Anathema

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.

-The Theological Declaration of Barmen, 1934

"The false doctrine," was the acceptance of Hitler's Nazism by German Christians.  The Barmen Declaration has made its way into The Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (USA), because it represents a moment in time when the church stood up and said enough.  Obviously, Karl Barth and the German Pastors that convened the in the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church in Barmen in May of 1934 lost the battle.  Hitler got to do what Hitler wanted to do, but these words have made it through.  They have outlasted the Third Reich by over half a century and they will continue to travel with us as Confessing Church through the ages.

In the face of a challenge like Nazism the church sometimes stumbles, because we are sinners prone to the same fear and hatred as anyone else.  We do not always listen to the voice of Jesus of Nazareth or heed the movement of the Holy Spirit, or even simply act with compassion towards our fellow humans.

This is a description of the German context in 1933 provided as background to the Barmen Declaration by the Book of Confessions:

In January 1933, after frustrating years in which no government in Germany was able to solve problems of economic depression and mass unemployment, Adolph Hitler was named chancellor.  By playing on people's fear of communism and Bolshevism, he was able to persuade Parliament to allow him to rule by edict.

You know what happened next.  Notice the words in this description: "frustrating," "economic depression," "unemployment," "playing on people's fear" of others with different ideologies.  It's chilling, because it sounds so cussedly familiar.
Anathematizing is a cool word, it means you name what is wrong and you agree it is wrong.  Sometimes that comes long before ever figuring out what is right.  Often, great theological and cultural debates and movements begin with a complaint against something.  Martin Luther's 99 theses were essentially complaints about what needed fixed in the Roman Catholic church. Martin Luther King Jr's I Have a Dream, speech named segregation, inequality and racism as anathema to a truly just society.
Unfortunately, the naming of anathema in recent years has not been a unified activity in the church of Jesus Christ.  We have often engaged in internecine arguments, accusing one another of this heresy or that heresy.  Differing positions on moral issues like abortion, on social issues like homosexuality and marriage equality, on political issues like gun control or healthcare, have all distracted us from recognizing an evil that is now rearing it's head. We have been on and on about the symptoms and we have missed the underlying disease.
I am not dismissing the importance or the nuanced reality of any of the above debates, but there is something deeper and more sinister that we must rise up to call Anathema: the rule of Greed and Violence.
Without question people have differing opinions on how best to manage these idols, but the fact remains that they are, in fact, idols and they are the dominant idols of our age.  Their tools are dissociated individualism, the illusion of security, and most of all fear.
We are so fragmented by our differences of opinion that we cannot do what is needed in the hour of crisis: name the enemy.  The enemy hides and lets us take out our rage on its puppets: fundamentalists, terrorists, bigots, as the kids today say: Haters.  And in the long run we become what we fear, because we don't recognize the darkness in ourselves and confess.
We have this hope: that love casts out fear.  And this is where the church needs to stand right now: with love, because God is love.  We need to hear that Jesus is the example of how God loves the world, and we need to pay attention closely to his example.  The Barmen Declaration uses Scripture to call the church to this task, it refers to them as "evangelical truths," using the word evangelical in it's proper sense rather than as a pseudo-religious political descriptor.  One of these "good news" truths is Ephesians 4: 15-16:

Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body is joined and knit together.

This is who we need to be in such a time as this. This is the "form of our message" to follow the way of the cross and not the empire, to seek mercy and not vengeance, to love and not fear. To understand that Christ has conquered death and sin, and we are heirs to that victory. which gives us little excuse to be fearful, hateful and violent people defending against the infidel.  To be as such is to join the idolatry.
We have been here before.
We have actually lost a very similar battle to the one that is now raging through our national culture and politics.  Losing the battle to Hitler was disastrous and painful, but it was not the end.  The words of those who "rejected the false doctrine" named the evil anathema, even if they seemed futile in 1934, are now helpful to those who face the fear once again.  Have you ears to hear?

Fear and Loathing in America

This is bad, and every day it seems to be getting worse.  Our crazy train is going off of the rails in a decidedly non-Ozzy-wild-party sort of way.  The rage and hate has gotten the better of us. Someone even crossed the line at Fox News for being too rude to President Obama.  Color me shocked that Fox News even had that line.  An ex military man responded to Obama's speech about responding to Daesh by using an epithet that was so out of the bounds of good taste that even Fox had to say, "whoa dude, you went too far."
It occurs to me that it's not just the bad word, it is what it reveals about a certain mindset present in American culture at the moment.  It is present in the ravings of presidential hopeful and egomaniac Donald the Trump.  It is present in the gun in my back pocket speech by Jerry Falwell Jr. It is present in the general fear and loathing that infests us at the moment.  We are responding like bullies.  The word that was used by Ralph Peters to describe our President is a word that is usually accompanied by a shove in the chest and a wedgie by some hyper-thyroidal seventh grader.  It is a word straight out of pornographic dirty talk.  It is not a word that should be used in polite conversation or indeed in any form of speech that wishes to be taken seriously by adults.
And a grown man used it about the elected leader of the most powerful nation on earth, because we haven't gone all total war on ISIS.  This is precisely in the same context and manner that a bully would try to goad someone into a fist fight behind the gym.
That's where we are America.  That's where this has brought us.  I hope you're satisfied.
We need to repent.  Despite the reality that I just sounded like a scolding middle school teacher, I say WE need to repent, because this culture includes me, I am a part of it, and if things are broken, I bear responsibility for that.
Once upon a time, I was talking to a very wise uncle of mine.  We were discussing the ins and outs of the tax code and the general prospects of the continued solvency of Social Security.  He was "splaining" as he said, how the federal gubmint had been borrowing money from Social Security for years and not paying it back, which is essentially not a problem until the Baby Boomers started retiring and all of the sudden the foundations of the whole thing start to erode.  All of this was rather news to me, but I have long lived with a fatalism about the whole enterprise upon which my retirement will depend at least in some part.
At some point I asked, rather incredulously, why this sort of thing is allowed to go on?  Why don't we change the rules?  Why doesn't any of this get fixed?
His answer: "Someone with enough money and power wants it to stay the way it is."
"But democracy..." I stammered, suddenly feeling rather more desperate to understand than any 30 year old with Masters degree really ought to feel.  My Uncle Larry just sort of shook his head.
"I'd give mine back if I thought it would do you any good," he said, "but it wouldn't, they'd just steal that too."
Since that conversation, I have started to look differently at the systems we are a part of, and examining those things that are only explicable by an irrational maintenance of the status quo.  I understand mistrusting the government, I do, but where are we if we can't at least acknowledge the humanity of our leaders (and they do sometimes make that difficult).  No matter what you think of Obama, for instance, he deserves the respect due his office, not the derision of "playground" thugs.
I repent if I have thought of those I disagree with as "morons," "idiots," "racists," "thieves," "bandits," or any other number of derogatory things I might call them.  I will not back away from honest descriptions (such as calling Trump an egomaniac, he totally is one, and he would probably agree). But I do not wish to participate in a national re-enactment of Lord of the Flies, or the Sixth Grade.  It's not taking us anywhere good.

The Debater of the Age

What does Mr. Chesterton think about it?

I want to know, not only because of the public importance of his opinions,

but because I have always followed  Mr. Chesterton with extraordinary interest and enjoyment, 

and his assent to any view of mine is a great personal pleasure, 

because I am very fond of Mr. Chesterton.

-George Bernard Shaw, in a debate with G.K. Chesterton.

George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton are a study in how to be human beings who disagree.  If you have the time and the inclination you can read this, and enjoy the actual commerce of two amazing minds and admirable if irascible personalities.  That Chesterton and Shaw could engage in such dialogue might actually make you mourn for the state of public debate in our day and age, where we can say so much, but just seem to do it so badly.

There was a time when dialogue and debate was not done in soundbites.  There was a time when ideas between great thinkers were exchanged in public forums, and people were interested enough to crowd into a hall to listen for a good long while.  There was an age where scholars wrote theses and other scholars responded in well thought out and premised argument.  It could get salty to say the least, but for either one of them to resort to the crude "gotcha" style of rhetoric so prevalent these days?  It would have been a disgrace, as indeed it should be.

I guess I'm just sort of pining our loss. We have so many pressing issues: human rights, poverty, wars, healthcare, terrorism, violence run amok, and the best of us can't even get a hearing.  The stage is dominated by the most rigid and dogmatic, and perhaps even criminal sorts, who seem to honestly be trying to make the problems worse.  In the debate above, Mr. Shaw says in his opening remarks that both he and Chesterton are mad men.  They are writers, traffickers in ideas and stories, but that that doesn't mean they don't have something valuable to say.  Shaw says:

Obviously we are mad men; and in the East we should be reverenced as madmen.  The wisdom of the East says: "Let us listen to these men carefully, but let us not forget that they are madmen."

Chesterton and Shaw had this humor about them, and humility of a very peculiar sort, that may have just been a product of their era and Britishness, but it is something that seems utterly absent from the discourses of our day.
Beyond that though, they both had a desire that the world they lived in should become a better, more just and decent place as a result of their argument.  In the debates they had they focused their sharp intellects on the real merits, and weaknesses of their own assumptions and approaches to the problem.  They had profound disagreements, but they never let that get in the way of being rather fond of one another.  They actually seemed to enjoy the product of the other's intellect, even if they thought it was wrong.
I have seen both Chesterton and Shaw quotations used on the interweb to express certain values and ideals in the present political situations.  The purposes to which these quotes are being put would make both men give a disgusted harrumph. Chesterton has become a darling of political and religious conservatives, as well he probably should be, if conservatives were at all concerned with being what society most needs them to be: the voice of orthodoxy and stability, instead of anger-mongers.  Shaw lends himself to rationalist and liberal causes, but he is not soft in head or heart, he is a rigorous proponent of common sense and humanist ethics that actually present a positive challenge to people of faith to shun their hypocrisy in a way that rings prophetic.
At the conclusion of the debate, Hillaire Belloc, the moderator, offers this observation about the subject of the debate (growing inequity in industrial society and the possible remedies thereof, sound familiar?):

In I do not know how many years--five, ten, twenty--this debate
will be as antiquated as crinolines are.  I am surprised that
neither of the two speakers pointed out that one of three things
is going to happen.  One of three things:  not one of two.
It is always one of three things.  This industrial civilization which,
thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we
are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore
end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude,
leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs,
complicated but based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens.
Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert.
Or it will lead the mass of men to become contented slaves,
with a few rich men controlling them.  Take your choice.
You will all be dead before any of the three things comes off.
One of the three things is going to happen, or a mixture of two,
or possibly a mixture of the three combined.

 That was written almost 100 years ago.  Surely everyone who heard it is now dead, but I do not think the judgment has been transmuted.  We're still suffering from the monstrous wickedness, folly and ineptitude of the wanton consumption of resources and lives.  There has been no restoration of sane ordinary human affairs.  The desert option is still very much in play, as is the plutocracy option.  We need voices, true conservatives like Chesterton, true liberals like Shaw, and we need them to talk to each other and work with each other, we need the madmen who know their madness.  We need the return of civil discourse and the iron-on-iron sharpening of ideas. Without it, we are going to continue shouting at clouds, jousting at windmills and repeating all of our mistakes.

 

What Has Been, Will Be Again

"You brood of vipers!"

-Jesus, AND John the Baptist

It is the Tweet/Facebook share of the day, the New York Daily News cover with all the tweets from Republican presidential candidates around the edge offering "thoughts and prayers" to the victims of the latest atrocity, and in big block letters: "God is not fixing this."

Each time this happens the backlash against the "thoughts and prayers" reaction gets a little stronger and a little louder.  I'm not even going to go into the gun control/violence part of this equation today, I'm just going to talk a bit about the things that really made Jesus mad, because actually the same thing that inspired the Daily News headline and the rising sense of futility around this whole issue was the thing that drove both Jesus and his cousin John to use the phrase "Brood of vipers," which if anything is unfair to the snakes.

Look, I believe in prayer.  Specifically, I believe in the power of prayer as more than just a "centering exercise."  I believe that God responds to our prayers, I believe that in prayer we connect with our Creator, and I believe that, sometimes, prayer can bring miracles.  That said, I don't think our prayers are doing much good in this case, and sincerity and faith are not the reason.  Sure, I'm rather certain that a lot of the "thoughts and prayers" that are going up from politicians and the like are just pro-forma, "Gee I'm sorry we're not going to do anything to actually help" type prayers, I'm not even counting those.  But I do know that many people, people who really grasp the power of prayer and are praying good prayers with sincere faith and not just in a CYA sort of way, are praying fervently that this would end, and it's not ending.

That doesn't mean those prayers are worthless, it just means we haven't gotten to the part where God acts yet.  Jesus prayed really this prayer about a cup passing from him really hard one time, and God didn't answer him.  If it can happen to Jesus, it can happen to anyone.  The end of that prayer was this, "Not my will, but thy will be done."

I don't pretend to know what God's will is all the time.  I certainly don't presume to know how to fix the problems we are having.  I suspect that the answer is much bigger and more far reaching than we can realize in the heat of these moments.

This is not me suggesting that we continue to sit back and do nothing, and continue to use the illusion of prayer to sanctify our apathy.  If we're praying for God's will to be done, we need to be ready to accept that the first thing God will change is not the gun laws or the mental health system, but our hearts.  Want to see a way through this?  Invite God to change your heart, invite God to convict you in how to act on this, pay attention to the results.  Those who are praying in sympathy are only asking God to alleviate the symptoms of an illness, not to take over the cause of the illness.

There have always been people who learn to speak the language of prayer, "those who say long prayers in public," without ever actually opening themselves to the presence of God.  I'm not putting myself in the seat of judgment on those people, because, you know, glass houses.

I'm sort of a professional pray-er.  I have to say prayers a lot, often out loud, that are just sort of expected prayers: grace before meals, invocations at the start of events, those sorts of things.  I know what words to say, and I know when to keep it short, and I just sort of ask God to forgive me if I don't always manage to pray that sincerely when we sit down to lunch at Panera.

On the other hand there are those prayers that come from deep down, the ones that sometimes come with tears and powerful emotions, and no, it doesn't mean they have to be spontaneous and extemporaneous, they can be written prayers, they can use the words spoken by others, What matters is that you open yourself to the presence of the Holy Spirit.  These are the prayers that connect.  I consider it a gift that, on occasion, I get to say these out loud, in front of people, that's what keeps me going.

The fact that prayer can have such power is actually the reason why I find insincere prayer so offensive, why I sometimes resist the obligatory prayers, why I am, along with many others, getting tired of hearing about all the "thoughts and prayers," that are obviously not leading to changed hearts and lives.

I will leave you with this prayer, one of my favorites, by Howard Thurman:

Lord, Open unto me

Open unto me - light for my darkness.

Open unto me - courage for my fear.

Open unto me - hope for my despair.

Open unto me - peace for my turmoil.

Open unto me - joy for my sorrow.

Open unto me - strength for my weakness.

Open unto me - wisdom for my confusion.

Open unto me - forgiveness for my sins.

Open unto me - Love for my hates.

Open unto me - thy Self for my self.

Lord, Lord, open unto me!

Stop Me If You Think that You've Heard this One Before (on second thought just listen)

Turn, O Lord! How long?

Have compassion on your servants!

-Psalm 90: 13

We're in "thoughts and prayers" mode again.  For the second time in what seems like just a few days.  Add San Bernardino to the list of places that have hosted a shooting rampage.  We're cranking out these things like housewives having Tupperware parties.  Is there a Black Friday deal? Two atrocities for the price of one?

I don't even care what the details of this one are.  I don't care what sick reason somebody had for opening fire.  I don't care whether they got the guns legally or illegally or whether we call them terrorists or not.  I don't... I can't...

My eyes are spent with weeping;

-Lamentations 2: 11a

There is no easy way out of this.  There is no clean legislative solution.  Even if we get rid of the nonsense of the NRA, even if we pass meaningful gun control, these things are still going to happen. We have sold our soul to a demon a long time ago.  That demon's name is violence, Appolluon, the Destroyer.  And he's probably not the only one who has his hooks in this one. I think selfishness, greed and fear are probably riding shotgun.  I think we can't pull our own heads out of our collective rear-ends long enough to simply say that this has got to stop and act like grown-ups.

You, mortal, will you judge the bloody city?

Then declare to it all its abominable deeds.

You shall say, "Thus says the Lord God: A city! 

Shedding blood within itself; its time has come; making its idols, defiling itself.

You have become guilty by the blood you have shed, and defiled by the idols you have made; 

you have brought your day near, the appointed time of your years has come.

-Ezekiel 22: 2-4

Saying it's got to stop is not enough.  This is going to need to be an act of political, social and spiritual willpower that I'm just not sure we have in us.  We have to hit this thing on multiple fronts.  We have to stop talking like we can solve this with more violence and name the sinister force behind this for what it is.  We cannot continue to entrench in our own positions, name each other enemy and expect this sort of thing to cease.  It is a sickness of our soul.

Among some of the tribes of the Great Plains there came a time when they realized that it was too late.  They had lost the fight with the Europeans, the buffalo were gone, the people were starving, and they turned to the one thing they had left, their spirit, and they started the Ghost Dance.  In as much as I understand it, which is not a whole lot, they were dancing to commune with the past.  It was almost sort of an apology to their ancestors, "sorry, we lost."

The whites felt threatened by something they didn't understand and therefore felt powerless to control, and that combined with other factors lead to the massacre of Wounded Knee.  I wonder if massacres are becoming a way of life in America?  We certainly seem to be developing a liturgy for them.  It's getting pretty predictable, maybe we should just go whole hog and make up our own Ghost Dance to apologize to all these innocent people we are failing to protect.  To apologize to crucified God who tried to show us a way that doesn't end like this.  To apologize to the children we're putting out there in this world where violence rules unquestioned.

At least if we dance, no one gets killed, right?

Hashing Things Out

This happens sometimes, I get an idea related to what I'm going to preach about on Sunday and, boom, the thing just sort of explodes into something that is just too catastrophically messy for a sermon.  That's when you, the readers of this blog, get to join me in the adventure of sermon preparation.

Beneath the surface of the sermon I'm working on about John the Baptist preparing the way of the Lord is a discussion of the tripartite relationship between Prophet, Priest and King.  I sat down this morning with a good old fashioned pen and paper and started diagramming and outlining how this these three identities relate to one another and after I filled up two pages with descriptive statements and scribbled lines, generalizations and anecdotal exceptions to those generalizations, I realized that this was getting hopeless.

To further complicate matters, I'm reading Robert Pirsig's follow up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a novel called Lila, An Inquiry into Morals, which like ZAMM is half novel, half philosophical dissertation.  The protagonist, Phaedrus, is grappling with metaphysics and the failure of the generally accepted subject-object scheme of understanding.  About a quarter of the way through, he is expounding upon a "better" metaphysical frame of reference: static-dynamic tension.  His primary illustration at this point in the book is an anthropological anecdote from Zuni tribal culture in the American southwest where what he calls a Brujo, to borrow the Latin American term challenges the authority structure of his tribe, is tortured and then calls upon the authority of the "foreign" European colonial justice system for redress, leading to the dethronement and incarceration of the "War Priests," of his tribe and eventually the succession of the Brujo, to the position of power, both within the tribe and within the now dominant colonial government.

It is an illustration of the static-dynamic tension in which one can see the moral ambiguity of the situation.  The Brujo is not a hero in the traditional sense, in fact, he is somewhat of a troubling character.  He does in fact overturn the status quo of the tribe, which was probably experienced as a trauma by the community.  We know, of course, that the status quo of the community was going to be overturned soon enough by the ascension of European colonists and the upheaval of the aboriginal cultures that ensued, and in many ways the Brujo was able to keep his tribe ahead of the most disastrous implications of that shift, but only by kicking down the door, so to speak.

Pirsig has not specifically compared this story to the narrative of the Biblical Prophets, but I'm making that jump.  Prophets are dynamic figures, they are agents of change, whereas kings and priests tend to be agents of the "way it is."  For the most part, prophets have an adversarial relationship with kings and priests, even when the prophets happen to be priests themselves.  Luke names the worldly rulers of the time and the religious authorities of the time in his introduction to John the Baptist.  The Romans and Herod are the kings, Annas and Caiaphus are the priests, John is the prophet, "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness." Everyone except John is invested in the static condition of things.  Sure Herod doesn't like the Romans, and the Priests don't like Herod or the Romans, and the Romans are no fans of the Priests, but they feel that they share a mutual interest in keeping the "peace." Which is famously the "pax romana," a peace maintained by military force and utter fear.

The Priesthood in the Temple and the rulers in Rome and Judea pretty much agree that it is best to keep the common people under their thumb. John the Baptist starts rocking that boat, most immediately by telling people they are forgiven for their sins, which if it is a message that is believed is going to cut into the Temple's business.  He also (off screen as it were) says nasty things about Herod and Philip and some of the incestuous/adulterous stuff happening in their spots.  Apparently John attended the Jeremiah school of prophecy, because he  is pretty good at making enemies of the powerful.  But people love him, because he's speaking to where they are, he's giving them an alternative to the impossible and desperate task of appeasing God through sacrifices and he's telling them that there's some authority over them that is even bigger and much more beneficent than Rome.

John is a dynamic force, and therefore is set in tension with the static forces of the age.  This creates turmoil, because the static forces don't deal with that tension well and eventually get violent.  From the perspective of the authorities John was a troublemaker. I have heard that label applied to Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi, and a host of others that would seem to indicate pretty good company..

Essentially, change is a defining characteristic of prophets: repent (metanoia, turning), maybe go back to what you used to know, maybe reach for something new, but don't just stay the course, because it's not the good way.  Prophets don't always seem like the good guys, because sometimes, a lot of the time, they create a ruckus.

What I'm trying to do is get around to peace.  But Prophets aren't usually about peace.  They are about pointing the way to a better peace than what we have now.  John the Baptist was not an agent of peace, he was a troublemaker. The traditional understanding of Jesus as a union of prophet, priest and king may be the part of this iceberg that sticks above the water.  He is all three, and so is able to perfectly exercise the needed functions of all three in harmony instead of discord, but I think there still has to be tension in those relationships.

Tension is not bad, it's how you deal with it.  Do you respond to tension violently?  Do you allow it to pull you in a better direction?  When they say repent do you get defensive?  How do you hear a prophet?

On Being Part of the Problem

And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.

Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Confession: too often I sit down with the Scripture as though it is a problem to be solved.  I start preparing a sermon in sort of the same way that I would solve a word problem. I was always pretty good at word problems, it was sort of like a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, using words to cushion the fact that I was doing arithmetic or algebra.  To be sure there are cultural, linguistic, theological and textual issues to be unraveled when it comes to interpreting Scripture, but sometimes I feel like all the taking apart subtracts from the putting together of truth, beauty and meaning.  Last winter the lectionary study group that I was part of with a group of mostly Lutherans disbanded for a variety of reasons.  Everyone seemed to agree that it really wasn't "doing anything for them."

I have spent some time thinking about that dynamic, and I think it was true, and probably symptomatic of a disease that afflicts the modern church: the desire to be right, which is not necessarily the problem in and of itself, but it's corollary is an unwillingness to be wrong.  I think we were approaching the texts as though they were riddles to be solved, and each of us had our own method of solving them.  We fell into a habit of using the same sources and pretty much adopting the same enlightenment (you could almost call it scientific) exegetical methods, where you try to determine what the text "really means," so that you can give "the answers" on Sunday morning and have everyone admire how clever you are.

When your primary skill is being clever and right all of the time, you become unwilling and maybe even unable to engage in dialogue that might challenge your status as the answer person.  As bruising to my ego as it might be, I am trying to learn from those sort of rare moments where someone presents me with a challenge to my assumptions.  Sometimes I fail.  I fail if the person is angry because I get defensive.  I fail if the person is too vague or too far away for me to find the common ground.  I fail if I'm just too tired to go through the work it takes to allow my assumptions (often the ones I just unveiled and expounded in front of over 100 people) to be challenged. I can fail for lots of reasons.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and you are powerless to solve it on your own.  This is not just a matter of willpower and trying harder next time.

This is not just a preacher problem, or even a particularly religious problem, it is a life problem, it is a human problem, and it leads to a lot of tragedy.  Think about all the evil that is committed these days in the name of God, and I'm not just talking about ISIS either.  There is a terrible destructive power in the shadow side of faith, in the side that sees it as an answer to be worked at, rather than a question to ask.

On a very deep level, when faith becomes an answer rather than a question it ceases to be faith.

A poet of a very different stripe, Charles Bukowski said, "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence."  Yeats said it more winsomely: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Why am I quoting all of these poets?  Because I suspect they're the only ones who get it, everyone else is too wound up in being right.  Poets don't care about that, they're only concerned with telling the truth, but the problem with truth is that it's not always the same for everyone everywhere.  That is the core reality that gives birth to the various forms of relativism that are so decried by the various priesthoods of the ages.

Poets, good ones at least, are open to interpretation.  Question a really good poet or writer about, what they meant exactly and they will probably give you this quizzical little look.  That look means about the same thing as when a southern lady says, "Bless your heart."

There is always something numinous about language (I'm back on words again), and it is only the most brutal usage that can make it otherwise.  To treat Scripture (and I will include all texts that are called sacred: Bible, Koran, Vedas, and so on) as though it has anything in common with that sort of profane usage is perhaps the highest form of heresy at work in the world today.

For some fun on what is otherwise a very serious subject, I give you the following examples of contrasting the numinous and profane qualities of language:

James Earl Jones and Malcolm MacDowell do a Sprint Commercial

Jesse Jackson reads Green Eggs and Ham