Cult and Culture

Cult: noun: A particular system of religious worship, 

especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies

I was thinking about the passing of the year on my drive into work this morning, when a song by The Cult came on the satellite radio.  For those of you unfamiliar with semi-obscure 1980's genre bending music, The Cult was sort of metal, sort of alternative, all black wearing, somewhere in between Iron Maiden and U2, thus their semi-obscurity.  You don't hear much Cult on the traditional radio stations, because they just don't actually fit.  They were sort of emblematic of a paradigm shift in music, punk and new wave were mixing together and forming something that musically and culturally was going to sink big-hair metal.  The Cult could put on the big hair look, with the leather pants and frizzy blond hairdos, but the lead singer, had this really impressive straight black hair that really made hairspray seem like sort of an abomination (which of course we now know it truly was).
I got to thinking about cults, and cultural paradigm shifts, and remembering that pretty much any religious practice can more or less be termed a cult, in scholarly parlance.  There are other more specific usages that apply to people outside the mainstream of any particular religion, or engaged in various pagan/idolatrous systems, but in the broadest sense, almost any religious activity can be called a cult.  For instance the scribes and temple authorities that Jesus was always butting heads with were representing the Temple cult of Judaism, and Jesus was challenging some of their ways of doing things, even though they were worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he rather strenuously disagreed with how they were going about it.
God may be One, but our cultic devotion to God, and attendant rituals and practices can change pretty dramatically.  And it has, it really has, and you should be deeply skeptical of anyone who presents the history of faith in a way that assumes otherwise.  This is actually highly visible within Christianity, we have sorted ourselves into more variant cults than I care to count, some of them are declared orthodox based on their theology and praxis, others are not, but they're all cults in the broad sense of the word.
The particular cult I'm a part of is called the Presbyterian Church (USA), which in anthropological terms is a reformed church which means it was formed out of the protestant reformation of the 16th century, it is distinguished from Lutherans and Anglicans by the general theological framework of John Calvin, which was brought over from the continent to the British Isles by John Knox, where the first church called Presbyterian was formed in Scotland.  In a confluence of Scottish anti-hierarchy and democratic impulse the Presbyterian cult adopted a system of government based on the rule of Elders, which can be described as a democratic republic, rather similar to the one that was eventually going to emerge in these United States.  Compared with the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and their Methodist progeny, and even the Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian movement has been relatively small, but influential in shaping western society.  By the late 20th century, the Presbyterian Church, along with pretty much every other Christian cult was decidedly on the wane.
One of the things I need to remind myself of, more or less constantly, is that cults live and die and change, and this is just the way of things.  If you take the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox cults, our older Christian Cults, you will notice that they have changed dramatically as well (yes even the Eastern Church), they simply aren't doing things the same way they were 1000 years ago, they have been shaped by cultures.  If  you were to plop down Pope Francis next to Pope Leo X, who was in power during the reformation, Francis would have a lot more in common with an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther than he would with Leo X, and he would probably have a lot more in common with a modern Presbyterian like me, than he would with either of those Roman Catholic folks from 500 years ago.
Sometimes change is good, sometimes change is bad, but when it comes to the church, change is almost always slow, glacially slow, which is why it looks like the church is dying.
Our culture is changing really quickly, and our cults are poorly equipped to keep up.  At our best we're sort of like The Cult, we lose the hairspray and throw some U2 guitar riffs in there, but we're still wearing leather pants and singing like Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden), which some people actually like, and get kind of mad if we all of the sudden go all Kurt Cobain.
Change is driven by grass roots, not by top down decisions.  Punk music flew under the radar of commercial success, but its offspring changed the landscape, it took about ten or fifteen years, which is actually really fast for a cultural shift, it's unbelievably fast for a cultic shift.  In cults we're dealing with people's ideas about God, which are much more difficult to tinker with than their taste in music (although at the moment the two things seem oddly related).
The church next door has a sign with two cups of coffee on it and it says: "Classic, 9:00 AM, Contemporary, 11:00 AM,  Choose your brew."  Referring to worship services.
Worship... of God... the Consuming Fire, the Alpha and the Omega...
I'm not judging, at least I'm trying not to, we do the same thing, we just haven't advertised our consumerism using the same plan as Starbucks (maybe that's why they're bigger than we are).
Something tells me that if that's what it's come to, we're already dead, we just don't know it yet.
We are a zombie church shuffling through the motions moaning, "New Members...."
Luckily, as Chesterton, Ecclesiastes and Battlestar Galactica all remind us, what has happened will happen again.  And a resurrection started all of this to begin with.

The Best of Both Worlds?

Here's a thing to think about: what is the biggest problem with a polarized culture?
Is it the polemical shouting between "combatants," rather than the dialogue between people?
Is it the rigid ideologies?
Is it the hateful propaganda that gets lobbed in either direction?
Is it the fact that it can eventually lead to violence?

Or is it just the fact that that the truth is often orphaned?
I have, in the course of my time serving the church, migrated from a moderate/conservative position to what I would describe as a more progressive/liberal position.  It's a long story, and rooted in my experiences of various kinds of suffering, and finding the certainty and rigidity of my former ideology rather unsatisfactory.  This move has been, contrary to what my former self would have imagined, very much rooted in my relationship with God and the Word as we find it in Scripture.
It really is this Jesus character that pushes me to the left, but I know it would not have been possible, even for him, to move me had I not had my compassion and empathy forcibly jump-started by the experience of grief and loss when my brother died, and by the horror that befell the community I served for ten years.  When you stare down the barrel of a father that kills his wife and two little girls, smug answers and platitudes no longer hold much water.  Grace becomes our only hope, the rules are silly nonsense that are meaningless at best and hurtful at worst.
That's my story in a nutshell: I see what a mess we make of ourselves without God, I understand sin, and I have seen and felt some of its most horrendous consequences.  I think I understand the cross better now, but I am not naive enough to think I understand it perfectly.  I need room for questions, sometimes angry questions.  I think the church has utterly failed at being the answer people, and this is primarily due to the fact that Jesus intended us to be question people.  He taught his disciples to ask questions in a certain way, he taught them to look at the world through a different lens.
Some people prefer to believe in gods who are distant, or only get involved on their terms.  Some people believe in gods who are generally benevolent, as long as you do something or other in just the right way, but watch out if you cross them.  Then there is the God who is genuinely revealed to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Can this God get angry?  Sure, but for that there is forgiveness.  Does this God get involved with us?  Most certainly, but mostly not as the hero that saves the day, more often as the steadfast friend who will not leave you when the way is dark.
I have found progressive Christianity to be much more tolerant of the questions that need to be asked in order for faith to be relevant, but something is missing.
I hate the word "accountability," because it sounds too business-y for my taste, so lets call it a challenge to commit.  See liberalism in general is so busy making sure that everyone is heard and validated that it has a hard time setting any boundaries or marking out the narrow gate.  It does prevent a certain pharisaic legalism, but we should also remember that being utterly lost is not helpful either. Just because we like to be question people doesn't mean we shouldn't stumble across the occasional answer, or at least affirm Jesus and a life of discipleship as some sort of valuable answer.  Progressive Christianity needs to struggle to stay Christian, because Jesus is specifically important, and the church needs to be about making disciples, people who follow.
For all the doctrinal rigidity and attendant meanness of certain evangelical/conservative strains of the faith, one thing many of them seem to do well is get people to commit.  Tithing is preached and sometimes enforced, mission (the hands-on variety) is esteemed and encouraged, faith sharing in pushed and pushed and pushed some more, in other words, they make disciples of something, which if you squint your eyes hard enough might actually look like Jesus.
I think we really need to get the band back together.  We need to push the politics out of the way and learn from each other.  Liberals can be paralyzed by feelings and making sure that everyone is validated.  Conservatives can just be downright mean.  Both sides can retreat into their dogmatic tree houses and hang up signs that ban the other, and name each other the enemy, and generally bring disgrace on the Body of Christ in the world.  And while were at it, let's remember that none of us can really lay claim to the moral high ground, but that's okay, because Jesus didn't exactly like the moral high ground, in fact he generally tried to pull people off it: "Let the one who is without sin, cast the first stone."
It's fairly clear that the church is in a time of flux (and probably has been for some time).  This change may take the form of revitalization of existing structures, but more likely it will come out of dying and being resurrected.  I think that what will emerge from the tomb needs to contain the genetic material of the whole church, and hopefully it will.

Now What?

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and the princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among the people,

To make music in the heart.

-Howard Thurman

All done.  Candles lit, presents opened, family visited, mass quantities consumed, all the pretty things have found their place.  Oh, and now there's a baby to take care of.  Once upon a time, we had a little boy born exactly a week before Christmas, he was our first child and we had been waiting for him for a lot longer than a month.  For a couple of days we could just get lost in looking at his little pink toes and trying to figure out if he was smiling or just had gas, but eventually, right about this time, it dawned on us that babies are a lot of work.  Even when all they do is eat, sleep and poop, they are pretty much on a constant pattern of those three activities and suddenly, your life revolves around them as well.

Being fairly self-reflective people, Michele and I laughed a couple of times about how silly we were to have been so impatient for the child's arrival.  Perhaps our Advent preparations were naive in a similar fashion, this baby has some pretty hard implications.  He's going to grow up all too soon, and start telling us to put aside our greed and selfishness and start caring for others, even loving our enemies.  He's going to start pointing us towards a cross, which we are simply not allowed to ignore or avoid, at least not if we want to go where he goes.

Warm, fuzzy Christianity, about babies, shepherds and magi, is over, from here on out it's dirty diapers, and temper tantrums and puberty and driving lessons and paying for college.

Ok, maybe I'm being a little grim there, but the point is that following Jesus is actually rather more important, and more difficult, than simply "believing."  Belief is fine, but faith is a little more than believing that the story is true, it's putting your trust in the story, and that means trusting that all this crazy stuff happened for a reason.  

It's not just about assenting to the truth of the story, it is allowing the story to do something to you, and through you, and that, unfortunately, is where most of us fall down.

Did you manage to think about Jesus for a couple minutes during all the hooplah?

Congratulations, now he wants you to follow him.

Did you manage to "keep Christ in Christmas?"

Congratulations, feed his sheep, do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

Are you thankful and grateful for all God has done for you?

Congratulations, God wants to do the same sort of thing for everyone, and he wants to use your hands and feet, and words, get to it.

Almost There

El Cristiano sabe que nada puede reclamar,

pero que puede esperar todo.

The Christian knows that he can claim nothing;

but can hope for everything.

-An Aphorism of Don Colacho

The phrase: defending the faith, is very capable of creating a monster.  It is the sentiment behind all sorts of fundamentalism.  It is the sentiment that most often leads even our holiest inclinations down a path towards violence.  It is the creed of the Taliban, and it is the creed of the crusaders and the inquisitors. It is also the creed of many who do not consider themselves fundamentalists, but who still behave as though their god was so fragile and tenuous that it needed to be protected from dirty things like sex and greed, and shielded from anyone who might ask a presumptuous question.

I think creeds and statements of faith are a good thing for the church to do from time to time, but we need to understand that they're paving stones not battlements, they are to support our feet and give us a place to stand, they are not to hide behind, or worse, to be flung at the enemy.

I don't think I'm being presumptuous in saying that it looks like the war on Christmas has failed yet again.  It's here, I'm still thinking about Jesus being born, and putting the finishing touches on a Christmas Eve service that will be attended, hopefully by a large crowd of the faithful.  The government or roving bands of terrorists will not storm in and force us to say "happy holidays," instead of "Merry Christmas."

There will be the usual distractions of thinking about gift giving and gluttony, travel and time with family (whom you may love on variegated levels), there will be some who are there on a yearly sojourn because Grandma made them go, there will be college kids who want mostly to bump into old friends, but none of that can stop Jesus.

The Roman occupation didn't stop him.  The questionable situation of his mother and her betrothed did not stop him, being away from home did not stop him, having only lowly shepherds to bear witness to the angel armies did not stop him.  The fact that all of those stories (except the Romans) may, in fact, be fabrications of a Gospel writer with something to prove, does not stop him.

We can claim nothing.

But sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.

We can hope for everything, because God has demonstrated that he can work small, he can work vulnerable, he can show up with or without recognition.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

What do we need to do to protect the light?  Nothing.

What can we do to help the light grow?  Everything.

A Sigh of Relief

Last night I watched OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) for the first time ever.  It sort of feels like an affirmation of comfortable adult manhood to be able to say that without shame.  I was watching to see what Rob Bell was actually up to.  As you may know, I was a little worried, what after he had been kicked around by the right-leaning evangelical types for questioning the existence of Hell, and actually using the sacred words of Scripture to justify his "heresy."  Bell left his Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids Michigan not long after the book firestorm, and I kind of had the feeling that he was just beat up, maybe more than he wanted to admit.
What we (by we I mean the American Church) don't need right now is one of our poster boys joining the "I love Jesus but I can't freaking stand Christians movement."  I was a little worried that Bell was going to take that route, but at least on the first show, he seems to still be in the boat with the other disciples.
If anything, the experience of being trolled by people who think they speak for Jesus instead of following him, seems to have pushed him more in the acceptance/forgiveness direction, and that was really the focus of the show last night (and yes, he did talk about the cross, so yay).
The whole thing was rather a relief for me, first because, I can still like Rob, and admire his sort of down to earth way of talking about faith, and not feel like I need to hedge when I tell people how great NOOMA was and is.  Secondly, because I can now say I've watched the show, I can stay the heck away from OWN.  There is still a lot about the Oprah Empire that I find disturbing, but I can rather happily say that I don't think Rob Bell is one of those things.  He just may be representing actual Christian faith in a world that is overrun with Wayne Dyer and Dr. Phil.
It's one show, I know, it could all still go horribly wrong, but it's not a bad start.  He had a couple people give testimony and talk about how they owned and accepted the tragedies of their life.  The stories were intense and harrowing enough that Michele wondered if maybe Jack shouldn't be watching, but grace and love come through in the end, then there was talky-time, then there were audience questions, and then the hour was over.  It was pretty much the standard talk show pattern: slightly voyeuristic, definitely melodramatic, and overall not too difficult to watch.  It was Christian in a fairly unassuming, yet definite manner.
I sort of hope that he will eventually get back to offering the same sort of NT Wright-esque biblical interpretations that he put into the NOOMA series and that he used to do pretty regularly in his preaching at Mars Hill.  I'm glad that he seems to have found a sense of humor and some peace of mind about the whole Love Wins backlash.
The long and short of it is that I think Rob represents Christian faith pretty well, even if he is just doing a pretty standard sort of talk show.  You don't hear him getting defensive, you don't hear him blaming some sort of bias, you don't hear him angry and hurt by the slings and arrows, even though I'm pretty sure he was.  There are worse ways to approach the Gospel than by emphasizing grace and forgiveness, a lot of worse ways as a matter of fact.
All in all, I 'm glad his voice is still out there, proclaiming the good news,

Now for this:

The interweb is flipping out about Sony canceling the release of the Seth Rogen/James Franco goofball comedy, The Interview.  Some cyber terrorists have hacked Sony and been leaking private emails and information about Sony's apparently nasty and juvenile internal conversations, and they have threatened violence against theaters that decide to show the movie...

Sigh.

I have thoughts, and I have a deepening despair about the direction of the human race.

First of all, here's a thought that should have occurred to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of global politics: xenophobes do not appreciate being mocked.  This goes for the Taliban and Muslim extremists who get all we-kill-you whenever someone draws a picture of the Prophet Mohammed.  This goes for Kim Jong whatever, whenever he thinks about about anyone sniggering behind his back.  Seriously, it's kind of complex for North Korean dictators, they refuse to be photographed next to people that make them look short or otherwise inferior, they force their starving and impoverished people to watch parades of immaculately outfitted military regiments and massively expensive machinery of war.  They have this idea that the west is decadent and vulgar, and Seth freaking Rogen is basically the poster child for decadent and vulgar.  We vilify them as the axis of evil, we lament their human rights violations and brutal oppression of their own people, they call us swine who are fixated on pornography and big macs.  Neither characterization is exactly wrong, but those stereotypes are patently unhelpful.

I'm all for a good satire.  I believe that good humor is important, I like to use laughter to diffuse a difficult situation, but I've also spent enough time around small children and mentally unstable people to know that it's not a one-size-fits-all sort of tool.  North Korea is basically the paranoid schizophrenic agoraphobic of the world community, and they don't have much of a sense of humor.

Am I glad that a basically terrorist group has been able to bully a movie into not being released?  No.  Do I think that someone should have had the good sense not to let that movie get made in the first place?  Yes.  I'm no fan of censorship.  I'm all for freedom of expression, but lets be honest, context does matter.  This movie was not a socially conscious piece that lifted up the absurdity of North Korea's cults of personality and their brutal oppression of their own people, it is a movie where two stooges make potty jokes while bungling through an assassination plot, sponsored by the CIA.

It offends me a little that the CIA actually does plot to assassinate people, it offends me more to present that reality as something laughable.  I don't care who it is.  I don't want to see a slapstick comedy version of Zero Dark Thirty.

Maybe thats why I'm not all free-speech outraged about this, because what has been suppressed was just silly, and the people who worked so hard to suppress it are going to look silly in the long run.  In the meantime the world will get along just fine without the "artistic" contribution of Mr. Rogen and Mr. Franco for the time being.

As for the moral defeat of letting the terrorists win, we need to re-evaluate what real terror actually is.  Terror is what happened in Peshwar.  Terror is what happens daily in Iraq and Syria.  Releasing embarrassing emails and making impotent threats probably should be viewed through a different lens. 

What troubles me most in all of this is how we seem to be drifting farther apart as a species.  On a day when a 60 year old detente with Cuba actually showed a narrow crack, we're still busy setting up other dragons that need slaying.  Can we maybe admit that perhaps Communism is no longer really a threat to our way of life?  Can we perhaps try and see if diplomacy might actually bring these madmen to heel, where war will only make them more frantic and cause them to dig their trenches deeper?

Can we admit that maybe some of the dragons we're trying to slay are actually windmills?

The Annunciation

Los problemos humanos no son ni exactamente definibles, ni remotamente solubles.

El que espera que el cristianismo los resuelva dejo de ser cristiano.

The problems of humanity are not exactly definable, nor remotely solvable.

He who expects Christianity to solve them has ceased to be a Christian.

- An Aphorism of Don Colacho

This Sunday, I get to wrestle with the annunciation.  Luckily, it's the choir Cantata in our main service, so I will deal with this mess in front of a much smaller audience at our early Eucharist service.  I will admit, right at the top, that I have the utmost sympathy for Mary.  I always did, even as a child, hearing this story in the sort of glossed over, sanitized for our protection form that this whole narrative occupies in our warm fuzzy Christmas traditions.  Then I learned what a virgin was.  Then I experienced the family drama, even in the 1990's, of having a 14 year old girl show up pregnant (my sister).  I watched as my parents dealt with shame, and judgment from people in the church and the community.  I watched as a scared and off the rails teenager put her baby up for adoption.  I began to hear this story differently.

I learned later about things like honor killings, which still happen in many parts of the world, where a girl is killed for disgracing her family, sometimes even by being the victim of rape.  And I know that this sort of a fate was a very real possibility for Mary, and I know she knows it too.  This text brings all sorts of cultural hangups about sex into question, because I notice that God decidedly does not avoid the issue.  God gets involved in a very messy way, in an actual flesh and blood kind of way, and this makes us patently uncomfortable.

Thus we, the Church, have done all sorts of difficult procedural gymnastics to get around it: virgin birth, immaculate conception, perpetual virginity of Mary, all sorts of things to preserve the divinity of Jesus.  All because we think sex is dirty.

We have opened up our faith to all sorts of derision over this issue, and I'm not just talking about modern, scientific skepticism either.  Going back to the age when the Gospels were being written, this whole birth narrative was seen by some as a dangerous flirtation with pagan mythology.  Virgin birth and being sired by gods was not exactly a novel concept in the pagan stories, in fact they're about as old as stories about supernatural beings, which is to say, really old.

To a certain eye, all of this seems like Christians ripping off older ideas.  And unfortunately it can detract from the real importance of the grown up Jesus.

The Gospel according to Mark, jumps right in with grown up Jesus.  John talks about the miracle of the incarnation in highly philosophized terms: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Matthew is obligated to make the patrimonial connection to the house of David, through Joseph, and also explain a little bit about how Joseph didn't just fly into a rage and have Mary stoned to death.  Luke, as is his wont, goes further into the back story than any other Gospel.  It seems though that these stories inspire a large quantity of historical challengers, who want to explain away, or prove impossible, or at the very least unlikely, all of our nice Christmas stories.

I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't be better off not spending so much on time on this, couldn't we just have given these things the same treatment we did the Gospel according to Thomas, and declare that perhaps we're overstepping a little on the facts?

Then I actually read the story in the context of everything I have experienced, and I love this story even more, factual or not, it's deeply true.  God gets involved in our messiest messes.  God is incarnate in a situation that is highly suspicious to the skeptical mind.  God "overshadows" a frightened young girl, and God soothes a husband who has every reason to believe he has been betrayed.  God breaks these two people out of everything they think they know, and he chooses them to be his parents, to bring him into the world and protect him and raise him and teach him how to be a human being...

And that is Holy beyond anything that I can possibly imagine.  To be a follower of this Jesus is to believe that God gets involved, in this very particular and frightfully messy fashion.  God doesn't solve Mary's problem, God creates Mary's problem.  There's a very real possibility that this whole thing could end badly; she could go off the deep end, Joseph could ignore that dream, Jesus could have died as a fetus inside the corpse of a brutalized teenage girl.  Or he could have grown up being resented by his mother and despised by his father, or he could have always had people give him the stink eye because they knew there was something fishy, and no one ever would have listened to what he had to say. Those are things that could have happened if the wind blew slightly differently, and that is how precarious this story really is.

And that's also why it's wonderful.

A Loud Voice in Ramah

A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

she refused to be consoled,

because they are no more.

-Matthew 2: 18

Being a kid is tough.

I'm not talking about the usual, school, homework, cliques, adolescent angst kind of stuff either.  Children are symbols of our hope as human beings, and they are also the victims of some of our worst violence.  In evaluating and ranking tragedies we immediately put one that involves large quantities of children.

The Taliban just killed 130 people, most of whom were children, at a school in Pakistan.  Almost 200 young girls are still missing in Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram.  You have all too common school shootings, not to mention the horrendously under-reported business of human trafficking where many of the victims are children and teenagers.

Children are victims in every arena of adult evil: human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism, war mongering, and perhaps over-arching all of those things: economic injustice.  They are vulnerable and often they have no one to speak for them, and all too often all we can do is weep loudly for them, because they are no more.

Rachel must be a wreck by now.

This use and abuse of children makes an appearance in the Gospel.  The occasion of Jesus' birth and the arrival of strange visitors from the east precipitates the violence of Herod. The killing of babies and toddlers on the whim of a king.  A peculiar thing is that, outside of the Gospel account, there is no mention of this event in the annals of history.

Some would say a historical lacuna like this reveals a fabrication, a dramatic device meant to bolster the importance and the peril of the birth of Christ.

I happen to believe it happened, and that the reason why it's not recorded is because it was all too common.  Histories record important things, like who is king and how they came to be king, and the sorts of battles they won against large armies.  The royal historian does not record the savagery of slaughtering babies, it's not news that anyone needs to remember.

But it needs to become a part of God's story, it needs to get this little remark, this small, but powerful quotation about a loud voice in Ramah.  Someone needs to remember those children and their parents, someone needs to speak for the victims.

A while back a young Pakistani girl was shot in the face by the Taliban for daring to say publicly that girls ought to be educated.  A few weeks ago, this young girl, Malala Yousafzai, was given the Nobel Peace Prize, at seventeen years old.  Sometimes a child survives our evil and breaks the darkness.  Isn't that actually the story of Jesus too?

In a season where we pay so much attention to the birth of a child, and in a season where so much of our celebration is centered around the joy of children, we NEED to refuse to be consoled, not just about our children, but about all children.  Because their story is important, because it needs to be remembered, because it involves far too much wailing and loud lamentation.

I think this is why this sort of thing makes the news, so to speak, in the Gospel.  Because someone needs to remember, because we need to see and hear and feel how great the darkness really is, so that, in turn, we will truly appreciate the light.  One baby that survived, and escaped, and changed the world.  It happens, because God finds a way.

Oceans of Stupidity

Cuando navigamos en oceanos de imbecilidad, 

La inteligencia necesita el auxilio del buen gusto.

When we sail in oceans of stupidity,

Intelligence requires the aid of good taste.

-An Aphorism of Don Colacho

That tipping point is upon me.  The place where Christmas starts to lose it's charm, where my enjoyment of holiday cheer begins to give way to just wanting to get it over with already.  I found myself perusing the crankier sections of Don Colacho's aphorisms this morning, and the phrase "oceans of stupidity" grabbed my attention.  Maybe it's because I had to listen to Chris Collingsworth narrate the defeat of my Iggles at the hands of the Dallas football franchise, but I woke up this morning with a bad case of "the world is a cesspool of banality and vacuousness" blues, kind of reminds me of college.

I found myself revisiting a theme that often strikes me at this time of year, usually in relationship to the cultural saturation with yuletide sentimentality, as well as the rather disturbing level of material excess.  Why do we like the things we like?

Why is The Big Bang Theory one of the most popular shows on TV?

Why is Rocking Around the Christmas Tree even a thing?

Why is there a Michael Buble Christmas Special?

Why does every kiss begin with Kay?

Why does it matter if he went to Jared?

I get to a point where I'm just about ready to flip out.  This is that point.

"Calm down," you may say.  "People have different taste," you might also add.  "The relative horror of those things is largely just your opinion," you could finally conclude, and you would be right to a certain extent, but it's not just the things themselves that drive me up a wall, it's the whole mechanism behind those things.  It's the fact that all of those things exist because someone likes them, someone watches them, someone buys from them.  It has been figured out, by some very smart, creative people, that all those things have mass appeal, enough mass appeal to warrant spending millions of dollars producing and disseminating them.

There was a time, the cranky Don reminds me, when there was such a thing as "taste," and this taste was not defined by the unpolished cravings of the masses.  It was defined, rather, by the sensibilities of the aristocracy.  It was not without it's silliness; it gave us powdered wigs and rouged cheeks and decorative codpieces, but it also produced Mozart, Monet, and Goethe, and supported forms of arts and academics that were not quite so beholden to the almighty dollar.  In this era, an education was not simply a glorified form of career training, and a painting or a book did not have to always have commercial appeal to be appreciated.  Robert Kincaid and Nicholas Sparks would not have been able to buy a small country by hacking their way through something that vaguely resembles art...

Sorry, I'm being a snob again.

But that's another point to be made, intelligence was not considered obnoxious, and having a refined taste or appreciation of something was not viewed as effete snobbery.

We are awash in mediocrity.  No one expects anything remarkable, except when we watch sports.  Our gladiatorial contests have become the only form of entertainment where taste still reigns; we want to see the best, and we want to admire the best.  We want Peyton Manning, and Lebron James, and we will wax religiously sentimental about greatness on the field of contest.

Ask your average college student to name a contemporary sculptor or painter that they admire.  If they say Andy Warhol, smack them, he's been dead since I was a kid, he's not contemporary.  Now ask them to name an athlete that they admire... 

You may see my point.

In fact, if you repeat that experiment with almost anyone who is not the artsy sort, including me, you'll probably get a pretty blank response on the artist.  Why?

Because our cultural tastes have moved away from paintings and sculptures.  We now favor moving pictures and television for our art, but those things necessarily become beholden to mass appeal, because they're expensive, and not the produce of a lone artist wrestling with their muse.  The Ocean of Stupidity, it would appear, is here to stay.

Now, we must be on a passionate quest for things that touch the true, the beautiful and the deep.

Advent has become just such a quest.  How to filter out all the materialism and the banal sentimentality?  How to arrive at the cradle of the Christ without feeling absolutely worn out?

No answers, just the questions.

The Stew

I enjoy these moments when different sorts of ingredients come together and I can somehow manage a connection.  It's probably why I like to cook, and why I like to preach.  Here are my ingredients for today:

1. A visit to the dentist's office, where I had my teeth cleaned, whilst being watched carefully by Shiva and Ganesh, not to mention Buddha, as well as several oriental paintings.  Not surprising given that my Dentist is a Hindu and an Indian, but the weird thing was the Christmas music being played over the PA system, it was decidedly religious: O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and several pieces from Handel's Messiah, no Rockin' around the Christmas Tree, thanks be to God.
2. This rather lengthy post-mortem of the Mars Hill / Mark Driscoll implosion.
3. Research from the seemingly tireless folks at the Barna group about just how un-churched, de-churched and otherwise practically heathen this "Christian" nation actually is.

What sort of conclusion do I draw from all of these ingredients?
Primarily that our world, when it comes to religion, largely resembles my Dentist's office.  I thought about it from an anthropological perspective.  What would some future scientist make of my Dentist's office?  There is all manner of medical paraphernalia, some of it pretty high tech, there are computers and records of a large number of people and their teeth.  There are several small operating theaters, there are representations of several major and largely contradictory religious systems: Hindu/Buddhist, Christian, Shinto/Taoist, Confucian, Judaic, if you count the Old Testament of the several Gideon's Bibles in the waiting room, no Muslim stuff, but maybe I just didn't spot that.
In my head, I began writing the sort of unsupported but truthy sort of "scientific" explanation one often hears on those History channel documentaries.

In the early twenty-first century, in what became known as the post-modern period, Americans, elevated their obsession with dental hygiene to an unprecedented level.  Dentist's offices resembled shrines, where people of all persuasions put aside the differences that formerly divided them, in the hope that a winning smile would be the key to everlasting happiness and enlightenment.  All the old exclusive claims to ultimate truth vanished like tartar and coffee stains, as Shiva triumphantly admired the patients' flossing technique (especially since they mostly had only two arms), while Pavarotti sang of the birth of Jesus the Christ.

Until my hygienist asked me to stop laughing because it was making her job difficult.
What do we do with a world like this?
Well, it's pretty obvious that the same old stuff is not going to work anymore, but neither is the sort of Amazon.com overhaul that Driscoll was working on out on the left coast.  It would seem to me that number/business model driven churches are doomed to eventual failure.  Probably because, as a wise man once said, "you can't serve two masters."
The Barna research seems to tell us that something is not working, and it's not necessarily that people don't care about God.  The fact that well over half of the "un-churched" consider themselves Christian, was absolutely not news to me.  If you added in agnostic and vaguely religious people you would have an even more impressive majority.
The world is not becoming godless, it has just become confused.  I felt that confusion as I looked at Shiva while hearing a choir sing "hallelujah, hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!"
It is my belief that Christianity has the answer to this confusion, but the forms in which we choose to incarnate that answer are often misguided.  We seek a triumphal answer, we still, even after all this time, expect the same messiah that Scribes and Pharisees expected, and which they crucified Jesus for not being.
We still look for proof of God's covenant faithfulness in the sort of "frontline" missionality that fueled the Mars Hill boom and eventually led to the collapse.  We, and I admit frequent culpability in this attitude, have no patience for the slow and painstaking work of the Kingdom.  Discipleship is too hard and too difficult to sell, the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, we've got serious business model problems here people!
So, apparently, does every other religion.
It occurs to me that it's much easier to just put an interesting hanging of Ganesh on the wall, and a Gideon's Bible on the table (after all they just give those away), and keep your fingers crossed that somewhere in the stew, everything just works out.

The Old Rugged Cross

My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate and rhetorical, 

easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; 

men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of a talent for happiness.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.

It's a rainy, unpleasant Tuesday, and it's nearly Christmas; can you imagine anything more depressing?  As a matter of fact, I can, which in and of itself is part of the problem.  I can almost always imagine myriad ways in which things can get worse, and generally think that they most probably will.  When I first read C.S. Lewis describing his father and his father's family, I actually laughed out loud, not because it was humorous, but rather because I self-identified with the description.  I had no idea that it was an ethnic identity.

I'm not particularly keen on the whole practice of tracing ones genealogy back through the sands of time.  Partially because, on my Mother's side the whole issue is rather a dead letter office, she was adopted, and the people I know as my family are really the important part.  I suppose that's a value I was given by my mother, and it has led to some level of disinterest in the swirling seas of various gaelic genetic material embedded in the nuclei of my cells.

But I know I've never been one to go in for glad tidings and good cheer, in fact, I can remember, one Christmas, when I was probably about eight or nine, when I made the connection between Christmas and Easter: that the Baby Jesus was also the crucified Jesus, and well, things just haven't been the same since.

Maybe it's natural predisposition, maybe it's more complicated, but I have always intuitively grasped the foolishness of the cross.  Even when I wandered away from the church and from faith, I always held on to the austerity of a Good Friday sort of faith.  Not because of atonement, I'm not sure I always believed that part, but because I understood that God would get in the muck with us.  Even when the resurrection seemed like a sort of sentimental pipe-dream, I felt the presence of God in the contemplation of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

In the HBO series True Detective, Rust Cole has a cross in his apartment, despite the fact that he is avowedly an atheist and a fairly nihilistic atheist at that.  He says he meditates on it and considers what it means.  I get that in my gut.

It's like rainy days, it's like sad and wistful poetry, it's like The Cure, or various Seattle bands from my youth, it's like the blues. It's like THIS!!

I always look for it.

When it's lacking, I am deeply suspicious.  Thus my suspicion of folks like Joel Osteen and various other prosperity teachers, I look for the Cross, and I don't find it.

Lately, I have been watching the happenings around Rob Bell, former pastor of a big old megachurch in Michigan and now Christian-ish representative in the celestial sphere of the Oprah.  Back in the day, I was a big Rob Bell fan.  I loved his NOOMA videos, still do.  I listened to his sermons on the Mars Hill website, and he gave me inspiration.  I read some of his books and really enjoyed them, even if it did only take me twenty minutes or so.  I liked Rob's liberal slant on evangelical Christian faith.  I defended him against people who talked about him as though he was a traitor and a heretic.

But I always had this feeling that maybe he was getting to be a bit of a cult of personality, but his heart seemed to be in the right place, and I could still find the cross somewhere in his teaching.

But now I'm a little worried about Rob.  Not for the same reasons that the Rightish, Evangelical folk are, it's not his orthodoxy or lack thereof, it's not his alliance with Oprah (though that does give me a moment of head scratching).

It's that I'm looking for the cross.

He's a celebrity, he's rich, living in California and surfing, doing a TV show, and hanging out with Richard Rohr and various other luminaries. He has apparently abandoned the rather passe and imperfect community of a normal church to just kind of hang out in a religious sort of way with some people he knows.

I'll admit, maybe it's just jealousy talking.  Maybe it's just another example of me not having much of a "talent for happiness," but the trajectory he's on reminds me a lot more of the prosperity/self help gospel of don't worry be happy than it does the cross centered gospel of Jesus.

Not that it matters much what I think, I'm just sharing it with the dozen or so people that read my little blog, because I think it's a question we all need to ask ourselves in our privilege and in our comfort: where is the cross?

Rob's story still has some chapters to unfold, and along the way, he will likely do some good for the kingdom, he will certainly have the audience.  I wish him well in my rainy-day, Welsh sort of a way, but I'm still going to look for the cross, because without it, there is no resurrection.

Advent: Waiting for What We Don't Deserve.

Nuestra ultima esperanza esta en la injusticia de Dios.

Our last hope is in the injustice of God.

-An Aphorism of Don Colacho

Justice has been on my mind lately.  Everyone gets treated unfairly at one point or another, and when we do it's tempting to cry out for justice.  Indeed, one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible is Micah 6: 8, "He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness (mercy), and to walk humbly with your God?"

Whether I'm writing a sermon or making a decision about how to live my life, that verse is never far from my mind.  For us, justice is a pretty good code to live by, especially when it is properly tempered with kindness-mercy and humility.  In the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures there are two words, transliterated misphat, and sedaqua, or something along those lines.  Misphat means "justice."  Sedaqua means "righteousness."  They go together like peanut butter and jelly, they are foundational words for understanding God, and, as per usual, we only think we know what they mean.

These are dynamic words, words that mean more than just one thing, and words that have a sort of living relationship.  You really can't have one without the other.  Justice, one of our most primary values as a culture, is too small a thing, by itself.  Justice and righteousness can defined narrowly.  From the perspective of Pilate, crucifying Jesus was just, he went through the proper motions, he washed his hands of the guilt and probably went to bed with a clear conscience, even if he thought for a moment about whether or not it was right, due process was followed, such as it was.  If you are a member of a privileged class, anything and everything that is done to protect your privilege and security and privilege is righteous, righteous bombs may fall on the innocent with proper pretense.

We are masterful, as a species, at framing our own selfish interests in the gilded squares of justice and righteousness.  It is a perverse skill indeed.

Micah uses a different word as the partner of misphat, instead of sedaqua, he uses hesed, which means goodness, kindness and mercy.  That changes everything, it does not invalidate either concept, but it certainly adds a bit of a different flavor.  Hesed points us in the direction of seeing things from the perspective of the other.  Hesed shapes Misphat in a different way, and redefines sedaqua.  Righteousness now has some important qualifications to live up to.  It's not good enough just to look out for your own interests, while abiding by the letter of the law, now you must consider a more abstract idea, and most importantly consider how it effects others.  This triad of words is now a more complete relationship (wonderfully Trinitarian no?).

We often want to limit God to one, or maybe two of these attributes, but the fact of the matter is that God exhibits and desires and even insists on all three, not as disconnected abstractions, but as living truth.

Disconnect one element and you're smack dab in a big old theological, ethical and existential mess.  God's justice is so perfect that we get what we do not deserve, in fact, you could call it, what Don Colacho did: injustice.  But it's not injustice in the way we understand it.  It's a turning away from the punishment that we certainly have coming, it's a commutation of the sentence for our egregious and repeated violations of righteousness.  It is justice because it confirms God's original assessment of Creation, putting aside everything that we have done to violate and invalidate that judgment.  It is righteous because the Creator alone has the right to judge, and it is good and kind, because that is the nature of God.

It's kind of a shame that we have chosen to celebrate the birth of Christ by telling our kids that Santa keeps a list of the naughty and nice.  It's kind of a shame that we seem to get caught in the mindset of "exchanging" gifts and, whether we want to or not, find ourselves silently figuring whether we've been treated fairly (with justice).  This whole thing is about how God gave us something we didn't earn and certainly don't deserve, but which is the only thing we need.

Sacred Text

Whether you like studies and polls or not, most of us have to use them at one time or another to try and understand a world that has simply become to large for us to get a grip on all by ourselves.  In our global culture, even studies with daunting sample sizes can fail to really grasp important trends.  Since I was a rather horrible statistics student, I generally rely on summary articles with neat info graphics to help me understand the data.  Thus I present such a summary of  this Study by the Barna Group, which doesn't so much surprise me, as it does confirm my more intuitive observations about the church in the world.
While this was done as focused research on Millennials, I think that these sorts of trends probably apply to the larger population, it's just that younger people present the spirit of the age in a less diluted fashion.  We can discuss the phenomenon of treating young people like some sort of problem to be figured out at another time, I want to talk about the Bible stuff.
It was not a surprise to me that people who self-identify as Christians would take the Bible seriously, especially in evangelical protestant circles, the authority of Scripture is a big old elephant in the room.  We divide into tribes largely based on our interpretive methods (called hermeneutics by fancy academic types).  Scripture gets thrown into pretty much every debate we have, as perhaps it must, because after all, without the book, we'd be pretty hard pressed to say why we believe anything.  From literalists to liberals and everywhere in between, self identifying Christians sort themselves according to their view of Scripture.
It is therefore somewhat surprising to us that people outside the church generally look at our Sacred text with suspicion and perhaps even resentment.  The study points out the agnostics and outsiders don't see someone with a Bible as a source of light in the darkness, they see them as judgmental and possibly angry.  This is a major problem for us.
It is a fundamental disconnection between what we think of ourselves and what everybody else sees in us.  If we let the Scripture, particularly the Gospels, work on us and lead us to live a life that is shaped and transformed by a relationship with a living God, we will be much more effective witnesses than people who can simply quote Scripture.  Yeah, kinda, duh, right?
It may seem obvious, but sometimes we are too far into the trees to see the forest.  We get involved in defining and defending this or that fundamental principle and we miss the fact that God is calling us to a relationship, not to sign a petition or join a club.
Of course, Scripture is important to us on the inside, but maybe that's not where we should start the discussion with folks on the outside.  Maybe we need to wrestle with and allow ourselves to be changed by the words of this book that we claim is so important.  Maybe the peculiar phenomenon of Bibliotlatry (making the book an idol) is actually just another defense against really letting God into your life.
How attractive and spiritually alive does a bunch of people arguing about stuff seem to outsiders?
Do we need to debate and engage with one another?  Yes, but how we do that is of supreme importance if we want to remain a faithful church.  Another telling trend among the young is the much ballyhooed rise of the "Nones" and the "Dones."  People who have either never found the church a vital part of their spiritual life, or who did and were simply driven away by shrill dogmatism or just plain meanness.  How shall they hear? The Scripture asks us, in today's world, if your actions don't speak of a loving God, your words are never going to matter.
In the Scripture we can find a God who is loving, and merciful and who forgives sins.  We can also, if we really want to, ignore that part and concentrate on all the smiting that takes place.  We can use the book to imagine a world where the struggle for power and purity is all encompassing and where nothing matters but holiness and strict adherence to a moral code, which is sort of where the Islamic extremists everyone loves to hate these days go with Sharia law.  Does that look attractive to you?
It does to the insiders.
Christians need to pay attention to the way that Jesus rather insistently criticized the insiders and welcomed the outsiders.  If we ignore that part of the book, we're probably missing the point of the whole adventure.  It would seem as though a study actually backs that up, so does the the majority of Christian tradition (not that we don't miss the mark from time to time).  It's sort of sad to me that people find the church less helpful in knowing God than a Bible they find for free in a hotel nightstand.

Advent: Ready, Set, Go

El invento se inventa una vez por todas.

La idea tiene que ser reinventada cada vez.

The invention is invented one time for all times.

The idea has to be reinvented each time.

-An aphorism of Don Colacho

Advent is upon us, and to be honest, the idea can just make me tired.  I've got so much to do, church-wise and family-wise.  I wish I could receive the gifts of this season with the same excitement as my kids.  I actually just wish I could fool myself into believing that they're excited about something other than presents.

While I'm no proponent of the "war on Christmas" mentality, I do see how our ultra busy-ness and hyper-materialism can absolutely wring the life out of the next month.  All of this absolutely enforces the need for the season of Advent, a build up, a sorting out, a preparation, a recovery of an idea that has and is in the process of transforming the world.

We remember a single event: the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  It happened a long time ago, among people we can scarcely even imagine correctly through the mists of history.  Let's call that the invention of the incarnation, the physical process of God becoming a human being.  It only needs to happen once, in that particular way.  However, the life and teachings of Jesus point us towards a reality that it needs to continue to happen.  Christ needs to be continually present in a broken world.

How is that going to happen?

You could choose to believe in some ethereal mystical presence of God in the world, and vaguely hope for peace on earth, good will to men.  You could just not think about it and go about your business.  Or you could accept the challenge of Advent: being ready for Christ to come alive in your life.

But let me warn you: that guy is disruptive and troubling, and will take you places you probably don't want to go.  Look at what he did to Mary's safe little life, and Joseph's careful little business.  Look at what his arrival precipitated in Herod's palace, a murderous rage and a slaughter of infants.

From the very beginning this event was a source of drama.

We have so carefully sanitized it.

We have so thoroughly buried it under an avalanche of tinsel.

The idea must be reinvented.  The incarnation must happen again... every year.

That means a ritual observance, that means a liturgy, that means a repeatable observation, which can also lead to death and emptiness.  We can go through the motions and never think about the incarnation, which is the core of why we do all this.

Learn something new about the old stories. Check this guy out for a minute.  Don't get scared, he's on our side, but he brings a way of looking at those Christmas stories that may be entirely new to us, but insistently truth telling.

This Advent, don't just go through the motions, let God's grace be born anew in your life.