But I haven't seen Barbados...

Me, and a gun, and a man on my back,

But I haven't seen Barbados,

So I must get out of this.

-Tori Amos, Me and a Gun

When I was in college, I went to see Tori Amos in concert, which I suppose gives me some kind of feminist street cred, which I need to draw upon in order to talk about something that makes most of my gender either angry or uncomfortable, or both.  Tori is a survivor of a violent rape, and her song, Me and a Gun, is about that experience.  As a 20 something year old boy/man in a darkened auditorium surrounded by mostly women, listening and watching as this flame haired pixie hammers out one of the most uncomfortably powerful songs I have ever heard, I was not aware that probably more than a quarter of the women sitting near me had been victims of sexual assault and rape.

But statistically they had been, and as "survivors" of a big anonymous school like Penn State, and devotees of Tori Amos, the percentage may have been higher.

Full disclosure moment: as a college student, I was an utter misfit.  I was disenchanted with the football and frat party crowd, but was not at all comfortable with the "sensitive new age" crowd either.  I was fully aware of the prevalence of date rape and alcohol related sexual assault.  I knew women who had been assaulted, raped, accosted and harassed.  I knew boys who told stories gleefully about encounters they had that almost certainly fell into one of those categories, and to tell you the truth, I didn't really know what to do about any of that.

When I was sober, I made a promise to myself that I would never take advantage of someone who was too drunk.  As I grew up a little, I tried to keep myself under control enough vis-a-vis the binge drinking, to try and avoid even being on the border of that.  What do you do though, in a world where drunken hook ups are a way of life?  How do you keep from becoming a freaking rapist?  It's not as easy as you might think, especially in the muddled adolescent mind.  So I do have some sympathy for that kid from Stanford, but I have more sympathy for his victim.

It seems to me that two lives have been ruined, and to recognize that there are really two victims in this case is not to negate the suffering of either one. We all have some guilt in that destruction.

There are a few things that we must stop doing in order to address that guilt.

1. We must stop shaming and blaming the victims.  In the Stanford case, as in so many of these scenarios, alcohol and drugs are involved, questionable behaviors are involved, "going out to party" in skimpy clothes and with flirty intentions are involved.  None of that means that a girl deserves to be raped or assaulted.  You should not have to be a model citizen in order to be protected from such a violation.
2. We must teach our boys better.  It would seem that a lot of these cases involve athletes, but that might be just a warning flag about a deeper problem.  The culture of most athletic programs does indeed reinforce the type of drive and attitude that leads to this sort of event, but let's be clear, we teach all of our boys that assertiveness is manly.  We glorify the winners.  We idolize strength and the alpha male ideal.  Sports don't make rapists, but the same sort of single minded focus and determination that gets you up for a 4:00 AM workout and drives you to push through the pain of wind sprints can blow up in your face when hot and heavy runs into a, "No, stop." If you have been conditioned to overcome obstacles, her free will can seem like just another tackler to evade.  Which actually leads right into...
3. We need to work harder on presenting a healthy approach to human sexuality.  Our dysfunctional attitudes about sex are absolutely toxic to so much of this debate.  We have tried to make it "no big deal." We have tried to treat it like learning geometry.  We have tried to somehow keep our old "dark and shameful," labels to scare away the young.  We keep it always out there as a tool to sell things and we parade it up and down. We present it as though it is an achievement or a conquest. Losing your virginity is akin to winning some sort of trophy. We have worked furiously to insist that it can happen without emotional attachment and damage and our glorification of promiscuity has robbed people of the ability to learn about sexuality in a safe and committed relationship.  The "hook up" was the most common form sexual encounter when I was in college, actual relationships seemed harder to come by. To many of my peers this did not seem to matter, but it did matter, and a lot of us are dealing with scars now that we're creeping into middle age.  I am terrified at sending my daughter (and my son for that matter) into a world where people are so steeped in badly warped ideas about sex and intimacy.

As these sorts of events play out on college campuses around the country, it is pretty clear that something needs to change.  It is not as simple as telling girls to be more careful.  Nor is it reasonable to imagine that you are going to be able to train 20 year old boys out of this sort of thing while you still feed them hyper-sexuality in almost ever waking moment.  I think that one thing that is hopeful in the Stanford case was the simple fact that two passers by intervened.  Not so long ago, I think those bikers might have just kept on riding. Which, I think, shines a light on the fact that our solution must be the work of our culture and our communities.

Rape and sexual assault has been happening forever, read the Bible sometime, but it's not something that we as a community just have to accept.  Not accepting it involves much more than just punishing the offenders though.  Fear of punishment should not be the only thing standing between us and becoming a rapist.  We need to confront our deep denials of the issue, we need to take the victims more seriously, we need to seriously consider the culture that we create where this stuff breeds like mildew. We need to talk about this, like Tori did, we need to hold a light up to this darkness, because that's the only way we're ever going to beat it.

Don't Blaspheme

A funny thing has happened to me since I became a minister; people started apologizing to me for their use of profanity.  Usually it's the expected culprits, you know the ones that get a PG-13 or an R rating if they're in a movie.  The thing is that none of those are actually the ones that bother me.  The ones I really wish people would stop dropping are the uses of the Lord's name in vain, and I'm not actually talking about God, as in OMG.  I'm talking about the use of my Lord's name as in Jesus Christ, sometimes adding an H as a middle initial.
The thing is, I'm not really able to parse whether or not someone is saying, "Oh my God," or "Oh my god," because spoken language usually doesn't give us much info about capitalization.  On top of that, all of our names for the Creator God, are probably imperfect human constructions anyway.  When Moses asks the name of God at the burning bush, the voice gives him an interesting answer to say the least, it's more of an action word, "I AM," is how it gets spoken in English.
Jesus on the other hand, is a pretty specific name, especially if you're not talking about a Mexican guy with a different pronunciation (Hay-zus).  The anglicized name of Christ, just doesn't get used a lot in reference to anyone but the Nazarene.  Technically, his name was Yeshua, which has more in common with the modern Joshua, and his name in Greek was Iesous, because Greek doesn't have a letter J, while we're talking about technicality, let's do that regarding the third commandment:

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. -Exodus 20: 7

It is my educated opinion that we ought to apply that much more broadly than simply to apply to people swearing.  I suspect that the author of these rules would find those who use the Name of God to justify their bigotry, hatred and violence to be far more blasphemous than people who yell a throaty g-dammit after they stub their toe.  Using the name of the Lord is crude, rude and a bad habit, using God to justify your nastiness towards others is what becomes blasphemy.
Every so often, I find it useful to read a critique of faith written by an atheist.  I used to enjoy the late Christopher Hitchens, before he got every bit as dogmatic about his atheism as the most doctrinaire scholastic of the church.  The thing I have come to realize about these critiques though is that the god they are railing against has nothing to do with the God I believe in.  You will often catch them admiring Christ as a person while denying that his divinity is even possible.  It becomes quickly apparent that what they dislike are in fact the many and varied ways in which the human practitioners of faith (any faith really) violate the third commandment and blaspheme the name of the God of love and grace.
I will admit that it makes little sense, in the postmodern age of technology and de-mythology, to adhere to a religion that does not give you a solid example of what it looks like to follow God.  The rules alone are not enough, they just tell you what to avoid, not how to live.  The rules give you commandments and a declaration of God's holiness, but they do not get into the dust and dirt of human existence.  I think you see where I'm going with this; Jesus gives us that example and that presence, and his teachings are actually fairly simple.  "Love God, Love Each Other."  Not easy to follow, but clear and measurable.
People usually find it necessary to hedge on one or the other of those simple rules though.
One side exalts the holiness and purity of God, protecting the sanctity of their selected temples and idols.  But they do this too often at the expense of caring for one another and for the "least of these."
The other side exalts the ministry of compassion, honestly desiring to tear down the curtain in the temple. From a humanist perspective this approach would appear to be on your "side."
The problem with both approaches is essentially one of balance, which is at best a tenuous line to walk. You will find "conservatives" who insist that they work for justice and show compassion to the poor, and maybe they do.  You will also find "liberals" who want to insist that their faith is "biblical," and maybe it is.
The sin that neither side is immune to is the cooption of God in the fight against their enemies, and there is where the blasphemy train really gets rolling.
There are many examples of Jesus teaching his disciples and people in general that this is not the Way.  Example: Luke 9: 49-50 about another person casting out demons in Jesus' name, even though he wasn't one of the disciples.  Example: John 8: 1-11, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  Stop me before I start proof texting uncontrollably.  The thing is though, you can actually go through the Gospels and apply this particular lens to things and find that it's pretty much all over the place, presented in many varied and nuanced forms, because "love your enemies," is important, counterintuitive, and freaking difficult, therefore we are challenged to do it over and over again. To ignore that imperative is perhaps the greatest blasphemy of all.

Trigger Warning

The Hangover, like most goofball comedies, had very few redeeming qualities. Ken Jong was one of them, the other one probably being the tiger, and of course Iron Mike Tyson. Jong's character Mr. Chow has a recurring theme: he judges any chaos that happens by the benchmark of "Did you die?"  Which I have to admit, does put things in perspective.  I am starting with some humor today, because what comes next is pretty brutal.  You can thank Michele for kicking over this rock.
Four years ago, I found out what happens when your perspective on the worst thing that can happen gets punted twenty yards past where you thought it was.  The little town of Plumville was hit by a series of tragedies that probably would strain the suspension of disbelief of an avid Lifetime movie audience.  First there was an Amish boy who died in a grain silo at my neighbor's farm.  Farms are dangerous places, and accidents like this one happen, people were shocked and grieved.  As you may know, the Amish are sort of famous for their faithful grace in situations like this, and so even in tragedy there was light.  Then within a span of two weeks, an estranged husband fatally shot his father in law through the door of the house and was only prevented from inflicting further harm when his estranged wife disabled him with a .22 rifle.  A young mother of two had a sudden and fatal heart attack. All of these things were shocking to the little town, they were life and death traumas, and people died, but none of them were the thing that set my current benchmark for tragedy.
That title goes to the other domestic violence of that weekend (you may ask what trumps a gun fight between an estranged couple that resulted in one fatality? Hold on to your butt). A man killed his two little girls ages 6 and 10, and his estranged wife, not with a gun, with his hands and a hunting knife. They were part of our church. I had been trying to help them work through their relationship issues for six months. I had those two little girls sit on the floor with me during Children's sermons and at VBS.  I had spent hours trying to help their father and mother figure out how to live and love together. Obviously I failed, catastrophically.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't fail by being incompetent, or callous, or by ignoring the hard truth that was staring me in the face.  I failed only because I didn't recognize how strong evil's grip really is.  I was working with the proper assumption that most marital problems are communication based, and so we worked on learning to really hear each other.  When we started, the woman was an utterly worn out victim.  She had been living with a control freak.  I can't go into details because I feel like I still need to honor her confidence, but I will give her this honor as well: she took control of her life, she stopped allowing him to control her, she moved out, she got a job and her own place, and even though he tried to change a little, she kept getting further and further away from him.  When he finally realized that she was probably not coming back, his psyche broke.  It looked like sadness on the outside, but it was really the manifestation of all his desire for control finally reaching critical mass.
I knew his greatest fear was losing them, his wife and children.  There's a line in a song by Pearl Jam: "That which you fear the most, will meet you halfway." There was a demonic presence at work on that day, and I don't say that without acknowledging that there was mental illness, and long patterns of bad behavior, and abuse.  But the thing that pushed it over the edge was a demon.  A demon, in our mythos, is a twisted and fallen angel.  The thing that led a man to strangle his little girl was a twisted and fallen version of love.  It was love that existed in a place devoid of of grace, a place where control and domination was the only expression of love, where fear of loss was the motivating emotion.
I think this demon is running amok through our world.  I consider it one of my most hard-learned lessons to have seen the demon tear off his facade and to have seen the bloody fangs and the sheer ugliness, so that I will never forget.  So that I can learn to let go of my ego, and my illusions of control.  We keep a picture of those two little girls on our basement refrigerator (the one we moved with us from Pennsylvania).  Every time I look at it, I remember how bad it can get, and I am reminded that I am not in control.  I am not strong enough to face the demon.  I require the grace of God.
Awareness of God's presence in that bleak situation was the culmination of my nearly ten years in that town.  If I did nothing else among them, I was there for that: the worst day, the darkest hour.  I failed to rescue the marriage, I failed to protect those girls, I failed to reach their father, but God stood with me, and that I will remember as well.
I came into the ministry as a man with a lot of answers and certainty and arrogance.  I thought I could lead the church through cleverness and skill and whatever other gifts I thought I had.  That has turned out to be bullshit (pardon the language, but there is no other appropriate word).  My job is to take up my cross and follow Christ, the same as it is for any Christian who really takes Jesus seriously.  I will tell you one thing, I read Paul's letters a lot differently now than I did in seminary: 1 Corinthians 1: 25-31 (The Message Translation):

Human wisdom is so tinny and impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's "weakness."  Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life.  I don't see many of the brightest and the best among you, not many influential, not many from high society families.  Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.  Everything that we have - right thinking, and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start - comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.  That's why we have the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God."

The Art of Rage

When I interviewed at the Pittsburgh VA hospital for a spot in the summer intensive Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) cohort back in 2002, one of the supervisors asked me if I ate my anger, a question that kind of took me off guard, being as this was only an interview and not the actual thing.  It surprised me, and then it made me a little angry, and then I got hungry, and that made me more angry.
For those of you who don't know CPE is a thing that a lot of your pastors have had to go through at some point in their training.  It is basically half working as a chaplain in a clinical setting and half group therapy designed to rip your false sense of self to shreds and then put you back together.  Each unit of CPE is 400 hours, either in a summer intensive (10 weeks of 40 hour weeks) or spread out over the course of a year.  People talk about it the same way military people talk about boot camp.  If you haven't been through it, you don't know, and once you have been through it you get to join the crowd that knows, or thinks they know.  To this day, I use the things I learned in CPE much more than I use my knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and John Calvin.  It is valuable, and it is hard, and it pretty regularly makes you confront your shadow side, which for me turned out to be a lot of mad.
I learned that anger can be used, or it can use you, largely depending on your awareness and your level of emotional balance.  Which leads me to today's observation that our cultural level of anger has risen to a place where it is certainly using us.  Here's a stream of consciousness recollection of all the things I have seen people be outraged about over the past few days:

Trump (oh so much Trump), Harambe the Gorilla, the kid who fell into the Gorilla's enclosure, the mother of the kid who fell into the Gorilla's enclosure, the people who shot Harambe the Gorilla, Thailand Tigers, Hillary's emails (again and again), the fact that Bernie Sanders exists, Trump (did I already mention Trump?), Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the electoral process, the primary process, Ted Cruz (still for some reason), Mitch McConnell, Obama visiting Hiroshima, Obama not apologizing for our country nuking Japan, Obama hugging a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, ISIS, Muslims, abortions, fundamentalists, #blacklivesmatter, #alllivesmatter, The Iran nuclear disarmament treaty, transgender bathroom stuff, gay marriage, Methodists who like homosexuals, Methodists who don't like homosexuals, Methodists who are homosexuals, traffic, the weather, guns, gun regulation, the fact that memorial day and veterans day are different, the fact that people die in war, the fact that have wars, the fact that some people say we shouldn't have wars and how that disrespects the people who die in wars...

Yeah, so I could go on, and on, and on, but I hope you get the point, name something and there's someone out there who is freaking irate about it, and that, friends and neighbors, is not particularly healthy.  There are some legitimately worrisome things in that list, and some emotionally charged issues, but what seems to be happening is that we're filtering all of these complex events and ideas through glasses that are very much a darker shade of red than the rose colored ones.
Anger triggers a strong fight instinct, which if it goes unchecked and even un-evaluated, makes for dialogue, particularly sensitive, nuanced dialogue very difficult.  The thing is that anger is actually a secondary emotional response, and forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but the underlying emotion is actually fear.  There's that feel again.
Believe me, back in the day, I didn't want to admit that anger flowed from fear.  I was okay being angry, that was bad-ass, that was manly, that was perhaps even culturally acceptable, but being afraid?  Who wants to identify with that?
CPE supervisors have this annoying way of peeling the onion of your emotional processes back to the underlying motivations.  Things you think make you strong and powerful turn out to be motivated by some deep seated feeling of inadequacy, acknowledging that is uncomfortable and most of us don't want to do it, so we build our walls higher and stronger and we entrench deeper and deeper into our own egoism.
Once you have had your emotional fortress razed to the ground, you find that you still have the same raw materials to work with, but you also have the freedom to arrange them rather differently.  I still get angry at things, but I have a different way of dealing with that anger; I ask myself, what am I afraid of?  For instance, injustice makes me angry, because I am afraid that our ability to love one another is growing weaker, because injustice is a failure of two other core emotions: love and peace, the failure of love and peace leaves a vacuum which fear is all to happy to fill and anger then starts flinging things around like, you know, a 400 pound gorilla, but this is actually the way it should work, it's part of how we know stuff is wrong.
If I ask myself, what am I afraid of? and the answer comes back with something less universally askew, I may need to reevaluate my feelings, which is difficult, but necessary.
For instance: At first I was angry about Harambe the Gorilla being killed, then I realized that my anger was based on a fear that perhaps we, including our expert zookeepers are not quite the responsible stewards of the creation that we should be.  Fear response: we are not in control of a 400 pound silverback gorilla, even though he's in a cage, he can still fling that little kid around like a piece of paper.  Fear response: what if my kid slipped away from me and did something dumb like falling into a gorilla enclosure.
These are true things, but our response to them is rarely rational and it leads us to fits of rage and saying things that are not helpful or constructive, like blaming the mother of the kid for being distracted while her kid did something dumb, or the animal response team for responding according to protocol and judgment that had to be made quickly without any emotional hand-wringing, or even Harambe the Gorilla, for well, being a gorilla.
We should be sad about such a waste, but sad is a different root emotion.  We should seek to take a constructive look about how we treat animals and how we keep our kids safe, but raging about on the internet does no one any good, least of all Harambe or that little boy.  Maybe there is a place for anger, but most of it seems to have been misplaced.  The fact of the matter is, like them or not, zoos are not just entertainment, but are often important resources in the preservation of biodiversity.  Like it or not, studying gorillas is not particularly profitable, unless you figure out a way to generate revenue by having tourists come see them.  Whether you want to admit it or not parents, your four year old can get away from you and probably do things that aren't that bright.  When that happens you should be glad that there are people who wrote, and who followed the protocol for dealing with a 400 pound gorilla that wants to play volleyball with your kid.
I feel like we need to do more thinking and less raging.  I think we could use less knee jerk reacting and more constructive criticism.  I hope that love and peace don't always get shoved aside by the 400 pound gorilla of our fear.

The Old Order

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

Potential... Maybe

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

Getting In Touch with Feelings

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