All Hallows Eve

When I was younger, there were a few people we knew who thought Halloween was a Satanic holiday.  While their passion against the celebration caused some consternation among adults, most of us kids just thought they needed to have more of a sense of humor and stop trying to bum out our candy collection.
There is no denying that Halloween has it's roots in the ancient pagan harvest festivals.  Pagans would wear costumes to allow the spirits of the dead to roam freely for the evening, and thus appease any restless spirits or random deities so that they would not interfere with this most crucial time, as they gathered in the produce of their labor against the hardships of a long winter.
When Christianity encountered these traditions, rather than shrilly denouncing them and crying out about the devil, they in fact did something that the church has been quite good at over the centuries: they went with the flow.  See, despite the reputation that relatively rare crusades and witch hunts have given the Christian faith, we're actually much more successful at syncretism than we are at driving out the pagan gods.
It all comes down to the rather basic realization that all the gods that Christianity has faced as it expanded over the last two thousand years, are not real.  If we treat them as real, we are jousting at windmills.  In Gaelic culture, the church transmuted Samhain, into All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, in Mesoamerica they took the Dia de los Muertos, the day of the dead and turned it into a preparatory celebration for Dia de todos los Santos. 
Of course, these celebrations held on to much of the pagan revelry.  That's why you have to love pagans, they really know how to party. You just have to watch out when they come for you with a knife, because a ritual sacrifice usually plays into it sooner or later.  These celebrations hit a theme: honoring the passing of time, in terms of the "death" of the natural world as winter sets in (at least in the northern hemisphere), in terms of honoring our ancestors and bringing the community together to unwind after a long agricultural season and before the vicissitudes of winter set in.
I like to look at these as rather pleasing translations of the human experience into religious observances.  Even long after Halloween has become a completely irreligious observance for most (which is another reason to just calm the heck down), there is still that chance to reflect on the blessings of year and the passage of seasons, if you want to.  And, I think, you should want to.
As far as the Saints go, I find that, for me at least, enough time has passed since the whole reformation thing, that I can begin to appreciate the Saints and what they add to our collective Christian faith.  They have so many cool stories to tell, and they give us a chance to get our feet on the ground in the history of the church.  Santiago, St. James, has become rather important to me over the past years and as I look forward to my second pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela at winter's end, I can't help but think that maybe we Protestants threw the baby out with the bath water in many regards.
Excluding and anathematizing, while it is sometimes necessary, is not when the Disciples of Jesus are really at their best.  It's not when we are following him most closely.  When we take the loaves and fishes (metaphorically speaking) and turn them into a celebration and a feast, that's when we're getting warmer.
That is what makes me happy about seeing all those children dressed up in scary costumes on their mercenary quest for sweet treats, it reminds me that God is so very good at taking what we give him, tricks or treats, and making it all very good indeed.  It reminds me that our faith has been at it's best when we open ourselves to the many and varied forms of what it means to be human, translated and connected them with the life of Christ and the message of the Gospel.

Hubris and the Big Kablooie

For the last few evenings, we have gathered with a couple folks in the church parking lot in the expectation of seeing a rocket launch from Wallops Island in Northern Virginia.  On Monday night, the launch was aborted because of a sailboat, which was kind of funny, to think that the launch of a vehicle into space could be prevented by something as mundane and ancient as a sailboat.  Tuesday night had a few more clouds but it was sailboat free, and again we were there watching the countdown on an ipad and waiting for the little dot to stream up into outer space.
Even in an age when we are surrounded by technology, and you probably can't even look up in  a clear sky for very long without a satellite zooming by, this still seemed like an auspicious moment.  Something of the little kid who plays with rocketship toys comes out and you're in awe of our human endeavor.
At the moment when the little point of light was supposed to climb into view, I saw an orangish glow on the clouds, and then shortly thereafter the keeper of the ipad says, "That's not supposed to happen," and shows us the enormous fireball on the launchpad where the rocket had, until recently, stood.
It turns out, launching tons of steel and supplies into space is still kind of difficult.
The capsule was unmanned, and no one was hurt, except for maybe what I assume are the fairly prodigious egos of the people who design rockets, aka rocket scientists.
It reminded me of the fact that we take so much for granted when it comes to our technology.  Our world is balanced on some very fragile shoulders at the moment.  We are dependent on a decaying infrastructure of roads and an electronic grid that is, by most accounts, sadly obsolete.  We lost our phones and internet for the afternoon because someone crashed into a pole down the street.  The amount of work that got done in that time period was negligible, no calls made, no emails sent, everything sort of ground to a halt.
Now, I'm not one for dystopian visions of future disasters, I would imagine that if something catastrophic were to happen to our world, human society would probably hold on to some semblance of civilization, because it's just kind of what we do.  I don't really buy the apocalyptic visions put forth in movies like The Road Warrior, or in Cormac MCarthy's The Road.  I tend to think that people will tend to recover societal order rather more quickly than might be expected in the wake of a disaster.  Especially in the years since Hurricane Katrina, we have seen steady improvement in our level of preparation for such disasters.
That still doesn't take away the rather stark and despairing moment when the fireball erupts on the launch pad, when we remember that all our calculations and preparations could be for naught.
It is more a triumph of the human spirit to sift through the wreckage and rebuild and go again, than it is to marvel at the perfection of a single launch.
Knowing that a fireball is always a very real possibility makes the little points of light that we launch into the endless dark all that much more impressive.

Conversion

Conversion is not joining a different group,

But seeing with the eyes of the crucified.

-Richard Rohr

On our road trip this weekend, we passed a little country church with a sign out front that asked: "Is your name written in God's book?"  Which I suppose is meant as an invitation to faith, but it seems more like a cosmic scare tactic.  I thought about it very briefly and said to Michele, "I think it must be, because that Dude won't leave me alone."

Later, at a wedding reception, I talked to one of my colleagues from my former Presbytery and we considered together the grind of ministry.  For those of you on the outside, I hope I'm not disillusioning you about what your pastor does, but this job wears on you.  You can work for years and years, with sincere concern for the spiritual health and growth of your congregation, and never see much in the way of results, because there's this thing called sin.  Most of the really good ministers I know have many days where they would rather be doing something else, anything else.  

There are times when the idea of a God who will not let you go seems ominous rather than comforting.  If we are in the yoke of pastoral ministry, and if we are human, we all have Jonah moments, when we just want to run away, and sometimes we do.  But we find that we cannot run from God, we always end up vomited back on the beach (yes, I know it's a gruesome image, that's why it's used in Jonah).

To anyone on the outside who thinks that this is an easy job, I just shake my head.  To anyone who thinks that the life of faith is a crutch or a superstitious sop for the weak minded, I say, "you have no idea what you're talking about."

The reality of this journey of faith is that once you see "with the eyes of the crucified," which is not a pleasant experience, you cannot go back to sleep.  The funny thing is that, from my perspective now, the thing that I always remember as my conversion experience, was actually a moment of profound grace and peace, but it was a definite set up.  It led me into a walk that was going to lead to the cross, and that cross is the practice of ministry.  One of my seminary Professors wrote a book called The Crucifixion of Ministry in which he talks about how you must constantly put your ministry to death, so that God's ministry can take place, it is what Jesus does, and it is the path we are to follow.

When you see your best plans fail.  When your careful sermons meet with, "Hey you kind of lost me there."  When you make agonizing changes and nobody much seems to care.  These are hard to take.

Then there are those times when you know you're over-matched and in over your head, when you're with someone who is dying, when you're holding a new baby over the baptismal font, when you're trying to find some word of hope to speak into a storming cloud of evil; that's when God shows up.

Seeing with the eyes of the crucified is to know that God understands EXACTLY what it's like to be ignored, scorned, schemed against, insulted, challenged at every turn, betrayed one friend and denied by another.  God knows what it's like to get "Hosanna" one minute and "Crucify" the next.

God knows what it's like to really, really want to take a different road, but know it's not "my will, but thy will."

I have heard similar sentiments from writers and artists; that they make art or write because they "have to."  And I know that it's fortunate that my particular calling still comes with a salary and benefits.  Because I know that seeing through the eyes of the crucified is what I'm supposed to be doing, and telling people about it is the thing I am most gifted to do.

If you pay close enough attention to a group of clergy talking you will hear, at least if they're being honest, a great deal of bellyaching.  Know that it's probably justified, but know also that, if they're being true to their calling, there really isn't much else they could actually do, because God won't leave them alone.

Memorial

Flight 93 Memorial Site: Somerset County Pennsylvania

We went to the Flight 93 Memorial site in Somerset County Pennsylvania on our way back from a wedding in the old neighborhood.  You turn off of route 30 onto a three and a half mile road that winds through empty high mountain meadows and you come to this little parking area.  You then walk through an "under construction" welcome area and across a field on a walkway finished in matte black to a wall of white marble with the names of the people who had boarded a plane in Boston on September 11, 2001 as completely unremarkable air travelers, and in the course of the next few hours became heroes and martyrs.
There is more in the works for this windswept mountaintop, there is a large swooping wall on the high point, that is going to become the real center of the site.  It will overlook the "sacred ground" of the debris field, the boulder that marks the center of the impact and the wall of names that points the way.  It's all very striking.  And intentional, right down the strategically placed ledges in the black sloping wall that skirts the edge of the sacred ground of the debris field, designated places for people to leave flowers and mementoes, the most striking of which was a pair of desert combat boots signed by the members of a platoon, who had served in Afghanistan.
Watching the flag wave in a stiff breeze, with the new monument going up on the hill above, and the silent reverence of the white marble wall of names in the distance, you can't help but feel a swelling of patriotism.  The man in decidedly military looking garb who stands by the wall, ready with a very scripted and somewhat stilted speech to give to visitors, cinches it.  He is like the VFW guys who do their thing at certain funerals, liberal with the use of terms like "hero" and "sacrifice."
But as with all things 9-11, I wonder if we are honoring those who died by our behavior in the days that have come since then.  I wonder if we are glossing over the tragedy with all this white marble and carefully planned somberness.
The wall of names is wonderful, the placards with the faces of the passengers and crew is good, the lonely road that winds across the mountaintop is good.  Best of all are the trees that have been planted on the barren places, life in the place of death.  That's all good.
I like the memorial, I like the sense of moving on, I don't like the parts of it that feel like running your fingers over an old scar to stir up any bitterness and anger that might still be lurking, and I think there is some of that.
I have trouble with the phrase forgive and forget, because I think it's really actually impossible to make yourself forget by an act of will.  I believe that forgiveness can happen even when there is still a memory of a wound.  Thus I think remembering is important.  What is crucial is the manner in which we remember.  Do we remember as a tool to heal?  Or do we remember to stoke our bitterness?  As of today, I think the simplicity of the Flight 93 memorial has a healing and living feel, it's the "bigger and better" things that seem to be coming soon that give me a little bit of the shivers.  Are the things to come going to remain in the spirit of remembering and trying to move on, or are they going to embrace that maudlin and dire sensibility that drives us towards violence?

Sabbath

I can't say it has been a pleasant week.
There were times when things seemed overwhelming.
Times when I cursed my luck,
And hated circumstances.

I was forced to examine my relationship with things.
And I found it was not at all in balance.
It put me in a bubble of discontent.
I had to work to count my blessings,
Appreciate my helpers,
And feel the presence of my God.

I suppose it is what is it is,
And what it was,
And what it ever shall be:
Life distracting us,
Troubling us,
Breaking us down.

This morning when the work has been done,
The problems have been solved,
The sun shines brightly.
And God is obvious again.
I see that it is ever true,
I recall moments of grace and peace,
Guidance in decisions I thought I had to make on my own.

And I am rather ashamed that I found it so easy to miss the presence,
Which sabbath so reliably helps to see.

That New Car Smell

The new car is a thing.  The mechanic called this morning and said, "I don't have good news."  Outside of your doctor, the mechanic is the person you least want to hear say those words.  So my plans and considerations got kicked into high gear, no more deliberations, no more prowling through Carmax, cars.com, autotrader and various other consumer review sites, no more waffling back and forth between models and agonizing over whether or not it was finally time to abandon one of my final youthful ideals and buy a minivan.
In the end it was a stewardship issue: fuel economy, that saved me from that fate.  Though I admit the word "turbo" may have also factored into my decision.  The new VW sportwagen that is sitting in my driveway is actually a testament to where I am in life right now: it's practical, it gets upwards of 40 miles to the gallon, it has room for the kids and the dog, it has heated seats and hands free phone operation, it's gray and no nonsense, in short it's very German.
Oh yeah and about the turbo, it has a 4 cylinder turbo diesel engine, clean diesel, one of the few you can actually get in a mid-size station wagon.  It purrs and gets up and goes like one of it's cousins with much larger displacement.  Oh yeah, and it has a reputation for running forever.  I read a bunch of reviews that absolutely gushed about the TDI, but until I put my foot on the pedal, I'm not sure I really drank the kool-aid.  I have now.
I'm kind of wondering why they don't do more diesel engines like that around.  The sales guy says that most American car manufacturers can't get a diesel to be anything like "clean."  Therefore, while most of Europe chugs away in little cars that get upwards of 60 kpg, that's at least about 30 mpg for you who insist that metric is the work of Satan.  We think diesel is for big trucks and things that belch black smoke, but my little sportwagen begs to differ.
Yeah, you can probably tell, I'm a little pleased with it right now, and maybe there's really no point to be made here other than that.  But I've been thinking lately that, while technology is giving us some really darn good gadgets, it's not really stepping up to the plate in some of the more vital areas, like energy and fuel efficiency.  Is it just our sheer commitment to the status quo?
I know I have spent years driving around a gas guzzling Chevy Tahoe, largely because I felt like I had to, even though I very rarely hauled anything.  Even in my current euphoric state, I still wonder about what I'm going to have to give up for the sake of driving this much smaller vehicle.  I just don't know and that not knowing was the thing that kept pushing me towards minivans.
Most days, I think I'm going to like my little VW a lot better.

First World Problem DuJour

Got a call from the mechanic this morning.  Bad brake lines. Cost about $1200.  Crap and double crap.  I'm not playing this game with my old Chevy anymore.  She's just too high maintenance, and she eats too much.  I'm getting it patched, and I'm going car shopping.  I had hoped to hold off and be a responsible grown up.  I had hoped to get more miles out of the beast, but sometimes the facts make the decision for you.  That $1200 would be better spent towards a down payment on something new and more fuel efficient.
Funny thing is though, this kind of feels like a moral defeat.  I was hoping that I could make do with what I had, I was hoping that I could somehow remain satisfied with an old SUV with duct tape on the bumper and a bunch of funny noises.  Then the brake lines decided to rust out, which is not okay, and it's not something that you can just smile past, it already put me, my kids and several random strangers in peril.
Therefore, I am going to get on the treadmill of financing and more car payments and ditching a car that, in much of the developing world would be a perfectly functional vehicle.  And I am thankful for good credit, and thankful for the resources to be able to do such things, even if it is a little bit of of big pain in the you know what.
I suppose I could look at this as God telling me that the desire that had been eating at me for months wasn't actually so misguided.  I have wanted a new car, I have suspected that I needed a new car.  I don't feel like a responsible steward of resources driving around in such a gas guzzler.  I'm going to downsize and simplify.  In many ways, this is an attempt to be less wasteful, and it is, also a referendum on a period of time where I made many less than ideal decisions.
We got the Chevy because it was big, and we had babies to haul around and babies have lots of stuff that goes with them everywhere: strollers, booster seats, pack-and-play cribs, large toys and car seats, lots of car seats, for a long time.  Then we got a camper, because we had a truck that would tow the camper and because, you know, we had a case of the wants.  Could we afford it?  No.  Did we need it? No.  Did we even like it that much?  Sorry, but no.
It's funny that I feel like I'm putting an age of acquisitive foolishness behind me by buying something really expensive.  It's funny that my best effort at self discipline was taken essentially out of my hands.  It's like being on a diet and having someone tell you that you NEED to eat a piece of chocolate cake the size of a football or else one of your children is going to be horribly maimed.
Mixed emotions for sure.

Does the Truth Smirk?

As you may know, I am a big fan of The Daily Show, I suspect that this is largely due to the way that it's brand of sarcasm appeals to my Gen-X sensibility.  I have often told people that the only television news show I watch is The Daily Show, which is actually not true, but it sounds funny, and I like to be funny.  A while back though I noticed that people were actually starting to assign Jon Stewart some sort of social spokesperson role, a role which he didn't seem to want, and which probably definitely should not have been given to him.  Yes, he and his protege Stephen Colbert are insightful as satirists and, yes, they may even serve as a voice for some part of a generation, but they are not advocates, as in being a voice for the powerless, and they should not be trusted as such.
Sojourners magazine put Stewart on the cover one month with the tag line "The Truth Smirks." The content of the cover story counted examples of times when Jon Stewart had spoken truth to power, challenged propaganda and asked some very hard questions of politicians and public figures.  Which he does, sometimes, in some ways.  But for all my years of watching the show, I have never been duly impressed by his interviews.  They're just not that funny or insightful, except when he has the chance to zing one of his clear antagonists (i.e. Bill O'Reilly, one of the only right wingers with the sheer audacity to go toe to toe with a seasoned comedian and try to peddle his political dogma).
There is a rather long and somewhat twisty article that actually describes quite adequately the flaws of The Daily Show as a motivator of social change.  Indeed the scoffers and the cynics can rarely come away from their mountains of derision to actually make a difference.  It will actually be interesting to see if Stephen Colbert, the real Stephen Colbert, maintains any of his edge once he is absorbed by the warm embrace of the mainstream when he takes his seat behind David Letterman's desk (Letterman sure didn't).  The thing is, I don't think either one of them actually want to make a difference beyond making people laugh and perhaps deflating some of the dogmatic angst that dominates our politics.
I will say this for them though, they do often come across as a voice of reason, and often times a little humor and a little distance do help you see the problems more clearly.  However, perspective is not the only thing that is needed.
I'm still thinking about my experience with the local do-gooders (and I mean that entirely as a compliment).  We had lots of talk about some very real problems, but there was also a great deal of front-line awareness about what can and cannot be done.  And this is where the nitty-gritty of advocacy and activism comes in, it is not enough to tear into a politician with your rapier wit and insightful criticism.  That sort of thing will not get you on the docket of the next county council meeting.  It is not helpful to the poor to eviscerate the "sinister" corporate influences that drive the back room deals.  You need to know that most politicians will do the "right" thing if they have political cover to do it, and they will just as easily do the "wrong" thing as long as there is political cover to do it.  Successful activism and advocacy must accept this reality.  It is much more helpful to know who is holding the leash than it is to shout insults at the dog.
There is a real need for ideologically neutral journalists (or as close to ideologically neutral as is humanly possible), and indeed the likes of Fox news and MSNBC aren't exactly even trying for that.  But that doesn't meant the job can or should be handed to clowns, just because in the process of going for a laugh they can sometimes tell the truth.
We need truth tellers to some extent, but it helps when the ones telling the truth actually care enough to get involved.  In my area of expertise, we talk about prophets.  Prophets were people who called the nation of Israel back to it's covenant relationship with God.  There were prophets who spoke with an air of disconnection and some level of smirking.  I'm actually a fan of Amos, who was probably the best example of that style, but I find there to be much more power and impact in the messages of prophets who knew they would share the fate of the people: Ezekiel, Jeremiah.  Hosea actually demonstrated God's predicament by marrying an unfaithful woman and maintaining his righteousness in that relationship even when she did not.  That, friends and neighbors, is commitment to a cultural criticism.
That is the sort of thing that might actually change things: someone who sees clearly, and is willing to care enough not just to laugh it off.

Talky Time

I went to a seminar this morning over at the Community College that was put on by a local Justice and Advocacy group.  It was obvious from the gathering of the usual suspects in Charles County that this was something that struck a bit of a nerve.  There were pastors, non-profit types, social services, counselors and various other activist sorts.  It was a diverse collection of the sorts of people who make it their primary purpose in life to help people.
It was also more than a time to talk about all the things that are available in the County, it was step in the direction of a different paradigm in helping.  Two thirds of the breakout groups were not about the usual litany of how to funnel needy people towards available services.  We talked about advocacy, which was eventually understood as a means to address the "wholesale" rather than "retail" issues facing people in poverty.  In other words, we started talking about systemic problems, how to try and remedy the public policies and rule that contribute to keeping people down and dependent on the system.
We also talked about self sufficiency, which in the parlance of the old saying is, "teaching people to fish, rather than giving them a fish."  It was, in my opinion, a conversation that many of us in the room have been longing to have.  We helpers need to talk to one another, we need to think in bigger terms than just one crisis after another.
I'm sure that there might be people who sat in on the conversation that felt like there were not enough action items.  I'm sure some people might feel that it was just a lot of talk.  Which would be true if we were talking about a gathering of random well meaning folk, or even a group made up exclusively of clergy, it was the impressive array of religious and secular, of social and spiritual, of different approaches to the problem.  It made for a somewhat cacophonous discussion in the early going, but when things settled down and specific agendas faded away, we found out that we have a lot in common, and there is a lot we don't yet know, and have not yet learned to clearly articulate, and that the problem is absolutely huge, and absolutely unacceptable.
One of the things we talked about was the disconnection that so many people of all socio-economic situations feel in the modern world.  Communities are important, they are the best lines of defense against individual suffering and the best support networks when disaster strikes.  We talked about how people in our community, who are on the edge and possibly about to sink into poverty just might be saved from that fate with a good community around them... maybe.
What occurred to me as I looked around the room at the people gathered was that this was a community of significant power and influence in our local community.  It made me glad to be there, it made me glad that we were talking, even if we weren't exactly "doing" any of the things that would make a direct impact, the formation of a community and/or network around this subject is a great way to spend a Monday morning.

Relativity

It's an absolutely beautiful day.  I should feel blessed.  But I do not.  And the fact that I'm not feeling blessed is kind of grating in and of itself, because the air is cool and the sky is blue and it's fall.  I wish I could be like my dog, who is sprawled out on some wood chips in the sun with his junk in the air doing some version of dog yoga and looking more relaxed than anything that wears a chain around it's neck has any right to be.
I'm thinking about my car, and how I want a new one.  I'm thinking about the camper I wish wasn't sitting in my driveway, I'm thinking about the gutters that need cleaned and how I don't have a ladder that will reach them.  I'm thinking about the moment yesterday when my brakes went out and almost sent me careening through a red light and into turning traffic, and how, thankfully they locked up just in time to prevent a bad thing and just end up with a stupid moment, and how now the car is telling me to service brakes and I'm like: "Duh."
I'm hoping to be able to fix the brakes and get a few more miles out of the beast before I inevitably trade it in, but I'm hoping (with futility I suspect) that the repair bill will be less than a down payment on a new car.
And sometimes I think it would be nice to just start walking and never stop.
It's moments like this that make the ancient ascetics seem like sensible people.  Because, for all the comforts that can be bought and paid for in the modern world, there is a price to be paid.  And the price seems sometimes like it's not really worth it, when I consider that, on a day like today, thousands of years ago, a nomad probably sat on a rock watching his sheep or goats or whatever and felt the same sort of existential crap that I feel right now.  I don't imagine that he was somehow happier, he was just worried about different stuff.
I'm quite certain that this is a spiritual affliction: to be able to notice and appreciate all the things you should definitely be grateful for, and not be able to feel gratitude, because at one particular moment the things you're worried about outweigh the things you love.
To add to the malaise, I had a doctor appointment yesterday morning and found out that all my "numbers," the things that science uses as health metrics, are going the wrong direction.  Another lovely predicament of the modern world!  We don't judge health by how we feel or what we're able to do, but by blood tests and measurements.  When I climb to the top of a hill and look out at the world, I feel healthy, when I climb on to a scale and look at one of my numbers I feel like a lump of bacon grease.
My doctor gives me these pep talks and instructions and ideas, but the poor guy doesn't understand that I know what I'm supposed to do, it's really just a matter of convincing my stomach to cooperate.  He's wasting his time, and mine with these little lectures, because it's not a matter of knowing what to do, it's a matter of willpower and discipline to do it.
I know I should be glad about a lot of things: that I live in a time and place where it's possible and indeed quite easy, to overeat, that I live in a time and place where I can have a nice doctor look at a bunch of blood test results and recommend some medicines to help me strengthen my grip on mortality.  And deep down inside, a little voice says: "what kind of fool wants to live for 90 years without bacon and cherry pie?"  And I know that little voice is going to win eventually, because it makes sense in a way that my nice, encouraging and sensible doctor never will.
Knowledge of all the things that are probably going to kill me does not make me happy, any more than that "service brake system" light on my car's dashboard does.
I think this is why we have such problems imagining that eternity is going to involve some sort of embodiment, because bodies, like machines, break down, and when things break down it makes us unhappy, and no one wants to imagine an eternity of unhappiness.
This is one of the reasons why I think it's so important to cultivate faith and learn to live in God's universe, because if eternal life is a real thing, then I'm going to need some coping mechanisms.  If the atheists are right and it all just ends then there really isn't that much of a reason to struggle, because, when it's done it's done, and I can deal with that okay as well.  It's only if it goes on that I need to think about what is making it go on.  It's only if there is more to be done when we shuffle off the mortal coil that makes struggling for gratitude seem like a worthwhile effort.
Enjoy!

Some Light

So I saw this thing early this morning, and it just about made my day.  Not because it's incredibly hilarious, frankly videos of cats trying to sit in odd containers is probably good for more chuckles.  Not because it's Star Wars related, although that generally grabs my attention.  It made my day because it is an example of human beings essentially laughing in the face of an absurd and absurdly broken system.
This comes to us from Ukraine, and it reminds me that my experience of people from Ukraine, Russia and that part of the world has been rather contrary to the stereotype.  Growing up during the Cold War, my primary impression of Soviets was not favorable, reading Russian Literature on top of that generalized fear left me with a feeling that "Russians" were pretty hardcore people, who could really take a licking and keep on ticking.  With the rather unfortunate exception of Yakov Smirnov, I had a hard time imagining that people on that side of the world laughing.
Yet, as I have gotten to know actual people from that part of the world, an experience our hate and fear largely prevented during my formative years, I find that laughter is a big thing, and it comes easily, even when things seem dire.
And so that article about the people from Ukraine who are running for office as Darth Vader and Stepan Chubakka, made me very happy.  Despite the real trauma that is happening in Ukraine, despite the uncertain future and political currents that will certainly end up sinking some ships, a few people have the courage to laugh into the face of dysfunction.
Humans can be wonderful.
The odds of us being wonderful seems inversely proportional to how seriously we take ourselves.
Last night on Survivor, one of the last network TV shows I actually pay any attention to, and the only "reality" show I have ever really watched faithfully, there was a perfect example.  One tribe had been running rough-shod over the other, and had yet to lose an immunity challenge.  For unknown reasons one of the more abrasive characters on the dominant tribe, Drew, decided to throw the challenge.  Drew then proceeded to flex his muscles, alienate people, and not surprisingly become the first member of his tribe voted out.
Drew swore that he was the mastermind, that he was in control, that he was such a "bad ass" that no one would dare go against him.  He was wrong.
The editing of the show told that story full well (I have come to understand that most of the narratives on Survivor are profoundly effected by the editing process, but that's another story).  Drew was arrogant and obviously thought more of himself and his position than he had any right to do.  My kids both applauded when he was voted out.  I pay attention to their reactions because their emotional responses are less jaded and thus probably more reliable than mine.  He deserved to leave, and I guess the reason why I like that show is for moments like that.
Because that very rarely happens in the real world.  The Vladmir Putins of the world get re-elected and ISIS actually gains support on the ground.  The worst are able to skulk their way to power, while people who might actually take the greater good into consideration stand very little chance.  Violence is the road to power.  Cheating is often the only way to win.
No wonder we like reality TV, at least there are rules, and the narratives aren't so damned depressing.
In a situation as bleak as Ukraine, sometimes the only thing to do is to dress up like a Wookie or a Sith Lord and play that harp-y thing.  I wonder if the same thing could bend our politics for the better?
Lando Calrisian for President in '16!

Constantinian Consternation

Rulers make bad lovers,

Better put your kingdom up for sale.

-Fleetwood Mac, Gold Dust Woman

For the first three hundred years of the Common Era, the group of Jesus followers that would eventually become the church were really little more than a curious hybrid of Judaism and Greek philosophy.  The news that Jesus of Nazareth had purportedly been raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven was by no means an earth shattering revelation to most people.  Few outside of the Jewish faith understood the messianic expectation that indwelt Jesus' life and ministry, and as far as Greek thought went, the Logos was old news.  But somehow the faith withstood various persecutions, and even more dangerous times of success, it discerned truth as it walked down a sometimes wandering doctrinal path, which was largely defined by the correction of various gnostic errors.
Quite surprisingly to many, this thing that was being called Christianity was doing rather well.  It was not, however, the "official" religion of anyone or anywhere, and it still had to deal with the odd persecution here or there and the ever-present reality that it didn't have much of a foothold in what many of their Apostles called "the World," in a somewhat adversarial tone.  It was okay though, because followers of Christ were called to be pilgrims and witnesses and a light in the darkness, and they were encouraged by all of Jesus' status-challenging teachings and the dramatic perspective shift of these books they called Gospels, or Good News.
In this period, I'm fairly sure that no one called themselves a follower of Jesus, "just because."  I'm not being idealistic here either, I'm fully aware that this early iteration of Christianity had many issues, most of which are still rather pesky even after almost 2000 years.
But in 312 C.E. the best and worst thing that could have ever happened to the followers of Jesus Christ occurred: Constantine, the man who was about to become Roman Emperor, essentially became a Christian at precisely the moment when he was able to claim authority over the Western Roman Empire, the battle of Milvian Bridge.  Constantine had a vision, and later attributed his victory to God, and faith in Jesus.  Thus one of the more peculiar story arcs of human history came into being: a ruler of the very empire that had crucified Jesus was now a follower of Jesus, sort of.
It is also, probably, the moment where triumphal Christianity became a thing.  I don't imagine that when the Apostle Paul wrote, "Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ," that he was thinking of a Roman Emperor winning a battle.  In fact in 1 Cor 15, he's talking mostly about resurrection, which means dying happens as a part of the whole equation, but that's probably an argument for another time.
It's hard to overstate what a massive impact Constantine's conversion and subsequent establishment of Christianity as the "official" faith of the Empire, had on the Church and the world.  It led directly to the creation of the Nicene Creed, which was good, but it also led to the necessity for the Church to become something it was and is perhaps ill equipped to be: a Ruler.
This is a religion founded around a crucified man.  This is a religion that, in it's most authentic expressions, cares deeply for the marginalized and the downtrodden.  This is a religion that has the notion of taking up a cross and dying to yourself at it's very core.  So, while I am always happy to hear about Constantine's conversion, because I'm always glad when people get to know Jesus, I'm coming to think that perhaps it would have been better for us all if he had just tried to live out his own salvation rather than imposing his faith on an entire Empire.
There are, no doubt, times when all of us feel a little frustrated by the insistence of our Constitution that the government remain neutral in matters of religion, but I am convinced that it is really the only way.  I would prefer to live in a religiously neutral country than in a Christian one, or a Muslim one, or a Jewish one, or in any other form of theocracy or religiocracy. I would also argue that since Atheism is technically a religious position, it also shows its flaws in this arena.  The best case scenario is essentially an agnostic, neutral government.
Religions, including Christianity, make bad rulers.  While religious principles and religious people may be important elements in creating a state where justice is valued and equality is a goal, the attempt to run anything like a truly diverse, secular society while privileging one religion over others is doomed to injustice and ultimately will be consumed by brutality.
Do I think that religion should keep it's nose out of politics?  By no means, but the political arena should be a neutral space where the field is not tilted in favor of one group at the expense of another (this goes for economic and racial groups as well).  We have work to do in this regard, and we should do it with some level of urgency, because we cannot really face the dangers imposed by the fearsome Islamist States, without understanding how we as "Christian Nations" have fallen short of the goals of justice and equality ourselves.
As for the dream of an ideal society based on Christian principles, our current doctrine of separation of church and state is probably the best attempt so far at making that a reality.  Is it perfect? No, but it's the best chance we've got.  I want my government to be neutral when it comes to matters of faith, I don't want them telling me what to do or what to say, I don't want them interfering in my walk with God.  My faith will shape my political life, and my place in the community, I want it to be allowed to do so, but I also hope that others will be free to do the same, whether I agree with them or not.

You Are What You Worship

Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

-Simon and Garfunkel, Mrs. Robinson

I read this first thing this morning.  You may have noticed that I'm on sort of a Rohr kick lately, and I am, because the ideas I find in his writings unfold and intertwine like vines with almost everything else that's going on.  Yesterday, I wrote about how we never seem to learn from the past, and about how we probably shouldn't imagine that things are getting better or worse, but are more aptly described as hovering at a rather disappointing point of futility.  Today, I'm going to give an opinion on why that is, and the answer is simple: idolatry.

Yesterday, we observed a national holiday, well some people did anyway, in honor of Christopher Columbus who "discovered" America.  Columbus Day, for me in the past few years, has been a rather enjoyable reminder of how good postmodern folk are getting at deconstructing mythology.  The Columbus mythology that most of us grew up with was that he defied the odds, and through sheer courage and resolve disproved the conventional belief that the world was flat and in the process stumbled upon a new world.  In fact, by 1492, most people had come to agree with Galileo and the ancient Greeks, that indeed the world was a sphere, the only thing that Columbus really "proved" is the sphere was, in fact, larger than previously imagined by anyone except the Scandinavians who had been there and done that, and been driven off by the rather fierce inhabitants of the "New" world.

Columbus, however, landed far south of where Leif Erikson had originally drug his butt ashore.  Down south, the natives were friendlier, and more gullible, and didn't really see why everyone shouldn't just get along and have some Pina Coladas.  Columbus then brought his nobility and dauntless courage to bear on forming a mutually beneficial society that bridged the gap between...

Oh, no he didn't, he started raping and murdering and enslaving people in a blind quest for gold, which, as it turns out, the natives didn't actually have all that much.  The latter history of Columbus in the New World reads a lot more like a story I don't want to tell my children under any circumstances.  He was brutal to the people he encountered in a way that would probably make Josef Stalin step back and say, "Whoa bro, you ought to chill out." or however you say "chill out" in Russian.

And we have a holiday for him, and we learn that he is a hero.  Remind me again, exactly how the world is getting worse?

This is where idolatry ultimately leads: you end up worshiping monsters.  You end up celebrating a man who sold 9 and 10 year old girls to his crew as sex slaves, and cut off the hands of people who didn't mine enough gold to make a quota, and then made them wear the hands tied around their necks.  Tell me again about how letting gays get married is going to bring down God's wrath.

Go back and read that thing about becoming what you worship again.  Who do we worship?  Who do we venerate and honor?  Historical figures?  Columbus?  Jefferson (another guy with a questionable human rights record)?  What about athletes?  How is that Adrian Petersen or Ray Rice jersey feeling right about now?  Movie stars?  Politicians?

You know, it occurs to me that there was a pretty good reason why God was so unreasonable about Israel worshiping idols.  When you worship an idol, whether it's a person, or even an idea, it shapes who you are.  If you worship power, you become war-like.  If you worship money, you are driven by greed.  If you worship success, you become hard and driven.

No matter what you worship, if it's not God, you are essentially worshiping a demon, and thus the world is populated afresh with demons and the idolaters that sacrifice on their altars.

So what's the way around this?

Jesus, but you probably guessed I was going to say that.  Jesus shows us a God that is loving to an extent that challenges the rational abilities of every human being.  He breaks apart the assumptions of will to power (when people wanted to make him king or Messiah, he avoided them).  He certainly shuns the trappings of wealth and greed (just look at how he talks about the rich).  He even breaks out of the most deeply held human instinct of self-preservation at one point.  In the process he rejects the cycle of violence and revenge that dominates our history, and becomes something more.

If you're going to worship something, worship him.

Hearts and Minds

There seem to be three different perspectives on the general progress of the world:

1. The world is getting better.  This view is generally held by those who are optimistic and progressive, who look at the human race as a flawed but generally well-meaning lot, and have a hopeful outlook that some how, some way, perhaps with a bit of divine intervention, all will be well with the Creation.
2. The world is getting worse.  This view is generally held by those who are pessimistic and would much rather see things go back to being the way they were in "the Good Old Days."  They may be a bit delusional about how good the old days were, but whether you're talking pharisees in Jesus' time or Fox News in ours, these conservative caretakers of the status quo will probably always be with us in some way.
3. The world is pretty much the same as it ever was.  Human sin is a relatively known quantity from a historical perspective.  I don't imagine that Genghis Khan was really much better, or much worse than ISIS.  I suspect that the ultimate failure of the Crusades had a lot in common with the current failures of our Middle Eastern foreign policies.  The names may have been changed but the pernicious sin and misapprehension remains.  We never learn from history and thus we are doomed to repeat it.

Something rather crucial is going on in Syria and Iraq (you may slap your forehead and say, "Duh" if you wish).  There is an evolutionary step taking place, which does not bespeak good things for the immediate future of an already troubled part of the world.  ISIS, which is currently being roundly criticized and justly attacked by most of the world, is transmuting from a terrorist organization to a genuine movement of the people.
There has been a line crossed in the sand (take the pun if you want it).  A group has stormed the castle, so to speak, and taken control of a large geographical area, but more importantly they have given a voice to a group of people who have felt marginalized in their particular place.  The Sunni Muslims, who are being absorbed into ISIS, and who are giving this ersatz collection of extremists their real power, may not broadly agree with the fundamentalist extremism of the group, but they do agree that they have been neglected, marginalized and oppressed by the secular government in Baghdad, and they certainly have no love for the Kurds, Christians and Shia who are being persecuted by the IS.
I heard a phrase that rather chilled me in an interview on the radio this morning: "hearts and minds."  ISIS is winning the "hearts and minds" of the populace in areas they have conquered through their sheer brutality.  This idea chills me because it is precisely the phrase used during the Vietnam conflict, before it became the Vietnam War.  Many people do not realize exactly how long we were in Vietnam, they only remember the years of open conflict, with the draft and occupying forces and thousands of rather reluctant US teenagers getting blown to bits in the jungles of southeast Asia.
But well before that, there were the Green Berets.  Men who were trained and prepared for the actual tactics of winning hearts and minds and honestly preventing the spread of communism into South Vietnam.  In the beginning, we had such a wonderful idea: show up in villages that were being strong-armed by Viet Cong and NVA regulars and "liberate" them.  Vaccinate children, fix up things that had been broken and generally protect the people from the "bad guys."
For a long time this actually worked out pretty well, our special forces had the hard earned trust of most of the South Vietnamese who weren't so thrilled about the communist threat.  They were trained and immersed in the culture, they spoke the language and knew who to trust and who not to trust.  They could hold off the "red menace" one village at a time.
The problem was that this approach was never going to win the decisive end to conflict that a lot of politicians craved.  They wanted another solid "win" like Korea, where they kept the Commies north of a certain line on a map.  Our inability to see the nuanced differences between Asian people and places led to some rather dire mistakes, much worse than referring to Sushi as Chinese food.
As it turns out, you know what doesn't win you a lot of points with poor peasants who sort of like you but don't really trust you?  Bombs, people who live in little villages in the jungle, who don't like the Viet Cong extorting them for money, actually really hate having napalm dropped on their kids a lot more.
Fast forward 50 years.  You know what's not going to really defeat ISIS or any other organization like them?  Bombs, except maybe of the sort we really don't want to use, you know the kind that will turn the desert sand into radioactive glass littered with charred skeletons for a thousand years.
This is one of those: stuff doesn't really change sorts of moments aka SSDD.  We still don't fully grasp the deep-seated differences between an Iraqi and an Iranian, any more than we understood the difference between the Chinese and the NVA, or the North Koreans, we just think they're all the enemy.  We don't get that some of the people who are fighting for ISIS may not actually buy into the ideology, but are just sick and tired of other people telling them what to do.
We need to be the people that offer a better alternative, not just the people who have the bombs.

Getting There

Today I started working my way towards the Camino de Santiago.  I took my backpack out of the closet, where it's been since Jack and I got back from our trip on the AT.  I loaded it up with about three quarters of what I'll eventually carry to Spain.  And I walked my normal loop around the lake.  It's a shade over two miles, a good morning walk, but this morning I noticed something: I was thinking way too much about just finishing the walk.  I thought maybe it was just the extra load, even though it wasn't anything like the load I was carrying on the AT.  Maybe it was just that I had a few other things I wanted to get done today, but as I walked I considered how I have come to experience my walk as though I'm checking things off of a list.
On the outward stretch there are a few steep little rises and falls as the trail follows the contour of the shore line.  I know exactly where the last "real" climb on the loop comes.  I also use a fitbit now, which also makes walking and moving in general a goal oriented activity.  I began to think about how, in about seven months, I will have nothing to do but walk.  I will have to walk every day, rain or shine, whether I feel like it or not.  I will need to cover about five or six times the distance of my morning walk per day, and my pack will not be optional.  It's a daunting mental situation, to know that your goal is always so far away, I'm wondering how it's going to be that first week, before I really settle into the journey.
In the background, I'm thinking about how this pilgrimage is going to shape the rest of my life and ministry.  These preparations remind me of somewhat of seminary.  I'm trying to teach my body to accept and bear the burden, I'm breaking in my boots, I'm thinking about how the Camino is going to be a challenge (I've actually even done something like a Field education on my walk from Sarria last year).  But the idea of walking for a month, with almost no other reason for being, is still a bit of an abstract idea.  Sort of like the idea of actually serving a church week in and week out was to me in seminary.
Conventional wisdom says that it's a good idea to set small achievable goals en route to your larger goals, so you don't get discouraged and give up.  Thus many of us, tend to break our lives up into a series of goals: the simplest of which is the common sigh of relief breathed by so many on Friday, but which also includes waiting to have children or buy a house, which includes a good deal of obsessive and sometimes destructive behavior in pursuit of a a promotion or just more money.
Goals are not a bad thing, but the utilitarian ethics that sometimes arise from single-minded focus on goals, can blind us to some obvious dangers at the very least.  In more dire scenarios the idea that the end justifies the means leads people who claim to follow Christ to tacitly accept war mongering and economic tyranny, because of "the way the world works."
We set little goals for ourselves with the hope that if we string these little milestones together, we will eventually get to where we're going.  The problem is that you can spend so much time looking for the next milestone that you don't appreciate the journey.  Living into the incarnation is about appreciating the journey.
Sure there are times to set your face towards something and just resolve to push towards it, but don't let that be your whole life.  In the case of my morning walk, while I do it for health goals and even as I'm working towards a big goal, I am trying to stay present to the beauty of the lake as the seasons change, to the variety that still exists in a familiar route, to the various thoughts and prayers that come along the way.  I know that my mind and soul need preparation for the Camino as much as my body, but where the physical preparation involves setting goals and hardening muscles, the soul work involves letting go of a mind that grows impatient with the ground beneath my feet, and being perpetually vulnerable enough to live in the now.

Lo, This Is Our God.

It will be said on that day, "Lo, this is our God; 

we have waited for him; so that he might save us."

-Isaiah 25: 9a

This comes from one of the lectionary texts for this week.  It's one I didn't choose to incorporate, but it's one that gnaws at me in a non-sermonizing sort of way.  We mulled it over in study group yesterday, and we had all sorts of pastor-like thoughts about historical context and word associations.  We talked about what images grabbed us, but when we got to the: "well what does this say?" question we just kind of looked at each other and said, "I guess it means we're supposed to wait."  And then we talked some more about what it might look like to wait for God and decided that it wouldn't make a very good sermon and moved on.

We don't like waiting as a course of action very much at all.  We humans are chronically impatient creatures.  We don't want to wait for solutions to our problems, we don't want to wait for the rewards we covet, we don't want to wait for anything.  I spend a good portion of any given day trying to read broadly about crucial matters in the church and in the world.  I try to read varied opinions and different perspectives, and I find it interesting that almost no one ever counsels patience.  Whether it's politics or a debate about what songs to sing in church, no one ever wants to wait for God to act, it just seems like a bad idea.

Most of us pastor types are no better than anyone else, we want people to get with the changing, I mean, as long as they're going generally our direction.  In most cases, waiting seems like wasting time.  After all, a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.

Waiting may be an exception, at least if we're going to take the Bible seriously, because people wait for God a whole awful lot.  Of course there are the odd exceptions, like if you are in the course of an oncoming train and you decide to just wait until you know exactly which direction is the best escape, maybe you ought to just act.  And there is certainly no shortage of on-coming trains, but waiting patiently for the Lord may be the only sane thing we can do at this particular moment in the life of the church.  Our attempts to modernize lead to alienation, our attempts to cater to niches and try to meet all sorts of specialized needs leads to an incoherent, stumbling existence, where we just don't know what we're doing, which then leads to a crisis of actually not knowing who we are.

"But," come the voices, "We can't just do nothing!"

Indeed, it doesn't seem prudent, we need to adapt, we need to change, we've got to solve this problem and plan our way out of this pit.  We need a strategy.  We need measurable goals.  We need benchmarks and mission statements.  We need to do more advertising, better advertising, more outreach, better outreach, we need a gimmick, a slogan, some T-shirts.

We need more activity and services, we need more mission projects, we just need to DO something, because what we are ain't working, at least not the way we think it should.

I read an article this morning about how, after decades of churches trying to keep up with cultural styles of worship music, people (at least a few people, mostly pastor types and religious bloggers) are returning to the traditional liturgies and kind of liking them.  I so want him to be right.  I would love nothing more than to put worship wars in the rearview mirror and just go back to the good old, tried and true Presbyterian forms, which may not be high liturgy to some, but are consistent and predictable in the same ways.  (If you're curious the liturgical order of mainline protestant denominations, in order from high to low goes something like (Episcopalian/Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal).

The problem I have with the perspective, is that it still focuses the debate about worship, on what a given person "likes."  And while I spoke in favor of "liking" your theology, I would caution against letting your personal preference run your worshiping life.  If you do, you will channel surf worshiping communities and thus never really come to rest and wait in any one.

There is a typical huge mega church on the other side of town from our little Presbyterian Church, and at session meetings and such, we always hear about New Life this and New Life  that, and how we should be more like New Life because they have thousands of participants every weekend.

"But," I say, "we're not them, we're us, and being us has some good points, and those good points for us are different than the good points for them."  I presume, in this day and age, that the reason why people come to us, is because they want to do what we do.  Would I enjoy more people joining in what we do?  Certainly.  Do I think we ought never to consider new ideas or work to adapt to the community we're in?  By no means, as Paul likes to say.  But I think we also need to get more comfortable with waiting.

Waiting is doing something.  However, waiting, when you're in relationship with a God who has an eternal scope of vision, can be uncomfortable to say the least.

Too much dissatisfaction with what we are now prevents us from living in the "Eternal Now," and essentially makes it more difficult for us to participate in the Body of Christ.  If we, out of fear of what we might lose, or anxiety about the future, wander away from our participation in the incarnation, we are then utterly lost, and we will never find a vision to hold us on course.

As a Pastor, I try to balance the sense of God's action in what we are now, with a prophetic vision of what we might be, which is what Isaiah does as well, I think, and what the Psalms do for us again and again.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

Translation

I have been thinking a bit about the churchy catchword missional lately, and I there has been this gnawing sense of unease about the word.  Usually I just chalk that feeling up to being jargon averse thanks to my undergraduate education in Environmental Science as well as my Seminary education and participation in Presbyterianism, each world being rather rife with jargon, and two of which have idolized to some extent the term missional.  I was just talking with some colleagues this morning at a Lectionary study group about idolizing mission, and the danger of the church becoming a service organization, and the bind that we find ourselves in, as pastors and stewards of an institutional structure.
Then I got back to my office and read this article.  It's kind of long, but I'll summarize: a couple of seminaries have recently run into rough patches because of the personalities and behaviors or their presidents.  I'm not going to comment on the particulars, because I think the article does that fairly well.  I also appreciate his connection of these crises in leadership with the Jerry Sandusky debacle at my alma mater, and I also like his use of Bonhoeffer and 2001, in short, I'm a fan of what he has to say, but I want to translate a little, from the context of an institution of higher education, to the local church congregation, because I think local churches have, by and large, been making the same mistake or substituting mission for formation.
One of my morning conversation partners is fond of summarizing the mission of the church as making disciples, which should seem obvious in light of the Great Commission at the end of Matthew, but which can be easily obfuscated by the general business and busy-ness of the church.
It is something we must recover if we are going to use the word mission with any sort of integrity.
As nice as it may sound, the purpose of the church is not to help the poor, or work for justice, or even educate people per se, rather the mission of the church is to form people into disciples who will do those things, and fully internalize those purposes.  When we attempt to perform those functions on an institutional level we are usually just successful enough to be dangerous, meaning that we can rob the individuals within the church of their identity as disciples.
Consider the rampant over-functioning of pastoral staff, an example I will use as a sort of mea culpa.  I know it is much easier to do things myself than it is to ask others to do them.  I know it makes me look good and valuable and worthy of my salary if I am always on the ball, and in the loop, and any other such metaphors you care to dream up.  But it is also true that if I do everything, people will let me.  I will never grow more leaders if I lead everything.  I will never make disciples if I do everything myself.
Jesus asked and expected his disciples to listen and learn, but he also required them to do.  Which brings me to another point that is central to the article and is also a function of our busy-ness: we are supposed to be making disciples of Jesus, not indoctrinating people into "the way things are around here."  Which is referenced in the article as a tendency towards isomorphism, and which I heard someone on a radio discussion describe as "the normative influence of the actual."  Which can also be said in less jargonish language as "what already is tends to seem right."  Which is a powerful force in the life of congregations: "the way we've always done things," which at best means mean we're rooted in tradition and at worst means we're stuck in a dysfunctional rut.
I sometimes wonder if it's essentially the only force that really stands in our way.
It would be nice if it was simply as easy as unplugging the memory chips from HAL 9000, but in the case of most church congregations, the memory chips are people.  They can be people who don't particularly agree with your approach to the mission parameters.  They can be people that mean well, but who simply aren't interested in becoming or making disciples.  They can even be people who see the mission, but just don't know what to do about it.  And a lot of times, these people can be the pastors of the church.
That's a somewhat painful reality, the people who are supposed to be casting a vision and leading people and continuing the chain of Christian discipleship, are often as caught in the systemic dysfunction as anyone, and so you have bullies, and people with moral failings, and all sorts of sinners, trying to lead congregations.  Even if they manage to differentiate from the system, that doesn't mean they'll be able to overcome the malfunction.  To go back to the 2001 comparison, even when Bowman realized HAL was the problem, he still couldn't solve the problem in any way that was going to allow him to get out alive (though again Jesus didn't get out alive in the traditional sense either).
In the case of Joe Paterno and Penn State, it was remarkable to see how his reputation fell from practical sainthood, to sinister villain and then settled somewhere around a sort of Frankenstein tragic figure who was destroyed by the monster he created.  It's what happens when we make idols: they eventually prove their falsehood.
So, I want to call out the idol of the word missional, because I think there are people out there who think that it's going to save the church, but it won't unless we understand that our only real mission is to make disciples.  To do some very hard formational and transformational work in the lives of the people we serve.  We are not here to fit people into an institutional puzzle, no matter how elegant it might seem.  We are here to live out a relationship with a whole bunch of different, broken and beloved children of God.
If you think about it, that's what Jesus did, and it all started with "follow me."

Explaining Away

I'm really having to wrassle the text (Matthew 22: 1-14) this week, but not like I did last week, because this time I get the connection, but I'm wrasslin' with the reality of God as a King.  After all the nice things I said about God loving and forgiving, and even forgiving the very crucifixion of Jesus, here comes a parable about a wedding banquet, and a bunch of people who disrespect the king.  The King is anything but forgiving, he is... well... King-like.  After all, these people don't just not show up to the feast, they defy the King, they abuse and kill his servants (again like the landowner from last week).  The King has a rebellion on his hands, and he puts it down, because that's what Kings do.
I get all this, it's what the various commentaries say is going on, but I also have a bit of a twinge that I sometimes get with sympathetic bible commentaries, I think they might be trying to explain away too much.  I think they want to resolve the tension of a loving God and a righteous King a little bit too badly.  I know I do.
I want to find the mercy in all this, I want to focus on that second crop of people that are invited to the feast, isn't it great for them?  Isn't it great that a whole bunch of other people will be invited in the place of the ungrateful rebels?
But I still get this feeling that the King is somehow cheating, the hall is filled, yes, but there's not really a genuine celebration going on, and he's on edge.  He sees one guest who hasn't even bothered to put on nice clothes and he goes a little bananas, because that's disrespectful too, and quite frankly I think the King is a little tired of being disrespected, even by a common person who was only invited because the chosen guests refused or ignored the invite.
I'm quite sure there is a way to explain this whole mess with all sorts of historical context, I mean, the political angle, and understanding what Kings are all about is helpful, but I think trying to explain it away is a pretty good way to miss the point.
I'm going back and looking at the text again and again, and I keep noticing that the real rebellion is in ignoring and despising the invitation.  Throughout these parables, the easy way out is to look at the wicked tenants and the non-committal wedding guests through the lens of the relationship between the Jews and Jesus.  It's pretty obvious that the Scribes and the Pharisees are just ripe to be the bad guys in these parables, but if we simply read them as an invective against people and way of being that has been over and done with for two thousand years, then we're missing the point.
After all, what are the common excuses for people not coming to church?  Too busy, not interested, just had enough of "organized religion."  Aren't the modern responses to the living community of God's people pretty much the same as the ones of the folk in the parable?  Aren't we even more like them than even the Pharisees and the Scribes?
And when we do come are we coming properly?  Are we coming in expectation of a glorious celebration or are we slouching in our everyday attitudes, saying, "Impress me."  I don't want to read the last part of this parable as a cautionary tale against dressing like a slob at church, I don't think the metaphor is intended to encourage fancy hats and three piece suits, it is meant to indicate a willingness and participation in something glorious.
The church often takes the blame for people's disinterest.  The blame can be a matter of doctrine that is either too lax or too rigid, the blame can be worship that is too old and dull to get people excited or too slick and entertaining to really have depth, the blame can be that you're not friendly enough, or that you're too friendly and you smother people, the blame can be that you don't advertise enough or in the right way or it can be that you are overexposed and become something people despise like that Gerber Life commercial, and that's far from a complete list of faults.
But what if we look at this parable that way, I mean, what if we blame the King?  It's well known that his wedding feasts are no good, or boring, or that his food just isn't the kind that young families are looking for.  I'm becoming convinced that we, meaning the church, have been doing just that, we have been ashamed of our King and unsure of what we are.  We certainly don't have the power, nor should we try to strong arm people into attendance.
But it bears repeating that, at no point, does this dynamic indicate that the King should somehow alter his preparations or change the wedding banquet to suit the rebels.  That's probably because it wouldn't work, they would come up with another excuse.
This is a cautionary tale for the 21st century American Church: don't go changing just to change, you can adapt yourself right out of the wedding feast.  As much as God loves you and, as much as God will forgive, God will not force you to attend, but if you don't show up, you're riding into oblivion.
This is not to say that the church should not strive for relevance and try to reach out to the lost, but I have been thinking lately that many sheep aren't so much lost as they are just willfully ignoring the call of the shepherd, and that's a different thing isn't it?
I'm still wrasslin'.  Lucky it's only Tuesday.

The Other Side of Apologetics

I often speak in favor of nuance and finding the reasonable center of things.  Generally speaking, I think that the thing that is lacking in many of our dialogues is an inability to experience empathy and to truly walk a mile in one another's shoes.  I believe that people are generally good, but that they often buy into systems that are utterly twisted.  I believe that there is a such thing as sin, and I think it has very real power in the world, and what's worse, the power that it has is given to it by the choices of humankind.
I believe it is possible for good people to do bad things, and it is fairly common for good people to allow bad things to happen.  I also believe that there are fair number of people who have become so twisted by sin that they no longer see their violence, greed and lust for power, as being evil.
Every so often, we get a full on glimpse of these sorts of lost souls: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Charles Manson, Osama Bin Laden, they range from garden variety sociopaths to megalomaniacs bent on genocide.
The appearance of a truly epic villain does not happen in a vacuum.  If comic books and movies have taught us anything, a villain usually has a pretty compelling back story.  A lot has been said in recent weeks, including by me, that we should not judge the global religion of Islam based on the actions of ISIS.  I'll stand by that.  I'll stand by it, because I wouldn't want to be judged as a Christian because of the acts of the Klu Klux Klan, or the Westboro Baptist Church.
But to be fair, I also think we need to examine where and how the system that produces hateful fundamentalist groups.  We can pin all of the blame on cultural circumstances: poverty, ignorance, fear of change, but you have to also acknowledge that most of those systemic problems can be ameliorated by a true religion that preaches faith, hope and love, rather than a false one that preaches, hatred, anger and fear.
There's this line in a Jethro Tull song that has always kind of stuck in my head as a Christian, "Well if Jesus saves, then he'd better save himself, or the gory glory seekers, will use his name in death."  Maybe it's the Reformed idealist in me coming out, but I think the best defense against extremism in any situation is a truly self-aware orthodoxy.  Let me explain what I mean by that: a grounded center of people who are fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their belief system and the culture it produces.  Christianity has this, currently it is beings staffed by the likes of Eugene Peterson, Walter Brueggeman, and N.T. Wright, but it does not just consist of big celebrity author types, it is represented by the large majority of faithful pastors and laypeople who do not buy into the madness of the lunatic fringe.  This does not stop the lunatic fringe from existing, but it keeps them for, the most part, from becoming violent.  The rise of the Nazi party in pre-WWII Germany was an instance where the center did not hold, and by the time the "good" guys got around to writing the Barmen Declaration it was already too late.
As it turns out, it was important for Christendom to take stock of it's racist and imperialist tendencies, and it took a villain as out of balance as the Nazis to make it happen.  Up until WWII it was unheard of to question the assumptions of nationalism and exceptionalism that were so central to the Nazi sales pitch.  Until it erupted across Europe and produced the apocalyptic horrors of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Sobibor, good Christian people never would have believed that a "Christian Nation" would have been capable of such atrocities.
The idea that your mission is sanctioned by God makes you dangerous, always.
ISIS currently has that idea, and no one, including the voices of their more moderate Muslim brothers, is going to convince them that they're wrong.  It's going to take a cooperative effort of all the world powers to root out ISIS, but even if we manage to defeat this villain, as the Allies defeated Hitler, unless there is some extensive soul searching to follow on the part of Islam, there will just be another one to take their place.
Islam has become a fertile breeding ground for villains.  It is not the religious aspect alone, just as it was not Christian doctrine alone that created Hitler.  It is a combination of economic and imperialistic catastrophes that have made the Arab world what it is, but the militaristic and often misunderstood teachings of Islam have certainly added a necessary and dangerous ingredient to the stew.
I am not saying that all Muslims are terrorists or villains, but very few of them are actually willing to examine the hard truths that produce things like ISIS and Al Quaida, most would prefer to just insist that "we're not like them."
This is akin to saying, "It's not my fault," it's not particularly helpful.  Global Islam has some real problems: factionalism and inter-sectarian violence, the treatment of women, the troubling imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, and a general backward motion in many regards that does a great disservice to the heritage of the followers of Mohammed.
I am committed to trying to examine the log in my own eye, meaning I want to constantly examine the systemic injustices that Christianity is complicit in perpetrating.  I'm not a big fan of the constant violence and imperialist activity of the "Christian" west.  Some would say, "well we can't exactly call the west Christian any more," but that's a cop out, and it's exactly the same sort of thing we decry when moderate Muslims say, "we don't like ISIS, but what can we do?"
Well, I believe in this process called sanctification, which means that we should always try to do a little better, which means we should always try to be a little more like Christ.  Being like Christ does not require a specific cultural context, or at least it shouldn't.  Being like Christ doesn't mean that everything around me needs to shape up, it means that I need to see the way things are with the eyes of a loving and merciful God.  It means I need to challenge the assumptions of the world around me, to show them "a more excellent way."  That often means pointing out what is wrong with the way things are.  It means admitting all the ways we're complicit in unjust and violent systems, it means never getting to cozy with the status quo, even, and especially, when it's working out just fine for us.

As You Like It

As much as I would like to think that my beliefs are a product of deep reflection on Scripture interfacing with my personal experience, guided by and rooted in the long traditions of the Church, and rigorously analyzed with my faculties of reason, the fact of the matter is that that's probably mostly window dressing.  The process I just outlined, using four elements: Scripture, Experience, Tradition and Reason is sometimes called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (Methodists rejoice).  I had to write my first Systematic Theology paper about it, and it has generally held up pretty well in the practical theology that one uses most in my line of work.  We were asked to rank them in order of importance and justify our rankings, my ranking then: Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason.
In brief, my definition was that Scripture is necessary as revelation of God's story, tradition was the long and sometimes difficult task of interpreting Scripture through the ages, experience was the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit in ones life, and reason was the means by which the other three were processed into something coherent.  Sounds pretty good right?  I also backed it up with all sorts of citations and was learning to inject a good amount of appropriate humility about tension and ambiguity and the mystery of God, I got an A on the paper.
But over the intervening years, I have come to realize that most of us come to believe what we believe by a much less methodical process, (apologies to Charles and John Wesley).  We believe what we want to believe, and no clever quadrilateral process will be able to change that, absent some rather stark smack upside the head.
I first encountered the most admirable admission of this reality in the New Testament and patristic classes I had with Dr. Dale Allison (name dropping, sorry).  Dr. Allison is a well known Biblical scholar, co author of the International Critical Commentary volumes on the Gospel according to Matthew, in other words he is about as serious an academic as you can get.  As Dr. Allison taught, he would outline several different possible interpretations of a text or positions in a theological debate, and after each one he would say either, "I don't like that," or "I like that," and then explain why.
It was there that I began to consider whether I "liked" the things I said I believed.  It was then that I started to admit that my own theology was much more shaped by experience than I had wanted to admit in my Introduction to Systematic Theology paper.  It was an intellectually freeing moment, and I am very glad that I learned it from Dale Allison, because in doing so, I learned that being guided by your heart does not mean turning off your brain.  In fact, it meant allowing your heart to challenge your brain to re-evaluate dogmatic positions the brain holds in order to maintain equilibrium.
You do realize of course that our commitment to the status quo is a survival mechanism.  If we constantly challenged the "way things are" our societies would descend into chaos.  If we didn't abide by conventions and learn from the experiences of the past, we would be utterly lost and unable to make any progress whatsoever.
But every once in while, perhaps we ought to stop and ask ourselves, "do you LIKE this?"
Do you like the fact that the world is run by violence and greed?
I'm not asking if you believe that it is or whether or not it's inevitable, or anything about the nature of sin.  I'm just asking if you like it.
Do you dislike it enough to try and change it?
Do you like the things you "believe?"
Do you like believing in an angry god?
Do you like believing that your enemies are going to get what's coming to them someday?
Do you like believing that your beliefs are going to be the dividing line between salvation and damnation?

If you like believing those things, you're probably going to keep it up, no matter what anyone tells you.  I found I didn't like believing those things any more.  It started with things like the rapture, and taking Genesis literally.  I found that believing those things put Scripture, which I still believe is important, at odds with Reason to a large extent, but also with Tradition and Experience as well, and I didn't LIKE that feeling.
So here's what I do like to believe, and have, perhaps not surprisingly found supported more than adequately by Scripture and Tradition:

1. God is not angry or wrathful, God is loving.  God loves us enough to want to show us how to live without hurting each other, but God also loves us enough to let us make mistakes and to help us learn from them.  Do our mistakes upset God, yes, just like I get upset when my kids disobey or do stupid things, but there's nothing they could do to make me want to utterly destroy them.  I like to believe that God is at least as loving as I am.
2. God is generous.  You might even say wasteful.  God does things like sunsets and flowers, over and over again.  Do we strictly need them to survive?  No, not so much, everything could be gray and uniform and probably a lot more efficient, but what about beauty?  If God, like the Prodigal's father and the vineyard owners of the parable, is forgiving and generous then we probably ought to prepare for the reality that he's going to be that way with everyone, not just the churchgoing folk.
3. Salvation is a relationship.  I don't like to see my relationship with a living God as a burden.  I admit sometimes it feels heavy, but it's a lot better than feeling alone in the universe, that's absolutely crushing.  I live out my relationship with God in a community of people, who teach me how to love as I should, not just people that I like or am attracted to, not just people who I agree with, but everyone.  The Church teaches me how to love my neighbor, and my enemy.  I get to practice on real people!  I like that, and that feels like being saved from selfishness and sin.
4. God will do NEW things.  God is going to show me new people, things and ideas to like, sort of like Facebook, but better (I suspect a lot of the things will also involve puppies, kittens and babies).  When I stopped worrying so much about how the old creation happened in a literal sense, I opened up to the wonderful reality of God's on going creativity and also to the real hope for a Creatio Nova, a New Creation.  When I stopped believing in a silly thing like the Rapture, the idea of Christ coming again sounded hopeful and joyful again.

I just realized I could go on and on about this.  Because it turns out when you like to believe, you can do it better.  Try it, I bet you like it.

The Path to the Dark Side?

As I discussed earlier this week, authority is a peculiar thing.  Claiming authority in the postmodern context is an even more peculiar thing.  In the dominant mythology of my childhood: Star Wars, the peculiarity of power and the exercise thereof were at the center of the story of Anakin and Luke Skywalker, father and son, a man seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and his son who sought to avoid sharing his father's fate.  It's a simple story really, and George Lucas crafts the Force as a mysterious  power, which blends several of the world religions, into a quite attractive, if somewhat  vague, spiritual stew.  The Force is life, the Force binds us together, the Force can be an amazing source of power, but the force also has a Dark Side.

As I grew up with these stories, I sometimes felt a bit frustrated by the limitations of the Force, if you are going to stay on the "light" side of it.  The Dark Side always seemed more powerful and one step ahead of the light.  Even Yoda, the last true Jedi Master, is in exile on the distant swamp world of Dagobah when we meet him.  He can only stand by wringing his little green hands as Luke flies off into danger and almost certain failure.  Meanwhile Darth Vader is choking dudes out with the Force and blowing up planets without so much as a how do you do.  Oh yeah and there are lightsabers, which Vader also rocks with amazing effectiveness.

Throughout episodes IV and V all you ever hear about is how doing anything actually useful with the force is basically a path to the Dark Side, and you begin to wonder if maybe you've picked the wrong side to root for.  It's not actually until you see Anakin finally loose his mind and his soul in The Revenge of the Sith that you really see the power and the cost of the Dark Side.  I mean, sure you knew some bad juju had to take place to make a handsome young Jedi into an eggplant inside a robot, but until you sort of "live through it," I don't think the full insanity of the Dark Side sinks in.

Of course, one of my biggest critiques of the Star Wars narrative is how "quickly" Anakin goes from a guy who mostly tries to do good things to a guy who slaughters younglings.  Especially given the fact that the level of Jedi training he had achieved at that point (he was a Jedi Master trusted with his own Paduwan Learner if you follow the Clone Wars narrative) should have given him the insight to see that the Sith Lord was yanking his chain, again the "light" side of the Force seems pretty deficient and way too bound up in the rules.

But it is his railing against the rules and his impatience with doing things peacefully, as much as his fear of losing everything that ultimately blinds him to the subtle whispers of evil in his ear.  He justifies a lot of his rebellion against the "right" way of doing things with an exceedingly transparent utilitarianism.  Which brings me to the debate about what to do in this galaxy, in our time, on our lonely little planet, where there are no Jedi and no Galactic Empires and alas, no lightsabers.

We are faced with a moment where the use of power and violence present us with an existential crisis.  Do we lash out and destroy our enemy?  Do we take the slow and frustrating road, while so many are suffering and dying?  Can't we defeat evil with it's own weapon, if we just wield it with enough skill?  Aren't we the chosen ones after all?

It was not lost on cultural observers that "safety" and "security" through utter domination were the goals of the Sith.  They were, in fact, the ultimate utilitarians, defeat all the opposition and hold the power to keep the peace and the order of society, until someone was strong enough to take it away.  Eventually they managed to supplant a difficult and corrupt democracy with a crystalline and brutal tyranny.

As we step back, or at least tap the brakes on our latest adventure in the Middle East, I can't help but wonder if our intervention by violence is the best idea.  After all, hasn't ISIS duly demonstrated that when it comes to brutality, they brought their big boy pants?

Don't you think they're drawing a line in the sand and just daring us to step across?

Sure bombs seem like a good idea, even if they're not doing a whole lot of good, it still feels good to be doing something, and maybe make those savages go boom in the process.

But I can't help thinking that the whole thing is pushing us just a little closer to the Dark Side.

Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

I have read Dr. Seuss books to my kids since they were in utero, and there's a pretty solid reason why my blog is titled The Thinks You Can Think.  The good Dr. teaches kids about environmental stewardship in The Lorax, about the silliness of keeping up with whoever in The Star Belly Sneetches, about self esteem and also how to deal with bad times in Oh, the Places You'll Go.  But one that I keep reading them as they grow up in this affluent American culture is Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are. 
As I listened to the radio news on NPR this week, I am reminded how lucky we truly are.  We could live in West Africa and be staring down the barrel of an Ebola outbreak that our nation's medical system is woefully ill-equipped to handle.  Here, I have heard more worry from CDC about a bad flu epidemic than I do about Ebola, it's not an airborne pathogen (therefore more easily contained) and it is actually treatable with the resources and medicines available to us (if you will notice the American folk who were shipped home a few months ago and treated are mostly doing just fine).  I shiver when I think of the number of human lives that are going to be claimed by this disease, just because they aren't "lucky" enough to live in a place that could stop it.
Also, I think about the children in Ukraine, who went back to school later than usual because of a teacher's strike, oh no wait, it was because of a war, that a whole bunch of people on both sides don't want to admit is even happening.  Hearing a description on the radio yesterday of a reporter on the scene and he said it was shocking to hear the sound of children playing and parents sending them off to their first day of school while mortar shells exploded some five kilometers away.  It choked me up a little.  I wondered if I would have the courage to send my kids to school if I knew mortars were going off anywhere in the vicinity.  I was awed by the adaptability of human beings, and I was sorrowful that some of us have to adapt to that sort of horror. I get the sense that perhaps "lucky" is a bad word to describe what we are.
And now Hong Kong, people are protesting in the streets and calling for a change, and it seems mostly peaceful and somewhat hopeful, but a man, who covered the 1988 events in Tiananmen square, said that it seemed that way there too, until the army and the tanks showed up.  I wonder if China has changed very much in almost 20 years, and then I remember how old China is, and how slowly they change, and I worry for all those people in Hong Kong, who just want a little more "luck."
Finally, there was the report from Baghdad, Where some "lucky" Iraqis were enjoying themselves at a park along the Tigris river, or trying to enjoy themselves if it weren't for the very Irish sounding BBC reporter who kept reminding them that the Islamic State fighters were only a few miles away, and that their defense forces were probably not going to be able to stop them.  I wondered how lucky they felt when their best choice was to "invite" the imperial powers of the west back into their city, to once again occupy and once again start the bombing, in order to protect them.  I wonder if they feel "lucky?"
We live in a culture that believes, by and large, that you make your own luck.  We are the work hard and play smart and you'll rise to the top, but we don't adequately account for all the luck that goes into being able to believe that.
Telling ourselves how lucky we are doesn't necessarily produce the necessary empathy for the plight of our fellow human beings.  We must remember that we don't deserve our "luck" any more than they deserve theirs.  Jesus said, "to those to whom much has been given, much will be required," most people think he was talking about some spiritual gift of salvation, but maybe he was simply talking about "luck."
In that case, perhaps we should re-think some of our foreign policies.