A Rather Disturbing Observation

I'm about to engage in a rhetorical maneuver of questionable value, but bear with me.
I'm about to compare ISIS or ISIL, the "so called" Islamic state, with Dispensationalists, otherwise known as those Rapture people.  Here is a brief survey of their commonality:

1. Both believe that they are favored by God and therefore they will be vindicated.
2. Both believe that people who do not agree with them are and should be condemned to destruction.
3. Both have decided to interpret their individual sacred texts, either Koran or Bible, as a sort of choose your own adventure novel, and have come out with an eschatological perspective that is completely at odds with the idea of a loving and merciful God.
4. Both will react violently (either physically or verbally) when you challenge that interpretation.
5. Both are generally discredited by the sensible and rigorous theology of their own larger community.

To be clear now, I am not using this comparison to claim that anyone who goes to see, and perhaps even likes the new Left Behind movie is in any way the moral equivalent of a terrorist who beheads reporters.  What I would like to point out to a whole bunch of people who are currently engaged in painting a large segment of our human family as being delusional and violent because of the actions of a very few of their number.
If you're paying attention, you will notice that the world community of Islam is, in no uncertain terms, letting us know that they feel the same, and perhaps worse about ISIS than we do.  In addition to the persecution of Iraqi Christians, ISIS is persecuting a whole load of Iraqi Muslims as well, and we would do well not to forget that.
Jesus one time said this thing about taking the log out of our own eye before we try to take the splinter out of someone else.  As Christians we have not done a particularly good job of stopping our own faith from being represented by the tin-foil hat crowd, whether it is something like Creation Science or Dispensational theology or whether it is the catastrophic hybridization of triumphal Christianity and American imperialism/exceptionalism.  Our own house is certainly not in order.
The thing is though, we've sort of gotten our beheading/jihad days behind us.  Our most blood thirsty religious fantasies are now movies starring Nicholas Cage, not young angry men in stolen tanks and humvees.
I think Islam as a global religion is trying to get past this phase as well, and as much as I want to say that ISIS is evil, I don't want to extend that judgment to Islam as a whole.  Honestly, I don't know that many Muslims, but the ones I have met have seemed like fairly gentle, rational people.  The Muslim voices that I need to listen to now, to hold back the fear, are the ones who seem to feel the same way about fundamentalists and extremists in their house as I do about the wing-nuts in mine.
If I'm going to be serious about this Jesus thing, I'm going to have to start opening my heart to the suffering of people, and right now, I see a world community that is suffering hatred and derision because of the actions of a relatively few members, who have been driven to desperation by horrible circumstances and even worse theology.
This whole situation really does have the capacity to start an Armageddon-ish scenario, but if we're going to get through it we're going to need to work together in our common humanity.  We're going to need our Muslim brothers and sisters to fix this, and they're probably going to need our help.  Since I don't believe the Rapture is a thing, I know that we're in this together.  Me and mine aren't going to magically disappear before any sort of tribulation starts, so I hope we can get our act together and stop all the hate and fear.
I do believe that one day, "every knee shall bow" and "every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."  Until that happens I'm going to try as hard as I can to love my neighbors, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist and Agnostic, as well as I possibly can .
Because were all in this together.

Science Being Scientific

I really love it when science does its thing. I just read an interesting blurb about a couple of math/science types basically calling into question some of the most widely accepted, and at the same time poorly understood (including by me) assumptions of modern cosmology.  First let me say, as is mentioned in the article, the research has yet to be peer reviewed, and while I may not be much good at higher math, I know that peer reviewing is really freaking important to the scientific process, but what I want to talk about is actually the process, and how good it really is, so hey, don't get mad if you're not ready to admit the big bang, black holes or other articles of your faith are not actually true.  You can hold on until someone else disputes their method or their data.
This is a beautiful thing, when science (and I hate to admit mathematics) actually brings an honest challenge to what "everybody knows."  I have heard none other than Stephen Hawking espouse the doctrine that the big bang theory, as a starting place for time and space, actually disproves the existence of God, because if there is a beginning then there cannot be an eternal being at the heart of creation.  I could have told him that theologians wrestled their way past that particular stumbling block 1700 years ago, but I suspect he would probably be frustrated by the lack of data and mathematical proofs used by the Council of Nicea.
Because even though Theology shares the ology with various scientific disciplines, our methods are rather more inductive and subjective than most scientists would find acceptable.  But what any honest philosophy or theology must do is submit to perpetual and rigorous re-examination and revision.  You cannot ever settle on something and name it absolute truth, as soon as you do that you become an idolater.
Science has its share of idolaters.  Watch science-ish television shows sometime.  They present for your viewing pleasure all sorts of fancy scientific conjecture about origins and possibilities, usually read by Morgan Freeman, or James Earl Jones, to give it that special gravitas.  And very rarely do they mention the fact that what they are selling is essentially a theory, and if if they do use the word theory, they do not define it properly.  When they say Quantum theory or the theory of Evolution, they do not present these sets of assumptions as what they are; one systematic set of beliefs that explain somewhat coherently the data that we currently have.
Theories are presented as facts, and most people do not have the scientific chops (read: didn't pay close enough attention in seventh grade) to understand actually what a theory is: a work in progress.  You start with a hypothesis, you design experiments, you gather data, you interpret data, then, if you'r lucky you can come up with something like a result, but a lot of the time the result is that your hypothesis was completely off, so it's back to the drawing board with a new hypothesis and some new tests, if your experiments actually confirm your hypothesis then you're in for some real trouble, because other scientists are going to have at your work and try to tear it apart, and repeat it, and if they can't repeat it that's going to count as a big fail.  If they agree with you, then more scientists are going to try to rip you and them apart if at all possible.  If most of you're reviewers decide that your methods, data and conclusions are valid: hooray you have consensus, but consensus still doesn't amount to anything like truth.  Eventually if you have enough stuff to cohere together, you might get a theory, or you might get absolute bumpkiss, there are no guarantees.  Science, actual science is very difficult and frustrating.
It's actually freaking amazing that we ever got to the moon, or have iPhones, mostly because inventors tend to bypass the actual science and just make stuff.  Technology moves fast, because people want stuff that does things for them.  Which is why I now have basically a supercomputer that I can carry around in my pocket.  You may have heard the fact that the average smartphone has something like 100 times the computing power of anything used by NASA during the Apollo missions.  That's right, we get a new iPhone every year, but going to the moon? Screw that, it's nothing but cold, dark and dusty.  Most of the scientific exploration of the universe is being done by mathematics, which absolutely sucks to this Star Trek fan, but it's the only way we're ever going to get a warp drive or something like that, by figuring out how the universe is put together.  If we don't actually understand how space and time work, we're never going to figure out how to get around.  So I'm glad someone finally managed to poke a hole in the dogma of singularities and things going bang, not because I am more ready than anyone else to accept a new reality, but because reality really doesn't care whether I accept it or not.
It's tempting sometimes to be frightened, intimidated or frustrated by the way that scientific theories and consensus seems to change.  Having your dogma punctured is never very much fun, but it is an absolutely vital step on the road to the truth.

Easy Offense

I have actually begun to feel sorry for the most powerful man in the world.  You would think that when you finally claw your way to the top of the political heap and become President of these United States of America, people would begin to show you a little bit of respect.  The other day though, our Commander in Chief was disembarking from Marine One, and he gives a casual salute to the Marine security detail, with a cup of coffee in his hand.  It's really a wave, a half a nod to a Marine in full dress uniform, which means he's mostly there for show (Marines don't dress like that when they have to fight).  I've seen this little act before, a lot of times the president doesn't even acknowledge the guard, why should he?  In case you're unaware of the structure of our executive branch, the President is actually the highest authority when it comes to the armed forces, that's why we call him Commander in Chief, yet he's also a civilian, which means he is not necessarily bound to the code of military protocol.  If, as a civilian, I see a soldier, I may choose to salute him out of respect or even just vague gratitude, but I am not bound to do it.  However, within the system, salutes mean something a bit more, you'd better do it when you're supposed to and do it right (which I'm not even sure what right is, but I've seen movies where people get all angry about a sloppy salute, so I'm going to assume that there is a right and wrong way to do it).  I get it, in the service, a salute is a sign of respect, but I've seen lots of them done hastily and not in perfect form, particularly when carrying something or when there's something distracting, like, I don't know, a big honking helicopter running in the background.
Obama gave a Marine a sloppy salute for sure, but he didn't have to do it at all.  Of course certain media outlets are treating the whole thing as though the President peed on the poor guard's shiny black boots.
In my lifetime, I've seen Presidents criticized for everything from refusing to eat broccoli to having a little in-office hanky panky with an intern, but I'm really starting to think that nothing Obama does is ever going to make certain people happy.  People have made him a villain, and they're willing to believe that almost anything he does is crap, and avoid giving the guy any credit whatsoever for his successes (I've heard the Affordable Care Act called Obamacare a lot less since it started actually working).
I'm guessing, by this point, he's probably super glad that we have a two term limit for the oval office.
But I can't wrap my head around something, or maybe I can, but I just don't want to admit that it's true.  Why is it that we seem to have something called a "scandal" involving Obama almost on a weekly basis?  I mean Clinton was being impeached for lying to Congress, that was an actual scandal in the proper sense.  Obama gets a howling crap-storm for wearing a tan suit and having a cup of coffee as he's getting off a helicopter.  Don't we have bigger and better things to get upset about?
Maybe it's just that we're almost 20 years down the road of polarization towards the extremes.
Maybe it's the fact that we're just that much more "tuned in" to everything that happens.
Maybe it's because Barack is not as approachable and charismatic as Billy.
Maybe it's because he's black.  That's the one that really turns my stomach, because I was so proud of our country when we put him in office, because I thought it was a real step in the right direction in terms of our long-standing problem with regard to racism.
Why doesn't he get the same sort of deference as Bill Clinton (also a Democrat, also during the era of the 24 hour news cycle)?  See, I think that Barack Obama is a pretty ordinary President, he's not a cult of personality like Kennedy, Reagan or Clinton, he's not sinister and ruthless like Nixon, he's not a Bush (nuff said).  He's sort of balanced and moderate in most regards, he's actually pretty darn boring as a President.  As a matter of fact, he's more like Jimmy Carter than anyone else, except Mitt Romney was no Ronald Reagan so B got a second term.  He has been frustrated by an obstructionist Congress, and mired by economic and military realities that he had nothing to do with creating, so why do some people want to blame him for every calamity, real or imagined, that comes down the pike?
I'm not saying everyone should love him, but cut the guy a little slack. He's got a hard job, and sometimes he has a cup of coffee in his saluting hand.

Complications

I heard an interview on BBC radio this morning with a Saudi journalist.  He was talking about ISIS and the current round of boomy-things that are happening in the Middle East.  It may be far too early to hope, but things seem a little bit different this time around.  First of all, you have the involvement of a lot of different people that are normally trying to kill each other (Iran and Saudi Arabia for instance) in what can only be called as a mutual self-interest in making ISIS no longer a thing.
The Saudi journalist said something like: ISIS is not just an anti Shia movement, or an anti western movement, they are against everything that is not them.  They are against moderate Islam, they are primarily defined by being against things.
A friend of mine in Plumville used to tell about the people he knew that he called, "aginners,"  For those of you who don't speak Western Pennsylvanian, that's people who are "agin" this, or "agin" that, "agin" is a form of the word against.  ISIS is apparently the ultimate group of "aginners."
Any rational person should quickly grasp that this is not a fruitful way of being a human being, but then again: Fox news is a thing, though to their credit they have not beheaded anyone yet.  The problem with defining yourself by what you are against only truly rises to the surface like the whitehead of an infected pimple, when you finally run into the rather difficult task of deciding what to do next, after you have purged the infidel from your presence, now what?
ISIS is now in full control of a swath of land that most of the world has officially decided to avoid.  We are having serious disagreements about whether or not we should even bomb it, and it's not an ethical discussion about whether bombing is right, it's a basic reality that it probably won't do any good, that centers our dilemma about whether to make the whole place go boom.
It's sort of like the black knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail, we have the military might to cut off ISIS' arms and legs and leave them nothing but a bloody stump, but the power of hatred would still leave them threatening to bite our kneecaps.  How does one deal with such an enemy?
I don't have an answer for that.
I am much more interested in the all too temporary shift in global politics that this has caused.  They are bad guys to absolutely everybody right now.  In the same way the Al Quaida was after 9-11.  The opinion of the world is against them, and that is more powerful than bombs at this particular moment.
This type of Islamic Fundamentalism needs a glorious and divinely sanctioned victory as its validation.  Up until now we have always given them some spider hole to escape into, prior to 9-11 they could flee to almost any nation in the world and find some refuge.  After 9-11, their choices were narrowed significantly, but they still had Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and virtually anywhere in the Middle East, except Israel.  If we had not gone all Conan the Barbarian on that whole segment of the globe, their hiding places may have diminished, but we didn't, we became another occupying army, largely validating the claims that the terrorists made against us, in the eyes of anyone who had their house blown up or their children end up as collateral damage.
We have a chance to take a different course this time around.  We have, for a moment, a unity of purpose shared by some very odd fellows indeed.  It will not last long though, and we need to remember that, and do everything we can not to be the goof that tips the balance.  I think Iran and the Saudis and even the Syrians, are invested on a lot of levels in making sure this ISIS thing doesn't continue, therefore we should do everything that we can to avoid reminding them that they really don't like the U.S. and Israel very much at all.  We need to know that these countries, while they may cooperate with out plan, are not going to suddenly become our best buds. When ISIS is gone there will still be a great animosity towards the west, and fertile ground for extremism to continue to grow.
This momentary pause does not mean that Sunni and Shia are finally going to resolve their differences, through the fight.  This momentary pause does not mean that Iran is going to give up altogether on trying to develop nuclear capability, or that the Saudis are going to stop trying to buy the world with oil.  It certainly does not mean that the Arab world is going to play nice with Israel.
But it does mean that we might not need to play the part of imperious imperial bad guys in this one.
Wouldn't that be nice?

Pushing Through the Fear

My son is arbitrary and stubborn.  I wonder where he got that from?
This morning we were having a "discussion" about whether he should join in a school robotics club that uses Lego EVO and teaches about computer programming and such.  Jack went to a week of STEM camp this summer where they built and programmed robots using the EVO system, and he loved it.  But, as I remember, he was also a bit tentative, because he didn't know what it was going to be like.  As the week went on, he loved it more and more, and by the time his team won several awards in the end of week competition and the instructor pulled me aside at the end of the week and made sure to tell me that each elementary school ran their own program during the school year, and that I ought to sign Jack up, I thought for sure he would want to do that!
As it turns out, not so much.  When the flyer came home on Monday, I said, "Hey Jack! It's the robotics club, wanna join?"
"No," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I don't want to get up earlier than I have to."
"Do they meet before school? It doesn't say anything about when they meet."
"They did last year."
"What time would you have to be there?"
"I don't know."
"Whaddya mean you don't know?"
"I don't know."
"What if it's not that early?"
"I still don't want to."
"Why not?"
"Because I've decided, I don't want to."
"That's not a reason, that's a description of what you want."
And on, and on, and on we go. I began to picture Melville's Bartleby The Scrivener, saying "I prefer not to," over and over again.
I actually threatened to sign him up for the debate team so he can learn what causation means.
At some point, I realized that he was just afraid of something.  He was afraid he was going to sign up for something that was "just too much."  And I realized that he is my son.  He's got introvert batteries, and right now a days worth of school is about all his batteries can manage.  The idea of spending more time there is absolutely repulsive.
I also realized that the reason why I am pushing him to do this is because I regret the fact that I wasn't pushed to do much of anything.  I had the same predilection as Jack, I wanted to get home, to my safe place and just re-charge.  All the stupid interpersonal relationships that school required, for better or worse, just wore me out.
But my school didn't have clubs for things that I loved as much as Jack loved that STEM program.  Or if it did, I willfully ignored them.  See the flyer for the robotics club was given to me by Caitlyn, Jack was hiding his, having already decided that he didn't "want" to participate.
It must be rather annoying to Jack that I understand him better than he understands himself, because when I called him on being afraid, I could see it cracked something open: his pride.
He's not afraid, he's almost eleven, he's not afraid of new things, he just doesn't want to do them.
I began to play nicer, I told him that there are lots of things that I don't "want" to do, some of them for valid reasons, but, in my experience, when my reasons are less than valid, and I end up doing the thing I was trying to wiggle out of, I usually am glad that I did.
"So," I insisted, "you need to have a good reason why you don't want to participate.  If you can't come up with one by the end of the day, you're signing up for robotics club."
As it turns out, he really has no idea what the club does, or when they meet, or what it would be like to be a part of it.  In other words, it's just baseless fear that holds him back.  It's just his introverted nature.
I know he's going to need a push to do this sort of thing.
I needed a push, but in most cases, my parents were too nice to give me that push.
I'm wondering though, where is the line between doing what is best for my son, and letting my own regrets run the show.  I don't want to push him to be what I want him to be, but in this case I have the feeling that he needs the push to be what he actually wants to be and to do something that he will really love.
Unless he comes home with a really good argument, he's going to get a push.
If he does come home with a really good argument, I'm signing him up for the debate club.

An Apology

There only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done."  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.  Those who seek find.  To those who knock it is opened.

-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

This is not an "I'm sorry."
This is another sort of apology, an apology as in an explanation of a belief or a practice, as in apologist: "a person who defends or supports something," according to the dictionary.  I was aware, as I delivered my sermon yesterday, that I was opening myself up to some questions and perhaps some accusations.
It has become, over the years I have spent in ministry, a great sorrow, to see many people I care for very much, interpret their own Christian faith simply as an exercise in "hell-avoidance."  In fact, I have come to suspect that many who are supposedly bound for glory, spend altogether too much time thinking about damnation.  A couple of years ago, Rob Bell wrote a book called Love Wins, where he questioned the foundations of our belief in Hell as an eternal punishment, and he was greeted with much weeping and gnashing of teeth from certain quarters.  Though to be honest, he didn't really say anything that other revered and staunchly orthodox thinkers had not already said.  Saying entirely novel things isn't really Bell's strong suit, he is good at mining up extant material and presenting it with fresh coat of paint.
Karl Barth, in all his voluminous Germanic theology, was of a similar mind, he just could not say it with anything resembling brevity.  Lewis, in his Anglican allegories, had a beautiful and imaginative vision of Heaven as the only true reality and Hell as nearly nothing.
The point that has been made, over the centuries by a diverse group of people who might, very broadly be called universalists, is that God is infinite and thus God's love is infinite, and that to say there is a sin that God cannot forgive and life that God cannot redeem is perhaps the only true blasphemy.
I understand why, in a world where persecution and suffering for the Gospel is living possibility, you might have a deep desire for God to judge those who are crushing you day by day.  I understand why some people might want to believe in a blissful future of salvation and peace and why they might have a strong need for some inverse to that promise for those that ain't among the number.
But I have a hard time believing it, primarily because of the Bible.
Which, I know, sounds weird to those of you who are probably already thinking I've gone all apostate.  See, I take the Bible quite seriously, even if I don't take it literally.  I read in the sacred texts about a God who rescues slaves and makes covenant promises with childless nomads, and loves people who are pretty awful and broken at times, and who warns and warns and warns, and even when "judgment" comes, never actually gives up and always keeps a remnant.
And lest you think I've given up on Jesus, I want you to know that I fully believe that Jesus is the way, and the truth and the life, and that I base that belief on the utter and confounding consistency of what he taught with the constant forbearance and forgiveness of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  I believe, as Jesus taught his disciples, that there are two distinct options available to all human beings: The Kingdom of Heaven, and the The World, but these are not merely teleological (how things will be) choices to be made they are ontological (how things are in their being and their now-ness), they have to do with the way that we live right here and now every bit as much as they do with how we're going to spend eternity.
I think that the Gospel should be Good News and a message of hope, and it bugs me that many people present it as yet another form of damnation to avoid.  I think it is we who do this, not God.  I think Jesus told us enough stories about unmerciful servants, and grumbling workers, and prodigals returning (not to mention bitter brothers), that we ought to be able to see how serious God is about the love and forgiveness thing.
Consider this hymn from Paul's letter to Philippi:

Therefore God also highly

exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and

under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

-Philippians 2: 9-12 (NRSV)

I used to think of that as sort of a promise that one day everyone was going to realize that I was right.  I used to think that one day, all of my churchgoing and sin-repenting and dying to self was going to be rewarded and, I suppose, I also believed that there were going to be some people who were in for a nasty surprise.

But I was supplying a lot of imagination to that vision.

What I see now when I read that is a scene where I, and everyone I ever loved, hated, served, or wronged, is going to be together and receiving God's grace and glory.

The church, or a life of faith, is not a way to earn or even find salvation, it's practice for an inevitable moment when God's reality replaces our illusions.

Not that it's going to matter a whole bunch, but I like to be prepared.

Fifteen

Dear Michele,

You know what this picture is, you know what song is playing on the boombox.  Normally we write each other nice little private letters, which is romantic in one way.  But I'm putting our fifteenth anniversary letter on my blog, because, like that kid up there, I want to make a public spectacle of how much I love you.

Fifteen years is long enough to learn that love is not about grand romantic gestures, but it's also long enough to learn something about when those gestures are good and right.

I know you like lists, so here's a list of things I've learned in the past fifteen years:

1. Life is better when you share.  Even for an introvert like me, it's better to have someone to talk and listen to.  It's good to have someone to put your arms around.  It's even good to have someone to force you to do things you don't want to do, but which you NEED to do.
2. Forgiveness is important.  Forgiving other people teaches you to forgive yourself, which is actually a lot harder than most people admit.  
3. Kids are a big hassle, but they're probably worth it.
4. Being with someone who is different from you, who can challenge you and who can see things from a different angle is a huge blessing.  Maybe God actually knew what he was doing when he made us with such variation.
5. It's better being lost, if you're not alone.  When I look at that wedding picture that you put up this morning, I think of all the things that those two kids didn't know.  All the people they are going to meet, and love, and say goodbye to, the really painful things they are going to have to go through, but I wouldn't tell them to do anything differently.

Life seems so busy now and things are probably only going to pick up speed.  It's scary to think that in another fifteen years the kids will be grown ups, we might even be grandparents.  So here's to this moment, and our life together, and all that is to come.

Love,

Mark

Vocation

Recently, as the Church is trying to adapt to a new way of being, there have been many prescriptions for what is necessary, and often these prescriptions involve the sacrifice of certain institutional elements.  Here is a compilation of various suggestions that I have heard arguments for:

1. Dissolution of large denominational structures. the rational being that we really don't need formal structures in order to stay connected.  This would mean that we no longer hold national assemblies and that local churches would be more or less on their own to connect with whatever other parts of the Body of Christ, they so chose.  This is attractive because it's rather hard to agree with each other in most cases and any institutional system is going to require a good amount of investment in staff and facilities, not to mention being ponderous and resistant to change.
2. Give up the buildings: It is a reality that having a big, fancy church building is expensive.  There is constant maintenance to be done, and often the "settled" feeling leads to stagnation that seems less likely, if you're out there in a rented space or better yet in public places.  How much more could we give if we didn't have to pay a mortgage?
3. Ditch the professional Clergy: the logic here is that people can have gifts to preach and teach but they don't necessarily have to be a salaried employee.  After the building, the minister or the priest is usually the biggest expense on the church's budget.  Getting rid of his or her would enable the church to be more focused on "what really matters" (that changes depending on the particular angle the proposal is taking).  It also would challenge the congregation to really take up the ball and run for themselves.

Admittedly, I have a bias, but all of these ideas are bad ideas.  In the short run, they may actually work, and there is certainly some hard evaluation that can be done in all three arenas.  In the long run though, the institution (no that's not a dirty word) of the church, would dissolve.  I hear the arguments that we're too tied down, that we've been pulled away from a vital life together by the mundane requirements of institutional maintenance, but we need institutions, and thus we should not abandon their maintenance so blithely.

I think a better idea is to be creative with what you maintain and how you maintain it.  I'm going to focus here on the role of clergy in the church, because it's near and dear to my heart, and my livelihood.

A long time ago, the Apostle Paul worked as a tent maker in order that he might not be too much of a financial burden to the churches he was trying to plant around Asia Minor.  However, he makes sure to let people know that he is an exception rather than a rule.  He makes it clear in 1 Corinthians 9 that his sort of service cannot and should not be considered normative in the life of the church.  When Jesus sent his disciples out to proclaim the Gospel, he expressly told them not to take provisions, and to rely on the hospitality of the people in the places where they were going.
This was not a crazy notion.  It was, and still is in fact, something that travelers have a right to expect in Semitic culture.  Paul, had to support himself more because he was entering a Greek world, where the laws of hospitality were different.  Jesus never seemed to have that problem, despite his reputation for being a bit of a troublemaker, he always seemed to be invited to the table, sometimes to the table of a tax collector and sometimes to the table of a prominent leader, but always there is a table to be found.
George MacDonald wrote a novel called Thomas Wingfold, Curate about an Anglican parson who was just slogging through a career as a Vicar.  Wingfold had been gifted with several volumes of pre-written sermons, by his uncle, who was a gifted preacher.  He was now fraudulently recycling those works as he made his living.  The premise of the book is that, even though his vocation as a preacher may be a little shaky, his vocation as a Priest is actually not.
The peculiar thing about being a member of the clergy is that, if God would actually allow you to  do anything else, you probably would.  Wingfold's travails illustrate that there is much more to being a Priest than simply being able to preach a decent sermon.  It's not easy, and it is made more difficult by the fact that most people have very little idea what you do.
In the interest of not trying to sound too defensive, let me say that the critique of clergy as expensive and over-functioning is actually valid, but let's be honest, at least in most cases it's not a super-high paying job, nor does it even come with the social status and perks that it used to.  Nowadays, most clergy are doing this job because they have to.  They don't have to because they can't make a living some other way, they have to because God will not let them do anything else in peace.  They have a vocation, a calling, that can be frightfully narrow.  Only once they make peace with that narrow gate, can they possibly experience the open-ness and grace that lies beyond
You want someone who is in touch with God's open-ness and grace to lead your congregation, you really do.  You don't want someone who has other priorities.  Indeed you don't want someone who is too busy to pray for you and with you, you don't want someone who is so bogged down with institutional "stuff" that they can't see what God is doing right in front of them.
I realize that I just described a highly idealized version of what pastoral ministry is actually like, but that's the point.  If churches want a pastor like that, they need to give them the space to follow that vocation.  You need to know that your pastor is prone to over-function, don't try to make it worse.  You need to understand that spiritual growth and leadership is not a nine to five occupation, and it's certainly not a part time gig.
Church is a living thing, and it requires tending.  It requires a place and a time, and a purpose, and those things don't come automatically or by accident.  Institutions are a way that we have of passing on what we do and what we know.  Through them we continue to evolve as a species.  Think of the things we know now that are a result of cumulative knowledge.  Would we be able to make an iPhone if we had not collected the technological know-how of thousands of years, so that we weren't starting from ground zero, learning to make fire?  Our collective spiritual life is like that too, it's just not as simple as an iPhone.
Let's not hurl ourselves off of a deconstructionist cliff just yet.

Messiahs and Suchlike

I was thinking about Cool Hand Luke this morning.  It's actually a pretty regular phenomenon for me; I've watched the movie quite a few times, and I would securely place it on my list of "movies I would want if I was ever stranded someplace with nothing but a TV, DVD player and electricity to run them," which is a list I made during some long car trip, when I was mainly trying to keep my brain awake and force it to keep driving.
But there is a reason why Luke stays with me beyond simple repetition, it's because, at it's core, Cool Hand Luke, is a movie about our relationship with God.  I'm not talking about one of those God Is Not Dead, or Heaven Is for Real, kinds of movies either.  I'm talking about a movie that asks some hard questions and gives absolutely no answers. It's a hard look at what it takes to be a messiah.
For those who have never seen the movie, though I somehow doubt you are a real person if you've never seen Cool Hand Luke, let me summarize.  Lucas Jackson, played by Paul Newman, is a man with some demons to say the least, he is arrested for cutting the heads off of parking meters in a drunken state, "small town, not much else to do," is his excuse.  He is sentenced to a term in a work camp prison and by various twists and turns, moves from being "new meat" to being what I will call the spiritual leader of the prisoners.  But it's not a hero story, it's not about redemption, as one might expect, it is about how the world handles a messiah, even an unwilling one.  Luke first runs afoul of Dragline, the shot caller of the prison played to absolute perfection by George Kennedy.  Dragline is a man who has learned the system of the prison and managed to use it to his advantage.  He is a massive man, who can match strength and, to some extent, wits with anyone in the camp.  Luke is a challenge to him, because he won't play the game.  The climax of the antagonism between Luke and Drag is a Sunday fight scene where they put on gloves and "settle differences" in the yard, while other inmates and guards alike place bets on who will win.
In your standard Hollywood movie, scrappy Luke would have managed to somehow bring down Dragline and take his place as the big dog in the yard, but he doesn't.  In fact, Dragline is simply too big and too strong and Luke takes a major beat down.  But he never gives up, even as his blows fall with absolutely no effect, and he can barely stand on his own.  The crowd quiets as Luke goes down again and again and still keeps getting up and coming back at Dragline.  Dragline has managed to destroy the much smaller man, while barely even breaking a sweat, but he cannot beat him.  A half unconscious and stumbling Luke takes one last swing and Dragline simply scoops him up over his shoulder and carries his limp form back towards the barracks, and the antagonism between the two has been transmuted into a friendship of sorts.  It is the first several crucifixion scenes in the movie.
And it's a theme that repeats: Luke is beaten, but not broken.
He eats fifty hard boiled eggs to win a bet, and he is stretched out, incapacitated and full to bursting on a bench table, arms out to the side as though he was nailed to the cross.
He is tortured by "the Bosses," put in "the box" made to do backbreaking and pointless labor for hours.  He is "disowned" by his dying mother.
Eventually it seems as though Luke is broken by the brutality and the power of the system, but he's not, at least not permanently, he makes one final escape, during which he is shot in a church by Boss Godfrey, and the crucifixion is complete.
During the movie Luke has several conversations with God, which reveal that he feels abandoned and alone, and that he desires nothing more than the faith to believe that God is actually there.  Luke can deal with the brutality of authority better than anyone else, whether it's Dragline's Yard rules or the carefully crafted cruelty of the bosses that is supposed to turn him into a compliant (read broken) man.
But God never gives him anything.  God is persistently silent.
Even as the other prisoners begin to look to Luke for leadership, and to need him to be their hope and their salvation, he feels ever more isolated.  Because the expectations placed on a Messiah were just too much for him to carry around on his obviously weighted shoulders.
"Stop feeding off of me!" he shouts at his bunkhouse mates.
They accept him as a sort of hero, or even antihero, as a man who can eat fifty eggs and escape the clutches of the Bosses, who can resist Dragline and defy the Cap'n, who doesn't fear "the man with no eyes." They love him as Cool Hand Luke, but they don't have the foggiest notion of who Lucas Jackson actually is.
In the end, it's only death that can set Luke free, free from his own limitations, free from the tyranny and the adulation, free from the constant struggle.
I wonder how much of this we can learn and use in our relationship with the Messiah.  I often wonder if we're like those other prisoners who were feeding off of Luke, when it comes to our understanding of Jesus.  Do we like him because he can eat fifty eggs (or feed five thousand)?  Do we love him because he stands up to the crooked and tyrannical authorities?  Do we love him because he can appear to be beaten and yet not be crushed?
You leave the movie with the understanding that nothing has really changed, except maybe Luke.  The prisoners will still be cowed and broken, the Bosses will still be brutal, and the world will still be full of suffering.  The only difference is that hope has now been given, a bigger idea has been planted.
I think the narrative of Scripture, with it's telling of a relationship between God and humanity, shows us that, while there was a time and place for God to be mediated though one person or one lineage, that time has come to an end through what Jesus did.
The Messiah, did not act like the messiah that people expected.  He didn't blow up the prison, but he gave the prisoners hope.  It is not reasonable for us to expect one person to be a superhero, even in the incarnation, Jesus realized that He was not enough, and that bigger things were going to need to happen and those bigger things were never going to happen as long as he was in the way.  No matter how many miracles he did, there would still be doubts, no matter how sound his doctrine there would still be those who disagreed.
The Messiah, therefore, had to go, and the Advocate had to come.  What Luke left the other prisoners was a vision, a vision that, even in their privation, life could be good and full of wonder, and that death, the ultimate tool of the brutal, was not perhaps a final defeat.  He still had that Luke smile, even as the Bosses condemned him to certain death.
When we make Jesus into a conquering hero, we are making a major mistake.  That's a role he will not play until the closing credits are about to roll.  What he did was give the other prisoners hope, and an assurance, to those of faith that death is certainly not the end of the story.  It's just a really good bluff, it looks like it's final, it looks like you have nothing, but "sometimes nothing is a real cool hand."

Defining Sin

Driving home from dinner last night, Michele asked me if I had ever defined sin in my sermon, because I talked quite a bit about it, but she wasn't sure I actually defined it.  I was actually pretty sure I had, and was about to demonstrate some sin, by getting angry, frustrated or whatever that she didn't get it. My oh, so clever sermon states that sin is rooted in thinking that we know better than God.  I still think it's a pretty good definition, going back to the aboriginal catastrophe as it is envisioned in Genesis, the "first" sin is precipitated by the desire to be like or be perhaps even better than God.
I worked out from there is a wonderful and elegant process, in which I considered whole rafts of different sorts of sin, which can all be reduced to violating or at least ignoring God's good purposes and/or despising the Love of God.  Sin is bad for you, it carries unhealthy consequences in physical, emotional and spiritual reality.  God, as Creator, knows how we work and thus has prescribed some rules and boundaries, "for our own good."
The rules are not always absolute, and to some extent, they are intended to be broken in certain cases and perhaps entirely abolished in other cases.  My definition of sin rests on what I would like to think is a non-legalistic foundation.  My assumption is that all of the rules that God actually makes, as compared to the ones that humans invent or extrapolate from God's Law, are entirely good.  Unfortunately they are also rather broad and in need of constant evaluation and interpretation, and thus come the lawyers, and the ever increasing complexity of case law.  Case in point: "Thou shall not kill," which in most systems is recognized to be an entirely untenable edict.  Let's face it, between criminals and other enemies of the common good, there's always some killing that's got to be done in order to preserve the security of the people.  So we parse the rule, "thou shall not kill, but actually that really means murder, so, you know, accidents, executions and stuff that happens in war really doesn't count."
But in actual experience, those sort of killing are also damaging to us, I mean to us as a society and also to the ones who do the killing.  You cannot kill another human being without consequence, even if it is "justified."  Soldiers often experience horrible guilt and post traumatic stress from the real experience of taking lives.  Even if they are entirely sure that their actions were in the defense of the common good, even if they are rigorously moral about doing their duty, there is still a price to be paid for doing something that God has made to "feel" wrong.
Michele's objection to my definition of sin was that she didn't agree with the premise that people who sin, "think they know better than God." My counter to that is that they don't actually plan to violate God's will, they just do because they put their own desires in front of what their conscience and the very fiber of their spirit tells them is wrong.  I feel that my definition holds whether you believe in God or not, and does not at all depend on your private moral landscape.
It is based on the simple observation of consequences, and the fact that almost everything we do has consequences, and left with only that information, we can indeed construct a basic idea of right and wrong.  "Right," or "righteous" things have good consequences, they increase our ability to enjoy life and to show the love of God to our communities and our world.  Sins have negative consequences, but are also masters of disguise, and experts at self-justification.  From the most pervasive and fundamental sins of jealousy and pride, to the final and "unforgivable" sin of not forgiving, we always have a ton of reasons whey we just can't repent and turn away.
And so, until we trust that God knows what is best for us, and learn to follow the path of radical forgiveness that Jesus has shown us, we are always, in some way, in rebellion against what God  has told us is best, and thus, implicitly, we are demonstrating our belief that we know better than God.
Indeed,it is not always that we consciously "think" we know better than God, but we demonstrate our derision for the goodness of creation whenever we sin, big, little or somewhere in between, and thus we are chained to our own guilt, because we never recognize that it's there.

A Hard Look

This is what following the lectionary does to you sometimes.  On the thirteenth anniversary of 9-11, I had to write a sermon about forgiveness.  Specifically, I had to deal with the parable that Jesus tells about the unmerciful servant, and the injunction that if we don't forgive others then God is rather likely to hold that against us.
I thought about where the journey of vengeance has taken us over the past dozen plus years, and I came to the rather un-shocking realization that our quest for vengeance has really only made matters worse.  We haven't really solved any problems long term.  We took out Osama and Saddam, and now we have ISIS and only the extremely naive believe that the Taliban in actually defeated.  The middle east is a mess and most of the world, including our some of our "allies" pretty much blame us for it.
Well played Al-Qaida, well played.
But we didn't have to take the bait you know.  We could have thought things through a little longer, we could have been a bit more, I don't know, diplomatic, in our response.  If we had just exercised forbearance, not even honest to goodness forgiveness, we could have held on to something very important, much more important than the spurious "victories" we have won in the "war on terror."
In the wake of 9-11, we had the sympathy and good will of the world.  For those brief moments that we mourned, the majority of people, Muslim people especially, I seem to remember, mourned with us.  We could have made meaningful progress on so many fronts, we had credibility and gravitas, and we could have become a voice of reason, but we didn't, and the world has paid the price.
There's this scene in A River Runs Through It, where the two brothers are fighting, and one of them accidentally knocks their mother over, and they both realize that they were being stupid.  We had a chance to be the mother, and to use our pain to heal, and speak a word of sense into a crazy, violent world, but we didn't.  We didn't live up to our self proclaimed status of being a Christian Nation, we became a vengeful nation, we went on the warpath, we became the savage, violent, imperialist power that our attackers claimed we would be.  We waded into several quagmires, just like they wanted. We have made a generation of new martyrs to feed the flames of extreme fundamentalism, just like they wanted.
The really peculiar thing about all this, is we knew that's what they wanted.  They stated their goals, in writing and on video, they told us exactly what they expected us to do, and we freaking did it.
It was absolute arrogance.
It was unrepentant violence.
It was a pervasive taint of greed.
And it was a total lack of forethought.
In short, it was the worst elements of Christendom that responded to the attack by the worst elements of Islam, while in the background, the best elements of both were in the background saying, "Hey, um guys, can you stop punching each other for just a second, we've got another idea."
I'm not sure how it felt to the moderates on the Muslim side, but on the Jesus side it felt like getting told to shut up and get out of the way.  All of that peace, love and forgiveness is a nice idea, but now Jesus wants us to bomb the living snot out of some brown people, because "Hoorah."
I have to think, that whatever else Jesus might think of the USA, he would have to question whether we actually understand what we're praying when we say, "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us."
I think that if we had been a the Christian Nation we sometimes claim to be we could have actually created a world where things like 9-11 never happen again.  Instead, by being violent and vengeful, we have created a world where they're almost inevitable.  All of our efforts to enforce our way to a safer world, just seem to have made the world a more hostile place, not to mention hamstringing our economy with the massive cost of war, and allowing fear to polarize and paralyze our whole political system.
I know forgiving seems like a crazy idea, but why don't we try it sometime?

Schadenfreude

Some celebrity pastor-types have stepped in it recently.  First you have Mark Driscoll, pastor of the Mars Hill Churches out in Washington state.  Driscoll has been criticized for abuse of power, for defying the accountability measures of his community, and for, as far as I can tell, being a big jerk.  I'm not going to even speculate as to whether some of the misogyny and totalitarian methods of church governance are even 100% true, but what I do know about Driscoll is that he seems angry about something.  Granted my emotional radar is not always foolproof, but I'm pretty good at spotting angry men, mainly because I know the signs from firsthand experience.  Driscoll seems angry.  Anger is a second level emotion founded on fear.  Fear explains a lot of what he is accused of doing and being, from his "complementarian" approach to gender roles, which includes women being submissive, to his alleged abusive treatment of colleagues, to his apparent need to control everything and everyone around him.  He seems deeply fearful of something, and he is trying to hide it under a blustery and aggressive persona.  It has run him on to the rocks; as fear, especially when you express it through anger, tends to do.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Victoria and Joel Osteen, who have become exceedingly rich and famous by telling people that God wants them to be happy and therefore, faith means that you will get every thing you want and "live your best life now."  There was a video of Victoria saying as much that was making the rounds this week, and a whole bunch of responses that seemed rather shocked that she would be so bald-faced in espousing the exact theology that all prosperity Gospel teachers essentially present.  I wonder why people didn't notice this "alarming" theology sooner.  It's not exactly a secret.  I kind of wonder if the whole thing would be a "scandal" if it had come out of Joel's mouth instead of his Barbie Doll looking wife.  The community that responds to the prosperity Gospel tends to have the same "traditional" ideas about men and women as the evangelical stream that Driscoll swims in.
There's this vision of a divinely mandated scenario: man, woman, being fruitful and multiplying, as God said in Genesis that it should be.  Following the plan leads to happiness and success and salvation, straying from the plan leads to damnation.  It is filled with "literal" interpretation of the Bible that carefully picks and chooses which verses (sometimes only handful) that it actually wants to take literally.  It tends to talk a lot about God as some sort of magic genie, sometimes benevolent, sometimes wrathful, that must be constantly placated with worship and rule following if you want to get what you want, whether it be eternal life or a Mercedes.
It has room for sinners, but only sinners who are willing to repent and fall into line.  It has trouble with people whose identity has been named sinful, such as homosexuals, and to a rather disturbing extent, women.
To many of us in the boring old world of Mainline Christianity, the theological foundations of both Prosperity teaching and what I like to call 'Merican Evangelicalism are deeply flawed.  But then again most of us are struggling to stay afloat with our little 100-300 member churches, while the likes of Osteen and Driscoll are "ministering" to tens of thousands of people every week.  They are "Megachurch" we are just plain old church, small, slow, sometimes a little cranky, and definitely not the "next big thing."
I must confess therefore, that I feel at least a little perverse pleasure in their downfall.  I am amused when the emperor has no clothes.  I felt vindicated when Driscoll was forced to step down, why, I don't rightly know.  It's kind of like hearing that one of those "fat cats" who got rich quick had now fallen on hard times.  The feeling is not an admirable, or Christ-like emotion.
I know I should not take pleasure in the pain of another part of the Body of Christ, which is really the damnable thing about all this: I have to somehow find the grace to call Driscoll and Osteen brothers.  And - well - I just don't want to.  I don't want them to represent Jesus to the world, I don't want to be associated with their muddle-headed and angry theologies, I don't want people thinking I'm with them.  Most of all I don't want to love them enough to forgive them for their faults.
But the fact that I don't want to leads me to the rather unpleasant, yet also inescapable reality that I need to do just that.
This Christian stuff can be really hard.

Now, Apparently, Is the Time for Your Tears

It's been like a car accident in slow motion, but the other shoe finally dropped.  TMZ finally got their hands on the other half of the security video of the Ray Rice elevator incident.  For those of you who have been willfully ignoring the whole scenario, here's what happened:
1. Baltimore Raven's running back Ray Rice and his then fiance got into an argument in an Atlantic City Casino sometime last winter, they boarded an elevator in the midst of said argument.  Moments later Mr. Rice exited the elevator by dragging his now unconscious girlfriend into the lobby.
People had several imaginary narratives about what transpired in that elevator, and as long as we didn't really know we were inclined to give the, rich, famous and talented Mr. Rice the benefit of the the doubt, at least a little.
2. The public response to seeing the video from outside the elevator, them getting on and dragging/being dragged off, was mixed to say the least.  The benefit of the doubt people believed some sort of version of: "we were having an argument, things got heated, pushy-shovey stuff happened, bam she hit her head, terrible accident really, so sorry."  This was essentially supported by the young woman in question, and therefore, everyone, from the press to the NFL thought some anger management classes and a slap on the wrist would do Mr. Rice just fine.
3. Then the people who actually know something about domestic violence began to call shenanigans on the whole scene.  When the Commissioner of the NFL gave Rice a two game suspension and a stern talking to, based on his contrition and the corroboration of his now wife, social workers everywhere collectively gnashed their teeth, because anyone familiar with the peculiar beast that is domestic violence, knew in an instant that the narrative Goodell, the NFL and ESPN were swallowing hook, line and sinker was total BS.
4. The NFL, in the person of Mr. Goodell, realized that they had a public relations nightmare on their hands, because their players seem to find themselves up a domestic battery charge crick without a paddle about every other week, and mostly the League responds with very light penalties indeed.  Most of the time there is plausible doubt, we know things get intense in intimate relationships and these men are conditioned, from the time they're about 12 or so, to harness violence and aggression to perform amazing athletic feats.  It's reasonable to expect that a man like Ray Rice who makes a living by fighting off people who are trying to tackle him, might give a stiff arm to his 120 lb girlfriend in a heated moment, with some unexpected results.  But still, we can't be seen as too lenient on this sort of thing, so more stringent rules were put in place.

Phew, crisis averted right?

Well, not so much.  The other half of the video shows domestic violence for exactly what it is: brutality.  You see Rice and his girl arguing, you don't know over what.  He is hulking and obviously angry, she is also upset about something.  They get on the elevator and you cut to the inside camera, she takes one step towards him and he unloads on her face and she goes down like a sack of bricks.  This is shocking to people who have no firsthand experience with violence, they expect some dramatic scene, some lead up, a few volleys of shoving, perhaps a few well placed slaps from the feisty little lady.  What it was was just a 235 pound athlete, who is absolutely menacing physically, punching a woman in the face, suddenly, with no prelude or warning, just flat out knocking her senseless.  What did you think it was going to look like?
That's a real question, what do you think domestic violence looks like?
If this wasn't such a deadly serious thing, the reaction from the talking heads would be laughable.  Now there's all sorts of highly affected outrage, now it's serious, now he deserves to be terminated and kicked out of the league, now he's a monster.
But I can't help but think we're all a bit monstrous in taking this long to understand that we should be outraged and appalled by the whole situation.
Why does it take a video?
Why do we have to see him throw the punch, and her go down like that to believe that there is no excuse?
Why do we still continue to believe the victims when they tell us that it's okay, that he didn't mean it, that he'll never do it again, that they probably deserved it?
We shouldn't need video to prove that domestic violence is a big problem.
The bruises on her face and arms should be enough.
The cowed posture and averted eyes should tell us all we need to know.
The thin excuses should no longer deflect an attempt at justice.
She shouldn't have to be the perfect person for the law to protect her from getting knocked out on an elevator, or anywhere else.
Violence against women and girls is a global epidemic, but here we have a highly visible example of a sort that occurs under most of our noses: physical abuse by a spouse or significant other.  We can do better than this people.  Let's stop sticking our heads in the sand and making excuses.  Let's start teaching our sons, whether they play running back or whether they play the piccolo, it's not okay to hit people (not just women, anyone).  We need to deal with our cultural assumption that violence is the solution to everything and that it's essentially unavoidable and therefore just an expected fact of life.
It is not unavoidable, and it should never be considered inevitable.
Several of the ESPN talking heads said yesterday afternoon, "just imagine that was your daughter," as they worked up a good self-righteous froth.  My question is then, why was it not their daughter when she was being dragged unconscious from that elevator?  Why did they need to see fist hit face for their empathy to be engaged?  Why were they not outraged that that happened to someone else's little girl?
I've said this a lot lately, but we really need to figure out what empathy is, and then try as hard as we can to have it.

That's Just Kind of Who I Am

When I turned 40 a little over a month ago, one of my friends from high school showed up.  Yesterday, I went to his 40th celebration, and I noticed something, in both cases, we were the only people from our teenage years at one another's 40th birthday party.  Jeff and I have been friends a long time, but we don't really see each other that much.  Twice in a little over a month is pretty much a record since graduation.  We sort of keep up on facebook and play words with friends and that is, I think, in the postmodern world, what qualifies as a friendship.  We live a little bit over two hours apart, and life is just, well... life.  We've both got wives, kids and jobs that keep us more or less occupied.  We're not high school kids who live around the block from one another any more, and since my parents moved away from the town I grew up in, I don't even have "old home" week around Christmas or Thanksgiving, my list of long-time friends is pretty small.
On the way home last night, I was thinking about how nice (and also peculiar) it was to spend time with a person you have known for such a long time, but with whom your relationship moves in very short bursts: a dinner here, a party there.  I also wondered a little why almost all of my non-church friendships seem to be of that character.
There's this scene in a documentary about The Pixies, called Loud, Quiet, Loud, where the filmmakers are chronicling the career of one of the seminal alternative bands of my high school years.  The band broke up a some point in the 1990's amid rumors that they pretty much hated each other.  The filmmaker questioned the lead singer, Black Francis or Frank Black, as he generally calls himself these days, about the reasons for the split and why, after so long, they are attempting a bit of a reunion.  Black says that he hasn't talked to any of the other Pixies for ten years, the interviewer asks if there is a reason, do they dislike each other?  Was there a conflict? Is there bad blood?
"No," Black said, "That's just kind of who we are."
When I saw that a couple of years ago, I thought, "Yes, that is kind of who we are."
I know lots of people who take a more proactive approach to friendship, and I admire that, and I suspect it's probably a good idea, but it's also not really who I am.  I'll drive two hours to a birthday party, just like he did to come to mine, but we don't usually just call each other up to catch up on stuff.  I really don't like talking on the phone, and I can't exactly tell you why, but I'm pretty sure my aversion to that form of communication is at the heart of a lot of my social oddities.
The thing is, I really like getting together with people I knew a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it's kind of like time travel, getting in touch with the person I used to be.  A couple years back, I officiated at the wedding of one of my college room-mates, again, a sort of "check in" kind of moment.   We hadn't really seen much of one another for 15 years or so, and then we connected again, spent some time together, planned a wedding, spent a very significant moment together and then blam, I move away from Pittsburgh and it's back to liking each other's stuff on facebook.
This may sound like I'm complaining to those of you who have more conventional friendships, but I'm not, I'm really just trying to describe the way things are, without judging it, in the same sort of way Frank Black said, "That's just kind of who we are."  I admire that clarity.
Maybe it's a generational thing, maybe it's just me, but I feel entirely okay with friendships being like that.  In some ways it makes things more interesting, because I change so much in some ways from one incident to the next, but in other ways I can access stories and jokes, which I may have otherwise totally forgotten.  These friendships also provide an interesting perspective on life in general, Jeff and I are both responsible Dad-types at this particular moment, but I can tell when we talk to each other we still have this awareness that we used to drive around too fast listening to Led Zeppelin and try to think of ways to make things go boom.  We may have been, at one point, a couple of really stupid teenagers who did a bunch of really stupid stuff, and it's kind of of nice to see someone who reminds you of that, it reminds you that you are on a journey, and that you have changed quite a bit.
It also, hopefully, helps you to accept, and perhaps even forgive, the person you used to be.
Just please, don't anyone tell our kids about the stuff we used to do.

Guns N' Roses

So, first read this.  Because it says a lot that I was going to say anyway.  Try to suppress the urge to dismiss it because it talks about a higher consciousness, just trust me that Rohr is a solid citizen, a Franciscan priest, firmly rooted in the deep soil of the Christian tradition and not some new-age fruit loop.  This idea of a non-dual consciousness is really important.  It's important because I think it's our way forward as followers of Jesus Christ, and it may even be the only way that our species avoids killing each other off through either mass conflagration or slow degradation.
If that sounds too grandiose, think about it this way, right now we are Guns N' Roses circa 1991.  Guns N' Roses, for those of you who are not really into the Rock N' Roll thing, were probably the epitome of heavy metal.  They were loud, they scared your parents, they had big hair and big egos.  They were also really skilled musicians and so you had this perfect blend of attitude and actual talent.  They were huge, they could do anything they wanted, and they had the world on a string.  Axl Rose, the front man/lead singer had quite a reputation for being a full-bore jerk, but the man had vocal range, and despite being a pretty ugly guy, managed to date and marry supermodels, for teenage boys who were scared to talk to actual girls, Axl was an icon.
Then this scruffy looking kid from Seattle, who looked like absolute trash, with greasy hair, dirty, baggy clothes and reportedly a fairly good case of BO, not to mention a bit of a drug habit and a bad stomach, showed up on the record charts.  His vocal range was nowhere near what Axl could boast, in fact, if this kid could actually hit a clean note in any register it would be surprising.  His name was Kurt Cobain, and his band was called Nirvana, they were a three person (later adding a fourth because Kurt's guitar skills needed a little boost) band with a stripped down style that came to be called grunge.  Punk Rocker Henry Rollins has compared what Cobain did to Hair Metal to "bringing down a rhinoceros with a BB gun."
What it actually was, was a paradigm shift.  People stopped being quite so impressed with the virtuoso talents and began wanting something real.  If you were 16 when you first heard Nirvana, and you were feeling a little out of place and left out of the great big world, like I was, you heard this growly, angry music as though it was the voice of God, telling you that you weren't alone.  Even though I liked Guns N' Roses, I heard something in the new paradigm that seemed even better, a little more real.
We are, as a church and as a society, dealing with a paradigm shift that requires us to challenge some of our assumptions.  Rohr describes it as a shift from dualistic thinking to non-dual consciousness.  Dualistic consciousness sees everything in terms of black and white, right and wrong, insider and outsider.  You can pick a side: Democrat or Republican, Protestant or Catholic, Star Wars or Star Trek, but you must be convinced that your side is the right one, and you have to develop a certain antagonism towards the "other."  Non-dual thinking, appreciates aspects of both sides and includes some of the in-between stuff that gets left out.  I think it's also important to note that "evolution" to non-dual thinking does not involve casting judgment upon the earlier phases of consciousness, it is not interesting in saying, "Now we finally have the truth," because if it does that then it is just dualism in another guise.
I still like Guns N' Roses when they come on the radio, I still appreciate the virtuosity and raw power of their music, but I also know that Nirvana has forever altered the way I listen to music.  After Nirvana, I was not as satisfied with poppy lyrics about "eyes of the bluest skies," I wanted a little more authenticity.  At first I just jumped to another side of the dualism, which often feels like a true evolution, but is not so much.
This is the challenge, to incorporate and appreciate the consciousness you have grown out of (it's also what makes you sound like a hypocrite or a milquetoast to dualists).  It's only fairly recently, after a great deal of soul-searching and struggle, that I feel like I am approaching a non-dual consciousness with any sort of regularity.  I am much more comfortable with ambiguity, and more inclined to love people for who they are, not for who I want them to be.
Let me fall back on the music analogy: I still prefer music with substance, I still want Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, when it comes to my personal preference, but I also enjoy watching my kids groove along to Pharrell.  Ten years ago "Happy" would have nauseated me, and I probably would have had a very negative reaction to Imagine Dragons or Lorde, but now I kind of like them, because I'm no longer requiring them to be something they're not.  I'm learning to appreciate things for what they are.  That goes for music and people.
It also goes for ideas.  I'm trying to take a non-dual approach to faith and the life of the church as well.  It doesn't mean I somehow have all the answers, but I am no longer as angry about the questions for sure.

Know Your Enemy (and then pray for them)

It occurs to me that we have a chance for a big do-over.  That is, if we have learned anything from the past decade of warring against terrorists, we have a chance to realize that our first and most likely response is actually playing the game exactly the way Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda ilk want us to play it.   With the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq and with unrest in Egypt and Libya, not to mention Hamas and Israel, oh yeah and don't forget Afghanistan, we're all up in some of the most nerve-wracking sorts of conflicts you could possibly imagine.
Have you ever played that boardwalk game whack-a-mole?  Plastic, actually I think they're gopher heads despite the fact that it's called whack-a-mole, pop up out of different holes and you use this large padded mallet to whack them.  The more you whack the more points you score, but they keep moving faster and coming up randomly until you just can't get them all, and you lose.  Did you ever think that maybe our current antagonists are at least as smart as the people who can't even tell a mole from a gopher?
Look, it's pretty obvious to everyone that we're the big kid on the block at the moment.  Our terrorist buddies know this, they know that when they kick us in the shins by blowing up a train, a plane or a bunch of automobiles, or when they behead journalists and humanitarian workers, that they are going to make us really, really mad.  The same way that Hamas knows that lobbing mortars into Israel is going to provoke a response.  They do it to get a response, they know they're not going to scare us, they know they're not going to break our will, they want us to come after them.  They want the drones and the cruise missiles to blow up women and children, because that will create more people who think we're evil and it will draw us, into a conflict that we can't win because we're fighting an enemy who doesn't mind retreat, or defeat, or even the suffering of their own people.
Yes, it's evil, yes, it's a trap, and no, we haven't figured it out yet, so they're going to keep trying it.
You know the old saying, "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me?"  I'm not sure how many times past twice we are yet, but the shame is increasingly on us for using hand grenades to kill a spider in the nursery.  I am not the only person who has noticed that our enemy doesn't seem to mind our almost comical over-reactions to anything and everything terrorist.  In 2001 they flew planes into buildings, but that was a lot more work than just kidnapping some journalists and hacking off their heads, why would they go the extra mile if they can get the same result?
The result they want is for the US and the Western powers to burn themselves out economically and psychically, dare I say, spiritually, because that's what protracted fear and war does to you, it kills your soul.
Don't get me wrong, I've got a good case of the mads for those masked men who are beheading journalists and killing children and raping women and persecuting Iraqi Christians and Shia Muslims alike, they are evil, and they are acting in the delusion that they are serving God, which makes them the worst kind of evil.  But I remember the feeling that I had when Seal Team 6 finally got Osama Bin Laden, I was all like, "Yes, finally!"  And then I looked at where that whole adventure had taken us, and I felt, well, less than triumphant.
Did I feel sorry for Bin Laden?
Nope, not even a little, but I suspect that he didn't feel sorry for himself either, he got what he wanted, and what was coming to him.
Actually, I felt sorry for myself, because I had allowed myself to hate him so much, which was especially galling because that's exactly what he wanted.  The Jihadists want to expose the "hypocrisy" of the west, they want to expose "Christian" nations as bullies and oppressors.  They are fighting a different war than we are, thus it is entirely possible for them to be winning their war, even though we are capable of crushing them militarily wherever and whenever we finally get angry enough to do so.
Their plan is to cause the collapse of American and European military and economic hegemony, and then, they will be able to unite the world under an Islamic regime.  The part of the plan where they seize power is flawed, because over 90 percent of the Muslim world hates them as much if not more than we do at the moment, but the attack phase of the plan is going so well, they figure they can bend it back any time, you know, the will of Allah and all.
That doesn't mean that our plan of action in response to them is a good one.  It's pretty simple, and it's a lesson that we teach our kids all the time: to respond to a bully with violence is to sink to their level.  There is a balance in the use of force (just like in The Force, sorry couldn't resist), you have the right to stand up for yourself, but consider carefully the means by which you do so.  You might "win" the fight, but you have damaged yourself in doing so.
So what do we do?
Here's an idea: let's not be exactly the oppressors that they claim we are.  Let's rescue and protect civilians, let's be vocal and supportive of efforts to bring those who commit atrocities to justice, but let's not invade, let's not do the "shock and awe" thing again, because it didn't shock or awe anyone, it just made the resolve of those who hate us even stronger and made them even harder to find.  There's always somewhere to run and our enemy in this case has no honor, and very little pride of the sort that they are using against us.
Let's try something different, because the last time around on this merry-go-round got us absolutely nowhere.  You know what insanity is right?  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

How You Say It

Both of us say there are laws to obey,

But frankly, I don't like your tone.

-Leonard Cohen, Different Sides

Here's an actual honest to goodness case of an ironic situation: at a time when we have access to staggering amounts of information via the interweb (which my daughter insists that I call the internet, and so I continue to say interweb, just to bug her), we choose to use that access mostly to reinforce on our own personal echo chambers (and look at kittens and puppies).

A few posts came across my twitter feed this morning that mentioned that President Jimmy Carter was going to be speaking at a gathering of the Islamic Society of North America in Detroit.  Some of them were just, "Hey, Jimmy Carter is going to talk to a bunch of Muslims in Detroit, ain't that neat?" sort of posts.  Others were, "OH MY SWEET RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!  TRAITOROUS FORMER PRESIDENT IS SAYING HAMAS IS GOOD PEOPLE!" sorts of posts.

In actuality, Carter is going to talk to a bunch of American people, who happen to be Muslims, about a Carter center initiative and the subject of his latest book: A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power, which I have sitting on the coffee table in my office right now.  Carter is going to talk to the Islamic Americans (and I suspect probably Canadians as well, but don't let that spoil the stew), about women's rights.  Carter is unapologetic in announcing that, of the three major Abrahamic faiths, Islam has the furthest road to travel with regards to the treatment of women.  Most of us know the headlines: honor killings, slavery, child brides, etc.  But the fact of the matter is it's actually much worse than that.  Women and children are the collateral damage in the great conflicts of the world, all of which are started and waged by male power structures.  President Carter is using his status as a former world leader, and as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and as a generally well respected diplomat and do-gooder to advance the cause of equality and security for the women of the world.

I think this world needs a lot more Jimmy Carters.

Not everyone agrees, which is okay, you don't have to agree with me, but let's admit that objective truth takes a brutal beating in this world of inter-news.  Vetting appears to be a thing of the past, people only go to the first news source that doesn't appear to be selling Cialis or openly have a swastika anywhere on the header.  We distrust the "big" media, you know the ones with actual journalists, because we don't feel like they reinforce our opinions quite vehemently enough (except Fox News, they totally get people).

And then you have the blogs, like this one, where anyone who has the time and inclination can sit down and write stuff.  I generally strive for some level of circumspection and humility, understanding that I have at least as many assumptions and blind spots as Bill O'Reilly, mine are just different from his.

In order for there to be dialogue different people must first make this really crucial discovery: there are valid opinions that may be significantly different from mine.   I don't mean saying: "Everyone is entitled to their opinion," that's not good enough.  You have to admit, difficult though it may be, that those other opinions may in fact contain as much, if not more truth than yours.  Then, and only then, are you ready to actually listen and discuss.

Unfortunately, I don't see that happening very much in this great big world.

But until it does happen, we are going to continue to have problems.

To me, the fact that the Islamic Society of North America has invited Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, to come and talk to them about women's rights, is a really, really good thing.  It shows an openness to learning about a much bigger issue in global Islam, than even extremism and terrorism: the oppression of half (maybe over half) of the world's Muslim people.

I have read Carter's book, he has found the things that need to be said, and says them in a way that is sensitive enough that the Islamic people can hear it.  That is valuable, that is kingdom of heaven work, and it is an eminent representation of American Christianity, it is the best of what we can be.  Our reactionary fear, well that's another story.