Thursday, September 04, 2008

Palin, Pentecostals, and Politics

While this article from the Washington Post pretty much confirms my fears about Palin, the article itself and the buzz around it annoys me. Why, exactly, is speaking in tongues scary? This is several-thousand year-old religious practice (which was pagan before it was Christian). It’s certainly less strange than some other Christian practices, like the eucharist. “Here, drink Jesus’ blood and eat his flesh.” Frea-ky!

And this quote:

Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, lamented Palin’s comments. “I miss the days when pastors delivered sermons and politicians delivered political speeches,”

That would be when? During the abolitionist movement? Maybe during the Gettysburg Address, when Lincoln described the ground as “hallowed?” Women’s suffrage? Civil rights?

Don’t get me wrong. I have problems with anyone—politicians or pastors—who assert that any war or pipeline is God’s will. The problem is not that she is religious. The problem is that her religion is bad. 

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Problem with Political Speechwriters

Not only are we going to make every sentence eighteen words too long so that when it is read out loud it must be chopped up in unnatural places before the speaker runs of breath, but we will also finish as many sentences as possible with a triad like this next one so that our declarations will sound authoritative, well-reasoned, and final. We are going to use passive verbs at every opportunity, even when an obvious active verb is at hand, and we will fill each sentence with fluff, redundancy, and repetition to help us reach our target word counts. 

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Excellent Article on Glide Memorial

I’ve been pretty swamped with writing projects lately. I stumbled across this article while doing research for one of them. It’s worth a gander. 

Friday, July 25, 2008

Chiquitano Stations of the Cross

I’ve returned from our mission trip to Bolivia, and I’ll share some photos and adventures later. But one of the coolest things we saw was this series of paintings at one of the missions. This is a series that shows the stations of the cross in a distinctly Bolivian context. Pilate and the soldiers wear military fatigues, the homes have red tile roofs, and as the series progresses the environmental degradation of the forest parallels what happens to Jesus. I thought this was a powerful statement.

Cool stuff. The resurrection scene was in a different style on a different wall - I would have liked to have seen what this artist would have done with it.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Missing Generation, pt. 2

In the last post I said that the primary reason the Church is missing lots of young adults has little to do with the the mission, theology, or politics of the Church, but much to do with demographics. The economic and social forces that prolong adolescence and delay “settled” adulthood are what keep people from participating in worship. I’m also bracketing my qualms about equating “adulthood” with “settling down.” Some of the most visionary and mature Christian adults I know never settle.

But now I want to backtrack a bit and say that this extended adolescence is also part of what creates friction between unchurched young adults and “The Church.” There are two components to extended adolescence. One is physiological and sexual, and the other is social.* These are related issues, but I want to illustrate them separately.

First, the physiological and sexual. People hit puberty earlier. The research varies, but the most extreme research suggests that the average age of menarche has fallen from age 15 (or even 17 in rural, nutritionally-poor areas) to age 12, with some girls having their first period as early as 8 or 10. The most conservative research suggests that the drop is more modest, perhaps from 13-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half. Regardless, people’s bodies mature earlier and they marry later than they did 100 years ago. If you roll the clock way back, some people estimate that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was just 13 when she was betrothed to Joseph.

Now, if people are maturing earlier and marrying later, they have a longer period of time in which to be sexually active. While Jane Austen’s heroines typically married somewhere between 18 and 21**, the average age of marriage these days is 27 or 28 (as I pointed out in the last post). So the time between when someone begins to sexually mature and the time at which they marry (if they marry at all) can be as long as twenty years.  That’s two decades.

During this time, a human being becomes socialized to their peer group. They begin placing more weight on what their peers think than their families. We encourage this process through factory education, where we isolate persons from those in other age groups, teaching them as a class or cohort, and refer to them as a “generation.” So their primary source of character education comes not from family, not from church, but from their peers.

And media.

Mary Pipher, Carol Gilligan, Jeane Kilbourne, and a number of other feminist psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers have pointed out that this is when girls get socialized to think of themselves as objects, to lose their voice, to develop eating disorders. Although their parents have been telling them from birth that they can do anything, be anyone, and have social equality with men, they are relentlessly educated by the media and by their peer group that their primary value is derived by being sexually attractive and sexually pleasing to men. There is a similar social travesty that happens to boys, but for the purposes of considering extended adolescence and how it impacts what we do as church, it’s easier to see in our culture with girls. What is on the cover of men’s magazines? Women. What’s on the cover of women’s magazines? Women. Women as objects. Women as infantile. Women bound, powerless, and dehumanized.

We dump young teenagers into this environment, and the only advice they hear from the church is “do not have sex.” For 20 years. Oh, and don’t touch yourself. Although the Bible doesn’t say a word about masturbation, it’s assumed that any sexual pleasure you give yourself is wrong and shameful. It’s a theme the popular culture is all too happy to take up with either mocking or shocking. Mocked in movies like American Pie, or expressed as shock when the surgeon general mentions the word.

Imagine yourself as a teenager immersed in this environment. You are told you must suppress all sexual feelings for 20 years. Save yourself for marriage. Yet you know that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce - in fact, it’s likely that your parents are divorced, and one or both of them may be living with a girlfriend or boyfriend. See the problem?

Now, follow me carefully here. I am not talking about premarital sex,*** or pornography, or media culture. I am talking about the church’s credibility. From the beginning of puberty, everyone knows the church is not credible on this issue. We all know it, and nobody says a blessed thing about it. Into this credibility gap we are sold a vision of ideal sexuality, involving all kinds of products ranging from cosmetics to viagra. Sexual fulfillment becomes something you buy, not something that comes from deep intimacy with another human being. We are taught to be immature, and to linger in this state well past “adulthood.” Our extended adolescence is characterized by immature sexual attitudes and sexual anxiety.

By contrast, adulthood is associated with boring and unsexy things: minivans, baby spit-up, balancing checkbooks, paying the bills. Corporate-produced mass culture offers us a choice between this world, and the world of young, idealized, sexualized hipness, and even the most media-savvy of us buy into it.

The second component of extended adolescence is social, and it has to do with responsibility and the relative value of your contributions to society. I like to use the illustration of a reality television show that came on PBS several years ago called Frontier House. Three families go to spend several months in Montana, living as the pioneers did. When the kids first begin the adventure, you hear them complain. “What are we going to do for all these weeks? It’s going to be horrible! There’s no television, no cell phones, no video games, no malls.” Over the course of the program, you get to see what they fill their time with. They learn to ride horses. Because they have no mp3 players, they make their own music. Some learn to play the guitar. They milk the cows. The collect the eggs. If they fail in their chores, the family suffers. But the cool thing about the program is that you see the kids absolutely bloom. They grow up.

At the end of the show, they return to their homes. They wander their McMansions like zombies. The modern world sucks the life right out of them. And they say, “there’s nothing to do here but watch television, play video games, and go to the mall.” In Montana, they are useful. They actually contribute to the survival of their family and the flourishing of their community. In the modern world, they become surplus people. They have no social value except as consumers, and they know it. They can do two things - go to school, and buy crap. This is why all media culture is geared toward teenagers, who have the most disposable income and the most time on their hands. They have no other use.

Again, follow me carefully. I’m not arguing that “kids today just need to get a job.” That’s just it. They don’t need to get a job. There’s nothing that depends on them getting a job except some external expectation that they “learn responsibility” or some such dreck. You can’t just give them more chores and drill a work ethic into them. Our society considers them surplus people. They are an economic problem, which is why we need to delay their entry into the workforce for 20 years (during which time, by the way, they aren’t supposed to “do it"). And they know it! On a gut level, the place that tells them they are a fully functional, competent human being who have the skills to survive on their own, they know that they are still children.

And when they act out this anger, frustration, lust, or despair, we blame it on hormones. Or we make up some ridiculous generalization about “kids today.” I say it makes sense when prisoners act like prisoners. 

When these teenagers become young adults, the landscape changes a bit. Now, when you work in a retail store to make money to pay bills, you get to become part of that shallow society. Now you get to sell crap to teenagers. And when you grouse about having a dead-end job, or about your tremendous debt-load, or about the fact that your career has no meaning, or if you demand better, you are vilified by news pundits as belonging to an ”entitlement generation.” Why can’t you just shut up and work for The Man, like your grandparents did? Why are you so spoiled? Preachers parrot back this conventional wisdom in pulpits all across America, again losing credibility with young adults.

But I do believe that part of what the church needs to do is to help people grow up. Not just by helping “young adults,” because we have several generations of people who have grown up under this same model who have been educated to be consumers. Nor am I suggesting we all need to move back on the farm or become Amish (though there is something appealing about that). But I do think that part of what is called for is a radical re-visioning of our lifestyle and how we behave as communities together. How do we give teenagers meaningful work? How do we create a community in which “unsettled” young adults can make important contributions to a community’s thriving? 

*(When I use the term “extended adolescence,” I do not mean to denigrate adolescents or to use it as a purely negative term. Donald Joy’s book Bonding: Relationships in the Image of God is where I first grew to like the idea, and I’ve found it to be useful in explaining the way that we simultaneously idolize and infantilize youth. “Adolescence” the way I use it here is a social construction which our media culture uses to educate children to be consumers and to prevent adults from growing up.)

**(I’m not claiming that Jane Austen’s works are reliable estimates of average age of marriage, but it’s a nice reference point to consider. There is some debate about whether these age differences are as extreme as I’m claiming. Regardless, I think it’s pretty significant for the church if 100 years ago, the span of time between when one matured sexually and the time of socially-acceptable sexual experience was shorter than today.)

***(When I’ve talked about this with other church workers, they inevitably get frustrated and ask, “well, what should we do, then - pass out condoms?” This misses the point. I do not seriously think the church should either a) promote earlier marriage or b) encourage sex outside of marriage. But I do think our credibility is at stake if we do not honestly confront the economic forces which impact families and human sexuality.)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The Missing Generation, pt. 1

It is the nature of the Church that it is always in crisis. The current crisis for the Methodist church is that it is aging. Members are dying off at a rate higher than new members are joining. People have rightly pointed out that we need to be about the business of evanglizing, not so much to “keep the church from dying,” but because the statistics indicate that we haven’t been spreading the gospel.

So every book you pick up about church renewal mentions that we are missing a whole generation of Christians between the ages of 18 and 35. “Where are the young adults?” they ask. “What have we done wrong?” Most of these books are full of strong opinions. We haven’t evangelized. We’ve focused too much on evangelism. We aren’t missionally-focused. We’re too missionally-focused. We are not relevant to the culture. We are too relevant to the culture and not relevant to the Bible. We are too judmental. We are too soft. We preach cheap grace. We don’t preach grace enough.

There is some good theology that comes out of these books. I think their authors are sincere, and their criticisms of the church are often justified. But I have appreciated reading Robert Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers because Wuthnow has more than strong opinions. He has data.

It turns out that the single greatest predictor of whether someone joins a church or not is if they are married and have children. This has been the case for decades. What has happened in recent years, though, is that people get married later. The average age of marriage is now 27 or 28. The average age of having a first child is now the early 30’s. This means that the functional definition of “adulthood” has shifted. Sociologists point out that thanks to longer life spans and a later average age of marriage, someone can be called a “young adult” until they are 40.

Now, I have serious theological and philosophical problems with some of these implications. Are people who are single not adults? Are childless couples not adults? But my theoretical qualms are irrelevant. The fact is people don’t join a church until they “settle down,” and economic and demographic forces mean people settle down later, if they settle down at all. Most adults will change career directions several times before they retire. They marry later and have children later. Of course these factors affect church attendance.

So I find it a bit frustrating when churches beat themselves up about not attracting young people. This isn’t about theology. It’s about demographics.

Ten years ago, people were pointing out that mainline liberal Protestant churches were declining, but conservative Evangelical churches were not. So, they reasoned, it must have something to do with what they preach. The Evangelical gospel must be more compelling, more true, or better-marketed than the Protestant gospel.

Wuthnow points out that the discrepancy is due almost entirely to socioeconomics. Mainline Protestants tended to be better-educated and have higher incomes. Longer education and higher income correlate with a later average age of marriage. So-called Evangelical churches tended to have members with less education and less income, so their members tended to marry earlier and have more children. In recent years, though, the demographic shift has begun to affect Evangelical churches as well. Guess what? I guess “their” gospel wasn’t better than “ours.”

Of course, I don’t think that Wuthnow’s analysis means that everything is okay, and that churches should rest on their laurels. I think his research points to a broader social problem. We are increasingly isolated from authentic community. Our economic and social system discourages people from deep, life-giving relationships.

Here’s an example. In most other cultures, people are plugged into extended families of support. In fact, it is not uncommon for young adults, when they marry, to move back with their parents into a spare room or an addition on the house. If you go to the Middle East, or South America, or nearly anywhere outside of the United States, you will see this same living strategy. Even in the rural U.S., young adults often move into a trailer on property adjoining their parents’ houses. This facilitates the sharing of resources and labor. But in the U.S., the goal is to get out of your parents’ house as soon as possible. If you are thirty years old and living at home, then you have “failed to launch.” You have not moved into adulthood.

Do you see the paradox? Young adults in the United States are the most adolescent adults in the world. We drag adolescence out longer and longer, and make adulthood more and more unobtainable. As the narrator says in Fight Club, “I feel like a 30 year-old boy.”

Unless the Church is going to advocate early (possibly arranged) marriages and bans birth control, we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with a new social reality. One hundred years ago our society invented adolescence by passing child labor laws and requiring public education. Now we are inventing young adulthood for similar economic reasons. Just as the Church took a hard look at youth ministry in the 1940’s and 50’s, we will have to take a hard look at young adulthood and ask some critical questions about how we do church if we really want them to hear and live the Gospel. 

Friday, June 13, 2008

What Does “Conservative” Mean?

What are “conservatives” conserving?
What does “conservative” mean?
Are they conserving our forests and rivers?
Are they keeping the atmosphere clean?

Perhaps they’re conserving financially,
Saving for some rainy day?
But with nine trillion dollars of national debt,
I don’t think that’s what we’d say.

Maybe conserving our values?
Our system of morals and truth?
To pass to the next generation
The lessons we learned in our youth?

I’d say that’s a noble endeavor -
One certainly needed, for sure.
(Minus the hate and racism
And ruthless contempt for the poor.)

Some say conservatives use reason.
Feelings are what liberals use.
I’d say that’s much too simplistic,
And is merely rhetorical ruse.

Big government, war, and big spending-
The legacies of Republican men…
All it takes is a glance at the data
And a look at the mess that we’re in.

Yet what of this word, this “conservative?”
I think it’s confusing, at best.
And liberal means something quite different
In Europe than it does in the West. 

A woman who’s a radical feminist
Yet believes that trade should be free
Is called, in our country, a “moderate.”
A misleading label, you see. 

Once “liberal” was used as an insult.
To be labeled a lib was a curse.
But pendulums swing, as pendulums will,
And now we are in the reverse.

I fear that politics, like fashion,
Is subject to seasonal fads.
But conservative power is ending,
And I am exceedingly glad.

-Dave Barnhart, June, 2008

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Gas is Still Too Cheap

I performed an accidental experiment a few years ago when I was late for an appointment in Nashville. I left Birmingham a half-hour later than I intended. I filled up the tank of my Honda Accord, and drove up I-65 at 80 miles per hour. After my meeting, I filled up again, and made the return trip doing no more than 65 miles per hour. The difference was a quarter tank of gasoline. Let me put that a different way: I burned a quarter tank of gasoline to push air. I spent 4 gallons just to overcome wind resistance.

Now, I realize it’s not a perfect experiment, and could be influenced by wind, altitude, and the shape of my tank. But that one trip shaped my behavior. I drive much more conservatively now, seldom breaking 64 miles per hour on the interstate even when people are zipping past me at 80 or 90. And it has led me to this belief: gasoline is not too expensive until people slow down.

I’ve been biking to the office when I can. It’s only a mile, and when I drive I feel like a loser. But even here, gasoline is not too expensive until I’m biking or walking nearly all the time. And “too expensive” isn’t even the right expression. “Just right” may be more accurate.

Look at the design of our cities, and how much we have spent on inefficient infrastructure: 8-lane highways, massive parking lots in front of big-box retailers, little or no public transportation. It’s like we have been making every effort to be as wasteful as possible. I’m hopeful that as prices go up, we may actually see some positive social change. 

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Poverty Problem

I haven’t posted much recently because in addition to various life stressors, I’ve decided I need to solve the problem of poverty. Yeah, I know - pretty arrogant, isn’t it?

Since I’m in charge of Outreach and Missions, when people walk in to the church office and ask for financial assistance or groceries, they usually get referred to me. Thus I am confronted on a regular basis with the panhandler dilemma - to help or to refuse?

People tend to think this is a pretty simple issue. Most American Christians fall into two camps. You either a) ignore or refuse the request, since “they’ll probably spend it on drugs anyway,” or b) you help them somehow because it’s what Jesus says to do. Now, I’m inclined to answer b, but the corollary is that the person making the request will tell their friends, and pretty soon you have a line stretching from your office out the door and down the street. This makes it tempting to lean toward answer a, because nobody like making work for themselves.

Now, one possible solution is c) refer the person making the request to another partner organization who has social workers, a screening process, and some kind of bureaucracy in place to do what you do not have time to do. I call this solution “paying other people to be Christian for you.” It’s not my favorite answer either. I have tried to rationalize it this way: when people come to the church office asking for money, we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that they have come to “the church.” The church is out there in the world. The office is the office. It would be a bit like going into the corporate headquarters of Publix and trying to buy a head of lettuce. It’s a pretty good rationalization, actually, and sometimes it convinces me.

The problem with all these responses, of course, is that they all perpetuate poverty. In all cases, I become the great benevolent church savior, who bestows my favor or withholds it based on whatever social philosophy I’m using. I am a participant in the system which keeps people in poverty. And rather than seeing the person who has come making the request as a human being, I see them as a set of problems to be fixed.

And then there’s the meta-meta problem, which is that this is simply the way poverty is: we keep trying to dump the issue on someone else, pay the poor to get out of our faces, or ignore them. The fact that someone comes into our office occasionally (and perhaps even gets belligerent) is a reminder that poverty does not go away. It should be frustrating.

I also can’t help but notice that although Jesus said, “give to whoever asks,” he also had a habit of making himself scarce when people were looking for him.

So I’ve done a ton of research over the past several weeks. One of the best resources I’ve found is Walking with the Poor by Bryant Myers. I’ve also talked with many social workers and professionals at our partner organizations. One of my favorite pieces of advice was from a woman who handles direct assistance for her organization: “don’t do walk-ins, honey, you’ll wear yourself out.”

My temporary solution is to be proactive - take the budgeted amount we have for financial and food assistance and go out and find the people who need help. It doesn’t stop people from walking in with requests, but it does give me the sense that we are doing something that’s somewhat more theologically appropriate. I realize that my subjective sense of “doing something” is not the best criteria to use, but honestly I don’t have much else to work with at this point. I am thankful that this crisis has pushed me into a place where I can no longer be satisfied or silent about the Church’s response to poverty. 

I’ve also reached a place where I understand in a deeper way that there are no procedural or strategic answers to this systemic problem. It cannot be solved with more money or a better policy as long as the social systems which maintain poverty are still in place. The fact is that there are people who profit from poverty, and they will continue to resist attempts to change the system. 

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Preaching Boot Camp

I imagined this movie scene, because sometimes I need to hear it:

SCENE: Interior church, day. A student ascends the pulpit.

INSTRUCTOR: Name?
STUDENT: John Smith.
INSTRUCTOR: Excuse me?
STUDENT: John Smith.
INSTRUCTOR: Wrong. Try again.
STUDENT (louder): John Smith!
INSTRUCTOR: Wrong. Listen to me. You are the Reverend John Smith. Say it.
STUDENT: Reverend John Smith.
INSTRUCTOR: Have you been shot?
STUDENT: What?
INSTRUCTOR: I said have you been shot. Has… anyone… shot… you.
STUDENT: With a gun?
INSTRUCTOR: No, with a corn dog. Yes, a gun!
STUDENT: No.
INSTRUCTOR: Well that’s good, because I was about to call 911 so we could get someone to inflate your collapsed lungs. Now, what is your name?
STUDENT (loud): Reverend John Smith!
INSTRUCTOR: That’s right, Reverend. Do you know why you are in that pulpit? Do you know why you are a preacher?
STUDENT: God called me to be a preacher.
INSTRUCTOR: No, you are in that pulpit because I put you in that pulpit. God calls people all the time, they don’t wind up in a church. I can throw a rock and hit 5 people been called by God. They’re not in a pulpit. You are in that pulpit because I, or a bunch of church people like me, decided that we thought your call was genuine. So we voted and gave money and sent your butt to school so you could get educated and go read the Bible and then tell us about it. And I don’t care what kind of postmodern authority issues you’ve got tucked away in your wrinkled brain, but after a hard week of paying bills, dealing with sick kids, dealing with sexual dysfunction, hearing my alcoholic daughter tell me how much she hates me, watching the news about people getting shot and tortured, watching movies of people getting shot or tortured, cleaning up cat pee, watching my parents die and tearing up letters from debt collectors, I didn’t haul my weary self out of bed on a Sunday morning to come hear you offer your opinions or tell me what you think. I came to hear The Word of God. I don’t want you to be my buddy. I want you to be my preacher. So you put on that black robe and you read from that Bible and you tell me the Good News, you give me the truth. Can you handle that?
STUDENT: Yes ma’am.
INSTRUCTOR: So, what’s your name again?
STUDENT: The Reverend John Smith.
INSTRUCTOR: Thank you, Reverend Smith. Today, you will be preaching the text of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Begin from the top.
STUDENT (looking confused): ...Mary had a little lamb…
INSTRUCTOR: Would someone call 911? We’re having lung problems again. 
STUDENT (dramatically): Mary had a little lamb! It’s fleece… was white. White as snow…

FADE TO BLACK

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Living the Sermon on the Mount

You may have seen this story making the rounds on the internet. It was on NPR the other day: A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

I post it for three reasons:

• First, it’s a good story.
• Second, it even showed up on Boing Boing.
• Third, I know it’s abundantly obvious, but I have yet to see any journalist point out that this guy was basically living out the Sermon on the Mount.

I don’t know what the guy’s religious beliefs are, but he gets it. 

Sunday, March 23, 2008

White People, Get Over Yourselves - Amen!

Could not have said it better:

White People, Get Over Yourselves from Dantrification on Vimeo.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

“Don’t Preach At Me”

Some of us hate preaching. If a movie crosses the boundary between storytelling and moralizing, we call it “preachy.” Occasionally when I talk to someone else about a movie or book, I’ll say something like “it was good, until the narrator started preaching.” Documentaries get preachy when they catalogue all the ways our culture or our government fails. We tell someone “don’t preach to me” if they start telling us how to behave. There’s Madonna’s song, “Papa Don’t Preach.” “Preachy” is the word we use when a monologue gets heavy with “shoulds” and “oughts.” Sure, occasionally we use it in positive ways. I’ve heard someone completely non-religious shout “preach it!” to a television celebrity when they supported what he was saying.

I believe there are two reasons that the word “preach” has taken on such negative connotations in our culture. First, most preaching relies heavily on “shoulds” and “oughts.” Second, most preachers fail to inhabit more than one point of view.

We call the verbs “is” and “have” state-of-being verbs. They describe the way something is: its state of being. Good writers and storytellers avoid state-of-being verbs and passive voice. It sounds better to say “someone stole the candy” than “the candy was stolen.”

I call the verbs “should,” “ought,” and “must” state-of-non-being verbs. They describe the way something is not, but should be. Unfortunately, most preachers use state-of-non-being verbs freely. “We ought to love our neighbors.” “We mustn’t judge.” Yuck.

Rather than tell us what we must or should do, why not simply show us doing it? Paint a picture of what the world would be like if people did love their neighbors. Imagine a situation—a specific situation—in which someone doesn’t judge. Tell us about how a small congregation responds when one of its teenage girls with HIV gets pregnant.

The other thing that makes a sermon preachy is when the preacher inhabits only one point of view. Speaking from an omniscient, authoritative, deeply religious position, the preacher never puts her toe into the turbulent surf of human experience. She takes the Word and makes it unincarnate, abstract, lifting it above the messiness of human life and placing it up in glory, where we can stare at it in its crystal perfection. When she preaches about hope in the face of despair, you can hear it in her rhetorical questions: “Why not just give up? When we see the mess the world is in, sometimes we just want to throw our hands in the air and call it quits, don’t we?” She’s uncomfortable with staying with this train of thought, because her very next word will be, “but.” She can’t just leave “calling it quits” at the end of a sentence, so she adds “don’t we?”

And this is if she preaches better than most. Because across the street, her colleague at the other church won’t even go there. “Some people just give up,” he says. “They look at the mess the world is in, and they just throw their hands in the air and call it quits.” Because they are not as enlightened as we are, even though they should see the world differently. We know we mustn’t give up, mustn’t lose faith. Gack!

Preacher, please. Give us at least an inkling. Try, just try for a bit, to be a one of the ones Jesus didn’t heal. Be the pagan woman who Jesus insulted by comparing her to a dog. Get on the other side of grace, and spend some time with those of us faithless ones. Dwell with us for awhile in this darkness before you brush it aside with a wave and a “but Jesus said.” The Word put on flesh, which means it saw the world from a particular perspective—the world in 3-D, thanks to those orbs of gristle and fluid on either side of his nose that we call “eyes.”

Parallax. That’s what it is. Every human being with functioning eyes walks around with two simultaneous perspectives, which our brains interpret as depth. Can you give us that? More than one perspective, just so we know that what we see has depth and reality, instead of the two-dimensional flannel-graph preaching we usually get at church?

And if you don’t, well, then you can forgive us if we nod off to sleep. Because, really, I’ve got enough people preaching at me all day long. 

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Why We Hate Prophets

In Romans 13, Paul says,

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. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

Some Christians carry Paul’s assertion that “there is no authority except from God” to advocate a sort of divine right of rule. I’ve heard Christians speak glowingly of George Bush’s implication that God had put him in power for the purpose of fighting terrorism, and speak disparagingly of anyone who argues against U.S. foreign policy. I’ve even heard folks use Paul’s rhetoric to support warrantless wiretapping and our loss of civil liberties.

But in the ancient Israelite tradition, there were always two: a king and a prophet. Although God may have anointed the king, God also raised up a prophet to confront the king and hold him accountable to God’s standards of justice. Saul had Samuel. David had Nathan. Ahab had Elijah. Hezekiah had Isaiah. All were confronted and challenged by the prophets. Sometimes the prophets spoke in ways that were scandalous - treasonous, even. So I think it’s interesting that people are in a tizzy about Jeremiah Wright and James Hagee.

Now, I have to wince a bit when I call James Hagee a prophet. I think his message is no better than Fred Phelps’. But both Hagee and Wright use the rhetoric of God’s judgment on the nation. If someone wants to figure out which one is a true prophet and which one is a shill, I’d invite them to read the prophets for themselves.

The reaction to Wright’s message, in particular, makes me wonder. Are we not allowed to say that God will judge, should judge, or has judged our country? Must we say “God bless America?” Is this the only kind of truth we will allow ourselves to hear?

I suspect that it is not God’s judgment that really scares folks. I suspect it is having the mask pulled off of white privilege.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

African-American Religious Folk Art

I snapped a photo with my cell phone of this piece in the narthex of Resurrection Catholic Church in Montgomery, AL.

There are so many things I like about this painting. I love the way the cross is a tree which becomes the tree of knowledge in the top of the frame. I like the very modern soldiers at the bottom. I wish it were not so blurry, because I could look at it for a long time.