Puros

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

- WB Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, III

The Sting of Nature

It was a beautiful Monday afternoon, blessedly free of the dank Mid-Atlantic humidity that defines so many August days, and I was on my bicycle.  Fairfax County has some delightful bike trails, and I and my younger son were taking an hour or so to ride the Cross County trail, starting at a tiny little park and ending at the beach at Lake Accotink.

The ride itself was a pleasure, snaking through woodlands and along the utility right-of-way clearings, which had been left to become lush grasslands.  At the lake...which actually looked like a lake, given recent soaking rains...we stopped to hydrate and chat.

And then we returned. I marveled at all of the life around us as the trail pushed through an area of powerline-crossed wetland.  Small gulleys and streams snaked lazily through heavy growth of reeds and tall grasses, and throughout all of it, insects buzzed and hummed about their business.  So many pollinators, so many living creatures!  

It was all a wonder of natural beauty.

Which was precisely when a small black something crossed my plane of vision right in close and right to left, and I felt the impact of an insect right where my head and the front of my bike helmet intersected.  There was a moment of fierce chitinous scrabbling, followed by what was to be the first in a succession of sharp stabbing stings.  

The insect's efforts were immediately joined by my own, as I endeavored to 1) get it the rackafracking frack off of me and 2) not crash and 3) come to a stop and 4) also not crash.  A second sting was followed by a third and a fourth, before finally my frantic beating at my own forehead dislodged whatever it was, and I came to an abrupt halt.

For the next few days, the flesh over my os frontale was swollen, giving me a faintly Neanderthal aesthetic.  I don't doubt the wasp fared far worse.

Of all the foreheads on all the bike paths in all the world, you had to fly into mine?

Why, one might ask, did that happen?  Was there a reason for it?  Was it purely random, or was there a Lesson To Be Learned about the sharpness of the natural world, about how little it cares for our romantic musings and moonings?

This, I can't know.  In the scheme of things, and against the backdrop of how easily we mortals are broken, that momentary unpleasantness was a very little thing.  

It is a peculiarity of our times that shortly thereafter, I watched a viral video in which tiny little human forms...each, a soul, as fully human as I...fled an oncoming wall of water, rock, glacial ice, and mud in a Nepalese/Tibetan valley.  Along with millions of others, I watched them consumed.  I watched the moment of their deaths.  One moment, they were tourists and workers enjoying the beauty of a mountainous valley.  The next, they were gone.

My trivial discomfort, nothing to theirs, and infinitesimally tiny relative to the wrenching, heartbreaking loss of those who loved them.  Yet still, it is nature, showing how buses can be tossed like matchsticks, how seven story concrete edifices can be shattered like glass, how even the swiftness of flight and terror can end in a tossing, tumbling oblivion.

Why, one might ask again, shaken by the viewing, did that happen?  There are reasons, of course, underlying the mechanics of the event.  Glacial collapses...like wildfires and droughts and megastorms...are more common now that our world is warming.  But the "why" of those particular deaths is harder to parse out.  Do we suppose they died because they deserved it in some way?  They did not.

It is as beyond me as the reason for Job's suffering was beyond Job.

The Divine Nonconformist

I've doing some planning work for an adult education class this Fall, one in which I'm going to be exploring familial conflict and dysfunction through the lens of Scripture. Meaning, go into the Torah and the Writings and the Gospels, and surface pungent archetypal tales of Folks Not Getting Along.

The challenge, of course, isn't finding such stories. Lord have mercy, is that not a problem. The challenge is picking and choosing from the great groaning table of human mess woven into our Holy Book of Books, so's it ain't a one hundred and fifty seven week study. I mean, we get one opening chapter in which it's all good, and by the end of the second chapter, Adam's shaming and Eve's blaming and then it’s the healthy sibling dynamics of Cain and Abel and we're off to the races.

As part of that, I went searching for an old book on family systems that I'd read years ago, one called How Your Church Family Works, which somehow had made its way from the pastor's office into the parlor of the manse. 

Bowen/Friedman Family Systems work isn't cutting edge these days, as the therapeutic herd has moved on to trauma-centering approaches, but I still find some of the core concepts useful. The operating assumption of family systems therapy is this: we're part of organic systems and networks of relationship that shape our reactions and responses to others in ways that we frequently struggle to understand. That has always made sense to me, and it can be quite useful as a therapeutic process, but digging back into those concepts reminded me of a couple of things that never worked for me about that approach.

First, one of the core ideas behind Family Systems work is the concept of the triad. Meaning, it's not just your binary relationship with your mother, but your relationship with your mother and your father. It's not just your relationship with your mother, but your relationship between you, her and your younger brother. You talk about her to him, he talks about you to her, and you talk to him about her, and everything is emotional triangles and triangulation, as the trifold energies of interrelationship play out. There, the challenge I have isn't that this is too complex. It's that it's far too simple. Most of us are connected intimately to more than just two other people, I would hope, and that means our true relational connections aren't a two dimensional shape. They're more like energies playing across an ever evolving four-dimensional neural network than anything crudely Pythagorean.

Second...and this is a nontrivial problem I have with secular therapy-speak generally...it can get too centered on the dynamics of dysfunction. Everything is seen through the lens of dysfunction. As part of my family systems counseling coursework years ago, one central class assignment was to chart our emotional genealogy. We created actual charts of our family history going back as many generations as we could remember. Then, we had to use a set of labels to indicate the triangulated dysfunctions...the divorces, the addictions, the estrangements, the co-dependencies. That left us with a dark genealogy, a familial tapestry of wreck and ruin. And on that chart, there was no way to indicate the places of health. No mutual care, or faithfulness, or honor, or nurturing, or love.  It felt both jaundiced and a weensy bit counterproductive.

There’s a rule in motorcycling, and it’s a simple one: you go where you’re looking. If you anxiously target-fixate on a hazard in the road, you’re going to go right into it. Without a hopeful vision, a clear sense of the good, or anything to orient one’s faithful action towards, things stay broken.

The Apostle Paul describes a very different approach to life in his letter to the Church at Rome. In the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul talks about how we live our lives. That represents a shift from the tone of Romans up to this point, which has been mostly diving deep into the theology of salvation by grace through faith.

As the letter ends, Paul takes a step back, and starts grounding all his theologizing in what it actually means to walk the Way of Christ. Here is what that actually looks like, Paul says.

In the first verses of Romans 12, Paul is once again talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the good of one another, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.

This is a significant part of our reality right now, as our culture stumbles through thickets of violence, chaos and turmoil. The world is on fire, there are unprecedented storms and the spreading blight of war, and none of that is metaphorical. In all of that, we’re obsessed with dysfunction, focused on dysfunction, because that’s what our culture wants us to look at.  Obsessing over what is broken is the primary business model of commodified media, eh?  And where does that get us?  Just deeper into the mess.

What is our task, as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, in such a time?

It is not to be conformed to that world. We are not to yield to the disorder that comes from the human hunger for control. We are not to hunger for power, spread fear, or expect others to serve us. We are not to succumb to slander and innuendo, eagerly passing along gossip and misinformation. That does not mean “the gossip and misinformation spread by the people we disagree with.” It means our gossip and misinformation. It means the lie we tell ourselves about others to reinforce our bias against them.

As the apostle Paul writes elsewhere, true followers of Jesus do not seek to tear down, but to build up. They do not deconstruct, but construct. We are children of the God who brings order from nothingness. If we wish to build or rebuild, that creative act rises from having developed a deep sense of the gifts and graces God has given you, and knowing what makes the world good. Know what is broken and why, sure. But it requires grace and wisdom to heal that broken thing.

For all of the wisdom in that family systems book about church as a family...and let it be said, there are very valuable sections in there...there was a third thing that I found challenging.  The last part of that "triad," so to speak.

There was a minor missing piece on the church front: God.

Oh, the concept of God was present.  Scripture was cited.  Here and there God would be included as one of the persons in a dysfunctional triangle, like some absent uncle or neglectful parent. 

But God at work among us, as the one that stands above our mess, and that can transform our mess? That was entirely missing. All we got is systems on systems on systems, and no sense of engagement with the higher power and startling grace that heals and transforms the wreck we make of things.

So, sure, we must accurately observe the things that don’t work, the shredded quiltwork of the pain we inflict on one another. There are good uses for family systems thinking, as there are for so many of the myriad other approaches to surfacing our brokenness. Being aware of how we sustain and maintain our pain is a vital step in that process.

But what heals?  What transforms?  That comes from knowing that God is above that dysfunction, and that Christ’s path leads us to something very, very blessedly different.

The Crumbs

Whenever summer arrives, I’m reminded of one of those entertaining facts about the complex, beautiful living world around us. We humans may seem to be the dominant species on the planet, but there are other creatures that do just as well. Like, say, the ants, who outnumber us two point five million to one, and are one of the most successful and adaptive creatures on our little world.

There are nearly fourteen thousand distinct species of ant. There’s the nearly two-inch long Amazonian Dinoponera Gigantea, meaning “Terrible Painful Giant” ant, which has a pretty potent sting and sharp mandibles. There’s the less threatening Carabara Atoma, the smallest known ant, which means “Heavy-Headed Speck” ant, which is as long from the tip of its antennae to the end of it’s abdomen as a credit card is thick.

Ants have a solid foothold on every continent but one, and that one is…kind of ironic, right?

Mostly, my encounters seem to be with the nearly ubiquitous Tetramorium Immigrans, the little black pavement ants that invariably find their way into mid-Atlantic homes when the weather gets warmer. They’ll come noodling into bathrooms, or booping across kitchen counters, and where one comes leaving a little pheromone trail, it means more will follow. “Dave, we’ve got ants again,” Rache will say, and I know it’ll be my sad duty to spray. Otherwise, I try not to kill them if I can avoid it, because they neither bite, sting, nor carry diseases.

So long as they stay in the yard, they’re welcome. There’s been a constant stream of Tetamorium Immigrans flowing across my carport this season, a relentless bustling rush of tiny chitinous bodies running right along the brick wall of the house, along a groove in the concrete, and then down and under the driveway. If it’s an average-sized nest, there are fifteen to thirty thousand of them down there, and so that flow doesn’t ever seem to stop, morning, noon and night, as relentless a bustle as any major human thoroughfare at the height of rush hour, with the only differences being 1) size and 2) the fact that the ants are actually moving. 

I got to wondering: Where are they going?  So I tracked them one day.  They’re going to my compost bucket, where they push past the charcoal filter to help themselves to countless little bits of rotted tomato, carrot peelings, and the cut-tops of okra.

Should I begrudge them this? I know, given the frequency with which I receive flyers from exterminators eager to kill every insect on my property, that there are some folks who struggle with the idea that there might be any unauthorized living creatures on their land. Kill the bugs!  Sure, spray kills mosquitoes and ticks, but it also kills nearly every other insect.  It kills the ants and spiders, kills the beetles and butterflies, kills all of them, all for our convenience.  We human beings can be weirdly territorial that way, mindlessly guarding even the crumbs that fall on the periphery of our lives.

The Gospel of Matthew delves into that a little bit, in a strange passage about a foreign woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.

First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not a Judean. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the subhuman creatures.

But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her relentlessness...very publicly backs down. She is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.

It’s worth noting which Gospels have this story, and which Gospels do not. Mark has it, Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, clearly written for a community of Jewish Christians before everything in Judah fell apart. Matthew has it too, Matthew, whose primary goal is to show how Jesus meets and exceeds the demands of Torah and the Prophets, again for a primarily Jewish audience. Luke and John, which were written for Gentiles, all of whom were outside that first fold of Galileans and Judeans? They don’t have this story.

The difference seems obvious. There were ethnically insular Christian communities at the dawn of the church, who assumed that the Gospel belonged only to their particular race, nation, or ethnic group. The communities that first received Mark and Matthew tended that way. So Mark and Matthew made sure to remember to them that one time when Jesus allowed himself to be seen publicly changing his mind. Jesus himself, yielding to the insistence of a foreign woman who just wanted to experience God’s healing and grace, allowing his hardness to fall away.

We know, we do, that this selfishness of soul still lives in the heart of humankind, and that we are prone to treating certain others as if they are not human, as if their hopes and their sorrows aren’t as known to God as our own. It seems just part of our lingering soul-blindness, that inability to offer the grace we mistakenly assume is ours and ours alone.

Typically, I read this passage as speaking most directly to our ethnonationalist biases, to our tendency to look on those from other cultures as unworthy.  It's not primarily about how we treat our dogs, eh?  

But I do wonder, at times, if the measure of the grace we will receive might rest in our willingness to show compassion not just to our human neighbors, but also to those creatures that really and truly aren’t us, and that we consider less than us.

Just to be clear, I’m not considering converting to Jainism. Nor will I…and my wife will be relieved to hear this…be scattering crumbs for the ants in our kitchen. If there were some way to come to an agreement with ants, in which they’d only come into the kitchen to clean up debris between the hours of one and four am, we’d be good. But I don’t speak any of the many varieties of ant-language, as the pheromones I produce aren’t of much help.

That said, I’m aware, as I watch the ant highway to my compost bin, that they’re God’s creatures too, and I watch where I step. I’m aware, as I tend to my garden, that the dozens of species of native bees and little wasps and tiny shining flies that bustle from my flowering mint to my bolting basil to those great gorgeous okra blossoms are the very farthest things from pests.

Sure, they’re small and their lives are fleeting. But so are we, and so are ours. 

It’s a hard world for little things, but we don’t need to contribute to making it any harder.

----

Just because, here's a Portlandia sketch about ants that amuses me.  Note: Tetramorium Immigrans are also known as "sugar ants."  They do not eat wood.  I know this because I am a Dad.

Uncle Tom's Eisegesis

"Religion!" said St. Clare, in a tone that made both ladies look at him.  "Religion!  Is what you hear at church religion?  Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?  Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature?  No!  When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath."

"Then you don't believe that the Bible justifies slavery," said Miss Ophelia.

"The Bible was my mother's book," said St. Clare.  "By it she lived and died, and I would be very sorry to think it did.  I'd as soon desire to have it proved that my mother could drink brandy, chew tobacco, and swear, by way of satisfying me that I did right in doing the same.  It wouldn't make me at all more satisfied with these things in myself, and it would take from me the comfort of respecting her; and it really is a comfort, in this world, to have anything one can respect..."

Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 190-191

Headwinds

I knew, when I headed to church one recent Sunday, that the ride home was going to be a little damp. The forecast was for rain, copious rain, blessed, welcome, drought-busting rain, and with the MidAtlantic humidifier turned up to eleven, there was no question we were going to get a drenching.

It drizzled a little bit on the way there, but when I stepped out to the scooter to head home, it was pouring. I no longer fit into the rainsuit I bought thirty years and thirty pounds ago, but that doesn’t matter. Riding home in the rain on a hot day is like getting free admission to a water park, and I was actually looking forward to it. I stowed my phone and my wallet in my waterproof courier bag, which I put in my scooter’s waterproof storage compartment, and with my torso protected by an excellent raincoat, I set out home.

In light, moderate, or passing rain, scooters are superior to motorcycles. Tuck your legs as demurely as Audrey Hepburn behind the scooter fairing, and you often don’t get wet at all. In light, moderate, or passing rain, that is. Last week was not that. But getting soaked isn’t the primary challenge when you’re on two wheels and the heavens are set to torrential-plus.

Challenge one is traction, as water courses across the road. When the ground is first dampened, things get slick. Then, the issue is flowing or standing water. Have you ever hydroplaned in a car? Let me assure you that hydroplaning on two wheels is a more…interesting.. sensation. You need to be careful of pace, particularly when changing directions, because the direction you go when you hydroplane in a sharp turn on two wheels is down.

Challenge two is visibility. When the rain picks up, you soon notice that the wiper settings on motorcycle helmets leave something to be desired. When you’re on the Beltway and the cars around you are slowing and pulling over, have hazards on, and their wipers are flailing as wildly as a panicked eight year old trying to escape a yellowjacket? When rain isn’t just torrential-plus but torrential plus coming at you at highway speeds? 

This is where doubt begins to enter one's mind.

Whenever we attempt something challenging, particularly if that challenging thing speaks to becoming the grace-filled soul that that God yearns for us to be, there is a moment of enthusiasm, a moment of delight. But then the storm has a tendency to pick up. You commit to a new life, a new path of action or a time of recovery, something that you know will bring you into alignment with a more gracious path.  But the wind howls in your ears that you’re sure you can’t do this, that it’s too much, that it’d be better to be back in the safe prison of your familiar brokenness.

The world around us is filled with powerful things we cannot control, after all, and our fear that our humble efforts will be sunk by those powers and principalities can crowd out our hope.

There’s a story of storm in the Gospel, as the disciples find themselves out on the sea of Galilee. They’ve just left a gathered throng, and between the demands of the crowd and the endless questions of his inner circle, Jesus was spent. He first needed that time away after the death of his cousin John, and after feeding the five thousand, he finally was able to be by himself, and he told his friends to go on ahead across the sea while he went to the mountaintop.

The Sea of Galilee is susceptible to sudden storms that blow up, winds that race across open waters and turn what is typically a flat and easy passage into something rather more significantly challenging. As fishermen, the disciples would have known this, and known how to cope with it. It wasn’t life threatening, or so we are told, and the sea was up, and the waves were high, and the wind was blowing hard against them.

They were handling that, although the going was hard.

What freaked them out just a little bit more was Jesus, as he walked towards them across the water. This is entirely understandable, because it’s unsettling when things step outside of their normal pattern, and a dude walking across the roiling surface of a lake in heavy seas is pretty far outside of the normal pattern.

They are justifiably a little upset by this, and Jesus hollers out to them to calm them down. Peter, hearing him, is still a little doubtful. Hey Jesus, he yells back, if it’s you, ask me to come join you! To which Jesus says, sure, c’mon over.

I’m not quite sure why this was enough for Peter to get out of the boat, but apparently it was. So the story tells us that Peter set out across the water towards Jesus. Now, it’s one thing to be in a boat on the water, and it’s another thing to be right there on the surface of the storm.

Peter panics. He’s suddenly aware of his vulnerability, of all the different reasons this just won’t work, and the water starts to consume him. Jesus comes over, lends a hand up, and the two get into the boat. The winds calm, and the disciples are in awe.

This story is a story of faithful striving when all around us is churn and storm and spray. In those times, faith in our purpose is tested, and doubt comes easy.

We all do that, but those first earnest efforts can be so easily undercut by doubt. We know you need to heal that relationship. We know we need to stop doing that one thing…you know what that is, for you…that has continually sabotaged our ability to show the grace of the Spirit. We know you’re called to something new and wonderful and hard. For a moment, it’s wonderful and euphoric. And then things get harder.

The salt of the spray fills our mouths and blinds our eyes, and we feel our hope bleed away to nothing, and it seems as if we’re going to sink beneath the waves. We falter, we hesitate, and any hope we had vanishes like Eurydice before the eyes of Orpheus.

That’s the point, as Jesus folk, where we need to set aside strangling anxieties and smothering doubts, reach our hands out, and trust in God’s strength and Christ’s grace and the love of the Holy Spirit.

If you are anxious and fearful on two wheels, you’ll freeze or panic, and that doesn’t end well.  There've been times in my life...times of stress and times of hardship...where I've stopped motorcycling, because I could feel my confidence in everything shaken.  But that wasn't what I felt on the road that day.  

I knew that I knew what I was doing.  When the wind drives the rain into you, and your water-coated visor makes visibility like opening your eyes in a swimming pool, there are two solutions.

First, pause, pull over under an overpass, and wait it out.  That works, but I prefer not to do that on the Beltway in low visibility situations if I can avoid it.  It's a dangerous road, filled with incompetent and distracted drivers who don't have a great sense of whether they're in a lane or on the shoulder.

There's a second approach, one that works if the road isn't flooded.   You want to clear your visor?  Go faster.  Don't speed.  Just be sure that the same wind that's blinding you is driving the rain off.  It works, time and time again.  So I forced my way into the storm.

The visor cleared, the beaded rain streaming away as rapidly as it landed. I could see again, as I pulled onto the high occupancy toll lanes, empty but for myself.

Wordsmithing is not a Spiritual Gift

Continuing on from my prior meditations on the PCUSA's Proposed New Confession:

Having laid out the nature of God and our stubborn violation of the good in its first two sections, the third section tells the story of God's response.  It describes the point and purpose of Jesus, and the blessings of the Holy Spirit as it gathers and empowers those who are moved by the grace of the Gospel.

There are things, of course, that one can pick at and quibble with.  

Calling Jesus a "Palestinian Jew," for example, is comprehensible but peculiar.  Would any Judean of the first century have spoken of themselves in this way?  Would Jesus?  Generally speaking, the understanding of that region as uniformly "Palestine" is a historical imposition of imperialism, both Roman and British, which means it's got some wildly ironic resonances.  Colonizing history with ideological anachronisms isn't just a venial sin of right wing nationalist hagiographers, eh?

Or in the very next sentence, where we are told that "Jesus showed that the brutality of facts does not define the truth of God."  It's a very pretty sentence, but...huh.  "The Brutality of Facts?"  What exactly does that mean?   Is factuality a problem?  It sure is in our post-reality culture, where facts are whatever we say they are, and alternative facts are the wormed tongue of tyrannical systems.  "We will not allow Our Truth to be defined by Facts," sounds like the sort of thing one hears from a White House spokesperson these days.

Saying "the brutality of facts" seems far less sharp than "the facts of brutality," which creates a cleaner mirrored couplet with "the truth of God."  Assuming, of course, that this is what was meant.

I could keep going.  

But I won't.

Mostly, this is because as I engage with these latter two sections, I can feel the Dark Spirit of Wordsmithing rising within me.   Picking over language and legalistic quibbling are both bitter fruits of the Presbyterian compulsion to wordsmith, in which we imagine that we can build a semiotic tower to heaven if only we can workshop just the right words.  I succumb to the prideful, perfectionist, endlessly dissatisfied obsessions of that particular demon just as easily as any other Presbyterian.

And mostly?  Mostly these last two sections are lovely and thoughtful, gracious and faithful and hopeful.  Really solid work.

I would have no trouble integrating large sections of them into my little congregation's weekly Affirmation of Faith, where we read from the Confessions as a shared expression of what we hold together.

Once I've stopped worrying at it, that is.

Pride and Courage

"Do not pursue spectacular deeds. We must deliberately renounce all desires to see the fruit of our labor, doing all we can as best we can, leaving the rest in the hands of God. What matters is the gift of your self, the degree of love that you put into each one of your actions.

Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best. Neither glory in your success, but refer all to God in deepest thankfulness.

If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride, because it shows you trust in your own powers. Never bother about people’s opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed."

Mother Teresa, from Called to Community

Of Faith and Sycophancy

One of the most unsettling things about the sudden surge in artificial intelligence abilities is just how relentless and ubiquitous AI seems to be becoming. It can do, well, pretty much everything, and as it iterates more and more towards holding competencies that unsettle us, it’s increasingly present. Just recently, I listened to my sons have a long and passionate discussion about AI capacities in the afternoon, after which I talked with a dear friend about how much more comforting and competent AI was than their doctors during a recent major health challenge. 

Sure, there are still AI errors, like receiving the first clearly-AI-generated flyer for the community Easter Sunrise Service and noting that we’ll be celebrating the resurrection of “J-hus Chris.” J-hus Chris is Risen Today just doesn’t quite have that Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-leyee-uuu-yah ring to it.

But those mistakes are getting rarer. The latest iterations of Anthropic’s Claude are strikingly superior to models from just six months ago, capable of performing extended and complex multistage tasks, strategically analyzing large amounts of information, or inferring intent from textual cues.

Again, though, it’s not perfect, and one of AI’s primary flaws is sycophancy.

AI is notoriously agreeable, always telling you what a genius you are. It doesn’t challenge you, doesn’t point out that maybe you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and always affirms you using language that mirrors your own. Claude does this a bunch with me, throwing theological terms into the mix, or noting how very pastoral my interests are. Most of the time, it feels pandering, like someone who’s telling you what they think you want to hear, but who doesn’t know you well.

Why does it do this? Two reasons: Pretraining and Emergence. It’s pretrained to be agreeable, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use it, and it wouldn’t learn and grow and let OpenAI show us profit-padding ads.

Second, that obsequious fawning comes because it’s learned from interacting with millions of us to be even more relentlessly agreeable, because that’s what the great sprawling mass of humanity desires. We want to be affirmed. We want to be encouraged. We don’t like to be challenged, or to be told when we’ve fundamentally misunderstood something important. This is particularly true when it comes to our ever-tenuous grasp of how our Creator wants us to live together.

Are we challenged by Jesus? Because we should be.

Christian faith, honestly and plainly understood, challenges our operating presumptions the moment we engage with it.  

To our desire for possessions and material gain, we are told with clarity that we can't serve that and God, and that wealth poses a mortal danger to our souls.

Desiring any form of human power...mammon, social influence, or the sword of the state?  No matter how sure we are of the correctness of our views, or how pure we imagine our intent may be, Jesus ain't buyin' it.   He'll call us out, every single time.  We cannot yield to those yearnings, and we really really do not want to hear that.

To the righteous hatred we feel for our enemies, we are told that we must not just let that go, but let it be transformed by Christ's love.  Loving those who believe exactly as you do and who inhabit your precise ideological echo chamber is morally meaningless.  "Enemies are for hating" is the AntiChrist's self-serving and circuitous logic, and a moral sinkhole.  It can govern no disciple of Jesus.

All of this is hard for us, as it was hard for those who first gathered around Jesus.  We'd rather engage in the moral equivalent of cognitive outsourcing, refusing to accept that the Gospel first and foremost fundamentally unsettles our sense of our own correctness.

In the Flesh

Every year, the group is different.

They stand just up the street, a cluster of teens, all of them awaiting the arrival of the big yellow bus that will take them to the nearby high school. I pass them on the other side of the street on my morning walk with the dog, every once in a while making sure to be out of the way when a teen comes hurtling down the street, having gotten out of the house at precisely the moment the bus passed it.

This year, it’s a group of four teenage girls that seems to have been selected by a casting director’s diversity and representation consultant. A Latina, an African immigrant, an Asian American, and a White girl, and they’re all lined up in a row, in precisely that order, morning after morning.

This would, were one to be making some slightly unsubtle teen film about the joys and blessings of our multiethnic melting-pot republic, be a perfect setup. Each of their lives and backgrounds, different, coming together and finding friendship and common humanity as they got to know one another. That’d be great, but that’s not the reality.

All year long when I’ve passed them, they’re always standing in what apparently is their assigned spot, each a perfect COVID era six feet away from the other, Latina first, two meters, then the African girl, then two meters, then the Asian girl, and two meters beyond that, the white girl sitting separate in the passenger seat of her dad’s idling car.

And never, not once all year long, have I seen any of them interacting with one another. Not once. 

 Every day I pass them, they’re all in The Position. Hands together, head down, thumbs typing or swiping.

The pastor in me wishes that some morning, the Apostle Paul could join me on my walk, and I could point to that foursome hermetically sealed away from one another, and ask: 

Paul? When you talk about the importance of not being in the flesh, how does that relate to what we’re seeing happen all around us? Could you break that down for me? This culture-wide discomfort around face to face connection, our seemingly inexorable separation from one another? How does that play out against what you taught about Spirit and flesh?

What does that have to say to us, in a time when we struggle with the realization that the society-wide experiment with inescapably present media is depriving us of an essential component of our humanity? How, I want to ask Paul, does that speak to the peculiar character of our distracted lives and disembodied attentions? When passing a group of teen girls doesn’t sound like the delightful chattering spring vibrance of a murmuration of starlings, but is day by day as silent as a sarcophagus?

Like the clinical psychologists who designed the software that drives the dark glass shards that consume our attention, we know that the reason we aren’t present is because of a weakness of the flesh, a vulnerability that can be hacked. When we can be shown exactly what our brains desire, all the time, without ceasing, why would we get to know or care about the person standing right next to us? Or, equally and to be fair to the teens, the person sitting right next to us on the couch every evening, as we both scroll mindlessly through nothing.

We cannot be compassionate or love our neighbor if we don’t even notice the human beings around us, if we’re oblivious to the place in which we are standing.

Resisting this, I think, is a necessary thing, if our every action and every deed of our body is to be a part of what Christ is working in the world.

The Weight of the World

I’ve always consumed the news of the world, because knowing what’s going on has always seemed something that an informed citizen should be doing. How can you do your duty to a republic if you’re oblivious? You cannot.

Only there’s a cost.

Like, say, this last week, when across my consciousness came news about dolphins and porpoises. I’ve always loved cetaceans, because, I mean, who doesn’t? They’re remarkable, intelligent, social creatures, with brains as complex as ours. Human beings have always recognized their playfulness and their curiosity. They inhabit a similar place to us in the ocean, as an apex hunter, but there’s another similarity: they’ve got a problem with screens.

It’s not that they’re on their screens all day, because that’s harder without hands. It’s that our screens are in them. Liquid crystals, specifically, the tiny little electrically reactive elements used in dashboards and calculators. When those are disposed of, liquid crystal monomers don’t go away, and studies of deceased dolphins shows they’re building up in their muscles and fatty tissues, and are so small they’re crossing over cellular membranes into their brains, where…like nanoparticles of plastic…they just accumulate, because they can’t be digested or dissolved.

That’s been shown to mess with brain function, and hormonal function, and it’s a problem for large brained animals at the top of their food chain. 

Can you name another large brained mammal at the top of it’s food chain?

And I think, great. Another thing. Because Liquid Crystal Monomers might be a problem, but are they front of mind right now? The drums of war have deepened into the thunder of bombs. AI is angling to take every single job. There are rising seas and dying bees and sickened trees and Jeez Louise, how do you save such a world, a world that’s such a sprawling, relentless, irreducibly complex wreck?

It’s easier to stand at a remove, to just look at it from a critic’s distance and judge it, or to give up on it entirely.

Or to rush about madly, consumed by every new crisis, flitting and flailing from urgency to urgency and accomplishing nothing.

We must act, as moral agents, and yet at the same time acknowledge that all of it is larger than we can possibly influence.

It's a peculiar advantage of faith, I think, that allows us to act right where we are, as we know we must, trusting that the rest of it is out of our hands.  

Giving Solace

I wonder, sometimes, at the limits of my capacity to give comfort.

I know, I know, there are folks who say the task of the prophet is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but mostly what I see in the world is suffering.  Hurt and loss, fear and trembling, those things are everywhere and a near universal.  I ache at the inescapable ubiquity of the world's pain. 

The pastor's task is primarily to give solace, but there's a boundary to that calling.

That boundary lies in the unique needs of every soul I encounter.  What gives comfort to one person will be of no use to another, and words that are bright with grace to one ear might be gibberish to another.  

Almost all of my own resilience in the face of loss and sorrow lies in my trust in the reality of God.  I know, from my faith, that nothing that has occurred in our time and space is ever forgotten.  It's all there in the mind of God, and that includes the reality and personhood of everyone I've lost.  I am blessed with the knowledge that they are completed, and that their completeness is a blessing.

I also trust, in my understanding of the infinite creative power of God, that everything that could possibly be is as real to my Creator as that which is.  All of the universe as we can see it is not the limit of God's work.  So the loved one who was taken from us too soon, where we feel the loss of all that they could have been?  Where we lament that we never reconciled, and there are parts of us we never shared with them?  All of those lost moments may be beyond us, but they are not beyond our Maker.  In God, nothing of what they could have been is gone.  In that, I find comfort.

I also know, from the heart of my faith, that our seasons of suffering aren't something God inflicts upon us, as if the Lord were some distant, demanding and monstrous tyrant.  God participates in the fullness of our struggles, knows them round about and within.  Everything we experience is known and felt by our Creator.  Being Itself bears the weight of our sorrow, and I am comforted by that.

But if Jesus is not shared between you and I, how can I share that comfort?  

If you believe the universe is a blind trampling machine, a churning murderous thrum of quantum cogs and mindless algorithms, I will struggle to reach you with my words of grace.  You will hear my words as delusion, as foolishness, as the prattle of a fanciful, willful child.

I could, in that knowledge, simply withdraw.  Coil back into my own bedrock certainty, leaving you infidel and alone.

What an ugly and selfish act that would be.

If you suffer, now, and do not find purpose and solace in Jesus as I do, then my task is to walk with you.  

To hear you.  To celebrate with you.  To weep with you.  To offer you food and warmth and encouragement.

To be your friend, even in our difference.

Reverie, Rage, and Repentance

It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was on my way to pick up my mom for an evening at our house. I'd been ill for most of the week, laid low by a particularly unpleasant bacterial infection. I'd not been out much, other than to crawl whimpering out of bed, shamble whimpering into the bathroom, and shamble whimpering back to bed.

But things finally seemed to be trending towards health. The fevers, finally faded. The discomfort, largely banished. So we invited Mom to our standing Friday British Baking Show watch gathering with my father-in-law, and I was going to get her. It felt good getting into the car, opening the sunroof and rolling down the windows, and putting on some chill music. Motoring along those deeply familiar roads, I bathed in the goodness of some relaxing playlists and the pleasure of feeling the breeze under a perfectly cloud-speckled late afternoon sky. I sang along to them, as I often do.

I came to a stop at the intersection of Graham road and Route 50.  It was a Friday at five thirty, so there was traffic. It's a long long light, so I leaned back, peered up at the blue sky through the sunroof, and sighed.

I was just meditating on how lovely it all felt when the shouting began.

"JESUS CHRIST!"

From behind me and to my right, a man's voice raised and harsh.

"JEEEESUS CHRIST!"

Someone out there on a beautiful day, windows open, yelling his fourth commandment violation at the world.

Was it road rage? Just a crazy person? I couldn't tell. I couldn't see the car or the driver in my mirror, just the Lord's name taken in vain again and again in a harsh and dissonant tone.

My reverie disrupted, I was a little annoyed. Why was this man so angry? The traffic was what it was. No-one was blocking traffic, or failing to turn when they should be turning. I couldn't see any reason anyone would be yelling, but it felt somehow part of the bitter zeitgeist of the day.

Because we barely seem to need reasons to be yelling. We're so reactive, so quick to find fault, quick to anger, quick to violence. Human beings have always been like that, of course, but it feels so amplified now, as provocateurs and professional agitators are supercharged by corporate algorithms designed to keep us addicted to being always upset, all the time.

That’s stirred the bubbling cauldron of political violence and the din of our endless shouting and finger-pointing, and for the umpteenth time in human history, a people seem drifting closer to a familiar psychosis.

It feels a dark path we've set ourselves down, so hooked on a poisonous cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol that we'd rather blow it all up than find a better path. We seem so lost.

But there is always a better path. As far as we flee into our personalized bespoke darknesses, there is always a way out, if we’re willing to take it.  If we're willing to accept that we're lost, and that we're so often wrong, and that no amount of pride and bile will make things better.  If we're willing to understand, and to act on that understanding, there is always hope.

As I marvelled at the amount of anger in the world, the lane to my right opened up a bit, and the voice grew louder. I thought about rolling up my windows, but I did not. I wanted to hear the voice clearly, and see who it was that just couldn’t seem to stop shouting.

As a battered Nissan Altima pulled alongside, windows down, I saw it was driven a middle aged man. He wore black plastic glasses, and looked to be either Afrocaribbean or Latino or some admixture thereof. He was, given the ruckus he was producing, surprisingly calm. JEEESUS CHRIST, he croaked, but then he gargled, laa laa laaa mmm mmm laaaa laaaa, and I realized that he wasn’t yelling at all.

Because there was music coming from the car, too, an old Christian contemporary song I kinda faintly remembered. He was singing very loudly to a song whose lyrics he didn’t totally remember. 

Was he singing well? No. O Sweet Lord Jesus he was not. But what he lacked in natural talent, tone, and training he was making up for with enthusiasm and volume. Whenever he’d hit the chorus, he’d shout it at the top of his lungs.

That was all I had been hearing. It made me laugh.

 
We can always, all of us, be wrong. We do need to remember that.

A Fierce and Joyous Voluntarism

Last year, my butternut squash really struggled.

Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings.  Deer savaged the spreading vines.  It was a horticultural debacle.  I got a quarter of my usual yield.

This year, things are different.  I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents.  I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.  

Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines.  The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all.  It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra.  I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut.  I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke.  Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.

I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers.  I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut.  But I had okra growing elsewhere.  Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance.  That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.

It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.

It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.

  Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn.  The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard.  Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.  

From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten.  More than my entire harvest last year.

From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts.  This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.

There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff.  We are the prophets and the vision-casters!  We dream the dreams!  We know the knowledge!  Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.  

This is a spiritually dangerous assumption.  It's why we pastors overfunction.  It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders.  It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.  

Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection.  The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos.  They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.

The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.

The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."

Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.

Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.

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.

Faith, Purpose, and Identity

Faith, as I understand it, is that which defines every other thing that you do.

It provides the answer to the question, "Why?"  It provides the overarching and unifying purpose, the moral measure of every action.   It is, in evangelical Christian terms, the thing that makes life "purpose-driven," or so Rick Warren once described it.

I share that essential understanding, although I came to it via a quite different route.  When I began my return to faith, it was through the writings of 20th century Christian existentialists.  Kierkegaard, of course, but also Tillich.  Tillich's understanding of faith was that it was our "ultimate concern," meaning it was that goal that defined all other goals, that was not "contingent," but defining.

I've not taught Tillich over the years, or preached explicitly from Tillich, for two reasons.  One, people just don't get him, and I see why.  His big thinky theology tended to be a wee bit abstracted from the day-to-day choices that define our moral lives.  Second, his form of Christian faith has no purchase in contemporary Christian debates.  His philosophizing ain't gonna fly if you're conservative and evangelical, nor does he...as a dead white man...have any lingering voice amongst the progressive oldline.

But still, that basic truth about faith remains, and it's the plumb line against which I measure both my actions and my inactions.  If I'm committed to following Jesus, which I am, then that commitment defines all other commitments.  It's how you operationalize the Great Commandment.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind," said Jesus, and if that's not a clear indicator of Ultimate Concern in the Gospel, I don't know what is.

I was meditating on this reality yesterday, after I bumped into one of those peculiar little faith factoids that regularly drop from the table of Ryan Burge.  Burge is an American Baptist Convention pastor and a professor, who gathers and discusses the state of religion in the United States.  

The data point that caught my eye tracked the responses of Americans to this survey question:  

How important are your views about religion to your identity and how you think of yourself?  

The possible responses were: 1) Not at all, 2) A little, 3) Somewhat, and 4) Very much.  Now, I'd prefer a Likert approach to this data, myself.  Four possible responses doesn't provide a meaningful midpoint, eh?  That, and I don't quite like the phrasing, which modifies importance.  "Very much important?"  That's kinda clumsy sounding.  

But the replies, broken down by forms of faith, showed a striking outlier.  

Self-identified evangelicals responded to the question with a resounding supermajority going with the highest category.  As Burge noted, this is a strong signal, twice that of every other group.  Non-evangelicals, which presumably includes the oldline denominations?  Seventy percent replied with an answer ranging from Not at all to Somewhat.

Having bumped into this data point on very progressive BlueSky, the responses I encountered there were all from progressive folks who inhabit the non-evangelical category.  All equated the evangelical response with extremism and oppression.

But I took this another way.  

The Gospel and the teachings of Jesus aren't secondary, or one input among many.  There is nothing in them that would suggest that's an option.  They define all other categories.  They are more important than my race and my gender.  They define my moral actions as a father and a husband, as a neighbor and a citizen.

Why do I stand for the rights of the last, the least, and the lost?  Because it's what Jesus did and taught.  Why do I reject the politics of dominance, resentment, and ethnonationalism?  Because Jesus demands that his disciples set down that sword.  Why do I reject crass mammonism?  Because resisting the corruption of greed is a core theme in Christ's teachings.  Why do I press back against willful cruelty to the stranger and the foreigner in our land?  'Cause Jesus makes it real clear that's a non-negotiable.

If religion does not shape identity, does not form our souls at the most fundamental level, then what is it?  Faith that does not clearly give us both purpose and Ultimate Concern has buried the lede.

It is salt without saltiness, as a friend once put it.

  

Hating the Samaritan

One of my congregants brought my attention to a statement yesterday by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse.  

Samaritan's Purse, if you don't know it, is an evangelical relief organization, one that does tremendous work to bring lifegiving support to places of crisis in the world.  They're competently run and remarkably bold in stepping into areas of crisis to provide food, medicine, and emergency support.  I have friends who have witnessed first hand the good work they're doing, particularly in Sudan and Haiti.

Workers for relief agencies work side-by-side in desperate conditions, even as they may come from different national and ideological backgrounds.  Those workers face violence, desperation, and privation, all to ensure the hungry are fed, the thirsty have water, and those wrenched from their homes by war or natural disaster are cared for.  

It's heroic work, and every effort counts.

Which makes Graham's statement about USAID utterly incomprehensible.  USAID was founded during the Cold War to use American soft power to push back against Soviet propaganda.  Like the Marshall Plan, the goal was to win the hearts and minds of the world by showing that we as a nation were noble, honorable, and generous.  It provides relief in precisely the areas where Samaritan's Purse operates.  And yet Franklin Graham said the following about it yesterday:

"USAID, under the control of the Democratic left, has been pushing LGBTQ, transgender, and other godless agendas to the world in the name of the United States of America. We the taxpayers have been paying for this to the tune of billions of dollars. Thank you Elon Musk for exposing this—and now President Donald J. Trump is bringing it to an end. I encourage the State Department to continue providing life-saving aid like food and medicine."

Is this true?

The first sentence has some truth to it, as do most well spun falsehoods.  A tiny fraction of the USAID budget has been used to support organizations that assert that Queer folks are human beings with rights.    But the second sentence does not follow from the first, and what it implies is false.  Yes, the USAID budget is in the billions, but those billions are spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health initiatives.

Because faith-based initiatives are a major part of American identity, much of that money goes to support the efforts of Christian relief efforts.  The largest single recipient of USAID funding, at over $4 billion dollars, is Catholic Relief Services.  World Vision and Lutheran World Relief and the Presbyterian Church in East Africa have also been significant USAID partners, with total annual giving to Christian organizations in the billions of dollars.  USAID also buys billions of dollars of food for emergency relief from American farmers. 

Franklin Graham knows this.  He knows this because his own organization received $90,000,000 from USAID over the last four years.  Ninety million dollars.  Samaritan's Purse alone receives ten times as much USAID funding as all of the grants supporting Queer folk combined.  Watch this far right propaganda video listing every "offensive" grant they could find, and add up the amounts.  It's not even close.

Again, this is not meant to in any way denigrate Samaritan's Purse, which does excellent work.  They're worthy of support.  But Franklin Graham should know better.  I think, on some level, he does know better.  But when you've bent the knee to Powers and Principalities, and made your witness subordinate to a decadent worldly authority, you must parrot the lies that they tell.  And that dissonance makes you angrier and angrier, as you shout down the voice of grace in your own heart.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that Graham seems to have completely forgotten the point of an obscure story Jesus told.  Maybe you've heard of it?  The one about the Samaritan?  

That parable was about how we approach those who we consider our enemies, yet through the fruits of their actions show themselves to be our neighbors.  Samaritans were hated by Judeans, considered unfaithful and idolatrous and traitors to the faith.  Yet it was the good work of a Samaritan that Jesus honored, as a way of telling us who we are to love as much as we love ourselves. 

It's straight up, right there, front and center.  But Lord have mercy, we mortals are so good at missing the point.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.

Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.

Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.

It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  

Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  

They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  

Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  

The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."

To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  

The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.

Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.

Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.

Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.

Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

I So Basic

Why write a book on the Lord's Prayer? 

I mean, it's hardly a complicated thing.  It's one of the most familiar rituals of the Christian faith, and it's pretty danged simple.  This isn't a deep dive into the discursive techniques of Thomistic theology, or a treatise on the distinctives between Tillich and Berdyaev.

It's not particularly trendy, or buzzy, or pushing the leading edge.  It's just the Lord's Prayer.  We all know that already, right?

It's. Just. So. Basic.

I mean, of course it is.

But how are we at the basics?  How important are the basics?

If you're entirely new to the faith, how much do you know about the point and purpose of prayer?  What do you know about this core Christian practice, and the whys and wherefores of this thing Jesus asks his followers to do?  There was a time when most Americans were culturally Christian, but honey, that time ain't now.  Sure, it's basic. Basics, after all, are a good place to start.

If you've left the church, burned by politicization or the mean-girls cruelty that often drives folks from communities, were the basics what drove you away?  Likely not.  I bailed on church in young adulthood after a totally pointless ego-driven fight tore the church I'd grown up in apart.  Watching Christians squabble and scheme over control of a church just made the whole thing seem like complete [bovine excrement].  When I finally returned, it was to the simplest practices of following Jesus, of service and prayer.  When you start again, it's a fine idea to start at the beginning.

But what if you're deep in, so far past the first stages of being a "Baby Christian" that talking about the Lord's Prayer feels like going back to read Hop On Pop or Horton Hears a Who.  You're sophisticated.  You're experienced.  You've got your doctorate in Presuppositional Apologetics, or host a podcast on Queering the Meta-liturgics of Contemplation.

You need this prayer.

Because when Jesus taught this prayer, he didn't describe it as a "starter prayer."  This isn't a prayer for beginners, to be replaced by more sophisticated mystic incantations as we advance to higher and higher levels of spiritual power.  This is.  The Prayer.   It doesn't matter if we've just discovered the grace of the Gospel, or if we're the Renowned Senior Pastor of a Gigachurch.  It doesn't matter if we're tenure track or if we've got 97,000 followers on ChristTok.   

This is the prayer we are meant to pray.

It is meant to shape us and form us and remind us of our purpose, no matter where we are in our journey.  

And as we're in a time when Christians have kinda forgotten the purpose of prayer, when we pray for wealth and material success, when we pray for political power, when we pray for influence?

Perhaps a refresher is in order.