a difficult thing to avoid.
It's important, in judging this whole mess to understand the reasons and the historical context of the writings.  Calvin was still holding to an extremely medieval understanding of heaven and hell, election and reprobation.  He was also living with the reality that people were being killed and excommunicated for theological positions.  His was an age where no sentence that was written passed by unnoticed, and the charge of heresy could be leveled with fiery force at any moment.
The world that Calvin inhabited was rife with passionate arguments about doctrine and no shortage of condemnation for those who dared express different opinions.  If you judge Calvin by the standards of his age, which is really the only fair way to judge, he was remarkably circumspect; leaning much more on the sovereignty and grace of God than you might suspect from the way people who have adopted his name into their "ism."
Calvin's purpose in discussing election, as I understand it, was to reassure people who were daring to challenge the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church (which consequently was not shy about condemning it's enemies to mortal and eternal suffering), that if they were God's elect, nothing could shake or challenge that identity.  The fact that so many people chose to focus on the negative aspect: the ones who are not elect and therefore predestined to damnation (which is, I admit, a pretty crappy idea), seemed to annoy Calvin, and he flat out chooses to ignore them: "Here I shall pass over many fictions that stupid men have invented to overthrow predestination.  They need no refutation, for as soon as they are brought forth they abundantly prove their falsity." III.21.7
So, Calvin was not soft and cuddly, by any stretch of the imagination, but remember, what he's trying to do is to assure people of God's unconditional love.  See, from the perspective of the elect, you are utterly free from the fear and guilt that so many people associate with Christian religion these days (and in those days as well), and which Calvin found to be contrary to true faith in Jesus Christ.  Calvin never prescribes a formula for determining who is elect other than the Biblical doctrine that: "You shall know them by their fruit."
Paul says to the Galatians: "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." (Gal. 5: 22-23)  One wonders, if those are the signs of election, why we seem to want to focus on people who exhibit the inverse qualities: hate, negativity, intolerance, cruelty, greed, infidelity, violence and indulgence.  If someone is living in the grip of those things they are already in Hell.
The doctrine, while we may rightly argue with certain aspects and the worldview it represents, is mostly about describing reality, rather than condemning any particular person.  Some people "get it" and some people don't.  Calvin was writing unabashedly for those that "get it" and challenging them to live into "joyous obedience" to God's plan.
It is certainly possible to sit here in the 21st century and judge our ancestors harshly: most of the founders of the United States were slave owners.  However, if we do that we can easily miss the contributions they made.

True Detective

For the past couple of months I have been rather enthralled with the HBO series True Detective, the story of two detectives pursuing a serial killer in rural Louisiana.  Fair warning: just because I think the show is one of the best things to come through the idiot box in years, don't think it's for everyone.  It's decidedly R-rated, and it's unrelentingly dark and tense, it will probably make your blood pressure go up and it may just give you Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or trigger episodes if you already have PTSD.
So why, you might ask, do I think it's so great?
Well first off, it's extremely well written and superbly acted.  It has a "feel" that grips you, and an atmosphere that makes you forget you're watching flickering images on the screen.  It's a story filled with grace: both main characters are deeply flawed and ultimately not very likable men, however, for some reason, you end up identifying with them because they are on the right side, almost despite themselves.
Rust Cohle is a man who has lost almost everything that matters: his four year old daughter was run over by a car as she played in the front yard and in the wake of her death his marriage fell apart.  He is the ultimate nihilist for most of the show.  He staunchly believes that the universe amounts to nothing and human consciousness is a tragic evolutionary mistake.  He dwells in the darkness and drinks heavily to kill the pain.
Marty Harte, is Cohle's partner and foil.  Marty is a good old boy, who likes to have affairs with women who are younger and somewhat unbalanced versions of his wife. Marty doesn't get Cohle's nihilism, because for at least half of the show's episodes he is managing to have his cake and eat it too, but ultimately the two men have to overcome their differences in order to stop the "Yellow King" who we find out is a hulking psychopath who abducts and kills people in the underground ruins of what seems to be a civil war era stone fortress, which he calls Carcosa, a name that is ominously repeated throughout the show as if it were a territory in the very infernos of Hell.
The darkness of the show is consuming, the visuals are dark, the subject matter is dark, the characters themselves are dark.  Through eight episodes, that span almost 20 years, it seems that everything is falling apart.  Marty's fantasy world finally bites him in the rear, Cohle becomes more dysfunctional and nihilistic.  Halfway through they kill the wrong bad guy (who still deserved it mind you, but not the Yellow King), which consequently allows the Yellow King to go on killing, for over a decade.
In the end they get him, at great personal cost to both men, but they don't manage to crumple the corrupt system that covered up for him and made his reign of terror possible, but they got the one they both felt responsible for.
The final scene of the show is the two men, outside of the hospital where they have been recovering.  They are talking about what has happened, and how it fits into the big picture.  Cohle has been in a coma for some time and has had an experience of sinking, literally into death and eternity.  His nihilism evaporated as he touched the mysterium tremendum, and here's where we see the turn:

Marty: “Didn’t you tell me one time, dinner once, maybe, about how you used to ... you used to make up stories about the stars?”
Rust: “Yeah, that was in Alaska, under the night skies.”
Marty: “Yeah, you used to lay there and look up, at the stars?”
Rust: “Yeah, I think you remember how I never watched the TV until I was 17, so there wasn’t much to do up there but walk around, explore, and...”
Marty: “And look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?”
Rust: “I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.”
Marty: “What’s that?”
Rust: “Light versus dark.”
Marty: “Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
Rust: “Yeah, you’re right about that.”
Rust insists that Marty help him leave the hospital, and Marty agrees. As they head to the car, Rust makes one final point to his former partner.
Rust: “You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.”
Marty: “How’s that?”

Rust: "Well, once there was only dark, seems to me the light's winning.”

That's good theology right there. That's Christianity at it's best: the light shining in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. It doesn't mean the darkness goes away, it's just the light shines, like stars.
Believe me, I really didn't expect any good news at the end of that show, in fact, I fully expected that Rust would be dead and maybe Marty too, but there it was: light.
But it wasn't happy, triumphal light, it was just enough light to give you hope and keep  you going through the dark.  It was just enough to help you walk away from it without a grim feeling of doom.  The power and beauty of the light, in fact, was actually accented by the darkness.  The hope that Rust had finally found, may seem small, but it was really huge compared to his earlier desperation and emptiness.

The Expense of Poverty

I keep running across this, in quotes and now in pictures:

The closest I ever came to being really poor were those years when I was a student: as an undergrad and later as a seminary student, I had very little money to spend on things I wanted.  But I wasn't really dealing with poverty... I had the back up of a middle class family and a middle class church and family inheritances and overwhelming support from all of those systems.  Entitlements, not welfare, not from the government, but entitlements nonetheless: privilege.  I was born white, middle class and male (add straight to that list if you want), in other words, I have very little experience with being oppressed.

Because of that, I have had to learn to see oppression, because it sometimes seems like a fictional thing to me.  My experience, if I do not examine the privilege that I was born into, tells me that you can get an education and somehow make your way in the world without getting crushed by injustice, judged for some categorical fact of identity, and sentenced to a life of struggling just to get by.

But I know that those assumptions are lying to me, I know that the game is fixed and the field was tilted in my favor before I was even born, and that keeps me from glibly thinking and acting as though people who live in the grip of persistent poverty, could somehow just will their way out of it.

We bought a house last year.  We had good credit, and a good friend working as our real estate agent.  The process itself was daunting and I became keenly aware of how difficult it would have been were it not for the peculiar advantages I have as a pastor: instant connection to a community, the financial resources of the church, and family that can and will help out.  We were able to get a specific sort of loan that has a really great fixed interest rate, and did not require a down payment, it was like things were just meant to be.

Maybe they were, I believe that God has a hand in that sort of thing, but I need to be vigilant that I do not interpret my good fortune as a sign that God somehow prefers me over a person who has a different experience of that system.

When we closed on the house, we finally got the whole picture: not the asking price of the home, but the full cost of what we were going to pay in taxes and interest and everything over the 30 year term of the mortgage: over $450,000!  Which means, even with our advantages and privilege, we are still going to pay almost twice the market value of our home.

That same scenario is true when you finance anything, the price goes up when you cannot pay up front, and woe is you if you have to start borrowing from those payday advance places, you're going to get behind the eight ball in a big hurry.

While on the other hand, people with large amounts of capital (read pre-exsistent wealth) can make money with their money in relative safety.  The system is rigged against the poor and for the wealthy, because the wealthy designed the system.

When you're poor, or even middle class, the cost of everything is higher in terms of actual dollars, but even more so in terms of living value.  And then there is the spiritual cost of discovering that somehow your best efforts are not enough to "get by."  Or even if they do manage to stave off financial disaster, that your work is never going to get you to that Cadillac and comfortable retirement.

It makes me angry when I hear people who make their living by talking on the television deride the "takers" and the "welfare queens," because I know that, while abuses of the system may indeed happen, the majority of people in public assistance programs work incredibly hard just to stay afloat, even with the extra boost.

Let's be honest, if the world even approached justice, the people who do the many thankless jobs, which make our lifestyle even possible would not have to worry about whether or not their children were going to be able to eat, while people who sit in comfortable offices doing most of their work with two fingers can afford cars that cost as much as a house.

That is not a statement about white collar work, because the world needs accountants as much as it needs mechanics.  It is simply a question of scale in terms of value and/or necessity, and the fact that we don't have a very sensible one.  

Ashes to Ashes

Ash Wednesday has not really been a part of the life of the congregation that I serve.  I suppose it's because we still have a little bit of a hangover from the reformation (500 year hangovers... Phew), or maybe it's just because we never did it that way before.  But we had one last night, and there were 11 of us, including my two kids who were really just there because they had to be.
As I approach the text for this Sunday, about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, I am tempted in my own way to feel down about an Ash Wednesday service with only 11 people, but something keeps gnawing at me whenever I start to feel the pity party coming on.  That gnawing is the sense, scratch that, the conviction that I have bought into the cultural attitude of more is better a little too much.
Ash Wednesday is, after all, a day that reminds us of our mortality, and sets our feet on a difficult path.  Jesus knew the journey was going to test the 12 men that he had called to be his disciples, and he kept watching as they stumbled and missed the point all along the way.  He knew that they had certain expectations of him; expectations that he was not going to fulfill, at least not their way.
So here I am on Thursday, reflecting with thanksgiving for the 10 people that did show up, knowing that they are enough.  This is what I will remember about my first Ash Wednesday service at GSPC:
I didn't ask an Elder of the church to give me the ashes.  I could have, I probably should have, but I didn't.
I asked my eight-year-old daughter to do it, with no preparation, no warning, after I drew the sign of the cross on her head, the head that I baptized, the head that I have dragged around to more churchy stuff than is really fair, I knelt down and asked her to make the cross on my forehead.
I could tell right away that it was the right thing to do, she is a sensitive soul and she gets things like this.  She was the one who was actually excited about getting ashes before the service, she is the one who loves to always touch and do things herself.  She reverently and conscientiously dipped her finger in the ashes and oil and drew a perfect cross.
It wasn't something I planned, it was a moment, a flash of inspiration, and for me it was sacred.
My kids have taught me a lot about mortality.  I don't think I ever realized how truly precious life is until they were born.  I had theological knowledge and philosophical perspective, but I don't think I truly learned to value my numbered days until I held those little people, who were so intimately connected to me, but who will, by the grace of God, go on after I am gone.
I don't know if I would have had that moment in a bigger service, where I had a line of 20 or more people waiting for the imposition.  I'm afraid that I would have been too decent and in order and done things the normal way, with a duly ordained Elder, instead of my flesh and blood.
I don't know if she will remember that simple act more than a few days, but I will remember it forever.
Do I wish more people had been there? Sure.
Do I hope that more people will find the time and space to step out of their ordinary routines and remember that they are dust?  You bet.
Does it detract from the holiness of last night?  Not in the least.

To Russia (and Ukraine) with Love

Having grown up in the Cold War, Russia scares me.  I don't care what you say, about geopolitical reality.  I understand that the Soviet Union doesn't even exist any more, I get that what I grew up thinking of as this monolithic, communist juggernaut, is actually a number of very different nations, each with their own quirks and each with their own brokenness.  I admit, that I do not understand the situation in Ukraine as well as I should.  It seems that the more I read about it, the more confusing it gets.
It reminds me of when I started reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, it took me 150 pages to start to be able to sort out who the characters were, let alone decipher the plot and why certain people were behaving the way they did.  But over the years, I have learned to love the Russians through their literature, I have learned to love Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.  I have learned to love the way they can be so open about almost everything, and yet it feels like you really have to work to actually get to know them.  I have learned to admire the capacity that the Russian heart has to suffer, and find meaning in suffering.  Especially living as I do in the lap of American privilege, I know that the very people I grew up fearing have a lot to teach me.
But I'm worried that the legacy of the long dark winter is going to get in the way of what the Russian heart has to give to the world.  Solzhenitsyn managed to win a Nobel Prize in literature despite having much of his work suppressed by the Soviets, but by and large the Cold War crushed Russian culture under a frozen combat boot.  Now we have Vlad Putin, former KGB, cold-warrior extraordinaire, flexing the muscles that he still apparently has (numerous shirtless pics have provided ample fodder for comedians of all nations, except Russians).  Putin is a serious man, and Putin is what scares me about Russia.
He's a holdover from the Soviet system that I grew up believing would be our primary antagonist in the war that would finally end life on earth.  He's strong, he's smart, he's paranoid, powerful, and he's living forty years in the past (no wonder Sarah Palin admires him).  He has been compared to one of the villains in a James Bond movie, which from the outside looking in seems ominously accurate.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Putin appeared on television with a maniacal smile (the only kind of smile I imagine he's really capable of) and announced a plan to blow up the moon.  However, I think his aspirations are a bit more mundane, and deadly practical: hold on to the Ukraine.
It should be noted, if my historical perspective is accurate, holding on to the Ukraine has been a bit of a pre-occupation for Russian leaders going back a long way.  Now, I'm grabbing at dimly remembered seventh grade geography class here, but I seem to remember something about Ukraine being sort of like Nebraska is to the US, not our favorite vacation spot, but man do they grow a lot of food.
The problem has long been that the people on the European side of the Ukraine, feel rather differently about Moscow than the people on the Russian side.  Over the years the Ukraine has seen it's share of fighting, and it usually ends up being the place where megalomaniacs meet their match: Napolean, Hitler, to name the big ones.  I'm sure Putin has made note of those events, because they are part of the history of his Russia, in those cases the Ukraine was the reason why he didn't grow up speaking French or German.
What worries me is that, for a while at least, his Soviet comrades did manage to control Ukraine, maybe he thinks he can do it again.  I suspect not, but I'm worried that there might be a lot of blood before that bet is settled.
I'm praying for Ukraine.

Being Presbyterian

There are groups of Boy Scouts hiking around the neighborhood this morning, going to different churches, learning about the ten commandments and what the different churches they visit are about.  It's my job to tell them about Presbyterians, which is interesting, particularly when it comes to Cub Scouts, who are rather unlikely to find much understanding all the theological doctrines of the Presbyterian tradition.  Actually, scratch that, it's not just Cub Scouts who aren't likely to find much understanding in them, it's pretty much everyone.
The older scout who was teaching the lesson on the ten commandments asked me, "what makes you different?"
I have to admit, the question took me a minute.  I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about th things that hold us together as a Christian church over the past several years, and I have invested a fair amount of energy in learning to see the unity in the church.  Thus, I think I may have neglected careful consideration of why I'm Presbyterian.  The simple answer is that I was born this way.  My Dad has been a Presbyterian Teaching Elder for as long as I can remember, and so my faith and more specifically my call to ministry has been shaped by that reality.
Sorry, it's not really that profound.  The fact of the matter is, I could probably have felt every bit as comfortable in a Methodist, Lutheran or Episcopalian Church.  As time goes by, my personal convictions lean increasingly towards the traditions of various Anabaptist traditions.  I am seeing non-violence less as an option and more of a necessity.  I really like the new Pope, and I am hopeful that his leadership will bring some much needed authenticity to the Roman Catholic Church.  I admire the ancientness of the Orthodox, and the freshness of the Emergents.
In short, I appreciate all the nuances and different traditions of various other forms of Christianity, but I am Presbyterian.  I am Presbyterian because I like the fact that my tradition allows me to seek understanding from all those other traditions without naming me a heretic or an apostate.  I am Presbyterian because I have trouble with hierarchical authority structures, but I know that I need accountability and connection with others.
I am Presbyterian because I can be an intellectual and a mystic, and our framework allows me to exercise both in the life of a congregation.  I like being Presbyterian because finding all those things that make me different from others is a sort of afterthought to the unifying purpose of following Jesus Christ in the world.
I am Presbyterian because my denominational affiliation in no way prescribes my political, social or economic convictions.  My participation in the PC(USA) puts me in contact with people who challenge me and support me at the same time.  My church does not simply blithely stand by and allow me to follow my own heart down broken and sinful paths, but it does not insist that the deep cries of my heart and soul must be inherently wrong.  My church helps me evaluate those deep cries in the light of Christ and in the presence of a cloud of witnesses.
I am Presbyterian because, when it's doing as it should  , my church doesn't make the claim to be the only avenue on which one can find these blessed conditions.
I am Presbyterian because I see God at work here, and because I believe God is at work elsewhere as well.  My church supports and embodies that reality, with all our flaws and foibles, we are Presbyterian.