Monthly Archives: August 2013

Syria and Catch-22’s

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The politician in me is worried aboubombs1t the United States (and the UN’s) response to Syria’s (alleged) use of chemical weapons.

We target military sites…or so we say.  We try to do “surgical strikes.”

But I’m a pacifist; these things scare me.

The Christian in me isn’t worried, though.  The Christian in me, the person of faith in me, is absolutely terrified.

I’m terrified at the video on CNN of the child being doused in water to wash off the chemical agents as he convulses (even if this video is not authentic to the current situation…although it appears it is…it is absolutely horrifying).

I’m terrified that many times we target “military sites” and hit schools and children and people doing business.

I’m terrified that a “surgical strike” actually means we’re just cutting out another slice of our humanity in a failed attempt to show power.

I’m afraid that non-intervention will just result in having to ignore continuing genocide while we sing Christmas carols again this year.

I’m afraid that non-intervention will be a stain upon our moral conscience.

I’m afraid that intervention will be a stain upon our future as the wrong people get the wrong weapons that we manufacture, which means that the wrong people will get paid to continue building weapons with no other purpose than to kill other people, which means that the war machine monster gets fed instead of starved, which means…

Death. A lot of death.

I come from a faith tradition that lifts up a “two kingdoms” doctrine when it comes to the world.  Essentially it asserts that the world is ruled by God, and the world is split into two kingdoms.  The spiritual kingdom of God is ruled by grace, while the kingdom of humanity is ruled by rightly ordered governments and principalities (an extension of God’s Law)*, and we live in both simultaneously.  First of all, I’d argue that Martin Luther never fleshed out this so-called doctrine, and that attempts to do so by scholars are largely just defenses for their own political ideals.  In short: I don’t buy it.  It makes me a bad Lutheran, I guess.  But I think it makes me a good Christian, even if I am so reluctantly.

Secondly, if you show me a rightly ordered government I’ll ride my unicorn over the moon.

I think people of my generation (I’m on the millennial bubble with a cursed 1980 birth year) look back at World War II and largely figure it was “just war.”  But when I listened to (the one time) my grandfather talk about flying over occupied China and being absolutely piss-pants scared about what he was doing and how he was doing it, I’m not sure I even know what “just war” means no matter what metric you put in front of me.

I know people shouldn’t be slaughtered.  I also know people shouldn’t fly planes built to kill other people.

I’m terrified because I care about life, and this is a catch-22.

And a church that is radical enough to understand that only God can redeem in any sort of lasting way is a church where our soldiers and our conscientious objectors are both honored and prayed for, and where our loudest shout as people who claim to be of God is one for the catch-22 nature of this whole damned business.

If life is sacred, that means all life.

And I’m typing this as I hold my son, and I see my son in that little boy being doused in a futile attempt to save his life. And I know he’ll die. And I know we can’t allow these things to go on, and yet I also know that fighting violence with violence only perpetuates violence.

And so…yeah, there we are.

And I am wondering what the church will say about this.  Drumbeats for war are antithetical to the message of Jesus.  Watching innocents (or even the guilty, I would argue) be poisoned and killed without some sort of action is antithetical to the message of Jesus, too.

But real sacrifice for the other…the heart of the message of Jesus…who is really willing to do that?

I just wanted to be honest here. This is what this reluctant Christian is meditating on today.  And I know we will, and should, do something.

I just want to lament about that “something”, whatever it ends up being, and stand with Rachel as she weeps for her children.  And your children.  And my children.  And Syrian children.

All of us.

 

*Many thanks to Pr. Mark Williamson in encouraging me to better define and make more distinct the modern formulation of this “doctrine.”  While I don’t agree that it is a doctrine, I shouldn’t cut it short in deference to brevity.

I’m an Addict

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I’m addicted to mapl2-imin1-20y cellphone.

I’m addicted to Ted talks.

I’m addicted to social media.

I’m addicted to being connected.

I’m an addict.  I imagine a not-so-distant future where we have TA meetings in churches.

I’m serious.

When I forget my phone at home, I feel naked.  Like missing my drivers license before a cross-country trip.  Or like forgetting my kid at the grocery store.

No really; the anxiety can be that bad sometimes.

It preoccupies my mind. No, that’s wrongly said.  It doesn’t preoccupy my mind.  It colonizes my mind.

I’ll call my wife from the middle of Target to find out where she is when we’re in the same store.

You laugh.  I laugh.  But it’s serious. It’s like laughing the way we do when a friend describes a drinking escapade that is obviously indicative of an issue.  It’s funny and we laugh because if we were to take it seriously we’d have to change our behavior.

And this is the thing: I know it’s a spiritual condition.

It’s a spiritual condition because my phone and my ipod and my computers prevent me from being present.  Oh, sure; I’m up to date.  I read the New York Times like it’s nobody’s business.  Back articles galore.

And I know exactly where folks are because of Twitter and Facebook and…

Except myself.  I’m not sure exactly where I am in those moments.

Because physically I’m in a room with my family, my boy babbling on the blanket spread out on the floor.

But mentally I’m in cyberspace.

And I don’t want to be.

The thing is, I don’t think that Christianity is talking about this addiction very much.  In fact, I often am encouraged in my addiction by other pastors and professional leaders and leadership gurus who encourage us to “up our presence” on social media, on web blogs and chat sites.

Our Klout scores must rise…

And as it rises, my spirituality falls.  Because I’m never present.

Sunday morning can be a time of presence, of course.  As I ring the meditation bell after the scripture readings at services, I fall into the present in a way that really is transcendent.

That’s the irony that I find in worship: it grounds me in the present by lifting me beyond myself.

And I pray for it at other times in my life.

But the bell of a new text calls me from my present into the anxiety of the digital words on my screen; a different scripture reading of sorts that lays claim on my time and attention.  And I worry some about introducing technology into sacred spaces.  I’m not totally against it…but I have mixed feelings about it.

And it has nothing to do with “old” and “new” styles of worship (whatever that means).  It has to do with breaking an addiction.  And I know I rarely listen to any one thing anymore.  Listen; really listen.  I know that meditation is pretty much the only thing I do in a day that doesn’t involve a computer chip (except that I do prefer old-school books to Kindles and Nooks…though I usually am listening to my ipod when I’m reading).

I don’t think we’re doing this very well, church.  We may be encouraging our people’s addictions.  I’m of mixed emotions on it.

I’m not saying the church should be anti-technology; I’m a blogger after all.

But, by God, we’re very much reinforcing the terrible addictions of so many by our deafening silence on this spiritual issue.  And it’s not only making me a reluctant tweeter, it’s making me a reluctant Christian.

And it’s killing me.  Killing us, I think.

Is technology to blame?

It’s interesting to me that technology intends, by profession, to connect the world, and yet by doing so it cuts us off from those right in front of us and around us. And I’m not complaining like the octogenarian who wishes things were “like the old days.”  The “old days” weren’t all that awesome from what I can tell.

I’m really just wondering if we should do something just because we can.

But, I digress.  No; technology is not to blame.

It’s my need to know. To constantly know.

That is to blame.

Perhaps we should stop texting about it and start talking about it as a faith community.  Because our addictions to know are preventing us from being, now.

“Jesus Wouldn’t Like That…” and “What Would Jesus Do” Shouldn’t Be Uttered Anymore

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I once had a teaimagescher in High School tell me that Jesus wouldn’t like that I told a kid to kiss my ass.

He was probably right, I guess, if I thought Jesus had an opinion on my language when there are wars to be fought and bellies to be fed and slavery to be abolished and the kid in my theater class was getting picked on by another teacher because he had good hair and he liked  to shop more than he liked shop class, and nobody said anything about it.

Not to mention that the kid I had cursed at had been picking on me mercilessly for two years, and I finally had gotten the nerve to tell him that I wasn’t interested in being a chew toy for him to throw around to impress his friends anymore.

I wonder if Jesus has an opinion about that.

We talk about Jesus all the time as if Jesus is opining about our every move, and while part of me thinks this is a healthy response to a theology that reinforces the nearness of God, it can sometimes just be plain stupid.

As catch-22 as “What Would Jesus Do,” when we imagine that Jesus wouldn’t “like” a particular action, I wonder what kind of guilt we think we’re laying on the person.  I think that they’re “Rubik’s Cube” questions.  We puzzle them about, except that with these cubes, there’s no solution.

I think we ask these questions and make these statements because we’re trying to escape the fact that we don’t like it and we don’t know what to do (or we do, but we’d like to pretend we don’t so that we can justify our actions by saying we prayed on it).

When we’re held up a mirror and the truth about ourselves is exposed, we don’t like it.

Truth is, that teacher saw that kid pick on me about 10 times a week for two years.  I wonder if Jesus has an opinion on that.  Maybe that’s why he didn’t like me telling the kid to kiss my ass; I had gotten the guts that the teacher had lacked.

Or maybe the teacher didn’t care.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that we don’t like mirrors. We rebel against them.

Like when I read a little blog the other day where a pastor goes off on Hollywood for flaunting what he calls “anti-Christian propaganda.” It’s a preview about a kid’s movie that talks about how some families have a mom and a dad, while others have two mommies and two daddies, or one parent, or a whole bunch of relatives in one house. Movie looks cute.

Apparently this is propaganda and oppressive for this particular parent.

God forbid that his children hear that families come in all sorts of forms (as if the kid can’t look around and see that).  How dare Hollywood expose his children so such truth?!  The bubble of brainwashing is burst in such ways; that’s not what he wants as a parent, I guess.

I imagine he doesn’t think Jesus would like that.

So I wonder what he’ll do when his kids get invited over to a classmate’s house who has two mommies.  And I wonder if he’ll consider, before uttering “Jesus wouldn’t like that,”  how one of those mommies was forced by society into a loveless marriage at a young age because she had been told that Jesus wouldn’t like her acting on her attraction to women.  And she had broken free of those societal chains that were killing her insides, speaking up in a way that society couldn’t or wouldn’t and found a way to be more whole.

And then I wonder if he might consider that Jesus wouldn’t like his child turning down an invitation to celebrate another child’s birth just because the sight of two mommies might cause some cognitive dissonance for that young kid being raised in a bubble full of half-truths.

Because, as much as the father doesn’t want to believe it, the child will be living in a world where there are two mommy families and two daddy families and divorced families and all sorts of families.  And to pretend that they won’t, well, I wonder if Jesus would like that sort of ignorance…

See the kind of bind we get in when we think like this? We pretend to pit Jesus against these situations when really all we’re doing is crashing the mirror set up in front of us because we don’t like being shown truth and our own inabilities to deal with life situations.

Because my teacher didn’t like being confronted with the fact that I had been picked on in front of him for far too long without him saying a word, and I wasn’t having it from the bully or from the voiceless teacher anymore.  And this father doesn’t like the fact that love comes in a few different forms–even if he doesn’t approve of them–and his speaking out against same-sex couples, his flaunting of his “traditional, Biblical values,” is now being drowned out by other voices of love as he cries out that he is now the oppressed one.

Jesus wouldn’t like that, I think.

And I wonder what Jesus would do in that situation.

And as you sit with those unsolvable Rubik’s Cube questions, perhaps you’ll just come to see, as I see, that they are manipulative ways of trying to get around the fact that we’re sometimes confronted with our own shortsightedness and don’t like it.

Perhaps we shouldn’t get Jesus into the damning business like “Jesus wouldn’t like that” does.  And perhaps we should get Jesus out of the “choose your own Christian adventure” business like “What would Jesus do?” tries to press on us.

Instead, why don’t we live like Jesus lived. Or try to.  And I don’t think you have to ask WWJD in every situation to try to live like the Christ.  We have a pretty good understanding of what Jesus would do: love God and the neighbor as yourself.  Give of yourself for others. Get mad at injustice in the world and act on it, even if it kills you.  Be peaceful. Forgive.

I mean, I guess we can look at the rampant malnutrition in a world full of food and say, “Jesus wouldn’t like that…”  But we won’t, by and large.  Because there’s probably not enough guilt in the world to make us change our economic practices and allow the food insecure to eat well.  We’ll just save Jesus’ damnation for people who use the word ass…

I’m a reluctant Christian sometimes because we’ve confused trying to predict how Jesus would act in the 21st Century and what he’d opine on 21st Century problems without even mastering how to live like he did in ancient Palestine first, and we call it “Christian values” or “the Christian life.”

When you’ve mastered loving your God and your neighbor as yourself, then perhaps we can ponder what Jesus thinks about movie previews and what Jesus would do about it.

My hunch is he’d smile and mark his calendar to go see it.