Now This?

I am not easily offended.  I grew up as a sort of chubby kid whose last name includes the word "gas," and it has made me pretty thick skinned.  I like to think I have a sharp sense of humor and can usually tell and take a good joke. I was a little disappointed by Donald Sterling's racist comments, but in no way surprised by the fact that a rich white guy was harboring such despicable ideas in his heart.  Generally, when I hear or see people being that way, it just sort of confirms my basic opinion of humanity as a rather wretched bunch of sinners.  Oddly this generally increases my appreciation of those moments when people actually get it right: when they help, when they care, when they're just decent.
Low expectations of people in general make me pretty outrage proof.
Then Sarah Palin compared water-boarding to baptism... or baptism to water-boarding... or whatever, I'm not really sure... I'm not sure she was even sure what exactly she was saying.  I suppose I should have expected such stuff from Sarah, who is a rich fount of verbal bungling and practically a walking non sequitur, but I wondered at how the rather large crowd of NRA supporters, most of whom, I'm guessing, identify as some sort of Christian, actually cheered for her when she said, and I quote: "If I was in charge, they'd know that water-boarding is how we'd baptize terrorists."

Let's walk through this step by step, shall we?

1. Jesus was absolutely insistent on non-violence, to the point where he submitted to being tortured and killed himself rather than rallying his followers to take up arms and fight.

2. Whenever one of his followers tried to suggest that perhaps they get all butt-kicky he put them in their place and usually reminded them that his gig was a little different.

3. While there are certain theological schemes that can justify the use of force as an exercise of the commandment to love thy neighbor (i.e. putting a stop to Hitler's nonsense), the general tenor of a Christ-like existence should probably not be "stand and fight." (the theme of the NRA rally where Palin vomited all over two thousand years of Jesus following).

4. So, therefore, obviously, Jesus would enjoy having one of the most universal signs of the covenant between a loving God and his wayward children, be compared to a form of torture that involves the repeated near drowning of the victim.

In Baptism we remember that we are dead to sin and alive in Christ, we are joined with Christ in a death like his (which was rather plainly as the victim, not the perpetrator of torture), so that we might be with him in a life like his.  I'm just guessing that the guy who said, "blessed are the meek," and "forgive them Father, they don't know what they're doing," would probably have a pretty clear and simple stance on torture.

That stance would be: "Are you serious?"

Look people, theology does matter sometimes.  This nonsense of equating guns, freedom and 'Merica with Jesus has got to stop.  We need to be convicted of the reality that we're a lot more like Rome than we are a "Christian Nation." 

That doesn't mean I hate our country, or that I want to live somewhere else, it means that I love our country enough to want to see it live up to it's potential.  I also love Jesus, and if it comes down to picking a side, I'm going to take Jesus before I take the stars and stripes.

I honestly wonder if Ms. Palin has some sort of cognitive disorder, if so that means that all the people who will still sit and listen to her give one of these maniacal speeches must somehow share the disorder.

The sheer volume of psychopathy is more than a little frightening.

Lord, save us all, and please introduce yourself to Sarah Palin.

Of Canons and Lasers, and Laser Cannon

There has been a great disturbance in the force.  George Lucas has sold the rights to the Star Wars universe to Disney, and Disney has plans for it.  Just the other day they sent shockwaves through Star Wars fandom the likes of which have not been felt since the first Death Star obliterated Alderaan.  The announcement was the formation of a canon, not a cannon, a canon, a set of material that is going to be considered authoritative for whatever direction Disney now takes the worlds of Star Wars.  The Canon has been identified as the first six movies, which focus on the Annakin Skywalker-Darth Vader story arc, as well as the animated Clone Wars movie and series.
What is left out is the rather massive opus of work that has been done under the Star Wars trademark, which includes novels, comics, role playing games, and various and sundry other creative ventures that have fed a group of fans well in the long spaces between Lucas' creative activity.  The novels, for instance, have reached back into the days of the Old Republic and gone forward into the lives of the children and grandchildren of Han Solo and Princess Leia.  They have traced the work of Luke Skywalker as he rebuilt the Jedi Order.  It has all had to meet a certain standard of internal consistency in order to bear the name Star Wars, and there are people who consider it sacred, which is where I get really interested in this phenomenon.
I should pause and give an account of my Star Wars street cred.  I have a Millennium Falcon and several action figures on a shelf in my office.  I have a tattoo of the Jedi Order insignia (the Knights of the Old Republic version).  Star Wars was every bit as foundational to me as a child as the Bible, (I have to admit that, at one point, I probably cared a lot more about Luke being Vader's son than I did about Jesus being God's Son).  Watching R2D2 and C-3PO making their way through the deserts of Tatooine is one of my earliest and fondest memories of a movie of any sort.  I destroyed enough Star Wars merchandise by actually playing with it to make collectors everywhere weep.  Princess Leia was the first woman, besides my Mom, that I thought was really beautiful.  I am, to this day, disappointed that science has wasted it's potential on iPhones and hybrid cars and still not produced a working lightsaber.  Jar Jar Binks makes me clench my fist involuntarily, and I really don't see what Padme ever saw in Annakin in the first place.  Yoda is still my favorite character, followed closely by Chewbacca.
Let's just say, I have a rooting interest in Star Wars, but I have been a little surprised by the lament from the people who out-geek me.  The formation of the "canon" of Star Wars, has apparently led some fans into a sort of existential crisis, and in doing so has given me a real-time insight into what probably went on in the Church circa 320-370 CE.  It sort of dawned on me this morning that there were probably people who were deeply attached to the Gospel of Thomas or The Apocalypse of Peter.  We actually have historical knowledge of the debate that went on over the inclusion of The Apocalypse of John, also called Revelation.  It was a little heated.
There were large quantities of material written about Jesus, and by the early church, which just didn't make the cut.  It wasn't just a random process, there were good reasons why the things that were eventually called Scripture were picked over the things that weren't, and yes, as Dan Brown likes to point out, there was some political stuff involved, but ultimately the choices that were made were made so that the Canon of Holy Scripture could be a faithful and living foundation for the Church.
One of the things that the Canon sought to avoid were Gnostic heresies and theological dead ends, of which there were plenty.  They did not want to paint themselves into any corners.  Which is also why Disney (I think) has decided to abandon the novelizations of the Star Wars universe and go a different way.  If they follow the story arc of the novels, they would get some good stories, but, like the Dark Side, forever would those books dominate their destiny.  Once you canonize something, you're stuck with it.  Some of the books are well done, and some of them are just pulp fiction, but there are a lot of them, and I can see how trying to hold them all in canonical regard would seriously crimp the creativity that might just breathe some real life back into a franchise that I dearly love.  One of the reasons The Clone Wars is my favorite post Return of the Jedi part of the universe is that it is free to explore a bit and not be slavishly bound to the Annakin-Vader-Luke Skywalker story line, which, quite frankly, gets a bit old after six movies.
Now we can have some fresh stuff, without the whole, "that's not how it worked in the book!" arguments that geek/fandom is so hell bent on having.  I think Peter Jackson's work on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings has firmly established that cinematic and literary storytelling are different things, and that both can be good.
While I have some misgivings about whether Disney is a trustworthy steward of a world that I have loved since I was a kid, I am actually rather excited to see what they do with it, when the end of the story is not a foregone conclusion.  I am thankful that George Lucas came up with this wonderful idea, but I am glad that he finally has given it to the world to continue to tell the story.
In essence that describes very well the life of the church.  In many ways the canon is never really done, even as we argue about the various ways to interpret the canon of scripture, the story of Jesus and his disciples continues to be told in different ways by different people, in different cultures and different ages of humanity.  The re-telling, and the continual searching is life.  I fear for any universe where that process stops.

Shoah

I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.

-Elie Wiesel, Night

Today is the day that we remember the millions of people who died at the hands of the Nazis.  One day, somewhat ironically placed at the end of May when new life is springing up all around and flowers are in bloom on the trees.  We sometimes call it the holocaust, from the Greek word that means "burnt," which I suppose is somewhat appropriate, but many have re-labeled it using the Hebrew word Shoah, which means "catastrophe."

It's worth mentioning that Jews were not the only victims of the catastrophe, but they were focal point of the hate behind Hitler and the Nazis.  I think it's also worth mentioning that this sort of thing has happened far too often in the recent history of the world.  Stalin, our ally in defeating Hitler, apparently outdid Adolf in both scope and brutality, there have been numerous genocidal events in Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and Congo, and there is one going on in Syria as we speak.
These are all catastrophes of human evil.
They at least raise the question of whether or not God really knows what He's doing in giving us this sort of freedom.  If you have not read Elie Wiesel's book Night, you really should get around to it, but have a good stiff drink handy.  Wiesel survived the Shoah as a boy, he watched his parents taken away and killed, he starved in the camps, he lived in the fear that, at any moment, he might arbitrarily be taken away and shot or gassed and burned in the ovens.
There really is no good theological way to talk around the questions that Wiesel raises in his book, they are things you must just simply absorb and endure.  He talks of how the Shoah killed God.  God hung on the gallows, God went into the ovens, God died in the night.
He's not wrong.
It's a powerful read for Christians, but in an entirely different sense than it is for our Jewish friends.
Christians live through the story of God dying every year.  The cross is nothing new to our way of thinking, the brutal act of crucifixion is a part of our faith story, and so is resurrection.
The thing is though, there has been no Easter morning for Jews after the Shoah.  There are small redemptive moments, there are powerful remembrances, but there is nothing that opens the tombs of the millions who died.
Which makes it all the more wondrous to me that people like Wiesel and other Shoah survivors have managed to do just that: survive.  They have survived physically, spiritually and they have blessed the world with their stories, and they have held on to God, and found that He was not dead after all.
As time does naturally what Hitler tried to do brutally, we need to observe and remember all the more vigilantly, and we need to remember that we, as a species, have not risen above the hate and violence that caused the catastrophe.  When the eyewitnesses are no longer around to tell us what happened, we still need to remember.

Mother Earth

Tuesday was Earth Day, a "holiday" of sorts where we think about all things ecological.  In another lifetime, I studied Environmental Resource Management at the Pennsylvania State University, and even though life and God's call have taken me far away from that field of study, I'm still paying attention.  In the nearly 20 years since I graduated some things have radically changed, other things have not.  We have "greened" up in a lot of ways, solar farms and wind turbines are now common sites around the nation, and growing numbers of people are moving from the "environmentalism is all about hippie communists" camp to the, "hmmm, clean drinking water and breathable air are pretty cool things" camp. But we're still a long way from breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, and so the noose around our neck grows ever tighter.
Ecology is a complicated thing, and like many complicated things, it frightens and intimidates people, inducing a range of reactions from flat out denial to apocalyptic panic.  As per usual, extreme reactions are usually a result of drastically over-simplifying the problem.  The deniers confuse current local weather patterns with long term climate data, the chicken littles believe that Waterworld is right around the corner.  As per usual, extreme perspectives are usually wrong, with only a grain of truth to make them seem plausible.
We do certainly need to get a handle on our stewardship of this planet, because science is telling us that in the vastness of the universe, planets similar to our own are a little hard to come by.  They may be out there, but as of now we have not found them, let alone developed the ability to get to them.  It's rather startling really, how tenuous our hold on life actually is.  Life is resilient, but things do go extinct, and we would do well to remember that.
Mind boggling creatures have walked, swum and flown around this planet over the course of geologic history, and many of them are now nothing but fossils.  We may be someday too, before the sun burns out.  But here's the funny thing, we are also the first species, (at least as far as we know) to be aware of its capacity to cause its own destruction.  Which gives us a fighting chance, maybe not much of one given human nature, but at least a chance.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about humanity is that, collectively, we have not come to the realization that we can really change things for the better.  We are still unfortunate slaves to the way things always have been.  Individually we can be altruistic and understand the need for sacrifice, but collectively, we are still blind, selfish and prone to panic.  This is born out by the reality that there is still poverty and famine in the world, and by the fact that we still don't recognize, despite an increasing global awareness, that we're all in this together.
I'm not exactly an optimist, and I am fully aware of the nature of sin, but it still gives me major agitation to think that children starve while we let millions of tons of grain rot in storage.  It torques me to think that some people are paid millions of dollars a year to play games or play games with numbers, while people who work in desperate and inhumane conditions get next to nothing.  What bothers me most of all is that I am absolutely powerless to change any of it.  I might as well tell the wind not to blow for all the good my rage will do.
So I do little things, like pay a little more for the coffee I drink in the morning, so that more coffee farmers in Rwanda can make a bit a of better living.  I recycle, I compost, I support various charities that work for environmental and social justice, but I'm just shouting at the ocean.
I hope, for my children's sake, that something in our collective human consciousness gets over its adolescent self-absorption soon.  We need the earth a lot more than she needs us, and so as is the case with Easter, we need to remember that every day is Earth Day, every day we need to breath air and drink water is a day that we should remember to be good and faithful stewards of our place on this "salubrious blue-green orb," as Kurt Vonnegut so loquaciously called it.
I look around my backyard, in the middle of the Megalopolis, just 20 miles from Washington DC, I see life going on, trees growing tall, animals thriving in the spaces between human habitations.  I realize that even now, as "civilized" as we are, we are still capable of living in balance with nature, but we do need to understand that balance is not served by simply taking whatever and as much as we think we need.
We need to take responsibility for what we have done, and make a better plan for what we're going to do, or else the Earth will celebrate her day without us.

Out, Out, Brief Candle!

Today is St. Georges day, the day that we commonly observe both the birth and death of William Shakespeare.  To many, Shakespeare is the epitome of literary culture, particularly when it comes to his plays.  History is an interesting thing, it twists and turns in such unexpected ways.
When Shakespeare first appeared on the stage, he was hailed, more or less as a hack, who was making cheap knockoffs of work of the true geniuses of the day (notably Christopher Marlowe).  Indeed when one looks at Shakespeare's work on it's own merit, it is generally not terribly inventive.  He writes histories, tragedies and comedies and he's not above a little pandering to the audience with bawdy humor.
I thought about this as I was watching an advertisement for yet another re-make of Godzilla that's due out soon, and yet another edition of the Amazing Spiderman series. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good superhero movie, and endless remakes of old horror flicks, and I'm married to someone who can watch chick flicks with the most absurd premises and deliberately manipulative plot lines that you can possibly imagine, and it doesn't mean we're stupid.  What it means is that we like to be entertained.  I have watched some movies that break new ground; that tell really novel stories; that challenge me to think about the human condition; and when they were done, I thought, "wow, I'm glad that's over."
I would like to tell you that I watch nothing but inventive independent films that push the boundaries of cinema as an art form, but honestly, the last thing I rented was Thor, The Dark World, partly because I have a ten year old son, but partly because I just like watching stuff explode.
What Bill Shakespeare did, perhaps better than any writer ever, was slip some really wonderful words into his pandering, money-making machines.  I suspect he knew that there is actually very little artistic integrity in starving to death, and I think he would be somewhat amused or perhaps bemused by the fact that his plays are now considered by most high school English teachers to be the zenith of English literature.  What he did was present his genius in digestible chunks.
His blasts of witty dialogue are the foundation for the great masters of the golden age of cinema, think of the banter between Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, that was none other than William Faulkner.  I can picture Ingrid Bergman delivering Rosalind's line from As You Like It: "I pray you, do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine."
The histories and tragedies have those famous monologues that are the forerunners the rousing speeches in the war movies.  If you ever see Kenneth Branagh's cinematic renderings of Shakespeare's work, you will understand that plays were simply the movies of the Elizabethan era, and as such they had to satisfy a certain commercial appeal, which means catering to the masses.
And if you think that the masses were more literate, or more intelligent and discerning than they are today, you are sorely mistaken.  Shakespeare includes enough fart jokes, insults and sexual innuendo to keep the pub crowd happy, and then he slips in these monologues that really deal with our common humanity.  I guess that's what sets him apart.  Maybe that's why we read his stuff, instead of Marlowe, in high school English classes.
There is no shame in making art that people, even the low-brow, and unwashed, actually enjoy.  That's why Nicholas Sparks and Stephen King are freaking billionaires, they make stuff that is marginally valuable as literature, but people eat it up.  People that insist on a stringent artistic vision regardless of what people want, usually die broke.  There's no doubt in my mind that William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson are better writers than George R.R. Martin, but Game of Thrones is making that dude super rich and Thompson needed Johnny Depp to finance his funeral (granted that was a work of art too).
Ultimately Shakespeare's legacy is not reducible to just the things he wrote, he has become a cultural foundation stone.  And I suppose we ought to get used to the fact that our culture has been profoundly shaped by a man who was not above going for some cheap laughs with a page long fat joke (Comedy of Errors) or numerous thinly veiled innuendos that would definitely earn an R-rating.
Like it or not, mass appeal is something you probably need to consider when setting out on an artistic adventure.  It doesn't mean you have to dumb down, or always take the low road, but it does mean you should probably know your audience.  Shakespeare did, and he is now the Immortal Bard.

Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning

There's an on-going "dispute" among the members of the GSPC praise band about the relative merits of a certain song called Every Morning Is Easter Morning.  Apparently, at some point in the history of this group, this song was sung a little bit too much, and it's one of those songs that can get overexposed quick, fast and in a hurry.  Some people love it, some people sort of cringe when you mention the title, my predecessor banned it, due to overexposure.
It's an understandable restriction.  Despite the theological truth of the song, it is not exactly Amazing Grace.
Easter this year was quite an event, in our house, not only did we have the normal demands of my role in the Church's celebration, we had family visiting from as far away as Wisconsin.  We had seven adults and six children hanging out at our house, and it was a pretty good time, but it didn't exactly leave me a lot of time for solemn reflection on the silence of the tomb.
But we survived, and Jesus is risen, and it's Tuesday morning.  In the modern rhythms of life Tuesday morning can be a sort of symbol of the ordinary.  It's not loathed like Monday or celebrated like Friday, it's not hump day or thirsty Thursday, if you still listen to the radio it might be double-shot Tuesday, but who really cares?
Tuesday is nothing special, but it's still a day for living the resurrection, in fact it may be the best day for living the resurrection.  Why? Well because the resurrection means more than just a special occurrence.  Like the song says, "every morning is Easter morning."  We live in the reality of the resurrection and that should change things rather radically.  Resurrection means death does not get the last word, and that should certainly change the way we live.
There is far too much "human nature" that is founded on the fear of mortality.  We grasp power and engage in futile hedonism because life is too short.  We neglect God and others because we just don't have time.  But what if we shift our thinking towards the infinite?  What if, it's not just "out brief candle?"
What if there's more?
And not just a vague disembodied more, but a more that shares deeply and significantly with the now.  What if your scars and your brokenness and all your Tuesday mornings go with you?
What if all the songs you sing and the relationships you build matter?  What if profound melodies, boppy, borderline annoying tunes and obscure Cowboy Junkies songs all somehow get woven into a chorus of holy music?
What if it all matters?
Not just Sunday.

We're on Each Other's Team

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, 

but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

-Matthew 7:21

Today is Maundy Thursday, which I thought growing up was Monday Thursday, and that seemed strange.  Maundy is derived from the Latin word mandatum, which means "mandate."  Jesus has called his disciples, taught them what they needed to know, and now, before the suffering and death, before the resurrection, he gives them their purpose.

In most of the modern protestant formulations of Christianity we have emphasized the idea of salvation by grace through faith.  This was a reaction to the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the practice of  "works righteousness" where you could work your way out of your sins with acts of penance (the most particularly repugnant to reformers was giving a whole bunch of money to the church in exchange for forgiveness of sins). 

Theological ideas, like most human constructions, tend to swing like a pendulum, an initial impetus pushes an idea in one direction and it moves, then most often it gets to a place where the inertia of the initial impulse simply runs out and the pendulum begins to swing back the other way.  The reaction against works righteousness and the simultaneous rise of individualism have created a bit of a monster: a brand of Christianity that stridently preaches the Gospel of "giving your heart to Jesus," but only sporadically challenges people to live into the transformative power of that affirmation.  And so you have millions of people who strongly self-identify as Christian, but who have only a thumbnail sketch in their mind of what Jesus actually said and did.

I used to hate group projects.  I used to hate getting randomly assigned to work with a bunch of other people on something or other and finding out that half the "team" thought meetings were more or less optional.  It has taken me years and is an on going discipline in my life to learn to work with and accept the way other people work.  In pastoral work, it's tempting to wish for a congregation full of dedicated disciples, all of whom hold solid theology and all of whom are striving for the kingdom in the best sense of the word.  Then I have to be convicted of the naivety of that desire, and I have to learn, over and over how to work with what I've got.

Remember a couple of years ago when Lebron James left Cleveland for Miami?  People in Cleveland burned his jersey and generally wanted to strangle him, but people everywhere else pretty much understood why he was leaving, even if they didn't particularly care for the, "I'm taking my talents to South Beach," TV extravaganza.  He looked around a the Cleveland Cavaliers and he saw a team that, without him, was going absolutely nowhere, and even with him was only ever going to get close but no cigar.  He understood that even as preternaturally talented as he is, basketball is a team game, and to win the big prize you have to have teammates.  He didn't like the teammates he had there and he liked the teammates in Miami a lot better.  Lucky for us, Jesus was a different sort of King.

When I read articles and blogs, or hear first hand stories about why people have left or are leaving the church, I can feel in my guts that the criticism of the Body of Christ is all fairly well deserved.  Churches and their people can be annoying, misguided and sometimes downright toxic.  We are full of sloppy theology, intolerant and dogmatic positions, loose organizational controls and sometimes just downright laziness.

Then I remember that Judas and Peter were both part of the Mandate.  The betrayer and the denier were both there when Jesus broke the bread and made the New Covenant.  Peter was going to make amends, but Judas?  Yes, Judas.  This gets really messy.

Judas had some messy work to do, but I suspect he's not the villain that Dante made him out to be.  I suspect that Judas is just like many people in Christian churches all over the world, who think that they are advancing the cause, and maybe he is, but I suspect not in the way he imagined.  The explanation that I like best about why Judas betrays Jesus is not the greed angle, it's the zealot angle.  I think that Judas was trying to force Jesus' hand and get the rebellion started, I think he really thought that once the palace guards were there to arrest Jesus, the gloves would come off and the Messianic butt-whooping would commence.

Slight miscalculation on his part, but we all make them.

It's not enough to call Jesus Lord and then ignore everything he taught, or even selectively ignore things that you don't happen to like. It is not enough to go all lone ranger on the high plains of  "spirituality." That is not salvation.  That is only the individualist simulacrum of salvation which is the great heresy of modern Christianity. Salvation is not just what happens when you die, it is living out the process of both justification (getting saved) and sanctification (which does not have a neat little word or phrase to describe it because it is too complicated).  If it was as simple as a confession or affirming the proper doctrine, Jesus would not have said anything like the above quote from Matthew's Gospel, but he did and he repeated similar themes in parables and teachings all the time.

We're all lucky that there's such a thing as grace, because without it we would be in big trouble.  Look around you on Sunday, look at all those people you know, and a whole bunch that you don't know: they're your team.  It ain't always gonna be pretty, but it is the Mandate.