What Are We Thinking?

Okay, so when I first saw stuff referencing this, I thought it was a hoax.  There's no way that anyone would hand an Uzi on full auto to a nine year old girl, but apparently there was.  It was the last error in judgment that he will ever make, but it was not a lone ranger moment of stupidity, there is a whole culture of messed up stuff to blame.
Look, I've said before, I have no problem with guns, I have a couple, but I also have a nine year old girl, and I am aware of her relative limitations as much as I am of the guns deadly potential.  Thus my shotguns are trigger locked, unloaded and stored in an entirely different location from the ammunition for said weapons.  This means, I suppose, that I will not be able to employ them as a means of defense, should someone break into my castle.  They will just have to deal with a 300 lb, knife-wielding maniac in his underwear, I ask you honestly to consider which is more terrifying.  But I do not have to worry that my daughter will somehow decide to play with Daddy's guns and shoot herself (or her brother) in the face.
There are, of course, the horrendous Devil's Rejects sorts of incidents, where a real bad guy or two decides to capture and torture a family.  And I suppose there are at least a few of those moments that are prevented by a well-trained adult with a handgun, but those black and white sorts of events are few and far between.  What is far more common are the grey area incidents, where a frightened person shoots a drunken neighbor or even worse, one of their own children who got out of bed to go to the bathroom.  And let's be honest here, gun or no, when you think someone's breaking into your house in the middle of the night you're going to be scared out of  your mind.  Fear does not do good things to human judgment, and thus a scared person is a dangerous person, and a scared person with a gun is an extremely dangerous person.
There are differences of opinion on the efficacy and necessity of firearms for self defense, but the whole argument seems tangential when I consider my own children.  There is no scenario, even in the most extreme hypothetical position that I would hand my daughter a freaking Uzi set to full auto.  Full grown men have can be ill prepared for the amount of recoil from a 9mm handgun, let alone a sub-machine gun. If you watch the carefully edited video of the Uzi event, you will notice that that little girl was really close to shooting herself in the face as well as the instructor.  As it is it's almost unavoidable that that little girl is going to need years of psychiatric care in order to deal with that moment when something slipped out of her hands.
The point is that it was something that never should have been in her hands.  Places like Guns N Burgers, should not exist in a sane civilization.  No matter what your opinion on the issue of guns in general, we need a moment of sanity to take a deep breath and consider our idolatry, because we're sacrificing more children on that altar than the Canaanites did to Moloch.
How many kid's lives is your "right" to bear arms really worth?  I'm including that little girl, because her life is going to be really screwed up for a very long time.
Why is every attempt to make owning a gun at least as documented a process as owning a car seen as an attack on our freedom?
Because someone told us it was.  Just like that gun instructor probably told that little girl's parents: "don't worry, it's perfectly safe."
We need to stop this obsession.
Our guns are not more important than our children.
You can have both, just please, keep them separate.

What If?

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, leave peaceably with all.

Romans 12: 18

I'm going to engage in a moment of unbridled hope.  It's a rare occurrence, because the world gives me very little evidence to support optimism, particularly when it comes to human behavior.  We are afflicted by racism and prejudice so systemic and pervasive that many of us choose to deny that it even exists.  We are convinced daily that self-interest and therefore selfishness is the only true driving force in the world.  We cannot see that there is really any alternative to the endless cycles of violence, and therefore our search for security leads us only to the accumulation of power in the hopes of holding the violence at bay.

Sorry, I said I was going to be hopeful, it's difficult to say the least.

Can you imagine a world where all people who claim to have faith in a certain God, actually took the prescription of that Creator seriously?  That would mean, Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, because we all share parts of the same book, a book that prescribes basically two rules: love God and love each other. Whatever other things we might find in the book, and our various favorite appendices, all of the big three agree on those two.  If we set the love God part to the side for one moment, you could even bring in the Hindu and Buddhist folks and probably a handful of other random religions that are based on the basic ethics of not treating other people like big piles of manure.

Imagine a world where we took this as seriously as we take various definitions of sin and trying to judge who is in and who is out.  It puts that stupid John Lennon song to shame (you don't need to get rid of all the religions, you just need them to start acting their age).

So why don't we take this stuff more seriously?

Literal types who want to hold on to all sorts of abominations, and fight and protest and schism, are you doing everything you can to live peaceably with all?

Liberal folks who like a forgiving God, are you really trying everything you can to live peaceably with all?  What about those fundamentalists who keep bugging you?

I'm not even saying that we somehow need to do this perfectly, I know, ain't none of us perfect.  I am saying that we could try a little harder than we are.

We need to stop making excuses and pretending like we're just making the best of a bad situation, because we're not.  We're blaming our enemies and saying we can't live peaceably because, basically, "they're just a bunch of big stupid-heads."

Notice that this a unilateral command, it says nothing about expecting the "enemy" to behave themselves.  We can make peace a one-sided equation, as Ghandi and MLK tried very hard to demonstrate.  It is possible, it's always possible, it is just really difficult sometimes.

Paul gives us more than a little bit of wiggle room, so that we really can't make the excuse that it's just an impossible goal.  "If it's possible, so far as it depends on you..."  That's a good amount of weasel space.  After all, you could interpret that as: "just don't pick a fight, but once it's on, let the claws come out."  That appears to be the way that most of us approach it, if we approach it at all.

Christ-likeness is all good and fine until the cross starts to loom on the horizon, then it starts to seem like maybe we should try something different.

"Get thee behind me, Satan."  I'm trying to be optimistic here.

But the fact of the matter is, that when I start to try and think about how to love my neighbor, and live peaceably with all, the reality of all the exceptions starts to close in around me.  I start to think of all the good and practical reasons why this really isn't a tenable plan of action.  There are people who would like to shoot me, rob me, blow me up and otherwise not be very good neighbors.  How am I supposed to "love" them?

This is where Paul is so great at giving us that room to deal with reality: you don't actually have to love them, you just have to act like you do, in other words, treat them as though they were not your enemy.  If they're hungry, give them food, if they're thirsty, give them drink. You don't have to be stupid about it, but you should always seek to be kind and hospitable.  Is that asking too much?

God seems to think not.

What Now?

So I started off this morning reading this.  My first response was to get a little angry.  It was a throwback response really, back to my earlier days, when I used to think that Christian Faith was a flag to be flown, and a tower to be defended against the infidel.  But as the article unfolded, I felt the author's hurt for sure, but I found myself having a hard time feeling the good old outrage.  Understanding that "the Gospel is as unstoppable as it is unacceptable," was a bit of a comfort to be sure.  I am a fan of how this author has contextualized and dealt with what was obviously a rather traumatic time for her.  Recovering the counter-cultural impact of the Gospel is perhaps the most important thing that we American Christians need to do.
Unfortunately, and here's where I'm going to poke a bit further, we probably cannot do that if we continue to hold on to our privileged position.  As much as it seems like an injustice to have Intervarsity and other Christian student groups lose their "official" status, I think that is exactly what needs to happen.  I will admit that I am biased, as a young adult, coming out of a lifetime of church involvement, I very briefly explored the world of campus Christianity, and quite frankly I found it lame.  If you liked it, please don't jump down my throat, I'm glad you found it helpful to your walk, but allow me to explain.  I am not really much of a joiner.  In fact, I consider the fact that I have been called to serve as a pastor (read leader), as not just an adept use of my talents and gifts, but as a concession to the fact that I would make a lousy church member.  If I attended at all, I would be cranky and non-committal, I know it, and so God has put me in this place perhaps because I have empathy for cranky and non-committal people.
I serve an institution, but I have these dreams of serving a community of disciples, united by more than just a need to pay the bills and run some programs.  So when I got to the place where Tish described what happened at Vanderbilt in the end; the fellowship of Christians did not dissolve or go away, it just stopped being an "official" institution of the university.  Kids started wearing T-shirts that said simply: "We Are Here."
Jumpin' Jehosophat, how perfect is that?
No smarmy messages about getting saved, or WWJD, just a reminder that the person wearing that shirt was part of something.  And in what I remember of my College self-awareness that would have been a lot more of an effective hook to get me interested.  The fact of the matter is, they probably didn't change what they did all that much.  Their group was probably still "pizza and the Bible," but embracing their place as a group that stood outside the culture?  Those politically paranoid university administrators couldn't have done those kids a bigger solid in terms of fostering their Christian walk.
Inertia is no secret, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force, also an object at rest tends to stay at rest.  The Status Quo most often represents a point of equilibrium.  Things have settled the way they are for a reason.  The reasons may be good, bad or ambivalent, but the Newtonian rule applies in all cases, change takes effort, and the only easy change is probably not worth it.  As Wendell Berry says in one of his sabbath poems: "Wrong was easy, gravity helped it."
I understand the grief that people feel as they watch the world change around them.  I understand that after over a thousand years of Christendom, it's hard to watch our beloved Church fall from the pinnacle of power, and become a sordid sideshow of conflicted, broken people.
Except for the fact that we probably never should have occupied that pinnacle in the first place.
And the fear of losing what we probably never should had in the first place has led to a lot of bad behavior.
Conservatism makes sense, until it doesn't.  Trying to hold on to an equilibrium point is not an ignoble effort, until it crosses the line of sanity and becomes the repeated attempt to try the same thing, expecting different results.
I often get "helpful suggestions" on what our church could, and perhaps should do.  Ideas that are seen and read about, churches that have "magically" started to climb back out of decline and into vitality.  I enjoy reading about these ideas, they feed my dream of a church that runs wide open.  But as the shepherd of the church as it is, I know there are lines that cannot be crossed at the moment.  There is anxiety that must be dealt with, and as much as I would like to say, "pshaw" to the anxiety, I know that is not an available option.
A trend that I have noticed among revolutionary churches is that their revolution happened when the church was forced to stare down their own mortality and realize that if they didn't change, they were going to die, like a smoker who only quits when the first cancer spots show up on their lungs.
As a pastor who cares about the good creation that his church is right now, I do not want to see people in that position.  But my own desire to run the machine well does sometimes get in the way of seeing a new possibility, particularly when it comes from the margins.  What I try to do is be permission giving and supportive of people who have ideas, which means saying, "that's a great idea, how do WE do it?"  Emphasizing the WE.
Keeping the institution going is a full time job, it's designed to be that way, just as it's designed to hold onto that functional equilibrium.  But if you want to grow, the machine has to change, the institution is going to have to split open somewhere.
So here's a message church: if you want to grow, you're going to have to change.  And you're the ones who are going to have to do it.  Your pastor, if he or she is any good at taking care of you, might throw down the challenge to grow, but they won't force you into it.  They won't force you into it for the same reason God won't force you to accept love and grace, because they value who you are.  But they also see who you can be, and they want very much for you to grow into that.
In the Jesus model, the disciples never feel quite ready or up to the challenge, they are always a little too invested in the status quo, because it's comfortable.  Being counter-cultural feels too much like swimming upstream, and it comes with all sorts of baggage and maybe even some persecution, but that's the road we're called to walk, isn't it?

Postscript

Preachers play Monday morning quarterback too.  Sometimes we sit around thinking about things we really shouldn't have said, but other times there are things that sort of show up unbidden in between Sunday afternoon naps, or maybe even during them.
I preached on the text from Matthew called "Peter's Declaration," where Peter says that Jesus is, "The Messiah, the Son of the Living God," and Jesus tells them all to keep it a secret.  Oh yeah, and I talked quite a bit about Doctor Who.  Since I'm a big fan of Jesus, and also of the Doctor, there was just so much material to sort through, some of it inevitably had to be trimmed out.  My thoughts centered around the question of identity.  Lately, the story of the Doctor has really been hitting that hard.  As I watched the re-runs of the past few seasons, which BBC America was so kindly running pretty much 24-7 last week leading up the first episode featuring Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, I found myself getting more and more geeked up about Who in general, but also about the little wrinkles of thought that surrounded the issue of identity.
See, Timelords choose their name, the one they want to be called by random people.  Over the course of the 50 years of the show, you learn that many Gallifrean words do not translate into other languages.  Timelords are just special that way.  Therefore, rather than constantly trying to tell people a Gallifrean name, the Gallifreans who travel out into the universe, through space and time pick names that do, which are defined by function.  The Doctor, the Master, the Corsair, the Rani (a Hindi queen), are a few of the travelling Timelords you run into during the course of the show (notice none of them lack for self confidence).  Recently the writers of the show have turned to unraveling the meaning behind why the Doctor chose the Doctor as a moniker.  It's because he's the one who fixes things and saves people, and helps when there is need.  He has a Gallifrean name, they all do, like Rassalon, one of the important historical figures in the history of the Timelords, but that name is ultimately not as important as the self-selected, character-defining name.  It's sort of like the names taken by certain Native American Tribes, where someone's character is reflected in the name they are given as an adult, rather than being stuck with what their parents might have chosen to call them as a child (former Bubba here, calling that a really good idea).
And yet I wonder if maybe, when it comes to Jesus, we're not missing something really beautiful in our rush to define him by his function.  We are very quick to leap to the title: Messiah, Christ, Savior, Lamb of God, Son of Man, Son of the Living God, and so on and so forth.  Do we forget that his mother probably just called him Yeshua?  And what is the significance of that?
We Christians talk quite a bit about having a "relationship" with God in Christ, but having a relationship based on a functional role has certain limits.  I share certain very intimate details of my life with my physician, however, that relationship will always be a different sort of intimacy than what I share with my wife.  While there are times when God seems to function as a doctor of sorts, the images that seem to dominate are much more intimate than that.  We like to keep God at arms length, perhaps because we fear the sort of terrible vulnerability that might come from allowing an all powerful God into such close proximity.
The Doctor often comes across as being a very lonely creature, because he is the last of the Timelords, there is even one scene where he practically begs his mad antagonist, the Master to just give up the megalomania and they can go hang out, but of course megalomaniacs are not prone to take that sort of  invitation to chill.  The Doctor always has companions, but there are definite lines that must be drawn, as we have found out in recent seasons, for the protection of the humans.
The rather interesting thing about Jesus though is that he doesn't draw those lines very often.  Sure he warns the disciples that following him might be a bit troublesome at times, but still  he calls them and invites them into the same journey: to take up the cross.
The Doctor is mostly a single-handed save the day sort, but every once in a while, he calls on a little help from his friends, usually when the situation is most dire.  He is not averse to self-sacrifice but he is fiercely protective of his friends, which always sets up a sort of paternalistic dynamic.  He can't always protect them perfectly, but he would still have them around for adventures, but most of the time it's worth the risk, until it isn't and then the companions go away and "break his heart."
The Jesus model is a bit different, he invites us into the adventure for sure, but there is absolutely no guarantee that it's going to be safe.  He willingly, in fact, I would say specifically and purposefully, gives us the main role.  He knows that we're not super-heroic.  He knows all of our faults, and yet we are called nonetheless.
Faith is not designed for fictional relationships, or for lop-sided relationships with a functionary God.  Functionary gods are idols, you can go to them like you go to a doctor or an accountant: devotion and/or sacrifice for a certain set of metaphysical and/or supernatural services.  In order for that to work though, we have to be able to simplify those gods in a way that is not possible or desirable to do with an actual living breathing person.  However, if you make your gods two dimensional, how are you ever going to see the majority of humanity as anything else?
Sure you can have a relationship with a two dimensional being.  I feel like I have known the Doctor all my life, even though his face keeps changing.  It's not quite the same as having a relationship with a Living God though.  That's what we're shooting for, a real, living relationship with a real living God.  It's kind of dangerous actually.  That's probably why so many people prefer to find their glimpse of transcendence in a safer package.
The devotion that you can observe in crowds of people, for Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Twilight, Harry Potter, pick your favorite fandom, would probably be much more constructively channeled into an actual relationship with God, but we, as the church, have failed rather tragically to adequately describe our journey together in those terms.  We make it about rules and doctrine, instead of about adventure.  We make it seem like something we do out of a sense of guilt rather than a rabid excitement.
I have to admit, I have rarely had the same feeling of anticipation and excitement about a worship service as I had about Saturday night's premiere of Doctor Who, and I feel like that's a question begging for an answer: why not?  Why do I not expect a real relationship with God to be as exciting as a TV show?
That's a question that I need to answer.  That's a question the Church needs to answer.  But I think we're a little afraid to even ask it, because it makes us look bad.  It admits that we're not really as super-spiritual as we might want others to think.  It admits that, maybe, the way things are and "always" have been is not really cutting the mustard.  It challenges us to change, it opens the door on a new adventure, but we're not sure we can trust it.
Following Jesus is not safe, or easy.  It's a practice that should and will consume your life.  If we make it anything less, we are not really following the Living God, we're following some sort of vague facsimile, and who really wants to do that?
I think churches need to be like the TARDIS (The Doctor's blue box: stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space).  A sign of hope, and adventure, of help when you need it and always an invitation to a journey.  They need to be bigger on the inside, and they need to put us in touch with all of time, and space and creation.  They can each have their own personality, and sometimes that might be a little quirky.  They may not always take you where you want to go, but they will take you where you need to go, seriously, that's a thing that the TARDIS told the Doctor in an episode when she got to be a person.
Sometimes fiction tells the truth.

Why I Hate the Phrase: Like Minded

For if you love those who love you, 

What reward do you have?

-Matthew 5: 46a

Mea Culpa: The other night I posted a comment on a facebook post, which was largely based on facts that are a few years out of date.  It was late, and I was tired and had just read an article that vented some venom on a group I don't particularly like, and I may have been half-way through a glass of the Glen Livet.  A couple pastors I know from the "other side" responded to the article and my comment, and indeed, I was wrong, or at least off, and it reminded me that one of my personal rules, right after never get into a land war in Asia, is never get into arguments on facebook, don't even participate, they're stupid and pointless and never change anyone's mind.  I have deleted the comment, rather than making apologies in that place and probably compounding my mistake, I will just quietly retreat to my blog and make this apology, which they may or may not read, I don't really care, I'm apologizing to myself as much as anything else.
As it turns out, I'm also dealing with some Presbyterian Post Traumatic Stress (PPTS), you heard it here first.  A few years ago, I was serving in rural Pennsylvania, in a fairly conservative congregation.  Which was not really a problem at the start, as I came out of Seminary full of what I believed to be orthodoxy and righteousness.  For the first few years I was perfectly happy proclaiming the standard evangelical interpretations of the Gospels and trying to keep my head down as far as what was going on in the PC(USA).  For the most part, I just didn't get involved, I had enough on my plate, what with having two kids and trying to grow into a functional pastor and become a part of a small community.  But then my brother's drug addiction started to kick in to full swing, and eventually he died of an overdose, and I got a big old kick in my self-righteousness and started to wrestle with the idea of grace and costly love, or love and costly grace, however you want to order those words.  It was the beginning of a big swing for me, but I suppose it was not very visible on the outside.
At some point, I got a call from the pastor of the largest church in the Presbytery.  For those of you not familiar with Presbytery dynamics: a young pastor from a <100 member congregation is pretty much like a member of the chess club and the "tall steeple" pastors are like the captains of the football team.  So I was pretty much happy to be noticed, and he said something like, "we're having a get together of 'like-minded' pastors to talk about strategies and responses to what might happen at General Assembly."  At that point, "like-minded," was a phrase that was being thrown around an awful lot in conservative circles.  It was circle the wagons time, and you needed to get the posse together.
I went, and it was a really heady experience, most of the power-players in the Presbytery were there, including the one person in the Presbytery that was truly a source of wisdom and encouragement for my entire tenure there.  We talked and we talked some more.  In hindsight, the one man I truly should have looked to for guidance, didn't say much, and I should have probably learned from that, and from the fact that later he said that I shouldn't get too wound up about that group.  I was too young and excited to really hear what he had to say, after all, wasn't he "like-minded" too?
Yes and no.  He was generally conservative, but he had been around way too long to think that good things were going to come from this sort of cabal.
To make a long story short, as my left-ward swing continued, eventually I stopped getting invited to these gatherings of the like-minded.  Now, I only knew about them because of my colleague, who was now becoming more like my mentor.  Now, I found myself at odds with a lot of what my colleagues from that gathering were saying and doing.  I wasn't getting lunch invites from the tall steeples any more.  And yeah, that kind of hurt, and yeah it brought back all sorts of "I'm a high school nerd," type of feelings, and it made me feel more and more at odds with everything that was going on in the larger church.
Fast forward a few years, and now I've been around long enough to become chair of a committee and thus sit on Presbytery Council, and then I get roped into being chair of a committee to deal with dismissing one of the Presbytery's congregations to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.  Now I have to be in Captain Picard mode (which means diplomatic for you non-trek types).  Now I have to deal rationally and attempt to be compassionate for a congregation that is in full schism, which mistrusts the Presbytery and which is pretty angry and defensive from the get go.
Somehow or other, I have now become the most liberal guy in the room, and I have to put my money where my mouth is, in terms of compassion, and dialogue, and building trust, and being gracious.  And I did it, I think pretty well.  We accomplished the separation, complete with a worship service to hand things over to reps from the EPC, and we had coffee and cookies together afterwards.
But I will never again be able to hear the phrase: "like-minded" or "on the same page" without getting a little shiver of discomfort.  Because I no longer believe that segregating ourselves based on preferences or affinity is a desirable state of affairs for humanity, especially not for Christians.  Segregation allows us to maintain our stereotypes, prejudices and eventually leads to fear and hatred.  Whether you're talking about race relations or ecclesial disagreements, you need to hear from people who are different from you, and you need to listen to them and try to love them.  To do otherwise leads you down path to intolerance and fundamentalism.
Which is probably the main reason why Jesus repeatedly insisted that his disciples at least look at people who were outside their comfort zone, even going so far as to tell them to love their enemies.
Maybe that's not the only thing that he taught, but in such a time as this, it is perhaps the lesson that I am struggling with the most.

Journalism: "I'm not dead yet!"

I have to admit it, I had an ax to grind with journalists for a long time.  I think it started in high school sometime and was probably a result of some really bad portrayals of journalists in various fictional scenarios. Maybe it was a trend of some sort, but in the 1980's it seemed like reporters were always portrayed as pushy and driven sorts who mostly just ended up getting in the way (think Lois Lane in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie).  Reporters were either sharks who smelled blood in the water, or incompetent talking heads who got their place by being pretty.  I wonder if it had something to do with the fact that television was taking over for print journalism, and with the transfer to a visual, rather than a written medium, priority was being given to good looks rather than journalistic integrity.
There was definitely a time when it seemed like the main requirements for a TV news person were a good head of hair and a winning smile.  By the 1990's it would have been laughable to put someone as ugly as Walter Cronkite on TV.  I suppose that is changing, inasmuch as I still see TV news accidentally, there are some people who do not appear to be animated Barbie and Ken dolls, but the stereotype of journalists as pushy and often intrusive is still alive and well.
I have personally dealt with news people who were trying to cover several rather tragic incidents in the community, and I know, there is still that odor of a sensational story that can create a frenzy of curiosity that leads the people supplying the coverage of those events to act in ways that violate some basic human principles.  Very inappropriate requests can be and often are made in the name of getting the scoop, and often speculation and conjecture gets reported as truth, and in these cases people can get hurt.
But there are times when journalists rise up and become the voice of the people, which is the noble calling at the heart of what they do.  The journalists who are in the fray in Ferguson are giving us a really top flight picture of the real ambiguity of the situation there, with some sympathy for both the protesters and the police, but with a definite edge in the direction of driving away the haze that would allow the authorities who are being questioned to operate with impunity.
And we have the case of James Foley, who was executed by the Muslim regime in Iraq and Syria, as some sort of twisted proof that they are the servants of Allah.  Meanwhile, most of the Muslim world recoils in horror, because they are pretty sure that serving Allah has nothing to do with beheading people.  It is significant that Foley was a journalist, because it is almost always the case that corrupt and wicked powers hate anyone who tells the truth.  If you find yourself persecuting journalists, then you probably ought to check yourself, because you are probably afraid of the truth.  This goes for corrupt governments and for the guy who had the "I don't believe the liberal media" bumper sticker on his truck.
It's important to distinguish actual journalists from pundits and opinion-casters.  Journalists report on what is happening, sometimes with a commentary on what it means or how to interpret the facts.  Pundits present their opinions and only present the facts that endorse their opinion. Do journalists have biases?  Yes, they do, they're human beings, and no one really believes in the false idol of pure objectivity anymore.  But for a journalist a bias is something to be recognized and balanced.  For a pundit a bias is their raison d'etre, and this makes an awful lot of difference in how you process what they are saying.
Unfortunately for all of us, television doesn't do us the solid of clearly noting who is a journalist and who is a pundit.  Newspapers (remember them?) kindly put opinions on the editorial page and label them clearly as such, in fact they get the stink eye from other newspapers when they blur the lines.
The Interweb is even worse than TV, because here there is absolutely no accountability whatsoever.  I don't have to run this blog by an editor, and I can say anything I want.  Most people who read what I have to say will notice that I'm just some guy who likes to bloviate about random stuff.  I don't have my feet on the ground of any particular situation and thus, my opinion is worth about as much as it costs to read this blog, which is basically just an investment of time, not money.
All of us have had to learn how to process information in the electronic age.  We have learned to consider the source, fact check and perhaps even to reserve judgment.  It is a peculiar thing, in an age when we can get the "facts" so quickly that we must now learn to wait to find out if those "facts" are actually facts.  You might notice, if you've been reading this blog for a while, that I very rarely write about something that is "breaking news."  Current?  Yes, but I never just fire off a gut reaction to some headline or another, because headlines are deceptive, sensational and often worthy of hitting the trash bin.  Learn about how the Interweb works, about terms like "clickbait" and actually think about how and why people are putting out the kind of misleading or downright false information that gets around so quickly.
It's because we want it.  We want Fox News and CNN to blow up about the latest sensational thing that's happening.  The National Enquirer polluted "news" stands for so long because enough people actually wanted to read about werewolves and bat-people secretly living in the sewers of Boise.  People Magazine exists because someone cares about Kim-Ye and whether or not Katy Perry wore underwear to the latest exercise in self-congratulation.
That doesn't mean it's journalism.  Journalism gets in the clouds of tear gas.  Journalism gets arrested.  Journalism sometimes gets beheaded.  Because Journalism is dangerous stuff, because the truth is a powerful thing, and because, while we may want bloated opinions, fear mongering and sensationalism, what we really need is someone to tell our story, warts and all.

Listen, Please.

What is happening in Ferguson MO absolutely breaks my heart, I suppose that's why I keep writing about it, because I just can't get away from it.  I don't really even know where to start, here's a list:
1. We have a race problem.  To which the two most common replies are: "Duh!" or "Nuh-uh."  I think the "Nuh-uh," crowd is the most problematic.  The, mostly white, portion of the population who think because of MLK we have magically gotten past the legacy of slavery and because of legally enforced de-segregation we are somehow on equal footing.  Being a young black man in this country is still treated like an illegal activity.  If you're white and you have black friends, which so many of us "not racist" white folk claim to have, ask them how it goes when they get pulled over by John Q. Law.  Ask them about their experiences of DWB, (driving while black), I can almost guarantee you they have some stories that will make your skin crawl. We have not solved anything, we are not living up to the ideal of liberty and justice for all, because of race certainly but also because:
2. We have a poverty problem.  We are one of the "richest" countries in the world by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), however, such reliable reports as this one by Stanford indicate that our economic system is not sharing the wealth anything like equally.  It is tied to the race problem that we have because the poverty rate for African Americans is twelve points higher than the general population (27% versus 15%) and it is similarly unbalanced for Hispanics (25.6%).  In truly understanding poverty, you need to look beyond the numbers though, because a poor person in this country would not be suffering the same way in many poorer countries.  We have rather exorbitant costs of living, at least for anything that resembles the "American Dream."  We're up there with European countries which have less space, less natural resources, and in most cases a tighter social safety net (some call it socialism).
We "need" two cars and a fairly good sized house in the suburbs (or a really big house in the country, or a ritzy apartment in the "right" part of the city) to really be living the "good life."  And the cost of that, in most urban metro areas, is nearly three times what an income well above the poverty line would provide.  Which means that even a two income household can still be poor.  Which means:
3. We have a security problem.  Economic insecurity leads to a whole host of social ills.  It leads to people walking a thin line of legality and thus having a somewhat antagonistic relationship with law enforcement.  When you feel like the system is rigged against you, you are rather more comfortable trying to get yours, whether that means trying to wring every last drop out of welfare, or actually crossing the line and selling drugs, or running scams, or outright theft, and other crime, it all starts with people who feel like they don't really have a shot at "making it" through the regular channels.  The reason that I think Breaking Bad, was such a cultural phenomenon is that it presented a very believable "middle class" family that was confronted with a believable scenario: cancer.  The insurance won't pay for the treatment and a high school chemistry teacher decides to cook methamphetamine to pay the bills.  It starts with an insecure situation and ends with a criminal empire, and would make no sense in most other developed nations, like, say Canada, where medical care is guaranteed.  But the biggest problem on the list is:
4. We have an empathy problem.  We have become insulated against the suffering of our neighbors.  You see this in the varied responses to what happened to Michael Brown.  You have people who want to believe that he was an unruly young black man who may have just robbed a convenience store while high on marijuana.  Their failure to be empathetic is obvious.  Then you have the people who want to believe that "Mike Mike" was a kid on the verge of finally breaking out of the badness of poverty through the golden gates of college education.  They believe his death was a tragedy because he was finally going to "make it."  But they're failing in empathy too, because they need a righteous victim rather than just a victim.  We have a problem blaming the victims for their own suffering.  Whether it's police brutality, profiling, rape, or what have you, we seem to only want to feel for people who seem righteous.  But you don't have to think that all prisoners are innocent to see that our penal system could use some reform.  You don't have to think that a girl is Polly Pureheart to think that she doesn't deserve to be raped.  You don't have to think that Mike Brown was a choirboy to think that he didn't deserve to get shot 6 times.
What we need to do is stop requiring that every injustice be illustrated by the tragic killing of an innocent before we decide that we can do better.  Does it always have to come down to a tragedy like the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama (1963)?  Does our national conscience always need four little black girls in their Sunday best to be the victims before we decide it's time to fix what is broken?  Can't we listen to Michael Brown's silent witness... to the protesters who are so angry they are willing to fight the power... to the protesters who want to get this done peacefully and non-violently?
We need to listen, or this is going to get even worse.

Haters Gonna Hate

I have enjoyed watching a collection of random people I know douse themselves with ice water over the past week or so.  And it's been all the more enjoyable to know that they are also giving money to ALS research.  It has just seemed like an organic sort of social media feelgood story.  Until, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this, someone found fault.
"They're all wasting perfectly good water," they said.
"They just want attention," they said.
"They don't really care about ALS," they said.
"Lighten the frack up!" I say, using Battlestar Galactica terminology, to imply the emphasis of a profane statement in a PG rated sort of way. (and also because I love BSG)
And of course this was not an isolated incident of hater-a-tude.  There were many who decided that those buckets of ice water would really be appreciated in Africa somewhere, or in drought-stricken places like California, which I suppose they would, if someone were inclined to seal it up and mail it to Africa.  But that would cost approximately three to ten times as much as actually purchasing a small filtration system like the ones our Presbytery in PA used to buy for churches and villages in Rwanda, which will provide clean drinking water for a family indefinitely, a single Sawyer Point One water filter can be rigged up with two five gallon buckets to create a gravity fed water filtration system that will produce over 500 gallons of clean water per day and has an expected lifetime capacity of - get this - one million gallons.  Seriously, here's where Cabelas sells something similar to campers and doomsday preppers for $72.99.
So yeah, the $100 that people gave to ALS, might also have gone to a project that supports clean drinking water, but here's the thing: there are a lot of good causes and things that need support out there.  But the idea that the people who took the ice bucket challenge were somehow wasting water that could have helped people without access to drinking water is on par with your parents telling you about all the starving kids in China who would just love those brussel sprouts you hate.
Better yet, instead of hating on all the people who did something silly and fun with good intentions, you could just decide to quietly give money yourself, without fanfare and without writing a sanctimonious blog post about how you're so much better than all those ice water people.
I'm not going to tell you if I'm giving money to anything here, because I'm already being sanctimonious enough.  But I do want to make a point here: the internet can do wonderful things, but it can also, almost in the same breath, totally ruin beautiful things.
The interweb gives me daily reminders of the rather precarious balance between good and evil that is built into human nature.  In places like Ferguson and Gaza, brutality is being unmasked and victims are being heard from behind walls that would have heretofore been nothing but the silence of oppression.  Legitimate outrage is being amplified by a global awareness of the things that are wrong with our treatment of one another.  Discussions and dialogue happen at lighting speed, and you may think that awareness of the sort raised by silly acts of hashtag activism or "slacktivism" as it has come to be called by those who are #holierthanthou, has had and will continue to shape our human awareness.
Look at the events in Ferguson, as opposed to what happened in the 1990s in the LA riots, there is much more evidence of understanding by the outside world, there is information, there is accountability and generally things are shaping up to be less violent.  There are stories about the legitimate protesters stepping in to stop looting, there are stories of solidarity in the community and from places all around the country.  Does all this mean that the situation is rosy?  No, the whole mess is still an open wound, which has forced some of the most pernicious and systemic issues of injustice that afflict our nation into an uncomfortable spotlight.
The flow of information that allows us to see this, and gives a voice to the victim, also gives a voice to those who would like to call the people of Ferguson "animals" and paint them as lawless thugs, rather than a community which has been grieved by brutality once too often.
I guess the only real truth is that the Interweb gives people a voice, it gives voice to people who are oppressed and it gives voice to the oppressor.  It gives people who are kind and thoughtful a voice, and it gives people who are narrow and bigoted a voice as well.
Here I am, like Demosthenes, speaking to the ocean with my mouth full of stones.

And Now This...

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

Do you wish to have no fear of the authority?

Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval;

For it is God's servant for your good.

-Romans 13: 3

I'm not trying to set Paul up as a straw man, but I question whether he really believed what he was saying, or if he was really just trying to somehow address the widespread rumors that the early church was engaged in seditious and perhaps even revolutionary behavior.  Rome certainly does not have a sparkling reputation for being free of those who would abuse their authority, in fact if you read about the Caesars, you might conclude that abuse of a authority was a rather well attested Roman pass time.

Romans were known to quell rebellion by destroying entire cities and crucifying thousands of people and enslaving the rest.  In fact Pax Romana has become synonymous with peace through superior firepower.

But I keep this teaching in my mind as I read about what is taking place in Ferguson Missouri.  I'm not so historically naive as to think that the sort of thing that is happening there didn't happen in Paul's world, I know that it did, and yet he still wrote, with what seems like a straight face: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God."

I kind of doubt that Michael Brown's family and friends, and now the citizens of Ferguson, feel that way.

As per usual, nothing is simple, but from what I can tell, young Mr. Brown did not deserve to get shot.  It is also fairly apparent that this sort of thing happens way too often, specifically to African American boys and men.  It would seem you could make a case, as some have, that it the most illegal activity in America is being a black male.  How else do you explain the incarceration rate?  How else do you explain the fact that stories like Ferguson dance across our conscience ever couple of months?

My experience with police has been generally positive, because I'm white, most of my stories about police involve getting pulled over for breaking a traffic law, or having the cops show up when my friends and I were doing something stupid, and even, one time, in another lifetime, being arrested, very politely I might add, and taken to the State Police barracks until my Dad came to pick me up at 4:00 AM.  It is that last event that really shows me my privilege, I was not brutalized in any way, I was far more afraid of my Dad than I ever was of the State Troopers, and mostly it's something I can look back on 20 plus years later with a little bit of humor.

I actually did something wrong.  Mike Brown did not, and he got shot... a lot of times.

It's really disturbing how often race creeps into our discussions of justice.

I have to think that if Mike was a white kid and this was happening in a predominantly white town, there would be a lot more outrage (there's a fair amount of outrage right now anyway, but I think we would be on def-con four as a nation right now if he was white).

And that's not okay.

It's not okay that a kid from a poor neighborhood, who actually got through high school and was actually headed to college soon, was gunned down by the people who are supposed to protect us.  It really wouldn't be okay if he was a thug and a dropout either, as a matter of fact.

So I think we need to talk about the Police, and their authority.  As I said before, my experience of the police is generally positive, and I'm glad they're protecting and serving.  I have no reservations telling my kids to run to a Police Officer if they ever need help, but it makes me a little sad that I would have to think twice about telling the same thing to my brown nephews.

Authority means that you are in control, or at least that you have the power in a situation where you are the authority.  As a pastor, I have authority in certain situations, and because I have authority the responsibility for not abusing that authority is on my shoulders.  For instance, if someone complains to me about something at the church, even if they're not particularly nice about it,  it is my responsibility to listen to them and not just tell them to shut up and get over it.  Even if I really want to... Even if they're really annoying... Even if they're absolutely wrong.

Police have guns and badges and night sticks and tasers and smoke grenades and radios to call more police, and dogs and SWAT teams and helicopters and in many cases immunity from legal prosecution.  That's a whole lot of authority, and it should mean that they also have the restraint not to shoot an unarmed black man, who was, by most accounts, minding his own business.

Some might object that being a police officer is dangerous and they're always on edge because of that, but, on the list of most dangerous jobs in America, police officer doesn't even make the top ten.  Garbage collectors (#6) and farmers (#9) are more at risk on a daily basis than police.  Another disturbing facet of this debate is what happened in 2012 in Rialto CA: the police started wearing cameras, all the time on duty.  Little Jiminy Cricket sized cameras produced some rather startling changes: 

1. Complaints against the police officers dropped 88%.  Not a small drop, but a major crash.

2. Use of force incidents dropped 59%.

It is possible, as the Rialto Chief of Police speculated to the New York Times, that it was a result of citizens behaving better and interacting more humanely with the officers because they knew they were on film and that the video of their encounter could potentially become evidence against them if things went south.  I suspect though that it was more the shoe on the other foot, that the police officers now had to do things "by the book," instead of by bullying and intimidation tactics.

"Big man with a gun" syndrome is pretty easy to fall into.  Having authority can be quite a rush, and it changes you for sure.

I once did pre-marital counseling with a police officer and his bride to be, and we talked quite a bit about his job and how it affected their relationship.  He was a good man, and he loved her very much, but when he came home from a ten hour shift, where most of the people he talked to lied to him in some way shape or form, he had some trouble with trust.  This is where I'm sympathetic to the po-lice, they do have a hard job, and a necessary job, because there are real bad guys out there.

However, the cowboy mentality is exactly not what you need to be a good police officer, you need the self restraint and the discipline to not let your authority go to your head, and to not react to irrational behavior with more irrational and forceful behavior.

There is a culture of fear that exists between our African American neighbors and the police that protect and serve us.  Many black and brown folks do not trust the police to be on their side.  Unfortunately, many of them have ever reason to hold on to that attitude, Michael Brown of Ferguson Missouri is just the latest name of that list.

Denial Gets you up a Crick

On a walk around the lake this morning, I saw a bald eagle perched on one of the dock pilings.  It's not the first time I've seen one at the lake, in fact last winter there were two hanging around at the same time.  It's becoming increasingly common to see them around here and pretty much all over the eastern United States.  But it wasn't always that way, when I was a kid, I grew up never seeing one our nation's most recognizable symbols in the wild.  Then I went to Alaska in 1991 and I saw bald eagles all over the place, and I came to the realization that they are not really the solitary residents of pristine wilderness that I had thought.
It turns out that human beings actually had a lot to do with the extirpation of bald eagles from large parts of the country, because of pesticides.  We didn't start out with the intention of making them disappear, we like them, unlike wolves, coyotes and bears (other extirpated species).  We wanted to still see the noble birds of prey, like bald eagles and osprey, soaring through our skies.  But we also don't like mosquitoes and various other crop pests that cost us a bunch of money, and we found this stuff dichlorodiphenaltrichloroethane or DDT for short (and man am I glad there's an abbreviation).
The DDT is demonstrably not toxic to higher order species in low doses, and even in some cases of acute exposure, it doesn't really seem too horrible, so A+, science has given us a miracle solution for bugs eating us and our crops!  Turns out, DDT is just gangbusters and getting rid of bugs, and it seems pretty safe otherwise, but it also has a rather persnickety quality: it bio-accumulates.  Which means the bugs die, but the DDT then enters the water supply and is absorbed by algae and other organisms on the bottom of the food chain, which are eaten by fish, which are eaten by, you guessed it: eagles.
The DDT doesn't kill the fish or the eagles, because it's largely non-digestible, it just sort of hangs around.  The fish are pretty fine, there doesn't seem to much of a down side for them living life with DDT coursing through their veins, and the birds that eat the fish seem okay too, except when it comes time to make new birds, the DDT affects the hardness of their eggshells.  Now, to be fair, we started using DDT as a pesticide in 1939, and environmentalism wasn't really much of a thing, outside of some rich white dudes who actually just wanted to make sure there would always be enough big game for them to shoot.  We weren't really paying that much attention to animals we couldn't eat.
Rachel Carson didn't write Silent Spring until 1962, and even then she was kind of just questioning whether some of the things we were up to were really that wise.  She didn't know about the egg thing, she just noticed that there seemed to be a lot fewer birds around than there used to be, and she had the audacity to think that we might have had something to do with that.
Ms. Carson woke some people up, and she also ticked some people off.  Which has been pretty much the dichotomous set of reactions that people have to bad environmental news.  It's either: "Wow, I didn't know we could cause this sort of a problem, how can we fix it?"  Or it's: "You're a big liar with all your science-y mumbo jumbo, the world is just too big for us to make that sort of a difference."
Look, my grandpa still had some jars of DDT in his garage when he died, because he was holding on to some of the "good stuff," in case he ever had some really pesky aphids or Japanese beetles.  I'm pretty sure he had heard the "story" of how it was killing the eagles, but he probably disbelieved it.  I loved my grandpa and he was entitled to his opinion, but his opinion was wrong, and if it had prevailed I still wouldn't be able to see a bald eagle just hanging around at the lake.
I really do believe that people are entitled to their opinion, up to a point.  The line is crossed when someone's opinion runs counter to facts, but not just any facts.  If your opinion is that Nickleback is a good band, you are entitled to that opinion, even though you are really, really wrong, you're not hurting anyone, unless I'm riding in your car and make me listen to Nickleback, but even then, your tone-deaf aesthetically bankrupt taste in music is not going to do irrevocable harm to the world that we're going to hand to our children and grandchildren, other than the fact that when people learn about the music of the 1990's they will think Nickelback was every bit as good as Pearl Jam.  It's misinformation, but it's not dangerous.
However, if your opinion is that DDT is fine, you're going to make it so my kids will only see bald eagles on money.  If your opinion is that our climate is not changing and that our rampant consumption of fossil fuels and attendant rise in atmospheric CO2 is not causing that change that isn't actually happening, then you are demonstrably wrong, by 99% of climate scientists.
It's hard to get 99% of any sort of scientist to agree on anything, that's the nature of science, they test hypotheses.  I'm pretty sure 99% never agreed about DDT, but we still banned it and now I see bald eagles at the lake.  Unfortunately, we are a little too addicted to fossil fuels and we're not going to be able to quit cold-turkey anytime soon.  But we have to start taking steps, or else we're going to cause our children and grandchildren a lot more trauma than never being able to see an eagle.
The good news is that we have learned a lot over the past 50 years, and we are starting to realize (at least some of us are) that we can, and should, try to fix the problems that our wanton ignorance has caused.  As of now there is no "cure" for climate change, but give us time, slow down, drive less, support sane legislative measures regarding the ecosystem, most of all stop pretending it's not happening.

The Crying on the Inside Kind

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

There's a Bill Murray movie called Quick Change, where he robs a bank dressed as a clown.  Someone asks him: "What kind of Clown are you?"  To which he replies, "The crying on the inside kind."
That actually may be the only kind of clown that actually exists.  Read about the pathology of funny here.
John Belushi, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, now Robin Williams, the list of funny people who have laughed themselves to death is long and tragic.
Williams suicide seems to have struck a chord, perhaps because he had time to evolve as an actor beyond comedy: Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, and even One Hour Photo, showed us that Williams had range beyond playing Mork from Ork and the manic wild man of his stand up comedy.  He let us see other facades that he had constructed as well as the funny man.  I suspect that very few people actually saw the real Robin Williams, and not being seen, especially when you are so famous, is a lonely thing.
Artists of various sorts have proven this true, from Vincent Van Gogh to Kurt Cobain, the ability to express your inner self through art is a gift and a curse.  The process by which you produce art, whether it is writing, painting, music, acting, or just making people laugh is way of reaching within yourself and showing what you have done with your pain.  It can be excruciating, and it can be beautiful, and sometimes the most painful things are also the most beautiful.
The fact that we have made many of our artists into celebrities, with all the benefits and curses thereof, further complicates matters.  In Kurt Cobain's suicide note, he lamented the fact that he couldn't feed off of the crowd like Freddy Mercury, but the truth is Freddy couldn't either, it cost him, it always costs us dearly to share ourselves with others, it makes us vulnerable and it makes us human.  The danger is in denying the cost, and not having enough "off stage" time and support.
So back to Williams, he was obviously a one of a kind sort of talent.  He was distinctive enough as a comedian that other comedians couldn't really even try to emulate his manic energy.  But that manic side has a shadow, as bipolar and manic-depressive people will tell you, and that shadow is dark indeed.  How many times have you heard someone say of a person who has committed suicide: "They seemed so...(insert favorite generic emotional statement of well-being here: happy, normal, content, funny, creative)."
Does it surprise anyone that he had substance abuse problems?  No, probably not, we sort of expect that sort of thing from our artistic types.
Yet it does surprise us that he was depressed.  Well, here's a news flash, the two things are intimately related.  Substance abuse is an attempt to self-medicate and numb the pain of existence; and when is existence painful?  When you're depressed.
Notice that good art speaks to our pain, even as it uplifts us.  Art that does not touch pain somehow is merely entertainment, and it will never change the world.  Art that lets us into the heart of the artist brings us together, whether it's the quizzical smile of the Mona Lisa or the words of Ernest Hemmingway (another suicide).  Art that doesn't cost anything, I'm talking to you pop music and formulaic movies, only numbs us in the most superficial and temporary manner.
Since the news of Williams suicide broke, social media has been filled with various expressions of the ways that Williams has touched people, and most of it was from his forays into drama.  Dead Poet's Society was one of those generation defining movies, right up there with The Breakfast Club for folks my age, it made us think for a moment that maybe Whitman was worthwhile.  Good Will Hunting, for better or worse, has brought us Afleck and Damon to stay.  In The Fisher King, Williams played a schizophrenic man in a way that was both humane and immensely entertaining.  In Good Morning, Vietnam, one of the first R-rated movies I was allowed to see, he played a funny man who has to get serious.  In What Dreams May Come, he plays a man who deals with grief and loss and finding hope.
It's profoundly sad, now that we know the end of the script, that a man who gave us so much of himself still felt so very alone and hopeless.  Looking back on it, his movies contained so much that can help us deal with life.
So long funny man, I hope you have found out now that God has a great sense of humor.
You don't have to play the clown any more.

An Inquiry into Values

I went to visit my cousin, who lives in D.C., just a little way up the road.  She is a lawyer, her husband is a political type who works for a Senator.  They're doing very well for themselves.  We showed up at the appointed hour at the upscale condo-complex where they live, right smack dab in the city, not far from Union Station.  Immediately we run into the conundrum of locked doors and gates.  I don't see my cousin that much and so I don't have a phone number or anything sensible like that, just an address and a time of arrival.  We go into a concierge sort of guy, and start asking questions.
Already, I'm beginning to feel decidedly like a country bumpkin, and I'm realizing that I'm really out of my societal comfort zone.  Nothing about the rest of the afternoon really changes that.  These condos where my cousin lives are really nice.  Even the hallways smell nice, which is impressive compared to the hallways of most of the apartment buildings I have ever lived or spent time in, where stale air and various other odors are fairly expected. They have a first floor unit with a nice little fenced in back yard, not my three acres by any stretch but enough space for a grill and a patio and a little fountain, which is really impressive in DC, where I can hear traffic on the street right on the other side of the fence.
Later, we go up to the roof of one of the tall towers in the complex. Above the 15th story of the tall buildings, it is not the tar paper and pigeon coop kind of city roof, it's club med.  There are nice little nooks with tables and chairs, a giant chess board and a pool, a freaking pool.  There are all these young, urban professionals, sunbathing by the pool, reading on ipads and phones, drinking beer, at the tables, carefully cultivating that "I'm in public, but I've got my own thing to do, but I hope some of my peeps show up soon to hang out" sort of attitude that you see so often in coffee houses and such.
I suddenly realize that I feel sort of uncomfortable.  Not because I'm on a roof, which was enough for a few of our group, but because I realized that I did not belong there as anything more than a visitor, there to see the sights.  It's a funny thing, even though I'm an introvert by nature, I spend so much time talking in front of people that I've become extremely un-selfconscious.  If I were to go on television or in front a large crowd, I would be able to act like I belong there and comport myself accordingly.  I have a Master's Degree, so I'm rarely intimidated by educated folk, I'm a spiritual/contemplative sort so mystics and empathic people don't throw me, I've spent a lot of time around medical stuff, so doctors don't shake me. But here on that roof, some rich kids threw me out of joint.
I started thinking about ways to get around that uncomfortable feeling.  I looked out at the city and I imagined that I could see all the invisible people that were living lives of quiet desperation somewhere down there.
Ah, there it was, the warm feeling of moral superiority.  I have chosen a job that will never, in any reasonable iteration, allow me to live in such luxury.  I have education, community respect and a leadership position, but I will most likely never make a six figure income, and I will never live someplace with a freaking pool on the freaking roof.  I am living sensibly and happily in my little house in the woods out in Maryland, and if I ever feel guilty about how much I have, all I really have to do is remember that roof and how there are many people who aren't any smarter or harder working, who get so much more.
And here's the weird part: I actually like that, because of the whole Jesus-following thing, the money really doesn't hook me too bad, at least not in the envy.  Maybe in the cultural conscience, but not in the "I want a pool on my roof" place.
What that sort of conspicuous consumption and the security measures it takes to maintain that little urban bubble remind me about is that fact that I have enough, and I likely have more than I need.  Which is a conviction that most of us need from time to time.
I know that if I give up some of my stuff, and if all those rich folks give up some of their stuff, it's not really going to solve the economic problems of our world.  We will still have a system where, despite having the raw affluence to make everyone a winner, we still insist that some people must be losers.  It's easy for me to look at the rooftop pool and feel bad for the homeless guy that lives in the alley over near the train station, or the kids who get their drinking and cooking water out of stagnant, polluted puddles, but eventually I need to turn the lens of my moral outrage onto my own house.
I have three acres of land that I don't use to grow food (at the moment).  I have more stuff than I really care to talk about and much of it just sits around in boxes or on shelves, waiting for a day when I "might" need it.  I have not gone hungry, other than in an attempt to lose weight, for a very long time.  I have as much water as I need, I have access to all sorts of recreation in order to spend my bountiful free time.
My wealth, compared to people in many parts of the world, is as ostentatious as the roof pool is to me.
I don't want to think about that, because it bums my trip right out.
I need to think about it, because the only way we're going to lift the people who really need it out of the mud, is if we focus on creating a world where your time and your effort earn you a living.
It occurs to me that most of our definitions of enough amount to: "just a little more than we have."
That in turn locks us into cycles of envy, stress and ultimately wastefulness.
And while we waste, others go hungry and thirsty.  While we are safe and secure others are homeless and vulnerable.  While we are free others are oppressed.  And none of that is okay.
The way to fix that is not to tear down the tall buildings with their roof pools, or split up my nice little backyard.  The solution is to work for more justice in the economic ans social systems of the world, to use our influence and prosperity to make "enough" a state of being for more than just us.

Absence of a Different Sort

But do know this: every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.

-Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond

The kids have been with Michele's parents at the beach this week.  For the two of us, going about our daily routines and living life the way we must have lived it before they came along, it has been an interesting time.  We notice that there is something missing.  Michele has been a bit more emotional about it than me.  She misses her babies.  I don't so much miss them as I find their absence peculiar.
Part of the reason I don't get emotional about their absence is I trust that they're having fun, spending time with Grandparents and most importantly that they will be back tomorrow, and life will pretty much go back to normal.
That, of course, is not true for everyone who experiences the presence of an absence.  Let's call it the "second wave" of grief; that moment when it really sinks in that someone you love is not going to walk back in the door, or call you on the phone.
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.  That is certainly true in the case of my kids.  There have been times when I have had just about enough of them, and this week has been a refreshing break from the grind of parenthood (Michele and I went out and dropped a C-note on school supplies last night just to remind ourselves that we're parents).  Now though, I'm ready for the little nippers to come back, and I'm glad that they will.
The prospect of re-union is made more joyful because of the experience of knowing what it's like when we will not meet again upon the mortal coil. (I know, a lot of stuff comes back to that eventually, just be glad if you're among the fortunate ones who have not experienced a loss out of turn).
One of the things that has become clear to me in this brief separation, is how unusual it is to only have to think about just two.  At one point in my life, it was all I could do to manage my own stuff, then I began to learn to accommodate Michele, then a cat, then a dog, then Jack, then Cate, then another dog.  For a while there, life was getting awfully crowded.
And I almost forgot!  The whole Pastor thing!  Somewhere in that mix, I have learned to share my life with a whole bunch of people of all different sorts.
If you had told 19 year old me that I was going to do that, I would have told you that you were a crazy person.
I'm not going to go all Barbara Streisand on you here, but here's a surprise: 40 year old me, with all these connections and responsibilities and relationships, is a hell of a lot happier than 19 year old me.  I'm better because I have shared my life with people, even if I've had to say goodbye to some of the people I really liked and loved.
There are times when I think it would have been easier to stay closed off, and to think only of myself, and to protect my fragile emotions.  I know there are many in the world who live that way.
I mourn for them deeply.
I am glad that I have been shown the depth of beauty that comes out of even our most tragic losses.
Pauses are important to the meaning of the spoken word.
Punctuation is crucial to the written word.
Rests are as important to music as notes.
Negative space is crucial in drawing and painting.
Sculptures are created by removing bits and pieces from a meaningless block.
The void has it's work to do in every aspect of creation.
Peace.

Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge ;-)

I'm preaching this week on the story of Jesus walking on the water, from the Gospel according to Matthew.  This morning I met with a bunch of pastors to talk about the lectionary texts for this week.  We had a good discussion going, but because we're all intellectual sorts it is inevitable that at some point one of us is going to kind of blithely mention the possibility that in fact this might not have happened the way it says.  None of us are what you would call literalists, but we're all searching for an angle that seems interesting in this particular story.
One problem, as it appears to the modern mind, is that this doesn't make sense as a miracle.  Most of Jesus' other miracles were born out of compassion for people (even in one case, compassion for a wedding party that was going to be over a little too soon).  The walking on water thing just seems like Jesus is showing off.  There's no human purpose to it, other than to create this little scene with Peter and the other disciples.
But why is that not okay?
The struggle to understand Scripture for modern people is no longer about debunking myths.  Much damage has been done in the name of God, using flawed interpretations of Scripture and often doing so in an excessively literal or fundamentalist manner.  But in the world today, I think we need to hold on to more of our sacred stories, not hack away at the roots of our very humanity.  There is danger, of course, in understanding that Scripture, including the Gospels, is not a detailed historical record of everything that happened, and admitting that perhaps some stories were included for didactic purposes and perhaps were even driven by some agenda or were written in response to a situation that came up well after Jesus was actually walking around.  The danger is that we somehow negate the value of anything our rather limited modern historical perspective says is unlikely to be actually true.
Which is stupid, because we create meaning through fictional stories all of the time.  Outside of the Bible, Shakespeare's works have been incredibly formative to western civilization, and last I checked, he didn't write any non-fiction, even his histories of the English Kings are at best "based on the true story."  But does it matter if Henry V really gave the "band of brothers" monologue on the eve of Agincourt?  Is it any less inspiring?  Does the fact that Hamlet or Macbeth were fictional characters make their contribution to the world any less important?
I'm going to say that it matters not one whit.
But if I'm going to take that position, I need to be consistent.  If I'm going to say that I find sacred value in the story of Noah or Jonah, or some of the more suspect tales about Jesus, I need to actually embrace that sacred value, and not be a scoffer under my breath.
If I'm going to say that the truth of Scripture is greater than literalism allows it to be, then I need to allow it to be as well.  I should not narrow my perspective until I make the actual mistake that literalists always claim is down a slippery slope: if it's not all true than none of it is true, and if it's not completely true in our "objective" framework of understanding than it's not true at all, in any way.
This is a place where ancient people, who believed all sorts of things that we know to be false, actually have a leg up on us in understanding the mystery that truth doesn't have to be factual or rational to be truth.
Sure it helps when truth and the facts line up.  It's nice when you can back up your conclusions with nicely ordered proof and explanations, but I suspect that if that is the only criteria you accept, you are giving up on an awful lot of the beauty of being human (not all, just some really important parts).
Faith, hope and love are damnably subjective things, and yet they are the crowning glory of the human condition.  They are things we understand from stories and relationships and they absolutely refuse to be valid subjects of scientific investigation.
I'm going to believe that Jesus walked on water because it helps me learn something deep about faith and life.  Because I like the way things are better in a world where it's true.
There is, I believe, a historical reality to the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
There are also places where the raw material of that reality has been formed in the hands of the Gospel writers, and places where translation and interpretive decisions have been made with regard to how they have been passed down.
I believe that perhaps the biggest miracle of Jesus is that he can still speak to so many, so that we can hear the truth through so much static.

By The Rivers of Babylon...

I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; 

but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.

-The Prophet Amos (7:14)

If you have been following along with this little blog, you know that there are several things going on right now that greatly trouble my soul.  Most of them begin with war of some sort: war between Israel and Palestinians, the war on drugs, the war against terror, which has begotten a war in Afghanistan, and one in Iraq that we thought we won, until recently when ISIS stormed through various parts of the country and established an Islamic caliphate, which has proceeded to brutally persecute Christians and Islamic minorities in the name of Allah (way to go guys, be the monster everyone already suspected you were).

I'm getting pretty tired of war, and I'm not even personally involved in any of them, except as a human being, and it is as a human being that these things deeply trouble my soul.  I have been told that as an American Christian I really have no right to comment on things like the Israel/Gaza conflagration, because I don't understand what it's like for Israelis to live in a place where they are surrounded by people who openly wish they did not exist.  I'm not Jewish, indeed, so therefore I should just accept the bombing of civilians and the murder of children because: security is important.

The whole notion that I should just accept the atrocities of the world because it doesn't concern me is a theological and moral disaster.  You want to talk about decaying morality?  Leave the homosexuals and their cute little weddings out of it, let's talk dying children, let's talk people robbed of their homes and livelihoods, let's talk thousands of children fleeing the narco-state violence in their home country showing up on our doorstep, those are freaking moral crises!

I'll let the Jews speak for Israel, because at least a few of them are doing a good job:

Here

and 

Here.

I want to talk to American Christians, because I am one of them, and I think we are failing with a capital F to be Jesus followers.  In the article above by Rabbi Lerner, he compares the modern nation state of Israel to the Golden Calf, a form of idolatry.  We 'Mericans have the same problem, we have made our nation, because it really is a pretty remarkable human venture into liberty and justice, into an idol.  Remember, the Golden Calf seemed like a good idea, even to Aaron, Moses' own brother.  It seemed like a good idea because people need symbols and something in which to place their hope and trust.  God, the actual living God, didn't really seem like he had a good plan.  God was up there in the smoke on the mountain talking to Moses about the Law and the people were, quite frankly, terrified of that God.  The Golden Calf was a lot more of a sure thing... or at least a thing they could control.

When people want to control things, there are two things that we really love: Idols and Violence, not necessarily in that order.  You can control other people with violence for a while, but it usually gets out of control, Idols are more effective in the long term.  If you can create in people's hearts a strong affinity for anything that is not God, you can often subtly deprive them of their inherent connection to God.  This is not a desirable state of affairs, because God, our Creator, is what binds us together.  God is about bringing things together.

Roman Catholic Theologian Richard Rohr notes that the etymology of the word religion comes from the root ligio, to bind, and essentially means re-binding.  It should hold us together with one another and with God, and in so many cases it has the exact opposite effect.  It tells us that we are far from God; abject sinners and flawed creations.  It convinces us that we should hold ourselves superior to those who believe differently than we, because we have ascertained the essential truth of God's will.  That is, as Rohr points out, "diabolical," in Greek dia balein, means to throw apart.

The notion of empathy that I wrote about yesterday and then also ran across in Rabbi Jacob's article above, is exactly the sort of thing that holds us together as human beings.  It is, I suspect, a major component of what the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ seeks to demonstrate for us: God has empathy for creation.  Jesus is often sidetracked by his compassion (read empathy) for the afflicted.  His activity as a healer and a miracle worker, was both a blessing and a curse to his message.  Some people believed because he made the blind see, others remained spiritually blind despite his miracles.  In fact, it seemed to be the religious folk who were most offended by Jesus' empathy for people they had previously considered unclean and unworthy.

When people speak to me of God's elegant plans where everything works out for the best, I have to call shenanigans.  God's plans are messy, because God insistently works in and through human beings.  He pushes us in the direction of unity, like a parent who puts his toddler in a sandbox with other kids, hoping that little Billy will play nice.  God has made us for community, we are social at our very core, even introverts like me, (and I really HATE to admit this) need other people from time to time.  To deny our connections to one another makes us less than human, in extreme cases it makes for a sociopath.

Unfortunately, there are way too many sociopaths running loose in the world today.  There are way too many people who deny the living, relational God that I see pretty clearly in Scripture and in Jesus, in favor of some static idol.

The idols are legion: money, power, empire, lust, pleasure, leisure, individual rights, security, family, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.  Do you notice how that list migrates from "deadly sin" type stuff, to things we might actually think of as good and moral things?  That's what idols do, they are parasitic on our need for a living God, they offer us a way that is a little neater and a little more controllable than a God who might just show up in a whirlwind and cause all manner of messiness.

God does not have many names, aliases are more the devil's thing.  The basic prayer of Israel, Shema, goes as follows: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is ONE."  And the really remarkable thing is that you can actually sum God up in one word, and it is a word that you can find in all the religions and in all human cultures.  The word is Love, a relationship word, a together word, a word that defies violence and power and says, "Hey, maybe we should go a different path."  It is a word that Jesus uses a whole awful lot, and it is a word that speaks of a connection.

It is a word that holds empathy and compassion, mercy and justice, sacrifice and celebration, sex and friendship, art and beauty, all within those four letters.

It is the failure of love that is causing ALL of the problems of humanity.  We fail to love others, and we quickly name them enemies, they then threaten our security, we compete, endlessly for finite resources, and in the process our connection, our ligio, begins to wither and disintegrate.  We lose each other.  And if you think that we can lose each other this tragically and hold on to God, you have not been paying attention.

More on War

Mankind must put an end to war,

Before war puts an end to mankind.

- John F. Kennedy

There is a line where my convictions about non-violence begin to waver.  And it's not, as it is for some, about defending myself.  As a kid with a bit of a temper, I needed to learn at an early age to swallow my pride and walk away from a fight, or else I was going to probably go down a bad road.  I have this hope that, in a real pinch I would have the nerve to choose non-violence, even if it meant my own demise.  That is not the line.

The line is my children.  In one of my arguments/discussions with my parents last weekend we were talking about the situation in Israel.  I was moving along the lines that you find in recent blog entries about the futility and criminality of war in general, and trying to make the point that Israel is not the unquestionable good guy in this situation.  And my Dad, asked me this question that kind of knocked me off my high horse for a minute: "What if it was Caitlyn that got blown up by one of Hamas' RPGs?"  "What if it was her blood out there on your driveway?  How would you feel about war then?"

It was a low blow, because it crossed the line of my convictions.  It was where I realized I would be so angry that I would be perfectly willing to utterly destroy the villains who perpetrated that catastrophe.  I would feel utterly justified in bombing an entire city into rubble in order to destroy the person who fired the rocket that killed my daughter.

Over the course of a couple of days after this conversation I saw pictures, pictures of parents living through the exact nightmare that, even in a hypothetical case, threw me off the rails.  And it was compassion for those parents that has brought me back to the conviction that war must end.  I realized that the hatred and vengeance that must have been created in the hearts of those parents is going to be the seed of the next wave of violence.  Because, as I have come to believe, violence only begets more violence.  Peace by force is by nature an ephemeral creature.  Eventually hatred will win, eventually revenge will find a way.

The failure of human empathy gives the lie to any claim we might have to Christian ethics.  If we are willing to kill other people's children in defense of our own then we are still child killers.  I think we should have a pretty good idea how Jesus would feel about killing children, but even more directly we should hear his words about our enemies: "You have heard it said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

So my question is: Is he actually serious about that?

I think he is and I think he knows something that we really need to figure out as a species or we're going to go on slaughtering each other's children.  The only thing that will end the cycles of violence is for us to care enough about each other, to have enough empathy for one another that we realize that no goal is worth the death of a child.  Until we collectively say, "Never again!" to the holocaust of dead children, no matter who and where they are, we are not even getting a glimpse of the kingdom that Jesus was always going on about.

So here's where I am: I have no desire to see my daughter blown to pieces by a terrorist, and if that were to happen, I'm not sure I could restrain my hatred and my desire for vengeance.  And so I think that we ought not to expect any less from those parents in Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq, who have had to dig their children's bodies out of the rubble of their own homes.  Our violence is not going to bring peace, unless those parents somehow don't feel the same thing for their children that I do.

And I know that's absolutely not true.

War is just going to cycle us through this whole mess, over and over again.

Somebody stop this merry-go-round, I want to get off.