Still Waiting

I was sitting in a hospital room with a friend on Friday and one of his doctors came in and talked to us for a minute, about mostly non-medical stuff, it was just a sort of check in to see how he was doing.  The doctor is a very pleasant lady of either Indian or Pakistani descent.  As she was leaving, my friend said, "Merry Christmas," and she replied in kind, and then (she knew I was a pastor from our earlier conversation) said, "I don't celebrate it for religious reasons, but I still do for cultural reasons, I get gifts for my two daughters and we have fun."

We then proceeded to talk about the challenges of buying gifts for kids as they grow up, adolescents being particularly challenging at times.  I did not jump in with any sort of religious response and honestly did not feel the need to do so.  This was an exercise in practical pluralism, and in no small way a testament to the rather interesting and peculiar world we find ourselves living in.

The doctor was a very nice person, most likely Hindu, but probably fairly non-observant of her religious traditions (just a guess).  She is probably one of those people that the cultural observers like to call the "nones." Yes, Virginia, they come from other religions besides Christianity.  Judaism has dealt with this reality for decades (if not centuries) people for whom their religious identity is more or less something they claim on paper and do absolutely nothing about.  Christianity has fairly recently noticed it and put on a poor simulation of shock.

I have decided not to let this sort of thing ruin my Christmas.  In fact, I'm going to wrap my arms around it and thank God for the grace to be a part of this radical thing that takes place in plain sight, for all to see.

I'm still probably going to get a little tweaked about all the commercialism, and maybe I'll make some snide comments about how none of this stuff has anything to do with Jesus, but in the final analysis, I'm just going to go along with the Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, or whatever you want to say, because in my heart I'm still waiting for the return of Christ and this gives me something to do in the meantime.

I'm going to be nice to people who honor the birth of my Lord, whether they can follow Anselm's explanation of the Incarnation or not.  If nothing else, the story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, indeed perhaps his whole life, shows us that God has a way of flying under the radar.

A long time ago, I realized that there were a lot of people you only see at Church on Christmas Eve.  Sometimes that bothers me, because I know there's a lot more to following Jesus than just showing up once or twice a year, and I mean that in the most non-judgmental sort of way.  Honestly, if you can form yourself into the image of Jesus Christ with semiannual visitation and worship, more power to you.  I cannot, it's much more difficult for me.  I need a lot more of the Scripture than a few stories, I need more of the Gospels than just the beginning and the end.  I'm not capable of saying I truly love God enough to just sort of coast along for 98 percent of the time and hope I'll be renewed in an hour.

I understand that I get to be a bit of a bummer during this season.  You know how you get when you have to sit in the doctor's office or at the motor vehicle administration?  That's pretty much what Advent is like for me, and to make matters worse everyone else seems to want to have parties about how great the expired magazines are and talk about how whatever happens at the end of this is going to change everything.

The plain and simple fact is that, at the end of this, nothing's going to change for most of the people who hear this old story one more time.  There are going to be hundreds of thousands of people who will go to church on Christmas Eve, and most of them will not "get it" in the least.

Such people have always been the witnesses to the birth of the Messiah, random shepherds from the fields who came and praised God for a minute, but then went along their way and back to life as usual with nothing more than a neat story that will probably be disbelieved by most.  Wise men from the east, who followed an astronomical phenomenon foretold in their pagan sacred writings (very possibly, Hindu or Zoroastrian), but we have no evidence that anything ever came of what they saw or what they reported when they got home.

I believe that God changes the world when Jesus is born, but it happens in such a way that world never really notices it.  I guess I'm still waiting, not for God, but for the world to notice.

I think that I have gotten that wrong.  I think that God doesn't and never has needed us to notice what God is doing.  God invites us to notice this miracle, but does not shout at us.  I confess that I sometimes give in to the temptation of pride and maybe even wrath when it comes to "defending" the true meaning of Christmas, because I'm still waiting for that miracle to come.  I still need to have God change my heart too.  I need to notice that God is trying to be born in my life every day of the year, and not just on December 25.

In the Name

I would rather talk about Star Wars today, but I can't just brush this one off.  I wanted to.  Quite frankly talking about this sort of idiocy is crushing my soul, because it's my people that are doing this.  I didn't go to Wheaton, but I do consider myself evangelical, because the root of the word evangelical is euaggelion, which in Greek means, "Good News."  I believe that Jesus is good news, I believe that the church is the body of Christ in the world, and that includes the knuckleheads that suspended Ms. Hawkins for her position that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
I've got some news for you: they do.  And that's not a matter of opinion, it is not a mystery of the nature of God, it is quite simply a fact of the development of the three major monotheistic world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  If I were to say that Jews and Christians worship the same God, no one would have a problem.  There are plenty of Christians who love to toss around the name Yahweh, which is the Hebrew combination of letters that signifies THE LORD, and is derived from the verb "to be," which basically jives with the idea of God as being and the ground of all being.  The existence and the handling of the Name has always been complicated.  It's what Moses wanted to know before he went off on mission to liberate the Israelites from Egypt.  Flaming shrubbery wasn't going to cut it, if he was going to stick his neck out like that, he needed to know the name of The LORD.  The LORD is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, oh yeah and Ishmael, you remember Ishmael right? Abraham's other son, the one he had with Hagar and then had to run off because Sarah got jealous, but who God took care of anyway.  Ishmael, the reason why Muslims around the world refer to Jews and Christians as people of the Book.  In fact, Muslims who are not insane fundamentalists, will readily acknowledge the sacred text of the Bible, both testaments, including the Jesus stuff, as being the Word (capital W) of God, who they refer to as Allah, because that's the name they use for God.  All languages have different names for God: dios, theos, deus etc.
Now, does the fact that we are all talking about the same God mean our religions are the same? Well, no, but it does give us some rather interesting common ground to start from, if we could get over our ignorance and fear, which is really what Professor Hawkins was trying to do by wearing a Hijab and making the statement she made.  She's trying to remind us of how we're all in this together.
It goes back to the promise that God made to Abraham, the whole thing:

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." -Genesis 12: 1-3

Unless you happen to be Jewish (descended through Isaac and Jacob), it would behoove you to interpret that as broadly as possible.  Especially us Christians, because we're the adopted kids.  The Ishmaelites too, they are part of this great nation and the great name.  Look at the reason behind this: "So that you will be a blessing."  "...in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."
What I see in this whole scenario is a conflict between two types of religion: a kind of religion that seeks the face of God in the stranger and the alien and even the enemy, and a kind of religion that puts on blinders and builds defenses.  To me, Professor Hawkins was doing something prophetic, and as such we should probably expect this sort of backlash from the palace and the temple.
We all have work to do, all of our religions can be distorted to violence.  The name of God is a powerful thing, which is probably why ancients people were hesitant to even pronounce it aloud.  You name your god, they name theirs, we choose up sides and start killing in the name that we just made up.  That says more about us than about God.
You know what would be really good news?  If we could remember what John told us in his first letter: "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them." (1 John 4: 16b) That's good news for all of us children of Abraham, and the rest of the families of the earth. Let's try that scarf on for a while shall we?

Geeking Out

Two days. Two days until something that I have been waiting for since I still had baby teeth happens. You know what I'm talking about: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
We bought tickets for the Thursday evening show almost two whole months ago using the internet, a technology that would have seemed as futuristic as a lightsaber when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983.  There has been a lot of water under the bridge since I first saw the Imperial Star Destroyer chasing down Princess Leia's Corellian Corvette (the Tantive IV, in case you want to know).  We have now lived through the entire story arc of Annakin Skywalker who would become the menacing Sith Lord Darth Vader, who we first see striding through a smoky corridor to choke out a rebel pilot as he insists they're on a diplomatic mission.  We now know that Leia is actually Annakin/Vader's daughter, one of a pair of twins separated at birth and hidden from their father in the wake of his catastrophic turn to the dark side of the force.
To tell you the truth, we now know entirely too much about the tragedy of Annakin Skywalker.  We may have been getting a little tired of his whining and secretly rejoicing when he wheezes his way into the cyborg Vader, because bad guy or not, Vader is awesome.  Which is really the problem with with everything that happens after Luke, Lando and the gang rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt, including the flashbacks that were the prequels.  Everything conspires to remove the menace of Darth Vader from the universe, not just by defeating him, but by revealing him to be human.
Grown up me has come to the conclusion that he liked Vader a lot more than he liked Annakin.
I've wrestled a long time with what exactly it is that I dislike so much about the prequels.  Part of it is that I was not eight years old when I saw them, I know I appreciate all the movies more when I watch them with my kids.  Part of it is that I was a little disgusted with the crass commercialism and marketing of it all (Star Wars episodes IV, V and VI basically invented that though so...), when I was really too old to be buying action figures and spaceships (I did anyway).  Part of it was Jar Jar Binks, but part of it goes back to the trying to live up to the encounter of a six year old boy with the spark of imagination.  Like a lot of people, when I first saw Episode IV, A New Hope, I had never seen anything like it.  The movies and the toys associated with them were a huge part of my childhood.  Darth Vader, for several very important formative years, was the definition of evil and the dark side of life.  When Vader is redeemed in Return of the Jedi (in the opinion of grown up me), we needed to move on to something new, not go back and rehash his fall.  The mythology that I had in my head was much better than the stumbling, overwrought, self indulgent storytelling of the Episodes I-III.
I knew too much about Annakin already, I knew he couldn't be trusted, I knew he was doomed, I knew that inscrutable black metal mask was his future.  I felt too much dread about what was going to happen to Padme, and was always trying to find the wisdom of old Obi Wan in the young Obi Wan, oh yeah, and I wanted Han Solo or something like him.
For Episode VII, I have put all of that to rest.  I am going to soak this one in with my kids.  I'm going to let the story be what it is, and I'm not going to expect it to rock my world the way A New Hope did, because it can't, I'm not six years old.  I am looking forward to seeing this movie, in the same way that I look forward to seeing old friends.  I have some expectations, but I also know that there is going to be some strangeness caused by the inevitable passage of time.
Forty-one year old me is a lot more comfortable with that strangeness than twenty-five year old me could have been.  After almost thirty years, I'm ready to see where this thing goes.

Tilt

Remember pinball machines?  Before video games, bars, arcades, pizza joints and all sorts of places had them.  You shot a little steel ball up the side and then tried to hit as many bumpers and targets as you could by batting that little ball with flippers at the bottom, controlled by buttons on the side.  You could also nudge the whole machine if you had the strength and touch required, but you had to be careful not to nudge it too much or else it would shut down and flash the message "TILT" across the scoreboard, which means you just cheated and that shot is done.
They used to use tilt signs in old cartoons too, when a character would get beat up to an absurd degree, tilt would appear in his eyes or on a little sign above his head, as a sign that things had just gone too far.  I never really understood what exactly that meant until I started lurking around pinball machines, which by that point were sort of retro and decidedly a vanishing symbol of the analog age (I suppose Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote are too).  Cheating video games is part of the show.  A lot of people my age can sort of do the Konami code in their sleep (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B,A), and those of us who played Doom on the PC will remember what IDKFA gets you.  Video games have embraced the cheating to a large extent and allow user patches and toy around with easter eggs and various glitches that give people with way too much time on their hands something to do.  It's curious to be sure.
But I wonder if, when it comes to politics and our national dialogue, whether or not we need to bring back the tilt device.  I don't know if there is any other solution in this age of "truthiness," (thank you Stephen Colbert).  It occurs to me that we need some way to tell when politicians are crossing the veracity/prevarication line.  This is complicated by the fact that we tend to disbelieve people who say things that challenge our worldview and assumptions.  For instance, when Hilary Clinton answers questions about Benghazi, Republican types assume she's lying, and no amount of fact checking is going to convince them otherwise.  The media is biased, the fact checkers are also the media, there's been a cover up, you get the idea. In the current political climate our tilt mechanism seems to be set a bit too stiff, and the amount of untruth and truthiness we tolerate is usually way too high for those we agree with, and we are not willing to hear things that challenge our position.
When Bill Clinton got caught diddling a young intern, he did all kinds of shimmying and adjustment to avoid the simple fact that he was a very naughty boy.  Democrats pretty much gave him a pass in the end, not because they're okay with a married POTUS fooling around with a woman half his age, but because they really didn't want to admit that their saxophone playing slick willy was somehow wrong.  When Clinton testified in front of congress, challenging the definition of the word "is" our cultural tilt mechanisms went off.  The Bush-Cheney quest for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq set it off as well, but it was too late by that point.
I think maybe the immigration (of Muslims and Mexicans) issues are close to setting it off if they have not already.  I also think maybe the gun control debate is at a bit of a tilting point.  But here's the problem, I'm not sure either one of them is going to stop the game.  They both should, they should be causing us to shut down and re-think the strategy that brought us to this point.  A malfunctioning tilt device allows us to continue to play the game in an unethical manner, which is morally wrong, and furthermore initiates us into dangerously un-self-aware patterns of behavior.  In other words we think that we can just ignore the rules of truth and logic, even at the cost of lives and our own souls, as long as the score keeps going up.
In the past week or so, I think Donald Trump, and to a slightly lesser extent Ted Cruz, have been testing our tilt device.  Trump has said things that are so outlandish and brash that they even startle people who generally agree with his uber-capitalist dogma. It has come out that most of the GOP genuinely dislikes Cruz for being obstructionist and generally priggish.  Republican stalwarts like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice have expressed dismay at what can pretty aptly be described as the radicalization of the GOP and the general Bizzarro world values of Cruz and Trump have prompted fairly supportable theories that neither one of them expects or even wants to win the Presidency, they are just iconoclasts who desire to tear down everything, including their own GOP.
They both seem dead set on destroying the established order, but I have yet to get a grip on what they would propose in it's place.  Bernie Sanders has a bit of the iconoclastic ethos about him as well, but he has done a better job of framing his proposed alternatives to the current plutocracy.  Admittedly, my own personal convictions lean in the direction of democratic socialism.  To me, Sanders makes sense, but I can see where his approach might also set off the tilt alarm.  I have been watching Bernie carefully over these past months, expecting him to try something sketchy, but he has not, in fact he appears to be playing the game on the up and up.
I feel like we need someone who can play the game without tilting.  POTUS is not a Monarch or a Fascist dictator, no matter what you might have heard on Rush Limbaugh.  Obama's presidency has shown us rather distinctly the serious limits that our system places on our Commander in Chief.  The Constitution of these United States has a hell of a tilt meter, which is probably why we've made it this far.  I get the feeling though that we're on the verge of setting it off.

Anathema

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.

-The Theological Declaration of Barmen, 1934

"The false doctrine," was the acceptance of Hitler's Nazism by German Christians.  The Barmen Declaration has made its way into The Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (USA), because it represents a moment in time when the church stood up and said enough.  Obviously, Karl Barth and the German Pastors that convened the in the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church in Barmen in May of 1934 lost the battle.  Hitler got to do what Hitler wanted to do, but these words have made it through.  They have outlasted the Third Reich by over half a century and they will continue to travel with us as Confessing Church through the ages.

In the face of a challenge like Nazism the church sometimes stumbles, because we are sinners prone to the same fear and hatred as anyone else.  We do not always listen to the voice of Jesus of Nazareth or heed the movement of the Holy Spirit, or even simply act with compassion towards our fellow humans.

This is a description of the German context in 1933 provided as background to the Barmen Declaration by the Book of Confessions:

In January 1933, after frustrating years in which no government in Germany was able to solve problems of economic depression and mass unemployment, Adolph Hitler was named chancellor.  By playing on people's fear of communism and Bolshevism, he was able to persuade Parliament to allow him to rule by edict.

You know what happened next.  Notice the words in this description: "frustrating," "economic depression," "unemployment," "playing on people's fear" of others with different ideologies.  It's chilling, because it sounds so cussedly familiar.
Anathematizing is a cool word, it means you name what is wrong and you agree it is wrong.  Sometimes that comes long before ever figuring out what is right.  Often, great theological and cultural debates and movements begin with a complaint against something.  Martin Luther's 99 theses were essentially complaints about what needed fixed in the Roman Catholic church. Martin Luther King Jr's I Have a Dream, speech named segregation, inequality and racism as anathema to a truly just society.
Unfortunately, the naming of anathema in recent years has not been a unified activity in the church of Jesus Christ.  We have often engaged in internecine arguments, accusing one another of this heresy or that heresy.  Differing positions on moral issues like abortion, on social issues like homosexuality and marriage equality, on political issues like gun control or healthcare, have all distracted us from recognizing an evil that is now rearing it's head. We have been on and on about the symptoms and we have missed the underlying disease.
I am not dismissing the importance or the nuanced reality of any of the above debates, but there is something deeper and more sinister that we must rise up to call Anathema: the rule of Greed and Violence.
Without question people have differing opinions on how best to manage these idols, but the fact remains that they are, in fact, idols and they are the dominant idols of our age.  Their tools are dissociated individualism, the illusion of security, and most of all fear.
We are so fragmented by our differences of opinion that we cannot do what is needed in the hour of crisis: name the enemy.  The enemy hides and lets us take out our rage on its puppets: fundamentalists, terrorists, bigots, as the kids today say: Haters.  And in the long run we become what we fear, because we don't recognize the darkness in ourselves and confess.
We have this hope: that love casts out fear.  And this is where the church needs to stand right now: with love, because God is love.  We need to hear that Jesus is the example of how God loves the world, and we need to pay attention closely to his example.  The Barmen Declaration uses Scripture to call the church to this task, it refers to them as "evangelical truths," using the word evangelical in it's proper sense rather than as a pseudo-religious political descriptor.  One of these "good news" truths is Ephesians 4: 15-16:

Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body is joined and knit together.

This is who we need to be in such a time as this. This is the "form of our message" to follow the way of the cross and not the empire, to seek mercy and not vengeance, to love and not fear. To understand that Christ has conquered death and sin, and we are heirs to that victory. which gives us little excuse to be fearful, hateful and violent people defending against the infidel.  To be as such is to join the idolatry.
We have been here before.
We have actually lost a very similar battle to the one that is now raging through our national culture and politics.  Losing the battle to Hitler was disastrous and painful, but it was not the end.  The words of those who "rejected the false doctrine" named the evil anathema, even if they seemed futile in 1934, are now helpful to those who face the fear once again.  Have you ears to hear?

Fear and Loathing in America

This is bad, and every day it seems to be getting worse.  Our crazy train is going off of the rails in a decidedly non-Ozzy-wild-party sort of way.  The rage and hate has gotten the better of us. Someone even crossed the line at Fox News for being too rude to President Obama.  Color me shocked that Fox News even had that line.  An ex military man responded to Obama's speech about responding to Daesh by using an epithet that was so out of the bounds of good taste that even Fox had to say, "whoa dude, you went too far."
It occurs to me that it's not just the bad word, it is what it reveals about a certain mindset present in American culture at the moment.  It is present in the ravings of presidential hopeful and egomaniac Donald the Trump.  It is present in the gun in my back pocket speech by Jerry Falwell Jr. It is present in the general fear and loathing that infests us at the moment.  We are responding like bullies.  The word that was used by Ralph Peters to describe our President is a word that is usually accompanied by a shove in the chest and a wedgie by some hyper-thyroidal seventh grader.  It is a word straight out of pornographic dirty talk.  It is not a word that should be used in polite conversation or indeed in any form of speech that wishes to be taken seriously by adults.
And a grown man used it about the elected leader of the most powerful nation on earth, because we haven't gone all total war on ISIS.  This is precisely in the same context and manner that a bully would try to goad someone into a fist fight behind the gym.
That's where we are America.  That's where this has brought us.  I hope you're satisfied.
We need to repent.  Despite the reality that I just sounded like a scolding middle school teacher, I say WE need to repent, because this culture includes me, I am a part of it, and if things are broken, I bear responsibility for that.
Once upon a time, I was talking to a very wise uncle of mine.  We were discussing the ins and outs of the tax code and the general prospects of the continued solvency of Social Security.  He was "splaining" as he said, how the federal gubmint had been borrowing money from Social Security for years and not paying it back, which is essentially not a problem until the Baby Boomers started retiring and all of the sudden the foundations of the whole thing start to erode.  All of this was rather news to me, but I have long lived with a fatalism about the whole enterprise upon which my retirement will depend at least in some part.
At some point I asked, rather incredulously, why this sort of thing is allowed to go on?  Why don't we change the rules?  Why doesn't any of this get fixed?
His answer: "Someone with enough money and power wants it to stay the way it is."
"But democracy..." I stammered, suddenly feeling rather more desperate to understand than any 30 year old with Masters degree really ought to feel.  My Uncle Larry just sort of shook his head.
"I'd give mine back if I thought it would do you any good," he said, "but it wouldn't, they'd just steal that too."
Since that conversation, I have started to look differently at the systems we are a part of, and examining those things that are only explicable by an irrational maintenance of the status quo.  I understand mistrusting the government, I do, but where are we if we can't at least acknowledge the humanity of our leaders (and they do sometimes make that difficult).  No matter what you think of Obama, for instance, he deserves the respect due his office, not the derision of "playground" thugs.
I repent if I have thought of those I disagree with as "morons," "idiots," "racists," "thieves," "bandits," or any other number of derogatory things I might call them.  I will not back away from honest descriptions (such as calling Trump an egomaniac, he totally is one, and he would probably agree). But I do not wish to participate in a national re-enactment of Lord of the Flies, or the Sixth Grade.  It's not taking us anywhere good.

The Debater of the Age

What does Mr. Chesterton think about it?

I want to know, not only because of the public importance of his opinions,

but because I have always followed  Mr. Chesterton with extraordinary interest and enjoyment, 

and his assent to any view of mine is a great personal pleasure, 

because I am very fond of Mr. Chesterton.

-George Bernard Shaw, in a debate with G.K. Chesterton.

George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton are a study in how to be human beings who disagree.  If you have the time and the inclination you can read this, and enjoy the actual commerce of two amazing minds and admirable if irascible personalities.  That Chesterton and Shaw could engage in such dialogue might actually make you mourn for the state of public debate in our day and age, where we can say so much, but just seem to do it so badly.

There was a time when dialogue and debate was not done in soundbites.  There was a time when ideas between great thinkers were exchanged in public forums, and people were interested enough to crowd into a hall to listen for a good long while.  There was an age where scholars wrote theses and other scholars responded in well thought out and premised argument.  It could get salty to say the least, but for either one of them to resort to the crude "gotcha" style of rhetoric so prevalent these days?  It would have been a disgrace, as indeed it should be.

I guess I'm just sort of pining our loss. We have so many pressing issues: human rights, poverty, wars, healthcare, terrorism, violence run amok, and the best of us can't even get a hearing.  The stage is dominated by the most rigid and dogmatic, and perhaps even criminal sorts, who seem to honestly be trying to make the problems worse.  In the debate above, Mr. Shaw says in his opening remarks that both he and Chesterton are mad men.  They are writers, traffickers in ideas and stories, but that that doesn't mean they don't have something valuable to say.  Shaw says:

Obviously we are mad men; and in the East we should be reverenced as madmen.  The wisdom of the East says: "Let us listen to these men carefully, but let us not forget that they are madmen."

Chesterton and Shaw had this humor about them, and humility of a very peculiar sort, that may have just been a product of their era and Britishness, but it is something that seems utterly absent from the discourses of our day.
Beyond that though, they both had a desire that the world they lived in should become a better, more just and decent place as a result of their argument.  In the debates they had they focused their sharp intellects on the real merits, and weaknesses of their own assumptions and approaches to the problem.  They had profound disagreements, but they never let that get in the way of being rather fond of one another.  They actually seemed to enjoy the product of the other's intellect, even if they thought it was wrong.
I have seen both Chesterton and Shaw quotations used on the interweb to express certain values and ideals in the present political situations.  The purposes to which these quotes are being put would make both men give a disgusted harrumph. Chesterton has become a darling of political and religious conservatives, as well he probably should be, if conservatives were at all concerned with being what society most needs them to be: the voice of orthodoxy and stability, instead of anger-mongers.  Shaw lends himself to rationalist and liberal causes, but he is not soft in head or heart, he is a rigorous proponent of common sense and humanist ethics that actually present a positive challenge to people of faith to shun their hypocrisy in a way that rings prophetic.
At the conclusion of the debate, Hillaire Belloc, the moderator, offers this observation about the subject of the debate (growing inequity in industrial society and the possible remedies thereof, sound familiar?):

In I do not know how many years--five, ten, twenty--this debate
will be as antiquated as crinolines are.  I am surprised that
neither of the two speakers pointed out that one of three things
is going to happen.  One of three things:  not one of two.
It is always one of three things.  This industrial civilization which,
thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we
are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore
end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude,
leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs,
complicated but based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens.
Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert.
Or it will lead the mass of men to become contented slaves,
with a few rich men controlling them.  Take your choice.
You will all be dead before any of the three things comes off.
One of the three things is going to happen, or a mixture of two,
or possibly a mixture of the three combined.

 That was written almost 100 years ago.  Surely everyone who heard it is now dead, but I do not think the judgment has been transmuted.  We're still suffering from the monstrous wickedness, folly and ineptitude of the wanton consumption of resources and lives.  There has been no restoration of sane ordinary human affairs.  The desert option is still very much in play, as is the plutocracy option.  We need voices, true conservatives like Chesterton, true liberals like Shaw, and we need them to talk to each other and work with each other, we need the madmen who know their madness.  We need the return of civil discourse and the iron-on-iron sharpening of ideas. Without it, we are going to continue shouting at clouds, jousting at windmills and repeating all of our mistakes.

 

What Has Been, Will Be Again

"You brood of vipers!"

-Jesus, AND John the Baptist

It is the Tweet/Facebook share of the day, the New York Daily News cover with all the tweets from Republican presidential candidates around the edge offering "thoughts and prayers" to the victims of the latest atrocity, and in big block letters: "God is not fixing this."

Each time this happens the backlash against the "thoughts and prayers" reaction gets a little stronger and a little louder.  I'm not even going to go into the gun control/violence part of this equation today, I'm just going to talk a bit about the things that really made Jesus mad, because actually the same thing that inspired the Daily News headline and the rising sense of futility around this whole issue was the thing that drove both Jesus and his cousin John to use the phrase "Brood of vipers," which if anything is unfair to the snakes.

Look, I believe in prayer.  Specifically, I believe in the power of prayer as more than just a "centering exercise."  I believe that God responds to our prayers, I believe that in prayer we connect with our Creator, and I believe that, sometimes, prayer can bring miracles.  That said, I don't think our prayers are doing much good in this case, and sincerity and faith are not the reason.  Sure, I'm rather certain that a lot of the "thoughts and prayers" that are going up from politicians and the like are just pro-forma, "Gee I'm sorry we're not going to do anything to actually help" type prayers, I'm not even counting those.  But I do know that many people, people who really grasp the power of prayer and are praying good prayers with sincere faith and not just in a CYA sort of way, are praying fervently that this would end, and it's not ending.

That doesn't mean those prayers are worthless, it just means we haven't gotten to the part where God acts yet.  Jesus prayed really this prayer about a cup passing from him really hard one time, and God didn't answer him.  If it can happen to Jesus, it can happen to anyone.  The end of that prayer was this, "Not my will, but thy will be done."

I don't pretend to know what God's will is all the time.  I certainly don't presume to know how to fix the problems we are having.  I suspect that the answer is much bigger and more far reaching than we can realize in the heat of these moments.

This is not me suggesting that we continue to sit back and do nothing, and continue to use the illusion of prayer to sanctify our apathy.  If we're praying for God's will to be done, we need to be ready to accept that the first thing God will change is not the gun laws or the mental health system, but our hearts.  Want to see a way through this?  Invite God to change your heart, invite God to convict you in how to act on this, pay attention to the results.  Those who are praying in sympathy are only asking God to alleviate the symptoms of an illness, not to take over the cause of the illness.

There have always been people who learn to speak the language of prayer, "those who say long prayers in public," without ever actually opening themselves to the presence of God.  I'm not putting myself in the seat of judgment on those people, because, you know, glass houses.

I'm sort of a professional pray-er.  I have to say prayers a lot, often out loud, that are just sort of expected prayers: grace before meals, invocations at the start of events, those sorts of things.  I know what words to say, and I know when to keep it short, and I just sort of ask God to forgive me if I don't always manage to pray that sincerely when we sit down to lunch at Panera.

On the other hand there are those prayers that come from deep down, the ones that sometimes come with tears and powerful emotions, and no, it doesn't mean they have to be spontaneous and extemporaneous, they can be written prayers, they can use the words spoken by others, What matters is that you open yourself to the presence of the Holy Spirit.  These are the prayers that connect.  I consider it a gift that, on occasion, I get to say these out loud, in front of people, that's what keeps me going.

The fact that prayer can have such power is actually the reason why I find insincere prayer so offensive, why I sometimes resist the obligatory prayers, why I am, along with many others, getting tired of hearing about all the "thoughts and prayers," that are obviously not leading to changed hearts and lives.

I will leave you with this prayer, one of my favorites, by Howard Thurman:

Lord, Open unto me

Open unto me - light for my darkness.

Open unto me - courage for my fear.

Open unto me - hope for my despair.

Open unto me - peace for my turmoil.

Open unto me - joy for my sorrow.

Open unto me - strength for my weakness.

Open unto me - wisdom for my confusion.

Open unto me - forgiveness for my sins.

Open unto me - Love for my hates.

Open unto me - thy Self for my self.

Lord, Lord, open unto me!

Stop Me If You Think that You've Heard this One Before (on second thought just listen)

Turn, O Lord! How long?

Have compassion on your servants!

-Psalm 90: 13

We're in "thoughts and prayers" mode again.  For the second time in what seems like just a few days.  Add San Bernardino to the list of places that have hosted a shooting rampage.  We're cranking out these things like housewives having Tupperware parties.  Is there a Black Friday deal? Two atrocities for the price of one?

I don't even care what the details of this one are.  I don't care what sick reason somebody had for opening fire.  I don't care whether they got the guns legally or illegally or whether we call them terrorists or not.  I don't... I can't...

My eyes are spent with weeping;

-Lamentations 2: 11a

There is no easy way out of this.  There is no clean legislative solution.  Even if we get rid of the nonsense of the NRA, even if we pass meaningful gun control, these things are still going to happen. We have sold our soul to a demon a long time ago.  That demon's name is violence, Appolluon, the Destroyer.  And he's probably not the only one who has his hooks in this one. I think selfishness, greed and fear are probably riding shotgun.  I think we can't pull our own heads out of our collective rear-ends long enough to simply say that this has got to stop and act like grown-ups.

You, mortal, will you judge the bloody city?

Then declare to it all its abominable deeds.

You shall say, "Thus says the Lord God: A city! 

Shedding blood within itself; its time has come; making its idols, defiling itself.

You have become guilty by the blood you have shed, and defiled by the idols you have made; 

you have brought your day near, the appointed time of your years has come.

-Ezekiel 22: 2-4

Saying it's got to stop is not enough.  This is going to need to be an act of political, social and spiritual willpower that I'm just not sure we have in us.  We have to hit this thing on multiple fronts.  We have to stop talking like we can solve this with more violence and name the sinister force behind this for what it is.  We cannot continue to entrench in our own positions, name each other enemy and expect this sort of thing to cease.  It is a sickness of our soul.

Among some of the tribes of the Great Plains there came a time when they realized that it was too late.  They had lost the fight with the Europeans, the buffalo were gone, the people were starving, and they turned to the one thing they had left, their spirit, and they started the Ghost Dance.  In as much as I understand it, which is not a whole lot, they were dancing to commune with the past.  It was almost sort of an apology to their ancestors, "sorry, we lost."

The whites felt threatened by something they didn't understand and therefore felt powerless to control, and that combined with other factors lead to the massacre of Wounded Knee.  I wonder if massacres are becoming a way of life in America?  We certainly seem to be developing a liturgy for them.  It's getting pretty predictable, maybe we should just go whole hog and make up our own Ghost Dance to apologize to all these innocent people we are failing to protect.  To apologize to crucified God who tried to show us a way that doesn't end like this.  To apologize to the children we're putting out there in this world where violence rules unquestioned.

At least if we dance, no one gets killed, right?

Hashing Things Out

This happens sometimes, I get an idea related to what I'm going to preach about on Sunday and, boom, the thing just sort of explodes into something that is just too catastrophically messy for a sermon.  That's when you, the readers of this blog, get to join me in the adventure of sermon preparation.

Beneath the surface of the sermon I'm working on about John the Baptist preparing the way of the Lord is a discussion of the tripartite relationship between Prophet, Priest and King.  I sat down this morning with a good old fashioned pen and paper and started diagramming and outlining how this these three identities relate to one another and after I filled up two pages with descriptive statements and scribbled lines, generalizations and anecdotal exceptions to those generalizations, I realized that this was getting hopeless.

To further complicate matters, I'm reading Robert Pirsig's follow up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a novel called Lila, An Inquiry into Morals, which like ZAMM is half novel, half philosophical dissertation.  The protagonist, Phaedrus, is grappling with metaphysics and the failure of the generally accepted subject-object scheme of understanding.  About a quarter of the way through, he is expounding upon a "better" metaphysical frame of reference: static-dynamic tension.  His primary illustration at this point in the book is an anthropological anecdote from Zuni tribal culture in the American southwest where what he calls a Brujo, to borrow the Latin American term challenges the authority structure of his tribe, is tortured and then calls upon the authority of the "foreign" European colonial justice system for redress, leading to the dethronement and incarceration of the "War Priests," of his tribe and eventually the succession of the Brujo, to the position of power, both within the tribe and within the now dominant colonial government.

It is an illustration of the static-dynamic tension in which one can see the moral ambiguity of the situation.  The Brujo is not a hero in the traditional sense, in fact, he is somewhat of a troubling character.  He does in fact overturn the status quo of the tribe, which was probably experienced as a trauma by the community.  We know, of course, that the status quo of the community was going to be overturned soon enough by the ascension of European colonists and the upheaval of the aboriginal cultures that ensued, and in many ways the Brujo was able to keep his tribe ahead of the most disastrous implications of that shift, but only by kicking down the door, so to speak.

Pirsig has not specifically compared this story to the narrative of the Biblical Prophets, but I'm making that jump.  Prophets are dynamic figures, they are agents of change, whereas kings and priests tend to be agents of the "way it is."  For the most part, prophets have an adversarial relationship with kings and priests, even when the prophets happen to be priests themselves.  Luke names the worldly rulers of the time and the religious authorities of the time in his introduction to John the Baptist.  The Romans and Herod are the kings, Annas and Caiaphus are the priests, John is the prophet, "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness." Everyone except John is invested in the static condition of things.  Sure Herod doesn't like the Romans, and the Priests don't like Herod or the Romans, and the Romans are no fans of the Priests, but they feel that they share a mutual interest in keeping the "peace." Which is famously the "pax romana," a peace maintained by military force and utter fear.

The Priesthood in the Temple and the rulers in Rome and Judea pretty much agree that it is best to keep the common people under their thumb. John the Baptist starts rocking that boat, most immediately by telling people they are forgiven for their sins, which if it is a message that is believed is going to cut into the Temple's business.  He also (off screen as it were) says nasty things about Herod and Philip and some of the incestuous/adulterous stuff happening in their spots.  Apparently John attended the Jeremiah school of prophecy, because he  is pretty good at making enemies of the powerful.  But people love him, because he's speaking to where they are, he's giving them an alternative to the impossible and desperate task of appeasing God through sacrifices and he's telling them that there's some authority over them that is even bigger and much more beneficent than Rome.

John is a dynamic force, and therefore is set in tension with the static forces of the age.  This creates turmoil, because the static forces don't deal with that tension well and eventually get violent.  From the perspective of the authorities John was a troublemaker. I have heard that label applied to Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi, and a host of others that would seem to indicate pretty good company..

Essentially, change is a defining characteristic of prophets: repent (metanoia, turning), maybe go back to what you used to know, maybe reach for something new, but don't just stay the course, because it's not the good way.  Prophets don't always seem like the good guys, because sometimes, a lot of the time, they create a ruckus.

What I'm trying to do is get around to peace.  But Prophets aren't usually about peace.  They are about pointing the way to a better peace than what we have now.  John the Baptist was not an agent of peace, he was a troublemaker. The traditional understanding of Jesus as a union of prophet, priest and king may be the part of this iceberg that sticks above the water.  He is all three, and so is able to perfectly exercise the needed functions of all three in harmony instead of discord, but I think there still has to be tension in those relationships.

Tension is not bad, it's how you deal with it.  Do you respond to tension violently?  Do you allow it to pull you in a better direction?  When they say repent do you get defensive?  How do you hear a prophet?

On Being Part of the Problem

And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.

Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Confession: too often I sit down with the Scripture as though it is a problem to be solved.  I start preparing a sermon in sort of the same way that I would solve a word problem. I was always pretty good at word problems, it was sort of like a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, using words to cushion the fact that I was doing arithmetic or algebra.  To be sure there are cultural, linguistic, theological and textual issues to be unraveled when it comes to interpreting Scripture, but sometimes I feel like all the taking apart subtracts from the putting together of truth, beauty and meaning.  Last winter the lectionary study group that I was part of with a group of mostly Lutherans disbanded for a variety of reasons.  Everyone seemed to agree that it really wasn't "doing anything for them."

I have spent some time thinking about that dynamic, and I think it was true, and probably symptomatic of a disease that afflicts the modern church: the desire to be right, which is not necessarily the problem in and of itself, but it's corollary is an unwillingness to be wrong.  I think we were approaching the texts as though they were riddles to be solved, and each of us had our own method of solving them.  We fell into a habit of using the same sources and pretty much adopting the same enlightenment (you could almost call it scientific) exegetical methods, where you try to determine what the text "really means," so that you can give "the answers" on Sunday morning and have everyone admire how clever you are.

When your primary skill is being clever and right all of the time, you become unwilling and maybe even unable to engage in dialogue that might challenge your status as the answer person.  As bruising to my ego as it might be, I am trying to learn from those sort of rare moments where someone presents me with a challenge to my assumptions.  Sometimes I fail.  I fail if the person is angry because I get defensive.  I fail if the person is too vague or too far away for me to find the common ground.  I fail if I'm just too tired to go through the work it takes to allow my assumptions (often the ones I just unveiled and expounded in front of over 100 people) to be challenged. I can fail for lots of reasons.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and you are powerless to solve it on your own.  This is not just a matter of willpower and trying harder next time.

This is not just a preacher problem, or even a particularly religious problem, it is a life problem, it is a human problem, and it leads to a lot of tragedy.  Think about all the evil that is committed these days in the name of God, and I'm not just talking about ISIS either.  There is a terrible destructive power in the shadow side of faith, in the side that sees it as an answer to be worked at, rather than a question to ask.

On a very deep level, when faith becomes an answer rather than a question it ceases to be faith.

A poet of a very different stripe, Charles Bukowski said, "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence."  Yeats said it more winsomely: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Why am I quoting all of these poets?  Because I suspect they're the only ones who get it, everyone else is too wound up in being right.  Poets don't care about that, they're only concerned with telling the truth, but the problem with truth is that it's not always the same for everyone everywhere.  That is the core reality that gives birth to the various forms of relativism that are so decried by the various priesthoods of the ages.

Poets, good ones at least, are open to interpretation.  Question a really good poet or writer about, what they meant exactly and they will probably give you this quizzical little look.  That look means about the same thing as when a southern lady says, "Bless your heart."

There is always something numinous about language (I'm back on words again), and it is only the most brutal usage that can make it otherwise.  To treat Scripture (and I will include all texts that are called sacred: Bible, Koran, Vedas, and so on) as though it has anything in common with that sort of profane usage is perhaps the highest form of heresy at work in the world today.

For some fun on what is otherwise a very serious subject, I give you the following examples of contrasting the numinous and profane qualities of language:

James Earl Jones and Malcolm MacDowell do a Sprint Commercial

Jesse Jackson reads Green Eggs and Ham

Words Matter

I'll admit, I'm probably more into words than the average person.  I talk for a living.  Beyond that the thing that I talk about is basically words, which we call Scripture.  I also do a fair amount of writing and even more reading, some of which is job related and some of which is just for fun.  I love playing games with words, like crossword puzzles and Scrabble (Words with Friends as well).  There are certain words that I find amusing in their own right, regardless of any context (salubrious, halcyon, coniferous).  One of my college English professors challenged the class with defining the following: sesquipedalian logophile (neither part of which is recognized by the Blogger spell check).  It means someone who likes big words, which I knew, because I am one.
I fairly regularly get quite angry with the way words are being used and abused in our current culture, whether it is through the mercenary (possibly sinister) efforts of advertisers, or the blatant disregard of the rules of rhetoric and discourse evident in politics these days, or whether it is just the run of the mill illiteracy of every day folks (actually that last one bothers me the least, because there is no malice in it).  Because of my awareness of the power of words and language, I want to be very careful how I deal with today's subject.  It feels almost like reaching out to grab a hot wire, and knowing you're going to get shocked, but here goes.
Let's talk about Abortion.  I'm not going to hedge and say something like reproductive rights or women's issues.  I'm going to talk specifically and as directly as I can about the practice of terminating a viable pregnancy through a surgical intervention.  Since the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the case of Roe versus Wade in 1973 women in this nation have had the legal right to choose this procedure for reasons other than imminent danger to the life of the mother.  In the 1980's some religious groups seized on the "Abortion issue," as a key moral issue facing our nation.  Ever since then it has been a dividing line for our nation.  Politicians have to clearly declare whether they are Pro-Choice or Pro-life, and only the most careful parsing of the "legal but rare" stance is allowed to those who would seek to stand in the gray area.
I am trying to become more comfortable in this gray area.  Here's what I believe for what it's worth: Life is sacred.  I am in this sense extremely Pro-Life.  I try to be as consistent about this as I can, I believe that all life is sacred.  This means I am an advocate of non-violence, I am anti-capital punishment, I am pro-adoption (my mother was adopted by my grandparents, I'm so in on that one), I am also in favor of Planned Parenthood and the help that they give, especially to poor women, in the arena of healthcare and birth control and general care and support to women who are pregnant.  I would like to live in a world where no woman felt like she needed to choose between her own health and life and the life and health of her child.
But we don't live in that world.
We live in a world where sometimes children are conceived in terrible circumstances.  Their mothers are too young, too poor, too something, to be able to care for them, or even carry them to term.  A choice is made. It is not an easy choice.  It is often a choice that leaves lasting emotional scars.  It is a choice that is rarely made casually or quickly. It is not a choice that I would ever want to make myself.  So I do not presume to make it for anyone else, nor do I believe it ought to be made by the government.
I am extremely skeptical that even the politicians who so gladly accept the votes of the Pro-life crowd, are ever going to do anything constructive and meaningful in that direction anyway.  After all it has been almost 43 years since Roe V. Wade, we have had Republicans in power and Democrats in power, we have had a conservative SCOTUS and a Liberal SCOTUS, and there has not been even a meaningful challenge to the fundamental decision on Roe.  I think maybe what we have now is the only legislative answer that is available to us, the only one that truly accounts for the weight of this issue. This means that all the division and anger has been for nothing.
These words: life and choice, are words we should use with reverence.  They are not words that should ever be used for crass political posturing, but they have been.  They are not words that should be shouted by angry mobs or waved on picket signs, but they are.
And people (born and unborn) are dying.
I'm not going to blame anyone in particular for the guy in Colorado who shot up Planned Parenthood.  I would like to suggest that terrorism is a product of cultural forces.  Within a certain segment of Islam, anti-western sentiment runs strong enough to create things like ISIS.  Within a certain segment of White-American Christianity, racism runs strong enough to create the KKK. The rhetoric and the emotions surrounding the abortion issue have been overheated for decades.  You can't just deny culpability when some unstable person blows a gasket and starts shooting. Does accepting culpability mean blaming or taking blame? No, but it might serve well to watch how you speak.  Does being shocked and appalled by the latest act of terror mean you should re-evaluate your position about the value of unborn children? No, but it might serve you well to be kinder about how you express those convictions.
I think we're capable of looking around the obvious defensive reactions on these sorts of things.  I think we need to start to address racism and not just write off Dylan Roof as a deranged lunatic, but rather understand that his violence and terror was directed and channeled by a culture that fed him on racism and hatred of black people.  Robert Dear (The Colorado Springs shooter, in case you haven't had his name seared into your memory yet), apparently was absorbed with enough rage at the baby killers, abortionists and President Obama (another story entirely) that it was time to unleash the terror.  Some will undoubtedly explain this away, but I think we do so at our own peril.  It's time to stop writing all of these people off as lone wolves and start to take stock of what is really driving them to murderous behavior.  I think our words have a lot to do with it.

Persistent Problems

A God without wrath brought humans without sin into a kingdom 

without judgment through ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

-H. Richard Niebuhr

In the world of theology geeks, the above is a fairly well known statement (I suppose I should note it is a facetious statement that presents an exaggerated negative image of what he actually believes to be true) by Reinhold Niebuhr's little brother, himself a very influential theologian, perhaps without the broader cultural recognition that Reinhold achieved through his "Serenity Prayer."  I know what you're saying: "Broader recognition? What are you talking about?  Who the heck are these Niebuhrs?"

Well, since you asked, they are the great white buffaloes of American Theology.  They are both extraordinary thinkers, whose thought is often quoted by theological types like me, and described with obtuse terms like "post-liberal" and "neo-orthdox."  Those two terms are defined by the fact that they come after a great battle of ideas, in which there was much passionate argument and much general consternation.  The Niebuhrs did their work in the wake of a theological and ecclesiastical war.

The war in question was the "fundamentalist-modernist controversy," within my very own Presbyterian tradition which has been powerfully reflected in the culture ever since.  Then though "fundamentalist" meant something rather different than what we picture, and "modernist" actually had some sort of clear meaning.

To sum up a rather long story, the "fundamentals" were:

• The nature of Scripture as inspired by God and "inerrant."
• The Virgin Birth of Jesus.
• The idea that Christ's death was an atonement for sin.
• The Resurrection of the Body
• The historical reality of the Miracles attributed to Jesus.

Modernists essentially challenged those fundamentals in the following ways:

• Scripture is inspired by God, but written by human hands and therefore in need of interpretation by human readers, therefore it cannot be said to be "inerrant," because the communication chain involves human writers, readers and interpreters.
• The Virgin birth of Christ, the historicity of miracles and the resurrection of the body all sort of fit into a single argument: simply that they are mythological additions and not absolutely necessary to Christian faith, and as they were often the object of ridicule from the secular and scientific community, should be de-emphasized, if not totally disregarded as core doctrines of the church.
• Atonement was seen as a sort of draconian leftover from Roman Catholicism, without going into all the various theories of atonement, modernists tended towards an understanding of God's mercy as being greater than God's need to punish iniquity.  (This, in my opinion, was the greatest blind spot of modernism, because it tends to minimize the impact that sin has on our ability to relate to a Holy God, which I think Niebuhr pointed out rather well).

It cannot, and really should not be said that either side really "won," this debate, they simply separated and went their own way.  Even though this argument stared in the good old Presbyterian Church, it has spread like a fire into other denominations and is even raging in the Roman Catholic world.  The words have changed, because Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Islamic extremists have forever tainted the name of fundamentalism.  It is a word, I do not think we can get back, nor should we try.  And honestly, Modernist and even Liberal don't really have the same precision as perhaps they once did.

Here is something that has not really changed though: Sin.  Yes, sin, I am moved by my compassion for humanity to adopt many opinions that might rightly be called liberal or progressive, but let me tell you one way that I am still absolutely orthodox: I believe that sin is huge problem for all people.  The nature of sin prevents me from thoroughly embracing a progressive attitude that we will somehow grow or evolve out of our current troubles.  The nature of sin prevents me from holding to my former conservatism that truly felt we should just maintain the status quo until we were sure of the way forward.

Much of the theology one sees out and about these days fails to account for this little three letter word that everyone recognizes, but none of us fully understand or give its full account.  Sin is what turns our discussions of the truly crucial problems of our age into nasty sectarian sniping.  Sin is what prevents progressives from taking stock of the ways that human nature is going to derail their plans to do good.  Sin is what causes conservatives to fear the change that so dearly needs to happen.  Sin is what keeps us naming each other enemy, and refusing to hear and acknowledge what is good about the ideas and people that challenge our assumptions.  Sin is a perpetual motion machine which generates its own energy and power and can sustain its own cycle for as long as there are people afflicted by it, which will be always, until Jesus comes back.

Constantly harping on sin is a big drag to be sure, but if we ignore it and pretend it's not a big deal, we will continue to see what history has born out thus far: no end to suffering, no end to violence, no peace among humankind, no exit from the endless oppressive cycles of what could very honestly be called Hell.

There is only one answer to sin, Jesus Christ and him crucified, and even if you don't like the word atonement or any of the various "theories" of atonement, the fact remains that Jesus is the only way to deal with sin.  Rules make it stronger.  Quests for purity feed the fires of Hell as readily as the light of Heaven.  By the way, I didn't make this up, here is the Apostle Paul in Romans 3: 20 quoting Psalm 143:2: For "no human being will be justified in (God's) sight" by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. If you're not familiar, he goes on a bit about that.

The point is that the Grace of God is the only answer to sin, righteousness ain't gonna cut it, good works ain't gonna cut it, right belief ain't gonna cut it (yeah that's right, your purity of doctrine isn't getting you off the hook either, that's just more works righteousness, except the works happen between your ears).

So what do we do then?  We proclaim Jesus as Lord, and we seek to live that way, we trust in the mercy of God when we mess up, but never fail to repent. Our identity as the Body of Christ does not presuppose a "solution" to human sin, but rather an answer to the fact that it is persistent and inescapable.  We are the body of Christ, not because we're perfect and holy, we are perfect and holy because we are the body of Christ.  Here's a more in depth quote from H. Richard Niebuhr:

The way to the organic, active peace of brotherhood leads through the hearts of peacemakers who will knit together, with patience and self sacrifice, the shorn and tangled fibers of human aspirations faith and hopes, who will transcend the fear and dangers of an adventure of trust. The road to unity is the road of repentance.

That is all for now.

Human? Nature

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.

-The Apocalypse of John 22: 1

Sometimes a whole bunch of things just come together in my brain.  Having lived in Pittsburgh for a bit, I have adopted a geographical word for this: confluence.  That's what they call the place where two, or in the case of the burgh, three rivers come together.  So here's my Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio for this week: Refugees, people experiencing homelessness, and the church, specifically the church I serve as pastor, but I think you will see a broader application.
First, without belaboring points I have made earlier, let me just say that I have been profoundly disappointed with some of the responses to the refugee crisis, even before the Paris attacks ratcheted the rhetoric up to eleven.  The fear and intolerance that I have seen displayed by many, including the governor of my own state has quite frankly dented my faith in humanity, and reminded me, rather vividly of the depth of human sin.
Second, this was our week to host the local Safe Nights program, which provides temporary shelter for people in Charles County who are experiencing homelessness.  Our church's lower level is packed with cots and the meager personal effects of between 30 and 40 men, women and children who are experiencing homelessness.  We feed them, we give them a place to sleep and our local community action group, Lifestyles of Southern Maryland (shameless plug, they're freaking awesome), does as much as possible to help them get their lives together during the day.  I would like to tell you that all of the people we serve are paragons of virtue who have just fallen on hard times, but that is not the truth.  The group as a whole is a full mixture of people of all different sorts, they can be surly and petulant with each other, they can be ungrateful and rude, but it is our duty to serve them and give them shelter nonetheless.  We have to stop this pervasive and perverse notion that those in need of help must somehow live up to certain standards in order to be treated decently.  That is not grace.  Whether you're talking about refugees or the homeless, or the person in traffic or at the grocery store, being grace filled is not something you should ever try to turn on and off according to the situation.
And so I walk up to a powder keg holding an open flame, and I attempt to investigate something that has and does trouble me about the church: do we allow ourselves to experience grace?  In our meetings and our plans, in our gatherings and in our attitudes towards one another?  In our relationship to individuals, congregations and other institutional groups, do we understand that we are what we are thanks to the grace of God and not because of how good we are?
Those who truly experience the grace of God in their lives are then called, and even compelled to let that grace flow out of them.  I believe that God is love, and that love is expressed towards humanity in the form of grace incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  I used Reinhold Niebuhr's famous Serenity prayer in our Session meeting last night, you know the one: "God, give me the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."  People who are familiar with some form of that prayer may not remember that it goes on from there, to say the following line: "Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it."
That hit me between the eyes.  I thought about how Jesus interfaced with the world, and it occurs to me that Niebuhr hit the nail on the head, Jesus took the world as it was, and people as they were.  He certainly recognized the failings and the sin, and sometimes it made him angry or even caused him to weep, but in the midst of all that there was a radical kind of acceptance, which we commonly call grace.
A lot of younglings these days use the phrase, "don't judge me," frequently.  I noticed this coming from my daughter and from some of our youth here at church, and I asked them about it. I asked them why they said it so often, even if there was no real sign that anyone was judging them.  One girl said, "I feel judged a lot."
"Why?" I asked, "I didn't say anything or do anything to indicate that I was judging you."
"I just feel it," she said, "because I do weird things, because I am weird."
Don't get me wrong, I understand there is plenty of judgment to go around that comes from external sources, but what I was encountering here was almost entirely internal judgment.
I said, in a moment of Pastoral inspiration, "you know, it occurs to me that the only way someone should be able to judge you, is if they really love you, otherwise they'll do it wrong."  Honestly, I don't really know where that came from, but the more I think about it the more it sort of runs away with me.  Jesus can be the judge of creation because he loves it.  He was able to set things right in the world and call sinners to repent, because he loved them, because he accepted their weirdness and did not judge without understanding that perhaps their sins were afflictions, and not flaws.  He did not come to "condemn the world, but came that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:17)
We need to learn to accept that grace and that justification.  If we can't accept it for ourselves, we will never, ever be able to give it to others.
If we fail to receive and give grace to others we will fail, not just as Christians, but as humans.

Complicated We Stand

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded

than the shouting of a ruler among fools.

-Ecclesiastes 9:17

Last night I was listening to BBC radio on the way home from a Presbytery meeting and I heard an extended interview with former NATO chief Admiral James Stavridis.  As I usually am, I was impressed with the rather calm, clear eyed perspective of a person who has dealt with war and terrorism and violence on rather more concrete terms than those of us who think they understand war on the basis of playing Call of Duty.  He was talking about ISIS/ISIL/Da'esh (Here's the deal with the different names) and how they are rather different from Al Quaida or Hamas, and about how our strategies for dealing with them need to reflect the different nature of what they are.

As you might expect from a former NATO chief, he is an advocate of cooperation between nation states in dealing with Da'esh.  He notes that, in fact, there is a rather unprecedented level of agreement between the United States, Europe and even Iran about the fact that these villains need to be taken down.  In the half an hour or so that I was listening, he described an almost impossible scenario where the United States, the European Union, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Iraqi security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and various other Middle Eastern nations would all cooperate to bring down this band of lunatics.

As I am also, the interviewer was somewhat incredulous that this sort of cooperation might take place.  But Stavridis insisted that all those groups have a fairly well established self interest in seeing Da'esh ended and stability restored to Syria and Iraq. Once the common enemy is gone, however, things get decidedly less crystalline.  The US teaming up with Russia seems like a movie sequel to the cold war, where former enemies get together to fight a common foe, but there is still the rather sticky matter of the Ukraine, which is not just going to go away.  If we buddy up the Russians, are we tacitly abandoning Ukraine to Uncle Vlad's neighborhood?  And of course there's the Sunni/Shia enmity, how do we convince Sunni Muslims around the world that inviting Shiite Iran into our little brute squad to take out an essentially Sunni group like Da'esh isn't going to result in a tilt of the old persecution see-saw.  I mean, most Sunni are pretty strongly disavowing any notion that Da'esh is their people, but they still don't particularly care for the Shia, that goes back a really long way.  You've got religious considerations, geopolitical considerations, cultural considerations and in light of all that Stavridis made what is perhaps the understatement of the year: "The world is a complicated place."

He talked about the short game: destroy Da'esh, all of them, the black flag, machine gun toting dudes in the desert, the presence online, the loose networks throughout the middle east and Europe by which they continue to "expand their influence" even as their actual territory remains "contained" as President Obama keeps saying.

Then he mentioned the long game, which involves a rather more difficult task of doing all of this in a way that does not resemble playing Whack-a-Mole (you know that boardwalk game where you try to hit all the plastic moles that pop out of different holes with a big padded mallet).  Our history with fighting terror groups is that, as soon as we get one, more pop up, and the success of our own violence tends to lead to the very conditions that make for fertile recruiting grounds among those who are tired of poverty and war.

I have my suspicions that even the short game won't exactly be a walk in the park, but I have to admit the picture he painted was appealing.  As for the long game, I was just sort of glad to hear an actual authority type person admit that it was really the big problem.  I also appreciated the fact that he didn't just say, "it's complicated," and walk away in frustration, he actually had ideas about what to do, other than ignore it and hope it will away.  He didn't make it sound simple or easy, but there seemed to be a way around the terror and a way, no matter how uphill it may be, to find our way through this seemingly intractable mess.

The barriers to cooperation were perhaps the most disappointing aspect of all of this: how hard it is for us to just get our heads together to combat something as obviously evil as Da'esh.  The constant rhetoric of fear and bigotry that is just flying in all directions right now.  It sort of reminds me of that ominous line in The Lord of the Rings: "on that day the strength of men failed."  Honestly, I'm ready to grab for whatever hope I can.  These days I guess quiet words of the wise can be hard to come by, here are some:

These times we know much evil, little good

to steady us in faith

and comfort us when our losses press

hard on us, and we choose,

in panic or despair or both,

to keep what we will lose.

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace

broken, and so we must

love where we cannot trust,

trust where we cannot know,

and must await the wayward coming grace

that joins the living and dead,

taking us where we would not go -

into the boundless dark.

when what was made has been unmade

The Maker comes to His work.

-Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir

Porte Ouvert

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, 

shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.

Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah 

on the day of judgment than for that town.

-Matthew 10: 14-15

In Paris, people are welcoming strangers into their homes.  In the midst of the fear and violence they are opening doors to people who are stuck and away from their safety and security.  In Paris, where the police are mobilizing with frightening military efficiency and where the dead from last week are not yet buried, ordinary people are deciding not to be terrorized.

In the United States, a nation built by immigrants, which has as one of her enduring symbols a gift from France standing in New York Harbor, Lady Liberty, with her torch raised and her inscription: "Send me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."  Governors quibble about receiving refugees, people indulge dark, fearful, isolationist thoughts.

I cannot recall a time when I have been more ashamed of our nation.  I may have disagreed with policies, I may not really like the vast and unquestionable military industrial complex, but always I have felt that when the rubber hit the road America would do the right thing.  There have been moments where it took us a minute: Hurricane Katrina, and there are areas where we undoubtedly have lots of work left to do: civil rights, but I would like to believe that we as a nation have the courage of our convictions.

There is no country on earth that owes as much to the diversity and richness of immigrants.  There is no other country in the history of humanity that can offer such a hope that, somehow, someway, we can transcend our differences and live together in peace.  Right now, we are failing to be our best, and we are failing for the worst reasons: fear, greed and selfishness.

Even if you are a secular humanist with no interest in biblical standards, you should notice that these rampant expressions of fear and hatred are contrary to the better angels of our nature.  You should be aware that the terrorists are winning, because we are afraid.  In our fear we are becoming violent and hateful, and that is precisely what they believed we were all along.

If you are a person who cares about the Bible, Jew, Christian, Muslim or even one of those Spiritual But Not Religious types, you should note that Cain wandered the earth and was a refugee, and God forbid anyone from harming him (even though he had murdered his brother).  Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, not because they were sexually depraved, but because they failed to offer proper hospitality to strangers. Abram (Abraham) left his home country and wandered to the place The LORD showed him.  His son Ishmael was disinherited and God cared for him.  His grandson Jacob had to flee from his brother Esau and take refuge in the house of his uncle Laban.  The twelve tribes of Israel went to Egypt as refugees and were rescued from a famine.  The refugees, being different and homeless eventually became oppressed and were rescued by another fugitive, a murderer named Moses.  They wandered as refugees for forty years, and remember that wandering even now on Passover and Sukkoth.  Jesus was a refugee before he was even old enough to talk, and he remained a man who had no place to lay his head, even as he began to preach about the Kingdom of Heaven, and he emphasized to his disciples the necessity of giving and receiving hospitality.

I'm not even going to bother assembling a collection of texts that prove this point, because proof texting is obnoxious, but also because it's utterly unnecessary in this particular case, this is such a powerful theme in the whole narrative that if you miss it you're just being as dense as a neutron star.

Don't tell me about your faith and then say we can't or we shouldn't welcome these people fleeing from hell itself.  Don't make excuses about how they might be dangerous, because I'll admit, they might be, most of them aren't, but a few of them will be.

The Church I Pastor is called Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church, the story of the Good Samaritan challenges us to re-define our definition of neighbor.  Jesus uses a Samaritan for a purposeful effect, to summon the idea of someone who is different from the man in the ditch, someone who most of the audience would find objectionable.  The Samaritan is the one who risks his life for the wounded man, who invests his time and treasure in the man whom he does not know.

Let's face it America, we're not on the front lines of this one, there is an ocean between us and the refugees fleeing Syria.  Only a small fraction of them will ever get here, but if Paris can open their doors, given what has just happened there, it is a dirty, rotten shame if we can't at least do the same.

I want to have faith, that if this decision was put in the hands of the American people instead of in the hands of politicians we would be better, we would be more loving and welcoming, we would live up to our own values and get serious about our unique place in history as a demonstration that we can be more together than we are apart, you know E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one.  Seriously people, this idea is all over the place, open the ever loving door.

Comment Cava?

Mes Chers Amis en France,
Don't worry, I'm not going to afflict you any more with my poor French.  But I would like to drop you a line this Monday morning to tell you that you have been much in my thoughts over the weekend.  I know we've had some differences of opinion vis-a-vis the whole international affairs scene. I really do regret the whole "freedom fries" debacle, I know you don't even want us to call pomme-frittes "french fries" anyway, we 'Mericans can be pretty hot headed sometimes.  The thing was we felt like you didn't have our back about the whole Iraq thing, and we were still reeling from our own day of national hate and fear, a lot like the one you're having now.
If nothing else, you need to know that we are with you, even if our politicians can't always get out of their own way, we totally feel your pain, and right now, people are putting the Tricolor on their facebook profiles all over the place, I did.  It may seem like a small thing, but you have to understand that for Americans, even with all our power, most of us feel utterly helpless when it comes to this terrorism thing, which is why I think we're having such a hard time getting a grip.
So here's a bit of an apology, it turns out that you were maybe kind of right about the whole attempt to re-colonize the middle east, shaky stuff that.  We were too angry to listen to reason at that moment, and now, here we are a decade later still trying to deal with terrorist organizations that have sprung up in the power vacuums that we created.  ISIS and the war in Syria are now lobbing hundreds of thousands of refugees towards Europe, and in that mix are some dangerous elements.  To tell you the truth though, in the long run this whole mess is a lot more dangerous than a few wolves hiding among the fleeing sheep.  This whole scenario, and how we deal with it, is going to shape the world for a long time.
People with nothing to lose and nothing to protect are pretty dangerous.  The people who, right now, are suffering the degradation and horror of being a refugee are going to be either welcomed and cared for in their time of need by the "West," or they are going to be turned away and further brutalized and marginalized.  If we take the latter course, out of fear, we will prove the terrorists right: western society is decadent and perverse and does not accept or care for the rest of the world.  If we vilify our Muslim neighbors and blame them for the actions of a very small group of people, we prove ourselves to be as blind to the diversity of global Islam, in terms of race, and particular forms of practice.
I know, coming from an American, this sounds awfully hypocritical, but this is really one of those learn from the mistakes of other people moments.  What the terrorists want is a violent response. They want rage, they want us to try and take revenge, they want bombs to fall, because that's what they have been telling people we would do all along.  Their motivation is not swift decisive victory in battle, their goal is a doomsday scenario where all the people of Islam rise up and destroy the infidel.  They don't care that the Qu'ran doesn't support the idea, they don't care how many of them have to die in the cause.  We have made so many mistakes in confronting this evil.
The genius, if you can call it that, of terrorism is that they don't want to win battles.  As the label terrorist implies, they want to create terror.  They want to make people afraid, they want to cause suffering, they want to provoke violence, because that is their stock and trade.  Terrorism is a tool of extremely small groups of people who are trying to battle something that is much bigger than them.  Remember when you all helped a bunch of American Colonists take on the mighty British Empire?  We used some of the same ideas.  In that case though, we were dealing with an enemy we understood very well.  We just had to make enough of a stink for the whole colonial enterprise to become unprofitable, we just had the British Parliament and old King George to run off, and you had our back. Comparatively, we had a lot more leverage than your average Mujahadeen, and our goal was much more attainable than the downfall of the entire western world.
The thing is though, at the start of that conflict, it was pretty split down the middle in terms of colonists who supported the crown and didn't really mind paying taxes in order to be part of the grand and glorious British Empire, and those who wanted independence.  The Rebels needed the Brits to flash their teeth before independence became a thing that a majority could agree on.  They did, and the war for independence was begun.
The plan of the Jihadists is plain and simple: provoke the west into acting like the imperialist bullies they have been saying we are.  Sow enough terror among the populations of nations like France and the US so that we "have to" respond with military intervention.  Then go run and hide. Leave the disposable foot soldiers out there to die in the bombings and  head back to comfortable compounds in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.  Wait for the war to create martyrs, and a whole new generation of desperate men with nothing to lose.  Rinse, lather, repeat.
So what do we do?
The only hope is to react in a way that is going to take a lot of self control.  We need to convince humanity that these clowns are a boil on the posterior of our species, a condition which is more properly handled with a sterile needle than with a bloody sword.  This means Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Atheists, this means people of all nations who are truly invested in the commonwealth of humanity are going to need to cooperate, and say, "enough."  Understand that this is going to be a slow process and we may need to absorb a punch or two along the way.  We've taken a few, we know it can be done.  But beware the warmongers!  There are many in our own houses who are invested financially and by temper in the waging of war.  Their voices grow loud in the wake of tragedy, and they recruit the victims and their loved ones all too easily.  They are the all too willing dance partners of the terrorists, and they want us not to notice that without them the techniques of the terrorists would be useless.
I admire your words: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.  The first two are important in our words as well, "Liberty and Justice for all."  But the last one, brotherhood or solidarity, well I suppose that's what I'm saying we need more than anything right now.
It is my hope that someday soon all the world will realize how important our mutual connection really is.  That is the only thing that can end the terror.
Amities,
Marc