Welcome to the Party

I don’t mean to suggest that all Southern Baptists, or for that matter every Evangelical, is anti-environmental. But it is demonstrably true that these brothers and sisters in Christ, while not shy to speak out on many public issues of religion and morality, have been markedly silent about the devastating pollution of God’s creation.

In fact, some have been surprisingly obstinate to the conversation. Global warming deniers and oil industry sycophants, you know who you are.

Well, at least for the Southern Baptism Conference, no more! No more silence about pollution, no more heads-in-the-sand attitude toward accountability for government and corporations, no more wink-and-nod ignorance about the Biblical and spiritual implications of this problem.

The Deepwater Horizon spill has awakened the beast. I hope.

In a reasonably strong statement this month, the SBC expressed their grief over this tragedy, called on government and corporate interests to work together to resolve it, and acknowledged our common responsibility to God and neighbor in caring for the creation. These words are, I would say, the least that one would expect from any faithful community.

But then hidden within the statement a small, powerful gem of truth, one with the potential to bear an amazing witness to the creating and saving God, a little phrase that could, if taken to heart, change the world:

Our God-given dominion over the creation is not unlimited, as though we were gods and not creatures, so therefore, all persons and all industries are then accountable to higher standards than to profit alone …

Wow. Sin. Now that’s what we need to hear.

Because this is the true tragedy – the Horizon spill is not an accident, not an unforeseeable catastrophe, not a miscalculation of engineering. No, it is the angels of our worse nature brought to bear, the cost of our self-centered, self-serving, greedy-live-only-for-the-moment-and-damn-the-consequences mode of being. Every drop of oil in the Gulf of Mexico today is an incarnation of human wastefulness, intransigence and unwillingness to change.

In the words of the SBC, it happened because we think we are gods and can do whatever we desire to this planet.

And it’s time to be called to the higher standard.

Which brings me to what is missing from their statement, the natural, logical and necessary conclusion to this great simple truth. It is far too simple to decry the problem, cry alas for the suffering, call for repair and rebuilding. To truly understand this moment, to truly appreciate its author, is to call for acts and lives that will justly address it.

The problem is deeper than our addiction to oil. The problem is our willing addiction to oil because it is cheap, easy, and immediately satisfying.

The problem is sin.

Brothers and sisters, you have rightly identified the problem. Now, I pray, come join the path toward the renewal of us all.

to the end

It is a despairing time. Acts of unspeakable planetary despoilment. Racial anger. Corporate greed. Unrepentant corruption in politicians and judges. What does it take to find hope?

A tennis match.

Not just any tennis match. Not a championship match, or a match of champions even, rather two barely noticeable contenders. But the game they played, O, the game they played.

Or should I say games?

For eleven amazing hours, over the course of three days, they were bound together in immortal struggle, neither relenting, neither succumbing, fighting and fighting for that last advantage and victory. It must have seemed as if it could go on forever. But yet they played on, perhaps even knowing that in doing so they were draining themselves of precious resources they might need later.

Under other circumstances, a tennis match might (at most) contain no more than 65 games. The fifth set contained twice that all on its own. How many serves, how many shots, how many near moments? And still they played on.

It was, in part, a throwback approach to tournament that has long since been abandoned in favor of shot clocks, sudden death endings and shoot outs. Our inability to withstand such exquisitely drawn-out anticipation without near satisfaction makes such a show of courage and endurance impossible in this age.

Which is our great loss.

“He who endures to the end,” Jesus said, “shall be saved.”

What if this word is not just a command, but an opportunity, a gift? What if he means us to know that the very act of enduring, of hanging in, of – to put it biblically – remaining, is the very best thing for us, the place of heroism, the fulfillment of created possibility, the awakening of baptismal promise? We seek for ourselves victory, but what if we were created for the long, hard fought, well-played game itself?

Life cannot be won by easy or quick answers, though we would surely prefer it that way. We are mostly crying whiner-babies in the face of difficult challenges, trying desperately to convince ourselves that anger is sufficient to plug the hole in the ocean floor, that merchants and bankers will not bury the world in greed if we just ask them not to, that poverty and hunger will end without sacrifice and health care comes without cost. We have defined freedom to mean that we can have everything we want for free.

Which is just not so.

But one tennis match, one long and enduring tennis match, shows us that there is in this more in this world, a divine spirit that can empower us to be more, that can move us and call us to true and great works. Works that endure. Real works born of real honor that produce real change.

Yes, the match is long and hard. But we need not be champions. We need only be competitors. We need only endure.

Really Big Ten ... Twelve ... Whatever

There has been much talk of late in these parts about affiliation.

The dominant conversation here on my radio and newspaper is about colleges and conference affiliations and the relative values of several different affiliation. There is much gnashing of teeth over the loss of tradition and anticipation of possible futures. It is a reminder of the importance of affiliation, of belonging, of the value of connecting and the importance of seeking out such connections as are most valuable in so many ways.

Which is the problem with affiliations.

They are value-based. Well, what isn’t in this world? It is our essential motivation, our greatest purpose. To value. To find and receive value. To share value, particularly where it returns more value to us. It is the lens, the dogma, the doorway through which we come to affiliate.

What’s in this for me?

Every affiliation, every relationship, every purchase and gift subsists in this narrow category. Every act, every choice, every moment of every day is measured by its value. What did I gain? What did I add?

And this is the source of our every failure. We hope for value that we cannot obtain in this world, we ask for value from those around us that they cannot give, we pretend to add value to the world that we do not have. We have raised this world and each other and our lives to a bar that they cannot pass. We have laid down a standard that cannot be met.

Because we are prisoners of affiliations who do not understand what value is.

The word affiliation does not appear in the Bible. Ever. Anywhere. God is not interested in our affiliations, knowing that we assign them value that does not exist. What matters is not affiliation, not the simple, pragmatic, contractual, careful, casually made and easily broken relationships that we pretend matter.

What matters is love.

Compassion, as Luther translated it, is not an affiliation of value. It is, rather, a gut-wrenching, full body and soul leaping, go all in approach to life and the world around us. It is not a “what could I choose to do?” but a “how could I not?” altitude of existence. It is the fullness of grace, the wholeness of abundant life, the challenge and dare of discipleship.

It is the difference between listening to news about poverty and putting a check in the offering. It is the difference between worrying about pollution and changing the way we use energy. It is the difference between caring about homelessness and picking up a hammer at a Habitat build. It is the difference between a sympathy card and a hug.

And it is what really adds value.

No one has ever been truly changed by an affiliation. Oh, certainly, we’ve shared by, delighted in, been proud of our affiliations, but not changed. It is only profound and intimate places of compassion that have the power to form and move. It is only grace. It is only love.

For what else except grace has the power to move a God of wrath and righteousness to give his own Son to redeem a broken and lost creation? No affiliation of this world or the next can produce such a day.

For we are daily blessed to know a God who does not affiliate with us but loves us, graces us, embraces and sacrifices for us. And perhaps we might, in the midst of our search for affiliation, pause to love as well.

If it might not make much news, it would surely change the world.

The Gospel according to St. Robert

In 1876, embarrassed at his inability to conduct an orderly public meeting, an Army Engineer by the name of Henry Martyn Robert created a set of rules and procedures that we all know as Robert’s Rules of Order.

I have a hard time deciding whether he ought to be remembered a hero or reckoned a scapegoat.

I have no doubt that Robert’s Rules, like every good Parlimentary process, is the skeleton on which good and wise decisions have been assembled. There are, no doubt, many, many episodes where Robert’s Rules constrained conflict unto civility, and even productivity.

Good for Parliaments, Senates and Congresses. A true boon to lawyers everywhere. But a horrible and even dangerous delusion for the rest of us.

The very name gives away its flaw. Robert’s Rules of Order. Of Order. Meant to be particularly useful, acceptable, valuable even, to those moments requiring, capable of, order.

But what of those other places? What of the community of faith?

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 1 Corinthians 1:20

Yes, it was another Synodical gathering this weekend past. In many ways, a reminder of all that is beloved and lovable about the institution of the church, the earnestness, the warmth, the unchanging but ever new stories. But then the gathering becomes a meeting, and we forsake being a church to try to be something else.

Which is that we try to be right.

I don’t mean to be as dismissive of such things as I’m sure I seem. I understand and even trust that the brothers and sisters in Christ who bravely approach the numbered microphones in the hall to speak to the assembly intend good, seek righteousness, believe and mean what they say. What they do not know, what we all dare not say, is that what we seek is not within our grasp.

We wish to be right about God. We wish to be right about God in this life, in this world. We can not. We are not capable in all things, in many things, perhaps even in most things, to be wise, true, right. It is not for to know right – that is the purpose of law, of command. We cannot do right – that is the purpose of Christ.

But more, I believe. When we search for right, we miss the point entirely.

God does not call us to right. He calls us to faith. He calls us, in fact, to foolishness, to weakness, to what must seem undoubtedly wrong. The endless and fruitless search for right turns out to be, in the end, a journey to division, frustration, violence. Death.

Let our search be otherwise. Let it be our search for God.

God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. 1 Corinthians 1:25