What I Learned During the Great 2020 Quarantine

 

Thing Three: At hand

Religion considers itself a journey to come closer to God. In reality, it usually works to keep God far away. Or at least within the limitations of what we are willing to accept as God’s realm.

We desire to be close to God after this life is over, to reside in his heavenly city with its streets of gold. We would like God to be near us in times of need, to protect us from threats and dangers, to provide for us in times of need, to lend his healing power when we are sick, and to fill our hearts with hope and joy when we are down. When we look at the brokenness of the world, we blame atheists and secularists who have driven God from our homes and our schools and our public life. Let God back in, we say, and all will be well.

As long as it’s the God we worship.

We worship a God who reigns from on high, who keeps track of rights and wrongs and properly assigns rewards and punishments. We have built a system that we call religion to keep God in his proper place, doling out rewards and punishments as required by law, giving mercy and the occasional miracle just to keep the game interesting. We know that Jesus talks a lot about love and healing sick people and giving money to the poor, nice things to be sure, but we know deep in our hearts that God is ultimately concerned about spiritual and moral matters. In that way, religion remains a private, personal concern. A choice. You’d think Americans invented it.

We didn’t. This was the church of the Middle Ages. Religion permeated every aspect of medieval life, if sometimes with a heavy hand. For most of the population, life without the church was simply not conceivable. For people whose lives were filled with hardship and constantly overshadowed by death, church was not just another activity, it was a necessity for survival. Despite our modern skepticism about the medieval church, most people were truly devout, and practiced their faith fervently, even hopefully. Yet in all of this God remained distant, aloof, seated on his heavenly throne watching over his creation with righteousness and (occasionally) benevolence. Any relationship with such a God was by definition transactional, blessings received for true faith and good works, acts of penance made to compensate for sins great and small. There were lots of sins that demanded compensation.

Some, actually, could be paid for with cash. A dedicated mass, a gift given in adoration of an ancient relic, an offering made for a special occasion dedicated by the Pope that could resolve some, if not all, of a person or their loved one’s sin, erasing thousands upon thousands of year of purgatorial punishment. Until Luther came along. The church complained that Luther endangered the religious well-being of the laity by destroying practices that kept them close to God. Luther attacked Indulgences, and later the whole array of common religious acts, because in fact they distanced people from a real relationship with God. These religious acts turned believers back to themselves, to their sorrow, to their fear. God remained in heaven afar, bound by the same rules and procedures that governed the life of the faithful, no more free than they were.

Luther dreamed of a different life of faith, where penance was not resolved by praxis or ritual, but experienced deep in the heart of the believer who found solace in the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. He wrote longingly of faith that was profound, powerful enough to cast out actual demons that haunted consciences and not merely the cartoon devils conceived to motivate recalcitrant sinners. He yearned for faith that amended hearts and redirected lives and rebuilt worlds. His writings often reveal a deep emotion and passion in his own spirituality, his struggle to find peace in his anfectung, to fully experience a God of grace. What changed his life was the realization that God was not waiting for him to pass his religious test, but was actively transforming his very being and his every act through the power of the grace bestowed in baptism, the promise fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

                For Luther, God was not seated on some distant heavenly throne, the keeper of law, waiting for him to accomplish his own salvation. God was hard at work in Luther and in the world creating a new Adam, bringing to life a new Kingdom. Right here. Right now.

                That is the other important part of this equation. Religion keeps God at bay by assigning religious fufillment to a distant event in the chronological future, at the end of life, at the end of time. For religion, in the middle ages and now, the work of faith is given as a downpayment on some (hopefully) heavenly tomorrow. The potential for a different ending, one filled with heat and pain and torment, is a powerful deterrent to sin. Supposedly. As the modern age comes to a close it seems that cynicism has got the best of the devil, until even the threat of the fires of hell have little or no impact on the choices of most humans. As attention spans shorten and immediate gratification becomes a defining lifestyle, a religion dependent on the appeal of investing in some mystical post-life scenario is less and less meaningful. And less faithful.

                How did we reach this point? This is not following the path of a Jesus who came spending grace like it was going out of style, like it was burning a hole in his pocket. He confronted the need that was immediately in front of him, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, touching the untouchable, crossing boundaries geographic and social. And he did it in real, hands-on physical acts. He spat into the eyes of the blind, hugged children, broke bread with friends and lifted drowning disciples from the lake. He told stories about farmers and fathers, shepherds and servants. Real people. And in the end he hurt and bled and died, as any of us might. His instructions to his disciples for their ministry was the same. “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” (Matthew 10:8 NRSV) And those instructions were to be an enactment of their proclamation: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 10:7 NRSV)

                To come near, to approach, to be in the vicinity, close by. It is a word that describes the historical turning point of Jesus arrival, the immanence of the destruction of Jerusalem, the hour of destiny that is Jesus’ true mission. Its best translation is “at hand,” a baton passed in relay, a help up from a deep pit, the touch of a beloved at bedside. It is anticipation in the moment of fulfillment, the bright flash on the horizon at dawn. This is Jesus’ schedule, not a distant and abstract someday, but an extant, if unrecognized, reality that can no longer be ignored.

                Jesus didn’t invent this idea, by the way. Jesus comes to announce what was always true for God’s people. The soul of the Torah is its immediacy, its pertinence. “The word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” (Deuteronomy 30:14 NRSV) The prophets did not come to predict events beyond the veil of time, they spoke to the present brokenness of Israel and its immediate consequence. While we rummage through the pages of the prophets for the keys to unlock a mysterious future like a gambler perusing the daily racing form for a hot tip on a longshot, the truth stares us in the face and dares us to attend to it. Salvation is not waiting for us. It is here. Why are we still waiting?

                That is what we do in a quarantine of course. We wait. We sit in the safety of our homes and we wait for the plague to pass, for the demonstrators to go home and the streets to clear, for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, for leaders to lead, for a sign to come and show us the way. We yearn for the day when this all will be over and we will be free.

         We have forgotten: we are free right now.

And the world is waiting for us to do something with our God-given freedom.

The great failure of the church is its willful ignorance of the immediacy of its calling, its procrastination in Christ’s mission to the detriment of the neighbor. Perhaps we have watched the cycles of history for too long and so we assume that this day will just pass as well. The world has been through so much already and just kept on going without really changing. There is still a generation among us who has lived through world-wide financial depression and war. There has been social unrest before, there have been sickness and disease. We are comfortable in the assumption that this too will pass, won’t it?

The problem, of course, is that, for the most part time does pass, problems come and go and then things return to their previous undisturbed state. We think that a blessing. After all, change is frightening and difficult. Better the devil we know, a cliché that depends on our willful obliviousness to the devil in our midst. Privilege creates a myopathy that shelters us from suffering in the world and our neighbor behind the facade of our own real and imagined travails. Wrapped up in our own needs, our heart is closed off and our faith is defeated. And the mission of the Kingdom of God is denied.

In the misery of the Babylonian exile God gave a powerful vision of redemption to the Israelites. But the image is not a conquering hero who would overcome their enemies, it is a figure who suffers too. The Savior will be “despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces.” (Isaiah 53:3 NRSV) God would redeem their pain and grief by binding himself to the pain and grief of the world. Instead of the same old cycle of ignoring the brokenness of our lives and our world, God invites us to move into the deep experiences of all that hurts to find him. To find ourselves. To find truth. Facing up to who we are and what we have done is the beginning and the end of change, the start of what is new.

Isaiah introduced the figure of the Suffering Servant in the context of that great promise:    “Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, see, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” (Isaiah 42:9 NRSV) The joining of the divine to the mortal, the coming of the Son into midst of injustice and peace is the new thing that creates new things. Breaking us away from our narcissistic self-involvements and opening us up to see the world around us is the moment when the Kingdom of God dawns in our eyes and in our hearts. Here, in the poverty and oppression of our neighbor is purpose and identity. Here, in the fear and helplessness of our neighbor is strength and healing. Here, in a lost and wandering world is the signpost of the day that is becoming in our midst.

                Now, more than two millennia later, these words reach out to us in the midst of the darkness of 2020. We have been exiled from everything we consider normal, usual, important. We are suffering. We are waiting for this moment to pass, we are looking for the calendar page to turn and take us to some other place, to any other place than this. But God is bringing in his Kingdom right here, right now, and dares us to stay where we are this time, to open our eyes and our hearts to this moment, to have courage and hope and faith, to discover that our salvation is bound to the salvation of our neighbor and the whole world. And our neighbor and the whole world can’t wait for us any longer. Martin Luther King Jr. said it this way:

 We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.[1] 

With all due deference to Dr. King, let’s not say this is a time. Let us instead embrace the promise: this is the time. This is God’s time, and so it must be our time too. We have been burdened for too long with bad theology and false leadership and horrible teaching and corrupted institutions and every other manner of human brokenness, but that need not stop us any longer. We have learned something during these months of quarantine, during this time of disorder and unrest. We have been opened to acts of faith long avoided and possibilities long unheeded. The Kingdom is here. The Kingdom is now. It has come for us. This is the day that the Lord has made, let us enter it with joy and thanksgiving!

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[1] 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

What I Learned During the Great 2020 Quarantine

 

Thing two: stuff happens (yes, even in the Kingdom)

“God’s people should be the happiest people on earth. Maybe you came from a family like my dad’s, where they didn’t have much. Perhaps you hail from a long line of divorce, failure, depression or mediocrity. You need to say, “Enough is enough. I’m going to start believing God for bigger and better things.” Get up each day expecting God’s favor. Friend, no matter what you’ve been through, no matter whose fault it was, no matter how impossible your situation may look, the good news is that God wants to turn it around and restore what has been stolen from you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. It’s your faith that activates the power of God. Remember, if you obey God and are willing to trust Him, you will have the best this life has to offer — and more. You can start living your best life now.”

 These are the words of Joel Osteen, author and Pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. They are typical of what is commonly known as the “Prosperity Gospel,” an uplifting and inspiring message that promises God’s rewards for those who believe and trust. Not merely the reward of an eternal life in paradise, but a fulfilled, prosperous and trouble-free life here and now. Material rewards for material acts of faith – church attendance, clean living and homage to other appointed marks of holy living. Happiness and serenity for those who choose the right side. Lakewood church has a membership counted in the tens of thousands, and a televised media following in the millions. And who would not want such a glorious, fortunate life?

If only it worked like that.

Years of ministry have shown me again and again that the opposite is true. The deeply faithful people I have encountered in my journeys have struggled with poverty and disease, strife and grief in the course of their lives, sometimes of their own making, sometimes not. There have been some who have enjoyed the fruits of their labors, there have been many who have been favored with the joys of family and friendship and community. Yet they have also had dark days and difficult times. Suffering is not the purpose of discipleship, not a requirement of faith, nor should it be. But faithfulness is not an inoculation against the vagaries of life and the hardship it brings.

What is constantly amazing is not the bad things that happen to God’s people, but how the light of their faith shines through even in dark times. And while I have never even toyed with the notion that following Jesus might bring me either wealth or health, I have coveted such grace that I might bear the same witness when my days are trying.

And now we come into the year of our Lord 2020. The perfect intersection of the long history of human brokenness and uncommon events, seemingly designed to ask the most of us, and for which we have proven ourselves least able to meet. This moment is laying bare the undeniable truth – we have not yet learned to live in both our brokenness and in the grace of our God. We expect the world to be what it is not, and so we are unprepared and unable to live within it when it simply is what it is. We are not walking where God expects us to walk, we are not living where God expects us to live.

When the disciples pestered Jesus to foretell his upcoming victory, they did so expecting promises of glory and joy, an end to the oppression and suffering they experienced on a daily basis. They spoke from generations of belief that the world, their story, was going somewhere, becoming something, and they longed for liberation from their troubles with every ounce of their faith. Jesus did not give them the answer they wanted: 

“Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down … When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place … nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs … they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues … Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name …Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now.” (Mark 13:2, 7-9, 12-13, 17-19).

 It is not a rosy picture, not an image consistent with our hoped-for escape from our drab, limited and often painful existence. Things like pandemics and social upheaval are painful in every way, even if they don’t touch us directly. They impair our carefully constructed expectation of how life should be, they are a veil over the hope we cling to so desperately. We suffer every day in the world we are seeking to escape, and that’s why it never changes. We cannot be instruments of Grace and Light in the world if we refuse to live in the world.

                Following Jesus means going where he went, being where he was. Discipleship is not all changing water into wine or joyful parades into Jerusalem. Discipleship is touching the untouchable, feeding the hungry, sitting with tax collectors and sinners. Discipleship is crossing boundaries, standing against power, freeing captives. And discipleship is enduring betrayal and denial, suffering and death. These are the places where we are needed, where we are led, where Jesus’ work is done.

This is where we must go so we can be who we were saved to be.

But we refuse to be who we were saved to be. We desire the same perfection in ourselves (and each other) as we do in the world around us. We fill our days with self-improvement programs and sanctimonious religious quests, all which end in disappointment because even if they are born in a true desire to be good people who do good things, they are driven by a need to be who we cannot be. We are re-enacting an age-old Christian heresy.

Luther’s life work spoke to that error. While the story of Luther pledging his life in service to the church during a lightning storm may be apocryphal, it was typical of his time. Surrounded by poverty, hardship and death, the church provided much needed protection from the adversities of this world and the key to paradise in the next one. Becoming a priest, monk or nun was an escape – not merely from the hardships of life, but from the personal brokenness that haunted the life of the faithful.

Not everyone followed that path. But the church had plenty of answers. For the laity there were practices and rituals that ensured God’s protective grace against the dangers and evil powers that ran through world. There were holy days to observe (lots of special holy days), special prayers to say, rituals that marked not merely the passage of time but provided safe escort through the perils and trials of life. And there was the mass itself, the supreme mystery of faith in which bread and wine became the very body and blood of Christ with all of its powers over sickness and death. It was not unheard of for a parishioner to sneak the host home to feed a sick animal. Spoken in Latin, the words “this is my body” (hoc es corpus meium) become the expression “hocus pocus.”

Of course it was the practice of Indulgences in particular that caught Luther’s attention and ignited his reformation. An indulgence was a special gift of grace, granted by the Pope himself, to speed the passage of a soul through the terrors of purgatory, a time of punishment and suffering for those who lacked the necessary credit to enter heaven directly. As if life itself wasn’t bad enough. Luther’s complaint went much deeper than the financial corruption driving the practice of indulgences. It was the lie they told, that the purpose of life was the achievement of spiritual perfection in whatever way it could be gained. Luther had come to realize through his own spiritual tribulations (which he called his anfechtung) that such a thing was a false hope, a barrier to true faith and the peace of Christ.

For Luther, the reformation began in the discovery in the Epistle to the Romans that Paul spoke of righteous as a property of God rather than a human achievement, given freely in faith as a free gift of God. But he might as well have taken the words directly from Jesus’ mouth. Mistrusted for his constant disgraceful association with tax collectors and other known sinners, Jesus rebuked his critics with these words: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Matthew 9:12–13 NRSV). The harder we try to define ourselves and our works as righteous, good and worthy, the farther we are removed from the saving grace of God in Jesus.

Luther had a great way of describing the reality that we detest. Simul Iustis et Peccator. Simultaneously saved and sinful. Not loved because we are perfect or in spite of our imperfection but showered with grace and mercy because of it. Loved by God as the whole being we are, and called to discipleship with all of our gifts and our flaws. Rather than live in a prison of denial, Luther imagined living fully in the freedom of grace. Rather than tilt at the windmills of sanctity, we could be free to do the best we can as often as we can, and when we come short, to try again. Not religion, faith.

Faith teaches us this hard truth about our world: stuff happens. Sometimes we are that stuff. God is not deterred by that. The Bible is a never-ending string of stories of mostly well-meaning people with serious character flaws who work against God’s plan as often as they follow it. But somehow, miraculously, the Kingdom of God moves irresistibly forward, not merely in spite of humanity, but surely through it. It is the imperfections of the creation that make it the perfect instrument of grace.

Grace is in the stuff that happens.

There is both a material and a spiritual dimension to reality, and grace lives and flourishes where they cross. We flee the harsh realities of the world we inhabit, we despise the shortcomings of the person we see in the mirror every morning. But we are called to abide in the fullness of both, to fulfill our calling to discipleship as we follow Jesus into all of the places we would rather not go. We are not waiting for perfection – either in the world or in ourselves or in some later transition to glory. We are looking for the Kingdom of God as it lives and breathes, close at hand.

What I Learned in the Great 2020 Quarantine: Kingdom

 

Thing one: Pilgrims in a Strange Land

The word is fraught with meaning in America. Our origin story centers on a group of people that we fondly remember as our “pilgrim” forefathers. There were other European explorers who adventured their way to the North American continent in those days, but as school children we were taught that the landing on Plymouth Rock in 1642 is the genesis of the story of America. We know they came to escape religious persecution, we laud their search for freedom to practice their faith in the manner they chose. We remember them as the forefathers of our nation. However, that is not what made them “pilgrims.”

They came looking for a place that they could call home. They had been chased from country to country, never finding the welcome they desired, never having the opportunity to put down roots and build a world according to their designs. They had a particular vision of how the world should be, and in what they called “the New World” they saw an opportunity to realize that vision. They believed they were building the Kingdom of God on earth. That’s not what it means to be a pilgrim either.

The first community of disciples were pilgrims. The resurrection gave them a radical new vision of life and hope and faith and love, and now they had to make their way in a world that looked nothing like it. They were little more than another religious cult. They had no concrete power or status or institutional authority, no weapons or tools to bend the world to their will. That was not their mission anyway. Their purpose was to preach the good news of the resurrection so that God would transform hearts and minds and, in time, lives. And then the world.

In fact, they didn’t call themselves “the church” or even “a church.” They called themselves The Way. They were a movement, blown by the Spirit into and throughout the world. It seems to have worked. The book of Acts records the tremendous growth of the early church. The persecution of Christianity by the empire indicates that they became a force to be reckoned with. As Diana Butler-Bass notes:

 

They exercised an alternative power to that of empire – the power of neighborly love, the power of nonviolence. The more the Romans used imperial power against them, the more people noticed, listened to their message, and joined their communities.[1] 

They knew how the world saw them, how it feared them, how it fought against them. They knew  they didn’t belong to the world. They lived as pilgrims, temporary residents, aliens, exiles. They did not live as the world lived or believe as the world believed, and accordingly they were treated with neglect and persecution. They considered it a great blessing.

It took more than three centuries for things to change. But it did. In the fourth century, Rome decided that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. In 325 CE the emperor Constantine,  a new devotee of the Christian faith, gathered Christian leaders to a town called Nicaea and instructed them to produce a standardized statement of doctrine, a creed. From that foundation a church was built, an institution of the world. The Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire, keeper and enforcer of Christianity. Jesus was enthroned in the kingdom of the world, and the pilgrim identity of the faithful was lost.

Having gained power and status, the church has sought and fought to retain it ever since. That is what God wants for the church and for the world, right? That all of life should be an extension of religion, or vice versa. That’s how it was in the glory days of the kingdom, and that is the promise we are waiting to see fulfilled – that we should see the church vindicated while the unfaithful burn for their infidelity. The fact that it is not that way is a constant source of frustration and disappointment, especially in this country.

Lacking the status of a state-sanctioned religion, the American Christian Church fancies itself a constant victim of persecution, surrounded by a world full of threats. Christians, especially older white Christians, grieve for the loss of the status of the church and the significance of its traditions, feeling, for example, that their very livelihood could be taken from them if they “didn’t believe in homosexuality.” They deem social change as a personal threat against their religious freedom, and they extrapolate their own fears into a war against themselves and their faith. They are egged on by church leaders who feel their worldly power diminishing and will do anything, demand everything, make any alliance, to survive.

Doctrinal adherence as a primary proof of faithfulness is a sign of a body struggling to hold on to power. Defining freedom according to the ability to impose its doctrine on the world (or the fear that it will be imposed on you) is a sign of a body struggling to hold on to power. There is a widespread assumption among Christians that America was founded as a Christian nation, which is not true and mocks the experience of early colonists running from nations that sought to impose a singular doctrine and religion on its citizens.

This is not the life or the work of pilgrims.

Jesus came into the world preaching, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” (Mark 1:15 NRSV) The word Kingdom has been the bane of the community of faith ever since. First we share an intentional misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the word itself. Properly heard, the word denotes activity rather than structure, as in “God’s reign,” or “God’s rule.” God’s mission. Moreover, our pursuit of a worldly Christian Kingdom displays our ignorance of the actual preaching, teaching and work of Jesus himself, who stood against worldly power and authorities and called his followers to lives in pursuit of justice, advocating for the powerless and oppressed, serving the neediest by standing with and for them. The empire we covet is the empire that crucified Jesus, at the behest of religious leaders who were powerless to act for themselves. As the Reverend Daniel D Brereton says, “Christianity was never supposed to be about dominating society, but uplifting it - and you can't lift if you're already on top.”[2]

The fullness of the Kingdom of God is revealed at the climactic moment of Jesus’ ministry. Facing imperial power in the person of Pontius Pilate, he was challenged to either show his power or submit willfully to the world’s power. He choose neither. “My kingdom is not from this world,” he replies to Pilate. And lest that statement be treated as mere spiritual metaphor, he clarified the point. “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” (John 18:36 NRSV) If faith was all about world dominance, about getting our way and imposing our doctrine, that would have been the moment to begin. Instead Jesus chose to go to his cross, signaling the upside-down reality of God’s rule: he is only a pilgrim in this world, and we should be too.

What is the draw of our grasping for worldly power? There are probably several answers to that question. But in these days of pandemic and social disorder, one seems particularly clear. We do not like to suffer, and we are living in days of great suffering. Power protects people from suffering, and because God probably does not want us to suffer, he must want us to seize power. The constant turn of history, the never-ending flow of chance and change is terrifying. Grasping for power is a classic symptom of fear, and we have empty, needy hands. The events of 2020 are merely the final straw breaking the back of generations of watching the powerful and seemingly indispensable church of our childhood die. What we miss in the turmoil of our grief is the hard truth: the church of our childhood – that dominant, permanent, comfortable edifice of the world - was never meant to be.

Jesus called his followers to be pilgrims in the world. “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals …” (Luke 10:3-4 NRSV) Our calling is not to build, to establish, to preserve. We are merely passing through this place and time, preaching an impending Kingdom that is not of this world but surely coming to be in it. We are signs of what God is building – why would we be invested in building things of our own? So we make our way now, travelers without roots, pilgrims all, living out our mission in a strange and hostile place because this is where and when we were sent to be. No matter what may happen.

Because things always happen.

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[1] Butler-Bass, Diana, The Price of Power. Christianity Will Have Power, But What Kind? The Cottage, August 2020. © 2020 Diana Butler Bass.

[2] Via Twitter, @RevDaniel, August 11, 2020.

What I Learned in the Great 2020 Quarantine: Welcome to the Upside Down (part three)

 

Thing three: What If We’re Wrong? (spoiler alert, we are)

The words loom like the dark clouds of a late summer thunderstorm. Essential. Matters. And what is more essential, and what matters more, than truth? Was the real product of the Information Age bad information? It is everywhere now, literally at our fingertips. Dishonesty and deception thrive in spaces like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and similar loci in their world. Propaganda is an ancient and effective weapon, aided in this day by powerful technology and an intentionally engineered devotion to ignorance. Mistruth polls better than truth. How do lies become reality? They get repeated again and again. Psychologists call it gaslighting. Politicians call it media strategy. Media magnates calls it profit. A rose by any other name.

Social media is an amplifier of mistruth but the foundation of the proliferation of dishonesty is our inability, our unwillingness, to accept something that we do not like. We prefer our own instinct. We pride ourselves on the illusion that we already know everything we need to know. Learning new things is hard, unlearning old things is harder. We wear our ignorance like a badge of honor. We patronize messengers who tell us what we want to hear. And we look down our nose at those who presume to inform or educate us. How dare they act as if they were our betters?

For faith, truth is a much greater challenge. It is a person, a pronouncement and a proclamation, a claim laid upon us by God and set before us as a life-long journey of discovery and growth. The world prefers an injudicious education system that churns out mindless cogs on the economic wheel. Spiritual gifts like curiosity or inquisitiveness are disparaged. New ideas are shunned. We burden future generations with nostalgic remembrances of our own childhood, oblivious to the fact that they live in an entirely different time and place. Why are we so surrounded by illiteracy and disingenuity? Because those in power know it works. Surely we are seeing now the cost of our self-serving myopathy in the suffering and death of our neighbors. Society cannot survive deprived of reason and intelligence, bound by common ignorance and immaturity. That is a freedom we cannot afford.

The world is a complicated place and faith is hard. And trying to navigate this world faithfully without wisdom – not merely doctrine or tradition, but the word of God that is Jesus Christ – is perilous and trying. Stupid is not a virtue. Dishonesty is not clever. The God-given gift of a mind is a terrible thing to waste. How do we expect to find our way to a better world if we cannot comprehend the damage we have done to this one?

That is what this moment is trying to tell us. We have been told lies. We have believed the lies. We have embraced the lies. We have followed the lies. All because the lies give comfort and solace, because they support our desire to avoid those very difficult words: I am wrong. And if we are going to find the courage to say those words and mean it, then we are going to have to turn our backs on one other religious idol: fundamentalism.

                Fundamentalism pretends to be about holding on to the truth, about stripping the Bible and church doctrine of the blight of modernism, but in fact the doctrine and practice of fundamentalism is a newcomer to religion, to Christianity and other religions as well. It is a 20^th Century reaction to the advent of historical and literary criticism of the Bible. It ignores the reality that the Bible has always been read as the complicated and multi-layered work. Moving through the word (small w) of the Bible and getting to the Word (with a capital W) requires an investment of time, energy, scholarship and faith. Marcus Borg puts it this way:

 

[Fundamentalists] also commonly see themselves as affirming “the old-time religion”—that is, Christianity as it was before the modern period. In fact … their approach is itself modern, largely the product of a particular form of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant theology. Moreover, rather than allowing the Bible its full voice, their approach actually confines the Bible within a tight theological structure.[1]

 

Consider Rabbinical scholarship. There, the word of God comes to life in the back-and-forth dialogue of the Mishnah and not merely the dry reading of the Torah. Jesus himself did not read or teach the Scriptures literally, applying the words “but I say to you” to Scriptural texts six consecutive times in the sermon on the Mount (along with nine other uses of the word “but” in the same passages) to enhance, illustrate, challenge, and even contradict what was written and known. Fundamentalism is neither biblical nor faithful. It is a fear-based reaction of a church that cannot even allow the possibility of being wrong.

I am fascinated by the allure of fundamentalism in American Christianity. Given our death-grip on the doctrine of free-will, anything that demands strict adherence to or observance of a singular irreducible doctrine or practice seems absurd. We like our options, our choices. Fundamentalism is about taking options away, denying questions, abolishing individuality of any kind. Yet there is a clarity to fundamentalism, a focused choosing. This is how it is. Take it or leave it. There is one truth, and those who willingly embrace it will be properly rewarded. Faith becomes transactional, a win-lose proposition where the competitors are clearly identified and the rules are straightforward. And there is one other benefit.

Fundamentalism is static. It proclaims that things should and will always be as they have always been (and will always be?). Having whitewashed any grey area, there is a desirable and affirming clarity in fundamentalism that is often absent from the rest of life. But the effort it takes to hold such an untenable position! Fundamentalism, in whatever domain it is practiced, in constantly embattled with the dynamic world in which we actually live. Intolerance breeds enmity, hate and violence. It justifies conflict with a good dose of self-righteousness. Paul listed enmity as a “fruit of the flesh,” a product of worldly living that should be unnatural to spirit-filled people. Yet “strife, jealousy, anger, and quarrels,” (Galatians 5:20 NSV) are go-to rituals in fundamentalist Christianity, the public face of faith in this country. No wonder fewer and fewer want any part of it.

Fundamentalism will not, cannot, perceive wrongness. It does not know humility. It cannot confess its brokenness, it constrains the work of the Spirit within the limitations of human grasping. It is self-aggrandizing, power-seeking, undeservedly proud. It is not characteristic of followers of Jesus. It is a denial of the overwhelming, abundant, free-spirited gift of grace.

And it will never, ever, get us to the place we desire most: the Kingdom of God.

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[1] Borg, Marcus J.. Reading the Bible Again For the First Time . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.