“Relationship Issues” or “Jesus Doesn’t Want to be My Boyfriend.”

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I know…the title.  images

I actually wanted to title this “Jesus Isn’t That Into You” as a play off of the movie…but that would have really brought the hate mail.

So let me start with a disclaimer.

Let me say, unequivocally, that I think Jesus is “into you” (although I think that sounds weird).

But maybe…maybe Jesus isn’t that into you.  Or, at least, not as solely about you as we’ve made it out to be.  Jesus doesn’t want to be my boyfriend.

Let me explain for a second.

In my blog on 5 Phrases I Think Christians Shouldn’t Say, I got a lot of push back for #2 on my list, “You just have to do God’s will…”  Specifically for my statement in the subsequent lines where I posit that I’m not convinced that God’s greatest wish is for us to be in relationship with God.

I should have put an asterisk next to that statement because, here’s what I really mean by that: I think that Christianity has adopted a “win souls for Jesus,” “you must invite Jesus into your heart,” “you need to have a personal relationship with Jesus” mentality at the sacrifice of every other type of relationship that God might desire for humanity.

We’ve given up our relationship as stewards of the Earth so that we can build monstrous mega-church compounds on open land to focus on the “Jesus-and-Me” relationship, adopting crazy ideas that perhaps global warming is fake and is God’s plan for the world.

We’ve given up our authentic relationships with others who, perhaps, don’t think the same things we do, because our singular focus is now to try and convert and “win souls for Christ.”

American evangelical Christianity has focused so much on fostering personal relationships with Jesus Christ, most other relationships are left in the dust…

Plus, speaking from a place of honesty, much of the agnostic/marginally Christian world (and a good number of us convicted Christians) finds the super-close-Jesus-is-my-boyfriend talk creepy.

I think we all want to be known; really known.  And I think God knows us; truly knows us.

But when we start talking about Jesus like he’s our lover in the modern sense we really are talking in ways that put people off.

Don’t think we do that?  Consider the song “In the Secret.”  Here are the lyrics:

In the secret, in the quiet place

in the stillness you are there.

In the secret, in the quiet hour I wait

only for you (this part is usually whispered)

Because I want to know you more.

I want to know you,

I want to hear your voice

I want to know you more.

I want to touch you

I want to see your face

I want to know you more.

Creepy, right?

Or what about Hillsong’s “I Surrender” where you sing “have your way in me, Lord”?  I’ve banned that song from my church because I can’t hear that without imagining how someone who has been sexually abused hears it…

I mean, c’mon folks, maybe Jesus isn’t that into us.

I’m all for the talk of having the “heart strangely warmed,” to use a Wesley phrase (and he was reading my boy, Luther, btw).  I’m all for the stirring of the spirit, for soul-stirring that you can’t explain.  I’m Lutheran, a spiritual descendant of the one who kept repeating over and over again, pro me, when it came to Jesus’ promises in Scripture.

“For me.”

It’s personal.  And the opposite can be true.  A lot of places talk so much about God in the abstract, that any sort of relational talk is totally absent.

But I hear less of the latter and more of the former.  It’s good to talk about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but we’ve taken that and run right into the crazy bin.

If that’s all we focus on, the personal…and that’s a lot of what I hear…then, well, I think the boat has been missed, by and large.

When Jesus said “Love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself,” I don’t think he imagined we’d stop on the first part as much we have.  Remember, that second part is “like the first.”

I’m all for a relationship with God; the mystic in me can’t do without it. St. Julian spoke of her relationship with Jesus in the most intimate way possible (totally scandalous…everyone should read some St. Julian).  But even from Julian you get the sense that she’s speaking from a “remain in me” kind of way, echoing Jesus from the Gospel of John.

But if it stops there…

No, really…I think a lot of places talk as if it goes on from there, about helping the neighbor, loving people for who they are and where they are in life, but it’s really just about you and Jesus and what you gain from that.

If that’s the case, well, then I’d say you have relationship issues. Maybe it’s good to consider that Jesus might not be that into you…not your boyfriend.

And that singular focus that I hear so much really often makes me a reluctant Christian.

“Love is Heavy, but Hate is a Burden” or “The Old Switch-a-Roo”

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“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”-Martin Luther King, Jr.index

Love is heavy.

It brings with it many frustrations and tears.

I walk with people caring for aging parents and see this to the fullest.  They are tired, weary, worn.  They love their parents…but it is a heavy burden.

I walk with new parents and see the same thing, after a while.  They are tired, weary, worn.  They love their children…but they’re a burden.

Or parents of children with special needs.  Or adults who work primarily in the service industry.  Or adults who work in social services, or nurses, or educators, or hospice workers.

Or people who do justice work.

Because, and this is a truth about humanity that I think is under-appreciated by those who don’t work daily, one-on-one, with a wide swath of humanity: people suck.

They do; no two ways about it.

But sometimes the general nature of people can get the best of us.  Especially those of us who fancy ourselves as doing justice work.

How easily justice work can turn into hatred.  I’ve seen that too many times.  Justice work becomes full of “us and them” dichotomies when the heart is left unattended.  The unattended heart easily turns to hate over time.  Calcification is the natural state of everything that is left alone.

The heart is no exception.

We like to think that love and hate are opposites.  No; they are cousins.  Love and apathy are opposites.  Hate and apathy are opposites.  Love and hate are cousins who quickly dress alike in their zeal and passion when left unattended.

Love and hate are like those twins you dated in high school.  You’re always wondering if they’ve pulled the old “switch-a-roo” on you.

It does no good to hate the oppressor…MLK knew this in a powerful way that is instructive for us all.

Working against an oppressor must be a labor of love, not a labor of hate.  If it’s not, then pain is just transmitted instead of transformed.

This, of course, is easy for me to say as a white, able-bodied, heterosexual, male.

But even there, too, I must be careful.  In my zeal for justice work I can get sucked into reactionary hate against my status and privilege.

I must learn to give up my privilege as best I can.  Hating it does very little to change things.  Only in giving things up can we change them.

Jesus understood this.  “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

As I said, MLK knew this.  He gave up his justifiable hatred for a humanity that moved…moves…too slowly toward justice and peace.

But that’s indicative of a heart attended to.  Attending to the heart is heavy work.

But letting the heart calcify…that’s the work of the dying and dead.

I think the task of justice work these days is to work against systems of oppression while also attending to the heart.

Unfortunately I don’t see it very often.  Too much “us and them” talk coming from liberal circles.  Too much silence from conservative circles.

The radical circles are the ones speaking against justice while attending to the heart.  MLK was a radical, not letting the heart calcify to the point of hate.  I think he knew that, to do otherwise would be to replace one burden for another.

And Lord knows we have too many burdens to add anymore to this world.

I Found Jesus…He Was Behind the Couch

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My wife and I have a magnet on our fridge that says, “I found Jesus…he was behind the couch the whole time!”7786.jpg_3

My nephews love it.  I love it.

I think my nephews are even likely to tell their pastor that.  I encourage them to.  I told them it’d always be the “right” answer in Sunday School…because, you know, faith is all about having the “right answer”.

I think it’s funny.

I think it’s funny because, well, that whole theme of “lost and found” in the Bible is turned around by this whole notion of “finding Jesus.”

In all of those “lost and found” verses in the Bible, it’s not Jesus who is lost, but the other person.

Even in that “seek and you shall find” passage, there’s no indication that it’s “seeking” Jesus.

Seeking knowledge.  Seeking enlightenment.  Seeking salvation, liberation, wholeness…sure.

But not Jesus.

So this idea that we can “find Jesus”…well, you might as well look behind the couch because I think you’re just as likely to find Jesus crouching there as you are to find him in the “seeker’s service” at your local big-box worship center.

I’m not trying to come down harshly on “seeker services”; I think faith communities need accessible points of entry.

But if we think we’re giving them Jesus, as if Jesus can be commodified…well, we should stop fooling ourselves.

The search for Jesus is the search for the white stag…it’s pointless.

Yeah, pointless.  Because I think all you’ll end up finding is a mirror image of yourself that you pass off as Jesus.

Instead the faith teaches that Jesus is/was/will be right where you are, and has been all along.

Martin Luther has this totally unhelpful/helpful phrase about looking for Jesus.  When explaining how God is present in the Eucharist, Luther said that Jesus is “in, with, and under the elements.”

This is absolutely unhelpful to the rational mind.  The literalist, the legalist, the fundamentalist, they won’t accept that answer.

There must always be a system, a way of finding, a problem/solution answer.

But what if there isn’t?  What if, instead, we leave those things behind and just agree to encounter the mystery of a present God, seen in the Christ, who subverts every single system and search, and who just surprises us as being on the scene?  What if we just walk with mindfulness?

It’d be a Biblical way of operating, that’s for sure.  Jesus surprises everyone at the tomb, the house of Mr. and Mrs. Clopas, the upper room, Paul’s lonely road to nowhereville.

Jesus surprises everyone in little Bethlehem (remember the Magi go six miles off course to Jerusalem to find him?).

Hell, maybe Jesus is behind the couch.  It’d surprise the socks off of me.

But if you looked, you won’t find him there.  Instead, it seems, Jesus finds us on the roads of confusion, in the upper rooms of fear, at the tomb of despair, in the little town of doubt.

That seems to be Jesus’ way.  This is why I don’t shy away from confusion, doubt, and despair.  I don’t have to have it all worked out.

Because that’s not the point.

I have a little mantra I repeat a lot to myself: “Jesus walked into a bar and no one noticed.”

Yeah…that sounds about right.

On How I Can Trust that Jonah is a Story but That the Resurrection Was/Is Real

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I trust that the Jonah story is myth and not a real event.  I trust that the resurrection of Jesus was/is not myth, but a real event.

I trust that they are both true.

This is a difficult concept to grasp, I think, especially if you come out of a tradition where the Bible is taken very literally.

JonahBear with me a bit on this, though, because the binary thinking of “true/untrue” or “fact/fiction” is not as clear cut as we like to make it out to be.

If we take the Bible absolutely, unequivocally literally, we do it, it’s teachings, and ourselves a disservice.

Primarily we do a disservice because we know that the Bible was not meant to be taken literally in it’s origins.  How do we know this?  Because it contains different types of writings: histories, prose, poetry, legend, and yes, myth.

And Jonah is a myth.  An instructive myth, a myth worth being in the Bible, but a myth.  It’s form is mythic.  It’s pattern is mythic.  It’s characters, narration, plot, all of it is mythic.  It’s not meant to be taken literally.  It’s to be read and learned from and pondered over and thought over…but not in the way you’d ponder over a math problem.  Not in the way you’d ponder over how someone could be stuck in a whale for days and not eaten by stomach acid.

So, we do Scripture a disservice when we hold all of it’s parts (written over hundreds of years) as all the same type of writing.

Secondly, we do it’s teachings a disservice by holding the whole Bible as being all the same type of writing to be held at the same status.  Why?  Well, if I can’t bend my mind around how Jonah can sit in a whale and not be eaten by stomach acid, and that story is just as real as a Jesus story, then I have to throw the whole thing out.

This line of thinking is a byproduct (an unfortunate one) of the Enlightenment.

Finally, we do ourselves a disservice by thinking that it all is the same because we either force our brain to believe something that we know isn’t…and isn’t supposed to be…true, or we keep ourselves from deep riches found in Scripture because, if we can’t buy all of it the same, we’ll buy none of it the same.  In this case we don’t allow ourselves the great love of God shown in the Scriptures, and a relationship with God informed by these ancient writings, specifically around the message of the Christ.

So, how then are we to take the resurrection?  Here’s how this pastor sees it.

For the Christian, something should be honored at the outset: the resurrection is central to the faith whereas the story of Jonah is not.

I think that’s just true.

Were Jonah missing from Scripture, the Christian faith would largely go on with all systems normal (for better or for worse).

I feel that, without the resurrection, the central tenet that God’s work moves into a future where nothing is lost, specifically the very people God has come to hold in love through eternity, would be missing.  In short: the bookend of the salvation story would be lost, leaving everything before it in a heap on the theological floor without any sense, order, or telos.

And thus we end up with Saturday morning Christians: the Christ is crucified, time to hideout in an upper room because there’s nothing left.

It’s also worth noting that, for Jewish-Christians to propose that someone singularly rose from the dead is not only unthinkable, 15-the-resurrection-of-jesusbut would most likely initiate charges of blasphemy and result in death or expulsion from the Jewish community of faith.  If they were willing to risk talking in this way, that’s telling.  The masterful theologian N. T. Wright goes to great lengths on this in his book Surprised by Hope, which I found myself agreeing with.

This all being said, do I think that you have to believe in the bodily resurrection to be a Christian?  No.  The calls from Tony Jones and other theologians (even in my tradition) for those who may not subscribe to a bodily resurrection to “re-think” and recant on their take of a metaphorical/mystical or otherwise-known interpretation are wrongheaded.

As if the Christian faith was ever meant to be one with a list of beliefs that one had to check-off to be considered a Christ follower.  If that is the case, the most literal Christ-followers in Scripture, both the Magi in Matthew and the disciples pre-Easter in all of the Gospels, fail the test.  The Magi were pagan and the disciples were clueless.

Any attempt to coerce another person into trusting the veracity of a certain story, historical, mythical, or otherwise, is not creating trust and faith, it is trying to force fact.

A story can be true without being fact.  I’m reluctant Christian because much of the church has forgotten this.

For this Christian I think it is intellectually honest to acknowledge that not all of scripture is meant to be read the same way. We do all sorts of disservices when we do.

But, for this Christian, a healthy dose of mystery surrounding the central stories is also important, especially those written so as to be a history of the salvation story.  After all, the resurrection is not a “problem” to be solved.  It is a mystery to be pondered over, embraced, and loved.

Jonah is a great fire-side tale that tells many truths and should be embraced and loved and pondered over (and should be acted out by persons to get the whole picture).  But it wasn’t written to be history, and we shouldn’t have to take it as history to be faithful.

One Thought on God and Suffering

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For some reason my entry “5where-is-god-suffering Phrases I Think Christians Shouldn’t Say” is getting a lot of traffic again.

And I’m getting a lot of push back because of my thoughts on suffering and “God’s plan.”

So, in an attempt to clarify it all, let me say this:

I will not endorse the notion that it is God’s plan that people get cancer.  I will not endorse the notion that it is part of God’s plan, specific or otherwise, that children die by gunfire.  I will not endorse that Hiroshima was part of God’s big plan.

I cannot do any of these things because I have sat by too many bedsides and buried too many children, even in my short pastorate.

Now, have I seen beauty in death?  Absolutely.  But have I seen senselessness?  Senselessness that goes far beyond any sort of platitude like “God’s wisdom is foolishness” or any other attempt to bend the words of Scripture to make meaning out of the meaningless?

Damn right.

And that’s the thing.  Such theologies that try to put God at the helm of these tragedies or, even worse, try to say that God is a passive bystander, are attempts to make concrete meaning out of meaninglessness.

We all make meaning out of life.  We all do; there’s no escaping it.  I have heard and known people calling their disabilities beautiful tools they use to learn about life.  I have heard people say that the death of their child was instructive for them.

I do not deny that these things are true.

What I deny is that a particular truth was intended to be drawn from them.  What I deny is that a particular truth was in the Divine mind as those tragic events happened.

What I deny is that God is in the dirty pain business.

Now, I think that God has caused me pain; causes me pain. I experience the pain of being wrong all the time (perhaps in this instance, too?).  I experience the pain of having my ego subverted, my best-laid intentions crumbled, my pride blown away, my intellect shattered by a God who speaks a word of grace to me when my greatest desire is for retribution.

But I do not think that God has caused my car accident so that I learn to drive better.  I may thank God for an accident that taught me a life lesson, but I don’t think God was passively watching it.

I think God was in the pit of fear and hell that I was in while going through it.

And that is a theology of the cross that, I think, truly speaks to the crucifixion story and the Good News of God.

The crucifixion story is one that speaks of Jesus’ suffering not as something apart from humanity, but a part of humanity.  I am not one to believe that God caused the crucifixion for some atonement.  I think that when you act and talk like Jesus, you die for it because our power systems (even the power systems that try to make sense out of the senseless) don’t like it.

So, do I think that it is all part of God’s plan that your foot was amputated?  That your brother or sister died in the Iraq war?  That your father has prostate cancer?

No.  I don’t. And we can quibble about philosophical categories for God, and whether God knows all, can do all, is everywhere…all of that.  We can quibble until the end of time, and I don’t think we’ll be any closer to the truth than if we just allowed God to say, “I’m not going to make sense out of senselessness…I’m going to make resurrection.”

Then maybe we can learn to die to our need to make sense of it all, and be resurrected as people who can hold tension well…a tension taught to us by a life that includes suffering, joy, and all in between.

New Years Resolution

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Today, just a bit of original poetry.

indexNew Years Resolution

Well 2013,

(or should I call you “Twentythirteen”?)

you had a good run.

The events, memories, touchstones,

too many to now recount

even if I had the desire to recount them all,

were all leading up to this one moment: the clock striking twelve.

And, sure, people who call themselves religious made fools of themselves this past year

as they did in 2012

and even as far back as year 1

(and before then),

but I expect nothing less.  Fear seems not to know that all things can be new

in the new year,

and it continually shows up, right on time, staying long past the party is over, waking up in a haze on your living room floor expecting breakfast.

Fear does that.

Fear of the other, of difference,

fear that “not being right” means failure.

Fear has survived too many years in a row, even past the angel’s cries of “Fear not.”

Fear doesn’t take a hint.

For 2014, I wonder if we can all make this resolution:

Let us hold that someone else’s opinions

beliefs

thoughts

convictions

aren’t threatening to me.  We need not fear them.

Let us instead hold that the only threatening thing in this world is indifference.

And then, maybe, we’ll get somewhere.

2013, you had a good run.  But sometimes the clown car took over the religious circus.

2014, here’s to hoping that you have within you

(and you do, as the incarnation makes clear)

the ability to have it done differently.

Blessed New Year

pt…

 

“Power Sucks” or “Sing the Magnificat Carefully”

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So, I’m going to try my best not to join the chorus Phenom-Power-631of people lamenting Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyers and Beth Moore and the like.  Well, at least not too much.

Needless to say I think they’re all full of it; I don’t think I need to point out to you why that is in any great detail.

But too many in the church are calling them “false prophets” and other such crazy names.  Frankly, I think that’s giving them too much credit.  We shouldn’t call them prophets at all because their message isn’t, in the least, prophetic.  They’re just people trying to make a buck, I think.

No really, I think that’s all they are.  They’re great showmen.  They’re good speakers (not great speakers, mind you).  And they’re good at organizing other people around them.  Natural leaders.

But they’re not prophets.

To be a prophet, to speak prophetically in the historical sense, was to speak truth with some boldness.  It was to speak in such a way that the very powers and systems of the world were shaken, afraid of your message.  This is why Paul speaks of teaching and preaching, “boldly.”  He does so in such a way that the very powers were afraid.

Hence why he ended up in jail so often.  Prophets usually ended up dead because of their message.

I’m pretty certain Olsteen, Meyers, Moore, Dollar, Jakes, and basically the personalities of channels 460-480 on my cable package will end up in jail.

For tax fraud.

Not for speaking too boldly against the powers of this world.

See, their message is one of power: God wants you to be powerful.

Powerful bank accounts.  Powerful influence.  Prestige.  Powerful enough to look at a house and “claim it” before you can afford it (aka “The Joel Osteen Story” coming to a Lifetime time-slot near you).

Powerful enough to actually believe that Living Proof Ministries would be an attractive name for a company that publishes “educational material” written by someone with no scholarly training in Biblical history or interpretation (that’s Beth Moore’s ministry outfit, in case you were wondering).

I need the living proof that she’s qualified to write material…

Here’s where the cognitive dissonance comes for this Christian: Jesus, in his life, in his birth, in his death, in his interactions, was not powerful by any worldly definition of power.

In fact, the song we’ll be singing in my faith community on Sunday, The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56), talks about how God throws down the mighty from their thrones, fills up the hungry but sends the rich away empty, scatters the proud, and causes all sorts of ruckus for those who play by the power rules of the world.

Look, Jesus was a homeless man, born to an unwed mother.  He had no job, lived off of the kindness of others, and died when he was a young man in the most horrible way possible.

By all accounts, Jesus was a failure.

And apparently Meyers’ and Olsteen’s and Jakes’ message to Jesus would be, “God’s got a blessing just waiting for you!  Just wait and see!  God doesn’t put up with people who are down on themselves, who don’t think they can. You are powerful in God!”

To which Jesus replies, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Power sucks.  It sucks the life out of us.  It sucks the message out of the church.  It just plain sucks.

Look, I’m not down on wealth or self-esteem.  God hasn’t made you to be a Debbie Downer (though God did make Rachel Dratch for that role).  Nor has God made you to be scraping by economically (though, I think there is such a thing as having too much).

I’m just down on wealth and self-esteem being pandered around as the central message of the church in this nation’s biggest churches.  And especially at this time of year, when laser-light Christmas pageants are being planned, and live camels are being rented, and all sorts of nonsense is costing people millions of dollars and hundreds of hours because they think God desires “bigger and better!”…

I have to imagine Jesus is in the back row, quietly lighting a candle, looking up at the stage and saying, “Father forgive them…for they know not what they do.”

Oh, and Father, forgive me, too.  This reluctant Christian is often just a little too proud in his thoughts.

So scatter my ego as well.

Then perhaps I, too, can sing The Magnificat with Mary this Advent.  Carefully.

On Why I Will Allow (and Encourage) My Kid(s) to Believe in Santa Claus

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Just like the perennial “Waimagesr on Christmas” creeps its Grinch-like head around this time of year, so do the calls for people to abandon Santa Claus, the “Elf on the Shelf,” and other child-pleasing myths that we’ve come to associate with this season.

Apparently because we celebrate the birth of Jesus at this time of year, everything else must come to a halt…lest we overshadow the “reason for the season.”

Well, to be honest, if we’re trying to get back to the “reason for the season” at its roots, we should probably leave Jesus out of the equation, too.  December 25th was not originally known as “Christmas,” and didn’t become so for many years after Christianity had been around.  “The Feast of the Undying Sun” was marked on December 25th, an acknowledgment of the solstice that would now ebb away into increasing daylight.  A nice pagan festival in the dead of winter.

We invited Jesus to the party late.  He wasn’t the original reason for celebrations at this time of year.

Christians now celebrate the “Feast of the Undying Son” (I should trademark that little monicker because I think it’s pretty darn clever), but we should be honest and recognize that it’s not our original festival to claim.  And it certainly wasn’t chosen because it was the date of Jesus’ birth.

Face it, we put the “Christ” in Christmas.  Any attempt to “keep” Christ there are done so because we cemented him there…

But back to Santa and the crazy Elf on the Shelf: I say “do it.”

As a pastor, as a father, as someone who thinks that life is more than water and trace elements forced to eek out an existence, I say “do it.”

As I preached this last Sunday, St. Nicholas can provide a real depth of meaning in this season where we celebrate Jesus’ birth (for Christians) by buying one another a Lexus adorned with a huge bow.

St. Nicholas was known for his giving…not for getting whatever he wanted.  And by keeping St. Nick in this season, we too, can focus our children on the giving of the season, rather than the receiving.

“Keep Christ in Christmas” the bumper sticker reads…on the gas guzzling car.  What about keeping Christ in consumerism? In fact, if you want to eliminate the real issue with this season, it has nothing to do with saying “Happy Holidays” or burning effigies of the jolly fat elf.  It has everything to do with buying and selling and how and why and where we do it.

But I digress.

Even more than the historical St. Nicholas, there is a bit of wonder and awe that is lost from this season if we don’t allow our children (and our adults) to play around in the great mystery that comes from things not being dark forever, from lights that shine out of a tree planted in the living room, from characters that point to good virtues and mischievous glee.

I encourage you to believe in Santa Claus, who is chief giver in a season where our natural inclination is to conserve and save-up to survive the winter.  Likewise, believe in the elf that creates havoc in the middle of the night.  Lord knows we all need another example to follow when our tendency to look out for ourselves butts up against the command to look out for our neighbor’s needs first.  Lord knows we all need a reminder that, though things seem to run havoc in the darkness, a little light can expose the havoc and encourage us to laugh at it all.

Santa and the Elf and the like can encourage our children, and even us, to live deeply in the season, look lightly at ourselves, and look wondrously at life.

The real trouble, I think, happens when we start teaching our children that believing in Santa Claus is analogous to belief in God.  That is the real fear behind inviting these characters into the season: belief and attention to them will point away from “true” belief and attention to Jesus.

But if we start holding Jesus and Santa at the same level, when we teach that belief in the Elf on the Shelf is like belief in God, and that you can’t hold both at the same time, then we do a real disservice.  Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers sing that wonderfully awful song, “I Believe in Santa Claus” where they also claim to believe in magic, in God, and in human destiny…as if it’s all on the same level…and we’ve bought into that perspective.  It doesn’t help the situation.

They are different types of belief.

I don’t trust Santa like I trust God.  Santa is a mental assent I allow myself at certain times with a wink and nod; hopefully a mental assent that points me toward a deeper truth in the world.

But God…I don’t allow myself to mentally assent to God’s existence.  I tried to do that and ended up an atheist for a while.  Rather, I trust God’s existence and lean on it (for more on this line of thinking, see what I wrote here).

Santa, the Elf on the Shelf, it all lends itself to wonder and awe and joy.  I say that you shouldn’t take that away from children.  But also don’t make belief in it all analogous to trust in God.  That’s the real problem with this whole season, I think.  We feel we’re in competition for “belief resources.”

In fact, the God who invites imagination, who inventively sung creation into being (and sung salvation into being through a lullaby), pulls out of me the desire to embrace these traditions.

They’re not harmless; they’re helpful.

And they’re only hurtful when we put them on par with faith.  And sometimes I’m a reluctant Christian because that’s exactly what Christians have done.

So, Findley will be finding some presents from Santa on Christmas morning (and we’ll probably address some from the cats as well even though they don’t have the opposable thumbs needed to wrap presents).  It won’t be the primary focus of our festival, but it’ll be there. And he’ll squeal with joy and, for a moment, feel the wonder in the magic of the season where a jolly fat guy fits down a non-working fireplace and cats wrap presents to give to their owners.

And while we don’t do the Elf on the Shelf thing (mostly because I find the elf’s proportions creepily elongated) if that’s your bag, go for it.

And if Christmas bells deliver your presents, or if Santa rides a donkey, or if gnomes put presents in stockings…all traditions from around the world…allow yourself the wonder and awe to believe that this world might just be a little bigger than we want to make it.

Perhaps you’ll find yourself caught up in joy that points to Joy greater than itself.  Perhaps you’ll figure out why the ancient church put Jesus’ natal day on December 25th.  In the time of darkness, the lightness that comes from such joy is a welcome guest.

Really Re-Claim Advent. We Need It.

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I love Christmas.7772528906_b6961079fb_z

Secular Christmas, religious Christmas, Christmas movies, Christmas cookies, Christmas eggnog, Christmas candles, Christmas lights.

I am the quintessential consumer of Christmas crap that every marketer dreams of and every minimalist fears.

Because at Christmas it should be classy…but the definition of classy has permeable boundaries.

And I listen to Christmas music early in the season.  Mostly because I think it reminds me of Christmases when I was a kid, which were always full of magic and mystery and all sorts of greatness.

And perennial calls for stopping “wars on Christmas” or yelling for “no Christmas music until Advent is over” is all a bunch of nonsense from people who love to control things and who have an inordinate amount of time to obsess over nothingness.

But one thing is true: Christmas is for children.  And I’m not just talking about secular Christmas with the fat elf and the flying Rangifer tarandus.  

Religious Christmas is for children, too, in many ways.  You may not want to hear that, but it’s true. The myths that have grown themselves around the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke (often conflated awkwardly with the first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew) have created a narrative that theologically resonates, but realistically falls flat.

Angels, traveling Magi, virgin births…it’s all hard to swallow as reality, even for the faithful. It’s a story for children’s books.

And I’d advocate that you need not swallow it all to be Christian.  In fact, it sounds like so much myth mostly because it was written to evoke that kind of thought in the reader and that kind of hope in the reader’s heart.  You, too, are supposed to see that something unusual, epic, of mythical proportions is taking place in the person of Jesus.

Yes, you too.

But we’ve taken the mythical narrative and have tried to pass it off as history, and it all makes for people creating wars on Christmas (real and imaginary), and people rejecting theological truths because they don’t line-up with historical reality, and…

Well, here we are.

But see, this is the thing: the mythical nature of Christmastide is, and should be, balanced by the stark reality of Advent.

If only we could really re-claim Advent.

And I’m not talking about the Advent calendar with nice little doors that have chocolate inside until you get to Christmas eve.

That’s not real Advent.  That’s commercial Advent.

And I’m not talking about just banning Christmas hymns or music in deference to Advent music.  That’s like only focusing on one tire on a car, when the whole thing is broken.  It won’t do what you want it to.

No, we need to reclaim the totality of Advent because Advent is for adults.

Advent is for adults who wait for births, or for diagnoses, or for the death of a loved one, or for a new job, or for any job, or for that pink slip they know is coming, or for relief from pain, or for visitors to arrive and cheer up a lonely existence, or…

Or anything that we wait for that causes anxiety.

Because Advent is all about receiving the uncomfortable news that God is on the scene, is going to show up, is going to shake up your world in some way.  And that news when coupled with the “Fear not!” of the angel message is what balances out this season.

Your life is going to be shaken.  But fear not!

Jesus, we need to hear that again.  And I mean that phrase in every way it can be taken.

Because all the ridiculous anxiety around this time of year just points to the unrest that we have, the imbalance that we feel, when we focus so closely on one part of a larger issue.

The church needs to reclaim Advent because society, humanity, lives in Advent quite a bit of the time.  It’s one of the shortest seasons in the church year, but one of the longest seasons of our lives: the season of waiting.

And we need to practice waiting well.  Advent can do that, for the secular and the religious alike.

And I’m a reluctant Christian at times because most of the Christian world just skips right over it in deference to “defending Christmas” or focusing on music rather than meaning, or just abandoning it all together because, who cares?

Who cares?

That’s a question I’ve asked myself many times while waiting  as both ends of the wick burn, as patience runs thin, as the meagerness of my existence comes colliding with the immensity of the existing world and I feel like a measly piece of nothingness against it all.

And I don’t have time for nothingness.

Who cares?

Advent’s answer to that question is, “Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.  Wait for the Lord; be strong take heart.”

I don’t like answers.  I like questions.  But when all I have are questions, Advent’s response is balm for a weary soul.

On Why Clergy Don’t Need Tax Exempt Housing

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Recently a federal juindexdge in Wisconsin ruled, in a suit filed by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, that clergy person’s tax-exempt housing is unconstitutional.  You can read more about it here.

The reason why clergy have tax-exempt housing in the first place is baffling to me.  It’s not necessary.

True, it’s a nice perk in a job where the burn-out rate is almost on par with air traffic controllers.

But they don’t get tax-free housing.  Hell, I don’t even think they get free unlimited plane flights…and they help land the things!

It’s not necessary.  In fact, I think it’s a problem.

Because if you look at the marriage between the clergy tax-free housing status and the government that granted it, you’ll find that this all arose in the 1920’s at a time when modern American exceptionalism was merging with revived religious fervor.  And you know the trajectory: revivals, the end of the Third Great Awakening bleeding into two World Wars and then a Fourth Great Awakening, the marriage of American cultural values and “Christian values.”

The church became the backbone of a social structure where everyone lived in little pink houses (for you and me), waved the flags that stood near the crosses next to the altars, and believed that God’s protection was over the USA.

At least, that’s the pretty picture painted by many.

Lost in the shadow of this false utopia that many look back on with fond affection is a series of systems that held racism iron-locked, held fear of the “other” as a value, and held crippling poverty as something you shy away from looking at (remember Robert Kennedy’s national tour?).

I think it is no accident that the “social gospel” of the Third Great Awakening was largely stifled in the 20’s-30’s and fell out of influence as we tumbled into the World Wars as now religious structures, who had been given a hand-out by Uncle Sam, began focusing on the individual rather than society.

Enter the Fourth Great Awakening with altar calls and personal commitments to Christ and civic duty…

What happens when Caesar sends you a gift? You become hesitant to critique Caesar.  You begin to scratch political backs.

The systems of the Great Society became largely solidified as religious and civic powers walked in lock-step.  Why is it, do you think, that Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his prophetic letter to white pastors from that jail cell?

Their silence was deafening!

And all the while they were taking their tax breaks from a system that didn’t find it important that people of all races vote.

I’m happy to give up my tax-free housing allowance.  I hope other clergy are, too.  I don’t think I can take personal money from a system that continues to cut SNAP benefits, continues to feed fat insurance companies even in medical care reform, that continues to fight wars at considerable expense but refuses to fight poverty with any like measure.

I am not an advocate for being against things simply to be against something.  But there is much in our world that does not exhibit righteousness, “right-relationship,” and I must be free to speak against those ills.  Let’s give tax breaks to people that really are persecuted.

Perhaps this move will free clergy up to advocate for such a position.