Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Golden Compass and Hallmarks of Methodism

A friend of mine wrote an awesome article about the recent brouhaha over The Golden Compass and his own reflections on what it means to be a United Methodist. Even if you aren’t Methnocentric, what he says about the Church is wonderful. Go read it!

Monday, February 25, 2008

Pinhole Photography Update

Here are some examples from my recent diddling with pinhole photography:

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Sunday

Sunday comes with relentless regularity.
Sunday comes once a week. It does not delay. And it will not linger.
Punctual.

Sunday does not care that you stayed up too late last night.
It does not care that you have a stuffy nose or a sore throat.
Sunday is not interested in your mood. It does not wait for you to find your voice.
(Your voice will be in the last place you left it.)

It does not allow any of the following excuses: 

writer’s block

lack of inspiration

problematic texts
(It does not excuse much, in fact).

Sunday has only one request: preach the Gospel.

Preach the Gospel to the parents whose baby lies in a incubator, lungs like paper, tubes threaded into tiny veins. Preach the Gospel to the shaking addict. Preach the Gospel to the woman thinking about leaving her man. Preach the Gospel to the ones who doubt God exists, but they want to give you one more chance to convince them otherwise. Preach the Gospel to the self-centered and the self-hating, to the doormats and the bullies, to the bigots and the smallots. Preach the Gospel.

And if you do what it asks, in spite of Monday, Tuesday, and all the other days, occasionally Sunday will give you
grace.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Movie Mini-Review - The Lives of Others

This movie snuck up on me. It started rather slow, but the suspense built over time, and by the time I felt myself sympathizing for the Stasi spy, I had been drawn into the story completely.

I love the way Weisler’s idealism grows and changes him from an efficient authoritarian to a lover of beauty as he keeps the author Dreyfuss and his girlfriend under surveillance. Two days later, I’m still thinking about this movie, wondering if I could get away with preaching it. I could pair it with the story of Paul, perhaps invite listeners to ponder what it means to be a “good man.”

You can read a synopsis of it here. Beware of spoilers.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Why Do We Celebrate Holy Week?

There is an excellent article by John Dominic Crossan on why we celebrate Holy Week called Collision Course: Jesus’ Final Week. The fourth paragraph succinctly summarizes why I often feel frustrated with evangelical culture:

...this widespread Christian understanding of Jesus’ death [as a subsitutionary atonement] is misleading and impoverished. As we listened to our fellow Christians discussing the film [The Passion of the Christ], we realized that vast numbers of them simply did not know the gospel story. They knew how Jesus’ last week ended but not how it began, how it continued day by day, and why it finally went the way that it did. For Christians to recover the whole story of Holy Week is crucially important.

And then later on:

No answer is given to the crucial question, “Why was Jesus killed?” Jesus didn’t simply die; he was executed by the authorities who ruled his world. If we hear only the Good Friday story, we hear the authorities condemning him to death for “blasphemy” but we get no idea of why they acted against him. Jesus’ passion—in the sense of what he was passionate about—remains largely invisible.

Excellent stuff.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Boy Jesus

We don’t know much about Jesus’ childhood. We have the birth narrative, of course, and the story of his parents’ encounter with Simeon and Anna. But we only get one childhood event, from when he was a precocious 12 year-old impressing the scholars in the temple.

The boy Jesus has been fleshed out a bit thanks to recent scholarship on the “Jewishness” of Jesus. A recent twist in this trend has been an interesting discussion about whether it is more appropriate to refer to Jesus as a Jew or a Judean. Rob Bell’s artful teaching-sermons often focus on the Jewish background of the gospels. People eat this stuff up, because for most of their lives they have been served up a Jesus that is context-free, whose pious sayings seem to come out of nowhere. A Jesus without a context, without a childhood in which he learned, is a Jesus without personality. This kind of Jesus, I have argued, is unloveable.

Our culture celebrates and idolizes childhood. Thanks to Sigmund Freud and Charles Dickens, all our biographies of famous people start with their childhood. Who were their parents? What formative events shaped the course of their lives? How did they feel about their mothers? We talk about the inner child, the hierarchy of needs, how people learn to trust, to love, to dream and pursue their ambitions. But childhood in the first century was something else entirely. Children were incomplete persons. They were, some have argued, nobodies. This interpretation makes Jesus’ words about greatness and entering the Kingdom of Heaven more powerful. The disciples ask him who will be greatest in the Kingdom. He says we must become like a child not because children are trusting or innocent (both of which are debatable), but because they are not great. The nobodies are the greatest. When you read it this way, his saying is revolutionary. When you read it the normal way, it’s just sentimental glurge.

And it is at least partially because of this disregard for children, this belief that they should be seen and not heard, that we have almost nothing of Jesus’ childhood.

David Buttrick often said in class that Jesus was not born with a “magic Christian brain.” He did not fall from the sky with an omniscient mind in order to teach Christian doctrine. He was born, educated, and formed by his first-century Jewish context. It was likely while in Nazareth or Capernaum that he learned Hillel’s Golden Rule:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

Compare that to Jesus’ version from the Sermon on the Mount:

Do to others as you would have them do to you. For this is all the Law and the Prophets.

Christians are often surprised that Jesus did not invent the Golden Rule. We attribute more originality to him because of his special status as the God-Man. But no matter how Divine you believe Jesus was, he was fully human - he learned. He was taught. He absorbed the best teachings of his day.

To me, this image of Jesus not only as teacher, but as learner, is part of what makes him lovable. Even if you have a high Christology, even if you believe Jesus was Fully Divine, the Word of God made Flesh - he had to learn how to talk. He had to learn how to think. He would not have walked around as a four-year-old lecturing his parents without getting spanked for sassing back. He had to learn how to share. He had to learn in what contexts it was unacceptable to pick his nose or break wind. These are the things children have to learn. Nobody - not even God - gets to skip childhood.

Once I heard a little girl ask during a children’s sermon: was Jesus ever spanked? I think that question gets to the heart of a tough theological issue. How human was he? Fully human? Did he screw up? Did he get in trouble? Or was he such a sinless goody-two-shoes that he always upheld the status quo, never fought, never lied, and never hurt anyone else. In other words, was he so good that he never actually had to learn anything?

What is being human, if not learning? Growing? Changing? If Jesus did not experience those things, then can it truly be said that he was fully human?

Christians sense this issue underlying the spanking question. I’ve asked other preachers this question, and they hem and haw. “Well,” they say, “the Bible says he was sinless.” Yes, I reply, but that isn’t the question. The question is, did he get spanked?

I suspect that he did - especially after temple incident when he was 12. He ditched his parents to hang out in the temple for three days. When they found him, he said, “why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know I’d be in my father’s house?” Here in Alabama, we call that sassing back. After hunting frantically for three days, do you think his parents stood for that kind of back-talk? Now, I’ve always maintained that corporal punishment is not the best discipline, and I do not advocate spanking. But I’m guessing that, in their frenzied state, after hearing that kind of lip, Joseph and Mary took him out behind the woodshed. And when their arms grew tired, I bet they took turns.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Jesus and Sarcasm

Some people are unconvinced when I tell them that Jesus often uses sarcasm. But here is yet another example: the parable of the unmerciful servant. The story goes like this: a servant owes his boss about a gazillion dollars. He’s brought before the boss and makes a ridiculous plea - “give me a few days, and I’ll pay back everything.” This is nonsense, and the hearers know it. But the king simply waves his hand, and cancels a debt as big a the gross national product of a small country. Then the servant leaves the boss and finds someone who owes him 20 bucks. He roughs his debtor up a bit. His fellow servants witness this injustice, and tattle to the boss.

Now, here is the outrageous part. The boss goes back on his word. The boss does something as morally reprehensible as the unmerciful servant. He reinstates a cancelled debt. Instead of being morally indignant at the servant, we should be morally indignant as the boss! So is this boss our God? Keep in mind that Jesus sometimes uses characters in parables for what God is not like. For example, in the parable of the unjust judge, Jesus obviously does not mean God is like an unjust judge.

Also keep in mind that before Jesus tells the parable of the Unmerciful Servant, he has just told Peter that he should forgive someone who sins against him not seven times, but seventy times seven. He tells Peter, in effect, that he should be an endless well of forgiveness.

Yet another thing to keep in mind about this parable: before talking about forgiveness, Jesus talks about how communities should deal with offenses. First you talk it out privately. If that doesn’t work, you bring in a friend. If that doesn’t work, you take it to the community. Notice that the fellow servants don’t follow this protocol. So every character in the story demonstrates a lack of mercy.

This parable illustrates the opposite of what Jesus says about forgiveness, from top to bottom, from the boss to the fellow servants. It raises the question, what would it be like if God were as unforgiving as we are? And yet though this parable is obviously an example of what God is not like, I’ve heard this passage used as a prooftext that Jesus believed in a hell of eternal torment. “See?” they say. “Jesus says hell is a place where people are tortured until they can pay!” Is that what Jesus really says? If so, then Jesus is also saying that God is a jerk who goes back on his word. If we are meant to read this parable as an allegory of metaphysical reality, then Jesus is a hypocrite - demanding of his followers a kind of forgiveness that surpasses God’s own. Either that… or Jesus is being sarcastic.

But just in case we were too stupid to get the message, Jesus offers this little gem: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat you unless your forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” So in other words, though Jesus tells us to forgive “seventy times seven,” God will trade us forgiveness, tit for tat? No! It’s sarcasm! It’s dry humor, and it’s painful to me that people are so slow to get it. Put the two statements together: “Forgive your brother or sister seventy times seven / but God will torture you for eternity if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Could this be anything but dry humor?

I mention his name often, but I should point out that I owe a good bit of my interpretation of this passage to David Buttrick. As I’ve said before, his teaching really helped me see Jesus in a new way. I recommend his books to all preachers and thoughtful Christians.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Like Hope, But Different

I can’t stop laughing:

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Why Most Christians Don’t Love Jesus (Part 2)

I began to love Jesus when I realized he had a sense of humor.

You don’t get to hear his sense of humor often, because preachers prefer to crack their own jokes. Our jokes are funny, and usually involve something cute a kid said about God. Jesus jokes tend to be rather caustic, and sometimes involve poo-poo, and we don’t use that kind of language in the pulpit. Also, when you tell one of Jesus’ jokes instead of your own, you lose something in translation, and then you are put in the less-than-exciting position of explaining the punchline. In fact, I feel that’s most of what I’m doing when I’m preaching: explaining a punchline that we keep missing. I stand there with my palms upward, my brow furrowed. I ask the congregation, somewhat desperately, “do you get it?”

But I had a hard time relating to Jesus until I realized he used sarcasm. I think we all understand that sarcasm isn’t nice, and if Jesus were nice, he wouldn’t use sarcasm. Thank God he wasn’t nice. Realizing he wasn’t nice was liberating. If Jesus was sometimes sarcastic, might it be okay with God if I was snarky sometimes?

It happened while I was in a class with David Buttrick on the Parables of Jesus. There were two stories in particular - jokes, really, although we call them parables. Let me set up the joke first. The Judeans were tired of being kicked around, and they loved this passage of scripture from Ezekiel chapter 17:22 and following:

” ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the field will know that I the LORD bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. 
” ‘I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it.’ “

They often compared nations to trees, and they had this dream that one day they would be a great nation, God would vindicate them, and people from all over the world would come to Jerusalem to worship at the temple. Well, then Jesus comes along and tells them this story:

Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”

So for centuries preachers have preached about the tiny mustard seed growing into a tree, some going so far to posit that there must have been some other kind of species of tree called a mustard tree. But the point of the story is that Jesus is making fun! The mustard plant is a weed. It’s more like a dandelion than a tree. It’s a joke! He’s being sarcastic! It would be like someone saying about the United States - “ah yes, America, the great eagle. That ferocious predator whose favorite food is road kill. America, that great melting pot where everyone is a descendent of illegal immigrants. America, that shining city on a hill - and the hill is made of human skulls, and the brightest light in that city is a sign for McDonald’s.”

If Jesus goes around saying things like that, it’s no wonder he gets himself killed. But it’s also no wonder that people stand up and follow him.

Another time, in Luke 13:8, Jesus tells a parable about the day of judgment, the day of the Lord that is coming when the bad guys will all get what’s coming to them, and the righteous will all be saved. But that Great Day keeps not coming. Here they are, thumbing through their copies of Left Behind, wondering how much longer they have to wait. Jesus says the nation is, again, like a tree that hasn’t produced fruit. So the owner comes and says, “cut it down! This tree has been barren for 8 years, it doesn’t have any leaves, and it’s rotten on the inside.” The gardener replies, “give me another year to work with it.” And then your Bible (the NIV, naturally) puts it very delicately - “let me put some fertilizer around it.” Only Jesus doesn’t say fertilizer. He uses a much more colorful term. The idea here is that you’re looking at a stick in the ground, and the gardener is begging for a stay of execution, saying if he just has one more year to work some shit (coprion) into the soil, he’ll make it produce. It’s ridiculous!

But the fact that Jesus uses humor to make his point tells me that there’s a real person here, under the text. We’re talking about a person who cracked jokes, who had a edge, who wasn’t afraid to offend people. And when I began to learn about that Jesus, I began to fall in love with him. So, as I said, the turning point in my relationship with Jesus was learning he had a sense of humor.

Now, I know that we often remake Jesus in our own image. To professors, Jesus is teacher, to liberals, he’s a liberal, to conservatives, he’s a conservative, to mystics, he’s a guru, and to me, he’s a vulgar liberal evangelical theologian. But… there’s a real Jesus under here somewhere if we will simply dig a bit. He resists all those attempts to boil him down to one thing or another, because there is always another facet to his personality. And one of the important things about being in a relationship with a real person is that you are always learning more about them. They push you, and you grow. You push back, and it becomes a kind of dance. It sounds more romantic than it is, but if you’ve been in a relationship like that, you understand. I’ve only been married 13 years, but I know there is more to both my wife and me that we each have yet to learn. Likewise, I expect to learn more about Jesus through study, prayer, worship, experience… but most of all through mutual friends, other people who know him well and who can shed a bit more light on his personality.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Why Most Christians Don’t Love Jesus (Part 1)

I have a confession to make. For most of my life as a Christian, I have not loved Jesus. Sure, after my conversion experience, I believed (some) Christian doctrines. I believed Jesus was the Son of God, and that it was important to have a “personal relationship” with him (whatever those things mean), yadda yadda yadda. But I didn’t love him.

I recently saw some “man on the street” interviews in which the interviewer asked kids and adults who claimed to be Christian how they would describe Jesus. Most of them said:

Really nice? And… um… kind? And… um… Forgiving? Just, you know, really… nice.

Nice. Do you know what nice means? It means no second date. As in:

“So, how was the blind date?”
“Fine.”
“Well what did you think of him?”
“Oh he was nice.”

You know there’s not going to be a second date. No love there. On the other hand, if you describe someone you are madly, passionately in love with, you will almost never use the word “nice.” This is a word you use about someone only if they completely fail to make an impression on you. They don’t stir you up, they don’t make you angry, and they certainly don’t help you grow. People describe Jesus that way because they Jesus they know has no personality.

So I knew that I was supposed to love Jesus, that we ought to love Jesus, but how can you love someone so abstract? With no body, no physical presence? Who doesn’t talk to you? How can you love someone with all your heart and soul and mind if you never see them and you never hear their voice? That’s not a relationship. That’s neglect. Oh, I know, the spiritual folks say things like, “but he talks to me all the time. He talks to me through the sunsets, and the oceans, and through the silence.” Well why doesn’t he use verbs and nouns like everyone else? “He talks through the Bible.” Oh please.

But most Christians are afraid of this kind of talk, as I have discovered when I ask them about it. They, too, know they are supposed to love Jesus, but nobody has ever told them how. And I believe that deep down they know that the only answer they have to the question “why should I love Jesus,” is “so you don’t go to hell.” So under threat of eternal damnation, we’re supposed to flex some internal muscle to love someone we don’t know, can’t see or hear, and who has no personality beyond nice.

In addition to this improbable emotional obligation, Christians often tell others in our culture (especially teenagers) that although Jesus doesn’t like the music they listen to, the movies they watch, the books they read, their atheist friends, their clothes, their attitude, or anything about them, he loves them. So it isn’t surprising that many people find it difficult to muster up the emotional energy to love Jesus.

Another reason I’m pretty sure most Christians don’t love Jesus is that occasionally I’ll hear Christians wonder, “why did they kill Jesus? Why couldn’t they see that he was the messiah?” It bewilders them because the Jesus they’ve been taught all their life is not dangerous, is not threatening, upholds the status quo and walks around in a bathrobe spouting trite sayings that sound like they were stolen from Hallmark greeting cards. “Blessed are the meek, blessed are the quiet, blessed are those who act like doormats, blessed are those who are nice to puppies.” One professor I had said that the only reason anyone would want to kill such a Jesus is because he was boring. When Jesus’ message is “be nice, don’t cause trouble, go to church, and support the status quo,” it’s no wonder people don’t feel any love for this perfect, sinless, goody-two-shoes.

But Jesus must have been electric. Dazzling. His disciples were ready to die for him. His words galvanized people, and threatened people, and he was dangerous enough to be killed. You can get a sense of this kind of passion during election years. People get out the door and go to a polling station and vote, they get into arguments over coffee, and they disown members of their own family based on their passion for Obama, or Clinton, or McCain, or Huckabee. And many times this passion is based as much on a figure’s personality as it is on any particular issue. People write fan mail to Bono or J.K. Rowling, they go on pilgrimages to Graceland, because they are a fan (fanatic) of someone they hardly know.

Jesus must have been the same way. People got so worked up about Jesus that they rejected family members, that arguments broke out whenever someone mentioned his name. He was such a lightning rod that the establishment put out a contract on him. What about him inspired such love and hatred?

I’m not sure anyone could ever answer the questions completely, but over the 7 Sundays of Lent and Easter I’m going to give it my best shot.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Pinhole Camera Experiment

I built a pinhole camera out of an oatmeal box. The rounded container creates a great wide-angle effect. The pinhole is about .0017 inch in diameter - that’s an f-stop of something like 265. I exposed it for 8 seconds using photo paper. Considering that it was windy and the box was shaking slightly, I think it took a good pic. In the pic I’m actually holding the shutter - a piece of gaffer’s tape - in my right hand. I peeled it off and walked over to that spot, then walked back and re-applied it.

There’s something cool about how low-tech a pinhole camera is. In this digital age, it’s a lot of fun to make a camera with found and recycled materials, and to develop a photo by dipping it into toxic chemicals. It’s about as basic and primitive as you can get. Who needs a $600 digital SLR? (Well, I want one anyway, but this is still cool).

There’s something about framing a photograph that can seem sacramental, if it’s done well. The one I took, at right, is not one of those photos. But this is.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Rearranging the Furniture

I spent part of my vacation rearranging this site. I hope you like the new look. It’s a more scaled-down design borrowed from Matthew James Taylor’s excellent design site. I’ve been wanting to streamline things for a while now, and this template fit the bill.

There are still some broken links here and there. The rss feed was acting up earlier, but I think I’ve tamed it now. I’ve moved most of my bloggy stuff (blogroll, links, etc.) to the other things section.

I’m also updating my Technorati Profile.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Words and Power

You may or may not have seen this video:

I’m always a bit cynical, a bit skeptical. I know enough about how language works in the human psyche to understand the power of engaging the emotions. So there’s a piece of me that always regards inspiration with a critical eye. And whenever celebrities get on a bandwagon, that piece of me folds its arms and says, “humph! Bah, humbug!” After all, remember “We Are the World?”

Obama is not a savior. He is a man. And like everyone else in the world, he is an ordinary sinner. If he is elected, he will disappoint. He will fail. He will make wrong decisions, and he will have to endure the projected self-hatred of an entire nation when he does.

And yet… grace is that free, unmerited loving action of God, that sometimes gives human beings the right word at the right time, so that, flawed as we are, we sometimes speak the truth just by trying. The Bible is full of flawed heroes who were heroes not because they were perfect, but because they were the right person doing the right thing or speaking the right action at the right time. So it isn’t too far off for Obama to invoke the image of Moses looking into the promised land, just as it wasn’t wrong for Martin Luther King, Jr. to do so.

Everyone… everyone recognizes that truth has power. I thought today’s Doonesbury captures the idea well: every candidate is talking about change, even the Republicans, but nobody articulates that truth as well as Obama.

And why the cynicism? Isn’t it simply a kind of learned helplessness, a resignation that every election must be choice between the lesser of two evils, that democracy only serves the interests of wealthy and powerful people, that politicians cannot be trusted?

Let me ask another question: who benefits from our cynicism? Who counts on it? Who profits by it? Who wins when young people stay away from the polls? Who benefits when we believe that all rhetoric is spin, that all government is bad, that nothing we say or do makes a difference?

You know the answer.

So optimism and helplessness are not mere reactions. They are political choices with political consequences. They are the difference between going back to eating the thin gruel of Egyptian slavery or pressing on to the Promised Land.

To those of you who haven’t been to church in a while: this is good preaching. This is why people invoke religious language when talking about Obama. Words have power, and the Powers fear the Word.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Snowball Fight

Occasionally it does snow in Alabama.