Leaks, Secrecy, and the Kingdom

It seems like the last month has been dominated by the flood of classified and leaked documents pouring out of Wikileaks.  This odd little internet entity has sprung into the limelight based on what appears to be the sole premise of its founder, Julian Assange: We should know what our governments and the leadership of corporations are saying and doing.  Thanks to the ability of most human institutions to cause deep disgruntlement among people who have access to privileged information, Assange appears to have struck the motherlode.

Depending on what media outlet you rely upon for your information, this is either a fascinating source of inside information or a treasonous betrayal of our security.  Given Assange's recent releases, he now finds himself in a British prison, charged with being...well...a "person of interest" in a sexual assault trial in Sweden.  I don't know definitively about Assange, but for some reason, my gut responds to him in the same way that it responded to Mikhael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  He's in trouble because he's messed with powers and principalities.  He's likely not a saint.  But dang, is his story both real and compelling.

Assange isn't just in trouble because he's cheesed off some Russian mobsters, though he has.  In this country, fulminators on the right have gone as far as calling for his assassination.  Palin has, of course, but she's hardly the most pungent.  That award goes to columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer, who in an article about Assange recalled fondly how the Soviets murdered Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in the late 1970s with a poison ball shot from the tip of an umbrella.

He's not saying.  He's just saying.  Nudge nudge.

Amazing how consistently evil far right wingers can be, be they Soviet or neocon.

The Wikileaks phenomenon leaves me wondering a bit.  I understand the place of secrets in geopolitics, and in the dynamics of corporate life.  Nation states and profit-driven entities depend on secrecy to maintain advantage.  Lies and obscurity and deception are necessary aspects of every system of power, be it sociopolitical power or socioeconomic power.  That's reality.  It's really easy to understand.

But as I look at WikiLeaks through the lens of Christianity, I find it rather harder to condemn it or the actions of Assange.  Secrets and darkness and shadows are not the stuff of the Kingdom.  The Reign of God that we Jesus people proclaim has no place for the whispering machinations of geopolitics.  It has no place for the deceptive platitudes that mask predatory profiteering.

Children of light have nothing to fear from the truth.  We recognize that whispering obfuscation is a methodology of the Enemy.

However you spin it, that WikiLeaks should be so problematic to so many people is a sign of just how far we are from being close to the Kingdom.

New Things

As I sit in the pastor's office on a Saturday morning, things are typically silent in the church. The halls are empty. The classrooms sit cold and dormant. The sanctuary is still. The thrums and wheezes of our heating system and the staccato clacking of my Mac's chicklet keyboard are the usually the only sounds. It can feel like a hollow, empty shell of a building, a brittle egg with no yolk and no white.

Today, though, the church bustles and hums with life. One of the folks who is joining the church tomorrow had the vision and desire to restart a culture school for adoptive parents of Korean kids. Our church had hosted a similar program years ago, but it waned when the agency we worked with changed hands and lost interest. But one eager and entrepreneurial soul was enough to get it rolling again. The church gives her the space and our encouragement and our prayers, and suddenly, there's sound and laughter and footsteps here again. I had the pleasure of offering up words of welcome to the group on behalf of the church this morning, and it was a delightful thing.

For a small church, there are three things to carefully avoid when you start up a new thing.

First, we need to avoid viewing new things as a distraction or a threat to "how things are." Many fading churches are desperate to revitalize, but only understand revitalization as "doing what we've always done but with more people." That is the path of decay and death. Life means dynamism and change and openness to the new. Vibrant and successful churches both nurture and celebrate newness. They encourage the gifts and hopes and aspirations of every soul who gathers with them. I think we've got this one down. Folks here are willing to embrace change, and my little leadership cadre has made that an explicit part of our congregational vision.

Second, we need to avoid being physically territorial. Whenever there is change in the life of a church, sometimes folks bump up against other folks. We try to coordinate times and spaces, but sometimes..well..things get moved. Or a room isn't quite exactly the way you left it. Or someone chasing down a child forgets they left a half-consumed cup of coffee on your desk. Given our not-so-distant remove from other higher primates, it's easy for human beings to get all pissy about picayune stuff like this. I know I can be that way sometimes. But that petty material gracelessness can be a surprisingly impressive impediment to renewal. For little groups who are used to everything being theirs, the whispering and puckered-lip disapproval over their use of our space and place can hamstring efforts to welcome in new opportunities for joy. I think we do OK at this about two-thirds of the time. I commit to doing it better, and to lovingly kicking the butts of folks I see falling into this trap.

Third, and this one is the hardest, we need not to be grasping. As any new program comes into being, particularly ones that serve others, it's really really hard for churches not to seize hold of them like a panicked drowning person. Every person who comes SIMPLY MUST JOIN US! We need you here! Pleasepleasepleaseplease! In our desperation to be moving in the right direction, we view every new opportunity as something that should serve us.

This gets it exactly backwards. Every new opportunity is an opportunity for us to better serve others. I know we don't have much time, and things are tough. But we need not to grasp and cling and cry out and have our future drown with us as we claw it under with us. Be calm. Don't panic. Celebrate the moments as they come, and keep ourselves open to the moments of new possibility that will arrive.