Fake It 'Til You Make It

A few days ago, I found myself sitting around with a bunch of Jesus folks, talking about the impact of the prosperity gospel on folks who are struggling.  If being "blessed" is best understood in terms of material prosperity, then if you aren't visibly and materially prosperous, there must be something wrong with you.

We shared about folks we'd known who'd been presenting themselves as wealthy, when in fact they were financing their apparently comfortable lifestyle through credit card debt and an endless string of ever more punitive loans.

"Yeah," said one of my good sisters.  "You got to fake it 'til you make it."

The others in the group laughed and nodded.  The idea, as it got bandied about, is that if you project the image of prosperity, you are much more likely to prosper.  People will assume you're successful, and from that assumption, will treat you as if you were.  Work will come your way, and connections will be made, and you'll be in like Flynn.

That's the idea, anyway.  What happens with greater frequency is that our expectations of how we must appear to others drives us to make decisions that are ultimately our downfall.  Our debt-financed lives crash down around us.  The lies we tell the world about who we are back up into an unsustainable mess, and we crumble into nothing.  The only people this mindset serves are the folks who own us.

If the appearance of wealth and material prosperity are our goal, then our efforts to "fake it" will destroy us.  Just ask former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell about how that whole "fake it" thing worked out for him.

Then a day or so later, I found myself sitting around with another bunch of Jesus folks, talking about how we struggle our way through the relationships we have with those around us.  Those people who make themselves really hard to love, who are hateful and hurtful to us, who betray our trust and beat us down?  How are we supposed to deal with them, if we're serious about how Jesus taught us to love our enemies?

We all shared stories, about other church folks who'd done everything in their power to tear us down. How could we love those people?  How could we forgive those folks, when we don't really even want to try?

"Yeah," said one of my good sisters.  "You've got to fake it 'til you make it."  At which the others in the group laughed and nodded.

It was an interesting conjunction.

And I wondered, in those times where I've dealt respectfully with human beings I would really much rather have punched full on in the face in that moment, whether I was faking it.

I don't think so, not really.  In those exchanges...and I have had those exchanges...I recognize that my rage and my anxiety are a legitimate reaction to a broken thing.  I also recognize that the actions of the person in question aren't to be justified or glossed over.

But I also recognize that my primary allegiance is to my faith, and to the path that Jesus taught.  Even if I am required to discontinue relationship with someone, I cannot allow myself to imagine that they are irredeemable or that the possibility of their restoration is impossible.

If I rage at them, not just articulating my anger but being ruled by it, then I am acting in a way that would impede their healing and their growth.  I am reducing the probability of their transformation.

And given my commitment to the Gospel, I just can't do that.

It's hard, but it's not false, any more than duty is false, or faith, hope, and love are false.

Hell Hath No Fury

It's been coming for a while.

Following a recent leadership transition at the tippy-top of my wife's organization, things started shifting in ways that augured poorly.   Despite an amazing work ethic, a deep knowledge of her field, and a track record of turning around a struggling area of her organization, the missus found herself today on the wrong side of a restructuring.

A new CEO brought in a bevy of highly paid restructuring consultants, with the idea of totally changing the entire business model of the organization.  Everything about the organization, or so this new CEO overtly told everyone on staff, has sucked.  I'm going to save it by being the powerful transformative leader you poor pathetic sods have needed all along.

Lord knows that's not ever a good sign.  In congregational leadership literature, that's an almost guaranteed mark of a pastor who's going to leave wreck and ruin in their wake, but the corporate world hasn't clued in to that reality yet.  Nor have many churches, not to mention the board of one particular nonprofit membership organization.

So my wife's reward for years of dedication, long work hours and demonstrated excellence in delivering the core competency of the organization?  A pre-holiday pink slip, one of dozens done today in a typically corporate style, with the CEO hiding away while their flunkies do the firing.  

That, of course, leaves our household with a nontrivial 75% drop in income.  Not being fools, we've prepared for this possibility, and have a healthy war chest stashed away.   And my wife is a remarkably competent and capable human being, who will find an organization that appreciates that.  Still, it stings, and the anxiety of not knowing where things will head is deep, despite the kind whisper of my Master's voice in my ear.

It also leaves me pondering the spiritual challenge of the day: forgiveness.  Having a heart of forgiveness towards those who have harmed you is absolutely central to the Christian life, and it's something I find I can practice without too much strain.   If you strike me, turning the other cheek is easy.  It is an act that defies both your anger and my own, and that refuses to let brokenness define being.

What I have found considerably harder is finding that heart of Gospel forgiveness for those who have harmed others, particularly those I love.   When someone harms my wife, or my child, I find forgiveness...harder.  Having watched the tears and the dismay of the last few months, my reaction is more primal, more feral.  Mess with my family?  I want your bloody head on the end of a pike.   I want the sky above your driveway to fill with eagles, which descend upon you in a shrieking cloud with razor sharp talons extended.  I want there to be a thunderclap, and a smoking pair of shoes where once you stood.  I don't feel merciful.  I feel as forgiving as a slighted Roma matriarch.  Even the fires of hell seem somehow inadequately hot.

Which is why it is good I am not God.

I remind myself, of course, to think systemically, and to understand the complex underlying dynamics that go into every human action.  I remind myself of the importance of looking towards the future in hope, and letting go of the things that cannot be changed.

And I remind myself that, not being God, I am not the one who is the measure of justice.  It is not for me to understand the balance.  That is best left to the Maker of things, whose capacity for both grace and justice...thankfully...exceed my own.

Jesus Isn't Fair, Either

One of the themes that has echoed and re-echoed across this nation after our housing bubble went inevitably kerpop is that of fairness. Millions of folks bought houses that were utterly beyond their means, homes that were either too big or...more likely...whose value had been absurdly inflated by relentless churning speculation.

Those struggling homeowners soon found themselves deep "underwater," as their equity dried up and their income took a hit from the crumbling job market. It weren't just a few folks, neither. Last year, 2.8 million American households faced foreclosure, a rate that is on track to hit 3 million even in 2010. The sheer volume of collapse hasn't just stirred a government response. Banks, realizing that they can't manage or sell that many homes, have often been renegotiating the interest on the loans for these houses. But that hasn't always been enough.

This last week, some banks have started to reduce the amount of principal as well. Meaning, they're deciding, heck, remember that $475,000 townhouse you took out a jumbo loan to purchase in 2008 right before your wife lost her job? The one that's worth $275,000 now? Let's make that a $300,000 loan instead! It's the only way to keep folks in their homes, and while it's a desperation measure, it works best for the banks and for those who would otherwise find themselves out of a place to live.

For some of us who bought smaller and earlier, and who've never ever not once even come close to missing a mortgage payment, this can seem, like, TOTALLY unfair. We were wise. Diligent. Aware of market dynamics. Focused on living within our means. We saw the bubble for what it was, to the point of solemnly warning folks we knew not to buy at the peak of the market. And I did utter that warning, over and over again.

But the world is full of fools and dreamers, suckers ready to believe something that is obviously too good to be true. Why should they be rewarded or cut slack? They should bear the penalty of their stupidity. Moving their family of five into Grandma and Grandpa's basement for three or four years is the only way they'll ever learn to stop making dumb decisions. They made the bed. Let 'em sleep in it. Or on the street. Whichever.

Problem is, self-righteousness and an overdeveloped sense of what is and isn't fair have no place in the heart of a Jesus follower. That was, as I recall, the whole point of that little story he told about the laborers in the vineyard. That story, of course, had mostly to do with quelling the spiritual resentments of those who have always done what's right. We want to be rewarded, and we want our reward to be bigger than the reward of those who come stumbling into the Kingdom at the last moment.

As an ethic, though, it reminds us that Christians don't desire others to suffer. We are not to want others to be diminished or humiliated. Period.

If we find ourselves grumbling because someone is being given another chance, or forgiven a debt, then something has gone very very wrong with our faith. When we allow ourselves to want that suffering as just recompense for cluelessness, or want others to be cut down a notch or two because it's what they deserve, then the spirit of grace that lies at the beating heart of Christ is no longer within us.

Beloved Spear Bible Puzzler: Sour Grapes

Yesterday as I trundled along the Beltway on my way to church, I found myself meditating on one of my favorite passages from the major prophets. Beats the heck out of listening to kei$a or talk radio, let me tell you.

It's from Ezekiel. Yeah, I know, he's an odd one, what with the wheels within wheels, the nakedness and the bread cooked over burning poo. Ol' Zeke comes across as the most intense of the major prophets, a YHWH-touched performance artist/writer/priest who seems both DSM IV certifiable and authentically aware of God's presence. For all his intensity, there's a grace to his vision.

One of my favorite riffs in his mind-boggling theopoetics comes in Ezekiel 18, where he declares with typical God-fired ferocity that a saying being bandied about among the Israelites in diaspora annoys the bejabbers out of the creator of the universe. That saying is this:

The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.

Meaning, if your ancestors mess up, you'll pay the price. For an entire chapter of generational back and forth, Zeke expresses YHWH's total disapproval of this concept. Each soul is to be judged only on the basis of what it does. Sin is not something that automatically conveys from generation to generation. Zeke isn't the only one to express this concept, although he seriously goes to town on it. The prophet Jeremiah also lays in to the very same saying.

What struck me during my meditation was this: that idea seems rather at odds with the way that the concept of original sin is often articulated in Christian theology. Let's take, for instance, 1 Timothy 2:11-15. Women are to shut up and be submissive...because way back when a woman sinned in Eden. What we hear in Ezekiel and Jeremiah essentially says, no, that way of thinking has nothing to do with the way God works.

More significantly, what Ezekiel is saying also seems in rather significant tension with Romans 5, in which the Apostle Paul asserts that we are all condemned because of Adam's sin. As I view the story of the Fall as a non-literal and archetypal expression of our universal human resistance to God's grace and our calling to care for one another, this tension resolves for me. The sin of the adam is my sin, because the adam symbolically represents all humankind. Within a more progressive theology, Paul and Zeke aren't at odds.

But if you take the entirety of scripture mechanistically, this is more of a challenge. If a guy named Adam or a chica named Eve did something bad 6,000 years ago in some Mesopotamian garden spot, then Ezekiel and Jeremiah both proclaim that that thing cannot be held against us. Resolving that tension from a literalistic understanding of Paul and deutero-Paul is rather more difficult.

It would seem that from a literalist perspective, either one is true, or the other is true.