Do As I Say, Not As I Do

As my kids grow up, I find myself the subject of very close observation, which is uncomfortable to say the least.  I don't always think very carefully about how I talk, what I listen to on the radio, watch on TV, or about what I eat, but those are basic things that I am trying to teach my kids how to do better than me.  It's a challenge for me as a parent to be a good example in many areas of life, to live as I would want my kids to live, rather than how I actually live myself.
It is with that awareness that I would like to challenge all of us collectively to stop doing this one thing: outrage comparisons.  Let me explain what I mean by outrage comparisons with the latest example, the bombing in Istanbul where a bunch of people died at the hands of terrorists.  It has been noted by some that our collective rending of garments is not quite as enthusiastic as it was for Paris or Brussels.  Other examples have been: Orlando to Wounded Knee,  how can we spend our time and energy trying to help Syrian Refugees when we have Homeless Veterans in this country; how can we get upset about victims of (insert natural disaster that happened in some other country) when (insert natural disaster that happens here); and of course, any time there is an outbreak of violence, someone, somewhere is going to say it wasn't like 9-11.
Now, I will admit that the reasoning behind these comparisons can seem complicated, there are large geopolitical reasons, there are deep seeded issues of tribalism, there is the simple fact that we're pretty much on tragedy overload, but what they all boil down to is people assuming that our ability to have empathy and compassion for the suffering of our fellow humans is somehow a limited resource.  I don't know about you, but every time a terrorist blows up a bunch of people I get a whole new burst of sadness, and while it has changed character as these things have become more common, it doesn't seem to dry up at all.
I'm kind of running out of eloquent things to say in response to this sort of nonsense.  My responses are growing less shocked as time goes by, but I'm still grieved, not more, not less, pretty much the same.
So, I'm going to tell you not to judge other people's reaction to tragedy, by judging other people's reaction to tragedy.  If your reaction to tragedy is to immediately try to negate the tragedy, all or in part, by comparing it to another "worse" tragedy, you are wrong, that's not how this works.  The fact that Hiroshima happened does not make the bombing of some little village in the mountains of Afghanistan where some goat farmer's daughter was the only victim any less of a tragedy.
We have fallen into the grievous error, I would go so far as to call it a sin, of ranking tragedies according to numbers.  We are obsessed with how many people died, in doing this we are ignoring the fact that for every individual life that is lost there are families and friends that will mourn for years, there are permanent voids created in countless lives, who cares how many? Who cares whether they're "your" type of person or not?
This is, for me, a Jesus thing.  Comes up a lot, I know. He taught us to care for the least of these, and I think that meaning stretches to not just meaning the poor and the oppressed, but extends to victims of violence, even if they weren't particularly poor or oppressed in life.  The Gospels tell us rather poignant and surprising stories of Jesus actually learning the lesson at the core of what I'm talking about here, I think particularly of the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7. She asks that Jesus heal her daughter, Jesus refuses, because in his mind that's not part of his mission, she's an outsider, an other, a Gentile Dog.  I don't like the interpretations that have Jesus only "play acting" the part of a prejudiced Jew to prove some point, that to me is far too Gnostic (Docetism specifically, the idea that Jesus was not really a human, but rather some sort of astral projection of God, essentially denying the reality that Jesus could suffer, learn and change).  I think he was acting fully consistently with the cultural norms of his human society, it is not necessary to say he was sinning, but he was privileging his group over others. This foreign woman, through her humility and through the action of the Holy Spirit, teaches Jesus that this is wrong. Indeed his mission is to heal the broken and bring the Kingdom of Heaven near to all, that doesn't change but the scope expands. The end result of this is that Jesus again establishes an above and beyond standard of human love and compassion, as he did with the Sermon on the mount, "The law says... but I say..."
This is a difficult move to make for sure, which is why the Gospels and Acts and a good part of Paul's letters spend so much time talking about how grace is supposed to set us free, not just from whatever punitive condemnation we might feel, but free from narrowness and bigotry and the constant pissing matches of the sinful human nature.  The Jesus Way is a challenge to all of us to move, as our Lord did, in the direction of love and grace, we don't always get that message, or follow it, but wouldn't it be great if we did?

Contemplation

I know, I do a lot of complaining here.  Even if I try to dress it up as criticism or reflection, it amounts to nothing more than obsessing over all the crap that goes wrong in the world.  I try not to get too wrapped up in the small things, like I don't want to constantly be picking apart TV shows or arguing about which Geek Kingdom is the best (though I will entertain arguments on the relative merits of Kirk v. Picard).  But no matter how I try to stay positive there is this daily stream of really terrible things happening (bombing in Istanbul yesterday), it makes me wonder sometimes if this level of hyper-informational connectedness is really worth it.
I think maybe one reason why people remember the "good old days," as being so good is that they didn't actually know that much about what was going on in the world.  In the world of newspapers and Walter Cronkite, you were more than a couple of clicks away from watching someone get beheaded by a terrorist in a black veil, in fact, even if it was happening somewhere, you would probably never even hear about it let alone see it.
That was probably a good thing.  Not the ignorance, but the fact that you were given time to construct a view of the world with markedly less horror in it. There is something about being inundated with bad news, even if it's important, which upsets your spiritual balance.  The common critique of the internet is that it is really good for only two things: arguing with strangers and pictures of kittens.  And I will admit, after reading through the news of the day at the Post or the Times sites, I am itching to watch some cats do silly stuff, the internet provides the opportunity for both.
But it is actually hard for the good, sweet, funny stuff to outweigh the hatred and fear.  Hatred and fear are, by nature, heavier things.  I am trying to get into a habit of getting up early and going for a walk around the lake at the local park with my dog.  This morning was beautiful, it rained last night and everything was clean and fresh and not too hot at 6:45 AM.  The sun was just rising over the hills and it was in that time when the low angles of the light do really magical things.  I started with the freshness of the morning and a thankful heart.  Then the bugs started to come. Now I wear some pretty serious bug repellent on these walks, because I basically live on the edge of a swamp and the lake shore has some decidedly swampy areas.  The 100% Deet stuff keeps me from getting eaten, but it doesn't entirely stop bugs from giving me a hassle.  There are those buzzy things that like to just sort of dive at your head, apparently before they get the message that you are covered in a toxic film.  I go along sort of swiping at them and then my dog starts pulling at his leash instead of just walking.  Over a couple little rises on the steep side of the lake and I'm working up a bit of a sweat. My thoughts, which had been pleasant and serene are starting to take a turn for the worse.  I'm starting to envision conflicts that haven't even happened, I'm starting to feel defensive and edgy, most of all, at one point, I realize that I haven't even been paying attention to the glorious creation around me, or the magic of the sunlight poking holes in the dark forest canopy, I've been hating those damn bugs.
But I notice what happened, and I won't say that it changes my attitude towards the pests, I don't suddenly become St. Francis, it is simply that I notice what an effect those nuisances were having on me, and in noticing I am able to re-center myself.
This is how contemplation works, it does not keep you from sinful thoughts and ways, in fact, you may find that your mind wanders off on some rather unholy errands at times.  The trick is recognizing, without shame or criticism, what is happening to you, how you are being pulled and manipulated by the negative side of your own mind and soul.  Contemplative practice is ever more important in a world where we don't often pause to reflect about all the information we are flooded with daily.  It is not in avoiding those bugs that the value comes, it is learning to accept them as part of the journey.  Swat at them, swear at them, do what you will, but also look at the light and breath with the trees, feel the blood pumping through you, and remember that God is in all of this.

Of Fear and Futility

Start to connect the dots and the zeitgeist takes shape, like that cartoon character or zoo animal in your children's coloring book.  Globalization is creating anxiety all over the world, whether it is the Brexit or Trump's "great" wall, it would seem that enough people are gripped with anxiety, anger and angst to start doing things, dangerous (maybe) things.  For a while I have been wondering exactly what the face of the enemy looked like, and I wasn't having much luck to tell you the truth, it could have been greed, it could have been bigotry or racism, because all of those things seem to certainly be manifest in our political situation.  But as is usually the case there is a much more basic instinct underneath all of this, more primal even than greed: fear of the other.

To be realistic about this, we need to understand that family and tribal affiliations, for much of human history have been the basic social structure that provided us with safety, security and meaning.  These connections and the instinct to protect and preserve them are practically hardwired into us.  

In my line of work, skeptics sometimes ask me (if we get that far into honest conversation) to make sense of the Hebrew Scriptures, where God does (or commands his followers to do) some undeniably violent and brutal things.  My answer usually hinges on the fact that God uses the material at hand when it comes to human beings.  If Abram is the one who hears God's call to leave his home and his country and go out to a new place, God will work with that, even though Abram and Sarah are beyond child-bearing years.  If Moses is a stuttering refugee from Egypt, God will work with that.  If David is the youngest son of Jesse, or a murderous adulterer, God can work with that.  If Joshua thinks that the only way to deal with Canaanites is to kill em all in the name of God... well you get the idea.  We humans can get some pretty shady ideas all on our own, and if we win, it's pretty easy to imagine that God is on our side.

I have seen a bit of shock on the faces of our cousins across the pond as they realized that fearful rhetoric had actually had real life consequences.  The people who didn't vote because they assumed the status quo would rule, even the politicians who had been instrumental in pushing the Brexit, they all seem a little shocked that a majority of voters actually did it.  Pay attention America, you think it won't happen here, but you very well might be calling The Donald, President Trump before too long.

There is something in our nature to identify the winners as the blessed.

Which is why the Beatitudes matter.  Which is why Jesus entire ministry to the least of these is absolutely crucial in shaping Christian ethics.  If Trump were elected President with the help of conservative, evangelical Christians, many would anoint him with the very hand of God.  And they would probably be on pretty solid footing from an Old Testament angle. God's providence on a metahistorical level includes accepting as divine instruments: Tiglath Pileser (Assyria), Nebuchadnezzar (Babylon), Cyrus and Xerxes (Persia), not to mention good old Joshua who doggedly slaughtered men, women, children and livestock under the Herem (the holy ban), in the very name of God. In that company, I'm not sure the Donald even stacks up.

But he's using their tools: fear, anger, discontent, the will to power, the idea that the "others" are going to come and soak up all the good stuff that is supposed to belong to you.  The ground has been well prepared for this moment.  We have bought trickle down economics and accepted increasing economic inequality for decades. What's more we have accepted the proposition that protecting the "right" of unbridled capitalism is the same thing as protecting the right of ordinary people to make a living.  The economic interests of the middle class will always be more closely aligned with the interests of the poor than they will be with the aristocracy.  It would be far more likely for a middle class person to fall back into poverty than would be for them to climb into the upper echelons of wealth, but the myth that most of us have swallowed is just the opposite.  Lately the Emperor's clothes have seemed oddly translucent, particularly to the under 50 crowd.  Bernie Sanders' message about political corruption and income inequality has struck a raw nerve, as has Trump's bombastic xenophobia, and while they may seem like polar opposites they are resonating with the same problem: we think that problems are solved by power and money.

I am not equating Sanders and Trump, because my personal feeling is that Sanders' approach might actually improve our situation, while I believe firmly that Trump's approach will make things worse.  What I am saying is that, from a theological perspective, they're probably both wrong.  Bernie's talk of a revolution brings to mind a myriad of failed messianic movements that provided hope, but were squashed by a brutal empire seeking to maintain its power.  Trump, of course, sounds like he's trying to make that empire yet more brutal.

What the political realities of the world have shown me recently is that, until our hearts change towards each other, our political systems are always going to be broken to some extent.  But that doesn't excuse apathy or give anyone an ethical out to just throw their hands up in frustration.  Use your voice, even if you don't win.  Be a responsible citizen no matter what nation you call home, and if you need a bit of a boost, remember that God will work no matter what happens.

Once Upon A Time...

Today is the 19th anniversary of my first date with Michele, which I remember because I am married to a person who is absolutely a fanatic about birthdays and anniversaries.  It is a date I remember because I, actually we, did nearly everything we could to torpedo the whole experience, and therefore it is no minor miracle that we actually ended up getting married.  My dating history, up until June 27, 1997 was checkered to say the least.  I blamed it on lots of things, crazy girls mostly, which is partly true, but the deeper truth is that I was simply not very good at the whole process of what some will call romance and others will simply call mating.
I suppose I watched too many John Hughes movies, like many an eighties kid.  If you judge by my behavior (I can't claim to remember what was going on in my mind) I expected the prom queen to mysteriously recognize that I was, in fact, the catch of the century, and then utterly transform herself into my ideal woman. There was an episode of Star Trek, which I believe sort of summed up my expectations, it's called The Perfect Mate.  There is a woman who is what they call a metamorph, her name is Kamalah and she is being given as a gift of peace between two warring worlds.  She is stunningly beautiful and has the rather handy attribute of being wired to sense whatever the nearest male really wants and then to shape her very self to that idea (fantasy maybe?).  The idea is that she is supposed to form a permanent bond with her life mate at a very specific time and then become, forever, his "perfect mate."  Of course, things do not go according to plan, and Kamalah ends up bonding with Picard rather than her intended, which of course sets up a rather bittersweet resolution where Picard and Kamalah have to choose between love and duty.  It is complicated by the fact that Picard, representing modern human values, finds the very notion of giving a person as a gift morally repugnant, and also the fact that, unlike it was for James T. Kirk, the galaxy has not proven to be one enormous snog palace for Jean Luc Picard.
Anyway, Picard and Kamalah make the "right" choice, meaning the choice that doesn't prolong a conflict between two worlds, but which denies the two of them the happiness that was obviously supposed to be implied by a metamorphosis of one person into the "perfect mate" of another.  That is apparently what I was actually expecting the whole process to be like, to find a woman who was compatible with me, who liked the same things, who sort of mirrored my thought patterns, who was my perfect mate.
So, when I was thinking about where to take Michele on our first date, it was obviously to the new John Woo movie, Face Off, starring Nick Cage and John Travolta, how could that possibly go wrong?  I mean this is John Woo, of The Killer, and Hard Boiled, Taiwanese action movies that are just, well amazing.  In Hard Boiled there is this scene that takes place in a hospital between two guys, they get they end up at both ends of a hallway filled with frightened patients, and you think (because you're used to American movies) that they're going to move the violence elsewhere, but no, they don't, they just start shooting up the whole place, innocent people and all. That's John Woo, at least in his original form, willing to go over just about any line.  As it turns out, John Woo was capable of being corrupted by Hollywood, and Face Off was not a very good movie.  But it was an even worse decision, because I did not yet understand that my wife to be is a sensitive soul, who would probably not have liked The Killer or Hard Boiled, even if she did like Chow Yun Fat in Anna and the King.
I also did not fully comprehend that she was nervous as all get out, because she had been trying to get me to go out with her for a while, and I had been almost comically oblivious.  I also did not know that she had not eaten very much at all that day, before we went and had a couple big sugary cappuccinos before the movie.  I also did not know that she didn't really drink coffee or very much caffeine at all.
There were several times in the evening when I thought she might be sick.  By the time I dropped her back at her house, I pretty much figured that would be the end of us.  I had unintentionally sabotaged our date, and was prepared for her to decide that I was not, in fact, her perfect mate, because that's mostly how this goes: you mess up something that bad, you are not "made for each other" obviously.  But she wanted to go out again, and this time I had learned some lessons, no more ultra-violence, no more being oblivious to the fact that there was another person who is different from me involved in this relationship.  It was an important lesson, and a lesson that I continue to learn after nearly two decades of togetherness.
We have now both learned that we like different things. I don't make her watch Game of Thrones and she doesn't make me watch Nicholas Sparks movies, it's just better that way, it doesn't mean we're not compatible, we're just not like that poor creature on Star Trek who had to form herself into whatever someone else wanted her to be. When we do agree on things, it makes it all that much sweeter to be able to enjoy something from our different perspective.
Diversity in an ecosystem generally means that the system is more stable, more resistant to disease, more able to absorb trauma and maintain it's health, I think that holds true for families as well.
Happy First-Date-a-versary Michele.

Official Confession

The 222nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) just voted to include the Confession of Belhar in our Book of Confessions.  This has been in the works for almost 10 years now, because like most democratic government systems, nothing moves quickly through the denomination.  I have been part of two Presbyteries that have dealt with Belhar.  The first, Kiskiminetas Presbytery in Western Pennsylvania, voted to reject the recommendation of the 219th General Assembly that would have adopted the Confession nearly five years ago.  There were complicated reasons for this rejection, including a general resistance of more conservative leaning Presbyteries to anything that altered or was perceived to alter the confessional standards of the denomination.
Belhar was a casualty of the culture war.  It's language of inclusion and equality and it's rejection of doctrine which would further the separation and discrimination within the Body of Christ, made people who were fighting against full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the polity of the Church a little bit nervous. The argument about the Belhar Confession was a bit of an eye-opener for me, as I found myself at odds with colleagues, who up until that point had considered me "like-minded."  After rising to speak in favor of Belhar, I was no longer invited to their discussions.  It is, to this day, the only time I have ever stood up to speak either for or against something on the floor of a Presbytery meeting. My argument wasn't that great, I simply said that if I had to pick a side, I would rather stand with the likes of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. in speaking for justice and equality for all of God's children. It wasn't that I was right beyond reproach, I was being admittedly emotional and committing several rhetorical sins (name dropping, false equivalency and straw man fallacy), it was rather that I felt like it wasn't even heard.
It wasn't the dialogue everyone said we should be craving, it was gotcha politics and soundbites, spouting of dogma and rhetorical jousting. I wasn't even saying that Belhar was as good as I now think it is, I was just willing to say that we need to say something, we needed to have a dog in the fight.  That moment is also what I would consider the breaking point, where I realized that too many people were willing to split the child in half in order to win the argument.  How could we turn away from a statement of racial reconciliation that we, as a nation, need as much as South Africa?  Were we that afraid of the "homosexual issue?"  Were we that closed off to speaking a new word? Were we that broken?
Belhar did not die with that vote though. The 220th General Assembly sent it back for study, which means they kept it on the table. 221 then recommended it for adoption again and this time around the Presbyteries, including the one I currently serve, enthusiastically adopted it.  Thanks in no small part to the fact that the LGBTQ issues that had been such a divisive factor in 2010, are no longer an open question, and many of those offended by the moves we have made towards inclusion have moved on to more "like-minded" pastures. I am trying to honestly wish them well, and hold on to the unity of the Body of Christ, but I've still got some forgiving to do.  It's hard when people treat you like a heretic for trying to follow Jesus, but I guess he did warn us.
So what is the Confession of Belhar anyway?  And why should anyone other than Presbyterians of the PC(USA) persuasion even care a little bit?
The Confession was a product of the Uniting Reformed Church of Southern Africa (URCSA, Presbyterians love acronyms).  It was written and adopted in 1986 in the midst of Apartheid in the nation of South Africa and it is a solid piece of confessional history that represents a specifically Christian response to such an atrocity.  Both Godfrey Betha, and Alan Boesak (one of the writers of Belhar) represented the URCSA at GA this year and rejoiced that an American Reformed denomination has finally joined with them in this Confession.
Our cultural addiction to bigotry and racism has reached a critical point, and I think that we need an intervention. The Confession of Belhar is sort of like a 12 step program for institutional racism.  The URCSA is sort of like our AA sponsor, they are giving us the benefit of thirty years of sobriety, which they began in an era when their own government was still actively maintaining the system of Apartheid.  Too often white churches (which the PC(USA) definitely is) have been complicit in the perpetuation of those sorts of systemic injustices.  When we call this a Confession, there is a very real sense in which we can mean it in both senses of the word: a statement of faith, and a statement of repentance for our sins.  Racism is not a by gone problem or an issue that has been adequately resolved in our own nation.  We trumpet the Barmen Declaration because it was written against the Nazis, and we all know what bad guys they were.  But it is too safe to shout at the dead dragons of history, it is much more dangerous and necessary to speak into the face of living, breathing evil.
The Confession of Belhar does that, and even if nobody else really cares, I'm actually proud of General Assembly on this day, so I'm gonna hold on to that feeling.
If you missed the link above, please read the Confession of Belhar right here.

Phase II

Prophetic thinking is the capacity for healthy self-criticism, the ability to recognize your own dark side, as the prophets did for Israel. Without failure, suffering, and shadowboxing, most people (and most of religion) never move beyond narcissism and tribal thinking (egoism extended to the group). This has been most of human history up to now, which is why war has been the norm. But healthy self-criticism helps you realize you are not that good and neither is your group. It begins to break down either/or, dualistic thinking as you realize all things are both good and bad. This makes all idolatry, and all the delusions that go with it, impossible.

-Richard Rohr, Daily Devotion 6-22-2016

Adapted from Falling Upward, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

When I was 20, I honestly had a hard time imagining that I would live to be as old as I am now. Twenty year old me would have found this very scene preposterous: sitting in my comfortable office at the church where I serve as a pastor, where I get up in front of crowds of people and talk about God and stuff, where it is my job to comfort people who are hurting and challenge people to live with a higher awareness of God's purpose in their lives, where it is my job to deal with the weekly (daily) task of exegesis of the text of Scripture and of the life of my congregation.  But perhaps more than any of that, 20 year old Mark would have a hard time fathoming the 12 year old boy sitting on the couch playing video games and waiting for me to take him to robotics camp.  20 year old Mark wasn't really interested in having kids, in fact, I would say he was probably considered it to be a fate worse than death, which is why he figured he would probably kick off at around 30 rather than become a father for the second time in two years.  20 year old me didn't know what it was like to lose people you thought would always be around.  20 year old me didn't have any idea what sort of tragedy lurks out there in the world.  And yet 20 year old me was a pretty pessimistic and angry young man for some reason, with very little hope for the future.

Twenty year old me had never thought of shadowboxing as a spiritual practice.

Twenty year old me was extremely dualistic.

Twenty year old me was incapable of recognizing let alone being challenged in his own idolatry.

Fortunately, I hope, that young man had a chance to grow up.  Thanks to that process, this 41 year old man recognizes, as he peeks over the horizon into middle age, that the process of growth is not always easy, but it is always necessary.

I suppose, if I accept that I'm hitting the transition between first and second halves of life that Rohr is describing, I'm somewhere in the prophetic movement of life, having left the dualism and strictures of the law somewhere in the rear-view mirror.  Hopefully I learned those lessons well enough that I can remain a dependable citizen of life while not becoming too rigid.  I feel that's where I am, having escaped the conservatism of my youth, which for me was far too rooted in anger and self-righteousness, I have been trying to live and preach a message of grace consistently.

I'm not always sure I'm being prophetic, but I do know that the shift angered some of the people who liked me the way I was, and that probably is evidence of some sort. I feel like being a prophet is more about having questions than answers. I'm pretty sure I have not yet become wise, although I aspire to that someday.  Someday I want to be like Eugene Peterson, who just sort of oozes the wisdom of a long obedience in the same direction, and whom I blatantly plagiarize, or Richard Rohr, who afflicts me daily with these devotions that challenge the very foundations of the idols that I apparently still have.

The thing is though, even though I recognize how far I have come in two decades, the main thing that I attribute that growth to is a simple awareness that I am utterly over-matched in almost everything I do.  But the remarkable truth that I have come to see is that failure teaches us more and helps us grow faster than success.

So maybe that's where this absurd feeling of hope that I have been having lately comes from.  I am looking around at the world, at our church, at our nation, at all the really horrible things that are going on, from Donald Trump to the crisis in the Middle East, and I am thinking that perhaps, as Paul said, these are just the birth pangs.  What if our entire world is stuck in the place where I was personally at twenty? Dualistic, idolatrous, violent, angry, hopeless, and what if all of that has to fail in order for something new to be born?

What if the next adaptation in the evolution of our species is not some physical mutation that gives us greater brain size or fewer digits or whatever.  What if our next step is a spiritual step?  Isn't that essentially what Christ taught us?  The way of the cross, moving beyond the small, legalistic categories that constantly lead to conflict and wars, moving beyond self-interest into something called love.

It seems impossible, or at the very best unlikely, that we will ever collectively make such a jump, but then again, me being the father of a 12 year old seemed the same way twenty years ago, and we have so much more time, and God never stops creating.

Cleveland Rocks, Finally.

Every once in a while sports catches me caring about something I didn't know I cared about.  Like, for instance, Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.  Last night Lebron led the Cavaliers and the entire City of Cleveland, indeed perhaps the whole northeast corner of Ohio, out of the shadowlands of sports purgatory and into the glorious light of Championship.
Cleveland's sports woes are well chronicled: The Drive by John Elway, The Fumble by Ernest Byner, Michael Jordan stealing Craig Ehlo's face and perhaps even devouring his soul, the actual departure of the Browns to Baltimore, pretty much everything the Indians have ever done, and perhaps most acrid of all: native son Lebron James' own announcement that he would be "taking his talents to South Beach."  Cleveland is the poster child for the rust belt and the punchline of jokes about futility.  It is Detroit without the tragedy and violence.  The thing that really probably stung the most about Cleveland sports is how close they came so many times.  It wasn't that they were mired in perpetual losing, the Cavaliers made the finals a few times and lost, the Browns were int he AFC championship games, the Indians probably made the playoffs once or twice, and they did actually get a really funny movie (Major League) made about how pathetic they actually were.
As Philly phan, I can sort of feel Cleveland's pain (four NFC championship games in a row and one Super Bowl loss, can certainly make you forget about all the winning that Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb's Iggles did in the first decade of the new millennium).  So last night, after I watched Game of Thrones, I clicked on over to game seven and watched Lebron's Cavaliers complete an unprecedented comeback from a 3-1 series deficit and actually become NBA champions.  In the process they defeated the defending champion Golden State Warriors, the new darlings of the NBA, and the harbingers of the future of the league.  They beat a team that had only lost nine regular season games four times, including the last three in a row, while facing elimination.  Lebron was not Michael Jordan in these games either, he didn't drop 60 points a night and dominate like some sort of mythical basketball god.  He played hard though, and he made his teammates better.  He defended like a demon, he passed like point guard and he fought for everything, even as he seemed to be battling for his scoring touch.
In the end, when he collapsed on the floor, I felt that he had earned that moment perhaps more than any athlete I can remember.  It was the completion of an epic story arc.  It started with him being the most talented, most sought after high school player, maybe ever.  It followed with him, Akron boy, being drafted by the local Cleveland Cavaliers, and almost immediately making the team that Jordan had gutted in the 1990's relevant again.  He got them close, he got them right to the brink, but he couldn't bring it home, so he left.  He left like a 20 something year old, who doesn't really know how to go about things. He went to someplace warm and cosmopolitan, a place that is pretty much the antithesis of Cleveland, Miami.  Cleveland mourned and burned his jersey, but deep in their heart they knew why he left.  Most of them would probably have left too given the chance. In Miami Lebron assembled his super team, there he won, there he gloated, and there he decided he had unfinished business in Cleveland.
When he came back two years ago, he was a savior and all was forgiven, instantly, without a second glance.  It would have been a perfect thing to have won last year, he bootstrapped a young, incoherent team into the finals and ran into the three point shooting buzz saw of the Golden State Warriors.  His two main supporting players were down and out, and he couldn't quite muscle through the team that has proven to be this year, until last night, an absolute force of nature.  I didn't really blame him, and neither did Cleveland, even though the sports writers were pronouncing the demise of Lebron James as a force in the game.  If you really paid attention, you would know that the story of him riding back to Cleveland to an instant championship was not really how it goes for that city.  It just wouldn't have been right.  It would have been too easy.  It wouldn't have been right for someone else to take out the Warriors either.  Just like Jordan needed to slay the dragon of the Detroit Pistons, Lebron needed to fend off the challenge of Stephen Curry.  Cleveland needed to wear its heart on the outside of its body for a week as the Cavs fended off elimination three times in a row. They were the underdogs, which is what Cleveland must be.  It was not a fluke that they had to come back from a deficit, it was not a fluke that they were locked up at 89 coming down to the final seconds of game 7, it was not a fluke that Lebron had to fly in with a desperate block on Steph Curry and then crash to the floor after a missed dunk, leaving him clutching his arm and Cleveland holding its breath 2500 miles away, it was exactly as it should be that he winced his way through making one of two free throws to mostly seal the deal, it was absolutely right that the deal never really seemed sealed until the game clock went red.  It was all, well, not perfect, but it was exactly what had to happen for Cleveland.

Talking in an Empty Room

A couple of Democratic Senators have started a filibuster on the floor of the Senate, aimed at preventing discussions of the appropriations bill from going forward until the legislators take some meaningful action on gun control.  Their aim appears to be closing the loopholes that exist for online purchases and gun show purchases, as well as pushing for better, universal background checks, which include not just felons but people who have been put on "watchlists" by the FBI.  Pretty dramatic sounding stuff, but not a very high bar to jump over to tell you the truth.  These are the "common sense" measures that have been bandied about for years now, but never acted upon.  What we're talking about here is nothing more than making sure that the laws we all pretty much know are needed are enforced across the board and without all the leaks that allow people like Omar Mateen to legally purchase an AR-15.  They are not talking about repealing the second amendment, or abrogating the 5th amendment and confiscating guns, they are simply trying to get a body of 100 of our elected leaders, trained lawyers and politicians, to do SOMETHING.
And they're talking to mostly empty chairs, but not like Clint Eastwood.  The absence of most of Congress during this action is an abomination.  People ought to be crossing party lines and making things go, but they're not, and they probably will not.  If you value human life, and you care about the integrity of this nation of ours, you should not vote for any Senator who refuses to address this issue.  If they think these measures are wrong, tell us why.  If they're refusing to vote, or even participate in a discussion don't we deserve to know why.
As President Obama said the other day: a decision to do nothing is a form of action.  The bodies are piling up pretty high.  I for one am pretty depressed about having to watch some of the most powerful people in the world, including POTUS have to ruefully shrug their shoulders and say there's nothing we can do, because the majority refuses to do their job, the job we elected them to do and the job that a majority of the public, an overwhelming majority of the public, wants them to do right freaking now.
I get it, some don't agree with the measures, fine, vote them down, but don't just run away and hide.  Think they need tweaking, tweak them, but show up.
I'm done now.

Caught in a Trap

The Gospels record many instances where the religious authorities of the day tried to test and trap Jesus into crossing the line.  They suspected that he was somehow a heretic, but he was popular with the people because he could heal people and because his message of the Kingdom what with the Beatitudes and the whole last being first thing tended to resonate with the people who felt the weight of oppression on their necks.  They knew they had to get him to say things that they could use to nail him (sorry for that pun).  These things had to be clear violations that everyone sort of had to understand and agree were bad news.  Sabbath breaking was apparently their best weapon, because Jesus and his disciples appeared to flaunt it on many occasions.  This turned out to be less than ideal though, because even in this Jesus used an appeal to the situation of the common people; namely that they did not always have the luxury not working on the Sabbath.  They had livestock that needed fed and tended, they had things that needed to be done, and they did not have the wealth to simply pay for others to do it so that they could keep the Sabbath.
The Pharisees technically caught Jesus breaking the Sabbath, but he used compassion to present them with a conundrum that they could not defeat and still seem like the good guys.  They could not very well say that they truly wished for their fellow humans to continue being blind or crippled in some way, just because it was the Sabbath.  They could not politically maintain a rigid interpretation of the Sabbath keeping standard without sacrificing the respect of the people.
This always happens to people who are trying to maintain standards (moral or cultural) that conflict with deeper ethical principles.  The ethical principles that Jesus was operating under were: love God, love others.  Pretty simple, but problematic for the Pharisees who were mostly willing to sacrifice the second principle in favor of the first, or what they thought was the first.  Jesus was making a connection though, between loving God and loving others, establishing that it is no longer a tenable position to love God kicking his children in the teeth and kneeling on their throats.
We see this sort of dissonance on the center stage of many of our cultural tragedies.  It is clear and visible that the hatred of LGBTQ people has become toxic, what happened in Orlando was perpetrated by a Muslim pledging himself to ISIS, because within that stream of fundamentalist religion Homosexuality is an affront to the will of Allah.  Honestly though, he very well could have been Christian, there is enough of that floating around our pond.  We are all quick to run up the rainbow flags this week, but last week we were all up in arms about transgender people going tinkle in the next stall and conflating homosexuality and transgender identity with pedophilia.  I'm not saying you can't still consider homosexuality to be a sin and also be sad about the victims in Orlando, I'm just pointing out that you need to take account of the dissonance that is created by your "biblical" interpretation which labels people as "abominations," and then wondering how anyone might be so misguided as to start mowing down the abominations.  You have dehumanized people, which is by the standards set forth in the sermon on the mount, tantamount to murdering them.  Eugene Peterson's Message translation of Matthew 5: 22, "The simple moral fact is that words kill."
Words like, "abomination," and "sinner," spoken without an offer of grace or love. Words like "judgment," and "repent," without the promise of forgiveness or the simple connection of relationship where that means something. Words that dehumanize others, lead to a toxicity in our culture that can and does manifest as violent acts.  The words of racism, discrimination, hatred and bigotry are demonic tools.  If you think you can use them and control them, as a certain Presidential candidate has been doing, you are fooling yourself.
The rhetoric that is used every day on the news is inflammatory, the political discourse has become toxic, and there are far too many people out there, poorly educated and psychologically unbalanced, who simply cannot sort that all out for themselves.  The demonic influence can come from ISIS or the Westboro Baptist Church, it can come from talking heads on the television or from that angry guy down at the VFW or the local bar.  Too often it can come from people in positions of authority, from Pastors, Imams, Congresspeople, leaders of the state, and often they don't even realize how toxic they are becoming.  As Goethe said through Mephistopheles: "Not even if he had them by the neck, I vow, would ere these people scent the devil!"
It would seem to me then, the Devil does have us by the neck, and indeed we don't scent it and seem hell bent on denying it even when our noses are being rubbed in it.  50 dead bodies gives us pause, but in a week we will be back to "normal" arguing about bathrooms again, and the demonic fingers will tighten just a bit more.

Among the Tombs

Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

He said, "Legion," for many demons had entered him.

-Luke 8: 30

Again, there is nothing new under the sun.  The aftermath of these mass shootings is all beginning to make me feel like I'm living that movie Groundhog Day, except I'm in one of the many implied repetition days where we don't actually learn anything that advances our self knowledge.  Seriously, the articles I've read are all starting to sound the same, the same as they did after Sandy Hook, after Virginia Tech, Aurora, all of them just repeating the themes of "thoughts and prayers," guns, mental illness, ISIS and/or radical Islam, terrorism, racism, and this time the cause du jour is homophobia.

It's a toxic stew to be sure.

Everyone has a favorite "ingredient" in this toxic stew, which they blame for the over all damage.  But I think the demons are working as a gang, and banishing all of us to the tombs, driving us out of our homes and into filthy stinking places where we can beat ourselves with rocks and rave like lunatics.  It's no wonder that people have come to believe in a malevolent, demonic, counter-persona which we name the Devil, it would seem that evil very much has a specific modus operandi: prey on hate, alienate and isolate an individual, use their natural fear and loathing to wind them up, give them the tools of destruction and watch them go.  It can happen to anyone, it can happen to nations, but honestly why even go to all the trouble of raising up another Nazi party when you can get such random and senseless massacres using such rudimentary fear, hate and giving them perfectly legal killing tools?

I'm convinced that we have been conscripted into a religion of violence, all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, and all the rest.  Despite the fact that all of our approaches to faith and life would tell us, in their best expressions, that non-violence and care for the vulnerable are important attributes of the Divine, or fundamental virtues in the case of those who don't want to believe in God or gods.

I believe that worship of something is a fundamental human characteristic, we are made for it, we need to do it.  As Bob Dylan said in his brief foray into Christianity, "It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody."  The fact of the matter is that we have collectively chosen to serve a god of violence and death masquerading as an angel of freedom and liberty.  This god tells us that, if we're going to truly be free, we must accept these sorts of calamities as the price of freedom.

I'm going to call B.S. on that one, and I'm going to thank John Calvin for introducing me to Christian Freedom, which is freedom from sin and death through the Way of Jesus Christ.  Here's how it works: God has given us status as children of the Kingdom of Heaven, demonstrating God's love for us in Christ.  If we accept other terms, such as the Law, or if we do good things out of dire feelings of duty, then we are servants, and not free, and not capable of living up to God's plan for us. God has forgiven us and set us free for what Calvin calls, "Joyous Obedience." (Institutes III.19.5).  I'll just let Johnny say it for himself:

And we need this assurance in no slight degree, for without it we attempt everything in vain. For God considers that he is revered by no work of ours unless we truly do it in reverence toward him. But how can this be done amidst all this dread, where one doubts whether God is offended or honored by our works?

Now, if you divorce the confidence that should come from that assurance from the Gospel witness to Jesus of Nazareth and how he actually lived, this idea could create a monster for sure. But if you pay any attention to the other 1200 pages of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, you will clearly glean the message that Calvin would in no way, shape or form, wish to divorce this idea of freedom from the person of Christ, and the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, to do so would be to commit a foul kind of idolatry.  In fact, if you read the whole stream of Calvin's argument here you will find him weaving back and forth over the idea of freedom and the insistence that it must be subject to the will of God, or else it is just another kind of bondage.
Which is what I'm driving at here.  We have made an idol of freedom, and in doing so have created a trap for ourselves.  Freedom, unshackled from the love of God in Christ, and from the way of Jesus, can become an unholy terror.  Freedom to do whatever you choose, if you are not constrained to love one another will get you right where we are now, and no law can fix that.  You won't be able to legislate this evil away, it requires a change of heart.
How do we work for this change?  It can seem so hopeless because the demons are indeed legion.  The first thing to do though is for all of us who claim to follow the way of Jesus to cease worshiping our idols of violence, stop looking for the solution in force, power and intimidation.  It's not as simple as guns, but guns and our faith in them is part of it. It's not as simple as tolerance of those who are different, but if we can cease hating people just because we don't entirely understand them, it would be a step.  If we stop believing there is some sort of magic bullet to solve this problem, then we will be in the right frame of mind to do something meaningful.  Our freedom is given to us so that we can glorify God, not so that we can bitterly defend our own rights, or stomp on others before they stomp on us, which is the demonic ideology that gets us where we are right now, again, and again, and again.

Imprecation

Is this any way to run a country?

Is there an honest politician in the house?

Behind the scenes you brew cauldrons of evil,

Behind closed doors you make deals with demons.

-Psalm 58: 1-2, The Message

It happened again last night. A madman with a gun went on a rampage, and now we are sending our "thoughts and prayers" to another community and rending our garments about this woeful and "unavoidable" tragedy.  It makes me want to spit fire.  I'm going to take a different route though, I'm going to listen to Eugene Peterson's advice and learn how to cuss without cussing, using the imprecatory Psalms like 58.

They're good stuff for moments like this, because frankly, I've run the gamut of taking this on like a reasonable person.  I just give up trying to talk sense to people who are willing to accept consequences like what happened in Orlando, San Bernardino, Oregon, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, I don't even what to list all the places because I don't want to type that much, and seriously, I type fast.  So this is not going to be a rational argument for sane gun control, this is going to be curse on the idolatry of violence that warps our souls to the point where we really feel this sort of thing is inevitable.

You are entitled to your opinion, but people are dying because we lack the spine to be grown ups.  I'm tired of watching our President and our congress people, who we elected to make decisions in the best interests of our nation, throw up their hands and say there is nothing they can do about this stuff.  There is something they can do, they just don't have the guts to do it.  And I'm tired of all the good people of this country, including the gun owners, accepting and voting for politicians who don't have the guts to do anything about it, because they jive with other opinions and positions.  This and war are becoming my make or break issues.  I'm tired of letting the Hawks run the show, they are not just people that disagree with me, they are what the Bible often describes as the "Wicked," they profit off of war, they hold power through fear, and they are evil, demonic and violent.  Here's more Psalms:

God, get me out of here, away from this evil;

protect me from these vicious people.

All they do is think up new ways to be bad,

They spend their days plotting war games.

They practice the sharp rhetoric of hate and hurt;

Speak venomous words that maim and kill.

-Psalm 140: 1-3, The Message

What can you do about such tragedy?  First, reject the "sharp rhetoric of hate and hurt," if anyone uses it reject them as leader, they are not worthy.  Don't have a choice?  Yes you do, you always do, write letters, if they represent you, hold them accountable with your voice and your vote.  Do your homework, if the people on your ballot have the support of the NRA or have ties to warmongering companies like Haliburton, don't vote for them, even if you might agree with them on economic policy, or other issues, don't accept their "cauldron of evil" and their demonic deals.

Make peace your priority, not just security for you either.  Think of all the people, who may be strangers to you, who are going to die because you accepted and elected a person who would not stand up to the wickedness that is rampant in our world, and no, I'm not talking about the Muslims, or even the mentally unstable people who are often the perpetrators of these crimes. I'm certainly not talking about the LGBTQ people which are too often the target of the venomous words of people in my own line of work. I'm talking about the people who create the system where this sort of violence happens and fight to keep it going in the face of such atrocity, because they're getting rich.

Moloch and Mammon have always been fast friends. They are a symbiotic duo that can twist the human soul rather skillfully. Violence and greed keep us locked in cycles that we think are so unbreakable that we feel utterly powerless to confront them, but we can, like no other people in the history of the world, we can, and thus we should, indeed we must.

Addendum

So Tamar remained a desolate woman in her brother Absalom's house.

When King David heard of all these things, he became angry, but he would not punish Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn.  But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad; for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had raped his sister Tamar.

-2 Samuel 13: 20b-22

I would like to be done with Brock Turner, because the whole story gives me a sour stomach.  I took the time to read the victim's statement, which honestly I only recommend if you aren't already heartbroken for her.  If you have any of that victim blaming impulse that I talked about yesterday, take the time and read as she pours her guts out and graphically describes the aftermath of her sexual assault.
I have also read Turner's father's plea to the judge for clemency, which I will not link because, while I understand the desire of a father to try and help his son, his plea is a rather repugnant case of the "boys will be boys" defense, and I cannot even pretend to endorse that.  The judge, however, did grant Turner rather remarkable leniency, which is really what has caused the interweb to collective lose its mind.  Apparently the judge is now facing everything from death threats to a recall campaign, and Brock Turner is being turned into the face of sexual violence and white privilege with one broad stroke.
Man Internet, you can be a vicious nest of hornets sometimes.
Don't get me wrong, I don't feel bad for Mr. Rapist, he did something very vile.  If we're going to do something constructive with this tragic mess though, we need to put the brakes on the outrage machine for just a minute and consider the following: Brock Turner is not some sort of outrageous villain, he is probably a pretty normal kid who made a bad decision.  He is a  young man who grew up immersed in privilege: a wealthy, white, top performing athlete who was on the fast track to being someone.  I know, that makes him easy to hate for most of us, but for the love of truth and justice can we please take a step back and realize that he is not Hannibal Lechter.
If you will permit me to go all preacher for a minute, the story of the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel is a rather poignant analog to this situation (Oh yeah, this stuff happened in the Bible).  The violation, the refusal of the King to do justice and the eventual rebellion of Absalom which tears the kingdom apart and leads the death of Amnon, and eventually Absalom as well.  Just in case you think stuff like this is new, go read it now.  Seriously, this goes pretty deep, same stuff different millennium.
Incidents like this one are far too common.  This one has just happened to catch fire in the public eye.  Baylor has been rocked by a scandal involving sexual assaults by athletes.  A Columbia student carried a mattress around campus to demonstrate against indifference to her plight. Rape and sexual assault on college campuses is an epidemic and it has been for a long time.  Many of the victims do not speak out, and the Turner case is a vivid and damning example of why.  If they were drunk, they're going to get blamed.  If they were flirty or dressed all sexy, they're going to get blamed.  If the guy is a an athlete or a really good student, or if he is well liked and good looking, people are going to make excuses for him.
Many victims of rape get violated all over again if and when they seek justice.
I think that focusing too much on this one guy, making him the poster child for campus sexual assault might actually be helpful if we can hold in tension the reality that he is actually a pretty normal guy.  We can, and should hold both realities: he is a young kid, who has mostly towed the line and who was on the right track, who in a moment of alcohol induced stupidity did something bad; and because of that something bad he is now a sex offender.  That is how fast it can happen, that's why this problem is so deep.  There are, in fact, a goodly number of actual serial rapists on most college campuses, however, that doesn't limn out the whole problem.  You can become a rapist without lurking in the bushes or forcing your way through a bedroom door, you can become a rapist if you simply don't understand what "No" means, or if you don't account for the fact that the object of your lust being unconscious is an automatic "No."
It can happen that fast, it can be that irrevocable.  And once it's over there is very little you can do that would truly amount to justice.  If we locked up Turner for ten years, would it give that girl back what she lost? If we vilify him and scapegoat him and recall the judge for being lenient, if we round up an angry mob and hang him from the old oak tree, would that take away the violation?  Who is right? Absalom? David? Who? No one? Tamar remains a desolate woman.
Somehow we need to figure out how to head Amnon off at the pass.

But I haven't seen Barbados...

Me, and a gun, and a man on my back,

But I haven't seen Barbados,

So I must get out of this.

-Tori Amos, Me and a Gun

When I was in college, I went to see Tori Amos in concert, which I suppose gives me some kind of feminist street cred, which I need to draw upon in order to talk about something that makes most of my gender either angry or uncomfortable, or both.  Tori is a survivor of a violent rape, and her song, Me and a Gun, is about that experience.  As a 20 something year old boy/man in a darkened auditorium surrounded by mostly women, listening and watching as this flame haired pixie hammers out one of the most uncomfortably powerful songs I have ever heard, I was not aware that probably more than a quarter of the women sitting near me had been victims of sexual assault and rape.

But statistically they had been, and as "survivors" of a big anonymous school like Penn State, and devotees of Tori Amos, the percentage may have been higher.

Full disclosure moment: as a college student, I was an utter misfit.  I was disenchanted with the football and frat party crowd, but was not at all comfortable with the "sensitive new age" crowd either.  I was fully aware of the prevalence of date rape and alcohol related sexual assault.  I knew women who had been assaulted, raped, accosted and harassed.  I knew boys who told stories gleefully about encounters they had that almost certainly fell into one of those categories, and to tell you the truth, I didn't really know what to do about any of that.

When I was sober, I made a promise to myself that I would never take advantage of someone who was too drunk.  As I grew up a little, I tried to keep myself under control enough vis-a-vis the binge drinking, to try and avoid even being on the border of that.  What do you do though, in a world where drunken hook ups are a way of life?  How do you keep from becoming a freaking rapist?  It's not as easy as you might think, especially in the muddled adolescent mind.  So I do have some sympathy for that kid from Stanford, but I have more sympathy for his victim.

It seems to me that two lives have been ruined, and to recognize that there are really two victims in this case is not to negate the suffering of either one. We all have some guilt in that destruction.

There are a few things that we must stop doing in order to address that guilt.

1. We must stop shaming and blaming the victims.  In the Stanford case, as in so many of these scenarios, alcohol and drugs are involved, questionable behaviors are involved, "going out to party" in skimpy clothes and with flirty intentions are involved.  None of that means that a girl deserves to be raped or assaulted.  You should not have to be a model citizen in order to be protected from such a violation.
2. We must teach our boys better.  It would seem that a lot of these cases involve athletes, but that might be just a warning flag about a deeper problem.  The culture of most athletic programs does indeed reinforce the type of drive and attitude that leads to this sort of event, but let's be clear, we teach all of our boys that assertiveness is manly.  We glorify the winners.  We idolize strength and the alpha male ideal.  Sports don't make rapists, but the same sort of single minded focus and determination that gets you up for a 4:00 AM workout and drives you to push through the pain of wind sprints can blow up in your face when hot and heavy runs into a, "No, stop." If you have been conditioned to overcome obstacles, her free will can seem like just another tackler to evade.  Which actually leads right into...
3. We need to work harder on presenting a healthy approach to human sexuality.  Our dysfunctional attitudes about sex are absolutely toxic to so much of this debate.  We have tried to make it "no big deal." We have tried to treat it like learning geometry.  We have tried to somehow keep our old "dark and shameful," labels to scare away the young.  We keep it always out there as a tool to sell things and we parade it up and down. We present it as though it is an achievement or a conquest. Losing your virginity is akin to winning some sort of trophy. We have worked furiously to insist that it can happen without emotional attachment and damage and our glorification of promiscuity has robbed people of the ability to learn about sexuality in a safe and committed relationship.  The "hook up" was the most common form sexual encounter when I was in college, actual relationships seemed harder to come by. To many of my peers this did not seem to matter, but it did matter, and a lot of us are dealing with scars now that we're creeping into middle age.  I am terrified at sending my daughter (and my son for that matter) into a world where people are so steeped in badly warped ideas about sex and intimacy.

As these sorts of events play out on college campuses around the country, it is pretty clear that something needs to change.  It is not as simple as telling girls to be more careful.  Nor is it reasonable to imagine that you are going to be able to train 20 year old boys out of this sort of thing while you still feed them hyper-sexuality in almost ever waking moment.  I think that one thing that is hopeful in the Stanford case was the simple fact that two passers by intervened.  Not so long ago, I think those bikers might have just kept on riding. Which, I think, shines a light on the fact that our solution must be the work of our culture and our communities.

Rape and sexual assault has been happening forever, read the Bible sometime, but it's not something that we as a community just have to accept.  Not accepting it involves much more than just punishing the offenders though.  Fear of punishment should not be the only thing standing between us and becoming a rapist.  We need to confront our deep denials of the issue, we need to take the victims more seriously, we need to seriously consider the culture that we create where this stuff breeds like mildew. We need to talk about this, like Tori did, we need to hold a light up to this darkness, because that's the only way we're ever going to beat it.

Don't Blaspheme

A funny thing has happened to me since I became a minister; people started apologizing to me for their use of profanity.  Usually it's the expected culprits, you know the ones that get a PG-13 or an R rating if they're in a movie.  The thing is that none of those are actually the ones that bother me.  The ones I really wish people would stop dropping are the uses of the Lord's name in vain, and I'm not actually talking about God, as in OMG.  I'm talking about the use of my Lord's name as in Jesus Christ, sometimes adding an H as a middle initial.
The thing is, I'm not really able to parse whether or not someone is saying, "Oh my God," or "Oh my god," because spoken language usually doesn't give us much info about capitalization.  On top of that, all of our names for the Creator God, are probably imperfect human constructions anyway.  When Moses asks the name of God at the burning bush, the voice gives him an interesting answer to say the least, it's more of an action word, "I AM," is how it gets spoken in English.
Jesus on the other hand, is a pretty specific name, especially if you're not talking about a Mexican guy with a different pronunciation (Hay-zus).  The anglicized name of Christ, just doesn't get used a lot in reference to anyone but the Nazarene.  Technically, his name was Yeshua, which has more in common with the modern Joshua, and his name in Greek was Iesous, because Greek doesn't have a letter J, while we're talking about technicality, let's do that regarding the third commandment:

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. -Exodus 20: 7

It is my educated opinion that we ought to apply that much more broadly than simply to apply to people swearing.  I suspect that the author of these rules would find those who use the Name of God to justify their bigotry, hatred and violence to be far more blasphemous than people who yell a throaty g-dammit after they stub their toe.  Using the name of the Lord is crude, rude and a bad habit, using God to justify your nastiness towards others is what becomes blasphemy.
Every so often, I find it useful to read a critique of faith written by an atheist.  I used to enjoy the late Christopher Hitchens, before he got every bit as dogmatic about his atheism as the most doctrinaire scholastic of the church.  The thing I have come to realize about these critiques though is that the god they are railing against has nothing to do with the God I believe in.  You will often catch them admiring Christ as a person while denying that his divinity is even possible.  It becomes quickly apparent that what they dislike are in fact the many and varied ways in which the human practitioners of faith (any faith really) violate the third commandment and blaspheme the name of the God of love and grace.
I will admit that it makes little sense, in the postmodern age of technology and de-mythology, to adhere to a religion that does not give you a solid example of what it looks like to follow God.  The rules alone are not enough, they just tell you what to avoid, not how to live.  The rules give you commandments and a declaration of God's holiness, but they do not get into the dust and dirt of human existence.  I think you see where I'm going with this; Jesus gives us that example and that presence, and his teachings are actually fairly simple.  "Love God, Love Each Other."  Not easy to follow, but clear and measurable.
People usually find it necessary to hedge on one or the other of those simple rules though.
One side exalts the holiness and purity of God, protecting the sanctity of their selected temples and idols.  But they do this too often at the expense of caring for one another and for the "least of these."
The other side exalts the ministry of compassion, honestly desiring to tear down the curtain in the temple. From a humanist perspective this approach would appear to be on your "side."
The problem with both approaches is essentially one of balance, which is at best a tenuous line to walk. You will find "conservatives" who insist that they work for justice and show compassion to the poor, and maybe they do.  You will also find "liberals" who want to insist that their faith is "biblical," and maybe it is.
The sin that neither side is immune to is the cooption of God in the fight against their enemies, and there is where the blasphemy train really gets rolling.
There are many examples of Jesus teaching his disciples and people in general that this is not the Way.  Example: Luke 9: 49-50 about another person casting out demons in Jesus' name, even though he wasn't one of the disciples.  Example: John 8: 1-11, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  Stop me before I start proof texting uncontrollably.  The thing is though, you can actually go through the Gospels and apply this particular lens to things and find that it's pretty much all over the place, presented in many varied and nuanced forms, because "love your enemies," is important, counterintuitive, and freaking difficult, therefore we are challenged to do it over and over again. To ignore that imperative is perhaps the greatest blasphemy of all.

Trigger Warning

The Hangover, like most goofball comedies, had very few redeeming qualities. Ken Jong was one of them, the other one probably being the tiger, and of course Iron Mike Tyson. Jong's character Mr. Chow has a recurring theme: he judges any chaos that happens by the benchmark of "Did you die?"  Which I have to admit, does put things in perspective.  I am starting with some humor today, because what comes next is pretty brutal.  You can thank Michele for kicking over this rock.
Four years ago, I found out what happens when your perspective on the worst thing that can happen gets punted twenty yards past where you thought it was.  The little town of Plumville was hit by a series of tragedies that probably would strain the suspension of disbelief of an avid Lifetime movie audience.  First there was an Amish boy who died in a grain silo at my neighbor's farm.  Farms are dangerous places, and accidents like this one happen, people were shocked and grieved.  As you may know, the Amish are sort of famous for their faithful grace in situations like this, and so even in tragedy there was light.  Then within a span of two weeks, an estranged husband fatally shot his father in law through the door of the house and was only prevented from inflicting further harm when his estranged wife disabled him with a .22 rifle.  A young mother of two had a sudden and fatal heart attack. All of these things were shocking to the little town, they were life and death traumas, and people died, but none of them were the thing that set my current benchmark for tragedy.
That title goes to the other domestic violence of that weekend (you may ask what trumps a gun fight between an estranged couple that resulted in one fatality? Hold on to your butt). A man killed his two little girls ages 6 and 10, and his estranged wife, not with a gun, with his hands and a hunting knife. They were part of our church. I had been trying to help them work through their relationship issues for six months. I had those two little girls sit on the floor with me during Children's sermons and at VBS.  I had spent hours trying to help their father and mother figure out how to live and love together. Obviously I failed, catastrophically.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't fail by being incompetent, or callous, or by ignoring the hard truth that was staring me in the face.  I failed only because I didn't recognize how strong evil's grip really is.  I was working with the proper assumption that most marital problems are communication based, and so we worked on learning to really hear each other.  When we started, the woman was an utterly worn out victim.  She had been living with a control freak.  I can't go into details because I feel like I still need to honor her confidence, but I will give her this honor as well: she took control of her life, she stopped allowing him to control her, she moved out, she got a job and her own place, and even though he tried to change a little, she kept getting further and further away from him.  When he finally realized that she was probably not coming back, his psyche broke.  It looked like sadness on the outside, but it was really the manifestation of all his desire for control finally reaching critical mass.
I knew his greatest fear was losing them, his wife and children.  There's a line in a song by Pearl Jam: "That which you fear the most, will meet you halfway." There was a demonic presence at work on that day, and I don't say that without acknowledging that there was mental illness, and long patterns of bad behavior, and abuse.  But the thing that pushed it over the edge was a demon.  A demon, in our mythos, is a twisted and fallen angel.  The thing that led a man to strangle his little girl was a twisted and fallen version of love.  It was love that existed in a place devoid of of grace, a place where control and domination was the only expression of love, where fear of loss was the motivating emotion.
I think this demon is running amok through our world.  I consider it one of my most hard-learned lessons to have seen the demon tear off his facade and to have seen the bloody fangs and the sheer ugliness, so that I will never forget.  So that I can learn to let go of my ego, and my illusions of control.  We keep a picture of those two little girls on our basement refrigerator (the one we moved with us from Pennsylvania).  Every time I look at it, I remember how bad it can get, and I am reminded that I am not in control.  I am not strong enough to face the demon.  I require the grace of God.
Awareness of God's presence in that bleak situation was the culmination of my nearly ten years in that town.  If I did nothing else among them, I was there for that: the worst day, the darkest hour.  I failed to rescue the marriage, I failed to protect those girls, I failed to reach their father, but God stood with me, and that I will remember as well.
I came into the ministry as a man with a lot of answers and certainty and arrogance.  I thought I could lead the church through cleverness and skill and whatever other gifts I thought I had.  That has turned out to be bullshit (pardon the language, but there is no other appropriate word).  My job is to take up my cross and follow Christ, the same as it is for any Christian who really takes Jesus seriously.  I will tell you one thing, I read Paul's letters a lot differently now than I did in seminary: 1 Corinthians 1: 25-31 (The Message Translation):

Human wisdom is so tinny and impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's "weakness."  Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life.  I don't see many of the brightest and the best among you, not many influential, not many from high society families.  Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.  Everything that we have - right thinking, and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start - comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.  That's why we have the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God."

The Art of Rage

When I interviewed at the Pittsburgh VA hospital for a spot in the summer intensive Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) cohort back in 2002, one of the supervisors asked me if I ate my anger, a question that kind of took me off guard, being as this was only an interview and not the actual thing.  It surprised me, and then it made me a little angry, and then I got hungry, and that made me more angry.
For those of you who don't know CPE is a thing that a lot of your pastors have had to go through at some point in their training.  It is basically half working as a chaplain in a clinical setting and half group therapy designed to rip your false sense of self to shreds and then put you back together.  Each unit of CPE is 400 hours, either in a summer intensive (10 weeks of 40 hour weeks) or spread out over the course of a year.  People talk about it the same way military people talk about boot camp.  If you haven't been through it, you don't know, and once you have been through it you get to join the crowd that knows, or thinks they know.  To this day, I use the things I learned in CPE much more than I use my knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and John Calvin.  It is valuable, and it is hard, and it pretty regularly makes you confront your shadow side, which for me turned out to be a lot of mad.
I learned that anger can be used, or it can use you, largely depending on your awareness and your level of emotional balance.  Which leads me to today's observation that our cultural level of anger has risen to a place where it is certainly using us.  Here's a stream of consciousness recollection of all the things I have seen people be outraged about over the past few days:

Trump (oh so much Trump), Harambe the Gorilla, the kid who fell into the Gorilla's enclosure, the mother of the kid who fell into the Gorilla's enclosure, the people who shot Harambe the Gorilla, Thailand Tigers, Hillary's emails (again and again), the fact that Bernie Sanders exists, Trump (did I already mention Trump?), Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the electoral process, the primary process, Ted Cruz (still for some reason), Mitch McConnell, Obama visiting Hiroshima, Obama not apologizing for our country nuking Japan, Obama hugging a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, ISIS, Muslims, abortions, fundamentalists, #blacklivesmatter, #alllivesmatter, The Iran nuclear disarmament treaty, transgender bathroom stuff, gay marriage, Methodists who like homosexuals, Methodists who don't like homosexuals, Methodists who are homosexuals, traffic, the weather, guns, gun regulation, the fact that memorial day and veterans day are different, the fact that people die in war, the fact that have wars, the fact that some people say we shouldn't have wars and how that disrespects the people who die in wars...

Yeah, so I could go on, and on, and on, but I hope you get the point, name something and there's someone out there who is freaking irate about it, and that, friends and neighbors, is not particularly healthy.  There are some legitimately worrisome things in that list, and some emotionally charged issues, but what seems to be happening is that we're filtering all of these complex events and ideas through glasses that are very much a darker shade of red than the rose colored ones.
Anger triggers a strong fight instinct, which if it goes unchecked and even un-evaluated, makes for dialogue, particularly sensitive, nuanced dialogue very difficult.  The thing is that anger is actually a secondary emotional response, and forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but the underlying emotion is actually fear.  There's that feel again.
Believe me, back in the day, I didn't want to admit that anger flowed from fear.  I was okay being angry, that was bad-ass, that was manly, that was perhaps even culturally acceptable, but being afraid?  Who wants to identify with that?
CPE supervisors have this annoying way of peeling the onion of your emotional processes back to the underlying motivations.  Things you think make you strong and powerful turn out to be motivated by some deep seated feeling of inadequacy, acknowledging that is uncomfortable and most of us don't want to do it, so we build our walls higher and stronger and we entrench deeper and deeper into our own egoism.
Once you have had your emotional fortress razed to the ground, you find that you still have the same raw materials to work with, but you also have the freedom to arrange them rather differently.  I still get angry at things, but I have a different way of dealing with that anger; I ask myself, what am I afraid of?  For instance, injustice makes me angry, because I am afraid that our ability to love one another is growing weaker, because injustice is a failure of two other core emotions: love and peace, the failure of love and peace leaves a vacuum which fear is all to happy to fill and anger then starts flinging things around like, you know, a 400 pound gorilla, but this is actually the way it should work, it's part of how we know stuff is wrong.
If I ask myself, what am I afraid of? and the answer comes back with something less universally askew, I may need to reevaluate my feelings, which is difficult, but necessary.
For instance: At first I was angry about Harambe the Gorilla being killed, then I realized that my anger was based on a fear that perhaps we, including our expert zookeepers are not quite the responsible stewards of the creation that we should be.  Fear response: we are not in control of a 400 pound silverback gorilla, even though he's in a cage, he can still fling that little kid around like a piece of paper.  Fear response: what if my kid slipped away from me and did something dumb like falling into a gorilla enclosure.
These are true things, but our response to them is rarely rational and it leads us to fits of rage and saying things that are not helpful or constructive, like blaming the mother of the kid for being distracted while her kid did something dumb, or the animal response team for responding according to protocol and judgment that had to be made quickly without any emotional hand-wringing, or even Harambe the Gorilla, for well, being a gorilla.
We should be sad about such a waste, but sad is a different root emotion.  We should seek to take a constructive look about how we treat animals and how we keep our kids safe, but raging about on the internet does no one any good, least of all Harambe or that little boy.  Maybe there is a place for anger, but most of it seems to have been misplaced.  The fact of the matter is, like them or not, zoos are not just entertainment, but are often important resources in the preservation of biodiversity.  Like it or not, studying gorillas is not particularly profitable, unless you figure out a way to generate revenue by having tourists come see them.  Whether you want to admit it or not parents, your four year old can get away from you and probably do things that aren't that bright.  When that happens you should be glad that there are people who wrote, and who followed the protocol for dealing with a 400 pound gorilla that wants to play volleyball with your kid.
I feel like we need to do more thinking and less raging.  I think we could use less knee jerk reacting and more constructive criticism.  I hope that love and peace don't always get shoved aside by the 400 pound gorilla of our fear.