Rebel Jesus and the Nerd Gospel

I am a nerd sympathizer.  Once upon a time I had some good nerd potential: I liked and was good at math, I did well in school, I love science fiction/fantasy, and I have never felt socially adept.  Then I decided to become a social worker and then a pastor instead of an engineer or something.  I discovered I stink at technology.  So, my nerd potential went unrealized.  Somewhere inside me, though, there is still a nerd crying to get out.  The jokes my nerd friends (I hope they will take that title as the compliment it is intended to be) post on facebook almost always make me laugh... unless the unrealized part of my nerd potential means I don't understand them.  I find more inspiration in books on quantum physics and in the science fiction/fantasy genre than in theological or spiritual books. 

So, when I run across the word “empire,” while reading some theology, the Star Wars theme strikes up in my head.   But then I read on and I realize what I am reading would make a really good Unpopular, Rebel Against the Status Quo, Dare to be Uncool Nerd Gospel. I’ve been reading “Saving Jesus From The Church” by Robin Meyers in which he talks about Jesus’ references to the Kingdom of God being in opposition to the empire of Rome.  I have been hearing about Joerg Rieger who talks about following Jesus being contrary to the idea of empire and top down rule.  Then I listened to this speech by John Dominic Crossan in which he outlines how the language used by Paul in scriptures: calling Jesus Lord, Son of God, etc. was using language which was used at that time to describe the Roman emperor.  This is to say Jesus is our lord not Caesar and that peace will not come through the victory of military might but rather through God working nonviolent justice through God’s people.  This is a rebellion against the powers that be.  This is a rebellion against a few living in luxury while many suffer.  This is a rebellion against poverty, injustice, and devaluing those who are outcasts from society.  

Someone dear to me used to have a Confederate flag which he loved.  He was not racist. He was not from the south.  To him it was a symbol of rebellion.  Sadly, that was the best symbol of rebellion he could find in part because Christianity has strayed so far from following Jesus.  The fish, the dove, the cross, all our Christian symbols ought to be symbols of rebellion because Jesus was a kick-booty nonviolent rebel.  Jesus calls us to rebel against the powers that be through healing, feeding the hungry and struggling for justice for all people.  Jesus calls us to this rebellion even today when most don’t label the powers that be as an empire.  Yet when few prosper and many suffer what else could it be?  

For all those who dare to be different, for all those who are different through no choice of their own, for all those who dream of a world that is different, peaceful, and just, this is the Good News:  Rebel Jesus calls you forth. 

I guess this shouldn't be too surprising.  I mean, don't you think the followers of Jesus in the Gospels look more like the folks on Serenity (the spaceship on the show Firefly) than the folks on the 700 Club? 

What say you, oh nerd friends?  And don't we all have a bit of nerd in us anyway?

Evolution: Moving towards God's kingdom in the here and now

I have another favorite scripture passage to do to my list - Jeremiah 31:33-34. “....I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.....”

Almost as powerful is John 12:32 - “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

Here’s another one of my favorites, from Galatians 3:28 - “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos refers to sequential time, time that can be measured in units of years, days, hours, minutes. It is a quantitative description of time and from it we derive the words chronology and chronological. It also happens to be the description of time we are most cognizant of, with our schedules and our eye to our watches. But there is an entire other dimension to time and the Greeks called this kairos. Kairos time is what happens in the moment. It cannot be measured, but it’s what is remembered. Kairos stirs our anticipation for the future. We don’t strain ahead to reach an arbitrary day, we push forward, eager for that elusive moment of joy and consummation. Kairos time is qualitative. According to the ancient Greeks, ‘Kairos was the god of the fleeting moment.’ Too often, we neglect to comprehend that the Bible is not a chronos document, but is a testimony to kairos.
　
The Bible is a compiled testimony of many, many different cultures’ attempts to try and capture kairos moments in time that somehow conveyed a greater truth. And very often different scripture passages do indeed pull back the curtain of uncertainty to reveal an aspect of God. But because all cultures are as limited as the humans which comprise them, all too often scripture actually obscures more than it illuminates. Particularly when people attempt to make the Bible something it is not, as is the case when Christians work to make scripture fit into the confining box of chronos.

Every so often people ask me how I am able to keep finding new things to talk about from the pulpit when I speak about the exact same scriptures every 3 years, according to our lectionary cycle, or in some cases, every year, such as at Easter or Christmas. For a long time my reply has been that by the time I travel by a scripture text again, a year or so later, I am in a different place in life and so what I see revealed changes as I age. This is certainly true. But I’m discovering something new now as well. In my first years of preaching, I trampled all over the texts trying to get at their meaning. But each successive year my footstep got progressively lighter. Now I almost feel like I do a dance with scripture each week, treading very lightly on the words in an attempt to give the Spirit room to breathe new life into my very limited understandings. And I continue to enjoy this dance very much.

I think the trick is to give these ancient texts the space they need to open themselves beyond their written words so that we might get at the yearning, the instinctive pull found in the hearts of humanity all those years ago in order to place these heart yearnings next to our own heart beats and see what that yields. When I treat the Bible as a kairos testimony and seek to find the truth embedded deep within these written words, I see a pull towards oneness, towards unity in God. It’s written all over the Bible, including in the three scripture texts I began with. And this yearning for oneness is echoed in our own most heartfelt longings today.
　　
　
This is not a new idea. I’ve shared these thoughts from the pulpit at other times. However, friends have recently helped renew my hope that as a human civilization, we are indeed moving in the right direction. If you look and compare some of the earliest written books in the Bible with some of the concluding books, you’ll see that arc of progress nicely illustrated. Similarly, if you look at human civilization 1500 or 1000 years ago, compared to where we are at today, we are indeed moving towards greater unity. But in the moment, it often doesn’t feel like progress at all. In fact, too often it feels like we’re going backwards. So it’s important to keep in mind that evolution is a very sloooow process. And again, chronos vs. kairos comes into play. God exists in kairos. Think of 2 Peter 3:8 - “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.”

Here are some life-giving examples to encourage each of us. One of my good friends recently finished reading the book, The End of War, by John Horgan (January 2012), for her seminary class. She shared with me how this book uses statistical analysis to make the case that as a human civilization we are evolving beyond the need for war. We are becoming a more peaceful species. Now my first reaction was to be quite dubious. But as I think back to the little I remember about world history, it does seem as though war was a constant reality. It was the way of life, everywhere. That’s really not the case anymore.

My sister-in-law and blog parnter, Sheri, also uncovered some really hopeful signs which she speaks to in one her recent blogs ( http://Ending Poverty, Changing Government: Things That Are Totally Possible ). She cites a recent Sojourners blog in which Dr. Scott Todd, a representative for the group 58, which is a global initiative to end extreme poverty, gives these statistics,　
　
"We used to say that 40,000 children die each day from preventable causes.
In the 1990s, that number dropped to 33,000 per day. By 2008, it dropped again to 24,000. Now it is down to 21,000. That means that in a generation we cut that number in half. 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty today. That's a staggering amount, but let's put those numbers in perspective: In 1981, 52 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it's 26 percent. Again, that means we have cut the number in half, and we did it in one generation."

Now 21,000 children dying each day from preventable causes due to poverty is still a ridiculously high number. But Scott is making the argument that we can do something about it. And in fact, in just one generation we have cut extreme poverty in half. This simply demonstrates we are in fact capable of pretty much wiping extreme poverty out all together and we are in the process of doing so.

In that same blog, Sheri also includes a link to a TED lecture. TED is an organization committed to passing on really great ideas and while it’s been around for awhile, it’s only recently becoming a really powerful online source. This particular TED lecture was by “Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, which matches software geniuses with US cities to reboot local services.” Her talk was titled, “Coding a Better Government.” She proposes using technology to make government much more interactive and she stresses the fact that “until our understanding of citizenry changes, government will not change.” Meaning, until we begin to take more responsibility for ourselves and for each other, government will remain an outsized, and terribly inefficient guzzler of tax dollars. Pahlka asks whether government can actually jettison politics and instead be “run like the internet, permissionless and open.” Then she goes on to explain why she believes this is possible.　
　
　
Computer technology is difficult for me. My sister this week shared a quote that resonated. “Computers are a second language for people 40 and older but are a first language for everyone younger.” Could it be, however, that computers offer the real language of love? It feels like the greatest manmade force at work uniting humanity is our technologically and interactive capabilities. Why are we progressively going to war less? Because we regularly see and hear about the impact of war on people around the world. Why are we making a big dent in poverty? Because technology regularly forces us to confront these issues, these people, even in the safety of our own homes. I am awed by the way education will be revolutionized in just a few short years due to technology. My children are going to have relationships with other kids their age around this world due to connections made in their classrooms. We are increasingly becoming a global community. And technology is providing the links with others we must have in place if we are to continue evolving towards greater unity.

Even on a quantum level, scientists are sensing this movement. In an earlier blog I spend time making connections between science and theology (http://Another look at creation). I also used a quote by Timothy Ferris, a physicist at the University of California and author of the book The Whole Shebang (1998), which speaks beautifully to this idea of increasing unity.

Ferris writes, "The quantum universe may be thought of as the other side of the coin from the spatiotemporal, relativistic universe that has, to date, dominated cosmological thought. We humans, having come along when the universe was already billions of years old and being rather big creatures, able to see stars in the sky but not atoms in an apple, naturally got into cosmology from the large-scale side of things--by observing galaxies and developing theories, such as relativity, to interpret their behavior. But the universe was not always big and classical. Once it was small and quantum, and possibly it has not lost the memory of those times. It may well turn out that over there--or, more properly, inside and underfoot, marbled through the very fabric of the space that is in turn marbled through every material object--the universe remains as it was in the beginning, when all places were one place, all times one time, and all things the same thing."
　　
If I switch now to theological language, I might say the universe is bent on reclaiming this unity of purpose, of mind, of being. And that whenever we find this unity, we see the face of God. The Reign of God is all about making God’s unity, God’s love visible in this realm of existence. I love the idea we were created with an intuitive memory of the unity that once was and a yearning for that unity to be made real once more.

Last week I offered the thought that maybe we stand on the brink of birth, a new religion evolving from Christianity. Again, friends expanded my vision wondering if maybe a new understanding of God is emerging around the world, a religion that might unite us with all humanity. It sounds almost like utopia, God’s Kingdom on earth. The Bible talks about that quite a lot too. We’ve always assumed these references were to a life that would follow this one. But what if we were wrong? What if God is gently moving us, pushing us, coaxing us towards a time of fulfillment in this age? And what if, in the realm of kairos, that reality were only a day away?

“....I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord....”

Reasons I Sometimes Consider Leaving Church

Between blogs and facebook I have read several lists lately about why people are leaving the church (here is one and another by Christian Piatt and another by Barna Group.)  Most often these are targeted particularly at why young people are leaving the church.  I thought I would weigh in with my own spin on this topic.  I don’t qualify as a young person anymore but I certainly find myself empathizing with the young people and others who are leaving church.  And after reading the slightly self-congratulatory comments from a few mainline folks regarding Rachel Held-Evan’s reasons for leaving the church, I wanted to write about the reasons I (a Lutheran) sometimes entertain the notion of leaving church.  A little disclaimer here: this is not an indictment of my local congregation.  My local congregation, much like other congregations I have experienced, is full of wonderful people.  The pastors I have encountered have often been wonderful people, including my current pastor.  My dissatisfaction comes from organized Christianity in general.

1. I long for deep conversation about the reality that we might be wrong.  It is possible that there is no god at all, that faith is wishful thinking, or that we entirely missed Jesus’ point.  Admittedly in mainline traditions it is often okay to admit that we have doubts or that we don’t understand a passage or maybe (though not always) that we don’t believe in miracles or don't believe certain scriptures are factual.  But we are still often uncomfortable looking more closely at the doubts and have few venues for really exploring them in any depth beyond a sympathetic pat on the back for those experiencing doubts while going through some traumatic event.  Isn’t church the very place where such questions should be considered?      
2. The focus of the church seems to be almost entirely upon worship and wringing our hands over why we can’t get more people to come to worship (we label the latter as evangelism.)  I keep reading the Gospels trying to see what I am missing but I cannot see that this is what Jesus calls us to do.  What I read is Jesus being about healing, reaching out to the poor and the outcast.  I don’t think Jesus meant reaching out and handing them an invitation to your church.  A few token service projects or even several, though helpful, still don’t really get to the heart of what I read Jesus calling us to do.
3. I find myself agreeing more often with my atheist friends and non-Christian friends than my Christian friends. 
4. I feel a sense of incomplete purpose in my life.  Not purposeless since raising my children and caring for our farm are pretty important purposes.  But I feel like I am being called to more than this.  It is unsettling to me that the church does not seem to be well equipped to help me figure this out. 
5. I live in a "red" state.  It seems to me that the conversations in church are influenced as much by this fact as by denomination or any other factor.  I absolutely believe that faith should influence our politics.  But if faith were the influencing factor would the results really be along party lines?
6. Then there is the question of my children.  I love the people in the church and want my children to be surrounded by a loving community.  But is torturing them with worship (time for brutal honesty folks most of our worship experiences are terribly boring for children if not for adults too) really the best way to do that?  Wouldn’t it be better to spend that time working side by side with these wonderful people and actually helping somebody?
7. Another thing that makes me ponder leaving church is comments like some of those following any of the afore mentioned lists.  It is so easy to dodge the criticism by telling someone he or she is being selfish or to stick it out with the church, or just drive a little further and search a little harder to find “a good fit”.  This isn’t about one particular church or a few bad apples.  This isn’t about not liking the music or the liturgy.  This is about people having real struggles with important issues in the Christian church and needing to be heard.  Simply telling people to try harder is not listening.  People are leaving.  There are many who think the church is dying.  We need to listen.  Or we can stand around the graveside feeling self-righteous satisfaction that we stuck it out until the bitter end but that won’t make the church any less dead. 

These are some of the things I contemplate as I feel a general sense of dissatisfaction with the church.  Though I echo things others have mentioned before, what I have written is personal to me and I am not attempting to generalize this list to anyone else.  Yet, my understanding is that people are leaving all Christian churches: fundamentalist, liberal, mega and tiny.  I have a deep suspicion that the trouble is with the very framework of what we have come to understand as church.  My suspicion is we have strayed far away from what it means to follow Jesus.  I am willing to admit I might be wrong about the underlying causes, the symptoms, the path we need to take but I find it harder to believe that I am wrong about a need for change.  Yet from conservative to liberal to emerging church nothing I am aware of looks to me like more than just changing the wrapping paper on the same empty box.  I know of some glimmers of hope and some shining individuals but mostly just different colored boxes.

So, here is my voice, joining with the others, calling for change.

Turning from the snake pole and towards God's new creation

In the book of I Timothy, the author states "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." While I agree, I'm guessing the root of most evil can eventually be traced back to fear.


There's a story from the book of Numbers (21:4-9) that serves as a good example. The Israelites are in the midst of the wilderness wanderings when they start running short on food and water and what they have left is in rough shape. They get worried about their diminishing rations and so they complain about it to both Moses and God. At about this same time, they travel into an area thick with venomous snakes. Many people are bitten and die. Understandably, the people move very quickly from worried to terrified. So they fall back on their theology which allows them to conveniently control God. At that time, most everyone believed if good things happen to you, it only followed you were being blessed by God. Therefore if bad things happened, you must have done something to bring on God's wrath. It's unfortunate this theology is still only too alive and well today.


Anyway, these snakes are a bad thing and so the automatic assumption is that God is angry with them. They sift back through their last several days and/or weeks trying to figure out what they had done wrong. Their complaints from days ago are the only thing they can come up with, so they confess their sin to Moses and ask him to see if he might be able to make things right with God again. Moses prays and lands upon a snake replica wrapped around a pole (can we say idol??) as the divinely inspired solution. He explains that if snake-bit people look at the snake pole, they will be healed. In the meantime, the Israelites keep on moving, and soon leave the snake infested area behind. Because this is a good thing, they interpret it as a gift from God.

Now I don't for a second think the real sin here was the complaining. And I certainly don't think God punishes us for complaining. If that were the case, there wouldn't be too many of us left standing! It also wasn't sinful for the Israelites to be scared. There are times when fear makes good sense! No, the real sin in this story was the way in which the Israelites allowed their fear to shape their response. Acting in fear, the Israelites worked to manipulate God. Of course no one can actually manipulate God, thank goodness. But that doesn't stop us from trying all the time. And that is sinful, no matter how subtle you are about it. As this story is written, we find a puppet God controlled by a puppet leader named Moses. But it's the Israelites who really seem to be running the show. Something bad happens, so they do a quick confession, promise never to do it again and thus, fairly easily, win back their good grace. They have God in their back pocket, or at least they choose to believe they do. Why? Because life is hard for these people. They never know when the next catastrophe will strike and rob them of some or a lot of their members. Thus they try to gain some semblance of control over life by subconsciously pretending they can control God.

Most often I seein myself and others one of two really poor responses to fear. A lot of people do everything they can to push it away without ever acknowledging it's presence. When this happens, the tendency is to get caught up in the really trivial and stupid shallowness on display at every turn around the world. A really extreme example is revealed in alleged emails from the President of Syria and his wife. They show President Assad emailing his wife songs from iTunes and downloading "America's Got Talent" videos while his wife does online shopping for luxury shoes as their country's citizens continue to be brutalized by Assad's government.

The second type of response jumps the spectrum to the polar opposite end. Rather than denying fear, too often people feed on it. I read last week about a man who spent one hundred thousand dollars on "end of day" preparations. Following 911, our political administration very deliberately fed this nation's fears and now, two wars later, the world is much worse of because of it.

The gospel of John (chapter 3) introduces a fearful Pharisee named, Nicodemus, creeping out to meet Jesus under the cover of darkness to learn more about this man he feels drawn to. Nicodemus represents a religious institution beside itself with fear.

Some background on the book of John might be helpful. I just finished reading Bishop John Shelby Spong's latest book called, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. Spong goes through the entire Bible in these pages outlining the historical context which shaped these texts. Much of this I learned in seminary, though a refresher course was needed. Much was also new, for me anyway. The following information I present forms in large part the majority consensus of Biblical scholarship, but I owe Spong the debt of neatly consolidating and offering up this more factual data.

Here's a real quick New Testament timeline. Jesus was born in 6 CE and died in 32 CE, give or take a few years. This can't be exactly dated, but that's close. The first New Testament books to be written were Paul's epistles somewhere between 51 and 64 CE, so some 20 years after the death of Christ. Rome ruled this area of the world beginning in 65 BC. Close to 100 years later, in 66 CE, the Zealots kicked off a 7 year war against the Roman authories. Needless to say, the Romans won and in the process, Jerusalem, along with the temple, was destroyed. The war ended in 73 CE, right around the time Mark's gospel was written. Matthew's gospel followed around 10 years later and a few years after that, sometime in the 80's, we got Luke. The gospel of John wasn't composed until sometime in the 90's. We call Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Synoptic gospels because the three have so many similarities. And then there's John. Well, something pretty major happened between the time Luke and John were written.

The first three gospels emerged still within the context of Judaism. In fact, Spong makes a pretty compelling argument that these three gospels were framed in a way that allowed them to be used liturgically in the synagogues (see Part 5). So when Mark, Matthew and Luke were written, there's still no such thing as Christianity. But there are lots of Jews within the synagogue, such as Nicodemus, who feel drawn to Jesus, to his teachings and stories of his example, to the revelation of God they sense in his life. There are also many Gentile converts to Judaism not particularly enamored with things like food purity laws and circumcision, but who appreciate the moral and ethical grounding as well as the inclusivity preached by those Jews who insistently lift Jesus up as the example. Eventually, this movement gets too powerful within the ranks of Judaism and so sometime after Luke but before John, the Jesus followers become their own movement when they are expelled from the synagogue.

At the time of John, Judaism had lost its most holy institution in the form of the temple. In addition, it was still responding to an upstart and breakaway movement. Things were changing fast and change is almost always scary. In chapter 3, Nicodemus seems to embody this fear. He is holding on tight to what he has always known, to the traditions and law he has devoted his life to protecting. But Jesus is persistently at work, prying his fingers loose, encouraging him to let go and allow himself to be born into a truth bigger than he's ever imagined. Jesus is helping Nicodemus get around his fear to the other side.

Eighteen months ago we began a "future" conversation in my congregation. I pastor a small and ever-declining rural congregation. A year and a half ago, our shrinking body made it necessary to begin making plans for our future, fully aware this future would most likely entail closing our doors at some point very soon. I wanted to know why this was happening and so I began doing much reading and research and found myself on a journey I hadn't anticipated. Soon enough, I realized that in some form or another, this was happening in a majority of churches in every main-line denomination in the United States. It was also soon very clear this exodus from the church began generations ago. In other words, the church has been turning away from its fear, denying it, for an awfully long time.

Instead, we've focused on really trivial stuff, at least if you consider the whole scope of the issue. The church has had really divisive arguments about what kinds of music we should use in worship. We've spent lots of time trying to figure out how to make our churches more welcoming and user friendly. We've split ourselves, time and time again over things like divorce and remarriage, women in ministry and now, homosexuality.

But our denial hasn't and won't do anything to slow the pace of change. Change has and will continue to engulf the church. I've been anticipating some form of Reformation in anglo Christianity at some point in the near future. Maybe not in my lifetime, but in my children's lifetime, perhaps? After reading through Spong's book on Biblical history and learning all over again how Christianity was birthed from Judaism, a religion that prided itself on it's unchanging traditions and law, it made me wonder if instead, we're seeing a pregnant movement afoot that will in time give way to an entirely new understanding and relationship with God - a new religion birthed from Christianity.

The fear is palpable. It's hard to deny anymore and so much of Christianity is now feeding on it. There is angry religious rhetoric all over the place. Many Christian groups are building impermeable walls around their sacred shrines in order to keep their numbers pure and exclude those who don't fit their notions of righteousness. And like Nicodemus, most traditional Christian churches are holding on tight to old understandings that no longer serve us well. For example, we are seeing a new emphasis on evangelization dressed up in more contemporary language. We want to believe we can evangelize ourselves out of this perceived crisis.

I am one of those people within Christianity longing for the new I see and feel emerging and over the last few years I've been taken aback at how many people I've met who are right there with me - still within the traditional church, but peering over the side to try and catch a glimpse of the breathtaking scope of God beyond these precious walls. My prayer is that the church would turn to face its fear honestly and let go of the snake wrapped around the pole - that illusion of security - so it is able, so WE are able to open ourselves to a new creation, a more unknown realm of God, a deeper understanding of Christ that soars beyond our words and our understanding.

We sang a newer hymn on Sunday. It seems like an appropriate conclusion.

"Christ is Alive"

"This is a day of new beginnings, time to remember, and move on, time to believe what love is bringing, laying to rest the pain that's gone. (verse 1)

"Then let us, with the Spirit's daring, step from the past, and leave behind our disappointment, guilt, and grieving, seeking new paths, and sure to find. (verse 3)

"Christ is alive and goes before us to show and share what love can do. This is a day of new beginnings; our God is making all things new, our God is making all things new (chorus)."

"Christ is Alive" - words by Brian Wren (1983), music by Lori True (2003).

Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non Religious World by John Shelby Spong; HarperOne, 2011.

Ending Poverty, Changing Government: Things That Are Totally Possible

I was drawing a blank about what to write this morning and I thought to myself, "What is the one message that you really want people to hear?" Not surprisingly the message I came up with is one I have expressed in this blog and in sermons time and time again.  Forgive me for repeating myself.  That message is this: we are all connected.  When one of us suffers we all are in danger of suffering.  When one part of the world is made a little safer, we all are a little safer.  We help ourselves by helping each other.  We are in this together.  To put it in religious terms, God calls us to work for justice and peace for all of God's creation.  That is how we work toward the Kingdom of God.

There it is.  There is my message.  It could be stated more eloquently, I am sure, but the passion behind it is real.  But, even in an old message there can always be new insight and new perspective.  I found such as I looked around on the internet last night.  Two very different sources gave me inspiration and hope.  The first was a blog on the Sojourners website "Ending Poverty In Our Time" by Derek Flood.  This blog includes a video by a group called Live58 which attempts to unite Christians in action to end extreme poverty in this generation.  The video is inspiring though I know little about this group and from what I read on the website I do find it to be a little too exclusively Christian (now there is a comment that will make me popular among my more conservative religious neighbors).  But what was inspiring and hopeful to me in this blog was the statistics that show how far we have come.  We are making progress fighting poverty. We can make a difference.  We know this because we already have made a difference.

The second source of inspiration was a talk on the TED website, "Coding A Better Government", by Jennifer Pahlka.  It is a bit surprising to me to find inspiration in a talk that is in part about technology.  I am not much of a techie.  I can't even understand my blog stats.  What was inspiring to me about this talk was the way she talked about government.  She talked about the politics we see on TV being only a very small portion of what government is.  She also talked about our participation in government being more than just voting.

Lately I have read a bit about the way we tell the story of people in Africa.  We tend to depict Africans as living in horrible conditions without any hope, doing nothing but waiting on Americans to come and save them.  This is not the full story nor the most helpful one in many ways.  Hearing Pahlka's TED talk made me wonder about the way we tell our own story.  Do we tell the story of the United States as a bunch of really good people held back by the corruption of our politicians?  Do we tell our story as one of hopelessness: what can we do since our options, come voting time, are between the lesser of two (or three or four) evils?  Is this the full story or the most helpful one?

Voting is not the only way we can impact our government.  We can see needs in our local communities and find ways to address them.  We can become informed about some of the complex issues facing our society and speak to those issues in helpful ways.  We can take the time to help a neighbor.

Next time you get fed up with the politicians on TV, shut it off and then spend a few minutes thinking about your community and what you can do to make it a better place.  Next time facebook is full of some idiot politician who said some idiotic thing, don't escape to pinterest (not that there is anything wrong with pinterest, I like it too). Don't flee into the sports channel.  Rather explore world news to get perspective.  Look at informative sites that help you understand the issues so you can better become part of the solutions.  I have often wondered how different our country might be if the magazine racks at the checkout counters contained news magazines, newspapers, and even international news rather than magazines about what celebrity is fat or having an affair.  Let's take time to be informed and to participate in our communities and maybe there will be a trickle up effect.  If we govern ourselves on the local level with intelligence, efficiency, and compassion perhaps Washington will take notice and at least try to pretend that they can do it too.

We can make a difference.  We have made a difference in the past, we can do it again.  We can end extreme poverty.  We can build a better government.  I believe these things to be true.  Let's get to it.

Jettisoning law for love

My family has been thoroughly enjoying a kids' book series called, Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games books. One of the pieces I particularly appreciated as an adult reader was the subtext in this series which offered a pointed critique of the United States, religion and war. The story is set in the Underland, a universe miles below the surface of the earth, accessed through neglected New York subway stairs. The Underland civilization relies on an ancient code which offers clues about the destiny of the different Underland races and how the humans might go about achieving their desired aims. Every event that unfolds is interpreted in light of this ancient, prophetic overlay which often involves much reinterpretation in order to make the prophecies fit and thus retain their authoritative status. This Code is particularly sacred to the Underland humans, both because the Code was written by a human, but also because the prophecies predict that if the humans do exactly what is written, they will ultimately come to dominate and rule the Underland. As the series unfolds, the reader begins to get a little uneasy with the prophecy and in the end, you learn a few key characters don't actually believe in the prophecy either, but they do recognize and appreciate the Code's power to manipulate and control.

Honestly, I think this is always the danger with religion, that it will confine itself to a limited overlay as its base of functioning. For example, some religious streams use evangelization as their primary overlay. This is the lens through which reality is filtered. So Jesus' great commission at the end of Matthew's gospel, to "go and make disciples of all nations" becomes the guiding scripture text. Proselytizing is the highest priority and the number of people you have in the pews becomes the indicator of success. And then there are apocalyptic religious movements that pull all the "final day" scriptures out of their intended contexts and then lay them over present day affairs in order to come up with end of the world predictions.

Biblical cultures demonstrate the use of all kinds of overlays too. The gospels were written many decades after Jesus' death. And each of the four schools of thought represented by the four gospels had their own unique agenda in mind. But they did find common ground on at least one issue. All the gospels work hard to illustrate Jesus was the Messiah and to do this they use the overlay of prophecy much like I describe from the Gregor the Overlander books. They put this overlay of Old Testament prophecy on top of the life of Jesus and then they work hard to make that overlay fit perfectly. In many cases this calls for some creative invention.

Jesus also targets a religious overlay throughout his ministry. His indignation, frustration, anger is directed at the overlay of law and how that law is manipulated and abused. In so many ways law and the keeping of the law defined Judaism. Law gave Judaism much of its definition and set the people apart from everyone else. Law also generated the very convincing illusion that God could be contained. You could put this overlay of law down on top of life and anything the law didn't cover was assumed to be out of and thus opposed to God's realm. But law....human law, is so limited. It pulls your focus to the external keeping of the law without really addressing so much the internal motivations. On more than one occassion, this makes Jesus blow his top and his anger is almost always directed at those appointed to uphold and cherish the law above all others - the Pharisee, the Sadducees and the scribes. Here you have a religious institution thoroughly engulfed in law and yet the spirit of the law, that which is supposed to give the law life and light, has been entirely neglected.

Here's one of Jesus' tirades from Matthew 23:23-28 (NRSV). "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisees! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

The Ten Commandments are revered in our Christian society. People might be interested to know there are actually three versions of these core laws. The most well-known is from Exodus 20 and is divided in such a way as to yield 10 commandments. But Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 6 also contain these core commandments, though in these versions it's much more difficult to outline 10. Leviticus has more than 10, Deuteronomy has less. Because we are most familiar with the Exodus version, I'll go from there. I've actually written a number of sermons in the past extolling the wisdom put forth by this ancient code of law. But today, I want to instead point out how limited they are as a definitive guide.

First, the image of God they put forward is troubling, referring to God as a jealous and vengeful deity. This gives rise to a troubling theology that no longer fits out modern worldview. At that time, people believed God punished those who disobeyed the law of God. This punishment could take many forms - a catastrophic flood, a defeat in war, premature death through illness, etc. In the same manner, it was believed that if you led a truly virtuous life, you would receive all manner of blessings as a reward...in this life. The book of Job offers perhaps the best depiction as well as critique of this worldview. Nonetheless, this theology is on display throughout the Old Testament and even on into the New Testament. Here in the 10 Commandments we find this allusion in verse 12 - "Honor you father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you." So what's the motivation for doing the right thing here? It's external. You do the right thing in order to receive your reward, not because it is the right thing to do. In addition, I find the idea of women as property disturbing. But at that time women were indeed property - either their father's or their husband's. So the final commandment is a prohibition against men to covet the property of their neighbor. Examples given include the neighbor's house, the neighbor's wife, his slaves, his livestock and finally, anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Second, equally disturbing is what the commandments don't say. The Exodus version includes nothing about justice. Justice is more present in the Leviticus account, but in this Exodus passage there's absolutely nothing. Equally striking is the omission of love. In verse six there is a reference made to external rewards given to those who love God, but that's it.

The third unsettling piece is how application of the commandments was understood at that time. Waldemar Janzen, author of the Believer's Church Bible Commentary on the book of Exodus writes, "The 10 Commandment's intent is to focus particularly on rules which will help govern family of clan systems, and not to be concerned with the laws reaching beyond more immediate family or tight community relationships." In other words, the prohibition on murder was only honored within the Israelite clan system. This did not stop them from murdering those outside their circle who might have stood in their way. Not only that, but they would have assumed God was on their side and actually encouraged murder or warfare if it served the Israelites' purposes. Maybe they wouldn't covet their neighbor's wife, but they could have adulterous relationships with or in the case of war, even rape alien or heathen women (Deut. 21:10-14 as one example among several).

Now most of the 10 Commandments are commonsensical. Of course you shouldn't steal or commit adultery. It is spiritually/physically/emotionally healthy to have a Sabbath day. But no matter how good a law might be, laws are still very, very limited in their ability to govern attitudes, motivations. They fall short when it comes to the governance of our hearts.

Fast forward back to the New Testament and we have Jesus coming down hard on the legal overlay this whole religious institution relied on for its shape and definition. He jerks the rug right out from under the establishment and tells them to start over. It's no wonder he got himself killed!

The problem with overlays is that in the end they tend to serve their maker's best interests - law, prophecy, evangelization, and the list goes on - in the end they are all equally self-serving and therefore equally flawed. As far as I know, there's only one overlay that doesn't fit this description and that's exactly what Jesus, drawing on the best of the Old Testament, offered folk back then. In so many ways, it also happens to be what the church continues to drag its feet on today. Jesus takes all the law, and there was and is a lot of it, and he boils it all down to two commandments. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record this passage. In my Bible these are referred to as the Great Commandment and the First Commandment. From Mark 12:28-31 - "One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, 'Which commandment is the first of all?' Jesus answered, 'The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.'"

Taking things yet a step further, in many places throughout the remainder of the New Testament, the two great commandments are further distilled to their very essence. For example, I John 4:16, "God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them." This is the only overlay the church has any business using.

That's not to say that love can't be manipulated - that we can do pretty awful things in the name of love. That's true, but that's also not love. More than any other trait, fear seems to like masquerading as love. But as a good friend reminded me the other week, fear and love go together like oil and water. Just a few verses down from I John 4:16 we find this, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." This is what we're going for - perfect love. How would the application of perfect love transform our conversation on homosexuality in the church? How would perfect love motivate the church towards greater action on poverty and injustice around our world? How would perfect love move us towards political healing in this nation?

Certainly love means honoring your father and mother. It also means parents should honor their relationships with their children. Siblings should honor their relationships with one another and so on. Loving God may mean taking a day in the week to more intentionally be aware of God's presense, but it might also mean being more tuned into the Holy and Divine every day of the week. Of course loving excludes murder. But in the words of Jesus, loving also requires us to "love our enemies."

The perfect overlay - perfect love. Simple maybe, though certainly not easy. And yet this is the Great Commission. So the question remains, how could/would perfect love transform the church today?

Original Sin? Cultural Conditioning? I Don't Know.

There are a lot of things about life, about faith, about scripture that I just don't know.  I don't know how much of the bible is myth and how much factually happened.  I don't know what/who God is.  I don't know what happens after we die.  But sometimes, even in the midst of not knowing, truth shines forth in an undeniable way.
I don't know if Eve and Adam literally ate fruit from some tree and doomed the world to sin.  Yet I find it hard to deny that there is within me an inherent selfishness that is difficult to overcome.  I was reminded of this as I undertook a fast from certain foods this Lent.  On that first morning when I ate oatmeal without the usual big ol' dollop of sugar, I felt sorry for myself.  Then, it occurred to me that people all over the world would be thrilled to have oatmeal to eat because it feeds their bodies and quiets the hunger pangs for a time.  And here I was whimpering because my morning oatmeal didn't taste like cake.  Is that kind of self-centeredness original sin?  Is it cultural conditioning as our society conditions us to think more is always better and safety, worth and all good things come from more stuff?  Is it survival instinct gone haywire?  I don't know, but it is real.  It is truth.

I know that in my marriage no matter how many times I tell myself I should focus on what I am giving instead of what I am getting, I still have a tendency to keep score.  "I did this for him so he should do this for me." Original sin?  Culturally conditioned false ideals of romance?  I don't know.

I know that there are stirrings in my heart that tell me we are called to a new way of life, a way focused upon the good of all people, a way beyond selfishness, a way that acknowledges our interconnectedness and the inherent value of all people.  Yet I am immobilized in finding my way forward to follow these ideas.  And when I speak of these things sometimes I feel like people are looking at me a bit like the cat in the above picture is looking at the goat.  Like I must be a different species.

I don't know the origin of all these struggles and things that weigh me down but I sure know they are real.  As I contemplated all of this that song from Wicked started running through my head again in the voice of Kurt from Glee, "It's time to try defying gravity."  Call it sin, call it selfishness, whatever we call it there is something that weighs us down and keeps us caught up in our own lives and our own needs.  We won't always succeed but I believe we can defy this gravity and rise above our selfishness for the sake of others.  I believe this is what we are called to do.

I also believe that sometimes life is too heavy and the best way to find the energy necessary for defying gravity comes from inspirational sources like music and humor.  I also believe this blog has been a bit heavy lately.  So, in the interest of a little comic relief let me tell you about the price I paid for the above picture.  I sat in the goat pen taking pictures trying to capture a goat defying gravity again (advent-readings-from-outside-box-part-2).  I thought I got a great one but it turned out blurry.  Uggh.  Anyway, we have some friendly goats and one of the mama goats came to inspect me.

She sniffed my face... my nose....  Ahh, so sweet.

Then she belched right in my face.

God's way of telling me I take life to seriously?  I don't know.

Willy Wonka and our startlingly strange Gospels

Years ago when my son was 3, we were having lunch together and Jonathan decided we should all be animals. He settled on a monkey for himself, recently having admired a lonely, little monkey at the zoo. After some deliberation he concluded his sister would be an "efelant." Next he declared me to be a lion. His daddy sat waiting with anticipation, wondering what regal and impressively large animal Jonathan would connect with him. Finally Jonathan turned to his father, looked him in the eye and said, "Daddy, you are a swan." Todd's face fell as I cracked up. His daddy, the swan.

In a great passage from the gospel of Luke (13:31-35), Jesus seems to be playing a similar game. He calls Herod a fox. And then a few verses later, he likens himself to an animal as well. We may wonder what regal and impressively large animal this could be. We wait with bated breath, anticipating. And the animal is.......a chicken. A chicken!!! God incarnate is like a chicken?!

Much in the Bible, the New Testament in particular, makes me chuckle on good days and leaves me scratching my head at other times. It's so incongruous and subverted. We have a baby, who also happens to be the Son of God, born in a stable. We find Jesus coming to the rescue at a party, choosing to make water out of wine for his first miracle. And then we get to what Jesus actually says. He tells us to offer up our other cheek if someone attacks us. He speaks of leaving ninety-nine obedient sheep behind in order to go find the ornery one. He spins a story about a wealthy man inviting the lame, the poor, the crippled and blind right off the street into his home for a grand banquet. He speaks about camels contemplating passage through the eye of a needle. He says the Kingdom of God belongs to children. He makes clear that being great is about being last. He blesses and lifts up those who are poor, grieving, hungry and reviled and then turns around and castigates those who are comfortable, happy content and well thought of in their communities. He has the power to determine his future and yet volunteers for death on a cross. Days later, he sits on a beach, alive again, nonchalantly munching on fish and talking with his friends. And lest we forget, he compares himself to a chicken.

This is all very strange. We hear these stories so often, we maybe overlook the peculiarities. Of course the Luke text doesn't use the word, "chicken". Rather, Jesus talks about being like a mother hen who longs to gather her brood, in this case the children of Jerusalem, under her wings to keep them safe. But it's good at times to be jarred from our time-worn interpretations, so the word, "chicken", serves well.

A few years back I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl to my kids and then we concluded watching the old Gene Wilder Willy Wonka movie, based on the book. Talk about strange. Willy Wonka, owner of the world's most magnificent and secretive chocolate factory, is an eccentric personality who employs all sorts of extraordinary measures in the creation of his candy. He mixes his chocolate using a chocolate waterfall. If a certain candy batter feels too cold, he stirs in a coat to warm it up. He employs squirrels to sort nuts. He partners with Oompah Loompahs to run his factory. Adults call him crazy, a loon. And hidden in their ridicule is a kernel of fear. Therefore, at the point of retirement, Wonka hands his business over to a poverty-stricken child who seems to understand and even revere Wonka's irrational logic.

Children love both the books and the movie. I remember watching the movie a ridiculous number of times growing up. My kids have now watched the movie many times as well and at one point Becca even commented that "it just kept getting better". There is a subversive logic in this story that appeals to children. Yes, it's strange, but in the midst of strangeness and maybe even because of the strangeness that is Wonka, there is light. In some bizarre way, pieces begin to come together and add up. And you get the sense that maybe it's the rest of the world that has it wrong.

I can't emphasize enough how contrary the values of the gospel are to the world. So much of what we rely on to illuminate our days truly has nothing to do with light. Increasing earning power, schedules, time is money, power makes might and might makes right, more is more, denial of pain, happy thoughts, accessorizing, illusions of security. I think of the words to Joni Mitchell's classic song, "Both Sides Now."

Tear and fears and feeling proud to say "I love you" right out loud,
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I've looked at life that way.
But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say I've changed.
Something's lost but something's gained in living every day.

I've looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.

So much of what feeds us every day is illusion. What is an illusion - that which obscures truth. It's another word for darkness. But we buy into our illusions so wholeheartedly, the gospel looks startlingly strange in contrast.

Funny then how we seem drawn to its strangeness. On some level of our being we must intuit that the only thing that makes sense is to be found in all the glorious strangeness communicated in these pages. "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it." I'm being honest when I say the only thing that's ever made sense to me is this completely irrational book. Now lots of attempts are made to turn it into something rational, but it resists every attempt to be tamed. It's power lies in everything antithetical to our notion of rational. And this is scary as heck and so half the time this book might feel a little dark. Strangeness is laced with doubt and doubt is confounding. That's why this community of faith is so essential. We need company. We need our hands held. We need people to listen to our fears and affirm our joys. Faith is not an easy road to travel. At times the light feels all too dim. We need each other to help us along the way. And we need reminders, like today's strange passage from Luke, which help enlighten and embolden our efforts.

There's more to the swan story than I shared as I opened this post. Days prior to our lunch conversation, Jonathan had witnessed a swan at the zoo try to eat a child's shoe. From that point on, he was convinced that swans are as ferocious as it gets in the animal kingdom. I'm assuming he saw his daddy as a protector and so naming him a swan seemed quite apropos.

Jesus also had good reason for comparing himself to a chicken. Mother hens are fiercely protective of their chicks and will go to any length to assure their safety and well being. A reading I found on the internet referenced an article by Phillip Allred from Meridian Magazine.

"A group of young college students were helping measure range damage after a wildfire raged across the prairie outside their university town. As they walked over the expanse of blackened earth, they noticed a cluster of small, smoldering mounds. One of the volunteers was particularly interested in the unidentifiable heaps and asked one of the more experienced range managers what they were.

"This veteran of many range fires replied that he had seen this phenomenon on a few occasions and suggested that the young man turn over one of the piles. He did. To his great surprise, several sage grouse chicks ran out from under the upturned mound. He was fascinated. How incredible, he thought, that these little chicks had known to find and run underneath this mysterious shelter.

"This young man asked what the mound was and how the chicks knew to take refuge there. To his amazement, he was told the smoldering heap was the remains of their mother. When there is danger, the mother hen instinctively calls out to her young ones and stretches out her wings for them to run under and find protection in her embrace. The young man was profoundly moved by this symbol of a mother's innate love and protection."

The mother hen is vulnerable. Jesus was too. Herod, the fox, wasn't directly responsible for Jesus' death, but other foxes were. This too strikes many of us as strange. We worship a vulnerable Christ. And yet, through his vulnerability, he found new life and won us the hope of new life as well. Strangely beautiful and so perfectly illogical and right. This is the light we live in. This is the light we seek.

Why I don’t Believe in Evangelism

I don’t think I agree with the church’s focus on evangelism anymore.  

When I say I don’t agree with evangelism, I am talking about what evangelism has come to mean.  The root of the word “evangelism” is “good news.”  I am not against good news.  I am not even against speaking the good news that Jesus came to earth as the clearest revelation of God’s love.  What I am against is evangelism as coercion.  Evangelism has come to mean employing any and all tricks up our sleeves to make people believe as we do.  Whether we try to “convince” people to join our church through guilt (you nasty sinner), fear (your going to hell), or by offering tantalizing gifts (come listen to our spiel and we will give you food, have faith like us and you will prosper, be like us and find peace and tranquility), it all amounts to trying to make people do what we want them to do.  And let’s face it, what we want them to do is join our church and make us feel good about how our church is growing, evidence that we are being “evangelical”.  

I can imagine that some of you at this point are saying “What’s wrong with giving folks a little gospel with their meal?” There is not necessarily anything wrong with it.  But, allow me to point out that Jesus told Peter to “feed my sheep. (John 21:17)” Period.  He did not say “feed my sheep because that is a really fantastic way to get them in the door.”  It reminds me of what those selling pyramid schemes do.   The message of Jesus is way better than any pyramid scheme.  If we have to bait people to get them to listen then something is wrong with our message.  

Furthermore, when our motives in feeding people are really about getting them to believe the way we do then sometimes our efforts at “helping” will go way wrong.  If we are focused on doing a good deed for the sake of evangelism than we are not focused on doing a good deed for the sake of the person we are supposedly helping.  If I want to bait you into our church by doing the good deed of giving you food, for example, I might not take the time to find out if food is what you really need.  Then we end up feeding the naked and clothing the hungry.  

What really gets me frustrated about evangelism, though, is that it is upheld as the highest ideal of the majority of Christian churches.  Evangelism is supposed to be our main focus and purpose.  Yet my reading of the Gospels reveals Jesus much more concerned with caring for the poor, fighting for justice and healing people.  

Yes Jesus also talks about sharing the Good News but how do we get from there to “all must believe like you do and it is your main job to make them?”

Yes we should welcome the stranger but not so we can make that person be like us.  Rather we welcome the stranger because it is the loving and compassionate thing to do and because we can learn from the stranger.  

I suppose I am being a stereotypical “bleeding heart liberal” in writing this when just last week I wrote about the value of breaking stereotypes.  But, I guess this time I am more concerned with breaking the stereotype of Christians as people who shove their religion down other people’s throats.  Furthermore, this is a cry out on my own behalf: I am longing to find others who believe similarly and to find ways to genuinely love my neighbors in a real, committed, world-changing, justice making way,

...and not as a way to get them to church.

Is there anybody out there?