Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A Very Sad Story (Please Keep It Going!)

Occasionally you hear something that changes your perspective on life.

A woman I know was late to work one day. As she went out the door, she shouted goodbye over her shoulder to her husband and child, who she assumed were inside. She climbed into her car and put it into reverse to back out of the driveway. She felt a thump, looked in her sideview mirror, and saw her daughter’s pink playground ball bouncing away. She turned the other way and made eye contact with her husband, whose face was twisted in horror. She leapt out of the car and made it to her daughter at the same time he did. Her daughter uttered one word with her last breath: “Mommy.”

A year later, she dreams this scene every night. Though her friends are still angry at her husband for divorcing her, she says she can’t really blame him. She can’t live with herself either.

So, is that a sad story or what? Now I’m going to tell you something that I hope makes you a bit angry. I made it up.

Now, if this were a viral email, after I’d got your attention with a tearjerking story like the above, I’d go on to say how you should always tell the ones close to you how much you love them, and please forward this to five of your closest friends. Now, while it irks me to get these things in my inbox, I have to admit I’m guilty of similar stuff. In fact, I think every preacher at some point shoots for the easy emotional hook. I mean, I didn’t completely make my sad story up. I’ve heard true stories like it before. It’s more of a composite than an outright lie, I’ll tell myself.

The other side of it is that we excuse this kind of manipulation. This is one of the things that makes Oprah so successful. She’s an expert at finding the emotional hook, and people tune in to get hooked. Sometimes we enjoy being jerked around emotionally - that’s why we go to see movies. It’s also why people forward emails with jingoistic slogans, or about children with cancer. It’s why people slow down as they pass an awful wreck. I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. These things fulfill an important social purpose. We like to empathize.

What I do object to is having these things passed off as prayer requests with directives to forward them to everyone I know. I have no problem with someone sharing their grief or pain with others and asking for prayer. But I’m not going to pray for a sad story. If I know the person who the story affects, I will pray for that person.

I wish I had the courage to hold people accountable for the stuff they forward to me. I imagine calling them up two weeks later. “You remember little Nancy? How is she doing with the chemo? You don’t know who I’m talking about? You know, Little Nancy, the girl you sent me that heartbreaking email about. What do you mean you don’t know? You aren’t still praying for her? You haven’t followed up? Well, golly, I’ve spent the last two weeks absolutely sleepless, on my knees for three, four hours a day, praying for a miracle. I thought for sure, since it was so important to you to forward it to me, that you must be wearing holes in your carpet lying prostrate before the throne of God, that your pillow must be mildewed with your tears. And you’re telling me you don’t remember?”

Nine times out of ten, these things are not prayer requests. In fact, I suspect they actually discourage people from real prayer. They are the online version of slowing down to look at a car wreck. Prayer and action should flow out of each other. There is enough genuine grief in the world that people of faith should be praying for, but to pray for those things might require them to do more than click “forward” on their email client. If you pray for the AIDS crisis in Africa, God might nudge you to do something about it. If you pray for children dying of malaria, maybe you should check out nothing but nets. If you pray for parents who are grieving for a lost child, maybe you should actually go and be present with them. But it’s so much easier to pray for stuff you can’t do anything about, isn’t it? A child with cancer, or “supporting our troops,” stuff that doesn’t actually require us to put anything on the line. Forwarding an email is the religious equivalent of putting a yellow ribbon on the back of your SUV. It shows folks how sensitive and religious you are.

There’s a real life version of the viral email I get all the time. It goes like this: “Pastor, have you heard of [insert name]‘s [insert sad story]? I think you should go visit and pray with them.” I suppose then I should forward it to five of my closest friends.

Monday, March 26, 2007

The Education of Shelby Knox - Mini-review

One of the books I consider essential reading for anyone interested in saving Western Civilization is Revivng Ophelia, by Mary Pipher. Watching the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox is even more powerful if you have Ophelia in mind.

This is a movie about an adolescent girl’s education into the world of activism and politics when she helps lead a campaign for comprehensive sex education in Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock has an abstinence-only policy, a strong religiously conservative demographic, as well as one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. It reminds me of Alabama.

It’s a great discussion starter for conversations about religion and public policy. There are several clips that I will probably use in the future in Sunday school classes and discussion settings. At one point, a local preacher makes the point that “Christianity is the most intolerant religion in the world,” - a rhetorical device intended to shift the conversation from tolerance to faithfulness. It’s a pretty stupid statement, actually. If it is true (which it isn’t), what does that have to do with public policy?

Although I think the movie does a pretty decent job of respecting Shelby’s own faith, I think it shouldn’t have been too difficult to find a non-fundamentalist perspective somewhere in Lubbock. It’s telling that the only Christian voices in the movie (besides Shelby’s) are non-denominational and parachurch voices. Are there no Episcopalians in Lubbock? No Disciples of Christ, no Methodists? Or did the directors leave these interactions out of the picture to highlight Shelby’s own struggle with her faith? As if she alone, unique among Christians, struggles between faithfulness to scripture and belief in democratic ideals?

The best part of the documentary, I thought, is that it shows a supportive Christian family. Sure, there are clearly places where her parents are uncomfortable with her activist stance, and they wish she would do something less political. But, by and large, they support their daughter doing something of significance that is meaningful to her. If you’ve read Ophelia, you know what I’m talking about. For some reason, according to Pipher, religiously conservative dads seem to be better at empowering their daughters and easing their transition to womanhood, on average, than others. This is pretty shocking to most liberal folks concerned with empowering young girls to become healthy outspoken women. But in watching this movie, you can see how this works.

I also think it’s important to note that part of her ability to be outspoken on the issue of sex education was the fact that she had taken the True Love Waits pledge. If she had not, her abstinence-only accusers would have been able to use it as ammunition against her. It reminded me of Paul telling the Corinthians that though he had freedom through Christ, he would not exercise it lest it hurt his message. If she had been advocating comprehensive sex ed from a position of sexual freedom, then her accuser in the Family Values Coalition would have had a moral leg to stand on when he tried to shame her for her activism. But when she pointed out that she was able to be an activist precisely because of her pledge to abstinence, because “not every teenager has a strong faith and a supportive family,” he was himself shamed into silence. I think this is part of what Jesus meant when he said, “your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees.”

Liberal activists need to take notes. If you want to persuade conservative fundamentalist Christians to your cause, you will need a stronger faith, you will need to do more than tithe, you will need to know more scripture, you will need to devote yourself more fully to God than they do. You must be able to be more holy than the holier-than-thous. And if this seems unfair, or too much of a burden, you need to ask yourself what you believe in. The vast majority of people believe what they believe because it fits their lifestyle. If you are an activist, you need to be able to show that you are willing to sacrifice your own personal freedom to advance your beliefs. You have to love the cause more than your lifestyle. 

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Atonement Theory and God’s Justice

This is not a new idea, but try this on for a minute:

We often talk about Jesus’ dying on the cross as the fulfillment of God’s justice. What if it didn’t fulfill God’s justice, but fulfilled ours? What if our justice, and not God’s, put Jesus on the cross?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that Jesus was most truly human even as he was most truly divine. But our sin, as old as Adam and Eve in the garden, is that we reject being truly human because we aspire to be like God. I believe one symptom of our sin of wishing to be God-like is that we establish anti-human religions and perverted systems of ethics, enshrining human power in religious language. We despise our own humanity because we reject the true image of God - prefering instead to make God over in our image.

It is our hatred of that true image of God - our hatred of being human - that accuses Jesus of blasphemy, that puts him on the cross, that taunts him to rescue himself. It is God’s true justice (which, oddly enough, looks just like love) that he stays there and accepts our unjust sentence.

I believe that often (not always), when we say that God’s justice put Jesus on the cross, we legitimate our own perverted systems of power. If the Son is crucified by the Father, we can remain uncritical of human justice. But if human justice, both religious and political, condemned God, then all human justice comes under God’s judgment. And since God willingly submitted to human justice, we get a picture of what real love - and real justice - looks like.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Harry Emerson Fosdick on Doubt

Something about this part of a Fosdick sermon really spoke to me:

...most Christians know about the faith of the great believers, but not about their inner struggles. ...remember William Lyon Phelps. What a radiant Christian faith he had! But listen to him in his autobiography: “My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally sceptical mind.” That experience belongs in the best tradition of the great believers. ...Increase Mather - that doughty Puritan - what a man of faith! Yes, but read his diary and run on entries like this: “Greatly molested with temptations to atheism.” Sing Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” and one would suppose he never questioned his faith, but see him in other hours. “For more than a week,” he wrote, “Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy against God.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick, “The Importance of Doubting our Doubts,” from A Chorus of Witnesses, edited by Long & Plantinga

Monday, March 12, 2007

The School Bus Test

A.J. Levine gave some great advice to preachers when she gave a guest lecture to our homiletics class at Vanderbilt (similar to the one outlined here). She asked us to think about how we portray Jews and Jewishness in our sermons, to remember that Jesus was a Jew, and to please refrain from preaching sermons that would get Jewish kids beat up on the bus.

Here’s a classic example. It’s not a bad sermon as long as it’s dealing with John the Baptist. But then it does something that sermons often do badly. It tries to grapple with a hidden (and wrong) presupposition, “why was the Jewish religion deficient, such that it had to be replaced by Christianity?”

Get a load of this zinger:

“How can a son of Abraham, then, ever worry about being swept away like chaff by the wrath of God?” John is warning the Jews that such a line of reasoning is a great mistake. A person should never think that any merely human distinctive (like Jewishness) can obligate God to bless. The Jews are a great lesson book to all of us who tend to rely on anything for salvation other than the mercy of God.

It begins with a rhetorical question, put in the mind of a straw man who thinks he will be saved by his “Jewishness.” Because, God knows, their history had certainly taught them that Jewishness protects people from the wrath of God - their ancestors had only been carried in captivity in Babylon, had their land given to foreigners, seen their kings and their kings’ sons publicly tortured and executed, felt the grinding boot of occupation by multiple pagan armies, and been harangued by their prophets again and again that it was due to their sin. So of course, they were trusting in their “Jewishness” to avert the wrath of God, right?

And what is that last line supposed to mean? Only a Christian who has completely appropriated the suffering servant passages in Isaiah could ignore that Israel is a lesson book in suffering - by whose stripes the rest of us are healed. If Jesus has redemptive power, it is in part because he carries in his person the whole story of Israel for the world; and if there is hope of resurrection then it is in part a hope that a people who have been crushed repeatedly - by Chaldeans, by Romans, by Europeans, by Christians - will one day be vindicated by God.

I found this sermon while researching John the Baptist, and I don’t mean to pick on J.P. - if all the transcripts of my sermons were on the web, I’m sure there would be more than a few of my paragraphs that would be offensive. But, preachers, when you preach about Judaism, do please try to respect. This is your Savior’s religion you are talking about.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Walking Toward Jerusalem

During this season of Lent, I’m preparing for my own journey to Jerusalem.

In the middle of next month, I’ll be traveling with the Society for Biblical Studies to Jordan and Israel for a 2-week learning experience. Going to the Holy Land has been a dream of mine for several years.

I listened to a sermon for the first time when I was 12 years old. Our pastor, Herb Williamson, had just come back from a trip to the Holy Land with his Ministerial Education group. I remember that as he described hiking up a mountain that looked into the Promised Land, I stopped drawing on the back of the offering envelope, dangling the pencil in my hand, staring at him as he transported me there. I could see the rocks, feel the sun on the back of my neck, smell the sweat of my hiking companions. The stories of Moses ceased being myths related in archaic language and became the stories of real people who sweated and stubbed their toes and felt their hearts move as they looked from that peak into Caanan.

Obviously, I did not know at 12 that I would one day be a preacher. But since I’ve had time to reflect, I’ve thought about that first sermon that I truly listened to, and I’ve wanted what Rev. Williamson had for myself. I want to feel the story become more alive in me - mostly beause I want that feeling. If it helps me preach better, that’s great. But I want most of all that experience that makes me stop and hear again with new ears.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Site Redesign

After working on our church website for a while. I decided to revamp my own site.

This is a work in progress, as you can probably tell. I wanted to see what I could do with Expression Engine. Mark Steinruck does very cool things with it. It’s a pretty nifty content management system, and it is especially appealing because it can grow as I add content. I’ve enjoyed iBlog, and just for ease of use I was seriously considering Apple’s iWeb. But I’m pretty much through with client-side content management. It takes too long to upload the entire site.

Anyway, I’m hopeful that I will be able to make this look somewhat decent. It will probably look like coprian for a while. What I know about CSS could fit into a thimble, but I can cut and paste like a pro.