cyber spirit cafe

The bishop comes to call (Sunday Reflections for November 13, 2011)

2011-11-14T16:10:00.000-06:00

Metro Chicago Synod Bishop Wayne Miller dropped by the church last week. He is setting aside time for “no agenda” visits with pastors in their parishes, hoping to get to most of them within two years. Since, as he said, the bishop tends to be contacted only when there is a problem, these visits are giving him a better sense of what is happening in the lives of synod pastors and congregations.

Our conversation was very cordial. After discussing our congregation and our community, we turned to the church-at-large. Miller was refreshingly frank and open. He made no attempt to hide or downplay the crisis the church is in. Everything is changing, whether we want it to or not, whether we’re ready for it or not. And, of course, the reality is we don’t want to change and we’re not ready. Miller is trying to manage our institutional decline and the resulting tensions and disorder. Yet at the same time, he is looking for signs of new life and energy in the church—green shoots to be nurtured, embers to be fanned.

What is clear is that nothing of the institutional church will be exempt from the changes sweeping through it. Will there be synods? Will there be bishops? Who knows? Already some synod offices are on the verge of closing. At a minimum, a wave of synod consolidation is inevitable. Seminaries are also stressed, including my alma mater, LSTC, here in Chicago. Mergers or closures are coming.

Layoffs in the ELCA’s churchwide organization have left many empty cubicles at the office headquarters on Higgins Road. (Know anyone in the market for an O’Hare office tower?) Board and committee meetings are being reduced, including having the biennial churchwide assembly becoming triennial. Of course, the change obvious to the most people is the shrinking number and size of congregations. Fewer and fewer can afford a pastor’s salary, or even the buildings they are in.

But reducing, shrinking and consolidating can only get the church so far. As Miller and a growing number of others recognize, what is really needed is imagining new ways of doing church, at all levels.

Instead of congregations with separate buildings and full-time pastors, we may need to be looking at starting and nurturing “house churches.” These would have little in the way of formal programs. Instead, they would emphasize more intimate worship and fellowship, as well as community service and outreach.

Three- and four-year seminary programs have become too expensive and impractical. Perhaps pastors can begin their preparation as apprentices. During this period, they would have other employment while working in congregations with experienced pastors. Formal training would be shorter, combining part-time classroom time with online learning, similar to many secular, professional graduate programs.

In general, the trend is away from broad church organizations and bureaucracy to the more local and personal. Such trends are common in many institutions today. Decision making can often be more effective when done closer to where those decisions will be implemented. Yet there can also be a loss of coordination, cooperation, and connectivity. The Internet and social networking, however, may replace at least some of those functions previously performed by more formal church structures.

Later, as I thought about our conversation, I nonetheless felt we had missed something fundamental. I still felt we were talking about rearranging the deck chairs on our sinking ship. And I’m not sure Bishop Miller would disagree. For the reality is that when you’re part of a two thousand year-old institution, genuinely thinking outside the box is really, really hard. Yet that is what we need to be doing, for it is what our times are forcing upon us.

One thing we didn’t discuss was theology. Now I admit that such talk can often seem esoteric and irrelevant. Yet theology is the church’s starting point. It’s where we decide who we are and what we are about. Without theology the church simply exists to exist; we go through the motions without knowing why.

And that is a lot of what has been going on in the church: going through the motions. The church has been running on momentum from its past. We do things because “this is what we’ve always done,” even when we know it doesn’t make any sense today. So we still pray to “God up in heaven,” even when heaven stopped being a map-able place as it was for our ancestors, and when even “up” has no objective meaning anymore!

No, the world of the church of our ancestors is long gone. Where for ancient and medieval people, what was constant and unchanging was the norm and most important, for us the opposite is true. Our world is in constant flux. One generation struggles to understand the world of another, even when they’re living side-by-side.

So the church needs to reimagine its purpose and identity, as much as its structures and organization. But it may be this also needs to happen mostly ad hoc and at the grass roots. Like the bureaucrats, the academics also need to watch and listen (a good Advent theme). The church, like most institutions, has usually wanted the flow of ideas and direction to be from the top down. Today, however, rather than looking to ancient authorities and documents, or contemporary studies and commissions, it may be time to let the spirit blow where it wills, and the theological chips fall where they may.

Hide and seek (Sunday Reflections for November 6, 2011)

2011-11-10T15:11:00.000-06:00

Once in awhile, I’ll notice a topic or theme appear in multiple places, nearly all at once. That happened recently on three different interviews I heard, one on TV and two on the radio. When it happens it makes me think something is happening in our culture that’s worth paying attention to. In this case, the connecting thread of these broadcast conversations was how much a mystery other people can often be to us, and how much we often hide from people around us.

The first time this came up was in the 60 Minutes interview with Ruth Madoff and her youngest son, Andrew Madoff. Their experiences and stories are different, but both claim they knew nothing about the enormous fraud being perpetrated by their husband and father, Bernie Maddoff. Because Andrew worked for one of his father’s companies, his shock and anger comes from believing he was intentionally duped. He says he will never forgive his father or ever speak to him again.

Ruth’s reaction was different. She seems more stunned by the events, and resigned to her social fall and now very bleak future. From this and other stories about her, she apparently played a role as Bernie Madoff’s wife which included very little involvement in his business affairs. From an early age she was enthralled with him, but despite having lived with him most of her life, Ruth actually knew her husband at only a superficial level.

Another interview, this time on radio, was with British actor Bill Nighy. He plays the role of a spy in a new BBC drama, Page Eight, which airs this month on PBS. In a short excerpt played from the show, his daughter dismisses his concern for her when she realizes he is simultaneously trying to get information from her. “You’re working! Hell, you’re not even talking to me. You’re working…. Do you have any honest relationships in your life at all?”

Nighy goes on to describe his character’s dilemma as never being able to be fully honest, especially with this family. He is always keeping important parts of his life hidden from them. In an excerpt from another of his films, the comedy Love Actually, Nighy is an aging rock star being interviewed on the radio. Nighy’s character startles the radio host with the bluntness of his answers, as he reflects on his life near the end of his career. “Wow. We don’t get many honest answers on this show. Thanks for that.”

The most powerful of the interviews I heard was with author Joan Didion. Most recently Didion’s life and writing have been focused on dealing first with the death of her husband (The Year of Magical Thinking), and then with the death of her adult daughter, which occurred a few years later. She began the interview reading from the introduction to her new book, Blue Nights:

When I began writing these pages, I believed their subject to be children: the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances, the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them, the ways in which our investments in each other remain too frayed ever to see the other clear, the ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.

As the pages progressed, it occurred to me that the actual subject was not children at all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children. Their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in this contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death, this fear. Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.

Just this small selection makes evident the depth of Didion’s writing, which comes from her clear vision and honesty. And yet she is admitting here her own weakness in not knowing her own child and susceptibility to the temptation to intentionally not see what she doesn’t want to see—in other words, her lack of vision and honesty.

What sets Didion apart, however, is her remarkable ability and willingness to recognize such things in herself. She is willing to double back on her own life and say, “I wasn’t honest here. I only saw what I wanted to there. I hid things from myself I didn’t want to know or understand.” Thus, we see the enormous gulf between a Joan Didion and a Ruth Madoff. Anyone can be deceived, or even deceive them self. But who has the courage to recognize and admit it, to them self or to others?

The challenge of honestly understanding others or ourselves is not a new one. It’s a major theme of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Bible’s story of David, and even a folk talk like The Emperor’s New Clothes. The stories I heard perhaps only pointed to the new permutations on this common human foible, made possible in our unique time.

They certainly make clear that, however else we may have advanced as a culture, the temptations of ego and deceit certainly are alive as ever. They also illustrate the healing truth of one the Bible’s most profound insights and promise, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Reformation reprise (Sunday Reflections for October 30, 2011)

2011-10-29T11:18:00.000-05:00

In honor of Reformation Day, I am reprinting this column from a year ago. It followed an earlier discussion of last fall’s ELCA churchwide lay-offs and many organizational difficulties. Here I respond to those asking what the church ought to do to get past its problems.

The question is a fair one. However, to use a medical analogy, the patient isn’t going to accept the treatment if she doesn’t believe she’s really sick. I think the church has been, and still is, in this situation. The various “fixes” that have been tried over the past few decades have almost always fallen into the category of “If it doesn’t work, do more of it.” In other words, most still believe the church is fundamentally okay but it just needs to do what it does better. The result—to use the quote from my earlier post—has been lots of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So I’ll cut to the chase and state my conclusion: religion as we have known it is dead—or dying and soon to be dead. Now I am well aware of the signs of life that still remain. Most of those are in parts of the world just now entering the modern industrial world. Where modernism has taken hold, however, religion’s trajectory has been steadily downward for decades or even centuries.

Religion has not disappeared but it is now simply a personal option, a life-style choice. Some people still “enjoy” religion but it’s the way others enjoy music, art, reading, gardening, sports, and so on. In the past, religion was part of the fabric of society. Today religion is just one among many cultural components, all jostling for people’s attention. This cultural “comedown” is why fundamentalist religions are in such a panic. Remembering religion’s glorious past, they are desperately trying to reclaim its power.

The problem for moderate religions, including mainline Christianity, is that we get it. We know what’s happened but we don’t know what to do about it. We know that religion of the past is just that: past, over, done. Yet we also have this gut feeling that there is something of value that needs to be kept alive, even if we can’t quite put our finger on it. That, I think, is what churches like the ELCA are trying to reach for but we’ve been going about it very poorly. We’re like the trapeze artist who just can’t let go of the rope because we’re not convinced another one will be there to grab on to.

A new Lutheran magazine came out at the same time as the ELCA’s latest turmoil and it included Bishop Hanson’s monthly back-page column. When I first read it I admit I thought it was another mish-mash of theological jargon, saying little. Re-reading, however, I decided it actually spills Christianity’s theological beans (though I doubt that’s what Bishop Hanson intended).

Over the years, I’ve come to the realization that Christianity contains the seeds of its own destruction—intentionally so. Historically I think there has always been a minority that understood this but who were oppressed if they started talking about it too loudly. It is a tension that has existed in Christianity from the start, planted by Jesus himself. Perhaps the best symbol of it is the story of his overturning the moneychangers’ tables in the temple. This one we know as the founder of the world’s greatest religion was actually prophesying the end of religion.

Hanson’s essay is titled “Our gospel must be Jesus.” Briefly he describes the many competing, false “gospels” in the world, both secular and religious, with their strenuous requirements for success and salvation. Hanson then uses a series of quotations from Paul (someone else who got it) to describe Jesus’ gospel—of freedom.

This gospel, in Paul’s view, is the healing of all separation and alienation. It exposes the pointlessness of a life of hoop-jumping and rule-keeping. It gives the assurance of every person’s inherent importance and worth. Hanson summarizes this saying: “The good news we proclaim and believe is that Jesus would rather die than be in the sin-accounting business.” Exactly—and to me this is another way of saying, “Jesus would rather die than be in the religion business.”

Which is why Hanson fumbles at the end of his essay. He wants this to lead to a stirring call for revival in the church, but he can’t pull it off. And for a simple reason: it doesn’t lead there and he knows it. Instead we get this:

When we proclaim this gospel with clarity, courage and conviction, the Spirit will be at work, bringing us to faith, freeing us and calling us so mission will flow from it into the various contexts of our lives and throughout the world.

Did you feel the air just seep out of the balloon? Why not say this instead?

Whether you use Hanson’s statement or mine, it’s hard to see how either necessarily leads to joining a congregation, attending worship services, and serving on the property committee.

Hanson quotes Paul from Galatians in what may be the most revolutionary statement in all religion: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” The irony of our time is that the modern secular world gets this, but the church still doesn’t. It wants to take back the most important thing the gospel offers. Realizing its implications, the church keeps sputtering “Yes but…!” in a desperate attempt at self-preservation. It’s not working. More and more people do get it. Our freedom also means freedom from religion.

So, should the church just shut its doors and hang out the “For Sale” sign? That certainly is happening, but I’m not sure it’s the only option. True to its heritage, however, for it to go on the church must die to be reborn. It must give up what it was for it to become something new and genuinely life-giving. The question is whether the patient will ever accept that prescription.

Living here, now (Sunday Reflections for October 23, 2011)

2011-10-21T10:17:00.000-05:00

Emily Rapp is a creative writing professor in Santa Fe, NM. She uses all her talents in a brief, heart-wrenching, yet profoundly wise essay that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times. Rapp is a relatively new mother but as she writes, at least this time, her experience will be far from what our culture sees as the parenting norm. She describes that norm this way:

All parents want their children to prosper, to matter. We enroll our children in music class or take them to Mommy and Me swim class because we hope they will manifest some fabulous talent that will set them — and therefore us, the proud parents — apart. Traditional parenting naturally presumes a future where the child outlives the parent and ideally becomes successful, perhaps even achieves something spectacular. Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is only the latest handbook for parents hoping to guide their children along this path. It’s animated by the idea that good, careful investments in your children will pay off in the form of happy endings, rich futures. But I have abandoned the future. . . .

Abandoned, in the case of her 18-month old son Ronan, because there won’t be a future. Ronan, despite multiple prenatal tests, was born with Tay-Sachs, a fatal genetic disorder for which there is no cure. While still relatively healthy, he is unlikely to see his third birthday. Emily Rapp, it would seem, is living a parent’s worst nightmare.

And yet, while difficult and incredibly sad, Rapp is enduring and fully living this experience by throwing out all her previous expectations. She is redefining parenting, and in doing so exposing how distorted many of our attitudes have become—not only about parenting but life in general. She has realized the pointlessness of focusing her life where all the advice has told her she should focus it: on the future.

Parenting advice is, by its nature, future-directed. I know. I read all the parenting magazines. During my pregnancy, I devoured every parenting guide I could find. My husband and I thought about a lot of questions they raised: will breast-feeding enhance his brain function? Will music class improve his cognitive skills? Will the right preschool help him get into the right college? I made lists. I planned and plotted and hoped. Future, future, future. We never thought about how we might parent a child for whom there is no future. . . .

Our parenting plans, our lists, the advice I read before Ronan’s birth make little sense now. No matter what we do for Ronan — choose organic or non-organic food; cloth diapers or disposable; attachment parenting or sleep training — he will die. All the decisions that once mattered so much, don’t.

Rather than a tiger parent, with her eyes focused down the road, thinking about what’s over the horizon, her attention is on the only thing that matters: this day, this moment. She has instead joined the ranks of an elite group, the dragon parents.

We are . . . fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice. . . . The certainties that most parents face are irrelevant to us, and frankly, kind of silly. . . . And there’s this: parents who, particularly in this country, are expected to be superhuman, to raise children who outpace all their peers, don’t want to see what we see. The long truth about their children, about themselves: that none of it is forever.

I would walk through a tunnel of fire . . . if it would make a difference. But it won’t. I can roar all I want about the unfairness of this ridiculous disease, but the facts remain. What I can do is protect my son from as much pain as possible, and then finally do the hardest thing of all, a thing most parents will thankfully never have to do: I will love him to the end of his life, and then I will let him go. . . . This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.

It is a teaching found in all the world’s great religions. The Buddha said one of the most difficult life skills is to simply be present, to actually live in the here and now. Jesus says much the same in the Sermon on the Mount: "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.” Or as the Psalmist says, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong in planning, in anticipating and preparing for the future. Yet it is easy for the future to become an obsession, especially as it feeds the illusion that we can control our lives. For this is the truth the Buddha and Jesus were trying to teach, and the reality exposed by a story like that of Emily Rapp: life is ultimately contingent and beyond our control, including and especially the fact that our lives will sooner or later come to an end.

So as we plot and plan and scheme, as we make our lists and agendas, as we dash from one essential activity or event to another, it may be helpful to think of other lives, like that of Emily Rapp. The future is important, and dreaming about it and planning for it can be valuable and even fun. Yet as it says in Ecclesiastes, none of us can count our days. And the most valuable of them all is the only one we know for sure that we will have: today.

What were they thinking? (Sunday Reflections for October 16, 2011)

2011-10-18T15:46:00.001-05:00

This week I watched a TV program that left me puzzled and more than a little annoyed. Thursday night WTTW Channel 11 broadcast the first episode of a series called Catholicism. It is the creation of, and hosted by, a Father Robert Barron. Barron heads up the Chicago-based Catholic evangelism organization called “Word on Fire.”

And that’s what Catholicism is: an evangelism tool. Ok, but what is it doing on public television? As I looked around WTTW’s website and local newspaper reviews, there seemed be no effort to explain this or even any real surprise at it. Well, color me surprised.

The show is well made with lots of HD quality video shot on-location around the world. Father Barron is certainly an engaging narrator. He doesn’t come across preachy but just enthusiastic.

In the reviews and summaries I read, the program is described as being like a religious version of Kenneth Clark’s groundbreaking BBC documentary Civilization. Father Barron is likened to being Ken Burns (the famous US TV documentary maker) with a Roman collar. To which I say: No and No.

There is one huge problem with this program which belies either of the above comparisons: it doesn’t even pretend to be objective. Instead of scholarship, we get Father Barron giving his personal views on the church. This is all slickly shot against lovely and fascinating backdrops but we are never told why we should believe him. Other authorities are never interviewed and rarely quoted because, for this piece, Father Barron is the authority. This is contemporary propaganda at its most beguiling: believe what I am saying because I am articulate, attractive, and a nice guy. I wouldn’t lie to you, would I?

The first episode is about the life of Jesus. The presentation by Barron is made as if the past two centuries of biblical scholarship never happened. He recounts numerous sayings and incidents of Jesus without even a hint that some of them may not be historical. Most scholars today, for example, doubt Jesus himself ever claimed to be divine, though the early church came to that conclusion later. For Barron, however, this is a key part of Jesus’ teaching and self-identity.

Barron carefully weaves together an appealing picture of Jesus that fits perfectly with traditional church teaching. He does it well and is certainly free to do that. But this is 2011, not 1511. We know so much more now, and Barron surely knows how much more we know now. His choice to simply ignore the mountain of critical scholarship about Jesus and the early church can only be described as deliberate deception.

Why deception? Because of the format of his presentation. It is intended to look like a modern documentary. The audience is supposed to believe that what he says is researched fact, as one finds in a Ken Burns production. But it’s not. Instead, it is one man’s view as filtered through the teaching of his church.

Earlier this year a group of us watched a 1990s PBS program called From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians. It was an episode of PBS’ premier documentary program Frontline, and featured high quality on-location video and interviews with numerous scholars in the field of biblical and early church history. The contrast between this programs and Catholicism couldn’t be greater. While the Frontline series used multiple, recognized authorities presenting the current findings of research scholarship, Catholicism gives us one voice of uncertain qualifications giving his personal opinion.

From Jesus to Christ was groundbreaking for PBS at the time, yet totally appropriate. It easily met and even exceeded their standards for objective broadcasting in the public interest. I don’t understand at all what Catholicism was doing on Channel 11 Thursday night.

Actually, I probably do. The explanation is, of course, money. The program’s production was privately funded. The broadcast is being supported by Loyola University Hospital and a long list of individuals, presumably mostly local Catholics. As a result, this probably isn’t costing WTTW anything and might even be making them a little money. (Another sign of their money status was the program that followed. Rather than pickup—and pay for—the PBS’ feed of Live from Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis, they repeated an old program about the abdicated King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.)

It isn’t my place to tell WTTW what they can and can’t broadcast. Yet to keep their integrity as a public television outlet they should at least acknowledge upfront what they are doing. Catholicism is not a documentary about the Catholic Church (which I would actually probably enjoy watching). Instead, it’s a piece of propaganda.

It really fits into that strange category, common on many cable channels filling broadcast time, called an “infomercial.” Rather than on Channel 11, Catholicism belongs on Mother Angelica’s EWTN network. And guess what? It turns out that is where most of it is going to be shown. The whole series is 10 parts but only the first 4 will be on WTTW. EWTN is picking up the remainder starting in November.

What I a most disappointed at, however, is the church attitude reflected in a program like Catholicism. Once again it is assumed that ordinary people can’t handle the truth. Instead, they have to be given a highly polished, whitewashed picture of Christianity.

As an evangelism effort, however, I can’t see how this will be anything but preaching to the choir. Contemporary people, and especially young people, know when they’re being sold a bill of goods. This is a day when everything about everybody gets revealed. A soft-focus, romanticized portrayal of the church just isn’t going to cut it. People outside the church are going to smell it from a mile away and be reinforced in their suspicion that religion just tries to pull the wool over their eyes. And in the case of Catholicism, they would be right.

Alien evangelism? (Sunday Reflections for October 9, 2011)

2011-10-12T09:38:00.000-05:00

If “Does God exist?” is the most argued about speculative question, then a close second would probably be “Does other intelligent life exist?” Recently a conference devoted part of its time to an overlap of those questions: What would be the religious implications of discovering intelligent aliens?

The “100-Year Starship Symposium,” held in Orlando last week, was sponsored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Such a “starship” is not currently being developed but DARPA (which specializes in studying somewhat far-out ideas) and NASA have jointly begun a project to explore the possibilities. In addition to the technical how-to questions, the project also wants to look at cultural implications of such an endeavor. Thus, one panel of conference speakers discussed the philosophical and religious considerations of visiting other planets.

The summary I read focused mostly on a presentation by German philosophy professor Christian Weidemann. His talk was titled "Did Jesus die for Klingons too?" and examined the implications for Christianity if intelligent life was found elsewhere. Weidemann identified the main problem for Christianity if such a discovery were made, which is its exclusive claims for Jesus: through Christ, and Christ alone, God saved the whole universe.

It’s hard to tell from what I read just how seriously Weidemann took all this (he is identified as a Protestant Christian). His title certainly implies he was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Basically he looks at the problems that would be presented to orthodox Christian beliefs by such an event. His discussion of them has a kind of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” quality to it. Maybe aliens aren’t sinners. Maybe God’s incarnation occurred simultaneously in multiple forms in all the Universe’s existing civilizations. And so on.

I can only imagine how any NASA scientists or astrophysicists present must have reacted to such a conversation. They probably felt like they had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. Weidermann is correct that followers of conventional Christianity would be challenged to explain how other intelligent life fits into their view of reality. Yet conventional Christianity has been challenged by multiple scientific discoveries long before this.

To say God saved the world in Christ meant one thing in the context of ancient or medieval Europe. To say it now in the 21^st century, and in the context of the pictures of the Hubble space telescope, seems almost laughable. We literally live in a different world than did the original formulators of Christian doctrine. Perhaps asking “Did Jesus die for Klingons?” was Weidermann’s way of showing the absurdity of our situation.

Of course, part of the absurdity is how hypothetical all this is. Is there other intelligent life in the universe? Given the immensity of the universe, it certainly seems possible and perhaps even likely. The difficulty, however, is the immensity of the distances between the stars, let alone other galaxies. It could be a long, long time before we are able to travel just to parts of our own galaxy.

Fifteen years ago the movie Contact explored a number of these questions. Based on a story by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, it hypothesizes alien life reaching out to us. We are “discovered” when earth’s first TV signal (assumed ironically to be the 1936 broadcast of Adolf Hitler opening the Berlin Olympics) reaches them in the Vega system 26 light years away.

As science fiction often assumes, the aliens are far more advanced than we are, but in this case they are also friendly. Their “outreach” is basically to communicate a method for humans to contact them, which is done by the lead character, a scientist played by Jody Foster. The implications of all this are debated by her (an agnostic) and a clergy friend, played by Matthew McConaughey (who is incredibly miscast but this is before he achieved “hunk” status—I don’t think he ever takes off his shirt). The story ends with Foster being forced to ask others to simply believe that she really did contact the aliens, thus raising the issue of faith and doubt even in scientific endeavors.

In addition to allowing us to speculate about the future, science fiction also helps us think about life right now with its “what if” perspective. One of the most interesting part of the movie is the brief conversation Foster has with an alien (who chooses to appear to her in the form of her late father—oh my). He tells her that they have basically solved the social and technical problems that bedevil human civilization. The life question has thus become for them, so now what do we do?

In brief, alien life is about learning and discovering—hence, their reaching out to “contact” human beings. Their explorations are how they deal with two fundamental challenges of intelligent existence: boredom and loneliness. It does raise an interesting question: What is our life apart from solving our problems?

Medieval theology hangs on because it preserves a much simpler world: God is in heaven and all’s right with the world. As much as we might want to, however, we no longer live in that world. The vastness of the universe which we now recognize, both in time and space, is something no ancient religion imagined or could comprehend.

The hypothetical question of alien intelligence raises the very real question of religion’s continued relevance. Any religion that hasn’t already figure out we are in a new world now won’t be helped by the discovery of alien life. Any religion that is contributing to meeting contemporary life’s challenges, rather than being part of the problem, has already come to that realization, welcomed it, and is moving on.

Youth to world: we can do better (Sunday Reflections for October 2, 2011)

2011-10-07T14:41:00.002-05:00

Young people are upset and angry with their government:

“We elect the people’s representatives so they can solve our problems, but that is not actually happening. Corruption is ruling our country.”

“The political system has abandoned its citizens.”

“We don’t think they are doing anything for us.”

“We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.”

While easily understandable in our own political context, none of these quotes come from Americans. Rather they are the words of young adults in Spain, Israel and India, quoted in a New York Times story, “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge around Globe.” Young people throughout the developed world are saying what is obvious, but which has been largely ignored until now: that the global financial crisis is the result of a political crisis. For hundreds of millions of citizens, democracy is failing.

The financial crisis is bouncing around the world like a soccer ball: from Iceland to Ireland to the US to Greece to Spain to the US to Japan to Greece to the US to Italy to Greece to . . . . Most of the world’s industrial economies are awash in debt. Normally this isn’t a problem—until it is. Debt is all about confidence. I loan you money on the belief you will pay be back eventually. But we are running out of confidence and now debt is a hot potato. Nobody wants it and it just gets tossed around.

People are losing confidence in more than just international finance. People are losing confidence in their governments’ ability to govern. That’s what the protests that have occurred this year around the world are about, both in Western democracies and in authoritarian countries. The Arab Spring uprisings were certainly due to declining economic opportunities. Yet it took young people, raised in the “open source,” freewheeling culture of the internet and popular music, to boil over in frustration and topple their autocratic elder leaders.

Earlier this year, Great Britain was caught off guard by the sudden irruption of riots and looting in cities across the country. Leaders dismissed the mayhem as simple hooliganism yet everyone knew it was more than that. The recent cutback of government social services was taken by many poor and unemployed young people as yet another brush-off by their country’s political and economic leadership. The frustration and rage was random but not without cause. As British author Owen Jones said, “The young people who took part in the riots didn’t feel they had a future to risk.”

In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln famously defined democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” More and more people seem to doubt the reality of all three of these phrases.

Democracy is never perfect. There are always suspicions and accusations that some group has acquired undue political power and influence. Yet never have such claims been made from people around the globe, and all pointing in one direction. In short: the process has been bought by the rich and powerful; the game is rigged.

The current “Great Recession” is different not just for its length or depth. Its most glaring anomaly is its inequality. Statistical reports around the world all show that the economic elites have come through this economic collapse virtually unscathed. The disparity of wealth and income in the United States is the greatest it’s been since the 1920s. It is no surprise then that the one sector of retail sales at or above pre-recession levels is luxury goods. (The ultimate symbol of luxury, Rolls-Royce, is on track for a new sales record this year, so far up 64% from 2010.)

In all of this the most incredible story has been that of banking and financial services. Recklessness, greed, incompetence, and fraud by the companies of this sector are recognized as the primary cause of the 2008 financial implosion. Yet they were infamously “bailed out” at the height of the crisis and there have been only a handful of prosecutions of company leaders. Salaries and bonuses are as outsized as ever. Government officials have defended this as protecting a critical part of the economy. Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs, infamously said his business was doing “God’s work.”

The past couple weeks a small and somewhat disorganized protest has begun to “occupy” Wall Street. Relatively insignificant thus far, it may signal a new phase of disillusionment with the power elites of this country, especially by young people. What is more evident is their rapidly growing dismissal of the political process. A brief rise of enthusiasm for the Obama candidacy has quickly deflated. The gridlock and farcical shutdown battles in Washington have renewed their view that the democratic process has become a joke. They see the shrill ideological battles as sideshows to distract people from the growing economic inequalities that have become the norm.

If, as expected, young people stay away in droves from the 2012 ballot box, this should only be taken as a grave warning. If their frustration with a failing economy and lack of opportunity is not expressed by voting, it will be vented elsewhere. History has shown again and again that gross economic imbalances always lead to social instability. No society is secure or can prosper when few of its members believe they benefit from it or that their contribution to it is fairly rewarded.

So I will send a fire on Judah, and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem. Thus says the LORD… because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way. (Amos 2)

A jobless future? (Sunday Reflections for September 25, 2011)

2011-10-03T10:58:00.001-05:00

The latest “inside the White House” book is David Susskind’s Confidence Men. It focuses mostly on the making of economic policy by the Obama administration as it struggled to respond to the “Great Recession.” One excerpt that has gotten attention reports President Obama’s belief that rising productivity is the primary cause of the current high unemployment. This stunned some of his advisors.

The prevailing view has been that unemployment rose as the result of a drop in economic demand. A view like Obama’s, however, could lead to the conclusion that growing unemployment is the result of improving efficiency. In other words, more people out-of-work is the unfortunate consequence of a highly productive economy.

There is no question that something is different about this recession. Not only is the basic unemployment rate staying high longer than usual, more people are staying unemployed for long periods and more people than usual are “under employed”—i.e. working part-time rather than full-time or working significantly below their previous pay or skill levels.

On the surface Obama’s belief doesn’t seem to fit with what happened. Unemployment jumped dramatically following the 2008 financial crisis. Obviously this wasn’t the result of a sudden increase in productivity. Yet as a longer-term phenomenon, Obama’s notion has some merit and may partially explain why unemployment is remaining so high.

Before this downturn, a growing number of economists and others have been expressing apprehension about the future of industrial society. Most everyone has cheered the constant stream of technological advancements which have sent efficiency and worker productivity soaring. Nearly every successful business tells stories of how, what it took 100 workers to do a generation ago, it now takes only 25, 10 or 5.

A well-known example is the picture of a typical assembly line before World War II, showing a place bustling with human activity. A similar picture today shows a place bustling with computerized machinery, operated or even just watched over by a handful of people. Computerization has had an even bigger impact in offices of all kinds. Digitizing and manipulating data and information are what computers are all about.

In the case of the assembly line, the obvious question is what happened to the 75 to 95 people who used to work there? Until now it’s just been assumed they found work somewhere else (or their children or grandchildren did). Yet even before this recession there had been a growing awareness that many of the new jobs available were not as good as those they replaced. Statistics now show a majority of households with stagnant or even declining inflation-adjusted income for the past two decades.

The growing concern, then, is that this is becoming the “new normal.” A recent blog post I came across discussed a book written almost twenty years ago, darkly titled The Jobless Future. The book analyzes this now familiar story of automation and job elimination. Its conclusion is that many of the well-paid professional, technical, and production jobs that raised living standards in the 1950s and 60s, and which have been lost, will not be coming back in anything like the numbers needed to maintain those living standards.

The authors do not, however, see this as necessarily leading to economic disaster. Rather, they say we are nearing the time when we need to radically re-think many of our assumptions about life and economic well-being. We are at a point where our society and economy can meet everyone’s basic needs, and even provide a “good” life, but we don’t need everyone working at traditional full-time jobs to do it. As the authors are quoted, “The aim of this work is to suggest political and social solutions that take us in a direction in which it is clear that jobs are no longer the solution, that we must find another way to ensure a just standard of living for all.” The blogger then goes on to say of the writers,

They are as interested in the "satisfying" part of the question as the "standard of living" part. They want to know what sources of meaning, worth, and value are possible for a whole civilization in which work and career are no longer the primary focus? It is an existential question as much as it is an economic one.

And, I would say, it is a spiritual question.

For a long time, people have been aware of the inadequacy of defining our lives by our jobs or occupations, even though we all do it. It is the standard question when meeting someone for the first time: “And what do you do for a living?” Implicit in the question is the assumption that we will then make judgments about a person’s worth and importance based on the answer: conclusions about income, wealth, education, intelligence, character, lifestyle, power and influence, etc.

We are also aware of the crisis many people experience at retirement. A moment people look forward to can nonetheless send them into confusion and depression, as they lose what had been their primary source of identity: their job. This experience, of course, is made even worse when a job is lost through unemployment, compounded by the resulting financial insecurity.

The immediate question is how to support people during this time of economic upheaval and transition. Sadly there has been far too much blaming the victim, with the unemployed being dismissed as lazy, stupid, dumb, or just “unlucky.” If high un- and under-employment is now inevitable, then this needs to be recognized and social policies adjusted for it. Otherwise we face the prospect of increasing social unrest that is the inevitable consequence of having 20 percent or more or our people having little or nothing to do.

In the longer-term, we are faced with the even more challenging question of what do we want human life to be? We are being faced again with the ancient questions of what makes us happy as individuals, and what makes for a good society. Thus far much of our increasing “free-time” has been filled with fairly passive and escapist entertainment. That’s not working so well now and it certainly isn’t going to be adequate in the future.

The question can make us anxious yet it can also be incredibly liberating: Who and what do you really want to be? In the future, with new freedom we probably can’t even imagine yet, our life will literally depend on how we answer that question.

Less words (Sunday Reflections for September 18, 2011)

2011-09-16T20:46:00.000-05:00

ProgressiveChristianity.org is a network of people and organizations promoting an alternative to conservative and fundamentalist Christianity. Started in 1994 by an Episcopal rector in Washington, D.C., it now includes individuals and congregations from 17 denominations, as well as various independent and ecumenical groups.

Among the resources it provides is a summary statement of “8 Points of Progressive Christianity.” I thought you might find interesting their recently revised version of that statement.

By calling ourselves progressive Christians, we mean we are Christians who . . .

1. Believe that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an experience and of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life;

2. Affirm that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life, and that we can draw from diverse sources of wisdom in our spiritual journey;

3. Seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to: conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, believers and agnostics, women and men, those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, those of all classes and abilities;

4. Know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe;

5. Find grace in the search for understanding and believe there is more value in questioning than in absolutes;

6. Strive for peace and justice among all people;

7. Strive to protect and restore the integrity of our Earth; and

8. Commit to a path of life-long learning, compassion, and selfless love.

This is certainly not the most elegant statement of belief or principles I have seen. It reads like it was written by a committee, which it probably was. Nor is it written “for the ages”—I’m sure it will be revised again. Yet I think that is one of its other points. Over the centuries, Christianity has become notorious for its endless production of doctrines, creeds and statements of belief. Theologians have then written millions more words interpreting those statements. (And Lutherans have been at the forefront of those efforts.)

A statement like The 8 Points is really an attempt to step away from all that. It is not systematic theology nor does it claim to summarize “The Truth” (in fact, it almost denies such a thing exists). It is more about behavior and attitudes than about intellectual ideas or beliefs.

My intellectual guru, English theologian Don Cupitt, has said that systematic theology basically stopped being written after about 1970, and I think he is right. The last two great Christian theologians were the German-American Lutheran Paul Tillich (who died in Chicago in 1965) and Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968). They were the last to write “grand theology” that genuinely broke new ground or said anything original.

The few attempts made after Tillich and Barth have not really said anything new. Most theologians haven’t tried, however, because they have understood Cupitt’s point that the world has changed. Christianity, and religion generally, has run itself into an intellectual cul-de-sac. In other words, theology really just doesn’t have any new insight to offer about the world or human life in that world. That baton has been passed to the natural and behavioral sciences.

Unfortunately, it has been very hard for theologically-oriented churches to recognize or accept this new reality. Such churches are predominantly mainline denominations, like Lutherans, and Roman Catholics. We continue to insist on the importance of getting all our theological and doctrinal ducks in a row, when most people, including most of our own church members, don’t really care about such things or even understand them. Denominational offices and gatherings continue to talk and talk, and write and write. Yet fewer and fewer pay any attention to such efforts, which look more esoteric and antiquarian with each passing year.

A simple and kind of unrefined statement like The 8 Points is really an effort to say, “Let’s be done with all that.” It is an attempt to redirect the church away from an obsession with getting its thinking right and refocus on values and behavior. Of course, this is nothing but a scandal and a horror to those convinced that being a Christian is all about what you think or believe. Yet in my experience, while such people tend to very vocal, they are a shrinking minority.

I think the real weight behind a statement like The 8 Points is that it is not only more true to our times, but it is also more true to the biblical tradition. There is actually very little explicit theology in the Bible, and what theology there is certainly isn’t systematic. Only in the latter stages of the New Testament do we begin to see a fixation on “getting it right” in our thinking. Prior to that, and certainly in the life and teachings of Jesus, “getting it right” is all about our behavior, individually and as a community.

Apart from its specific statements, The 8 Points says that in the 21^st century Christianity’s value is to cause people to ask “How shall we live?” not “What do we think?” In doing so, progressive Christians aren’t charting a new path but getting us back to an ancient one.

9-11 plus ten (Sunday Reflections for September 11, 2011)

2011-09-16T20:08:00.002-05:00

I’ve had a hard time knowing what to make of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The New York and Washington media have been telling us this is a big deal. Since many of those in the industry experienced it personally, this isn’t surprising. Yet their perspective is inevitably skewed by the huge impact it had on those cities. If my experience is at all representative, I suspect the thoughts and feelings of much of the rest of the country are more conflicted.

There is no question the 9/11 attacks were stunning and horrific. Yet ten years later, “What did it all mean?” is a question we still wonder and argue about. 9/11 set off a dramatic chain of events for the country and the world: wars, economic upheaval, new security measures, and increased anxiety, to name some of the most obvious. Here again, however, the meaning and necessity of all these are still debated.

In evaluating important events, ten years is much too short a time to have genuine perspective. Yet I will hazard a guess that 50 or 100 years from now, the 9/11 attacks, even acknowledging their horror, will not be seen to have been history changing events. Rather, I suspect 9/11 will be seen as one example or symptom (though perhaps the most dramatic) of an extended period of global instability—a period that is probably still far from over.

Historians often disagree about which events are the actual turning points for some period. History rarely turns on a dime. Change comes gradually, yet often there are events where that change becomes obvious and inevitable. In this case, I suspect our most recent historical turning point will be seen to have been, not 9/11, but the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the time the Cold War ended, there were a number of observers who said we would soon come to miss it. Subsequent events have demonstrated the insight of their prophecy. As bad as it was, the Cold War did provide a power balance which drew in nearly every country on the planet. Nuclear weapons kept the US and USSR apart but it was the broader dynamics of Cold War politics which kept conflicts between all other countries from getting out of control.

With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika all that came to an end. Decades long power balances were thrown out of kilter and nations new and old went spinning out in all directions. Perhaps the region most constrained by Cold War politics was the Muslim world of North Africa, the Middle East, and South-central Asia.

This area, more than any other, has demonstrated how many authoritarian regimes were kept in power by playing off the US and Soviet Union against each other. This year’s Arab Spring uprising is the most recent example of the region’s upheaval. A much earlier instance, of course, was Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida, whose original goal was the overthrow of the corrupt and US-allied monarchy ruling Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Islam.

Yet what the Soviet Union’s end really represents is not just new, head-spinning geopolitics but a whole cascade of social changes sweeping the globe. From modern cities to primitive villages, people everywhere are experiencing cultural upheaval unlike anything the world has known. Much of it is driven by an avalanche of new technologies, especially in information management, agriculture, communication, transportation, and health care. Many people are literally finding themselves being propelled from the 19^th century (or even earlier) into the 21^st century, with the trauma such rapid change inevitably causes.

The media has drawn attention to the role of cell phones and social networking in the Arab Spring. Ironically these youth-inspired revolts also demonstrated how far behind Al Qaida had fallen in appreciating the social changes underway in the Muslim world. That, as well as the destruction of most its leadership, is quickly making Al Qaida into a historical footnote and casting doubt on whether it will really have any lasting impact on the world.

Contemporary terrorist organizations and revolutionary movements, like Al Qaida, have drawn their strength from the fear and anxiety caused by the cultural changes in less-developed countries. 9/11 may come to be seen as the moment when people in the West were finally confronted by the dark side of our technological and economic transformation.

One reaction throughout the world has been the rise of fundamentalist and jihadist-type religion. This has been driven by a turn-back-the-clock desire to reverse traumatic cultural changes. The impossibility and irrationality of this is often ironically demonstrated by the use of modern technology by these “traditionalist” movements.

In any case, social upheaval is almost certain to continue for the indefinite future, whether inspired by religion, politics or economics. Even the most beneficial technological changes are going to continue to cause unpredictable, ricocheting consequences. We have much more to learn about how to manage those changes and minimize their unintended consequences.

Yet the answer to technology’s problems can’t simply be more technology. The greatest challenge we face is how to integrate technological developments with a moral perspective. While not yet officially acknowledged, it is becoming increasingly clear that the recent financial meltdown was the result of technologies used to hide the risky and even felonious nature of countless financial transactions.

Others point to the growing use of technology and its complexity to mask fraud and deceit in nearly every field and institution. Lying and cheating, of course, are as old as history itself. It is also true that they have tended to rise and fall in waves and that they are kept in check only by the intentional efforts of society. Al Qaida has essentially been eliminated but, if anything, the social upheaval and injustice which spawned it have only grown. We are, however, more aware of it, even if we feel helpless to do anything about it.

Yet we are never helpless. History and all the world’s religions testify that a commitment to genuine community, and the fairness and equality it requires, does make a difference and ultimately wins out. Our values do get out of kilter and we often succumb to looking out only for our own interests. Yet the voices of our consciences and our prophets challenge us to do better, and we know we can. Ultimately controlling technology is not our greatest challenge. Rather, it is the age-old task of controlling our egos and emotions with a commitment to justice and compassion for all.

He even associates with SNRs! (Sunday Reflections for September 4, 2011)

2011-09-03T15:18:00.003-05:00

In recent years I’ve come to expect whining and complaining about the decline of Christianity from religious conservatives and fundamentalists. I was stunned—frankly—to hear it this week coming from a minister of a denomination that usually epitomizes acceptance and accommodation with modern culture, the United Church of Christ (UCC).

Two pastoral colleagues shared on Facebook a short “devotional” piece by Rev. Lillian Daniel, senior minister of First Congregational Church of Glen Ellyn, IL. These two friends liked it (as did many of their friends in reply). I was appalled. The essay was titled, “Spiritual but Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.” Rev. Daniel apparently does a lot of traveling and gets stuck with a lot of annoying seatmates:

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo.

Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?

Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition.

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community?

Yikes! I pity the next person who sits next to Rev. Daniel on a plane, especially if they’re not an active church member. Perhaps she just needs a vacation.

I quoted most of her piece so you could get its tone, because that’s what I think is important. The content is primarily sweeping and unsupported generalizations, both about “spiritual but not religious” people (hereafter “SNR”) and about the church. On the Facebook forum where it first appeared, most comments were supportive but a number were from people taken aback as I was. These echoed my thought that many are not religious specifically because of negative experiences with churches.

In her essay, Daniel presents an idealized, and even romanticized, conception of the church, especially as it’s expressed in actual congregations. The ongoing exposure of clergy sex scandals, the screeching judgmentalism of fundamentalists, and the stories any Christian can tell of congregational fights and schisms (to name just a few prominent ones) surely provide ample explanations of why people could be alienated from organized religion.

I also can only dismiss as nonsense Daniel’s assertion that there is no challenge to “having deep thoughts all by oneself.” Oh that more people would have such experiences! I hardly think we are over-supplied with deep thought. Nor can I accept her implication that the church is the only community where one can genuinely put spiritual thought to work. In fact, I think most spiritual work is hammered out in the crucibles of the family, the work place, government assemblies, and the countless informal “non-religious” communities of which we are all apart.

I think most of this is so obvious it hardly needs explanation. That’s why I am left wondering what is really going on with Rev. Daniel, who ought to be aware of all this. While I joked about her needing a vacation, I do hear burnout, frustration and discouragement in her rant. She is not alone in this in the church, especially among clergy.

While fundamentalists have been complaining for decades about the decline of Christianity and the rise of secularism, it is the mainline churches that have really taken it on the chin. I guess it’s not surprising that this would occasionally lead to the kind of venting Daniel engages in here. She’s picked the wrong target, though.

Of course, SNR folks can be superficial and shallow in their thinking and behavior. Yet they are hardly unique in that, even when compared with religious people! The SNRs I meet are a mixed bag but many are as sincere, thoughtful and socially engaged as the religious people I know. The reality which Daniel ignores is that the nature of religion is changing around the world. For those committed to traditional religious organizations and religious activity, this can be very hard to understand or accept.

Yet understand and accept is exactly what we must do, even and perhaps especially if we are in the church. Nothing in the world stands still, including religion. Recent scholarship has emphasized that Jesus lived in just such a cultural moment, with ancient religions increasingly unsatisfactory and ineffective.

Jesus accepted the religion of his time but was hardly committed to it. Indeed some scholars believe he actually anticipated the end of traditional religion, believing there was no need for religious institutions acting as go-betweens for God and humanity. Indeed it’s hard to make the case that the church which was created centuries after him is not something he also would have railed against.

The Bible shows again and again that it’s the religious outsiders who usually have the best insight into spiritual truth, not the folks invested in the success of religious institutions. For that reasons alone, rather than lecturing the SNRs we need to be listening to them.

Jesus business (Sunday Reflections for August 7, 2011)

2011-08-09T10:07:00.001-05:00

Last week I caught part of a BBC radio program about business innovation, including the difficulty large legacy companies have staying competitive and even surviving. One guest interviewed spoke at length about the now commonly heard idea that companies need to know what business they are in. Often they make the mistake of focusing on specific products they make rather than the service those products provide for their customers. When clear about that service, companies can then continually refine their product line, even if it means dropping products the company has long been identified with.

The example he cited where this did not occur (at least not soon enough) was the two American one-time photography giants, Kodak and Polaroid. Kodak assumed it was a company that primarily made camera film while Polaroid’s identity was wedded to its instant picture cameras. Because of inflexibility in their corporate self-images, neither was able to adjust to the revolution of digital photography and camera miniaturization.

This was especially ironic for Kodak because at onetime it had invented a digital camera. Its corporate culture, however, couldn’t figure out what to do with it since it couldn’t imagine a photographic world without film. Like Kodak, Polaroid also possessed many technologies and products which could have been transitioned into the new digital realm but it just wasn’t looking in that direction. If these companies had understood themselves as serving the photographic community rather than as producers of specific products, they could have found the flexibility to pivot with new technologies and popular interests.

The Kodak/Polaroid experience has become an increasingly common one in the corporate world. The long-predicted collapse of Borders was also the result of its leadership being unable to adjust, in this case to the popularity of both online retailing and electronic book readers. For too long it assumed its business was selling physical books in large brick-and-mortar stores, rather than providing its customers reading material however they wanted to get it.

It’s not hard to see where I am going with this. Can you think of a “legacy” business that we are all involved in that is having trouble adjusting to new market and technological realities? For me this radio conversation raised some very practical, pointed and, certainly for some, disturbing questions about the contemporary church.

Just thinking about the church in these terms makes some people squirm and I know there are those who would reject this whole approach. For me, however, the questions are obvious and unavoidable. What business is the church in? Have we identified our self too much with particular products and not with the services we provide? Is our product identity blinding us to resources we have which would enable us to provide new products and services, better meeting people’s wants and needs?

In the past I’ve used the analogy of the church being like a buggy whip manufacturer that has been unable to adjust to the automobile age. What the BBC program made clear is how much such organizations’ problems are psychological. They have a mental block, a blindness, to the new world around them. They can’t imagine the world has changed in such drastic ways that people no longer need or want the products they had successfully offered for so long.

It’s the nature of religion to be about “eternal truths.” Historically, however, we are aware that every religion adjusts to changing times, sometimes radically, or they disappear. When “eternal truth” runs up against new conflicting realities, they are adjusted or forgotten, though that may not be publicly admitted. Those truths become like outdated products a company drops and replaces with more relevant ones.

The single “product” the church has most identified itself with is salvation. The meaning of salvation has often been somewhat fluid but the church has always liked the idea that, whatever it was, it was the only place you could get it. (I heard that notion again just this summer from our synod bishop.) People need what we have and they can’t get it anywhere else. No. That is the blindness that has bankrupted companies and is now sinking the church.

Like the veteran corporate and department heads of Kodak and Polaroid, the church is dominated by people (clergy especially but laity as well) who love what once was. Cameras without film, built into your phone?? Instant pictures on digital screens, not on a piece of ejected paper?? Churches that don’t save people?? Close your eyes, stop your ears, and these crazy ideas will go away. “What has been will always be.” Right.

What’s different about the church’s situation is that it has been in decline longer than any company has existed, at least two centuries. Within mainline churches certainly, most people know the world has changed and the church has not, yet we lack the imagination to think of the church and what it does in a new way.

One example: It’s debatable whether traditional Christian worship has a future, yet the church is unwilling to even consider recasting it in ways to make it more welcoming and relevant. Why can baptism only be the entrance right for church membership? Why not open it to anyone wanting a ritual of community blessing at the beginning of life? And why not do something similar with communion, making it into a meal of fellowship and spiritual blessing rather than an experience reserved for elect few?

The reason such changes are resisted is that both are still too closely identified as dispensers of salvation, a “prize” that only worthy people are entitled to receive. Unfortunately for the church, that “prize” is one fewer and fewer people are interested in getting. They’re not interested in jumping through the hoops the church puts up to get it.

The challenge facing the church is to be willing to throw open its doors and genuinely welcome anyone and everyone without condition. Let people’s needs guide its practice and self-understanding, rather than its identification with its “salvation product line.” Salvation, meaning, hope, new life and all the other ideas Christianity has used over the centuries still have meaning and value for people, but not in the classic, antique forms in which the church has preserved them.

Jesus is still one of the most popular and well known figures in the world, but not in the theologically straight-jacketed form the church hangs on to. Rather, people are attracted to him as a real person: inspiring, encouraging, challenging, puzzling, loving, hope-giving, welcoming—all the things that seemed to get people’s attention during his life. The church could do worse than to simply say: we are in the Jesus business. Then be prepared to dump any part of our “product line” that doesn’t contribute to that.

Talking to ourselves (Sunday Reflections for July 31, 2011)

2011-08-08T12:11:00.000-05:00

“Why did I do that?” Not only do we all ask ourselves that question, we probably ask it more often than we care to admit. We also probably ask it more often than we even realize. Often the behavior in question is something trivial or just annoying but sometimes it is more serious. “I do not understand my own actions,” St Paul writes in Romans. It is an ancient problem, apparently.

If we think about it long enough, the frequency and apparent universality of this experience gets a little unnerving. “What do you MEAN you didn’t know what you were doing?” If you didn’t know what you were doing, just who is this you that we’re talking about? Is there more than one of you “in there?”

Thinking this way may give us a headache but the research of neuroscience increasingly supports the notion that yes, there is more than one of you “in there.” As reported on MSNBC.com, neuroscientist David Eagleman describes this reality in his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. According to Eagleman there are indeed many voices in our heads:

The only way to understand the brain is as a neural parliament, where you have different political parties battling it out to control your behavior. This can now be measured in the brain with neural imaging. We can see that there are all these competing subpopulations in the brain that are always battling it out. You can call this a "team of rivals," and I think that’s a much more nuanced view of ourselves. You can get a real understanding how it is you can argue with yourself and cajole yourself. When you stop to think about it, you might ask yourself, which "you" is you? It’s all you.

I think this gives us a much more nuanced view of others' behavior as well. We don’t have to fall into this simplistic path of asking, "What are this person’s true colors? Is this person a racist or not a racist?" For better or worse, it’s perfectly possible that there are racist parts of your brain and non-racist parts. You get a much better understanding when you understand that, as Walt Whitman correctly surmised, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

He had the spirit of that exactly right. Freud had a similar idea with the concepts of id, ego and superego. What’s different now is that we can actually measure and understand the processes going on under the hood.

In addition to questioning our own behavior we also question others’ behavior. “Why did they do that?” To this Eagleman says, they may have had “no choice.” Another discovery of neuroscience is that all brains are not created equal. Well of course we may say, but Eagleman is not just referring to mental ability or even personality.

Everyone’s brain is like a unique fingerprint. Every brain is the result of unique genetics and the social environment in which it developed. How we think, behave and react to situations and events is a function of our unique brain. You can probably see we are now teetering on the edge of that trickiest of subjects, human choice and free will. Eagleman doesn’t go down that road, however.

Free will is really about responsibility for our actions, whether to give credit or blame. From his study of the brain Eagleman thinks that’s kind of pointless because it doesn’t get us anywhere. The question rather is how do we encourage socially productive behavior and discourage anti-social behavior? When it comes to criminal behavior, the problem in Eagleman’s view is that we make few if any distinctions. The pathological criminal can only be taken out of society and “warehoused.” There’s nothing else we can do at this point. They are a small minority of the criminal population, however, yet most of the rest are treated the same way.

Nearly one-third of prison inmates are mentally ill and need treatment, though few get it. The criminal behavior of many others can be explained by unique factors for each person. They should be placed in rehabilitation programs that address those factors. Instead, most are lumped together often resulting in criminal and anti-social tendencies being cemented or even made worse.

Charging one’s opponent with “coddling criminals” or being “soft on crime” has become a standard campaign tactic. Yet there is little evidence that having created one of the largest prison populations in the world, our society is actually any safer or more just.

Conservative Christians often assume that the Bible requires us to classify people and their behavior as good or bad and that bad behavior must be punished. In fact, as the Paul quote above indicates, the Bible is actually very aware of the complications of judging, let alone understanding, human behavior.

While the Bible has a great deal to say about social injustice, criminal behavior and its punishment gets remarkably little attention. One could even say the Bible has a rather cynical attitude since nearly every one of its trial or prison stories is a case of abuse and injustice. At the end of Matthew, in the story of the separation of the sheep and goats, the true disciples are those who visited “the least of these” in prison.

Frustration and anger at criminal behavior is understandable but the evidence is mounting that our one-size-fits-all punishment system is accomplishing little and probably making things worse. The developments of neuroscience such as Eagleman reports give us reason to put our emotions aside to ask how we can actually deal with the problem of criminality in ways that would make our society better. While our own behavior or that of our neighbors may surprise us, it is actually becoming less of a mystery. There is profit for all of us in putting that knowledge to work.

He must increase (Sunday Reflections for July 24, 2011)

2011-07-21T21:48:00.005-05:00

Last week via Facebook another pastor directed my attention to a Huffington Post article, “Why I'm Not a 'Fan' of Jesus.” It was by a Pastor Kyle Idleman, identified as the “teaching pastor” of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, supposedly the fifth largest in the country. The article apparently summarizes a recent book/DVD he authored.

Idleman’s basic point is a familiar one and not without value: being a “fan” of Jesus is not the same as being a follower of Jesus. He observes that while three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christians, it’s pretty hard to tell that from their behavior or the state of our society. With all these Christians around, he asks, why are there so many hungry, homeless, with inadequate health care, etc.

One explanation for this discrepancy Idleman found in learning about a new kind of vegetarian, called a “flexitarian.” They don’t eat meat—usually. One woman interviewed said she considers herself a vegetarian but admits she likes—and occasionally eats—bacon. In Idlemans’ view that really means she isn’t a vegetarian whatever she might think of herself. Similarly, Idleman says that people claiming to be Christian, but living in ways that hardly show it, are not followers of Jesus but fans of Jesus.

The word fan is most simply defined as, an enthusiastic admirer. And I think Jesus has a lot of fans these days. Some fans may even get dressed up for church on Sunday and make their ringtone a worship song. They like being associated with Jesus. Fans want to be close enough to Jesus to get the benefits, but not so close that it requires anything from them. They want a no-strings-attached relationship with Jesus. So a fan says, I like Jesus but don't ask me to serve the poor. I like Jesus, but I'm not going to give my money to people who are in need. I like Jesus, but don't ask me to forgive the person who hurt me. I like Jesus, but don't talk to me about money or sex that's off limits. Fans like Jesus just fine, but they don't want to give up the bacon.

I understand and in some ways share Pastor Idleman’s frustration but I think he is barking up the wrong tree. Unfortunately he is engaging in a favorite activity of clergy and other church authorities going all the way back to St Paul: blaming the victim. The über-Christians who naturally end up in the church’s hierarchy are always complaining about the lack of commitment and understanding of the folks in the pews. Why don’t they get it? Why aren’t they as faithful and devoted as I am? Whining and scolding is a fine art in the church.

I give Idleman credit that he doesn’t follow the usual path of complaining about people’s lack of support for the church and its activities: Why don’t they give more? Why don’t they worship more often? Why don’t they witness and evangelize? Jesus spoke little about such things. Rather, like Jesus, Idleman focuses on people’s social behavior. Where are the fruits of their faith and commitment?

While Idleman’s approach is truer to the teaching of Jesus it isn’t going to have any better result. The reason is because he hasn’t identified the problem, which goes all the way back to the beginning. Regardless of what was said about the Christian life, over the centuries most people have equated being a Christian with belonging to an organization. Or in the words of an admittedly oversimplified yet basically true assessment: While Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom, what we got was the church.

Jesus’ message was that the reign of God was coming into the world in a new way, right now. It may be that he expected that to include some dramatic divine intervention in world affairs. In any case, he does not seem to have made any provision for an organized movement to come after him. Any “church talk” from Jesus was almost certainly put on his lips later by the gospel writers. And while in the gospels Jesus does make radical statements about disciples needing to deny themselves and take up their crosses (as Idleman says), Jesus also tells people not to follow him but go back to their homes and live out their new experiences of God’s grace.

In any case, out of the confusion following Jesus’ death came the church. First it was small and informal as we see in Paul’s letters but it quickly became a highly structured, hierarchical and authoritarian organization. And while there was always some presentation of the gospel and the call to a new ways of life, nonetheless what most people heard as it spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond was: Join the church and be saved.

The Reformation attempted to put a new emphasis on Christian lifestyle and personal transformation over against merely belonging to the church. Yet Protestant churches still required baptism and retained a simplified congregational structure. Thus being a Christian still meant receiving sacraments and “going” to church. Even for “born again” Evangelicals this could become as perfunctory as for any Roman Catholic.

Pastor Idleman’s push to transform Christians from being fans to followers seems like another trip around an old and well-worn track. Would he say that among the 20,000 that supposedly show up at his church each week, there are only followers and no fans? I doubt even he would make that claim.

Idleman is right, along with so many others, that we are in the midst of a religious and spiritual crisis. It is a crisis of purpose and identity, not for the church, but for Christianity. Shortly before his death Dietrich Bonheoffer, who decried the lack of commitment of German Christians, wrote enigmatically of the need for a “religionless Christianity.” He saw that the church had become an obstacle rather than the means to Germany’s spiritual renewal.

While there are exceptions like Pastor Idleman’s megachurch, overall church Christianity is in decline in the developed world. Belonging to an organization simply doesn’t meet people’s spiritual needs anymore. Yet what recent biblical scholarship has made clear is, that isn’t what Jesus was about anyway.

If people are genuinely going to become followers rather than fans of Jesus, they’re going to have to relearn who Jesus actually was. So far, as Bonheoffer, Kierkegaard, and many others concluded, the church has been mostly an obstacle to that reeducation. Encountering this ancient Jesus and a kingdom-centered Christianity, the church would be forced into the role of John the Baptist who admitted honestly, “He must increase and I must decrease.”

From Jesus to Christ and back again (Sunday Reflections for July 17, 20110

2011-07-15T20:13:00.003-05:00

(I am at last posting again. I have a several Reflections articles I need to catch up on but I thought I should start with the most recent first. Watch for more to come!)

FRONTLINE is PBS’s premier documentary news program. So it probably seemed odd back in the late 1990s when it broadcast a 4-hour series about Jesus and the early church. From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians (which a group of us watched last month) really did report news, however, as well as tell history.

The news was of the cumulative results of decades of scholarly research into that subject, and which was just then coming to a culmination. (When I was in seminary in the early 80s this scholarship was beginning to trickle in.) What had been found really was something new about the earliest years of the Jesus movement, but it wasn’t the kind of sudden discovery that might happen in a laboratory.

The study of ancient documents and archeological findings often takes many years to bear fruit. For example, shortly after World War II two ancient collections of documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library were found in the Middle East. Once they saw them, scholars knew immediately they were of immense importance. Yet it literally took nearly a half-century of study (and even physical reconstruction) to genuinely understand them. Many scholars did not even live long enough to fully appreciate what they were studying, and that study still goes on.

The question that scholars have been trying to answer is, Who was Jesus and what was the movement launched in his name about? Just asking the question shows we are in a different world from our ancestors. For centuries and generations the answer to that question had been found by looking at the church’s creeds. But that had stopped being satisfactory or adequate well over a century ago.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars began looking at the Bible with new honesty. Among other things, they had come to realize that the creeds smoothed over a much more complex reality about Christianity’s origins. The four gospels, as well as Paul, each had distinctly different understandings of Jesus. They also came to realize that figuring out where the historical Jesus was in the midst of this was much more difficult than anyone had imagined. Some concluded that such a task was impossible.

As From Jesus to Christ reports, what needs to be said first is that nothing new has been found that can be traced back directly to Jesus himself. We still have no physical evidence of him or of anything he did or said. It’s almost certain he never wrote anything. In fact, it could be said we have taken a step backwards because most scholars now doubt we even have anything genuine from his followers or disciples, either.

And this is unlikely to change. Scholars and archaeologists have literally gone over Jesus’ Palestinian homeland with a fine tooth comb. More important than their thoroughness, however, is the realization of how amorphous Jesus’ life and ministry truly was. He just didn’t leave much of a footprint—and probably couldn’t have if he wanted to.

During his lifetime the number of people he interacted with or even knew he existed was probably very small. The “crowds” the gospels report him attracting are almost certainly exaggerative ways of conveying how important Jesus had become for the early church years later. In fact, the evidence for Jesus’ historical life is so thin and ambiguous that there are some who have concluded he didn’t exist at all.

That’s probably going too far. Yet it is true we are unlikely to ever have a very clear or accurate picture of him. This is due both to lack of evidence but also because his own ideas were so quickly mixed together with those of other spiritual leaders and movements of the time, Paul and the gospel writers being the most well known examples.

What seems to be the case is that Jesus was a genuine social catalyst. He was a spark which found an ample supply of human kindling. Scholars now have a much better understanding of Jesus’ world and it is evident it was ripe for change: spiritual, religious, social, economic, political. At the same time, however, that world wasn’t as ready for change as Jesus hoped and envisioned. The new “kingdom of God” of justice and equality he believed he was inaugurating was certainly more than those in positions of authority would tolerate.

His death by execution then was no surprise. What was (and still is) a surprise was that Jesus didn’t then disappear into the dust of history. And perhaps that was the genius of his vagueness and ambiguity. He said just enough to enflame people’s imaginations and give them a vision and hope of a better world. Yet his message was open enough to interpretation that many different and even conflicting people and movements could rally around him.

Thus from the start, the movement and church that followed Jesus’ death was fractious, conflicted, and marvelously chaotic. No one then or since knew what Jesus was really up to. And we will never know. All we have are the bubbling ideas that erupted from him and those around him, and which have challenged every generation since to hope and work for a better world.

Over the centuries countless church authorities have thought it their job to reign in this disorderly mess and get it under control. It’s now clear, however, that the man who upset the tables in the temple believed that such holy chaos is often the only way God’s will ever gets done. The religious chaos afflicting the church today may well be just what Jesus would have hoped for, or even ignited himself.

Time to lose some Passion (Sunday Reflections for April 17, 2011)

2011-04-18T20:32:00.004-05:00

Recently Michael Rinehart, an ELCA synod bishop from Texas, was discussing on his blog liturgical and preaching issues related to Palm/Passion Sunday. It seems to him that the trend is swinging back toward this day focusing exclusively on the gospel accounts of Jesus’ Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem. The Passion story then is reserved exclusively for Good Friday.

I don’t know if his perception of a trend is accurate but he seems to think this is a good idea. I believe he is correct in saying that this change occurred when attendance at Good Friday services had declined significantly. Growing up I only remember Palm Sunday but by the time I got to seminary the transition to Passion Sunday was all the rage.

I embraced the change (to the dismay of the senior pastor I worked with) and especially enjoyed the dramatic reading in parts of the full Passion narrative (usually replacing the sermon because of its length). For me, the high point (for lack of a better term) was always the moment when the congregation (taking the role of the crowd) shouted out, “Crucify him!” in response to Pilate’s offer of mercy.

Well, that was then. As the years have passed, my enthusiasm for all that has waned considerably. While I still appreciate the drama, I have found myself asking, “But what’s the point?”--not just what's the point of it liturgically, but also what is the point of the story?

Perhaps my attitude began to change when I served as interim pastor of a congregation in Omaha. We had a lay parish assistant who I respected a lot. She surprised me when she said she wouldn’t be at the Good Friday service (she attended nearly everything). “The story is just too sad,” she said. This was someone who probably could have explained Luther’s theology of the cross as well as many pastors, but for her the Passion story itself was just too much.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, biblical scholarship of the past two centuries has significantly challenged the traditional understanding of the events surrounding Jesus’ death. Basically scholars tell us we really just don’t know much about what happened. We do know, however, that a lot of what the gospels’ passion narratives say is unlikely and sometimes preposterous. In many places the gospel accounts contradict each other so obviously they can’t each be right; some of their reports then have to be wrong.

It’s now nearly certain that none of the gospel writers were eye witnesses to the events they report. (Mark, the earliest gospel, was written at least forty years after Jesus’ death.) Did they have eye witnesses as sources? We don’t know but that also seems unlikely. And what’s hard for us to understand is that they very likely didn’t care, either. Telling the message, the “good news” about Jesus, was their priority rather than historical accuracy, which is our modern concern.

In all likelihood, much of the detail in the gospels’ stories of Jesus’ last week was inspired by the writers’ Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Thus, rather than biblical prophecy fulfilled by the events of Holy Week, this scripture was the primary source for the gospel writers’ passion stories. They created a narrative with material from their scriptural tradition, which conveyed the meaning and importance of Jesus’ death rather than its history, which probably no one knew.

The question for us is whether the meaning and importance they saw (and the gospels themselves have differing views) is what we would now see or value. To me, there are at least two major problems for us today, and both contribute to the overwrought nature of the gospels’ telling of the passion story.

The first is the anti-Judaism present to some degree in each of the gospels, especially in the Passion stories. This problem has been recognized for a long time and, particularly since the Holocaust, various attempts have been made to remedy it.

Biblical scholarship has cast doubt on what role, if any, Jewish religious authorities would have had in Jesus’ death. Even the gospels strain to come up with a plausible connection, primarily because their own accounts of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee give them little to work with. It is much more likely that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities, probably because he did something which made them consider him a threat to public order. The table-turning incident in the temple is one possibility.

So why the hostility to Judaism in the gospels? Because they were written at the time of the split between church and synagogue. Divorces can be angry, messy affairs and this one certainly was. That most Jews did not embrace Jesus as the Christ became an awkward embarrassment for the early church. If Jesus really was the Jewish messiah, then why did most Jews not accept him? Thus began the meme of the messiah’s rejection by his own people, portrayed most dramatically in his Jerusalem trial.

The second problem is the theological interpretation of Jesus’ death. Again, the gospels have somewhat differing views on this (as does Paul). Yet they all agree that Jesus’ death was somehow necessary in God’s plan of salvation. Jesus’ death was a sacrifice for humanity’s sin like the animal sacrifices made in the temple.

Today I’m not sure this is even understandable by modern people. More importantly, however, it makes God appear as some kind of ancient bloodthirsty ogre. While some fundamentalists still revel in this image, most people find it repulsive and just bizarre. There is a lot of anger in the Bible but today we can recognize that much of it is our own anger and frustration projected on God.

The obvious rebuttal to that portrayal is, of course, Jesus himself. This supposed divine need for justice and judgment that sent Jesus to the cross is most noticeably absent in Jesus’ own teaching and human interactions. Forgiveness and compassion is the heart of his life and ministry. As this has been rediscovered in recent years, Jesus’ death has been reframed as the ultimate act of that compassion and selflessness. Jesus’ death is saving for us by vividly portraying and leading us to the life of love that is our human calling. God is not “satisfied” by Jesus’ death but heartbroken.

Can the gospels’ Passion narratives be saved? The disinterest in Good Friday and the resistance to imposing the Passion on Palm Sunday are pretty strong indications of how average Christians feel. I think we need to pay attention. The image of the cross is certainly important and powerful and should not be lost. Ironically, however, the stories that for centuries have swirled around it are now preventing us from seeing it. Somehow the church has to find a way to clear the air.

All hell (Sunday Reflections for April 10, 2011)

2011-04-10T21:14:00.003-05:00

This coming week will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. As we all remember from our history lessons, the conflict began on April 12, 1861 with the bombardment by Confederate forces of Ft. Sumter, located on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The conflict would end almost exactly four years later on April 9, 1865 with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House, a few hundred miles north in Virginia. Symbolically, however, the war’s last shot came a few days later on April 13, with the tragic and pointless assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

I visited Charleston for the first time the week after Christmas. It’s a lovely and fascinating historical tourist Mecca, with buildings dating back to the 1600s. There’s little evidence now of the wreck it became at the end of the war as a result of the fighting prior to its capture by Sherman’s army. I saw Ft. Sumter but did not take the boat ride out to it. I did tour Ft Moultrie, however. Built during the American Revolution, Ft Moultrie had been evacuated by Federal forces for the more defensible but unfinished Ft Sumter. It was used by Confederates in the bombardment and saw service off-and-on until World War II.

Cleaned-up and tourist friendly, most historic sites have a bit of a Disneyland feel to them. The exception in Charleston came when we stumbled upon the old slave market building. It looked like any other building on any other block, as it was probably viewed at the time. It was just another business establishment, like the butcher, stable or dry goods store. It just happened that the business here was the buying and selling of human beings. Walking through the simple building and looking at the displays I couldn’t help thinking this was America’s Auschwitz.

Last week over five nights, PBS rebroadcast the award-winning, blockbuster documentary, The Civil War, by Ken Burns. It’s so easy now to forget the scale of the conflict and the resulting destruction of people and property. Over 600,000 died; more than in all the rest of American wars combined. Millions more were wounded, many with life-long injuries, especially the loss of arms and legs.

With the exception of Gettysburg (in Pennsylvania), all the major fighting was in Southern or Border States and the region was devastated. The Burns documentary was possible because the Civil War was the first major war anywhere to be photographed. Mostly taken after the fighting was over, the pictures are not much different from those of World War I or II: blocks of burned-out buildings, torn up railroad tracks, soldiers’ bodies lying in open fields or trenches, living soldiers exhausted and hollow-eyed, dazed refugees, and emaciated prisoners.

Famously Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman summed up the conflict saying, “War is all hell.” Unlike the early romanticized expectations of most civilians and politicians, many of the commanders on both sides knew what a protracted horror the war would be. Historians now see the American Civil War as anticipating the carnage of the world wars of the next century. The trenches of Verdun were foreshadowed at Petersburg and Grant’s nine-month siege. Concentration camps had their roots in places like Andersonville, whose commander was executed after one of the first war crimes trials. His defense: I was just following orders.

The Civil War was also one of the first “people’s wars,” which therefore required ongoing popular support. There is little doubt, for example, that the North would have ended the conflict had Lincoln not been re-elected in 1864, as looked very likely through most of that year. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta that September seemed to turn the tide, however, convincing enough voters that victory was in sight.

Nonetheless, the official explanations of the conflict by political leaders on both sides shifted as it went on: preserving the Union or defending states’ rights, abolishing slavery or defending slavery. Different people saw different purposes in the war, which showed that the war had really taken on a life of its own.

In both the North and South, many saw the war as a religious crusade: God was on their side. For the North, Julie Ward Howe summed up the sentiment in her stirring Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yet the religious potential for horror was also shown in the pre-war attacks of John Brown, who today would be labeled a terrorist or even jihadist.

Lincoln’s view was different. He had no known religious affiliation and rarely attended worship, yet he frequently quoted scripture in his speeches and framed events in theological terms. As he saw it, the war was God’s judgment on the entire nation. The whole country had practiced or tolerated slavery, and the conflict was the result of a moral breakdown across the board. There would be no winners in this war. Its conclusion, however, would bring the possibility of reconciliation and rebirth.

Lincoln, like many of the war’s generals, saw that war really solved nothing. It was a necessary evil. The real work, and the real chance for a better society and better lives for its people, would come after the fighting was over. After it had gotten it out of its system, the country could get back to its true purpose of being a commonwealth, a place of life and opportunity for all. War, on the other hand, was always and could never be anything other than “all hell.”

Rewriting Holy Week (Sunday Reflections for April 3, 2011)

2011-03-31T21:36:00.007-05:00

In two weeks we begin Holy Week, the church’s observance of the death of Jesus. Various events recounted in the gospels will be commemorated at services during the week, including Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, his last supper with his disciples, his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, his trial before the priests and Pilate, and his crucifixion.

Most Christians, as well as many people outside the church, will regard all this as the remembrance of historical occurrences. They would likely be surprised, and perhaps dismayed, to learn that most biblical scholars today (excluding fundamentalists, of course) regard little if any of it that way. “You mean someone made this all up?” a person might ask. Well, many people were likely involved but, basically, yes.

What we might call “scientific” biblical scholarship has been going on for a little over two centuries. Throughout this time most of these scholars have felt at least some restraint reporting their findings out of fear of how they would be received within the church. One result is that their work increasingly went “underground.” Scholars discussed their work among themselves but only a small portion leaked out to the general public.

After about World War II, critical biblical scholarship became standard fare in seminaries and theology schools. Nonetheless, pastors-in-training were usually directed to keep most of this to themselves or intuitively knew to do so. The bizarre result was that pastors became the only trained professionals I know of who were encouraged NOT to use a significant portion of their education in carrying out their work. Why this wasn’t recognized for decades as a sign that the church was in serious distress, I still haven’t figured out. I’m not sure it is yet today.

Much has changed in the church over the past 200 years and finally we may be able to tolerate some biblical honesty. The biggest change is that most people in the Western world will not pass through the doors of a church at all during Holy Week, nor on Easter for that matter. The culture’s emotional attachment to these stories is significantly weaker that it once was. Frankly, not many people even know these stories anymore except in vague outline. This may, however, give the church some much needed freedom and fresh air.

As we discussed at this past week’s “Living the Questions” video session, the biggest problem with reconstructing the life of Jesus is that we simply have so little reliable information. The earliest writings after Jesus’ death are the letters of Paul, and for reasons still not understood, he tells us little if anything about the historic Jesus. The canonical gospels were written from 40-80 years after Jesus (some scholars would argue for even later dates) and are not eye-witness accounts. In fact, it is entirely possible we have nothing in writing from anyone who actually knew or even saw Jesus.

While this might seem surprising, it really isn’t. As I told awhile ago, I recently read the new biography of Cleopatra, who lived about a generation before Jesus (she knew Herod the Great and it was the Roman Emperor Augustus who defeated her and Mark Antony). At the beginning of the book, the author laments how fragmentary are the sources for Cleopatra’s life. At the high point of her reign, Cleopatra was one of the most powerful persons in the world. Her life intertwined with the greatest of Rome’s rulers, yet no one at the time wrote an account of her life. The information we do have is written many years later, almost all by people attempting to discredit her. Indeed, reconstructing the life of any historically significant person of antiquity is almost impossible in detail and often difficult in even broad outline.

The difficulty in reconstructing the life of Jesus isn’t surprising then, given that he was a virtual social nonentity. Scholars today agree that Jesus came from the furthest margins of society: a Jewish peasant who lived in the backwater of a backwater: the region of Galilee on the fringe of Rome’s despised province of Judea. To observers of the time, Jesus would have been one of “a dime-a-dozen” wandering mystics, teachers, holy men, and miracle workers common to the region and the time. If Cleopatra could barely get her story told, Jesus didn’t stand a chance.

Which, in brief, is the main reason the biblical events of Holy Week are now seen as literary fiction. The basic plot is certainly plausible. For whatever reason, Jesus may have gone to Jerusalem (perhaps for the first time in his life), gotten himself in trouble by creating a commotion (in the temple?), which then led to his arrest and execution. But someone as insignificant as Jesus would never have rated the tumult or attention depicted in the gospels.

The details of that story are now viewed as the product of early church evangelists and writers. Their source, rather than eye witnesses, was primarily the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Following a long and respected religious tradition, its stories were used to provide the interpretive framework for this new religious event, the life and death of Jesus the Christ.

Whatever its cause, Jesus’ arrest would have led to a minimal legal proceeding followed by a quick execution. It certainly wouldn’t have rated a hearing before the Roman governor. Public crucifixions were literally almost everyday occurrences. It would have been normal if repulsive to pass rotting bodies hanging on crosses as one entered Jerusalem. This was ancient state terrorism and crowd control. Most victims were not buried because wild animals and the elements quickly disposed of the bodies.

Nor is it clear that Jewish authorities would have ever been involved given that Jesus did little if anything to merit their intervention. Calling yourself the messiah (if Jesus even did that) might get you labeled as crazy but it wasn’t a capital offense. And Jesus almost certainly did not call himself the son of God. That was an identity given him after his death by the early church, to contest the Roman emperor’s claim to that title.

As we read a novel or watch a movie, most of us easily enter the story as if it is real, and temporarily suspend our awareness that what is being depicted is the creation of the writer or director. The same is true for our hearing of the Holy Week narratives. Nonetheless, it is likely that the gospel writers and early church knew nothing about the events surrounding Jesus’ death. What is hinted at in the gospels themselves may have been truer than we realize: Jesus may well have died alone and abandoned—and unnoticed.

The earliest years of the church after Jesus’ death are essentially a blank slate. We know next to nothing about them. What we can surmise, though, is that some of his followers had experiences which convinced them that Jesus was yet alive (and the first of these may well have been women). “I have seen the Lord.” He lived now in God’s heavenly realm, yet somehow his Spirit also remained with his disciples on earth. As the church spread, and after most of his original followers had died, the story of Jesus was fleshed out, not to reconstruct the chain of events, but for evangelistic proclamation purposes.

For us a narrative like Holy Week now hides as much as it reveals. We are distracted by its over-the-top dramatics and flagrant anti-Semitism. Biblical scholars are helping us regain some perspective, shifting our attention from his death to his life as what is most important for us today. Yet this is something that perhaps even Mark, the earliest gospel, understood. For at its very end the angel at the tomb directs the women to go back to Galilee, the place of Jesus’ life and ministry. “There you will see him.”

Bell's hell (Sunday Reflections for March 27, 2011)

2011-03-27T20:35:00.005-05:00

I talked in my sermon a couple weeks ago about the current tempest in the evangelical teapot. The dustup is over a new book by Rob Bell, an evangelical pastor of a megachurch in Grand Rapids. Bell is considered a leader in the “emerging Christianity” movement which has been popular with many younger evangelicals, as well as some mainline Christians.

In the book, Love Wins, Bell continues to push the envelope of traditional Christian doctrine and theology. What has created controversy this time is his questioning of the meaning and reality of hell. The latest wrinkle is a story picked up by multiple news outlets. It seems a young Methodist pastor posted an article endorsing Bell’s book and this proved the last straw for his church’s members. As a result his rural North Carolina congregation fired him. They didn’t want a pastor who wasn’t a firm believer in hell.

In its summary of Bell’s book, the news story says:

Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell. "This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."

In a video introducing the book,

[Bell] describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: "Reality check: He's in hell." "Gandhi's in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?" Bell asks in the video.

Bell is right in seeing that the Gandhi example goes to the heart of the dark side of the black-and-white nature of evangelicalism. Historically, of course, most of Christianity has tended in this direction at one time or another. “Who’s in and who’s out” is a question the church has often obsessed over and sometimes wielded like a club (as the Methodist pastor rediscovered).

Personally it’s hard for me to take any of this very seriously as I can’t remember ever accepting the idea of hell as a literal place. Indeed most of mainline Christianity has treated hell as a metaphor for a long time. I remember a seminary professor saying thirty years ago, with a wry smile, that while he might believe there was a hell, he didn’t have to believe anyone was in it.

The repeated refrain of Bell’s evangelical critics is that he ignores God’s righteousness. The article summarizes a Baptist theologian’s assessment that “Bell errs in a conception of a loving God that leaves out the divine attributes of justice and holiness.” Ironically this rarely seems to be a concern of Jesus (as in Sunday’s Gospel story from John of the woman at the well). Rather, Bell’s critics sound much more like the Pharisees with whom Jesus so often jousts.

Probably the best takedown of those concerned for God’s justice, however, is the book of Jonah. After his detour with the fish, Johan finally goes to Nineveh to preach as God had asked him. When the city almost instantaneously repents, Jonah goes off into the wilderness to sulk, wanting to die. When God asks him what his problem is, Jonah complains that this is exactly what he knew would happen. The evil Ninevites would repent and get off the hook, “for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”

Hell - Deriec Bouts 15th c.

This has been the secret fear of righteous Christians all along: that the God of Jesus really is a big softy. In their distaste for evil and evil-doers, they want to see some hellfire and brimstone. They don’t want to belong to a club that lets everyone in. Isn’t part of the pleasure of heaven knowing that you didn’t end up in hell like those “other” people? What value is a prize if everyone gets it? Does the carrot really work if there isn’t also a big stick as a threatening alternative?

This debate goes to the heart of Christianity, of the Bible, and of religion generally. Indeed, it is a debate within the Bible itself, as the book of Jonah and Jesus’ arguments with the Pharisees show. Many clearly want a God whose primarily role is to establish and enforce the rules. Historically this has been the god of official state religions, which then sanctioned the king as god’s earthly representative. It was his divinely authorized job to keep order and punish law breakers.

This, however, seems nothing like the God of Jesus. He is the one the church calls the Son of God just like Israel’s ancient kings, yet as we will see again in a few weeks rides into Jerusalem not on a war horse but on a donkey. He is the one who turns away an angry justice-seeking crowd with the disarming words, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” He is the one who looks on those who have hung him on a cross and says, “God forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.”

In one of my favorite movie lines, Groucho Marx says with typical self-deprecating irony, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” Somehow I have the same feeling about the heaven imagined by those who so fervently believe in hell. That’s a club I don’t think I would want to belong to.

"But God was not in the earthquake" (Sunday Reflections for March 20, 2011)

2011-03-25T15:32:00.002-05:00

"But God was not in the earthquake..." 1 Kings 19:11

There has been one remarkable thing about the theological reaction to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan: there hasn’t been any. The one exception I’m aware of was Glen Beck’s vague observation on-air that “perhaps” God was trying to tell the world something, like it needs to change its ways. Apparently even Beck realized how vacuous this sounded and dropped the subject.

A catastrophe of this magnitude begs for some kind of interpretation. In the past, such events inevitably led to sermons and theological treatises on the ways of Almighty God and humanity’s weakness and sinfulness. This time by implication, the theological silence is rendering a different judgment: God had nothing to do with it.

Today in our world of instant communication, we are aware of natural and human-made disasters within minutes of their occurring. We’re also aware of more of them, prompting some to mistakenly think such events are happening at an increased rate. Scientific evidence doesn’t support that, however. Rather, the ballooning human population just means people are more often impacted by such events.

Science has given us an awesome but also disturbing picture of our world. As beautiful and bountiful as the earth is, it can also be amazingly and capriciously violent. Or at least so it seems to us, for on a global scale such events are barely a ripple. The Japanese earthquake was one of the strongest ever measured yet it caused the world’s rotation to increase by only a fraction of a second and changed its axis by a fraction of a degree.

Understood in the context of the earth’s geological history, all this is barely a hiccup. And yet it is just these “hiccups,” multiplied over hundreds of millions of years, which have made the planet what it is today. We marvel at the beauty and scale of the Rocky Mountains yet they didn’t get that way by being modeled out of Play Doh. They are the result of countless instances of just the kind of violent moving and shaking northern Japan experienced.

And this is true of most of our world’s features. We can multiply the examples endlessly. Meteorologists are beginning to understand how hurricanes keep the world’s atmosphere in balance. The Gulf of Mexico is likely the result of an enormous meteor or asteroid collision. Indeed, we probably are only here now because of that “catastrophe,” which was the likely cause of the huge “die-off” that wiped out the dinosaurs and 90% of the rest of animal life. It was the dinosaurs’ untimely exit which allowed the mammals to come to dominate the planet.

In 1755 a huge earthquake and tsunami nearly destroyed the city of Lisbon, Portugal. For Europe, at least, many historians view it as the turning point of Christianity’s cultural domination for it was an event that left theologians speechless. They had no explanation for it because Lisbon was seen as a beautiful and truly Christian city. If any place was deserving of God’s blessing and protection, it was Lisbon. Clearly, it didn’t get. Instead, the event came to be viewed as a confirmation of the new Enlightenment understanding that the world operated according to natural laws rather than divine ones.

God didn’t cause the Lisbon earthquake or the most recent one in Japan. Nor does God cause any other natural phenomenon which we humans may judge to be disasters because we were in the way when they occurred. All of them are simply part of the natural rhythm of events on our churning and heaving planet.

In our last Lent midweek "Living the Questions" video, it was suggested that we need to get rid of the notion of God as “almighty.” Events like these underscore that idea. It isn’t helpful, it isn’t (as the video correctly says) biblical, and experience just says it can’t be true. Life is full of events that are beyond anyone’s control. Most of them are benign and we hardly notice them. Occasionally they are beneficial and sometimes they are catastrophic. Where God enters the picture is in challenging us to decide how to react. If we are blessed at such moments, how will we use that blessing? When disaster strikes, how will we respond to our own needs or to those of others? These are often the crucial moments that define our character and who we are as human beings.

As much as science has done for us, it is highly unlikely we will ever tame our planetary home. Nor for that matter should we, according to what science has shown us. These natural churnings are essential for what has made the earth the planet that it is. Science can help us learn how to better co-exist with our planet’s shakes and rolls. Wisdom should cause us to heed their warnings and counsel. Compassion is what should move us to aid whoever suffers in such disasters wherever our knowledge and wisdom haven’t been enough.

Youthful enthusiasm (Sunday Reflections for March 13, 2011)

2011-03-20T21:59:00.003-05:00

A couple church colleagues of mine recently linked enthusiastically to a blog post by the Episcopal Bishop of Arizona, Rev. Kirk Smith. Bishop Smith says that he is frequently asked what can be done to get more young people to come to church. In response, he quotes from the post of a young woman, Tamie Fields Harkins, who used to be a college chaplain in his diocese. In the post she gives a 20-point “fool-proof plan” for attracting young people to church.

I like many of her ideas but on one major issue I think she is dead wrong. I’ll come to that at the end, though. Here is Ms. Harkins’ plan for your reflection:

1. Be genuine. Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, if you are not already intrinsically trendy or hip. If you are a 90-year-old woman who enjoys crocheting and listens to Beethoven, by God be proud of it.

2. Stop pretending you have a rock band.

3. Stop arguing about whether gay people are okay, fully human, or whatever else. Seriously. Stop it.

4. Stop arguing about whether women are okay, fully human, or are capable of being in a position of leadership.

5. Stop looking for the "objective truth" in Scripture.

6. Start looking for the beautiful truth in Scripture.

7. Actually read the Scriptures. If you are Episcopalian, go buy a Bible and read it. Start in Genesis, it's pretty cool. You can skip some of the other boring parts in the Bible. Remember though that almost every book of the Bible has some really funky stuff in it. Remember to keep #5 and #6 in mind though. If you are evangelical, you may need to stop reading the Bible for about 10 years. Don't worry: during those 10 years you can work on putting these other steps into practice.

8. Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism, consumerism, and the rate at which children are dying worldwide of preventable, treatable diseases. Put all the energy you formerly spent worrying about the legit-ness of gay people into figuring out ways to do some good in these areas.

9. Do not shy away from lighting candles, silence, incense, laughter, really good food, and extraordinary music. By "extraordinary music" I mean genuine music. Soulful music. Well-written, well-composed music. Original music. Four-part harmony music. Funky retro organ music. Hymns. Taize chants. Bluegrass. Steel guitar. Humming. Gospel. We are the church; we have an uber-rich history of amazing music. Remember this.

10. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

11. Learn how to sit with people who are dying.

12. Feast as much as possible. Cardboard communion wafers are a feast in symbol only. Humans cannot live on symbols alone. Remember this.

13. Notice visitors, smile genuinely at them, include them in conversations, but do not overwhelm them.

14. Be vulnerable.

15. Stop worrying about getting young people into the church. Stop worrying about marketing strategies. Take a deep breath. If there is a God, that God isn't going to die even if there are no more Christians at all.

16. Figure out who is suffering in your community. Go be with them.

17. Remind yourself that you don't have to take God to anyone. God is already with everyone. So, rather than taking the approach that you need to take the truth out to people who need it, adopt the approach that you need to go find the truth that others have and you are missing. Go be evangelized.

18. Put some time and care and energy into creating a beautiful space for worship and being-together. But shy away from building campaigns, parking lot expansions, and what-have-you.

19. Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7. Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.

20. Listen to God (to Wisdom, to Love) more than you speak your opinions.

In conclusion, Harkins says, “This is a fool-proof plan. If you do it, I guarantee that you will attract young people to your church. And lots of other kinds of people too. The end.”

Well, this may be Harkins way of saying that she is presenting this “plan” at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. In short, she is urging the church to resist the temptation to “faddishness” and following what secular culture says is popular. She is telling the church: Be honest. Be who you are and don’t try to be something else just because you think that’s what other people want you to be. Also, get rid of some baggage the church has accumulated over the years (e.g. prejudice towards women and gays, biblical literalism) which isn’t intrinsic to Christianity and has now become an impediment to its true mission.

So I would agree that doing most if not all these things would make a church better. I don’t think there is any guarantee it would make a church grow, however. Again, Harkins may be more aware of this than she lets on. But for argument’s sake, at face value her plan has one major flaw, which is a common one in the church. It makes the assumption that church is inherently and obviously attractive.

In this way of thinking, the church’s main problem is execution. It has a really good “product” but falls down in quality control and/or marketing. If the church would just be the church, people would come flocking in. Uh, no. For a young adult already inclined to joining a church, these ideas could well attract him or her to a congregation using them rather than to another. Unfortunatley, however, the reality is that church is just not something most young adults are looking for. A congregation could fulfill every one of Harkin’s points but many would still say, “That’s great but I’m just not interested.”

If you’ve read me before you may recognize this as another example of “buggy-whip” thinking. “If sales are falling then we just need to improve our quality or marketing,” this attitude says. It ignores the possibility that people just don’t need or want buggy-whips anymore, no matter how good they are.

Notice, however, that I am not criticizing Harkins’ proposals. Most of them are spot on, I think, and would indeed lead to a more genuine and healthy congregational life. For better or for worse, however, congregational life itself is simply appealing to fewer and fewer people. So by all means, I think congregations should adopt Harkins’ plan if it appeals to them. But do it for yourselves, to improve your mission and the quality of your life-in-community. Just don’t do it to refill your empty pews. That’s something you probably have no control over.

The Maccabeats are back for Purim

2011-03-20T06:59:00.004-05:00

With thanks and/or apologies to Pink: Raise your glass!

If you missed it, be sure to watch their Hanukkah song "Candlelight."

Lessons from a funeral (Sunday Reflections for March 6, 2011)

2011-03-05T15:52:00.002-06:00

A funeral this past week provided me with an interesting view of “religion in America.”

A little while ago one of our members called to ask me to visit someone dying of cancer. She was his daughter’s mother-in-law and I said I would be glad to. Over the course of a few visits in hospital and then in hospice I got to know Lynne and other members of her family. She was already seriously ill so my interactions with her were limited. Nonetheless, I found Lynne and the rest of the family very enjoyable. My attention to them seemed genuinely appreciated, including conducting Lynne’s funeral.

Lynne had some church involvement in her past and considered herself Christian but had not had any affiliation with a church for quite awhile. This seemed true for most of the rest of the family, with the exception of a daughter and her husband who were very committed evangelicals. From the size of the crowd at the funeral home it was obvious Lynne had many friends who would genuinely miss her. It was repeated again and again what a kind and gracious person she was. She was a good person, who had lived a good life, which ended too soon.

I appreciated the opportunity to meet Lynne and members of her family, who obviously shared many of her fine qualities. I was glad to be of help to them in a difficult time of need. I have done similar things many times before and they are always rewarding experiences for me. Nonetheless, on almost every occasion I find myself wondering at some point what it is I’m doing. Officially I represent the church but that’s not really the capacity I’m exercising, since these are not church members I’m dealing with.

No, I’ve come to understand that I am there as a kind of generic “God- or spirit-person.” In such situations, I guide and assist people through life transitions that we recognize as spiritual events, which include things like birth, marriage, personal crisis, as well as death. On such occasions neither they nor I assume any particular religious beliefs or commitment. We relate to each other simply on the basis of our common humanity. I’m brought in because I have some training and experience in these things and—since I’ve thought about them more than most people do—presumably have something worthwhile to say at such times.

What’s become obvious today is that this is where most people are at in regards to their spiritual life and needs. As we discussed this week at our first “Living the Questions” video session, we all now understand our life as a journey, which is an inherently spiritual idea. Observing this, British theologian Don Cupitt has said that a “religion of everyday life” is rapidly replacing the old traditional religions in the modern world. (He has done some fascinating studies to show how often the word “life” is now used in everyday speech where “God” used to be, e.g. “Right now I’m just going wherever life takes me.” You’d be surprised how easy it is to come up with more examples.)

What has yet to find a place in this religion of everyday life, of course, is the church. What role does this global institution with two thousand years of history, and more tradition than any person could possibly understand or appreciate, have to play anymore? With such a religion and spirituality, why would people belong to an organization with rules, budgets, buildings and staff?

As I talk to people about belonging to the church I hear very similar responses. Most people consider themselves spiritual, believers in God (however they understand that), religious even, and often even identify with a particular denomination. When pressed, many say that they would like to go to church, that it would be a good idea, but they are just too busy or just doesn’t fit into their life right now.

I take such responses as sincere and honest. What it says to me is that church has simply dropped down people’s priority lists. People only have so much time and have certain things they want to do with that time. If we arbitrarily say that there are 20 significant things we can do in our daily life (family, work, sleep, eating, exercise, friends, entertainment, etc.), then on average church is about #23 on people’s lists. Belonging to a church, worshiping regularly, participating in its other activities, and supporting it financially—people just find themselves asking, “Why?”

As I said, I didn’t get to know Lynne very well but this church question came to mind as I thought of her. All indications are that she was a good and lovely person. She had many friends and belonged to a variety of organizations. She was surrounded and supported by a loving family, especially during her struggle with cancer. As a pastor, I was invited into her life at its end as a sort of spiritual adviser. Though I think I could have been of more help if I had been there sooner, she certainly seemed to end her life with peace, maturity and grace.

Her story is not uncommon: a good person with a real spiritual life, who does not “belong” to the church, yet has occasional need or desire for what we might describe as “religious services.” Frankly, I think this is becoming the norm but the church is having greatly difficulty adjusting to this situation or even accepting this new role. With its history and tradition, the church can’t imagine itself except as a great, divinely instituted organization, wrapped up somehow in the fate of the world. I’m afraid those days are long gone and never to return.

People’s lives today are remarkably free and, consequently, remarkably complicated. Navigating this journey called life is at the essence of spirituality, and we all seek help and guidance for it. Most of us appreciate ritual markings of special moments in that journey: birth, entering adulthood, marriage, death. In this there is a real opportunity for the church to redefine itself and be of genuine value in people’s lives. The question is whether the church can see this, not as a comedown from past glory, but as a new way to continue to enrich people’s lives and make the world a better place.

Blessed questions (Sunday Reflections for February 20, 2011)

2011-03-04T17:49:00.001-06:00

Timothy Beal is Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University and author of the just-published book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book. He concludes an essay this week on Huffington Post on the book’s theme saying,

The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions. As such it opens up space for us to explore different voices and perspectives, to discuss, to disagree and, above all, to think. Too often, however, that's not what happens.

I agree with Beal but that first sentence also that points to why this view isn’t often followed, as he himself recognizes. At bottom, most of us prefer answers to questions. “I don’t need more questions,” I can hear someone saying; “I’ve got enough of my own. What I need are answers.” What we want, as the 19th century evangelical hymn say, is “blessed assurance.” Questions don’t suggest assurance.

And this dichotomy in how we view the Bible is true for religion in general. Are religion and faith primarily about questions or about answers? You could say this is the main division within religion today. In fact, it is a fault line that has probably run through religion throughout human history.

It’s pretty obvious that fundamentalist religions are all about having answers, and this has been the irony of modern fundamentalism. In terms of their frame of mind and how they look at the world, fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, etc. are pretty similar. For this reason they often espouse very similar views on moral issues (generally very traditional and conservative). In terms of their actual religious beliefs, however, they would each condemn the others as wrong and in error. Theirs is the true religion and theirs alone.

In our shrinking world, however, such black-and-white theology is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. Such religious purity is mostly the concern of the clergy leadership. Average lay people often have a more open attitude because they are increasingly familiar with people of other religions and beliefs. Interestingly, fundamentalist leaders rarely debate other religions about their beliefs. They reserve most of their energy for fighting liberals within their own religion, seeing them as the bigger threat.

Just a brief look at the history of Christianity’s unending theological squabbles and divisions shows that Beal is, of course, absolutely right. He would probably accept rephrasing his sentence above to “The Bible is a book of answers and a library of questions”—too many answers because they don’t agree with each other.

A perfect example can be found in the Gospels of the past few weeks, which have been from the so-called Sermon on the Mount. A repeated phrase of Jesus is “You have heard it said ______ but I say to you ______.” Here and elsewhere Jesus joins in the already long tradition of debating about what scripture means. Nothing has changed in the two thousand years since.

It’s understandable that in the turbulence of the modern world many people are looking for concrete answers to life’s challenges and problems. This is especially true when that turbulence disrupts people’s lives very personally. But the black-and-white certainties of fundamentalism are really not answers at all because they refuse to acknowledge the genuineness of the questions. We really have learned new things; our world really is different now; we really must live our lives differently than our ancient ancestors did.

One of the biggest changes is in how we view our own lives. In the past most people, in most situations, simply followed cultural tradition. Modern people, however, experience their lives as remarkably free and open. We have choices previous generations never dreamed of. Where they were essentially given most of their identity, today we create ourselves. “Here is your life: now, what will you do with it?”

Many people, and probably all of us at some time, can feel overwhelmed at such responsibility. Freedom can be scary and is certainly hard work. I think a lot of people have problems with this because we aren’t doing a very good job of preparing them for it or even helping them understand it.

I believe this is the new calling of religion: not telling people what to do with their lives but helping them understand life’s questions and finding answers that are good for them. I actually think this is what Jesus was up to. It’s what made him unique at the time and what got him into trouble. Rather than interpret old rules and traditions, Jesus confronted people with the opportunity and responsibility of their inherent freedom. Needless to say, it was too much for some people, especially the ones charged with enforcing the old rules.

It could be that only now have we become able to fully appreciate what Jesus was saying and doing. That suspicion may be what has been behind the recent attempts by scholars to get back to the genuine historical Jesus, freeing him from centuries of encrusted layers of church tradition and re-interpretation.

I think this also makes it more intriguing that the description adopted by Jesus’ earliest disciples was “followers of the way.” It seems they thought of themselves not as people who had arrived at some ultimate truth but as people on a journey, the term we now commonly use to describe our own lives. Religion’s traditional answers increasingly look like detours that take us off our journey. Religious questions, however, can give us the insight and the courage to continue on our journey, however difficult it might be and wherever it leads us.

Multicultural yet single-minded (Sunday Reflections for February 13, 2011)

2011-02-21T20:21:00.001-06:00

Persian rap (this and picture below)

Last week, in a speech to world leaders, British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that multiculturalism has failed. From a report on MSNBC:

“Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream,” Cameron said during a panel discussion attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.”

Merkel had expressed similar views last fall. Cameron went on to say that such cultural separation was partly to blame for the development of domestic terrorists in the UK.

“Multiculturalism” is a hot-button issue around the world, including here in the US. One of the problems with discussing it, however, is that it means so many different things. Cameron and Merkel are right in some of what they say—and very wrong in others.

The whole issue has arisen because of the recent and historically unprecedented movement of peoples around the globe. This has been made possible by the revolutions in both transportation and communication of the past fifty years. For the same reasons millions of people left Europe for North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of people are migrating from so-called Third World countries to the developed nations in search of economic opportunity.

While in the US most concerns have been economic (e.g. the effect of immigration on wages and jobs), in Europe the concern has been more cultural and primarily with Muslims. Immigrants are not integrating into European society, say these critics, but are living separately in cultural if not physical ghettos. Being disconnected from mainstream British society, Cameron believes, leads disgruntled immigrants to more likely act out their frustrations through terrorism.

One response to Cameron has been to question how culturally disconnected Muslims in the UK actually feel. Surveys have shown them to actually have a high regard for the country’s institutions, three-quarters saying they strongly identified with their British homeland. The terrorist connection also seems more complicated on closer examination. Several of the most prominent British Muslim terrorists actually were well educated, wore Western clothes, and had culturally mixed friendships. Their families were often as shocked as anyone at their involvement.

At the height of the US immigration wave over a century ago, concerns were similarly expressed about lack of cultural integration or even threats to American culture. Immigrants then, too, were chided for not learning English or adopting American dress or habits. Many Protestants were concerned about the numbers of Roman Catholics entering the country. Business and political leaders feared immigrants were bringing radical European labor and socialist ideas. Despite that, most everyone today agrees America’s immigrants proved to be one of the country’s greatest assets.

The Muslim world is in an increasing state of unrest, and not for the reasons people have often assumed. The domestic protests and demonstrations of recent weeks have shown that much of its people’s dissatisfaction is due to economic issues, rather than ideological or cultural ones.

For some time, extremists have taken advantage of that frustration and used it to pursue their own political or religious agendas. It has been said all along, for example, that the West never really understood al-Qaida or how small its base of support really was. Lacking other options, millions of impoverished and oppressed Muslims cheered some of its attacks as ways to vent their anger at whoever was bigger and more powerful than they. In many of the recent protests, the familiar Muslim extremist groups have largely found themselves on the sidelines. At long last, and ignoring most recognized anti-government leaders (many of whom live outside their countries in exile), people have spontaneously and on their own brought down governments which were doing little or nothing for their welfare. This is truly remarkable.

There is no real evidence that Muslim immigrants are more resistant to cultural assimilation than any other group. Instead they seem to be following the same pattern as immigrants of previous eras. Those who actually make the move from one country to another are typically least likely to adopt the customs of their new land—as we all know, old habits die hard. Where real change comes is in the following generations. The children of immigrants almost always learn the native language and are much more likely to adopt local dress and other habits. Childhood, and especially adolescence, is an enormously leveling experience.

There is a big difference this time, however, but it has nothing to do with any unique traits of Muslims. What’s different now is the rise of a genuinely global culture. Just spend a little time watching some international TV or other media. Never have the world’s youth looked and acted more the same. On every continent you see the same uniform: t-shirts, jeans, baseball caps, athletic shoes. Music is truly the global language with almost every style having some international influence. Rap has become the universal music of the underprivileged. You can Facebook, Twitter, Google, and game online in every major language and many minor ones. And the list goes on and on of franchised or syndicated TV shows, restaurants, stores, magazines, clothing lines, electronics, cars, and much more that now have a global presence.

Multiculturalism really can’t be said to have failed. It simply is what is happening. It is what our world is becoming. It can be disruptive and make us uncomfortable. Yet those who are finding it most uncomfortable are those who have it coming. The ideas inspiring, and technology enabling, the overthrow of Muslim despots are very multicultural—but it’s the Muslim world that is shaking and benefiting.

On the other hand, the mass migration of people is also challenging the economic domination of business and political oligarchies around the world. Is it a threat of multiculturalism for people to decide that poverty is no longer an option—anywhere? Yes, a threat to some but a means to hope and empowerment for far more. And as for a multicultural source, we need look no further than the ancient Near Eastern world of the biblical prophets and of Jesus.

What Cleopatra knew (Sunday Reflections for February 6, 2011)

2011-02-20T21:02:00.001-06:00

While most of our attention has been on the weather this past week, we are also aware of the demonstrations and upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere. This is big news, as the networks remind us when they send their top reporters to be on the scene (a bigger deal than before in these days of slim news department budgets).

While events in Egypt have gotten the most attention, they are part of a chain of uprisings across the Arab world. It began in Tunisia with the popular overthrow of a decades-long dictatorship, and then spread to Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. There have also been calls for demonstrations in other countries, like Syria.

Hosni Mubarak was relatively unknown when he succeeded Anwar Sadat as Egypt’s President, following Sadat’s assassination. Nonetheless, he has remained in power for thirty years. On paper Egypt is a democracy, but elections are assumed to be rigged and opposition parties are heavily restricted or banned outright.

Since the Camp David peace accords, Egypt has been a staunch ally of the United States. It is the second largest recipient of US military aid, after Israel. It has no real threats on its borders but its military is viewed by American officials as a stabilizing force in the Middle East. Nonetheless, that military power has served primarily to keep the Egyptian government in power and has earned the US considerable hostility with the Egyptian public. Pictures of tear gas canisters with “Made in the USA” on the side have been widely seen.

Sadly this repeats an all too familiar pattern of US intervention in other nations’ affairs. Since the Cold War it has often adopted a policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This has resulted in our support for dictatorial governments whose policies would seem to be anathema to our own liberal democratic principles, but are perceived as allies against other threatening powers.

In the long run these policies have almost always backfired. Perhaps the biggest debacle was the US support for the Shah of Iran, for which we are still paying the price. Ironically, one consequence of his overthrow and replacement by a hostile Islamic republic was our support for another dictator, neighboring Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We all know how well that turned out.

Egypt is a large country with a history unmatched by any other. I’ve watched developments there a little differently since finishing the new biography of Cleopatra. Egypt was already ancient in her day, and living a century before Jesus we think of her world as ancient. By the time of her reign, many of Egypt’s famous monuments were already in decay (with graffiti!) and some were even unknown by her, lost in the sand only to be rediscovered centuries later.

Mubarak should have studied Cleopatra because he would have learned some pertinent lessons. While she was ultimately undone by the rise of Roman power, her rule over Egypt was one of the most prosperous and peaceful times it had known. What most people don’t know about Cleopatra was that ethnically she was not Egyptian but Greek. Her family the Ptolemy’s had ruled Egypt since Alexander the Great’s conquest three centuries earlier.

Egypt was a wealthy nation, often called the bread basket of the Mediterranean. Its capital, Alexandria, was a rich and cosmopolitan city, an ancient combined version of New York and Paris. (At this time Rome was viewed as kind of a “cow town,” a sprawling urban mess yet to have its great monumental building spree.) Cleopatra made Alexandria even more fabulous.

The key to Cleopatra’s domestic success was her intentional efforts to bridge the cultural gap between herself and her people. Unlike her predecessors, she was fluent in Egyptian and studied Egyptian culture. Cleopatra actively participated in Egyptian religious festivals and hence was viewed as both a queen and a goddess. She planned for agricultural disasters and stored food for emergency distribution. She worked to make the Egyptian bureaucracy and legal system responsive and fair.

Today, in Egypt and the other nations in turmoil, hundreds of millions of young people have become overwhelmed with frustration. Many have grown up in poverty or just barely above it but see no prospect for change or economic opportunity. They see leaders who have been in power for decades yet have done little but build their own personal fortunes and those of their cronies. Tiny wealthy oligarchies live in gated McMansion communities, untouched by the impossibly frustrating lives of most of their fellow citizens.

The rise of the Internet, mobile phone networks, and global TV, however, is creating a new international community among the down-and-out. And in numbers and knowledge there is power. They are now in communication with each other, are inspired by each other, and respond to each other. All these uprisings are linked by global telecommunications and this is a genie that can’t be put back.

The gap between the haves and have-nots has been growing around the world, including in this country. While such a gap may be inevitable, it is has its limits and those limits are becoming tighter in this electronically connected world. Out ranking both religion and politics, the basic concern of all people is fairness and opportunity. In times of distress, everyone must share in the suffering. In times of prosperity, everyone must receive some part of the growth. In many places that hasn’t been happening. But where in the past those disparities could be kept under wraps, today they are being displayed for all to see. As in Jesus’ parable, the lamp is on the stand illuminating all in the house, whether they like it or not.

A script in need of a re-write (Sunday Reflections for January 30, 2011)

2011-02-19T21:10:00.003-06:00

(What follows is my 2011 report for my congregation. This year it was a summary of my view of the state of Christianity and of the church in general.)

I’ve just finished one of the most satisfying and important books I’ve read in a long time. It’s by one of my favorite authors, the English theologian and philosopher Don Cupitt, and is titled A New Grand Story. I like Cupitt because he is incredibly insightful and honest. An Anglican priest now in his 70s, Cupitt long ago paid the career price for his honesty, being shuffled off to Cambridge University. Nonetheless his career has been distinguished, valuable and, most importantly, satisfying to him, even if not in limelight. I doubt you have ever heard of him.

What’s a new “grand story?” Over the centuries, religion’s primary purpose has been to help people understand themselves and the world they live in. Religions do this by telling stories—“grand stories”—about human origins, purpose, and destiny. These stories answer questions like: Who are we? Where did we come from? What should we do or not do? How do we live with each other and with those different from us? How will it all end? The biblical story, used and adapted by Jews, Christians and Muslims, is one of creation, suffering due to sin, and redemption.

As Don Cupitt has been saying and writing for many years, it is just this biblical grand story which no longer is meaningful, or even makes sense, to the majority of modern people— many of whom are still active in the religions which tell it. Hence this book, which is an attempt to shape a new story of human meaning and purpose for the 21st century and beyond. In it he attempts to show the relevance for what he believes was at the heart of Jesus’ message—a message obscured and even intentionally lost by the church which followed in is name. It is a call to live our lives freely, fully, creatively, and without holding back. I believe he makes a persuasive case.

In the mean time the ancient church stumbles on, as Cupitt well knows and understands. Christianity (like other religions) has hung on even after people stopped believing its story because it serves other purposes, as well. It provides us with an identity; the community of a congregation can be like a second family for us; and moved by the gospel message, the church is a means for us to serve people in need. In addition worship, liturgy, prayers, hymns, scripture, art and church architecture all provide us a vehicle for emotional expression and a spiritual connection with a reality greater than ourselves.

Without a believable, central “grand story,” however, the way the church meets these needs seems increasingly antique and artificial. To outsiders worship feels like a step back in time, like those “living history” re-enactments you see in parks. In Europe and elsewhere, it’s not uncommon for churches to exist wholly or in part as museums for the tourists. So the church rolls on but like a tire with a slow leak. How much further can it go?

Unfortunately, few church leaders want to acknowledge let alone talk about this reality. They can’t even begin to imagine what’s to be done. Those that are bureaucrats often can only focus on immediate issues of budget and personnel. Increasingly I hear the criticism that they really just want to hang on long enough to get to retirement. But honestly, I can’t judge them for that concern because, at my point in life, I understand the feeling all too well.

And frankly, it’s nearly impossible (as Cupitt has discovered) for those living in the church to honestly grasp what is occurring. Bluntly, Christianity as we have known it is slowly but surely coming to an end. And this is the case for all the world’s great ancient religions. Yes, people still claim traditional religious identities. And a significant, though much smaller number, are active members of congregations. Yet worshiping communities everywhere are getting smaller and older, year-by-year. Religion provides little if any creative fuel for contemporary culture’s fire.

Where the ancient religions do still possess energy, it is increasingly directed into conservative, and often violent, political movements. This is true of fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and sometimes even Buddhism. While appealing to some, this politically militant and extremist religion is increasingly alienating to most residents of modern countries and cities. This is especially the case for young adults, where recent surveys show that those in their 20s and 30s now more often view traditional religion as a source of division and conflict in the world, rather than a force for peace or spiritual growth.

I have written and spoken many times about the impact of these developments on our own congregation and our denomination, the ELCA. The past two years especially have been difficult and—literally—dark times for our denominational leaders. Past and present staff members have told me of large portions of the ELCA Higgins Road office tower virtually shut down due to staff layoffs and reductions. The lights have been turned off on thousands of square feet of cubicles and meeting rooms.

Locally, multiple synod congregations now close every year, especially in Chicago and the older suburbs. Most others are shrinking, with a growing number served by part-time or only pulpit supply pastors. As a synod staff member reported awhile back, the few congregations that are growing do so mostly by gaining the former members of other ELCA churches.

Inevitably for us in the church, these developments seem grim and depressing. As with all change, important things are being lost. Yet I am convinced that these movements in our society and world will ultimately prove to be for the better. Cupitt’s story is one of the human species on the move. While not always in a positive direction, humanity’s track over-all is towards freedom, understanding, and responsibility—in short, towards maturity.

For all its benefits, traditional religion has tended to keep people dependent and is suspicious of human freedom. For these and other reasons many people now view religion as holding them back, or at least largely irrelevant to their lives. Yet living as a free, independent and responsible human being remains an enormous challenge. It’s hard work, and we all need guidance and support in that journey.

People are looking for that help but often with very unsatisfactory results. A genuine need is there, and ultimately I believe the church will evolve into a community that is dedicated simply to helping people in this challenge we call life. We’re not there yet, however. We carry too much baggage. We can’t let go of our past, of our memories of what the church once was. As Lot’s wife learned and as Jesus admonished those holding the plow, if you’re looking back you can’t be moving forward.

My own understanding of all this continues to evolve. I understand well the appeal of just continuing to do and say all the same things as before. It feels so much safer, yet I’m convinced that way leads only to stagnation and death. The hope and promise of life is always the challenge and risk of going forward, even if into the unknown, into a fog where sometimes you can barely see a foot in front of you.

So in the coming year I will continue to try to strike the balance of offering the traditional services our church provides, yet at the same time exploring what new direction the Spirit is leading us. I thank all of you for your continued support of our work in a very challenging time. We are a community of good and deeply caring people. You are our church’s most important asset and your love and life are the most important gifts you have to offer. I hope you will join me in continuing to give all you can with joy, and without looking back.

Be it resolved (Sunday Reflections for January 16, 2011)

2011-02-19T11:23:00.003-06:00

(It's taking me a while to get back in blogging mode and a couple friends have prodded me about it--thanks for the push! So I will be playing catch up publishing the past few Reflections articles and apologize that these may feel a little out of date.)

How are those New Year’s resolutions coming? If you’re like most people, some or all of them may have already fallen by the wayside. Or if your intended resolution was to procrastinate less, perhaps you haven’t gotten around to making any yet. Hey, 2011 is only a couple weeks old—plenty of time.

I don’t know how long the idea of New Year’s resolutions has been around. Nor do I know when they became focused almost exclusively on issues of diet and exercise—and thereby exercises in futility. This is the time regular gym goers complain about the flood of new members crowding the facilities. “But just wait a few weeks,” they continue. “They’ll be gone soon and things will get back to normal.” And they’re right.

The difficulty of these resolutions, I think, is that they usually are about us trying to be or become people different than who we are. They’re about doing things we really don’t want to do but have come to believe we ought to do. It’s hardly a surprise most of these plans and good intentions quickly crash and burn.

Most of the health issues these resolutions try to address are due to our modern lifestyles (sitting at a desk rather than working out in the fields) and/or compensating behaviors for other problems. In other words, we eat, smoke, drink, etc to deal with boredom, anxiety, depression or other emotional conditions. Trying to change the behavior without dealing with the underlying cause is, as we all know, nearly impossible.

I do think, however, that making intentions and plans for ourselves can be a good thing. Rather than trying to do things we really don’t want to do though, I think better and more realistic resolutions are to do things we actually like doing or want to try doing.

Unfortunately, many of us still carry around a kind of Puritanical view of life—one which religion often reinforces. We have voices in our heads constantly telling us that we ought to be doing or not doing one thing or another. Then add the real voices of our family, boss, and our doctor—no wonder we want to drown in a bag of potato chips or M&Ms!

Life is not a game or a contest, though. There aren’t rules to follow and points awarded for following them. Nor is life preparation or training for something else. Our lives are infinitely valuable and worthwhile in and of themselves, right here and now.

So in thinking about “2011 Resolutions,” rather than asking what I need to change about myself, I could instead ask what more do I want to do or become. In talking about New Year’s resolutions (and why he doesn’t make them), Deepak Chopra makes the unprofound yet absolutely true observation that what most people want is to be happy.

Of course! And why not? Again: what are we waiting for? There is nothing wrong with doing things for the simple reason that they make us happy. And so there might be our first resolution: I’m going to do more things that make me happy, and for no other reason than that.

This raises the problem that we often don’t know what makes us happy; or that we’ve forgotten what used to make us happy. One simple place to start in figuring this out is with childhood memories. What did you enjoy doing when you were 8 or 10? Very likely there is some related adult activity that would give you as much or more enjoyment today.

Adulthood should be about expanding our horizons so we should also wonder about things we’ve never done but perhaps might enjoy. Here there is almost no limit. And in a city like ours there are countless opportunities to take a class or otherwise try some new activity.

Adulthood is also about becoming less self-centered and more involved in relationships. Many of our interests are made more enjoyable by doing them with others. Like to read? Join a book group. Like sports but the joints aren’t cooperating like they used to? Coach in a youth league. Enjoy some field like history, science or art? Share your enthusiasm by volunteering as a docent or guide. And don’t forget the value of just helping someone in need. Again, there is no end to the human service organizations needing volunteers to help in their work.

Sadly, the enthusiasm and curiosity most of us have as children seem to get lost somewhere along our journey into adulthood. It’s no wonder that as we feel more and more burdened by duties and responsibilities, and then begin to experience the physical challenges of adulthood, we try to find simple pleasures to compensate. Unfortunately many of these are self-destructive and really don’t make us very happy anyway. No amount of TV watching or calories can really do the trick.

What would you like to do—really? Is there some itch in you that needs scratching? Maybe it’s as simple as committing to reading a book an hour each day (okay, half-an-hour). Or maybe you really want to learn to play the violin, or help someone else learn to play the violin.

In any case, rather than resolving to deny yourself something, why not resolve to give yourself something? Rather than resolving to constrain yourself in some way, why not resolve to expand who you are in some new or renewed direction? Rather than committing yourself to some drudgery, how about committing to something enriching, exciting, or perhaps even a little scary?

How about resolving to start doing something, regularly, that makes you happy? What could possibly be bad about that? And who knows, it might even help you forget those potato chips and M&Ms waiting in the cupboard.

Milton Bradley was wrong: Life is not a game (Sunday Reflections for January 9, 2011)

2011-01-24T12:50:00.001-06:00

(After a month's long break, I will be back to posting again. First, I'll catch up with my Sunday morning bulletin Reflections.)

What do these stories have in common?

Thousands of people, including prominent professional athletes, wear a metal wrist band believing it will improve their strength, balance and other aspects of physical well-being. A recent admission by the retailer that there is no scientific evidence to support its claims for the bracelets seems to have had little or no impact on the beliefs of current users or on sales.
Based on the calculations of a radio evangelist, thousands of people are preparing for the return of Jesus Christ this May 21. Specifically, they believe that Christian “true believers” will be raptured into heaven on this date while the world will come to an end five months later on October 21. This news is being spread via religious broadcasts, billboards, and individual witnessing. Some have had the message painted on their cars and vans. Previously this same evangelist had said these events would occur in 1994 but later revised his biblical interpretations.
Thousands of people, mostly parents, believe the little understood psychological condition called autism is caused by childhood vaccines. Though there has been little scientific support for this belief, in recent years there has been a drop in vaccination rates and an increase in outbreaks of the diseases the vaccines prevent. This week the one peer reviewed study supporting the vaccine-autism connection was shown to be “an elaborate fraud” involving faked evidence by the researcher.

You may view some or all of these ideas as simply silly and evidence of how gullible people can be. Nonetheless, the people who bought into these notions are generally not especially different from our friends and family, or even ourselves. They are not particularly dimwitted or have a diagnosable psychological disorder. Believing what they believe and doing what they do seems reasonable to them.

What these stories do point to, though, is a commonly held assumption that fundamental truths about life and the world are often hidden from us. Sometimes these truths are hidden as part of a deception by others and sometimes that hiddeness is just part of their nature. We often believe that we aren’t being told the whole story; that things are happening “behind the scenes” which are being kept from us.

In the modern world we are susceptible to such beliefs because life is so complex. We often have to deal with large bureaucracies. Advanced technologies force us to trust in countless experts. When we can’t get the results we want we are prone to think we aren’t talking to the right person or somehow we aren’t being told the whole truth. We all understand the frustrating dilemma of Dorothy and her companions: How do we get to see the Wizard, the one who has the answers?

People in the ancient world had much the same experience, however. For them it was simply the mysteries of the pre-scientific world that were so frustrating. So much of day-to-day life, like illness or natural disasters, just seemed random and haphazard. “That’s just the way it is” was no more an acceptable response then than it is now. Religion, in countless forms, was often the primary response to this confusion. Scriptures, prophets, and soothsayers claimed to know things that were hidden from ordinary people.

The Judeo-Christian tradition certainly got pulled in that direction many times over the centuries, and still can be today. Yet I think that is not its essential nature. Despite the claims of many fundamentalists, the Bible is not an “answer book.” Rather, as Luther said, its goal is to create and build faith, which is probably best understood as “trust.” As Einstein said (in another context but I think still reflecting his Jewish upbringing), “God does not play dice with the universe”—nor with our lives, we might add.

In this respect the Bible’s message is simple and reassuring. Life is not a game. There are not winners and losers. There is not a grand and hidden “Meaning to Life” which we must discover but rather we are simply given the gift and the challenge of creating the meaning of our own individual lives.

There are a few rules but even the Bible treats them as simple and obvious. Both testaments have famous versions of them. In Micah we read, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” And Jesus congratulates the man who responds to the question about the greatest commandment this way: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

Yes, there are many things about the world we don’t know or understand. And, yes, undoubtedly there are things that people intentionally keep from us which ought to be made public. But when it comes to the essential questions and challenges of our lives there really is no mystery or conspiracy. Our life is a gift, as is the lives of all those around us. Our challenge is simply to enjoy them and make the most of them, and do so with a spirit of gratitude.

Candlelight--the music video

2010-12-09T11:14:00.001-06:00

Hanukkah ends today so I thought I should promo this YouTube video one more time (I shared it earlier on Facebook). From The Maccabeats--enjoy!

If you enjoyed that, be sure to see the video that inspired it, Mike Tompkins' version of Taio Cruz's Dynamite--incredibly clever and cute.

Advent dreams (Sunday Reflections for December 5, 2010)

2010-12-07T16:51:00.001-06:00

One look out the window and it’s obvious: the world has gone dead. After a long and pleasant fall, we’ve finally experienced a hard freeze and even the first snow. My neighbor’s pear tree still has quite a few leaves on it and the grass still holds some residual green color but that won’t last long.

There are also reminders of the “green season” in some of the annuals and other plants that keep going to the very end, e.g. potted and now shriveled geraniums and marigolds. There’s a large rose bush that I walk by with a couple dozen blooms, now all freeze dried—kind of weird looking.

Balancing all this dying is the growing life and energy involved in preparations for Christmas. Malls and retail districts are bustling with shoppers. Holiday lights are glowing everywhere. Nonetheless, the shortening days, increasing cloudiness and our exhaustion at all the extra activity leave us feeling like some of our life is draining out, as well. When Christmas is past and we head into January, we hunker down for the slog to the time when life begins to return with the first signs of spring.

One of the geniuses of the ancient liturgical calendar is that it not only tells the church’s story of Jesus, it also repeats many of the experiences of nature and life. The current season of Advent is characterized by themes of expectation and preparation. The liturgy and music are generally more subdued and reflective.

For quite awhile this has put it at odds with the secular “Xmas season” (as C. S. Lewis called it). Popular culture tends to “front-load” its holidays. In other words, the holiday is usually the climax of a period of celebration. Once the actual day has come and gone, culture moves on to the next thing. In the church, the holiday begins the season. So when Christmas comes (or Easter as another example), the church’s celebration is just starting while secular culture has hit its peak and now it’s all downhill.

Wisely, the church has mostly stopped trying to impose its agenda on secular culture, or even its own members. At the same time, however, I think people have come to appreciate the church’s observance of Advent as a place of calm in the midst of the storm. I don’t hear the clamor for Christmas carols during Advent the way I used to. I suspect that’s due in part to the fact that we now start hearing Christmas music on the radio and in stores not long after Halloween.

The music and liturgy of Advent encourages us to pause and catch our breath. In the midst of the chaotic shopping, decorating and partying, Advent provides us a place to stop, think, meditate, and enjoy some silence. “Just come in, sit and be quiet,” the season seems to say.

In this sense, Advent is much in harmony with the natural world right now. While we may lament the cold and dark descending on us, nature is also “clearing the decks” we might say. In the Middle East, ancient Christians went to the desert as a place to clear their minds and renew their spirits. The barrenness of winter can provide the same service for us.

Barren times are not unusual. Not only are they built into the cycles of nature, we also know them as regular occurrences in our own lives. This is true individually and collectively. Today we are in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Many people have lost jobs and lost their homes. Nearly everyone has experienced some financial reversal.

It’s a barren time and it’s gone on a long time. And while it doesn’t seem to be getting worse, it doesn’t seem to be getting better very fast. Things will get better, of course, but it’s looking increasingly to be the case that things won’t just go back to the way they were. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Bible has repeated stories of success and reversal, often quite dramatic. In fact, in some ways those cycles are what the Bible is about. One of its most profound ironies is that while God’s people are repeatedly promised and looking forward to better times (“a land flowing with milk and honey”), success and prosperity is almost always a prelude to disaster. Here indeed is support for that popular wisdom, “Be careful what you wish for.”

After the various disasters that befall them, people in the Bible then have a period of time to reflect on what’s happened and how they can do better. The prophets are the people we most associate with facilitating this process. These times in the wilderness or in exile are indeed barren, yet spiritually they become the incubators for faith and hope and new visions of life and community.

Our country and in some ways the whole planet are at a turning point. Free-market capitalism, along with science and technology, have produced standards and qualities of living unimaginable just a few generations ago. Within our country, and even more so globally, these riches have been shared grossly unequally. This isn’t a new problem, and not coincidentally it is one the prophets railed against more than any other over two thousand years ago.

History has shown that such inequality simply cannot last. No society can function that is grossly imbalanced and we are seeing that the same is true for the planet. In this “barren time” we have an opportunity to reflect on what has past and what we wish now will come. What is our hope, our vision, our dream? Can we imagine a world of prosperity as well as one of fairness and equal opportunity?

In his Pentecost sermon in Acts, Peter repeats the words of the prophet Joel: in the days when God’s Spirit is poured out on the people, “your young shall see visions and your old shall dream dreams.” Such experiences rarely happen in the normal hurriedness of life but more often in the dark and the quiet. May these times of darkness and barrenness be, for each of us and for our world, times of visions and dreams, courage and hope.

Will the real Jesus please stand up? (Sunday Reflections for November 21, 2010)

2010-11-21T20:49:00.002-06:00

Most adults remember the long running game show To Tell the Truth. Three contestants would each claim to be someone with an unusual occupation or experience when, in fact, two of them were imposters. By asking questions, a celebrity panel would try to figure out which person was genuine. After making their guesses, the narrator would intone, “Would the REAL _____ please stand up?” All three contestants would make motions as if to stand until the actual person finally did so.

That scenario isn’t a bad description of the state of biblical study into the life of Jesus. For one of the truths biblical scholars have been uncovering almost since beginning their work is that the New Testament contains multiple Jesuses. By that I mean that the various ways he is depicted in the gospels and other writings just can’t be merged together into a single person.

As scholar Robert Price says, there are just too many Jesuses: teacher, sage, miracle worker, prophet, mystic, reformer, revolutionary, etc. All the ways he is depicted in the Bible simply can’t be brought together into a single, coherent individual. The result is that over the centuries people have constructed multiple Jesus figures from the materials available, selecting some bits and ignoring others.

Over a century ago, and before his medical missionary days, the scholar Albert Schweitzer exposed this practice among theologians. It’s only been more recently that we’ve realized the problem goes all the way back to the New Testament itself. “Will the real Jesus please stand up?” Unfortunately we seem stuck in that moment when the contestants each make the gesture of standing up—but no one ever does.

The past few weeks I have been writing about the problems of religion in the modern world. Standing in the middle of any discussion about re-thinking Christianity or re-making the church is, of course, the figure of Jesus. In reality, though, we don’t have one Jesus to deal with, but many. Some New Testament scholars talk about the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. I think a variation on this that is more helpful is to think about the Jesus of Galilee and the Christ of Calvary.

It doesn’t take a literary or theological genius to realize that a dramatic shift takes place in the gospels when the rabbi Jesus leaves Galilee for Jerusalem, to become the crucified Christ. Nor is it hard to recognize that the gospels struggle to make this transition convincing or logical. Jesus’ “trial” is never really believable because the story of his prior life doesn’t set the readers up for it. The evangelists try to make this support the notion of the unfairness of Jesus’ death but it really just leaves a dramatic hole. Asking “What did Jesus do to deserve this?” is as much a question about the story as it is about theology.

The conclusion of many scholars is that the gospels in essence are two stories awkwardly pasted together: one about Jesus’ Galilean ministry and the other his death in Jerusalem. Some have described the gospels as passion stories with long introductions. I think this is wrong, but it certainly has been a popular interpretation and probably the prevailing one over the centuries. In any case, it points to that sense of disjunction, resolved by making the Galilee story a prolog to the Calvary story.

The reality, which preachers and most scholars both prefer to ignore, is that the origins of the New Testament and the church are hidden in a fog that will never clear. Modern New Testament scholarship has taught us a lot. Yet one of its most important realizations is that there is much we almost certainly will never know. One consequence is that it is unlikely the “real Jesus” will ever stand up.

This has been the source of many of the biggest fights in the church over the centuries. Yet paradoxically this diversity has probably also been a source of strength. People have claimed the label Christian while constructing in their own minds a Jesus that suits their personalities and needs. The church today needs again to take advantage of its “multiple Jesuses.”

Around the world, even among non-Christians, Jesus remains a popular figure. Yet it isn’t just any Jesus. It is almost always the rabbi Jesus of Galilee. Today most people, including many Christians, have relatively little interest in the crucified Christ of Calvary. Yet it is this latter Christ that the church has promoted and built itself upon—and that’s a problem.

Salvation through faith in the crucified Christ has been the church’s primary “product.” In Catholicism and the churches which remained close to it, people received salvation through the sacraments, especially baptism and communion. Salvation was very real as people literally “got” Jesus this way. For evangelical Protestants, salvation was more of a psychological or emotional experience. People got Jesus by believing in or “accepting” him and often by having various spiritual experiences so that they “felt” saved.

Yet whatever the tradition, the result was the same: people received salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross. It was tangible and very personal, as this well-known 19th c. hymn declares:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Today, most people are not interested in possessing Jesus as the ticket to a heavenly reward. However, this is the Jesus promoted and “sold” by the church through most of its existence. As that market has dried up, the church’s fortunes have fallen. People’s concerns are for their lives here and now, not for some intangible existence that might come later.

Yet this practicality is exactly what we find in the rabbi Jesus of Galilee. This Jesus rarely if ever offers “pie in the sky, bye and bye.” His concerns are consistently with how people treat one another, with their values, and with their appreciation of what a gift they have in each day of living. He focuses both on individual relationships and on the justice and injustice of social structures. He is concerned with the abuse of power and the need to protect and care for the weak. In this Jesus we encounter someone who treats each person as an equally valued individual.

Admittedly, Jesus is a person of his ancient world. Not everything he says or does has equal relevance to life in our time. Yet there is much that does speak to life in this world and that people are still listening to. Putting this wise, prophetic and compassionate Jesus front-and-center would be a step toward remaking the church into something contemporary people could find of value. But that can only happen if the church is willing to move the crucified, savior Christ into the background and let go of the ancient baggage he carries with him.

Getting out of the salvation business (Sunday Reflections for November 14, 2010)

2010-11-12T16:28:00.004-06:00

What business is the church in? What is the church’s product? As I said last week, this can be a bit complicated to figure out. Over the centuries, the church has always offered a variety of products and services. This has been part of its strength as it allowed people to connect with the church in a variety of ways. Still, however people valued it, the church has understood itself to offer one primary product more important than any other: salvation. That product, I believe, has become the church’s buggy whip.

Theologians and church historians will tell us that salvation has always been understood in a variety of ways. That is true, but let’s accept that for the vast majority of Christians, as well as for most people who have heard the Christian message but didn’t accept it, salvation has meant escaping the judgment and wrath of God and receiving the gift of eternal life. That is what has been the church’s primary product and that is what it can’t sell anymore, or even give away for that matter.

In my ministry, I can honestly say I have encountered only one person seriously concerned about going to hell, and she was in a hospital psychiatric unit. Not only are people not concerned about this for themselves, they show no concern about it for others they know (hence our evangelism problem).

My most memorable example of this was a young man whose life was basically one screw-up after another, hurting a lot of people along the way. He finally took his own life and at his funeral (which was well attended) I quoted his brother’s summary of him and of people’s feelings about him: “He was a son-of-a-bitch but we loved him.” Afterward, people congratulated me on my message. No one expressed any concern about his soul.

Salvation and its alternative are simply not on people’s radar screens anymore. Generally we’ve all become pretty vague about what we think does happen in “the next life” or even if there is one. That’s a topic for another time but for now I’ll just note that whatever is awaiting us, very few of us are concerned about it. The experience of dying may scare us (especially our loss of control) and we may be anxious about all those potentially unfinished items on our to-do lists. Yet the idea of being dead doesn’t seem to bother us much. The very-old often look forward to it. In any case, the once awesome image of “meeting our maker” hardly gets a thought.

And to that I say, “Well, it’s about time.” For to me this is testimony that the church’s message has finally sunk in. Whoever or whatever God is, people have concluded, God loves us. God is the personification of love. God is love. That’s all in the Bible but so is a lot of other less positive God-talk. Yet I don’t think the God-of-love has ever been reconcilable with the God-of-wrath. It’s just been too obvious that the God of hellfire and brimstone has been a convenient tool of religious authorities to scare people into propping up religion and its institutions.

As the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Paul and Luther all discovered, a genuine message of grace inevitably generates violent opposition from religion and the people in charge of it. They just have too much to lose if people ever genuinely believed it. And they’re right, of course. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the Christian message of freedom also means freedom from religion. The inevitable conclusion is: I don’t need it anymore.

In short, humanity has been growing up but religion, including Christianity, hasn’t been keeping up. In fact, it often has been resisting that development. It has been to the church’s advantage to keep its members in a child-like, dependent relationship. Over the past century or two, however, people throughout the modern Western world have been maturing and leaving the church by the millions.

Aimee Semple McPherson

And so to repeat, people don’t need to be “saved”—not from God’s wrath and judgment, not from hell and damnation. That buggy whip won’t sell. Now as I indicated above, for many theologians, as well as many church leaders and even ordinary Christians, this is old news. For them salvation long ago became a metaphor for other human needs and experiences. For them, the gospel is about our experience of God’s love and grace in this life rather than some reward in a life-to-come.

Fine—yet the truth is that even in so-called moderate and liberal denominations like ours, this is rarely said explicitly nor has it significantly influenced our liturgy or the materials we use in Sunday school, adult education, evangelism, and so on. I think there are two reasons for this. One, as I’ve talked about before, is the unwillingness of clergy, especially, to do anything that might provoke those who retain old traditional religious beliefs. Why kick the hornets' nest? Yet, protecting their sensibilities has resulted in the loss of far more people for whom religion has become increasingly disconnected from real life and therefore irrelevant.

The other reason the church has resisted moving beyond “salvation” is that it will take hard work to, quite frankly, recreate Christianity. It will take admitting, once and for all, that ancient Christianity is dead and that the only alternative now is for something new to take its place. It will take major rethinking, remaking, and even some killing off of much if not all of the church’s sacraments, liturgy, liturgical calendar, scripture, institutional structures and self-image.

Billy Sunday & Mae West

It will require re-imaging an adult God for adult people. This God can no longer simply be Santa Claus on a cosmic scale, who’s got a list, checking it twice, to see who’s been naughty or nice; a God who brings treats and toys to good girls and boys but puts coal in bad children’s stockings. This God must somehow encompass a 14 billion year old Universe, vast in space and time beyond our imagining, yet also relates to a human species on one small planet and whose history encompasses only the tiniest last fraction of the Universe’s existence.

The church must get off its high-horse and finally say to itself and to the world, no one needs us. We are not God’s instrument of salvation for the planet. We are not essential to the life or well-being of humanity.

Then, having said it and genuinely believing it, perhaps the church can re-create itself to be something people want in their lives. Then, perhaps, we can rediscover the genuine hope and wisdom of our scriptures and of our saints, buried by centuries of institutional self-interest and stagnation. Then, perhaps, we can again be a genuine force for justice and peace in the world and a source of courage and love in people’s lives.

That could be a viable business plan, with a product that will sell. But first we must accept, once and for all, that the church is not any longer in the salvation business.

The best buggy whip money can buy (Sunday Reflections for November 7, 2010)

2010-11-08T16:06:00.001-06:00

Imagine it is 1905 and you are president of Acme Buggy Whip Company. Your sales are dropping alarmingly. Without questioning why this is so, you assume you need to improve your product to make it more appealing to your customers. As a result, you begin making buggy whips in different colors, different sizes, and with different grades of materials. You begin having contests, two-for-one deals, a buggy whip of the month club, and other promotions. Result? Sales continue to drop and you are soon out of business.

The problem, of course, wasn’t with the quality of your buggy whips or their price. The problem was that fewer and fewer people wanted buggy whips at all. The problem was the arrival of something brand new and which you did not anticipate: the automobile. As a result, there was nothing you could have done to improve your buggy whips that would have made any difference. What you really needed to do was change your product.

Businesses have become very introspective. They are all followers of Socrates: “Know thyself.” Business guru authors, seminar leaders and consultants all preach that businesses need to better understand their operations. They need to have a clear understanding of their “mission,” of their customers, of their products, of their internal operations, and of their company culture.

To be successful (they are told) businesses need to know who they are and what they are trying to accomplish. In short, they need to know what business they are in. Remarkably, this is much more difficult than it sounds. Like people, businesses are reluctant to change, preferring to keep on doing what they are familiar with. Plus, there are those monthly bills to pay. If there is enough cash coming in to cover expenses, why do something risky? And we don’t want to alienate our stockholders.

In recent years, there have been attempts to apply MBA-style thinking and concepts to the church. In general, they haven’t accomplished a whole lot but frankly I suspect that is because churches find it difficult to be as honest or as ruthless as such thinking often requires. The church isn’t a business but it certainly has business aspects, as the Crystal Cathedral, the ELCA national operations, and countless congregations around the country, including our own, have learned. Churches, too, have a bottom line.

Yet as my example above illustrates, business thinking doesn’t start with dollars and cents. It starts by asking a more fundamental, and therefore more difficult, question: What business are you in? Acme Buggy Whip was making a product which its customers no longer needed. It had to re-imagine itself and understand its primary objective was to meet customer needs. If customers no longer needed buggy whips, Acme needed to re-create itself to meet some other need—or go out of business.

Today, the church needs to be asking itself: What business are we in? Like Acme, the church has been offering a variety of products and services for which there has been a steadily falling demand. Also like Acme, the church has responded by trying to improve those products making them more appealing, more consumer friendly, more affordable, etc. Result? “Sales” have continued falling with hardly a pause. Could it be that, like Acme, the church’s real challenge is not to improve its product but to find a new one altogether?

Of course, the church’s product is not as tangible or simple as a buggy whip. Over the centuries, the church has provided a variety of services and, as a result, people have joined churches for a variety of reasons. Take worship, for example (the church’s most well-known service). I have learned during my years as a pastor that people come to worship for many reason. For some it’s the liturgy or the sacraments, for others it’s the sermon, or the music, or having some quiet time, or the fellowship, or the coffee and donuts afterward, or for the kids or to keep their spouse happy, or just habit.

Because the church as a whole has this multi-faceted nature, it’s made it hard to figure out what isn’t working (maybe we just need better donuts). A big part of the church’s success has been the variety of products and services that it offers. It’s given people many different ways to connect with the church. So when, despite that variety, and the tweaking and improving that’s gone on lately, participation in church life is still falling, then that would indicate something has fundamentally changed.

Remember again our beloved Acme: the reason it couldn’t sell its buggy whips wasn’t because it didn’t make good buggy whips. They were the best. It was because people no longer needed them. Their horses and buggies had been replaced by automobiles. What could Acme do? Assuming its whips were made of leather, it could have found a different leather product to make. If it wanted to stay in transportation, perhaps it could have shifted to leather wrapped steering wheels or gear shifts, or leather interiors, or something we can’t imagine.

What business is the church in? That’s been a difficult question for church leaders to look at. When you think you’ve been given your mission by God it’s pretty hard to imagine that mission changing. Acme’s management couldn’t imagine a world without horses and buggies, or that they could be replaced by those noisy, dangerous, unreliable auto-mobiles, motorcars, or whatever you wanted to call them (“Menaces is what I call them!”). And yet….

It’s probably true, as some people say, that the phrase “out of the box thinking” is overused. It is a useful image, though, because our thinking often does get trapped inside of mental “boxes.” Cars were outside the box of Acme’s leaders. And being unable to imagine such a world, they couldn’t imagine how Acme could fit into it—and so it didn’t. End of Acme.

The church is now in a new world. Thus far, it is a world the church cannot imagine and therefore can’t imagine its place in it. Its thinking is still in that box with the horses and buggies. Surely some people will always want our buggy whips, won’t they? For awhile longer, yes. However, that time seems to be coming to an end. But imagine the opportunities in this new world! Can we get out of our box, put aside the buggy whips—and imagine?

The first thing we do, let's kill all the churches (Sunday Reflections for October 31, 2010)

2010-10-28T16:21:00.003-05:00

(My Sunday Reflections post a few weeks ago on the latest round of ELCA cutbacks generated a lot of blog hits and quite a few comments. A few of those raised the obvious question, “Well then, what’s the church supposed to do?” Neither in that post or previously have I provided many constructive suggestions. Mostly I have just reported on the problems and how what the ELCA and other churches are doing isn’t working.

The question is a fair one. However, to use a medical analogy, the patient isn’t going to accept the treatment if she doesn’t believe she’s really sick. I believe the church has been, and still is, in this situation. The various “fixes” that have been tried over the past few decades have almost always fallen into the category of “If it doesn’t work, do more of it.” In other words, most still believe the church is fundamentally okay but it just needs to do what it does better. The result—to use the quote from my earlier post—has been lots of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So I’ll cut to the chase and state my conclusion: religion as we have known it is dead—or dying and soon to be dead. Now I am well aware of the signs of life that still remain. Most of those, however, are in parts of the world just now entering the modern industrial world. Where modernism has taken hold, religion’s trajectory has been steadily downward for decades or even centuries.

Religion has not disappeared but it is now simply a personal option, a life-style choice. Some people still “enjoy” religion but it’s the way others enjoy music, art, reading, gardening, sports, fitness, and so on. In the past religion was part of the fabric of society; so much so that some ancient languages (like biblical Hebrew) didn’t even have words for “religion,” since it was inseparable from the culture. Today religion is just one among many cultural components, all jostling for people’s attention. This cultural “comedown” is why traditional fundamentalist religions are in such a panic. Remembering their glorious past, they are desperately trying to reassert their power and generally being pains-in-the-neck.

The problem for moderate religions, including mainline Christianity, is that basically, we get it. We know what’s happened but we don’t know what to do about it. We know that religion of the past is just that: past, over, done. Yet we also have this gut feeling that there is something of value that needs to be kept alive, that is of value at least to us, even if we can’t quite put our finger on it. That, I think, is what churches like the ELCA are trying to reach for but we’ve been going about it very poorly. We’re like the trapeze artist who just can’t let go of the rope because we’re not convinced another one will be there to grab on to.

A new Lutheran magazine came out at the same time as the ELCA’s latest turmoil and it included Bishop Hanson’s monthly back-page column (which now inexplicably is behind a subscriber's paywall. Can the Lutheran find anymore ways to shoot itself in the foot?) When I first read it I admit I thought it was another mish-mash of theological jargon, using nice-sounding words but saying little. Re-reading it I changed my opinion. I think it actually spills Christianity’s theological beans, though I don’t know if that’s what Bishop Hanson intended.

Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that Christianity really contains the seeds of its own destruction—intentionally so. Historically I think there has always been a minority that understood this but who were oppressed if they started talking about it too loudly. It is a tension that has existed in Christianity from the start, planted by Jesus himself. Perhaps the best symbol of it is the story of his overturning the moneychangers’ tables in the temple. This one we know as the founder of the world’s greatest religion was actually prophesying the end of religion.

Hanson’s essay is titled “Our gospel must be Jesus.” Briefly he describes the many competing, false “gospels” in the world, both secular and religious, with their strenuous requirements for success and salvation. Hanson then uses a series of quotations from Paul (someone else who got it) to describe Jesus’ gospel—of freedom.

This gospel is the healing of all separation and alienation It reveals the fruitlessness of all hoop-jumping and rule-keeping. It gives the assurance of every person’s inherent importance and worth. Hanson summarizes this saying: “The good news we proclaim and believe is that Jesus would rather die than be in the sin-accounting business.” Exactly—and to me this is another way of saying, “Jesus would rather die than be in the religion business.”

Which is why Hanson fumbles at the end of his essay. He wants this to lead to a stirring call for revival in the church. He can’t pull it off, though, for a simple reason: It doesn’t lead there and he knows it. Instead we get this:

When we proclaim this gospel with clarity, courage and conviction, the Spirit will be at work, bringing us to faith, freeing us and calling us so mission will flow from it into the various contexts of our lives and throughout the world.

Why not say this instead?

When we truly hear and believe this good news of affirmation and freedom, we will go out and live our lives with passion and joy, using our talents and opportunities to the fullest, with love and compassion.

The bottom line, though, is that whether you use Hanson’s statement or mine, it’s hard to see how either leads to joining a church, attending worship services, and serving on the property committee.

Hanson quotes Paul from Galatians in what may be the most revolutionary statement in all religion: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” The irony of our time is that the modern secular world gets this, but the church still doesn’t. It wants to take back the most important thing the gospel offers. Realizing its implications, the church keeps sputtering “Yes but…!” in a desperate attempt at self-preservation. It’s not working. More and more people do get it. Our freedom also means freedom from religion.

So, should the church just shut its doors and hang out the For Sale sign? That certainly is happening, but I’m not sure it’s the only option. True to its heritage, however, for it to go on the church must die to be reborn. It must give up what it was for it to become something new and genuinely life-giving. The question is how long it will be before the patient is ready to take that medicine.

Controlled descent (Sunday Reflections for October 24, 2010)

2010-10-24T20:55:00.001-05:00

National midterm elections are less than two weeks away. Typically less than half of those eligible cast ballots in such elections and that is likely to be true this time, as well. Not voting can reflect satisfaction with the way things are, frustration with the system, or disinterest. Polls report an unusually higher number of likely voters who are angry. Not surprisingly incumbent Democrats are especially anxious and the party may lose control of one or both houses of Congress.

The distressed state of the economy is the dominant campaign topic. Unlike previous disagreements over wars or social issues, however, there is no clear “for or against” divide. The result has been a muddled election campaign with a lot more emotion expressed than clear ideas. The economy is a mess; it doesn’t seem to be getting much better; so somebody needs to do something—but what?

Not surprisingly the party in power gets the blame for such problems. The likely gain in Republican congressional seats will not set a clear alternative direction, however. Instead, it will likely result in more Washington muddle for the next two years, which in some people’s minds is a good thing. They may be right, but I doubt it.

As a country we are in new territory, and while we don’t really like where we are at, neither do we know of another place to go. We certainly don’t have anyone confidently saying, “Follow me. I know the way out of here.” In fact, the real problem is that we don’t know where we are. We’ve run off the map.

Many view the modern study of history as beginning with Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was published in England, in multiple volumes, during the time of the American Revolution. Gibbon’s work reflected the Enlightenment’s fascination with the classical origins of Western culture. Its focus on the end of Rome’s empire was also a cautionary tale. With unrest and revolution in the air, there was considerable interest in learning how great nations can also go greatly wrong.

That interest has continued and been the topic of many subsequent books and college courses. One of the more obvious conclusions of such studies is that no empire lasts forever. Another conclusion, however, is that empires and great nations do not all end or decline the same way. There is considerable difference, for example, between ancient and modern empires.

The ancient world was characterized by a succession of dominating, long-lasting empires, like Egypt, Persia, Greece, and, of course, Rome. The modern world, on the other hand, has seen countless competing empires come and go relatively quickly. Some have fallen suddenly and often violently. Others, however, have come to an end more gradually and orderly, often transitioning into new, smaller entities. Nazi Germany is a spectacular example of the former while Great Britain demonstrated the possibility of the latter.

Not surprisingly, there has been much speculation on whether the United States has begun its decline. One of the first and still best scholarly examinations of this was historian Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), which covered the period from 1500 onward. If there is one word that explains the decline of the powers Kennedy looks at, it is “overstretch.” Ultimately, the dominating power of all of these nations ended because their (mostly) military endeavors eventually outran their resources.

Kennedy does not say there was necessarily anything these countries could have done to prevent this outcome. Indeed, he says, it is simply not given for any nation to dominate the world indefinitely. Awareness of that truth, and awareness of how decline happens, implies that nations can have some say in preparing for and managing their inevitable yielding of the world power stage to another.

The current recession has revealed that we are in a state of denial about our future. The recently burst housing bubble was the result of government economic policies trying to compensate for decades of flat household income growth with cheap and easy credit. In fact, this was only the latest of a series of such bubbles, each one trying to create wealth via investment schemes rather than with actual economic growth. The result each time is that a few savvy folks make out like bandits while far more lose their shirts.

As a consequence, the disparity in income and wealth has been growing alarmingly. Not since the 1920s has such a small percentage of the population controlled such a large portion of the nation’s wealth. The rich are also doing a remarkable job of hiding this fact. A recent survey showed that American’s have no clue just how rich the rich really are—and how relatively poor they are as a result.

Voter anger is not surprising given these circumstances. Unfortunately, politicians are all too ready to exploit that anger for their own purposes by directing it at manufactured bogeymen. This only makes the problems worse, however, and plays right into the hands of those able to exploit those problems for their own benefit.

We need to face the fact that the United States’ political and economic place in the world is changing. The global dominance it has experience since the end of World War II is ending, as it inevitably had to. Just as Europe and Japan rebuilt themselves after that war, so now many formerly poor and often exploited countries are joining the modern global economy.

Our slice of the global economic pie is shrinking but only because the pie itself is getting bigger. It’s essential we understand this difference between perception and reality. Thus far, though, we haven’t been doing a very good job with that. Trying to hold back this tide will only result in disaster, as we have seen. Instead, we need to learn how to ride with it.

We need to rediscover who we are as a people and recommit ourselves to our historic values: preservation of personal freedom and opportunity combined with care and support for those in need. We need to channel our anger, not into hatred or vengeance, but into a resolve to right what is wrong. We need set a new course that reflects our changed circumstances, that will lead us all together to a better tomorrow.

Time to get disorganized (Sunday Reflections for October 17, 2010)

2010-10-15T15:31:00.003-05:00

Wind from the Sea--Andrew Wyeth, 1947

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind. (Acts 2)

As expected, ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson revealed last Monday the outline of the ELCA’s new churchwide structure. The plan was approved by the ELCA Church Council at a meeting the prior week held via conference call. The new structure purports to be simpler and is certainly smaller. Sixty-five staff members will be let go, most working at the Chicago headquarters on Higgins Road. This is about 20% of the ELCA staff and comes after a ten percent reduction last November.

The reorganization is the consequence of a dramatic falloff in churchwide revenue. According to the ELCA news release:

"In 2008 after adjusting for inflation, the value of mission support income had declined by half since the founding of this church in 1988," Hanson wrote to the council. "From 2008 to 2011, estimated churchwide mission support dropped from $65.3 million to $48 million." The work of the design team is based on an estimated range of $45 million to $48 million in annual mission support income for the next three years, Hanson said.

The last statement indicates ELCA leadership believes the income drop has hit bottom but doesn’t say why they believe this. I don’t see any reason to believe this is the case, which means another round of cutbacks will be coming soon. This can only add to the sense of embattlement and malaise in the churchwide office.

One Lutheran blogger described the reorganization plan as “more of the same, only on a smaller scale” and that’s the way it looks to me, as well. Perhaps that is all that can be expected as this point. The new scheme was put together pretty quickly with the overriding objective being to cut spending. I think this needs to be seen as a stop-gap that has bought some time because this is going to have to be revisited, and soon.

“The same but smaller” just isn’t going to cut it because the church really has entered a whole new situation. This was true even at the time the ELCA was formed, though it wasn’t recognized sufficiently at the time. And it is why the ELCA has essentially failed—and this needs to be frankly admitted. It’s time to go back to the drawing board and start over.

The group forming the ELCA in the 1980s was called the Commission for a New Lutheran Church (CNLC). Much emphasis was placed at the time on the goal being to create a genuinely new denomination. In hindsight we can now see the result really wasn’t nearly new enough. As a student I attended a conference at my seminary about the potential merger. I remember one presenter (I think it was Bob Benne) wondering aloud whether this would actually renew American Lutheranism or whether it would simply be a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, or of the last two dinosaurs mating. The current reorganization certainly is deck chair arranging, after having tossed some of them over the side.

So what’s next? As I’ve written many times before, it is incredibly difficult for people within an organization to imagine it becoming something genuinely different. The secular, contemporary example I often cite is General Motors. GM has been doing what it’s been doing, the way it’s been doing it, for so long that it’s been nearly impossible for it to adjust to the dramatic changes sweeping the automotive world. The end result, of course, was bankruptcy.

The church, especially at its higher bureaucratic levels, is much the same. Yet change it must. Recently the ELCA appointed (yet another) task force to study itself, called LIFT (Living into the Future Together). LIFT member and lay youth minister, Erik Ullestad, wrote this in response to the ELCA restructuring:

Much of the conversation and research on the LIFT Task Force has pointed to something painfully radical: The mark of a vibrant organization in a post-modern, open-source world is not a large national expression headquartered in a high-rise building, but instead consists of strong, healthy local expressions that network together for mission and ministry.

Perhaps the best symbolic statement the ELCA could make that it is going to be something radically different would be to hang a big “For Sale” sign on its Higgins Road office tower (of course, good luck with that in this real estate market). I think it’s now apparent that the goal of the ELCA was to achieve the pinnacle of denominational organization, just as the denominational model was dying. What better symbol of that was there than to have a tall, shiny, big city office building?

I don’t know what the future holds for American Lutheranism or American Christianity. I have ideas, some of which I have shared and will share more, and others have ideas, but what most everybody agrees on is that religion in America and around the world is changing radically. What the ELCA needs to do is certainly not to fight that, for that is sure to end in disaster. Neither can it ignore that reality or simply react as it gets clobbered by one blow after another, which is what it has mostly been doing.

The challenge for the ELCA is to reform itself to so it can ride with these changes, adjust to them and, when and where possible, take advantage of them and perhaps even influence them. As Ullestad’s quote indicates, this is likely not going to happen at the top but in the responses of the multiple, inter-dependent parts of the church: congregations, colleges and seminaries, social service organizations, ad hoc associations, etc.

All of this seems to argue for a radical decentralizing of the church. There needs to be some creative chaos right now. We need to let things get out of (our) control. This, of course, is the bureaucrat’s worst nightmare: “We can’t let them do that!” Nor will it please anyone concerned about Lutheran quality control. Yet the truth is that such control and administration is already breaking down, especially at the congregational level. Instead of resisting it, now is the time to encourage it.

There is, of course, a long history of creative disorder in the church, supported by considerable biblical tradition. Indeed you could make the case it’s the way God most often gets things done. At least that seems to be what Jesus is telling one of the Bible’s many control freaks, Nicodemus: “The wind/Spirit blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” It’s time to open the windows and let the winds blow in.

Looking for direction on Higgins Road: A follow-up

2010-10-11T14:51:00.004-05:00

The ELCA News Service has put out a news release about the churchwide reorganization just approved by the ELCA Church Council. It gives an overview of the consolidation of what was previously 16 “units” into three, though not many specifics. The bottom line is that 65 staff members will be let go, out of a total of 358, most of them at the Chicago headquarters. Questionably the reorganization assumes no further fall-off in contributions. Why it is assumed the church income drop has hit bottom is not explained. This fits, though, with an overall picture of a church that is still not grappling with the harsh new realities of denominational life.

In one quote Bishop Hanson says, "This new design positions the churchwide organization to make a vital and vibrant contribution to the ministries of this church and the work of partners throughout the world.” Again, there seems to be an unwillingness or inability to recognize that the role of “the churchwide organization” and denominations generally must change and has changed fundamentally. Churchwide support is now half what is was when the ELCA was formed yet the impression being given is that this is just a bit of tightening and fine-tuning. Rather than a pro-active vision this seems like yet another short-sighted reaction to blows that will just keep on coming.

Postscript: And how can you not see the cover of the October Lutheran magazine epitomizing the ELCA’s current near total confusion. Jack Benny? What percentage of the population would even recognize his picture?

Looking for direction on Higgins Road (Sunday Reflections for October 10, 2010)

2010-10-10T21:48:00.001-05:00

Change continues to be the dominant reality for the ELCA’s national organization. The Conference of Bishops met this past week to hear of a major reorganization of the ELCA’s churchwide operation. These changes have been necessitated by a continuing and dramatic fall-off in contributions to the synods and national church.

The details haven’t been announced yet but everyone knows major staff cuts are inevitable at the Chicago headquarters on Higgins Road. There have been lay-offs before but they have involved shrinking existing offices and departments. This time there will be a real reorganization. The national church will be different with, of course, some months of inevitable chaos and confusion bringing it about.

Last year, when a ten percent budget cut and corresponding lay-offs were announced, two ELCA leaders presented them very differently. Mark Hanson, the Presiding Bishop, lamented the cutbacks but insisted they would not materially affect the ELCA’s ministry. The church’s mission and commitments would remain. However, Pastor Wyvetta Bullock, ELCA executive for administration, in detailing the reductions admitted frankly, “We will be doing less with less.” Now, apparently, the ELCA will be doing even less, with even less.

These are tough times for the ELCA. The atmosphere in the Higgins Road office tower is understandably grim. The staff has known for weeks that major layoffs were coming but specifics weren’t to be announced until now. As church employees they are not covered by unemployment insurance. Those let go will probably get a small severance package which, in this economy, will run out well before they find new jobs.

I have yet to hear an explanation for why the church provides less of a social safety net than secular society. This issue is at the heart of another church employee mess, the cancellation of an Augsburg Fortress’ pension plan. Plan members have sued the ELCA Publishing House for fraud because it claimed exemption from the federal pension insurance program, ERISA.

The problem is that the ELCA has tried to have it both ways with Augsburg Fortress. Its sole purpose is to meet the ELCA’s publishing needs, is run by an ELCA elected board, and operates as a church organization for legal purposes, such as exemption from ERISA. Yet the ELCA also has claimed that AF is an independent organization, meaning the church has no financial obligation to it or its employees. This may be legally accurate (we’ll see what the courts think) but ethically it stinks and everyone knows it. No one in ELCA leadership can talk about it now that it’s in litigation, but it is just adding to the ELCA’s sense of confusion and deterioration.

I suppose it’s understandable, then, that Bishop Hanson seems to have assumed the role of denominational cheerleader. Most people give him a lot of credit for his dispassionate and even-handed management of last year’s churchwide assembly and the multi-year process leading to the approval of gay clergy. The dust is settling, it’s fairly clear what congregations have left or are leaving over this (significant but certainly less than 10%), so he wants to rally the troops to move ahead.

The ELCA news service published a summary of Hanson’s report at the start of the bishop’s meeting last weekend:

• It is time for the church to move forward and get over being “timid” about mission and ministry.

• "I've been pondering that a lot. Have we become a timid church?" Hanson asked the ELCA leaders. A sign of a timid church is one that describes itself by what it has lost and what it lacks, he said. Such a church is one that tries to hold onto the past and preserve what was, Hanson said.

• A church that defines itself by controversies and partisan divisions "will become a weary and timid church," Hanson said.… The presiding bishop also said he is "deeply concerned" that leaders preach with a sense of confidence.

• Hanson said he continues to have confidence in the two priorities for the churchwide organization: accompanying congregations as growing centers of evangelical mission, and building capacity for evangelical witness in the world to alleviate poverty, and work for justice and peace.

• He reflected on his experiences at recent gatherings [of teens and youth and campus ministry leaders]. "In those gatherings, I saw evidence of the stirring up of leaders in this church that gives me a sense of confidence and courage," he said.

• Hanson concluded his report by asking leaders not to lose confidence "in the gifts of the Spirit and what it means to live out the faith."

So, timidity is out and confidence is in. If only it were that simple. Actually, as I wrote to a colleague, I don’t think the problem is timidity as it is confusion. The Bishop wants the church to more forward, but which way is that? Unfortunately it is so easy in the church to get lost in rhetoric, speaking without actually communicating. Above Hanson describes the church’s priorities as “accompanying” and “building capacity.” Huh? Paul says somewhere that an army can’t move forward if the trumpeter’s sound is uncertain. I think we’ve found an example.

I don’t mean to dump on Bishop Hanson personally. He is a good man who has done very well in an impossible job. Rather I cite him because his words and actions reflect the state of the ELCA and church denominations generally. While recent controversies have given the ELCA a jolt, the downward trends have been in place for a long time, and not just for Lutherans.

Unfortunately Hanson and most church leaders are too close to the problems to get real perspective—and perhaps also don’t want to see what’s there. An ELCA staff member posted on Facebook a quote from the management guru Peter Drucker: "Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does." Perhaps the question the folks on Higgins Road and in our synod offices need to ask is, “What would happen, and who would notice, if we didn’t exist anymore?” It’s a question being asked in lots of places today, all around the world, and many are startled to find the answer is, “Not much and not many.”

Going down?

2010-10-05T21:31:00.001-05:00

And while stock prices (and gold, but more on that in a minute) are going up, the value of other things are going down. Inflation has been virtually nonexistent this year. Prices for most retail items have held steady or even fallen. The most publicized price drop, of course, has been real estate, which is what started the cascade of financial dominoes over three years ago. Yet even after all that time prices do not yet seem to have hit bottom, with recent forecasts being for another 10-20% drop still to come.

Recently, however, a more disturbing drop has been occurring and that has been in curency exchange rates. Last year President Obama said the country would export its way out of the recession. The only problem with this strategy is that all the other stumbling developed economies are also trying to export their way to recovery. If everyone is exporting, where are all these products going to? Mars?

The result has been a competition to see who can lower the value of their currency the furthest and the fastest. Since these countries all have more or less the same costs and levels of efficiency, the only way to make their products cheaper, and therefore attractive to foreign buyers, is by making their currencies cheaper. This bizarre competition has been dubbed the “race to the bottom.”

This isn’t just an academic exercise, however—it has real consequences, most of them bad. If pursued long enough it really does mean those dollars we have (or Yen or Euros or Pounds) really do lose value. So how can everyone’s currencies lose value at the same time? Good question. It does sound impossible since we usually thing of a currency’s value relative to other currencies. If they’re all dropping they should actually stay relatively the same.

Yes—and no. Currencies are also valued for what they buy (obviously) and it is possible that they could all start buying less of certain things. Like gold, or oil, or a number of other commodities which have been going up in price recently. The meaning and ultimate value of gold is a topic of endless debate. Its practical uses are pretty small yet its supply is remarkably constant—and also small. Thus, it remains popular as a kind of economic insurance: you can’t do much with it yet it is always in some degree of demand. Many are interpreting gold’s recent fairly dramatic run-up in price as a sign that people are trying to get away from national currencies. In other words, it’s a vote of “No confidence” in the whole global economic system.

Sound complicated? You have no idea—no one does. And this is what makes our current situation so scary. We really are in uncharted waters. Could currency values start tumbling in a free-fall? Perhaps. The central banks have pumped trillions of dollars (or their equivalent) into the world’s economy over the past two years with virtually no result. Where has all that money gone? If that money suddenly started getting pulled out of the corporate mattresses and cookie jars where it’s hiding, inflation could go through the roof. Yet we want them to spend some of it to get the economy moving again—that’s why it’s been given out.

The gaping hole in what I’ve said here is that there has been no mention of the “BRICs”: the developing powerhouse economies of Brazil, India, and of course China. China’s economy is huge but in some ways still very primitive. Yet it has already been making economic waves around the world. How it fits into the rest of this economic puzzle is anyone’s guess. It’s very new at this mega-economics stuff and could make some horrendous mistakes. Or not.

In any case, the simplistic talk of whether we are in a recovery yet or not is so beside the point as to be laughable—laughable except for the fact that we’re talking about the economic well-being of hundreds of millions of people. The only thing that’s certain is that we have a long road ahead of us.

Going up?

2010-10-05T17:10:00.001-05:00

(I haven't had an economics post in awhile so here's a brief comment on recent developments. Frankly, it's a bit depressing to do this very often.)

The stock markets roared ahead today and the DOW is within spitting distance of 11,000. The MSM chorus is singing in harmony: surely this is another sign of “the recovery.” But waiting for the recovery is increasingly like waiting for Godot.

Why did the market go up today? Because it can. The media can always find some news story as an explanation. Ignore them—no one knows why the market does what it does, not even the traders.

Here are a few facts. Since the crash two years ago, there has been a steady outflow of investors from the market and trading volume has dropped accordingly. If there was an inclination to reverse this, the bizarre “flash crash” last May (when the DOW dropped 1000 points in minutes) reaffirmed the suspicions of an out-of-control market. More than a few investment advisers have advocated putting a big “Danger! Keep Out!” sign on Wall Street.

Because they like the black-and-whiteness of numbers, the media want to hang on to the notion of the DOW as a barometer of the nation’s economic health. If that was ever true, today there is no evidence for such a correlation. Nonetheless, even supposedly sober news outlets like NPR and PBS breathlessly led their news summaries with reports of the DOW’s jump today.

Stock markets are likely gaining for one simple reason: money, and the anticipation of money. The one real economic news story today was the announcement that the Bank of Japan would be buying lots of public and private bonds and just about any other kind of financial paper it can get a hold of. This is what the Federal Reserve did for over a year after the crash and is likely to resume doing late this year. Oh, and the European Central Bank as well as the Bank of England have been doing it too. All this is their way of trying to pump money into their economies.

The reason for this is the same in each place. Interest rates are the way central banks normally regulate money supply and try to adjust the economic thermostats of their respective countries. The problem is that interest rates have dropped to zero. The national banks literally can’t give money away. Or as in the US, private banks will take it but they’re just squirreling it away because their own financial state is so precarious and because businesses aren’t borrowing since they can’t find anything to spend it on.

Bankers, however, do have a lifestyle to maintain so they have to make money someplace. One place they are willing to put some of that free money is the stock market. In this instance, Wall Street is really not much different than The Strip in Las Vegas. The banks are playing craps with the Fed’s free money and that activity is pushing up stock prices, even though there is little or no economic reason for the markets to be going up. Is the Fed upset by this? Not really because there is some hope that rising stocks will stimulate economic activity (note: the opposite of the way people assume it works) and besides, nothing else seems to be working.

Could it work that way? Because if it does, then those rising prices are anticipating economic growth and if you don’t get in now you’ll have missed the action. At least, that’s the kind of talk you’ll hear on MSNBC or from your broker. Right now the chances of this happening seem to be somewhere between slim and none.

The nation’s economic problems—or the world’s economic problems, for that matter—are not going to be solved on Wall Street. The economic hole we are in was years, if not decades, in the making. Wall Street doesn’t have enough shovels to dig us out. Besides which, the bankers' and brokers' sole interest is in digging themselves out of the hole. Once they’ve done that, they’ll rip the shovel they let you borrow out of your hands so fast, it’ll leave splinters.

Don't know much 'bout religion (Sunday Reflections for October 3, 2010)

2010-10-04T16:17:00.001-05:00

This week the media have given quite a bit of attention to the release of a Pew Trust survey on the religious knowledge of Americans. The results were not what one many would expect—hence the media scrutiny.

A survey sample of over 3400 people was asked 32 questions about Christianity and other major religions. What was startling was that the religious group that scored the best was: None of the above. That’s right, atheists and agnostics knew more about religion than people who claimed to actually follow a religion. The groups that scored the next best were Jews and Mormons.

Among the zingers: More than half of Protestant responders did not know that Martin Luther began the Reformation. Nearly half of Roman Catholics did not know their church teaches that the Eucharistic bread and wine become the real body and blood of Christ, rather than just symbolizing it. There was also confusion about the political status of religion. While nearly 90% knew that public schools teachers are constitutionally prohibited from leading classroom prayer, only a quarter knew that teachers are allowed “to read from the Bible as an example of literature.”

Of course, this is not the first time that the ignorance of religious people has been exposed. As I wrote last week, Martin Luther wrote his Small Catechism after a depressing tour of German parishes:

Mercy! Good God! what manifold misery I beheld! The common people, especially in the villages, have no knowledge whatever of Christian doctrine, and, alas! many pastors are altogether incapable and incompetent to teach….

Luther wasn’t one to mince words. More recently evangelical church leaders have reacted with alarm to awareness that many of their members are ignorant of the basics of Christian beliefs. This is dismaying to them especially because they put such high value on right theology and doctrine.

Yet Luther’s experience nearly 500 years ago gives us a clue that knowledge about religion—even one’s own—is not valued all that highly by average folks. Theologians and religious academics inevitably evaluate religions for what they believe and teach. Most religious people, however, value religions for their practices, values, traditions, community, and sense of identity.

As a freshly minted pastor, I too was initially horrified at how little church members knew about the Bible or the basics of Christian theology, let alone Lutheran teaching. That horror has greatly diminished over the years. And it’s not that I have simply become resigned to this state of affairs. Rather, my understanding of the place of religion in people’s lives and in the world has changed.

It’s been realized for quite awhile, for example, that theologians don’t initiate inter-religious dialog and cooperation. Average religious followers do that. Theologians come in much later to put their seals of approval on what has already been going on. Religious leaders, in a classic case of running to get ahead of the parade, come up with the fancy theological language and formal documents to bless what people have been doing on their own for some time. The reason, of course, is that average people aren’t blinded by doctrine and theology. They simply recognize the common humanity of people they live and work with, who happen to follow a different religious tradition.

It’s also no secret that in the modern world much traditional religious doctrine and belief has taken it on the chin. Science has simply made unbelievable most of the ancient and medieval presuppositions religion has been built upon. This has certainly explained some of the decline of religion in Western countries but many have been surprised that religion has hung on as well as it has.

Here again the fallacy may be in the assumption that value of religion for most people is in its beliefs. Over the years I have found the beliefs of many church members to be all over the map. Many are aware that science has knocked out most of the legs of religion’s theological stool. They just don’t care. For some it’s out of a defensive stubbornness but I think for just as many it’s because theology and doctrine isn’t why they’re involved with religion in the first place.

One person not surprised by the Pew survey results is Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists. He told The New York Times, “I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

Ouch. Yet there is some truth to what Silverman says. Put most religions under a microscope and you do find a lot of nonsensical beliefs and some pretty abhorrent behavior. Yet you would also miss something because getting up real close isn’t always the best way to see—you know: that whole forest and trees thing.

But frankly, that may be the mistake religion itself is making. As we all know, there is a lot of distress and hand wringing about the decline of religion, and especially Christianity, in modern Western society. In fact, we should probably be amazed it’s still around at all. That it is should tell us something about what religion’s true value: it isn’t in its doctrines or teachings. Religion is much more than what its books and teachers say it believes.

For that reason, the Pew results make sense. The people most aware of religious teachings are those most put-off by them. The ignorance of such things by many people claiming a religious identity isn’t surprising because that isn’t what’s important to them. The problem, however, is that those are often the things most important to the people trying to save or revive religion: theologians, bishops, preachers, and frankly the religious fanatics. If religion is to be saved, it may need to be taken away from the religious professionals and given to the ignorant amateurs who actually may know and understand it much better.

What shall we tell the children? (Sunday Reflections for September 26, 2010)

2010-09-23T12:51:00.001-05:00

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (1 Corinthians 13)

Once again I am about to begin a new year of teaching confirmation. I have been doing this for a long time—almost 30 years if you count my seminary internship. It’s a bit frightening to realize some of my first students could now have children of their own in confirmation class (if they’re still in the church).

For as long as I have been in the ministry, confirmation has been an unsolvable mystery. The attitude of most clergy I know was revealed in a candid moment at the time the new ELCA was electing its first synod bishops. Upon hearing of his election, one about-to-be bishop blurted out, “I don’t have to teach confirmation anymore!” I lost count long ago of how many confirmation programs Augsburg Fortress or its predecessors have offered. It seems there is a new one almost every year. Then there are those from independent publishers, plus the churches or pastors who make up their own (I’m now basically in this category).

I think what makes confirmation so problematic for pastors is that it forces us to confront the most difficult puzzles of the church and of Christianity, ones we would often rather avoid. If they are honest, I would guess every pastor would admit to thinking at least once, and possibly every year, “What the hell are we doing?” It’s not enough that we’re dealing with one of the most difficult times of life: junior high and early adolescence. We’re also trying to answer, for these theologically innocent young people, all the questions the church can no longer answer for itself.

Historically, the primary resource for Lutheran confirmation preparation has been Martin Luther’s Small Catechism (1529). Luther wrote it, he says in the book’s preface, in horrified reaction to the theological ignorance he found while visiting small town and rural parishes in Germany. Thus, it was intended for use by adults, as much as for older children.

The Small Catechism (and yes there is a Large Catechism, read mostly by theological over-achievers who usually are or become pastors) provides a simple explanation of the basic elements of Christianity: the Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments of baptism and communion. It is a classic and, for Lutherans, the book has become an icon in itself.

In some ways this was the high watermark of traditional Christianity, for it essentially has been all downhill from there. It wasn’t long before all the things Luther sought to make clear with his little guidebook were being questioned for their meaning, accuracy or value. After nearly 500 years the contents of Luther’s Small Catechism and the confirmation preparation efforts it inspired are creaking and stumbling to near collapse. For that reason, publishers crank out one new program after another (“Now Online!”), trying to keep the old machine going just a little longer.

Like the Small Catechism, confirmation preparation has primarily been about conveying ideas and content—people, events, beliefs, rules, vocabulary, memorization, etc. In the past, the primary motivation for young people to cram this stuff into their little heads has been fear of the thundering wrath of a Herr Pastor and/or one’s own parents. The days of such motivation are, of course, long gone. As a result, the content of confirmation has changed to . . . what?

It seems to be all over the map. Learning this content isn’t as important anymore because . . . well, because the content isn’t as important anymore. The simple reality is that much of what Luther was so sure Christians needed to know we just aren’t sure about. Here we again face the yawning gap between our world and Luther’s and the Bible’s, between ancient times and modernity.

Consider this “simple” question: Where is God? Ancient people knew and Luther knew. God was in heaven and heaven was “up there.” There are even ancient and medieval maps that show where heaven is. Now: Your answer? Uh huh, that’s what I thought. Why do we have trouble believing in heaven? Because we have no place to put it. “Up there” has no objective meaning anymore. There is no up or down in the universe; there isn’t even a beginning or end. So today God is “in our hearts,” or “all around us,” or “everywhere,” or—fill in the blank.

Now I can work with all that, and some of those ideas are even in the Bible, but they’re not the mainstream. So we have to be honest and admit we’re not really talking about our ancestors’ Christianity anymore. We’re moving on, and that’s okay. We need to because the world certainly has moved on. In doing so, however, we’re leaving things behind, not unlike when we grow up and leave home. And as the saying says, once you’ve left you can never really go back.

Our world is in flux, and that includes Christianity and religion generally. We’re now in a mode of exploration and experimentation. To do that effectively, I think it’s important we know where we are coming from. For that reason, teaching the Christian tradition is important because it has profoundly shaped us and the world around us. In doing so, however, we have to be honest with ourselves and with our kids that this was the world of our ancestors but it isn’t ours anymore.

In education today, teaching content isn’t nearly as important as it once was. We have more content at our fingertips than we know what to do with. Answers to more questions than we can even imagine are seconds away via Google and Wikipedia. No, the challenge is learning what to do with all that information: how to find it, sort it, evaluate it, judge it, and synthesize it.

I think something like that is what we should be doing with our kids in the church. The goal is no longer to teach them “The Truth.” First, we’re not sure what that is or means. Second, even if we had it, it’s not what they need. Why not? Because truth is not something handed to us on a silver platter. It doesn’t arrive in a box labeled, “Contents: The Truth.” In fact, when something does show up like that, alarm bells should go off because it almost certainly is a fraud.

In the past, young people were taught lots of practical survival skills: how to hunt, fish, plant, cook, sew, build, and so on. Religion, however, was pretty much handed to them ready-made. Today I think the reverse is true. Most of the “stuff” we need to live is made for us, but our religious beliefs and practices are what we need to learn how to develop and construct. Some techniques are better than others and some materials are better than others. There are good sources for these things and there are hucksters peddling crap and we need to learn how to distinguish between them.

If we can convey to our young people the basics of the Christian tradition, something about the world’s other historic religious traditions, an understanding and appreciation of the great questions of life, an ability to sort through and judge possible answers to those questions, and—most importantly—an appreciation of what a gift life is and what a joy and responsibility it is to be a part of that life—If we can provide them some basic tools to start down that path, then I think we will have done them a great service. We will have helped them become truly good persons—and that’s what it’s about, isn’t it?

Now, how am I actually going to do that starting next Sunday? Well, that’s another question.

The rich you will always have with you (Sunday Reflections for September 19, 2010)

2010-09-17T16:41:00.001-05:00

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land…. The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. (Amos 8)

In last week’s Reflections column I wrote: "Too easily we are drawn to an irrational problem with a simplistic solution, rather than confront the real problem whose solution may be protracted and complicated." I don’t think there is any doubt that solving the problems our country faces today will be “protracted and complicated,” but that isn’t something any of us want to hear.

Suppose you have a newly diagnosed health problem. Your doctor says you need to exercise, and change your diet, and stop bad habits, and puts you on daily medication—for the rest of your life. Faced with such a challenge, you inevitably ask, “Doc, isn’t there any other way?” already knowing the answer.

But imagine if she said, “Why, yes there is! Here, take this pill once a month and you’ll be fine. It’s something I just invented in my laboratory. I know it will work. And you won’t have to change your lifestyle at all.” Hopefully you would have the sense to leave quickly and find a new doctor.

When our life is on the line, we tend to be pretty sober in our thinking. When it comes to almost anything else, however, we can surprise ourselves how easily we fall for the magic pill or snake oil sales pitch. All that tells us, though, is how badly we want such solutions to work—not that they will.

This week politicians and the media were all a twitter about the supposed Tea Party primary victories. On Election Day, I heard an interview with a self-identified Tea Partier. “We want to return our country to what it used to be,” is how he explained his politics. And I thought, “Where’s the magic pill salesman? We have a customer.”

Mr Peabody and Sherman

This person did not explain what point in the past he wished to return to, or whether he had found Mr Peabody’s WABAK machine (i.e. “way back” for those not conversant with Rocky and Bullwinkle) to accomplish this feat. In any case, over the years the promise of returning to some mythical past is one of the most popular political smokescreens. It kept the Confederacy alive in people’s fantasies for decades after Appomattox (some would say it’s still alive) and Hitler road its magic carpet to electoral victory (though it had much less value on the battlefield).

But the past is past. There’s no going back; we can only go forward (regardless of what theoretical physics might say). The question is whether we want to have a say in our destination, and how we get there, or whether we just want to go along for the ride.

In the nearly five centuries of the modern world, the direction of history has been for increasing numbers of people to have growing amounts of freedom and responsibility for determining their own destinies. This is what the Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment were all about, as well as every political revolution since.

Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People" 1830

That freedom, however, was not something just laying around waiting to be picked up. Freedom always needs to be won, taken, carved out, secured, guaranteed in laws and regulations. The reason is that throughout history, minorities always accumulate power which allows them to use and abuse the majority. These oppressive groups have included royalty, nobility, religious priesthoods, landed gentry, and ethnic minorities.

In more recent years, the most powerful minority in most developed countries have been capitalists: the small minority of the population that owns or controls most of the land, businesses, and money. The notion of getting rid of this group has largely been abandoned. Some say full economic equality could never be achieved (see George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all are equal but some—inevitably—are more equal than others) and others say it wouldn’t be a good idea in any case. As a recent book concludes, the rich are necessary.

Inevitable or necessary, however, doesn’t mean always good or honorable. We must remember the lessons learned by our ancestors in the struggle for freedom: the powerful, whoever they are, always want to become more powerful. The expansion and preservation of freedom has always meant legislated restraints on society’s empowered minorities.

The past thirty years has seen a steady increase in the proportion of wealth and income controlled by the richest Americans. Numerically this imbalance in the control of society’s wealth is the highest it has been since 1928. This week it was announced that the portion of the population living below the poverty line is the highest in 15 years (and many economists believe if the number was calculated more accurately it would be even greater).

Banksters testify before Congress

In the past, the poor and weak knew full well who was taking advantage of them. They worked for them, or paid taxes to them, or literally saw them steal what was theirs. The complexity of the modern economy makes this much more difficult, even if it allows for tremendous economic growth. That complexity can be used to benefit those most involved with it and give them an unfair advantage. As a result, one of the primary functions of democratic government has become the creation and enforcement of financial regulation and setting broad economic policy.

In recent years this government role has come under attack and been legislatively curtailed. Now it’s true, of course, that government functions can always be improved and need to be changed as society changes. Yet it is simply a fact that the steady reduction of government regulation of the economy in the past thirty years has been paralleled by the steady growth of social economic imbalance. Bluntly, the rich have been getting richer and the poor—as well as nearly everyone else—have been getting poorer.

The consequences of this are far reaching and potentially disastrous. As I said, economic inequality can’t be eliminated but in a democracy it does need to be held within certain bounds. If allowed to grow too large, people lose a sense ownership or value in society. Cooperation and commitment to common goals wane. Social bonds begin to fray. People lose hope because they are not being adequately compensated for their labor. The system seems unfair. The cards are stacked against them.

Bangkok shopping mall

Complicating this even more is the fact that we are now part of a global economy. Indeed, the rise in economic inequality probably was spurred by the economically powerful trying to protect themselves from the consequences of this change. America’s overwhelming economic predominance after World War II was an anomaly and couldn’t last forever. China, India and countless other nations wouldn’t remain poverty stricken indefinitely. The planet simply cannot sustain everyone living the way we have grown accustomed to the past fifty years.

Adjusting to this new world is something everyone must share in, however. The response of the rich—nearly in a panic—to grab all they can while they can is immoral, unnecessary, and could well end up destroying what they are trying to preserve. We must all rediscover the stake we have in the “common-wealth.” It’s time for our democracy to re-assert its most basic function: to restrain the powerful few from taking advantage of the weak and powerless. While our economics have become more complicated, such basic biblical ethics have not.

Have no fear (Sunday Reflections for September 12, 2010)

2010-09-10T16:48:00.002-05:00

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. (1 John 4)

Certainly one of the most famous lines from a presidential inaugural address is from FDR’s first in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” If it is an overstatement, it isn’t one by very much. As one scans history or the events of our own lives, fear appears again and again as the culprit in many of our worst judgments and disastrously impulsive acts.

In recent years, science has been making us aware that many of our primitive instincts are ill-suited to modern life. Reactive behaviors which saved our pre-historic ancestors’ lives, and were programmed into our DNA, now can work against us. Often they short-circuit our ability to pause and reflect on events or environments that seem to threaten us. In the wild there was often no time to think, as seconds could be the difference between a narrow escape or ending up as some other creature’s lunch. Fear saved us, triggering a rush of adrenaline to power our heart and legs as we literally ran for our lives.

Such a response can still be appropriate—and life saving—but now in the modern world threats are often more subtle and the best response to them less obvious. Nonetheless, the old fight-or-flight mechanisms still function. We still get that adrenaline rush and can barely resist the urge to do something, whether it makes sense or not, whether it might not, in fact, make the situation worse rather than better.

Roosevelt’s inauguration occurred 3-1/2 years after the infamous October 1929 stock market crash. After an initial skid, the economy had seemed to be recovering. Then in 1932 the bottom dropped out: economic activity slumped, unemployment soared, banks failed, savings disappeared. During this time there were many voices seeking to exploit people’s fears. There’s a reason that economic crises have often been called “panics.” These voices called for drastic action, saying that the existing order had failed and something completely new had to be tried.

In many places around the world, such voices were heeded. In Italy and Germany, fascist parties muscled aside fledgling democracies and indeed soon had industry producing and people working again. The Soviet Union seemed to have escaped the global downturn altogether. Years later, these achievements were shown to have been unsustainable (in the case of fascism) or illusory (in the case of Stalinism) but at the time they were alluring alternatives.

It’s understandable then that much of Roosevelt’s speech in that early spring of 1933 sought to rebuild confidence in America’s democratic institutions. He needed to, for many saw them as hopelessly broken and beyond repair. People were afraid and demanded action. What FDR needed to prove was that the existing system could rise to the occasion and right the badly listing ship of state.

One of the primary tactics of the voices of fear has been to find someone to simplistically blame for the nation’s troubles. From the Bible, such people have come to be called “scapegoats”—one hapless victim made to take responsibility for the community’s ills. If only we get rid of “them,” then our problems will be solved.

Here, too, science has been helping us understand this behavior and it’s really just another aspect of our innate fear response. Again, our primitive ancestors’ survival required that they be able to quickly identify exterior threats. It also seems that survival chances were improved for those who could quickly unite to fight a perceived common enemy. Thus today the most divided communities can still be brought together to fight an external threat, even if it had been impossible to come together for any other purpose.

Fear and anxiety never go completely away. Typically, however, they are kept in check by the general sense of security provided by society’s political, economic and cultural structures. Today that sense of security has weakened and the voices of fear have become more numerous.

This weekend it is nine years since the attacks of 9/11; long enough that it is now only a blurry memory for adolescents. For most adults, however, the images are still vivid and the anxiety it induced is only just below the surface. As a result, those memories can still be exploited by demagogues and hysterics, such as the Quran-burning pastor from Florida. He and his tiny church are, of course, virtual non-entities. What is so interesting is how easily he has gotten the attention of global media and political leaders. (There has also been a paranoiac reaction from church leaders rushing to say “He’s not one of us!” But that’s another story.)

There is no question our country faces serious problems but possible attacks from Muslim extremists is probably not actually very high on the list. One of the reasons Roosevelt saw fear as an obstacle was its potential to distract attention from the real problems needing to be solved. Too easily we are drawn to an irrational problem with a simplistic solution, rather than confront the real problem whose solution may be protracted and complicated. Again, we have to fight our own instincts to DO SOMETHING NOW in order to pause, think, plan, and then get down to work.

Every religious tradition recognizes the close connection between fear and hatred. In that sense, the 1 John verse quoted above is not remarkable. Its insight, however, is that we will not conquer our fears (and the hatred that accompanies them) by removing all their causes. There will always be sources of danger in our lives.

Rather, we conquer the power fear has over us by love. By loving family, friends and neighbors we, first of all, pull our attention off of ourselves and our problems and onto others. It strengthens our ties with other people and makes the whole world seem less threatening. Love also rebalances our lives and readjusts our priorities and sense of what is genuinely important. We cling less; and open up, let go, and reach out more.

The political and economic problems we face today are serious but they also are complicated and a long time in the making. There will be no quick fix, no enemy to be disposed of, and no man or woman on a white horse who will ride to our rescue. Indeed, our attempts to pursue any of those things will only make our situation worse.

We will need calm spirits and clear thinking to accurately perceive both the problems and their solutions. Fear is the biggest obstacle to all those things. Rediscovering who and what we love is the surest way to short-circuit the power of fear and those who seek to exploit it.

The kids are alright (Sunday Reflections for September 5, 2010)

2010-08-31T21:53:00.001-05:00

(Kids! I don't know what's wrong with these kids today!

Kids! Who can understand anything they say?

Kids! You can talk and talk till your face is blue!

Kids! But they still just do what they want to do!

Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?

What's the matter with kids today?

These lyrics (if you don’t recognize them) are from the hit musical Bye, Bye Birdie, which opened on Broadway fifty years ago in 1960. And it was fifty years before this that something called “adolescence” was discovered. For at least a century, adults—parents, educators, clergy, doctors, police, politicians—have been wondering and worrying about “kids:” those odd creatures, no longer children but not yet adults.

It’s easy to make a speech or a sermon (or a movie or a show) that gets people’s attention—and riles them up—if your subject is “the problems of American youth today.” And heaven knows adolescents have plenty of problems. Most of us remember our own vividly. The difficulty is that rarely does anyone really know what’s to be done about them. In the end, most kids muddle through and move on with their lives. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to worry.

This past week, via a couple of clergy colleagues, my attention was drawn to a piece on CNN.com provocatively titled “More teens becoming ‘fake’ Christians.” The inspiration for the story is a new book by Kenda Creasy Dean called Almost Christian. Dean is a United Methodist minister and “professor of youth and church culture” at Princeton Theological Seminary (which is not a part of Princeton University).

In her book, Dean warns that teenagers are adopting an anemic form of Christianity, “a watered-down faith that portrays God as a ‘divine therapist’ whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem.” According to CNN,

Dean drew her conclusions from what she calls one of the most depressing summers of her life. She interviewed teens about their faith after helping conduct research for a controversial study called the National Study of Youth and Religion. The study, which included in-depth interviews with at least 3,300 American teenagers between 13 and 17, found that most American teens who called themselves Christian were indifferent and inarticulate about their faith.

The study included Christians of all stripes -- from Catholics to Protestants of both conservative and liberal denominations. Though three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can't talk coherently about their beliefs, the study found. Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good—what the study's researchers called "moralistic therapeutic deism."

Again, according to CNN, Dean’s book

argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity. She says this "imposter'' faith is one reason teenagers abandon churches."If this is the God they're seeing in church, they are right to leave us in the dust," Dean says. "Churches don't give them enough to be passionate about."

“What's the matter with kids today?” A lot according to Prof Dean’s hand-wringing analysis. Yet looking at her statistics, the problem with kids seems to be they’re acting just like grownups! “Three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can't talk coherently about their beliefs.” Uh, Prof Dean, have you talked to any adults lately?

Teen behavior and attitudes toward Christianity and religion generally is certainly at the low end of the age-scale. Yet they seem to be right where one would expect given the steady drop in religious interest most studies find as one moves from older to younger age groups. The lack of religious passion or theological coherence Dean reports among young people is actually just a somewhat more extreme case of church trends that have been ongoing for decades. The problem isn’t the kids; it’s modern day Christianity.

There is always a tendency for adults to try to live their lives through their kids. We want them to avoid the mistakes we made and often want them to be things we aren’t but wish we were. Religious “passion” went out of mainline Christianity long ago and seems to be leaking out of most evangelical churches, as well. And the expectation that average Christians should be able to coherently articulate their beliefs has probably always been a pipe dream. In his introduction, Luther says he wrote the Small Catechism as a kind of field manual because of the “wretchedness” he found hearing the ignorance of members of local parishes he visited. That was 500 years ago!

CNN goes on to quote another author with a different perspective.

Barbara A. Lewis, author of "The Teen Guide to Global Action," says Dean is right -- more teens are embracing a nebulous belief in God. Yet there's been an "explosion" in youth service since 1995 that Lewis attributes to more schools emphasizing community service. Teens that are less religious aren't automatically less compassionate, she says. "I see an increase in youth passion to make the world a better place," she says. "I see young people reaching out to solve problems. They're not waiting for adults."

Dean dismisses teens' belief “that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good.” While that sounds like something from an “everything important I learned in kindergarten” book, many people could certainly do worse than following such a philosophy. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to the prophet Micah’s famous summation of Hebrew teaching:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

I think Prof Dean forgets something else: youth is a time for rebellion and that’s a good thing. Adolescence, as we all know, is the time when we begin to establish our own identity, independent of that of our parents and family. Yes it’s traumatic for everyone involved but it is a necessary part of becoming a full human being. It should be expected and even encouraged.

Often teens and young adults reject beliefs and practices which they come back to later. If that happens, though, it is because they have come to accept them on their own and are not just mimicking their parents or other adults. They also typically reshape them to fit their own lives, which are not the same as that of previous generations.

In that, I think, there is some hope. Dean is right in seeing a vague, passionless Christianity among the adults teens are learning from. What is the appeal of that for young people today? But Dean’s hope that they will somehow revert to the muscular Christianity of a romanticized past is a fantasy. No, Christianity’s only hope is that it can be re-invented for a world utterly changed from the one in which it began. Young people moving into adulthood, seeking to reshape the world in which they live, may well be the ones to bring about such a transformation. If Christianity has something of lasting value they, of all people, are the ones mostly likely to find it.

Everybody loves a parade (Sunday Reflections for August 29, 2010)

2010-08-27T23:00:00.001-05:00

There is a tradition that one starting point of the modern age is the Italian poet Petrach’s Ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. In his account of the event, Petrarch claims to be the first person since antiquity to climb a mountain simply for the view.

Whether true or not, the popularity of the story reflected the new attitude toward the world and toward life that swept Europe in the period known as the Renaissance. We know it best from the paintings of the time but Petrarch’s story shows that this new attitude also affected people’s behavior and state of mind. The world came to life in a new way and people looked at their own lives in a new way.

Over the past few weeks I’ve looked at a lot of songs, searching for popular music for the “Word from Culture” portion of our summer worship services. Popular music is, of course, one of the legacies of the Renaissance. Especially since its explosion in the 20th century, it seems that nearly every aspect of life has had a song written about it.

Petrarch

Some would say this is just another example of human narcissism but I think that’s too harsh. Yes, we are fascinated with ourselves but then, why shouldn’t we be? Isn’t that what it means to be a human being? Isn’t that what self-consciousness is about? We are unique in the animal kingdom (as far as we know) in being able to reflect about our own lives. Sometimes it gets obsessive but more often it’s either curiosity about ourselves, reflection on our successes and failures leading to planning for a better future, or simply celebration of who we are and of the joys of life.

This “celebration of life” category is one I’ve become especially aware of as I’ve perused the popular music realm. In finding so much of it, I’ve realize that there isn’t so much of it in the church music realm. That’s due, it seems, because it just isn’t a big topic in either the Bible or Christian theology. And that, I think, is a problem.

No, Christianity as it has been traditionally presented just isn’t real big on celebrating life. Don’t get me wrong. It is there to be found, both in the Bible and in its theological tradition, but it is a bit of a minority report. Awareness of life’s joys often gets drowned out, frankly, by the stronger awareness of our propensity to do bad things to each other (sin, in other words) and of life’s inherent pain and suffering.

Here again, I think we need to be aware of Christianity’s cultural and historical origins. To put it simply, it developed among people for whom life was often really, really hard—and typically, pretty short. For that reason, Christianity has had a tendency to dismiss this world and human life as essentially a failure and put all its eggs in the basket of a future world to come. Hence, there have been regular appearances of Christian prophets of doom and destruction, especially in times of social distress (war, famine, natural disaster, etc.

Wedding at Cana, Giotto 14 c.

Modern biblical scholarship has shown, however, that such a dismissive view of earthly life was not central to Jesus’ teaching. Contrary to the popular view that Jesus’ mission was all about getting people to heaven, the bulk of his teaching was actually about very this-worldly matters. When confronted with human suffering, he tried to alleviate it on the spot and rarely consoled people with “well your next life will be better” bromides. And then there was his notorious reputation for all that “eating and drinking.” Jesus a party animal? Well, there was the business with all that wine in Cana.

To be honest, I think the Hebrew Bible—the Christian Old Testament—gives a fairer representation of the biblical tradition on this score. It, too, likes its wine and banquets, even if they are most often used as images of God’s kingdom to come. The images only work, of course, if it’s already assumed these are really good things which we aren’t getting enough of in the here-and-now.

But even more fundamentally for the whole biblical tradition are the texts I go back to so often, the creation stories in Genesis. We have too often undervalued these texts’ report of God’s verdict on the creation, and especially human beings, as being “very good.” Nor have we sufficiently appreciated the essentially positive view of human life in God’s charge to “till the garden and keep it.” In affect God says, “I’ve given you all this stuff. Now enjoy it.”

Yes, there is that misadventure with the serpent and the tree. In the Bible’s view, however, that doesn’t negate God’s previous overall judgment. Human life has its problems—big ones. But the overarching theme of the Bible’s story is that we have the ability to overcome them and the responsibility to help each other overcome them.

The reason? Because of that opening story declaring that this world and this life are so “very good.” Who would want to waste them? Though much of the church scowled and grumbled, this was the re-discovery that launched the Renaissance 500 years ago and which has been at the center of modern life every since. It’s long past time for Christianity to embrace that truth, to join in the celebration of the gift of creation and life, and to stop, as Fanny Brice would say, raining on the parade.

Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter
Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter
Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade

Don't tell me not to fly, I simply got to
If someone takes a spill, it's me and not you
Who told you you're allowed to rain on my parade

Ooh, life is juicy, juicy and you see
I gotta have my bite, sir
Get ready for me love, 'cause I'm a "comer"
I simply gotta march, my heart's a drummer
Don't bring around the cloud to rain on my parade

An economic and political debacle in the making

2010-08-26T23:29:00.003-05:00

I haven’t posted anything on the economy in awhile because I know people get tired of hearing gloom and doom. This week’s housing report was so awful, however, that I feel a responsibility (ahem) to comment. Sales of both new and existing houses fell off a cliff in July. The numbers were beyond bad. Most MSM reports said the fall was unexpectedly large but the bloggers I read who actually look at real numbers saw this coming. This is yet another example of the mass media’s cooperation with the political and economic fantasy game being played in Washington these days.

The most likely cause of this drop-off happening now was the end of the first-time homebuyers’ tax credit in the spring. While costing the Treasury more billions it doesn’t have, the credit did nothing but pull housing demand forward. In other words, people who would have bought a house anyway did so earlier because of the tax credit. It actually generated little if any genuinely new sales. So this summer’s slump is the compensation for the artificial sales’ bump earlier in the year.

Yet the July home sales drop seems even too big for this explanation. The housing market is nearly collapsing. There is now more than a 12-month inventory of existing homes—nearly unprecedented. In the new McMansion market of homes over $750,000—once homebuilders’ gravy—there were too few sales nationwide in both June and July to statistically register.

What’s going on? Several things: people can’t sell their own homes and so are not buying new ones. People are underwater on their mortgage and can’t afford to move. People can’t get mortgages for new homes. Buyers realize that home prices are almost certain to start falling again, so why buy now? And, of course, tens of millions of people are unemployed, under-employed, or are otherwise economically distressed.

Typical predictions now are that house prices will fall another 10-15% in the coming year—and some are projecting declines of as high as 25%, at least in some areas. On multiple fronts this could be economically disastrous. It could push more people into foreclosure, it certainly means further shrinkage in the building industry, and it will put further stress on banks. This latter area is certainly one to watch. We have been assured that banks have turned the corner thanks to TARP and other government aids and bailouts but that is actually only true assuming the economy doesn’t get worse. Most banks are still heavily exposed to home mortgages and further deterioration in housing could threaten their stability yet again.

All this is leading to another area of deterioration: confidence in the Obama administration. Some months ago I read a blogger’s fear that Obama could become the Hoover of the Great Recession. That possibility seems to be growing steadily (and remember that Hoover was considered a very progressive politician when elected). The scale of this disaster for workers and their families just does not seem to be registering in the White House.

Example: the HAMP program was officially designed to assist distressed mortgage holders to renegotiate their loans to something affordable. The negotiating process was lengthy but people were able to stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure during this time. The program is nearing an end and it is now obvious relatively few of these loan modifications are actually occurring because people’s financial states are just too bad to make the numbers work. In conversations last week with economic journalists and bloggers, Treasury officials acknowledged that this result was actually what they expected. The real purpose of the program they now say was to prevent a flood of foreclosures at once which would drive down home prices and endanger the banks. In other words, HAMP’s real purpose was to spread the foreclosures out over a longer period, thus saving the banks but not the homeowners.

Again and again, administration programs have either been inadequate, poorly directed, or designed primarily to buy time for large tottering industries like banking and autos. The 2009 stimulus is coming to an end. It kept some people working but has done little to create long-term economic growth. I, for instance, have a re-paved street in front of my house thanks to the stimulus program. It’s nice but wasn’t really necessary. (There are worse streets nearby but in a ward whose alderman wasn’t as quick to grab the money as mine was.) And while it provided a few people with jobs at the time it is doing nothing right now in that regard.

In short, the economy is not growing. The stimulus stopped the free-fall but hasn’t reignited the country’s economic engines. Now it appears that the economy is again turning negative. People need to be put back to work. There is nothing on the horizon to indicate that will happen on its own, or as a result of anything the government is doing or even has proposed doing. In all likelihood unemployment will start to go up again soon, thus beginning a downward spiral.

Come November, the recession could well be back at full throttle. At that point, the finer points of political ideology will matter little to most people and a “throw the bums out” mentality will take hold. Democrats should then expect a shellacking. As President Clinton famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid” and that’s no less true today.

Note: The charts above are from Calculated Risk, perhaps the best site today for unvarnished economic information, especially regarding housing. I can't praise it enough. For another, more detailed, perspective on these recent housing reports and their implications, see today's post at The Automatic Earth. The first two parts are lengthy but especially good.

And an update: Paul Krugman's column in Thursday's New York Times also addresses the topic. One quote: "Why are people who know better sugar-coating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility." If you acknowledge there's a problem then you either have to do something about it or admit you don't know what to do.

Sing a new song (Sunday Reflections for August 22, 2010)

2010-08-20T10:08:00.005-05:00

This month we are using a pop song in our Sunday liturgy to provide another source of reflection, in addition to the regular scripture readings. Hearing this, a friend of mine commented on Facebook that she has come to appreciate secular music as much as religious songs as a source of spiritual support. “I'm enjoying the blurring of secular and sacred music,” she wrote. “If the message is inspirational, what does it matter who recorded it?”

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the difficulty of contemporary worship. Typically such efforts have involved taking traditional religious ideas (though expressed in modern language) and setting them to more contemporary sounding music. The fit, however, is rarely comfortable and often aesthetically mediocre.

Thus far, from comments and even attendance, this worship experiment has been well received. So while admittedly not quite knowing what I was doing, this experience has made me wonder more about why the church tries to add a contemporary veneer to its traditional spiritual life. Why do we try to create contemporary sounding church music rather than just use actual contemporary music instead?

Well, this question gets a bit complicated since you can approach it from several angles. For one thing, most pop music does not lend itself to sing-a-long. There are a few exceptions (Queen’s “We Will Rock You” comes to mind, as sports fans the world over know) but most of it is written as performance music, often by a solo voice. Fans may know a song’s lyrics but even when a musician encourages a concert audience to join in, the singing is usually rather pathetic even if enthusiastic.

Apart from this practical difficulty, I think the use of popular music in worship raises another more fundamental question. It’s a question that has been hanging over the church for several centuries, since the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. Namely, how does the church view and relate to secular culture? It’s a question the church has been alternately avoiding and wrestling with throughout this period but without any conclusion.

This is a long story, one that really starts all the way back with Jesus. It comes out of the differences of opinion within the church from the start about what Jesus was up to and what his followers should be doing after his death.

Modern New Testament scholarship is pretty well agreed that Jesus probably expected some dramatic apocalyptic event to occur in his life time—a “Day of the Lord,” if you will. Hence, Jesus talked about “the kingdom” being right around the corner and of the need to be ready at a moment’s notice for the “king’s” return. Of course, it didn’t happen. After his death, the early church then decided Jesus was referring to his own return and expected that at any moment, but that didn’t happen either.

It’s easy to see this shift in the later New Testament writings (both gospels and epistles). There is a growing concern with making the church organizationally sustainable for the long haul. The result is an accepted canon of scripture, worship practice, and ordained leadership. Yet this still begged the question of just what the church should be doing. Was it still in a hurry up and wait mode? If so, how long would the wait be? If not, then what was the church’s purpose?

The answer ended up being handed to it by none other than the Roman Emperor Constantine. For reasons that are still not entirely clear—and after years of on-again, off-again persecution—Constantine decided to make Christianity the new state religion of the empire. Suddenly the church had a dramatically different role to play, one for which it really was not prepared. Nor was it a role found in Jesus’ teachings. Regardless, the bishops jumped at the opportunity, concluding this must be what God wants and the church as we know it was born.

Ironically, the empire eventually collapsed but the church survived, carrying on many of the basic social functions the empire’s bureaucracy used to perform. The pope easily slid onto the emperor’s throne and Christendom replaced the empire as the organizational structure for much of Europe. For a thousand years church and society were virtually one and the same.

Then with the Renaissance and Reformation, Christendom began to crumble. The church split, of course, but the rise of commerce and the nation-state also carved out ever-larger portions of society independent of the church’s influence. That trend has continued to the present day. (An interesting physical representation of the decline of church power is seen in the shrinking of papal ruled territory from the Holy Roman Empire, to the Italian Papal States, to the Vatican acreage tucked inside the city of Rome.)

Christianity—whether Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox—has never figured out what to make of modern society and culture. At times it has acted as if it is all a disaster and we just need to get back to Christendom again. By now, however, that prospect seems preposterous to even the most die-hard traditionalist. One response is to resume the waiting game for Jesus’ return. Off and on, fundamentalists have liked predicting this, usually to be preceded by some catastrophic apocalypse. Most of Christianity, however, has kept going back and forth between wanting to fight modern culture or embrace it.

And the reason for this confusion, as I’ve said, is the church’s uncertainty from the start about its mission. Is the church supposed to be getting ready to abandon this world for a new and better one that God will somehow provide? Or is it working to transform this world into the new and better one envisioned by Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him?

Clearly, I am in the latter camp. The other, to me, is now pure fantasy and the longer the church clings to it the more bizarre it looks and acts and the more irrelevant it is to real life. This life and this world is what we have been given and what we have to work with. Hunkering down in the church like it’s a bomb shelter is just a waste.

Jan Wildens "Landscape with Christ and Disciples on the Road to Emmaus"

Coming to this conclusion, it seems to me that the church and Christians individually need to be fully engaged with the world in whatever way we can, doing all we can to make it a better place. We need to be recognizing and pointing out to everyone the world’s inherent sacredness and value, including that of all the people living in it. We need to be celebrating this world as the beautiful and glorious gift that it is. And we need to be partnering with anyone who shares this commitment, whatever their religious or philosophical label.

Jesus came announcing the coming of God’s kingdom—not the coming of the church. The church is one instrument for bringing that about but we have to admit it’s had a pretty spotty record in that regard over the years. To avoid simply becoming absurd and irrelevant, the church needs to recognize what has always been true, that the Spirit blows wherever it wills. God’s transforming power can and does work anywhere, through anyone, and God’s voice can be heard in anyplace—even, and perhaps especially today, in a song on the radio.