With Hands in the Soil

Out in my front yard, my garden is stirring after an erratic but wintery winter.

In the two eight by eight beds that flank my driveway, the green shoots of garlic that overwintered are getting perky again.  The asparagus has started to offer up its first tentative shoots, which means I've got about a month of early spring harvest ahead of me.

The budding seed potatoes that were starting to get out of hand in the darkness of a cupboard have found their way into half-barrels filled with compost and leaves.  Those taters were getting desperate, flailing out long dead-white tendrils that made their section of the cupboard look like something out of a John Carpenter film.

I've been clearing out all nine of my raised beds, pulling old weeds and removing excess leaf-fall.  With the beds prepped, I've brought wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of compost from my slightly disappointing compost yield for this year.  Even though that new earth isn't quite ready, it's still got plenty of wriggly waking worms mixed in, who'll help continue to break down the soil now that it's been mingled with the earth of the beds.

All of it means that I've got my hands in the dirt now, and it's a good feeling.  It is, rather literally, grounding.

I was down on my muddied knees weeding one of my four by four beds on a warm afternoon when a neighbor walked by.  This happens regularly, and it's a way for overly-introverted-me to be stirred to conversation with the souls who live nearby.  I'll hear their own stories of planting and soil, or tell them about something I'm excited to be growing.  It's part of what makes gardening such a pleasurable thing.

This neighbor was, as it happened, one who had recently yelled at me as I walked my dog past his property.  Twice.

Ah, thought I.  It's That Guy.

As he strode up the sidewalk, eyes forward, I suppose I could have ignored him.  Just kept my head down, busily paying attention to anything but the human being who was crossing in front of my property.

But the day was bright and lovely, and spring was in the air, and my hands were in the warm earth.  Gardening has me in the habit of offering gracious words to passers-by, and I was in no mood to be anything other than neighborly.  

"It's a beautiful day to be out in the world," I piped up, trowel in hand.

He looked over, a little startled.  "It really is a great day," he replied.  Not a hint of animosity in his voice, not even a whisper of the snarl that had last soured it.  He offered up a gentle smile of genuine pleasure at a shared and glorious afternoon.

"Enjoy your walk," I said.

"I will," he said, and continued on up the street.

It's good to get your hands in the earth.  It really is.

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 Gift of Tongues

As a part-time pastor, I'm the member of the family with daytime flexibility.  That means laundry and kid-shuttling and gardening and cleaning.  It also means study and writing.   But it also means I can take time to work with the local Meals on Wheels, which provides nutrition to the homebound elderly.  Pastor though I may be, I'm not "in leadership" here.  This is just a dirt-under-your-fingernails opportunity to simply be a servant.

I take my marching orders from a dear old saint who has coordinated the program for years, first from a warehouse near a hospital, and now from the basement of the nearby Baptist church.

My job, as I've chosen to accept it? I'm the delivery guy.  My route fluxes and varies from month to month, as folks seek the service or move...or pass on.

This week marked my second delivery to an elderly Korean woman, who spends her days sitting alone in the walk-out basement of a townhouse.  She's frail, semi-mobile, and knows very little English.  When I arrived, she was perched in a chair by an open sliding glass door.

As I approached, she was still and expressionless, her long-view gaze taking me in as another passer by.

I came nearer, and she looked up, still solemn.

"Ahn-yang-hasaeyo," I chirruped in greeting, smiling broadly, using the words for greeting given me by a Korean-American friend.  I stretched out that last "OH" as I'd heard it spoken hundreds of times in the hallways at my old church, and as I hear it spoken into cellphones in Annandale's sprawling Korea Mall.

Her expressionless face lit up with a huge bright smile, and giving her a curt respectful bow while still smiling, I presented her with her meals.

"Thankyouthankyou," she said, beaming.

"Have a great day," I said, having pretty much exhausted my vocubulary.  Well, I suppose I could have counted to three, but I'm not sure it would have worked in context.

"Nehnehnehneh," she said, still smiling, clutching her meal.

That's "yesyesyesyes," I think.

Political Differences

Last week, at the height of Holy Week, I officiated over the funeral of a member of my former church.   He was 92, and even though often at that age the circle of those who gather can be minimal, the service was remarkably well attended.  Family and friends and church folk were there in abundance, because he was a genuinely remarkable person.

He was a self-made man, who'd worked his way up to being a really rather successful lawyer.  He was also very staunchly conservative.  How staunchly?  Well, he represented Haldeman and Erlichman in the Watergate trials.  Or, rather, the Watergate affair.   A delightful poem I read in his honor by one of his daughters at the funeral included a reference to a family in-joke about an exchange he had with Nixon.

Conservative He and Liberal I had some rather significant political differences, which would surface on occasion in our conversations.

And yet none of it really ever seemed to matter.  He was a gracious host, remarkably supportive of my efforts as a wet-behind-the-ears youngish liberal pastor, and possessed of a flexible and engaged intellect.  Where we would disagree, there was a remarkable level of mutual tolerance.  What differences we did have just gave us a little more to talk about.

Getting to know him was a pleasure, and when I told the family I'd be honored to be a part of the remembrance his life, I wasn't just being polite.  It really was an honor.

It was also a reminder of how dangerous it is to get siloed.  If the only people we know are exactly like us, believe like us, and echo our every thought back at us, then we lose the ability to see the real and significant grace in others.  Particularly the others who are different from us.  When we do that, and allow our own preferences and predilections to calcify into disdain or active animosity towards those who do not share them, then our capacity for grace shrivels.

This is not a good thing, for us, for our culture, or...if we're Christian...for our congregations.

Registering Grace

Nothing gives more opportunities for being graceful than being an idiot.  I get more of those opportunities than I'd like.

This last Fall, I donated my aging Yamaha to the Salvation Army.   It was time to move on to a newer motorcycle, one with a riding position that didn't overly tax my aging frame.  So I did, and did all the requisite paperwork to transfer title.  That included notifying the State and the County that I no longer owned my vehicle.

A week or so later, I received a bill from Fairfax County.  It was for 2012 Registration for the bike, which, of course, I no longer owned.  I assumed things had crossed in the mail.  No point in registering a bike that isn't yours, now, is there?

Two months later, I got a past-due notice for the same registration fee, for the 2012 registration for same bike that I no longer owned.  I went online, and re-confirmed with the County system that the vehicle had been donated.  Yes, they knew I no longer owned it.

And then, with Christmas and doctoral papers and coursework consuming my brain, I completely forgot about it.

This last week, I got notification that because my registration for 2012 was past due, it had been referred to a collections agency, with a modest penalty attached, plus a service fee.   A bit of more fervent research revealed that in late 2010, Fairfax County quietly decided that "registration" no longer means "registration."  You're not paying a fee so that the county can know you own something, like, say, the registration fee you pay to own a dog.  There is no "decal."

You're paying retroactively for the privilege of having owned the vehicle in the previous year.  It's called "registration," but what it really is now is a county-level personal property tax on a vehicle.  So the law had changed, and I was now on the wrong side of it.

I really hate such things, and they tend to make me a tick irritable, something I'll remember come next election.  The payment would just have to be made.  But the call also needed to be made to the collections agency, because we all know how much fun those folks can be once their database has got its teeth in you.

I spent a few moments centering myself, getting calm.  To do this, I needed to talk with another human being, another soul.  

With form in hand, I made the call.  On the other end, a young man's voice came on after a brief hold time, by inflection clearly African American.  He went through a mandated schpiel about the call being monitored for quality assurance.  His voice was guarded and tight.  I asked him to confirm the amount, which he did.  I asked him to confirm where the check needed to be sent, which he did.

Then, I laughed at what an idiot I'd been, and explained how I'd botched it to him.  He "mmm-hhhhmmmed" his way through it, as he could tell payment was about to be made and could be heard typing away on the other end.

I thanked him for his help, and then remarked that he had a totally thankless, stressful job.  "I'm sure everyone you talk to is always sooo glad to be talking to you," I said, and he laughed.

"Oh, maaaaaan," he said, and you could hear him relax.  "Seriously.  Seriously.  You have no idea, man."

I told him to hang in, and to have a good one.  "You too, man," he replied, voice still smiling, and the call was done.

Venting grace is so much more satisfying than venting anger.

God Fearin'

In an interesting piece of  bloggery, Carol Howard-Merritt finds herself wrassling with the concept of "fearing God."  It is, or so our sacred tradition speaks it, the root of all wisdom.  Her struggling with that concept mirrors my own struggling with that concept, which generally takes two tacks.

Tack number one is theological.  If God is love, as we Jesus folk consistently and relentlessly insist, then why would we fear God?   It seems illogical and emotionally inconsistent.

Tack number two is sociopolitical and anthropological.   Within human institutions and cultures, fear of punishment is used to enforce conformity within autocratic cultures and family systems.  Do what I say, because you fear that if you do not, I will verbally abuse you and/or hang you, cut out your intestines in front of you, and then pull you apart with horses.   Generally, the former is family systems and the latter is...um...hopefully not, although I will grant that some families are worse than others.   If that is the character of the fear we are meant to have of God, then God would be little better than an abusive parent or medieval despot.

So is this a salvageable theological concept?

I tend to think so, with some notable caveats from the Apostle Paul.  Here, I'm talking about Paul, the author of the seven letters, not deutero-Paul, the follower of Paul who wrote in his name.  In his letter to the churches in both Rome and Galatia, Paul makes it clear that the purpose of Christian faith is not fear.   We are not meant to be slaves, living in fear, he tells the Romans.  If the Spirit of God lives and moves in us, then our connection to the gracious nature of our Maker frees us from the fear of coercion.  Christian faith is antithetical to "power over," both in our relationship to others and in our relationship with our Creator.  It is not a vassal/liege arrangement and not a social contract, with all the punishment/protection dynamics that such things entail.  That's the heart of the joyous anarchy of grace Paul proclaimed.

Fear of God, then, needs to be decoupled from the idea of social obedience and legalistic interpretations of Christianity.

But when it comes to our encounter with God...those transforming moments that take our faith out of the realm of ritual and abstraction and into the realm of the existential and experiential...fear takes on a different character.

Fear of God arises from the knowledge of God.

First, there is the fear that comes with unbidden theophany.  This does not happen often.  Being in the presence of the Numinous Other is the sort of thing that causes hair to stand on end, buckles knees, and leaves you unable to speak.  I've heard it described as a feeling of vertiginous awe, like looking out over a vast precipice.   That's close, but in my experience it's a bit more like that feeling when the railing you're leaning against gives way.  You are not observing the vastness from a distance.  It is grasping you, utterly present to you.

Fear?  Yes. When there is nothing between your face and God's face, yes.

Second, those moments when we feel most frequently connected to our Maker, at least in my experience, are moments of immense grace and calm.   We get there through prayer and meditation, through contemplation and self-stilling.  Emptied of self, we feel no terror, because we are consumed and suffused with God's Spirit.  "Feeling," in the sense of emotional affect, almost disappears in that great radiant wash of peace.   As a still fledgling and semi-competent mystic, I cherish those moments.  They are the existential anchor points for my faith, just as I'm sure they were for dear brother Paul.

That said, I don't live every moment that way.  I get angry.  I get confused.  I become lustful, and bitter, and impatient.   I get lost.

And in those all-too-frequent moments, I recall that depth of connectedness.  The light of that grace is a fearful thing when you are in the thrall of something...else.  Seeing how deeply the brokenness in yourself impedes your ability to live into the grace you have come to know is frightening.  Loss of that connection, of that grace, of the hope and strength it entails...that is a terrifying thing, because God as Other is a terrifying thing.  Not just because you're lost.  But because you know how deeply your lostness is incompatible with the grace you have known.

That fear is the root of right action, even in the separation.  Feeling the loss, and in the throes of the dark night of the soul, you nonetheless conform yourself to the grace you cannot feel.

And as wisdom is right action, that form of fear is, as I see it, the root of wisdom.

Burning the Bible

Over the last two weeks, in the midst of absorbing about 50 hours of nonstop doctoral coursework in seminary, I popped into the bookstore.  Using a gift card given to me by some of the saints of my former congregation, I bought myself a spanky new bible.  It was a Harper Collins Study Bible, functionally identical to the bible I've been using since 1996, when I first went to seminary.

This is far and away my preferred text for study purposes.  Yeah, the NRSV is a bit relentless on the gender-neutral language thing, to the point of not really accurately reflecting the meaning of the original text on occasion.  But the translation is otherwise sound, and better yet, it has exceptionally good footnotes.  Seriously.  The footnotes alone are worth the price of admission.

In many "study" bibles, the footnotes tell you what you are supposed to believe about the text.  They do the interpreting for you.  Given that the whole point of the Reformation was that we were to be set free to explore the texts on our own, this is a nontrivial thing.  Rule of thumb about scriptural study tools:  You should wield them, not the other way around.   In the Harper Collins, they give you historical context, details about variances in translation, and provide clear linkages to other relevant passages.

This left me in a bit of a conundrum.  My old Bible was dead in the water.  Repeated applications of clear packing tape, made necessary through daily use over a decade and a half, had finally failed.  The inner binding had come apart, to the point at which I could no longer use it in worship or study.   Books would just fall out of it, which isn't great in a class and even worse when you're up leading a service.  It was spent, a ruin of a book.

So it was time to...what?  Just leave it lying around?  No.  I despise clutter, perhaps because I'm so prone to it.  If a thing is broken and past its use, I'm not going to cling to it like a hoarder.  That kind of grasping thing-orientation is one of the more persistent demons of our culture.  

Throw it in the trash?  I couldn't see doing that.  Here was a book that had been by my side through seminary.  It had rested in my hands during literally hundreds of important conversations and sacred moments.    Dumping it in with the coffee grounds just didn't feel right.   

Neither, quite frankly, could I bring myself to recycle it.  Stuffing it into the pile of old newspapers and stacks of Best Buy and K-Mart advertising just didn't feel right either.   

So, in a moment of willful ritual carbon positivity, I decided to burn it.   

I made a little stack of wood in our fireplace, nestled the bible on top of it, open to Isaiah, and lit the pyre.   It took a bit to catch, but when it did, those thousands of pages burned long, hot and bright.   For about forty minutes, I sat by the flames, intermittently turning the pages with a poker, opening the book so that fire could dance in and devour the text.

Words would appear, here and there.  I saw Micah consumed, and a chapter on Hezekiah the king.   My face and chest burned, as the room grew hot with the heat of it.  

As the burning tongues licked text after text to ashen nothing, I remembered the feel of the book in my hand, the many times I'd sat with it preparing a sermon, or trying to open the gracious traditions of our faith to those who knew only enough about it to get themselves into trouble.

I reflected on the importance of those words, as bearers of concepts that have the power to change the direction of a human life.  I reflected on how far the Bible is from being a book of magic, as much as we want it to be.  

It's just ink and paper, text on media, no more infused with sacred power than the air we breathe or the light that plays across a room.   The message it conveys draws truth from a place beyond the pages and the language we print upon them.  Burning it does not destroy anything of what matters about it.  It's good to have a sacred text like that, I think.

And then the flames faded, and all that remained was ash and a faint sense of reverence.

The Creche Wars: A Pax on Both Your Houses

In my neck of the woods, there's a bit of disagreement about seasonal displays going on.  Deep in the Virginia exurbs, the mighty metropolis of Leesburg sits in all its strip-mall, big box glory.   But before Leesburg was an exurb, it was a modestly-sized town, one that had a long-standing tradition of having a Christmas tree and displaying Nativity scenes on the courthouse lawn celebrating the Christmas season.

Back in 2009, following concerns that this might violate the separation of church and state, the tradition was shut down.   Both the Christian Nativity and the...um...pagan solstice display...were removed.   There was outcry, of course, and much concern in the community that a beloved symbol had disappeared.

So the tradition was reinstated last year, with a caveat: anyone could display whatever they wanted, on a first come, first served basis.

And so there were displays put up.  Some were creches and nativities.  Others, though?   The Pastafarians came out with a repurposed creche image, in which the Infant Flying Spaghetti Monster was featured prominently, along with garden gnomes and other absurdist miscellany.   There was a Luke Skywalker display, put up by those who celebrate Life Day, I guess.  Atheists put up their own tree, upon which affirmations of vigorous godlessness and condemnations of the general stupidity of the faithful were placed.

This year, the conflict continued.  There was a display by a local artist, of a crucified skeleton Santa--a symbol of the way in which consumerism has consumed the season, or so the artist declared.  Many locals were troubled by these things, to the point that the skeleton Santa was pulled down a few times by Angry People.

Hearing about this squabbling, I find myself wishing that the Christians were being more Christian, and the atheists were being more rational.
 
For the Jesus folk, Brothers and Sisters, take a deep breath.   Particularly with the Skywalker stuff and the Pastafarians.  I mean, c'mon.  Some folks are just silly, and struggle with the hyper-seriousness that can pervade this season.  Christianity is a powerful, robust, and millennia-old faith, and is not going to be undone by some goofballs being random.  The most gracious response to this is...grace.  Smile.  Show that you aren't spiritually shallow and easily aggrieved.  Those are not the marks of one who is governed by the Spirit of the Living God.  Show that we can handle it.

And the artist guy with the Skeleton Santa?  Ask him what he means.  Be open to listening.  If his beef is with the consumerism that has sunk its undead fangs into the joy of this season, then maybe he's not a bad guy.  And he might be under the impression that Christians are angry, bitter people.  

Disabuse him of that notion.  We best teach Christ by living Christ, after all.

For the atheists?  I know, I'm not on the Team, but consider the season.   This is the time to open up the critical thinking skills, and show that you understand context and perception.  It's the time to show that you grasp the spirit of the season.  You don't have to sing Silent Night if you don't want to, and you have every right to present your opinion in the public square.

But if you want that opinion to be heard, consider presenting the following slogans:   "Just Love People.  How Hard is That?"   "Be Kind, Because It is the Way To Be."  "Care for Everyone."  "Every Human Being Has Value."   Slap your atheist logo under those, and maybe folks will be a little bit more willing to listen to the rest of what you have to say.  They may not be persuaded, but they'll be more willing to listen.

As stressed as we all can be this season, and as easily as tempers can fray, that's not the point of this time of year.  So...give it a go, y'all.  Get along, eh?

It's both the Christian and reasonable thing to do.

Being A Witness

Yesterday, in the mid afternoon of my day off, I was sitting relaxing at my kitchen table. I was feeling a bit tired, and while a book was in front of me, life seemed to be moving in a siesta direction.

I had just about come to the determination that it was time to go curl up for a refreshing Jeffersonian nap when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Moving down the sidewalk in groups of two were staidly dressed women bearing clipboards laden with tracts.

Jehovah's Witnesses. Gah.

Normally, I'm more than up for an exchange with the Witnesses. My last visit from them was really very satisfying. Being able to elicit the words "Um...ah...I really need to be going" from a Jehovah's Witness makes having a graduate degree in theology quite worth while.

But yesterday, I wasn't up for theologizing. I was tired, and as the women came to the door, I contemplated pretending I wasn't there. The dog started barking. I contemplated further.

Finally, I heaved myself up, and went to the door. I offered up a warm, smiling greeting, and assured the two ladies that the madly wagging Ellie only wanted to be friends and play. We exchanged some small talk about dogs, as my dog tried to scrabble through the screen. They asked if I'd be willing to take a flyer...and I said..."Sure." I opened up the door, took a leaflet, and then bid the two women a very good day.

It was a gentle, pleasant, hospitable exchange.

Of course, if they come back, I'm rested and ready for a pleasant exchange of views. But in that moment, despite my mid-afternoon haze, it felt strangely right to be nothing more and nothing less than gracious to these human beings.

Resentment

Every once in a while, that petty little beast wakes up in me, colors my eye with bitter jaundice and looks around with gritted-teeth irritation at those who are..inadequate.

This Saturday, I took a small group from my church to our local clothing closet for a few hours of sorting and setting out clothing for folks in our community who are struggling financially. I'll bring by clothes for donation often as well. It's an important thing for Jesus people to do. That's not because we're obeying an edict that says "Be Charitable Or Else." It's because real Christian compassion moves people to action...because we love as He loved, and are willing to give to others as freely as He gave himself for us.

As I moved clothes from the giant donation bins to the racks out on the display floor, I found myself growing increasingly irritated. It had been a bustling morning, and my balanced breakfast had been two equally sized cups of coffee...followed by no lunch at all. A caffeine-only diet never works well for my mood, and I could feel my snarkishness rising.

Many of the folks who come to the center in need of clothing move quietly among the racks, selecting work clothes or school clothes for their children. They politely ask the staff for help finding car seats for their children.

Others...well...others don't seem to quite *cough* grasp the system. They gather huge bags of clothes. They holler at their kids every forty seconds or so. They camp out in the back where the volunteers are sorting, hoping to snag choice items before they're set out. They ignore the staff when they're told they have taken too much, and continue to stuff bags full when the facility is closed and they're asked to leave.

Look at them! They are...undeserving! Unworthy! Or so snarled my inner Pharisee, who boiled over with indignation and outrage at these fools who were so clearly the source of their own suffering. If they were the sorts of people who knew How To Follow the Rules, they wouldn't be in this mess. Just look at them! Ignorant! Pushy! Selfish! I could feel myself growing more and more intolerant, along with a strange compulsion to watch FoxNews.

I let that mood run for a few moments, marveling at how easy it must be to live a life thinking this way. I then reminded myself of why my heart compels me to care...even for folks who don't "deserve" it...and with the Apostle Paul's help, stomped that little demon into oblivion.

Forgive Them, Father

Most folks who spend a great deal of time with the Bible come to have preferred books within it, a writer or prophet or poet whose expression of the story of our faith speaks most deeply to them. We'll also have verses...little snippets or soundbites...that tend to stick with us and resonate with us most intensely.

For me, one of those verses is from the Gospel of Luke, chapter twenty three, verse thirty four. It's from a particularly intense part of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He's being crucified, and what we hear from him during that moment of physical anguish is this:

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."^[a] And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

This verse, more than perhaps any other in the Bible, cements my conviction that Jesus is worth following. He's preached about the ethic of reconciling love...and he means it, to the point at which he is willing to ask God to forgive the people who are torturing him to death. There is a nobility and an integrity and a grace to that moment in the story of Jesus that I find utterly compelling.

But there's a little problem. There's a footnote. See it? Click on it if you like. The first sentence of this verse is...disputed...among the earliest Greek manuscripts of Luke. Some have it. Some don't. The ancient witness is not consistent, and there is no clear majority of accounts. So how do we decide which manuscripts are accurate? Did that phrase get inadvertently inserted? Did one set of manuscripts just neglect to include it? Or was it part of the original story, which some manuscripts deleted on purpose?

I tend to favor the last one, for three reasons.

First, the forgiveness Jesus offers just plain works with the heart of his teachings. It fits. It belongs, particularly in the context of the story Luke tells about Jesus. The man who Luke describes believed passionately in the transforming power of forgiveness, and also taught that our ability to show grace sets the foundation for how we ourselves are to stand before God.

Second, it gets worked into Luke's story of the early church. Where? We find Christ's words of forgiveness mirrored in the Acts of the Apostles, which is...as we should all know...part two of the the Gospel of Luke. When a mob sets in to killing Stephen, one of the first Jesus followers to die for his faith, Stephen echoes the words of Christ, asking that God not hold his murder against those who were killing him. This is a non-random thing. Luke/Acts is an intentionally crafted narrative compiled by a talented storyteller, in which themes and elements are included to provide us with a cohesive understanding of both Christ's teachings and the nature of the early church. Christ died with words of forgiveness on his lips, and Stephen shares the same Spirit and acts in the same way. We are meant to see the connection.

Third, I think the exclusion may have been intentional scribal editing. It is too consistent, and occurs not just in one but in several variant manuscripts. Why would a scribe delete this intense, poignant moment? Because I think..quite frankly...that this depth of grace can seem intimidating or threatening to us. If Christ is extending prayers of forgiveness to those who are killing him, where are those neat and tidy boundaries of grace that make us feel so good about ourselves? How can we get permission we want to turn up our noses at the people we just know must be going to hell? How can Jesus make us look stupid by forgiving people who..glurk...probably weren't even Christian?

We've been misunderstanding the Gospel since the moment we started writing it down. Fortunately, it's still there, witnessing to us and showing us grace that is so immense it can trouble our hearts.

Trolls and the Holy Ghost Dialectic

One of the things the emergent church gets pinged on a great deal is our relentless focus on conversation. We chat. We gather. We discuss. We convene. The idea behind those conversations is to get to know the other, to open ourselves to who they are. In those exchanges, we find understanding of the other. More importantly, it is in conversations with those who are not exactly "us" that we can find the deepest and most potent movements of the Holy Spirit.

The problem for emergents, as I see it, is that we don't really quite grasp how significant the thing we're doing is. While this approach is a foundational and roots-rock approach to both proclaiming and living into the Reign of God, we keep it in house. We like to talk grace amongst ourselves, but often don't realize that the same grace needs to be intentionally applied to our more challenging relationships. It needs to be expressed outside of comfortable places, in relationships that go beyond cups of coffee or tasty microbrewed beer shared among like-minded people.

We need to be graceful to our trolls.

Trolls, as anyone in the blogosphere knows, are those true-believing souls who take it upon themselves to attack and subvert those who fail to meet the pureblood standards of their particular belief. I've had several over the years. I've had hard-core neoatheist trolls, who have mocked my faith and my stupid fake Easter bunny God. I've had hard-core fundamentalist trolls, who have hurled snippets of scripture and bitter invective in equal parts. I am currently in between trolls, although there are some recent promising prospects. Hi Mark!

It's easy...and, in it's own way, fun...to hammer on these folks when they show up. What is not quite so easy is to realize that when Jesus told us to love our enemies, he was talking about trolls. It's a tough thing to do. Our immediate and human desire is to go to war, to open up the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

This is what the trolls want, although it isn't what they need. They look to the troll-lords on shout radio and shout-tv for inspiration. Trolls want to rant and bellow. Trolls want to find self-affirmation in a seething and closed-circle hatred of those who are different. As such, they are part and parcel of the cult of baseless self-esteem that has come to define our increasingly blighted society. But what they need is the same thing that we all need: the transforming grace of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

So...get to know your troll. Hold on to what is good, and defend what is right, but still be sure to show 'em a little lovingkindness. When they spit on that grace, offer up some more, and then some more after that. The font of our grace is, after all, infinite and without measure.

Evil is, after all, not overcome with more evil.

Rays, Part Two

It was the final day of our stay in Bermuda, and I was taking a little bit of time to pray.

Praying from a balcony on the twelfth deck of a cruise ship probably doesn't qualify me for membership in the Desert Fathers Monastic Ascetic Club. I hadn't spent the last 40 days sitting atop a pole. I wasn't wearing a hairshirt. Locusts had not been an option at the buffet that afternoon.

I was taking my usual approach to praying, meaning that rather than trying to come up with a nice little list of things I want God to do for me, I just tried to stop thinking and wanting and grasping for a while. As I did that, I looked out across the water of the King's Wharf Harbor, and...well...just looked at it.

It was late in the day, and the rays of light from the afternoon sun played like ten thousand fiery jewels across the surface of the sheltered water. The wind stirred and folded the water into ripples and whorls, and the sun shattered itself again and again across that stirring surface. It was so very simple, just the interplay of three basic elements in a tiny patch of creation. Yet it was also infinitely complex, as the patterns of sun-dapple shifted and changed on the waves in ways that were both logical and unpredictable.

As I contemplated it, I felt a strong sense of the interconnectedness of wind and air and light, how each one moved according to its connection to the other, and how each connection was both simple and almost unfathomably complex. Modeling even simple fluid dynamics is something that gives physicists headaches, and yet here it was before me.

The elegance of the dance between water and air and sun seemed, at that moment, just impossibly marvelous. These mindless things seemed so paradoxically mindful of their place, and of their relationship to one another.

If only human beings could move with such consistent grace.

I Have Had Enough

Although things seem to be turning around a tick, I find myself wondering if I am responsible for the recent economic downturn. Not me personally, mind you. But my attitude towards both money and possessions.

It isn't that I don't like stuff. Stuff is cool. I enjoy stuff. But I seem congenitally incapable of wanting things that are somehow better than the things I already have. Take motorcycles, for instance. I ride a 2000 Yamaha YZF600R. It's a bit aged, and looks more and more like a Mad Max ratbike as the years slip by. But when I bought it used a few years back, it was only after very carefully considering everything I was looking for in a bike. Fast? Check. Decent looking? Check. Fuel efficient? Very. Comfortable? Reasonably. It has a touring range that puts big touring Beemers and Gold Wings to shame...I've seen over 300 miles on a single tank. It's exactly the bike I wanted. And it still is. New bikes are appealing in the abstract, but there really is no reason to get one so long as my current ride is still running well.

So I fail an entire industry.

Or take our van. It's a seven year old Honda, again bought used. Though it's starting to show it's age, I still marvel at just how thoroughly it meets our needs. So I fail the struggling automotive industry. Or our house, which is a rumpled little hobbit-hole rambler built back in the early 60s. Sure, things need to be fixed and replaced...but it's not a starter home. It's plenty of space for the four of us. It always will be. We just don't need or want anything more, and so I fail the housing industry.

And I fail at that task willfully. Joyously, even.

Yesterday during my walking meditation, right before things got intense, the Hebrew word dayenu fluttered down and alighted in my consciousness.

It's a part of the Passover celebration, and is typically recited as a way of giving thanks for all of God's blessings. It means, roughly, "it would have been enough." During the Passover meal, that term is said over and over again, as the participants give thanks for each of the ways in which Israel was delivered from slavery. Each of them alone is enough to merit joy and thanksgiving, even if none of the rest of them had occurred. It is an expression of basic satisfaction.

Dayenu is, I think, the greatest enemy of consumer culture. Having that as one's attitude towards the life in which we find ourselves is a liberation the endless grasping acquisitiveness of our society. It is a counterbalance against that gnawing, desperate sense that we are not good enough, or smart enough, or rich enough, or pretty enough, and that we must constantly struggle with one another to prove our worth.

This is a particularly useful thing for a pastor to grasp. So what if my church doesn't seat 4,500 in each of our five Sunday services? So what if I'm flagrantly imperfect? For those ways my church is a joy, and for the ways I am able to make a difference, it is better not to fret and anguish and scheme. It's better to just say, dayenu, and let that attitude of gratefulness define all else.

Don't Give to that Charity...They'll Only Use It To Buy Booze

As the economy has tanked, more and more calls have come to my church for emergency assistance.

We're a small church that exists only because we have a small endowment. We give a fairly solid amount of our budget to support local charities and service organizations. We volunteer our time to help out. But what we don't do a tremendous amount of is direct giving to individuals.

In fact, we pretty much don't do any direct giving at all. I struggle with this a bit.

On the one hand, I tend to think that communities can better serve those in need if they pool their resources. The scattershot, church-by-church approach to giving tends to result in disjointed care. For families who are genuinely struggling, that means an arbitrary hit-or-miss approach to getting help. With the economy hitting parishioners hard, it also means that faith communities are rallying around their own, and may not have the resources or the energy to help those outside of their fold.

It also provides a rich environment for folks whose entire livelihood is a carefully manufactured sob story, like the young woman who comes by our church every year having been "just laid off this week and forced to live in her car." It's a late model Accord, the EX-L, with sunroof and navigation and leather seating. Or the man whose car "runs out of gas" in the church parking lot, and who needs cash...preferably twenty bucks...to get to work.

It's for that reason that a local charity that our church supports recently set up "charity meters" outside of local businesses as a way of reducing giving to professional panhandlers. Why give loose change to someone who's just going to buy a forty with it, when you can drop those quarters with a group that you know will provide housing, food, and sustained support to people in need? It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it'll either work or last.

That's because just giving cash or loose change to local charities is not enough. What that does not do is engage you personally with human beings who are struggling. It doesn't develop relationships. It doesn't engage you as anything other than a Sugah Daddy or a Lady Beneficent. If you don't really get to know the humanity of children of God who've fallen on hard times, then it's hard to say you're showing charity. By that, I don't mean charity as a process of financially supporting the disenfranchised. I mean charity as a spiritual gift, as charis, the essential manifestation of God's reconciling love.

Relationships governed by grace are a vital part of the way we are called to help transform the world, and that path includes but goes far beyond the financial.

How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

Westboro Baptist is unquestionably insane, but as I've spent a chunk of time going over their web presence in anticipation of their arrival in my neighborhood, I'm struck by a few things.

Their infamous signage, for one, is mostly remarkable for it's stark and iconic simplicity. It's a potent meld of basic primary colors and washes, coupled with brutishly simple messages that articulate their dark vision of the universe.

Second, as someone whose spent a small chunk of time recently trying to revamp the web presence of my own tiny little church, I can say that they've...well...got an impressive new media presence for a church their size. The Westboro website is clean and well designed. It gets right to the point, letting any visitors know in no uncertain terms that no matter who you are or where you're from, they hate you.

They've got an array of blogs, which express the viewpoints of a variety of different members of the extended Phelps family. Though each is somewhat different from the others, they all are remarkably good at staying on message. You've got current events related hate. There's a "Dear Abby"-esque hate-advice blog. There's a blog that angrily discusses their current schedule of hate-related picketing. Even more impressive, the folks at Westboro seem utterly committed to open-sourcing their material. Every page on their site boldly announces that there is no copyright on the text. Anyone can use it in any way they see fit. Why one would want to is beyond me, but I'm sure with some thought I could come up with some entertaining options.

As I've dug my way through their single-minded sea of festering bile, I've found myself wondering if it might be possible for a little church to become the Bizarro World Westboro Baptist. Could a congregation of 35-40 individuals be as intensely monomanaical in their expression of God's grace to the world as Westboro is in expressing their pathological hatred? Would it be possible for a small church to become as notoriously joyous as Westboro is notoriously horrid? Such a church would have to be more than a tiny bit insane, sure.

But it'd be a good sort of crazy.

Therefore...

So what’s Paul doing rhetorically in Romans 1? In terms of ethos, logos, and pathos, Paul starts, appropriately, with ethos. Remember, Paul hadn’t yet visited Rome. This letter was his best foot forward, a sincere effort to establish himself and his authority in a church that didn’t really know him yet. It was like that sermon a pastor preaches the very first Sunday in their new church. You pull out the stops. Read through Romans 1:1-17, and you see him establishing common ground, and presenting his spiritual credentials.

When we reach verse 18-32, Paul moves to pathos. He’s trying to evoke a sense of indignation at the sin of idolatry, which is the root sin expressed in Romans 1:22-23. It is idolatry that drives human beings to fall from God. The link between idolatry and the practices that Paul cites is cemented by his use of the Greek word dio, which we see translated as “therefore.” One thing happens, therefore another follows on.

According to Paul, what follows on from idolatry is twofold. First, there is degradation of desire (Romans 1:24-25), and second, the degradation of the mind (Romans 1:28). As an example of the first, Paul cites the giving up of phusiken kresin, or the “natural function” between men and women. As an example of the second, Paul runs through another one of his naughty lists, in verses 29-30.

Let’s set aside for a moment the argument about the root cause of homosexuality. Most people who are so inclined will tell you that they knew they felt same-sex attraction from childhood. Very few of them—at least in the survey and scientific data I’ve seen—indicate that they began feeling same sex attraction after they set up a small shrine to Regis Philbin in their basement. The causal link between worshipping idols and gayness is, shall we say, tenuous.

But I’m willing to spot Paul that point of fact, for two reasons. First, he’s using this as an example of fallenness—and idolatry as a concept, not a practice--based on his own observations of Roman Imperial culture. Second, it’s not his purpose. This section isn’t the point of his message. It serves much the same function as that cheesy canned anecdote your preacher uses to get you laughing before he gets around to the real message. The clear effect of Paul’s use of pathos is to make his listeners nod their heads at these wretched, godforsaken souls. They lived in Rome. They knew what went on. It would have lead some of his hearers, perhaps, feel a little more sure of their own righteousness under the law.

So when Paul continues on to the point of his argument in chapter two—an argument that will be sustained through to Romans 8:39—his listeners may well expect the “Therefore..” that begins chapter 2, verse one to lead to more of the same. They’re expecting Paul to lay in to a familiar list of known sinners in a way that would do Ann Coulter proud. Instead, having used pathos to stir that feeling, Paul switches to a formal rhetorical style known as diatribe, and they get this:

Romans 2:1-5 Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, "We know that God's judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth." Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.

Paul's point--and a core theme of Romans--is that all of us are sinners, and that all fall short of the demands of the law. If we only nod along to the pathos, and fail to hear the sharpness of Paul's challenge to our graceless judgments that this pathos establishes, then we've missed that point.

Back to Pastor Strangelove

Yeah, You're a Nice Person, but Jesus Hates You Anyway

One of the biggest sticking points I have with the core evangelical savedness script is the peculiar insistence that Hell is full of people who don't appear to in any conceivable way to have merited eternal damnation.

I was reminded of this while watching the highly entertaining film Ghost Town, in which Ricky Gervais plays an isolated and insufferably misanthropic dentist who ends up able to "see dead people." His partner in practice is a kind, gentle, genial Hindu. Even though he's constantly being graceful and pleasant to his maddening workmate, he's also precisely the sort of person who...according to the Good News of Jesus Christ, American Evangelical Edition...is going to burn forever in the fires of Gehenna as his nice unbeliever flesh is flayed from his nice unbeliever bones by an unrelenting personal incubus.

The reasons that Christians invariably give for this are twofold. First, you can only be saved by Jesus Christ. Not a Christian? Not saved. Of course, that's not how Jesus describes the final judgment in the only place in the Gospels he talks about it directly...but that's a minor detail. We're sure Jesus didn't actually MEAN that.

The second and more prevalent is this: we Christians assert that you are saved by grace, and not by works. Therefore, or so the argument goes, someone who does good but has not proclaimed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is just doing "works righteousness," which is pointless and worthless.

There is, under this rubric, no difference between an "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, stopping, bandaging your wounds, and getting you to the hospital and that same "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, taking your wallet and shoes, punching you repeatedly, and then slitting your throat so you can't tell anyone. From the perspective of the evangelical movement, any distinction between these acts is meaningless to God. Both are equally evil, for the person undertaking them is automatically damned no matter what they think or how they act.

What's most difficult about this for me..beyond it's self-evident disconnect from the idea of "Good News"...is that it seems to radically misrepresent Paul's essential point about works, faith, and righteousness. What are "works?" Well, they're anything you do. Anything. Building a Habitat for Humanity house? That's a work. Popping a cap into some fool who disrespected you? That's a work. Taking a dump? That's a work.

What is Apostle Paul is talking about when he describes "works" that do not save? Random actions? Any actions? Evil actions? No. The "works" being challenged are "works under the law." What Paul is challenging is the idea that obedience to an external code of conduct...in this case, the Torah...has any power to restore our relationship with God. Why?

Because law and legality assume an underlying enforcement through coercion. It's how the state runs. In the contract between a ruler and their people, failure to comply with the terms of a social compact will result in unpleasantness for those who mess up. That ranges from small fines to more unpleasant things, particularly if you live in the district of Sen. Vlad Dracul (R-Transylvania).

But if that's the reason you engage in moral action it means that you are, as Paul puts it, a slave to fear. You are not acting as one moved by Christ's grace, meaning you are not inwardly conformed to God's will through the action of the Spirit. You're just doing what you're told. It's a shallow, meaningless, untransformed obedience, rooted in a terror of divine punishment.

What Paul was doing was to proclaim that through Christ, that whole dynamic was shattered and replaced with an awareness of God's grace. Not God the divine autocrat...but God who moves to change our hearts to the good with a relentless and inexorable grace.

Yet when we see individuals who are not law-driven, when we experience souls that seem driven to show care for others not because fear of God but by some deep upwelling grace, for some reason we feel compelled to declare them damned by the name of Jesus.

In the name of grace, a sizable percentage of Christians are willing to be graceless. To fairly paraphrase Paul, "you who brag about grace, do you dishonor God by showing no grace? As it is written: 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'"