Something to Believe in...

I was walking the dog with the kids in a beautiful park near where I live this afternoon.  It was a sunny fall day that can really only be described as perfect.  We had gotten past the complaining and had swung on some vines and now the kids were walking close to one another sharing some deep conversation (probably about flatulence).  I was struck simultaneously by a deep feeling of gratitude and a profound sense of guilt.  Now guilt is generally something that doesn't trouble me very much.  After all, I'm a good reformed Christian, Presbyterian type, I know I'm a sinner and I also know I'm forgiven, and I believe, to paraphrase John Calvin: God wants us to accept forgiveness, stop whining and get on with life.
But this was a different kind of guilt.  This wasn't guilt because of something I did wrong, or something I should have done differently, or even something I didn't do at all.  This was guilt about how I, as a fairly affluent American, am tacitly complicit in a system of massive injustice, and there's not a whole lot I can do about it.  Maybe it was because of the typhoon that hit the Philippines, maybe it's because I was thinking about all the homeless people who are staying at GSPC this week for the local Safe Nights program.  Maybe it's because I knew that, even as I walked free and peaceful on a beautiful afternoon with my kids who are content and well cared for to the point of being spoiled rotten, there are people in the world being tortured, children being used and abused, bombs falling on families, people being impoverished, enslaved, incarcerated and otherwise broken on the wheel of modern "society."
Maybe it wasn't actually guilt that I was feeling at all, maybe it was helplessness...
Actually it was definitely helplessness, which I think is actually much worse than guilt.
I know that if I gave up everything I have, all I would really do is impoverish four more people, I would subject those two little people who were walking along so carefree in the afternoon sun, to the same kind of desperation that I wish didn't exist in the world.  I can really only protect those two, I don't have the resources or the gifts to take on any more.
I generally do the good that God puts in front of my nose.  Like now, I'm spending the night in my office so that a local charity can use our church building to house about 30 folks.  Our church has this week, other churches have weeks and together we get through the cold months.  Various congregation members are preparing meals or taking a shift sleeping on air mattresses in a Sunday School room.  It's really not much of a sacrifice, but you see all these people, some of them little kids, who have food and a warm place to sleep through the winter and you feel like you might actually be doing some good.  But you also feel really sad that they need this in the first place.
But it's not a solution to the problem of poverty, it's just treating a symptom.  What I really wish I could do is make it so people don't need to sleep on cots in church basements in order to make it through the winter.  I really wish I could make it so people would no longer need to think of church as a place to come for help with an electric bill.  I really wish we didn't need food pantries, and social services offices.  I really wish that we would just learn how to initiate a truly just society where people had what they needed, and everyone could just enjoy a beautiful afternoon walk with their spoiled kids.
I choose to believe that God wants that for us too.
It's not logical, and it's not realistic.  It's a matter of faith.
If you want to know why I'm a Christian that's all there is to it.  I think Jesus shows us who God is, and of all the options out there, I like what he shows me the best.  A God who turns away the angry mob of people holding stones, a God who shames the religious hypocrites, a God who shares meals with really messed up people and crowds of random strangers, a God who heals the sick and casts out demons.  A God who generally does the good thing that is right in front of his nose, and a God who feels those pangs of helpless sadness at all the suffering that comes from human sin.
So I'm sleeping in my office, as an exercise in incarnational ministry.  It's not as big a deal as it sounds, it's just a presence that means the doors are open and the heat is on, and someone is here doing the good that is front of their nose.

Incognito was just too obvious

Okay, so I'm falling in love with the ironic potential of a guy with the name Incognito, cut me some slack.  As it turns out, my gut feelings about this not being such a clear cut case of one bad guy riding one of his teammate into a nervous breakdown are proving to be rather accurate.  In my last blog post, I said that Richie Incognito was a scapegoat, which means he is being used as a symbol of the sins of many.  In Hebrew it is called azazel, a goat that carried all of the sins of the people into the wilderness (Leviticus 16: 20-22).
It's a very old practice to try and keep the community functioning in times when their depravity seems to have gotten the best of them.  Now we are hearing that the coaches may have instructed Incognito to "toughen up" Jonathan Martin, which sounds like a very martial, football kind of thing to do.  It's the Code Red that I mentioned from A Few Good Men, it's the blanket party from Full Metal Jacket, it's savage, man stuff, and it can break people.  In the latter movie, did it surprise anyone that "Private Pyle" ended up snapping on the drill sergeant?
As it turns out, Incognito isn't thought of as a bully or a racist by his other teammates, in fact, they seem to like him.  They like him enough to say so, when he is being cast out into the wilderness by an authority structure that is in full Public Relations Panic Mode.  Black players, are saying that they are not offended by Incognito using the N-word, and I don't mean in the sort of forbearing the stupidity of a drunk guy way that the other Eagles did for Riley Cooper, I mean that they genuinely think he was "allowed" to use it, like he was in the Wu-Tang Clan.  Incognito apparently has enough non-racist street cred, to be able to use that word among his black teammates and not get the beat down that most of us think would be coming to him.  Most of us white folk have probably not heard of being an honorary black guy, but apparently that's a thing that happens.  And that, if it means what I think it means, changes the dynamic of Incognito's interaction with Martin.  Without the racial element, the bullying is much more run of the mill, even if it is still vulgar and crude and barbaric.
The world these guys live in, is by nature vulgar, crude and barbaric.  They get paid to be huge and push people around.
But the other thing that is sort of emerging from the haze of this mess is a nuance that most soldiers, athletes or frat boys would probably have seen a mile away: Incognito may actually have been trying to help Martin.  Maybe Martin is one of those unmotivated, "soft" guys who just didn't seem to be willing to work and play as hard as the team wanted and needed.
The purpose of boot camp and hazing and such rituals is to break down the individual and replace them with a team player.  The suffering and degradation of recruits is meant to destroy the ego that looks out for number one and replace it with a loyalty to the group that will overcome the fear of death.  That's a tall order and you can see how some people just might not be able to handle it.
That being said, football is not war, all metaphor and hyperbole aside, nobody's life is hanging in the balance when the Dolphins play, and so perhaps we should not apply the same ethical standards to training for a game that we do to training for war, but we do.  Listen to the words and the descriptions, there is a lot of blood lust in the game of American Football, which is probably why we love it so.

Bully

The world of sport is proving to be rich fodder these days.  The latest kerfuffle: some very big bullies.  The Miami Dolphins have a situation on their hands.  Last week Jonathan Martin, an offensive lineman (read really big guy), left the team facility after some sort of meltdown.  As it turns out, Martin was being bullied, harassed and otherwise tormented by one (or maybe more) of his teammates.  The reaction, as the apologists for the gladiatorial atmosphere of professional sport try to get the spin under control, has been rather interesting, to say the least.

Luckily, they have been able to find a scapegoat to carry the sins of the community out into the wilderness: Richie Incognito.  He is the perfect bad guy.  He looks like everyone's idea of a bully; he's a hulking, blonde guy with lots of tattoos and a permanent bad attitude.  He looks like Biff, "hello Mcfly," attempted date rapist, from Back to the Future.  He's got look of a bully from some after school special all grown up.  He's got a record of unsociable behavior going back to college, he was named "the dirtiest player in the league," he's demonstrated that he's a vulgar racist and probably a deplorable human being, and he's probably not that different from people you are bound to run across in any given sector of the "real world."

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, they're not always as obvious as Incognito (by happy accident that is a really funny statement).  Bullies are everywhere, I don't know why everyone is so shocked that one existed in the Miami Dolphins locker room.  Locker rooms breed bullies like fungus, and a big part of the phenomenon is that the world of sports, with it's martial qualities, encourages "leadership" by the strongest members of the team.  Challenges to the hierarchy take place all the time.  It's animal behavior that we learned all about from Wild America: climb the ladder, get power and keep it by violence.  Mike Ditka on ESPN this morning seemed mystified why someone on the team didn't take Incognito "outside."  In other words, why didn't physical violence step in and solve the verbal and emotional abuse that Incognito was apparently inflicting on Martin.

The answer is sinister and also rather obvious.  To quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, "You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall."  Incognito probably wasn't picking on Martin out of the blue.  There was probably something about him that just begged for the bully to push him down.  Maybe it's that he was a little passive, maybe it's because he was a Stanford grad, maybe it was racial, maybe it was a combination of lots of things.  I'm not blaming the victim here, what I'm getting at is that the reason why this didn't raise eyebrows and draw out some noble defender of humanity, is because it happens all the time, it's part of "how things work," in sports, in the military, in offices and yes, even in churches.  You establish your place in the society by proving where you belong in the hierarchy, and it rarely has to do with pure talent and ability.  The nail that sticks up gets pounded down in most cases.

It seems rather hypocritical, at this late hour, for the talking heads of the sports world, to act all shocked and appalled at what has apparently happened in the Dolphin's organization.  Players are standing in the bright lights saying things like: "I don't know if I call it hazing, it's more like a right of passage."  They are referring to common practices like making rookies buy food for the team, taping them to goal posts and generally demonstrating that they are the low men on the totem pole.  My question is, when the system accepts "a certain amount" of bullying, hazing and humiliation, why is it so shocking when members of the system get out of hand?

In elementary schools all across the nation, like the one where my kids go, they have assemblies that talk about bullying.  How to spot it, what to do about it, and how to keep it from happening in the first place.  None of the strategies take the Iron Mike Ditka approach of "taking him outside and, you know, taking a shot at him."  Violence perpetuates violence, and while "we" do need to stand up to bullies, "we" really means we, all of us, the system, the other players the coaches, the students, the teachers, the parents.

The presence of bullies is an unacceptable failure of the system.  I am really hoping that this example helps us learn something about that reality.  I hope the fact that a massive offensive lineman, a Stanford graduate and a man who achieved in sport at the highest level, can be driven to a breakdown by the actions of a bully, helps us as a culture realize that this has to stop.  Because the system has to fight back, not just one person.  Trust me, I know from experience, standing up to one bully won't solve the problem of bullying in general, you have to change the culture that accepts bullying as "the way it is."

That means no more turning a blind eye when someone is being harassed, even if that someone "seems like they deserve it."  That means no more using the system of violence and hierarchy to maintain order, even if it wins championships.  That means no more tolerance of bullies, because "oh that's just how they are."

Call me a skeptic, but I don't think we talking monkeys are quite evolved enough to pull it off.

Cliche Away

The 2013 World Series is in the books, and it looks like the curse is still broken.  It has become more or less a given that sports have come to define the "faith" of our nation more so than any particular brand of actual religion.  People speak in reverent tones about the "integrity of the game," about the triumphs of the human spirit.  Even in a year when a seemingly mediocre team can be world champions (let's face it, this wasn't exactly a bloody-sock sort of series), there is still a lot of sacred language bandied about with regard to the fall classic, and millions of people participated in the sacrament, even though the teams were: meh, and the play was: meh, and unless you were a Red Sox fan you probably turned off Game 6 after the flyin' Hawaiian did his RBI thing.
I have noticed another way in which sports have become like religion, in addition to claiming the adoration and devotion of millions of people and dividing us into tribes (or denominations) based on our personal preferences: sports are now over-ridden with cliches.  Watch any postgame interview, you will hear things like "the will to win," "giving it our all," "playing the right way," "holding together as a team."  Welcome to the family sports, you have climbed your way from being a diversion, to being an obsession, and now... now... you shall experience the pit of dogma.  Where your own sense of self-importance keeps you from really thinking or saying anything honest and meaningful.  The Theologians will be glad to have some company after all these years.
Don't worry, there will still be sycophantic sports reporters around to nod and record your drivel verbatim, and overall the people won't care much about what you say, as long as you keep providing them with the entertainment they crave.  I suppose, being men of action, you probably won't start to feel the sting of existential emptiness as quickly as we "spiritual" types, but believe me, cliches will suck out your soul sooner or later.  I'm speaking as an expert, the church does cliches like nobody's business.  Here are some of our greatest hits:
"Too blessed for stress."
"His pain, your gain."
"If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it."
"My boss is a Jewish carpenter."
"God is my co-pilot."
And I'm not even going to go into the ones that express some sort of heresy, in fact, I've purposely narrowed my field to things that aren't theologically or scripturally untenable, but some of the above are just downright vomit inducing.  We can take the best idea in the world and make it into a lame cliche: "saved by grace," and then use that as a talking point to illustrate how right we are compared to all those other wrong people.  We can adopt cliches in other languages and sound really awesome: Sola Scriptura, Reformata semper reformanda, which are really great, and true on levels we don't even fully understand.
Basically, I think we religious folk have so thoroughly mastered the art of sloganeering that I wonder how anyone even feels a little bit good about saying: "we gave a 110 percent," I mean come on, that's not even mathematically possible.
So sports, enjoy your massive popularity and your status as cultural and economic juggernauts, but take it from the Church, you need to learn how to say something... anything... that's really true.  Ditch the cliches, I know it's dangerous, and actually really difficult when you get down to it.  You know, come to think of it, how about we make a deal, you keep running fast and doing neat things with balls, and we'll handle helping people find meaning in the universe.  You can keep your "will to win" and we'll help people with the "will to live."
Why compete?  There's certainly enough emptiness to go around.  And all your athletes are always giving a shout out to God anyway.  We should work together!  There's no I in team.  We could be a well oiled machine!  We could be a dynasty!  Let's get the job done!  We could be number one!

Running in a Pinch

I stayed up later than I should have last night watching game four of the World Series.  I haven't watched too much baseball this year, probably because the Phillies are back to being terrible.  I find that if I'm not "following" baseball, it's kind of hard to watch without falling asleep.  But last night was a good game, albeit between two teams I don't even care enough about to dislike.  It was 4-2 Boston, going into the bottom of the 9th inning.  A St. Louis  player with a bum wheel got on first base and was promptly replaced with a pinch runner.  It was a no-brainer for the manager, the tying run was at the plate, and a little extra speed could make all the difference.  That is, unless the pinch runner gets picked off and makes the last out of the game.  The best laid plans you know.

I really felt kind of bad for that guy, a bench player, whose only job was to run the bases.  I could hear it: "you had one job..."  But I also felt bad for the manager, who had made the "right" move, who had put his team in a position to fight back and tie o win the game.  Who could have known that the runner would stumble just a little trying to get back to the base?

It's pretty well established that sports are a metaphor for life.  I think one of the reasons we take them so all-fired seriously is because they help us understand our place in the universe.  I think that has a lot to do with why football is out-competing religion for the hearts and minds of Americans pretty much every week from late summer to the middle of winter.  Sports show us the struggles of humanity against weakness and sin played out in high definition, and incarnates those struggles in games, where there's a lot less gray area, and fewer people get really hurt.

I also think that sports show us something about how God treats us: putting us in the place we need to be and then relying on our very fallible efforts.  If we slip, if we drop the ball, it's not the end, the plan remains the same, and we were supposed to be there, and maybe somehow, our failure becomes a strength.  It's really hard to imagine that making the last out of the game could be part of the plan, but sometimes it is.

As we know all too well in Philly, there's always next year.  There's always more to come, defeat is never final.

Jesus has shown us that forgiveness, redemption and even resurrection are all parts of the plan.

As John Calvin points out, the fact that there is grace and mercy in the plan sets us free for joyous obedience.  It sets us free to take that lead off of first, to strive to do our best.  Sometimes we mess up.  That doesn't mean the plan was bad, it just means that things don't always go according to plan. Faith gives us the guts to go back again and keep trying.  Not just our faith, but the faith that God has in us, to put us in the right place at the right time, again and again, knowing that sometimes we'll fail and sometimes we'll succeed but we'll always be in the game.

New and Wonderful Words

I absolutely love it when we come up with new words that work.  Granted there are some (twerk springs to mind) that I wish weren't things, but by and large, when we language using monkeys come up with a new word, it seems to me like a triumph of the human spirit.  So I celebrate today, the birth of "nontroversy."  Which I first encountered here.  I was vaguely aware of who Nigella Lawson was, and absolutely oblivious to the nontroversy that had surrounded her, but the article explains out who she is and what has befallen her in recent days (as well as several other obviously British cultural references), as well as explaining the phenomenon of a twitterstorm and doing a fairly good job of telling us why, in the name of all that is holy, it matters.
I think a good place to start is with the following excerpt, for those of you who didn't choose to read the whole thing:

One problem is that the media landscape is structurally hostile to nuance, whether it's the gladiatorial debate format favoured by the likes of the Today programme, the pressure to generate kneejerk opinions at short notice, or the sheer volume of websites recycling unsourced, out-of-context and even mistranslated quotes. Subtlety doesn't sell. But bad habits aren't imposed from the top down. Across blogs and social media you can see how the internet amplifies and facilitates the impulse to think the worst of people you have never met and to ignore any facts or context that might take the wind out of your indignation.

I spend more time than is probably good for me reading about politics and more time than is definitely good for me trying to keep up with pop culture.  I have noticed that structural hostility, not just to nuance but to logic and reason.  The point about it not being a top down decision is also insightful.  The reason why Fox News and Bill Maher are both popular is because they give certain segments of the population something they want to hear.  Fox News tells people of a conservative bent that the world is teetering on the brink of socialist, amoral, cultural collapse and that the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are some of the last, desperate prophetic voices of truth, justice and the American way.  "Liberals" are the people who want to infringe on your rights and create a nanny state where individual freedom is sacrificed on the altar of "social justice."
Liberals have their propaganda too, and speak with decidedly uncharitable bile about the Tea Party and Ted Cruz.  They blame the Fox News contingent and "big business" for everything that's wrong with the world, and claim that if the darn conservatives would just get out of the way things would be all hearts and flowers
Being a moderate, I believe that the truth lies somewhere in the nuanced positions between the extremes.  I believe that someone does need to make sure that we don't give up our freedom for the sake of safety, but I also believe that we need to work a hell of a lot harder to create a just society where the deck isn't so stacked against the poor and disenfranchised.  I have almost entirely stopped paying attention to television news.  I thank the Lord for the interweb because it means that I can read and watch, research who is saying what and check the facts, and check the checking of the facts.  But sometimes I wonder if it's just too darn hard, then I remember that the truth is never easy, and if its "obvious" it stands a rather good chance of not being true.
I'm a skeptic by nature, and so this makes sense to me.  I have never trusted authority, and am generally suspicious of people who are too shiny (which includes most, if not all, TV news personalities). It seems to me that human community, real human community, sorry twitterverse, you don't really count, is necessary to combat the worst angels of our nature.  We must be exposed and learn to care about people who are different from us.
As I was driving into work this morning thinking about the nature of dialogue in our society I was struck by an abiding thankfulness for the diverse characters that God has put into my life, people I am related to, people I call friends, people I consider adversaries (I almost said enemies, but I think adversaries is a better description).
I have relatives who are:
White, black, bi-racial, conservatives, Tea Partiers, liberals, a heroin addict, alcoholics, people who believe that we're all going to be raptured into heaven any day now, creation scientists, mild racists, conspiracy theorists, welfare recipients, bourgeoisie, Protestant, Catholic, Atheist, profoundly agnostic, messianic Jews and some who are entirely non-religious.
I have friends and acquaintances who are:
Young and Old, Atheists, hipsters, anarchists, Universalists, survivalists, Zionists, observant Jews, secular Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, Native Americans, Asians, Irish, British, Mexican, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Russian, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Wesleyans, Mennonites, and Quakers, hermits, schizophrenics, bi-polar, Punks, head-bangers, Hippies, folksie people, dance club types, even people who listen to the worst music you can possibly find, mildly eccentric and profoundly dysfunctional, addicts (recovering and active), drug users and teetotalers.
And I won't even get into all the people I deal with at work.
The thing is, while this list may seem somewhat derogatory in some directions, I am profoundly thankful for all of them, because they teach me things.  When we talk, argue, or yell at each other, we are in community and in dialogue.  I have no desire to segregate my life into the ghetto of people who agree with me.  I have come to hate the term "like-minded" with a righteous hatred.  What could you possibly learn from someone who totally agrees with you?  Come to think of it, where would you find someone who totally agrees with you?
We need nuance, we need to learn to really see each other.  It's sometimes useful to classify people, I had a blast rifling off those lists I just made, but you need to know that each one of those categories has a name and a face, and I'm glad they are or have been a part of my life.
Controversy or nontroversy can be a great thing as long as we talk to each other, I mean really talk, and a world that is drained of all our differences and the variety that makes so all fired interesting, would really be hell indeed.

More Fun with Myers-Briggs

I just came across an interesting infographic that gives a breakdown of Myers Briggs personality type indicators to socio-economic position.  I am either an INTP or INTJ, depending on what day I take the test, though I think I'm leaning more and more towards the P (perceiving) as I get older.  What you might notice is that I fall into a group of personality types called rationalists, and that, as a percentage of the population, I'm in a rather drastic minority (10.3% of the American population).
Over the years, I have been through a couple different wrasslin' matches with the MBTI, usually I come away with some slightly new information, and a renewed question of whether or not the thing is anything more than a psychological parlor trick.  Being a "rationalist" though, I love things that seem science-like, and when you start breaking down something as seemingly complex as the human persona into four descriptive continua, I can't help but get a little geeked up.
Funny thing though, if you look at my dominant personality traits in my case the NT part of my Myers-Briggs type, you will find that I am probably not very well suited to the clerical vocation.  You may think, "well duh," being a Pastor doesn't really seem like a very good thing for a 'rationalist' to be doing."  And the career counseling/psychological evaluation that I had when I was in seminary would agree with you, but here I am.
The test indicates that I would be better off as an architect or something of that nature, but life is funny, and often times human beings end up confounding all the fancy instruments and indicators that supposedly tell us what to be and do.
MBTI is interesting though, because it explains a lot of things that are prolifically verified by my experience.  For instance, being an Introvert and also being a statistically rare personality type leads to feeling like an outsider rather frequently.  Some people experience the feeling of exclusion from the majority based on race, gender or sexual orientation, I experience it as an ontological condition that has nothing to do with my physical nature.
Despite an almost genetic predisposition to feelings of alienation, despite a profoundly skeptical nature, despite the fact that I generally do not accept things that cannot be proven, I have somehow wandered into a vocation that revolves around faith and, probably even more difficult: people.  The very core of what I do for a living is a mystery, not a sound and reasonable proposition or even a logical hypothesis, but a massive, and I would say intentional, void in our ability to comprehend our existence rationally.  It's somewhat like the the black holes that some astronomers suspect exist at the center of galaxies.  The hold clusters of stars by their gravitational force, but we can't directly study them because even light cannot escape the event horizon.  We only know they're there because of their effect on everything else.
To me, God is sort of like that.  I can't prove God's existence, but for some reason I can accept it, because I see evidence of it in so many other places, and I do see evidence.  The evidence is everywhere, truth, beauty and love confront us in just too many places.  The purpose behind things seems way too elegant to be random.  Theology tells us that God is ineffable and unknowable, like that black hole that cannot be directly observed.  We can only know about God because the effect God has on things we can see.  Like God changing Saul: murderous zealot, into  Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles.  Or God calling a rationalist malcontent, who always feels at odds with the world, to be a pastor.
I wonder what type of personality does that sort of thing?