More Snakes

I was talking the other day with one of my older and wiser friends, who has admitted he’s not sure he believes in God. In fact, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t. It’s the way it’s come to be. For a long time he did; then he did a little while longer out of habit. Then he wasn’t sure, and then he didn’t. He’d like to get it back, his faith; but it isn’t as easy as you might think, he tells me. It’s not like you can go out into the garden and pick faith like you pick strawberries. He’s right about that. He’s right about a lot of things.

I suspect, though, that while he says he’d like to get his faith back, he’s not desperate about the loss of it. If it came, he’d welcome it; but he’s not going out to look for it. I tell him that: “You can’t pick strawberries either, if you don’t go out into the garden.” I don’t know exactly what I mean by that—as we’ve already established that faith and strawberries are two different sorts of things. But I say it anyway, because it sounds good: “You can’t pick strawberries if you don’t go out into the garden.” I’m aware as soon as I say it that I’m ignoring not only that there is a difference between faith and strawberries, but that my friend still shows up in church almost every Sunday.

I’m not quite sure what he’s doing there, so I’m surprised when he tells me that he doesn’t think the church ought to . . . in this case, ordain gays and lesbians. “Of course, I’m in the minority on that here.” He means in his house. It’s something of a joke: his children are grown; there are only he and his wife. So, he smiles when he says it, though its being a joke doesn’t make it not true; and he and I both know that.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised when he says he thinks the church ought not to ordain gays and lesbians. But I am, so I don’t ask him why he thinks that. Instead, I start talking about something else, though not—apologies to Monty Python—“something completely different.” I start telling him about an editorial I’ve seen recently. It’s by Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal. Henninger is concerned first (in this essay) about dishonesty, which he thinks is becoming—Jack Abramoff, James Frey, Barry Bonds, Andrew Fastow—practically epidemic, so dangerously so that our “common understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong” may be dying.

In that case, what to do? “The efficient path to an ethical revival would be to call upon religious institutions and the schools to teach morality.” But, uh-oh, both schools and religion have been completely captured by the culture wars, which have become all about one thing: sex.

Henninger’s modest counterproposal is that we remove sex from the equation. “Maybe it’s time for the sex obsessives on the left and right to take their fights over abortion and gay rights into a corner somewhere and give the rest of society space” to talk about things that are, finally, more important—and about which we can largely agree: Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness. Indeed, to be distracted from these things has had a “corrosive effect,” breeding “too many little Bonds and little Fastows” and their associates.

I ask my friend what he thinks about that. He still thinks the church shouldn’t ordain gays and lesbians, he says. But that didn’t mean he wanted to argue about it. He just wanted me to know.

Rick

Snake Handling

It’s a corner of the calendar I occupy frequently. Either I’m a week late or three years early, relative to the New Revised Common Lectionary. The First Scripture Lesson for the 4th Sunday of Lent was (and will be again in 2009, under the condition of James 4:15) Numbers 21:4-9:

From Mount Hor (cue the guffaw of the inner 7th grader) they set out by the way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food. Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents (KJV is probably better here with “fiery serpents”) among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall looks at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it on a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

This is the very type of troubling text that we should study precisely because it is so bothersome, puzzling, even offensive at several details. We learn best from a passage of Scripture we don’t like, or so it seems to me. Instead of following this principle, however, I ducked the text entirely. I could see nothing edifying, much less meaningful, coming from it.

Ann, one of our lectionary partners, said that this was the kind of text she wants to ask God about someday in that land beyond time. That set me to thinking. What would that conversation sound like? I posed one of my own. In my imagination, I arranged for a two-way ticket into the heavenly precincts with a tourist visa and a press pass. As it turned out, I didn't get to interview God, which would have been more than I could have handled. But I did get to interview one of God’s secretaries, a fully if formerly human fellow named Stanley who has access to the heavenly court as well as to earthly events. After a few niceties exchanged in his spare and handsome office, we quickly got down to business.

ME: So, what’s up with Numbers 21: 4 and following?

STAN: You mean about the snakes?

ME: Yes. The way it’s written implies that God is showing signs of extreme stress. The people whine, which is what people do when they travel. Ever been in a mini van with a couple of kids on a twelve hour drive to Disney World?

STAN: Disney World and mini vans are after my time.

ME: Okay; wrong example. But it seems disproportionate. The people kvetch and God sends poisonous snakes to kill them? Is God just tired, or is this indicative of God’s nature? Or -- as I suspect -- does this passage contain a heap more human opinion than Divine Word?

STAN: Look at it this way. The people, not God, are tired. They’ve been camping out on rough ground for some time now. They naturally whine, murmur, whatever. They come upon some territory that is overrun with snakes. Viper heaven. Some people get bitten; some of those die. Their collective wisdom sees cause and effect. The person -- some aide to Moses, let’s say -- who’s in charge of the wilderness wandering daily log book, records this note: Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents… That note gets picked up in the final edit of the Book of Numbers, and it becomes embedded in the way that part of the story is told.

ME: My point exactly! It’s human opinion; I can’t imagine the God of grace and love I know in Jesus Christ killing men, women, and children, just because they get a little cranky during a long and difficult trip.

STAN: Slow down there, Professor Von Rad. It’s not just human opinion. Remember who these people were, and the times and places in which they lived. They are ex-slaves. Uneducated and unaccustomed to looking at anything beyond what was right before their noses. They were not given to transcendent thinking. They lived and breathed superstition. They were impressed by magicians. They world they inhabited was thickly populated with gods and semi-gods, angels and demons, spirits of benevolence, spirits of evil, and spirits of mischief.

Then, all of a sudden, they were coming to learn that there is but One God in the whole universe (which, for them, was Egypt plus the Sinai Peninsula plus this unseen but promised land toward which they traveled). Moses told them that there were not many equally significant gods competing with each other, but One. One without peer. Spiritual beings still existed, and maybe along with those gods they used to know, though with greatly lowered status. But they all worked for the One God. All creation was made through the agency of the One God, including every other creature on the earth, whether creeping, crawling, walking, swimming, or flying. So God -- the same One who engineered their escape from Egyptian oppression -- must be responsible for the snakes, too.

ME: By the way, did you read the front page lead article in the New York Times that happened to appear the 4th Sunday in Lent, 26 March 2006?

STAN: Yes, as a matter of fact, but you’re getting ahead of yourself again. You’ve got to understand that Monotheism is self-evident only to monotheists. For everyone else, its a long, slow process. Before monotheism was revealed to these folks, they might have attributed the snakes to some heretofore unknown deity, or that the snakes were gods or devils themselves. But with monotheism, they might make the leap directly to the notion that absolute sovereignty equates to infinite control over every detail. The idea of a free, undetermined world or of neutrally charged events would be nigh impossible to these people to have comprehended. They were not that complex.

ME: So over time, we developed the capacity to stop attributing everything to God’s will, just because it happened, like my mother dying of a blood clot when she was 43, or the parking spot that opened for me yesterday right in front of the restaurant.

STAN: Something like that, unless you’re thinking that you and your kind are smarter than those slaves. They possessed an intelligence as sharp as anyone’s, just otherwise focused.

ME: So verse 6 of Numbers 21 contains the Word of God for those people?

STAN: Yes it does. And for you too, if you hear it right. You can understand it this way: if it helped the people to understand that they were God’s and God was theirs, then God wouldn’t care to be blamed for the business with the snakes, even if the snakes were a random occurrence. Besides, you’ll notice that deliverance from the snakes comes at the mere suggestion of relief from the people through Moses. God comes out on the side of life as this snippet of Scripture ends.

ME: And then the sympathetic magic thing going on with the bronze serpent set on a pole shouldn’t bother us?

STAN: Be bothered if it suits you. Chase your discomfort and you might be led into a whole new discovery of who you are and who God is. But remember, God is determined to be in relationship with human beings. So much so as to communicate in the linguistic and cultural idiom of whomever God is dealing with.

ME: So that article in the Times. Can we talk about it now?

STAN: Sure.

ME: It was about the Guinea worm, and how hard it is to eradicate this pestilence in parts of Africa. The parasites enter the body through drinking water contaminated with water fleas containing Guinea worm larvae in their gut. There they emerge and grow until they mature and then they work their way out, normally through the legs or feet, but sometimes through the chest or even the eye socket. By this time they are thread thin but a yard long. They emit an acid that burns a tunnel through muscle and skin. Victims feel like they are on fire as these worms take days and weeks to come all the way out.

STAN: And you noticed the line which said that Guinea worms have been found in Egyptian mummies and are thought to be the “fiery serpents” described in the Old Testament, torturing the Israelites in the desert.

ME: I did. And I noticed that some Nigerian villagers felt that the Guinea worm was a curse sent them from their ancestors, and had nothing to do with dirty drinking water. That’s when something clicked in my mind, though I’m not entirely certain what it was.

STAN: Cause and effect thinking is hard to break, whether associated with revered ancestors or with the One true God.

ME: I have an odd appreciation for that way of thinking, though. The line between the spiritual and the physical, the past and the present, between this world and the world to come, is tissue paper thin. It is a thoroughly relational, organic, and wholistic way to live. Tilted in the right direction, it is alive with the presence of God.

STAN: But you recognize the dangers, too.

ME: I think so. I recognize the dangers in the superstitious resistance to intervention that can rid the world from pests like the Guinea worm by insuring that drinking water be clean. Neither our ancestors -- the saints with whom we enjoy communion -- nor God would want people to suffer unnecessarily from parasites that are easily preventable.

STAN: Maybe you see another illustration that the Word of God is living and active, not just squiggles on a page. God’s Word, hidden in Numbers 21, is being spoken by the work of the Jimmy Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program as described in that article. Their workers have sharply reduced the incidence of this dreadful disease, though it’s taken them twice as long as they thought, and they still have a way to go. And we are also noticing that down in your part of the earth, there is that program called Living Waters for the World, which helps people find technologically appropriate solutions to the problem of poor drinking water. God’s word is spoken through that work, too.

ME: I was going to mention that. Perhaps that’s what clicked in my mind while I read the newspaper. The more I tried to ignore this troubling text of Scripture, the more it wormed it way (sorry) into my consciousness. It brought me to a deeper understanding of how complaint can lead to cure, bitching to balm, murmuring to salvation. On some level or another, God took responsibility for the pestilence of the fiery/poisonous snakes. That can lead us to take responsibility for the pestilence of our place and time, and do something about them. And maybe God doesn’t care whether passages like Numbers 21 make God look good in our whiney little eyes or not. As long as people are helped. As long as more and more people drink cleaner and cleaner water.

STAN: It’s not magic; it’s not a bronze snake. But from fresh and living water, people are freed from the fiery serpent. They live. And that makes my boss and your boss very happy.

ME: One more thing. Can you check to see if the coincidence of the 4th Sunday of Lent with the publishing of the NY Times article was just that -- a coincidence? Or was the hint of providence involved?

STAN: Don’t push your luck, cowboy. All I can say is that she who has eyes to see may see, and that he who has ears to hear may hear.

ME: I hate it when you people talk like that.

STAN: But that’s about the best I can do.

ME: Yes. Sorry. You and your staff have been very helpful. Thank you.

STAN: That’s what we’re here for.

ME: Thanks again. I’ll see you later.

STAN: Probably sooner than you think.

ME: Say again?

Dee

Child's Play

I wonder how many books and articles have been written on prayer? Scripture is full of references to prayer. Some are comforting, some seem unrealistic, some even make me angry. The more I read about prayer, the more questions I have. The more I live into prayer, the more mysterious it seems.

I have attended workshops on numerous types of prayer and written theological papers on the efficacy of prayer. I have listened to “so called” experts in prayer. This is what I’ve learned… my best teachers are children.

It is my great joy to sit on the floor most Sundays with 2-5 year olds who worship God through a wonderful ministry called, “Godly Play.” One Sunday, Will and I were playing in the Desert box. We had just heard a story about Moses and murmurings of the Israelites. Will walked over and brought back the wooden figure of Jesus and placed it next to the wooden figure of Moses. Will said that Moses was sad and tired and that Jesus could help him.

“Will, do you pray?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Why do you pray?” I inquired.
“God and I have lots to talk about,” Will said.
“Does God answer your prayers?”
“Not always, but mommy doesn’t give me everything I want either. God loves me and knows what I need and how to help the world,” Will said with confidence.
After playing some more I said,
“What happens when your prayer doesn’t work?”
“What do you mean? My prayers can’t break and don’t need batteries.”
I smiled. “Sometimes I just get sad and confused.”
“I know,” said Will, “me too.”
“You know what?”
“What?” I said.
“God misses you when you don’t pray.”
“Really?” I wondered.
“Sure….Julie, don’t think so much.” Will patted my arm.

So, I try to practice prayer. I still read and wonder. I still go to workshops and conferences. But, my consistent prayer remains, “Lord, teach me to pray…like your child.”

Julie

Prayer: A Question

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if there were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Here is the question I have been living with acutely for more than six weeks although I’m not sure I’ve lived with it long enough to articulate it well. My question has something to do with prayer—how it works, if it works, why it works. My relationship with prayer these days is an uneasy one. Through a regular practice of contemplative prayer, I thought I had moved from the “Help me” and “Thank you” prayers of Anne LaMotte fame (nothing wrong with the thank you prayers, I probably don’t pray those enough), to an understanding of prayer as relationship with God. I really pray a lot more than I used to pray, sitting in silence each day, opening my life to God’s presence and action. It’s been good for me.

Then about six weeks ago, I got a call early on Sunday morning that a member of my congregation—former presbytery moderator and current council chair, beloved by me and by many in the church, the city, the state--had gone into full cardiac arrest and was in ICU. I went to see her husband, sat with him in the waiting room, prayed with him, got in the car, started driving to church, and as if from nowhere came to question—will it work? Will prayer work and Betty get better? I fumbled through a sermon on Namaan the leper and healing. And with the congregation, I commended Betty to God and asked for her healing.

More than six weeks have passed. Betty is on her way to a rehab facility, completely debilitated by a “virus” (because the disease did not respond to antibiotics) which attacked every system in her body. She is alive and perhaps will get well. Did God answer prayer? If she died then or dies now, did God answer prayer?

I continue my prayers for Betty, at her bedside, with her family as they have made difficult decisions, with the congregation, and I suppose in my daily practice of prayer since I open my heart to God and Betty is on my heart. I am not nor I guess will I ever be a so-called prayer warrior, one who practices intercessory prayer vigorously and regularly. If I pray at all with words, I use the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. In terms of the 11th of the 12 steps, I seek “through prayer and meditation to improve [my] conscious contact with God …., praying only for knowledge of [God’s] will for me and the power to carry that out.”

Betty’s husband and daughters and my friend Charlotte whose child is an addict and now a runaway tell me that they have been given strength and comfort by the power of others’ prayers for them. How does that happen? Is it like God telling Moses to put the serpent on the pole—the story in yesterday’s reading? Does knowing we are prayed for lift out eyes beyond the snakes at our ankles to a power higher than ourselves? Does prayer lift our eyes beyond our own ability to anything? Does prayer remind us that we are surrounded by a loving, caring community?

Those are the questions I am living today.

Lynn

Fun with Iambs (and one anapest)

The preacher read from memory and said:
The Gospel of Saint John, and chapter three—

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so he is lifted up, the son of man,
that all believing not just in but into him
will have eternal life.

For God so loved the world he gave his one, his only, son
(again:) that all believing into him will have
eternal life, not die, not ever die.
God didn’t send his son into the world
that he condemn the world,
but that the world be saved through him.

So if a man, a woman, if you believe in him,
you won’t be judged—condemned! But if—
if you do not believe, you are already judged—
condemned; for you did not believe into his name,
the one and only son of God. My friends,
we don’t believe just on the name of Christ (just sitting there)
but into it—we run toward him. Unless we run away:

This is the condemnation, John goes on: the light
is coming in the world—no, no, into—
that word again: it moves, this time toward us.
And do we turn and run away?—because we love the dark,
because our deeds are dark, we hate the light,
for in it we are seen, exposed to God and everyone.

We hate the light—unless we live by truth.
For anyone who lives by truth comes out into the light.

So you, my friends, come out
and let your deeds be plainly seen by God.
He sent his one, his only, son into the world for you.

Swinging with the Temptations - Side B

Julie’s blog The Temptations (just below) tags me. First, because I’ve sworn off for Lent things baked—bread, cake, cookies, crusts, croutons, cereals and all that might fall under the rubric “breadstuff”.

I came to this un-Gerald-like decision the Monday before Ash Wednesday while wrestling with Luke’s account of Jesus in the wilderness. I was especially convicted by the opening exchange between Big D and Jesus. In my mind I could see a stone, the size of a little-league football; it was ugly, clumpy, dirt- and sand-flecked. Then, astounded, I watched it transform into perfectly shaped, unblemished fresh-baked bread, blondish and puffy, steaming hot, the sort of loaf my grandmother would slice and butter shortly after taking it from the oven. What’s more, I could smell it—moist and sweet. My stomach began to plead. Then came the voice of Jesus quoting Deuteronomy with (for some reason) Gene Peterson’s translation: “It takes more than bread to really live.” I wanted to say, “Maybe, but bread’ll getcha half-way there!”

I didn’t say that, though. Because I sensed—honest to God, I really sensed—that I was being asked by Jesus to let go of bread. At first I had no response. I just pondered it all. Then, confirming Calvin’s hunch that all human thoughts and deeds in this life are imbued with sin, I felt a surge of attraction, “Man, I bet I could drop some serious weight, maybe become svelte, better-looking!” But, in the end, cumulative spiritual voices from my past were reprised to remind me that giving up bread for Lent would put me in a continual state of temptation, and thus provide me an entrée into the heart of my Savior—a “gateway to finding God” as Diogenes Allen has put it. So I made the pledge—as I said, a very un-Gerald-like decision.

Now I dream a lot about cake—red velvet, German chocolate, pound. (I am not making this up.) Usually, I eat the whole cake and immediately begin to suffer a bloated guilt and sadness because, in one fell swoop, I've completely regressed from a hard-earned, considerable advancement and have fallen a long way from the real fulfillment of my desire, the one I sense that only God can fill.

Eventually, though, I awake to the joyous (and yes, it always feels joyous) realization that my regimen is still intact, I am still advancing in the pilgrimage. But, then, pursued by my dreams, I spend a goodly portion of the day pondering temptation.

And Julie tagged me a second time in this wonderful line: “So in Lent we journey with Jesus and his (temptations) in the wilderness, and he journeys with us in the jungle of our own temptations.” For me, that perfectly frames Lent. Yet it has begun to beg a deeper question, a personal quandary that has to do with discernment. I’ll try to explain.

I do not always find it easy to distinguish God’s beckoning of me, on the one hand, from the temptations that are not of God, on the other. Sure, we all know the very obvious temptations, those exposed by the Ten Commandments: temptations to kill (or be in someway life-taking), to steal, to commit adultery, to lie, to covet what a neighbor has, etc. But to use Julie’s analogy, there is a part of my jungle where the flora grows very thick and complicated and the fauna beckon me in myriad directions. While I can usually recognize the serpents as sinful allures, there are other manifestations whose source and meaning are not so recognizable. Jesus doesn’t always come to me as he appears in the Sunday School lithograph posters. In my jungle, a cacophony of voices urges me, “Let go of that vine and come this way!” And more often than not, I’m likely to regard all allures as evil temptation. I prefer my present vine, thank you very much. Didn’t my Savior say, “I am the vine, you are the branches; cut off from me, you can do nothing”? Yes, but my Savior said other things as well. And he wasn’t fond of his disciples sticking around in one place for long.

This week’s gospel lection, John 3:14-22, includes a portion of Nicodemus’ under-cover-of-darkness visit with Jesus. Looking from Nicodemus’ perspective, we could say he’s being painfully tempted by Jesus. Theretofore well grounded in a Pharisaic worldview (rooted in Scripture, I might add) that supplied his moral compass, Nicodemus now feels the uncomfortable tug toward a heretic rabbi from Galilee. The rabbi tells him of a Spirit that takes hold of people and blows them where it will (wild vine-to-vine swinging?). Nicodemus will struggle against the temptation to open his heart to that Spirit, to let go of the jungle-vine he now hangs on, and to grab hold of another that will necessitate more grabbing and swinging—a kind of Tarzan pilgrimage? We know not exactly where Nicodemus arrived in his struggle against temptation, but portions of John 7 and 19 indicate that incrementally he succumbed to the allure.

So here I am, drawn toward places that many, perhaps most of my well-intentioned family, friends and colleagues may call “wrong places,” if not sinful temptations. But are they? All of them? Can conventional Christian wisdom easily distinguish all temptation from all divine beckoning? When Nicodemus asked that Jesus be given a fair hearing, his colleagues retorted, “Surely you’re not also from Galilee, are you? Look at the Scriptures and you’ll see that we’re right and you’re wrong!” They represented the prevailing wisdom of God’s people. They represented resistance to temptation. And they missed the point.

Julie says that paying attention to her cravings and temptations has helped her to see her emptiness and longing differently. I’m having the same experience. She says, “My prayer has been to ask God to fill those cravings not with whatever glitters and gleams…” Me, too.

But so often I struggle mightily to distinguish the chute to hell from the gateway to God.

God help me to know the Temptations from the Four Tops.

Ger

The Temptations

Yesterday I was out to lunch with a friend and we were talking about Lent and the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness. It was a lively conversation and a bit humorous since we were talking about the first temptation, “Human beings cannot live by bread alone,” in the middle of a bustling café.

It became obvious that the server had overheard our conversation as she served us our lunch. She blurted out enthusiastically, “Oh, I just love the Temptations too! We need more like the Temptations.” Basically, most people when the hear the word “temptations” are usually talking about a music group or how “tempting” that dessert was.

I’ve been meditating on the temptations of Jesus during this Lenten season with the help of Diogenes Allen’s recent book entitled, Temptations. I believe Lent offers us an invitation to look at those things that we cling to more tightly than Christ. Yes, many think this a drag, but I have actually found it quite liberating. Liberating because Jesus promises to lead us through our temptations, “For he (Jesus) himself has suffered and has been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.” –Hebrews 2:18

So in Lent we journey with Jesus and his in the wilderness and he journeys with us in the jungle of our own temptations. We are in this together. In fact our temptations can teach us. Allen writes, “We shall live by listening to all God tells us. So attend to that craving in yourself that only God’s words can fulfill.”

This is a new concept for me. Usually, I pray to avoid temptations or ask for forgiveness when I succumb to temptation. But to practice…paying attention to my cravings and temptations has helped me to see my emptiness and longing differently. My prayer has been to ask God to fill those cravings not with whatever glitters and gleams…even if it first presents as a “good thing” as Martha Stewart says.

In the beginning and in the end, only God can satisfy us completely. You might remember how Faust was tempted by the devil and gave in to taste all things and experience everything imaginable. But, do you remember how that turned out? He became bored. Only God can satisfy. So you and I need to pay attention to where we feel unsatisfied and restless. This will be a clue for us about God’s wisdom and invitation.

We live in a world created by God where evil is part of the human reality. We may wish it weren’t so, but it is. Again Allen is helpful,

Here we see that one of the conditions God sets
without any say on our part is that we are
exposed to evil. Whatever its ultimate source
may be, whatever our responsibility for it may
be, we presently are in the midst of evil and
the gateway to finding God is placed at a point,
where we are tempted by evil. We must face up
to it and renounce it, or we do not find
the gateway to God.” (emphasis mine)

God is always making a way and inviting us into deeper relationship. When we find ourselves lead into temptation or in the midst of temptation, let us pray that we pay attention to our deepest longings and watch for the gateway to the Holy. Then… with the singing Temptations, “Get Ready!” -Julie

Contested Shots

My bracket is busted all the way to the Bad Place. How’s yours? I know I brought it up, but can we talk about something else?

I also brought up Kris Kristofferson’s name last time I was pouring liquor. Between then and now a friend bought me a copy of his new CD, This Old Road, first in forever. He is my new point of fascination. I can’t help wondering if the current political line-up, which choose to start the war in Iraq, flushed Kristofferson out of retirement. Neil Young is also back, belting out fine anti- war tunes. Good to see ya, boys. Just in the nick.

For his part, Kris returns in all his glory, singing in that whiskey-strained voice of his, funny, pissed-off, wise, self-aware and mortality-aware. And there’s oodles of theological reflection. Some is in a song called "Pilgrim’s Progress" that includes:

Am I young enough to believe in revolution
Am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray
Am I high enough on the chain of evolution
To respect myself, and my brother and my sister
And perfect myself in my own peculiar way

I get lazy, and forget my obligations
I’d go crazy if I paid attention all the time
And I want justice, but I’ll settle for some mercy
On this Holy Road through the Universal Mind

I think the man is a believer. The kind you admire, that you’d like to know personally. I’ve been re-discovering John Prine lately, too. He shares some qualities with Kris Kristofferson. Both are story tellers, with an intelligent lyric, an appreciation for irony and all that. I like Prine considerably, but I feel he’s still in the skeptical phase. It’s a sophisticated, worthy skepticism, certainly witty. But Kris has grown past that phase it seems, to embrace faith in spite of all the reasons one has to be doubtful. From "In the News:"

Broken babies, broken homes
Broken-hearted people dying everyday
How’d this happen, what went wrong
Don’t blame God, I swear to God I heard him say

"Not in my name, not on my ground
I want nothing but the ending of the war
No more killing, or its over
And the mystery won’t matter anymore"

If I’m right about Kristofferson’s belief and Prine’s skepticism (and I may not be; I’m not on the speed dial of either of them), then the two pose an interesting way of talking about faith and doubt. I’m of the opinion that a strong faith emerges when it has weathered honest misgivings. It’s tougher, grizzlier, more real. Many of our people--but not all--appreciate hearing that we too have wrestled with doubt. God knows there are plenty of buffoons in the zoological garden of the church that cause thinking people to save themselves by running away from their squirrelly image of Jesus. We understand if they can’t believe in the church, but hope that they can believe in one God, and that the real Jesus can make a proper introduction.

Do we also hope that they can one day return to the church, with their skepticism fuelling a richer, more resonate faith? We put up a big banner in our church front yard announcing the time of our Palm/Passion Sunday and Easter Sunday services. Deborah, my long-suffering wife, asked if it was because we need more people to fill the sanctuary. No, I answered, and I think without defensiveness, we hung the banner because the passers-by need to be in our sanctuary. Upon reflection, I would say that passers-by need to be in our sanctuary (or any half-way decent sanctuary) on days like those during days like these.

We sometimes say that Christianity is impossible to practice all alone. That it takes a community. Does that mean, then, that, as Catholics and some reformers say, that there is no salvation without the church?

I like mature skeptics who finally yield to faith. That’s what I want to say. The late M. Scott Peck, despite his outsized ego, said it better. Karl Barth, though, adds a cautionary tone. He describes two kinds of doubt, one probing, sharpening faith, recognizing that all theological shots should be contested, for nothing can be taken for granted in such an important field of knowledge. But there’s another form of doubt, which he names as dangerous, as a swaying and staggering between Yes and No, a fixed uncertainty, a perpetual "perhaps this, perhaps not."

This form of doubt is "…altogether a pernicious companion which has its origin not in the good creation of God but in the Nihil -- the power of destruction… There is certainly justification for the doubter, but there is no justification for the doubt itself (and I wish someone would whisper that in Paul Tillich’s ear). No one, therefore, should account himself particularly truthful, deep, fine, and elegant because of his doubt" (Evangelical Theology, Eerdmans, 1963, p. 131).

So I am warned. I guess I’ll say that as long as skepticism (is that the same thing as doubt?) circles back to faith, it improves faith, or maybe it improves the faithful person, gives him or her an edge, a texture, some substance he or she wouldn’t otherwise have. I heard Jim Logan say one time that we minister types should preach our convictions and teach our doubts. Maybe there is something to that.

And maybe there’s something to this verse, again from Kris K.

The truth is a highway
Leading to freedom
All is forgiven
Love is to blame

Ain’t that good?

Dee

Equinox

Today is the spring equinox. Since once again, it is snowing here, I take the date’s significance to be that winter days are limited. I also heard on the radio this morning that three years ago today, the war on Iraq began. Has it been just three years? It seems much longer.

All of that—the beginning of spring, the war, an article I read in Christian Century about the delegate to the World Council of Churches from the United Church of Christ who joined with other delegates to make public amends for their part in the war—as well as the posts last week, reminded me of this poem by Wendell Berry. It is my offering this week:

A Purification

Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, p. 201-02

At start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter’s accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins; that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened too much to noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.

Happy Equinox,

Lynn

Saviors, Books, and Kings Starting with S

I have an uneasy relationship with Jesus, though I do have to say that when he calls me into his office, he’s as patient as he is disappointed. He is as Gerald depicted him. I sit down across the desk. And he looks at me for a minute—a long minute—then he begins shaking his head and saying my name, over and over again, “Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick. What am I going to do with you?” And I shrug. And he shakes his head again. “Oh, boy!” he sighs. And he lets me go.

I have an uneasy relationship with books. Perhaps it’s the result of their shape; they’re much more angular than Jesus, and angrier. They call down from their shelves, “Hey! You! Hey!” A cacophony of voices: shrill, gruff, sharp, whinging. The ones I haven’t read want to be read. The ones I have read want to be read again. This isn’t a metaphor. To get away from the noise I have to leave my office and go for a walk.

“Uneasy is the head that wears a crown.” That’s Henry IV, Part 2 (Act III, Scene 1). Henry is in his bedchamber, talking to himself. How is it that his subjects are asleep, and he cannot sleep? Even, a ship-boy sleeps, in the middle of the roughest storm. What’s the story? Can repose bring sleep

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

I’m start thinking on my walk about crowns, because I’m trying to think about power. And I’m trying to think about power, because I’m trying to make sense of the epistle lesson for Sunday. It’s First Corinthians 1, where Paul argues—louder than any book—that the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God more powerful (v. 25).

And for some reason I think about Jack Levine’s “portrait” of King David. It’s in one of my books, a reproduction, somewhere. Not that I can find it when I get back. But I do find Levine’s depiction of King Saul (from 1952). I also bump into Konrad Witz’s painting of Solomon and Sheba (1435). Both kings wear uneasy crowns.

Saul’s is a turban with a golden dome. (I’m sorry I can’t find a link to this; or I can but it doesn’t link. If you do, let me know.) And it sits not so much uneasy as ignored. Also ignored is the curved sword at Saul’s belt. It isn’t as if the king, worn and bleary-eyed—sleeping no better than Henry—it isn’t as if Saul has forgotten he’s king, but he wishes he could, staring past the viewer into some middle distance. But he can’t see far enough to remember before, his rambunctious beginnings, the innocent energy of his young manhood, so he can’t see either past his troubles, now longstanding. But soon they’ll be over. Let David have the @#%*&@ throne.

David hovers over Saul’s present and future; he looms over Solomon’s past and present. At least, that’s the way I read Witz’s dual portrait of the young king receiving Sheba. We don’t know much about the Swiss painter of this quick-frozen scene, but can see that he was a master of texture: the king’s robe is a richly embroidered green; the queen’s is plainer but substantial, and her white head-dress wraps elegantly about her fine-featured face. Oh, but his grand red hat is . . . well, rather too grand. It makes his small, smooth face seem even smaller. Under it Solomon is not wise at all but a small boy in his father’s fedora, falling down over his ears.

God’s weakness, I’m inclined to believe, doesn’t have to be too powerful to be stronger than men, for even the strongest of us are frail of body, faint of heart, and feeble of spirit, beaten down by the past, laid low by our futures. Except,

Except, Paul says, we are not perishing, for we have that weakness—and the foolishness—of God.

Let’s hope.

Rick

Answering to Jesus

Conversations last week with three long-time friends have set me to thinking about my own accountability before Jesus.

Oklahoma native Thad Meachum, whose pastoral pilgrimage has bounced him around Tennessee and now Louisiana, met me for coffee and told me of a congregation where members recently arranged the sudden, summary dismissal of their pastor because she did not immediately and unquestioningly acquiesce to a request to baptize an infant whose parents were neither members of the congregation nor residents of the community, but whose grandparents were influential church members. That the pastor paused to weigh the theological implications, that she dared to ask questions about the parents’ faith was seen by several as an unforgivable insult. The juggernaut was unleashed; the presbytery was called in; and when the thing had run its course, the pastor was given her severance and a few hollow well-wishes.

“They treated her brutally,” said Thad, “and then acted as if nothing had happened.” So, a couple of weeks ago, when Thad—on invitation from that congregation—preached Sunday’s sermon, he unloaded both barrels. You can’t treat people like *%@! and expect God to simply look the other way, he said in so many unminced words. He opened with an illustration taken from the TV sitcom “Scrubs” in which a doctor, after having mercilessly berated a young intern, stepped to the nurses’ station and said to the head nurse, “I’m sorry you had to hear that.” To which the nurse replied, “You don’t have to apologize to me, but you will have to answer to Jesus!”

Answering to Jesus. Sheepishly, I confess: I haven’t spent much time thinking about that. Having grown up in a bible-belt church whose theology was more belt than Bible, I was plied with ample doses of “God’s gonna getcha if you make a wrong move!” Some years later, when I learned of the God of grace and was overwhelmed by a great joy in knowing that nothing can or will separate me from God’s love,I may have, in my elation, fumbled the truth that God’s amazing grace does not mean that I’m no longer accountable to God, not only for my actions but even for my most private thoughts. Right now, as I think of this, I am rather shaken, realizing that, much like the aforementioned congregation, I have done some pretty God-displeasing things and then quickly shrugged them off with a sigh and an “oh well.”

My second long-time-friend conversation was a phone chat with Rick Dietrich (founder and chief proprietor of Theologic Al’s Bar & Grill). Reflecting on our nearly twenty years of friendship, I see that he’s always had a stronger (than my own) sense that God is paying close attention to how we treat one another. So I phoned him and put all of this before him. When I shared the illustration Thad had used to open his sermon, Rick challenged me to imagine what would happen next. Say Jesus is the hospital administrator, Rick suggested, and he calls the doctor into his office. What does he say to her, what’s the confrontation like? We agreed it would be one in which Jesus expressed deep disappointment. “Joan, Joan! What were you thinking? What the hell were you doing?”

Yet the hospital administrator would need to be more than simply an authority. Disappointing an authority means little to me if it doesn’t threaten my job. But deeply disappointing someone I love, someone whose love for me is vital to my existence—that’s a terribly painful, if not devastating, prospect.

My third long-time-friend conversation was another phone chat—with David Berry, native Michigander whose pastoral pilgrimage has bounced him around the Midwest and now has him in Indianapolis as associate pastor for missions at Second Pres. As seminarians, Dave and I wrote our senior faith statement together while camping at Brown County State Park in Indiana—a process that necessitated our throwing empty beer cans at post-midnight raccoons who persistently tried to break into the cooler that sat just outside our tent….but that’s another story for another day.

David was telling me of a recent mission trip to Gautier, MS, to aid in recovery from Hurricane Katrina. His crew spent a week ripping out moldy, water-logged wallboard and cabinetry from houses that were ravaged by the storm. Then, they replaced the contaminated stuff with fresh, new stuff. “It dawned on me that all around us was this amazing metaphor for Lent,” said Dave. He mentioned how many of these inland houses didn’t look so bad from the outside. But inside, they were diseased with mold, and disordered by the storm-surge. “Really a mess,” as he put it. “That’s us before God,” he said. That’s us, trying our best to look good on the outside, but inside we’re a mess. Lent is about looking realistically at our interiors, about opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit who will aid us with a recovery crew, to clear the house of disease and disorder.

Inspired by this, I tried to tell Dave’s story in Wednesday night vespers worship. I did my best to point out that, in this sense, the hurricane is not a whim that comes upon us, but—for the sake of our metaphor—the hurricane is our own doing, the pursuit of our own whims without regard for consequences. To accentuate this, I cobbled a power point slide show of images of hurricane devastation--especially indoor devastation--and of the forlorn people who suffered it, all shown while minor-keyed music played.

I must have overdone it, because the collective response was not one of confession and repentance, but rather of sadness and desire to aid those poor, pitiful people seen in the slides.

I thought I had failed in my worship strategy, until…. I saw that the slides had evoked something more than I had planned for. The sadness that all us viewers felt for the folks in those slides, the impulse to move in and restore purity and order into those houses, is but a miniscule percentage of the mega-impulse that Jesus feels for us when he sees our own interiors so disordered, so diseased. And yet, if we can trust scripture and personal experience, he does more than simply feel moved. He does move. He comes with a recovery crew to restore order to our disorderedness. “Do you want to get well?” he asked the man beside the Bethesda pool [John 5:6]. I suppose he asks us the same. If we know we’re accountable, we’ll know the answer is “yes!” If we ignore our accountability, we don’t even hear the question.

I think this is how the administrator questions the doctor when he calls her into his office. This is how he questions you and me.

Everybody gotta answer to Jesus.
--Gerald

Welcome to Bracketville

Can UK beat UConn, provided the Cats can get past that dangerous UAB bunch? And how ‘bout that Hansborough kid from UNC? Who can beat Redick and Duke? I’ve got to quit stewing over the NC2A basketball draw for the 2006 tournament or I’ll never get to working on that sermon for the third Sunday in Lent. One good thing about the preaching business is that you get to take another shot at it next week. There’s always another Sunday morning comin’ down (can you believe that Kris Kristofferson is 70 years old? Is that possible? Did I hear that right?)

Anyway, I defended the vulnerable God theme Lord’s Day last with a trapping man coverage, and it wasn't as bad as it could have been. There is no love without suffering and no suffering without love. That was one of my most effective moves. I couldn’t stop two particular problems, however. They proved tougher than scouting reports indicated.

The first asks if the God whose power is expressed in weakness has the sufficient strength to save us. If God is with us in our pain, is that enough? Is solidarity the same thing as salvation? I appreciate the fact that God has compassion for me because I couldn’t hit the front end of a one-and-one during crunch time. But can God get me out of this hole I’ve put myself in?

I was fortunate that my opponent (not Satan, but a mid-major demon) did not take advantage of this gaping hole in my sermonic attack. Could have driven a truck through it.

In the cool light of Monday morning, however, I would compare the problem with the effect of non-violent resistance against the violent intransigence of cultural forces. Jesus enters into the pain and suffering of our world and fights the powers of oppression and death not by might but by moral strength. He doesn’t return evil with evil. In the words of a John Bell Iona song, he doesn't give back the sin of the world, he takes it away. Into death, into hell. So that he can lead us into heaven.

Those who follow Jesus into this singular path take a chance on getting beaten up every so often. Here’s a Reinhold Niebuhr quote from The Nature and Destiny of Man (vol 2, pp. 72 & 290) and cited in William Placher’s Narratives of a Vulnerable God. It took my breath away when I read it on Sunday afternoon, several hours before the Selection Sunday program on CBS, and several hours too late for it to do my morning sermon any good: “The perfect disinterestedness of the divine love can have a counterpart in history only in a life which ends tragically,” since “the power of sin makes a simple triumph of love impossible.”

That may be a little strong, but isn’t it right most of the time, and shouldn’t our people hear it in order that the radical call of Jesus be understood, even if the particular cross they pick up probably won’t lead them to a tragic end? If you follow Jesus closely enough, you may die, but it is worth it, we believe, because murderous injustice needs to be exposed for what it is, but the cycle of violence needs to be broken. Pacifism good, passivism bad.

The second offensive set that breezed through my vulnerable God theme has to do with freedom. Freedom and cross-bearing, to be precise. It first showed its slippery moves in Rick’s blog offering from last week. He cited the Mark passage that includes the verse, If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Ah, our friend says, quoting loosely. Their cross? Our cross? That’s a relief. It’s still under our control, right?

I leaned toward saying it was our choice, that the cross is not Jesus’ cross. That cross has already been born. Our cross is tailor made for us, according to our gifts, our strengths. The cross we bear is not something that life throws our way willy nilly, a painful situation that just comes with being alive -- like your mother-in-law moving in with you or contracting a worrisome disease. Unless the particular way you deal with mom-in-law or deal with your disease is a statement of your faith in Jesus, then it’s not the cross that same Jesus was talking about. It is picked up, chosen, volunteered as a consciously selected act of discipleship. That’s what I thought and pretty much how I said it.

But then there’s this, from Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship (Macmillan, 1963). He references Luke 9:57-62, the passage in which Jesus relates to three would-be disciples. The first has no idea what he is getting into. The second two answer affirmatively, but with provisions. One wants to bury his father and the other wants to say good-bye to his family. Then they will follow Jesus.

Or so they say. Jesus is on his way to the cross, and "his whole life is summed up in the Apostle’s Creed by the word 'suffered.' No man can choose such a life for himself. No man can call himself to such a destiny, says Jesus, and his word stays unanswered. The gulf between a voluntary offer to follow and genuine discipleship is clear… Only Christ can speak in this fashion. He alone has the last word… this call, this grace is irresistible" (p. 64f).

Thrust upon Bonhoeffer by life and history, and not of his choosing, were the conditions in Germany in the 1930’s on. In one way, he had to act as he did; in another way, he could have answered the call differently. And what about us? Nazism may not be going on, but other things certainly are. These other things --warfare, greed, prejudice, exploitation of the weak, overly rough play under the basket, and the jump stop --picked us. They are our cross, perhaps, and maybe if we would be disciples, we have to pick one of them up. We have to resist the evil let loose in our world. We’re not free to live in another world, or to pretend this one doesn’t exist.

Maybe we are only free when we follow the unique way of Christ. Maybe giving
up latte is only symbolic for divesting ourselves of whatever stands between us and Jesus, between us and our best, most God-sculpted selves. Maybe it’s not what we give up for Lent but what we take on.

How miserably I have failed to to pick up and to put down. How miserably I have failed the test of freedom, and even the explication of it, from Sunday to Sunday. But there’s always another practice, the next game, a new chance to get it right, to play better, even to score a point or two. Its never one and done until the last preaching appearance in this present world comes, and the trumpet will sound and all that other stuff happens.

For that I am glad. I look up from my brackets and rejoice. I look up to the little hills in my neighborhood and wonder if a brother can get a little help down here. Is it conceivable that a number twelve seed Utah State can beat a number 5 seed Washington? Can God help me overcome my native bias so that I can gladly accept another Blue Devil championship? Or --UK vs UConn playing out to its expected result --dare I hope that this will be rag-tag Gonzaga’s year after all?

Dee

Today's Reality

The picture is yesterday’s reality: cloudy and snowy all day. Today’s reality is, of course, different (everywhere is I ever lived, the saying has always been, “if you don’t like the weather, wait.”). Anyway, there is still about six inches of snow on the ground; the North Platte River is still frozen; it was minus 3 when I woke up this morning. However, the sky is blue and the mountain to the south is glistening in the sun. And there is no wind—yet. If the wind does come up, I’ll try to get a picture for you of a ground blizzard.

I am in the coffee shop, thinking about what my bar mates have posted. I am also drinking a double non fat wet cappuccino, having just broken my Lenten fast. I had given up the expensive coffee drinks for forty days with the $4/day going into my fish bank for One Great Hour of Sharing. By coming into the coffee shop, I led myself into temptation. My name is Lynn and I’m a sinner in need of God’s grace. Hi, Lynn, glad you’re here.

Have any of you ever been to a 12-step meeting? Every one I have ever attended ends with everyone holding hands in a circle and praying together the Lord’s Prayer, even though AA and Al-Anon welcome people of all religious affiliations or of none. If a person is struggling with his or her powerlessness over a substance or the effect of said substance on a loved one or friend, then “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” is a real and heart felt prayer. And it is the very admission of the “temptation” and the “evil” that becomes the invitation to growth in a relationship with one’s Higher Power.

I led myself into this temptation (and while I’m here, I think I’ll have another.) And here in the wilderness of the coffee shop on a cold and sunny Monday morning with a posting due (check out Doonesbury today[http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/]—maybe I should have gone to Daylight Donuts—they don’t have a cappuccino machine), I hear an invitation once again to turn my life and my will over to God.

It is the invitation in the koan contained in the text Rick mentioned: Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? (Mark 8:334-37)

I had heard that “Lead Kindly Light,” words by John Henry Newman, was Gandhi’s favorite Christian hymn. I looked up the words. There appropriate to my journey today. Here they are:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th'encircling gloom, lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now lead thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, pride ruled my will: remember not past years!

So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

Lynn

“My name is Rick, and I’m a bureaucrat.”

“Hi, Rick.”

For thirteen years! I’m not saying that makes me uniquely qualified to explain how Peter became the first pope—from fisherman to bureaucrat in ten easy steps. In fact, I’ll argue that I’m hardly unique. But, how Peter did it, and it didn’t take ten steps; it didn’t take even one: he had it in him all along.

We like to think of Peter as slightly, endearingly unstable, almost out of control. But like every good bureaucrat—and the good bureaucrat in each of us—he is, on the contrary, not out of control but controlling. That’s part of—a big part of—what this coming Sunday’s gospel lesson is about (Mark 8:27 – 9:1, to set its proper limits), Peter’s desire to define the terms—actually to set them and define them. (What I’m saying here is nothing new, no inspiration of mine: the commentaries are full of it.)

Peter makes his grand confession, that Jesus is the Christ (8:29). Then, in Mark, after telling his disciples to let that go, to say nothing about it, Jesus goes on to another matter. We’re not sure quite why he asked the question, “Who are people saying I am?” He’s already on to other things: “This is the way I see what’s going to happen next.” The Spirit that drove him into the wilderness is leading him toward Jerusalem. The Son of man—this is what Jesus calls himself, not the Christ (or Messiah)—the Son of man is going there, even though it’s going to be a mess. A bloody mess.

“Oh, no,” Peter says, catching at Jesus’ sleeve. Peter has the bureaucrat’s fear of mess, and messiness. And he has the bureaucrat’s concern, as I’ve suggested, that terms be properly defined. “Oh, no. You are the Christ!” Don’t you know what that means? Let me explain.

The right thing to do at this point in the story, the right thing for the reader to do—I suppose this is right; the commentaries seem to agree—is to fall out of sympathy with Peter. I’d like to do that, but as I indicated, “My name is Rick, and I’m a bureaucrat.” (“Hi, Rick.”) None of us wants to let go of his most cherished ideas of Jesus—or hers. Actually, that’s an understatement. None of us wants to let go of his or her most cherished ideas for Jesus’. (Note the possessive.) Here’s an example.

In the January 20 New York Times, Charles Marsh takes on his fellow evangelicals with regard to their support of the war in Iraq (“Wayward Christian Soldiers”). “Recently, I took a few days to re-read the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. . . . Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president’s war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine,” so that the “single common theme among [these] sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God’s will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.”

Marsh winces and wonders how American evangelicals could have gotten so far from the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 that “affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that ‘the church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution’”—a bureaucratic institution, or can an institution be other than bureaucratic?—“belief that ‘the church is the community of God’s people . . . and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology’” (italics mine).

The commentators on Mark 8 suggest that we are supposed to see Peter’s mistake and somehow avoid it. But the forces of the world-we-live-in and the ideas that we gather from living in that world—and especially the way we frame those ideas to define our world and make it livable—are so strong and so obviously right that we just don’t escape them, no matter what the commentators say. At least I don’t see how. Not today.

“Take up your cross,” Jesus says, and I grasp at the word your. Thank God for it. It’s my cross, then, right? I get to say what it means.

Right?

Rick

Bureaucracy? No Koan Do!

Forgive me if my alter-ego Ocie Dee refuses to let me relinquish my fixation on Russ Moore’s tirade against the World Council of Churches. But….

What if, at its most recent assembly, instead of recognizing the Holy Spirit in other religions, the WCC had claimed to recognize the Holy Spirit in decision-making bureaucracies composed of religious people?

I think Russ would have had far greater reason to rail. And I might’ve railed alongside him. And maybe you would forgive me, because….

My denomination’s General Assembly is coming to my house this year. This means that Birmingham, AL, will sponge up several thousand sojourning Presbyterians (for every voting commissioner there’ll doubtless be five to ten persuaders) dead set on moving the church toward correct (read “moral” or “righteous”) decisions. Decisions about what, you ask.

About subjects spooned from the smorgasbord of controversies that are advanced, exploited and, if I my coin a word, hysterified by high-powered advertisers who call themselves CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.

Sexual orientation, Palestinian-Israeli relations, abortion, and others will be among the main courses. In all cases, there'll be strong beliefs that a decision (usually a once-and-for-all decision) MUST be made.

Thousands will come to Birmingham, believing that the Holy Spirit means for decisions to be made. Most of them will claim to know the nature of those Holy-Spirit decisions. A great many, perhaps most, will believe that this is how we recognize the Holy Spirit—by making big decisions. (“Yep, the Holy Spirit was there 'cause we got ‘er done!”)

Few will recognize that this is a very western way of seeing things—this notion that God’s got some kind of strategic solution that, if we’ll just seize it, will erase all our troubles. And so—to give witness to the Holy Spirit—we’ll sharpen our swords and fight to seize that righteous decision.

Where am I going with all this? Well, Julie’s words (“Holy Contradiction, Batman,” see below), prompted my little tirade. As Julie points out so well, following Jesus means living in paradox, living in contradiction. “Living in holy contradiction comes only after deep wrestling and concluding the truth of two truths and with Shirley Guthrie saying, ‘All truth is God’s truth,’” she writes.

As I reflect on this, I see that, usually, religious bureaucracies, however unwittingly, prevent faith from deepening because they view the holy contradiction as a mortal enemy. “A decision MUST be made! We can’t come all this way and not make a BIG decision!” What the bureaucracy doesn’t (can’t?) see is that its obsession with solving the problem is not unlike a mad junky’s craving for crack—with the results being equally self-devastating.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to decisions. And here’s one I wish to advocate: that people of faith and of varying views decide to live together in holy contradiction, that they say no to crack, say no to the rush to decision-making, and instead open themselves to the Holy Spirit, by pondering together the koans of our faith—e.g., that we worship a God who leads us into temptation and one who taught us to pray saying, “lead us not into temptation’’; one who said that those born of the Spirit are blown willy-nilly by the Spirit wind, and yet who also said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Julie’s got it: it’s in the koans that we find God’s gracious Spirit, not in the decisions.

Gerald Stephens Jr.

"Holy Contradition, Batman!"

The longer I live the Christian life, the more I see the paradoxical nature and love of God. Two truth things can be true at the same time: The Spirit of God blows where it will and Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. I do not believe that it is a ‘cop-out’ to live in holy contradiction. In many cases it takes more faith. It’s not as cut and dry as some of my more conservative sisters and brothers believe. When I talk about “living in the mystery” they often think that it’s my lame excuse for avoiding hard theological wrestling, and intense biblical study,or an unwillingness to commit myself and ‘take a stand.’ But for me, living in holy contradiction comes only after deep wrestling and concluding the truth of two truths and with Shirley Guthrie saying, “All truth is God’s truth.”

By example, may I offer two seemingly paradoxical statements from Scripture:

“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and
was led by the Spirit into the wilderness…” Luke 4:1
(emphasis mine)

“forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation…" Luke 11:4

So, here are my questions, bar mates…Does the Spirit of God sometimes lead us into temptation like Jesus was led into the wilderness? Or as God’s own, and since we pray the Lord’s prayer (though not magical) and say, “lead us not into temptation,” does God prevent us from being tempted? Is temptation the result of the human condition, fallen nature and sin (but what about the first temptation in Genesis) or is it holy invitation? And finally, where does grace meet us (read you) when you find yourself in the wilderness of temptation?
I will offer that for me, grace abounds in the midst of temptation—when I succumb and sin and when by grace I don’t. It’s all grace. But as to the author? I want to wrestle more with you about this before I say, ‘it’s all a mystery.”

Wilderness Blessings,
Julie

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

If you all want, I'll drive east a few miles to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and see if Russell D. Moore wants to come out and play. We might need him, in fact, because I sense that we regulars at Theologic Al's are all rooting for the same team. We're fans of The Lone, Wild Fowl in Lofty Flight. Our buddy Russ is into The Lone, Tame Parrot in a Low- Flying Holding Pattern over the Baptist Faith and Message. He could help us sharpen our language on the issue at hand, which, it seems to me, is about the sovereign freedom of God to go where God wants to go and speak through whomever God is pleased to speak. And, while God is visiting over in the next county, God can elect for salvation and service whomever God wants to elect. Thank God, we're not even registered to vote in that election.

Certainly the Holy Spirit, blowing where it will, can work through and be present in Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, etc. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, then God might even be able slip a word every now and then through the Dean of Theology at Southern Baptist Seminary.

These guys have got themselves into some kind of logical knot. Who was that Nobel Peace Prize candidate a few years back who covered a microphone with his slobber as he shouted that God doesn’t hear the prayer of a Jew since they don’t pray in the name of our most gracious Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. Not only is that the worst kind of formulaic literalism, on par with Old World, Vatican I Catholics worried overmuch about getting the Latin right at the altar or that hocus pocus thing wouldn’t kick in with the bread and the wine. It's also just plain wrong.

Leaving out Jesus his own self, what about all those OT types, Abraham, Moses, to name two? They had a communication block with God? We beg Russ's pardon. "All truth is God's truth," Shirley Guthrie liked to say. And truth that is transcendent is always true, no matter the time or the circumstances. (We avoid the phrase "absolutely true," because Russ and his crowd are into absolutism, and we don't want to mess with their stuff). Since that is the case, then God still hears the prayer of a Jew and God's grace, always connected to God's Unpredictable Spirit, can show up in the words and actions of Gerald's friends Ahmed, Gupta, Chang, and Finkelstein.

I be sure of two things. We have absolutely (oops) nothing to do with our salvation. It's all grace all the time. Not a song we can sing, a feeling we can feel, a doctrine we can affirm, a church we can join, nor a cause we can support has anything to do with it. It's not circumcision or uncircumcision, drinking bourbon whiskey or not drinking bourbon whiskey, or being a social activist or not. What matters is the new creation. God's gift it is.

The other thing I'm sure of is that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. God spoke a word in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that opens the way to wholeness and purpose and meaning to all people. Now comes the hard part: That openness exists whether individuals or groups of individuals name the name of Christ or not. Is that universalism? And is that a bad thing? Does it lead to moral laxity? (As if all the world's moral strenuousness has taken us to great places).

Rick, your translation of the German's poem comes as a shaft of light. And the way you set it up helped me read it. It's the very kind of writing that makes this nature boy's heart soar like a hawk. At first blush, it is the same question, about whether or not people we know and love lead us to God. Flawed human nature sometimes points the way. The perfect point, so to speak, lies beyond both human nature and nature nature. But a nice sunset or a surprising display of early spring wildflowers can open a portal to Christ's heart, too. And Christ leads us home. Like disciples hoofing it to Emmaus, sometimes you recognize Christ, and sometimes you don't. Jesus saves, though, not the act of recognition. No matter what Russ says.

Julie, your questions about Paradise Regained intrigue; I too have spent a lot of time wondering what it would look like. I don’t know if death itself is excluded from a restored creation, but it might have more meaning, or a more beautiful reality than our current take on mortality. Now a new creation, that may have nothing to do with images of Eden; since it is "new," we have even less of a preview. Familiar analogies may have no currency in that world at all. But maybe death in a restored creation looks like your regulars at the country club bar, bringing gifts to someone on the way out while they can still look someone in the eye and express simple, humble, unmanipulative love.

Dee Hamilton Wade

A Bit Windy

Hi, guys. Sorry I’m a little late getting here. Everything takes a little longer when you’re in Wyoming, where we gearing up for our own little culture war subtitled “Will Brokeback Mountain win an Oscar and are we really as dumb as the movie makes us out to be? “ Obviously, some of the people asking the questions have not lived in the South. Or were the folks in Kentucky just lucky that the Dukes of Hazzard barely missed that nomination? And by the way, if you saw the movie, (Brokeback Mountain, that is) it really is that beautiful here, even if the movie was filmed in Canada. Above is a photograph of Wyoming, taken by my friend LaRon Coleman.

Yesterday, I spent part of the day at a workshop on labyrinth walking. I had tried walking a labyrinth once before and didn’t “get it.” So when the Episcopal church next door to mine—with their very own labyrinth—offered a free workshop on Saturday—but not too early on Saturday—I thought why not try this labyrinth thing again.

The workshop consisted for a few prayers and introductory words on the history of the labyrinth and then the instructions to go and do, reflect, eat your lunch, and come back at 2 to share. [If you want more information and a picture, go to http://www.lessons4living.com/labyrinth.htm] We had our choice of labyrinths: one in the fellowship hall, a portable labyrinth painted on canvass and the one outside, painted on concrete.

I went outside. After all, it was a beautiful Wyoming day—clear, bright, warm, and windy. I’d say sustained winds of 40 mph with gusts to 50 mph, what is called in Florida “tropical force winds” and what is called in Wyoming “breezy.” This labyrinth, painted on the concrete, was probably about 40 feet in diameter; the winding path into the center is narrow, maybe 2 feet wide. I had to start over about four times because the wind would blow me from the “right” path, into the “wrong” path, and often into the path of a fellow traveler on the labyrinth. There was something of a wisdom psalm in the experience, you know “right paths and wrong paths,” the path of the wicked, the paths of righteousness. Out here, we have to say the wind reminds us of the Spirit; otherwise the wind makes us crazy and we go into bars and grills and do more than shoot the breeze. So here I am, being blown off the right path onto the wrong path by the wind which is supposed to be like the Holy Spirit, blowing where it may.

Finally, I figured out that when the wind in blowing where it will and I am trying to make a journey, even around a circle painted on concrete, I had to do two things. I had to lean into that wind. And I had to watch my feet. On this day, on this journey, there would be no “lifting mine eyes to the hills” because God would let my foot be moved if I wasn’t careful. Instead I had to watch myself put one foot in front of the other until at last (10 minutes later) I made it to the center, for a quick glance up and around, and then back out again.

I tried walking the portable labyrinth in the fellowship hall. But it was too crowded, which is what they say about the wind here: it keeps the population down. So I ate my lunch, took a meditative nap in the easy chair in the corner, and went to the grocery store. By the way, have you ever tried pushing a grocery cart full of white plastic bags head on into a 40 mile an hour wind? I’ll save that for another day.

I have decided that whenever I think I have things figured out—things like God, the universe, grace, prayer, the Spirit, other religions, Southern Baptists—I’m going to go next door and walk the labyrinth in the wind. The life of faith, I think, ain’t always a dance. Most of the time it’s one foot in front of the other, leaning into the wind. You’ve got to pay attention and watch where you’re going.

I still hope Brokeback Mountain wins some Oscars. Otherwise, all we’ll have to talk about here in Wyoming is the wind.

Lynn Williamson

Monk-y Business

Gerald: You’re sure that’s Russ Moore . . . and not Adrian Monk? Monk, everyone knows, is TV’s latest cute obsessive-compulsive, replacing Felix Unger. And he’s trying his best to keep the world in order or, at least, keep his world in order with closets filled with sharply creased trousers, perfectly pressed jackets, and purely white shirts, which he’ll button all the way to the collar; with gallons of bottled water and hand sanitizer. Let’s hope Jesus, dusty and smelly from the road, doesn’t come to his door and knock. Or a neighborhood kid hit a baseball through the window and the Spirit rush in with the outside air.

Monk likes Genesis 1. If only that were all he had. Here’s God taking the mess of nothing and making it good by putting everything in order. God puts time in order, darkness and light, day and night. And God puts vertical space in order, the sky above and the sea below. It’s good.

God puts horizontal space in order, the sea and the dry land. That’s good, too. The rest is fine-tuning—days become seasons become years; and the sea and the dry land are populated. But fine-tuning is important, if you’re going to have true order. So, this is also good.

Finally, God makes humankind, “man” according to the old King James Version I have beside me here. (Do we need to get something newer to keep behind the bar? It’s good enough for me, but . . . I’m a not-new kind of guy): So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (1:27).

This is especially pleasing to Monk, because of what he knows from what he’s read so far about God: God is one who takes a mess and puts it into order. Human beings created in the image of God are then homo ordens, makers of order, keepers of control.

Yes, but. We know—Monk himself is acutely aware—that our ability to control the world, even our own little “worlds,” is minimal. We know that without recourse to theology (even to the story of the fall that follows in Genesis 2: remember Monk hasn’t read that yet). That we cannot control the natural world is painfully obvious. Julie asked if there’d be tsunamis in paradise. I don’t know; I suppose it depends on whose paradise, ours or the tsunamis’. But there are tsunamis here and tornadoes and hurricanes in, it seems, increasing numbers. We have no control over any of these. (I’ll add, at the risk of making our greener customers flush, that I think any notion that we can do anything measurable about global warning is obsessive-compulsive, not to mention arrogant. We just don't have enough bottled water and hand sanitizer.)

But our painfully obvious lack of control over creation doesn’t prevent our trying to control the Creator. Note that I’m not whipping Monk over this without throwing a few lashes at myself as well. As Saul Bellow said somewhere, “I have a similar weakness for setting things straight,” though he added that he knew “how futile it is to work at it continually.” So, I stop here and offer a short prayer for systematic theologians or, as they prefer to be known these days—will someone tell me why?—constructive theologians. Let them work at setting things straight continually.

Where was I? We try to control God—at least, in part, I think—because if a natural world out of control is frightening, how much more frightening if the “ruler of all nature” is out of control?

Thus, Monk’s least favorite passage if he ever gets to it will be the third chapter of John, where Nicodemus comes at night, thanking God he’s separated it from the day: man needs a time to sneak around in, and ask a few questions. But Nicodemus can’t like the answers. Monk won’t. It doesn’t sound like Russ Moore does.

Particularly disturbing is the way Jesus treats the hole the baseball has created in Monk’s window. From in the old King James again: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit [John 3:8].

David Brooks has some unkind things to say about rhetoric in his column in yesterday’s New York Times. He also has some kind things to say about Reinhold Niebuhr. And mostly he’s right—given his definition of rhetoric—about both. But without some knowledge of rhetoric, how arguments are put together (my definition), it’s difficult to appreciate how surprising—and frightening!—this statement by Jesus is.

I don’t need to remind you that the word for “wind” and “spirit” is the same here, so that one rhetorical device Jesus is using is paronomasia—that’s the six-dollar word for punning. Of more interest is the way he sets up his analogy (using the pun) and then forswears it. “The wind blows where it wishes,” he says, “and we don’t know where that’s going to be. So it is,” and we expect him to go on: “So it is with the Spirit,” because that’s what the wind is like. The wind is like the spirit, and the spirit is like the wind. They’re the same word.

That’s not what Jesus says, however. “The wind blows you don’t know where. So it is with everyone that is born of the Spirit.”

One thing I like about this old King James I got in the fourth grade is the zipper. Not only can you shut it up, you can zip it up. Because the Spirit, don’t you know, escapes from the edges of the pages if they’re not confined. I wouldn’t mind that if it just blew around, but if it starts blowing me around willy-nilly, that’s another matter.

Rick

Russ Lassos the Holy Spirit

“The World Council of Churches has long been a boutique of paganism in Christian garb.” So says Russell D. Moore, senior vice president for academic administration and dean of the school of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.

Whoa, Russ, what did the WCC ever do to you?

Well, most recently, at its Feb. 14-23 assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the council recognized “’the Holy Spirit’ [as] working in non-Christian world religions.” Mimicking Sheldon Leonard’s memorable role as Nick the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life, Russell D. Moore bellows at the WCC: “That's it! Out you pixies go - through the door, or out the window!” [Clearly, not as gracious a bartender as Julie; see below.]

Actually what Russ said: “Regenerate believers across the world, whatever their denomination or communion, recognize the World Council for what it is: the spirit of antichrist.” He booms onward: “No one listens to the World Council of Churches anymore, and for that we should be thankful to God.” All this in a Baptist Press three-page story about recent proclamations issuing from the entity to which no one listens anymore.

I’m not a real theologian (but I play one on this blog); however, for the sake of argument, let’s say that when the WCC claims it recognizes the presence of the Holy Spirit in other religions, it means it sees manifestations of God’s grace in at least some of the activities of, for example, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews.

Now, my question for Russ and all the rest of you: can God’s grace be manifest apart from God’s Holy Spirit? Personally, I think not. Julie spoke eloquently about the out-pouring of grace she received from heathen Sunday golfers at the country-club men’s grill (a “boutique of paganism” that had not even the decency to garb itself as “Christian”). Some may say, “Well, that was just garden variety grace; that wasn’t God’s grace.” Sounded amazingly like God’s grace to me, especially those gestures that spirited Julie forward along her pilgrimage.

My wife Bonnie and I still marvel the time we spent in the presence of a Muslim woman who taught us French in Burkina Faso. Madame Habibu Campaore was among the most Christ-like people we’ve known. When Bonnie fell very ill during our first month in Africa, Madame Campaore’s compassion was essential to her return to good health. Bonnie recognized the Holy Spirit in Madame Campaore. I don’t want to be there when Russ tells Bonnie she’s got it all wrong.

Russ’s problem: like George Bailey (forgive the It’s a Wonderful Life analogies) who wanted to lasso the moon, Russ wants to lasso the Holy Spirit, wants to lasso God’s grace. “Hey, dammit, that’s ours! You can’t have it, Ahmed—you neither, Gupta, nor you, Chang. Okay, Finkelstein, you can borrow it, but I want it back by Saturday afternoon.”

Why do we weave theologies that assert exclusive rights to God’s Spirit, God's grace? Rick said—rightly, I think—that we are granted God’s grace by God’s grace through our Lord Jesus Christ. This Jesus, who mysteriously said: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” [John 10:16].

If I clamor for the one shepherd to be exclusively MY shepherd, I think it’s because I’m still running from my own fallen-ness. Sure, I’ll give lip-service to my fallen nature. I will even assert the truth of it---so long as there are those more fallen than I. But when you suggest that the shepherd extends grace to foreign folds with equal energy as he showers it on me and mine, when you suggest that foreign-fold sheep not only perceive and act on the shepherd’s grace, but share it, then my own fallen-ness is so sharply focused that it pierces me to the heart.

That very piercing of my heart, that sudden awareness that God loves me not because my dogma and doctrine are on straight, or my lifestyle is exemplary, but rather because…because...because… why?

Maybe we truly begin to fathom God’s grace when we’ve no longer any words to follow “because.”

Gerald Stephens Jr.

What'll Ya Have?

Glad to be serving here at Al's. I actually have experience as a bartender. I worked in a men's grill at a Country Club in my hometown of Indianapolis before I went to seminary. I'm not even much of a drinker so it was fun. The guys would come out of the locker room and on the way out to play 9 holes would order a sandwich and beer. Mostly guys at that time ordered drinks that had the recipe in the title: gin and tonic, whiskey sour, or rum and coke.

Interestingly, Rick's invitation to share a grace prompted this memory. It was here at this bar where I received both grace and a lesson on grace. The lesson...sometimes we receive grace in the most unlikely places! Who would have thought that I would been more supported and encouraged by these guys who had sworn off church (after all they were on the greens on Sunday), than in my previous two summer experiences working in the church. These guys became my biggest fans and believed in me. Yeah, it is true people talk to bartenders and we did have great talks across the bar.

The week before I left to go to Princeton, the guys gave me words of advice and gifts. They tipped me big. My colleague hand-tooled a beautiful new Bible cover that I still have. One afternoon, a shy guy came up to the bar and tossed a wrapped gift to me. When I opened it and found a concordance, he said, "What is it? They said you'd need one." I was overwhelmed and smiled tenderly at this guy. I was flooded with God's grace. Where the churches had been critical, they guys believed in me. I thanked the shy guy and whispered a prayer of gratitude. God's grace in unexpected places.

On this Ash Wednesday, I send you my prayers as we set our face towards Jerusalem with Jesus. It's God's grace that even enables us to make the journey. On this day, we will hear.."ashes to ashes, dust to dust." It so reminds me that we toil the earth and die because "paradise is lost." Would there have been (will there be) no more toil, no more death, no more ashes or dust when paradise is 're-found' (when paradise is restored)?

Rick, I think it is true that many believe so much in the power of nature to heal. I'm thinking though that the natural world is also fallen-- therefore the power of creation to heal cannot be equal to the power of Christ to heal. Christ is in all, above all and through all. God through Christ is restoring ALL things. I had never thought about this until Rick's comment... maybe even creation--the natural world--is fallen too. Creation itself is wounded. Often we say that human beings wound creation and that because of the sin of human beings creation is wounded. This is true, but could it also be true theologically speaking that creation in itself is wounded because of the Fall? In Romans 8, we read 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

So, I've been pondering...if the natural world is fallen, is there such a thing as a tsunami in paradise? We also claim that these, "acts of God" are just the way that the natural world is constructed...shifting techtonic plates causing waves--"natural events." But what if it is the result--consequence--of the falleness of the natural world? Can we imagine a created order, a natural world, that is constructed in a way where there is no more dying? It's hard isn't it? We say...it's the natural course of events...and I believe that...leaves die and fall off the trees. But isn't is intersting to ponder, maybe this isn't the "natural way". What will happen when there is a new heaven and a new EARTH? What will happen when nature/creation is restored, not just beause of our sin, but because of paradise lost? What will paradise found-restored look like?

Indeed there will be no more Ash Wednesday...
and perhaps no more ashes to ashes-- dust to dust.

What do you think?
Julie