An Unexpectedly Fine Prayer

Rache and I have, for the last few months, been watching our way through The Righteous Gemstones.  As a lampoon of American prosperity religion, it checks a whole bunch of buttons for me.  The cast is excellent, the writing mostly tart, and it blends drama and comedy in ways that work most of the time.  It can be a little tonally jarring, and it gets a wee bit too willfully profane at times, but I enjoy it.

What's...odd...about it is that, as much as it mocks the quarrelsome, shallow, wealth-and-success obsessed Gemstone family?  Every once in a while, a bit of faith slips through.  In season one, the megachurch spectacle was juxtaposed with a genuinely earnest presentation of mission work.  

In season two?  Well, beyond a murderous band of neon motorcycle ninjas, there was a single sublime moment that still sticks with me.

It came as the patriarch of the Gemstone clan, played by John Goodman, was renewing an old acquaintance.  Eli Gemstone was sitting in a restaurant with Junior, a friend from his former life as a professional wrestler.  Junior was reminiscing about his manipulative, distant, and unloving father, and was clearly nursing some significant emotional wounds.

Seeing an old friend struggling, Eli says, "Let's pray, Junior."

He replies, apologetically, that he's not religious.

Eli returns, "Well, it's a good thing I am.  I'll show you what to do."

And then they hold hands, and they pray together.  Now, prayer in the Gemstone world is often crassly self-interested, or presented as comedy.  But not this time.

The prayer that's offered up is heartfelt, personal, and deeply steeped in grace.  It acknowledged pain endured, the strangeness of God's purposes, and the trust that God's mercy always holds out the possibility of redemption.  It was short, simple, and meaningful.

"Damn.  Kinda nice," said Junior, surprised at how moving he found such good words.

"Dang," I thought as I watched, equally surprised.  "That was genuinely a fine prayer."

Every once in a while, the light and purpose of prayer makes itself known through the absurdity of it all.

A Little Mammon Ruins the Whole Loaf

It only takes the slightest change to make a very, very large difference.

For example, there's the human genome.  My genetic material, the basic information written into our DNA?  It's what makes us human, and what makes each human being different from every other human being.  The tiniest tweak, and we're a different person.

Larger variances make us not human at all.

Eighty percent of our fundamental genetic makeup is identical to that of cattle.  Eighty five percent, we share with mice.  So only a fifteen percent variance, and we're scuttering around beneath the floorboards and leaving little rice-sized poop pellets on the kitchen counter.

We become something categorically different.  A cow is not a human is not a mouse, eh?

I've been meditating on difference and Christian faith lately, as I lead the adult ed class of my little church through reflections on race, difference, and what binds us together as Jesus folk.  One of the great strengths of Christian faith, as I see it, is its ability to exist polyculturally.  The Gospel speaks in every language, and can adapt to the forms and norms of every human culture.

Not that we haven't squabbled over everything and anything, including a single vowel in a single Greek word in one statement of faith.  But Christian unity is formed and shaped by the grace of the Spirit, and our willingness to care for one another despite our manifold differences.  I see Jesus in Methodist and Mennonite, in Catholic and Charismatic, in Orthodoxies both Slavic and Amhara.  We're progressive and conservative, plain and erudite, and all of it can be truly Christian.

Still, there are areas where I'll admit I have always struggled, particularly where the Gospel becomes focused on wealth and prosperity.  

That's kind of a problem right now.

The Prosperity Gospel is ascendant in our culture, the dominant form of the faith, to the point where it's really the closest thing America has to a state religion.  As acolytes of Kenneth Copeland's Word of Faith movement now sit at the heart of power, there's never been a moment when this movement has been as prominent as a form of Christian expression. 

The language of Prosperity Preachin', as I've noted numerous times over the years, about 80 percent comprised of recognizable Christian theology.  Read through the writings of Creflo A. Dollar, or endure one of Paula White's surprisingly listless sermons, and you'll find most of it almost kinda sorta works.  

But that twenty percent variance makes a difference, enough so that it is no longer reflective of the teachings of Jesus.

Money money money, gain gain gain, ever bigger ever more?  There's no version of Jesus who pointed us towards material wealth and social influence. There's no version of the Jesus we know from the Gospels that tolerated venality and indulgence as a marker of spiritual blessing.   You can bowlderize him into a shambling FrankenChrist golem that makes that case, sure, but a plain reading of the Nazarene's intent just won't get you there.  It's uncanny valley Jesus, Jesus shifted and warped to serve the demands of our endless capitalist avarices.

Wealth, as Jesus taught about it, is a dangerous thing for the soul.  The wealthier you are, the more likely it is that you're in some serious spiritual mess.  You have built your house on the sand of human imaginings.  Our material gain is, at best, a dishonorable thing that must be bent to the use of grace with cunning and intention.  

You cannot, said my Lord and Savior in a very declarative way, serve God and wealth. 

Christian Men and the Manosphere

I loathe the "manosphere."

It's a dismal manifestation of our internet age, as stunted examples of human maleness parade themselves around as exemplars.  I've not been around folks like that for a while, not since undergrad, when I watched aggressive males acting out towards one another, and towards women.  It was the University of Virginia, so those Alpha-Hoos were wealthy, driven, and smart, which made them even more insufferable when they were drunk.  I found social circles that kept me as far away from that mess as I could.

Have stuff!  Treat women like meat!  Dominate those around you!  Bluster and preen!  It's been around forever, but here it is again, all of a sudden, pressing out into the world, supercharged by soulless algorithms.

The "men" who now pitch their stunted ethos over social media never made it through adolescence.  The vision of male self-understanding they present is the same vision held by the middle school boys who used to hit me up for lunch money back in the early 1980s.  They prattled on about girls and their anatomies in a way that showed they had no idea what they were talking about.

Or, more importantly, who they were talking about.   

Men who don't honor women as human persons...as friends, as family, as colleagues, as distinct, complex, and unique souls?  They don't understand what it means to be a person, let alone a man.  And those who treat women in a predatory way, who manipulate and objectify?  They're "lower than dogs," as my Grandfather used to say. 

Nothing is weaker, lazier, and less demanding than the indulgent, reactive, infantile vision of the "manosphere."  In the face of a deformed "maleness" defined by lust and self-promotion, greed and dominance, by the Andrew Tates and Donald Trumps of the world, there's another vision of what it means to be a man.

It's a much, much harder path.  It makes more demands.  It's a path of virtue, honor, and integrity.  It requires self-control and discipline.  It requires strength, courage, and sustained attention.

It's the path we learn from Jesus, and from a sacred tradition that goes back to the dawn of human history.

The Way is more challenging, and infinitely more rewarding, and it looks completely different.  

Here, for your convenience, are five distinct features of a male identity shaped by discipleship:

1) A Christian man is calm. There's a fundamental stillness to the authentically Christian man, a placidity that is not inert, but rather unswayed and unbowed by the endless churn of the world. The ideal among Christian men is not one who gets agitated, not one who is easily riled, not angry all the time about every last thing. He doesn't feel that it's his task in life to shout down everyone he disagrees with.

In that, there's a remarkable functional similarity between our ethos and that of the ancient Stoics, those philosophers of the Greco-Roman era who saw that being unfazed by anything was a significant virtue. In our hyper-emotive era, when we are expected to rage and weep and howl at the least input, this is profoundly countercultural.  

The roots of an ethos of measured calmness are also fundamentally biblical, with a deep foundation in Wisdom literature. The wise soul does not allow anger or lust, panic or anxiety to rule a life. Wisdom does not bellow or shout down. It remains unflappable, and sticks to what it knows is true.

That's true if your day is just an average day. It's equally true if planes are falling from the sky and the world as you know it has come crashing down.

In our reactive, ranting, overstimulated, hyperagitated #tweetstorm era, that's something worth remembering. It's also a fundamental principle for every Christian man.

2) A Christian man is humble. Yes, I know, we're all supposed to be constantly one-upping each other in Trump's America, posturing in an endless display of higher-primate alpha-male dominance. We're told to be brash and bold and loud. We're supposed to build our brands, and self-promote, and claw our way up over the bodies of those weaker than us, while indulging in all of those delightful mortal sins that popular consumer culture reinforces in us.

But that's not the path of Jesus. It just isn't. It has never been. There is no legitimate reading of the Gospel that says otherwise. If you want to be proud and feel powerful, you're welcome to go hang out with with Anton LaVey or Ayn Rand.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

For disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, humility is a fundamental virtue. The Christian man, first and foremost, sees himself as a servant to those around him. Though he is resourceful, competent, and able, he sees all of those strengths as existing primarily to be a bulwark to friends and family. Not to dominate or control them, or to advance himself, but to give aid and help bear the burdens of others.

When his community is threatened...by storms, by violence, by discord, he simply does what needs be done. We do our duty, no matter what that might entail, even up to the point of exposing ourselves to suffering and death.

This is, again, a fundamental dynamic of the the teaching of Jesus. It's the cross in a nutshell. And it is utterly alien to the culture of self-absorbed "manhood" taught in our society.

3) A Christian man is diligent. Popular culture presents us with an image of men as eternal man-children, permanent adolescents who like nothing more than to loaf about and can't manage to do much of anything. Golly, Dad just put the diaper on the baby's head again! Men are so witless! Hah! Hah! Better get back to the mancave to yell at the sportsball!

Christian manhood isn't like that. We're not called to be shallow, not flighty, not driven by appetite. Christian men remember what it was to be a boy, the playful energy and creativity of it. We are allowed to still enjoy those things. We're allowed to be childlike.

Childish? Not so much.

Oh, sure one can enjoy life. But we are also no longer boys, and we should know it. There comes a time when we must set aside childish ways, as the Apostle Paul reminds us.

That means attending to duty. It means pursuing labors even when they aren't what we feel like doing right at this very moment. It means not giving up, simply because we're feeling, like, so bored. It means pursuing competence at those things we know we need to accomplish.

Men are called to be pragmatic and results-oriented, who committing ourselves to crafts that require attention and focus.

It means we must be patient, and willing to do what we know Christ demands of us, while letting God do God's work at God's own pace. In this Veruca Salt I-want-it-now age, that requires being intentionally countercultural.

It is also the essence of what it means to be a disciple.

4) A Christian man is reflective. This one is tough.  It means we've got to be willing to look hard at our own lives and admit that we can be wrong. If you err, and you realize there's a possibility that the thing you just did or the thing you just said is incorrect, you correct yourself.

This is hard. It stabs at our pride, at our sense of self and sense of strength. We would rather double down. We would rather be defiant in our correctness.

But the process of growing and developing as a disciple requires that we constantly check ourselves against our primary commitment, which is following Jesus of Nazareth. If we act in ways that don't measure up, we've got to be willing to admit we're on the wrong path.

The operative word here is repentance. Yes, repentance. If you never allow for your being wrong, you won't ever repent. We've got to be willing to let repentance...that turning away from our brokenness that is every day of the Way...actually be what we do.

Truly Christian men are profoundly serious about that form of self-discipline, continually checking their own actions and thoughts against the standards of the Gospel. We must continually check ourselves against what we know our faith requires, and even then, we'll sometimes be surprised to discover that our assumptions about others are completely wrong.

And then we admit it. Then we correct ourselves.

When was the last time you reconsidered something about yourself? Or told someone, hey, you know, I completely messed that up?

That's not being weak. It's called repenting, and if all you do is double down, you do not have the discipline to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

5) A Christian man is peaceful. In this peculiar, benighted age, there's a relentless hostility, one that seethes and burns in so much of our communication with one another. Insults and conflict rage, as we take opposition and difference to mean we've got to prove ourselves dominant in every exchange.

That's not the path of Jesus. Never has been. We like to turn to those times Jesus felt and articulated anger to justify our own acting out in rage...and ignore the ethic that is clearly taught in the Gospels. Overturn the tables! Turn out the moneychangers! Booyah!

But when Jesus taught us what to do and how to act, that wasn't what he said. When the Apostle Paul taught how to approach the World, that wasn't what he said.

When interacting with peers and colleagues, we are to be peacemakers. When faced with those who oppose or oppress us, the centurions and jailers? We nonetheless act and speak with honesty, decency, and respect for their persons.

It's how we convince others. It's also how we show that we are who we say we are.

Again, this is immensely challenging. Men are aggressive. It's one of the reasons we do well in the world. Aggression...and the focused energy it creates...is part of our nature, and it can be useful, particularly where large predators are involved.

But the easy embrace of self-serving violence is not and has never been the Christian path. Christians have engaged in violence, sure. Wherever Christianity has subsumed itself into state power, it has become warped into an instrument to justify violent action. Occasionally, there have been Christians faced with demonic, dehumanizing powers so destructive that violence seemed the only option. Faithful men such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or John Brown took up arms against the brutal demons of their culture, and it's impossible to reject their witness out of hand.

But Christ presents us with a different path.

Christian men must be willing to both speak truth and resist, if our way of life is threatened. But we will never strike out, because to do so would violate our integrity as Christians.

When faced with the choice of using violence, even in self-defense, we don't. This is not because we are weak. Nor is it because we water down our Christianity with dreamy idealism.  There is nothing harder than setting down the sword. Looking at the saints of the church, those who have chosen to give their lives rather than yield to the siren song of violence, it can seem impossible. But it is not.

It's because they're better disciples of Jesus Christ than you or I.

As a lifelong Christian who prays daily, studies the bible, has three theological degrees under my belt, and pastors a church, I can say this. In their radical nonviolence, there is a purity of faith among those who will not take up the sword that I still struggle with.

This was the path of the early church, after all. Complete nonviolence, even unto death. Protestants in particular have forgotten this, as the stories of the martyrs are set by the wayside, replaced by tales of success and prowess and material prosperity.

Despite this, it is What Jesus Did, and What He Told Us To Do.

I wrestle with this, particularly when I see injustices inflicted on the weak. I struggle with this more deeply still, when I feel my loved ones are threatened.  I feel rage that is hard to contain.

But those who have had the strength to stand firm are more authentically Christian...more like Jesus and the first Spirit-fired churches...than I am. They didn't punch back. They didn't attack. They avoid violence, no matter what, because that is what Jesus did. Period.

We don't want to hear this. From our pricked pride and our innate, male aggression we resist it. We come up with rationalizations. We proof text. We wave our flags. It feels good.

But if we do not allow ourselves to see the deeper strength of their nonviolent path, we are being willfully blind, and we are not allowing ourselves to learn from those whose faith is stronger.  In our shallow, violent, hyperkinetic time, it's easy for men who've claimed Jesus as their primary life commitment to wander from his path.

Calmness. Humility. Diligence. Reflection. And a soul turned fiercely and defiantly towards peace.

These virtues are fundamental to every man's Christian journey. They are also, as much as I struggle with pride and aggression, the demands Jesus makes of us.

They aren't easy. But good things rarely are.

Putting Conservative Christians in Detention Camps

Looking at what we can anticipate from the upcoming administration, one action in particular stands prominent in my attention.  It's perhaps the most dissonant of the paradoxes facing this country as we move towards the next four-or-so years.

On the one hand, there's the fervent turnout of evangelical and conservative Christians, who voted en masse for Donald J. Trump.  

On the other hand, it's the stated intent of the forty-seventh president to...on day one...start rounding up conservative and evangelical Christians and forcibly taking them to camps.   

Generally speaking, this is not the way that most of the folks who voted for Trump would frame this commitment, but it's an entirely accurate way to describe what's planned.  

The plan is mass deportation, on an unprecedented scale, as tens of millions of undocumented migrants will be rounded up and returned to their countries of origin.  Given the logistics of such an endeavor, detention camps will be necessary.  If we're thinking only as selfish consumers, it might occur to us that this will cripple our ability to harvest crops, resulting in price increases and shortages.  But if we're thinking as Christians, there's that other consideration.

We know, with certainty, that most Latino immigrants profess to be followers of Jesus.  In the region of the world from which they hail, between 75% to 80% of the population are Christian.  They are Baptists and Pentecostals, independent evangelicals and traditional Catholics.  Those who risk their lives to reach our borders are no different, which is why so many reach out to Christian communities (or form their own churches) upon their arrival.  They are fleeing a combination of things: economic hardship, violence, and political oppression, particularly those trying to escape the oppressive leftist regime in Venezuela.

Again, American conservative and evangelical Christians voted, by a strong supermajority, for an administration that is planning...very first thing...on mobilizing the military to forcibly round other Christians up and ship them to detention camps, which is perhaps the least Christian response imaginable.  

Jackbooted soldiers herding Christians into trucks parses more like an Antichrist thing, or it was the last time I cringed my way through parts of one of those barely watchable Left Behind movies. 

Even more odd, to my eyes, at least, is that most of the immigrants America will be forcibly detaining aren't progressives, or leftists, or even liberal.  They're conservatives.

Latinos are many things, but most of those who come here are faith and family folk, the sort of people who are willing to risk their lives for the opportunity to work hard.  They are, as the protagonist of a novel of mine once noted, really just rednecks.  They like trucks and beer and dancing.  They like fireworks and cowboy hats and traditional family structures and Hey-zuus.  If America put the resources required to deport them into welcoming them in, they'd be Republicans for generations.

I know, I know, they're "illegal."  If you think that ultimately matters, you're welcome to lecture Jesus on immigration law and secure national borders when you stand before him on the day of judgement.  You might also try telling him about how they don't speak English, so they aren't really Christians, which I'm sure he'll appreciate.  Or how you believed Trump when when he belched out the slander-pander that they were all murderers and rapists.  I mean, it's not like showing hospitality to the stranger and mercy to the foreigner in one's land is ever mentioned in the Bible.  He'll understand that you put country and race before Christ, which he's totally cool with.  Ahem.

Que dios tenga piedad de tu alma.

The Flavor of Weak Sauce

I love my denomination, but if I am entirely honest, it often frustrates the bejabbers out of me.

At our recent General Assembly, we once again backed away from investing our resources in renewables and other forms of energy that might blunt or slow the onslaught of the climate crisis.

For over a decade, we've been noodling around  the edges of making our investment portfolio more clearly reflect care for creation, but once again, our bottom line got muddled by the endless competing interests that sabotage progress amongst progressives.

Of more concern, frankly, was the tepid, enervated approach to the incipient collapse of our republic.  Presbyterians were at the forefront of the American Revolution back in the day, and watching the work of the Founding Fathers systematically undone by the far right should stir us to a hue and cry.  

"Christian nationalism," in the context of both the American Constitution and the Presbyterian Constitution, is an abomination.  It reflects a fundamental failure of representative government, and a toxic commingling of political power and faith that betrays the intent and purpose of the Gospel.  

The current name of that movement is Trumpism, and it is organized around Trump and those who are either in on the grift, in his thrall, or taking a transactional perspective to morality.  

Its rise threatens every single social position the denomination holds: on climate, on racial justice, on inclusion of Queer folk, all of it.   

But it is, ultimately, not a political challenge.  It's a spiritual and existential threat, one that demands an immediate moral response.

And for that, my fellow Presbyterians are catastrophically ill equipped.

What we collectively did on that front?  We funded a study to examine the dynamics of White Christian Nationalism.  

A STUDY.  I know what that means.

I mean, I've lived most of my life inside the Beltway.  I live here now.  I can hear the thrum of 495 in the distance from my front yard.  If you want to do nothing, or to stall, or to kill something, what do we inside-the-Beltway types do?  We commission a study.  We say more information is needed, and that we need to be more deliberate in assessing the complexities of the issue, and opine that there are subtleties that need to be examined, and more perspectives that need to be considered.  We need to hear from all of the constituencies, particularly those that are historically underrepresented.

By the time that study is completed, Christian Nationalism may well be in power, in such a way that meaningful constitutional governance of our republic no longer exists.

"Something is actually happening, Reg!" as that line from Life of Brian goes.  

Which, of course, calls for immediate discussion.

Of Trump and Jesus

"Jesus of Nazareth.  Donald Trump.

Both were prosecuted and convicted of crimes by the state.

Therefore, they are the same."

This seems to be the logic permeating a substantial portion of American Christianity of late, the portion that sees Jesus and Donald Trump as essentially equivalent persons.  Trump is, by this way of thinking, a martyr, whose struggle is our struggle.  The only reason he is being pursued is that he is the only one who can speak up for the little guy, the only one who knows and speaks the truth.  And like Jesus, he is willing to pay the price for his truth-telling.

This is, of course, utterly insane.  

One could just as easily place Adolph Hitler into that Venn Diagram, only Hitler actually went to prison for the beer-fueled uprising he instigated in Munich.  Like Hitler, the trial and conviction of Adolph Hitler only cemented his popularity among his followers, for precisely the same reason that Trumpists take Trump's convictions as a marker of his legitimacy.  Only a true patriot would be willing to suffer for us!  Just like Jesus!  And Hitler!  Yay TrumpJesusHitler!

But just as Jesus and Adolph were nothing alike, so too Donald and Jesus are nothing alike.

The two bear no resemblance to one another whatsoever morally or personally.  They are, in point of fact, the opposite sort of person entirely.  Making the argument that they are the same is a marker of a disordered mind.

"Are you saying my mind is disordered?" might come the snarled aggression response from the avowed Trumpist, who has learned that threats and bullying are their most effective tools in silencing opponents. 

Yes.  Yes I am.  Insofar as you are in thrall, yes.

But I will admit that there's something inaccurate about my statement.  

That way of putting it assumes that Trumpism is a physical pathology, a peculiar and pernicious neurodivergence or imbalance in brain chemistry.  

It is not.  

Trumpism is first and foremost a moral disease, the same moral disease that has afflicted humankind since we were first driven from Eden. It is the willingness to blame others for our own mistakes.  It is the desire to resent, to attack, and to manipulate truth to our own ends.  It is the hate of one's enemies, and the love of mammon, and the delight in violence and violent thoughts. 

It is a disorder of the soul, a spiritual illness.  

To use some pointlessly overcomplicated words, Trumpism is a sociopolitical manifestation of Augustinian concupiscence.  It tastes of the fruit of the knowledge of evil, its' sickly sticky siren song sweet as Turkish Delight straight from the cold hand of Jadis.  

There, I suppose, you do have your theological connection, because the reason we human beings need Jesus so utterly is our hunger to be ruled by men like Donald.

Of Darkness and Clarity

Progressive Christians love complexity and uncertainty.

It's a significant part of the discourse, as integrated into the prog faithy schtick as Kramer's abrupt arrival through Jerry's front door or a Dangerfieldian tug at one's collar.  

The world is complex! The world is uncertain! Therefore, faith is complex and uncertain!  One must, if one is a progressive, embrace the Holy Dark, that place where we cannot see and where our path is unclear.

This, one is led to believe, is a marker of authenticity, a sign of progressive faith's connection to the Unknown and the Unknowable.  "Look at how bravely we acknowledge that we know nothing, and accept that our faith centers on simply sitting with our uncertainty!  Embrace the darkness!"

There is, of course, a truth to that.  We contingent, mortal beings cannot know the wholeness of the Divine intent.  The Numinous is infinitely beyond us, because, like, yo, that's what makes it Numinous, brah.

But true as that might be, there's a practical flip side to that truth.

If you're a church hawking uncertainty and complexity?  No-one, by which I mean pretty much functionally no-one, wants what you're selling. 

Why would they?  They have it already.  I mean, seriously.  It's the old "selling-refrigerators-to-the-Inuit" absurdity.  

Our blighted saeculum provides complexity and uncertainty by the heaping bucketload, every single day.   We are stuffed like foie gras geese with meaninglessness, directionlessness, and the irreconcilable cognitive dissonances of culture.  Truth and meaning are torn from our grasp by the shrieking winds of political disinformation and mammonist hucksterism, and human beings feel utterly lost in the yawning chaos of it all. 

We can feel it tearing at us, taking us apart, bit by bit.  Our sense of ourselves trembles, and the yearning is for something...anything...that can hold us together.

A theology that says, "Well, sure, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, really, I mean, who even knows, lol, whatevs?"

Sure, you're "being authentic."  You're "authentically" offering cups of water to the drowning. 

That is not what the Gospel is, nor is that what souls seek when they realize how very lost they are.

Faith embraces the cloud and the Holy Dark.  Sure.  Fine.  But it is also and more vitally the pillar of fire by night.  It is the light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.

On the Partisan Mind

Late last week, I woke early and puttered into southeast DC on my scooter.  I was headed to a formerly industrial area near the DC Navy Yard, where I planned to spend a day amongst members of a different Jesus tribe.

My own tribe is rather particular.  I'm a cradle Presbyterian, the child of a storied old church in downtown Washington.  It's the church of Lincoln, of Eisenhower.  The pastor who baptized me, and who was a regular guest at my house?  He preached the sermon that helped put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Let me note, because history warps weird: that same pastor also marched with Dr. King in Selma, and fiercely opposed our misbegotten war in Vietnam.  

I've been part of the PC(USA) since before the PC(USA) was the PC(USA), and after years of conservative flight, we're now a very uniformly progressive gathering. 

The purpose of my day last week was to attend something called The After Party.  There, I intended to listen to the voices of evangelicals lamenting the toxic direction of American political discourse, and challenging how the partisan mind has seeped into the faith.  Two of the three primary speakers...Russell Moore and David French...have been vigorously outspoken about the poisonous impact of Trumpism on the Christian witness, and their presence was a significant draw.

It was, I will say, a very different experience than attending Presbyterian gatherings.  The event was held in the worship space of an evangelical congregation, which was...as such spaces tend to be...a sleek conversion of a former industrial warehouse.  The seating, theater-style.  The tech, stunningly sophisticated, with a board exceeding the width of my congregation's sanctuary, gimballed cameras, and a primary ultra HD screen that spanned the entire front wall.  To my oldline sensibilities, such spaces parse as functional rather than sacred, but one has to appreciate the depth of the functionality.  

So it didn't look like most progressive Christian events.  Meaning, pastel fabrics wantonly festooned everywhere, like someone set off a grenade in a Michaels.

The attendees were a diverse mix of races and genders, as evangelicals tend to be.  There were also plenty of folks in their twenties and thirties, which was...different.  The oldline, progressive as it has become, remains remarkably and increasingly old.

It was a vigorous, intellectually bracing, remarkably grace-filled day of engagement.

I'm not sure, from my conversations and observations, if there was another mainline liberal in attendance.  

This got me to thinking about the partisan mind and progressivism.  

In this gathering, at least as my frank and remarkably civil conversations at table about queer folk and inclusion were concerned, I felt very liberal.  In mainline gatherings, I almost invariably feel like a conservative.  Decades of reimagining and reframing and deconstructing have created discourse that...to my soul...often wanders from the heart of the narrative.  Justice is a worthy fruit of the Gospel, but when it supplants grace as our purpose, we are no longer telling the same tale.

There is a point, without question, when the partisan mind...the mind that divides, that is motivated by hatred and resentment, that embraces the useful falsehood...infects any movement.  This is true of left and right.  If we understand that Christian faith is not and cannot be a creature of the saeculum, that disciples of Jesus are committed to the Gospel first and foremost, then there are places where we set bounds against our partisanship for that highest principle.

Unlike the bat from Aesop's fable, which claimed allegiance to whatever party held power, the Christian witness is to affirm commonality wherever it can be found, but also to retain integrity of witness to our own tribe when partisan conviction subverts the call to grace and redemption.

The Gate

How does one create the most gracious and effective threshold for entrance into a community?

The adult ed class in my little church is reading our way through CALLED TO COMMUNITY, a thematically sorted collection of essays that explore what it means for Christians to journey in the faith together.  It's produced by PLOUGH, the publishing wing of the Bruderhof.  

The Bruderhof, if you don't know 'em, are radical Mennonite communists, and if you're a radical Mennonite communist, doing life together well isn't a tangential concern.  When you share everything in common, and expect every member to freely and wholly embrace that ethic, doing community badly means things get real bad real fast.  

The book presents a rich array of perspectives from across the theological gamut of Christian faith, but the focus remains consistent throughout: how do we do this Jesus thing together?  It's designed for a year long study, but I've condensed it into twelve weeks, which means that our conversations are both rich and dense.  We don't touch on every essay, or every concept within every essay.

This last Sunday, the discussion cracked along energetically, but as has been the case in all of my class preparation, there were things I'd prepared to discuss that we didn't get to.

One of those things came in an essay by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an advocate for/participant in intentional communities and the new-monastic life.  I'd read him a few years back as part of my doctoral work, and enjoyed encountering his voice again.  What struck me were his reflections on how an individual enters a monastic or intentional community.  

Such communities aren't unwelcoming, and frequently have robust ministries of hospitality.  They're open to strangers.  They're friendly and kind and active in the world.

But they are also, by design, hard to join.  There's no hard sell, no effort at bait-and-switch to suck the curious into their common life.  Entering into membership requires significant work.  In order to join, there are substantial expectations of the seeker.

“Only if these seekers are persistent should they be invited into the community..." as Wilson-Hartgrove puts it.

Which, if one is interested in "growing an organization," can seem a little counterintuitive. "All are Welcome," or so the mantra goes in my dying oldline denomination, and you'd think that'd bring 'em in.

On its own, it does not.  Low thresholds for entry produce low levels of commitment.  Low levels of commitment produce a weak shared culture, and a weak shared culture lacks collective resilience.  Monastic communities being the fiercely focused things that they are, demands on the curious are frequently placed early.  

Some Zen Buddhist orders, in particular instance, often make a very pointy point about not being welcoming, in a Fight Club sort of way.  You've got to prove you are worthy, prove you're not a dilletante, prove that you're willing to sit out in the cold and endure being yelled at to go away.

Which, as I consider it in the context of my genuinely friendly little church, isn't at all how we roll.  Nor would we want to.  Visitors are genuinely welcome.  All of them.  We like talking with new folks.  I mean, really.  I hear some pastors lament that their congregations are a circle of backs, and visitors drift alone and ignored through fellowship hours.  My little church is not that way.  At all.

People are welcome to worship, and to join us in fellowship.  They can get their hands dirty in our gardens.  They can help us feed the hungry.  They are, in that place, genuinely our friends, and beloved.  They can stay in that place as long as they like.

When it comes to joining...which isn't that hard, truth be told...I find myself increasingly not pressing the matter.  Just welcome, include, accept, and befriend.  Show interest.  Visit. 

But don't rush it.  Don't grasp, or be anxious.  Let God give the growth.

Ashes to Stay

Every winter for the last several years, I've had to figure out what to do with ashes.

On a night that's below fifty degrees, I'll build a fire, a crackling dance of light and warmth that fills our home with a primal comfort.  We human beings evolved with fire, and evolved to delight in fire, and the place of the hearth in our lives only changed during my parents generation.  After countless millennia, the scent of carbonizing oak or pine or sycamore has been supplanted by the cool glow and flicker of our screens, the soft time of story and quietness around the open flame replaced with the bingbamboom bustle of one thing after another, scrolling ever downward.

It's a loss, it is, because in our frenetic rushing about we are forgetting things.

Like what ash is, and what ash does.

In our disposable age, we assume that when we have used a thing up, it no longer has worth.  We toss aside teratons of plastic nothings.  We crumple wrappers, we plan for obsolescence, we create a wastestream, a Heraclitan torrent of the unvalued and forgotten.

But ash isn't waste.  Ash isn't worthless.  Nothing God makes is waste, even the greyblack remains of the flame.  It only seems so because we now think in shallow, rushing, wasteful ways, flinging ourselves from moment to moment and missing the whole.  

When I clean out my hearth, I do not discard the ashes.  Ashes are precious to a gardener, rich with calcium and carbon and micronutrients.  Ashes are pitchforked into my compost.  Ashes feed my garlic, plumping the bulbs that have been patiently enduring the winter.  Ashes enrich the soil in which my asparagus grows, and a diet of carbon can keep them yielding for decades.  I'm setting three small beds aside for a new plant this year.  I'm eager to experiment with okra, a plant that is remarkably nutritious, easy to seedsave, beautifully ornamental, and will adapt well to our rapidly warming Midatlantic.  

What does okra love?  Okra loveslovesloves wood ash.

To appreciate ash, one must be unhurried about it.  Over patient years, you learn the richness it adds to the earth, come to know the living things that thrive and grow as they take that ash into themselves.  When you smell the cut garlic on your fingers, snap the first spear of asparagus in the spring, or taste the nutty crunch of fried okra?  

You see the value in what the fire has left behind, and that life has reclaimed and made its own.

Cowslip's Church

Denominational Christianity
Feels
Sometimes
To My Soul
Like
Cowslip's Warren
Filled with Fat
Soft Eyed Rabbits
Singing the Praises
Of the Shining Snare

Being Paid to Love Jesus

It was an interesting conversation, as a recent post was shared around with others.  I'd kvetched a little bit about the idea that the sacred--music, in this case--could be copyrighted.  Copyright is about preserving profit, and fusing commerce and faith is dangerous, dangerous thing for the soul and for the integrity of the message of Jesus.

One of the commenters slyly suggested that this wasn't all too different from the whole "getting paid to be a pastor" thing, and man, do I feel that.

On the one hand, I've certainly got the makings of a pro.  I've got an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies and a graduate degree in divinity and am about to get my Doctorate In Churchly Churchiness.  I've got more than a decade of minist'rin' under my belt, and professional certifications of various and sundry sorts.  That's taken time and energy and resources to accomplish, and it's been worth it.  If you're going to teach about the Way of Jesus of Nazareth, it helps to have a deep clue what you're talking about.  This has been an investment, one that has taken much of my now-half-over lifetime.

Neither could I do all of what I do and hold down a separate, full time job.  Well, I could, but then I'd be completely frazzled, unable to think or act or reflect in a creative and non-anxious way.

I've been paid to teach people about Jesus for the last decade.  I am a professional.  It's what I do.

As such, I am of course quite famil-yah with the skript-chah that most justifies my getting Pee Ay Aye Dee for Jesus.  I'm that ox, treading out the grain, although hopefully without quite the same stench.  Thanks, Paul!  Have any advice on how to set up a 409 plan or how to maximize my housing allowance without triggering an IRS audit?

The problem, of course, comes when you actually think and reflect about it.  Dagflabbit, brains are such pesky things.  Because money is a socioeconomic proxy for power, and power does strange things to our souls.  Jesus was always on about that, and he knew how the seductive power of mammon can burrow deep.

Not just into the strange souls of pastors like Prosperity Preacher Creflo A. Dollar, who if you encountered him in a novel would be utterly unbelievable.  A pastor named Dollar, for God's sake, who fleeces his congregation for Learjets and Rolls Royces and multi-million-dollar mansions, all in the name of Bright Shiny Golden Jeezus?  What a lazy, poorly crafted, and transparent caricature!   Totally stereotypical character development!  Who's writing this [poopy] soap opera, anyway?

The painful truth, for those of us who do this for a living, is that the dynamics of wealth can fold insidiously into the heart of our vocation no matter what the scope and scale of our ministry.

Our anxieties about family and material expectations natter and whisper and take control of what had once been a deep commitment to the Way.  They can govern our decisions about how to care for our communities, turning us away from taking wild Gospel risks.  We become managers and chief executive officers, interested primarily in organizational dynamics and branding and institutional structures.  We become development professionals.  We fret about giving, not because it's the common purse and part of our shared stewardship over our lives together, but because we've personally come to rely on the contents therein.  We attend to donors and assiduously court those who are wealthier, because, well, gosh.  We *need* them.  They are more important.  They are where the power lies.

Sure, that's how you run organizations.  That's good business practice.  When you're dealing with large and complex things, that's how you make 'em hum along.  It's the way you do Big Church, if you're going to do Big Church.  But as with all human endeavor, the strength that can be found in that approach is also its hubris.

Because the more we embrace and live those values out, the more the values of the worldly oikonomia suffuse themselves into the divine economy we're meant to be spreading, and into us.

The truth of what Jesus taught comes when all of the trappings of that other economy are torn away, when the lies of the sword and the whispers of mammon are gone and we are left only with the dangerous truth of grace.  That's the radical love that we see proven on the cross, unbroken and unbreakable.

The other kind of love, the kind that can be marketed and commodified, the kind of love that stops the moment you run out of Benjamins to slide into my ill-fitting garter?  I fight it, whenever I feel it rising in my soul, because that's not who we are called to be.

Being a Friend and Being an Ally

In the struggle for justice in our culture, one of the terms that gets bandied about a bunch lately is "ally."  If you support the rights of LGBT folks (which I unreservedly do) you need to be an "ally."   If you support the rights of women, you need to be an "ally."  In the leftist circles where I lurk, it's as prevalent a term as "comrade" once was amongst the fellow-travelers of the communist era.   Is true, tovarisch!

But it sounds oddly in my anarcho-libertarian Jesus-following soul, which quails against it.

Perhaps that's because ally, unlike comrade, does not just assume a common goal or purpose.

The term "ally" assumes a common struggle against a common enemy.  It is, as a term, largely representative of the power dynamics between nation-states.  Allies go to war together.  Allies share common economic goals. That form of relationship is about power and power dynamics, writ into a set of established and negotiated expectations.  Allies have rules and contracts and treaties that establish their alliances, which serve the shared interests of both.

Again, the word has to do with the dynamics of power and self-interest, not organic affinity and appreciation.

Thinking in terms of the United States?  Saudi Arabia is an ally.  So is the current government in Egypt.

Canada, on the other hand, is a friend.  The kind of friend who breaks into your national song when the singer's mike fails at a hockey game.  The kind of friend with whom you don't really worry about boundaries, because you trust each other so much those boundaries really don't matter.  You can be completely yourself and unafraid with a friend.  This is not true with an ally.

Among the wisest of the secular ancients, that's why friendship was considered among the highest of the virtues.  Philia, that natural and volitional affinity, was a relationship of complete, freely given trust between one person and another.  Being an ally is a more sterile, formalistic, and mechanical form of relation, one in which lists of rules and trigger-avoidance-protocols define a carefully negotiated exchange.

And for those who follow the Nazarene as their Teacher in all things, the term "ally" sounds with a peculiar dissonance against the radical command to both love and friendship.   "A greater love has no-one than this," says Jesus, as he swore his life to his friends.  Not his "allies."  The Greek word for "ally" does not appear in any of the teachings of Jesus, nor does it occur in any of the Epistles.

It's also challenging, honestly, to integrate the conflict-assumption of the "ally" concept into the radical agape ethic taught by the Nazarene.  Sure, one can have enemies, those ruled by brokenness and the injustices created by our hunger for power.

But the idea that your calling in existence is to go to war with those who your allies war with?  It stands in tension with the ground of the most fundamental ethic of Christian faith.  It is difficult to be authentically Christian and part of that form of binary relation.  Attacking and tearing down are not the methodology of the Way.

Yeah, I know, there's that one overturned table episode that's everyone's favorite conflict-prooftext, but last time I checked, an overturned table is not the defining symbol of the Christian ethic.    Neither can we create easily demonizable caricatures of those who inflict injustice, even as we oppose injustices.  That reflects neither the complex agape ethos of Jesus nor the justice-orthopraxis of soul-force satyagraha.

It is why, if they approach their commitment to discipleship seriously, Christians make somewhat awkward allies in a conflict.  They cannot be trusted in a fight, because their commitment to grace and mercy is too radical.

Christian Multiversalism

Elsewhere on this blog, I found myself recently in entertaining and stimulating conversation about Christianity and universalism.

I've posted on the interplay between those two concepts on a variety of occasions.  Universalism is a well-meaning, good-hearted theological yearning.  It rises from the faith of those who know that God is love, and from that love the idea that any might be eternally damnificated seems anathema.

The conceptual problem with hell, particularly coupled with divine omniscience and omnipotence, is clear.  It seems to infer a God who's a monster, who fashions creatures for the sole purpose of adding crispy-bits to some giant cosmic deep fat fryer.

Christians who are attempting to be orthodox and universalist, though, have the immense struggle before them of 1) asserting that God loves all beings and 2) asserting that God is neither zealous or just.

Universalism, in its simplest form, seems to imply that there's no variance in the character of the divine relationship with us no matter what we do.  God is Love, whether we are Pope Francis or Pol Pot, whether we love and cherish others or we beat and humiliate and torture them.

On the one hand, that's true.  On the other, it doesn't adequately grasp the terrible justice of God's Love.  Fully knowing and participating in the other, sharing in the truth of their lives completely?  No hellfire could burn the unjust and the cruel as painfully.

And there's always the whole "salvation through Jesus Christ" thing, which for Christians is a nontrivial thing.  Did Jesus matter?  Why?  And if Jesus does not matter, what is the impetus for following him, particularly if it changes nothing at all?  I can be a saint or a selfish, smug, libertine bastard.  The God of universalism does not care.  There is only love, and it's all the same in the end.

This seems problematic, and not just from the perspective of those who hold Jesus to be a magical talisman, a sacrifice whose mere existence absolves us of both sin and responsibility.  It's also a problem if you care about justice, and about living out a life conformed to the radical compassion Jesus taught.

Most significantly, for those of us in my denomination, there was traditionally the challenge that came when the right-wing noticed you'd gone all mushy and UU-ish in your faith.  Charges of apostasy and heresy can fly, and have flown, as fulminating folks fret ferociously about the decline of the faith.  That happens less so now, as there's been a right-wing exodus, but it's still there.

So straight up statements of universalism are...difficult.

This whole thing strikes me as funny, because...well...what I believe is so much more heretical than mere universalism.

One advantage of being a functional nobody, I suppose.  I pastor a sweet, gracious, small church.  I go to few meetings and have no public face other than this wee blog and my sparsely-selling books.  Ah well.  It keeps me from being yet another thing for John Piper to anguish about, I suppose.

That heresy...and it is heresy, in the truest sense of the world...revolves around my understanding of creation.  Along with a growing number of scientists, I hold that creation is not one linear time and space, but an infinite multiverse.

In our multiversal creation, I believe that God not only can save anyone, God does, actually and materially.

Does the Creator of All Things know what it would be like if every being lived fully in accordance with the Divine Intent?  Absolutely.  To say God does not...that God cannot...is an offense to both Divine Sovereignty and God's imagination.  God both knows that, and makes it real.  Is there any meaningful difference between the knowledge of God and existence itself?  No, or God's knowledge of the true good would be no more real than our human dreamings.

On the other hand, I know that this creation is not that perfect realm.  I know it because I, myself, am not that good.  I am not, in my full self, conformed to the best possible self I could be.  Here, I'm not talking "best self" in the sense of the health and wealth hucksters, the Osteens and the Copelands and the Dollars.

I'm talking about being the self that lives fully governed by the grace and compassion of Jesus of Nazareth.

Though that is my metric, my goal, and my purpose, I am not that person.  I do not serve Jesus as I could.  I make choices, struggle though I might, that take me away from being that person.  I know, just as surely, that the church is not perfect.  It is a corpus mixtum, threads of gold woven amongst the mess of human community.  And God help us, one look at our mess of a world lets us know that it is far, far from the best possible reality.

At every moment, the possibility of being that person...or of being a redeemed people...exists.  It is fully known, fully in God's presence, as real as I am as I write this.  As, at the same time, is every possible way we might fall.

We are both saved and damned, with uncountable gradations and in a fractal infinity of iterations.

Universalism seems, well, too small.  A quaint echo of the modern era, with its linear thinking and pre-established narrative.

The divine work is so much more than that.

Torture and the Integrity of Christian Faith

If you call yourself a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, you cannot participate in or justify torture.  That cannot be so, if your faith is to have integrity.

It would seem an obvious statement, but then, so little can be taken for granted with we human beings.   In the United States, surveys indicate that fully half of the population believes that torture can be justified.  At the same time, eighty three percent of the American population considers themselves Christian.

At a bare minimum and assuming the least possible overlap between those categories, this would mean that over a hundred million Americans are 1) Christian by self-understanding and 2) believe that the torture of prisoners can be justified.

This seems...problematic.

If you follow Jesus of Nazareth, he requires certain things of you.  He expects you do to do more than just fall on your knees saying, "Lord, Lord."  The Christian walk is considerably more than that.  You show your faith when you do what he has asked.  How do we treat others?  More significantly, how do we act towards our enemies?  These things are the measure of our faith, which is not an airy abstraction.  The more violent and coercive we are, the more we allow violence towards others to have a hold in us, the further we fall from being able to call Jesus Lord and have that word have any meaning.

And yet, again, there's that hundreds of millions number.

I know there are all sorts of hypothetical situations that folks spin out there, usually involving nuclear device countdowns in major metropolitan areas.  "You'd have to torture the terrorist then, or all those innocent people would die!  What, don't you care about innocent people?"  These are fabulistic absurdities created to distract the moral attention.  "What if a code key for that nuclear device had been surgically embedded in Jennifer Lawrence's brain, and you only had ten minutes to get it out?  You'd have to lobotomize her then!  What, you care more about America's Celebrity Sweetheart (tm) than the lives of innocent people?"  Such arguments are childish phantasms.

"What right have you to judge who is and isn't a Christian," I have also heard.  As a sentient being, I can observe what Jesus taught, which is remarkably consistent as a system of ethics.  I can observe what he taught, and see that it gives no ground to justify such an action.  If under no circumstances would Jesus have condoned brutalizing another person, and you condone it?  It is both self-evident and logically necessary that you are not acting in accordance with the heart of your faith.

There is nothing, nothing whatsoever, in the teachings of Jesus that can be used legitimately to justify torture.  In the Bible, there are descriptions of torture, acts of brutality inflicted on prisoners.  Those acts are, invariably and without exception, inflicted by the unrighteous upon the righteous.  Jesus was tortured, of course.  As were Paul, and Peter, and most of the early apostles.  There is no Biblical record, or biblical warrant, for Christians doing the same to others.  None.

Romans 13 gets carted out here, that passage where Paul talks about the state having the right to wield the sword.  But remember: this is coming from Paul, who himself had remained steadfastly nonviolent as he was beaten, abused, and imprisoned by that pagan, imperial state.  A state that would ultimately execute him for his beliefs.  It cannot be considered a legitimate sanction for Christian violence.

To those hundred million souls, I would say, again: your belief that torture can be justified--under any circumstances, and for any reason--stands in irreconcilable tension with your assertion that Jesus matters to you.

The two cannot be integrated.

That's not unusual.  Very few human beings are entirely consistent, and many of us believe things or do things that violate our stated moral purpose.  I am no different, and I will not claim to be.  I get irrationally angry.  I hold grudges. I feel greed and envy and the desire for power.  I lust.  Sometimes, on a bad day, I do all of those things at once.

What I try not to do, insofar as I am able, is lie to myself that all of that is just fine with Jesus.  And as what Jesus asks of me is not some little compartment, but my whole self, that's a problem.

Honest Welcome

I've been staying later on Sundays for the past month or so, sticking around for a really delightful and intense sequence of conversations about faith.  That's meant that I'm more likely to also be around when other things go on in the life of the church...or rather, the life of the church building.

Right now, for instance, the parking lot is all full as I peer out of my office window.  Row after row of cars and minivans.  Not quite as full as it was earlier in the day, but pretty close.  Parents have been bustling in and out, as in our fellowship hall, a large gathering of girl scouts, doing girl-scouty things.

It is, of course, something my little church is happy to host, in the same way that we're happy to host 12 step meetings and a little cooperative of area moms who share preschooling with one another two days a week.

For nonprofit gatherings, and voluntary community activities, the standing church policy is: Let's see if we've got an open slot.  Hmmm.  Looks like we do!  Welcome!  Here's a key.  Leave it neat when you're done.

That's it.

We don't charge, of course.  But other than popping in to say hello, what we also don't do is expect something in return.  One might say, for instance, were one focused on numerical growth, "Hey, here's a great opportunity to leverage building users into pledge units!  All these users are potential members, we need to figure out a way to insure that we're capturing value from this exchange!"

Which, organizationally, might well be true.  And for certain wings of Christian faith, it is true as well.  We welcome because we're looking to convert.  We welcome because our goal..our intent..is to add to our number.  Everything gets filtered through that desire, to the point where we start feeling as authentically welcoming as that friend's birthday gathering that you suddenly realize is going to be mostly about Tupperware.

Viewing others as a means to an end?  That spirit of grasping seems peculiarly antithetical to a heart of true Christian hospitality.

Word of the Day: Chramming

"Cramming," the word is, new to our modern vocabulary.

It's what happens when a large company--typically a telecom--bills you for services you didn't ask for and didn't want.  Oh, sometimes you've agreed to the charges, technically.  They're hidden away in the legalese of that fifty page terms-of-use you looked at for thirty seconds.  And then every month, deep in the thickets of your incomprehensibly complex bill, there'll be a line or two detailing those charges that you'll just pay because you're in a hurry.

Twice in the last couple of years, I've had to ferret those charges out of our cell phone bills, as AT&T has "accidentally" provided us with nonessential extra services for about $15 extra bucks a month.  Charges like "voice activated calling," which the phone they sold me already does for free.  Or a "star-somethingorother" information service, because you know a smartphone just doesn't give me enough access to information already.

"Gosh, how did those get there," AT&T has said.  "Of course we'll take them right out."

And so out the unnecessary stuff goes, at least until the next time they try to sneak something in there.

It's been profitable for AT&T to layer in the stuff we don't need, hidden away in an incomprehensible thicket of charges.  Hundreds of millions of dollars of profitable per year, actually, as a recent judgment against the company revealed.

Things like this are why we don't trust big businesses, because we know they're always trying to sneak something in that we neither need nor want.

It has occurred to me, though, that there's a Christian analogue.  Something that Big Jesus does when it's getting you in the door.   That thing?

Let's call it: "chramming."

"Chramming" happens when you're drawn to the essential goodness of the message of Jesus of Nazareth.  Compassion and grace, forgiveness and purpose and personal transformation?  Lived out in my own life, and in a community of others walking that path?  

That's what you hear from the good folks who tell you about Jesus, and it's a pretty dang good thing.

I want to be part of that!  Sign me up!

And so you sign up.  But you notice, when you start paying attention, that other things are folded in.  You have to believe God hates certain people.  You have to believe some pretty bizarre things about the nature of creation, things that you know just aren't so from looking at things.   You have to believe some pretty weird stuff about Satan and the Rapture and demons.

Huh, you say.  I don't remember signing up for that.

"It was right there in our terms of use," they'll say, right back.

But chramming in things that don't serve the heart of the Gospel does no one any good.  If you have a belief you have to "sneak in there?"  Honeychild, the odds are good that has nothing to do with what's important anyhow.

Better to just stick with the reason folks showed up in the first place.

The Terrible Secret of the Progressive Church

I have a little secret.

For the last couple of months, I'd been spending some time in an online group comprised of self-identifying "Progressive Christians."  It was interesting, but as the group grew and expanded into the thousands, the conversations became wildly cluttered and overwhelming, like the din of a roaring crowd at a concert.

Meaning, fun for a while, but a terrible place for a conversation.

One of the assumptions of that group--in fact, a fundamentally defining theme of that group--was the welcome and inclusion of LGBT folk.  A huge percentage of posts and exchanges revolved around resisting those who exclude, and celebrating those who include.  That was the focus, the place where all of the energy and passion lay.  It was the great and defining struggle.

I understand this, and am sympathetic.  When it comes to inclusion, ordination, and marriage equality, I'm there.

But I'm also aware that inclusion, ordination, and marriage equality are not my primary goal as a teacher of the Way.  They cannot be, for a reason that we generally don't talk about.

The reason?  Q-Folk are human beings, just as I am.  Oh, sure, they experience gender and sexuality differently.  But otherwise, they're children of God, formed of dust, breathed upon by the Spirit.  Just like me.

I know this because I know them.  They have been and are my co-workers.  They are my family, my own flesh and blood.

From my experience, LGBT people are thoughtful and caring parents, beloved uncles and aunts, good bosses, and wonderful teachers.  They make great friends and colleagues.  They can be funny and creative.  They can be thoughtful and precise.  They can be spiritual and radically caring.  They can be everything that a person can be.

Meaning: they can also be the opposite.  I have had LGBT colleagues who were embezzlers, incompetent, and chronically combative.  I have worked with LGBT folks who have betrayed their partners, and have lied about having cancer to falsely justify chronic absences from work.  Lord have mercy, was she a piece of work.

You can be LGBT and a deeply unpleasant and selfish person.  And you can be in between.  What does that mean, on the far side of this exchange?  What will the church that has welcomed in gays and lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered folk look like?

In that, I see a powerful analog in the full inclusion of women in the leadership of the church.  For those fellowships that have moved away from that ancient bias, it was both absolutely necessary and simultaneously meaningless.  It was necessary because including women's gifts and voices as full partners in the life of the Beloved Community righted an unacceptable injustice.

And at the same time, it makes no difference, because--for all of the heady abstraction of feminist theology--women themselves are not abstractions.  They are human beings, children of God, complex and flawed and wonderful.

What women who rightly fought for a full voice are finding is that--well--the church is still the church.

So just as a church that has finally welcomed the sisters to leadership is still a corpus mixtum, so too will a LGBT-friendly church be a wild mix of saints and sinners.  With that necessary righting of an injustice settled, it will still look EXACTLY like the church does now.

OK, perhaps a little more fabulous, sure.  But at the heart of it, the same.

Meaning, the church will rejoice together and have pointless fights.   People will build each other up, and tear each other down.  There will be wonderful communities, and there will be terrible ones.

The need for reformation, for repentance, for learning and living God's love, and for mutual growth in the Way will remain.

Christian and Libertarian

At a conference this last week in Washington, DC, a group of Catholic bishops and thinkers gathered to discuss the deep schism between Catholic teaching and American libertarian thought.  The title of the conference laid out the core premise pretty clearly:

"Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case Against Libertarianism."

The speakers and presenters weren't there for dialogue with the libertarian movement.  They were there to present the Vatican's position, which is pretty solid.  That position is that...as it is manifested in the United States right now...libertarian thought is fundamentally opposed to Catholic teaching.

The reasons for this are various.

The most obvious, is that the "libertarian" thought typified by Ayn Rand and some right-wing masters of global capital is utterly alien to the teachings of Jesus.  You cannot hold the poor, the outcast, and the weak in contempt and consider yourself a Christian.  You cannot have personal profit or "shareholder value" serve as your primary moral compass and consider yourself a Christian.  That cannot be so.

This is the thrust of the Vatican's case against what often passes for "libertarian" thought in American political discourse. What does this look like?

It looks like the cretin wandering through Target with a faux-assault long gun.

It looks like the CEO who couldn't care less about workers, customers, clients, or community, but only thinks about maximizing profits.

If you use your freedom to threaten or prey on others, Jesus has beef with that.  In that, I find myself in agreement with my Catholic brothers and sisters.

I'm not totally there, though, because I think it's easy to assume from the morons and magnates who tend to become the public face of libertarianism that that's all there is to it.  That's a flawed assumption.

I'm also aware that Catholicism is a deeply hierarchical and authority-based faith tradition.  If you are a traditional Catholic, all autonomy is erroneous.  Final authority for all spiritual matters rests with the Vatican.  One can resist, of course, or disagree.  And I know folks do, and still consider themselves Catholic.  But within that system of faith, autonomy is not a core value.

Or to put it another way, when Catholicism errs, too much freedom ain't the error.

While it is not possible to be an acolyte of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman and also Christian, it is entirely possible to be libertarian and Christian.

I can speak this with confidence, because I've bothered reading the Bible.  Jesus has plenty to say about freedom and the law, in both his actions and his teachings.  While he honored the intent of the law in both his actions and his teachings, he was also not willing to be bound by authority when authority itself transgressed against the purpose of the law.

The Apostle Paul--not "deutero-Paul," but the Apostle himself--taught precisely the same value set.  Honor and respect the law, even if it kills you.  He'd say this.  But at the same time, he recognized that following Jesus meant we no longer felt under the pressure of coercive power.  There's one law.  Just one.  Other than that, we're completely free.

That's the same position held by the Letter of James.  The "Royal Law" is also the Law of Liberty.

The Gospels and Epistles make it clear: liberty exists so long as love is the rule of our life.  If we do not love our neighbors as ourselves, then the systems and cultures we create will become the enemies of our own freedom.

If this is how you live, valuing your neighbor's freedom as deeply as your own, then liberty is a meaningful value for you.  You're both Christian and libertarian.

If not?  If all that matters to you are your rights, your wealth, and your power?  It is not a love of liberty that guides you.

That so many in our culture choose to understand liberty otherwise creates an interesting and observable irony: profit-driven capitalist "libertarianism" is the enemy of human freedom.  It controls with hunger and fear, and zealously defends its selfish freedom even if the liberty of others is trampled in the process.

So we can talk endlessly about liberty, while doing everything in our power to destroy it.  It never ceases to amaze me how many novel ways human beings can come up with to screw things up.

Jack Chick, Dark Dungeons, and Leveling Up

The other day, whilst perusing one of my social media feeds, I encountered a promo for an upcoming crowdsourced semi-amateur indy movie.

The film in question is an adaptation of a psychotronic comic-tract produced by the mysterious and elusive Jack Chick.  Jack Chick, if you're blessed not to know of him, produces those weird little pamphlets handed out on street corners by Christians who are convinced they are doing evangelism by just giving flyers and odd looks to passers-by.  

Chick tracts come in comic book form, and garishly represent the wildest and most insanely paranoiac version of Christianity imaginable.  

Global warming?  It's the devil at work.  Trick or treating on Halloween?  It's the devil at work.  Evolution?  It's the devil at work.   Being a race car driver with an Asian Buddhist wife?  It's the devil at work.  

Notice a theme?

The film in question is one based on one of his tracts: "Dark Dungeons."  That tract was produced in the 1980s, and was an attack on the then-new world of Dungeons and Dragons and role playing gaming.  Dice-and-book-games are how we become snared in the occult, it says!  These games control and destroy our lives, it says!  Those spells are real!  Burn your TSR books!  Throw away your dice!  Give up your satanic obsession and come to Jesus!

It's a peculiar tract, particularly if you have any first hand knowledge of the game itself.  Role playing gaming is social, pleasant, imaginative, and totally compatible with Christian faith.  Evil?  Not even vaguely.

The film itself is even more peculiar.

It's being produced by avid gamers, who find Jack Chick's attacks on their pastime so preposterous and insane that they can't resist the opportunity to make a film out of it.  I can't blame them in the slightest.  It's a joke, but as they go to great length to explain, it's neither parody or satire.  They're just presenting Jack Chick, exactly as Jack Chick presents himself.

Which is why Jack Chick has given them the rights to make the movie.

It's bizarre.  Here you have "evangelists" who know that they are working with people who view them as self-parody.  The movie, like the tracts, will just make Christian faith look laughable.  And yet...the evangelists don't care.

It's hard to know how to process that kind of willful obliviousness.  

How do you respond to that sort of disconnect from the actual results of an action, without getting your dander up and saying bitter and mean stuff about the creators of these utterly counterproductive tracts?  How to be loving, affirmative, and gracious, and yet debunk their dark imagination?  It's a struggle, but it's one worth having.  Because we do not overcome evil with evil, but with good.  We don't overcome hatred with more hatred, but with grace.

Sometimes, though, you need to overcome bad crazy with double-extra-good-crazy.

It is for that reason, among others, that I have produced what I believe to be the single geekiest book in all of Christendom.  I say this with pride in my own geekitude, as an unabashedly and unashamedly geekish pastor who fondly remembers both gaming as a kid, but also gaming with his boys when they were little.

The title: Leveling Up: How to be a Christian Cleric. 

This short tome is a love letter to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, one that plays around with the conceit that in some odd way, Jack Chick was right.  D&D is real.  And in that bizarre place where it is real, one can choose to be not just a fighter or a magic user or a thief, but a cleric.

And not just any kind of cleric, but a Christian cleric.

With spells and all, ones that Christian clerics would use, and that actually kinda work if you think about them in the right way.

Being a level eight Presbyterian cleric myself, I'm just the right person to pull that off.

If that sounds entertaining, or at least silly, feel free to go to Amazon and snag a copy.  The eBook version is no pricier than the Diet Dr. Pepper you'll drink while reading it, although the formatting is a bit squirrelly.  I'm still fiddling with that.

You're better off with the print version, honestly, though it'll put you back the cost of couple of pints of ale.

That a problem?  If you're short on silver pieces, just hit me up at belovedspear at gmail dot com, and I'll pitch you a nice clean PDF for free.