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Saturday, June 26, 2010

Social Justice FAQ

I was really ready to focus on something other than social justice for a while, but last week I received a call from a woman from another church who had read that I was developing a curriculum on social justice for the North Alabama Conference.

After asking me to define social justice, she asked, “but doesn’t that mean getting involved in politics?”
Yes, I replied.
“But won’t that jeopardize the church’s tax-exempt status?”
Well, I said, my first answer is no, because precedent indicates that churches can be politically active as long as they don’t endorse candidates. My second answer is, so what? Even if we lose our tax-exempt status we still have an obligation to preach the gospel.
“Well, I have a copy of the IRS tax code right here,” she said.

Ding.

In other words, she called in order to have an argument. So, I obliged. For the next hour and a half.

“...and it says that a church can be classified as a 501(c)(3) organization as long as ‘no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation.’”
First of all, I replied, there’s a lot of leeway in that statement. “Substantial part” would be what - 5%? And do you honestly think any judge in America is going to tell an African-American church that they can’t preach about civil rights, or affirmative action, or the historical importance of having a black president? Is any judge in America going to tell a conservative church they can’t campaign against abortion?

But I’m grateful to her, because I guess if she hadn’t called, I wouldn’t be sitting here on a Saturday working on a curriculum to educate Alabamians about social justice. A large number of United Methodists get more of their political theology from Glenn Beck and Mark Tooley than they do from John Wesley. So here is a draft of the Social Justice FAQ (which will go at the end of the document).

These questions are abstracted from that conversation. I’ll post a rhetorical analysis of the questions themselves at the end of this document.

I appreciate any feedback that helps me refine the document:

——————————————

Social Justice FAQ:
Doesn’t social justice mean getting involved in politics? What about the separation of church and state?

Women’s suffrage, Civil Rights, the abolition of slavery, and child labor laws were all the result of churches “getting involved” in politics. It is hard to imagine how many of these movements would have ever grown without the involvement of religious leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Sojourner Truth, William Wilberforce, and John Wesley. The first Methodist social creed was written in 1908 as a direct response to the crisis of child labor in the United States. Churches have always been involved in politics, because preaching the gospel inevitably means creating political conflict. When Paul visited Ephesus (Acts 19:20-41) and preached against idolatry, the city’s idol-makers tried to stir up the city against him for economic reasons.

Many churches, especially mainline Protestant churches, try to be “neutral” on political issues for fear of alienating some members or creating conflict. Even during these historical crises and shifts in culture, some Christians insisted that churches should, “stay out” of the Civil Rights movement, or of child labor legislation. What would have happened if they had?

The separation of church and state does not mean the separation of religion and politics. Separation of church and state avoids excessive government entanglement in religion, and allows religious groups to operate freely without persecution. The separation of church and state has allowed religion to thrive in the United States (while state-sponsored churches have declined in Europe), and has allowed a rich tradition of churches who promote civic engagement among their members.

Because we live in a [representative democracy], churches not only can but should be involved in politics. Since we the people make the decisions, we the people are accountable to God for how our cities, states, and nation run.

Won’t being involved in politics jeopardize churches’ tax-exempt status?

As a 501c(3) organization, a church can weigh in on matters of social policy and particular political issues, but it cannot campaign for or against any candidates themselves (Rossoti v. Branch Ministries, D.D.C. 1999). A list of the kinds of activities a church can engage in is available from the IRS at http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=170946,00.html.

The IRS even allows the publication of “voter guides,” which often include lists of issues and a summary of a candidates’ position on those issues. The IRS code states that “...certain “voter education” activities, including preparation and distribution of certain voter guides, conducted in a non-partisan manner may not constitute prohibited political activities under section 501(c)(3) of the Code.” (page 2, http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-07-41.pdf).

The same rule even says that candidates may participate in a public forum or debate as part of a voter education event. Churches may allow candidates to speak at their functions and may participate in voter registration drives. Focus on the Family has provided a summary of church political activities permitted under the 501(c)(3) rules here: http://www.citizenlink.org/pdfs/PastorsGuidelines_summary.pdf. Obviously, the same rules apply to churches of any political persuasion.

Won’t being involved in political activity cause divisions in the church?

Maybe.

In 1844, disputes over slavery led to a schism in the Methodist church. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, split into their own denomination. They removed from their General Rules the rule against owning slaves. So there are certainly precedents for denominations and even individual churches splitting over contentious issues.

But there are also churches and denominational bodies who are more united in how they engage the larger world. Conservative churches who protest abortion clinics and African-American churches who demonstrate against racism do not seem to worry about whether their activities divide the church.

Being politically neutral has not helped mainline Protestant churches grow in the last few decades. It has not helped them attract young people to church or lead people to Christ. Although we in the U.S. often describe ourselves in terms of “liberal” or “conservative,” there are often social justice issues that cross political boundaries. The environmentalism and creation care movement has seen churches across the political spectrum unite on important environmental issues.

Both “liberal” and “conservative” United Methodist churches have been struggling with declining membership in the last few decades. Ignoring social justice will not reverse that trend, and instead will simply make the church more irrelevant to a new generation.

Shouldn’t we just preach Christ, and Christ alone?  Isn’t the real message of Christianity about saving souls?

Jesus kicked off his ministry with a political statement: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ You can read the whole story in Luke 4:16-30.

The “year of the Lord’s favor” is a reference to the Jubilee year, when all debts were canceled and all slaves were freed (Leviticus 25:8-13). This commandment was supposed to be carried out every 50 years, but had long been neglected. Jesus was saying that his ministry was the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah, that God would reset the clock and bring justice to the world. (Some people say that Jesus never preached against slavery, but I believe his first sermon made explicit where he stood on the subject.)

Even before Jesus was born, people knew the messiah would bring social justice. Listen to his mother, Mary’s song from Luke 1:52-53: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Jesus talked more about the “Kingdom of God” than anything else. The Kingdom was not just a place we go when we die - it was the reign of God on earth. The language he uses is firmly in line with all the language of the prophets. When Jesus preaches his famous prophecy about the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, he describes very clearly the kind of behavior he expects from his followers.

The people who heard his message would have known, when he talked about judging sheep and goats, that he was also referring to Ezekiel 34:17-19. This is one of the clearest examples in the Bible about God’s interest in environmental justice: “When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?” So when Jesus talked about feeding the hungry, he wasn’t just telling his audience to be charitable; by using the language of Ezekiel he was also reminding them that they should be stewards of the earth.

So, preaching Christ means preaching social justice. There is no way to split one from the other. Evangelism, missions of mercy, and social justice go hand-in-hand

I understand that Jesus says we should individually help the poor, but he doesn’t say anywhere the government should. Isn’t it enough for Christians to help the poor individually?

Jesus also never said that there should be a separation of church and state, or that democracies are better than dictatorships. Making this kind of distinction between individuals and government puts modern ideas and words back into Jesus’ mouth. Roman Emperors and Judean Kings had no concept of things like “democracy” or “the consent of the governed.”

Amos told the nation of Israel that they were experts at acting individually religious, but that all their worship was worthless as long as they continued to oppress the poor. He called on the nation to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (5:24). Is this a command directed at individuals? At governments? At whole societies?

God repeatedly holds entire cities and nations accountable for their treatment of the poor. Ezekiel 16:49 says “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” God punishes the firstborn of every family in Egypt for Pharoah’s reluctance to let the Hebrews free from slavery. The prophets accuse whole societies of idolatry and injustice to the poor. If God holds nations accountable for the actions of their rulers or even of a majority, would God not hold every [voting member of a republic] accountable for their nation’s actions?

In addition, as shown above in his reference to the sheep and goats, Jesus frequently cites the prophets in addressing how whole communities should behave. He assumed that his listeners would be Biblically literate enough to make the connection between the prophets’ words and his own. Jesus did not just come to save souls - he came to save the world.

Historical examples show us that it is impossible to address some injustices as individuals. As a slave owner in the 1800’s, you might be kind to your slaves and still believe you were doing what the gospel required of you. But even a slave owner who freed their slaves could not end slavery without government action. As a factory-owner in the 1900’s, you might refuse to hire children. But you could not end child labor through your hiring practices.

Some obstacles that keep people poor - lack of health care, poor education, bad neighborhoods, lack of access to healthy food, human traficking - can only be overcome by community or government action. Of course, others can only be overcome by individual action. The answer is for the church not to put all its emphasis either on individual or collective action.

I understand social justice for life and death issues like slavery and child labor, but what about others? How do you decide which issues are important?

One incredulous woman told me that she understood that slavery, women’s suffrage, and child labor were important. These historical issues were “life and death” issues. But she did not consider Alabama Constitutional reform, grocery taxes, and other such issues “life and death,” and thought the church should stay out of them.

For privileged and comfortable people, slavery, child labor, Civil Rights, and women’s suffrage were not “life and death” issues, either. Slave owners had a vested interest in saying that the church should stay out of politics. After all, they would argue, they treated their slaves well. 100 years later, white opponents of civil rights could claim - rightly - that white churches would drive some members away if they preached against segregation. Here in Birmingham, some of those churches never recovered from their principled stand. Earlier in this century, wealthy factory owners actually claimed that keeping children out of the workplace would deprive poor families of important income and drive up the cost of labor. All of these examples point to the fact that everywhere that churches preach social justice, they will encounter resistance from people who want to keep things as they are. People who benefit from injustice have all they need - money, political power, health care, a supply of cheap labor - and they don’t want the power of the gospel disrupting their lives.

For those who live in privilege, grocery tax legislation, Alabama Constitutional reform, public transportation, gambling, environmental justice, health care reform, and American foreign policy are not “life and death” issues. But for those who are struggling in poverty, those whose lives are affected by climate change or industrial pollution, those who do not have access to health care, these are “life and death” issues. Oppressed people long to hear the words of Jesus, that today is the day they will be set free.

Every injustice that keeps people poor, or voiceless, or that treats people as something less than human beings created in the image of God is an issue worth addressing in church. God is still at work in our world, freeing prisoners, giving people second chances, and transforming lives. God will continue to work, with or without your church. The question for your church is simply, “Will you get on board with what God is doing in the world?”

——————————————-

I think it’s worth pointing out that each of these questions is really intended to undercut the idea of preaching social justice. Let’s unmask the rhetoric operating in each question:
a) there is no need for it because the issues are not important enough (to me),
b) there is no Biblical mandate for using government or collective action to address justice; individuals should handle it on their own,
c) the issues may be important but avoiding conflict and retaining members is more important,
d) preaching social justice will divert attention from the more important task of saving souls,
e) preaching social justice is somehow against the law or will result in negative legal consequences

Folks, that’s really all they got. Learn to recognize when someone deploys these rhetorical strategies. They are pretty easy to refute if you know your Bible.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Sexist Praise Songs

There’s a song titled “More Precious Than Silver,” which goes:

Lord you are more precious than silver
Lord you are more costly than gold
Lord you are more beautiful than diamonds
And nothing I desire compares with you.

Which is all fine and good, and it certainly has a pretty tune. But it struck me today as I was reading Proverbs that it’s an appropriated metaphor. The original text is a praise of Lady Wisdom:

Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding
for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold
She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. (Proverbs 3:13-15)

Most congregations, of course, are far more comfortable addressing our hymns and love songs to THE LORD, who we will refer to in the masculine gender. I wonder, how many congregations would be comfortable singing a love song to Lady Wisdom? Look, it’s more Biblical, and it even fits the meter just fine. So why do the lyrics substitute THE LORD for Lady Wisdom?

Wisdom is more precious than silver
Knowledge is more costly than gold
Wisdom is more beautiful than diamonds,
And nothing I desire compares with her.

Egad!

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Bono’s Open Letter to Italy and the G8

Great quotable bits from Bono’s letter:

This agitation on the subject of extreme poverty comes mainly from mothers, school teachers, students, churchgoers. When it comes from spoiled rotten rich rock stars it gets more attention, but it’s much harder to take — particularly when those rock stars are Irish. We know that’s an absurdity. But so is a child dying of a tiny mosquito bite in the 21st century.

Love thy neighbour is not advice — it’s a command.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Calvin’s Comeback

John Petty of Progressive Involvement puts it better than I ever could: Calvin’s comeback vastly overrated. 

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

In-carn-ation

Say these words:
carnal
carnival
carnage
charnel
carnation
carnivore
chili con carne

All have the same root word as “incarnation.” When you think about the word family this high-falutin’ theological notion comes from, it’s actually pretty shocking. Incarnation is the doctrine that God became meat.

John 1:14 says, “the word became flesh and lived among us…” “Flesh” sounds a bit better. Unless you know German. In German, “fleisch” is also meat.

Sure, at Christmas time it’s very cute meat. It gurgles and coos and lies in a manger with a bunch of animals whose destiny is also to be meat. But for a time it’s sufficient that the animals and the baby be adorable. We can cover the whole thing with a veneer of respectability and sentiment and pretend that it isn’t terrifying. But the fact is that we are so afraid of being mortal, of being worm food, that we dare not contemplate a God who trades a “spiritual” transcendence for life as flesh.

Maybe calling him the “bread of life” sounds a bit more reverent. A loaf of bread, wrapped in a napkin, lying in a feeding trough. Any way you slice it, he’s still food.

Merry Christmas!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Uncomfortable with Incarnation

Man, we are so uncomfortable with incarnation. I think Christians are more afraid of this doctrine than they are of hell.

I preached a sermon in our traditional service on January 30. It was about Joseph, a minor character in the Christmas story. He gets no dialogue, appears only in the background of nativity paintings, and vanishes after Jesus turns 12. I contrasted Joseph with Herod, who made his mark on history by building, killing, and dragging Judea into the modern (Roman) world.

In the sermon, I mentioned that Joseph was the Father of God. It’s a phrase that makes us uncomfortable. God doesn’t have a father - God is the Father! Heresy! But if Jesus is fully God, and Mary is his mother, then she is the Mother of God. Roman Catholics, by and large, don’t have a problem with this phrase. But then that makes Joseph his father. I pointed out that fatherhood is not about genes - it’s not about who conceived Jesus. Whether it was the Holy Spirit imparting that miraculous Y chromosome to Jesus or not, Joe is the father. He’s the one who holds Jesus in his arms and gives him his name, he’s the one who takes him to synagogue and teaches him to be a tekton, a builder. And when people hear Jesus speak and wonder, “isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Joseph’s heart swells and he thinks, “that’s my boy.” Jesus had a father, and Joseph was Jesus’ role model. When Jesus refers to God as “Abba,” it is because he first referred to Joseph as “Abba.” He understands a father’s love because he has been on the receiving end. Jesus is Joseph’s father.

Lucky for us gentiles, because we are God’s adopted children. If Joseph had not adopted Jesus, we would not have been adopted, either.

But, as I said, we are uncomfortable with all the implications of incarnation. Someone approached me afterward and said, “I think Joseph was his adopted father.” I mumbled some inadequate reply, but I should have said, “so?” As if Joseph went around introducing Jesus as “my bastard adopted son.”

Yes, God had a father, and a mother, and experienced dirty diapers and blisters and gas and zits and went through puberty and got bullied and earned a few scars long before he ever felt the lash of a Roman soldier. Why are we so uncomfortable with that?

Because we hate being human. We hate being finite. Dying. Feeling pain, being weak. And if someone says that God at God’s best looks like us at our worst, then what do we need God for? Give us the military might of Rome. Give us the power of Herod. That’s a God we would respect. Not a loser on a cross. Not a baby in a feed trough.

God was born, in-carn-ated, that we might have carnal, fleshly, knowledge of God. For many of us, it’s knowledge we can do without, thank you very much.

What would Christianity look like if we took incarnation seriously?

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

The Bible, Uncensored

I’m excited. I get to teach a version of Your Vulgar Bible as a Sunday morning class this winter. It’s a ten-week course and covers scatalogical humor, stories about sex and power, and scandalous theology. We will be exploring the stories of Ehud, Samson, Ruth, some parables of Jesus and some of Paul’s hyperbolic rhetoric.

I’m supposedly writing a book on this topic, but I was somewhat discouraged when I checked Amazon recently and found that someone has beaten me to it. Actually, there are several such books. But from a cursory overview I don’t see any that seem to address why the Bible is censored, what theological value there is to the “naughty bits,” and how we can wrestle with those texts in church.

The usual answer to the first question, why the Bible is censored, is that “people are uptight” about things like sex, violence, and poop. But I think there is more to it than that. I think that there are very powerful reasons for theological shallowness. There are social and political motivations for denying the incarnation. God in human flesh is perhaps the most terrifyingly threatening doctrine there is - far more threatening than the flames of hell or the final judgment. Those doctrines tend to support the status quo. Incarnation undermines it.

The word of God was wrapped in human flesh. This is, after all, what Christmas is about. He preached, slept, ate, and farted. Moreover, he continues to live wrapped in the human flesh of the church - in idea which leaves me both giddy and mortified. People who are too uncomfortable with this idea should try out a much less problematic religion.

Friday, November 30, 2007

A Reflection on Atheism

I’ve put off posting so long because when I’ve started to continue writing about atheism and faith, a strange conviction has hit me. It’s that most of the things vocal atheists believe, I believe too.

Some atheists are prophets. They denounce childish belief in a white-bearded God. I do too. They criticize the church for its inhumanity. I do too. They reprimand believers for clinging to God-belief to fulfill their own inadequacies, prop up their own hypocrisy, and bolster their political rhetoric. I do too. They lambaste Christians with mushy liberal theology and point out that our collective belief in God may actually kill us as a species. And they are right to do so. In fact, most of the frustration and incredulity they feel toward religion is echoed in my own heart.

I meditate on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, how he longed for a “religionless Christianity in a world come of age.” I think he meant more than faithful secularism. I see a world come of age as a mature world, an adult world that doesn’t need to use God for an explanation or an excuse for the universe and our place in it, but who recognizes God as a friend. I think that’s what God wants – for us to grow into the stature of Christ. These religionless Christians would recognize that they in-carn-ate, enflesh Christ, that God has taken up residence in a slice of humanity to be Christ’s broken-and-resurrected body for the world – not to rule the world, explain it, or remake it in our image..

Bonhoeffer had a very high theology of the church. But he also saw it through the atheist’s eyes and the eyes of the prophets. The church is a whore. She sells herself for money and political advantage, cozies up to Hitler as well as Wal-Mart. But she is also a blushing bride, and Christ’s own body. Sure, it’s a misogynistic metaphor, but it taps into that double-identity of the church in culture.

As for the existence of God – look, we’re talking about a God whose name is “I am that I am.” Buechner points out that the experience of Easter is an experience of emptiness – an empty tomb, an open future. One of the most powerful parts of the Bible is when Christ, the incarnate Word of God, experiences God-forsakenness. The Biblical authors cried out when God hid God’s face. Tillich’s theology is based on the idea that we can’t talk about God existing, as if God were a thing alongside other things. Instead, God is the ground of being. We as human beings are somewhere between being and non-being, but God encompasses even non-being.

The question of God’s existence is fundamental to human experience. We experience presence and mystery, but we also experience absence and loneliness. Human beings, with a straight face, standing on a planet with 6 billion people as well as animals and plants of every species, will look at the heavens and ask, “are we alone in the universe?” (If we found alien species on a distant planet, would there be some kind of comfort in being alone together?)

Some believers and non-believers wonder if God is a poetic metaphor. I’m reminded of the two men sitting on the beach in the movie Il Postino. The postman asks the poet, “are you saying all of existence is a metaphor for something else?” We can barely understand our own language. How can we parse the Word of God? If God is a metaphor, then God is a metaphor that’s more real than the real world we encounter every day. I held the hand of a man before he was wheeled into surgery for the last time. I prayed some weak prayer about healing or somesuch, and he looked at me with red-rimmed eyes, knowing he would probably die, squeezed my hand and said, “God is real.” When they wheeled him out of the prep room, I knew he was right. This is more than “belief in belief,” or holding up faith as a virtue. Both doubt and belief, the experience of God as mystery, says something about the nature of God. Christmas - the incarnation - is about the abstract becoming real, the universal becoming particular.

People who grapple with these ideas often get frustrated and throw up their hands. Believers say the word “faith” they way you might say “uncle” after your older brother wrestles you to the ground and twists your arm until your ligaments cry for mercy. But Jacob holds on to God until the sun rises. He never says uncle. He doesn’t get to see the face of God, but he does get a blessing.

Faith is not giving up the struggle. Faith is hanging on. An atheist says, “you’re only shadowboxing.” I say I’ve got a limp that proves otherwise.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

The God Who Wasn’t There Part 4: The Historicity of Jesus

This post is a continuation of my reflections on the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, by Brian Flemming.

Flemming argues that Jesus didn’t exist, and that the gospel accounts are attempts to place a mythological idea into real history. It’s tough for me to ascertain whether he thinks the gospel writers themselves meant their work to be read as history or not. He seems to draw a lot of his ideas on this point from Earl Doherty.

I recently took a trip to the Holy Land. One of the coolest things about the trip was that I got to see many of the places referenced in the gospels - the Garden of Gethsemane, the remains of the Fortress Antonia, the Temple Mount, Capernaum, and the Lake of Galilee.

Now, the fact that these places exist is not proof that Jesus existed. But it makes it really hard for me to swallow the idea that these stories were invented or transposed from a mythical realm to historical reality - which is what Flemming argues. When Jesus talks about the religious leaders being “white-washed tombs,” there, across the Kidron valley, sit white-washed tombs. When Jesus says “the Gates of Hades” won’t conquer this new movement, there’s the real Gates of Hades, a cave in the cliff at Caesarea Phillppi. When the gospels tell of Jesus waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane, you can stand in the Garden and realize how deliberately strategic his choice of location was: far enough outside the walls to prevent a riot, but not so far that the temple police would have trouble arresting him.

But Flemming’s argument is that these gospels take what the early Christians understood to be an event in a mythical realm and historicize it. He says that Paul, whose writings are the earliest about Jesus, shows almost no knowledge of the stories of the gospels - no virgin birth, no healings or miracle stories, no Last Supper, and little of the other material we associate with Jesus. He says, “Paul doesn’t know any of what we would call the story of Jesus.” The only thing Paul seems aware of in his letters, says Flemming, is that Jesus died, was resurrected, and ascended.

Flemming gives a thumbnail sketch of the timeline of the early stages of Christianity. Most Biblical scholarship puts Jesus’ birth around 0-3 AD, his death at 33 AD, and the writing of the Gospel of Mark after 76 AD. Like many other critics of Christianity, he asserts that the spread of Christianity is largely due to Paul’s activity between Jesus’ death and the first Gospel: “without Paul, Christianity would likely not exist,” and “he traveled widely and in his wake left behind groups of new Christians, who formed the early Christian church.” And Paul, he implies, is not entirely reliable - or even mentally stable. Regarding the time between Jesus’ alleged ascendeding and the writing of Mark, he says, “there’s a gap of 40 decades or more, and most of what we know of this period comes from a man who says he saw Jesus Christ come to him in a vision.”

To show that Paul didn’t believe in a historical Jesus, he quotes from the Letter to the Hebrews:

Paul puts the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension in a mythical realm. (slide: “If Jesus had been on earth, he would not even have been a priest.” Hebrews 8:4.)

The first problem I have with Flemming’s use of scripture here is that I’m not convinced that this verse has anything to do with a mythical realm. The second problem I have is that Paul didn’t write Hebrews.

Now, I often make mistakes, and I often do so in a way that hurts whatever argument I happen to be making at the time. So I understand that Flemming’s failure to do his homework doesn’t disprove the gist of his argument. He was probably taught that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews at his fundamentalist Christian school. But the letter itself never makes any claim about its authorship, and most scholars believe someone other than Paul wrote it.

Here’s why I don’t buy Flemming’s argument.

First, the fact that Paul was a prolific writer and had a great impact on the formation of the early church does not mean he was single-handedly responsible for the growth of The Church. In fact, a lot of his letters are to already-existing communities about establishing his credentials, arguing with dissident missionaries, and fundraising for the church in Jerusalem so that he can gain legitimacy for his mission to the Gentiles. His letters also often refer to an impending end of the age, when Christ will return and set things to rights.

Second, it is this impending eschaton, the end of the age, which explains why there is an absence of existing Christian writings for 40 years. Why write anything down? Who would be around to read it? Besides, the written materials, the early Church’s holy scriptures, already existed - in the Hebrew Bible. There may also have been another source document circulating, which scholars refer to as “Q,” which would have served to help the early Christians remember the sayings of Jesus around their central act of worship: the Lord’s Supper. Which Paul does reference. Repeatedly.

Third, beyond offhand references to “the Virgin Birth” and “miracles,” I haven’t actually told any stories in this post, because I assume you are familiar with them. Does that prove I don’t know them? Would Paul need to reference these stories in his letters? No way. Especially if he was writing out of a motivation to a) to respond to questions from communities in trouble, like Corinth and Galatia, or b) to establish his theological credentials and raise funds, as in Romans.

Fourth, the generally-accepted theory of the spread of the early church and the writing of the Gospels is that apostles and other Jesus-followers were scattered by early persecutions (of which Paul was a part). It makes sense that the communities of believers that formed around these early evangelists believed in the imminent Kingdom of God and began to write as they died off. The Gospel of John is most explicit about the community’s concern when their leader died: we thought Jesus would come back first! It is clear that a good bit of the New Testament writings were the early church’s way of dealing with the delayed return of a very historical Jesus from heaven. They expected this return in history. If the earliest understanding of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection was in a mythical realm, then why would they go through such efforts to explain his failure to return quickly? The calming of the storm, the resurrection of Lazarus, the parable of the talents, all can be read as how the church deals with Christ’s unexpected delay. As Martha cries, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” Or as the disciples cry out in the middle of the storm, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?”

Now, the historical perspective I’ve outlined does not require anyone to believe in the Divinity of Jesus. Plenty of atheists believe this version of events without believing in God, or that Jesus was his son. So I’m a bit curious as to what’s at stake for someone to argue that Jesus didn’t exist. To me, this is as extreme a view as 6-day creationism. For creationists, what’s at stake is the authority of the Bible, and they are unable or unwilling to conceive of authority that is not rooted in a literal interpretation. Is the same thing true for Flemming? If Jesus did exist, would that destroy his faith?

Interestingly, the only Biblical scholar Flemming interviews, Robert Price (who is also an ex-fundamentalist Christian), says this in a book review at infidels.org:

“Virtually all the rest of McDowell’s sixth chapter of Evidence That Demands a Verdict is taken up with defending what no one challenges: that various New Testament writers believed Jesus Christ was a heavenly being come to earth. That McDowell can for a moment imagine that such scripture prooftexting even begins to address the objections of nonbelievers shows once again that he really has no intention of engaging them.” [emphasis mine]

Wow. No one challenges that idea?

I hope Price has seen this movie.
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Previously:
The God Who Wasn’t There Part 1: First Impressions
The God Who Wasn’t There Part 2: Outline
The God Who Wasn’t There Part 3: The Sense of Moderate Christianity