#25 The Divine is Present When You Are

I was listening to a podcast called Freestyle Christianity the other day. This is a Swedish podcast that sometimes is in English so I can listen and enjoy.  I'm sure that is for my benefit alone because that's how American Exceptionalism works, right?  Anyway, Alexander Bard was the guest on the show. He is a philosopher who is doing some work with theology, although maybe not Christian Theology.  His theological work is focused on thinking within our internet age.  It seems like he has done some great work, none of which have I read.  I've only heard this one podcast with him.

Anyway, one of things Bard talked about doing was creating a sacred space for the internet generation.  He said this generation has always had the internet/smartphones, yet they seem to find sacredness within moments when smartphones are not present.  He and I both agree that the internet is a great tool and smartphones are not evil, but sometimes we struggle to be present to deeper realities when on our phones are around.

I'm sure that was an awful summary, so go listen for yourself. It was a great interview.  This interview and a recent TED Radio hour on NPR got me thinking about our relationship to the divine while under the influence of screens, which in turn made me think of camp.

The kids in my current youth group love going to camp.  I have always been a big fan of camping because it gets you away from the mundane of everyday life. But these kids really love it.  At my last ministry setting the same thing was true.  There was this group of kids that adored camp.  I have a new theory on why.

Camps are notorious for having awful cell coverage.  If you are lucky and the wind is blowing just right you can get a text message sent, otherwise, it's radio silence all week.  I think that is the key.  Camp is one spot where phones are no longer a distraction.  Not just because you are not supposed to have them, because let's face it, I get texts from kids who are in class all the time.  But because they actually can't do anything worthwhile on the phone.

Being unplugged then allows these students to be present in the moment.  They are present to the people around them.  They are present to nature.  They are present to their own inner monologue.  The main thing that gets in the way of being present is always looking down at your phone being present to twitter. (at least that's the way it is for me)

These students are in nature, phoneless, ready to be present to the divine within nature.  There is definitely something about nature that reflects that image of God back to us.  There is something sacred about being present to the world around you.  Once you are truly present to your surroundings, you'll start to feel that sacred that Bard mentioned, and these kids feel at camp. The divine is most present to you when you are present in the moment.

What can you do to be truly present more often?

P.S. Don't think I'm against phones or the internet or technology. These things are amazing and can help us be present to each other in some form from far away. These are great tools that allow humans to continue to become more aware of the world around them, but sometimes we need to have a fast from screens for a little while to connect with the physical world. Then, you'll be better at connecting in the realities of the internet.

#24 Atonement theories drive me crazy, so maybe they are not necessary.

It's Good Friday.  I don't work at a church.  It is a little strange to be in this place.  Usually, I have to be prepping talks about the cross, and I am not a fan.  Let's face it.  The cross doesn't make sense.  It seems like stupid violence that we have glorified over other more important themes.  Or we use the cross to make us feel guilty because our sins put Christ up there.  Or we are told that the gospel is summed up by the cross.  Is the good news that Christ was executed by the state in a horrific and public display of violent might.  You cannot stand against Rome.  Then, worse of all, we get told that it was the Jews who killed Jesus, who was Jewish, when they had no power to crucify.  Let's not blame and scapegoat the Jews just because the author of John's Gospel does (probably in an attempt to distance his community from Jews, who had revolted and weren't held in high esteem by the Romans, who, you know, could kill you next).  

In short, I hate the cross.  I hate the violence.  I hate the way it gets construed and used to hate other people, or to make us all feel guilty.  I hate the atonement theory that becomes confused with the good news of Jesus Christ.  You know the one where God hates humans because we sin and only blood will satisfy this God to forgive us.  Oh, and the only blood that will do is the blood of God, which means that God both is perpetrating the violence upon Godself.  Which makes no sense.  So penal substitution theory goes that God murders God so that God can forgive us.  Then, God comes back from the dead and is totally cool with us now.  Yikes!  (I know that might be an unfair assessment of the theory, but this is the way it ends up coming across to me). 

I took a class on atonement theories in Seminary.  It was an awful class because no theory makes a whole lot of sense.  It is interesting to note that the early church didn't seem to worry to much about atonement theories.  The creeds don't say how God saves humanity, or redeems/reconciles humanity.  It is just assumed that atonement happened and that seems to be enough for the early church.  Isn't it funny that incarnation is what is mainly fought over in the early church councils?  It was more important to them to figure out who Jesus was than it was to figure out how God forgives sins or atones for sins.  The Gospel for them had more to do with who Jesus is and the whole God-human being thing than anything else.  I think Gregory of Nazianzus said that what is assumed in the incarnation is saved.  Thus, what comes into contact with God is what is saved.

So maybe the cross has less to do with redemption and more to do with humanities one last bow to the powers of the world to use violence as a means to rid ourselves of true connection with God.  Then, we made the very act of state sanctioned murder and called it redemptive.  The myth of redemptive violence is the predominate belief in our world just watch any action movie.  So after violence doesn't work, God gives us the gift of an empty tomb and life lived differently from the ethos of the Empire, which is still alive today.  Maybe redemption has more to do with the life before and after the death instead of the actual death.  Maybe the death is exactly from what we need to be redeemed.

I advise all of you to go check out Homebrewed Christianity to see some different ideas on atonement and look up Girard's mimetic theory, or read Walter Wink (he's fun). 

#23-Listening to voices that are not in your camp is a hard but worthwhile experience.

I have a confession to make.  I am a theological snob.  I turn my nose up at any theology that doesn't fit my approved set of standards.  I turn my nose up at theological writings that I assume are going to be way different from what I believe.  Like I turn my nose up at super conservative, young Earth creationist ways of thinking.  I don't think they will ever actually convince me that the Bible is a science book.  But maybe there is a nugget of wisdom in there somewhere that can be helpful.  I usually just completely avoid people who make these kinds of arguments, but is that the right thing to do?  Or if I do read them it is in a dismissive sort of way that is just about seeing how wrong they are.  This can't be the best way to go about it.

I have been thinking about how I can enter into these writings and think critically without being dismissive and snobby towards other people's thinking.  I think it all has to come down to grace.  As I read a piece on homosexuality or any other hot button issue, I need to enter into this reading with grace.  I believe a certain way and the author of the piece believes a certain way.  Instead of tearing down the person who wrote the article,  I need to ask questions of the text.  Questions about whether or not I agree sure, but also questions like what is the motivation of this article.  Where does this person come from when writing it?  What are the points that are made that are wise?  What can I learn from this piece that isn't just what are the points I need to tear apart, but what can I learn to be more understanding of this person's camp?  How can I learn to be more empathetic to other people's worldviews?

I believe that the only way to actually change someone's mind or point of view is through real authentic relationships.  One time I watched a video interview with an evangelical radio host and Rob Bell.  The conversation was around the issue of homosexuality.  The radio host kept to the evangelical party line about homosexuality and Rob Bell talked about changing his mind on the issue.  Do you know what it was that had changed Mr. Bell's mind?  It was not a well reasoned argument, nor a certain hermeneutical flavor of Biblical interpretation.  Rob Bell changed his mind because of real relationships with real people who are homosexual.  Relationships are better than arguments at changing our ways of thinking.

Therefore, as I think about ways to respond to articles that are contrary to my way of thinking, I am going to try to be empathetic and try to enter into a dialogue with the author (using the text) to better understand myself and this other person.  It does no good for me to dismiss their thinking because it is different, but it also does no good to hurl insults.  The best way to become a better person is to read this article with grace as the lens through which I come up with a response.  This is what I am working on.  How to read and have conversations with people from other camps to become a more understanding person and to understand what wisdom is there that I may dismiss otherwise because it is nestle in thoughts I don't agree with.  In other words, I am trying not to be offended and reactionary, but empathetic and questioning.

How do you go about doing this?  Do you only read things you agree with, or do you branch out?  How has reading outside your comfort zone helped you grow as a person?

#22 We are being created and creating.

So apparently something happened on the internet or TV or something, where Bill "The Science Guy" Nye took on somebody named Ham, Ken Ham, the creation museum guy, in a debate between creation and evolution.  I didn't watch it.  I did, though, watch my twitter feed, which was quite worth it.

From irReligion.org 

On twitter I follow a variety of progressive Christians with a smattering of what I will call new Evangelicals.  The first group is a diverse group of people who all claim the title Christian, but like to think for themselves and question dogma.  I tend to fall into this group.  This is not a monolithic group.  The second group, the new Evangelicals are people who have continued to use the Evangelical label but are open to rethinking the teachings in light of reason and interpretation of the Bible.  Also, not a monolithic group because there is no such thing.

Needless to say both groups made fun of this debate and also pulled out quotes that were good from the debate.  In my estimation from watching none of the debate and reading my very biased twitter feed, Bill Nye won this debate.  But here's the thing.  NO ONE HAS CHANGED THEIR MINDS BECAUSE OF THIS DEBATE.  Whatever camp you were in before, you are still in it.

Here is what I think.  Let's stop the black and white, false binary thinking when it comes to creation.  Let the Bible be what it is, which is an ancient collect of texts that has nothing to do with modern science and history.  And let science be what it is, which is observing and trying to understand how things work and how they go together using a very regimented set of systems and processes.  The Bible is not a science textbook.  Science doesn't really care what the Bible says.  People fall on a broad spectrum of thinking on how the Universe came to be.  Did God do it?  Was it all a Cosmic accident?  Are those two things mutually exclusive?  Were Adam and Eve actually aliens?  Will my list of questions ever stop?

From what I understand, Bill Nye even said that many Christians believe in evolution (I fall in the camp, btdoubs).  So the atheistic scientific materialist said that there seems to be more than one way to see these things, yet the supposedly loving Christian would just as soon limit true Christian expression to his way of thinking.
 
Here is my quick answer for where I fall on this broad spectrum of the question of creation/evolution.  I believe that God created something, then invited us to participate in that creation.  Thus giving incredible amount of freedom and power to the very thing that God created.  We as humans are co-creating with God, and everything else in creation is responding to the creative power of God making creation itself both created and creator.  Now, my brain hurts so I'm just going to quit while I'm confused.  You can draw your own implications from that convoluted statement.

Where do you fall on this spectrum?  Are you 6,000 year old person, or 4.5 billion year old person (I'm actually 32)?  Did God create in 7 days or is God still creating?  What are your thoughts?

#21 A Dead Philosopher just critiqued my life.

I have been reading a little bit of Soren Kierkegaard's essay called "The Present Age."  His present age of course was in the 1800s so we are talking about different ages.  But there was something striking about his thoughts on his age that seems to pertain to me.  I'm not sure I like it when a notoriously curmudgeon of a philosophers pegs my own fear so well.  Anyway this grumpy cat philosopher (Is this disrespectful to that cat or to Kierkegaard?) said basically this, "Mark, you are really good at reflecting on self and others but those reflects never really get out of your head into the real world."  Only he said it in German and not specifically addressed to me and not in those words.  This is just how I heard it in my head. 

I think I can reflect all day and night on something.  And if I have someone to reflect with it is even better.  I can talk for weeks about a topic if someone is interested.  Few are, by the way, and this can be a very frustrating thing to my wife.  Although she can do it, too, if it is on a topic she is passionate about, but alas, rarely do our passion for reflection overlap.  This is a good thing because otherwise nothing of importance would probably ever get done.  

And that is precisely my fear.  I fear that I have become so good at reflecting and creating abstract assertions (some of which are meaningless, see what I did there!) that I don't know how to do anything worthwhile in the real world.  I think it is exciting to talk about the implications of Trinitarian theology, but I'm not sure I ever go a live them out.  I love to talk about how feminist thinking has enriched our culture and still has some work to do (this my wife and I can talk about), yet what do I do in a concrete sense to make the world more equal?

I fear that in an action-reflection model of life, I have left behind the action part.  I fear that I have become someone who only lives in my own mind and does little in the real world.  I fear that my reflections are stunted because I don't live them and test them in a concrete way in the real world.  

This matters to me because Kierkegaard was wrong about his present age.  He said they would never start revolution to change the oppressive power structures of his day, but then the French Revolution happened, and many revolutions happened across German to unify the country.  He was wrong about his age, but is he right about me personally.  I need to break out of pure abstraction and test these theories.  I need to question current power structures while coming up with new ways of living on this planet called Earth.  I need to put on ideas and become incarnate in these theories, so that I can see if they are really worthwhile or just really fun to think about.  Practice makes perfect, right?  So I need to go practice so I can critique and evolve theories into something more true and more engaged to effect real change in this world.

#20 I Gave Away My Power.

I have been thinking a little about power.  Maybe because my church is doing a preaching series on the book of Amos. That's right, a minor prophet preaching series, that is meant to challenge us and our way of life rather that a series telling us God is good and we can get better.  It's refreshing...in a difficult way.

Anyway, power...I have not done any kind of real study on power.  I've a read "The Powers that Be" by Walter Wink, which I think I mentioned in a previous post.  But I haven't done any real study beyond reading an occasional book.  So this isn't any kind of authoritative survey.  Just my typical meaningless babbling that an average of like 10 people read (I'm sure a book deal is to follow from such an amazing readership).

I have come to think of power as similar to energy.  There is a finite amount of power in the world that can be spread out among many people or can be hoarded by a few.  There is power in each of us sitting latent waiting for the stimulus to push it into action.  There are obviously many kinds of power, economical, personal, political, etc.  Sometimes power is giving to people through votes or mutual understandings of a situation.  Sometimes power is taken by force or manipulated out of someone through systemic injustice (there is Amos!).  I believe the problem comes when the few have too much of the power.  When the few are able to control the many.  Power can shift from latent to kinetic in a short amount of time.  Sometimes getting out of hand as it does.  This happens in revolutions that end up going too far and ending with more of the same oppression that was fought against.  The latent power was converted into kinetic power that was eventual all given to one person or organization.

We can give our power away as I did at the beginning of this little rambling post by giving the little warning that I haven't studied this before writing.  I totally undermined my own power as the author in the process.  I think we do this all the time.  We undermine, manipulate, and steal power without even realizing we are doing it.  I don't think that these evil actions come from evil people, but often start out as a well-meaning actions that end up doing harm.  Sometime self-worth and self-esteem get in the way of our exertion of power and sometimes systems are perpetuated and prosper on keeping certain groups from realizing and living into their power potential.

How can we have a redistribution of power?  Does that have to happen violently? Can we get other people to give up power without having to forcibly take it from them?  It is only natural to want to keep a hold of what you have.  I believe that power structures can be challenged without the use of violence, and I have written about that before, think MLK and Gandhi (see #17). But it is probably the harder road to travel.  If there is a finite amount of power in the world, how are we going to distribute or re-distribute it?

#19 Something about a Christian Ethic

Right now, I am unemployed.  I used to work in a church as a youth pastor, but I didn't play the church game well, and I was unwilling to play it.  So now, I'm without a job in a new city trying to figure out what to do with my life.  I've come to the realization that I really like to study and talk about faith, but when it comes to managing in a church context it all became too much for me.  I nearly walked away from my faith, now I realize that I probably just shouldn't be employed by the church.  I'm in the midst of trying to figure out what is next...

While that is all going on, I have taken the time to read a couple of books.  There are three book in particular that have made an impact on me.  The first is Red Letter Revolution.  This book is basically a conversation by two people who are trying to take what Jesus said seriously, Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne.   These two tend to make the news, in certain circles, for living differently from most Evangelicals.  Claiborne is part of a kind of protestant monastic community in Philadelphia.  Campolo is sociology professor at Eastern University who is know for saying things that upset our supposed Christian sense of Ethics.  To me there was nothing new in this book.  They talked about critically applying Jesus' expressed Ethics as we see especially in "The Sermon on the Mount" in Matthew 5-7. You know the Beatitudes and  turn the other cheek and such. The impact this book on me was that it helped me realize how sparingly we actually try to apply Jesus' Ethics.

The second book that had an impact on me was called Peace by Walter Brueggemann.  Brueggemann is a Hebrew Bible scholar who usually has some pretty fantastic things to say, so he is always worth the read.  Again nothing Earth shattering or new in this book.  He spent a lot of time talking about Shalom, which has a deeper definition of peace then our English word.  This is peace is about community and justice.  Not retributive justice with an eye for an eye but a restorative justice where everyone is treated as a child of God with respect and love.  It is about sharing power and really is an imagine of the Kingdom of God which we mistakenly make into a concept of where we go when we die.  That kingdom was the expectation of Israel and is what Jesus was talking about all the time.  The Kingdom of God is near, which is a kingdom of peace of shalom.  Again it made me think about how we don't really want to apply Jesus' Ethics on our own lives today.  We make it about a coming Kingdom forgetting that the kingdom is being realized today.  We are supposed to live Shalom now, like that kingdom (or empire if you'd like, it is the same word in Greek) is already fully realized.

The third book is called, Peace in a Post-Christian Era by Thomas Merton.  Merton was a Trappist Monk who was also a profound writer in the 1960s.  As a monk in this time period everything that he wrote to be published had to approved by the church.  This book was never approved during his lifetime because it was considered inappropriate for a monk to write about these things.  Merton apparently had hard time with this but tried to be obedient to the church.  You can be obedient and unhappy at the same time.  What was inappropriate for Merton to write about was the Cold War arms race.  Some say that having lots of nuclear weapons kept the Soviets from using nukes on us because they were afraid of the retaliation.  Merton was pointing out the serious danger in this thinking and trying to build a good moral argument again nuclear proliferation using Jesus' Ethics.  So basically the church didn't want to hear how Jesus' thoughts say on turning the other cheek can be applied to the arms race.  Merton's ideas didn't go along with conventional thinking at the time, so it wasn't published in his lifetime.

As we all know we managed not to blow up the world during the cold war, so good use of restraint on both sides of that staring contest.  There was a missile crisis or something with Cuba and the USSR, but happily no nuclear fallout.  Still the striking thing in this book was that here was someone trying to apply Jesus' Ethics to our lives and he got censored by the church of all things for it.  It was a political issue that church didn't want a monk weighing in on, but still can it be bad to try to apply the teachings of Jesus to our lives?

All of these people draw from other sources in the Bible, too.  For instance, Merton like Peter's words, of "Do not repay evil with evil" (1 Peter 3:9).  But mostly all of these people were drawing from the Sermon on the Mount and other ethical teachings from Jesus.  Do you really know what Jesus taught?  Do you really think that we are supposed to apply these things to our lives?  It seems that our Ethics are not really based on Jesus' teachings but on other things, like consumption and politics.

To wrap this rambling mess up, I would like to just put some Ethical statements out there for you. Ready?

Love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39/Leviticus 19:18)

Do not repay evil with evil or abuse with abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing (1 Peter 3:9)

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. (Luke 6:27-28)

Turn the other cheek (Luke 6:29; Matthew 5:39)

Do to other what you would have them do to you (Luke 6:31)

We are both Sinner and Saint--this one is Martin Luther, but keeping this in mind makes you more gracious especially with yourself.

How can you live these things out?  It seems counter-cultural to our current set of norms, yet so familiar and cliched.  Isn't this a frame for what a Christian Ethics should look like?  At least the start of one?