Systems of Belief

I watched the HBO documentary Going Clear, about the Church of Scientology, because as I told my wife, "I like to look in on the competition."  Scientology is rather more widely known than it's actual size warrants. By some estimates they only have about 50,000 adherents world wide, which may seem like a lot until you realize that there are approximately 600,000 Rastafarians, and they're sort of on the low end of the list (Judaism: 14 million, Islam 1.6 billion, Christianity: 2.2 billion, according to Wikipedia, but those numbers seem pretty on target).  Scientology is a fairly new religion founded by L.Ron Hubbard, a man who was a failure as a Science Fiction writer but whom you would have to say, started a fairly successful religion, at least if you judge by dollar signs.
And that seems to be the thing about Scientology, they are a religion that is all about success and straight cash money.  They attract a handful of super-wealthy, super-famous people: notably Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and they put on a show, about how they can help everyone succeed like those two have succeeded.  Of course, there's a bit of dark side to the whole thing as you can imagine, but if you want to know about that, watch Going Clear.
What I want to think out loud about here is the spectrum of religious practice, where Scientology occupies a clear (pun intended) end point.  This end point is the type of religion that starts with methods and only reveals it's "secrets" to the initiated.  One of the points that a former Scientologist made in the documentary was that if you ask your average Christian or Jew or Muslim what they believe, they will be able to tell you, roughly, in a couple of minutes.  Christians will say something that can be as simple as: Jesus is Lord, or get a little more complicated.  Muslims actually have a slogan: There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.  Atheists (yes they're a religious group) basically require their adherents to say there is no god, if you start talking about a god or gods or even the possibility of a god or gods,  you're technically an agnostic and out of the club.
Scientology however, starts with a whole bunch of practical instructions for living and succeeding, and never tells you anything about overlord Xenu until you're an Operating Thetan level III (or something like that).  Want to know what that means?  Actually you probably don't, particularly if Scientology has been working out pretty well for you so far, and by that I mean, it's methods and it's system of expensive audits has been helping you acquire wealth and live the "good life," which is actually their major selling point.
Scientology is a creation of the modern/postmodern mindset, it's mythos is founded in the writings of science fiction writer, its evangelists are celebrities, its practice, if we are to believe the growing number of ex-scientologists, are dystopian on an Orwellian scale.  But none of that is really getting to the core of the matter, which is the method.  Scientology does something for people, from the very beginning: it teaches them how to organize, how to communicate, how to focus, basically how to become successful in the world.  Once it establishes its value, and once it earns the acceptance and loyalty of its adherents, then it springs the ideas, the audits, the engrams, becoming clear, thetans, Xenu,,, all that stuff that sounds just absolutely crazy to outsiders.  To those inside though, it doesn't seem crazy because they have accepted that it all works, and often would rather not challenge the crazy for fear of upsetting a system that has real benefits for them.
In modern Protestant Christianity we tell you our "secret" on day one.  We tell you it's about a relationship with God, which is mediated by Jesus Christ, who is our savior and our example.  We have varied ways of expressing this truth, but it essentially comes back to the triune God, who is the same God that made covenant with the people of Israel, and thus connects us to Judaism.  It comes back to Jesus of Nazareth who was a Jewish teacher, healer and miracle worker, who was crucified by the Romans at the urging of the Sanhedrin (Jewish religious establishment/ruling class).  And we will tell you, most of us anyway, that Jesus was resurrected on the third day after his crucifixion and then ascended into heaven.
Some people will find that last part implausible, perhaps even impossible, and I will have to admit, given a scientific understanding of the world, it is, in fact, unlikely.  But that's what makes it an article of faith.  It cannot be proven or dis-proven, it can only be believed or not believed.  The thing about it is, you don't have to learn any secret handshakes or subscribe to any secret pact to be able to hear about our faith.  You don't have to follow our rules or worship in our community, you don't have to go on a mission or join a special group, you just have to hear and accept the love of God in Jesus.
There are some within the church who think we're giving away our truth a little too easily.  There are some who look at the commitment evoked by more strenuous disciplines in say Buddhism or even within Roman Catholicism (after all I'm going on a pilgrimage next week, you don't get much more Catholic or committed than trying to walk 500 miles to a cathedral where they supposedly have the bones of a Saint), and say that perhaps we've just made it too easy.
Maybe we have.
I realize, at about this point, that I have opened a large can of worms, this is going to have to be continued.

Last Things

I spent time this morning sifting through the narratives of Jesus' last days with his disciples before the crucifixion.  I also bought train tickets for a trip from Madrid to Pamplona.  I am thinking about Maundy Thursday service, and Easter Sunday, and leaving my family and my church for forty days.  I am sitting here flipping back and forth between the journey of Lent as it comes to a close and the journey that will absorb most of the Easter season.  What do I need to say and do in the next week?
I'm feeling the urgency of Jesus' prayer for his disciples, I'm feeling a little bit of his anxiety about something really big coming up (though my big event is decidedly of a different character).
I also know I'm coming back again!
And that's part of what I'm wrestling around with as well.  What about this whole experience is going to be transformative?  Jesus probably had a better idea on that one than me.  At least according to the Gospels, he sort of knew what this was going to accomplish, but I think he had some doubts and anxiety of his own.  What if he was wrong?  What if this cross incident was every bit as foolish as it looked from this vantage point 2000 years ago?  What if God's plan really was to give the whole Messiah thing one more try, and Jesus was just missing his big chance?
Let's face it, the crucifixion makes walking five hundred miles seem like a trip to Disney World.  There was absolutely no guarantee that his death was going to accomplish anything.  Even after the resurrection, and for quite a long time actually, the way of Jesus sort of hung on by a thread.  An awful lot depended on random moments and what can only be described as an ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit.  The story took shape, the Gospels were told and then written down.  People came to call Jesus Lord in the strangest places and when they did they seemed willing to devote themselves to that proposition, even if it meant putting themselves in harm's way.
Dad and I are sort of going through this flip-flop routine about how much to plan, how many reservations to make, how prepared to be.  For us, this pilgrimage is not about earning salvation (that's a verboten idea for a couple of die hard Protestants).  It's not even about earning some special favor or blessing (our theology doesn't permit that either).  But it is about more than just curiosity, and it is about more than just a particularly long walk.  It's a microcosm of the Christian story and the journey of faith.  We must give up a lot of our comfort and security, and join Jesus on the way.  Like the disciples, we don't exactly know what that's going to be like.  I'm quite sure that if we knew what change the Camino was going to bring to each one of us and if we could somehow just sort of learn those things without putting our bodies, minds and spirits through this ordeal, we probably wouldn't find this thing compelling enough to do.
Jesus faces the events this week with a knowledge that, while he doesn't really want to go, he must.  While he holds out some hope that there is another way, he knows that there is not.
Heaven, earth and the salvation of humanity do not hang in the balance when it comes to my father and I taking this journey, but we are going to find out some things.
The first of those things is what it's like to leave.

The Morning After

It is rare that I find myself still thinking about a Presbytery meeting the morning after.  Presbytery meetings are mostly business, with a thin veneer of worship and community, but yesterday was different.  National Capital Presbytery gathered for our meeting, where one of the most visible and crucial issues of the past 40 years was going to be decided.  Except it wasn't, because basically it had already passed the requisite number of Presbyteries to be ratified.
For those of you who are not Presbyterian, I'm talking about amendment 14F, which changes the language in our constitutional definition of marriage from "between a man and woman" to "between two people."  A constitutional change is moved by Presbyteries, voted up or down by General Assembly (the national governing body) and then sent back to Presbyteries for ratification.  Well, the change has been ratified.  Last week I talked about the change as a whole, today I want to talk about the process and the movement of God's people in the PC(USA).
If I had to pick one word to describe the process it would be gracious.  People were actually listening to each other, and hearing each other for real.  Maybe it was because the pressure was off, and the change was pretty much already a done deal, maybe it was because in an urban/metropolitan presbytery like NCP, there really wasn't ever very much doubt that it was going to pass by a landslide (217-55-6, was the final vote if I remember correctly).
But I would like to think it's because even those who disagree now recognize that the really important thing about all this is what we do now.  Do we continue to listen to each other?  Or do we retreat into our citadels of like-mindedness?  Do we continue to seek understanding of the other? Or do we just redraw the battle lines and go at something else?  Do we live up to our bright hopes? Or do we live down to our darkest fears?
We have choices to make and directions to choose, but for the first time in a long time, I'm not waiting for the other shoe to drop.  And that is a relief.
I also had the pleasure of attending this meeting with the youngest member of our session, it was her first Presbytery meeting, and it made me proud that it pretty much illustrated the best of what we can be.  In a church where we are constantly wringing our hands about what to do about young people, I saw something with fresh eyes: let's just trot out our good side a little more often.  Let's demonstrate that we can have mature and difficult conversations without getting steamed up like a bunch of posturing teenagers.
I think we forget that most kids and young people look to adults to set an example, at our table last night we had a male and a female pastor, we had a young single woman and two middle aged married women, and we had a man who had just celebrated his 60th wedding anniversary (for those of you who are into math that makes him at least 80).  We talked about what makes for a good marriage, and we learned from each other.  We had diversity, and it was good, and it was the church, and while I may not understand all the mysteries of God, I am absolutely sure that he found nothing wrong with what we were and what we are.
Amen.

Painted into a Corner

Personal history to the side for a moment, let's examine the nature of violence on a larger scale.  Almost everyone agrees, even most pacifists, that war is sometimes necessary.  The test case, now and probably forever, is World War II.  Forget Japan in this whole discussion, let's just talk Hitler.  Hitler has become the very definition of a madman, a megalomaniac, an unbalanced person consumed by hate and fear who wrought horror on Europe, and especially on the Jewish people.

Here's the narrative that we have been taught in history class: WWI was a pretty typical struggle between nation states for control of territory, it still involved Kaisers, Kings and various other feudal sounding figures (like Archdukes).  It was a pretty horrible conflagration where human beings first started trying out some of our new tricks, like chemistry and airplanes in the service of war.  It literally chewed up a good part of the European continent, and since Germany lost, they had to be punished.  That punishment was the Treaty of Versailles, which helped make Europe well again, largely at the expense of the German people.

As is usually the case, the next generation of Germans did not appreciate being the red-headed step children of the European community because of something that happened when they were little kids or not even born.  Along comes Uncle Adolf and his hyper-nationalist, angry young man Nazi propaganda.  And the whole Nazi thing is: we're going to show everyone how hard we can punch.  The despair and anger that allowed Hitler to take power is the same desperation and despair that has formed Al Quaeda and ISIS: our life is not as good as it should be, and it's somebody else's fault.

Basic human problem.

Enter the Jews, or rather, just sort of notice the Jews, because they were already there.  Throughout history, the Jews have been the perfect scapegoat for bad stuff; there are usually not that many of them compared to the general population, they insulate themselves from others, keeping all their secret religious days and eating their secret religious food and wearing those little funny hats.  When stuff starts rolling downhill it's really easy to make sure most of it lands on the Jews.  Seriously, it happens a lot over the course of history.

There's a fair amount of bigotry against Jewish people in America and Europe, for no really good reason.  And G-D help them in the Middle East, where the nation state of Israel has actively dispossessed an entire nation in the name of safety and security.  And this is where the rubber really hits the toad, because Arabs (particularly Palestinians) and Israelis have legitimate beef with one another.  This is no manufactured paranoia and no simple misunderstanding.  Hitler taught an entire race of people that they cannot just ignore hatred and bigotry and hope it will go away.  Israel is, even to moderate and dovish Israelis, the only hope of security in the world for the children of Jacob.

To an Israeli the threat of attack from people that live on their doorstep is no abstract threat.

To a Palestinian the notion that something precious and irreplaceable has been forcibly taken from them is not an abstraction either.

We have demonstrated the ability to fight massive wars over abstractions and ideologies.  The US and the USSR spent a good 70 years threatening to annihilate human life on this planet over different economic strategies, so I'm not throwing stones from this glass house, but this sort of thing has no happy ending, it's like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, it's a freaking tragedy.

It's a tragedy, because the people involved are painted into a corner.  One side cannot just back down and go away, it is their life and their identity.  I have been reading a book about Zionism, written by an Israeli, and what surprises me, and brings a lump to my throat is that there are people on both sides who know this, it's not a matter of understanding, it's an utter inability to do anything about that understanding.  The thing would be for Israelis and Palestinians to live together, there is apparently plenty of room.  The problem is that Israelis cannot and will not sacrifice their security, and the Palestinians are too angry to stop trying to blow them up.

Honestly, I don't blame either side.

Intervention from the west usually just makes things worse.  We like absolute solutions, we like clear-cut win/lose decisions.  We like to be the good guys, and in this case there are no good guys, there are only gradations of wrong.

I suppose we could just hunker down and wait for the paint to dry, but that's hard, and it means you have to stop adding new paint.  I suppose also we could just walk across the wet paint and then try to clean up the mess, but in this case the mess in human lives, so don't start that stroll casually.

A History of Violence

When I was a kid I had a bit of a temper.  I think the only thing that kept me from being a bully was probably the fact that I preferred to be mostly left alone and that trying to intimidate other kids would have taken too much effort on my part.  But I was usually bigger than a lot of kids my age and I was pretty quiet, and from time to time, that would attract attention from others... unwanted attention... unjust attention.  Attention that made Hulk want to smash.
By about 8th grade or so, I had managed to get my rage under control enough to largely avoid frequent suspensions and detentions, but it was not easy.  The urge to punch obnoxious kids in the face was more or less a daily struggle, especially since I had been in enough fights and altercations over the years to know (sort of) how to do it.  Don't get me wrong, I was not Chuck Norris just waiting to lay a beating down on some unsuspecting kid.  I knew that fights hurt, and that, even in the best of circumstances you were going to take a shot or two.
Here are some other things I have learned:

1. Never underestimate an opponent. I learned this from picking a fight with a girl in first grade, an age where girls and boys are pretty much on equal footing physically and if the girl in question happens to be a tomboy with several older brothers, you just bought yourself face full of snow on the playground. I have to say, to the girl's credit, she just took me down, shamefully quickly, pushed snow in my face, and said, "had enough?"  I said, "Yes" and it was done.  That was it, to this day that's about all I remember about the whole thing, no idea what started it, only that it was done without so much as a whimper, no teachers got involved, I'm not even sure any of the other kids even noticed it, which is kind of hard to believe, but then I remember, we were six, six-year-old kids are pretty clueless.
2. If you're going to fight, don't talk first, just fight.  I learned this from the first and last fight of my high school career, which oddly enough was not of my own doing, but rather the result of some misplaced jealousy and really shady teenage drama making.  I confronted a kid in my homeroom.  Through what I considered to be a wild rumor, I had heard that he wanted to fight me for something I had never done.  I was like, "Hey Joey, what's this I hear about..." and that's when I saw the fist coming.  The bruise on my jaw was testament to the fact that diplomacy had failed, and I suppose to the fact that I can take a punch.
3. If you're going to use violence, you really need to commit to it.  In the above mentioned fight, during the grappling and pushing phase, I remember pretty much my only conscious thought was whether or not to smash Joey's testicles into a pulp, I had a clear shot for a nice swift knee to the groin and was actually weighing that option when a couple of other boys pulled us apart. Had I been slightly more ruthless, and decisive that kid would have been the last of his bloodline, and I probably would have been in considerably more trouble.  Joey to this day has no idea that, A. I was fully capable of squashing his grapes and B. was just about to do it, viciously. To this day, there is is this part of me that wishes I had pulled the trigger on that knee to the groin.  He totally deserved it, and it would have probably put me on the list of people not to be messed with in my high school.  But at the same time, while it may have "taught him a lesson," I know it probably would not have taught me the lesson that I needed to learn, which is:
4. Violence never solves anything. If I had taken that swing, it would have made the next few weeks, more pleasant.  I would have had the "honor" of reducing a kid who sucker-punched me to a crying pile of Def-Leppard clad goo, and I would not have had to "watch my back."  As it was though, he thought the whole thing was more or less a draw, and still had the illusion that he could beat me up.  He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and tended to announce things, like the fact that he was going to ambush me when I got off the bus after school.  I wasn't about to relive the unsuspected punch to the jaw this time, this time I was ready, I had back up, and I was going to hurt this slime ball.  Sure enough here he came, in the parking lot of the bank near my bus stop, his arms were out to his side and all his really tender bits were just begging to be kicked, I was being given a second chance to live out my violence.  I can still remember it pretty vividly, my best friend was with me, there was this lady in a minivan saying, "hey you boys, stop it," but making no move to get out of her car, she was afraid of us.  And she was probably right, he wanted to fight, and honestly, I wanted to fight, and I could see the opening, guts begging to be punched, a nose in the middle of pugnacious face just begging to be smashed, a stupid, worthless waste of human flesh that I wanted to stomp into the asphalt, this time there would be no hesitation and no mercy, and I was just about to do it, and feel utterly justified, but then here came my Dad.  Ostensibly just going to the post office, at a time of day when he never went to the post office, but since my antagonist had been so very public about his intentions, even my Dad knew something was going down. Dad did the grown up thing and mentioned that if this sort of teenage nonsense didn't end here and now, police would be getting involved.  I have no idea what went through Joey's head, probably not much, but in mine it was like the end of The Lord of the Flies, where the kids come out on to the beach and there's an adult, and the savagery of the world they had been living in comes crashing down around them.  Now I couldn't, even though I wanted to, even though I had been primed for days by anxiety and hatred, even though I could envision Joey bleeding on the pavement, I was not going to be allowed to live that through.

Over the years, I hold my head higher when I think of the times that I prevented a fight or walked away from a fight, than on the fights I was in.  The fights, even the ones I won, are embarrassing.  I would rather really tell you about the one with the girl in first grade, which I totally and unequivocally lost, than the ones that I remember in more detail, especially the one with Joey. I really wish I could say it was my last one, but it was just the last one in school.  And that's really the worst part of it, none of that really taught me that violence is not the answer, if I was back in that bank parking lot now, I would still feel that rage and that desire to inflict violence.
This is the place I find myself in with regard to many sins and virtues, I only understand the virtue if I have been afflicted by the sin.  I only understand the power and the worth of peace because I have been through violence, I have felt it's rush and I have experienced it's weight, I have walked up to the edge of inflicting serious harm and have backed away.  I have learned that security through violence is folly.  Violence does not make the world safer, it only spawns and brings forth more violence.
But in the moment, it's hard to see that.  When we feel threatened and wronged, our impulse is to fight.  Oddly enough, we can twist the virtues of righteousness and justice to the extent where our own violence seems ultimately justified.  You need to be aware though, when you do that, your "enemy" probably is as well.  Neither one of you is correct, and you are both lesser for allowing yourself to get trapped in that web.  That is true if you are kids on the playground or nation states, violence erodes our humanity.
I don't know what ever happened to Joey, I suspect his life has been hard, since while my part in our little fracas cost me a three day suspension, his lead to 10 and an eventual expulsion (it wasn't his first trip to the principals office). It was, however, my last, except if you count the times I got called there to win an award. At the time of our fight, we were roughly the same size, when I saw him next, three years later, while I was working at a supermarket, I was at least four or five inches taller than him.  He kind of sneered at me, and I more or less pretended he didn't exist.  We never did make peace, but I learned a lot about why nonviolence is really our only hope from my history of violence.

Necessary Evil?

When are we going to catch on?
That necessary evil is still evil.
When are we going to see through the lies:
That we must discriminate,
That we must hate,
That we must imprison,
That we must oppress,
That we must kill.

Calling it our jobs,
Following orders,
Believing that it's necessary,
Saying that we're "only human,"
Does not make us righteous,
Does not make us safe,
Does not make us whole,
It makes us all less human.

Fear builds walls,
Fear builds prisons,
Fear aims the gun,
Fear pulls the trigger,
Fear drops bombs,
Fear pushes us into necessary evil.

Love casts out fear,
But fear is persistent and clever,
Fear can wear a mask
That looks like love,
But is really a shadow.
And in the shadows
Necessary Evil lurks.

There Goes Our Conservative Street Cred

And now, faith, hope and love abide, these three;

And the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13: 13

In the not so distant past, I dreaded this day.  I kind of knew it was coming, but I sort of hoped that it would take longer than it did.  I admit, I had great trepidation about what would happen if our particular part of the Body of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), were to actually move towards being fully inclusive of homosexual people.  Well we crossed one line a couple of years ago, we said that LGBTQ people could be ordained as Elders, even if they didn't agree to keep their sex lives on ice.  Some folks got mad, and walked away, and they said on the way out the door: "You just watch!  The next thing is going to be marriage!  They're going to want to get married, then what you gonna do brother?"

Sure enough, yesterday, the amendment to our constitution that clears the way for our churches to sanction same-gender marriages passed the requisite number of Presbyteries, and will go into effect on June 21.  While this truly and honestly seems like a step in the right direction for Christian faith in the 21st century, I feel like the thing to do is not get too loud and boisterous about it.  There is just too much important stuff still going on for us to gloat and carry on.  For one thing, this is just a small step in breaking the stranglehold that conservative political positions have had on the minds of American Christians, and yes, I am talking about all of us, even those of us in "liberal" traditions like the PC(USA) or the Episcopalian Church.  For another, it is important not to repeat the process of marginalizing a group of people who disagree with us.  We should not trumpet our inclusion and acceptance of LGBTQ people in the face of people for whom this is a difficult reality to accept.

Every time we make a change or even a statement, no matter how carefully discussed and thought through, someone is going to get mad about it.  We're just dealing with things that are far too sensitive; things like sex, Israel, abortion (which is related to sex as well), economic justice, racism, these things are what you call, "hot buttons."  And when you press hot buttons, people get mad.  My sort of default position was to think that we would be better off to just leave well enough alone. Except for the fact that these issues are causing people real pain, and once I admitted that to myself, the status quo became less and less tolerable within a very short period of time..

Yes, it was because of a change in cultural values, and yes, the church is called to be counter-cultural in some ways, but it got to the point where we were challenging a point of culture that was actually moving towards justice and, dare I say, love.  Love is supposed to be our thing, we're supposed to love people, even our enemies, we're supposed to be the forgiveness people, not the morality police.  The whole mess put us in a very bad place as a church.  I'm not so naive as to think that this move resolves the tension that has been pulling at our denomination for over 40 years, in fact, this probably sets the stage for more disagreements and schisms at the local level, in congregations and presbyteries across the country.  That's really what I was dreading: the day when we couldn't just keep calm and carry on.  I admit, that was selfish of me, to want this all to just go away, just so I didn't have to deal with it. 

As for me, my own heart changed a while back.  Part of it was looking at the people who were getting married whenever States made it legal.  They were not deviants, they were not dangerous to the fabric of society, they were mostly middle aged men and women who just wanted to live with the people they loved (and in many cases had loved for a rather long time) and feel that it was somehow normal and maybe even blessed, both inside and out. Part of it was God working on me, and yes, I do mean the same God that the Bible talks about, there is only one.  There was this moment where I read through the story of the woman caught in adultery, and when Jesus said, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone," I knew he was talking to me.  That's Biblical faith as I understand it, letting the Living Word work on you and challenge what you think you know.  Once I put my stone down and walked away from all my fear and anxiety a lot of the arguments that had seemed so persuasive stopped holding water.

Reality got a hold of me using a mystical voice, and the combination of those two is just really hard to refute for the sake of a few verses.  Slippery slope arguments, talk of abominations, and "love the sinner, hate the sin," all seemed to dissolve like so much dust.  The facts didn't change, my heart did.

I had to learn to love a little bit more than I did, I had to expand the definition of who my neighbor was, and actually consider whether it was loving for me to deny the holiness of how they experienced love.

Now, it's not so much a matter of whether this is going to trouble my conscience, but whether or not I can help people in my congregation deal with this issue, when not if, this comes up. Even as I learned to love one group of people, I need to hold on to the love I have for people who are seriously troubled by this sort of change.  I can't just make the same mistake over again and ignore their convictions.  I do pray that God will change hearts and open us to be more loving towards all, but in the meantime I've got to try and love people where they are, that's why I need to restrain my urge to celebrate something I truly feel is right.

This following Jesus thing is really tough sometimes.

Be Hippocratical

Ahh Saint Patrick's Day, a shining example of how people can utterly and shamefully misapprehend the events of history.  It's not quite as bad as Columbus Day mind you, but nonetheless it is essentially a celebration of the unholy union between Christian faith and Imperialism.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Pat was a good fellow, I'm quite sure that bringing Jesus to an entire island of benighted heathen would really earn him an extra crown in heaven, if I believed heaven worked at all like that.  In fact, I suspect that the actual impact of importing Roman Catholicism into Ireland is rather a wash on an objective level, and so there was the invention of a myth about Pat driving out the snakes.  Thing is though, cold, places like Ireland don't tend to be the favorite hangouts for cold-blooded creatures like snakes, and what snakes there were probably did mostly useful things like, I don't know, control the rodent population.  You know the funny thing about Boubonic Plague, I mean if there is anything funny about the Black Death?  It's spread by rats and the fleas that love them.  You know what eats rats?  Snakes.
Anyhoo, there's always the eternal souls of those poor pagans that Pat brought to Jesus, surely if you're going to die young from the Plague, at least you can get to go hang with JC?  Right?
Okay, I'm going to take the cynical stick out of my craw right about now, and I want to talk seriously to religious people, and believe me, I'm talking to myself as much as anyone else, but I want those of us who talk about a savior and/or about a gracious and loving God, or even some sort of elevated awareness called enlightenment, I want you to consider something: are you actually making the world a better place?
Don't immediately hide behind your justifications of sin or run and get your gnostic excuses that this world is just a shadow and a passing affliction that people of faith must somehow just live through, actually examine for a moment, is God's creation, in any way improved by what you believe?
I'll even let you balance things out; I'll accept that gift to charity, or that mission trip you went on where you built a house for a poor person, that's cool, good work.
But I want you to analyze the big picture of your life, do you work for justice as often as you should?  Do you show mercy to people who are broken?  Are you humble enough to admit that maybe you don't have all the answers?
If you observe the world carefully, and at least attempt to be the tiniest bit objective, you will quickly find that religious people are often at the heart of some of the absolute worst messes the human race has ever cooked up.  In fact, at the moment, the fundamentalist wingnuts in the three monotheistic religions are doing just about everything they can do to bring about Armageddon, and some of them are actually aware that that's what they're doing, seriously, it's their end game, let's start a huge conflagration so that God/Allah has no choice but to intervene and prove us right.  It goes like this: the sons of Jacob (Religious Zionism) think the State of Israel ought to be like the Kingdom of Israel, the divinely sanctioned, home of he LORD and his chosen people.  The radical fundamentalist sons of Ishmael (Arab Muslims) are cheesed off that Israel exists in any form and that, even worse, a group of Arab Muslims (and Christians I should probably add) were kicked out of their homes to make it so.  Back in the US of A, a whole raft of fundamentalist Christian types think that Israel is just super peachy, and feel super guilty that our Christian world has sort of treated the Jews rather badly over the years, so let's make ammends, right?  After all, the A-Rabs are going to hate us no matter what we do, so let's just keep dropping bombs on those haters.  I mean, from the perspective of some, why not just start a big old apocalypse, because that's when Jesus is going to come back.
I feel Christopher Hitchens smirking from the void, or wherever he wanted to be.
I have to admit, that most of the really intractable conflicts of humanity would be less intractable if people didn't believe so absolutely that God was on their side.
Would subtracting religion solve the Arab-Israeli conflict?  No.
Would subtracting religion make Western Imperialism go away?  No.
Would subtracting religion put an end to ISIS and Boko Haram?  I don't actually know, but I suspect those folks would just find another reason to hate.
The fact of the matter is that none of these things is all the fault of religious fervor, but it is also pretty clear that religious fervor fuels them, and does nothing to slow them down, and that, friends and neighbors, is the problem.  It is also a challenge, because it means that if religion is part of the problem, then it is incumbent upon religious people to help fix it.  People who "get it" from all quarters need to stand up to those who are using the name of their God in vain.  Yes, Muslims need to condemn ISIS, but I also need to condemn John Hagee and Pat Robertson and anyone else who believes that there should be a Christian Empire, I need to stop using the excuse that, well they're my brothers in Christ and I shouldn't really talk badly about them.  I must love the church and my America enough to critique them when they are making the world a more violent place and when they are contributing to the suffering of God's Creation.
I need to remember that Jesus was not all about the next world, he cared rather passionately about what happens in this one, and if I'm going to follow him, I should as well.
I think maybe what needs to happen is for Christians (and other religious types) to stop being hypocritical and consider the Hippocratic oath (see how those two words are similar, but mean different things, dang I'm clever) which says: "first do no harm."  Jesus said this thing one time about taking the log out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from another.  That's pretty good advice, as usual.

Learning Curves

At first I just chuckled.  I posted it to Facebook and waited for people to like it.  Then I started to think about it, and it just gets less funny.  I read the Bible a bit, and I am often struck by the way in which the people in those ancient stories, from vastly different cultures and worldviews, are going through some pretty familiar sounding trials and tribulations.  They are afflicted by greed, jealousy, lust, anger, pride and are more or less always on the verge of some idolatry or another.

It's troubling how little we have actually learned in thousands of years of recorded history.  We're just barely breaking out of the shell of tribalism, which has recently put on some big boy pants and called itself nationalism.  We have "grown" technologically very quickly, but we are still very much like teenagers behind the wheel of this thing called a world.  We often try to drive a bit too fast and end up crashing into each other or into natural boundaries.

One would think we would have learned to reflect and think of the overall wisdom of our actions by this point, but we have not.  Our technological ability outstrips our moral sense, and our moral sense outstrips our cultural actions.  In other words, we have the ability to do a thing before we question it's righteousness, and we are aware of a danger before we have the sense to avoid it.  Our history with Nuclear physics is a perfect example, we were able to make a bomb and use a bomb before we were able to use our knowledge for power generation and all sorts of constructive scientific applications.  We had to live through Hiroshima, Nagasaki and later Chernobyl, before we truly understood that we had unleashed a terror on the world, and it was a tense half century before we could finally sort of trust that some hothead wasn't going to trigger Armageddon.  Nuclear disarmament is still just a pipe dream, but there is a real sense that we have tiptoed back from the brink of that abyss.  However, we are certainly not out of the woods and we're still not really asking the right questions about our technological advances, let alone our political behavior.

The dualisms of liberal/conservative, dove/hawk, secular/religious, continue to trouble us.  Furthermore, the arrogance that tells us that one side or the other of a dualism is actually going to solve the problem just digs our pit deeper.  We are not able to see around our ideology and consider whether or not the solution we tacitly accept is the right one.

And too often, far too often, we operate from a place of fear, uncertainty, with an attitude of scarcity, where we constantly worry that there will not be enough, which takes me all the way back to Bible, where God was repeatedly demonstrating to people that there could be enough, and further that they could be enough.

How long until we learn that lesson?  That's another question the Bible asks quite a bit: How Long?

Shakedown Hike

Today was finally the day.  The snow was gone, the weather cooperated (in an odd sort of way), and I finally got a chance to really test out my body and my gear for the Camino.  Today was a little over 11 miles in the rain.

Still, I'm pretty happy here, because I walked about three quarters of an average day's walk on the Camino in about four hours, in the rain.  The walk helped me make a couple of decisions I had been mulling over, and drew my attention to which spots on my feet I'm going to need to protect right from the get go.  It also helped me realize that walking in a fairly persistent rain is not the absolute worst thing that can happen to you.

A little rain never hurt no one.

There is so much of this adventure that happens in between the ears.  I have been thinking and packing based on a sort of "be prepared" kind of motto.  That's pretty much a surefire way to carry things you don't need for almost 500 miles.  I don't need as much as I thought I needed, and so I'm ditching a couple things I had considered necessary in the pack until today.

This is the process of preparation: figuring out what you really need, not what you think might be handy.  I don't need to carry handy for 500 miles, I need to carry necessary.

My pack and my soul are getting lighter as I learn what to leave behind.

Now Children...

Ever heard the expression: "Give someone enough rope and they'll probably hang themselves?"
47 Republican Senators really should have given that some thought.
As it turns out, some of the same people who have been frothing at the mouth to try to catch President Obama in some sort of impropriety or over-reach of his authority, have sort of stumbled into precisely the sort of thing they were really hoping Barak would step in himself.  Check out the Logan Act, which was passed in 1799, yes that's right, a mere 10 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the US of A was just a wee baby nation state.  It essentially states that private individuals should in no way be able to negotiate with nation states on behalf of other nations without specific authorization of the nation they are negotiating with.  It is named the Logan Act because one Dr. George Logan, of Pennsylvania took it upon himself to get all involved with negotiations with France at a sort of touchy moment.  Needless to say, President Adams and some others took exception and thus: a law against meddling in the foreign affairs of your government, no matter how good your intentions.
Fast forward to 1936 and a Supreme Court decision in the case of the United States V. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, where a private company was brought up on charges of violating a trade embargo against South American Countries in the Chaco War.  The embargo was imposed by President Franklin Roosevelt under the authority of an actual act of Congress.  C-W Exports said that the Congress couldn't give the President such authority and that such an embargo was a bunch of malarkey and so nanny-nanny-boo-boo, we should be able to make a buck on a foreign war (sounds sort of like Haliburton).
The Supreme Court disagreed, in fact, they went as far as to say that the interests of the nation vis-a-vis foreign policy were of such primary importance that you can basically assume that the President has authority to do such stuff, EVEN WITHOUT CONGRESS.  Here is the quote from Justice Sutherland's majority opinion:

It is important to bear in mind that we are here dealing not alone with an authority vested in the President by an exertion of legislative power, but with such an authority plus the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations–a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress, but which, of course, like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution.

Okee dokee, if I can find that in about ten minutes on Wikipedia, how is it that 47 US Senators, I'm guess a fair number of whom have law degrees, and all of whom have super well paid legal counsel, think they can just toss it out the window and have no one notice that they may have just committed treason?
The two dudes from Tennessee, who refused to add their signatures, are probably feeling like the smartest guys in the room.
Look folks, I don't care if you like Barack Obama, I don't care if you think he's doing a good job, he is our elected leader, and he is nothing if not careful.  Seriously, the guy could and, and probably should have brought the hammer down on all this obstructionist and frankly seditious behavior a long time ago, but he didn't.  Probably because he has a bit of a sense of history and legacy and doesn't want the first black President to go down as a bully or a thug, and so he has taken the high road for the most part. If you would like a comparison, look at how Vlad Putin deals with people who disagree with him, say what you want, dude gets thing DONE, but I wouldn't vote for him.
In fact, the more of this stuff that happens, the more O looks like a grown up trying to deal with a room full of petulant children.  In it all he has seemed to me, more and more dignified.  He may, in fact, have ceded some of his power and passed on some opportunities to do more by taking advantage of his detractor's impetuous behavior, but he usually comes out in the end looking rather vindicated.
Now that his time as our leader is drawing to a close, I am a bit torn, on the one hand I want him to push a bit more to get things done, but on the other hand I also want him to keep to the high road and not leave in a flurry of flying crap.  Maybe that "turn the other cheek," thing really can work, even in the twisted world of politics,  We will see.

Social Studies

I want to give props to my 9th grade Social Studies teacher Mr. Eric Schott.  Not only was he a cool guy who could quote the Pixies and played the Dead Kennedys in class, he also was the first teacher I ever had who was able to present the rather stilted and biased curriculum of the American Educational system as though there was more than one side to the story.  He taught Comparative World Cultures and a class called Current Affairs (this was before Clinton so that didn't sound quite so sordid).  It was 1988, the Soviet Union was on the ropes, the Berlin wall actually came down, within a year and David Hasselhoff became known as a singer loved by Germans everywhere.  O the times they were a changin'.
Up until that point, I had been presented with a historical and political narrative, wherein, western culture, particularly American Christianity was the apex of human society, and everyone else were either benighted savages or sinister communists bent on killing the very idea of God and in the process also crushing the human soul.
At this particular moment in history the USA and the USSR were still sort of locked in the 50 year detente of the cold war and fingers were on buttons.  That was about to change, but everyone was pretty much skeptical that something with such high stakes and that had been so intractable for so long could just, all of the sudden, not be a thing anymore.  We had a bad guy.  We had, what they refer to in literature as a foil, a Moriarty to our Holmes, a Lex Luther to our Superman, you get the idea.  As it turns out, our enemy wasn't quite as together as we thought and it turns out that he was the one with feet of clay or a glass jaw or whatever metaphor you like for a fatal flaw.
The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the nightmare of nuclear annihilation was pretty big news, and we talked a bit about that, but what I want to give Mr. Schott big ups for was the fact that he also taught us about Islam.  Granted, we got the 1980s version, which was that there were basically two kinds of Muslim: Sunni and Shia (or Shiite, which was an endless source of vulgar humor for 14 year olds).  At that point, the Sunni were the good guys and the Shia were the bad guys.  We were supporting Saddam Hussein in his heroic battle against Ayatollah Khomeni, and we were big fans and suppliers to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan because those scrappy little dudes were taking on the mighty Red Army, and actually winning.  One of those "heroic" commie fighters was a young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden (not that that meant anything yet).
Mr. Schott was rather careful not to let us buy that story though.  He presented the history of the two groups within Islam and pointed out that actually the Shia were a rather drastic minority, historically persecuted by the Sunni, and that Iran, big bad Iran (which under no circumstances should ever be pronounced Eye-Ran), the ancient Persian Empire Iran, which was in no means to be trifled with Iran, was very much defined by their desire to be left well enough alone.
They are surrounded by Sunnis who don't like them, their theocracy is very much threatened by western values, and everyone, everywhere is always trying to tell them what to do.  You have to understand that, to a 9th grader, this is radical stuff, because you understand how that feels.  I became very sympathetic to Iran, not in the "gee I would like to go there" sort of way, but at least in the way I felt bad for some of the poor kids who were always getting picked on for not having the "right" jeans or sneakers.  I also understood the feeling sort of first hand, because I was sort of growing into a bit of a misfit identity myself.  The news just presented Iran as a threat, as an international bad actor, as a human rights catastrophe.  I know, all of that is true, they really are a bit of a spaz, but you need to understand why before you go rounding up the bully mob.
I really don't want Iran to get a nuke anymore than Bibi Netanyahu, for the same reason I wish Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't manage to get guns.  But I'm pretty sure as long as we keep treating them like pariahs, they're only going to want to hate us more.
Here is something they share with the Russians, which I don't think Americans or Westerners really ever understand: the capacity to suffer.  I learned a lot about the Russians from reading Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.  I know that our posture towards them during the Cold War, was probably the single biggest reason why the thing went on as long as it did.  As long as the Kruschevs of the world could convince the long suffering Russians that the USA was more abhorrent than the privations visited on them by Communism, the stoic Russian people would just suck it up and take it.  They're really amazing like that.
Iran has a similar character.  They have been alone so long they have lost many of the social skills and diplomatic instincts that we hear so much about in the Biblical narratives about Persian rulers like Cyrus and Xerxes, who at one point were hailed as actual messiahs by the Jews who had been exiled into Babylon (Iraq).  In a very real sense, the United States is sort of like a high school freshman on the scene of global politics (a big strong freshman, but way awkward).
We stumble our way through some sort of relationship (if you can even call it that) with these ancient cultures, with ethnic and religious grudge matches that go back to a time when the only great Empires on this continent were called Lenape, Aztec and Mayan.
The problem that we have is that we don't care to understand these ancient stories, we simply judge by who does what we want them to do, and who is more or less friendly to our interests.  Got oil?  You can be our friend.  Willing to sign our treaties and not break them (and not get too mad when we do)?  You're reasonable people.  Angry about poverty and economic injustice?  Sorry, we don't like angry people.  Threatened by lax moral standards and being surrounded by all sorts of licentious imagery and behavior?  Well then you must be a fundamentalist extremist, we can't even talk to you.
We are so very ignorant about the cultures and attitudes of people who are different from us, and the world is going global faster than we would care to admit. It's becoming too dangerous to continue to blunder about in our freshman fugue.  We need to learn, and we need to engage, and we need to stop letting ignorance and fear run us.

T-Minus 30 Days

Thirty days until I'm wheels up for Spain.  These will be thirty very busy days, because it's Lent, and because I'm not just popping off for a vacation.  I've got all sorts of little odds and ends to get prepared so that things will run smoothly in my absence: little prayers to write, Calls to Worship and hymn selections for six Sundays.  I've got preachers lined up, I've got the support of my congregation, I'm going to make sure that as many of the details are in place as I can... and then I'm going to go.
And I'm going to have to deal with the reality that life will go right on without me.
I have been through the phase where I worried about everything that could go wrong, but now I'm in the phase where I wonder: if I'm really that expendable.  Lots of "forward thinkers" in the church-y world are saying that salaried clergy are becoming an anachronism, that the church of the future needs to be more open to different gifts and less rigid.  "Churches are shrinking," they say, "the Pastor's salary is often the biggest line item in the budget," they say, "maybe we should be trying to help the poor instead of supporting one person's career as a professional church-person."
Sometimes it reminds me of a scene in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey's character is asked to justify his job, to explain what he does so that he won't be fired.  The result is... well... wonderful, but not the sort of thing I'm going to link to here, you know because of the whole NSFW aspect of the interweb, but if you're resourceful, you can find it on youtube.
The funny thing is that this sort of sentiment comes from pundits (yes the church has those too), and it neglects to consider the fact that institutional maintenance, while tedious, is necessary.  And it neglects to consider that the majority of the people in normal churches are not really theologians, which is okay, the world probably has enough theologians as it is, but that the church does need at least a few, you know for highly esoteric functions like trying to root our current practice with a two thousand year old tradition that needs us to stay alive, and like trying to formulate a vision for the rather eclectic collection of human beings that make up our congregation that involves more than just doing the same thing over and over again.
I think at some point, most pastors have this fear of being found out, not for some deep, dark and sordid secret, but for simply being unnecessary.  These church pundits are not helping.  Want to know if your pastor has this fear? Watch them, are they over-functioning (this means do they have their hand in everything)?  Are they obsessive about making sure everything is just so?  Do they "need to know" about every little sniffle and outpatient procedure?  Do they seem like they're sort of constantly on the edge of burning out?
Now ask yourself, do you want them that way?
Be honest, you probably do.  Because you know how much they get paid, and you wonder if they're worth it.  And if they're busy, and if they're "on top of things," and if the institution of the church runs like a well oiled machine and if complaints are sort of down to a dull roar, and if their sermons are inspiring and not too long, and if they have neat ideas about how to "get people involved," well then they're doing their job, and you're getting your money's worth.
Church, I know it sounds harsh when you say it like this.  I'm sorry, it is harsh, but it's something we all need to hear, clergy and congregations alike.  I phrase it like this, not as an accusation against the people in churches, because you're probably even now getting defensive and saying, "that's not how we are at all!"  I know, that's not how you mean it, but it is how it sounds when your pastor hears your grumbling through the filter of, their own insecurities, their own doubts about their call and their abilities.
I know this because it is a fear I have had to wrestle with in deciding to take a 40 day trip to Spain.
Can I just up and leave?
Do I want to let them see how well they'll get along without me?
Can I admit that I am really that expendable?
I want to be absolutely clear on this to non-GSPC readers, this congregation, especially the Session has been absolutely supportive of my little adventure.  I didn't have to assuage their fears, they said, "Go for it," from the very beginning.  I have had to deal with my own uncertainty about the magnitude of the absence.  I have had to fight off the demons of over-function and control issues.
Surprisingly (though perhaps only to me) the congregation has been quick to see the value of this journey.  They see how this is going to help me be a healthier in the long run, and I suppose they know that a healthy pastor is better than one on the verge of burnout.  One who has a vision and engages the journey is better than one who is constantly battling their own insecurity.  I think it's helping me already.
Somebody actually told me, "this seems like exactly the sort of thing a Pastor needs to do from time to time."  They said it in a context of sort of amazement at the distance, and peculiarity of simply leaving everything for over a month.  Moments like that, where an awareness of what the church is really about: being on a journey together and appreciating that there different parts and different inspirations and different calls, goes a long way to making more sense out of all the static.
That is the astounding truth and beauty of the church: we can be grumblers and complainers for sure, but every once in a while we see the light, and we are the light.

Farewell, You Old Codger

A while back I preached this sermon, detailing my experience of learning how to preach from Fred Craddock.  Today, I learned that Fred has joined the church triumphant.  I spent all of about five days with Fred, if you had asked him about me, he would not have known me from Adam, but he affected me.  He gave me the courage to get out from behind my protective shield when I preach, both literally from behind the pulpit, and figuratively in the sense that he cut me loose from trying to emulate someone else.
Craddock is one of the most gifted preachers you will ever hear.  He could do the same sort of thing that we hear Jesus doing in his teaching: come up beside you, tell you a good story, get you feeling the right feelings and thinking the right thoughts and then kind of level you with a truth that you really didn't expect.  Fred was also, when I spent my time with him, a grumpy old man, and I mean that in the kindest possible sense.  He was a curmudgeon, an old fashioned southern gentleman who warned us against ever saying that someone had "issues," because his granddaughter (who is most likely about my age) was rather fond of just saying "issues," whenever someone was acting odd.
For my part, even as star struck as I was, I knew that I was never going to give up on one of my favorite little Gen-Xish phrases.  I rather enjoy defining someone with an odd personality or quirky behavior or random phobia as having issues.
Fred had issues, with our use of the word issues, or maybe he just had issues with a world that seemed like it was changing a little too quickly, and he really liked the way things used to be.  I don't know, but I do know he gave us young whippersnappers some really good advice.
He told us that there never was, and there never will be a preacher who was good enough for us to imitate, including himself.  Which was shocking because we were in the middle of spending the better part of a week learning about how he prepared and delivered his famous sermons.  I won't claim that this advice really sunk in right away.  My own issues at the time were delusions of grandeur and learning how to preach like Fred Craddock, of being a sort of preaching celebrity like him, of being able to turn the tide of a church that was in decline by simply being an amazing preacher.
I needed to learn that that idea was just wrong.  I needed to realize that that idea was going to kill me inside.  I needed to learn that that idea was going to keep me from actually being a good preacher.  And I think I could really only learn that from one of the best preachers in the world, because I have issues.
My week with Fred made me a better preacher, or at least a different preacher.  I made the manuscript just a step in the process of preparation, the written word now stayed at home and a rough outline went with me to the pulpit, and then I left it there, and I went out into the great wide open and preached naked (not literally, I have always been fully clothed).  I told stories, sometimes stories about myself, and about painful or funny or instructive things that happened to me.  I stopped leaning so much on other people's stories and the dry theories of theologians, I started talking about my own living relationship with the Word, not all at once mind you, but steadily that is what it became.
I credit the old curmudgeon with giving me the nudge out of the nest that I needed.  Even if maybe I'm not the preacher he thinks I should be, I'm pretty sure I'm the preacher I need to be, and he gave me permission to go that way, whether he knew it or not.  It was his authority as a teacher that set me free.
I am thankful for the gift of that time and that gift.  I know that I was part of one of the last groups that he gave that gift, his health was in decline, and he just couldn't get around like he used to.  Our paths crossed at the right moment, and I know that was no accident.  So when I saw the news today, I was rather grieved.  I only spent a week with him, but he has been with me ever since, every time I step out from behind that pulpit, I take that step in honor of Fred.
So Craddock, do me one last favor, tell Jesus I said, "Hey."

Poem for a Snowy Day during Lent

Security is the cry
Oppression is the price
"We have to protect our own!"
Means we have to kill someone.

Like water from a poison stream
It looks so necessary,
Until it makes you sick.
Nightshade, deep and powerful
Deadly.

Defend, interdict, prevent!
Hold on to what you have!
Seek to save your life...
The Cross is folly.

Woody said, "Let's have Christ our President."
But the carpenter isn't running for office.
He doesn't want your crown
Because of the thorns;
And he's already got a better one.

Violence, Power,
Power, Violence,
An endless and tedious refrain

To quote Leonard,
"When they said, 'Repent!'
I wonder what they meant."
Can we really turn away the "way things always have been?"
Can we really turn towards Grace?

Can we forgive before our anger turns to hate?
Can we be better, even if nothing else changes?
Can we give a gift, when we know it will be misused?
Can we really give anything?
Or is it all just a usurious loan?

I Just... I Mean I Can't...

Church signs can make me cringe sometimes.  You might think that I would be cool with people cleverly sloganizing Christian themes, but I think, and maybe this is getting worse as time goes on, I'm not.
I saw the following phrase on a church sign this morning on my way to drop my daughter off at school: "Body Piercing Saved My Life."  I had a physiological response to it, want to know what it was?  Picture your grandparents getting "frisky."
I'm trying to track down exactly what it is about these signs that makes me sort of clench up.  I think I have a pretty good sense of humor.  I don't really mind at all when people tell a good joke, even when that joke involves the peculiarities of church or faith.  I have seen church signs on the internet that were actually good, but I wonder how far they had to travel to find them. Most of the church signs and Christian bumper stickers I see out there range from blah to blech.
I have come to prefer church signs that just do boring old sign work: tell us something about something.  It's not that I don't believe you can really get a good zinger up on the old board sometimes, there is anecdotal evidence that you can, it's just that I think humor is so very subjective and it can go wrong so easily.  One of my homiletics professors cautioned us against being too clever with our sermon titles because there is a danger of being "pornographic," because it profanes. trivializes and mocks something that is supposed to be sacred (as pornography does with sexuality).
For instance, the clever little gag about body piercing, referencing Jesus crucifixion.  First off, emphasizing the rather brutal notion that the brutality of Christ's death is somehow the vehicle of salvation rather than the very fact of his life, and moreover the reality of his resurrection is sort of dire and grim soteriology to be sure.  But even if you're not going there exactly, there is also the fact that crucifixion is decidedly one of the least funny things that have ever happened on the face of the earth.  There are some things that just shouldn't be joked about, some things so brutal and evil that humor cannot break through.  Gallows humor has to walk right up to the edge of morbidity and brutality and sort of laugh into the void, but sometimes one loses their balance.
There's an old joke: "Jesus walks into a hotel, hands the concierge three nails and says, 'can you put me up for the night?'"   Hah, sort of, not actually very funny, but also not particularly offensive, because everything about it shouts, "this is a stupid joke."  It's funny because it's stupid, and a little vulgar, but somehow the vulgarity is toned down by the non-pretentious context of a vaudeville/burlesque presentation.
Church signs on the other hand tend to shout: "Take us seriously!"  The humor in this context is tinged with the seriousness of people being "saved."  The gravitas of faith and spirituality can make for some good jokes to be sure, but good religious humor has to have a very special tone.  You can poke fun at the human part of church, you can laugh about cantankerous old "saints," you can poke fun at the silly way we sometimes handle Scripture, you can get a good laugh at misapprehensions, i.e. Monty Python's The Life of Brian, "Blessed are the cheesemakers."
In fact, Python's send up of first century Judea, is rather hilarious, it just oozes sacrilege, but they're standing off to the side as critics and scoffers, not trying to be funny from within the walls of a church.  And maybe that's what makes the difference for me at least.  The pathos fails.  I'm looking at those signs and thinking, "what are they thinking?"  I'm wondering if they get the fact that their cleverness and their sense of humor is just off.  I'm wondering, if I, as an insider to this Christianity thing, am a little skeeved by the clumsy attempt at being funny, what do outsiders think?  Is this presenting the Gospel? or is this making a mockery of it?
Would I be offended, for instance, if Monty Python made some sort of body piercing joke in one of their skits about Jesus?  Probably not, I would expect that sort of morbid humor from them.
Maybe there's a key to this back in the idea of pornography.  No one who has experienced an actual, healthy sexual relationship would find anything about pornography to be realistic, but someone who has not experienced a healthy relationship might get all sorts of bad ideas.  If you don't know what "real" people look like without their clothes on, and you expect your actual girlfriend to look like a Playboy model, without understanding about airbrushing and such, you're going to have some problems with intimacy, and you may really hurt some feelings.
Art is full of nudity, but it's not pornography, mostly because artists are portraying the beauty of the natural world rather than trying to make something that is salacious.  You might notice in old paintings that naked bodies come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes, as in the work of Goya for instance, the bodies are rather less than perfect.
Humor is a form of art, it points out our imperfections, and it helps us also see beauty.  Pornography mostly fails to be art because it points us to a false sort of intimacy/beauty, it presents sex as sordid and silly rather than as intimate and loving.
Trying to present the reality of a relationship with God and what it means to really follow Christ in a few dozen characters on a sign board is an absolutely impossible task.  Perhaps lampooning the brutality of crucifixion is not the best way for people to be drawn towards the nuances of various perspectives of atonement, perhaps threats about damnation, no matter how hidden behind sarcasm are not the best way to call disciples to your community.
I'm still not sure I have a handle on all this, but for now, I'm going to keep our signs pretty simple.

Sizing Up the Competition

Over the weekend we hosted a Waldensian Pastor (what exactly Waldensians are is a really interesting historical tangent, but not one I'm going to deal with here) from Northern Italy.  He is in this country on a sort of study sabbatical, and a large part of his study is to discuss all things cultural and ecclesiastical with the pastors and churches he visits in America.  Many of our discussions were about how things are different in Italy, attitudes towards food, cars, guns, church, the healthcare system.  I am generally of the opinion that the closest thing we American religious types have to a time machine is our ability to learn from the Church in Europe.  We can look backward to the history on the one hand, but we can also look forward as well, to see what the reality of church in an increasingly secular society will be like.
There are many differences in the context that my Waldensian brother faces as he works his way through this thing called ministry.  He is part of a protestant minority in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation.  In Italy, pretty much all protestants have to stick together, because even now, the Romans run the show.  As an American Protestant, I can sort of allow myself to be neutral or perhaps even sympathetic to the Roman Catholic system, they're not holding any power over me, and have not for a very long time.  In this country, Catholics pretty much have no choice but to get in the trenches with the people they once called heretics and try to figure out what exactly being a Christian in the 21st century is supposed to be about.  From my perspective I don't really feel like I'm in conflict with other denominations, truth be told, I think I personally feel a little more kinship with Roman Catholics (especially with their neat new Pope), than I do with some of the more Red State type Christians.
But I'm a Presbyterian of the postmodern world, I admit that my bias is towards inclusiveness and universalism.  I've probably internalized a lot more C.S. Lewis and Karl Barth theology than is really recommended if you want to hold on to your in-crowd mentality.  I'm not so much concerned with whether people agree with every little nook and cranny of reformed theology, I would generally just like people to take Jesus seriously and try to actually love one another, you know rather than hating, fearing and killing each other.  I think that's a pretty good plan, heaven, hell and whatever else you want to roll about to the side, I'm really convinced that Jesus is the guy I want to follow.
When I think about the "competition" I generally don't think about other churches or even other religions, increasingly these days, I think about sports.  I know, you thought I was going to say atheism or consumerism or maybe even Islam, but nope, sports.  My Waldensian friend and I got into a conversation about football, and yes, we were actually talking about different sorts of football, but the similarities were really quite eerie.  He said that, in his experience, football (talking about soccer), had taken away much of the territory once occupied by religion.  People might go to church, but they actually worshiped at the local pitch (soccer field), Liturgical colors had been replaced by team colors, feelings of belonging ran high when you were in the presence of people who cheered for the same club, feasts and celebrations now followed big wins instead of holy days,  Each team had songs that it's fans would sing, spontaneously, from the heart, with feeling.  There are passionate discussions about the merits of players, coaches and playing style, passionate discussions, that no one finds arcane or obtuse or pointless.  Who is better Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo?  People would invest in that argument, sometimes to the point of violence.  Yes, friends and neighbors perhaps sport is now the true religion of many, complete with some of the darker elements.
I couldn't help but identify, and also admit complicity in this shift.  I can discuss sports every bit as comfortably and enthusiastically as I can discuss theology, and most days I'll tell you which one I would prefer.  I can also spend hours watching ESPN, listening to everything from technical analysis to sentimental stories.  I feel an attachment to certain teams in each sport, I want them to do well, and I can be induced to despise my rivals (I'm pretty sure Jerry Jones is actually demonic, so there's a strong crossover there).  I'm not likely to get physically violent over sports, but then again, I wouldn't actually get violent over a theological disagreement either.  I am beginning to wonder how far this goes.  Some observations that are true on both sides of the pond.

1. We educated our kids in sports with dedication.  People regularly skip church for kid's sporting events or practices.  Do they ever skip a game to come to church?
2. We prioritize sporting events over any sort of religious participation.
3. We deify our athletes, even going so far as to call them "idols" and "icons" and "immortal" and we are deeply offended when they fail to live up to our standards.
4. If you asked people to donate to church the same amount they would pay for season tickets, many would get downright angry.
5. During the NFL season at least, and this was observed to be true of the other football by my Italian counterpart, the relative mood of a whole week can be altered for better or worse by what happens to your favorite team.  Does that ever happen with what happens in Church?

I know what you're going to say, a lot of this is the church's fault.  Maybe we should do a better job articulating and advertising and maybe even entertaining.  After all, if we're not a place where people are transformed, maybe it's because we're doing something wrong.

Except, people are changed by church, some dramatically, some gradually, but transformation is a thing that happens in almost all churches on some level.  The only thing is, it cannot be forced, or planned, or made into a commodity.  I am hesitant to say there is anything that we can do to facilitate the action of God's Spirit, because that can lead to some truly bad and dangerous theology, what perhaps we need to do more clearly and more consistently is bear witness to the what is happening to us as we walk.  Why do we come to church?  

I have heard people of all sorts tell others why they root for a sports team (and yes, because I have done it for my whole life is a valid response).  People are able to articulate how they came to be a Steelers fan when they grew up in Colorado.  They are able to explain whatever evil sorcery was involved in becoming a Cowboys fan living in New Jersey (I'm talking to you Chris Christie).  They can comfortably opine about why their relationship with a sports team makes a difference in their life.

We're less forthcoming about our relationship with God though aren't we?

Or is it that we really don't know?

I have a hard time believing, in this age of choices and lack of social pressure, that anyone goes to church without at least knowing some reason for it.

When I consider all this, I'm not just pointing the finger at others, I'm stating a mea culpa, as well.  I'm not above cancelling or re-scheduling a church meeting for a playoff game, or at least really wanting to, I'm certainly not above watching Sportscenter while I'm also reading my morning devotional.  I'm just choosing to take notice.