Plains words

A Hard Word to a Cold World

2012-02-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

They were lined up waiting for us.

Politely, to be sure, patiently even. Standing in the cold (and thank heavens itwasn’t a truly cold night as a January night should have been) with minimalcoats and few, if any, hats or gloves. Waiting for the arrival of a spoonful of warm, if not particularlytasteful food, a few slices of bread and a couple of ounces of juice.

They were lined up waiting for not much. But it was all they had to wait for.

The real face of American poverty, standing in a desertedparking lot on a cold dark evening is a stark reminder that we are not allliving in the same country. For many,for too many, for far too many of our neighbors and fellow citizens, poverty isnot a statistical anomaly or a poor economic outcome, it is a daily disaster, apersonal struggle for survival, an unsecured free fall. For those few folks on that one Januaryevening, waiting for a bite to eat before they shuffled back to theirsubstandard housing or the car they lived in or the steam grate they sleptover, it’s something to be actually worried about.

Mitt Romney, candidate to lead all of the people of thisnation and be caretaker for its soul, did not, as many commentators, make apolitical gaffe this week. He promulgatedour great national lie; that poverty is just a minor inconvenience that affectsa small portion of the population who are kept fat and lazy by overdonegovernment largesse and a vast and effective network of religious, charitableand beneficent persons and organizations.

It’s a lie – not because there isn’t help, but becausehelp is not a good enough answer to the real truth of poverty in America.

Fifteen percent of Americans, or 46 million human beings,men, women and children, live in poverty right now. That means absolutely that they do not haveenough money for food, clothing and shelter, certainly not at the same time. More so, thirty percent of us live within thereach of poverty, perhaps having just enough money for the most minimalneeds. Yes, those have TV’s, but theydon’t have reliable transportation, or health care, or money to send theirchildren to college. And sixty percentof Americans, the experts say, live within one missed paycheck, one unaffordablemedical disaster, of increasing the ranks of the most poor among us.

No, Mr. Romney, the poor are not fine, they are not keptby the so-called “safety net,” which at its worst, prolongs their suffering andnever, even at its best, changes their circumstances. No, they are not just a few percent of surpluspopulation (to borrow the phrase from another well-known Scrooge) who can bedisregarded for the sake of some more important political demographic.

Actually, I am not worried about the poor, either. I am scared to death for them.

As long as we live in a country where care for the leastamong us is treated as a hobby, a diversion for those needing occasional penanceor the few who can afford the luxury of feigned, sometime interest, the emptystomachs and the long lines waiting for a warm meal will grow only longer andlonger. Until it becomes our nationalresponsibility, our common calling, then we will share together the guilt andthe savage price of the poor among us.

A wise man wrote some 500 years ago: “Nobody ought to go begging among Christians.It would even be a very simple matter to make a law to the effect that everycity should look after its own poor, if only we had the courage and theintention to do so.” (Martin Luther, aLetter to the Christian Nobility).

Our apologies, Dr. Luther, for our failure to hear yourword, and for our continual selfish willingness to tell ourselves lies in the faceof our Lord’s sacred charge.

They are still lined up, waiting for us.

of Trade and Justice

2012-01-24T15:34:00.001-08:00

Records show that the giant and ground-breaking officesupply company Staples added tens of thousands of jobs during its relationshipwith Bain Capital, the venture capital concern of which Presidential candidateMitt Romney is now so famously associated. He is, justifiably, proud of that result.

Which is entirely beside the point.

By which I mean to say, that it is not beside the pointas a measure of either Mr. Romney’s capabilities as a capital manager nor of theStaples enterprise as a business model, but that it is entirely beside thepoint as a measure of capitalism as it is currently being practiced today.

For this is most certainly true: the addition of tens ofthousands of jobs was neither the purpose of nor the measure of Bain Capital’sinvolvement with Staples. They did notinvest in the company to create jobs – they invested to increase their ownwealth. Period. Whether Staples had grown and employed morepeople or not would have made no difference – they would have returned, andprobably amply, on their investment, as they did in so many other similarinstances. Dade Behring medical testingreturned more than 4 times an $85 million dollar investment but went bankruptin a decade. Stage Stores returned $100million on a $5 million investment, as did American Pad and Paper. Both went bankrupt, as did many others, butBain still profited, and mightily at that.

That is the point.

Capitalism, for all of what it may be in theory or hope,is in its current expression mostly the corrupt and greedy practice of seekingthe gain of personal wealth without the burden of adding any value to thelarger community. The stock market is nolonger a place to build a retirement nest egg or save for a child’s education,it is a giant casino where loathsome practices like short-selling are no longercheating, but normative. Corporations createstock dividends instead of goods and services that elevate our common standardof living, their executives are not properly rewarded for their hard work but blindlypaid off with gluttonous compensation packages whether they succeed orfail. Banks are not vaults of safety, protectingthe hard earned savings of laborers or supporters of individuals, families andsmall businessmen pursuing their dreams, but corporate con men, packing theirbad decisions for carefree marketplace swap meets.

Which is only part of the point, too.

This is not news. For all of our idealistic pretension of freedom and opportunity andthrift and the American way, we have always known this about themarketplace. No, it is not merely thesystem which is to blame, it is our willingness to unleash the beast in hopesthat it will consume our enemies and, by some miraculous and impossible fate,bring in the ship of our own good fortune. Did not Dr. Luther warn us centuries ago?

“Among themselves the merchants have a common rule whichis their chief maxim and the basis of all their sharp practices, where theysay: ‘I may sell my goods as dear as I can.’ They think this is their right. Thus occasion is given foravarice, and every window and door to hell is opened.” On Trade and Usury (LW 45:246)

In the end, it is not Capitalism that must be fettered,but us, not business that must be regulated, but us, not trade that must beordered, but me. Perhaps that is why weresist it so, because we see, however dimly, in the worst practices of modernbusiness our own greed and corruption. Capitalismis as it is because we are as we are. Wedare not confess its depravity aloud, because if it is wrong there, then itmust be wrong in me, too.

But perhaps, just perhaps, if we could bring ourselves tothe hard choice, if we could find the courage to chain that great beast andtame it and bring it under yoke and turn its power to the betterment of all andnot just the enrichment of a few, then we might in fact discover the possibilityof realizing God’s vision of justice, even in the system of Capitalism itself. For what the great Reformer spoke in thenegative, we might see in the positive:

“Selling ought not to be an act that is entirely withinyour own power and discretion, without law or limit, as though you were a godand beholden to no one. Because your selling is an act performed toward yourneighbor, it should rather be so governed by law and conscience that you do itwithout harm and injury to him.” Luther, Martin, On Trade and Usury (LW45:248)

Perhaps never, at least on this side of the Kingdom, willwe actually create a world where what is good and right and just permeate ourwhole life, spiritual and economic and political. But perhaps, if we were wise enough andhumble enough and brave enough, we could come closer.

Which, I think, is actually the point.

Envy

2012-01-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney thinks I am jealous of him.

He’s right.

I’d like to be able to fire service companies that don’tdeliver according to my standards. I’dlike to be able to fire my insurance company if they won’t pay for a procedureor test I’d like to have done or for meds I’d like to have. I can’t. My insurance plan came with my job, chosen for me by someone else whodecided what I could afford and what I could not. I have no real say, and I surely can’t affordto go out and buy insurance on my own, affordable care act or no.

Not that I’d get insurance from another company anyway,what with the whole pre-existing condition and all. And it probably wouldn’t be much cheaper either.

I’d like to change a lot of things in my life. I’d like to pay less for groceries, butcommodity traders and other assorted corporate forces keep driving pricesupward because they can. I’d like to notgo bankrupt sending my children to college, in fact, I’d like to be sendingthem to better colleges, but I can’t. Ofcourse, Mitt and his friends keep telling me that college is a privilege, not aright, and not everyone should get to go there after all.

Mitt’s right. I’m extremelyjealous of him and of lots of other people who live in a world where they canget what they want and do what they want all the time.

The question is whether or not that’s a good thing.

I understand perfectly well that it is the nature of afree society that some people will always have more than others – more money,more power, more control. I get that,and at some level, I’m okay with it. People are entitled to the fruits of their labors.

But when does inequality stop becoming an incentive foraspiration and become a barrier to justice? For that’s the real problem – not that I amjealous of Mitt Romney, who can run for political office now because he doesn’thave to worry about paying his mortgage while I can’t because I do, but that Ihave absolutely no opportunity to ever reach such a place in my life, nor dothe other ninety-nine percent of people like me, and especially the many peopleeven worse-off than I am. The issue isnot that some of us are richer than others, but that the benefits of wealth –success, power, control – have become the sole property of a very few,consolidated, restricted, secure behind gated communities and obscure taxloopholes.

It’s not that I’m jealous that you got yours, Mitt. It’s that you’ve got mine now, too. And in this season of being told what isdestroying America, let us clearly speak this one undeniable truth: as we watchold totalitarian regimes all over the world collapse because the many who werekept from power and wealth could take it no longer, let us not fail to observethe same log in our own eye. Wealth andprosperity are not the same things. Separatingour society into those who have much and those who have some is not the same asseparating it into those who have all and those who have none.

Do not scorn my jealousy, Mr. Romney. If you want to lead this country, fixit.

The Lord enters into judgmentwith the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the LordGod of hosts. Isaiah 3:14-15

What ugly is

2011-11-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

It’s pretty shocking, really, the ugly stories coming out ofPenn State this week.

Well, not, actually.

How many times must we bear witness to the incredibly horrificthings that people do to each other til we come to understand that it is not somuch that these stories are new and unusual as it is that they are far too oldand normal. It’s not that we’re animals –we should be so lucky. It’s that wehumans. Sinful humans. Originally and naturally sinful humans. Prisoners to sin humans.

Of course, we don’t want to hear that. If offends our carefully constructed fantasiesabout free will and natural virtue. Weare merely good people to whom bad things happen. We occasionally stumble, misstep, show badjudgment, err. But we hold on, however ineffectually,to this constant myth, that we are in our very core good, just lacking the raremétier to forestall the temptations of our lesser nature.

For who would want to face the truth of the abyss that isthe darkness of his soul?

Perhaps that is how the secondary tragedy of the PennState story came to be. That any humanbeing could perpetrate such acts upon a helpless child is unimaginable, thatothers could witness it and turn their back is another thing entirely. The denial intrinsic to the crimes of theother coaches and administrators is more than self-serving at an institutional,academic or programmatic level. Theywere protecting more than the Penn State athletic program. They were protecting themselves from facingthe truth about all of us and what we are capable of doing.

And this perfidy with our falsely superiorself-understanding is costly.

If we dared an honest assessment of our brokenness then wemight accomplish the construction of a safer world, a more diligent community,a heightened awareness of the dangers we pose to each other and a greatereffort at protecting those most vulnerable around us. If we stopped pretending to be surprised atwhat people might do we could possibly take some steps to stop them from doingit. Who wouldn’t trade in a little ofour fabricated freedom for one fewer molested child?

But maybe that would be too shocking to do.

Which brings me to Herman Cain, who is also shocked,shocked I tell you, that anyone would dare to accuse a fine, upstanding personsuch as himself of any kind of inappropriate behavior. He is, after all, a good person, a successfulchurch-going man of good intent and purpose, and by definition above suchugliness. Which is the more comical, butstill equivalent, experience of our misguided concept of human freedom. Even if we accept that it can happen, we aremost assuredly certain that it cannot happen to me.

Until it does.

Which brings me to the true cost of our falsely superiorself-understanding. Not that I deny thesinfulness of others, but that I deny my own complete and total corruption andin turn, deny the price paid for that sin by my Lord and Savior. To suggest that he died on the cross foranything less that the total depravity of human nature is the height offaithlessness. The price of my freewill fantasy is the constant crucifixion of Christ. If I proclaim my freedom, he dies fornothing.

But when I confess my bondage, when I admit my loss, thenthe full power of his gracious love overwhelms, then his ransom pays my debt infull, then I become His prisoner and His alone. As a free agent, I am alone. As aconfessed sinner, I am His, and in grace, never alone.

And that’s not shocking, just amazing.

The God of flat taxes

2011-10-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

Given how much they talk about Jesus, you think politicians would know more about what the Bible really says!

Because there are no flat taxes in the Bible. As far as God is concerned, when it’s time to pay, the wealthy pay more and the poor pay less.

For example, in the book of Leviticus the required offering for sin is laid out in extraordinary detail. The proper sacrifice for a guilt offering is a goat, a male goat, without blemish. A costly price indeed, which a “ruler” is required to give for their sin. An “ordinary” person, however, may give a female goat. Or a sheep. Or if they cannot afford that, two turtledoves. Or two pigeons. Or even one-tenth of an ephaph of flour. Whatever.

Because God’s law knows that not all people are created equal, at least not economically speaking. And in a just society, one modeled after God’s law, it is a given that those who are poor cannot afford the same as those who are rich.

But be not mistaken – this is about much, much more than protecting the poor. Though that is an extremely high priority in God’s reign, there is this other important concern – holding those who have been blessed with worldly riches to the highest responsibility for their position.

Jesus put it this way: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” (Luke 12:48) Fair share, it turns out, means something entirely different in God’s eyes.

This saying of Jesus is a punch line to a story about an unfaithful servant who, having been left in charge while the Master was away, chose not to pay the other servants but beat them and used the Master’s money to eat and drink and be merry. It is a powerful and confrontational word to a world where the numbers of both truly poor people and truly wealthy people are both increasing, where the very few enjoy the luxuries of life while more and more and more go hungry every
day. We live in a world hurtling toward a devastating judgment, a world on the brink of self-destruction, a world that does not need an economic philosophy which asks merely the same of the rich as it does of the poor.

It is not enough that consumption taxes burden the poor more heavily than the rich, or that decreasing taxes on rich people and corporations will destroy services that the poorest people depend on. It is a question of whether or not we are willing to live up to what is expected of us - not according to our political philosophies or narrow self-interests, but the God from whom our wealth comes.

A world that reflects biblical justice must tilt toward greater responsibility on the part of those who have greater wealth. It is not that God hates wealth or wealthy people (though the Bible seems to not have much good to say about them) – it is
that God despises a world that worships the accumulation of wealth. “For
the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. (1 Timothy 6:10) Flat tax plans exist for only one reason – to protect the interests of wealthy people against the needs of the poor.

When it’s time to pay God, when it’s time to bear the burdens of supporting the needs of the whoe community, the wealthy must pay more. It’s God’s way, after all.

It's not the Economy, stupid!

2011-08-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

Ben Bernanke. Benedict
Arnold. Yeah, I get those two confused
all the time.

When I was younger (I know you hate it when I start a
sentence with those words), treason was a serious accusation, rarely made,
reserved for very particular acts that aided and abetted enemies of our
nation. Selling state secrets. Sharing sensitive information about troops,
battle plans, defense systems.

It was not a word casually tossed about as a political
label, a quick cheap shot at any convenient target.

Evidently that’s changed.

Now, people who don’t subscribe to our philosophy are
traitors, policies that we differ over are treasonous, people who don’t follow
our brand of politics are terrorists, politicians, even Presidents, who don’t
do what we think they should do are unpatriotic, don’t really love
America.

It’s not my way vs. your way. It’s my way, end of sentence. You do not have different ideas, challenging
ideas, debatable ideas. You are just bad
and I hate you.

Is there no wonder that we can’t get anything done?

How amazing our egotism, how great our pride! Have we become incapable now of allowing any
diversity so that we must destroy anyone and anything which is not just like
us? Have we become so insecure that we
must cast off civility and forgo peace to protect ourselves? Is there no room in the world anymore for
anyone who is not me?

This same violence now infects the church. Anyone who believes or practices the faith
differently must be the anti-Christ, the devil, must be cast into hell. Will it be much longer before we start
burning heretics again? There is no freedom
in our theology any longer, we have imprisoned ourselves so narrowly in our
thinking that we have no option but to destroy the community in order to
protect ourselves.

Yet Jesus broke break with Pharisee and Tax Collector
alike, he spoke with divorced women, he exemplified Samaritans in his parables,
he died for all. For all! Not with words of judgment, with condemnation
even for his killers, but with grace and hope for the whole community, and with
the sacred charge to his followers that they were to bring good news to every
end of the earth.

He could do that, you see, because he knew then what we
refuse to believe, a benevolent God, a compassionate God, a God of such
extravagant love that he could not refuse anyone, could turn against no one, a
God who’s defining trait was his amazing and overwhelming forbearance and grace.

A God who could love even creatures full of hate and deceit
like us.

And all he would ever call us is his.

You Heard It Here First

2011-07-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

Having children really cleaned up my language.

Not that I was a big user of swear words, but it’s
amazing how quickly I learned to edit what I said on the fly. And not that I’m a prude about swearing either, but I’d rather be a good example to them, of what is appropriate to say and when it is appropriate to say it. Because with all I do not know about raising children, this one thing I do know: what they hear, they repeat, they learn, they believe, they live.

Yeah, you really have to watch what you say around children.

Which brings me to wondering what they are learning from us adults these days. How to live be nice and share and play well together, how to care about things that truly matter, how to control our worse impulses, how to hope, how to love, how to live in grace?

I think not. I think what they are seeing mostly from the adults around them these days are swear words, selfishness, corruption, greed, hatred, bigotry.

How to hate? How to hate and hate and hate until you want to kill?

Last Friday we heard on the news of a horror that most of us could never imagine, of the mass murder of innocent men, women and children in the name of religion, philosophy, politics. Not surprisingly nor humorously, some commentators immediately assumed that it was yet another Muslim terrorist attack. After all, aren’t all bad things that happen Muslim terrorist attacks? It’s not ironic how wrong they were, it’s illuminating. We need a new word in our vocabulary to describe our enemy’s worst traits when they show up in our mirror.

But of the many, many tragic elements of this story, there is no doubt in my mind what the worst is: the shooter thought he was doing a good thing. A right thing. A purposeful thing. A righteous thing.

And how did he come to that conclusion?

How does a human being come to the conclusion that the wanton murder of other human beings could ever serve any larger purpose? A more wise doctor of human behavior than I will have to describe the path of that pathology, but I do know its starting point: he heard it first from some other mouth.

Hatred is not original to human beings. Anger, prejudice, violence, these are our
original sins. But it takes another voice to direct those sinful impulses against another human being. It takes help. It takes a word that must be heard first from
without.

It takes a father to teach his children to swear.

Peter Beinart asks courageously the very important question for us all:

So let’s ask that question about the real Breivik attack: Could an anti-Muslim bigot commit a large-scale terrorist attack in the U.S.? The answer is, Absolutely, because the same anti-Muslim bigotry that influenced Breivik in Europe is widespread here …

Lots of “experts” will poo-poo his question, dismiss it, out of hand, because they are afraid of it, because they know too well its true implication. We can’t acknowledge that it could happen in America because then we will have to confess our own
responsibility, our own culpability, our own disease, our own sin. Like fathers swearing in front of their small children, we are teaching each other to hate, passing on our own smallness, validating our neighbor’s narrowness, fueling the violence that boils not far beneath the surface of our society.

The attack in Norway on Friday is not merely one man’s psychosis, it is our national (international?) personal failure. And if we do not have the ability to filter what we say, then perhaps it is time we started listening to what the person next to us is saying. Or the guy on the radio. Or the woman on the TV. Or the person on the campaign trail.

And to do something about it.

mea culpa

2011-06-09T08:05:00.002-07:00

for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. (Matthew 10:26)

Is there a right to privacy anymore?

Analysts of the most recent (of the long line of) sex scandals involving prominent elected officials find fertile ground to raise this most difficult question: is everything we do really everyone else’s business? What a Congressman does on his or her own time, however disgusting, is his or her own business, as long as it’s legal, after all.

Why should we care? Why should we even know?

It’s kind of an interesting question. Public officials are accountable for acts that affect their public office, for corruptions and crimes that degrade their official status, but does that apply to everything they do? Is the state of their marriage, their relationships, their personal peccadilloes the business of anyone but themselves?

In this age of tabloid journalism, we are besought on all sides by titillating stories of our favorite celebrities and least favorite politicians, and we are hooked. We are addicted. We are fully obsessed. The only thing more fun than reality TV is the daily soap opera that is real life itself. Now in the digital society, we can know everything about everyone, and the more lurid the detail, the greater our lust for it.

But our great enthusiasm for this distraction masks the real spiritual dilemma. While we celebrate the demolition of the privacy of others, we live in great fear for the exposure of our own. We join in the laughter at others, lest the bright light turn to our own lives.

Because here’s the dirty little secret: we all have one.

And what would we do if it became known? What would we do if the world around us, the people we care about, the ones we depend on and whose affection we seek, found out the truth about us? What would we do if the closet door sprung open and the skeletons came tumbling out, the smallness and pettiness and dirtiness of our deepest minds and hearts were shown?

And worse, what would we do if God knew how we really thought and felt and acted?

Oh …

For that is both the conviction and the freedom of our secret lives – that God really does know everything about us, every hidden sin, every expressed and unexpressed desire, every shameful weak moment. Though we would lock them deep into the abyss of our secret selves, he knows them, considers them, judges them.

And loves us still.

To be exposed to public ridicule and contempt is the greatest punishment that this world has to offer. As it should. There is a difference between right and wrong, between good and bad, even in this world. Married men should not be sending lewd and naked pictures of themselves to strange women. None of us, public nor private, should be involved in, connected to, approving of such behavior. None of us should be doing in private what we do not wish to have know in public. There does not need to be any excusing.

But there is a greater judgment than facing the TV cameras. It is the confession of the truth about us to the highest and holiest power, it is the admission of our shortcoming to our maker, that is most fearful. But it is exactly that one, who knows it all before we can speak it, before we can admit it, before we can even know it ourselves, who opens his hands in grace and loves us, not just in spite of our secrets, but because of them, who offers us a new reputation and new identity and new life for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Sin boldly, said Luther, but be even more confident in the mercy and forgiveness of God. Let go of the secret guilt and step out into the light of the new day.

There is no privacy before God, after all. There does not need to be.

Of church burglars and false prophets and other kinds of thieves

2011-05-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

"Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.”" (Matthew 9:20-21)

Our church was burglarized this weekend. Twice, actually. When the thieves failed to open the safe on Friday, they returned the next night better equipped, and were more successful. I simply don’t know what to say about that.

It got me thinking about robbery. It got me thinking about how so often we take what is not ours, about the unsatisfaction that marks our lives every day, about the envy and the greed and the hunger for power that makes us grasping, violent.

Harold Camping predicted that Jesus was returning at 6:00 p.m. this Saturday past, and the world, easily distracted by shiny and meaningless objects, paid much attention. People spent their life savings promoting his convoluted (and absolutely wrong) biblical analysis, they cancelled plans, they hoped falsely. And were disappointed, while the rest of us laughed at their expense.

And the children asked, didn’t Jesus say you couldn’t know the hour or the time? So why did Harold Camping think he did?

Yes, children, that is exactly the point.

Not “you can’t know” because the mystery is too opaque, because your intellect too dull, your math too imprecise. Not “you can’t know” because the key to the vast scriptural symbology is reserved for a select, chosen few and you are not pure enough or right enough.

NO! “You can’t know” because God does not want you to know, because this is wisdom God reserves for his own self. It is the sole prerogative of the creator to count the days of the creation, the divine freedom to reserve the end of history to his own time and not ours. It is not just the gullible and vulnerable followers who have been robbed. To claim this holy privilege is the greatest act of thievery itself, to try to steal away from God what he chooses not to give.

He desires we live by his grace alone, by his gifts, that we live his life and not our own. He desires that we live by what he gives, and not by what we take.

But we do it all the time.

We claim authorship of our faith for ourselves, we attribute salvation to our “decision” for Christ, we take pride in our good works, we smirk at the rest of the world through the lens of our own piety. We are the keepers of our own salvation, by virtue of our superior chastity and holiness and dogma.

As the great reformer once said, we have robbed the Cross of all meaning.

And that attack is our great crime against God. Not a couple of fools with a sledge hammer smashing apart a safe to steal a few hundred dollars from an emergency assistance fund, but the great mass of daily thefts of grace, the sinful unwillingness to accept that what we have, what we need, for this life and the next, comes completely and only from the hands of Christ, through no desire or deserving of our own. The greatest sin is the pretense that faith is ours for the taking, while it is only Christ’s for the giving.

Which is particularly foolish on our part, since he gives it away for free.

Life

2011-05-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me. …Awake to punish all the nations; spare none of those who treacherously plot evil. Psalm 59:1, 5

Outcomes are complicated things. A decade of pain and anger ended in the middle of the night by a secretive military act in some far-off strange place. An enemy is defeated in the most final way, an important and (I think) worthy symbolic victory to be sure, but is it justice? Does it bring closure, or is this just the next chapter in the old and tragic story of the world we have made?

I sense relief on the part of many, but are we proud of this? Perhaps there is even satisfaction, but is there hope?

Well, what exactly were we searching for, anyway?

In this world of conflict and violence, this place and time of hate and enmity, perhaps we thought that we could secure ourselves from those who would harm us without being getting caught up in bloodshed too. But it all just bombastic oratory, so much wishful thinking, that we are playing the part of innocent victims even as we took up the sword and sought our revenge. We were fooling ourselves to think that we could play their game without, in the end, becoming just like them.

In cartoons, the bad guys are blown up, shot, smashed by falling pianos, yet never maimed or killed, until they meekly wave their white flag and admit defeat. In the real world, they must be killed.

And who will stop the killing?

If we would dare to look, in the blood on our hands we would see the reflection of our true enemy, our greatest foe, our own selves. The death of one man, if necessary and tragic, is neither a victory nor a conclusion. It is finally just another death, just another day, just another step along a path that has come to dominate our lives in this world. Our enemy is not the other, it is the daily choices we make the tear down justice and thwart peace, the casual insults and selfish slights and callous acts of greed that birth division and misunderstanding and quarrel.

And eventually war. And surely death.

And there is only one way off of this path.

For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 1 Corinthians 15:25-26

Does it mean something that the killing of Osama bin Laden comes in the season of Easter, in the renewal of spring, in the bursting forth from the tomb? This is the promise of the resurrection, that we need not spend one more day imprisoned by death, that we carry within us the divine spirit of promise, that even in our most sinful day we can find the grace to make the next one different.

We do not need an end to the war on terror. We need an end to war. Period. We need an end to the thinking that war in any metaphor leads to anything but more war.

I do not really know how I feel about the death of Osama bin Laden. Except that I hope for nothing more than it would be the last. And I pray that God should deliver us to that new day. And soon.

The Full Easter Monty

2011-04-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

Halfway. Half-baked. Half-hearted.

(My father had a different word for it but I can’t say that here)

It’s meant to be a curse, a slam, a put-down. Halfway. Not good enough, bad effort, partial, mediocre, lazy. Halfway means trying, somewhat, but never getting there. And there are no rewards for doing half a job, for writing half a book, for running halfway down the field or up the baseline. There are no points for getting close to the basket, for almost making a goal.

No one wants less than the complete, full meal deal. No one want to pay for a job half done, you don’t sit on half a chair or paint half a house or plant half a lawn, you don’t buy half the groceries you need every week, you don’t want your car fixed halfway.

Halfway is really not good enough for us.

So why is it that we are so often halfway people when it comes to our faith? We bring our Lord a halfway passion, a halfway commitment, part of our time, some of our tithe. We serve halfway; you know, when we can, when there’s nothing better to do or nothing better on the TV. We want our church to grow, we want the gospel spread, but when it comes to inviting someone to church our efforts are halfway at best.

And the real loss is deep in our hearts, where our trust hangs halfway in the balance between hope and despair. We have a medium grip on our faith; it’s there, but not too much so, and one good challenge, one wrong temptation, one great hurt or one overwhelming loss casts us into the abyss or breaks us forever.

How can we survive only halfway saved?

Maybe the problem is that we experienced a halfway salvation. We suffered through Holy Week, we heard the Easter story, we sang the hymns and chased after the hidden eggs. We were told that HE WAS RAISED and we were thinking how great that would be. No more sin. No more evil. No more death. But then Monday came and the world seemed just the same as it had been before. Still full of sadness and sorrow and brokenness. Heaven, it turns out, is still far off, distant in some unknown future for us, and we remain, for the time being, only halfway there.

But there is nothing halfway about Resurrection. Nothing halfway about the promise. The tomb is all empty, he is completely alive, fully raised, wholly new. This is a brand new day, and the only “halfway” now is us, our foot-dragging, stubborn, moping, slothful selves clinging to the tombs of our lives like teenagers to their beds on a slow, Saturday morning.

He is fully alive! Why would we want to stay halfway dead? Isn’t it time to stop dipping our toes and dive fully into life, to give up the tasting and commence with the feasting, to quit pretending that we believe and trust and hope and start living like we do?

Easter, if only a day once a year, is never Easter. Resurrection is not life until it is lived, hope is not hope until it is tested, faith is not faith until it believes with every breath and touch and word. Let us stretch out our whole selves into this new being and be, really be, completely be, fully be, brand new.

This is our day, that the Lord has made just for us. And he made it all.

He is Risen – He is Risen Indeed!

math day

2011-04-22T13:56:00.001-07:00

a calculation
cold hard math
a profit? What else!
Silver. Ah.
The sum of it all
so much for now
for security, stability, certitude
the price small
one kiss.

a calculation
running the world is hard
Profit? Of course!
Prosperity. Ah.
so much (for some at least)
for poverty, disease, despair
the price small
one choice.

a calculation
salvation is hard.
But what profits a man?
A life kept? Ah …
so much compassion, so much hope
for brokenness, hurt, sorrow
the price small
one life.

Just a different perspective

2011-03-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

Mark Vernon noted yesterday the different view of nature inherent in Shintoism, the widely practiced religion in Japan.

In Christianity, we view ourselves as the center of the creation. By our greed, we interpret the Genesis call to “dominion” over the creation as license to use it to our own ends, rather than a command to serve it as fellow creatures. And so, when the powerful forces inherent in nature show forth, we are angered, offended, cheated.

In Shintoism nature is known to be more powerful than humanity and is honored as such. Earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes and storms, are reminders that we are put here as part of a thing and not the whole of the thing itself.

A very different attitude. One that would change much.

It would not prevent such tragedies. It would do little to decrease the suffering they cause. But it would change us to be reminded in this moment of history, as in all those past and those yet to come, that we are not the Masters of this Universe but merely its servants, as we are servants of the One who created it all.

Power, the waves seem to say, is much more than your mortal brains may comprehend. Your place here calls for humility and grace, in the ways you treat the Lord’s creation and each other.

May we work together with and pray for those who suffer in this time in full awareness that it is only by the grace of God that our places are not reversed. Let us look with meekness toward the waves that are yet to rise.

Day of Ashes

2011-03-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

Recently, Brigham Young University dismissed the best player from their basketball team over an Honor Code Violation and almost assuredly doomed their hopes for tournament glory. While many (many!) commentators could not grasp the harshness of that culture’s rules, they begrudgingly handed over their admiration of the school’s and players’ integrity in handling the situation.

They knew the rules and they kept the rules. Who knew it could be done?

Even more recently, it is brought to light that a football coach at a major college program actually knew in advance that a number of his players, including his star quarterback, had violated NCAA rules and were almost assuredly ineligible to play. His first instinct was to keep it quiet lest it endanger his team’s chances for glory.

He knew the rules and avoided the consequence. Now, that we can understand.

And so we come again to our annual celebration of Ash Wednesday, the world-wide Christian day of penance, where we smudge our countenance with a sign of grief and sorrow, a public admittance that we are sorry about who we are and what we have done, that we regret a world not as it should be. It is a day about guilt and penalty, about rules and codes and our relationship therein, our integrity, or more more likely, our lack of it.

Which is far from enough.

This inscription on our forehead, this shadow cast over the sign of our baptism, is a mark of truth. It is not enough to feel bad about being bad, it is not enough to fear consequence, it is not enough to merely know the rules, as if that was our invitation to sculpt them, twist them, bypass them. Guilt is not the theme of the day – honesty is. Not a little honesty, not an after-the-fact-well-I-guess-you-caught-me-now responsibility, but blunt, frank, open confession. You know, humility.

We are not good. We are not right. That is our confession on Ash Wednesday. We pray for a better world, a world of righteousness and justice and peace. And we know that it can only come one way. Not from us.

Ash Wednesday is our prayer that God would finally be the Lord of us and of this world because we have done such a poor job of it by ourselves.

Ashes are a symbol of grief, of sorrow, of loss. Ash Wednesday is a day of death, of the death of our will and our power and our seeking after glory so that God may finally become our God. It is only when we forego the future of our own creation that God’s future will become ours.

And so we trace again the cross upon our forehead and condemn ourselves and the world of our making and ask this one prayer, that God would take up the ashes of our lives and our world and renew them one more time. That he would fill the emptiness with new Grace and new Spirit and new Hope.

That he would bring us from this winter to the Easter waiting up ahead.

Look – I see a faint ray of dawn, a green shoot of resurrection!

Against the Law

2011-03-03T12:56:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you should be careful about putting amateurs in charge of important things.

I imagine that this is how God feels about human beings trying to make law. The great Divine Law-giver, the shaper of righteousness and the definer of right and wrong, must shed considerable heavenly tears observing worldly legislative bodies writing what we call laws, trying to do what we consider good, all the while blaspheming the very nature and purpose of the Holy Law itself and denying the grace that gives it life.

What happens when men write laws? (And I use the sexist term deliberately – maybe there would be less trouble if there were more female heads and hearts in the process!) We strive to ban people’s right to band together for their common good, we embrace injustice and drive out those who are different from us, we encourage murder in the name of preserving life.

I’ve been told that it’s ok to heave hundreds of thousands of people into unemployment for the sake of the ideal of reducing deficits. Whatever it takes lest we overtax our wealth! And what kind of legislation is this?

This is not what God intends as law.

But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” Matthew 12:7-8

It is a sign of our brokenness that we lift ideals above people, that we are cold-hearted and indifferent to the needs of the poor, that our principles, philosophies and political positions are worshipped at the price of violence and the suffering of many.

This is not how God teaches us righteousness. The Law of God is not abstract, not an arbitrary pronouncement, not an altar on which goodness and kindness are sacrificed over some other-worldly code. No, the law of God is the path of healing and wholeness, the definition of community and love of neighbor, the promotion of what is best and the vision of good will for all. God’s law does not condemn the other, it cares for aliens and orphans and widows. God’s law does not justify violence but turns other cheeks. God’s law does not protect wealth or power over people, but protects the oppressed and judges those who oppress them.

God gives law that we might know life. How abominable that we use the law to take life away.

How faithless we are to the God who gives law.

You see, the divine law-giver is also the God of the Christ, the one who defines what is right and wrong and showers mercy on both. He does not merely write laws, he creates and renews persons; he does not save himself, he saves us. In all things, his Word reflects his Grace, and by that Grace he moves his Kingdom forward with hope and purpose.

And he invites us to do the same, that we might know, even in a small way, the same.

We just have to learn now how really to make law.

Recovery or Redemption?

2011-01-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, if only for a moment, the Dow Jones Index crossed the 12,000 mark for the first time since June of 2008, since immediately prior to the crash which brought us this most recent version of the Great Recession.

My IRA is not unhappy, which is nice for me. Nor, should I imagine, are any number of stock brokers and commodity traders, who are surely enjoying a seeming return to the profitable days of yore.

Of course, this does not say much for the more than 9 percent of us who are still looking for jobs.

Corporate profits, I read, are good this year, maybe great, large and getting larger. Whether that is being fed by the markets or vice versa, I do not know. Nor, on an even more significant level, do I understand where all those profits are going. I guessing not so much for hiring or wage increases. Not into the hands of the people who need them so that they can put bread on their table or roofs over their children’s heads.

No, what seems to be recovering is the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in our society.

I am not an economist. I hear politicians arguing about what is best to fix the economy, but I hear few arguing about what is right to do to fix the real problem in the world. For I am quite sure that the real problem in the world today is not so much our fiscal deficits as it is our moral bankruptcy. The problem is not how we are managing our wealth but, as our Lord would surely remind us, how much we love it.

We have created a world engineered for the high purpose of accumulating wealth, holding wealth, worshipping wealth. We cannot afford to provide needed health care for everyone, but we are un-American if we dare to burden the passing of moneyed estates to moneyed children. We thrill at the sight of enormous mansions but look the other way when we see the homeless. We have completely lost track of what really matters. In a world where bankers and commodity brokers are the highest paid among us and the teachers of our children are the least, it should be obvious that our sense of what is actually valuable is far and long gone.

And we should know better.

The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts. Isaiah 3:14-15

The price of our guilt stands ever before us, the wage of our accumulated wealth is the slow death of our soul, our life, our hope. We have convinced ourselves and each other that it is our inherent right to have and hold as much as we dare – we have ignored the truth that such pursuit is, in fact, the judgment against us. Our unwillingness to confront our own greed and selfishness has become the prison that will ever confine us to this continual destruction.

But there is a path.

It leads away from the name-calling and false security and self-serving politics of wealth. It leads us away from our love of financial institutions and our faith in market performances to the love of our neighbor and our faith in the greater good for all. It changes our perspective from winner-take-all to I-am-my–brother’s-keeper. It measures us by radically different means.

It is not going to be a hard path to find. It will be an ever harder path to keep. But we are called by our Lord and Savior to this path because it is the only way to peace and true joy. It is our only recovery. It is our only salvation.

Justice, it turns out, is even better than good economic news.

It’s a small (handgun) world …

2011-01-10T08:38:00.000-08:00

This is the week of the 9mm Glock, evidently the handgun of choice for shooting members of Congress and Vice-Principals. Thank goodness for our second amendment rights and those who fight so diligently to protect them.

That small detail is, of course, the least (though not unimportant) connection between these two headline tragedies in my world. The more significant and valuable one is our national addiction to anger. That it is a more subtle and complex relationship makes it all the more deniable, of course.

But no less real.

Is it a failure of memory, or was there once a time when anger was a bad thing? I seem to recall a day when decorum and protocol required good and gentle manners, when polite behavior was taught in schools, when bullies were avoided and not given their own talk shows on television. When did we stop teaching our children to mind their behavior and their temper? When did we stop lifting up examples of adults with impeccable conduct, gentle rhetoric and visible dignity?

I suppose you’re going to blame that on the 60’s too.

Well, are we witnessing now the far-right in its own state of acid-like hysteria?

Now the works of the flesh are obvious… enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions … and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:19-21

Our national love of edgy commentary and impassioned demonstration at the expense of civil conduct has loosened the lid on Pandora’s box, and it’s time we quit closing our eyes to what we’re letting out. If our national political, social and religious language is not the hand holding the gun, then it is the devil’s whisper in the ear of the shooter, the flow of adrenaline in the veins, the ringing in the ears. It is the silence-gives-consent permission for the otherwise unspeakable act.

Maybe it’s time to stop before we speak any more.

For this is undeniable true - we cannot speak violence without expecting to beget violence. We cannot use violent imagery in our discourse without taking responsibility for violent acts. Angry words birth more anger. And in the end, that anger can only go to one place.

But even on this dark day I have hope, for the better way is immediately available to us. We belong to a Savior who did not respond in anger but turned another cheek, who did not raise his voice but rather stretched out his hands on a cross, who did not grasp at power but willingly acceded to the greater and better power from above. We have seen his example, we have his words, we need only bring them into our hearts and heed them.

Before it’s too late.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:22-25

And then it happens to you ...

2011-01-06T08:31:00.001-08:00

Is this not what happens when we don’t take sin seriously?

I did learn this at the seminary. The importance of taking sin seriously. I do remember the words from my childhood liturgy. We are BY NATURE sinful and unclean. We are IN BONDAGE to sin and cannot free ourselves. I know that human brokenness is real and tragedy is its consequence.

Taking sin seriously is the true work of faith.

Yesterday in our community we saw what can happen when we do. And when we do not.

There is a particularly gut wrenching kind of fright that comes to a parent when you hear that first report of a crisis at your child’s school, an experience that cannot be fully imagined until it happens to you. It is your primary vocation, after all, to keep them safe, a Godly charge to protect them and help them, and it hurts to find out that you cannot. The only, really only, help is to know that there are other responsible, professional, well-prepared people who willingly and competently share that charge and do their jobs well. Somewhere along the way, a group of teachers and administrators at our school overcame the “it would never happen here” mentality (the first symptom of sin denial) and planned and practiced and prepared for something horrible to happen.

Because they took sin seriously, they kept my children safe. Today I am thankful to God for them and their faithful work.

Sadly, though, we did not take sin seriously enough to stop this before it happened.

We will tell ourselves, of course, that we could not have known, that we could not have foreseen, that it is the nature of tragedy to be inexplicable and inexorable.

But that’s just an excuse.

I think it’s time to admit that we can do better. It’s time to admit that we have the tools and the ability and the wherewithal to identify our neighbors and children who are particularly in danger and at risk, who have become disconnected in whatever fashion from community and reality and hope and are just waiting to be picked off by the devil and used against us. It’s time for us to admit that we do know what’s wrong with our world and do something about it.

It’s time for us to admit that we are slaves to sin and be responsible in whatever way we can. To have the will to admit that we are in trouble and that we need to do something about it.

Can we now begin to own what we are doing to our children and to each other and to ourselves, how we are neglecting and abusing one another, how we have disowned and discarded too many of God’s children, how we have become miserly in love and kindness and gentleness and patience where we need it the most? Can we now own the profligacy of our anger and our addiction to violence and our worship of guns?

Can we finally take seriously the brokenness of our own creation, that our sin is killing us and can we try to do something about it?

Can we grieve?

For that is, I think, the bottom line, that we merely pass through these events now and do not grieve them. Rather than face down our denial we have become inured to our pain. This is, after all, just another school shooting. It’s news for today, until the next. And then it passes.

Except that it’s not. Except that another exceptional person has been lost to us, and the grief is becoming unbearable. Paul says that the wages of sin is death. Are we not dying enough yet?

Let us grieve fully this loss, let us capture its pain and sorrow, that we would fully experience the price of our smallness and our brokenness and our failure. Our sin. That we might change, something, someone, if just some little bit.

If not for what has been, then for what will be, let us take this moment this sin, seriously. And let it be enough.

Stop making Christmas into a War

2010-12-22T15:26:00.000-08:00

I hear there is a War on Christmas.

It looks like Christmas is winning.

Whenever anybody says to me, “Happy Holidays,” I don’t sneer or take them for a pagan atheistic enemy of all that is good and true. It is not that hard for me to imagine that they mean well. In the same way, I have come to understand, and even appreciate, the thoughtfulness of schools and civic organizations trying to not trample on the feelings of the non-Christian minority in our great nation. That seems kind to me, and good.

And isn’t that what the true meaning of Christmas is supposed to lead to?

If there is a war on Christmas, why is EVERY store on the planet have a Christmas sale? Why is every street corner lit and decorated? Why are Christmas specials taking up space on my TV, and filling up radio stations? Why, if the world is at war against Christmas, have the last six weeks been about nothing else but Christmas?

The world does not hate Christmas. The world loves Christmas, if even for some of the wrong reasons. So why are we trying so hard to hate back?

I am beginning to think that the real war is not against Christmas, but that it is a far more insidious war on the terrible crime of not-being-exactly-like-me. When I hear Christians complaining about the lack of respect given this most wonderful of celebrations, I smell the worst kind of pitiable self-righteousness. An “it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” whine that, despite loud protestations, in no way reflects a true understanding of what Christmas is actually about.

Once, as Jesus as his disciples were passing through Capernaum, they spotted a man casting out demons who was not actually a follower of Jesus, neither certified nor vetted nor a part of the “in” crowd. Not doing it in the right way, as it were. But as the disciples railed against him, Jesus stopped them, noting that as long as he was not actively “against” them, he was in fact, “for” them.

And so it is with Christmas still.

Has Christmas become over-commercialized? Over-secularized? Over-Santa-fied? Of course!

Would I rather that everyone knew and worshipped devoutly the child of Bethlehem, the one for whom this day is properly named? No doubt!

But isn’t it amazing, that even among the least religious, church-avoiding of us, there is still a different spirit that flows forth every December, a greater generosity, a warmer personality, a new hopefulness. It is reflected in the most secular of movies, TV shows and Christmas songs – even where Jesus is not known by name, goodwill to mankind abounds. Christmas, it seems, is working, if ever so silently, without fanfare or fame, sowing seeds of a better kingdom to come.

This is not a bad thing.

In recent polls, 90% of Americans report that they believe in God. Two in five say that they attend church services regularly. That is, of course, a lie. Few Americans actually attend church regularly or give or serve or pray or read the bible. If there is a war around religion in this country, we must know that the enemy is not outside the church but inside. It is the hypocritical, pious, slanderous, fear-filled, pettiness of his self-proclaimed followers that poses the greatest danger to the baby King.

But don’t worry – I think he can handle it just fine.

So the next time someone wishes you a “Happy Holiday,” simply respond with a “And Merry Christmas to you,” and go on your way in peace. Do not worry nor fear for Christ or his kingdom, for the angels song is loud enough to make itself heard no matter how they say it.

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: Luke 2:10

what I saw on a windy day in Ames

2010-11-08T13:53:00.000-08:00

It was a mistake.

During the coin toss, at the start of the Overtime period, the referee asked the player which side of the field they wanted to play. He chose to go against the wind. I think the radio announcer stuttered a little bit then. Against the wind? Into the 20 mile per hour gusts that had disrupted and disturbed the game for the whole day, causing errant passes and strange bounces?

Surely he was mistaken.

Until that final pass, the last ditch attempt, grabbed by that same wind and thrown off course, fluttering into the hands of the opposing team’s player, winning the game for the previously seemingly mistaken player.

So that turned out pretty well after all.

Football may be proof that God is the Lord of all things after all.

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. John 3:8

There is, as it seems to us, a certain randomness to the events of life. Like a strange wind blowing in a football game, there are just too many factors in life beyond our reach, out of our control. For many, that is exactly proof against the existence of any God, for such a divine presence ought to bring a greater order to the creation. Things ought to make sense. There should be no suffering, no wrong, no strangeness, no error. Any God worth his divinity in such thinking would not allow it, but rather bring all things to their proper end by some measure of merit or worth.

There should be no strange winds. But what fun would that be?

In fact, the randomness of life is precisely very proof of the existence of God, found in the knowledge that there are forces that defy control or definition, that will not be subjected to human will or mind. We are merely players in the game, called to give our greatest exertion over forces within our control and our utmost trust in the face of those we cannot.

And to know this:

Somehow, in defiance of logic and physics, God makes from our stumbles, mistakes, faults and brokenness a world and a life. Somehow, though we cannot know how, his Spirit moves through history and time and brings forth the most amazing ends, writes the most wonderful stories, saves us from our greatest foe and delivers us from our own smallness.

God, it seems, laughs even more at our mistakes than he does at the pretension of our plans.

And so the wind blows.

Of Signs

2010-09-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

Two adjacent billboards. An treatise on life.

The first, stark white text on dark background. A simple message: The World is Going to End. A citation from the book of Revelations. (chapter one, verse seven) A toll-free phone number, evidently leading to some manner of greater truth possessing the power to assuage the mortal fear struck by the previous message.

I am not brave enough to dial it. Or bored enough.

The second features a lovely young woman, with an enviable figure, clad in the scant attire of a popular eatery’s uniform well-designed to accentuate said figure, with a brief text containing a pun on the word, “cocktail.”

Childhood guilt has kept me from patronizing this particular establishment. Such is life.

Eternal damnation. Sexual titillation.

I cannot help but think sometimes that they got the billboards backwards. Shouldn’t temptation come before condemnation?

The great irony of these seemingly disconnected advertisements is that while they seem completely in opposition, one an appeal to animal lust and the other to religious ecstasy, they are in actuality the same message, the same emotion, the same pitch. They are the same in the way that papal political striving is the same as monastic aesthetic withdrawal. They both assume that life is defined by the same doomed or dooming misery. They both want to know what you’re going to do about it.

And they both want you to know that you should be very afraid.

We call it the lowest common denominator because it Is both low and common, this appeal to fear, this temptation to reptilian instinct. You are being left out, or you will soon be, if you do not … it you will not … Maybe there is something better out there, in the smile of a pretty girl or a glass of alcohol, there is a missing truth that threatens the entire meaning and purpose of your existence, you’re only here for a little while longer, so party!

Or pray.

Which will you choose? “There is nothing better for mortals,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “than to eat and to drink and to find enjoyment in their work.” But the Lord also says, “Keep awake!” undoubtedly reminding us that there is peril in our future. It is the classic Lady and the Tiger choice. Or so they tell us.

So which will it be?

Neither. Because we’re better than that.

OK, no we’re not, but we can be. Surely we are mostly small and broken, imprisoned by fear, yet in rare small glimpses, foretastes, whispers, promises, we can be touched by Grace and experience a small bit of a new truth. “Perfect love casts out fear,” says the writer of the Epistle to John. This world’s message of fear can be drowned out in Gospel song, despair replaced by hope, opportunity and service overcoming curvatus in se.

I once was blind, says the old song. As I pass by signs on the side of the this world’s road, I pray to be even blinder.

Do they really think we’re this stupid?

2010-08-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

I actually used the word “stupid” in a sermon on Sunday, and it kinda got me started.

I see these commercials on the TV all the time for various medicines, each containing long and frightening lists of assorted side effects and dangerous interactions with other drugs. I watched one the other day where the disclaimer was longer than the pitch itself, containing several frightening symptoms, some of which I had assumed were supposed to be cured by the drug. I was left more interested in avoiding the product than in purchasing it.

And then I hear an ad on the radio explaining to me how Martin Van Buren was a much more successful and important President than Franklin Roosevelt.

Must have been asleep during History class the day they taught that.

I couldn’t help but wonder who the advertisers thought they were fooling. And then it occurred to me that they obviously thought they were fooling lots of people, and probably had done research and testing and had prior experience to convince them that lots of people were out there, just waiting to be fooled.

Well, maybe P. T. Barnum was right after all.

God help us all if this is the end of it.

“See,” said Jesus, “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)

The subtlety here is almost overwhelming, the interplay between wisdom and innocence, between seeking acumen and avoiding worldliness. But in what may the most challenging question of faith, as in all others, grace provides a way.

There is a dangerous anti-intellectualism in the community of faith, an Amish-like tendency to withdrawal, to avoid the world, to shun modern knowledge, technology. There is a powerful anti-science movement afoot among Christians today, an overblown protective reflex which neither disturbs the facts nor strengthens the witness. It is not avoidable – we live in the world and we must function and work in the world. Just as God sent Christ to be fully incarnate in human life, so we too must be completely and wholly formed and purposeful in the place where we are living. Which means we must be wise, smart enough and savvy enough and informed enough to interact with and connect with and speak to and heal the real world, just as it is. Innocent cannot mean absent.

But also wise.

The far other end of failure is the overt surrender of the faithful to the calculations of the world around them. The world runs on power, so we seek power, the world understands violence, so we preach violence, the world hates, we hate even more. When it becomes impossible to distinguish the voice of faith from the voice of the world, then true stupidity is revealed. We have become what we were called to transform. Christlike wisdom speaks prophetically to the world, it understands the depth of brokenness in its simplest form, it is part of sin which makes it desire all the more to be harmless, inoffensive.

For here is the power of Grace, to make us what we are not. In truth we are neither wise nor innocent, no, we are gullible and malicious. But by grace we are shaped in the form of a cross, that most-worldly instrument of torture and death now transformed into a symbol of life and hope. We do know better, even if we often fall short, we are strengthened against temptation even as it entices us.

Perhaps it seems impossible. But that is the very nature of faith. You just have to be stupid enough to trust in it.

The final victim of 9/11 is you

2010-08-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

Now the works of the flesh are obvious… enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions … Galatians 5:19-20

Now, nearly nine years later, comes the final victim of the 9/11 attacks.

It is the soul of America.

The phobia over the building of a Mosque in the neighborhood of the former World Trade site (not a Mosque, not at the World Trade Center site, but whatever) exposes the truly terrifying reality – the terrorists have won.

Do not be fooled: the men who hijacked the airplanes and crashed them into the buildings were not trying to invade New York, to gain a beachhead in lower Manhattan for a later, larger invasion. They are not interested in taking over America – they are only interested in destroying it. This appalling act had only one purpose – to cause the greatest amount of harm and loss of life and so provoke the enemy (that would be us and everyone else) to join them in their cosmic fantasy apocalyptic war. They seek to create hatred, conflict and violence because they feed on hatred, conflict and violence.

I guess they are not getting what they want.

Are we really so foolhardy that we should play into their dark desires, to turn our world and lives into a bloody, never-ending holy war? Are our souls so small and bleak as theirs that we would enjoin the battle on their level?

If we destroy the very last good things of our own – our freedom, our peace – won’t they have won?

Perhaps they have.

Please spare me the commentary about the sacredness of the place. I don’t see protests over the strip club within the same distance of the towers as the proposed Cordoba project. What is sacred in lower Manhattan, what is sacred in any place, is the spirit, the soul of the people who occupy it, the hope, the grace that breathes in the words and actions of those who would be faithful to what is right and true.

The work of lifting up community, of neighborliness, of upholding the best practices of any faith, that is sacred. An opportunity to turn our backs on hatred and violence of every kind, that is sacred. A chance to promote relationships which may further the cause of peace, that is sacred.

I am not surprised that most people oppose the building of the Cordoba Center. I am never surprised by ignorance that is susceptible to fear-mongering, by self-promoting leaders who appeal to the least common denominator of the mob, to bigotry and pettiness that conveniently besmirches a whole people for the acts of a few. After all, aren’t all Mormons bigamists, isn’t every Priest a pedophile, aren’t all old people grouchy and all blonds dim-witted?

Friends, our children are watching us. And all of those long lessons about playing nice, sharing toys, getting along, being good company, are going to waste. We are becoming our own worst enemy, we are allowing our lesser demons full play. We must stop, we must stop now, lest we put the terrorists out of work by accomplishing our destruction by ourselves.

I am not so naïve as to think this is easy. Hatred is less complicated than tolerance, anger is less demanding than love. But we belong to and follow a Savior who is not looking for fainthearted disciples or milquetoast missionaries. His words call us to the higher standard …

I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also … I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. Matthew 5:39, 44-45

I pray for the world, for our leaders, for us. Now the battle is joined – not with Islam, but with the devil and with ourselves. May the Good God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, keep and protect us in these important days.

“Refudiate” the hatred that created Ground Zero in the first place.

2010-07-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

There is hubbub brewing over the building of a Mosque at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center tragedy. Should the very enemies who killed thousands of Americans be allowed to erect a religious shrine at the very place of this terrorist attack?

First, it’s not a mosque, but a large (13 story) community center that will include, among other religious places, a Muslim Worship space. Second, it’s two blocks from Ground Zero.

But flagrant lies aside, God has granted us a learnable moment, and now calls us to the possibility to rise above emotion and, yes!, racism, and a step closer to peace.

It is, after all, the extreme intolerance of Jihadism that made 9/11. It was the very notion that some religions, different religions, other religions, are enemies and therefore unworthy that led human beings to fly jet airplanes full of other human beings into buildings to kill many other human beings. It is exactly the delegitimizing of someone else’s beliefs that makes it possible for terrorists to kill others, not soldiers but innocent bystanders, women and children.

How does becoming more like the terrorists overcome their acts?

Is our intolerance not cut from the same cloth? Do we pretend that it will do anything less than continue, perhaps even increase, the worldwide hatred and violence which engulfs our planet like a deepwater oil spill?

Or can we dare the harder way, to make peace?

I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven … Matthew 5:44

There is another way, a way based not on fear but on hope, a path not of devastation but of creation. It is possible to live together as human beings, to allow space for others who are different but still neighbors.

We could build a Mosque at Ground Zero and ask our Muslim brothers and sisters to share our aspiration that what happend there once never happen anywhere again.

Let us be warned of the consequences of our words and acts. If we fail to make a space for moderate Muslims, if we fail to empower and lift up and support “peaceful Muslims,” if we desecrate and demean a whole people based on the acts of a few radicals, then we empower those very elements who would rather destroy us than exist with us. If we cannot be for a peaceful relationship with Islam, then we will surely be locked into a neverending dance of death with it.

No, I think that there must be a Mosque at Ground Zero, if there is to be any hope for the future. I believe that it is our best way forward.

This is one of those rare opportunities where we can be better than we were so our future can be more than our past. Here is a chance to grow a new world for the sake of our children and our grandchildren, one not ruled by our smallness but by the limitless grace that is our gift through our faith in Jesus Christ. This is our time to “refudiate” our hate and fear and be bigger than we really are.

I am sure that the Jesus who called us to love our enemies would lay the first stone for a new Mosque in New York.

What will you do?

Not the Independence Day I will Celebrate

2010-07-04T05:38:00.000-07:00

There is a loud and powerful chorus in America today, a refrain that I’m sure has been heard before and will probably and unfortunately, sound again. It is a simple but sad phrase that stains our Independence Day celebrations.

Take our Country Back.

It is the song of the angry and despairing, the hopeless and helpless. It is possible, I suppose that these words are not just political posturing, opportunism, but spoken sincerely, even honestly, from true concern and heartfelt fear.

But these words are wrong. Every single one wrong. Wrong because they are against what America is and should be.

Beginning with back.

Back from what? From rightly, democratically, legitimately elected leadership? Back from anyone who disagrees with my particular viewpoint, stand, position? Validating the rights of opposing ideas to exist and daring to share power with them is exactly the point of open democracy, is it not? America has never been just one place, one thing, one idea. America is built on the very truth of many ideas and the mutual search for the common, the shared, the whole. A different direction cannot be, ipso facto, a wrong direction in America, much less an evil one. It’s just a different one, and no ground for violence, notional or actual.

America is not a favored toy to be fought over in the nursery.

Because it can never be ours.

There is no ours in America. There is a my, a personal patriotism, an ownership of citizenship, duty, responsibility. But there is no ours, no single group of any ilk to which America only belongs, no group or groups with whom it can never be shared. Ours is a great obscenity in a nation of Immigrants, founded by pilgrims unwelcomed and discarded by other nations, ours cannot be claimed by a people carrying the guilt of what was done to the only native peoples who could fairly speak the word ours. What makes this America is precisely the fact that we do not belong here, that we have created a place for all others who do not belong, anywhere, either, who seek with us the freedom to have a home and live a life as best they can.

Which leaves the ugliest word of all. Take.

It is the essential error of human philosophy that we value force above all, that we equate ferocity with strength. In response to threat, apprehension, or loss, there must be force. I cannot have, so I will take. It is the very sin that defines humanity, the very wrong that destroys good everywhere. The loss is not merely to humility or civility, though both are surely destroyed. No, our loss is the loss of Grace, of faith in the larger arc of history and in the God who surely blesses this nation and all it stands for.

For there is not one good thing, of America or of any other thing, that comes from force. What is noble and right comes only by sacrifice, by the gift of self and the hope that it conveys, whether on a green in Lexington or a cross on Calvary or a local polling place. From force comes tyranny, pain and destruction, comes death and end. From giving comes greatness, future, grace.

Those who would take America would destroy her. And that is not the Independence day which I will celebrate this July 4th.

In angry voices today I hear a demand for freedom of a wrong kind, for Independence from the very ideals and responsibilities that define this nation and everything that is good about it. If freedom only means a for-profit-free-for-all or the blind and unworthy pursuit of power at the expense of person or creation, then they have won the day. They have taken America back.

May the God who has so richly blessed this nation grant us freedom from that.

Welcome to the Party

2010-06-28T15:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-15T06:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

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

Remembering

2010-05-30T05:22:00.000-07:00

Sacred places of loved ones
marked by stone
monument
solid, forever
impervious to time
as it should be.
Memories that we will not suffer lost.
Ever.

Marked by flowers
pretty, fragile
fleeting traces of beauty and life
passing through creation moments of joy.
Smiles.
Memories
like humans
drift fragrantly on the wind
only for awhile.

O the Power!
Memories
Strong, lasting, immutable
Fragile
Beauty
living things.

A day
merely a day
but a marker in time
a calling
permanent history
mindful of mortality
we salute you
we give thanks for you
and we remember.

This is why Christians should listen to their politicians

2010-05-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

Some people are suggesting that Rand Paul is a racist. If it was only that simple.

Commenting on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a recent interview, Paul noted, “I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant,” Paul said, “but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.”

In the world of “No Government is good government,” business owners must be allowed to discriminate if they choose. Not that we want them to, or like it, or affirm it in any way. But it is the natural outcome of our worship of individual freedom, that we must be willing to tolerate the words and acts of others with whom we disagree for the sake of the greater good. It is not, nor can it ever be, the place of government to tell individuals how to think, what to say, or how to act.

Which is pretty much the problem with the world.

It is assumed, of course, that “market” forces will correct anti-social behaviors, that a business would in time realize that it is unprofitable to discriminate, and change. When I read history it looks to me like slave-owners found racial discrimination rather profitable, but perhaps that’s not what we mean here. Rather, I’m guessing, we are asked to believe that freedom-worshipping people will, by nature of their God-given Free Will, in time, come to do that which is right and best for themselves and society as a whole.

When was the last time that happened?

I have to admit that I love discovering how absolutely right Martin Luther really was. About everything.

The failure of libertarian thinking ought to be self-evident by this point . Where are all the benefits of this great free-will? Where are all the acts of charity and love? Where is the wide-spread prosperity promised by the exercise of an unfettered marketplace?

Mine got buried under a pile of mortgage-based derivatives I guess.

People are not good. No, not even you. Occasionally they do good things, but that does not make them good. No, we never have been, and unless human evolution takes an unimaginable turn in the very near future, we never will truly be. Shall I list megalomaniacs, tyrants, mass-murders and criminals? Shall we peruse the daily news and read of drug wars and pollution, pedophilia and hate crimes? In every age, of every degree, people have been bad. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we speed on the Freeway in rush hour.

We are not good. We are bad.

Under what false assumptions do libertarians believe this will change? If we just give people their freedom, do you really believe they will then be good? No, in societies where there is less restraint, less powerful government, there is more corruption, more oppression and violence, more evil.

Human good will is the ultimate tenet of atheism. If we believe that people are by nature good and will do the right thing left to the acts of their free will, then we need neither God nor Savior. Both of those are, in actuality, a great restriction on human freedom, what with their demands of absolute devotion and total obedience to their superior divine will.

No, Christianity is not Libertarian. It is very likely the opposite of it.

For God at least knows that people need to be told what to do. There is a reason why He gave Moses 631 commandments, starting with the big Ten on Sinai. He knew that left to their freedom the Israelites would soon destroy themselves and each other. And he soon discovered (to His holy chagrin) that the provision of Law did by no means create or empower a good people. It would require a much greater work to finally put the lie of human freedom to death.

It would require a crucifixion.

Jesus, by the way, was a big believer if the work of governance to regulate the behavior of individuals in the community. Read Matthew 18 even once. He says, if your brother sins against you, go to him. If he does not listen, bring a witness. And then two or three. And then bring him before the whole congregation. He does not say, well, sometimes you have to put up with what your brother does because he is, after all, free to choose how he wants to be. No, this is Christian community: to exert the will of the whole and demand change from each of us.

The kingdom of God, Jesus tells us, is wherever people are gathered. Together. Bound to one another in mutual love, respect and desire for the good that transcends individual freedom.

To know the Grace of God is to love his truth more than freedom itself.

If loving Grace is wrong, I don't want to be right ...

2010-05-19T15:14:00.001-07:00

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right.

Sister Margaret McBride can probably speak to this issue better than I.

A member of the ethics committee of St Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, she consented along with other Doctors and professionals to allow an abortion because a patient’s life was endangered by continuing the pregnancy.

For that she has received the harshest of penalties – excommunication from her church - because of that choice. Only someone who has “married” themself to the church can fully appreciate what this has cost her.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said that "the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral." He is absolutely right of course. Sister Margaret did something wrong, and the church is unquestionably right to reprove her.

I myself cannot imagine the horror of facing such a choice – trading a woman’s life for her child’s (assuming that the baby could have been saved, which is not certain). It is an appropriate outcome in such cases, according to Bishop Olmsted, that the mother should die. To which there is also a certain horrible but inescapable logic.

Doing the right thing is not always easy. And this is what should happen in a world ruled by anyt sense of what is right, undeniably, irrevocably, and always right.

Who cannot appreciate the desire, even the need to live in such a world, with clear-cut rules and orders and categories. It is our constant search, our constant debate. And as long as we never face such choices as Sister Margaret, it seems an appropriate and fine way to live.

But then again.

Consider the ranging battles in the church today, the driving desire for the right, to erase wrong, to stand clearly on the side of God and His Word and stem the rising liberal erosion of value, of rightness. Is it not true that the Bible clearly tells us homosexuality is sinful, and if so, are we not obligated to stand firmly against it, in defense of marriage and pulpit? Churches are bleeding members and congregations for the lack of this simple rule: there is no place in the church for tolerating gay and lesbian marriage or ministry. None.

And shouldn’t then this always be our modus operandi? If we are called to the place about right and wrong then we will stand with integrity and power over and against all manner of sinfulness, wherever it is clearly proclaimed by Scripture and Tradition. We shall eradicate our pews of adulterers and fornicators, of liars and cheaters, of the irreligious and the intemperate.

People who forsake the speed limit on the freeway. Students who cheat on tests at school. Employees who take pens or post-it notes home from the office. Pastors who look at their Facebook page during office hours.

Do you know where this ends? I do. With Sister Margaret McBride and her awful, unimaginable, choice. Divorced from the church we love and the God we need.

Though it seems at first blush not to be, the fact is that Bishop Olmsted surely had a choice, too. What he did in excommunicating Sister Margaret was affirm the Law of God, the primacy of righteousness, and the authority of the church. What he did was turn his back of Jesus Christ.

For the sake of being right he forsook grace.

And we live daily in danger of doing so, too.

Someone recently reminded me that there are many, many people in the church who are angry and frustrated, who fear the direction of the church in its unwillingness to stand correctly against things that must be wrong. Someone recently reminded me that to many people this doesn’t seem like their church anymore.

Which it is not. Nor has it ever been. This is the church of Jesus Christ, who rules his kingdom in a very different way.

Being right is a powerful anchor, a steady foundation in the stormy seas of a difficult and confusing world. But like all weights, it is also the force that holds us down, turns us against one another, keeps us from rising above the real powers of sin, death and the devil, restrains us from the very Grace of God. Being right is the power to drown our church, each other, ourselves. Being right is very death.

It was Luther, finally, who reminded us, that the gift of Grace is a more wonderful “daily drowning” in baptism, the collapse of our search for righteousness until all that remains is a healthy dependence of the Grace of God. This God reminds us daily that we do not actually know the difference between right and wrong, not matter how powerfully we assert it, that we are not good, ever, not matter how certain we feel, that we must have a faith which knows only one good, only one God.

Sister Margaret faced a truth that we must face every day, though hopefully in not such a dramatic way. Life is full of choices too large for human beings.

We cannot depend on them. We must only depend on Him.

For our own safety, for the sake of our mortal souls, maybe we should stop trying to be right so much, and be thankful for the God who saves us in spite of them, from them, and through them.

Sister Margaret, our prayers are with you, and our pews are open for you.

If loving Grace is wrong, I don't want to be right ...

2010-05-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right

Sister Margaret McBride can probably speak to this issue better than I.

A member of the ethics committee of St Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, she consented along with other Doctors and professionals to allow an abortion because a patient’s life was endangered by continuing the pregnancy.

For that she has received the harshest of penalties – excommunication from her church - because of that choice. Only someone who has “married” themself to the church can fully appreciate what this has cost her.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said that "the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral." He is absolutely right of course. Sister Margaret did something wrong, and the church is unquestionably right to reprove her.

I myself cannot imagine the horror of facing such a choice – trading a woman’s life for her child’s (assuming that the baby could have been saved, which is not certain). It is an appropriate outcome in such cases, according to Bishop Olmsted, that the mother should die. To which there is also a certain horrible but inescapable logic.

Doing the right thing is not always easy. And this is what should happen in a world ruled by anyt sense of what is right, undeniably, irrevocably, and always right.

Who cannot appreciate the desire, even the need to live in such a world, with clear-cut rules and orders and categories. It is our constant search, our constant debate. And as long as we never face such choices as Sister Margaret, it seems an appropriate and fine way to live.

But then again.

Consider the ranging battles in the church today, the driving desire for the right, to erase wrong, to stand clearly on the side of God and His Word and stem the rising liberal erosion of value, of rightness. Is it not true that the Bible clearly tells us homosexuality is sinful, and if so, are we not obligated to stand firmly against it, in defense of marriage and pulpit? Churches are bleeding members and congregations for the lack of this simple rule: there is no place in the church for tolerating gay and lesbian marriage or ministry. None.

And shouldn’t then this always be our modus operandi? If we are called to the place about right and wrong then we will stand with integrity and power over and against all manner of sinfulness, wherever it is clearly proclaimed by Scripture and Tradition. We shall eradicate our pews of adulterers and fornicators, of liars and cheaters, of the irreligious and the intemperate.

People who forsake the speed limit on the freeway. Students who cheat on tests at school. Employees who take pens or post-it notes home from the office. Pastors who look at their Facebook page during office hours.

Do you know where this ends? I do. With Sister Margaret McBride and her awful, unimaginable, choice. Divorced from the church we love and the God we need.

Though it seems at first blush not to be, the fact is that Bishop Olmsted surely had a choice, too. What he did in excommunicating Sister Margaret was affirm the Law of God, the primacy of righteousness, and the authority of the church. What he did was turn his back of Jesus Christ.

For the sake of being right he forsook grace.

And we live daily in danger of doing so, too.

Someone recently reminded me that there are many, many people in the church who are angry and frustrated, who fear the direction of the church in its unwillingness to stand correctly against things that must be wrong. Someone recently reminded me that to many people this doesn’t seem like their church anymore.

Which it is not. Nor has it ever been. This is the church of Jesus Christ, who rules his kingdom in a very different way.

Being right is a powerful anchor, a steady foundation in the stormy seas of a difficult and confusing world. But like all weights, it is also the force that holds us down, turns us against one another, keeps us from rising above the real powers of sin, death and the devil, restrains us from the very Grace of God. Being right is the power to drown our church, each other, ourselves. Being right is very death.

It was Luther, finally, who reminded us, that the gift of Grace is a more wonderful “daily drowning” in baptism, the collapse of our search for righteousness until all that remains is a healthy dependence of the Grace of God. This God reminds us daily that we do not actually know the difference between right and wrong, not matter how powerfully we assert it, that we are not good, ever, not matter how certain we feel, that we must have a faith which knows only one good, only one God.

Sister Margaret faced a truth that we must face every day, though hopefully in not such a dramatic way. Life is full of choices too large for human beings.

We cannot depend on them. We must only depend on Him.

For our own safety, for the sake of our mortal souls, maybe we should stop trying to be right so much, and be thankful for the God who saves us in spite of them, from them, and through them.

Sister Margaret, our prayers are with you, and our pews are open for you.

The new face of book banning in the 21st Century

2010-05-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

When I was young, the hard work of removing books from school libraries and curricula was focused mostly on books with an overly developed sexuality, lest they needlessly stir up simmering adolescent hormones. Which was a fairly significant challenge in and of itself.

Classic book burners went after writers with radical social outlooks, agitators, communists all. But that was then and this is now. Having lost the battle against ideas, I guess it’s time to go after the scientists.

A local school district is being pressured by a few parents to remove the dangerous tome The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming and its companion video because it dares to present carbon-pollution-driven global climate change as science, even as scientific fact, when everyone knows “scientists disagree.”

Now, is that “scientists” who disagree, or just oil and coal company lobbyists? And is it truly actual disagreement, or just nit-picking over data and detail? I’m skeptical of the skeptics.

That this protest is being made by the wife of a Congressman who has voted for the oil companies and against clean energy legislation is probably noteworthy, but oversimplifies this conversation.

Then again, when has it ever been simple? What are the forces, not of nature but of human power and corruption, that have always stood against the pursuit of knowledge, that have disputed fact when it challenged institution, that persecuted Copernicus and Galileo, that shunned and still shun Darwin? When has the world ever accepted as truth proven fact when it was difficult or costly so to do? The answer is mostly never, especially when such truth calls out the sin and stupidity and corruption of the powers that rule us and the way we’ve always done things.

Undoubtedly, the real danger of Laurie David’s book is her portrayal of the “big corporations” who are accumulating untold wealth at the expense of the environment. One ought not expect such powerful giants to stand idly by, or not pour their considerable resources into the work of contesting this smear to their reputation. Luckily for them, they own plenty of Congressmen and Congressmen’s wives to aid their cause.

But Ms. Terry is right about one thing. The oil companies are not the enemy here. At least not the only one. We are. It is our dependence on cheap energy, our addiction to the road of least resistance, our unwillingness to change our habits and give up our indulgences that pollutes the earth. Oil is pouring into the Gulf of Mexico because we desire it, we demand it. Tarred beaches and destroyed marine life are the inevitable outcome of the battle for cheap gas in my SUV.

We are willing to bear the consequences of using oil because we are unwilling to do the hard and expensive work of converting to clean energy and changing the way we live. Whatever happens to the environment in the meantime, well, that’s a problem for some other day, some other generation.

All of which points to the greater and even more indisputable truth which has little to do with science. The despoiling of our plant, of God’s planet, is a serious moral failure, a great sin, a human catastrophe. Challenging the science is a great distraction, a way to not face up to the significant crimes we have been and are still committing every day against ourselves and generations to come. We have failed as human creatures, and we are bearing now the cost of our wrongdoing.

It must stop.

Congressman and Mrs. Terry, we should communicate that to 6th graders and 60 year olds in whatever way, by whatever book or video, we can.

Fences

2010-05-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

As the Macondo oil spill haunts the gulf coast of America, one man proposes a giant sand bar that would keep the pollution away from shore and protect sensitive environments like wetlands, beaches and casinos. Dredging, I understand, could begin in 10 days.

It may be a workable solution, a good idea. It may help minimize the impact of a significant environmental disaster. And it is the perfect human reaction.

When faced with any calamity, with any hard problem, we build a fence. We build a wall, a border, a defense. It is the predictable and inevitable jerk of the knee final resort to any of the real or scary bogeymen that inhabit the universe. Build a fence.

Crime? Add a security system. Computer predator? Get a network firewall. Immigration problems? Build a border fence. Protect what we have. Protect us. From them.

This is the thinking, the acting, that makes us human. And this is what condemns us to the lives we live.

It was St. Agustine who coined the phrase incurvatus in se – curved in on ourselves – to describe the state of living in sin. Our brokenness is this intransigence for defining life by how the world affects me, hurts me, harms me, scares me. That “how this affects me” is the smallest part of any problem in the world is of no concern. It is, from beginning to end, all we consider, all we see.

Never mind that this is what inflames the madness of our world. Never mind that the denial of our own culpability in the problems that trouble us condemns us to suffer them again and again. Never mind that seeing our own needs and not our own truth is our daily and final death.

No, just build another fence.

Or maybe there is another way.

Faith calls us to a powerful and new vision of life that reaches beyond fences to causes, to the root issues and needs and solutions that make the world out there less threatening, less harmful. Faith turns our attention from self to other, from today to tomorrow, from what is to what might be. Faith sees blessings not as treasures to be protected but gifts to use to transform the world and every life in it.

Faith turns us back to a God who breaks free from the tomb and invites us on the same path.

You see, the problem is that there is no fence high enough or wide enough or strong enough to protect us from all that threatens us. There is no border fence that will keep out every immigrant who want to, who needs to come in. There is no structure that can keep every drop of oil off from coast or wildlife, either this spill or the next one. There is no alarm system that can’t be beaten by a determined thief, no computer software sophisticated enough to keep your identity sacrosanct if someone really wants it.

But there are ways to be safer. There are ways to reduce poverty and corruption in neighboring governments. There are ways to not need more oil. There are ways to create jobs and futures and optimism in American cities. Oh, they are harder, higher, difficult, but there are ways.

There are ways, but they require skills and dreams other than building fences.

They require faith. They require the courage and hopefulness to look outside of our own very small needs and face the larger and more wonderful possibilities of the world around us.

They requires us to know that we are not the world but we are in it.

Shall we seek these ways, or shall we just build another fence?

We are not losing faith in the church. We never had it.

2010-04-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

The news is filled with scandal, pain, sin. What does it mean to see the church so lost, priests molesting children, superiors secreting them in their brokenness, passing along suffering in place of healing, corruption abounding? For many, the news about the Roman church is another chapter in the neverending story of human perversion, greed and dishonesty. But an important, perhaps the important story, is muted beneath the hubub about sexual orientation and clerical marriage. Like all things of this world, outrage and disgust conceal the deeper and more important truths, the fine meaning behind acts and events and words that change lives, that changes the world.

For while much will be spoken and written over sinful priests in the church, little will be said about the real captivity of Rome, the imprisonment to a simple but enduring word: Infallibility.

Infallibility is the belief system that multiplies tragedy into catastrophe; turns shortsightedness into blindness. It is the simplest, meanest, most popular and destructive mistake in all of human thinking. It runs the world.

It runs the world away from God.

From its birth, the Roman church has founded itself on such a principle, on the belief that the Lord endowed his disciple Peter with particular powers, ordained in his successors. It is what makes the Roman church the Roman church, the absolute trust in the God-granted authority of its words and deeds, and of the men who speak and make them.

To be infallible is to be trustworthy in classic Catholic theology. It influences and locates the laity of the church, it colors and shapes every doctrine, teaching and act of the priesthood.

It is the church’s great blindness.

Infallibility means that the work of God cannot be done by an ordinary human being, and so contrives to transfer divinity to a place where it can never fully reside. Infallibility is a system built on a lie which produces nothing but wrong.

For the sake of fairness, let us know that infallibility is not the sole provenance of the Roman church. It dwells wherever men place final significance in fixed things. It’s consequence is inanity, cruelty, death. Infallibility confuses the text with the truth, leading people to believe, for example, absurdities like humans living with dinosaurs, as if the Flintstones was a Discovery Channel special and not an after-school cartoon. Infallibility confuses lust with love, destroying families and communities. Infallibility confuses free market principles with greed at all cost, breeding obscene wealth and decadent poverty, loss of justice and economic disaster.

And so it goes. Confusing humans with saints preserves a system that cannot bear the truth, until it casts off victims and coddles criminals.

But the true loss is not merely of the world. It is the loss of faith.

Grace draws its power from very fallibility. It is the real brokenness of this world, the humanness of person and text and shortcoming and even sin that breathes life into God’s promise, the resurrects sinners, that infuses days with joy, that incarnates hope. God does not send grace to remove humanity, but to renew it. Faith calls us to trust solely and completely this one promise, in his promise and not our own, to walk always humbly and fearfully of what we could do, dependent on what he will do.

Grace is a promise that comes to fallible people.

But when Jesus heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

that April 20 could be a New National Holiday

2010-04-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

It is not an anniversary worth celebrating.

Waco. Columbine. Oklahoma City. A group calling themselves “Hutaree” is in jail in Michigan, or there would probably be another ignominious name to add to the list this year. A day more of infamy than anything else, and if not for the sorrows of many victims, it would be a day well worth forgetting.

Which is why it is an anniversary worth remembering.

Anger is the most underappreciated of all human phenomenon. St. Paul says “Be angry, but do not sin.” (Ephesians 4:26). Of course, he also thinks that wives should follow their husbands and husbands should love their wives like Christ loves us, so his objectivity is questionable, to say the least. In fact, a few verses later, he suggests that we just “put away … all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving …” (Ephesians 4:31-2). As if he heard what he was actually saying and thought better of it, too.

A prominent TV commentator says that God has called him to stand, “peacefully, quietly, with anger.” With what? Anger? How does that work? It’s far too clever by half, as my Grandpa used to say. Most of the angry people I see are neither peaceful nor quiet. They are everything but. Since when did peaceful and angry decide to not be opposites anymore? I didn’t get that memo. What new dictionary are we reading today? Or is there something else afoot? Should we now declare anger a Godly aspiration? Do we need more anger?

No, we have far too much anger I think.

Anger is a tool. A dangerous tool. Fear is the great motivator for otherwise ignorant masses, and anger is fear with an outward bend, fear in search of a scapegoat, of release. Anger provides the convenience of an enemy, a deception that salves failure with violence, replaces hope with passion, and explodes on the lives of the other for the preservation of the lowest, basest part of me. Manipulated by fear, cast down on my anger, I am Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I am Tim McVeigh.

In the hands of the devil, anger is the crucifixion of Christ all over again.

But in the hands of another? Oh!

Anger could be a different tool. Anger bent introspectively is humility, self-awareness, perhaps even change. Anger felt in truth, about truth, fashioned by truth, refines, distills and purifies life, it clarifies judgment, propels determination.

And that anger is in much short supply.

Perhaps we could enshrine a National Day of a new anger and ritualize a new truth – that we are the force of destruction and death that we fear most, that we are the enemy of our freedom and well-being. Perhaps a new national holiday of anger could be used to attack the foes that deserve our anger, the poverty, despair, pain and greed that are sucking the life out of our community.

A day of a new anger, directed not at the end of what is so much as driving us to the hard work of what ought to be.

Imagine capturing the energy of all of our hatred and building something instead of blowing it up, nurturing life instead of taking it, finding and taking new paths instead of burying each other on old ones. Picture a righteous anger that is not conceived in falsehood nor which leads not to sin, but a sacrificial anger, a cleansing anger, a fragrant offering of an anger. Imagine if we saw the world as it truly is, as God sees it, a world birthed and renewed and spirited in love. Can we know the distance between what we are doing and what we have been called to do?

Maybe if we were angry enough we could do something about it.

And that would be an anniversary worth celebrating.

Playground Bullies and Nuclear Treaties

2010-04-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

“The United States is declaring that we will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations.” (President Barack Obama)

And the response?

"It's kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, "Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want with me." (prominent politician and celebrity)

OK, I get that. I grew up on that schoolyard, I know that inherent violence of this world and the need to stand up for oneself.

It is, in fact, central to the American mythos, this emphasis on strength, on confidence, on self-reliance. The great American dream is to stand up victoriously to the neighborhood bully, to look him in the eye without backing down, to protect our own best interest without flinching.

It is this aspiration which has kept us safe and free for generations.

I can understand it. I can even honor it. I just can’t reconcile it with the teaching of my faith.

“But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Matthew 5:39

It is not, lest we profess our uncertainty, just another one of those things that Jesus uttered out loud. It is not a redactor’s trick, or an invention of the institutional church grown too far from its apostolic roots. It is the very heart and nature of Christ’s teaching, ministry and mission, and that pretenders to expertise in American Christian values do not understand this is our great sin.

Christians are called to be people of peace. Of passive, even non-resistive peace. Of active, sought-out, reconciling-with-enemies peace. Of reaching out, toward, across, down, beyond, peace.

Christians are named to be followers of a Savior who holds not a sword in his hand but the mark of a nail. Of a Savior who asks us not to “conquer” but to “endure.” Of a Savior who called down not armies of angels from his cross but words of forgiveness.

Christians are called to be people of peace as students and heirs of the man of peace, not as a hobby, not as a possibility that may come after every adversary is destroyed, after all other options are exhausted, but people who love peace, hope for peace, seek peace, live peace.

It is a tribute to our ignorance that we do not see how impossible peace is between two peoples who desire either victory or annihilation, not peace. It is a great evil that many of us (often not too secretly) are pleased to see the advance of their hatred. How amazing it is to see even the miniscule reductions of weapons, to hear conversations of any kind reflecting the possibility of less warfare. It should be celebrated, prayed for, not criticized, not scorned.

Oh, how unattainable to live a Christian life in this world! Oh how great our failure to live worthy of our Savior. Thanks be to the God of grace, who practices what he preaches, and offers us not a violent posture but the embrace of compassion, not condemnation for our helplessness, but a Spirit of peace, an opportunity for hopefulness.

Oh to be at Butler now that Spring is here ...

2010-04-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” Genesis 28:16

When we were little, we were told that the church was “God’s house,” and we believed it wholly and literally. We were quiet and respectful, as one should be in such an awesome place. When we grew up, we came to understand that God’s presence was not confined in space, that he was ultimately ubiquitous, and we believe that we experience his presence wherever we are.

That is rather encouraging to people who refuse to stay in any one place for too long a time.

But maybe we should rethink the subtleties of that notion.

Barry Collier first came to Butler University as basketball coach in 1989. Prior to his arrival, the Bulldogs had won 20 games only twice in 91 years of competition. His eleven year record there was 196-132, including a 90-39 record in his last four years , four straight post-season appearances, and seven first or second place conference finishes. He was named conference Coach of the Year four times.

In 2000, Collier answered the calling to coach at a major conference school and took over as Head Basketball Coach at the University of Nebraska. In six seasons, he amassed a 89-91 record, with two NIT tournaments bids and no post-season victories. While his tenure at Nebraska was marked by strong academic performance and Collier showed himself a man of significant integrity, it was a long way from his on-the-court performance at Butler.

In 2006, he went back.

In this, the fourth season since his return, Butler won 33 games, and went all the way to the Championship, losing only to perennial powerhouse Duke by a single basket at the end of the game.

Coincidence?

Yes, he is the Athletic Director now and not the coach, and sure, maybe Nebraska will never be the basketball haven that Butler University is. But maybe there is a deeper and more interesting question at play here, one that speaks directly to the spiritual issues that ought to guide us in choosing the path for our lives.

We are conditioned to believe that grass is always greener in somewhere else. Doubt and disbelief haunt us with the insinuation that paradise eludes us in some unseen and exotic locale just beyond our current reach. We are much too often stirred by an occasionally useful restlessness which distracts us from appreciating fully the setting where we are. Right now. Our eyes are cast toward some distant horizon and the possibilities that we certainly miss now, but maybe the good news is that THIS is the place where God is home for us, and we would do best to (as they say) bloom where we are planted.

In a world where too often we must “go off” to seek our fortune, perhaps Barry Collier could this morning teach us the joy of loving what we have and living well where we are.

Jacob named the place of his famous dream Beth-el, the place of God.

What do you call the place where you are?

The Hunt

2010-04-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

Now dawns the new day
mild sun smiling gently down from cornflower sky,
hint of green on softly sleeping lawn,
distant whiff of blossom coming I imagine.
A day to search
white patent leather shoes racing madly,
gladly,
pink wicker basket trailing dangerously,
stooping
stretching
to look
among the remainder of unraked leaves,
in the cool damp shadow of shrubbery.
Clever dad to hide so them so!
Where are they?

Treasures veiled
Look here! Look here!
It must be here
Pleasure -
Fulfillment -
Hope -
Where? Where?
Scampering as fast as short legs can go in search
in search -
it must be found.

Where is it?
Where is this promise?
Hidden
in dim of darkened heart,
wrapped up in the ghost of broken life, suffering, sorrowing, struggling;
a glint of pearl in faint sun,
a promise
life!
From a tomb, from a cross, from days of anguish and woe,
a morning of joy and giggles and sweetness and dreams

It must be found.

And now a message from our sponsor

2010-03-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

It’s a pretty funny world that we live in.

It turns out that the quintessentially all-American slacker-guy character on those clever FreeCreditReport.com commercials isn’t American at all. He is a French Canadian from Quebec by the name of Eric Violette. Complete with French Canadian accent. The ads were not filmed in a suburban basement in Cleveland or a seafood Restaurant in Omaha. They were filmed in Montreal.

Who’d thunk?

It is, of course, the nature of TV to present the world as allusion, as perception, as the shadow of reality either as we hope it would be or fear it actually might. It is why we love it so much, because it sets us free from the hard truths of the real world, grants us escape both from the boredom and the perils of daily life.

Which is why the TV world is starting to invade the real world. Because we know that it’s much more fun, much more thrilling, much more safe, and much more pleasurable than real life. Given the choice between the life I’m living and the one I’m watching on the TV, I’ll take the TV.

And it’s simpler. Easier.

But not this week.

We call this Holy Week, these all powerful, history-shaping events of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. The Triumphal Entry, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion. Events that are beyond historical, more than real. Days that define us no matter how we obfuscate. The Resurrection. Reality that cannot be contained within the stark boundary of what we know. Or even imagine.

Jesus looks down from the cross and mocks our simulated sufferings, our feigned indignations, our imaginary hardships. Our self-pity rings hollow in the face of his wounds, his blood, his death. The cross calls us harshly and directly back to reality, it calls us to put to death every self-deception, every false nuance, every cleverly misspoken word, every outright lie.

Dr. Luther taught us that a right understanding of the cross requires us to “call the thing what it actually is.” (Heidelberg Disputation) So, this week (at least) let us rather call things what they are.

· The phrase “in the crosshairs” is, in fact, a violent metaphor which has no place in constructive public debate and does not belong on the lips of people who aspire to be leaders in this country or any other.

· “No” for the sake of no is obstructionist, regardless of your convictions.

· Pedophilia is not a sexual orientation, it is a crime with neither excuse nor exemption. It deserves to be treated as such in every circumstance.

· If the cost of reconciliation is land, continuing to build new settlements is not a commitment to peace.

· "Christian" and "militia" are contradictory, not complimentary, terms.

It is the nature of politicians, human beings all, to not mean what they say. It is the failure of a TV addled generation that we accept it. It is why we do not progress as people – if we say nothing, then to do what we say is to do nothing. But thanks be to God for the gift of grace, for now he does what he says. Love is not word or concept, it is an amazing reality, plainly visible on the cross, daily available in the living and resurrected word.

As He practices what he preaches, so let us strive to do the same. Let us call ourselves what we truly are – debtors to his compassion and hopers for the resurrected life.

A good Holy Week and Happy Easter to all.

Buzzer beaters and legislative compromises

2010-03-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

You have to admit, it was a pretty improbable ending.

The outcome seemed, at least by most accounts, a foregone conclusion. The heavy weight of history and tradition, the clear opinion of pundits, odds makers and amateur observers alike made it obvious to all that this was not going to happen. Never.

Even the President didn’t predict it.

But then, the long determined effort, the defiant march forward, the last-minute scramble, and suddenly, for the sake of much toil against a seemingly superior foe, victory! To the consternation of many, the unexpected happens.

And that was just the basketball tournament.

On a side note, that the winning shot was made by the son of an Iranian immigrant with the extraordinary name of Ali Farokhmanesh is an amazing and fun conversation all to itself. Perhaps electing a President with the middle name Hussein had a greater impact on the world than we knew.

Sunday night, after more than a year of debating, cajoling, deal-making, huckstering and occasionally, if rarely, leading, the House of Representatives voted for Health Care Reform in America. It is, to be sure, not the legislation that many people (including this writer) wanted. It is not single payer Health Care. It does not contain the stronger guarantee of coverage for all that a robust Public Option for Health Insurance would have provided.

Perhaps some day in the future we will take another step in that direction. Perhaps our children will finish what we were unable to accomplish.

But it does one important thing - it proudly and clearly signals a new value in our society. No longer will it be the case in America that anyone should go without health care because they can’t afford it.

And it only took some 100 years to get here.

For me, it is a another reminder of the miraculous way that God works. Despite the name-calling, the fear-mongering, the outright lying by politicians and pundits and TV talking heads passing themselves off as journalists, the deed is done. Notwithstanding the worst of human nature, the goal is met. Many obstacles had to be overcome, most of them of our own making, but here we are in a brand new world, resurrected again.

St. Paul says that God’s Word exists in the world as a treasure in “clay jars.” Pedestrian, brittle, broken pottery holding that of greatest value. Politicians actually passing important legislation. It seems that we have proven once again how much God loves to work through the incredible messiness of human activity. Maybe he just loves an underdog as much as the next guy. Because there is nothing like a big upset to turn your bracket upside down and change everything.

Not too long ago it seemed like it was going to take a last minute, long three-pointer to get a Health Care bill passed. And so it did. Thanks, Ali.

In which Glen Beck does something good for the world

2010-03-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Thank God for Glenn Beck!

In the second century, a man named Marcion came to Rome. He was a avid student of Paul, and he noticed that there was a dramatic difference between the wrath-filled, eye-for-an-eye God of the Old Testament, and the merciful, forgiving Jesus Christ of the New Testament. They were, in his eyes, obviously not the same God. And so he collected the first Bible, including 11 epistles and the Gospel of Luke, and proclaimed the new, and superior, deity Jesus Christ as the replacement for the vengeful, smiting God of the Torah.

He did the church a favor. His heresy forced the church to consider carefully its relationship to the Jewish Scriptures, to put its theological house in order and to properly proclaim the amazing story of love that is the whole history of God with his peoples, from the beginning of creation to the empty tomb of Easter. Marcion made the church of Jesus Christ better by being so amazingly ,dramatically wrong.

And now Glenn Beck has done the same.

On a recent radio show, Beck urged his listeners to “run as fast as you can” from any church that preaches social justice. First of all, that’s probably correct. Social justice is a political category. Preachers of the gospel should not preach social justice. They should preach Biblical Justice. Which is a far more worthy of Beck’s fright.

Socialism (which is what he really means) is a political system that provides financial support to the poor through various taxes imposed on the working class and the wealthy. It aims to redistribute society’s wealth, causing the rich to be not-so-rich so that the poor are not-so-poor.

Weenies.

Biblical Justice demands much more. Much more. God complains against those who “rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey …” (Isaiah 10:2). The very existence of the poor is an indictment against the rich; no, against the whole of society. If even one goes without, one orphan, one widow goes uncared for, then all are condemned. Period.

Biblical justice is hard, It is not for the faint of heart.

Biblical justice does not suffer fools, it is not a part-time occupation, it is not for pretenders or do-gooders or theorists. Or radio talk-show hosts.

Biblical justice is not about charity, about generosity, even about love. Those are each good things, but pale in comparison. Even if Bill Gates gives a billion dollars to good causes, he still has four billion to live on, which I’m guessing means he can still live pretty well, much better say, than the average person living in their car. The issue is not how much rich people give to charity or how heavy their tax burden is. No, the issue is the very notion that some people should be rewarded and some should not, that some should have and some should not. In the kingdom of God, ruled by Grace and not by sin, there should be no poor people. There should be no rich people. There should only be God's people.

And God's word declares that we should aspire not to work at the problem, not to advance the cause, but to end poverty. Period. That is the only acceptable “ism” in the eyes of our God.

I don’t imagine that Glenn Beck can get his head around that idea. Then again, no one can. But let us give thanks for his willingness to allow his ignorance and pettiness to be publicly displayed, that a real conversation might be engaged, that discerning people of faith might speak the right Word of God into the darkness that passes for public discourse in America.

Beck has drawn a lot of angry reaction. Perhaps he deserves it, probably he intended it. But let’s allow the dust to settle, and see if instead we can coax some small part of the truth to arise. That is God’s purpose for heretics, after all. For blowhards, idiots, and small-minded fools, too.

May his will be done!

to live an After Life

2010-03-11T08:46:00.001-08:00

Is there life after Easter?

It is, I suppose, a question that is particularly concerning to preachers. The gist of the puzzle is the realization that, putting so much energy and attention and time into planning for one great day, for one special holiday, it is much too easy to forget to plan for whatever will come afterwards.

It happens to me every year. Somewhere along the path of Lent the idea will sneak into the edges of my consciousness that Easter will come and then there will be an “after Easter” in which I will need to be prepared to preach, teach, plan, and basically do life some more. Even though my whole focus is on one day, life begets the constant reminder of what comes next.

I wonder if basketball players have the same problem in the tournament season. Every game is win-or-go-home. But if you win, and of course you hope that you do, you have to turn in a matter of days or perhaps hours and play a game which you haven’t thought too much about, what with concentrating on winning the one at hand first.

And how do you do that?

It is something like a life question. Existence comes at us in a series of events, tests, victories, moments, crisis’, each demanding our full attention and desire. And after each one comes yet another and another and another for which, it often turns out, we are scarcely prepared.

We are always looking forward to an Easter of one kind or another. But will we be ready for what comes next?

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10

Faith, it turns out, is not so much as a destination as a launching. We search for the instance of belief, but it is to what follows that we are called. Grace is not a moment, an act, but a flow, a direction. Life is not a test, but an engagement in learning, growing, changing, an irresistible movement, towards, forward, yearning, stretching …

It is our nature to turn time into the finite, to seek an end of it, whether it be our own or someone else’s. This is the nature of our brokenness or perhaps the definition of all of it. That we even imagine a horizon, let alone seek its conquest, is the smallness of spirit that defies the God who made us. We are travelers, pilgrims, journeying along a creation, here for a time but then again here for much time, for pressing on time, for a next experience of time. We are not about things in the singular, we are born to the life eternal, not just for then but to bring its sense and meaning into now.

Abundant life means more than this life, it demands our constant faith and hope in after.

I should probably be getting ready for that.

They call it "joy!" You should try it.

2010-03-04T13:35:00.000-08:00

You knew it was going to be something special.

Let me say from the start that I’m not really a hockey fan. And so even though I knew it was going to be a big game, I didn’t watch much of the gold medal match at the Olympics between the US and Canada - only switching over from time to time so I could keep an eye on the score and be able to talk intelligently about the outcome on Monday. That is, until it went to overtime, at which point I put down the remote and settled in to watch what I knew was going to be a great finish.

Let me also say that I was truly rooting for the good ‘ole US to win, what with being a proud American and having heard how really well they had played for the entire tournament and remembering very well how amazing the Miracle on Ice was 30 years ago.

But I wasn’t unhappy with the outcome. Because as soon as I saw Canada score, I knew something great was going to happen, something we hardly ever see, something I wish we could see more often. I knew we were about to see a truly rare experience in human life.

I knew we were about to see joy.

Now, real joy is a extraordinary thing. The average person has occasional bouts of happiness, fits of giggles and even occasional moments of satiety. But joy, real joy, pure joy, well, you don’t see that very often. That sweet release, that complete free assurance that the world is right in its orbit and things are the best they can be, that is a exceptional thing indeed.

I understand. After all, the opposite of joy, whatever we might name it, is far more prevalent on this side of the Kingdom. We experience so much misery, sadness, suffering and sorrow that we become acclimated to it, prepared for it, even expectant of it. We stand in the midst of bliss waiting for the the rain to fall, for the other shoe to drop, for reality to come crashing down on whatever parade has come our way.

We believe in gloom, because it is what we see and experience. Joy, on the other hand, lives among us mostly as myth. Unprepared, we are disqualified in its presence.

I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. John 15:11

If only we believed it. If only we could, for even one moment, live by faith and not merely by sight, if we could trust the God of what will be and not the Devil of what is, then we might find one of those elusive moments and experience joy, be captivated and carried away by it, and sing, O Lord, sing. Not unlike those Canadians, who’s rafter-shaking rendition of their National Anthem raised shivers up and down my spine.

No, a hockey game is not forever. Nor is much of what can bring joy in this world, for life, such as it is, will always be waiting. But joy is forever, and sometimes we can taste it and touch it, even briefly, and be transported in Spirit to what will come. A victory, a birth, a sunny day, these are the reminders that the world is more than it seems, and so are we.

Complete the joy!

What makes terrorists terrible?

2010-02-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

A prominent news magazine recently opened up for all to see their internal debate on the use of the word “terrorist.” As in, why is someone who hijacks an airplane and crashes it into the World Trade Center and kills thousands a terrorist, but a Texan who crashes his small plane into a local IRS center and kills two people merely a “tax protestor?”

One inevitable answer, supported by far too much commentary since, is that one is a foreign enemy and the other is not. Too bluntly put? Of course we have come to reserve the word “terrorist” for Eastern, Muslim attackers and the word “criminal” for all others. Hence, torture and infinite imprisonment for some, Miranda rights and American jails for others.

It’s not so much the lack of justice that perturbs me as the wholesale short-shrifting of the word terrorist.

“It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come … “ (Mark 7:20-21)

I imagine that if asked, most Americans would say that they are most afraid of foreign, Muslim terrorists, killing Americans overseas, coming to American to kill more of us here. I can understand – there is something particularly frightening about that elusive, exotic, strange figure emerging as if out of some dark, far-off mist.

How naïve and self-deceptive of us! For the truest fear is that our own worst enemy is ourselves, the lurking dark and angry soul which threatens us from within. Timothy McVeigh, Joe Stack, Scott Roeder, these are us, they look like us and live among us and hold a mirror up to our own darkest and deepest fears. The true evil in the world is not that enemy there, it is my own worse nature that is my greatest threat. It is what comes from within, what we have tended with our anger and carefully neglected with our apathy and willfully watched fester that will be our ultimate destruction.

Yes, Mr. Isikoff, there is a difference between these similar actions, and it ought to be evident which is worse and more deserving of the label terrorist. For while I know there are always enemies without demanding my vigilance and courage, it is the one within who is best armed and most capable of my destruction and against whom I ought be most on guard. It is there that the word terror is rightly applied.

Shame is not helpful. Guilt, on the other hand …

2010-02-18T09:16:00.000-08:00

On the radio this morning, a national sports commentator polled his audience, asking if they felt that Tiger Woods owed them an apology. Nine out of ten said they did not. They are absolutely correct.

An apology is not nearly enough. He owes us all much, much more.

The most commonly expressed opinion seems to be that Tiger’s indiscretions, while making for good tabloid copy and titillating news reports, are a private matter between himself and his wife/family. It’s just none of our business. I’m also guessing that for many of the responders (mostly male I’ll bet) somewhere secretly or even subconsciously envy the lifestyle, the power, the women falling at his feet.

I think he owes an apology. But my reasons are much different.

Here is the truth: morality is a always a public matter. Certainly no one deserves to have their personal peccadilloes splashed all over the cover of the National Enquirer. Nor is anything gained by jokes made at the Tiger’s expense. But this is not about the porn stars, the shameful behavior. This is about a real problem in the real world. Adultery.

Adultery destroys marriages in the real world. Every day. Real people’s lives are ruined, spouses and children alike. Real marriages are broken, and we all bear the cost, because this society depends on stable families and good marriages and happy childhoods as its bedrock. For the last decade, people have been running to a ballot box to protect marriage from the supposed threat of homosexuality as if that really mattered. Now, here is the real enemy of something truly vital and important to us all (even those who are not married), and nine out of ten of us think it’s not our business.

Really?

I am not interested in whether or not Tiger is ashamed of what he has done. I do, however, depend on him to appreciate the true guilt that he is now part of a national tragedy. I do, however, depend on him to be mature enough to do something about it.

“From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required …” (Luke 12:48)

Tiger Woods has an unique opportunity. He has the attention of the entire world now. He has a moment given to him to speak clearly and honestly about the tragic decisions he has made, about the horrific pain he has brought upon his wife and children, about what was really wrong, and not just that he has a “sickness.” He has a chance to say in a voice that might actually be heard that adultery is wrong, that it is always wrong, that it is painful and devastating. He has a chance to hold himself accountable, and by extension, lift up the millions of other men and women who need the same chance at redemption. If he could, by some grace of God, cause even one other man to look and see and say, “Man, I don’t want to do that to my life,” and change his path, then, well, wouldn’t that be worth far more than any golf tournament?

And just to say it, let us remember that we are all Tiger now. For all the talk about who is and who is not a role model in our society and who should be and who should not, let us stop all the false posturing and finally accept that each of us are responsible for doing what is right, and when we don’t, for doing something about it. Marriage, like life itself, is a private relationship lived in a public institution, and people are watching. Children are watching. It matters what you do. Being good and doing what is right is not optional, not to the people living around you.

Some people get it. There are millions upon millions of married people who live every day being faithful to their spouse and responsible for their children. It isn’t always easy for them, but they know it matters and they try. They deserve something from Tiger, too. I’ve always been a fan of his. I just hope he comes through now. For them.

Can I make 8 turnovers and still get to heaven?

2009-10-27T07:27:00.000-07:00

Really, it’s not just a facetious question!

Usually the content of the question is slightly different, but the intent is still the same. How bad can I be and still earn my eternal reward? Is there some point where even Jesus, in all His grace and mercy, will give up on me?

Let me say from the outset that it is a different question from “Can I make 8 turnovers and still have a job?” That question, purely a matter of law, is much easier to answer. No, you can’t. In a contractual world, you get paid for performance. And if you don’t perform – and one might argue that 8 turnovers indicates lack of performance – you ought not get paid, whether that be a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars or the prestige of a starting position or whatever. In this life, you get paid to be good, and if you’re not good, you don’t get paid.

It is, after all, what makes this life understandable at all.

But, of course, as a matter of grace, you’re not getting paid to be good by God. That may come as a shock if you think about it a little bit. God does not pay us to be good, he just demands it. Luther says, “Therefore I surely ought to thank and praise, serve and obey him.” Nothing in it for me. As my father used to say, “Because I said so. That’s why!”

This is where faith trips us up every time. We like to see ourselves as the perfect free agents, owners of our own will, choosers of our moments and our destiny. We think that all of this good stuff is coming to us because we deserve it, we earned it. We may even be willing to take some responsibility for our faults. At least within reason. But that’s the brick wall that we never see coming. For that fault is a debt we could never pay off.

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? Malachi 3:2

The problem with Grace is that it can never be a partial proposition. To get a little grace is to get it all, to receive forgiveness once is to stand beholden forever. As much as we’d like Grace to be our fall-back position, it belongs to a God who will not abide anything less that complete devotion, complete lordship, complete pardon.

But that’s what makes it Grace! For it is not a matter of 8 turnovers, no more than it would matter if it was 88 or only one. The question itself misses the point – our place with God never depends on what we do or do not do, but only in what God does. Or did, for he sent his only Son not merely for the drama but to change the very nature of heaven and earth and of us.

So, to paraphrase Dr. Luther, when you put the ball on the ground, really give it a boot. For the one who counts isn’t keeping score. Sometimes I think he might just be getting a good laugh at all of it.

Up, Up and Away

2009-10-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

I hate having to confess to doing stupid things. But, as I must, I will. Last Friday, as I did my chores around the house, I kept one enraptured eye on the cable news running on my TV, watching and waiting to see what would happen with the now famous runaway balloon and its six-year-old passenger. I prayed for his safety, as did probably millions of other people.

I fell for the hoax.

In my own defense, how could I have known better? Well, maybe a little actual journalism on the part of anyone who works for the people who put the pictures on my TV might have altered the story before it was too late, but who’s to say? Given that the National Guard got caught up in the hunt, I feel somewhat acquitted. But still angry.

I am amazed at the brazen nerve of this family. Not surprised, but amazed nonetheless. Amazed by what they were willing to do, to put others through, to put even their small children through. Amazed at the depth of the deceit and the hubris all for a chance to be on TV. Again. I guess once was not, in fact, enough. For this is the new addiction of our age. Our lust for publicity is as unbounded as an junkie holding up a convenience store to get cash to score a quick hit. Thousands lining up for an American Idol audition. Not because they can sing, not necessarily because they want to bring their gift to the world, but because they know that the worst, the most embarrassing will get their 15 minutes of fame. And we gotta have our 15 minutes! Or even 15 seconds.

We long to be the next William Hung. Famous. For nothing. And what will save us from this self-destructive humiliation?

But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Matthew 6:6

Faith lives in the constant tension of public and private, of a word that must be proclaimed from rooftops and a piety that must not aggrandize. I do not believe that Jesus means that we should never pray in public or show our faith to others (though I fear that many of my more Lutheran brethren wish he did), but that we should always guard against making grace a servant of our lesser nature, grasping glory for ourselves, shining forth not God’s light but mine.

In creating us as community, God gave birth to a public world. But like all of his good gifts, it is best when it serves his purposes and spoils when we twist it to our own. The world should watch us not to see us, but to see God in us, to behold the little Christ we are called to be. To show that, to jump up and down and scream and shout and seek every moment of attention available to us so that Christ would be known is a good thing indeed. A right thing.

If we do it well.

It is also a gift of God that we are given these small learning moments, and here is one to be sure. We are in danger of raising a generation impoverished of attention, because we are teaching our children all the wrong things about it. The spotlight of self-promotion burns harshly, and the reward of fame floats away like a helium-filled balloon. But to be an instrument of grace, to speak and be Christ in the world is true and never-ending glory.

It might not get you a TV show. But then again, you might not really need one.

Not the way I imagined he would fulfill his promise

2009-10-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

He promised in his campaign that he would bring together disparate groups, that he would bridge vast divides and create new coalitions our of old enemies.

Who knew it would be the Republican National Committee and the Taliban?

Today they are one mind in their criticism and condemnation of the President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. As if it was his fault that the Nobel Committee chose to give him the award. As if there is something negative about an American President winning an award, or an American city being honored to host an Olympic games.

Was there someone else who was supposed to win?

This is the world where we live now, a world of institutionalized enmity with 24-hour-a-day cable news coverage. A world where we cheer our opponents losses and scoff at their victories. Not just civility, but basic sportsmanship, even humanity itself, has become an unaffordable luxury, an unprofitable lost art that will come to exist only in museums and old, old memories.

Which I think is exactly what this award is going to be a good thing.

I came late to the news this morning, having been up far too long into the night watching a football game. A hard fought game in ridiculous conditions with a stunning ending. But maybe the best moment for me wasn’t during the game, but right after, when the TV cameras caught the players of the teams crossing the field to shake a hand, pat a helmet, speak a small and gracious word. Which was why they played the game, after all.

I think it’s easy to miss the amazing importance of that. For 60 minutes they fought hard, hit hard, tried with every effort to defeat one another. But when the game was done these young men remembered their shared humanity, that they could be opponents without being enemies, that they could battle without hate.

I doubt that scene will make the ESPN highlights, which is too bad. Too bad for us. Too bad for our children. Where are they going to see that kind of example?

The news tells me of a recent political event, where attendees took turns shooting guns at a variety of targets, including one in the likeness of their political opponent who is, yes, a member of Congress. Yes, they shot guns at an effigy of a member of the United States Congress. Not a bunch of rednecks or hoodlums in some backyard or back alleyway, but elected officials and political figures and the person who believes themselves worthy of being in Congress themselves. I don’t think I’m ok with that. Are we replacing debate and dialog with gunplay? Yes, “pretend” gunplay. At least for now.

We have come to this point, that lacking real interest or efforts for peace or harmony or even adult conversation in our world, we are left only with those who have the vision and courage to at least hope for it. And if the Nobel Peace Prize committee has the wisdom to recognize that very rare hopefulness and the will to reward it, then I say good for them. The first step toward any goal, after all, is to desire it. And if this President has done nothing else than to truly desire a different politic, an open dialog with friend and enemy alike, a more civil society and a more peaceful world, then he has done much. Much worthy of great recognition.

Given that so few seem to desire the same thing, I await a more deserving winner.

Send in the Lutherans

2009-10-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

The latest thing in naked power grabs disguised as religious movements is called The Conservative Bible Project, launched by Conservapedia, a web site whose title page proudly proclaims The Truth Shall Set You Free. My uncle used to tell me that when the salesman said, “let me tell you the truth,” you should get a tight hold of your wallet. It seems to be the intent of this project to provide “a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias.” I must have missed the day at seminary where they covered the corrupting liberal bias of the Bible.

I’m keen to see how that will be accomplished. I wonder what method they will use to unearth the lost conservative ideas behind such seemingly liberal sayings as:

• The laborer deserves to be paid.
• Whoever is not against us is for us.
• Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
• One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.
• Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s …
• Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.
• Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
• If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also …
• Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor …

Those are just some of the sayings of Jesus from the Gospels. Lord help them if they try to read Isaiah.

All ludicrousness aside, behind this farce lies an interesting and important question. Since the Protestant Reformation, the supreme authority of what the Bible says has been taken as a article of faith for the church. What has never been answered completely is, what does the Bible say?

There is an assumption, of course, vital to fundamentalists everywhere, that the Bible is perfectly coherent and without guile or subtlety, that it speaks for itself and, as such, is the right and final authority for faith and life. Which must be why fundamentalist preachers spend so much time telling me what the Bible says. And even that works fairly well, until I find out that the Bible in fact tells me something else than what the preacher told me it said, hence requiring some momentous effort like the Conservative Bible Project to come along and save us all from these terrors.

Or we could just listen to the man who saved the Bible from the Dark Ages.

Luther taught us that the authority of the Bible comes not by its words, but from the giver of the Word, from the God of Scripture himself. He reminds us, as if we need to be reminded, that “God and the Scripture of God are two things, no less than the Creator and the creature are two things.” (Bondage of the Will) If he were with us today, I think he would find our obsession with the words of the Bible sinful and idolatrous, though neither new nor original. The Bible has become a modern Golden Calf, over which we cavort and screech every time we find its words in agreement with our own internal spiritual bias.

Luther once said that, left to our own devices, mankind would always seek to remake God in his own image. Or, at least in this case, to remake his Bible. The sense of distrust and despair, the fear that the words of the Bible could or should be written in any particular human viewpoint, is breathtaking. To reduce faith to the margins of human words is to grind it to dust and mix it in water and drink it. Which was what Moses did with the Golden Calf. This is the inspired Word of God, the Holy Spirit resides and reigns over it and speaks truth through it and calls and enlightens us by it. It does not need our help.

It does not deserve our scorn.

Maybe the greatest sin of all is the conceit which imagines to know the true but hidden intent, to see that which has been kept from the whole world until now. It is the greatest power move of all, tried and true, in which hearts have been broken, families and communities rent asunder, and much blood shed. It is the founding principle of radical elements of every great religion – Christian, Jewish, Islamic. Unable to submit to the Word, let us rewrite the texts themselves, and unlock the great secret and reveal that we were right the whole time.

As if there was any secret to what the Bible says.

There is, in fact, only one principal interpretive key, which cannot be cheaply labeled as either conservative or liberal. It is the cross of Jesus Christ, the power and the promise of a God who sacrifices his own best and most beloved for our salvation, who calls us to conform our lives that to this first and best example of self-giving love.

To know Christ, and, as Paul reminds us, to know “nothing … except him crucified,” is to be the master of Scriptures and the possessor of its every secret meaning. Even as God found the very human figure of Christ sufficient for the salvation of the whole creation, let us, by our faith, turn these pages and know that all we need has always been there.

Things you never hear at a post-game press conference ...

2009-09-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

The coach could not, of course, accept the loss as anything but a loss. There is no such thing as a moral victory. His job is to produce wins, his success is measured in wins, he cannot coach his players to do anything else but win. I get that.

But I cannot help but see there a danger that modern sports reflects on our society, an us-vs.-them win-at-all-costs trash-talking rivalry-driven mentality which has escaped the playing field and is starting to dominate everything from our politics to our churches. I’m talking about a way of looking at life, as if it could be boiled down in the end to a win-loss record. As if.

I say this as a sports fan, but also as a person who seeks faith: there is more to life than winning.

And I think that anyone who has actually lived a life should know that.

Life is rich and complex. It has victories, sure, but losses as well. The great and self-destructive myth is an undefeated life. Not that perfection isn’t a worthy goal – Jesus called his disciples to be perfect “as your heavenly Father is perfect!” (Matthew 5:48). But who ever is? No, we are all the sum of some wins and some losses, and of all kinds of moments that are somewhere in between.

For surely the majority of our experience does not easily count itself as win or loss. I think that most of our days are some of both, our accomplishments neither complete success nor utter defeat. I find life to be a constant tango of steps forward and back, and that the whole of me is no more determined by the good things which I’ve done than by the bad. In fact, I think it’s a tie.

I think that may be ok.

For this is the real devil here – the presumption that we must either conquer or be conquered, that unless we defeat all comers we have no value, that each loss is a permanent shame. Here is a godly desire to do well now twisted by sin into anger, enmity, and many kinds of violence, against self and others, so we are no longer striving to be like our heavenly father, but seeking after a much harsher kind of lord. Such is a real loss.

Can we not raise a generation that knows how to lose? Too many of our children cannot accept loss with grace, cannot learn from it and grow from it, cannot rejoice for their conqueror and find, finally, the joy of the game itself. Too many cannot win graciously, cannot carry the day and bring others with, too many do not know the meaning of mercy and humility. Sports should be a tool for raising a better people – competitors who thrive whether they win or lose.

We surely need more of that outside the sporting field. Perhaps we could start by teaching more of it on the field.

On the stadium in Lincoln are carved the words, “Not the victory but the action; Not the goal but the game; In the deed the glory.” Those words have been on that stadium longer than the 300 game sellout streak, they have seen championships come and go with losing seasons interspersed, and have overlooked countless millions of fans and players alike with their eternal wisdom. They are why players shake hands before and after the game, why fans cheer for the opposing team at the end of the day, why we come there at all. Not to win, but just to play. Because football, not unlike life, is just a game.

Sometimes you lose. And that’s ok.

You see, the victory has already been won. What we do here and now, every good work, every hard-fought victory, is but a vague shadow of that eternal triumph. And in that promise is our opportunity to play better at the game simply for the sake of playing better, while it lasts, to know joy and hope and face each challenge with grit and grace.

Surely that is the better reason to play at all.

A "Leap" Into The Abyss

2009-09-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

“To restore the sense of unity and purpose that American had in the days following 9/11”

That’s how one commentator described the intent of last weekend’s gathering in Washington, DC, at the instigation of Fox News host Glenn Beck. While my skepticism with Mr. Beck is at least partly due to his inability to spell his name correctly (the second “n” is superfluous, to my thinking), it is mostly due to his complete ignorance about the word “unity.”

Much of the noise around this event – and the preceding “Tea Party” gatherings, too - seems to echo a “hands off” kind of value system, as in hands off my money or hands off my guns. The prevailing mood of the crowd seems to be a shared anger over not getting their way, of having things taken from them by force, of evil leaders who would “share their wealth” (evidently even of those who have none to share.) It bespeaks a fear of intrusion and demands from which they ought to, by their very definition of America, be free.

Is that our perfect and patriotic vision of America? Fighting because we don’t want to have to share our toys?

This is so NOT what brought us together in the days following 9/11. It was a sense of responsibility and sacrifice for others, of firemen and policemen rushing into mortal danger to save lives regardless of their own safety, of citizens gladly and hopefully giving their time and opening up their wallets to aid victims of the tragedies, or people of all politics and philosophies setting aside their distrust and disapproval to work and cry and pray together.

9/11 reminded us that we HAD to stick together and care for each other, with no thought of price, that we could not afford the cost of hate. Sadly, it seems that the lesson did not stick.

We love unity in theory, but never in practice. In practice, in truth, unity demands shared space, a giving up for the other, a valuable forfeit of self to ensure peace. It is a basic fact that in a diverse society, living together means that no one gets all the stuff they want or gets their way all the time. It is true in families and it is true in nations. The more I demand that the world accommodate my own wants/needs/desires, the less unity I can expect.

Nor can unity be defined by anger. Some cohesion, among a few same-thinking people, is not unity. Which makes me doubt that this gathering, or any other like it, seeks unity. It makes me certain that it is not intended to honor the days following 9/11, but to cash in on them for some other, ugly and dark purpose.

Can we have a godly sense of unity in America? (or anywhere else, for that matter?) Not until we take His word to heart:

On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. 1 Corinthians 12:22-26

Paul words are clear. We cannot have unity while some of our members suffer. We cannot have unity while the gap between the poor and the wealthy in our society grows and grows with each passing year. We cannot have unity while some of our members cannot get health care that they need. We cannot have unity while it is acceptable to lift up symbols of racial hatred in our public discourse. We cannot have unity while some of our members are suffering and the rest refuse their responsibility to end it.

We cannot have unity as long as we refuse to pay its price. On 9/11, we glimpsed the horrific face of disunity, and while some faced up to their responsibility in those important days, mostly we missed our opportunity to do something about it. That we continue to suffer still leads me to this last conclusion …

I am not of the habit of writing words like this, but I find them unavoidable. This anger is a manifestation of wrath and sin among us, which will consume us, until we improve (at whatever cost) the lives of the weaker and inferior and less respectable among us. I am not an apocalyptic, but I find these events a sure sign of the brokenness and mortality and finitude which is this world. It calls us to long for the green shoots of the world to come and spring up among us and whisper to us that this is not all we are or all we can be.

Unity, I think, is less of a work than a prayer, a gift, a grace. May God grant that it may be. And soon.

To my friend whom I've deleted on Facebook: I'm sorry but I just can't listen to it anymore

2009-08-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

I swear I didn’t plan it this way.

But there they were on Sunday, printed large in the regular bulletin, the appointed Lectionary reading for the day as determined by some far off committee of academics and wiser people than I, the words of Paul in his letter to the church at Ephesus:

“Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another …” (Ephesians 4:31, NRSV)

Did they have cable news in Paul’s day, too?

Where has decency gone in America? When did we determine that shouting louder than anyone else would advance solutions to our problems? When did we decide that the swastika, a symbol of horrors that are still frighteningly memorable to living people on this planet, was acceptable for polite people to use in any context or for any purpose? Is that the only visual aid available? And forgive my disrespect, but for a former vice-presidential candidate to even imply, let alone state outright, that our government would desire to kill her child because of his disability, is so simply beyond believability as to be more than a just spin or falsehood – it is a slanderous lie designed for a grave purpose. What that purpose is, I cannot imagine.

I pray that someone might help me understand what drives the noise.

Perhaps you will say that many people feel distrustful. I can understand this. I can understand that people do not wish to lose control over their health care, their choice of doctor, their ability to make decisions about medicines and procedures and hospital stays. I can understand that they are fearful that this intervention will destroy what is perceived to be the best health care system in the world. I could understand this, if it were so.

I wonder who really gets to choose their own doctors. I do not, at least not past a small list approved by the PPO that my insurance company has assigned to me.

I participate in my health care decisions, I research and test what my doctor tells me, but mostly I do what I’m told. I choose between the couple of options present to me, if there is more than one. I’ve never advised my doctor on what to do, what diagnosis to make, what medicine to prescribe. Have you?

I know patients who were dismissed from a hospital before they were ready, not because they wanted to go home, but because their insurance plan would not allow a longer stay. I know some who ended up back in the hospital again, and so do you.

And because there seems to be a failure to report the truth among either media or politicians, let us debunk this one other well kept myth. We do not have the best health care in the world. According to the World Health Organization, which did not vote in the last election, we rank 37th. According to the real outcomes that matter, like life expectancy, 36 other nations have better health care than the United States. Nations from every corner of the globe, not all of which should do better than us. Maybe they spend more time and energy figuring out how to care for one another and less time and energy screaming on the 6:00 news.

Do we fear rationing of our health care? I expect that the 45 million people who are rationed right out of the health care system in America because they can’t afford health insurance could tell us what a real nightmare that can be. Now, that’s something to raise our voices about. That’s an injustice. That’s a corruption worthy of an increase in our collective blood pressure.

Except that doesn’t seem to be what all the screaming is about.

Angry children yell and scream at each other because they lack the mental and social capacity to resolve their conflict. They are helpless, and so they exercise their frustration in whatever level of violence is readily available. Friends, are we really merely angry children?

Last week, for the first time, I deleted a friend from Facebook. I admit to feelings of pride as the number of my friends on Facebook had climbed into high atmospheres. It felt good. But I found myself saddened and hurt and disappointed by the constant tirades and rants and name-calling that substituted for worthy discourse. I determined to let go, and take Paul’s advice, that instead of allowing the sun to “go down on my anger,” I would shut it off and lead a different life:

“… be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 4:32-5:2, NRSV)

Like Paul, I should hope and pray that we might.

What I wish they would say about Health Care in America

2009-07-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

Isn’t this a pro-life issue?

That seems to me a question that never gets asked in the health-care debate. The conversation seems to get bogged down talk of economics and insurance regulations and bureaucracies, but the powerful moral dimension gets little play. At least on my news. And I wonder why.

When it comes to abortion, the pro-life movement is impossible to ignore. Now, where tens of millions of Americans are going without needed medicine and medical treatment because they simply cannot afford it, where 14,000 men, women, and especially children lose their health coverage every day, where life and death questions are being decided by a profit and loss statement in some insurance company’s boardroom, where are the posters and bullhorns and the new conferences?

Thou shall not kill. It says it very clearly in my Bible. In more than one place. Every person who suffers and dies for lack of access to health care is blood-guilt on us all. Every sick child. Every missed surgery. Every pill not taken because it could not be purchased. It is not just statistics, not simply someone else's problem, it is a poor reflection on the world we have made and fight to maintain, it is our great and shared shame.

It is a great sin that our neighbors are doing without necessary medical care because someone else cannot profit from it.

I hear it said that it’s too expensive. We can’t afford it. It will overload our national debt for years and years to come. Is that what we truly want to say? That we are willing to sacrifice the health and life of our neighbors because we are unwilling to pay a few more dollars in taxes each year? How shall we explain that to St. Peter at the inevitable time?

I fear that too many of my pro-life brethren are silent now because, having sold their soul to the one particular political party, they are not capable of taking this stand against them. I’d like to be wrong about that, but probably am not.

There is a constant hue and cry over the lack of morality and decency in our politicians and our government in this country. Here is a first and easy step toward a more godly world. That we should stand up for the ideal that every person has the right to the medical treatment they needs is undoubtedly a very Christian notion. Let us honor our God by doing this necessary and right thing.

Plains folks have lost a hero.

2009-07-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

The most trusted man in America. Not a bad nickname to have.

Walter Cronkite, gone now to join the creator, enjoyed this appellation for many years. And rightly so I believe. But I wonder what it was that made him so. What particular characteristic, what mannerism, what wisdom did he possess or share entitle him to such respect?

Imagine that you would consider to offer any of the current television news celebrities, broadcast or cable, the honorarium of “most trusted.” Add in all the print journalists you know as well. Imagine calling most of them even trusted at all! You should be laughed off of the screen.

It is not just that they do not bring the same gravity to their work, though that is part of it. There is a flippancy of manner and a looseness with facts about today’s news media that truly frightens me. There is altogether too much willingness to share unsubstantiated gossip and untested rumor as if it were gospel in all the media, from mainstream to internet. I think it the a most dangerous ingredient in the decline of our public conversation.

But Walter Cronkite was more than just accurate in his reporting. It was something else about him, about his approach, about his person, that lent him the bearing which attracted our trust. There was a sense of genuineness about him, a authenticity that is much missing in our reality TV age.

He cared about the news. He knew it mattered to people, to all people, not just to the people who were on his side of the political spectrum. He respected the institutions of our society, the politicians, even the ones he disagreed with. He spoke in the same tenor of John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He had more than objectivity, he had integrity, a very rare trait these days. You cannot imagine him speaking in the same words or tones about any person in the way a Bill O’Reilly or Glen Beck regularly speaks about our president.

And in that way, he was always right.

Not just accurate or correct, but right. Right in his decorum, right in his language, right in his being. He celebrated great accomplishments as they deserved, he mourned great tragedies as they demanded. He was not there to sell us, to berate us, to persuade us, but to tell us, to show us, to serve us. He was not concerned with explaining the news or interpreting the news or even making the news, just with sharing the world “the way it was.”

To watch over mouth and tongue is to keep out of trouble. The proud, haughty person, named “Scoffer,” acts with arrogant pride. Proverbs 21:23-24

Goodbye, Walter. We wish you could come back and make it be “the way it is” all over again.

But Independent of What?

2009-07-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

Is Bernie Madoff an American Hero?

Consider the facts! He battled against the tyrannical oppression of mindless over-regulation and exercised the very best of capitalist ideals. He bought low and sold high. He single-mindedly pursued the good of profit. He improved himself and the lifestyle of his family. He crushed the cause of socialism by bankrupting bleeding heart liberals who only existed to redistribute the wealth of the hard-working few to the undeserving many.

Well, perhaps not.

But tell me - when did hatred of government come to pass for patriotism? This past holiday, while many gave thanks for the forming of this nation, too many others gathered in protest of its very existence. Has our public education system failed so drastically that we no longer understand that one cannot be a nation without government? Do we no longer understand that the existence of a public body which regulates common life for the best good for the most people is the very definition of what the Declaration meant to accomplish when the founders signed it in 1776?

And do they not know that it is also a Godly thing that they defy?

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval … Romans 13:1,3

This is the Madoff question. If you suppose him to be an aberrance, one occasional quirk in the human gene pool, then you might argue that government is the enemy. But if you are clear-headed and honest and have even the slightest experience with people or familiarity with news headlines then you know that a tiny Madoff seed lives in each of us. Few of us climb to such dizzying heights of evil and carnage. Mostly of our bad is petty and pitiful, but bad nevertheless, and destructive for its own sake, and for the sake of the good of all, worthy of restraint.

Do we imagine that God does not know this? Do we grieve grace so much that we cannot accept the gift of government, to aid us in our struggle to uphold his vision of peace and justice? Do we doubt his redemption so much that we would rather allow evil free run than be put out in joining the battle to progress toward his kingdom, if only in small, insignificant steps?

What exactly are we protesting against?

You will remind me, of course, that it was a Declaration of Independence that they signed in Philadelphia that hot summer long ago. But independence of what? Of common humanity? Of mutual responsibility? Of society at all? It was taxation without representation they feared, not taxation at all, not shared sacrifice, not the very hard work of the grand vision of what could be accomplished when all humanity joined its one work.

The founders loved government. They loved it so much that they dared to imagine it embracing not just some the people, but all of them.

For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. Romans 13:6-7

America is so much - her people, her industriousness, her role in history, her works both good and bad. But it is the height of ignorance to suggest that we can be American without our government. Human institution, fragile, occasionally incompetent and far-too-often corrupt, yes, but the American government it is. There is none like it in the world. It is that institution that men and women have died for, and that we all should aspire to love.

And it is the birth of that government we celebrate. It is what it means to be an American.

Of spangled vests and bubblegum music

2009-06-30T18:12:00.000-07:00

A-B-C, easy as one-two-three …

It was a crowd favorite every Saturday afternoon at Skateland in 1970. Round and round the rink we rolled to favorites like the Jackson 5. It was, I can say without fear, a different time. Now my children roll their eyes to such silly, sweet music. They guffaw at the rhinestones and the wide lapels and the platform heels for guys. And rightly so. Sigh.

The recent passing of favored icons compels our nostalgia. Ed McMahon was more than a TV star, he was a time-keeper. Bedtime was always marked with the familiar theme music and the ubiquitous “Heeeeere’s Johny!” Farah’s red swim suit did not just propel us into puberty, it made us a generation, an age, a time. We were the first to consider it plausible that private detectives could look like supermodels, that bikinis and guns could go together, and we changed both men and women because of it.

And Michael. They will say that his greatest album came in the 80's, and will speak endlessly of the strange creature he became in his later years, but I will always remember the Jackson 5 dream I wanted to live.

And now they are gone from us, these and many more, reminding us that nothing is forever, everything passes, nothing lasts. Will we?

“For everything,” says the Teacher, “there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

An important verse, even a great song, not just because it is of that generation, but because it is of all of them, the eternal and universal truth made for these times and for the next ones that will also surely come. All that is exists only for its time, until the next comes and what was is only memory. He is the God of ADD, never satisfied with what is, restlessly passing from season to season, from age to age, from the joy that is unto the joy yet to come.

Shall we fear this impetuous creator? By no means! Let us rather match his impatient love with our own, grateful for the moments that we are given and keen to share the next adventure. Having done great things, he is eager for the next. And rightly so. Aren’t we? For his journey is ours, marked with the signposts of our treasured memories but winding ever forward to new and wonderful places we cannot imagine.

Yes, our children will never have it as good as we did. Thanks be to God for that!

become the student, part II

2009-06-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

Some more wonderful thoughts from our confirmation class! Today, we first spent time reading Psalms of Confession, and then tried our hand and writing some of our own. Here are their thoughts:

We try to be perfect, God, we try to hide our flaws,
but no matter what we do we cannot stop sinning.
We try and fail.
Lord, I have done wrong,
please forgive my doing.
I plead for your help - please forgive me.
It was I, Lord,
I know what I have done
and I am begging for mercy
and standing on my knees.

Then we turned our attention to the books of wisdom, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. I challenged them to formulate some proverbs of their own, and this is what they came up with:

The greedy puts on extra sugar,
but the wise chooses the naturally sweet.
Many people think that they can't make a difference,
but the wise man knows that every can counts.
(this was originally a proverb about recycling, but there is greater wisdom here I think!)
God gives dreams to fill us with hope,
but the fool throws them away.
The wise man rejoices when dark clouds gather,
but the fool shuns the rain.
A friend's words bring joy and comfort,
but a stranger's greeting is unusual.

Hope you enjoy these words as much as I have. This is a pretty amazing group of young people.

Pastor Glen

The teacher becomes the student

2009-06-23T08:25:00.001-07:00

This week at confirmation camp, I've invited our students to try their hand at writing. Today, we've been looking at lament psalms, and this is what they've written today:

Our world is dying,
people are not helping.
People are becoming poor
and no one puts a penny in their cup.

People should have the same rights!
Why separate someone becomes of their color or clique?

Fighting is not the answer.
Let the Lord help you!
The Lord will take you,
live your life well.

Stop the wars, O God, there is too much fighting in the world.

And some words of comfort:

The Lord will let you be with your loved ones,
you will be raised to heaven in time.
Be strong and don't give up,
let God take the lead.
He will always be there in the time of need,
never forsake or turn away from the Lord.
The Lord protects us,
we are his children.

And one more:

Do I do well, O Lord,
am I doing it right?
Talk to me and tell me yes,
your words are tried and true.

Tomorrow - Words of Wisdom! I can hardly wait.

a forgotten word

2009-06-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

John 3:17 is the poor country cousin of Bible verses.

Everybody knows John 3:16. We’ve seen the crazy guy with the multi-colored wig at the football games with his big sign often enough to know that John 3:16 is important. Even Luther called it the gospel within the gospel. ““For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It’s all there, everything that’s important to faith: the love of God, the sending of the Son, the end of death and the wide open door to heaven. A simple saying.

But the implications, oh, the implications. They’ll get your every time.

Which is where poor old 3:17 comes in. It is one thing to speak the tender and pleasant word of grace. It is whole other thing to be confronted directly with the full outcome of grace, to face what it really means, to be called to preach it boldly and live it wholly and allow it to change your beliefs and your actions. It seems well enough to say that God loves the world, that he gave us Jesus. But what if that actually meant something?

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” After the warm and fuzzy thoughts of verse 16, it seems that this grace stuff may not be as good a deal as we had originally hoped. No condemning? None at all? Because we need judgment. Judgment gives the world order, allows it to make sense. Please, we hope, we plead, at least a little judgment, at least a little punishment, at least a little wrath. For who will hold in check the forces of evil that surround us if we take condemnation completely off of the table!

Such need for judgment surely underlies the recent events in Wichita. For what else would oblige a man to enter a church (of all places) and boldly and take a gun and end a life? Because it was deserved, one would say. Because it was just. Because it was necessary to end the other wrong, the greater wrong. Let us consider that an argument could be made for such judgment, such condemnation. Dr. Tiller was an abortion doctor, even a late-term abortion doctor. Shall we just stand idly by as such acts are committed? Are we just spectators in God’s world, or is our calling to discipleship serious?

We need judgment, do we not? Shall evil reign freely?

But it is, of course, that same zeal which turns our condemnation back upon us. If not always as dramatically, we encounter our own destruction in the judgment of others. Judgment is our festering swamp, the quicksand that oozes us toward the oblivion of our own end. We are judgment addicts, living from one condemnation fix to another. But the joke is on us, for this is the painful truth of John 3:16 – there is no judgment which can redeem this world. There is only one path to freedom, the product of grace which is the Son. It is not just a nice thing. It is the death of condemnation, and, as such, of us.

The true tragedy of Wichita sleeps beneath the horror of a cold-blooded killing in the house of God. It is the death of faith, the repudiation of grace, the denial of the consequence of salvation. Yes, there is an end to the atrocity that is abortion in our world. But it must be God’s end, it must be an end found in the same grace that brought us Christ. For God has sent us this new day, not for our condemnation, but that we might all be saved.

It says so in John 3:17. Give it a read sometime.

Everything I know about Evangelism I learned from from teenage girls in love on Facebook!

2009-06-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Enough of seminars and specialists and books. Find a teenager in love and see what Evangelism aspires to be.

Their status update is a constant litany of sameness. Waiting for a date with their boyfriend. Getting ready for a date with their boyfriend. On a date with their boyfriend. Just home from a date with their boyfriend. Planning the next date with their boyfriend. Their perfect, sweet, wonderful, cute, can-do-no-wrong heaven-sent angel who rules their every thought and dream.

They can hardly believe love happened to them. And they must tell you all about it.

It is as if they had invented love. As if no one had ever loved before. As if, in the entire history of humankind, there had never been such a perfect union of souls, as if God had invented this whole love thing just for them. As if each day dawned new simply because of their love. As if, by the sheer virtue of their presence on the planet, birds knew to sing and flowers learned to bloom.

And as a wise and grizzled veteran of love, you want to help them. You want to warn them that teen love is fleeting and insubstantial. You say that it will not last. You say things like grow up, go out and find a job, get serious about your life, you should play the field a little before you throw your future away over some boy.

They will not listen. Would you?

Teenage girls in love do not judge you. They barely notice you, and then only as a beneficiary over whom to gush about the perfection which is their love. They have a certain amount of pity for you, not enjoying such love, but if you’re interested, they know a certain cute boy, very sweet, and they could set you up with him, yeah, we should double date …

Teenage girls do not explain love. They do not knock on your door or hand you a pamphlet. They do not write treatises about love – they write poems and songs. They see their love in everything around them. They ruin bookcovers with hearts and flowers and practiced signatures. They do not care that they are using up their cell phone minutes or missing their favorite TV show. They are in love.

And if the slightest misspoken word or misdeed should endanger their relationship, then all life must come to a halt until amends are made, for they could never go on without their love.

You look at them with great scorn and deep jealousy. You are old and tired and you wish with every fiber of your being that you could feel that way again. But you’ve discovered life, and you have no time for fantasies and dreams like love and hope. But imagine if, even for a second, the church could be at least a little in teenage love with its perfect savior. What a different world it would be.

Like totally!

Theologian-in-Chief

2009-05-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

In the true spirit of “the Priesthood of all Believers,” the President entered the theological fray during his commencement address at Notre Dame last weekend. He posits an interesting thought:

The ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own. This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness.

This comment was a precursor, of course, to the President’s exhortation to a humbler, gentler discourse on topics of all kinds and in particular the one over which he found himself at odds with so much of his audience. But it also gets to the heart of matters, which is probably why he drew criticism. Michael Sean Winters says, “it is not doubt that invites humility. It is faith itself …” Pardon the pun, but from a purely empirical point of view, Winters’ point seems doubtful to me.

I see people every day who are doubtless and assured in their faith. They are on my Television and Radio and they pen strongly worded diatribes in my local newspaper and on the internet. They gather at places like Westboro Baptist church and are so absolutely certain of their dogma that they hardly blink as they consign their neighbors to eternal damnation. They wave and shout and cry in the pews, impressed at the dynamic power of their faith. They have humility, yes, the certain and confident humility that they have chosen wisely in their faith, they are awed by that to which they belong and don’t understand why I’m not awed as well.

But I also meet people who have a different kind of faith, a courageous faith that sees bluntly the works of this world and the dark thoughts of their hearts and trembles at the implausibility of their salvation. They carry thoroughly searched and worn out Bibles, and they pray quietly crumpled in their pews, not sure if they belong in the presence of such a God, but desperately hopeful that they might end up there regardless. Doubt is their assurance – there is nowhere else to turn.

Paul Tillich wrote in Dynamics of Faith that “serious doubt is confirmation of faith. It indicates the seriousness of the concern …” For faith to be humbling, it must be overwhelming, far above us, beyond understanding and even beyond belief. It is that God who merits trust and worship, and it is that God who rewards meekness each time we open our mouths. We speak of what we do not know because we must. It is the miracle of the Gospel.

Which is where, with all due respect, the President and his critics are mistaken. The question of faith becomes necessarily misdirected when it becomes a question of our faith. But the Gospel reminds us that faith itself is the gift of the resurrection, that every self-endeavor dies on the cross, that all human striving, with or without doubt is insufficient. “I believe that I cannot by my own faith or effort believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him …”

Winters asserts confidently that, “there is nothing ironic about faith.” Really? I find it amazingly ironic to glorify an ancient symbol of torture and death, to feast on a bit of bread and wine and dare to call them body and blood, to pray to the very creator of all and be promised that he counts even the hairs on my head. Ironic? Please. More like ridiculous. Foolish. Unbelievable.

For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 1 Corinthians 1:22-24

a spring parable

2009-05-14T18:50:00.000-07:00

In spring comes my nemesis.

They look innocent enough, to be sure, small golden wisps floating innocently to the warm spring earth. But, oh, how they float. By the thousands they come, a blizzard of debris that layers the ground with promises of yardwork, dirty fingernails and sore backs.

They are of course seeds, these falling helicopters from my wonderful maple tree, God’s clever plan to procreate acer saccharinum from generation to generation. And they are clever bits of biological engineering, wafting gently to the waiting ground, their slender fins atwirl, ensuring that they nose to the earth in such a way as to maximize their opportunity to find a fertile place waiting and stretch out their roots and make life.

One wonders about the farmer who sows his seeds so indiscriminately. For each that finds worthy ground, thousands end on roof and sidewalk. They fall millions by millions, but how many, really, might ever fulfill their purpose? One, or two? A handful at most. Small outcome for such great hope.

And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. (Mark 4:4-7)

Too often we view life as such a mistake. It falls all around us and we treat it as so much litter. It is in our way. It is not pleasing by our standards. It does not fit into our landscape. We cannot perceive its higher purpose, so we disregard both its creative source and its creative aspiration. It is too easy to dehumanize the other, to devalue and dispose. It is as if we despise it.

But even more so, we fear it. It overwhelms us, this promise of Grace. For God is the sower in this parable, casting seeds far and wide in some unknown but insistent plan. This is the unseen value of life, that it comes so abundantly, so madly. Where it seems only one or two seeds might do, God sends millions. Where we might plant more cautiously, God sows everywhere. Each seed carries in it a divine purpose. Each has hope.

So when we take up violence so easily, when we casually label enemy and terrorist, when we justify torture and murder, we mock the creator, the untamed sower, the giver of life. When we are miserly with our regard for others, we are immoral and we reap unto such judgment. We neglect the divine nature, that each life is the same, that each is valuable as the next, that we all fall from the same place to the same earth and in the divine grace we are one.

That is his secret. The divine plan escapes us, but we cannot escape it. We are all part of it, wherever we land. That we would have such grace for others would be a fruitful work indeed.

Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” Mark 4:8

Persistence of remembering

2009-04-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve been haunted by Salvador Dali’s melting clocks, the vision of time passing as fading, dying, dripping slowly away into seeming nothingness. No end, no conclusion, no resolution, but intermindable useless death. Time, or maybe life, seems to be such, without hope or presence or meaning. Just an ethereal wisp, a foggy blanket, an unknown prison.

I wonder this on a week after Easter. There was this one day, this family reunion of a gathering, old unseen friends suddenly reappearing, recommuning, recommitting. Full congregations of well dressed smiling faces and children in bonnets and shined little boy shoes. We are all the church again, hail, we are here, and the meaning and purpose of this place is resurrected with Jesus, the stones of complacency and busyness and distance rolled away and life be praised.

But then a few days past, and the pews again vacated almost as quickly as the tomb. And now time again drips surrealy by, the days long and drawn slowly forward. I wonder, in the empty quiet of the church, if their experience is the same, if the days pass for them in slow motion, in a distant memory of a place they used to know but now only remember like an old faded picture, a worn and broken trinket of a happiness which may or may not have happened, as they return to what they imagine is real life but fear may only be the other.

There tugs at us a memory of a person we used to be, were meant to be, were once a part of if only in the most remote corner of evolution. If only we could reconnect to that memory, only rewrite ourselves into the story, then there might come to us again a realization of the promise of us. But rather we slip silently under and fade into our lives, death coming not in a moment or an end but slowly, surely, unwittingly, bleakly.

But there is a persistence to Grace, too, a quiet not-quite-real tug at consciences and hearts that is more real than us, and cell by cell and bit by bit and memory by memory it drags us ever-complaining forth. Easter comes in passion and high drama, but the rest of the work of resurrection is slow, sure, holy work. We are becoming what we are, as death fades blackly from us there is revealed the truth underneath.

"But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to new life." II Peter 3:8-9

He persists. Alleluia, life persists.

The surprise that wasn't there

2009-04-12T04:11:00.001-07:00

It’s almost hard to remember now, as the boys get older, how much they really loved Easter Egg hunts when they were little. You could just see the amazement in their eyes as our backyard - which they had inhabited for countless hours - was suddenly full of these wonderful treasures! Where did they come from? But that question was mostly lost in the joy of finding more and more and more …

And then the real fun – opening the eggs up and finding all the goodies – candy, coins, toys. Each egg seems to hold something even better than the last and the eyes grow rounder as the pile grows bigger and bigger and bigger …

The women traveling to the tomb on the first Easter Sunday had a similar, if completely opposite, experience. They knew perfectly well how things should be and what they would find and how they would feel and what they would do. And then, BANG! A barrier removed, an empty tomb, an Angel’s words, confusion, fear, wonderment, tears, and a world turned upside down. They came looking for death. But it was gone.

The best surprise is the one that’s not there!

We know what to do with things as they are, as they should be. We’ve known that since we were very young. But this Easter is a new experience, this empty-tomb-faith, this confrontation that sends us out back into the world empty-handed, with prior expectations askew and all the things we knew for sure now shattered and all we have to go on, to go with, finally, is the drama and magic of faith itself.

This is not candy or money or toys. It is much better. It is life. It is nothing that was, and everything that could be. Go. The tomb is empty. Death is over. Go.

The church is dead. Long live the church!

2009-04-09T19:08:00.000-07:00

Just in time for our annual Good Friday observance, Newsweek writes up the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey and prophesies the death of Christianity in America. To be sure, the numbers are frightening. Self-identified Christians are decreasing as a portion of the population, the number of people who claim no affiliation with religion has nearly doubled in the last two decades.

I say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25)

Now, I agree, the problem is real. If anything, it is understated. Even among the vast majority of Americans who claim the Christian name, there is an ever declining population of regular church-goers and committed servants. Secreted beneath the glittering appeal of immense mega-churches is the unspoken family secret of thousands upon thousands of dying churches in small towns and city neighborhoods. And even among the remnant that clings to the church are a quiet many who have given up in spirit but not in name, who still sit in the pews, going through the motions of devotion, hardly moved and barely incarnate in the Spirit.

But I say that the problem in American is not the death of Christianity. It is the death of the church.

And it may be just in time.

I don’t accept that souls have changed, that humans have dramatically evolved into some new form of being in these last generations. Our innate desire to seek the divine, to find the elusive qualities of hope and grace and joy beyond the confines of this world is the same now as it was the first time our earliest ancestors stood on two legs and gazed at the stars above. The human need for faith transcends time and technology and cannot be delineated in National surveys. Those who believe least in the church in America voted the most in the last election for – wait for it – hope. We will always chafe against death and evil and always quest for their end. There will always be a Savior because there will always need to be.

But the church – she is a human and worldly thing, and her frailties and her sins are easily diagnosed and her days are always marked. Though her blessing and mission is to be the instrument by which God’s Word is channeled unto our striving, she is to many a hindrance to faith. The harder the church seeks to matter in the world, to sit among the powerful and share their influence, to use the channels of politics and law to advance her work, the more she becomes of the world. And the more the church becomes a part of this world the less she becomes of God, until finally God’s Word is mute and the church dies. And so she has.

That is what this survey and many others like it are telling us. The church of this age has failed. We have come to a new Babylonian Captivity, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Luther. The church has come to covet the role of the Pharisees and Chief Priests in the Passion drama, far too captivated by the sturm und drang of the blood and death of Good Friday to ever make it to Easter. In her legalisms and grasping for power, the church has closed the doors of the kingdom to those few, fervent believers who associate with her narrow dogma and so has driven away masses of the lost, of those seeking something greater, something more life-giving, you know, grace.

The church is dead. Long live the church!

We are brought to Good Friday to see God’s work in its purest form: the death of what cannot be for the sake of what must be. The cross is not just a horror picture to bring us to our knees in guilt and trepidation for some approaching day of Judgment. This is a saving work, a breaking down of broken and sinful human forms and human institutions so that something right may take their place. This is the great mystery of God, that every seed must fall to the earth and die, so that it might bear much fruit.

And so the promise beckons us. Easter is coming! Somewhere, beneath the facade of the church of this world is the hidden reality of grace. Like an Easter Egg well placed, it evades our first glance and calls us to seek in diligence and faithfulness. Even as the church passes from this form, God is fashioning a new creation, a new being, a new instrument of Grace and salvation and calling the faithful to His work. I do not write these words because I hate the church – no, I love the church. I pray that it may once again rise and become again God’s Word of Redemption in the world, that we may leave our anger and judgment and worldly lust for power in the tomb behind us and come out into the world where we are desperately needed.

Let this be the Easter that the church rises again. Hallelujah!

Giving what is due

2009-04-07T06:38:00.000-07:00

Since I deigned to brag that my NCAA bracket was ahead of the President, it only seems right to acknowledge that he did, in fact, correctly pick North Carolina to win it all. I'm also imagining that Coach K may opt to breakfast on a little humble pie himself this morning. "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but humbled himself ... " (Philippians 2:5-6)

Looking for an opening

2009-04-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” John 11:16

In the midst of all the festivities and observances of Holy Week, it’s easy to miss the other major event that comes with the arrival of April: Opening Day! (Perhaps you have the opposite experience.) And not to confuse the two, or even to equate them, but there is a striking similarity.

Finally.

That’s the feeling, after a long cold winter, after desperately following the Hot Stove League and imagining its impact on your favorite team, after long weeks of Spring Training and feverishly examining previously unknown and unheralded rookies, the day comes. Your own home team, in your own home park, bring on the hot dogs and the nachos and the cold beer (not quite so important in chilly April) and let’s PLAY BALL!

I wonder if Jerusalem felt the same way. Three long years of signs and miracles and preaching all around the countryside, in small hamlets and outlying places without names, growing in fame and reputation, but when, WHEN, will Jesus deign to step into the great city herself? That, as much as anything, might be the motivation behind the thronging crowds and the Hosannas and waving palms. Finally, he has come!

Palm Sunday is mostly a day that we observe as an end, or at least as the beginning of the end, the climax of horror and blood and death. But it is for Jesus a day of arrival, an entry, an opening. It is his way into Jerusalem and his way into us, and, as such, a beginning of victory and triumph, of life and life everlasting and abundant. The cross hides the mysteries of Heaven itself, this week is not merely the end of a long Lent but the beginning of a new life, the opening day to what will surely be our best season ever.

Yes, we have finally come, not to our end but to our opening, to the heavens opened up, the gate of eternity visible in death, mercy and divine grace shown in the very human misery of the cross. Prepare to see the stone rolled away, the tomb gaping open, prepare to hear angels bidding us who wait to live, and … let’s PLAY BALL!

Official Proclamation!

2009-04-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

I'd like to be among the first to make this April 1st Proclaimation - the community of faith ought to appropriate this secular holiday, known as "April Fool's Day," as an official observance of the church. It was St. Paul, after all, the great planter of the church, who first said, " We are fools for the sake of Christ." (I Corinthians 4:10) Let us wear our Jester's hats with pride!

My eldest, a sophomore in High School, has been encountering the horrible truth about the real world in his studies; experiencing the Holocaust and Darfur in the same week at school. He is in that place where many teenagers who are blessed with the gift of sensitivity find themselves: how can I go forward with my life in a world so broken and desperately evil?

And then last night, he (and a hundred or so of his classmates) put on a wonderful band concert, full of light and joy and surprising genius for a bunch of teenagers. And I was reminded of God's best prescription for dark and ugly days: seek beauty where you can find it, for somewhere, hidden under the gunk and grime of humanity breaks forth the splendor and grace of the kingdom which comes. Easter, death breaking forth from the tomb, life and hope in the cruel misery of the cross.

So let us embrace hope ridiculously, and cling to all things unreasonable: that in the midst of all manner of crisis, economic and political, national and personal, painful and media-driven, we are the fools who still believe in hope, we still trust, and we know the joke. Even here, even now, there is God.

Good one!

When your bracket is falling apart and all that’s left is heaven …

2009-03-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

Actually, I’m surprised that I had made it this far. Usually the lifeguard is blowing the whistle and telling me to get out of the pool by the end of the first weekend, but this year I did pretty well until Michigan State made their run and took my tournament winner out and I went through the door with them.

I’m not really that much of a college basketball fan, a consequence of living too far from a local rooting interest in any serious contenders, but I usually fill out a bracket. Why not? It’s a simple diversion, a joyful connection with friends, a playful competition with a minimal stake or reward. I find it hard to apprehend the outrage over the President taking the time to fill out a bracket – and you only need to see his outcome to know that he didn’t put too much time or energy into it (after all, even I beat him!).

It is, of course, at the center of our nature to be competitive, evidenced by the overwhelming nation-wide interest in challenging each other to this contest of blindly foreseeing the outcome of a game played by 18-year-olds. People -especially guys! - I meet are deeply invested in perfecting their bracket, regardless of the fact that it involves something less than the cost of lunch at McDonald’s. There’s pride at stake, bragging rights, winning! And we’re all about that.

Which is the rub, of course. Don’t misunderstand – I’m for winning. I’m for striving, putting forth best efforts, honest competition and learning grace both in victory and defeat. It ought to be within our human nature to always seek success, and desire and drive for the best outcome in all we do. But we must recognize the line where that drive for victory becomes a drive for self, a compulsion for pride and the trappings of mastery which destroy grace, humility, and finally defeats faith.

The savior said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" (Matthew 16:24-25) The life that matters is not a tournament, the prize we seek is not a trophy, the final score is measured not by what we have gained, but by what we have given, the victor’s crown is not gold but a twist of thorns covered in blood.

There is an opportunity in this season (the other March Madness that we call Lent) I hope, to be reminded again, that the true value in the tournament of life is not the rewards our labors bring to us, but the value they bring out from us.

Of Easter and Double-Dog-Dares ...

2009-03-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

I double dog dare you!

When I was 11, it was the ultimate threat. You could maybe slip away from a simple dare, you could sometimes even evade a double dare, but there was no getting away from the dreaded double-dog-dare. When that challenge was thrown in your face and you saw the expectant and fearful looks on the faces of your friends, the meaning of life snapped into instant focus. Somehow, despite the screaming voices in your head and the butterflies churning around in your stomach, you knew you had to step up.

And so you did.

Fear is a strange thing. It is one of those absolutely common characteristics that make us all human. Sometimes we are victimized by our fear, sometimes we rise above it, but it remains always there, always influencing our choices, defining our makeup, shaping our destiny. Many of our moments of many of our days contain opportunities for fear, usually small frights that are easily overcome. Sometimes, though, there are those great fears, those double-dog-dares, that challenge us at the very core of who we are. Those contests can make us great. Or they can destroy us.

What amazes me most about fear, though, is that it is not real. Fear is not how we react when bad things happen, it’s how we react BEFORE the bad things happens. Fear is the reaction to what we anticipate, what we expect to happen IF we do or do not do a thing. Fear exists, in most part, within ourselves, in past memories and shared experiences and deeply ingrained expectations. It does not take much, no, hardly anything, to bring it up. It comes, whether we bid it or not. The challenge is to not let it destroy us.

Which leads to the answer to the most important question: how do I conquer fear?

The world is full of scared people. You hear it in their voices as they talk about their retirement accounts, the markets, their jobs. You see it in their faces when they hear their neighbor’s bad news and wonder, “What if that happens to me?” The news headlines scream that we should be even more afraid, of terrorism and war, of unemployment and financial ruin, of even each other. It’s a wonder that we haven’t all crumpled into a fetal position in some corner by now.

But we can’t live like that. When the world throws you the old double-dog-dare, you have to answer. The alternative is shame and humiliation and rejection. You have to find, somewhere within yourself, the courage to face that fear and take that dare and grow, live, even triumph.

When the women who followed Jesus traveled to his tomb on that first Easter Sunday, they were afraid. Afraid of the aftermaths from the horrid events of the past Friday, afraid that they wouldn’t be able to roll the stone away from the tomb’s entrance. Then, finding the stone moved and the tomb emptied, they faced a whole new level of fright on seeing the angel and hearing his words. And in its original ending, Mark leaves us in this very human place …

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Mark 16:8

But, of course, we know that they didn’t. We know that somehow, in the face of the most amazing and frightening moment in all of history, they faced up to the angel’s double-dog-dare and they did go out and they did tell, and wow, did they tell! We are the heirs of their courage. We are their victory over fear.

So will we do the same? Will we find the power to overcome the fear of what might be in the awesome witness of what was, what is and what will be? For this is the promise of Easter, He has left the tomb behind, has put fear and terror and death behind him and beckons us forward to a place where we can conquer our fear and change ourselves and change our lives and change our world.

This Jesus, this living Jesus, is the one who is daring us now, double-dog-daring us to live with him, to come out from our own tombs and face the fears inside us and overcome them with the Spirit he has given us in our baptism. What will you dare to do in this brave new Easter world?

2009-03-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

As someone who avidly reads several wonderful blogs, it seems a good idea to take up my own best efforts to add to the conversation, and, by some grace, improve the nature of the world we share.

Dr. Luther admonished us to make "plain utterances" of our faith. I find that a great challenge as a preacher, to speak those things which truly reflect the gifts of faith, but do so in a plain way, so that many can hear and know and feel and understand. It is our daily task to use the gift of language well, with beauty that is simple and available to all.

This place that I call home is named by many as the "Plains" because those who first encountered it found it lacking in grandeur, and consequently, interest. But those of us who have been raised here know that its plainness is its very beauty, and though we enjoy a visit to mountain and forest and city as much as anyone, we find ourselves longing for the vast openness and truth of the prairie.

I think many, many people long for that. I believe it often eludes us.

I should only hope that I could bring that same quality to the words that follow here.

2009-03-26T13:56:00.000-07:00