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soul - ache - ideas, sounds and images between the already and the not-yet

on the sanctity of (teenage) life


Last week's execution of D.C. Sniper John Allen Muhammad was attended by the families of Muhammad's apparently random victims. As scholars and theologians continue to examine the moral, religious and societal implications of capital punishment, there is significant debate over whether or not the act does anything to comfort the victims of such violence.

Muhammad's death sentence was appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court who refused to hear it, just before hearing arguments on a case that effects   Muhammad's first victim--Lee Boyd Malvo--the 16 year old in search of a father figure who was trained, disciplined and taught to take aim at innocent, unsuspecting civilians as a an act of divine warfare. Currently before the court is whether or not juveniles found guilty of criminal acts (rape, homicide, severe aggravated assault and battery) can be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

 Malvo's case may seem to be the most logical--he was, after all the confirmed trigger-man on at least 4 of the murders. There seems to be a legal consensus around life sentences for murder, but in some states, the cases vary widely. District attorneys, often feeling societal pressure to "get tough on crime" have pushed for judicial power to try minors as adults, or at least have the power to convey the same sentence for "adult crimes". Florida currently has 77 of the approximately 100 prisoners serving life while tried and sentenced as minors. The State Solictor General told NPR last week "We have [had] a serious crime problem in Florida over the years, so in our view that justifies the stiff penalties that have been assessed."


If that sounds like a generality wrapped in an obfuscation, then you are hearing the same thing I did. In practical terms--real human cases involving what were once real-live teenage offenders. Almost one year ago the PBS program Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly featured a segment on the plight of Kenneth Young, who was barely 15 when a local drug-dealer told them if he didn't help him in an armed-robbery, he would attack Young's mother, a single mother then addicted to crack cocaine. Unlike Malvo, Young never touched a gun, but collected security camera tapes while the ringleader held hotel employees at day with a loaded handgun.

Young's story, as it turns out, is not unique. One of the two cases now before the Supreme Court is that of a 13 year old presently serving a life sentence for the rape of a 72-year old woman. When interrogated about the rape, Joe Sullivan's two older accomplices--both 16 at the time--named Sullivan for the rape, shortening their sentence. Even if Sullivan was the sole rapist, Justice Sotomayor suggested that the national median sentence for rape is 10 years, implying that a life sentence for a 13-year old first offender seemed highly inconsistent. 

Ultimately at issue is the accountability of a teenager. When pressed by the court, juvenile advocate Bryan Gowdy agreed that society had deemed murder as socially reprehensible enough to warrant a life sentence, but other offences were questionable, given a juvenile's capacity for rehabilitation, stating "Adolescents are different in that we can't tell at this age whether they are going to reform or not." 

Evangelicals have long labored over how to understand adolescent faith development--whether or not (and if so, at what point) a child or adolescent understand the deeper realities of religious experience. Recent research on adolescent brain development suggests that the"grey matter" is still forming up to and through puberty. Moreover, the seat of decision making seems to shift from the frontal cortex to the amygdala--the part of the emotional seat of the brain, that often controls raging hormones and impulses associated with adolescent growth and development. More recently, the National Institute for Mental Health has noted that the amygdala--often called the "gut" for it's propensity to influence sharp, instinctive, emotion-based decisions-- takes an even larger role when its most basic emotions are already evoked--namely fear.

Perhaps the larger question is whether or not teenagers are mentally capable of making decisions with adult-sized consequences. As people of faith, our default position tends to lean toward reform--that there is not human being beyond redemption. It may well be that the larger question that we must now consider is how our understanding of redemption, especially to teenagers who may not be mentally capable of making rational decisions, will lead us to act. The proof will not be found in the courts, but in the reaction of those following One who said "Let the children come unto me."

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Posted November 13, 2009
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on assuaging guilt (of indulgences and carbon credits)


I've been thinking a lot lately about Johannes Tetzel. Tetzel, you'll likely recall from 10th grade World History, was the one who (allegedly) set off the young monk-turned-professor Martin Luther into a theses-penning frenzy.

Tetzel's crime? Offering a traveling reliquary to bilk the masses out of their meager earnings, allegedly to give that final layer of gold leaf to St. Peter's. This it not to mention the dubious practice of indulgences, whereby souls could be restored from purgatory, "every time a coin into the coffer rings".

I feel fairly well haunted by the ghost of Tetzel. Most anyone who has at any point flirted with fundamentalism of any stripe knows this ghost. It whispers in our ears ways to make absolution--a way to assuage our guilty conscience for a small fee, be it in real dollars or self-flaggelating obeisance. 

More specifically I felt the eerie presence of Tetzel's ghost while listening to a recent story regarding the installation of carbon-offset kiosks at San Francisco International Airport. The idea is deceptively simple--air travel consumes massive quantities of fuel, resulting in the emission of all kinds of virulent greenhouse gases. The "kiosk" presents an opportunity for the eco-conscious traveler to take control of their own emissions--to put real dollars on the line in support of carbon offsets--funds that are typically invested in recovered forests where ancient trees are allowed to age and new oxygen-rich ones are planted. 

I encountered the same kind of "carbon-offset" when attending a recent U2 concert in Atlanta. The stage for the U2 360 tour is well documented as the largest steel structure ever created for concert. It takes 120 trucks to deliver each of the three stages to their respective destinations, a fact which many saw as great hypocrisy on the part of the socially conscious quartet. In response, the band touts from their homepage their commitment to purchasing carbon offsets, leading guitarist the Edge to say "We'd love to have some alternative to big trucks bringing the stuff around but there just isn't one."

Truth be told, it is quite difficult to know whether or not the efforts of U2 or travelers utilizing the new kiosks in San Francisco are, in fact, off-setting carbon emissions, at least in terms of actual emissions. Moreover, it is tempting, as with Tetzel, to dismiss out of hand these efforts as having more to do with perceived guilt than with environmental impact. But I'm not so sure...

In her book Hope Lives, Amber Van Schooneveld, a former worker with Compassion International talks about how most people are motivated to give to an organization out of guilt--it always starts with guilt. The problem, according to Van Schooneveld, isn't guilt--it's not moving past guilt.

Any level of ethical living--any impetus for social justice--any effort to work to bring the kind of blessed community that we find envisioned in Scripture or the Kingdom that fell from Jesus' own lips--all of these begin with some recognition of guilt and sin. We recognize our complicity in the horrors around us, even (and perhaps especially) if we were unaware of them.

The scandal of Tetzel is that many stayed there. The indulgence hawking, relic-marketing religious machine propagates a system where souls can be saved by the checks they can write. This is not sinful as a starting place, but as individuals and congregations find themselves content to invest from afar the reign of Tetzel continues.

The God who calls us forth to follow Christ Jesus bids us to come and find the poor, to enter into the fullness of Creation and learn about it, not to stroke checks and swipe cards in obeisance. The liberating power of the Gospel has far more to say about restoration than it does about guilt.

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Posted November 3, 2009
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on responsibility (of goldfish and denominations)


A week ago my wife and I decided to join her family at the North Georgia State Fair. With a looming vacation to Disney World next week, it seemed like a reasonable litmus test of our four year old's patience and willingness to ride the rides. Somewhere between my turkey-leg and funnel cake, my father-in-law had stopped at a nearby booth to engage in some sort of fishing game. He returned triumphant, carrying a plastic bag with a small multi-colored goldfish as his prize. Before I could completely process what was happening, he fished around in his pocket for another dollar and headed back toward the fishing booth. Five minutes later he was back, showing our son the goldfish he had won.

I think that by most accounts goldfish won at a carnival booth have a life expectancy of either one week or 13 years. Before I could pray for a quick and painless death for the creature, our son had christened him "Manny" and a bond was formed. It was only later, while waiting outside the pet store for my wife to find an appropriate aquarium that I started thinking about the benefits of pet-ownership.

Pets teach responsibility. They have to be fed, watered, walked, brushed, combed--their water or litter boxes periodically have to be changed. They give us a sense that we can be connected to something--something that we can care for--perhaps even love. While our four-year-old made silly voices in the back, periodically saying "Manny" with varying inflections, I seized the moment to check my e-mail and facebook, a confessed addiction. 

I was blithely checking the status updates of facebook "friends" when I came across one from a guy who had preceded me at Shorter College and was now pastoring a church in the rural South. It was an RT--a "re-tweet" of a twitter "tweet" from someone who serves as the editor of a large Southern Baptist state convention newspaper. Roughly, the "re-tweet" said that after the International Olympic Committee had failed to be persuaded by President Obama, he should head next to Iran to try and stop their nuclear program.

It was snarky, possibly clever, but also egregious. This was not a personal twitter account, but a name which claims the role he holds at the paper. But it was also not the first offense. For the last several years, the "editorial page" has entered a spiral of talk-radio regurgitations, most often as inspiration for righteous indignation or evangelical zeal. This months' issue highlights global threats against America (including a critique of "Muslim militants" only to drop the phrase militants when speaking of "celebrations after September 11") as a justification for a stronger domestic mission emphasis.

It would be easy to hang this on a rogue editor--someone who has simply gone off about the things that annoy, frighten or outrage. But what about the people who allow this kind of rhetoric to continue--are they not, in some way, complicit? I responded to my friend's "re-tweet" by calling it a question of responsibility. 

Inasmuch as my four-year-old needs to feed his fish everyday, those in positions of leadership within any stripe of God's glorious church have a responsibility to tell the truth as they see it as pertains to their calling. There was a day when this state newspaper was highly regarded for objectivity and diversity of content. Now it risks descending into political propaganda masquerading as religious pablum. I am told by countless others that this has been the case in many other states, often as the denominational guard has shifted in the polarizing years of the Southern Baptist Convention. Yet even as papers were under the influence of both conservative and moderate editors, there was a sense of journalistic integrity--even in the editorials--that suggested a faith that looked critically at world events and sought to discern one's role as a citizen of America and of God's Kingdom.

To confuse one's political beliefs with one's spiritual calling is dangerous, especially among Baptists, who so often laud ourselves as the champions of the separation of church and state. Those who take seriously this call see it as a responsibility--those who do not shame the opportunity, as one who wantonly leaves their pet untended. It was the herald of religious liberty John Leland, who, when speaking of the United States role in religion, said somewhat prophetically 
"the Constitution has left religion infallibly where it should be left in all government...duly appreciating that Christianity is not a scheme of coercion; but only calls for a patient hearing, a dispassionate examination and a rational faith."
Christianity is not a scheme of coercion. Woe to those who would do otherwise and foresake the God-given gift of responsibility.

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Posted October 9, 2009
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on icons real and virtual

We were standing in the middle of the Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. A bright high-school senior from our church was walking around the cathedral in hushed reverence, gazing upward at the towering depictions of St. Cyril and St. Methodius who brought the Bible (and the Cyrillic language) to the eastern world, and who happened to hail from Bulgaria. I watched as she approached the altar, staring up at the Christ Pantocrator in the dome directly above the altar. She circled the bright candelabras, aflame with thin beeswax candles lit by the Orthodox faithful. I was talking to her mom as she crossed over from a nearby icon where a man crossed himself before kissing an icon in obeisance.

Her mom was telling me how one of our translators--an "evangelical" now--described how as a child and teenager she had kissed a hundred icons, thinking of it now as a kind of slavery--a gilded, hand-painted veil separating the Creator and the creation. I watched her daughter's sense of awe fade into mild disappointment. 

Earlier in the week we were eating dinner after a day of throwing back-to-school parties at orphanages and squeezing in a short visit to a small monastery. She had told me how she thought the artwork was beautiful--the combination of the wall-to-wall art, tinged with the soot of two-hundred years of incense drew her spirit upward, toward something greater and more beautiful than we worshiped in our small white church.  

I tried to relate. I remember the first time I ever walked into Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth. From the chiming of the hour to the Choir Anthem--everything seemed bigger, grander, somehow more full of meaning than I had ever experienced in worship. After a few weeks of anticipating worship as a sumptuous feast for the senses, I sat in the North Transept to change my perspective. At one point my eyes scanned the crowd, only to see teenagers being, well, teenagers. A mop-headed boy was whispering something to a girl, who giggled a little too loudly. Others were passing notes. A couple of athletic boys were out cold, sleeping safely through a brilliant sermon. 

I told the young woman across the table from me that I realized in that moment that had I grown up in that beautiful church, I would likely have the same general apathy that many of those youth had. Familiarity may breed contempt, but more likely it breeds familiarity--we grow too passive, too comfortable. When the Spirit whispers we strain to hear it because our liturgical sensibilities have already switched to auto-pilot.

Last week someone told me that technology can become, as all created things, implicitly idolatrous. I struggled with that concept for some time. As a thirty-something who can barely remember when my parents bought their first computer, technology has always been a welcome companion. As a minister who seeks to integrate technology into worship, communication and even faith development, I am used to those resistant to technology--some fearing it is implicitly evil while most are leery of what they perceive as a steep learning curve.

Admittedly, there are some for whom technology has brought the same kind of slavery that our Bulgarian translator felt. Beyond the compulsion to check e-mail, we can develop a reliance on social networking, constantly checking to see who is following us on twitter or who currently maintains the wittiest status update on facebook.

Some have rightly claimed that technology, while "connecting" individuals, offers a sort of artificial community where each user controls the information others see about them. I am not sure this is dissimilar from the environment at most churches on a Sunday morning--after all, how many conversations go beyond "Good Morning, how are you?" not to mention whether or not anyone answers truthfully. Tradition can be its own kind of iconoclasm

The mortal sin of iconoclasm happens when any technology or tradition becomes the sole medium through which we understand grace.

I remember standing in that great cathedral thinking "How is it that both these things are happening at the same time--that this teenager and I feel such a sense of mystery and awe while others can only measure their faith by the number of prayers offered, tithes given or candles they've lighted?" And then I imagined sitting in my church on any given Sunday and feeling the same thing--and sometimes even feeling the other side of it--the one of compulsion and guilt. Or in front of a computer listening to a sermon from Michigan or Texas, hearing the word but missing the community in which the word was brought forth.

True community defies all attempts at iconoclasm. Technology and art, icons real and virtual can inspire, convict and uplift, but it is only in genuine, physical community that we find individuals that help us wrestle with mystery and curb our idolatrous tendencies.

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Posted September 28, 2009
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on building bigger barns

                 
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On any given day airwaves and satellites are jammed with information regarding healthcare, poverty, crime, taxation and the environment. The lingering and occasionally vociferous debates over these issues reflect what many already know--that these are often nuanced discussions with deep, abiding roots that run to the neural nexus of the American consciousness.

The root of the problem, by very definition, is not exposed, but occasionally emerges as it twists and turns through the soil of democracy. Whenever former presidential candidate Ron Paul goes on NPR's Weekend Edition and, in refusing to acknowledge medical care as a basic human right, he appeals to a Libertarian twist on an historic idea: "You have a right to your life, your liberty and you should have a right to keep what you earn".

When a local Atlanta radio station highlights the perceived increase in burglaries within the city, the reporter says blithely "Whether crime is up, or perceived to be, people are taking actions to protect their stuff.

The very thing that Ron Paul equates historically to the "pursuit of happiness" is the right of the individual to keep his or her earnings. The fear of crime in the city is part personal safety and part safety of property. There is a latent fear, that someone, somewhere, is waiting to steal everything from us (as evidenced by the bumper stickers I see more than once a week--"Don't steal. The government hates competition."

It isn't just a fear problem, but a deep-seated place in our psyche that craves excess. I wasn't aware of how deep this runs in my own consciousness until just this morning. 

Let me be clear--my wife and I are somewhere close to what David Brooks has called "The Bohemian Bourgeoisie" or Bobo's for short.  For the uninitiated,  Bobo's are socially conscious--more likely to care about Darfur than the governor of South Carolina's marital indiscretions. They are simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maintaining a healthy life of contradictions--willingly shelling out cash for fair-trade coffee and organic produce, all while following all manner of social media from iPhones, BlackBerrys and the like. Guilty as charged--or, I might say, we occasionally aspire to the opulence of true Bobo's the way preppy collegians aspired to be Yuppies in the era of Reagan.

So this morning as I take our Teva-wearing son to his private Pre-K we carry in his "Vacation Totem Pole"--a class art project that is a twist on the "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essay for the four-year-old set. We had intentionally put pictures from fun trips to the Beach and to the Petting zoo with Grandma and Grandpa, but we has also put pictures from his time with us at our youth mission-camp--his "big friends" as he calls them, including a shot of him serving lemonade to other kids and community members at the soccer game we held.

I was so proud of him and the work he had done. As I watched him hand his "Vacation Totem Pole" to the teacher I began surveying the other entries. Some were big and elaborate with sea-shells and separate poles for family friends and sports. Lest I succumb to the mortal sin of Totem Pole envy, I settled instead for Pride--quickly thinking why my son's was superior to all the other totem poles. I think I visually blushed as I walked out, realizing how ridiculous I was being--where did this latent sense of competition, this blood-lust for having the biggest, the baddest and the best--where did it come from? and how can I get RID of it!?!?!

What had once laid dormant, or occasionally surfaced only in feelings of moral superiority--buying fair trade coffee at an independent shop while silently sneering at the Starbucks crowd--reflected a basic, human, sinful tendency. Our greed isn't checked by our culture, it's amplified. It is so deep in our sub-conscious, that we scarcely notice when a politician says "Don't let Uncle Sam take your stuff!" or when we spend more on security systems than we paid for improving schools through property taxes.

A few months ago I was challenging our youth to consider the hard teachings of Jesus--the ones that run counter to our understanding of culture. We read his charge to the disciples--"If someone asks for your coat, give them your tunic as well." I even talked about how Walter Wink says our resulting nakedness shames their excess and exposes their greed.

The next week we did art projects as a response to Jesus' parable of the Rich Fool, who kept building better barns (see above). One sophomore painted a bright green $100 bill on fire--he said it was a metaphor--"everything burns". A junior-high kid painted a man drooling over a pile of gold coins while an adequate yet humble house sat in the background while a high-school art student fashioned a perpetual pyramid of triangles--ever-expanding, never satisfied with what he had previously created. Another collaged pictures of opulence in church architecture--angels and cherubs--with the headline "why do we sin?" and a picture of change, a bowl of rice, and an old ad for pea soup.

Those teenagers see the myth for what it is--a never-ending lust for more power, more wealth, more toys, more stuff. They could hear the words of Jesus and get the message--we don't need bigger barns, we need to help build barns for those who don't have them. They get it--and sometimes they remind me that I've forgotten it. Somewhere among the thousands of ads we'll all see today is the voice of Jesus warning us-- "Don't build bigger barns, don't accumulate more stuff, don't hoard your wealth...and while you're at it, chill out with the totem poles, okay?"

 

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Posted September 25, 2009
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on telling the truth (or what the church could learn from dan brown)


After four days and 509 pages I finally finished Dan Brown's latest novel The Last Symbol over the weekend. Without going into too much detail or critical review, suffice it to say that the formula that made The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons successful is entirely present in Brown's latest offering. There's secret societies and symbols, codes and crypts, and of course, the ubiquitously hopeful-yet-eternally-skeptical presence of Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon.

There is some (though not nearly as much as in The DaVinci Code) to offend the delicate theological sensibilities of Christian orthodoxy. Like his two previous works, Brown threads a tenuous needle between historical and textual data that is often "true enough" to serve the larger narrative arc. This is to say that the web Brown is weaving (through all three books, really) is loaded with an awareness of something larger--something beyond humanity that has simultaneously imbued humanity with the kind of creative power and knowledge previously restricted to divinity.

People clamor to read Brown's conspiratorial treasure hunts. Most "churched" folks know enough to raise an eyebrow when Brown questions orthodox doctrines such as the Virgin Birth and the unique divinity of Christ, but the brow further furrows at the historical "evidence" he cites, which is, most often, quite legitimate.

It is at this point that I think the Church has a great deal to learn. Brown's sales are compelling, even (and perhaps especially) among "church-going folk", but the real arbiter of doctrinal fidelity has been more tangibly measured of late by both the Barna Research Group and the Pew Forum on Religion and the Public Life.

Both surveys suggest that congregations are more theologically open to the varieties of religious experience despite otherwise conservative denominational affiliations. This revelation alone is startling, used by Barna and any number of others to martial the troops to "teaching and preaching The Bible."

But what are they being taught by their pastors? In a 2004 survey of 601 "senior pastors" barely 50% of pastors claimed to adhere to a what Barna calls a "biblical worldview." At the risk of taking the survey a bit too seriously, Barna further asserts that only 45% of pastors who have attended seminary claim a "biblical worldview".

I clearly remember a professor in seminary citing his mentor--a pillar of moderate Baptist life whose name I will not disclose. "There's an implicit double-speak to theological education that is unavoidable--'Don't leave here and go into your churches and teach what you've learned--not if you want to keep working in churches.'"

I remember my blood boiling at the suggestion--that very double-speak had led to feelings of betrayal in my collegiate years. I can clearly remember thinking "Why didn't anyone in church ever ask why there were two Gadarene demoniacs in Matthew but only one in Mark, or that parts of Daniel were written in Aramaic, or say ANYTHING about J-E-D-P!?!?!?!?" 

For years this has continued as its own secret society of sacerdotalism--that we (the educated clergy) learn secret information that is not/should not/would not be in our best professional interests to reveal to the congregation. I do not wish to minimize the impact of this--I know that there are many who have sought to preach faithfully the witness of the Gospel and Scripture in the fullness of the higher critical methods and a thorough understanding of Christian History and have done so at their own peril. This must, however, be the point at which we draw some measure of fidelity. I do not mean to suggest that we force anything--even a "new" orthodoxy on anyone, but that as ministers and lay-persons within the free-church tradition we have an imperative to tell the truth--"that which we have seen, that which we have beheld with our own eyes."

When the Church ceases to tell the truth--even the vagaries of its own history--it leaves the flock to fend for itself. It is entirely possible that there are a great number of Christians who will read Jesus' words "The Kingdom of God is within you" for the first time in Dan Brown's books. It is even more likely that something in that writing--the call to embrace the image God has imbued all humanity with--may introduce as new and novel that which is ancient, sacred, and thoroughly Christian.

It is not Dan Brown (or any other author or historian) that the Church has to fear--rather it is our own cowardice and tendencies toward self-preservation that have "obscured that which has been made plain." If the Church is to carry on, in this millennium or the next, the real test will be how honest we can be with ourselves, our faith, and with the God we love and serve. As ministers--as lay-people--as ones who know "that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched"—this, THIS, is what we are to proclaim, concerning the Word of Life.

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Posted September 21, 2009
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on symptoms and causes (or that which vexes us all)

"In one sense the opulence of American life has served to perpetuate Jeffersonian illusions about human nature. For we have thus far sought to solve all our problems by the expansion of our economy. This expansion cannot go on forever and ultimately we must face some vexatious issues of social justice."
-Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History, 1952.

Amid the multimedia din of competing voices and opinions on health care the voices of the past can scarcely be heard. There is no experience so singly salient as hearing words from the past, whether quoted or read, ringing with prescience in our modern context.

So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that while catching up on podcasts on a long flight I heard anew the words of Reinhold Niebuhr quoted above. The conversation centered on the influence of Niebuhr on Obama, including a spirited debate between E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times as to "what that really means."

The phrase above leapt out at me, assailing my verbal sensibilities with the curious and deliberate use of the word "vexatious". Victorian, yes. Accurate? ABSOLUTELY. Vexatious issues require serious debate and conversation--they must be accompanied by strong data and critical thinking, but also a humility that acknowledges the breadth of human experience.

Most doctors are faced with a choice in any given treatment plan--treat the symptoms, or identify the root cause. What Niebuhr causes me to consider is not the symptom, but the cause. The "health care crisis" is but a symptom of a larger crisis. When an economy is predicated upon limitless expansion, what happens when you hit the end? Health care costs are destined to rise, but the same can no longer be said for incomes and cost-of-living expenses.

The crisis has everything to do with expansion and contraction. In Niebuhr's book, just after the quote listed above, there is a curious footnote that quotes the great Thomas Huxley's speech at the opening commencement of Johns Hopkins University:

To an Englishman landing upon your shores for the first time, travelling for hundreds of miles through strings of great and well-ordered cities, seeing your enormous actual, and almost infinite potential, wealth in all commodities, and in the energy and ability to turn wealth to account, there is something sublime in the vista of the future. 

Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by national pride.  I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such.  Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.  The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?  What is to be the ends to which these are to be the means?

 
This struck me as curious, only because I had first read these words while researching a sermon a few months ago entitled "From Scarcity to Abundance". Huxley's words had effected me then as Niebuhr's did on that trans-Atlantic flight. Where Niebuhr claims as a statement of fact, Huxley poses the vexing question .

In the full view of American history, the "health care crisis" emerges as yet another symptom of a far more insidious disorder within the American condition. Care for fellow human beings, indeed Americans, is not tenable with limitless expansion. For a goose to lay a golden egg the goose must be fed, watered and kept by another. Paying the lowest possible price for this service at some point becomes exploitative. When workers are enlisted to keep the geese at these wages, the illusive nature of prosperity takes full effect, even if laborers suffer behind the curtain. One worker can scarcely complain, but in the interest of multiplying our geese, pretty soon you've got a union on your hands.

Again Huxley ascertains the fragility of our democracy:
"Truly America has a great future before her; great in toil, in care, and in responsibility; great in true glory if she be guided in wisdom and righteousness; great in shame if she fail."

The riddle (and, as Niebuhr rightly recognized, the paradox) of the American democratic experiment is that our expansion must always be tempered by the ways in which the needs of the "least of these" are met. One cannot claim to be American alone, or to be American at the exclusion of another would make the same claim. Expansion that benefits one individual and damns the other leaves the commonwealth with such "vexatious issues". What we reap now in health care, unemployment and bad banks we sowed in excess, avarice and entitlement.

Where Jeffersonian patterns err on trusting human nature too implicitly Augustinian views may not trust us enough

Perhaps the key is still hidden in the Niebuhrian labyrinth of paradox and genuine humility--that we are only as good and as bad as our best and our worst efforts. Deep in the center is the  democratic ideal--choice. For it is, as Huxley said, ultimately a question that we are left to answer.

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Posted September 15, 2009
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on what we should have learned from A Few Good Men (and what it says about torture)

"I want the truth!"

"You can't HANDLE the truth!"

If there's a more iconic scene among films produced in the 1990's I can't think of it. Now, replace the shiny-haired, eyes-steeled-with purpose Tom Cruise with the taller, moustached Eric Holder. On the witness stand, instead of Jack Nicholson as the decorated colonel Jessup see the spectacled scowl of Dick Cheney.

The debate is virtually the same. Cheney screams "You want me on that wall! you need me on that wall!"

Attorney General Holder says "I want to know what happened...did you order the code red?"

And Cheney, while not officially copping to it at first, does nothing but defend the actions of himself and others as necessary and legitimate--the kind of things that "save lives". And despite a certain terrifying gleam in his eye, for a second, you have to wonder if he could be right. That's when you try to nail him down and that's when he says "You bet I did."

This is what torture does to us. Many have talked about what it does to it's victims, and we are right to consider it in that light--we should be concerned about how we treat others first, and ourselves last. But years of American individualism have rendered the collective American psyche an "US-first" mentality that seems incapable of moving beyond self to neighbor,  so I'll try and make the argument that way.

Planes crashed and towers fell. Lives were lost--thousands of them. And, despite all my peace-loving ways, one of my first thoughts as I stared slack-jawed at the TV that September morning was "Who would do this? They should have thought it through some more--I don't think I'd mess with the largest military on Earth and a President who used to govern a state that executes more prisoners per year than most other states combined."

Yes, I'm embarrassed to admit that when collectively punched my first thought was how hard back we would hit. I'm not proud of it--but I'm prepared to say it was my first though because it is my most basic, human, gut-level reaction.

I distinctly remember thinking next about the Middle East--about how laughable all this would seem to them--that here was America covering one horrific attack when their news reports were full of daily attacks. We had always thought ourselves immune. At that point I started wondering what principles were under attack--capitalism and excess, corporate greed--maybe even the more noble ideals of genuine democracy and individual freedom.

A lot has happened in eight years, but our individual reactions to the attacks of September 11th still provide the primary lens through which we understand the torture issue.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been villianized as representative of our most basic reaction--to hit back, strike harder, faster, and with more force than we were hit--and if possible, make it a knock-out. It may be our first reaction, but that does not mean it is our best reaction.

Torture crosses all sorts of lines. If a ten-year-old did to an animal what CIA operatives have done to terror suspects we would call a therapist and have him examined for psychopathic tendencies. The fact that individuals not only carried on these kinds of interrogations, but that in many cases they were instructed to do so raises the stakes even higher. This is not the capricious acts of one, but evidence of a systemic influence--that on some level, in between the perceived need for protection--for wanting someone on that wall--we didn't stop to think what kind of people we were hiring to patrol it.

Like the film (and the Broadway play before it), A Few Good Men does what all good art does--it hold a mirror up to society and to the beholder. It forces us to align ourselves with the truth-hungry attorney and the rabid-yet-convicted C.O. We have to choose which voice we will listen to as our basic survival senses struggle against our nobler efforts at reason and diplomacy.

The "torture issue" raises the same moral challenge--do we stay at the fight-or-flight response, or can we see through the false dilemma to a better vision of humanity--the kind of higher level thinking that we always said separated us from the rest of the created world. 

Perhaps now is the time to resolve ourselves to what we will not--what we cannot--what we must not--do, lest we be forced to rely once again on our most basic reaction.

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Posted August 31, 2009
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on re-thinking mission (or the power of the non-native species)

About four years ago a good friend and former colleague of mine was in town and we were driving to the store. We drove past a large wooded field that was awash in verdant green leaves--the plight of many a field across the Southern United States--the sprawling made-in-Japan blanket of foliage known as Kudzu. No one living in the South needs any further explanation. 

Kudzu is a vine that was introduced to the South in order to prevent the Dust Bowl conditions faced by farmers in the Midwest. It has no known predator, save goats, and has subsequently swallowed much of the greenspace of the Bible Belt at a growth rate of three feet per day. (see picture for six hour growth)

As my friend and I drive past he said loudly "Kudzu! It's amazing the power of the non-native species." I laughed at his almost-precocious choice of words, but my friend is prone to such Dickensian detail. The next words out of his mouth were "Have you heard about the Northern Snakehead? It's this fish that's destroying the Potomac River Basin. It comes from Asia and is an aggressive predator. It eats everything, but it has a lung, so it can breathe out of water. Some have been known to wriggle and flop over a mile to the next closest water source."

I was suddenly horrified. This toothy carnivorous little fish sounded like the piranha of the B-grade horror movies of my youth. To this day, I find myself riveted by any documentary that is Snakehead related, equal parts morbid fascination and mortal terror.

On NPR this weekend there was the tale of the Burmese python. Commonly held as an "exotic" pet in South Florida, the Burmese python can grow up to 25 feet in length--far greater than any personal terrarium. Apparently, whenever your Burmese python outgrows its tank--well, there's always the Everglades. Biologists have discovered that there is now a breeding population of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, even going so far as to recruit trained python hunters to identify and remove the non-native species. A few weeks ago at Lake Okeechobee one was found that measured 17 feet long and weighed over 200 pounds!

Clearly, I am as horrified/fascinated by the lurking Burmese python (the gators deterred me from taking the air-boat Everglades tour before, now there's a whole new danger). My fascination isn't just with the Burmese python, or for that matter the Northern Snakehead or the comparatively-more-innocuous Kudzu. It's genuinely with the idea of non-native species--of what doesn't quite look right in the picture/environment/ecosystem before me.

Much has been said by denominational leaders and missiologists about the contextualization of the gospel in missional efforts. Scholars and visionaries like David Bosch and Lesslie Newbigin rightly remind the Church that when the Gospel is carried by colonialism there is no hope of a people finding Christ in their midst--only the Western Jesus with all its cultural trappings.

I was first introduced to Bosch and Newbigin in a seminary class in which the professor recounted seeing a picture in the 70's of the pastor of a Baptist pastor in Africa and his newly constructed church building. The white-clapboard church, complete with bell and steeple could just have easily been found in a hundred towns across the rural South. In front of the church stood the proud Pastor in a solid white suit, face beaming. He had a new building that looked like nothing else in all of Africa. He thought he was getting a building, but what he got was a kind of evangelical colonialism that wouldn't translate to the people of his village.

In his magnum opus Transforming Mission Bosch says:
Mission is, quite simply, the participation of Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus, wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belief. It is good news of God's love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.

A few years after that fateful seminary class I found myself listening to a friend and mentor who coordinates global mission for a mainline denomination. He recounted a story of being at an assembly when a pastor from Egypt stood up and passionately said/yelled "We do not need your people or your trips. we do not need your money or your missionaries. We need your churches!"

Those words have stayed with me for some time now. The arrogance of imperialistic mission, be it American or otherwise, is to presume that one is "taking" something somewhere--as if it were not there in the first place. Taking the cue from Paul on Mars Hill, some congregations have embraced a missiology that is more "tour guide" than conquistador--the goal isn't conversion, it's observation--pointing to the places where God is already at work and saying with a smile and a sense of genuine humility "See that right there?  That's God working in and through us--irrespective of time or geography."

The same is true of "domestic" mission--my suburban church walking coolly into the center of the city to pass out sandwiches and water, caps and coats, does little more than momentarily assuage our collectively guilty conscience. But when "we" identify ourselves with the Body at Christ already at work in the indigenous community then we have set about the sacred task of enabling, supporting, and building up the body of Christ as a whole.

In a few weeks we will make our fourth trip to Bulgaria to partner with indigenous churches and missionaries to work among the Roma villages and the countless orphanages placed "at the end of geography". I will be preaching in a modest church in a Roma (Gypsy) village just outside the city limits. The church, along with a bathhouse across the street,  were built five years ago through partnering churches in Texas and Arkansas. 

When you sit among the open windows you sit on pews from Texas and the Netherlands. There are songs sung in Roma, Bulgarian and English. I will never the first time I sat there considering the depth of God's church. American Christianity suddenly seemed so small--merely one part of the Church playing a role in helping another part of God's church.

I am convinced that this is what it means to re-think mission--to find the work of the Church in all contexts and to support them and to help them grow into the fullness of Christ. 

To swap recipes and pulpits, checks and materials. 

To find the same wideness of God's mercy in the wideness of God's Kingdom.

To avoid the sin of becoming a non-native species that chokes out the grass-roots work of the indigenous community.

To partner and to labor faithfully to the whole Gospel--physical, social and spiritual--in God's backyard as we would in our own.

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Posted August 24, 2009
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on the Voice of the Church


And the church is the one place where a doctor ought to forget that he's a doctor. The church is the one place where a Ph.D. ought to forget that he's a Ph.D. The church is the one place that the school teacher ought to forget the degree she has behind her name. The church is the one place where the lawyer ought to forget that he's a lawyer. And any church that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold church, (Yes) and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.

When the church is true to its nature, it says, "Whosoever will, let him come." And it does not supposed to satisfy the perverted uses of the drum major instinct. It's the one place where everybody should be the same, standing before a common master and savior. And a recognition grows out of this—that all men are brothers and women sisters because they are children of a common father.--Martin Luther King Jr.

In the sweltering heat of August, the political temperature keeps climbing. From Town Hall shouting matches to million-dollar ads on the airwaves, the health-care debate, once reserved for partisan parlance in the Capitol, now finds itself in the public square, literally and technologically. Every day another news release is sent out--interest groups marshaling the troops to blanket in-boxes with e-mail forwards. In the last speech of his time, Martin Luther King Jr. said, then of the inequitable treatment of Memphis sanitation workers, though prophetically it fits today-- "The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around."

Yesterday brought word that a collective of Progressive religious leaders were boldly going where no left-of-right Christians had gone before--launching a national campaign, complete with a network of local minister and leaders pleading the case before their own masses. 

I have found myself personally embroiled in conversations on Facebook and elsewhere about the role of the government in health-care reform. Four years of college, 3 years of seminary and 7 years in parish ministry yield a panoply of opinions that run the spectrum of political positions and ideologies. The only unifying strand among those conversations has been the perpetual telling and re-telling of the plight of people within our congregations who are without healthcare, or who have somehow slipped through the coverage cracks of private insurers.

These tales epitomize the tragic--lingering mortgage-sized hospital bills, individuals picking and choosing which prescriptions to buy, families torn apart by chronic illness and as-yet-undiagnosed diseases. They differ greatly in person, age and situation, but they represent a common need--that across any given congregation of 50 or more people, someone is struggling--perhaps even dying--and there is nothing to help them. Tending to the sick, the widow, the orphan has always first been the task of the church, not the government, and yet as democracy has advanced and denominations have divested themselves of hospitals and clinics, yielding our strange brew of private and public, right-to-care and right-to-the-debt-that-comes-with-it.

Partisan positions aside, the narrative of a people--lives effected on every level, across denomination, geography and socio-economic standing--bear witness to a common cry within the Church.

There are all sorts of questions to be raised regarding the voice of the church. For many, the pulpit has become a place to declare admiration for or ridicule of political positions and "agendas". Just as James Dobson conceded defeat (sort of) in the culture wars, the IRS continued to investigate red and blue pulpits--policing for rhetoric that would threaten the as-yet-tax-exempt church. For others, there is a sense in which the voice of the church must always be prophetic--speaking not to individual politicians and policies, but to the structures--the principalities and powers which cripple human beings and institutionalize oppression.

For the average minister I know (including myself), both of these polarities cause some unease. We are captive first to the Gospel and secondly to the congregation for whom we are parsing that Gospel. The breadth of human experience--notwithstanding the political and social trappings--is enough to, with one word, incite some to ecstasy and allow others to smolder with contempt. It is a precarious pulpit.

And yet there must be a Voice of the Church.

It is in the Church that human beings across race, across socio-economic standing, across ballot boxes and school districts, across the corner office and the welfare line--it is there--in the Church--where we gather to orient ourselves around a common purpose--learning to live and to love as Jesus whom we call Christ.

It is in the Church that stories are told and food is collected--hats are passed and visitation schedules are set--yards are mowed and children are watched. 

It is in the Church that we move beyond love of self and of God and toward love for neighbor.

It is in the Church that we realize our salvation is inextricably bound up in the salvation of those in our midst.

It is in the Church that our conscience is pricked and our hearts are stirred.

It is in the Church that we quit asking "What will happen to me?" and start asking "What will happen to them?"

The Church of Jesus Christ is uniquely poised to tell its story--to bear witness to that which it has seen and heard, concerning the way of Jesus and what that way has to say about how we live our lives hear and now. 

Where corporations speak only to those under their employ, the Church must speak to and for those who find refuge within--and the invitation is "for all who would, Come."

The Voice of the Church is to speak to the whole host of issues that plague the congregation--the poor, marginalized and oppressed and the affluent, successful and miserable. 

We cannot maintain silence in the face of gross negligence--we have a responsibility to take on the hard-work of caring for the least of these and to work diligently to repair that which is broken.

It is time for the Voice of the Church to be heard--lest the rocks and rock stars be the only ones crying out.

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Posted August 11, 2009
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