Ground Floor:

"Skepticism is the beginning of faith"

-Oscar Wilde

Holy week is upon us again.  As year go by I find myself more and more vulnerable to "cringe moments," when it comes to our celebration of the Resurrection.  At first it was the same kind of problem as I have at Christmas: commercialism... and creepy Easter Bunnies, and the weird conflation of pagan spring fertility rites with Jesus' Passion.  But year after year I am struck by the genuinely bad theology that rears it's head during this week.  I suspect that more dedicated observance of the Lenten discipline would help us out of some of these, which largely involve the more monstrous ideas about the atonement, and most of which bulldoze the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth in favor of a rather disturbingly Gnostic divine being.

Therefore, I would like to start from the ground up on this Monday morning.  I am going to explain why I would wish to call myself a Christian, even if I was an Atheist.  A lot of the objections to Christian faith are rooted in all the things that the church insists are true about Jesus, most of these involve our statements about his divinity.  This is because objective history (meaning history other than what we find in the Gospels, and other writings of Jesus' followers) has very little to say about Jesus of Nazareth.  He was a Jewish itinerant preacher/teacher who was crucified by the Romans for treason.  There were lots of people like him, and there is almost nothing historically peculiar about him.

Thomas Jefferson notoriously created a book he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or also called The Jefferson Bible, by literally cutting and pasting pieces of the Scripture together.  He excised all supernatural elements like miracles and resurrection, and left only the parables and teachings of Jesus.  Jefferson is often criticized for this behavior, but I would maintain that his approach is pretty much on par with what most of us do with Scripture: we take the parts we like and we tend to ignore things that bother us.

What I would like to do right now is engage in a little Jeffersonian exercise and strip away all the hocus pocus and simply focus (hey that rhymes!) on the teachings of Jesus.  On my good days, Jefferson's Jesus is all I really need.  I can find everything I really need to know in order to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in his ethical teachings, distilled down to one commandment: "Love your neighbor."  Remember, I can't include: "Love God," because we're working from an Atheist platform here.

Within many of the parables and "historical" events of Jesus' life there are examples of people who are attempting to get him to define, narrow down or otherwise qualify the command to love your neighbor, so that it won't be impossible, but he never will and he never does, and he bears the consequences of following that creed without flinching.

Even if there is no God, that is still pretty amazing, and he's still someone I would want to emulate and follow, in other words, I would still want to be his disciple.

The ground of Christian faith does not actually require faith at all, it simple requires looking at what we know about Jesus of Nazareth and agreeing that his way is better than our way, any of our ways.

You don't have to believe in miracles, or resurrection, or bloody theories of atonement, you don't technically have to even believe in God, to think that Jesus was "the way, and the truth and the life."  You can define those things is purely humanistic terms and they are still him.

The most basic faith is often the most unshakable.  The bedrock reality of a purely human Jesus is enough for me to want to call him teacher.  If there is no God then there is no sin, and I don't really need atonement.  If there is no resurrection then I don't really have to worry about what happens after I die, because I'm just going to disappear back into the chaos from which I emerged mostly by chance.  But learning from Jesus still makes my world a better place, it teaches me how to love others and be the best ephemeral creature that I can possibly be.

Even if there is no mystery to the universe, Jesus is still my Lord.

33

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

There are days now that I can't forget, no matter how hard I try.  April 10th is one of those days.  Today would have been my brother Jonathan's thirty-third birthday.  Last year, I opened with the above Dr. Who, and I will again this year, because the amount of what should have been is rapidly growing.  The fact that I find my brother's birthday unavoidable is one sign.
I was proud of myself because I remembered to send a happy birthday text to my sister a few weeks ago.  Her birthdays are not as terribly significant to me, because she's here, because I can exchange a brief message and let her know that I am glad she's here.  Which honestly, given that I am who I am, is probably about what I would be doing with Jon today.
Grief about this particular loss has long since ceased being generative, now it's just sort of like poking around the space where you've lost a tooth with your tongue, I really can't help doing it.  Which is why I write these little birthday epistles; I'm poking around to see if anything is different, or if it's just still that big empty.
What I've been thinking about a lot lately, is vacations.  I see that a lot of grown up brothers take vacations together.  I assume that, by now, Jon would be married and have a couple little ones, and we would rent a house at the beach or go camping or something of that ilk.  I don't imagine that we would be best friends, we never really were that way, but I sort of like the idea of annoying each other for one week a year.
It's an example of how an absence can get so much bigger than the presence ever was.
Whatever else Jon was, he was fun most of the time.  He never wanted to sit still, and he had a way of pulling people together and enlisting them in his ideas, me included.  As I creep towards forty, I sense the presence of an absence: someone to enlist me in doing stupid things.
It's really amazing how different two people with so much genetic material in common can be.  I have always been a thinker.  I'm already planning what sort of underwear I'm going to take with me on the Camino de Santiago next spring.  That's right, a year ahead of time, I'm weighing the options for my choice of undergarments, and I am not ashamed (well maybe a little, but not enough to keep me from admitting it).
Jon was a doer.  He spent a lot of money he didn't really have on going to Fiji on a surfing expedition, and he found out that he wasn't a good enough surfer for Fiji.  He spent more money he didn't have on a Honda CBR 750 that looked dangerous sitting still, and he admitted, in a candid moment, that the bike scared him a little.
I have never done anything so impulsive.  The closest I have come is buying a pop-up camper, which I have spent more time regretting than actually using.  I'm not cut out for impulsion, which is why I needed my brother to stick around.  To get me to do stuff without looking (three hundred times) before I leap, to stop me from thinking about every stupid thing way too much, to allow me to brush off April 10th with a simple text message instead of thinking about everything that should have been, but isn't.
All those things that should have been, but never were, mount up, drip after drop into an infinite bucket, and I take a day a year to write a few paragraphs and say Happy Birthday Molebutt.

Here We Are...

They will be making one of their two annual visits to church next week.  You know, the people you haven't seen since Christmas.  Among the "regulars," the Christmas and Easter crowd is definitely a source of mixed feelings.  On the one hand, it's really nice to have a full sanctuary, it makes you feel important and popular, like having a big crowd show up for your birthday party.  But on the other hand, you know they're mostly there for the wrong reasons, and you know you are probably not going to see them again until December.
Pastors can get nice and snarky about "them."  We wonder whether it matters at all that we're going to stand up and tell them what God has done in Jesus Christ.  I know I have preached two main types of Easter morning sermons: the challenge and the conciliation.  The logic behind the challenge is pretty solid: since this might be the only sermon (or maybe one of two) that they hear all year, give to them straight and true, preach the resurrection in all it's death defying glory and draw as much attention to the light breaking the darkness as you can.
But the logic behind conciliation can be good too, if you're really trying to "sell" the church: remember that they are obviously not strong in their faith, they are not very rooted at all in the worship of the community of faith, nor are they walking steadfastly down the path of discipleship.  They are "baby Christians," therefore give them the Good News with a bit of sugar coating, make them feel welcome... show them all the really warm fuzzy things that come with being part of a church.  Under no circumstances present anything really challenging, tell the story everyone expects to hear, and maybe, just maybe, they'll come back some other time.
As I typed that last paragraph, I realized that I'm not doing a very good job of making my point, because as I described the second type, a type I have almost certainly preached and a type that will be preached in many, many churches on Easter Sunday, I realized how I can't even sell it to myself.  I can't keep the sarcasm out of my tone, I can't make it sound like the right path to take.
So I guess what I ought to do is pay attention as to where the hazards are in presenting the resurrection as a challenge, what are the stumbling blocks that we try to avoid so desperately that we wander completely off the trail?  This is a list of descriptive factors about most of the preachers I know.  I am fairly certain that there are many people out there that don't fit this mold, but I generally try not to associate too much with them, because they're probably dangerous.
1. We don't want to be Priggish.  Thanks to C.S. Lewis for familiarizing me with the words prig and priggish, it allows me to avoid using profanity.  Over the past, say 40 years or so the pastoral vocation has become more and more friendly to introverted types.  This means a lot of the people who stand up in front of crowds of people to preach on Sunday morning are not in it because they like the attention, they are in it because they feel called to use the gifts of inward reflection in the service of the community.  This also means that, unlike some of our more extroverted brethren and sistren, we worry about being perceived as obnoxious and overbearing (not saying that introverts cannot be those things or that extroverts are always those things, I just mean that, for introverts becoming such is a major worry).  This means that the bombastic hell-fire sermon really doesn't fit with our idiom, it's just not who we are or what we tend to believe about God.  We want people to like us, and we don't really like loud, in-your-face people, so therefore, in a room with lots of new and strange people, we tend to get more reserved, often to a fault.
2. We equate challenging people with making people mad.  Mostly because we live in a world where disagreement almost always comes with lots of name calling and pissing contests.  Rhetoric as a general field of study has nearly shuffled off of the mortal coil, and people don't know how to present their opinions or refute the opinions of others without breaking rule number one.  Therefore, how do we challenge people, who are obviously fairly content doing whatever else they happen to do on 51 Sunday mornings a year, without making it sound like we're judging them, and thus making them angry.  Because, let's face it, nothing makes a 21st century American more red-in-the-face angry than being judged.
3. We are fairly certain that us preaching a sermon is an act of unmitigated grace.  Meaning that when the pressure grows, as it does on Easter week, we lean back into God's grace, instead of forward into the work and danger of discipleship (I know, I know grace is there too, but it's too hard to trust that when things are crazy, that's why we're having this talk).
4. Deep down, we wish all these people would like us enough to come see us every week.  That's right, "us," not God, "us," as in the preacher.  We will lament the cult of personality type preachers, we will be able to give treatises as to why Joel Osteen needs to be stoned to death, but deep down, because we're human, we want to be a rock star.  The peculiar mixed emotions are really seated in this reality, it's not enough that people come to church because it's what they're supposed to do on Easter, we want them to come because they like us.  Therefore, the C&E Christians really only remind us that without the prop of an institution and the rather hollow observance of what should be the holiest days of the year, we are really not all that interesting.
5. Ultimately, the fear that we have about bold proclamation is really just self doubt.  That self doubt can be important, if you use it to help develop understanding of the people who need to hear the Good News, but that same self doubt can lead you to relativism and equivocation faster than you can say, "boo," if you don't give full attention to the absolutely scandalous truth of the empty tomb.  No one wants to be the desperate ex-boyfriend begging for another chance, but that's what we become, and that's why there seem to be fewer and fewer people in church.
It's a psychological reality: differentiated people are more attractive.  That means that if you want to be attractive to others, know and accept who you are.  It's a lesson that the body of the church needs to learn.  It doesn't matter how physically attractive you are if you don't know who you are.  Should we then get stuck up and stuck on ourselves, as Paul liked to say, "by no means!"  And that's really the biggest danger of the challenging, pull no punches sort of Easter sermon, you are in danger of being a bully.  You can't approach it as a platform for your own genius, because it's not.  It doesn't make you sound logical and clever, it forces you into contact with mystery and something that makes no sense by most of the standard "rules" of life.
Easter Sunday is the perfect time to introduce people to an idea that can rock their world: resurrection.  Resurrection not just as something that happens somewhere over the rainbow, but as something that happens every day, in life, as we suffer together, as we rejoice together, as we live together.  Maybe that's where we go wrong, maybe we just think of resurrection as a one day a year sort of thing, and maybe that's where all "those people" got the idea.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Michele and I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, last night.  And since then I have been trying to think of some redeeming quality of the movie.  Really trying, because it's a Martin Scorcese movie and he has directed some of my favorite movies of all time, including Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Departed.  So I really wanted to like WOW,  but I didn't, I couldn't, and I'm trying to come up with a single reason why, and I think I've got it down to one word: Gratuitous.
There was gratuitous depravity at every turn.  The usual peppering of F-bombs, which I was prepared for, more drug use than Requiem for a Dream, and more orgy scenes than Caligula, all in the telling of what was basically a cautionary tale about unfettered greed and excess.
Except that Scorcese, in telling this tale, needed to heed his own advice.  I get that telling a story about a guy who loves money for money's sake and who indulges in every kind of excess he can possibly imagine, requires a certain amount of R-rated material, but at almost three solid hours long, I found myself wondering if maybe someone didn't need to shout, "Cut!" a little sooner.
I have preached sermons about Pulp Fiction, I'm not a prude when it comes to adult content in a movie, and I kind of get what Scorcese was trying to do, but I think it just went too far.  Ultimately the characters were just static and two dimensional and you didn't care about any of them.  The story was basically a re-telling of Goodfellas, replacing the Mafia with Wall Street, and replacing Henry Hill with Jordan Belfort.  Except that Henry Hill was a more sympathetic character, at least I don't remember really wanting him to get caught the same way I wanted Belfort to get caught.
Normally, I would use this space to lift up something good and right about a movie, but the only thing I can do with WOW is tell you not to watch it.  Don't watch it with the hope that it has some redeeming value.  The only message is that unfettered greed is bad, but that our society ultimately has very few consequences for rich people who break the rules.  The best part of the movie is over in about the first twenty minutes, but after Leo Dicaprio has lunch with Matthew McConaughy, the best is over and there is still over two hours of movie to go, of which the only thing worth watching is a scene involving Dicaprio, Jonah Hill, Bo Dietl and some 20 year old Quaaludes.
Everything else is entirely predictable.
Ultimately it just feels like getting beaten with a depravity stick, which is not really very much fun.

What Is Truth?

Pilate asked Jesus: "What is truth?"
It seems to have been a rhetorical question, but it shouldn't have been.
And Jesus doesn't answer, maybe because he knows that whatever he says will essentially fall on deaf ears, or maybe, he doesn't answer because he knows that truth is inherently undefinable.  His truth as a Jew is going to be different from that of a Roman like Pilate, his truth as a man facing a brutal death is going to be different from the truth of the man who is about to condemn him to that fate.
In the age of science we are on a quest to gain at least reasonable proximity to "objective" truth, but if you press hard enough you will always find that there needs to be some hedge against uncertainty: standard deviations, margins of error, variance that may or may not be explicable.  Even when you come to a place where you have strong enough data to state the facts, the interpretation of facts into truth is still a tricky process, where "reasonable people" might disagree.
If it's that difficult to name truth in a field that is entirely dependent on data to support conclusions, how much harder is it then in the realm of theology?  Where do you even begin?  If you think you're starting with an "objective" mind you are delusional.  If you think that you would ever arrive at the just and loving God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, simply based on observable reality, you are sorely mistaken.  Everything about the way the world actually works would probably lead you to some sort of paganism, atheism or a agnosticism.  The only reason anyone even knows who Jesus of Nazareth was is because of a tradition of people who have talked about him and retold the stories of his life, death and resurrection.  We have very little "objective" data about the man, and yet...
But I'm not going to jump off here and say that the fact that Christianity is still a thing is somehow proof that it's true, what I'm going to say is: isn't it amazing that Christianity is still a thing?  I'm often staggered by the historical reality of Christianity: the path that led from an obscure sect of Judaism to a world religion that dwarfs its progenitor, but that peculiar reality does not prove it's truth.
The reality of the Christian tradition was foreshadowed by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, when they talked about "the cloud of witnesses," all the people who have worked just a little ways along the path of discipleship.  The councils that have dealt with this heresy or that heresy, making course corrections, sometimes in peaceful debate, other times in violent confrontations, but who miraculously never entirely destroy the message of the Gospel.
The miracle of the Christian faith is not that we have entirely grasped the truth, but that we have managed to hold onto just enough of it to keep us going, and moving forward, to keep us out of the various ditches of extremism on one side and relativism on the other (yes, I know, there are parts of the body that can always throw some gutter balls from time to time, but the main course of Christianity somehow manages to wobble down the center).
We uncertainly apprehend the small bit of  truth we have.  Sometimes we neglect or even despise the truth that has been hard fought by our ancestors.  Most of the time we have a dangerous flirtation with worldly values, in short, the reason we have the truth we have is not because we are clever, disciplined and insightful, it is because grace is a thing.
We are pulled, in every generation, by the powerful lure of Gnosticism, by the arrogant voice of our inner teenager assuring us that we have finally figured out the mystery that has so badly outwitted our parents, we are tempted to retreat into the pseudo-pagan idea that morality is really all that God cares about.  We make unwarranted theological assumptions and then miss the truth that so plainly stares us in the face: just like Pilate.

Close Encounters of the Healthcare Kind

Mid afternoon Thursday: I get a call from the school nurse.  Caitlyn fell on the asphalt at recess and busted up her hand and skinned her knee.  The nurse says, "Her little finger on her right hand took the worst of  it, I think it might be fractured."
"Oh crap," I think, though probably in slightly more PG-13 language, "here we go."
What immediately starts running through my mind is really responsible adult type stuff: ER or Urgent Care, Pediatrician? No way, it will take a week to get an appointment.  I have to leave the office with a sermon only half done, I've got to get Michele to leave work early to make sure she can be home for Jack to get off the bus, I've got to hope and pray that we're not in the ER for six or seven hours because I have to preach a service at Grace Lutheran church, where I've never been, in the evening.  All the way from the Church to the school, I'm going through all this stuff, and thinking about how this is going to be another $400 or $500 hospital bill...
Then I walk into the nurses office...
And there's my little girl, all green around the gills, with her hand on an icepack and a trash can next to her, because she had been throwing up, because she was probably in shock, and I know that all the stuff I had been thinking about was utter crap (though probably in slightly more PG-13 language).
Then I go from being a responsible adult to just being Dad.  I don't know when that happened: the responsible adult thing or the Dad thing, but I'm pretty sure they're related.  I ask the nurse: "ER or urgent care?"  She says, "ER, if it's actually broken it will save you a step."
Okay, so that clears that up, and I have to be calm and help Cate, who's still looking a little piqued, not worry too much about what's going to happen, and off to the ER we go.
"No, X-rays don't hurt."
"It will probably just be a splint either way."
"Do you still feel like you're going to throw up?  Because please not in the car."
So we do the ER thing and the X-Rays show no broken bones, just a really banged up and bruised pinkie finger and then the responsible adult makes another appearance: "Great, another $500 band aid."
I have such mixed feelings about all of this.
I am so glad that I can just take my wounded little chick to the ER and get her taken care of, but I really wish there wasn't going to be such a steep price tag for the whole ordeal.  By the way, I have insurance, it's actually pretty good insurance... for big stuff, but it doesn't really help much with the "small" stuff.
But medical "emergencies" don't ever feel small, when they happen to your kids.
I am thankful that the actual health and care part of our system does actually seem to work pretty well.
What I wish is that the economic part of it wasn't so mangled.  I have tried to understand, and I get that in our capitalist society everyone wants to make a buck. I get that insurance companies want to make profits for doing what they do, I get that doctors and nurses work extremely hard and deserve to get paid, I get that medical equipment is expensive and running a hospital is a big operation, but I wonder why it is that other developed nations like Spain and the UK and even Canada, can manage something that makes more fiscal sense, while we've got a very functional healthcare system that is economically farcical.
The reason why it's bloated is also the reason why it's going to be really hard to fix: because a lot of people make a lot of money on the way things work now, but it leaves regular folk having to pay $500 for a band-aid, and there's something broken about that, even if my daughter's pinkie finger wasn't.

Meet Me at Camera Three...

Jon Stewart does this thing on the Daily Show where he mimics the gravitas that theoretically happens the camera cuts to a different shot.  He turns and switches tone and persona, it's a 60 Minutes sort of move: now over here, we're really going to cut to the chase.  I generally don't like to tell people what to think on these little blogs, or even in sermons, I would much rather pose what I consider to be interesting questions, express my opinions or sometimes just sit and lament about how generally screwy things are.  There are a few things that I would like to get off of my chest though, so I'm not going to hedge and walk you through my thought processes, I'm just going to say it, straight up, with a list.  These are things I think the American Christian Church needs to hear:
1. You are not persecuted.  There are places in the world where Christians have to be willing to die for their faith, the US of A is not one of them.  "Forcing" you to accept marriage equality legislation or taking the ten commandments out of the courthouse is not persecution, and calling it that is insulting to those who actually are persecuted.
2. You do not need to have a certain political affiliation or a particular approach to Scriptural interpretation to be a "Real Christian."  All you need to do is follow Jesus, in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but please, discipleship is hard so get into a church and be a part of a community because:
3. Faith is not a private matter between you and God.  If you make it that, you're eventually going to be dangerous, maybe not now and maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of your life.  Churches can be dysfunctional and dangerous; in the worst cases it's because there is someone (or several someones) there who thinks they can manipulate God and other people to get what they want, but in most cases it's just because they're full of sinners who are stumbling around and bumping into each other.  If you suspect the former run away, but try and be sure it's not just a case of the latter, because you're never going to find a community where that's not true.
4. A little bit of stumbling is par for the course, but that's okay because of grace. You need to know that God is forgiving, and that God's forgiveness is really, really big.  Big enough for you and your sin, and big enough for everyone else's as well.  A church that treats sin as avoidable is just as bad as a church that doesn't talk about sin at all, but sin doesn't get the final word.
5. God is bigger than the bogey man.  Whatever your favorite bogey man happens to be, God is bigger than that.
6. God is big enough to use broken people, whether they believe in him or not.  There's a popular quote attributed to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, heir apparent to Carl Sagan as ruler of the kingdom of science: "Science is true whether or not you believe in it."  Actually the same thing is true of God, only pagan deities rely solely on the devotion of their followers, so stop acting like you're the only one who really "gets" God.  That attitude makes you dangerously pagan.
7. Final point, stop telling God who to love, and accept that God loves everyone, prodigals and faithful alike.  Even thought that may be unpopular, God is not running for student council.  If you live with that you will find it much harder to hate other people, and it will start to be possible to do that love thing that Jesus was always going on about.