Now This?

I am not easily offended.  I grew up as a sort of chubby kid whose last name includes the word "gas," and it has made me pretty thick skinned.  I like to think I have a sharp sense of humor and can usually tell and take a good joke. I was a little disappointed by Donald Sterling's racist comments, but in no way surprised by the fact that a rich white guy was harboring such despicable ideas in his heart.  Generally, when I hear or see people being that way, it just sort of confirms my basic opinion of humanity as a rather wretched bunch of sinners.  Oddly this generally increases my appreciation of those moments when people actually get it right: when they help, when they care, when they're just decent.
Low expectations of people in general make me pretty outrage proof.
Then Sarah Palin compared water-boarding to baptism... or baptism to water-boarding... or whatever, I'm not really sure... I'm not sure she was even sure what exactly she was saying.  I suppose I should have expected such stuff from Sarah, who is a rich fount of verbal bungling and practically a walking non sequitur, but I wondered at how the rather large crowd of NRA supporters, most of whom, I'm guessing, identify as some sort of Christian, actually cheered for her when she said, and I quote: "If I was in charge, they'd know that water-boarding is how we'd baptize terrorists."

Let's walk through this step by step, shall we?

1. Jesus was absolutely insistent on non-violence, to the point where he submitted to being tortured and killed himself rather than rallying his followers to take up arms and fight.

2. Whenever one of his followers tried to suggest that perhaps they get all butt-kicky he put them in their place and usually reminded them that his gig was a little different.

3. While there are certain theological schemes that can justify the use of force as an exercise of the commandment to love thy neighbor (i.e. putting a stop to Hitler's nonsense), the general tenor of a Christ-like existence should probably not be "stand and fight." (the theme of the NRA rally where Palin vomited all over two thousand years of Jesus following).

4. So, therefore, obviously, Jesus would enjoy having one of the most universal signs of the covenant between a loving God and his wayward children, be compared to a form of torture that involves the repeated near drowning of the victim.

In Baptism we remember that we are dead to sin and alive in Christ, we are joined with Christ in a death like his (which was rather plainly as the victim, not the perpetrator of torture), so that we might be with him in a life like his.  I'm just guessing that the guy who said, "blessed are the meek," and "forgive them Father, they don't know what they're doing," would probably have a pretty clear and simple stance on torture.

That stance would be: "Are you serious?"

Look people, theology does matter sometimes.  This nonsense of equating guns, freedom and 'Merica with Jesus has got to stop.  We need to be convicted of the reality that we're a lot more like Rome than we are a "Christian Nation." 

That doesn't mean I hate our country, or that I want to live somewhere else, it means that I love our country enough to want to see it live up to it's potential.  I also love Jesus, and if it comes down to picking a side, I'm going to take Jesus before I take the stars and stripes.

I honestly wonder if Ms. Palin has some sort of cognitive disorder, if so that means that all the people who will still sit and listen to her give one of these maniacal speeches must somehow share the disorder.

The sheer volume of psychopathy is more than a little frightening.

Lord, save us all, and please introduce yourself to Sarah Palin.

Of Canons and Lasers, and Laser Cannon

There has been a great disturbance in the force.  George Lucas has sold the rights to the Star Wars universe to Disney, and Disney has plans for it.  Just the other day they sent shockwaves through Star Wars fandom the likes of which have not been felt since the first Death Star obliterated Alderaan.  The announcement was the formation of a canon, not a cannon, a canon, a set of material that is going to be considered authoritative for whatever direction Disney now takes the worlds of Star Wars.  The Canon has been identified as the first six movies, which focus on the Annakin Skywalker-Darth Vader story arc, as well as the animated Clone Wars movie and series.
What is left out is the rather massive opus of work that has been done under the Star Wars trademark, which includes novels, comics, role playing games, and various and sundry other creative ventures that have fed a group of fans well in the long spaces between Lucas' creative activity.  The novels, for instance, have reached back into the days of the Old Republic and gone forward into the lives of the children and grandchildren of Han Solo and Princess Leia.  They have traced the work of Luke Skywalker as he rebuilt the Jedi Order.  It has all had to meet a certain standard of internal consistency in order to bear the name Star Wars, and there are people who consider it sacred, which is where I get really interested in this phenomenon.
I should pause and give an account of my Star Wars street cred.  I have a Millennium Falcon and several action figures on a shelf in my office.  I have a tattoo of the Jedi Order insignia (the Knights of the Old Republic version).  Star Wars was every bit as foundational to me as a child as the Bible, (I have to admit that, at one point, I probably cared a lot more about Luke being Vader's son than I did about Jesus being God's Son).  Watching R2D2 and C-3PO making their way through the deserts of Tatooine is one of my earliest and fondest memories of a movie of any sort.  I destroyed enough Star Wars merchandise by actually playing with it to make collectors everywhere weep.  Princess Leia was the first woman, besides my Mom, that I thought was really beautiful.  I am, to this day, disappointed that science has wasted it's potential on iPhones and hybrid cars and still not produced a working lightsaber.  Jar Jar Binks makes me clench my fist involuntarily, and I really don't see what Padme ever saw in Annakin in the first place.  Yoda is still my favorite character, followed closely by Chewbacca.
Let's just say, I have a rooting interest in Star Wars, but I have been a little surprised by the lament from the people who out-geek me.  The formation of the "canon" of Star Wars, has apparently led some fans into a sort of existential crisis, and in doing so has given me a real-time insight into what probably went on in the Church circa 320-370 CE.  It sort of dawned on me this morning that there were probably people who were deeply attached to the Gospel of Thomas or The Apocalypse of Peter.  We actually have historical knowledge of the debate that went on over the inclusion of The Apocalypse of John, also called Revelation.  It was a little heated.
There were large quantities of material written about Jesus, and by the early church, which just didn't make the cut.  It wasn't just a random process, there were good reasons why the things that were eventually called Scripture were picked over the things that weren't, and yes, as Dan Brown likes to point out, there was some political stuff involved, but ultimately the choices that were made were made so that the Canon of Holy Scripture could be a faithful and living foundation for the Church.
One of the things that the Canon sought to avoid were Gnostic heresies and theological dead ends, of which there were plenty.  They did not want to paint themselves into any corners.  Which is also why Disney (I think) has decided to abandon the novelizations of the Star Wars universe and go a different way.  If they follow the story arc of the novels, they would get some good stories, but, like the Dark Side, forever would those books dominate their destiny.  Once you canonize something, you're stuck with it.  Some of the books are well done, and some of them are just pulp fiction, but there are a lot of them, and I can see how trying to hold them all in canonical regard would seriously crimp the creativity that might just breathe some real life back into a franchise that I dearly love.  One of the reasons The Clone Wars is my favorite post Return of the Jedi part of the universe is that it is free to explore a bit and not be slavishly bound to the Annakin-Vader-Luke Skywalker story line, which, quite frankly, gets a bit old after six movies.
Now we can have some fresh stuff, without the whole, "that's not how it worked in the book!" arguments that geek/fandom is so hell bent on having.  I think Peter Jackson's work on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings has firmly established that cinematic and literary storytelling are different things, and that both can be good.
While I have some misgivings about whether Disney is a trustworthy steward of a world that I have loved since I was a kid, I am actually rather excited to see what they do with it, when the end of the story is not a foregone conclusion.  I am thankful that George Lucas came up with this wonderful idea, but I am glad that he finally has given it to the world to continue to tell the story.
In essence that describes very well the life of the church.  In many ways the canon is never really done, even as we argue about the various ways to interpret the canon of scripture, the story of Jesus and his disciples continues to be told in different ways by different people, in different cultures and different ages of humanity.  The re-telling, and the continual searching is life.  I fear for any universe where that process stops.

Shoah

I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.

-Elie Wiesel, Night

Today is the day that we remember the millions of people who died at the hands of the Nazis.  One day, somewhat ironically placed at the end of May when new life is springing up all around and flowers are in bloom on the trees.  We sometimes call it the holocaust, from the Greek word that means "burnt," which I suppose is somewhat appropriate, but many have re-labeled it using the Hebrew word Shoah, which means "catastrophe."

It's worth mentioning that Jews were not the only victims of the catastrophe, but they were focal point of the hate behind Hitler and the Nazis.  I think it's also worth mentioning that this sort of thing has happened far too often in the recent history of the world.  Stalin, our ally in defeating Hitler, apparently outdid Adolf in both scope and brutality, there have been numerous genocidal events in Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and Congo, and there is one going on in Syria as we speak.
These are all catastrophes of human evil.
They at least raise the question of whether or not God really knows what He's doing in giving us this sort of freedom.  If you have not read Elie Wiesel's book Night, you really should get around to it, but have a good stiff drink handy.  Wiesel survived the Shoah as a boy, he watched his parents taken away and killed, he starved in the camps, he lived in the fear that, at any moment, he might arbitrarily be taken away and shot or gassed and burned in the ovens.
There really is no good theological way to talk around the questions that Wiesel raises in his book, they are things you must just simply absorb and endure.  He talks of how the Shoah killed God.  God hung on the gallows, God went into the ovens, God died in the night.
He's not wrong.
It's a powerful read for Christians, but in an entirely different sense than it is for our Jewish friends.
Christians live through the story of God dying every year.  The cross is nothing new to our way of thinking, the brutal act of crucifixion is a part of our faith story, and so is resurrection.
The thing is though, there has been no Easter morning for Jews after the Shoah.  There are small redemptive moments, there are powerful remembrances, but there is nothing that opens the tombs of the millions who died.
Which makes it all the more wondrous to me that people like Wiesel and other Shoah survivors have managed to do just that: survive.  They have survived physically, spiritually and they have blessed the world with their stories, and they have held on to God, and found that He was not dead after all.
As time does naturally what Hitler tried to do brutally, we need to observe and remember all the more vigilantly, and we need to remember that we, as a species, have not risen above the hate and violence that caused the catastrophe.  When the eyewitnesses are no longer around to tell us what happened, we still need to remember.

Mother Earth

Tuesday was Earth Day, a "holiday" of sorts where we think about all things ecological.  In another lifetime, I studied Environmental Resource Management at the Pennsylvania State University, and even though life and God's call have taken me far away from that field of study, I'm still paying attention.  In the nearly 20 years since I graduated some things have radically changed, other things have not.  We have "greened" up in a lot of ways, solar farms and wind turbines are now common sites around the nation, and growing numbers of people are moving from the "environmentalism is all about hippie communists" camp to the, "hmmm, clean drinking water and breathable air are pretty cool things" camp. But we're still a long way from breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, and so the noose around our neck grows ever tighter.
Ecology is a complicated thing, and like many complicated things, it frightens and intimidates people, inducing a range of reactions from flat out denial to apocalyptic panic.  As per usual, extreme reactions are usually a result of drastically over-simplifying the problem.  The deniers confuse current local weather patterns with long term climate data, the chicken littles believe that Waterworld is right around the corner.  As per usual, extreme perspectives are usually wrong, with only a grain of truth to make them seem plausible.
We do certainly need to get a handle on our stewardship of this planet, because science is telling us that in the vastness of the universe, planets similar to our own are a little hard to come by.  They may be out there, but as of now we have not found them, let alone developed the ability to get to them.  It's rather startling really, how tenuous our hold on life actually is.  Life is resilient, but things do go extinct, and we would do well to remember that.
Mind boggling creatures have walked, swum and flown around this planet over the course of geologic history, and many of them are now nothing but fossils.  We may be someday too, before the sun burns out.  But here's the funny thing, we are also the first species, (at least as far as we know) to be aware of its capacity to cause its own destruction.  Which gives us a fighting chance, maybe not much of one given human nature, but at least a chance.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about humanity is that, collectively, we have not come to the realization that we can really change things for the better.  We are still unfortunate slaves to the way things always have been.  Individually we can be altruistic and understand the need for sacrifice, but collectively, we are still blind, selfish and prone to panic.  This is born out by the reality that there is still poverty and famine in the world, and by the fact that we still don't recognize, despite an increasing global awareness, that we're all in this together.
I'm not exactly an optimist, and I am fully aware of the nature of sin, but it still gives me major agitation to think that children starve while we let millions of tons of grain rot in storage.  It torques me to think that some people are paid millions of dollars a year to play games or play games with numbers, while people who work in desperate and inhumane conditions get next to nothing.  What bothers me most of all is that I am absolutely powerless to change any of it.  I might as well tell the wind not to blow for all the good my rage will do.
So I do little things, like pay a little more for the coffee I drink in the morning, so that more coffee farmers in Rwanda can make a bit a of better living.  I recycle, I compost, I support various charities that work for environmental and social justice, but I'm just shouting at the ocean.
I hope, for my children's sake, that something in our collective human consciousness gets over its adolescent self-absorption soon.  We need the earth a lot more than she needs us, and so as is the case with Easter, we need to remember that every day is Earth Day, every day we need to breath air and drink water is a day that we should remember to be good and faithful stewards of our place on this "salubrious blue-green orb," as Kurt Vonnegut so loquaciously called it.
I look around my backyard, in the middle of the Megalopolis, just 20 miles from Washington DC, I see life going on, trees growing tall, animals thriving in the spaces between human habitations.  I realize that even now, as "civilized" as we are, we are still capable of living in balance with nature, but we do need to understand that balance is not served by simply taking whatever and as much as we think we need.
We need to take responsibility for what we have done, and make a better plan for what we're going to do, or else the Earth will celebrate her day without us.

Out, Out, Brief Candle!

Today is St. Georges day, the day that we commonly observe both the birth and death of William Shakespeare.  To many, Shakespeare is the epitome of literary culture, particularly when it comes to his plays.  History is an interesting thing, it twists and turns in such unexpected ways.
When Shakespeare first appeared on the stage, he was hailed, more or less as a hack, who was making cheap knockoffs of work of the true geniuses of the day (notably Christopher Marlowe).  Indeed when one looks at Shakespeare's work on it's own merit, it is generally not terribly inventive.  He writes histories, tragedies and comedies and he's not above a little pandering to the audience with bawdy humor.
I thought about this as I was watching an advertisement for yet another re-make of Godzilla that's due out soon, and yet another edition of the Amazing Spiderman series. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good superhero movie, and endless remakes of old horror flicks, and I'm married to someone who can watch chick flicks with the most absurd premises and deliberately manipulative plot lines that you can possibly imagine, and it doesn't mean we're stupid.  What it means is that we like to be entertained.  I have watched some movies that break new ground; that tell really novel stories; that challenge me to think about the human condition; and when they were done, I thought, "wow, I'm glad that's over."
I would like to tell you that I watch nothing but inventive independent films that push the boundaries of cinema as an art form, but honestly, the last thing I rented was Thor, The Dark World, partly because I have a ten year old son, but partly because I just like watching stuff explode.
What Bill Shakespeare did, perhaps better than any writer ever, was slip some really wonderful words into his pandering, money-making machines.  I suspect he knew that there is actually very little artistic integrity in starving to death, and I think he would be somewhat amused or perhaps bemused by the fact that his plays are now considered by most high school English teachers to be the zenith of English literature.  What he did was present his genius in digestible chunks.
His blasts of witty dialogue are the foundation for the great masters of the golden age of cinema, think of the banter between Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, that was none other than William Faulkner.  I can picture Ingrid Bergman delivering Rosalind's line from As You Like It: "I pray you, do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine."
The histories and tragedies have those famous monologues that are the forerunners the rousing speeches in the war movies.  If you ever see Kenneth Branagh's cinematic renderings of Shakespeare's work, you will understand that plays were simply the movies of the Elizabethan era, and as such they had to satisfy a certain commercial appeal, which means catering to the masses.
And if you think that the masses were more literate, or more intelligent and discerning than they are today, you are sorely mistaken.  Shakespeare includes enough fart jokes, insults and sexual innuendo to keep the pub crowd happy, and then he slips in these monologues that really deal with our common humanity.  I guess that's what sets him apart.  Maybe that's why we read his stuff, instead of Marlowe, in high school English classes.
There is no shame in making art that people, even the low-brow, and unwashed, actually enjoy.  That's why Nicholas Sparks and Stephen King are freaking billionaires, they make stuff that is marginally valuable as literature, but people eat it up.  People that insist on a stringent artistic vision regardless of what people want, usually die broke.  There's no doubt in my mind that William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson are better writers than George R.R. Martin, but Game of Thrones is making that dude super rich and Thompson needed Johnny Depp to finance his funeral (granted that was a work of art too).
Ultimately Shakespeare's legacy is not reducible to just the things he wrote, he has become a cultural foundation stone.  And I suppose we ought to get used to the fact that our culture has been profoundly shaped by a man who was not above going for some cheap laughs with a page long fat joke (Comedy of Errors) or numerous thinly veiled innuendos that would definitely earn an R-rating.
Like it or not, mass appeal is something you probably need to consider when setting out on an artistic adventure.  It doesn't mean you have to dumb down, or always take the low road, but it does mean you should probably know your audience.  Shakespeare did, and he is now the Immortal Bard.

Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning

There's an on-going "dispute" among the members of the GSPC praise band about the relative merits of a certain song called Every Morning Is Easter Morning.  Apparently, at some point in the history of this group, this song was sung a little bit too much, and it's one of those songs that can get overexposed quick, fast and in a hurry.  Some people love it, some people sort of cringe when you mention the title, my predecessor banned it, due to overexposure.
It's an understandable restriction.  Despite the theological truth of the song, it is not exactly Amazing Grace.
Easter this year was quite an event, in our house, not only did we have the normal demands of my role in the Church's celebration, we had family visiting from as far away as Wisconsin.  We had seven adults and six children hanging out at our house, and it was a pretty good time, but it didn't exactly leave me a lot of time for solemn reflection on the silence of the tomb.
But we survived, and Jesus is risen, and it's Tuesday morning.  In the modern rhythms of life Tuesday morning can be a sort of symbol of the ordinary.  It's not loathed like Monday or celebrated like Friday, it's not hump day or thirsty Thursday, if you still listen to the radio it might be double-shot Tuesday, but who really cares?
Tuesday is nothing special, but it's still a day for living the resurrection, in fact it may be the best day for living the resurrection.  Why? Well because the resurrection means more than just a special occurrence.  Like the song says, "every morning is Easter morning."  We live in the reality of the resurrection and that should change things rather radically.  Resurrection means death does not get the last word, and that should certainly change the way we live.
There is far too much "human nature" that is founded on the fear of mortality.  We grasp power and engage in futile hedonism because life is too short.  We neglect God and others because we just don't have time.  But what if we shift our thinking towards the infinite?  What if, it's not just "out brief candle?"
What if there's more?
And not just a vague disembodied more, but a more that shares deeply and significantly with the now.  What if your scars and your brokenness and all your Tuesday mornings go with you?
What if all the songs you sing and the relationships you build matter?  What if profound melodies, boppy, borderline annoying tunes and obscure Cowboy Junkies songs all somehow get woven into a chorus of holy music?
What if it all matters?
Not just Sunday.

We're on Each Other's Team

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, 

but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

-Matthew 7:21

Today is Maundy Thursday, which I thought growing up was Monday Thursday, and that seemed strange.  Maundy is derived from the Latin word mandatum, which means "mandate."  Jesus has called his disciples, taught them what they needed to know, and now, before the suffering and death, before the resurrection, he gives them their purpose.

In most of the modern protestant formulations of Christianity we have emphasized the idea of salvation by grace through faith.  This was a reaction to the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the practice of  "works righteousness" where you could work your way out of your sins with acts of penance (the most particularly repugnant to reformers was giving a whole bunch of money to the church in exchange for forgiveness of sins). 

Theological ideas, like most human constructions, tend to swing like a pendulum, an initial impetus pushes an idea in one direction and it moves, then most often it gets to a place where the inertia of the initial impulse simply runs out and the pendulum begins to swing back the other way.  The reaction against works righteousness and the simultaneous rise of individualism have created a bit of a monster: a brand of Christianity that stridently preaches the Gospel of "giving your heart to Jesus," but only sporadically challenges people to live into the transformative power of that affirmation.  And so you have millions of people who strongly self-identify as Christian, but who have only a thumbnail sketch in their mind of what Jesus actually said and did.

I used to hate group projects.  I used to hate getting randomly assigned to work with a bunch of other people on something or other and finding out that half the "team" thought meetings were more or less optional.  It has taken me years and is an on going discipline in my life to learn to work with and accept the way other people work.  In pastoral work, it's tempting to wish for a congregation full of dedicated disciples, all of whom hold solid theology and all of whom are striving for the kingdom in the best sense of the word.  Then I have to be convicted of the naivety of that desire, and I have to learn, over and over how to work with what I've got.

Remember a couple of years ago when Lebron James left Cleveland for Miami?  People in Cleveland burned his jersey and generally wanted to strangle him, but people everywhere else pretty much understood why he was leaving, even if they didn't particularly care for the, "I'm taking my talents to South Beach," TV extravaganza.  He looked around a the Cleveland Cavaliers and he saw a team that, without him, was going absolutely nowhere, and even with him was only ever going to get close but no cigar.  He understood that even as preternaturally talented as he is, basketball is a team game, and to win the big prize you have to have teammates.  He didn't like the teammates he had there and he liked the teammates in Miami a lot better.  Lucky for us, Jesus was a different sort of King.

When I read articles and blogs, or hear first hand stories about why people have left or are leaving the church, I can feel in my guts that the criticism of the Body of Christ is all fairly well deserved.  Churches and their people can be annoying, misguided and sometimes downright toxic.  We are full of sloppy theology, intolerant and dogmatic positions, loose organizational controls and sometimes just downright laziness.

Then I remember that Judas and Peter were both part of the Mandate.  The betrayer and the denier were both there when Jesus broke the bread and made the New Covenant.  Peter was going to make amends, but Judas?  Yes, Judas.  This gets really messy.

Judas had some messy work to do, but I suspect he's not the villain that Dante made him out to be.  I suspect that Judas is just like many people in Christian churches all over the world, who think that they are advancing the cause, and maybe he is, but I suspect not in the way he imagined.  The explanation that I like best about why Judas betrays Jesus is not the greed angle, it's the zealot angle.  I think that Judas was trying to force Jesus' hand and get the rebellion started, I think he really thought that once the palace guards were there to arrest Jesus, the gloves would come off and the Messianic butt-whooping would commence.

Slight miscalculation on his part, but we all make them.

It's not enough to call Jesus Lord and then ignore everything he taught, or even selectively ignore things that you don't happen to like. It is not enough to go all lone ranger on the high plains of  "spirituality." That is not salvation.  That is only the individualist simulacrum of salvation which is the great heresy of modern Christianity. Salvation is not just what happens when you die, it is living out the process of both justification (getting saved) and sanctification (which does not have a neat little word or phrase to describe it because it is too complicated).  If it was as simple as a confession or affirming the proper doctrine, Jesus would not have said anything like the above quote from Matthew's Gospel, but he did and he repeated similar themes in parables and teachings all the time.

We're all lucky that there's such a thing as grace, because without it we would be in big trouble.  Look around you on Sunday, look at all those people you know, and a whole bunch that you don't know: they're your team.  It ain't always gonna be pretty, but it is the Mandate.

Chinatown

I guess what you eventually have to come to terms with is the fact that Jesus believed in God, a very specific God as a matter of fact, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God he called Father.  Scripture offers very little evidence that Jesus thought he was that God.  In fact, the synoptic Gospels don't ever seem to deal with that question.  But John starts his Gospel with the bold statement that, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," and "the Word was with God and the Word was God."
This is where things get difficult and confusing, this is where the theologians start to get a reputation for endless and intractable arguing that seems to do nothing and go nowhere, this is the Chinatown of faith.
In the movie Chinatown, Jack Nicholson plays a private detective who used to work for the LAPD.  When he was with the police, one of his beats was the Asian immigrant section of the city.  In that era, as I suppose it still is to some extent, the immigrant community was insular and downright mystifying to westerners.  Crimes took on such a different character that the detectives that worked the Chinatown beat had a way of brushing off things that just didn't make sense or that challenged their assumptions a little too much: "It's Chinatown."  That's all you needed to say when things got a little too convoluted, it was an explanation without actually explaining.
The "Chinatown" of Christian faith is this thing called the Trinity, or the Triune nature of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (or if you prefer: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer).  Internally we have the Nicene Creed and some really wonderful explanations of how and why we believe, including the poetic explanation of John Donne: "Bones to reason but milk to faith."  Trinitarian faith allows us to be internally consistent, and affirm quite a few things about the nature of the relationship between God the Creator and Jesus of Nazareth.  These affirmations are crucial to Christian understanding of our own relationship with God.
When we read, study and say the Nicene Creed, we are getting in touch with an historical debate of enormous scope and importance, but it's a debate that to critics on the outside often looks like a bunch of political squabbles between bishops about who is going to run the show.  There are all sorts of conspiracy theories and various forms of religio-historic quackery that surround the fourth century debates that defined and continue to define Christian orthodoxy.
The Trinity, and springing from that the equally head spinning debate over the human/divine nature of Jesus.  Another scene from Chinatown, (spoiler alert, although is that really necessary for a movie that has been around so long?) the character played by Faye Dunaway has been at the center of a lot of the action, as well as being romantically involved with Nicholson's character, and things have come to a head.  He's grilling her about the identity of the young girl who is also mixed up in the whole thing: "Is she your sister or your daughter?"  Dunaway's character has been sexually abused by her father and so the answer is that both things are true, she is both sister and daughter, but that answer doesn't make sense, it's just a little too strange to be true, it's Chinatown all over again.
Jesus is both human and divine, and it's rather important that we don't do violence to one identity in the name of the other.  Paul Tillich described this as walking a narrow ridge between two chasms, holding in tension the full reality of both identities.
The problem is, in an age of relativist thinking, the two chasms don't seem so very foreboding, they sort of seem like nice little lakes where people are playing and having fun, while orthodoxy is uncomfortably balancing in that awful tension.  On the one side you have the divine camp, where Jesus is just "God in a man suit."  This was and is the hallmark perspective of Gnostics of many varieties.  It just makes no sense that God would or could actually become a genuine human being, so the whole Jesus thing must have been like God just checking us out see what we would do.  On this side you get lots of people who masquerade as Christians, and they will passionately defend their belief in a persistently all powerful, omnipotent God, who could never ever really limit himself so much that he would actually die on a cross.  The only thing to do with this sort of god is to hold on and try not tick him off too much, because eventually humanity is just going to push him too far and boom: apocalypse... you know, because god only has so much patience. On the other side you have all those folks who like the purely human Jesus well enough, but because he's just a guy, we really don't need to actually do anything about our admiration of him, you know, why worship?  Why live out a cruciform existence? Why mess around with all that tension and balancing? Why not just leave Chinatown altogether? It's never going to make sense and it's just going to bum you out.
Maybe this debate really only matters to the ones who choose to live on that ridge and hold those lines, but if it matters then in matters a whole awful lot.
As I stated Monday, on my good days I could follow a Jeffersonian Jesus, no problems.  The days when I need the Jesus of Athanasius, Anselm and Augustine, are the days when the cross looms large, as it does on this Wednesday.  We're getting closer to the betrayal and the denial and the brutality.  The days when suffering dominates the landscape and blackens the sky are the days when I need a Jesus who is both a man in full and fully God.  Funny thing is, on those days, in my experience, I don't need an explanation, I need a presence.  When the only answer is "It's Chinatown," that's when I really need Jesus, fully human and fully divine.

Mysterium Tremendum

In the beginning, God created humanity in God's image.  Since then, it has, with a few very brief exceptions, been the other way around.  Everyone who has ever lived has imagined God or the gods in their own special little way, and no one (except Jesus) has ever been 100 percent right.  The fullness of God's identity remains hidden, and unknowable.  On the whole, this is a good idea, knowledge is power and power makes us dangerous.  There is no better illustration of this fact than the reality of the atomic bomb.  One of the first things we did, when we developed the capability of splitting the atom was make a weapon.  Before power generation or any of the various scientific applications that later came from nuclear fission, we constructed a weapon straight from the pit of Hell, and we used it, on people... thousands and thousands of people, mostly civilians.
The thing is that the people who were developing the bomb, knew that they were messing around with the very powers of creation.  After the first test detonation, code named Trinity (yeah that's right, Trinity as in Father, Son and Holy Ghost), Robert Opphenheimer infamously invoked a the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  Indeed we have spent most of the time from then until now, with a very serious possibility that we could witness the end of humanity with the press of a button.
The power to destroy is nothing compared with the power of creation.  When Jack was a baby we got him a big tub of Lego Duplo blocks.  Our first game was for me to build big towers and for him to knock them down.  Gradually he grew into making things, and now is quite the Lego artisan.  It was fun to watch him gleefully knock things down as an infant, but as his father I am much more satisfied in his creative, constructive ability now that he is ten.
The point of all this is that God knows our nature, and therefore God limits our access to his power.  I would still be unwise to hand my circular saw to Jack and turn him loose to build things, he's not ready for that sort of power, for now, Legos will have to do.
God reveals things to people in small increments, and we should never make the mistake of thinking that somehow way back when, people understood God better and heard God more clearly.  In ancient days only a select few were given access to the divine name, the name that Moses first learned at the burning bush.  The Name was really the thing that Moses wanted before he started his mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.  If you actually trace the arc of Scripture you see that God is certainly not a static character.  That name that God gave Moses is an action: "I AM."
The thing is, burning bushes to the side, God doesn't make a habit of showing up and having conversations with people.  I know the Bible seems to be full of "God said unto..." and "thus says the Lord..."  But the way God really "talks" to people is through something that has been best described as "convictional knowing," which means basically that we come to an awareness of God's will through many channels, and most often they are non-verbal.  In other words, Abram's conviction that he was supposed to leave Ur and go to Haran was probably not as simple as a voice speaking to him out of the clear blue, but he knew it was what he was supposed to do nonetheless.  In telling the story, rather than recounting an entire internal dialogue and enumerating the reasons why their ancestor had left his father's country, the people of Israel simply state that God told Abram to go.  It's simpler, and it advances the narrative without a whole lot of mess.
All of the prophets and writers of the Scripture, including the Gospels and letters of the New Testament, have a specific perspective, and woe to anyone who tries to read their works as objective truth.  Willful ignorance of the human element in all of scripture only leads to tortured and ultimately unsustainable hermeneutics that will collapse on itself and leave us in a wasteland of self-inflicted darkness.  The symptoms of this wasteland are all around us, people using the Word as a weapon, not against evil but against other people who disagree with them.  The Word is not a tool to be used, it is an entryway into a relationship, and a path towards approaching the mystery of God.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that God speaks to people, and I believe that scripture is a primary conduit of that conversation.  I have formed my vocation and my life around a foundational sense of God's Call, but I also know that I never specifically heard a voice.  However, I am sure of the call in way that goes far beyond anything I have ever heard in words.  But I also know that, in my sinful, fallible nature, I could be wrong, and that is important, because it keeps me humble, it keeps me from grasping at power, because I know that I couldn't handle it.
The Old Testament is full of stories of people who grasp at God's power as though it's a tool: Abraham does it, Moses does it, David does it, and they are all convicted of their sin.  When people try to take the power of God in their own hands, disaster almost always ensues: there is no more heartbreaking example of this than the story of Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11:29-40).  Jephthah makes a vow that, if the Lord gives him victory in battle, he will sacrifice whatever he sees first upon arriving at home victorious, probably thinking that he would see a sheep or a goat out in the fields.  But his only daughter comes out to meet him, singing and dancing with bells.
Because he figures that God values a vow more than he values a child...
Oh... crap.
The Bible is a record of people's stories, and God is a factor in those stories, but people, even the "heroes" never actually get a verbatim account of God's will, we are left to muddle through as best we can.  Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes God has to send an angel to stop us from killing our only son.  Sometimes God's anguished cry never reaches a foolish father in time to save a little girl.  Sometimes people think that God wants them to murder thousands of people or even commit genocide, which doesn't actually mean that God wants those things, even if your name is Joshua. We're most dangerous when we think God is calling us to some glorious victory and that there is a divine sanction for our basic utilitarian thought process.
If you think that humanity would magically snap to and stop being so power-hungry if we had more knowledge and therefore had to live with less mystery, you haven't been paying attention.  Our first impulse is to weaponize every single power we get our hands on one way or another.  War has always prompted technology to advance by leaps and bounds.
The essence of God is to be able to create out of nothing, and to speak light out of darkness.  Quite frankly, I know I'm still a long way from being trustworthy with that sort of power.
I'm glad that God holds that terrifying mystery away from us, even if it means that some of us choose to be Atheists, agnostics, or pagans.  As the stories of the Old Testament suspect: One cannot see God face to face and live. This leaves us to live with a tremendous mystery, which should always humble our arrogance and temper our lust for power.
Individual humans have reached inspiring and beautiful levels of creativity, in that there is hope.  But as a species we are still infants, tearing down block towers as fast as others build them.  We are dangerous enough to become death, the destroyer of worlds, but I don't really think that's what God has in mind as a final destination for creatures made in his image.

Ground Floor:

"Skepticism is the beginning of faith"

-Oscar Wilde

Holy week is upon us again.  As year go by I find myself more and more vulnerable to "cringe moments," when it comes to our celebration of the Resurrection.  At first it was the same kind of problem as I have at Christmas: commercialism... and creepy Easter Bunnies, and the weird conflation of pagan spring fertility rites with Jesus' Passion.  But year after year I am struck by the genuinely bad theology that rears it's head during this week.  I suspect that more dedicated observance of the Lenten discipline would help us out of some of these, which largely involve the more monstrous ideas about the atonement, and most of which bulldoze the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth in favor of a rather disturbingly Gnostic divine being.

Therefore, I would like to start from the ground up on this Monday morning.  I am going to explain why I would wish to call myself a Christian, even if I was an Atheist.  A lot of the objections to Christian faith are rooted in all the things that the church insists are true about Jesus, most of these involve our statements about his divinity.  This is because objective history (meaning history other than what we find in the Gospels, and other writings of Jesus' followers) has very little to say about Jesus of Nazareth.  He was a Jewish itinerant preacher/teacher who was crucified by the Romans for treason.  There were lots of people like him, and there is almost nothing historically peculiar about him.

Thomas Jefferson notoriously created a book he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or also called The Jefferson Bible, by literally cutting and pasting pieces of the Scripture together.  He excised all supernatural elements like miracles and resurrection, and left only the parables and teachings of Jesus.  Jefferson is often criticized for this behavior, but I would maintain that his approach is pretty much on par with what most of us do with Scripture: we take the parts we like and we tend to ignore things that bother us.

What I would like to do right now is engage in a little Jeffersonian exercise and strip away all the hocus pocus and simply focus (hey that rhymes!) on the teachings of Jesus.  On my good days, Jefferson's Jesus is all I really need.  I can find everything I really need to know in order to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in his ethical teachings, distilled down to one commandment: "Love your neighbor."  Remember, I can't include: "Love God," because we're working from an Atheist platform here.

Within many of the parables and "historical" events of Jesus' life there are examples of people who are attempting to get him to define, narrow down or otherwise qualify the command to love your neighbor, so that it won't be impossible, but he never will and he never does, and he bears the consequences of following that creed without flinching.

Even if there is no God, that is still pretty amazing, and he's still someone I would want to emulate and follow, in other words, I would still want to be his disciple.

The ground of Christian faith does not actually require faith at all, it simple requires looking at what we know about Jesus of Nazareth and agreeing that his way is better than our way, any of our ways.

You don't have to believe in miracles, or resurrection, or bloody theories of atonement, you don't technically have to even believe in God, to think that Jesus was "the way, and the truth and the life."  You can define those things is purely humanistic terms and they are still him.

The most basic faith is often the most unshakable.  The bedrock reality of a purely human Jesus is enough for me to want to call him teacher.  If there is no God then there is no sin, and I don't really need atonement.  If there is no resurrection then I don't really have to worry about what happens after I die, because I'm just going to disappear back into the chaos from which I emerged mostly by chance.  But learning from Jesus still makes my world a better place, it teaches me how to love others and be the best ephemeral creature that I can possibly be.

Even if there is no mystery to the universe, Jesus is still my Lord.

33

There's quite a difference, isn't there?

Between what was and what should have been?

Because there is a lot of one, but there is an infinity of the other!

-Dr. Who, The Rings of Akhenaten

There are days now that I can't forget, no matter how hard I try.  April 10th is one of those days.  Today would have been my brother Jonathan's thirty-third birthday.  Last year, I opened with the above Dr. Who, and I will again this year, because the amount of what should have been is rapidly growing.  The fact that I find my brother's birthday unavoidable is one sign.
I was proud of myself because I remembered to send a happy birthday text to my sister a few weeks ago.  Her birthdays are not as terribly significant to me, because she's here, because I can exchange a brief message and let her know that I am glad she's here.  Which honestly, given that I am who I am, is probably about what I would be doing with Jon today.
Grief about this particular loss has long since ceased being generative, now it's just sort of like poking around the space where you've lost a tooth with your tongue, I really can't help doing it.  Which is why I write these little birthday epistles; I'm poking around to see if anything is different, or if it's just still that big empty.
What I've been thinking about a lot lately, is vacations.  I see that a lot of grown up brothers take vacations together.  I assume that, by now, Jon would be married and have a couple little ones, and we would rent a house at the beach or go camping or something of that ilk.  I don't imagine that we would be best friends, we never really were that way, but I sort of like the idea of annoying each other for one week a year.
It's an example of how an absence can get so much bigger than the presence ever was.
Whatever else Jon was, he was fun most of the time.  He never wanted to sit still, and he had a way of pulling people together and enlisting them in his ideas, me included.  As I creep towards forty, I sense the presence of an absence: someone to enlist me in doing stupid things.
It's really amazing how different two people with so much genetic material in common can be.  I have always been a thinker.  I'm already planning what sort of underwear I'm going to take with me on the Camino de Santiago next spring.  That's right, a year ahead of time, I'm weighing the options for my choice of undergarments, and I am not ashamed (well maybe a little, but not enough to keep me from admitting it).
Jon was a doer.  He spent a lot of money he didn't really have on going to Fiji on a surfing expedition, and he found out that he wasn't a good enough surfer for Fiji.  He spent more money he didn't have on a Honda CBR 750 that looked dangerous sitting still, and he admitted, in a candid moment, that the bike scared him a little.
I have never done anything so impulsive.  The closest I have come is buying a pop-up camper, which I have spent more time regretting than actually using.  I'm not cut out for impulsion, which is why I needed my brother to stick around.  To get me to do stuff without looking (three hundred times) before I leap, to stop me from thinking about every stupid thing way too much, to allow me to brush off April 10th with a simple text message instead of thinking about everything that should have been, but isn't.
All those things that should have been, but never were, mount up, drip after drop into an infinite bucket, and I take a day a year to write a few paragraphs and say Happy Birthday Molebutt.

Here We Are...

They will be making one of their two annual visits to church next week.  You know, the people you haven't seen since Christmas.  Among the "regulars," the Christmas and Easter crowd is definitely a source of mixed feelings.  On the one hand, it's really nice to have a full sanctuary, it makes you feel important and popular, like having a big crowd show up for your birthday party.  But on the other hand, you know they're mostly there for the wrong reasons, and you know you are probably not going to see them again until December.
Pastors can get nice and snarky about "them."  We wonder whether it matters at all that we're going to stand up and tell them what God has done in Jesus Christ.  I know I have preached two main types of Easter morning sermons: the challenge and the conciliation.  The logic behind the challenge is pretty solid: since this might be the only sermon (or maybe one of two) that they hear all year, give to them straight and true, preach the resurrection in all it's death defying glory and draw as much attention to the light breaking the darkness as you can.
But the logic behind conciliation can be good too, if you're really trying to "sell" the church: remember that they are obviously not strong in their faith, they are not very rooted at all in the worship of the community of faith, nor are they walking steadfastly down the path of discipleship.  They are "baby Christians," therefore give them the Good News with a bit of sugar coating, make them feel welcome... show them all the really warm fuzzy things that come with being part of a church.  Under no circumstances present anything really challenging, tell the story everyone expects to hear, and maybe, just maybe, they'll come back some other time.
As I typed that last paragraph, I realized that I'm not doing a very good job of making my point, because as I described the second type, a type I have almost certainly preached and a type that will be preached in many, many churches on Easter Sunday, I realized how I can't even sell it to myself.  I can't keep the sarcasm out of my tone, I can't make it sound like the right path to take.
So I guess what I ought to do is pay attention as to where the hazards are in presenting the resurrection as a challenge, what are the stumbling blocks that we try to avoid so desperately that we wander completely off the trail?  This is a list of descriptive factors about most of the preachers I know.  I am fairly certain that there are many people out there that don't fit this mold, but I generally try not to associate too much with them, because they're probably dangerous.
1. We don't want to be Priggish.  Thanks to C.S. Lewis for familiarizing me with the words prig and priggish, it allows me to avoid using profanity.  Over the past, say 40 years or so the pastoral vocation has become more and more friendly to introverted types.  This means a lot of the people who stand up in front of crowds of people to preach on Sunday morning are not in it because they like the attention, they are in it because they feel called to use the gifts of inward reflection in the service of the community.  This also means that, unlike some of our more extroverted brethren and sistren, we worry about being perceived as obnoxious and overbearing (not saying that introverts cannot be those things or that extroverts are always those things, I just mean that, for introverts becoming such is a major worry).  This means that the bombastic hell-fire sermon really doesn't fit with our idiom, it's just not who we are or what we tend to believe about God.  We want people to like us, and we don't really like loud, in-your-face people, so therefore, in a room with lots of new and strange people, we tend to get more reserved, often to a fault.
2. We equate challenging people with making people mad.  Mostly because we live in a world where disagreement almost always comes with lots of name calling and pissing contests.  Rhetoric as a general field of study has nearly shuffled off of the mortal coil, and people don't know how to present their opinions or refute the opinions of others without breaking rule number one.  Therefore, how do we challenge people, who are obviously fairly content doing whatever else they happen to do on 51 Sunday mornings a year, without making it sound like we're judging them, and thus making them angry.  Because, let's face it, nothing makes a 21st century American more red-in-the-face angry than being judged.
3. We are fairly certain that us preaching a sermon is an act of unmitigated grace.  Meaning that when the pressure grows, as it does on Easter week, we lean back into God's grace, instead of forward into the work and danger of discipleship (I know, I know grace is there too, but it's too hard to trust that when things are crazy, that's why we're having this talk).
4. Deep down, we wish all these people would like us enough to come see us every week.  That's right, "us," not God, "us," as in the preacher.  We will lament the cult of personality type preachers, we will be able to give treatises as to why Joel Osteen needs to be stoned to death, but deep down, because we're human, we want to be a rock star.  The peculiar mixed emotions are really seated in this reality, it's not enough that people come to church because it's what they're supposed to do on Easter, we want them to come because they like us.  Therefore, the C&E Christians really only remind us that without the prop of an institution and the rather hollow observance of what should be the holiest days of the year, we are really not all that interesting.
5. Ultimately, the fear that we have about bold proclamation is really just self doubt.  That self doubt can be important, if you use it to help develop understanding of the people who need to hear the Good News, but that same self doubt can lead you to relativism and equivocation faster than you can say, "boo," if you don't give full attention to the absolutely scandalous truth of the empty tomb.  No one wants to be the desperate ex-boyfriend begging for another chance, but that's what we become, and that's why there seem to be fewer and fewer people in church.
It's a psychological reality: differentiated people are more attractive.  That means that if you want to be attractive to others, know and accept who you are.  It's a lesson that the body of the church needs to learn.  It doesn't matter how physically attractive you are if you don't know who you are.  Should we then get stuck up and stuck on ourselves, as Paul liked to say, "by no means!"  And that's really the biggest danger of the challenging, pull no punches sort of Easter sermon, you are in danger of being a bully.  You can't approach it as a platform for your own genius, because it's not.  It doesn't make you sound logical and clever, it forces you into contact with mystery and something that makes no sense by most of the standard "rules" of life.
Easter Sunday is the perfect time to introduce people to an idea that can rock their world: resurrection.  Resurrection not just as something that happens somewhere over the rainbow, but as something that happens every day, in life, as we suffer together, as we rejoice together, as we live together.  Maybe that's where we go wrong, maybe we just think of resurrection as a one day a year sort of thing, and maybe that's where all "those people" got the idea.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Michele and I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, last night.  And since then I have been trying to think of some redeeming quality of the movie.  Really trying, because it's a Martin Scorcese movie and he has directed some of my favorite movies of all time, including Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Departed.  So I really wanted to like WOW,  but I didn't, I couldn't, and I'm trying to come up with a single reason why, and I think I've got it down to one word: Gratuitous.
There was gratuitous depravity at every turn.  The usual peppering of F-bombs, which I was prepared for, more drug use than Requiem for a Dream, and more orgy scenes than Caligula, all in the telling of what was basically a cautionary tale about unfettered greed and excess.
Except that Scorcese, in telling this tale, needed to heed his own advice.  I get that telling a story about a guy who loves money for money's sake and who indulges in every kind of excess he can possibly imagine, requires a certain amount of R-rated material, but at almost three solid hours long, I found myself wondering if maybe someone didn't need to shout, "Cut!" a little sooner.
I have preached sermons about Pulp Fiction, I'm not a prude when it comes to adult content in a movie, and I kind of get what Scorcese was trying to do, but I think it just went too far.  Ultimately the characters were just static and two dimensional and you didn't care about any of them.  The story was basically a re-telling of Goodfellas, replacing the Mafia with Wall Street, and replacing Henry Hill with Jordan Belfort.  Except that Henry Hill was a more sympathetic character, at least I don't remember really wanting him to get caught the same way I wanted Belfort to get caught.
Normally, I would use this space to lift up something good and right about a movie, but the only thing I can do with WOW is tell you not to watch it.  Don't watch it with the hope that it has some redeeming value.  The only message is that unfettered greed is bad, but that our society ultimately has very few consequences for rich people who break the rules.  The best part of the movie is over in about the first twenty minutes, but after Leo Dicaprio has lunch with Matthew McConaughy, the best is over and there is still over two hours of movie to go, of which the only thing worth watching is a scene involving Dicaprio, Jonah Hill, Bo Dietl and some 20 year old Quaaludes.
Everything else is entirely predictable.
Ultimately it just feels like getting beaten with a depravity stick, which is not really very much fun.

What Is Truth?

Pilate asked Jesus: "What is truth?"
It seems to have been a rhetorical question, but it shouldn't have been.
And Jesus doesn't answer, maybe because he knows that whatever he says will essentially fall on deaf ears, or maybe, he doesn't answer because he knows that truth is inherently undefinable.  His truth as a Jew is going to be different from that of a Roman like Pilate, his truth as a man facing a brutal death is going to be different from the truth of the man who is about to condemn him to that fate.
In the age of science we are on a quest to gain at least reasonable proximity to "objective" truth, but if you press hard enough you will always find that there needs to be some hedge against uncertainty: standard deviations, margins of error, variance that may or may not be explicable.  Even when you come to a place where you have strong enough data to state the facts, the interpretation of facts into truth is still a tricky process, where "reasonable people" might disagree.
If it's that difficult to name truth in a field that is entirely dependent on data to support conclusions, how much harder is it then in the realm of theology?  Where do you even begin?  If you think you're starting with an "objective" mind you are delusional.  If you think that you would ever arrive at the just and loving God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, simply based on observable reality, you are sorely mistaken.  Everything about the way the world actually works would probably lead you to some sort of paganism, atheism or a agnosticism.  The only reason anyone even knows who Jesus of Nazareth was is because of a tradition of people who have talked about him and retold the stories of his life, death and resurrection.  We have very little "objective" data about the man, and yet...
But I'm not going to jump off here and say that the fact that Christianity is still a thing is somehow proof that it's true, what I'm going to say is: isn't it amazing that Christianity is still a thing?  I'm often staggered by the historical reality of Christianity: the path that led from an obscure sect of Judaism to a world religion that dwarfs its progenitor, but that peculiar reality does not prove it's truth.
The reality of the Christian tradition was foreshadowed by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, when they talked about "the cloud of witnesses," all the people who have worked just a little ways along the path of discipleship.  The councils that have dealt with this heresy or that heresy, making course corrections, sometimes in peaceful debate, other times in violent confrontations, but who miraculously never entirely destroy the message of the Gospel.
The miracle of the Christian faith is not that we have entirely grasped the truth, but that we have managed to hold onto just enough of it to keep us going, and moving forward, to keep us out of the various ditches of extremism on one side and relativism on the other (yes, I know, there are parts of the body that can always throw some gutter balls from time to time, but the main course of Christianity somehow manages to wobble down the center).
We uncertainly apprehend the small bit of  truth we have.  Sometimes we neglect or even despise the truth that has been hard fought by our ancestors.  Most of the time we have a dangerous flirtation with worldly values, in short, the reason we have the truth we have is not because we are clever, disciplined and insightful, it is because grace is a thing.
We are pulled, in every generation, by the powerful lure of Gnosticism, by the arrogant voice of our inner teenager assuring us that we have finally figured out the mystery that has so badly outwitted our parents, we are tempted to retreat into the pseudo-pagan idea that morality is really all that God cares about.  We make unwarranted theological assumptions and then miss the truth that so plainly stares us in the face: just like Pilate.

Close Encounters of the Healthcare Kind

Mid afternoon Thursday: I get a call from the school nurse.  Caitlyn fell on the asphalt at recess and busted up her hand and skinned her knee.  The nurse says, "Her little finger on her right hand took the worst of  it, I think it might be fractured."
"Oh crap," I think, though probably in slightly more PG-13 language, "here we go."
What immediately starts running through my mind is really responsible adult type stuff: ER or Urgent Care, Pediatrician? No way, it will take a week to get an appointment.  I have to leave the office with a sermon only half done, I've got to get Michele to leave work early to make sure she can be home for Jack to get off the bus, I've got to hope and pray that we're not in the ER for six or seven hours because I have to preach a service at Grace Lutheran church, where I've never been, in the evening.  All the way from the Church to the school, I'm going through all this stuff, and thinking about how this is going to be another $400 or $500 hospital bill...
Then I walk into the nurses office...
And there's my little girl, all green around the gills, with her hand on an icepack and a trash can next to her, because she had been throwing up, because she was probably in shock, and I know that all the stuff I had been thinking about was utter crap (though probably in slightly more PG-13 language).
Then I go from being a responsible adult to just being Dad.  I don't know when that happened: the responsible adult thing or the Dad thing, but I'm pretty sure they're related.  I ask the nurse: "ER or urgent care?"  She says, "ER, if it's actually broken it will save you a step."
Okay, so that clears that up, and I have to be calm and help Cate, who's still looking a little piqued, not worry too much about what's going to happen, and off to the ER we go.
"No, X-rays don't hurt."
"It will probably just be a splint either way."
"Do you still feel like you're going to throw up?  Because please not in the car."
So we do the ER thing and the X-Rays show no broken bones, just a really banged up and bruised pinkie finger and then the responsible adult makes another appearance: "Great, another $500 band aid."
I have such mixed feelings about all of this.
I am so glad that I can just take my wounded little chick to the ER and get her taken care of, but I really wish there wasn't going to be such a steep price tag for the whole ordeal.  By the way, I have insurance, it's actually pretty good insurance... for big stuff, but it doesn't really help much with the "small" stuff.
But medical "emergencies" don't ever feel small, when they happen to your kids.
I am thankful that the actual health and care part of our system does actually seem to work pretty well.
What I wish is that the economic part of it wasn't so mangled.  I have tried to understand, and I get that in our capitalist society everyone wants to make a buck. I get that insurance companies want to make profits for doing what they do, I get that doctors and nurses work extremely hard and deserve to get paid, I get that medical equipment is expensive and running a hospital is a big operation, but I wonder why it is that other developed nations like Spain and the UK and even Canada, can manage something that makes more fiscal sense, while we've got a very functional healthcare system that is economically farcical.
The reason why it's bloated is also the reason why it's going to be really hard to fix: because a lot of people make a lot of money on the way things work now, but it leaves regular folk having to pay $500 for a band-aid, and there's something broken about that, even if my daughter's pinkie finger wasn't.

Meet Me at Camera Three...

Jon Stewart does this thing on the Daily Show where he mimics the gravitas that theoretically happens the camera cuts to a different shot.  He turns and switches tone and persona, it's a 60 Minutes sort of move: now over here, we're really going to cut to the chase.  I generally don't like to tell people what to think on these little blogs, or even in sermons, I would much rather pose what I consider to be interesting questions, express my opinions or sometimes just sit and lament about how generally screwy things are.  There are a few things that I would like to get off of my chest though, so I'm not going to hedge and walk you through my thought processes, I'm just going to say it, straight up, with a list.  These are things I think the American Christian Church needs to hear:
1. You are not persecuted.  There are places in the world where Christians have to be willing to die for their faith, the US of A is not one of them.  "Forcing" you to accept marriage equality legislation or taking the ten commandments out of the courthouse is not persecution, and calling it that is insulting to those who actually are persecuted.
2. You do not need to have a certain political affiliation or a particular approach to Scriptural interpretation to be a "Real Christian."  All you need to do is follow Jesus, in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but please, discipleship is hard so get into a church and be a part of a community because:
3. Faith is not a private matter between you and God.  If you make it that, you're eventually going to be dangerous, maybe not now and maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of your life.  Churches can be dysfunctional and dangerous; in the worst cases it's because there is someone (or several someones) there who thinks they can manipulate God and other people to get what they want, but in most cases it's just because they're full of sinners who are stumbling around and bumping into each other.  If you suspect the former run away, but try and be sure it's not just a case of the latter, because you're never going to find a community where that's not true.
4. A little bit of stumbling is par for the course, but that's okay because of grace. You need to know that God is forgiving, and that God's forgiveness is really, really big.  Big enough for you and your sin, and big enough for everyone else's as well.  A church that treats sin as avoidable is just as bad as a church that doesn't talk about sin at all, but sin doesn't get the final word.
5. God is bigger than the bogey man.  Whatever your favorite bogey man happens to be, God is bigger than that.
6. God is big enough to use broken people, whether they believe in him or not.  There's a popular quote attributed to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, heir apparent to Carl Sagan as ruler of the kingdom of science: "Science is true whether or not you believe in it."  Actually the same thing is true of God, only pagan deities rely solely on the devotion of their followers, so stop acting like you're the only one who really "gets" God.  That attitude makes you dangerously pagan.
7. Final point, stop telling God who to love, and accept that God loves everyone, prodigals and faithful alike.  Even thought that may be unpopular, God is not running for student council.  If you live with that you will find it much harder to hate other people, and it will start to be possible to do that love thing that Jesus was always going on about.