Learning to Speak Martian

Having now read through Stormie Omartian's The Prayer that Changes Everything (R), I can say that...well...I don't tend to read books like this.

Tillich's Systematics, this was not.  Nor was it the bare-knuckled mentally-demanding practical mysticism of my Teacher George MacDonald.

As I wended my way through this very, very straightforward book, it was clear that this was not written with me in mind.   She genuinely tries to be welcoming, to bring everyone in.  Her first chapter essentially reads: "Do you want your life to be terrible?  Me neither!  Here's one sure-fire way you can make it super extra awesome!"

In reality, not all beings are the same, and we encounter our Creator differently.   And no, it's not because she's Martian and I'm an Earthling, although when on page 154 she credits her faith in Jesus for getting her  "...through that extremely difficult transition from one planet to another," I did get to wondering.

We're just different folks.  How so?

I do not encounter creation in quite the same way as Ms. Omartian.   Really and actually, I do not.  I do not, for instance, have any issue with our having evolved from "monkeys."  One, well, we didn't.  We're hominids, technically.  Different family.  No tail, see?   I don't see the evolutionary process as lessening our value as children of God, any more than saying we're made of dirt devalues us.

Some of what she finds mysterious, I don't.  Like, say, how an airplane stays in the sky.  In one chapter, she recounts her fear of flying.  She doesn't get what's happening, and how it can happen, and it makes her anxious and afraid.  Then she realizes that she's trying to control things that are beyond her ken, and lets go and lets God.  That helps calm her.   I feel that same anxiety in planes myself, that same lack of control.   But what calms me is visualizing the reality of the airframe around me, and the thrust of the turbofans, and the physics of the Bernoulli effect.  I know the why of Creation, and that eases my mind. I save my praying for those times the plane is tossed around the sky like a leaf in a storm.  In that, we are not so different, I suppose.

Neither do I encounter scripture in quite the same way as she does.   For Stormie, God's Word is great because it means you don't have to worry anymore.  It just tells you what to do, which makes life a whole bunch simpler.   Scripture for her comes in snippets, verse by verse, here a little there a little.  It's all written for her, she says, a love letter from God.  I see in it the complexity of thousands of years of our encounter with God, sacred stories that need to be understood in their entirety, and in context.  My encounter with them changes me, but they are not mine alone.  Understanding their purpose requires both reason and the light of the Spirit.  The heart of it is simple.  But that simplicity is not always self-evident.

And worship?  I like a good worship, too, but here again, we're a tick different.

Omartian's first love is praise music, and so thats the focus of the book.  Praise worship is The Prayer that Changes Everything (R).   You just have to praise!   Meaning, 1) Sing!  and 2) Cry!   A great worship involves a great deal of Kleenex, and will both clear out your sinuses and change you forever. I've known folks who believed this was the only way to worship, and honestly?  Having been part of a church that was All About Praise (R) I know this isn't always true.  Some were fine folks, who really got the Jesus thing.  Others did a lot of emoting on Sunday, and went right back to gossiping and petty cruelty and bullying on Monday.   Or Sunday afternoon in the parking lot of the church.  Heck, some folks couldn't even make it through the fellowship hour.

Being Presbyterian, I worship differently.  For me, a great worship involves a great deal of Thinking, which we tend to do best with our eyes serenely closed in meditation.  That our congregation is nodding jerkily and drooling a bit during the sermon is just a sign they're Thinking Very Hard.  Or so I've been told.

After all, God speaks in our dreams.  My sermons just facilitate that.

But reading Stormie's writing, I found myself unable to get to that place of cattiness that makes for such good bloggery.  "Chill," said the Spirit.  "Listen to your sister."

Snark is easy, particularly when encountering a very simple and heartfelt faith.  What is harder is looking at a very different soul and saying, "Is there grace here?"  If someone believed and acted upon what was written here, how would they live relative to the teachings of Jesus?

I've known people like Stormie, and the people with whom her writing resonates.  They're good, practical people, and there are a lot of them.  They do read, a great deal.  But recommending that they read Tillich would be like telling me to rebuild a four-barrel carburetor.  Or, more entertainingly, having me lead a liturgical dance.   I've only done that once, but for all my pleadings, they won't take the video down.

Reading through this book, she doesn't appear to have a mean bone in her body.  She's been through a whole bunch, and she's perfectly open about how challenging her life has been.  In the face of those challenges, her faith has been hugely important to her.  Her encounter with Jesus prevented her from breaking, and kept her from becoming sour and vindictive and cruel.  Faith in Christ turned her soul towards a life of mercy and reconciliation.  So what she's doing is just sharing that.  I hear her, and as I read her, I see no reason to doubt it.

That, I think, is one of the primary keys to her success as an author.   Her writing about her experiences is simple.  Honest.  Authentic.  Practical.  Hopeful.  It speaks directly to the experiences of her audience, which is considerable in number.

Am I that audience?  No, not exactly, but that doesn't mean what she has to share isn't a good thing for many.  Do I agree with all of it?  No.  But that's the case with almost anyone I read.

Perhaps it's the name, which still amazes me, but reading this book I found myself thinking of Paul's preaching on the Areopagus.  When he got up on Mars Hill, he made sure to articulate the Message in a way that had purchase with the Athenians around him.

Long and short of it:  If you're going to speak to people about the importance of what Jesus taught, you need to speak in ways they understand.  And there are many, many ways to do that which preserve the essence of the Gospel.  That's the great strength of having so many different flavors of Christian faith.  That there are books out there like this one that reach folks I'd probably bore the bejabbers out of?  All the better.

Not all of us speak Martian.  But that some do?  Well, that's cool. 

Diversity

Following on my post from the other day reflecting on something Carol said over at tribalchurch, why diversity?

I mean, yeah, leftys and lib'rals tend to go on about how important it is to be inclusive.  We could klatch endlessly about the liberation of transgendered Guatemalans living with dwarfism.  Sorry, "little people."  Or, oops, that's gente pequeña.  Or transexuales poco de Guatemala.  So hard to keep track of the lingo sometimes.

The reasons to care about difference, though, need to go well beyond simply wanting to include everyone because it's inclusive, even though that word makes us feel as warm and tingly as a hot brimming cup of fair trade Ethiopian Yergacheffe.

Here, I think Christian progressives tend to fall back on the language of secular liberal academe, and we do so to our failing.  To my eyes, the deepest justification for diversity comes from within Scripture.  The great narrative arc of the Tanakh, the Gospels, and the Epistles rings out with stories of how vitally important it is that we be open to the other.

Yeah, I know, you can spin it the other way.  You can get all Ezra and kick out all them apostate furrin' wimmen and their mudblood children.  If you're a social conservative in a strict constructionist sense, there are plenty of opportunities within the tradition to stand firm against the creep of "syncretism" and/or those voices that seem to chip away at the authority you know is your birthright.  You can use the Bible to keep those loud whiny women in their place.  You can scripturally shout down those uppity colored folk.  But just 'cause it's the truth that affirms you in all you've been taught doesn't mean it won't wither to writhing embers in the hellfire of God's inexorable love.

From within the core metrics of our faith, there are some key operating assumptions about hearing the voices of folks different than us.

First, there's the Exodus presumption in favor of the stranger.  At a bare minimum, those who are different and those who are outside of the boundaries of our culture and our should be met with welcome, grace, and kindness.  Why?  Because our mythopoetic memory is of having been strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt. When we cried out for deliverance, it was the cry of the oppressed other that was heard by the Lord.   This is our story.  If we approach the other...any other...without a heart of compassion, then we have failed to understand the essence of the Biblical narrative and our place within it. 

Second, there's God's tendency to consistently use those who ain't part of "us" to school us, save us, or whup our behinds when they needs a whuppin'.  The prophets through whom God spoke stood outside of the structures of human culture and power.  They lived in the wilderness because those in power tended to drive them there, preferring instead the saccharine comforts of those who told them what they wanted to hear.   God goes so far as to use even those who aren't part of the faith at all.  When Israel forgot about covenant and justice and mercy, and got to be all about power and privilege, Babylon was an instrument in God's hands.  When Israel wept, helpless and lost and broken by the rivers in Babylon, Cyrus of Persia was an instrument in God's hands to save them.  God is not part of our culture.  God is not part of any society.  God is not "us."  With us, yes.  Working in us and through us, maybe.  But if the Biblical narrative is to be ours, then we must live into the truth that God is present and active even in those who are radically other.  If we want to hear our Creator, then we have to listen and be present with the other. 

Finally, there's Christ's redemptive work.   Yeah, that.  Jesus reaffirms and radicalizes the Exodus favoring of the stranger.  The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are oriented towards deep and God-centered engagement with the other, and in particular the other who is ostracized, hated, or powerless.  It is that baffling love for not just friends, not just family, but for the stranger and the enemy that makes Christianity a tradition that is 1) ever and always fundamentally countercultural and 2) worth following.

That isn't to say that Wuvvy Sparkleberry Jesus sprinkles lollipops and daisies on everyone.  Those who have worldly power, be it coercive or economic, well...Jesus has words for them.  Those words aren't easy ones.  Why?  Because defining ourselves in terms of society or the gun or the dollar turns us into adversaries of one another and of God.  Those forms of power make us approach others not in love, but with the intent of alienating them, or subjugating them, or profiting from them.

The more deeply we engage with those that worldly power declares other, the tax-collectors and the centurions and the lepers and the unclean, the more we manifest the Kingdom.

That, it would seem, is reason enough to make diversity a priority for Christians.

Tribes and Cultural Christianity

In the last week, there's been a spate of particularly ugly news coming out of West Africa. Meaning, it's something that most Americans are utterly unaware even happened. There's just no room for it in our brains, what with March Madness and the Oscars, so why even bother putting it on the air?

The news comes from Nigeria, a country where my folks lived for several years, and which I had the opportunity to visit on several occasions many moons ago. In and around the town of Jos, a group of Muslims attacked Christians, shooting and hacking to death several hundred people. It's a reprisal for a similar attack undertaken by bands of Christians, and part of a long cycle of interreligious violence in that region. It is, or so it might appear, yet another example of the brutality that folks inflict on one another in the name of God. Look at the bloodshed that faith causes, one might say. If there were no religions to divide people in the name of God, then the world would be a much better place, one might say.

Problem is, that's not what is at play here. The Muslims were all Fulani tribespeople. The Christians were all Berom tribespeople. The recent attacks seem to be related to the theft of some livestock a while back, which was followed by reprisals, which were followed by more reprisals. The Berom all are Christian, but they also are ethnically and linguistically separate from the Fulani, and have been so since before Jesus and Mohammed showed up in that part of sub-Saharan Africa.

The violence has to do with the thing that causes most human conflict...that tendency for groups to organize around a shared identity that differentiates them from other groups. The most elemental of those groupings is that of blood, as our bond to family becomes the most significant Us. We are the Hatfields! What was your last name again, stranger? On another level come the bonds that come from shared culture and land. We are American! We Support Our Troops (tm)! On yet another come the bonds that come from mutual interest. We are the West Burlington Knitting Society! Death to the East Burlington Knitting Society!

When faith is delimited by the particular forms and expectations of a given culture or society, then it can become yet another rationale to shore up hatreds driven by blood and material possession. That, as I've been opining of late, is one of the more radical things about what Jesus taught.

The bonds of blood and language and culture...even the bonds of religious self-identification...are things that Jesus explicitly rejected. It is the hated Samaritan who is offered as the highest model of grace. It is the Syrophonecian woman who Jesus yields to in a serious breach of gender and ethnic protocol, in front of his disciples no less. It is the pagan Roman centurion's child who is healed.

When we start viewing Christianity as functionally identical to our culture, when it becomes yet another Us that permits hatred of those who are Not Us, then we've lost our Way.

Racial-Ethnic and the "Other"

A recent Thanksgiving gathering of old friends at my homestead stirred some interesting conversation around demography and race. This is unsurprising, given that our little fellowship included two professors of sociology and the director of research for a decent-sized corporation. In particular, there was talk about how meaningless it is to project the growth of particular racial categories in the United States. Racial categories can change, because in a pluralistic culture, race is not a static thing. We're a mongrel nation, and expecting racial division to remain long term ain't realistic.

Ultimately, the box we're all going to check when the census man asks about our race is "Other." Either that or "Mutt."

One of the things that cheeses me off most consistently about my essentially well-meaning denomination is our obsession over demographics. Being decent and orderly and all, we like to keep track of and monitor and fret over all manner of data. And because we're sorta kinda progressive, we tend to fret most intensely over whether or not we're diverse.

We're not, of course. We are, as a denomination, mostly Anglo and aging. Realizing that monocultures are vulnerable both biologically and organizationally, we talk endlessly about the need to be inclusive of our racial-ethnic brothers and sisters. Do we have enough racial-ethnic participation on our committees? Are we training enough racial-ethnic pastors? Do we have enough racial-ethnic congregants?

To which I find myself thinking: "racial-ethnic?" Why does that category exist at all? It is, for the PC(USA), a catch-all category that means "y'all-ain't-white-folk." And though we're trying to be meticulously fair, slapping a big NON-HONKEY label on people seems mostly just to make people aware that they are not "us." It's a recipe for failure.

Some will argue that we need to be intentional about things, that we need to keep track and keep ourselves accountable. I think there's truth in that. But more important than our intellectual intentionality is it's fusion with a culture of intentional boundary shattering in our congregations. To do this right, we've got to couple our intellectual intentionality with a change in the cultural expectations of our congregations. Meaning we're as heart-intentional about it as we are mind-intentional.

What we need, as Bulworth* might put it, is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of ecclesiastical racial deconstruction.

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*Off-site links may not hew to the Beloved Spear no-profanity policy...so don't say I didn't warn ya.

The Call

One of the oddest things about the way the Good Lord lines up pastors with communities is that it works so very differently than we tend to expect.

My denomination has a "call process," which appears to be most closely modeled on the federal government's approach to hiring. It's an endless cycle of committees and requirements and measures that, taken individually, make sense. There's a good solid reason behind everything we do, and it all seems very official and circumspect. What it results in, though, is frustration for everyone involved...and not sufficiently better results than if folks just looked at a few resumes and made a decision. Call does not work the way we force it to work. It can work through the process, sure. But the two things are not the same.

It also doesn't work in the same way church shopping works. Pastors often ask themselves this key question: Would I attend the church I am serving? The idea behind this is simple. A pastor needs to be excited about their congregation. They need to instantly love it, and be filled with joy at the prospect of it growing and flourishing. If the community isn't a match for them, and they feel out of place or in some way distant, then they're going to stagnate or grow frustrated or be less vested in it's flourishing.

For that love to take place, the argument is simple: The pastor needs to feel that this church is their church. It's the place where they go for spiritual sustenance and fellowship with People Like Them, the place where folks are always glad they came and people are all the same and everybody knows their name.

That does not even come close to describing my church. When I started, my congregation was a tiny struggling group of elderly Anglos. The church was riven with conflict-echoes and despair after a particularly ugly break with the previous pastor. If I'd shown up on a Sunday looking...as a lay person...for a vibrant progressive community, one with a heart for Christ and for neighbor, I'd not have sensed it. I'd have felt mostly the aching pain of loss and desperation. As a church product for the savvy consumer, it had little to offer.

Now, my church is bigger, but not by much. Coming in this Sunday, I'd walk in the door...as folks do about once a month...and instantly see that with the exception of the anomalous White Guy up front, it was Not Me. Though it aspires to be multiethnic, it is almost entirely Korean. It is also very, very young...bordering on feeling like a youth group, even though it most certainly ain't. The worship is mostly contemporary, meaning heavy on the Chris Tomlin and Hillsong. It's still a little church rattling around in a big sanctuary. As a shopper for churches, I'd have sniffed it, found the scent unfamiliar, and moved on swiftly, as dozens and dozens have...sometimes before the service is even half over.

But being called to serve a congregation does not work that way. It just doesn't. Nowhere in the great story that runs from Torah through the Epistles can I find any evidence of that. Not a single call...at least, none that mattered...worked that way. Not Abraham or Moses or Jacob, not Isaiah or Jeremiah, not Paul, and most certainly not Christ.

The "process" is not like something an HR department does. It's also not like the market process by which we select consumer products. Call is more...heck...mystic than that. More God-related. It's a work of the Holy Spirit. It's an urging. It's a hunger. It's a strange compulsion driven by dreams and obscure theophanies.

And where that compulsion takes us is to places where everyone is not Just Like Us. Where things are difficult. Where we are forced to grow, and struggle, and grow some more. Where exposure to the Other and the Different makes us realize that what is not familiar is not automatically evil, and that we can come to care deeply and passionately for those who are not already neatly part of our marketing demographic.

As, over the last six years, I have.