Just Maybe...

It's the day after the Boston Marathon bombs.
We seem to be having a lot of these days after.
And we're getting a little too good at responding to disasters...
Because we keep having disasters and we have no choice but to respond.
But I've noticed that our responses are getting a little more polished, we are beginning to realize what's really important.  Yesterday, in addition to prayers for the victims there were lots of prayers for the first response personnel.  This is good, but it's not a thing that people thought about before 9-11-2001.  Believe me, I think we should pray for the people who rush into the breach to help people a lot more than we do, what struck me yesterday was how quickly that became a part of the public sentiment.
We are learning more than we really want to know about catastrophe.
I shared a quote from Mr. Rogers on facebook yesterday (yeah, I was one of about a million people who shared the same thing in one way or another) that was about what his mother told him to do whenever evil seemed out of control: "Look for the helpers, you will always find people who are helping."
Which turns out to be very true...
I remember growing up in a world where they always told you that people didn't want to get involved.  I remember hearing that women should yell, "fire" instead of "rape" because people will respond if they think there's a fire and will just ignore someone being violated sexually.
Some people will look at things like 9-11 or Columbine or Newtown or Boston and say: "Look how terrible the world has become!"  But sometimes I wonder if all of these calamities are proving that we're NOT actually as bad as we thought.
Which is weird, and a little twisted, but it might be true.
What if it takes acts of terrorism to glue us together?
What if it takes natural disasters to get people to act like neighbors?
I know enough about history to know that calamities and catastrophes are nothing new.  There will always be wars and rumors of wars.
That is not an excuse or a call to accept the evil.
It is an observation that our communities tend to show their strength in adversity.
Fire hardens steel.
We are at our best when the deck is stacked against us, we stand tall under the rocket's red glare.
We lose our way when there is no challenge.
We grow lazy and soft when prosperity lulls us to sleep.
Maybe it's not just an American thing...
Maybe the same is true of individuals...
Maybe it is true of small communities...
Maybe it is true of churches...
Maybe it is true of nations...
Maybe it's a human thing...
Maybe we are wired to fight the power...
Maybe it is the rocket's red glare and the bomb blast that brings out the best in us...
Maybe it is the life of comfort and ease that inspires selfishness and sloth...
Maybe without the worst in us rearing it's ugly head once in a while, we would never get to see the response from the best in us...

What Should Have Been

There's quite a difference, isn't there?

Between what was and what should have been?

Because there is a lot of one, but there is an infinity of the other!

-Dr. Who, The Rings of Akhenaten

One of the reasons why I love Dr. Who is the way that the show has always gone beyond the simple telling of a spacey-timey-wimey kind of story and into some rather deep reflections on the human condition.  For instance the latest episode that finally begins to tell you the story of the mysterious Clara "Oswin" Oswald.  Clara and the Doctor encounter a hungry and parasitic god inhabiting a sun and consuming the worship and stories of the people that are in orbit around him.  The Doctor and Clara are out to rescue a little girl, who knows all the stories and songs of her people, who has been chosen to appease the appetite of the "old god."

Funny how the worship of gods who constantly need to be fed usually leads to feeding them children...

But that's for another day.

What is for today is how the following clip reduced me to tears:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo8dbZavEXM

Today would have been my brother's 32nd birthday.
I go through this every year.
I try to forget it, but I can't, someone always reminds me.  My Dad called this morning, someone else who knew Jon posted something on facebook, it's just rather unavoidable.
The power of grief, after nearly eight years, is becoming not so much a mourning of what was, but all the moments that never were, and that's what gets me right in the gut.
I have two kids who aren't so little anymore that will never know what an amusing fool their Uncle Jon could be.  My brother had the perfect disposition to hang around with a seven and nine year old, he never sat still, he was always up to something.  My kids would love him, but Jack was a baby and Cate was still inutero when Jon left us.
As the years go by, I am feeling the weight of what might have been a lot more than the tragedy of what was.  Neither one of them is very pleasant.
I wish I had a leaf that held all of this...
Something I could just hold up to a hungry god and have it consumed in fire.
But instead I hold all the days of Jonathan that might have been up to a loving God and He gives me tears...
And there seems to be an infinity of them...
But they are powerful enough to fill all the emptiness.

Happy Birthday Molebutt.

The Remains of the Day

2:41 pm
It's Monday afternoon in a church office.
Everyone's gone except me, and I'm feeling like there will be little productive work done for the rest of the afternoon.  It's not that I'm stuck or out of gas either, it's just that it's so quiet and lovely right now with the windows open to a beautiful spring day.
It would probably be insulting to God for me to try and fill this particular moment of silence with something useful.  So I just listen to the mockingbirds imitating the delighted shrieks of the children who were playing at the school next door a few hours ago.  I let myself go quiet and listen.
Every once in a while my fingers tip-tap on the keyboard, but I'm not doing anything really important, just writing these random thoughts.
You might think I'm wasting my time.
After all there are probably some "important" things I could be doing...
Even this blog could be better thought out, I could have had some sort of plan for how it was going to turn out, but I didn't... I don't... not even now... I don't know how long it's going to be, I don't really know where it's going, I'm just letting the tip-tapping of the keys mix with the silence.
There is plenty of time for plans and phone calls and preparation and going out into the world.
We need more time to just listen...
Listen, I tell you a mystery: God speaks to us.
I don't know why, I've been trying to figure that out for years.
With all of the wonderful things there are in the universe, why does God take the time, when there are so many other things to do, to spend time in an empty and silent office on a Monday afternoon with a pastor who is idly wasting his time.
Like I said, I don't know why, but I know that it happens.
In fact, I suppose listening to God is technically part of my job description.
As a matter of fact, I  just caught myself praying...
Now I'm really working...
This is a very peculiar job.

Live and Let Live

Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone!  Let them go!

For if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail.

But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; 

you will only find yourselves fighting against God.

-Acts 5: 38-39

Once upon a time there was a culture that stood divided.

There were deep divisions among the people; among the leaders; among the teachers, philosophers and theologians.  No one could seem to agree about what was right and wrong, good and bad, and people were generally just a hair shy of breaking out into open hostility if you pushed them a little too far.

On one side you had people who called themselves the House of Hillel, after a great and wise teacher of a previous generation.  They were the progressives, the liberals, the live and let live crowd.  They were the ones who saw that you really couldn't fight the current of history for too long, so you should just figure out how to swim with the Roman sharks.  As long as you could still read your Holy Books and pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, what could Caesar really do to you anyway?

On the other side you had the House of Shammai, named for another great teacher, who was a little more of a headbanger than Hillel, who wanted to fight the power and shake the world with strict dedication to the Law.  The followers of Shammai wanted a revolution, they wanted the good old days back, they clung to their mores like a life raft and kicked at the sharks for all they were worth.

Shammai had it's day, but eventually there were just too many sharks.  When the temple came down in 70 CE, no one wanted to hear the fever dreams of a vengeful god anymore.  Eventually then Shammai became a footnote and Hillel became orthodoxy.

But they both eventually lost.

Without a challenger, Hillel had no fire and all that was left was to drift along with the current, avoiding the sharks, or getting in bed with them.  Hillel survived, but just like Shammai always said would happen, he was never quite what he once was.

But there was someone who had a few things in common with both Hillel and Shammai, who managed to find a different current.  Who drifted along until the sharks stopped swimming, who washed up on a virgin shore and founded a new empire.  Who claimed a new Rabbi, and their Rabbi was no mere human, their Rabbi was God incarnate.  Hillel and Shammai had the stone tablets of the law and the scrolls of the prophets; the new tribe had those as well, plus something new: Jesus of Nazareth.  They had a handful of parables, some peculiar miracle stories, a few strange new sacraments and a lot of talk about a bloody cross and an empty tomb.

What it all stacked up to was a New Covenant, based on the Old Covenant, but founded on grace instead of law, and burning with tongues of the fire of the Holy Spirit.  The New Covenant showed old Hillel and Shammai that they both missed the boat.  Now that they had that out of the way, what could possibly go wrong?

A lot apparently.  Sin is a Hell of thing.

It would seem that the New Covenant was not immune to the same polarizing process that afflicted their Hebrew forerunners.  Does God want us to follow the rules, or does God want us to go with the flow?  A lot depends on how you answer that question.

Even for people who once recognized that there was a way out of one shark infested current, it seems way too easy to get sucked right into another one.  We go through the endless process of choosing up sides, dividing into houses and fighting it out, until one side goes away and the other "wins."

And we all lose.

And we cry out to God: "Lord Jesus, how did you let this happen to your church?"

To which Christ replies: "I didn't call you to fight and win, I called you to stretch out your arms and die, so that in dying you might live.  Weren't you listening to that part?"

Got me... Good!

This morning on my facebook feed I saw a rather authentic looking post by George Takei, for those of you who aren't utter sci-fi geeks, he played Mr. Sulu on Star trek.  Takei is, pretty much  hands down, one of the best people to follow on facebook, because, well, he's darn funny.  The graphic in question has Takei in a Jedi hood with a lightsaber and announced that he had been tapped to play a Jedi master in the upcoming JJ Abrams production of Star Wars VII.  Hey, it seemed plausible.  Takei has some acting chops and would also win many kudos in the fandom of things sci-fi.  A cross-over homage to the original Star Trek, in the galaxy far far away of Star Wars!  Great God Jim! That would be better than bulls-eyeing Womprats in a T-16!
Except a few hours later, Takei posts: "Gotcha!"  Oh yeah, it's April Fools Day!  Duh, I should have known that, I was woken up this morning by my nine-year old pranking his sister (and his mother) that there was a puppy in the yard.
Like I said, he's got a sense of humor.  The best things about the prank were that it was plausible and that most of us out there in Sci-fi fandom who follow Takei, probably really WANTED it to be true.  The prank was harmless, the worst thing that was going to happen was some fanboy (like me) might have shared the post on facebook and publicly fallen for a joke (like I almost did, but didn't have time).  But the prank leads me to an interesting consideration of how and why we believe, because belief is a powerful thing and it's a honking big part of what I do for a living.
Belief can be dangerous, and it can be wonderful and sometimes it can be both at the same time.  Belief can comfort people who grieve and search for meaning and belief can inspire people to violence against those who do not share their belief.  When all you are asked to believe is that a quirky old actor got a small supporting role in a new movie, no one's going to get hurt.  When you are asked to believe that God wants you to kill a thousand people in His name... well someone's going to get hurt.
As I found out this morning, people are more gullible when they want to believe something.  In the case of this fanboy, I wanted to believe that two of my favorite fantasy universes could collide (why not throw in some Hobbits instead of Ewoks this time!), but what inspires some of the more hateful manifestations of belief?
Without going into any specific controversies, which would tend to derail the light-hearted spirit of April Fools day, I am interested in what happens when belief ceases to be the positive, creative force we call faith and becomes a force for ignorance, hatred and violence.  Oh well, I guess the light-heart got derailed anyway.
We see it all the time, belief in something that cannot qualify as faith.  As the Apostle Paul said, "faith, hope and love abide..."  That would seem to indicate that those three things must somehow coexist.  If you say you are acting on faith, but your actions are devoid of hope and love than you may be acting simply on belief.  I believed that George Takei was going to be playing a Jedi master, for a a minute, but I did not let that belief alter my life.  I still went for a walk, I still went to work, and I didn't shout hateful things at anyone who disagreed with me, or who called my belief into question, and I certainly did not kill anyone or take hostages to ensure that Takei was going to really get the part.
As a follower of Jesus Christ, I believe that the God, in whom I put my faith, calls me to lay down my life for the sake of the faith that I have been given.  However, I do not see anywhere in the scriptures I use as a guide for my journey, a way to justify taking someone else's life for the sake of that faith.  Nor do I see a justification for hatred, intolerance and general skulduggery in the name of Jesus.
I am often wrong in the things I believe, but faith is another matter, bound as it is to hope and love, and rooted in the grace of God, it will not let me down.

Holy Week Batman!

Call it an occupational hazard, but I think a lot about the church.  I think about the congregation I serve and the ones I have served.  I think about the Presbyterian Church (USA).  I think about the many other denominations that comprise the church in this country and around the world.  I think about the whole notion of being the Body of Christ, and that last one is usually where I smack myself upside the head and go "D'oh!"
It's easy to begin to wonder if God really thought this thing through.
I have served some wonderful churches and been privileged to know some genuinely good and loving people.  And I have also been profoundly annoyed by some genuinely good and loving people.  And I have been disappointed when those genuinely good and loving people were profoundly annoyed with me.
Genuinely good and loving just isn't enough.
Sin is a really big three letter word.
I have often heard those who would defend the church as an organization and/or an institution start to trumpet the genuinely good and loving things the church does and has done over the centuries of it's existence, and the list is not insignificant.  Then again, neither is the list of catastrophic failures: corruption, violence and general complicity with worldly evil. It all pretty much comes out in the wash.
Sometimes, in moments of uncharacteristic optimism I can almost see the balance shift a little bit to the good, and then some representative of some part of the church does something horrific, or just plain stupid.  For every Mother Theresa, there are five pedophile priests, for every Billy Graham there's Jim Bakker AND Jimmy Swaggart; after a while the math just gets depressing.  Then you have majority that are not exactly staggering failures, but you can't really get 100% on board with what they're up to either: Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Rob Bell, Joyce Meyer, Charles Stanley, TD Jakes etc.  They preach a very particular brand of Gospel, and sometimes, even if you generally like them, you get this creeping suspicion that perhaps they're peddling snake oil.  Maybe it's because they always seem to be trying to sell you something.
My point (I actually do have a point here) is that, from the beginning, Jesus gave his mandate to some profoundly flawed individuals.  He vested authority in a bunch of clowns who, honestly, were better suited to hauling fish out of the sea of Galilee than they were to continuing the incarnational ministry of God.  As hard as it is to believe from the results, God actually planned it this way.
Yahweh has always been a fan of seemingly random, often slipshod and momentary victories, using the worst  possible candidates in the most unlikely situations.  Like the point guard who slips at half court and has the ball fly out of his hand... and then hit nothing but net for a game-winning three pointer.  Yeah, he totally meant to do that.
Marketing the church of Jesus Christ with slick, results-driven, advertising-inspired, sorts of strategies, while it makes perfect sense to our modern minds, is probably rather contrary to God's actual plan for the church.  The stories of the Passion narratives kind of reinforce that notion in my mind.  There are no heroes in those stories.  No one saves the day, no one comes up with a really clever way out of the mess they're in.  Jesus himself prays for the cup to pass from him, but... no dice.
It all starts with a lot of promise and ends in a big hot mess.
The disciples start the week riding high on a wave of hosannas and end it hiding in the cheapest motel room they could find thinking about how they can slip out of Jerusalem without getting tacked up by the Romans.  It's not a pretty picture, but there you have it: our spiritual heritage, hiding in rented rooms thinking about maybe dying our hair in the bathroom of a Texaco so we can get out of town without being picked up by the man.
The really disturbing thought in all of this is: maybe that is the will of God after all.
Maybe the reason why the church is floundering and failing is because we've gotten too big for our britches and God is getting back to grassroots.  Maybe God wants some more glorious misfits like Abraham, Jonah and Peter instead of slick, smiley, dudes and well coiffured platinum blondes preaching and singing to arenas full of clamoring sycophants who "really feel uplifted" by the wonderful atmosphere.
Maybe I'm being cranky.
Maybe this mosaic of messed up, confused, self-absorbed, cult-of-personality driven, anxious, and complaint-ridden group of people who sit around wringing their hands about where they are ever going to find some "new" people to come be a part of this borderline psychotic community (honestly sometimes well over the borderline).
How's this for a new way of pitching the church: Messed up? Crazy? Lazy? Directionless? Anxious? Afraid? Combative? Obstinate?  We know how you feel.  We've been that way for two thousand years, but for some reason God still hangs out with us.
We've tried just about everything else, maybe we should give honesty a try.

Having the Right Accent

Dialogue is difficult when there is no trust.
Anyone with a little experience in group dynamics will bear witness to the fact that a conflicted group is unlikely to make serious inroads into resolving that conflict until they have established a bare minimum level of trust. I will call this bare minimum level of trust mutual forbearance, which means that both sides of the argument have agreed to a certain level of co-existence.  Sometimes that certain level is just barely enough to keep them from strangling each other, other times that certain level may actually involve a willingness to actually listen to the positions and opinions of the other.
Unfortunately, in many conflicted situations, mutual forbearance is actually the only achievable form of peace.  I think of the detente that existed between the Soviet Union and NATO during the Cold War and the tenuous, volatile situation in Israel/Palestine.  Sometimes mutual forbearance is only a temporary stay of an inevitable violent conflict, sometimes it is a foundation to an actual discussion or negotiation.
Thanks to technology and the complex web of developments that is vaguely referred to as "globalization" there are more and more opportunities for groups of people holding disparate social, economic and ideological opinions to be put into a situation where dialogue is necessary.  You no longer have to just get along with the people in your neighborhood, you could be required, by something as simple as calling technical support about a troublesome printer, to interact with someone on a different continent, from a different culture, with a different accent.  This depending on your disposition at the time, and whether or not the person is able to actually help with your problem, may result in certain discomfiture.
The companies that outsource things like customer service and technical support to foreign countries are well aware of the lack of mutual forbearance that is triggered in the American consumer by an unfamiliar accent, and thus, they train their people to mask their accent and use American sounding names and thus Raj becomes Tom and Suki becomes Stacey, in the hopes that they will gain your trust or at least prevent an immediate negative response to their attempt to help.
As an interesting experiment, one of the companies ought to attempt to train their Asian folks to speak with a British accent when dealing with Americans,  In my experience, though I'm not sure why, we colonists still attribute intelligence and dependability to the Queen's English, even if we don't particularly care for her tariffs.
Which brings me to my main point, which has to do with debates and discussions in the church.  I attended my first meeting with National Capital Presbytery this week and listened to a presentation by Dr. Joseph Small, that was an expansion on an article he wrote called Internal Injuries, about the moral divisions within the PC(USA).  Dr. Small made some excellent points about how majority rule inherently disenfranchises the minority.  This is particularly salient in regard to certain moral issues that are now being debated by the national church, where percentages are precarious indeed (often running 52%-48% or even narrower margins of difference).  I think I heard, somewhere in about an hour and half of talking, a challenge to try, particularly as the church, to try and do more than just achieve detente and narrow "victories." Amen to that.
The problem is, as I saw it, not with the idea, but the presentation.  The talk was DULL.  Wow, was it dry and well... Presbyterian.  I thought of how important some of the ideas were, and how unlikely they were to ever be heard by the majority of the people who really ought to consider how exactly they engage in dialogue with their brothers and sisters in Christ.
But it's not just being dry and boring that will get you in trouble in the world of the church today.  You can be too slick and engaging as well.  Enter Rob Bell.  Bell is the poster boy for the emerging church.  He has been a mega-church pastor with the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids Michigan and now he is out there doing his rock-star-author thing.  And he has some really good things to say, some things that really twist the knickers of his former brethren in the evangelical movement, and he says some things that just don't bear very close theological scrutiny, but he delivers good, bad and indifferent with a certain style and hipster coolness that makes you want to unquestioningly agree with what he says.
I have read several critiques of Bell who seem to be leveling the accusation that perhaps he is just a little too cool to be trusted.  Maybe he is, there certainly are aspects to his theology that push the edges of what conservative/evangelical Christians would call orthodoxy.  Then again his ideas seem rather tame and perhaps even passe to progressive Christians.  What I find about Bell is that he is a skillful compiler and illustrator of theological ideas.  He finds little flecks of gold among tons of gravel and holds them up and says,  "Hey, look at this! Isn't this cool?"
They may be out of context, they may be heretical in some people's mind, but they are, in fact, pretty cool.
Bell takes some very old ideas, and puts them in a blender with some of the better modern theology.  He gathers a smattering of Origen, Clement and Augustine and then dashes them with Calvin, Barth, Tillich and Buber and then finishes it off with a little N.T. Wright and Eugene Peterson and it just goes down smooth like a mocha latte.  But most of it is derivative, and it all is presented with a certain non-threatening, "hey whaddya think?" attitude.
He may not be the most careful and consistent theologian, and he certainly has his critics, but he definitely has the right accent.
So in the church, when we sit down and try to discuss and deal with difficult and seemingly intractable issues, we have to deal with this sort of dynamic as well: it's not just what you say, but how you say it.  You can have some good ideas, but if you're dull, you may not get traction.  You can speak with a prophetic voice, but don't be too slick about it, or people will sit around and dissect your hipster persona. You could actually have an idea that might just "fix our printers" permanently, but if you talk like a furriner, we ain't gonna trust you.
Lord, have mercy on us, poor sinners.