The Old Order

I started my morning by seeing a post from a Facebook friend who is also a Presbyterian Teaching Elder about the mascot of a minor league baseball team, the Fresno Grizzlies.  Parker T. Bear has been "ordained" and is legally able to perform weddings and vow renewals, and will be doing so at a Grizzlies game on such and such a date.
I will admit, that this sort of clenches me up a little.  It's not the whole fly-by-night ordination thing.  I have known a handful of people who did that in order to officiate at weddings for friends, okay, whatever, it's not the same thing as getting a Master of Divinity Degree, jumping through all the hoops of the ordination process of a denominational body and actually becoming ordained by a honest to goodness church.  It's mostly a legal thing, akin to becoming a notary these days, you pay your fee and someone says you can sign the Marriage License.
It's no big news that folks today don't exactly see the church as the center of their lives anymore, but when one of your time-honored professional roles can be fulfilled by a dude in a bear suit at a minor league baseball stadium...
Well, this is just sort of embarrassing, not just for me, but for the human race in general.
I am learning, well let's say practicing, the humility that it takes not to be offended by stuff like this.  But honestly, sometimes I wish there would have been some sort of catastrophic rupture in the continuity of our society that caused this sort of ludicrous lapse in human participation in the sacred, instead of a just a long slow decline.
I will turn to the world of Star Wars for an illustration, as I so often do.  Consider with me if you will, the Jedi Order.  When most of us first encountered the Jedi, it was in the person of one Obi Wan Kenobi, played (apparently somewhat reluctantly) by Sir Alec Guinness.  "Old Ben Kenobi," had been living in exile as a hermit in the wasteland of the desert planet Tattooine.  Young Luke Skywalker seeks him out because of a cryptic message he finds in his newly purchased R2 unit.  Obi Wan saves Luke from the Sand-people and introduces him to the force.  Kenobi, in episode IV, is the classic mystic wizard character, a practitioner of a way of being that has vanished from the universe thanks to the treachery of the Dark Side.  He plays much of what he knows pretty close to the vest, and is alluringly powerful.
In the back story, the Jedi were once a powerful force in the galaxy far, far away.  They were the masters of the Force, and keepers of the peace.  They were mostly wiped out when the clone armies of the Republic executed Order 66 (where Lucas falls one digit short of going full on Revelation), except for Obi Wan, Yoda, and the twin babies of Anakin Skywalker, who essentially "dies" when he becomes Darth Vader.  Luke and Leia Skywalker are separated and hidden from their father.  Leia is adopted by Senator Bail Organa and grows up on Alderaan.  Luke draws the short straw and gets sent back to Tattooine where we first found Anakin in first prequel (but we're not going to talk about that).  Luke is raised by Anakin's half brother Owen (which seems like sort of stupid hiding place to me, but then again Vader and Leia seem to actually have met before, so maybe it was sort of a hide in plain sight sort of deal).
Anyway, the Jedi were once this great and powerful hybrid of religion and an army, which is always a volatile combination.  But their power became blind when the Sith, practitioners of the Dark Side, began to manipulate the course of events.  The Dark Side is more adept at stealth and misdirection, the Dark Side has no trouble wielding power to subjugate others and maintain their position.  The Dark Side has no trouble harnessing fear and anger, and in fact that is the true source of their power.
The Jedi, by comparison, seem always hampered by rules and disciplines.  They learn that they have access to the most powerful thing in the universe, and then they are told all the things they're not allowed to do with it.
As a kid, I found parts of The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi to be profoundly frustrating, because it seemed like there were just too many rules keeping the Jedi from kicking butt and setting things right, until you got to the end and the "point" was driven home that those impulses to protect and dominate were in fact the path to the Dark Side. The prequels, for all their flaws did a fair to middling job of fleshing out the problems that confront Force users.  Superhero stories have largely focused on what I call Stan Lee's Razor (not the thing he shaves with see Occam's Razor) that we find first in The Amazing Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility."
Jedi are constrained by the Force to maintain a rigorous path, in order to safeguard the rest of the galaxy from the consequences of them abusing their power.  They are not to have attachments, including family, they are not to own property, or seek positions of power, they are not to use their power for attack, only defense.  It's hard to see how this scheme could possibly have failed.
In all honesty, it would have worked okay, if they always remained a monastic order, separated from the world and un-entangled as a group, the same way they demanded of individuals.  But they didn't, in the prequels you see the Jedi Order right in the thick of everything, a big fancy temple on Coruscant, engaging in politics and intrigue and wielding no small amount of power and influence.  Kind of like the Church in the not so distant past.
In A New Hope, you see the Jedi in the wake of the collapse of all that, and it may be my personal bias at work here, but they are so much better for it.  I mean they are a much better story as the few beacons of the Old Ways (a more civilized age) than they were as yet another arm of the bureaucracy confusing the status quo with true justice and peace.
Obi Wan Kenobi in the Junland Wastes of Tattoine and Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah were probably what the Jedi always should have been.  Mystic teachers of the divine force at the center of all that is (I'm purposefully ignoring all that stuff about midichlorians, so just don't go there).  The distillation of what they needed to teach Luke was essentially the same thing all true Religion seeks to teach: let go of yourself, your ego, your hates, your prejudice, and give yourself to God (or Allah, or the Buddha nature or whatever).  As a Christian I would say it like my Lord says it: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Mt. 10:39 NRSV)
So, you know, maybe a guy in a bear suit wearing a clerical shirt is a little bit of kick in my pride.  But maybe my pride needs kicked.  Maybe the loss of influence and status of the Church in our society is hard to live through, but maybe it's necessary for the Way of Jesus to become what it is supposed to be all along: an alternative to the endless cycles of power, violence, sin and death.
I'm still waiting for my lightsaber though.

Potential... Maybe

In the late 1980's Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called 57 Channels and Nothing On, about the experience that cable TV had wrought upon all of us: lots of choices and then again no choices at all.  Well, now that seems kind of quaint, only 57?  Of course, out of those 57 channels you had at least ten or twelve throwaways, public access, PBS during the day (Unless you were a kid), then there were the various news programs and pseudo news programs that were sort of like being slowly drugged with the worlds weakest tranquilizer, ESPN was around, but Sportscenter wasn't a round the clock phenomenon and you didn't even have the talk shows like PTI yet, so you mostly got daytime coverage of duck pin bowling or curling, The networks devoted most of the day to Merv Griffin and soap operas and the VHF stations (I'll explain that to the kids some other time) were mostly syndicated sitcoms rather than original programming.  Cable TV was essentially just a conglomeration of broadcast TV with a few pay channels that mostly repeated movies from three years ago in endless succession.  I try to explain this to my kids as they whine about not being allowed to use their internet thing-a-majigs any time we have 10 minutes of unoccupied time.  I remind myself of this anytime I feel like I'm getting a little too attached to my smartphone.
It doesn't work.
Springsteen had no idea that we would be where we are now by the time he was rasping out nursery rhymes to his grandkids.  Neither did I.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same.  I now have over 700 channels, all with on demand content through my TV, I also have Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, and the only thing that prevents me from shelling out the extra couple bucks a month for Hulu is the fact that I know there will still be nothing on the freaking TV worth watching. We live in an age when the potential of TV shows as a story telling medium is positively amazing: Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul (and it's antecedent Breaking Bad), The Walking Dead (which I don't watch but I hear is pretty good), Gotham (Ditto).  On top of those shows on the TV, the internet streaming services are cranking out some good stuff too: House of Cards for example.
And yet... there is still this regular occurrence where I just can't get jazzed about any of it.  Again, so many choices, but no choices at all.  Enter a show that may just be another break in the gray clouds of mass appeal media: Preacher on AMC.  I saw the commercials and I thought to myself, "I think you kind of HAVE to watch that."  After all it's called Preacher, and I'm a, you know, preacher, and it would appear to be about a preacher who is no saint in waiting, a situation which I rather identify with as well.
It's based on a comic book, and that, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing, because comic books are one of the best places to look for really edgy inventive stuff these days.  Also, being based on an established character and intellectual property with already developed story lines you don't have to worry that a show that starts with promise is just going to wander off into the abyss when they decide to fire a crucial writer.
The original Battlestar Galactica was a prime example of this pitfall.  The show started with a great premise and a pretty solid ensemble cast.  It had Lorne Greene, Mr. Bonanza himself, to give the old folks something grip on, and it had this new Science Fiction Star Trek/Star Wars clone thing going for the kiddos. It was also pretty expensive; sets, wardrobe, what passed for special effects in the late 1970's.  The Network decided they could do without something silly like writers, so they got rid of them and within months were focusing entire episodes on the adventures of a mechanical dog (I know it was called a dagget, but it was a freaking mechanical dog that looked vaguely like a bear terminator, but wasn't anywhere near that awesome (note to self, pitch for a new show: bear terminators)).  It all ended badly, and eventually they scrapped it.  Luckily for all of us, someone gave the Cylons another day in court, when special effects, the world of entertainment, and the imaginations of Science Fiction fans had all grown up a bit, and we got all the Battlestar we didn't even know we were missing, this time with grown up emotions and tattoos and lots of fracking.
Sorry, I was talking about Preacher, wasn't I?  Okay, the premise of the show is that this sort of beat up looking young man is a preacher in some run down church in nowhere Texas, trying fulfill some problem he made to his father who was also a preacher in this church in east jepip.  Thing is, he's done some things, maybe some bad things, and he's carrying a lot of scars about that stuff.  He's not very good at the whole preacher thing either.  The opening scenes are of him rolling out of bed all hung over, and taking his crumpled sermon into the pulpit and not even really understanding what he's trying to say himself.  Cut to various scenes of his congregation laying stereotypical annoyances and dilemmas on him... you get the picture, they ought to show it to first year divinity students to test their resolve.
The first episode shows him trying to be good and battling himself on the issue.  At the end of the episode he becomes the host for a half angel half demon called Genesis (this is comic book information, not show information).  Genesis has attempted to enter both an African Pentecostal preacher in a dirt floor church in Kenya (who I'm assuming represents good and honest religion), and what I believe is a Satanist (or some other brand of occultism) Magister in Russia (which is the flip side of the pure-hearted African).  Both men explode, literally and graphically (did I mention this show is not for kids, it's not, maybe not even for most adults).
Anyway, our preacher does not explode, I'm guessing because he is neither good nor evil himself, but rather he represents a non-dualistic personality where both attributes exist in some sort of uneasy balance, like, you know, most of us.
I'm not sure where the show is going from here, but given how rare a really interesting show is on the Tube, I'm looking forward to the ride, please don't fire the writers.

Getting In Touch with Feelings

In the colossal debate over Kirk versus Picard I side with the more cerebral diplomatic captain of the Next Generation Enterprise, but I will admit that, over the course arc of the series Jean-Luc Picard would have been more lost in the cosmos without his emotionless foil (Data) than James T. Kirk would have been without his (Spock).  Thanks to Vulcan longevity and Leonard Nimoy's willingness to participate, Data and Spock actually got to meet each other on the show, and as I recall they actually had a conversation (a highly analytical one at that) about the relative usefulness of "humanity," meaning emotions and intuition.  Vulcans aspire to put aside everything but logic.  Data, as an android, aspires to be "more human."  Their aspirations for their state of being seems to be moving in opposite directions, but they are crossing in the middle as it were.  The Vulcan feels plagued by unwanted emotions and attachments, the android feels he is always lacking something because he is unable to have them.  They both represent something of a heroic dream, which is a paradox of the human imagination: the desire to be purely creatures of fact and logic.
This is, of course, a rather new turn of the human psyche, certainly rooted in the values of the enlightenment and furthered by the advent of the "scientific" age.  We are not, nor will we ever be, creatures of pure logic, and honestly, I think our science fiction probably makes one of it's most salient points in showing us that it would be, in fact, rather undesirable.
To demonstrate that I am an ambidextrous sci-fi geek, I shall illustrate using The Force of the Star Wars universe.  Force users, both Jedi and Sith are always going on about feelings, "trust your feelings," "use your feelings," "reach out with your feelings," it's all kinds of mystical.  In the final analysis though, feelings are not found to be either infallible or unnecessary, they are in fact what you make of them: either a force for good or a path to the dark side.
I will admit, as a strongly determinate T on the Myers-Brigs Personality Type Indicator, I always liked the Spock/Data logic, and I will also tell you that my favorite Jedi is the Alec Guinness version of Obi Wan Kenobi, the old, controlled, disciplined Jedi Knight, who will slice off your arm, but do so without much of an emotional reaction. I have had to learn how to value my emotions.  I have had to wrestle with the reality that emotional responses are neither good or bad on their own, there is a place in the scheme of things even for fear, anger and hatred.  The negative emotions particularly need to be given their due, or else they become destructive (which was I think one of the rather glaring flaws in the training of Jedi, but that's for another day, I want to come back to Earth for now).
What spawned all of this in my brain was a theme I have run into several times over recent weeks, in politics both secular and in the church, in talk about gender identity, and with regard to interpretation of the Scripture (which is probably the thing that I want to get on about the most).  The theme I have stubbed my toe on several times is the old idea of "just feelings," and I'm not talking about feelings of justice, but as in "it's just a feeling."
I understand that feelings are not 100% reliable in any way.  I will admit that our emotional responses to things can be hopelessly convoluted and complicated.  Particularly with regard to something like gender or sexual orientation, oh yeah and probably also with regard to politics and religion.  I don't actually want to rehash or even dip a toe into trying to analyze the emotions tied to our most troubling arguments of the moment.  I want to make the point that emotions are neither something to be trusted entirely, nor are they a thing to be disregarded as wholly unreliable.  I will stay here and play in my own yard: interpretation of Scripture for instance, requires us to deal with human emotions.  We need to understand the motivations of the people in the stories, and the motivations of the writers of the stories, we need to understand the situation of the "original audience" and we need to understand the situation of the people we live with now.  This cannot be a purely intellectual exercise.  That is not following Christ's example.  Jesus got emotionally involved with people, he loved them, he got angry with them, he was frustrated by them, he was surprised (pleasantly) by their faith, I think it's safe to say he experienced the gamut of human emotion.
So why then, do I hear so many people denigrate an emotional response to Scripture as being "just a feeling?"  Why would you want to deal with it and live into it if it doesn't stir your blood?
I'm not advocating just going with whatever "feels" right, what I am rather disappointed with is the outright dismissal of how people understand the Living Word, by those who think it should be utterly black and white, cut and dry, dead and buried.
I know this doesn't work because it is what passes for orthodoxy in many traditions, and I am always running into the refugees it has created. I run into some really horrible theology in my line of work, and I am faced with the task of recovering a notion of God's grace.  The need for that comes back over and over, like waves on a shoreline.
There is, I think, a deep problem with the patterns the church has fallen into.  Maybe in the past, it was more necessary to throw loads of guilt at people. Maybe they didn't feel the weight of their own sin, maybe they needed more judgment, but nowadays I run into a lot more people who are carrying religious scars than is probably healthy.  Usually if they run into me here they are in the process of healing, if I meet them out there they may still be raw.  In the former case, I am careful not to poke my pastoral finger at them, in the latter case, I keep my entire pastoral hand in my pastoral pocket and may not even tell them what I do for a living, until I have established some sort of ground for them to trust that I'm not going to start tearing at that wound.
None of what I just said is logical, and I cannot give you a clinical blow by blow of how it works, or how I know, it's a feeling, an intuition, and I have come to realize, it's a crucial one for what I do and how I do it. It is part of the work of witnessing to Christ in the world.  So don't ever tell me it's "just" a feeling.

Potty Talk

First off, if you want to argue that being transgender is the same as being a cross dresser or that transgender people are perverts out to try and molest children, just go away.  Seriously, you're entitled to your opinion, but I would encourage you to have a little compassion and do a little research before you start in to this.  If you're honestly trying to work through this whole bathroom issue, and maybe just trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, well keep reading, maybe we will muddle towards some sort of truth.
You may have already seen this video of Aimee Toms, a young lady who was treated rudely in a Wal Mart bathroom because a woman thought she was transgender, when she is not.  Her video response is pretty much what you would expect from a college girl who ran into one slightly rude person, but she runs through the gamut of the usual arguments surrounding transgender people using the toilet.  Yes, I just wrote that sentence, and it does not make me happy.  She loses some points for ranting all over the place and engaging in some "creative" vocabulary usage, but she makes the rather salient point that you really shouldn't make judgments about whether people are male or female based on appearance.  For a more humorous take on that see here. She also wins points for empathy and realizing that one unpleasant lady in a Wal Mart bathroom is a drop in the bucket compared to what transgender people face on a daily basis.
On the more side of slightly more disciplined journalism there is this. Which once again forces us to watch as privileged and entitled people feel like it is an assault on their rights to have to give others the same rights that they have always enjoyed.  Seriously, don't you realize that "Straight Pride," is sort of along the same lines as "White Power?" But I digress, and I'm starting down a bad road there.  The point I want to draw out of that article involves the following excerpt:

There were practical issues.  When he had his period he wondered if he should revert to the girls' bathroom because there was nowhere to throw away his used tampons. But he had started feeling like an intruder in the girls' bathroom, and the single bathrooms were so far out of the way it was hard to make it to class on time.

Seriously, the sheer mundane details of this are the thing that really rings my bell. When you have to put that much thought into something like using the potty that most of us take for granted, do you really think that someone would put themselves through that if there wasn't really some deep, deep issue of self understanding in the works?  When I was in school, I remember consciously thinking about whether or not I was wearing green on Thursday (which meant you were horny, which I was mostly, but I didn't want everyone to know it) or whether or not I had worn the same shirt too many times in the span of a week or so.  Can you imagine trying to transition from a boy to a girl or vice versa, in high school?
Put yourself in the shoes of someone, a kid, in that situation.  Don't you think we should do what we can to help them out?  Even if we don't entirely understand why they need our help or if we find their particular situation to be a little bit strange to our fortunately cis-gender way of thinking.
Rather than simply shrug it off and realize that bathroom choice is not and should not really be that big of a deal, we have gone the other way and actually passed state laws, and issued edicts.  The issue of bathroom usage has become a major story. People are protesting, boycotting and generally making a ruckus about this. I'm guessing that most of the transgender folk out there, would much rather not have a civics course centered around where they pass water.
I get it, the idea of sharing a bathroom with someone, anyone really, is a little uncomfortable.  I have sat on the pot in a public restroom, all clenched up, holding it, until the dude in the next stall left.  I needed to relax, you know?  If that was a woman, or a man who looked like a woman, or a woman who identified as a man, or a llama who thought he was a poodle, I would still have probably waited until he/she/it left, so that I could move my bowels in peace and solitude. There is an inherent awkwardness to public restrooms.  I don't know how it is for women, but for men, it is generally accepted that you don't make eye contact or engage in small talk whilst in the porcelain chambers, an unspoken code which I fully endorse.  I promise that I will equally ignore everyone in public restrooms, gay, straight, transgender or other (whatever that might be). I think that turning this minor awkwardness into a major public debate is probably not doing our society any favors.  Don't we have bigger problems to sort out?
I know I do, I shall not speak of this again. My considered opinion on this: defecate and evacuate in the stall of your choice America, just please wash your hands afterwards.

Blind Spots

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation

And not a means to control others.

-James A. Baldwin,  In Search of a Majority

There is a simple fact of life that one must confront if you are of the sort that must write and speak to other people.  Those other people are going to, from time to time, disagree with you.  What you do with those disagreements is up to you, and ultimately it belies your level of maturity and ability to accept challenges to your own ego.  Dealing with disagreement well means being able to see and concede truth in opinions that may differ from your own.  It does not mean caving in or abandoning your convictions, but it does mean examining them.

All people have blind spots and biases that go un-examined.  Your job, as a thinking person, is to examine and confront as many of those as you can, but you will never be rid of them all. I repeat, you will never be rid of them all, and neither will I.  Which makes dialogue about deeply held differences a challenge to say the least.  We're often only willing to be challenged on our most superficial levels, and some of us can't even take that very well.  It is a growing edge for most of us to have our poorly thought out bloviations dispelled by honest critique.  It can be extremely hard to have something you feel deeply about shot full of holes.

I am watching from a distance as my United Methodist brothers and sisters wrestle with the issues of human sexuality that have been wrecking havoc within many of the mainline denominations over the past 40 years. Episcopalians (Anglicans), Lutherans (ELCA), Presbyterians (PC(USA)), Churches of Christ and various other denominations have already moved towards more inclusive stances towards LGBTQ people, and we still have work to do honestly, however, none of these conversations and decisions have been without pain.  Of particular difficulty are the global communions like the Anglicans and the United Methodist Church, because they include the increasingly powerful and insistent voices of the Church in the non-western world, which are much more conservative, reflecting the culture of their origin.

It becomes difficult to speak about this rift without sounding condescending and pejorative, even to call them the "developing world" or the "third world," indicates a prejudice that assumes we are some how more "developed," than they are, and therefore our acceptance of LGBTQ people is somehow more enlightened than their position that holds to some variation of Biblical interpretation that labels anything but heterosexual, cis-gender, and "traditional" sexual and gender positions to be "abominations."  In many African nations, homosexuals are persecuted in the extreme.  This is simply a fact, and a tragedy for our shared humanity.  It is also a fact that while the Western Church is on the down slope, the African churches are growing in vitality.  Some make the correlation between the perceived adherence to "traditional" values and this growth and vitality.  Likewise, the rise of secularism and the general apathy and lack of real fire in the "first world" churches is seen as the cause of our decline.  I think both of those assumptions require leaps which are beyond what is rationally justified, although I confess, I may have entertained such illusions at some point.  But I believe that they are just that, illusions, the reality of the church in the world is rather more complicated. Perhaps the incarnation is a little more amazing than I allowed it to be.  Perhaps the Body of Christ, really does look and act differently in different cultural settings. Maybe that has always been true and these sorts of arguments are simply the latest version of the hand saying to the feet, "we have no need of you." All I can really tell you is that this debate is painful, and I am just hoping the pain is eventually constructive.

Every denomination in the Church that has moved towards being fully inclusive has faced schism and endured pain.  The PC (USA) congregation I serve has lost members over our denominational positions allowing for ordination of LGBTQ people, and for opening the door to those who would like to become married to a person of the same gender.  I see many parallels between what happened in the PC(USA) recently and what is going on right now in the UMC.  There appears to be a schism lurking, except with the shoes on the other feet. In the Presbyterian Church (USA) the progressive voices won by attrition, as the more conservative voices, sensing ultimate defeat with a truly Calvinist sense of inevitability, voluntarily seceded from the communion. In the UMC it is the conservative wing, bolstered by the international parts of their communion, that is "winning," and it is the progressives who are talking about the need to separate.

This is something to grieve, because it moves us away from unity rather than towards it.  Unity, I believe, is the direction that the Holy Spirit is dragging us, however reluctantly we may go.  In our quest for unity though we have a responsibility to always consider who it is we might be leaving out and excluding.  Look for the broken and the wounded, and you will find Christ with them.  That is the path that has led me to where I stand now, which has not always been my place.

I once stood on the side of purity, but I was a hypocrite and my Lord told me to put down my stone. It was and is the Scripture that has convicted me that we have not been as graceful as we should be towards LGBTQ people. And some people have and will call me a heretic, or apostate, or maybe just stupid for that conviction. I do not enjoy that. So be it. I'm a grown up, and I occupy a position of privilege on many levels. I am not really in danger of being crushed, but I am sorry that we have to keep going through this.  I am sorry to all the people to whom the church (any part of it) says: "you are not the way God intended you to be." I am sorry to all the people who feel some deep seeded antipathy and sense of moral indignation at my need to say that. I grieve the loss of those who feel they can no longer participate as part of a larger body because they do not agree on this issue.  Make no mistake, we are all wounded by these divorces, no matter who is "right," or who has the majority, the truth is that nobody wins.

Language Muddled

Here is another overflow release from writing this week's sermon about Babel and Pentecost.  I want to take a minute and think about the true nature of our estrangement from one another and from our Creator.  I thought about taking this into the pulpit, but given the way I preach I don't really think I could keep all of this straight in verbal form, no matter how well I got it refined on paper.  Have you ever considered that we never truly understand everything about another person? Language gives us a window into what that person is thinking.  If you have enough time with a spouse you can learn a lot from observation, to the point where you almost know what they're thinking through non-verbal cues, thus that phenomenon where couples almost read each other's mind.  You can know almost everything about your children, having known them their whole lives, but at some point there is going to be a divergence between you.  You're going to think about something differently, your separate experiences are going to put some distance between  you, and you will have a miscommunication.
No amount of conversation or shared experience makes us immune from not understanding another person.  This is the fundamental reality that the story of Babel is meant to convey to us, we are inherently separated.  This is the fundamental miracle of Pentecost: we are brought together in one Spirit.  But Pentecost was not the end of human misunderstandings, oh so far from it.  Pentecost was such a powerful, and yet inexplicable phenomenon that the followers of the Jesus way lost it almost immediately and have had to engage in seemingly endless "discussions," about what it means to be the church ever since then. (I lift up prayers for my brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church as they do this work in their general conference this week).
So many of our conflicts and tragedies are rooted in the simple fact that our language has been confused.  I wonder how and why God was so worried about that pile of bricks that He had to do this to us.
But then I think about how almost everything true and beautiful that we do is rooted in our need to understand and to be understood.  We create art to express to others those truths within ourselves that we want and need to put out there.  We explore and engage in science so that we can share knowledge and find the "truth" of how things work. We reach out for relationships with others, willingly dealing with the fact that we might be confused or misunderstood and even hurt by those relationships, because our need to relate goes that deep.
The story of Babel itself, reaching way back into our mythological, primordial understanding of the world, reveals to us that people have always wondered why on earth it is so hard for us to understand one another.  The struggle for understanding is one of those things that makes us human. The Scriptures of the Hebrews and the New Testament of the Christian church unabashedly tell us of this struggle.  They do so in many and varied forms from personal accounts to epic poems.  Most of the time these texts, contrary to popular impressions, are not so much telling us what we ought to do, as they are describing how we are and asking the question: Is this really how you want it?
Pentecost shows us a glimpse of something possible, a unity and an undoing of the isolation and estrangement to which we cling. I do believe we cling to it.  We resist truly being in conversation with others, because it is difficult, because it makes us uncomfortable, because... Babel.
Did God do this to us, or do we do it to ourselves?  The story blames God, I think, "not so fast." These stories are NEVER as simple as they seem, precisely because they are myths, which contrary to our modern prejudice, are actually much more true and universally applicable than the simple facts of history.
I'm trying to keep my eye on that knuckleball, if you understand what I'm saying.

A Path Not Taken

Once upon a time I wanted to be MacGyver.  As it turns out, it takes more than "a little basic chemistry, (or physics)" as he so often said, to make a career out of driving around in Jeep and rescuing attractive women from incredibly stupid villains and having relationships with said attractive women that just tiptoe across the platonic friendship line enough to imply a little nooky, but rarely any long term commitment, thus leaving one free to take one's duct tape, Swiss Army knife and killer mullet on to the next damsel in distress scenario. I will note that, occasionally the writers of MacGyver must have had pangs of guilt about misusing pretty much the entire role of young Hollywood B-listers (Terri Hatcher pre Lois and Clark, Nana Visitor pre-Deep Space Nine among others), and replaced the damsel in distress with a chubby bald dude (Pete Thornton) or a random Asian kid, but the formula was the same...
I'm sorry, I started writing about my career aspirations and ended up ranting about MacGyver, sometimes I get off track.  As it turns out, when I became a grown up, MacGyver was not a job they were taking applications for, and I had long since sort of dropped the ball on being a brilliant science type.  But I did find myself enrolled in a Bachelor of Science program at Penn State, learning all about Environmental Resource Management, now simply called Environmental Science. I muddled my way through organic chemistry and various ecology and natural resource type programs, learning a little bit about everything, but mostly not enough to be really useful. Then I graduated and found, as so many college graduates do, that my degree was not, in fact, a ticket to a "real" job or anything like a career.  So I worked at Staples for a year, where I learned how to get up and show up for a job, and how to do stuff to be a really useful engine.  I was employee of the month like four out of the twelve months I worked there (not saying that to brag, it was low hanging fruit).  The point is that I was actually learning how to do something useful, I think that if I had settled in and stayed on that track, I would probably be managing a store somewhere, and probably making more money than I am now, it was a pretty clear path and well within my college educated potential.
However, along came a job, "in my field," you know that thing that most of us Gen-Xers spent our Twenties pursuing like the golden fleece?  I became... drum roll please... an environmental consultant.  And began to learn the painful truth behind Oscar Wilde's incisive statement: "The only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it."  My time as an Environmental Consultant caused me to unlearn most of the good things I had learned from my admittedly angst ridden tenure at Staples.  I became physically unhealthy and mentally over stressed, and I learned that perhaps the only skill that really mattered was covering your own tail, a fairly straightforward task which I eventually failed to do adequately.  Thus, I went to seminary partly with hope and a call from God, and partly with my tail tucked between my legs and dreams of being MacGyver in ruins.
I have been a pastor now for 13 years, lucky number 13.  I have done this longer than I have done anything else in my entire life, and it is good.  But yesterday I went on a field trip with my daughter to the Nanjemoy Creek Environmental Education Center and saw, at least an idea of what might have been. There were two guys there, who ran our programs for the kids, teaching them about animals and ecosystems and nature.  All of which gave me flashbacks to another lifetime.  Now, I'm pretty sure that neither one of these fellows, one young and right out of school (with the same bachelor's degree I have) and one older who seemed to be more along the lines of an eccentric hippy outdoor guru, were doing something that younger me would have found to be rather wonderful.  That is if you could have convinced younger me that spending your days teaching kids about all things environmental, from composting to birds of prey was wonderful.
But younger me probably wouldn't have gotten that message.  Younger me would have been put off by the (most likely) low end salary, the idea of trying to play tour guide to kids and various other, considerations.  Younger me was stupid, younger me never even considered this sort of a path, younger me made himself and those around him miserable until God lifted him up out of the pit and showed him something else to do.
I was happy for those guys at the Nanjemoy Creek Environmental Education Center, even though I could tell they didn't necessarily realize what a great job they had.  I probably wouldn't trade places with them now, because I'm not younger me anymore.  There's this episode of Star Trek TNG where Q gives Picard the chance to go back and make a different choice in a situation he regretted from his youth, an experience where Picard had made a foolish and impetuous decision that that almost cost him his life.  Picard makes a much more "grown up" choice, avoids the foolish decision, and as a result spends the rest of his life as a timid and bookish science officer rather than a Starfleet captain.  The point being that our mistakes and our flaws are as much a part of who we are, if not more, than our successes.
That can be hard thing to process.  It might lead you to wonder, "What if?"  But it might also set you free from so many regrets and a ton of guilt, so,  you know, it might be worth a try.

Riding Along

I have been following along with Rob Bell for nearly a decade.  I first "met" him through his series of short videos called Nooma, a phonetic pun on Pneuma, the Greek word for spirit or breath.  Then I watched his longer presentation called Everything Is Spiritual, with a youth group, then I read a few of his books, and listened to his sermons from Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids Michigan.
I guess you could say I became a bit of a fan of Rob, because I really did like what he said about things, and I definitely enjoyed his hipster/geek persona, and the self-conscious way he would nerd out about things.  I admired his success as a pastor, a preacher and a communicator.  At the same time though, I was never really in awe of Rob, I mean, he didn't seem to operate on a higher plane than me, he was just sort of like a slightly more popular peer.  He was not a great thinker and amazing writer like Eugene Peterson, or C.S. Lewis, and I could sort of always see that most of what he said, most of the really energized, creative things, were just sort of translating the work of a Peterson or an N.T. Wright into the common vernacular of a younger, American, post-christendom.  He did that really well, and I needed that.
For a while Rob represented a fairly safe stream of orthodoxy and evangelical faith.  He always seemed to me to stay in the Christian tradition, sort of reaching for some dusty ideas that had been stored in the basement and cleaning them off and saying, "Will you look at this?"  Pretty much what Wright, Brian McClaren, Shane Claiborne and even Tony Campolo do as well, I like all of them.  Then something happened.  Rob wrote this little book called Love Wins, which was notable for it's investigation of the scriptural, historical and theological development of what we believe about Heaven and Hell.  None of it was new to me, I had studied it in seminary, and so was unsurprised by any of Rob's conclusions or discussion.
Other people within the Body of Christ had, shall we say, a different reaction.  Rob Bell became one of the first people in quite a while that I heard openly being called a heretic.  This was utterly absurd to me, having read the book and having become familiar with Bell's work and preaching.  There was nothing heretical about it.  He challenged the notion of an eternal hell, which honestly is not very strongly supported in Scripture, and he leaned towards a sort of Christian Universalism that is very much in line with the thought of Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, and... well... me.
It goes like this: God is too good and loving to let any of his Creation go to waste.  What we cannot do through our own will and faith, God will do by grace. It can be sound biblical reasoning, it leads to perhaps the most sane theology you will find, but it does leave you kind of hanging out there without a real hammer to bring down on the reprobate.  Many pretty solid theologians have seemingly railed against this line of thinking.  H. Richard Niebuhr said, "A God without wrath has brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment by the ministry of a Christ without a cross." Which does raise the question of whether or not this approach has just gone soft with modern liberal sentiment.  Except for the fact that it is not modern, or liberal, or particularly controversial in the history of the Church.  As with many theological ideas there is a tension to be held between the holiness of God and the grace of God, both of which are defining characteristics of the God we find in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Testament.  The tension, the balance is that God is love.
What Bell says in Love Wins and what many others have said throughout the history of the Church is that we should not try to hem that in or try to control what it means, but rather we should set it loose.  Augustine said, "The truth is like a lion; you do not have to defend it. You set it loose, it will defend itself."  Many religious types have often used that quote as mic drop moment, but I don't think they really understood what it meant when they came after Rob Bell for abandoning the faith for daring to say that God's love conquers all, which is precisely the very core of the Gospel.
The problem is that this whole idea kicks a lot of Pharisees in the shins, and it also takes away the big stick that religion sometimes tries to hold over the heads of all those sinners out there to keep them in line.  There was a lot of judging and name calling and even some protesting about a book called Love Wins, that told us the same thing that the Bible from the Song of Songs to 1 Corinthians 13 has been telling us: Love is stronger than death, love never fails, the greatest of these is love.  It was rather troubling to me, as a pastor, and just as a Jesus follower to hear so much venom being poured out against a fellow pastor and Jesus follower for having the audacity to say that maybe God has a better plan for sinners than eternal Hell fire, which honestly I've always hoped is true.
Rob talks about the peculiarity of this experience in his latest work: Everything Is Spiritual II. You can watch in on Youtube if you have a couple hours, I would recommend it, if for no other reason than to hear a man who has experienced the venom of his own religion turning on him talk about how he dealt with it, (that happens in the second hour) and how he still seems to take Jesus pretty seriously, even if he has now been exiled from the evangelical church into the "spiritual" land of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), and Deepak Chopra.  Rob, for better or worse, now represents the Christian faith in Oprah-land (which may be Babylon or it might be the land of milk and honey, I'm not judging).  I think he has some scars from his time in the Church, but hey don't we all.

What You Gonna Do Brother?

America, how can I write my holy litany in your silly mood.

-Allen Ginsberg, America

Yesterday I read this, a "funny" piece of commentary from back in March.
Last night, Trump won the Indiana Primary, and Ted Cruz bowed out of the election.  This does not make me entirely unhappy. I have been coming to the realization that, in many ways Trump's crass huckster is preferable to Cruz's single-minded zealot.  But either one of them as the Chief Executive of this nation of ours is a disturbing indicator of our spiritual state.
Because here's the thing, whether we think that whoever is President is just another political beast who happened to claw their way to the top or we delude ourselves that the power of that office can make a real difference in our lives, the fact remains that the Oval Office largely remains a figure-head of our government, limited in the scope of its power by the design of our Constitution (I'm not going to go back into that puddle right now).  Presidents are important for what they say about us as a people, what they reflect about our character.
I grew up with Ronald Reagan as my President.  As an adult I dislike a lot of Reagan's policies and, in fact, I believe that many of the things he did have led us to the disastrous level of income inequality and economic injustice that is besetting us now.  But as a kid, learning about what a thermonuclear weapon can do, and finding out that the USSR had a bunch pointed at us, and we had even more pointed at them, it made me feel at least a little bit better having a man who could (and did) credibly play a cowboy in one of the old westerns sitting behind that desk.  The relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev, to this day reminds me that leaders matter, and the fact that my kids don't have to know, in the 6th grade, what Mutually Assured Destruction means, well that's a good thing.
They have to learn about new horrors.
There will always be new horrors.
More than anything we need our leaders to help us face those horrors with something like dignity and sensibility.
That's why this joke isn't funny any more.
This is the problem I have with both Trump and Hillary, neither one of them is going to help us face our horrors, both of them might just make them worse. I want to hand my kids a world with less horror in it, not more. What we have been doing is simply trading old horrors in for new ones.
What we have been doing is very selfish and self-interested, both Trump and Clinton, in their own special ways reflect that self interest.  They both have a ruthless drive to win at all costs, and honestly, at this point in history, you really couldn't come close to being President if that were the case, and therein lies our problem.
If you didn't take the time to read the article I linked above, here are Scott Adams' five premises of the Trump Campaign that really get my wheels spinning:

1. People are basically irrational.
2. Knowing that people are basically irrational, appeal on an emotional level.
3. Running on emotion, facts don't matter.
4. If facts don't matter, you can't really be wrong.
5. With fewer facts in play, it's easier to bend reality.
6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics and identity is the strongest persuader.

That's the thing, as a kid, I though Reagan was great, because he appealed to my kid-wired brain, which was essentially pre-rational,  Kids function out of emotion a lot, in fact, the "inner child" was at one point a psychological gimmick that actually did help people discover and honor their emotions (it has since become sort of silly, but there is truth in most jokes).

The state of our political discourse at the moment would seem to indicate that we are going through some sort of adolescent phase. Adolescence is the phase of life where "identity politics" basically run your life: what "crowd" are you in? How do you dress? What music do you like?  How many Twitter followers do you have? It's all about defining and exploring your identity.  

What happens if you discover an identity that is stupid?

Last week, I used the metaphor of a High School student body election: Trump is the wisecracking bully, making big promises; Hillary is the responsible lackey to the administration presenting the status quo plus some bland enticements of new and better things if we march in line the way we're supposed to.

I feel the same way about them now, as I did then: blah, blah, blah.

The only emotion either one of them inspire in me is despair, not fear, not anger, just a sinking feeling that if this is the best we can do, we really are in trouble.  Maybe this was the inevitable result of the Obama tenure. Who, as one of my regular conversation partners said, has sort of overplayed the "I'm the grown-up here" card.  Which is interesting, because that's sort of what I admire about him on an emotional level, but it certainly does play into the trap of stagnation that we are stuck in at the moment.

Right now, I'm feeling pangs of sympathy for my Republican friends.  Most of them are reasonable people (a few are not), most of them want what is best for our nation even if our ideas about what is best vary.  They deserved better than the motley band of misfits they had to pick from this year.  I am also sorry that the Democrats don't have something better than another Clinton to offer you by way of consolation.  Here's to us! A nation of emotionally stunted adolescents! Huzzah!

Bittersweet Symphony, That's Life

We went to the Symphony on Saturday night.  We took the kids.  It all started because Jack plays the Cello and the Baltimore Symphony has a featured cellist.  It was in the amazing Music Center at Strathmore up in Rockville MD.  Here's a pic:

Halfway through the first piece, a Rococco themed fugue, which was really interesting and a bit complicated musically, Caitlyn says, "I'm bored," then, "I'm hungry," then she starts fidgeting away and generally being about as pleasant to sit next to as an irritated badger.  At which point, I wanted to throttle my second born, for being ungrateful and thoroughly ten.

See, we sort of have this idea, that we ought to expose our kids to this sort of thing.  Not that we're really that cultured, to tell you the truth, I don't know much about what was going on on that stage, but it sounds kind of cool, and it can stir up some feels about as much as anything that doesn't involve words.  The thing that struck me though is the obviously herculean amount of effort it must take to get that many people, who are that good at playing instruments to pull together and put in the time and effort it takes to pull off something like a symphony.

I know people who play the violin, and the trumpet, but I have yet to meet anyone who plays the bassoon or any of those weird back row instruments, some which look like big cast iron skillets.

Jack was enthralled by the featured cellist, a very tall thin fellow, who is to cello what Jimi Hendrix is to guitar, Cate spent most of her time waiting for the trombone section to do something.  I found myself watching all of those peripheral musicians who just sort of sit there and wait, while the violins, cellos and flutes wail their way through the waves of high flying sound.  The tubas and trombones and basses, the drums and xylophones and chimes just sort of wait for the right moment.

Cate is a trombone player in her school band.  I wonder what, if anything, was going through her head as she watched the three trombones in the back row between the tuba and the trumpets, wait, and wait, and then play three notes and then wait some more.

I wonder if she appreciated that a symphony requires that some people play those parts.

I wonder if we appreciate that life is better for diversity.

I wonder if we don't hang too much on our celebrities and the "big news."

Maybe that's why we're so miserable most of the time.

Every day I read so many things that are telling us to be afraid or listing all the ills that afflict us.  There is no shortage of opinions that tell you we are a miserable, doomed lot of hairless apes who are violent and pugnacious to an unhealthy degree and who are like as not going to exterminate ourselves in a conflagration of greed, hatred and sheer ignorance.

But dammit we write symphonies, and we play them, and we listen to them, and we don't understand them, and we're bored by them, and we annoy the proper old lady sitting in front of us, but we don't care because music is art and art is what shows us that we are truly much more than what we seem.

When Caitlyn is grown up, she won't remember that she was bored or hungry (she didn't even remember that at intermission), she will only remember that shimmering gold concert hall and that strange, beautiful music, and waiting for the trombones to do something.  That's how memory works, that's why the past always seems better than the present, that's why your childhood is "way better" than what kids have nowadays.  That's why you post facebook memes about how great it was to play with rocks instead of an XBox and get regular floggings from your parents, because it all blends together into fondness in hindsight.  That's what art does, it re-frames the harsh reality of life, so that we find meaning.

I already forget how really irritated I was with my daughter (though I can pull off a fair re-enactment), and I am glad I stayed up past my bedtime and was given the gift of going to the symphony.  That's how this works.