Counter to What?

It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and the oppressed - this, despite the Gospel.

-Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

I don't think I have ever read three words in the English language that chill my soul quite like, "despite the Gospel."  It not only means that we have gone wrong through a sort of sin-blindness, but rather that we have willfully missed the point of Jesus and his teachings.  And I cannot come close to refuting Thurman when he says, "It cannot be denied."  Indeed I think trying to deny it is a very complex and certainly dangerous sort of spiritual/intellectual gymnastic routine.

Yet, I hear people try, rather than confess to the sins of empire, rather than admit that the people who call Jesus their Lord, have often been much more buddy-buddy with Caesar.  I have heard it said that the ones who climbed into bed with power and violence were not "true" Christians.  I have heard the excuse that they were just living according to the moral values appropriate to their time. I have even perhaps nibbled at these arguments and felt the warm embrace of their poison, as it soothed my middle class, white soul.  But for the past week or so, I have this staring at me:

And he is looking at me and telling me that a lot of my assumptions about stuff are really wrong.  As the Supreme Court made their decisions and dissents about the ACA and about marriage equality, black churches were burning in the south, and there is Thurman reminding me that these things are all connected, and how the church responds is really important.

I have heard people say that the church needs to be counter-cultural for years now.  I have heard people interpret the ways in which Jesus challenged the dominant and powerful people of his time.  But these days the most common usage of the "counter-cultural" argument is to encourage Christians to "stand up" on moral ground to the changing world around us.  This is all good and fine if it means we stand up for equality and dignity for people who are oppressed, if we work to see that human beings are not objectified, labeled as somehow inferior and denied their full participation in society.  It is all good and fine if we're working to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the homeless.  It is all good and fine if we rail against the ways that the social and economic systems of our day stack the decks against minorities and those who are born poor.  It is all good and fine if we say that we are against a culture built on violence and greed and fear.

But what if the culture changes for the better?

Do I need to remind you (again) of MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he strongly critiques the leaders of the Christian church for sitting on the sidelines of the civil rights fight?

Do I need to tell you the story of Thurman's Grandmother, born a slave, who used to hear white preachers tell her all about Paul's injunction for slaves to obey their masters?  (She eventually decided she didn't need to read or hear about that part of the Bible any more, and thankfully didn't reject the whole thing).

Yes, the church is supposed to be counter-cultural, but that is not synonymous with obstinate and contrarian.  I think that sometimes the world can have a prophetic pull on us as well as the other way around.  Wasn't it some while visiting some Gentiles that Peter had that dream about the sheet (Acts 10)? Didn't God and the changing world conspire to convince a bunch of Jewish followers of Jesus to accept and even eat with people who they had previously considered enemies, and even unclean?  Didn't the very voice of God say, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane?"

How do you read these stories church?

Want to be counter-cultural?  Try welcoming "the least of these," try loving unconditionally, try refusing the vicious cycle of power and violence, try laying down your swords and dropping your defenses, let your enemies in and love them.  Try actually forgiving, as you have been forgiven.

When we get done with that part, then we can talk morality.

Persecution Complex

"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness."

-2 Corinthians 12: 9

The above Bible verse is an answer to prayer.  In context it is an answer to the Apostle Paul, when he complains about the "thorn" that was given to him in his flesh, and about the fact that other people seemed to have much cooler visions of heaven than he did.  In other words, when Paul starts throwing himself a pity party, God says, "knock it off!"

So... so... so...

I guess same gender marriage is now a thing across our great nation.

I suspect you probably know what I think about this.  I'm not gloating.  I don't want to rub it in the faces of those who disagree with actions of either SCOTUS or with the Presbyterian Church (USA), which sort of fought this dragon a few months ahead of time.  I would like to say that some of the reactions to last week are causing me pastoral concern. 

Let me be as frank as I possibly can: losing cultural hegemony and privilege is not tantamount to persecution.  I know, it feels uncomfortable, to be shown that the "world" no longer agrees with your belief system and values, but let's be honest, if you follow Jesus, the world never agreed with you, or even really liked you.

Right now the artist formerly known as the Religious Right in the "glory days" of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush is sort of like a clique of once popular folks who bullied and intimidated their way around the whole school.  But a little queer kid stood up and punched them in the nose and now they're not the big man on campus any more.  The faculty (at least 5 out of 9) are supporting the little guy and saying that the big clique can't tell them what to do any more.  Yes, they still have a lot of people on their side, yes they once truly did set the trends and the tone of the entire body, but they don't have that right any more.

However, that does not make them persecuted.

Furthermore, I don't think it means that our culture has suddenly become a godless moral morass waiting suck us into an apocalypse. If God didn't strike us down for 400 years of slavery, for genocide of the Native population, for sitting on our hands while the Nazis stormed through Europe, for dropping not one, but two atomic bombs on Japan, for keeping the world locked in fear of a nuclear holocaust for over 50 years, for still failing to deal with the systemic oppression of people of color, not to mention the rather lackluster way we have shown our Christian "love" to LGBTQ people.  I don't think this decision is going to tip the scales.

I don't want to see persecution, I've talked to people from parts of the world where it actually happens.  I know that Christians around the world are facing the rather grim reality of dying for their faith, and because I find these stories so harrowing, it makes me a little skittish when I hear people who are angry about this decision talk like, now we're at the same place as Christians under Nero, or in Iraq under ISIS, and how God is going to bring down this nation because we have forsaken God's Holy Law.  So obviously I would like us to anathematize that sort of fundamentalist prattle.

There are, of course, many shades of gray in the reaction to the SCOTUS decision, not everyone who laments the decision is doing so with grand melodrama. Some are being quite reasonable and asking legitimate questions about what this says about our culture as a whole.  What does this mean for a nation that is founded on and for freedom of religion?  What is this going to do to our family structure?  How is the church going to deal with this?  Like it or not, we are rather wound up in the whole business of making people married.

The answers to these questions lies in the future, and so the answer to Paul's prayer is also an answer to our anxiety.  In our legal system, in order for one person to claim injury by another they must prove that they were somehow damaged or have had their rights violated.  A lot of people are "feeling" like they have had their rights violated.  In fact, feeling like you are victim of injustice in some way shape or form has become something of a national pass time.  The problem is that very few people can actually prove any damage.

This decision does not forebode persecution of hetero-normative Christian people any more than removing the Confederate Flag from South Carolina's state house implies the persecution of white people is right around the corner.  You can "feel" that it's true, but that does not make it true.

Time will tell if there are going to be negative consequences to this decision, but for right now there are mostly just a lot of feelings: some are happy, some are angry, some are just a little anxious.  As always if the anger and the anxiety win, there probably will be some bad days ahead.

But as so many have said recently, and as I thoroughly believe: love wins.

Love does not win through control.

Love wins through patience, kindness, gentleness, joy, peace, hope, and faith, in other words all the things that most of the angry, fearful and anxious people see as impossible and weak.

Wiser people than me have pointed out that the true measure of a society is not how well it's high born and powerful folks live, but how well it provides for the most vulnerable among them.  Giving equality and dignity to those who are not in the in crowd is not a bad idea, it is actually what God does for all of us.  Our prayers for strength often lead us to accept our weakness rather than conquer it, to endure trouble rather than eradicate our enemies.  "Power is made perfect in weakness."

Why are we afraid to be weak?  Haven't we been paying attention?

Searching Questions

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin?

Is this impotency due to the betrayal of the genius of the religion, 

or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?

The question is searching, for the dramatic demonstration of the impotency of Christianity in dealing with the issue is underscored by the apparent inability to cope with it within its own fellowship.

-Howard Thurman, The Preface to Jesus and the Disinherited

They are taking the Confederate Flag down, but honestly it's only because it's politically necessary, not because anyone really repents of the systemic disease of racism.  Another African American Church burned and who knows what the motives were, but it would take a pretty naive or willfully ignorant person to not at least suspect it was about race.

A week after the Emmanuel AME church killings, the person responsible is in custody and the nation has progressed rather quickly through the stages of grief.  For a few days the conversations about race and justice burned hot, people rallied, people prayed, flags were taken down, and I suspect that now life is pretty much getting back to normal as the burners of hatred are getting turned back down to simmer.

I decided I would re-read Thurman this week, to keep myself from moving on too quickly, because I'm white, and we do that (shrug and move on) when it's not at all appropriate or healthy.  Thurman is prophetic voice to me as a person who is utterly ensconced in white privilege and the ivory tower of intellectual, middle class, mainline protestant Christianity in America.  I'm going to have to take this reading of his rather thin little book very slowly.  I didn't even get through the preface before these questions smacked me upside the head.

I think the question of why Christianity (particularly American Christianity) is "impotent" to deal with the problems of racial justice is actually rather closely bound to why our nation is "impotent" to deal with them "radically, and therefore effectively,"  Like it or not, a certain manifestation of Christian faith is encoded into our national DNA.  You can argue about whether it's "authentic" Christianity, or some strain of Deism, but the fact remains that it almost always pranced about wearing the costume of the Church.  The discussions were different when our nation was founded, and the Church could only sporadically bring itself to say that "maybe" slavery was wrong, and "freedom of religion," basically meant you were free to be Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Unitarian or Quaker, and the government wasn't going to kill you for it.  Separation of Church and state was primarily to make sure that the government didn't have the power to meddle in the affairs of the church, read persecute certain people for their faith.  One wonders if the founding fathers could have ever envisioned the rise of the "religious right" or a "moral majority" as a political force.

But I digress, my point is that it is either the "betrayal of genius," or "basic weakness," that Thurman is talking about above has been coded into our national identity.  As a big fan of Jesus, I tend to want to think of this flaw as a "betrayal of genius," rather than a fundamental flaw.  I think that to use the teachings of man who did not grasp at power or seek to rule an earthly kingdom as a blueprint for a nation in the modern sense is fraught with danger. Take deistic humanism, gnostic denial of "the world,"the over-realized eschatology of millennialism, then throw it into a broth of worldly power and wealth the likes of which the world has never seen, and you have a soup that stands little chance of actually tasting anything like the recipe of a poor first century Jew.

I'm being a little bit negative here, because you do have to acknowledge that the better angels of our nature are also probably rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well, and when you compare how we are doing with how much of the non-Christian world is doing, things don't look quite so grim, but you have to admit, as Thurman insists repeatedly, that the majority of men at any moment in history stand, "with their backs against the wall."  What the church does about this can be our greatest glory and our greatest shame, and sometimes it can be both almost simultaneously.

We can be great servants of the poor, alleviating symptoms and ills of oppression, like hunger and homelessness, and we can be utterly silent about the systems that create these ills, and indeed we can even defend the very nature of the oppressor.  We can welcome the stranger into our midst and almost with the same breath say that a symbol of hate is just a "part of our heritage."

We may give our dollars to the poor, or the disinherited, or the ones with their backs against the wall, but will we give them our voices and our votes as well?  Will we speak of the injustice that doesn't effect us directly to those who are bound to represent us?  Will we move beyond mere self interest and actually care for the least of these?

I would ask these questions of Christians and Americans alike.

Responsibility

I've noticed that any time the issue of societal ills and systemic injustice come up, there are those who want very badly to make it all about personal responsibility.  The logic goes something like this: there are bad things; violence, poverty, addiction.  These things all have a somewhat complicated cultural pathology, but at their most basic level they could theoretically be solved by individuals deciding to act differently: don't hurt other people, work hard and pull yourself out of poverty, don't use the substance you're addicted to any more.  In other words, "Man (or Woman) up and stop whining that it's not your fault."
This sort of speech generally comes from middle class white people who have never significantly struggled with addiction.  They are mostly older guys who have worked their butts off for most of their life and are now enjoying a comfortable retirement.  Because of this, their perspective gains validity with many people who share their lifestyle and their experience.  It resonates with younger people who are following the same trajectory in life, who don't feel like life has really given them a big old head start, or rained showers of rose petals all over everything they've ever done.  They had to pay their dues and work hard; they never went on welfare, or turned to crime, or got lost in addiction.
Personal responsibility right?
Well yes, congratulations to all of you who are or have lived such virtuous lives.  I'm about to tell you something that you may not want to hear, but being the responsible, thoughtful, hard working people you are I'm sure you'll hear me out: You had a head start.  The best metaphor I have heard to explain privilege uses baseball.  In America white people are already on base, maybe it's second, maybe it's third depending on your socio-economic status, if you're born into money, you're practically standing a step away from home plate.  At any rate, you're somewhere on the diamond already, you don't really have to prove that you belong there.  People of color start at the plate with a bat in their hands if they're lucky.  They have to get a hit just to get where you are (that hit being education and surviving adolescence with your body, mind and heart in tact).  Then, maybe, you could call it a level playing field, but they still have to deal with umpires that are slightly biased against them, maybe not downright unfair, but definitely a little tilted.
The peculiar thing is though, by the time they get around third and cross home, they will totally agree with you about personal responsibility.  They will see that it could be done through hard work and a few good breaks.  They will say, "Gee, you were right about that," and you and all of the home plate crowd will dance and rejoice.
The fly in this ointment of hard work and success is, as usual, Jesus.  Jesus tells us that it's not enough to look out for number one.  It's not just about working hard and getting ahead and taking care of you and yours.  It's about the least of these; the ones who didn't have a chance, who struck out on three straight high fastballs, who got hit by a pitch and hauled away from the plate with a broken jaw, who tripped rounding first and snapped an ankle, who got thrown out trying to steal second, I could go on with the baseball metaphors, but I really want to get on with this.
Why should we change laws that work for most of us, just to accommodate those who seem to be unfairly oppressed by them?  Why should we examine our own assumptions about power and violence, when the way the world is has got us a boat and country club membership?  Why should we challenge unbridled greed and usurious practice when our 401K is sitting pretty?  In short, why would anyone, who has benefited so much from the system, work to change the system?
How about because it's broken?
Maybe not for you, but for a lot of people, it's broken.  Maybe you can turn a blind eye to racism, because it's never really affected you.  Maybe you can ignore poverty and massive incarceration rates because you were never poor or in jail.  Maybe you can vote for politicians who cut food stamp programs and welfare and send that money to build bombs.
But if you call yourself a Christian, I would read Matthew 25 very, very carefully, and think about a poor Jewish man who got crucified for breaking the laws of his time, who willingly associated with the untouchable and unsavory people in his world, and who has told us who call him Lord to do the same.  Ask yourself if he's going to be impressed with your level of personal responsibility.

Are We Dumbing Ourselves to Death?

Anti-intellectualism is not about intelligence (as the linked article helpfully points out).  Saying someone is ignorant is not the same thing as saying they are stupid.  In fact, in the actual definition of the word ignorant, you will notice that it is not as pejorative a term as your average seventh grader who just learned the word would have you believe, it is simply a lack of knowledge.  We are all ignorant of something. I am ignorant of how to integrate derivative equations, despite taking and passing two semesters of college calculus.  It's something I should have learned but did not, and the fact that I passed two terms (granted with D's) is a testament to the failure of something or other.
The problem is that ignorance has become acceptable and perhaps even lauded in certain quarters.  I'm not sure how old I was when I first felt self-conscious about being smart, but it happened, and it stuck with me until well into high school.  Through middle school I became rather adept at hiding my intelligence and feigning ignorance.  I suppose it's lucky for me that I'm rather good at taking tests, the standardized testing that we had to take in eighth grade finally clued the school system into the fact that I wasn't actually a lunkhead.
Honestly, it was sort of a surprise to me.  You might think that people suppressing their natural intelligence is a conscious decision, but actually it's more of a herd instinct in adolescence: don't stand out.  We want to fit in, and if ignorance is par for the course than so be it, bring on the Budweiser and Confederate flags, and I'll shout, "play Freebird" from the back row of a jazz concert.
How do people become racist?  You know, it's not that hard to figure out.  I've never met a racist toddler, we learn it.  We hear people we admire use the N-word or talk about "those people," and we accommodate our behavior to that standard.  And don't think that you need to have an uncle in the KKK for this to happen, it can happen in the most subtle ways.  Did you see your mom hug her purse a little tighter when that black man sat next to her on the bus?  Did you sense a little different tone in your grandfather's voice when he talked to the Latino teller at the bank?  Kids are little sponges, and they observe a lot more than you think.
The only thing that is going to counter-act that sort of conditioning is a lot of education and experiences that stretch you to form relationships with people who are different than you.
You can be smart and kind and still be a racist, in fact, some would tell you it's unavoidable to some extent because of a tribal mindset or because of unexamined privilege, or maybe a bit of both.  What ignorance does is never raise the question or the possibility that it might be bad. There is a difference between the sort of tacit racism that you find everywhere, and the active, hostile racism that breaks out with some regularity.  Both are the product of ignorance, but one is simply a lack of examination and one is a willful denial of reality.  Both are sinful, but only one is prone to violence.
We may have made this nest for ourselves, we may have glorified the marginally educated workingman a little too much.  We may have allowed people to consider personal freedom (and perhaps even salvation) as the be all and end all of existence, but the reality is that we are all connected.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, you mostly read about Israel being saved, people prayed for deliverance for their whole nation, not just for one or two people, or one or two thousand people.  An individual might be rescued from trouble here and there, but the idea of salvation was a larger picture.
The forms of Christianity that were dominant in this nation around the time of the founding, were largely individualistic, meaning they emphasized a "personal" faith and a "personal" salvation.  I think it may have been inevitable that this foundation would lead to fracturing of the community, both the churches and the nation.
The industrial revolution compounded the problem, by pulling people out of the simple, necessarily communal life of an agrarian society and putting them in a place where their identity more closely resembled drone ants or bees, and their intellect and curiosity was mostly just a nuisance to the productivity of a worker.
It's amazing to me how communism and capitalism both have this proletarian value system, and both of them utterly fail to empower the working class.  It's because educated people ask questions and desire more freedom and equality, and they don't want to just play the same old role.  Ultimately, we all want to be bourgeoisie.  We want to be the well to do, we want to be the upper managers and the executives, but we can't, and so we seethe and learn to hate, and we reject the "high-falutin" ways of the very people we aspire to be.
Pretend like you don't care.
Pretend you would rather have a beat up pickup truck than a Porsche.
Pretend you would rather eat hot dogs than sushi.
Pretend that "book learning" isn't really that important for the likes of you.
In other words: lie to yourself, stay ignorant, because if you ever learn the truth, you might have to change the way you behave.

And Now for Something Less Depressing: Sadness

Looking back over my blog posts, I realize I have fallen into a sort of serious rut, or a rut of seriousness, so I'm going to talk about a kid's movie: Inside Out.  I should begin by saying that when you combine this with Up, you have two of the most serious tear jerkers that I can think of short of Old Yeller, and Where the Red Fern Grows (movies where bad stuff happens to dogs are usually prime make a grown man cry territory).  This is especially interesting in the case of Inside Out because it is absolutely hilarious and emotionally poignant at the same time.  Up hit you with the montage about the little old man and his wife, and then it was all about the talking dogs.  Inside Out sort of tickles your emotions for a while with sweet little memories of how great life used to be contrasted with how it has really changed for the worse in the life of Riley the character in whose head most of the movie takes place.
Riley is an eleven year old girl, which was particularly important to me, as I currently attempt parenthood of an eleven year old male creature and will soon have an eleven year old female creature living in my house.  The female creature, now nine, has already demonstrated that no one, including her is the master of her emotions.  Riley has four different characters living in her brain: Joy (who was first), Sadness (second), Anger (third, voiced by Lewis Black and worth the price of admission), Fear and Disgust, who sort of work together to keep her safe.
You may have heard of the "Wheel of Feelings," which I like in a sort of tongue in cheek sort of way, but it is actually useful in deciphering the source of some complex feelings. So here it is again:

For the sake of the movie: Fear is purple, Sadness is blue and Anger is Red, Disgust is green and joy is golden (couldn't find a wheel with completely corresponding colors.  Each emotion colors certain memories, and for the most part, while Riley is little, Joy gives her memories a bias towards the golden and happy.  When the family moves from their comfortable home in Minnesota to San Francisco and stuff starts to get stressful, the other emotions start to over-rule Joy.  Sadness especially, an emotion that is sort of dumpy and depressed, who mostly just tries to stay out of the way of an irrepressible and overbearing Joy.  There are several scenes where sadness touches otherwise happy memories and they start to turn blue.

This is absolutely anathema to Joy and she becomes more and more oppressive to Sadness, at one point drawing a circle and telling her to stay in the "circle of sadness."  This leads to chaos, as one might imagine (though apparently not all actual adults realize this danger).  Joy and Sadness get thrown out of headquarters along with crucial core memories that make Riley who she is and help her cope with the world.  The longer Joy, Sadness and the core memories are lost, the worse Riley's ability to cope with life becomes.  The theme of the movie is that Joy needs to learn to let go and value the other emotions and their roles, especially the role of Sadness.

There is so much psychology sort of wedged into the movie that it kept me really paying attention and occasionally chuckling out loud, like the scene about the phases of abstract thought.  But what I was particularly interested in were a couple, possibly minor details.

First of all, there is the fact that most of the other characters in the movie have single gender emotions, while Riley has both male and female (Anger and Fear are male).  Her mother has all female emotions and her father has all male emotions.  Also, while Joy is the dominant emotion in Riley, her mother's dominant emotion is Sadness and Her father's is Anger.

I'm pretty sure these things were not an accident, and they kind of add an even greater amount of depth to a movie that's already pretty deep for a cartoon.

The Thing About Flags

Okay, so here is the disclaimer: I'm not against flags.  I will stand and say the pledge of allegiance, including the "under God" part.  I would never burn a flag. I even get a little choked up at funerals when the VFW guys do the folding and presentation of the flag to the family of the deceased veteran.  I understand that humans are wired for symbolism at a very deep level, and quite frankly it is because of the power of symbols that I feel like we need to have a talk about flags.
Let's start with the flag du jour, the "stars and bars," the battle flag of the Confederacy, the "Rebel" flag, which is still flown, worn and otherwise honored in much of the South, and on top of orange Dodge Challengers.  Some would tell you it's about being proud of where you come from, that it's about heritage and about holding on to home and family values and church and God, biscuits and sweet tea and fried chicken, and all the good things that make the South the South.  But others would tell you that it's a sign of a people who have never really given up an old grudge.  Maybe they're both right.

At this point in history though the Confederate flag means one thing that is absolutely and positively unavoidable: racism.  I know that the American Civil war was about a lot more than slavery, I have learned at least that much about history.  I know that the form of slavery that existed in the Antebellum era was going to die eventually and that the war was more about state's rights and taxation. I know that the Union was more or less telling the Confederacy that they just needed to pay their taxes and shut up. However, in the annals of history and perhaps more importantly, in the collective consciousness of our nation, the war was about ending the state sanctioned practice of slavery and making sure that we lived up to our creed of "all men" being created equal. That phrase continued to mean land owning white males long after the war was over, and to some extent is still true, but at least in theory we mean "all humans."

The Confederate Flag symbolizes a sort of uber-conservative mindset: leave us alone and let us do things our way, don't change because we like the way things are working out... at least for us and ours.  And so you still find it flying in many places, including South Carolina.

Don't you dare tell me that it's "just" a symbol, people kill and die for symbols all the time.  Symbols infect us in a way that we don't always fully understand.  Poor white people everywhere have been saturated with the notion that things have changed for the worse and those changes account for how crappy the world is for them.  They have been told that, once upon a time, the world was different for the likes of them, back in the good old days, when black folk knew their place and the benevolent white landowners made sure that things didn't fall apart.  Never mind that many of their ancestors were virtual slaves called sharecroppers, who were so poor and hungry that former slaves ended up regretting the emancipation proclamation when they found out how hard it was to feed your family the way the poor whites did.

The Confederacy was an idea that was conceived by and primarily benefited the wealthy landowning class.  They did everything within their power to convince the poor white folk they should buy in, and boy did they ever, and boy will they still buy in today.  They buy in to such an extent that it sort of confounds me on a nearly daily basis.  The Confederate mindset is alive and well in America today, and it has spread out of the South, and it has it's own TV shows and is all over talk radio.

Most white folks will whistle Dixie and view the idea as a sort of charming little cultural wrinkle.  Up until last week, I almost never heard anyone make a fuss about the Confederate flag flying in state capitols or being displayed in thousands of other public spaces.  Until we ask ourselves what it means, what is that symbol about?

Way back in the Hebrew Scriptures, God was always getting super cheesed off about idols.  "Have no other gods before me," it says in the Law of Moses, in fact, "don't even make pictures of other gods, or even of me, or angels or anything," because as soon as you do that you're tiptoeing towards idolatry.  Idols are tricky little blighters to say the least, they sort of sneak up on you.  Sure none of us have probably gone out to altar to Baal or Moloch recently, but I guarantee you we are not innocent of the idolatry thing.  It's because of our innate awareness and use of symbols, we give them power the very moment they start to mean something to us.

As you might imagine, this applies to any symbol, a flag, a swastika, a star of David, a picture of a dead president (money), or even a cross.  And so it behooves us to always consider the meaning of our symbols.  Where do they come from? What do they mean now?  Are our attitudes and allegiances to them consistently subordinate to our devotion to God?  In other words, what is more important: that we display a cross around our neck or in our home, or that we actually do what Jesus told us to do?  Is it more important that we pledge allegiance to the flag or that we truly seek to be a good and righteous nation "under God?"

Are we letting our idols get the better of us?

I'm not suggesting we stop being symbol using creatures, however, I am suggesting that we stop letting our symbols use us.

We Need to Have a Talk

Yesterday all I could come up with were words and phrases (sort of) strung together.  Today, well I think I'm losing it.  The tragedy at Emmanuel AME church in Charleston remains just that, a tragedy, an all too common sort of tragedy that's starting to become as predictable as your favorite character on Game of Thrones meeting with a sudden and brutal end.  This tragedy is rooted in three of the greatest flaws (one might say sins) of our national character.
First, this was undoubtedly about race.  The young man had been drinking a venomous cocktail of fear and propaganda.  He was drowning in it, and while a 21 year old is certainly a responsible adult, the pictures of the perpetrator don't show me a monster they show me a skinny, pale, unbalanced kid, who had come to believe that black people were his enemy, even the very people who welcomed him as a stranger into their prayer meeting, and I'm guessing were just super nice to him before he started murdering them.  I trust that, I trust that those people were busy being the church to this unstable and hate riddled young man, because I know church people, black, white or otherwise (that's important, but I'll come back to that).  This man was so filled with hate that love couldn't touch him, he was in hell, and like it or not we all helped put him there.
Because the second thing about our national character at the moment is that we allow hate and fear to run us.  I'm not going to pick on any particular group, because we are all guilty.  We have created a culture where being different is a sin and we cannot even talk about our differences without sinking into a morass of shame and enemy-making.  Fox News and MSNBC thrive on it, it seeps into all of our most important discussions, everyone's a victim, even the most privileged among us.  The government is out to get us (to be fair they give us some reason to actually believe that), the (insert name of feared group here) are leading to the downfall of our society, the media is biased and/or incompetent (again paranoia is often founded in some level of truth).  Any discussion, even about something silly like a man becoming a woman or a white woman pretending to be black and actually running a chapter of the NAACP, get so bogged down with discussions of who is even qualified to comment and how they/we/everyone-but-one-enlightened-commentator are missing the point that none of us can say anything.  When we do say something vaguely truthful, we're probably going to be trolled on some nuance that we probably didn't even think of, welcome to the blogosphere people, it's all opinions, all the time.
It's to the point where I almost prefer blatant ignorance and blind categorical statements, because at least then I know where we are.  When someone says something like, "Obama wants to take our guns," I know exactly where they are coming from, and I sort of appreciate that.  But let me say that the gun stuff is really rubbing me raw these days, not because I'm against guns, actually I kind of like them, but because of the way we approach them.  We think they're like magic.  We attach them to feelings of security when they're making our world much less safe.  We call them a right, when they should be considered a privilege, one that you should have to earn with more than just $200 and a quick background check.  A few months ago we hosted a guest from Italy, a pastor type, who was fascinated with the American attitude towards firearms.  In Italy, you are only allowed to own guns if you had or were serving in the military, or could demonstrate some actual need to have them (and yes hunting and personal security were on the list of actual needs).  Actually carrying a gun in public is almost unheard of unless you are a law enforcement type, and I think it probably goes without saying, stuff like Charleston doesn't happen that much in Italy.
Which, finally, brings me to the third thing: we're saturated in the idea that violence is the way to security.  I realized at some point that, sort of like in Die Hard, a lot of Europeans think Americans see themselves as cowboys walking around with six guns ready to blaze away at the bad guys.  Yes, that's a stereotype, but again, it has its foundation in truth.  Which leads me to the thing that has absolutely set my britches on fire with holy anger over the past 24 hours: on at least three different occasions (two of which were Fox News and the NRA, so I was at least not surprised) I have heard people suggest that church people ought to arm themselves, including the pastors of churches (ostensibly to protect their flock like a shepherd is supposed to, to which I say, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want").
At this point, I am moved to speak in a profane manner, but I will restrain myself.  I will, however, say that this line of thinking is absolutely the most non-christian, violence-loving, abhorrently evil thought mess that I have run across in quite some time.  I understand if some of my African American colleagues disagree, because their churches suffer violence a lot more often.  I cannot claim to understand fully the experience of being a truly persecuted minority.  I can only speak on being a follower of Jesus and a part of the Body of Christ, but here's what I think: I would rather be shot than climb into a pulpit to proclaim Christ crucified while carrying a gun.
The Apostle Paul says, "We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body." 2 Corinthians 4:10  And that is not an isolated proof text, he repeats a similar sentiment many times in various letters.  And it was a real possibility for Christians in that day to actually be martyred, and yet they kept on being the church, just like the Emmanuel AME church in Charleston.  Do not let fear get the best of you church, continue to set your eyes on Jesus and do what he did.  If we meet our end while being the church so be it, but do not let fear pull you away to an idol with Smith and Wesson inscribed on the barrel.
Look, I don't ever want to see someone come charging into my church with a gun, but I think a better way to prevent that is to speak kindness, love and mercy into a world that is filled with hate and fear.  I do understand that this idea puts me at odds with the principalities and powers, and that it may be dangerous, it certainly was for Jesus, but I'm pretty sure I want to be in the same boat as him (spoilers).

How Long?

Racism.
Guns.
Hate.
Fear.
No matter how you add it up, it amounts to the same thing.
People are dying.
How bad does it have to get before we admit we have a problem?
What is going to be our rock bottom?
A bunch of church people at a bible study.
A young man with a twisted heart.
And a dangerous weapon.
Exercising his "right" to bear arms.
He would have been dangerous enough without the gun.
We have built too much on a terrible foundation:
Racism, guns, hate, fear.
Why are we so angry?
What do we have to fear from a bunch of folks at a bible study?
They die, and their God does not protect them.
They are broken on the altar that we have built to violence and hatred.
They are given the gift that no one really wants:
A death like Jesus' death.
But I don't weep for them,
Because they believed,
As I do,
That they will have a life like his.
I weep for the broken world.
Where this sort of thing keeps happening
And we act like we have no idea what caused it.
But we know.
We know.
And we just aren't willing to do much about it.
Until that angry man walks into our church.
I've got news for you America, he just did.
Actually he's been here for a while,
Maybe as long as we have.
But we don't stop him.
Because he has rights,
And who are we to judge.
We're not racist.
We're just observers,
And realists,
and we know the problem is surely not with us,
Surely not us, O Lord.
Let's hold on to our hate and our fear,
Someday maybe they'll stop eating us alive.
Maybe,
Someday,
How long to sing this song?

The Agony of Defeat

The Golden State Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games to take the 2015 NBA championship home to Oakland.  Cleveland must endure yet another defeat despite having native son and best player on the planet Lebron James back home.  There is an awful lot of Lebron hating to go around, but after "taking his talents to South Beach," and winning a couple of titles, a boy became a man and came home.  He joins now the ranks of Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and Allen Iverson as players who were transcendent in terms of talent, but simply didn't have the team to win it all.
I remember Iverson, the 6 foot nothing, 175 pound ball of tattooed lightning.
Philadelphia loved Allen Iverson, they identified with his scrappy, shoot-em-up, style and his gruff, cranky personality.  Most of all though, they identified with the fact that he just never seemed to catch a break.  He was spectacular, but he was never surrounded by enough talent to win it all.  He dragged a sub-par team into the finals and ran into the Shaq and Kobe show.  I can't help but think about the way that felt, to get so close and then run into a brick wall.  There was no defeat in that though, it was just a simple case of being over-matched.  The Lakers were able to hinder Iverson just enough, with a second tier player named Tyron Lue, leaving Kobe and Shaq free to do their thing.  The Sixers had no other real bullets in their gun.  Iverson scored over 35 points a night and at one point was actually a leading rebounder (at 6'0"), and "he" still lost.  Because it really was him against a whole team.
Just like it was Lebron against the Golden State Warriors.
Lebron is by no means the underdog that Iverson was, he's 6'8" and usually the strongest, fastest and most talented guy on the floor (Iverson was just the fastest).  Lebron is his team's best scorer and best defender, he makes triple doubles look easy (they're not), but he can't win on his own.
I like Golden State, I  think Steph Curry is a really likable player, I like their approach and I think they truly are the best team, but the Philadelphia fan in me aches for Cleveland, because I wonder if, like it was with Iverson's Sixers, having the best player on the planet is not going to be enough.  Cleveland and Philly share a penchant for institutional stupidity, they can waste Jim Brown and Allen Iverson, and Donovan McNabb and maybe Lebron James, and never win it all.
But maybe in some cases you can't win.
Maybe in some cases you don't need to win.
Maybe trying your best really is enough and you should hold your head up.
Sometimes you're fighting something that's just too much.
Like Jesus (you knew I was going there at some point, and no, I'm not saying that basketball players are messianic figures).
In Jesus' confrontation of the powers and principalities of his age he was alone and confronting something that could not be beaten alone.  His disciples were not quite up to the challenge, but they could learn from his sacrifice, they could see a new way of being, a way that went through defeat but was not beaten.
I saw it in Iverson and I saw it in Lebron: they lost, but they were not beaten.  I see it in Philly and Cleveland every year: hope, irrational hope, but hope all the same.
I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that sports have taken over a lot of the territory that used to be covered by religion.  Religion struggles for a foothold, but football or futbol can weather scandals and kerfuffles galore.  FIFA has just been unmasked as corrupt to the highest levels and yet no fans will stop watching the games.  Baseball has been proven to be riddled with illegal performance enhancing drugs and yet parks still fill up and the coffers remain full.  American football players are videotaped in the act of domestic violence, charged with assault and even murder, ex players commit suicide because of damage done to their brains due to head trauma during games, and yet there is no hue and cry for and end to it all, just the need to clean things up.
It seems to me that the church has lost the benefit of the doubt and the second chances that are given to athletes and sports.  Now people just want to see us lose.
And we are.
We're not dying, which would be far less troubling for a people who are essentially about resurrection, rather we are becoming irrelevant and unimportant.  We are like Allen Iverson at the very end, he was no longer the fastest and now he was just a pitiable figure that nobody wanted anymore, riddled with his own demons and suffering for the sins of his past.  But we are still stumbling around trying to play for sympathy and pity.
Meanwhile sports provide people with the inspiration and the hope (not to mention entertainment) that they used to find in God.
So what do we do?
Well, I don't know exactly, but I do know it's not going to be a solo effort, one superstar is not going to win this series, and we have, I think been relying too much on our pastors, leaders and public faces to be too much and to do too much, and then jumping on the bandwagon of critics when they fail.
Our superstars play into to it sometimes, like Lebron referring to himself as the best player on the planet, everyone from Rob Bell, to Billy Graham, to Pope Francis, and even my beloved Richard Rohr are capable being named our great heroes.
They don't seize the crown, they may even protest a bit when it's placed on their head, but in the end, they'll take the adoration and admiration of the masses, "for the sake of the Gospel," or something like that.
It's really not their fault.  From the time of Moses the rather remarkable ability of humans to lapse into idolatry has been a bugaboo of the faith.  One of our real challenges in "competing" with sports for the souls of humanity is that sports doesn't have to apologize for idolatry, we can openly call Lebron, Messi, Manning and Ronaldo our sports idols and icons, we can go to vast assemblies of enthusiastic fans (derived from fanatics), and we can pour our time talent and treasure into the worship of those idols and they will never make us feel guilty, the worst they will do is lose, but there's always next year (right Cubs fans?)
But we can't compete with the idols, because our God seems absolutely okay with losing, getting crucified, and being among the least, and the outcast and the leftovers.  He always seems to have a team full of role players and no real superstars.
So what then?  What do we do?
I just don't know.
Only about three months until Football!

Clarity of Purpose

There were days, somewhere in the bulging middle of the Camino, where I was just at peace with - well - everything: up hill, down hill, wind, rain, sun, bad beds, pilgrim food, sore feet, tired legs.  It was an interesting, and all too fleeting time.  At the beginning it was all too new, at the end I just wanted to be done, but for a while, it just was what I was doing and I was able to just sort of rest in a very zen like sort of detachment as I walked.  I kept my own pace, and I was alone a lot of the time.  I would mostly keep Dad in sight, and periodically we would stop for a rest and a snack, but when we walked he preferred to move just a little faster, so we were usually about 50 meters apart.
But pace was important, when I tried to go faster than my pace, my feet started to ache more and there was this feeling that I was going to turn an ankle or pull a muscle, so I settled in, I thought about intentionally taking long strides and keeping my knees bent, especially on the descents.  I was slow on the uphills because, well they went up hill and I was slow on the downs because I was cautious and really didn't feel like tasting those rocky slopes with my face.  At some point I came to grips with the fact that I was the tortoise not the hare, and I think that fact kept me safe and healthy on the whole adventure: no blisters, no sprains, no injuries to speak of, slow and steady, one foot in front of the other.
All I had to do was walk.  And we did, day in and day out, without really taking a day off.  Maybe we should have taken a day here or there, but it felt too much like we would lose momentum.  As long as we had that clear purpose almost anything seemed bearable: get up, pack, walk, shower, rest, eat, sleep, repeat.  On such an amazing adventure, routine was still absolutely necessary.  There was a lot about the Camino that required flexibility and spontaneity and would push us out of the comfort zone, and in order to deal with those there needs to be a framework.
It doesn't have to be a rigid framework, but it does need to give you a general outline for what you do.  It occurred to me during this time that this was perhaps the real wisdom of the system of sabbath keeping that was so crucial to the identity of Israel.  If  you know that the seventh day is a day of rest, just as we knew the late afternoons were going to be on the Camino, you can deal with just about anything.  My nugget of wisdom from the Dutch Hospitalero in Villamayor: "Sooner or later, it will be evening."
Disciplines should give you that sense of boundary and framing.  The Camino does it daily, I think the biblical plan of sabbath (and the extended practice of jubilee) stretch that frame out a little.  If you know there's a limit to things, you deal better with what is.  This is counter-cultural in an age of rapid change and deeply camouflaged principalities and powers.  Often we don't even know what we're resting from, what cycle we're breaking or what boundary we are setting.
Sometimes the reflex is to neglect boundaries altogether.  Dad asked me towards the end if maybe we would have been better served to take days off.  We had built some sabbath time into the schedule and really the only thing we accomplished by pushing on was more downtime in Madrid before our flight home, so maybe we should have.  I'm still not really sure about the idea though, because I felt like every day was so finely balanced between work and rest, between routine and creative and intuitive problem solving, that I'm not sure we really needed to just sit still.  I understand though that this type of thinking would be dangerous in a longer term, but on the Camino any time I really considered sitting still for a day, it seemed like I would be falling into the opposite pit: creating false boundaries.
This is the hallmark of extreme conservatism, fundamentalism and reactive thinking: let's fight the barbarians at the gate, let's throw up our defenses with all sorts of rules and regulations, let's define the framework in the strongest possible terms.  Jesus' repeated conflicts with the Pharisees over sabbath keeping demonstrate how this works.  Their rules for keeping sabbath had become rigid to the point of being absurd.  Jesus never denigrates the idea of sabbath or says it's a bad idea, he basically just says, "be sensible about it people, it's there for your own good after all."
I think in the end, the pilgrimage as a whole was such a sabbath experience, away from everything that normally occupies my life, that it seemed silly to take a sabbath from a sabbath.  The experience of sitting still at the end of everything was nice for about a day or so, but then it started to become the norm again.
We met a fair number of people who were sort of fundamentalist about the Camino "rules," who looked down on private rooms or hotels as a betrayal, who sort of scoffed at people who used the baggage service or buses (I may have fallen into that pit a time or two).  There were people who felt that they had to make a certain number of kilometers per day, or had to get here or there by a certain time (also guilty of that occasionally).  At least for me though, this was self correcting on the Camino, it would humble you.  I wonder if life doesn't do that as well.
Maybe sometimes you don't really know the true importance of something until you walk away from it.

Belonging

This picks up where yesterday left off, so if you didn't read yesterday, scroll down.
The thing that really scares most people off from really living the sort of life that is open and generous and full of love is fear of getting hurt.  There are two very strong instincts present in almost all self-aware animals: self-preservation and reproduction.  Human beings are odd ducks in the scheme of things, because we occupy a place in the natural order of things that puts us on a par with apex predators: lions, tigers, bears, oh my.  However, as you will notice, we are not naturally as well armed as our peers, nor are we as fast and twitchy as most prey animals.  What we have instead is an abnormally large brain and thumbs, there are days when I would gladly trade those things for some big old fangs and lion claws, but unless evolution starts going all X-men on us, it's probably not going to happen.  What did happen to allow our particular strain of (relatively) hairless primates to become the dominate species on the planet is quite simply our ability to communicate and cooperate.
Sure, wolves, lions and even certain sharks communicate and cooperate, but not anything like humans, and we're not even as good at those two things as we could be.
If we were able to exhibit the sort of communication and cooperation of say an ant colony or a beehive, we would probably be out among the stars destroying and polluting many solar systems. So our Creator, in her wisdom, has not seen fit to link us together in an almost telepathic hive mind, but rather forced us to use words, which are always open to interpretation, and has placed in us this pervasive sense of individualism that practically guarantees we will never fully trust one another. (See Genesis 11 for mythological proof of concept)
We have ten thousand years of anthropological evidence that proves to us that community is the way we are going to survive and flourish.  We have spiritual evidence that we are made for relationship.  Every religion that makes any sort of sense tells us that we are created to be with others, and often that we are created to be with an ultimate Other.
And yet...
Yet we still manage to make everything about us.  We still labor under the often destructive illusion that we can love without risking a broken heart.  The story of Scripture tells us that God is love, and that God repeatedly gets his heart broken.  The good news is that a broken heart does not stop God from loving, never, ever, no matter how bad you break it, even if you crucify his greatest gift, you aren't going to stop the love.
I think the reason we find Jesus so easy to admire (maybe even love) and so hard to follow is that we recognize what love God has for us, but we're just not quite ready to give it back.  In the sin of our individual pride, we see people who love unconditionally as weak and pathetic, the boy who carries a torch for the girl who rejected him, the wife who bears with an emotionally distant (possibly even abusive) husband, swearing to all her friends that "he's really sweet underneath it all."  We can give people like this sympathy, but not empathy, unless we have suffered what they have suffered.
Why would God suffer a broken heart?
Is it because he wants to understand us?
Or is it because we are made in God's image, and because God's heart can be broken, therefore so can ours.  Is it God's way of showing us that it's worth the pain?
Incarnational theology tells us that, somehow, someway, God is in this with us. It necessitates togetherness, because if God is in this with us, God is in it with all of us, and we are all in it together, and as long as we deny or violate that togetherness, we're just never going to get anywhere, except maybe the Hell that we make for ourselves and others.

Taking Off the Armor

One of the things that the Camino does for you is it forces you out of your protective shell.  It doesn't take long to start noticing all the things that we use every day to insulate us from, well, just about everything.  Weather is usually the first thing you notice: sun, rain, wind, heat, cold, you notice and appreciate shade or a slight lessening of a stiff wind.  In a car, an office, or a home, you only notice the most severe climate disturbances, when you're out in it, small things really make a difference.
The next thing you tend to feel is the loss of privacy and personal space.  Especially since you spend most of your day out in the open with only the most voluntary human interactions, the crowds (and attending smells) can be a bit of a shock. But the physical proximity and shared spaces are not really the biggest challenge, it's the emotional strain of trying to live in that community without freaking out at someone.
Ultimately the biggest challenge is fear, specifically the fear that comes from not being in control of things.  On the one hand, you have great autonomy, you choose your distance and your speed, you choose where you stay and where you eat, you have no one to answer to but yourself and for a few days you think, "this is great!" And then you realize that something is missing.
It took me a while to figure out what was missing, but here's what I think it is: relationship.  And it's not so much just that you're lacking company, because there's plenty of that, but rather you are lacking trust of the people around you.
Here I'll just start speaking for myself, because I don't really know if this is true for all pilgrims, but for the first week or so, I still had my old habits of sizing people up and sorting them into categories: tourist, hippie, speed freak (referring to people who seemed driven to treat the Camino like a triathalon, not amphetamine users), etc.  My physical vulnerability was about all I could handle and I wasn't really able to be open (vulnerable) to the other pilgrims.
At some point, I remember realizing that I was living in fear, I was walking fearfully, I had some sort of anxiety about every hill, every meal, about every bed, every person I met, about every little need, and every challenge, and it was going to crush me.  I put the fear down, and it was the most important burden I could have unloaded.
Don't get me wrong, it still popped up from time to time, but I knew its face now and I would not let it climb back into my backpack, which was heavy enough.
This is when people started to come along side of Dad and I, people we liked (and a few we didn't care for very much), but all people with whom I (and I think we) chose to be open.  I'm not exactly sure when the hugging started, but among a certain core group of people, it became a habit pretty quickly.  Just in case you're wondering what the big deal is, you need to know that hugging a Peregrino is not something to be done lightly, we were not always clean and smelling our best.
It required a conscious decision to let go of my hangups.
But I'm glad I did.
I began to think of all the ways in which fear dominates our lives, and how all the armor and insulation that we work so hard to procure and keep in place, actually makes that fear worse.  Sure if you shield yourself with things, money, guns, walls, fences, titles, security details, even an army, you might think you're more secure, but you are also more afraid.
Here's a funny thing: about two weeks into the walk, I realized I had stopped fearing things that I thought were simply existential fears, not only did I stop fearing people, I was learning new things about welcoming whoever came along.  There were people that were easy to welcome, like Rodrigo, a Spaniard from Valencia, who had this wonderful smile, and infectious joy about him.  Rodrigo was  hugger from about the second time you met him, if he had seen you before you were an old friend.  But there were people who I didn't take to quite so quickly and had to learn that they too were part of my tribe.  I guess I learned first hand what Jesus was talking about when he told us it's really no great shakes to love the people that love you (and who you find likable).
Brene Brown has made some great points about vulnerability as a key to happiness (watch it here) and my experience bears that out.  What troubles me a great deal about coming back to the world is the many ways that we let fear run us, and the ways in which we minimize, numb and try in vain to ignore, negate and deny our vulnerability.  It kind of stings when I feel myself getting pulled back into fear.
I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but I am thinking that perhaps vulnerability may be more than a key to happiness and "whole heartedness," but it may also be an antidote to the fear and anxiety that grips us as individuals and twists and deforms all of humanity.

Re-invention

We went to see Nils Lofgren at the Birchmere last night.  Nils is one of those rock'n'roll lifers, guitarist, keyboard player, harpist, and now, apparently, tap dancer.  He has played with Neil Young and most famously as a member of Springsteen's E-Street Band, but he has also had a long solo career where he scratches his own songwriting itch.  One of the last numbers of the evening had him don tap shoes and thump out a rhythm with his feet and huge silver baton like you might see a drum major use at a college football game, while playing a harp with one hand, quickly switching to his Fender Stratocaster to wail out a solo and then back to the tap dancing, baton, harp routine.  He is 63 years old, did I mention that?
What this leads me to think about this morning is re-invention.  Almost all really great musicians do it. David Bowie does it every ten minutes, U2 has done it several times over the course of their career, the most notable being between The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, with a rather interesting detour called Rattle and Hum.  Dylan made the switch from acoustic folk to electric guitars with Highway 61, prompting a bunch of "folk purists" to call him Judas.  Zappa experimented so relentlessly that he pretty much lost all of the non-musical-genius audience.
You can go too far, you can make mistakes (I'm looking at you Zooropa), you can impress critics accidentally, or make something you really think is great but critics think is mud, the point is you should always try to keep things fresh.  I think musicians do it so they don't get bored.  Lofgren has been touring, more or less constantly for 46 years.  I'd probably think, "Hey, how about tap dancing" at some point too.
Which is more or less a problem for church (hey, you knew I was going to go there at some point), because we have this idea that we're rooted in tradition and we are part of something that is not just about passing fads and trends.  This is true, and important, but we use that rooted-ness as an excuse to ignore pressing realities and it traps our thinking in "look-back" mode.
Music is a good example, for instance rock'n'roll owes a debt to blues and jazz and folk and even classical music, it did not occur in a vacuum or disconnected from what came before, yet it is undeniably something new.  Musicians like Dylan and Bowie manage to hold on to a certain number of fans through changes.  Sure there will be people who think anything but Blowin' in the Wind, and Space Oddity just aren't up to scratch, but then again those one trick ponies would have been dead horses a long time ago.
Ultimately the innovators are the ones who last.  Pearl Jam is still around and making music, they still have many passionate fans.  Most of the bands who imitated them are pretty much relegated to the county fair circuit.  There just aren't that many rabid Collective Soul fans out there now, even though I just heard one of their songs on XM this morning.
I wonder, what are the "one hit wonders" of the Church?  You know the things that worked well for a minute but didn't really launch anything lasting.  Sure we have had our Highway 61  moments, like the Reformation.  We have had our bizarre experiments run amok, like dispensational eschatology.  We have had our prophetic, punk rock movements, but what really lasts, perhaps the only thing that really lasts are those moments when we get something that no one else really does.  When we boldly proclaim a God who is about love and mercy instead of wrath, when we actually try and do the things that Jesus did, and we constantly find new ways to do it, no one could really get bored.
Sure there will always be some moron in the back yelling, "Play Freebird!" Because that's what they want, because it's familiar and that guitar solo is awesome, but we need to learn to just ignore that guy, he's probably drunk.

O Troubler of my Soul

I have been wrestling a bit lately with the nature of greed and its relationship to violence and the role that fear seems to play in most of our defensive postures.  So this morning I read this.  Once again Richard Rohr has said essentially what I have wanted to hear for a while, but I have this one little problem: reality.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that what St. Francis (and recently the Pope who took the same name) are saying about acquisitiveness and greed leading to violence and oppression are absolutely true.  Sin tends to beget bigger sin.  What I mean is that there are things I am not willing to just give up, and things I would fight to keep.  I lean towards pacifism, but I suspect that if my family were threatened I would not have the courage of that conviction, and I would be perfectly willing to cut throats in defense of my wife and children.  The glorification of violence in our culture makes me nervous, but try to hurt my kids and I will totally go all Rambo.
It's idolatry, I know.  I will make no bones about it.  I said last week that I hope I would have the courage to die for my faith, but that I refused to kill for it.  Well, I'm pretty sure I would kill for my kids, I just hope it never comes up.
I know that I am like the rich young ruler who Jesus tells to sell all that he has and follow, but he can't because he's too attached to things.  And the man who asks to be able to bury his father before he goes, I get it, I am guilty of being attached to things, to security, to the illusion that I am in control enough to be the protector of those I love.
Here's what I want to say about all of this though: as much as I admit to a sinful attachment to my wife and kids, as much as I admit that my principles of loving my enemies and praying for my persecutors would go right out the window if they came after my family, I think we need to start drawing different lines in the sand.  We have taken self defense too far and we have crossed so many ethical lines that it's hard to imagine that it all started with the simple and righteous desire to protect our children. How do you get from defending your family to dropping nuclear bombs and the policy of mutually assured destruction? It's utter madness. Somewhere along the line we started fighting to protect ideologies not people, people were only the abstract foundation of our will to power.
We believed that there is a reachable point where we can be so strong that no one can threaten us any more.  That is the ultimate delusion of empire, and it is megalomania. You fear losing something precious, you fight off the "enemies" to make sure it's safe, you find that in the process you obtain more stuff that also needs to be protected. It is how tyrants are born and how the most wealthy people are also the most worried about money. It starts with the simple, human, desire to protect what you love and it ends with wanting to rule the world.  We need to learn to put the brakes on that mad spiral.
How?  Well the path of descent that Rohr talks about is a model, but understand that most of us are not St. Francis, or even Pope Francis.  Jesus, and all scripture quite frankly, challenge us to put our trust in God and stop trying to protect our stuff on our own.  At the same time, despite what the prosperity Gospel might tell you, God doesn't give us guarantees that our stuff is going to be safe.  Children die, things are destroyed, and as we learn in Job, it's not because of anything like Karma or works righteousness, it's just the way things are.
We are never going to be strong enough to change that.
In fact, most of our efforts to change that only result in more children dying and more things being destroyed.
I would suggest that this is a deep truth in so much of Jesus' teaching: violence will not solve anything, in fact, it will succeed only in making things darker and filled with greater horrors.  We will not be able to experience the Kingdom of God until we learn this.

The Kingdom Belongs to Such as These

My kid's school, Walter J. Mitchell Elementary, are the Bulldogs, and so they have a behavioral reinforcement program called Bark.  You get Barks for barking good behavior, for being kind and generous and helpful, for doing something that is above and beyond basic expectations. At the end of the year they have a carnival where kids can "spend" their Barks.  Even big old fifth graders get pretty excited about earning and redeeming their Barks.  This morning, Jack and Cate were talking about the impending carnival and Cate said that one of her friends didn't have any Barks, so the class "was nice" to her and let her earn all twelve of some extra credit Barks.  They didn't give her some of their Barks, they just let her take an opportunity to earn some for herself, because fourth graders recognize income inequality when they see it.
And this is obviously merit based, everyone had an equal opportunity to earn Barks, and most kids had many that they earned by doing good things.  But someone did not have any, and fourth graders know that's an injustice, even if the field was level, even if she really didn't earn any, they knew she deserved a chance to get in on the fun.  Michele said, "Hey, that's Socialism!"
And I said, "Right, and it works!"  But technically we're both wrong, it's not Socialism, it's just basic human decency.  Socialism or Communism would be where the kids formed a collective and decided what sort of things would earn Barks and also how many Barks would be given out to each person as long as they played their assigned role in the collective.  This wasn't that, this was good old charity, but not just alms to the poor, rather an opportunity for someone who had been left out to get back in.
So here's where a nice story about my kids starts to get a little hot and prophetic.  I hear all the time about the evils of welfare and public assistance, not about how it's inefficient and how it doesn't do enough for the people who desperately need it, but about how it's a blight on our society and creates a nation of takers and drains the middle class of much needed income.  I hear this from good people.  From Christian people, who have, or should have read Matthew 25 at some point.
People, we need to learn from fourth graders.
Let's talk numbers for just a second.  Depending on who you talk to, and what lens you use to look at the budget, entitlement programs do, in fact take up a lot of the federal budget, however, when you look at what those entitlement programs are... well the picture changes.  Most of what sometimes gets lumped in with "welfare" is actually Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the percentage of total spending that goes to public assistance programs is around 9 percent, and only a fraction of that is actually doled out to people who collect welfare.  The next time someone tells you something like: "my tax dollars are going to support people who just won't work."  Refer them to this handy little thing, an itemized tax receipt generator that will tell them exactly how much of their taxes go to what.
Let's talk about the average income tax liability of around $11000 per year.  That's decidedly middle class, probably a homeowner, most likely dual income family for people with normal jobs.  There are two separate line items that we can add up to get a picture of how much "the takers" are actually costing the average family: temporary assistance for needy families under the unemployment and labor category (welfare), in this case the bill comes to a whopping $70.29, or what my family of four usually spends to go out to a fairly nice restaurant.  Second, under the food and agriculture section, we find the SNAP program, food stamps, which costs us $329.03... out of $11,000.  $400 per year for the part of the safety net that is constantly demonized by folks as sucking the life out of the American Dream.
Yes, when you look at the total amount spent on entitlements, it's a bit staggering, but listen up middle class Americans, don't buy the mythology that the rich dudes are trying to sell you, most of those entitlements are in your best interest, and have nothing to do with "welfare queens" and people who refuse to work.  Most of the poor people, particularly those who qualify for SNAP and other programs like it, work pretty freaking hard.  I happen to know one rather well.  The myth is that "those" people are taking our "hard earned" money and living high on the hog, but it just isn't so.  First of all, they're not taking that much of our money in the first place, second of all most of what they do get is in the form of bare necessities, food, clothing, housing and utilities.  Maybe some of them do make bad decisions about how and what to spend, but you need to know that being poor is expensive, and difficult, and believe me, it's a rare anomaly of a person who says, "yeah, this is good enough for me (and my kids)."
Want to know who is really sucking the life out of the American Dream?
Don't tell the fourth grade, they already think grown-ups are stupid.

Is There Some Quota?

My daughter now shares a name (complete with peculiar spelling: Caitlyn) with the most famous transgender person in the world.  Over the past few days the interweb has been bristling with the Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner, who was formerly Bruce Jenner.  I'm going to leave the theological implications of transgender people alone for the moment (maybe forever, because I'm sure I'm not qualified to speak about them), and talk about the reaction.

For the most part, I feel like our society has been less mean-spirited about this particular thing than one might have expected.  There are trolls to be sure, but for the most part people have sort of noted how courageous it is for her to have gone through this process in the public eye.  Bruce Jenner was a fairly common face in my childhood, being a successful Olympic athlete, to this day probably one of just a handful of track and field people that I would recognize on the street (at least before the changes).  Lately he was more infamous as part of the Kardashian side show than any thing else, but fame and infamy have sort of blended together in the internet age.  Now Caitlyn Jenner has become something altogether different.  She is a sign of a very significant shift in society with regards to LGBT people.  She is not a pioneer, but she is a figurehead, a recognizable public example of something that is shrouded in pain, shame and misunderstanding.

No matter what your opinion about transgender people is, you have to acknowledge that this moment is significant.  But it is still fraught with fear and misunderstanding for many.

One of the more common ones, is a basic logical fallacy called false equivocation.  People put up angry or semi-angry posts about some really brave person, usually a soldier or a firefighter, and say that they should be honored by society more so than Caitlyn Jenner.  But that assumes that we don't honor the courage of soldiers and such, but we do, maybe not as much as they deserve, but we do that all the time, we have days off and parades and fireworks.  Up until now though, we have done very little for people who are transgender, in fact, we mostly do rather the opposite.

Except for a few unfortunate incidents in the Vietnam era, our veterans and soldiers are treated with respect and honor.  We could certainly do more in terms of tangible support, but I certainly don't feel that they're disrespected by the masses, except maybe in the deluded minds of paranoid patriots. The pacifists I know do not despise soldiers, even if they do object to the very concept of violence and war.  Which is an important standard to apply in this case too.

Even if you don't understand what makes someone transgender, even if the whole idea gives you a little bit of the shivers, that shouldn't stop you from respecting the courage of a human being who had to face the conviction that they were trapped in the wrong body, and do it in the public eye.

That courage does not detract from the courage of a Marine wounded in combat or a cop who stopped a crime in progress or a firefighter who rescued a baby from a burning building.  They are all in fact brave.  I'm always in favor of paying attention to those moments when human beings live up to our potential instead of down to the lowest common denominator.  Let's honor people who do brave things, period.

I think that, in a society that values freedom, it should do all those people who sacrifice for that freedom proud to see our society living up to our own standards of tolerance and understanding, because we're not always so good at that.

The Many Faced God

For several years now I have been watching the HBO series Game of Thrones, which is set in a medieval world of knights, kings, queens, dragons and monsters.  It is also a world with many competing religions.  Until recently, the religious aspect only showed up very briefly in tangential comments about those who kept to the "old gods," or those who put their faith in "the seven" and lately an interesting and cult of "the faceless men" has taken an important role in the character arc of Arya Stark.  The faceless men are servants of "the many faced god." As is the case with most of the religions in the show, this cult bears only a passing resemblance to the religions of our world, but it is notable because along with whatever sorcery based religion is represented by the Red Woman who has Stannis Baratheon in her thrall, it appears to be monotheistic.
I am working my way through the novels and I notice that these sorts of things are discussed in more detail there, so I may be able to learn more from them than from the show, but I find the idea of the many faced god rather fascinating, because it mirrors a rather ubiquitous assumption about faith in the modern/postmodern world: pluralism.  Not necessarily the belief that there are many gods, but rather the belief that many different faiths provide some pathway to whatever the truth of God actually is.  That truth remains largely a mystery, out of necessity, and possibly for our own protection.
Let me say that, while I no longer see pluralism as a "dirty word," I do understand that it has several very real limitations.  However, in light of the general trajectory of world events, I wonder if maybe pluralism is the only approach to our very real differences that is going to keep us from destroying one another in a massive conflagration that will probably have grim religious elements.
I am not going to say that all religions are equally valid in understanding the nature of God, which would be dishonest.  What I would like to encourage is that followers of Jesus Christ, ought to be a little more circumspect and compassionate in their approach to those who hold to a different set of beliefs.  In short, I think we need to stop labeling others, sometimes even other Christians, heretics and infidel.
The Children of Abraham have some rather large logs in our eyes when it comes to going on the warpath against the very people we're supposed to be a blessing to and for.  Muslims blame and hate Jews and Christians for the fact that they inhabit parts of the world that are backwards and impoverished. Jews and Christians, while we have largely managed to make nice with each other since the end of WWII, still sort of mistrust one another (a lot of water under that bridge) and are united by an often justified fear of radical Islam.  Atheists think we're all benighted fools laboring under a dark superstition, and agnostics, well they mostly don't know what to think, that's why they're agnostic.
And I just used more religious stereotypes than I'm really comfortable with, and I wonder if you noticed.
Categorical classification helps us understand our narrative.  Whether it's race, creed, or what football team you root for, the world becomes easier to deal with if you clump people together.  If you're left out there to deal with everyone as an individual it gets sort of difficult to do certain things, like wage war.  War doesn't make any sense if you think about the individual people you are fighting, if you see them as human beings with hopes and dreams, with families and homes, only a sociopath or a psychopath would be okay with mass killing.  We must group them by ideology and by some categorical principal: the king or nation they swear allegiance to, the god they follow, where and how they were born, and even their social status.  We have to see them as other and lesser in order to truly rationalize killing them.  What we do is essentially make them faceless people, and that in turn allows us to see them as evil.
Pluralism, for all it's faults, pushes back against that wave
Better theologians than me have pointed out that until we learn to see God in other people we will never truly know God.  In fact, one of the earliest challenges of the church was learning to love each other as God has loved us.  The first letter of John says it this way: "Those who say, 'I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." (1 John 4:20, NRSV)
Many people will try to explain that away by saying that brothers and sisters refers to people in the church.  Fine.  How is that working out?  Let me know when you've perfected it, and then we need to go talk to some other people you're supposed to love. I'm pretty sure, thanks to the parable of the Good Samaritan, that we're probably not supposed to be that narrow with our love.
I suppose, if you take a certain view of salvation and such, that the most loving thing you can do for anyone is to get them to accept Christ by any means necessary.  I might agree, except for the rather stubborn reality that Jesus definitely did not see it as his job to convince, convict or coerce anyone into believing him.
What Jesus does is present the good news that the kingdom of heaven is near and begins to flesh out the implications of that good news.  What strikes me about his methods is that he rarely tries to scare people.  Oh, he gets a little stern with the religious authorities who are a stumbling block, he warns people to be careful of the little ones, but most of his public teachings are about what the kingdom is like, in terms that pretty much everyone is able to understand.
He is much more pluralistic in his approach than any Jew of his era had a right to be.  In large part, this is what drew the ire of the establishment: his wanton crossing of political, social, racial and religious lines.  Samaritans, tax collectors, prostitutes, even (gulp) Romans, are all recorded in the Gospels as people who heard, believed and were touched by Jesus' ministry.  And that's going cheese off the fundamentalists and puritans no matter what.
How are you ever going to keep your message pure and theologically correct if you're that indiscriminate about who you tell and who you touch and who you eat with?
Jesus was not wishy-washy or bland in his proclamations and teachings, but he was compassionate and loving to people whom society had deemed unworthy.  The prospect of using fear and manipulation to bring people into the fold was and is utter nonsense.  You're not bringing them to Jesus, you're not showing them the way and the truth and the life, you're herding them into another sheepfold altogether, and so I guess that makes you a bandit.
Jesus was astonishingly patient with individuals and rather intolerant of principalities and powers.  He could call the Pharisees a brood of vipers, but sit and teach Nicodemus patiently and lovingly.  He understood that pluralism is necessary for individuals to come to God.  Each person is unique and God must have many faces in order to be in a good and loving relationship with so many different individuals.  But, as a very old prayer reminded him: "God is One."  Don't try to unravel that mystery, let it be precisely that, a mystery.
I believe that Jesus is the way to the Father, I believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation, but because I do, I will try my best to follow Jesus, that means being a part of the Good News, not a continuing link in the violent and hateful bad news.  I hope that if it came down to it, I would have the courage to die for my faith, but since Jesus is the author of that faith I can't see any way to justify killing in his name.  We need to stop that.  Yes, I think it would make God happy if all people of all faiths stopped killing in God's name.  I think our crucified Lord calls us to go first.

Through the Fear

Just as faith is not faith without doubt, so courage is not really courage without fear.  In the first few days of the Camino, undoubtedly while I was struggling up a hill, and feeling rather like my body was going to quit on me, I had the thought that I could just quit.  I could call it off, let my physical weakness get the best of me and just go home.  I could have done that, but I didn't.  As my body got stronger though I came to see that the impulse to quit was not actually very much about physical weakness, it was quite simply about fear, specifically fear of failure.
Somewhere in my mind there is this (probably unhealthy) idea that my body is not really that important.  I have never been an athlete, or a physical specimen, my self worth has always derived more from what I could do with my mind (and perhaps even my spirit) than what I could do with my body. My forays into the world of physical excellence have been short lived and never really that excellent.  I've been overweight and asthmatic for most of my life, and I realized on the side of that hill that I had always let that give me an excuse for giving up.  I had never done anything physically impressive, and at the very least the Camino was going to be that: physically impressive.
I have mentioned all of this before, but it bears repeating, because you need to know that I was not particularly afraid of failing physically.  The fear was that I might fail spiritually.  My resolve might break, I might not be able to finish this trip because of what was going on in my head and heart rather than because of my legs and lungs.  If my body let me down it would just be the latest in a rather long litany of failures and flops, but if I simply lost my nerve?  Well that would be unacceptable.
Edwin Friedman, author of the seminal family systems work Generation to Generation, was working on a book called Failure of Nerve, when he passed away.  The book (finished by his son and others) in it's best sections examines the way systems fail because of fear, primarily the fear that leaders have, but acknowledging that leaders are technically and really figureheads for the dysfunction of a system.  Energy is contagious, if a system is anxious it will seek and most likely find leaders who reflect that anxiety.  If a system is bold and generative, it will probably also find bold and generative leaders.  And leaders can change systems for better or worse, and systems (and this I think is rather the more powerful force, but I suppose I'm biased) can change leaders for better or worse.
In church terms, one has several roles to fill in leadership: prophet and priest, (some try king, but that should probably be left to God).  Prophet is the role that notices the wrong and addresses the struggles, prophets can either "afflict the comfortable, or comfort the afflicted," but they never simply accept the status quo.  The priestly function, however, is not into rocking the boat.  The priest is inherently invested in keeping things smooth and steady.  Let the traditions that give us roots hold us steady, let the rituals and practices of our faith anchor us in the storm of life.
You might read these descriptions and think I am expressing a preference for one or the other, depending on your personal resonance, but I assure you, I fully recognize the necessity of both roles.  The problem that exists is that neither role is immune from the anxiety of the system, and both can become perverse as a result of that anxiety.  "Fear is the mind killer," says a fictional mantra from Frank Herbert's Dune.  Indeed fear kills the faculty of rational thought, but it also squashes vision, it also shortens the perspective to consider only the most immediate concerns.  Fear seeks out enemies and threats, and if it finds none, it will invent them, real and imaginary.
The prophet cannot speak truly, nor can the priest serve truly, when the system is overrun with fear.  So how can one change the system?  If it is already fearful and anxious, how does one change it?  It is bigger than you are.
The first step is vision, having a idea that gives you a destination and some guiding principles.
Then you need to figure out your needs: knowledge, skills, and perhaps most importantly helpers and supporters.  You need others who will go with you, because you will never change an anxious and fearful system by yourself.
You need to understand that failure is an option: your knowledge can be incomplete,  your skills inadequate and your helpers and supporters inconstant, but your nerve cannot fail.  Learn from your failures, adjust your plans, find new helpers, whatever you need to do, but do not let your courage fail, do not let the fear get the better of you.
That said, flexibility and empathy are important characteristics.  Seek to understand your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and you will find this leads to an ability to bend but not break.  I know, this sounds weird even to people who have spent time wrestling with Jesus' teachings on the subject.  And it sounds especially troubling when you feel like your in a "fight or flight" confrontation, because fear is almost always winning the battle.
Mercy, forgiveness and grace are most often where the rubber hits the road and where the nerve most often fails us.  It's self defense.  It's the only sensible thing to do for the good of the whole.  These are sentiments that are often attached to acts of violence.  I won't judge their validity in the secular world, but in the community of God's people they ring awfully hollow.