Cloudburst

We stagger out drunkly, my neighbors and I,
startled from revery by the bass drums of heaven,
a trillion ecstatic splat-drops
denuding our wondering faces
all around the neighborhood.

These are three:
the rain that annoints wisened kings
the rain for children’s innocent druidic dances
and this rain –
a laughing hammer slaying old and young the same.

A man of the country from downstreet
insists it was some lightning-toothed devil
beating his wife.
You could hear him, said his lazy dark drawl,
in the rasping whiskey growl of the thunder.
That damned devil, out to ruin my new tennis shoes.

Perhaps, and perhaps – demons and djinns
are not to be taken lightly.
Yet the powers of hell (so I have been taught)
are all deceit and perversion, flies and slithering things.
Lucifer might dwell in fogs and muggy summer twilights,
but this cloudburst is a solid, sure promise:

“There is indeed milk and honey flowing
like candy-wrappers and floodwaters
in the land beyond the glutted river.”

A Whirling Mess

I like John Piper. I really do. Both his books and his preaching have been great helps to me in the past. That is part of why I was horrified to read this article he posted today interpreting a Minneapolis tornado as God’s judgment on the ELCA Lutheran church to consider a proposal allowing homosexuals to be ordained as clergymen.

His conclusion is as follows: “The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners”

Now, I agree with Dr. Piper that homosexuality is declared biblically as a sin, and while Jesus loves sinners, it is not something Christians can condone in an ongoing and unrepentant was in their clergy, any more than I can excuse a pastor who cheats on his wife because God loves sinners.

That said, this article was deeply troubling to me. I know that Dr. Piper loves the Puritans, and there are many exemplary things I too have treasured in Puritan writings. However, one of their (several) deep failings was to presume upon knowing God’s secret will. Whether this manifested in a presumption about who was and wasn’t elect or a willingness to draw a line from particular natural disasters to particular moral evils (one thinks of the “earthquake sermons” common in 1727 and 1755, which vary a great deal in this regard but often make this link), it was always problematic.

To give a counter-example: a church in the town where I used to live, faithful to Scripture and attended by several dear friends, burned down a couple years ago. Am I to assign this calamnity to some specific judgment of God? Of course not.

Indeed, this is the very point of the Tower of Siloam discussion in Luke 13. Dr. Piper cites it in his argument, but Christ’s whole point here was that, while the general brokenness of the world should point us to all of our general states of sin, we cannot link any specific disaster with some specific sin.

God is the creator and sustainer of the world, and as such his ways are beyond our knowing or finding out. While his providential rule over the world certainly must extend to things like natural disasters, it is utter presumption to think from this fact that we can discover the “why” behind it. We may never know – to suppose that we can makes God a little less holy and a little more in our own images.

real people

My wife calls them real people –

not real like tangibility or taxes,

but like bluegrass

or hip-hop before a producer’s “creative

direction” (that father of lies).

The sort of people who are atheists

because Jesus was a home-town boy,

smoking weed and tagging their tenements with

damnable revolutionary graffiti –

Not because some tsunami

on their big screen

soured their wine.

It’s not honesty,

not hearts worn on sleeves,

but that worn sleeves don’t hide bruises

like SUVs,

and what the neighbors think

is whether you’re good for a smoke

sitting on the cracked steps outside.

My wife calls them real people –

but I can’t bring myself to it.

We are all secrets locked in towers

bristling with spires and crennelations,

peering between merlons and

down murder holes, suspiciously

guarding our empty halls.

A castle beseiged or worn

by saltbreeze, seasons, intrusive ivy,

is a fortress yet; walking through

rotted gates, hostile gazes envy

my stiff keep of a neck.

“Real” is not a thing of degrees,

measured in cracks and breaches.

It is the trebuchet

whirring stony hammer-loads

across your bulwarks, and mine.

Social Programs and Sacred Callings

This is a modified e-mail I sent a friend who I’ve been visiting with about a Christian view of politics. They asked about how we should view social programs like Welfare and Social Security, which I think are complicated issues I’ve been pondering myself. Here are the three key questions I sent her that need to be under consideration; I’d love your thoughts if you have them.

1. What are these government programs? One of the challenges in talking about things like welfare is to avoid simple answers. While the classic Church and State/Cross and Sword dichotomy has value, the real world is much more complicated. Are government aid programs just exercises of the sword by an external political power? Simply put, no. Because of our republican government, they are also what could be termed “collective action” programs. That is, there is an element of cooperative problem-solving to them. This is what their proponents tend to argue for. Welfare and medicare are, in these peoples’ eyes, the result of a nation of people pooling their resources in order to combat social ills. Insofar as this is the case, it seems to me that the church can get behind and advocate them. However, it gets complicated because unlike other sorts of collective action, this one is backed up by the sword. If I decided to give my tax money that goes to social security to some other charity, I’d get thrown in jail. Because of this, the challenge is in determining how much of this is cooperative and how much is coercive. A Christian theology of politics has to make this distinction and base its support to some measure on whether the state is a helpful tool of organization or a substitute for the kingdom of heaven.

2. How effective are they? This needs to be a seperate question. For example, I agree with many of the younger, left-leaning Evangelicals I know that poverty and other social problems should be a huge priority for Christians. However, we have dramatically different political convictions because I think most of the remedies they recommend don’t actually work. This is where a lot of practical ground-level study needs to be made. Even if welfare and social security are judged to be more good than bad in theory, they are at present extremely ineffective programs. Working to reform, or even just to supplement these programs, should certainly be a Christian priority if they aren’t doing well. The same thing applies to questions of political aid versus private giving. They might be equally permissible in a Christian framework, but if one is more helpful or efficient than the other, it makes sense for us to focus resources on this area. After all, God has structured the world in certain ways, and we are responsible to live in the world has He has made it. In this regard, study of political theory, law, and economics are invaluable. I’m not arguing for simple pragmatism, but we must be practical as we implement Christ’s calling because the goal is to actually help people, not simply go through the motions to satisfy our own consciences.

3. How can the church live out its calling in a broken world? This is where I think a lot of political thought, including some that I myself have recommended, needs to spend more time than it does. Too often, we as Christians go looking for the perfect solution to a social problem, the one untainted by sin and fallenness. Of course, no such solution exists. For some, this perfectionism ends up being paralyzing. They can’t do anything because everything has issues. For others, and I’d say the majority live here, it breeds blindness to the weaknesses of the position you’re backing. In a very real sense, every political choice is the lesser of two evils. Then again, it’s also the greater of two goods. Much like the humans that create them, no political system or social program is completely good or thoroughly wicked. Our calling is to be God-loving realists who seek to see his kingdom come little by little in the world. When we try to make it happen faster, it usually ends in disaster.

Deconstruction Tastes Like Marlboro Lights

On a related note to some of what I said yesterday, I think that for some of us a fascination with “newness” and “relevance” often manifests as a love of “wrongness” – that is, the idea that we and everyone who has come before got it wrong. Nothing appeals to me more than to be told that I’ve completely missed the point.

It’s like a narcotic. Or, more accurately, it’s like some bizarre pain-addiction. Nothing compares to the thrill of learning some truth that casts our understanding of things in a whole new light. In that moment when the walls come crashing down and I realize that there is more to the world than I ever suspected, I get a rush I can only compare to something like smoking your first cigarette. And this is the root of the problem.

I’m all for gaining new insights about Jesus and the Christian story. I think there are plenty of wrong things that the church has tolerated for too long and which need to be challenged. That said, like cigarettes, it’s easy to get hooked. Before long, I’m not interested in truth anymore at all, just in the thrill of seeing it challenged.

This is only worsened by our cultural myth of the courageous hero standing against the evil system. The rush I get when I see the status quo broken, the admiration I feel when someone criticizes the reigning paradigm – these have more to do with the lone cowboy heroism of our cultural mythology than with the normal workings of the Church.

Left unchecked, I often end up mistaking ballsiness for holiness. I remember hearing a sermon in college by a guy who will remain nameless, but who I immediately fell in love with because I thought he was “speaking the hard truth.” In addressing a crowd of Southern Baptist kids, he basically made a point, and when they applauded, told them to shut up because they were the ones headed to hell. Wow, I thought, that was courageous.

It took me about 6 months to notice that maybe this wasn’t such an admirable thing. After all, according to this preacher, the reason these kids were going to hell was their TV-watching habits. Really? I didn’t agree with that. Funny, how I missed that part because I was so in love with the image of this man shouting down the masses. I inhaled the sweet smoke of beliefs burning, and it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t igniting them because they were wrong, but only because of the rush I got as they became glowing cinders.

Once again, the answer here is to be suspicious of novelty. It is a very good thing to seek truth, and sometimes this requires challenging our reigning paradigms. But most of the time, the right approach is to listen to the past. Saints for the last two thousand years have believed things for a reason. If I find myself continually chasing after the ways they got it wrong, it may be that I instead am addicted to the drug of deconstruction rather than the sweet taste of truth.

Relevance, Rehoboam-style?

I grew up in a tradition that had an unhealthy infatuation with youth. As an emotionally-unbalanced 16-year-old, my hormone-induced zeal was held up as a model of Christian virtue and commitment. I was one of the poster boys for what many in my denomination believed: that we needed revival, and that such revival would come for the young, so those of past generations need to get out of the way. My parents and grandparents were sometimes even portrayed as the enemies of God’s work in the world, and I needed to ignore their counsel in order to advance the kingdom.

While I am now in a less youth-focused denomination, I still feel the effects of this way of thinking. In particular, I often find myself seeing older, more experiences saints as the enemies of what God is doing in the world now. The more I recognize this proclivity in my heart, the more worried I am. I don’t want to look at the church this way, but it seems to be in the water. For whatever reason, I fail miserably to respect those older than me, or at least am very selective with that respect.

One of the biggest causes of my sin in this area is my constant obsession with the “new” and the “relevant.” For whatever reason, we Evangelicals have become convinced that the reason we’re losing the spiritual war in America is because we are out of touch. We don’t have the latest, shiniest weapons of our culture with which to fight for the cause of Christ, and hence we’re doomed to loss by attrition.

This is nonsense, for any number of reasons. In the first place, it doesn’t matter to Jesus how behind-the-times you are culturally. If you have the good news of Christ’s resurrection and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, you are far better-armed than any philosopher of this age.

What’s more, the cause of Christ is never served by mere hip-ness. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t speak in language people can understand or apply the truths of Christ to contemporary currents in society. Of course we should. However, our failure in these areas (if there has been one) is probably not themain cause of Evangelicalism’s decline. Our problem historically has not been irrelevance, but isolationism. Much of what we see as being “culturally relevant” is simply mimicking the culture around us while still living in isolation from it. Instead, we need to take the radical re-ordering of the world’s priorities which Jesus causes and then live out these new priorities before the world.

This is where reconnecting with the older generation is so important. In our talk of relevance, we have left them behind. As one younger preacher points out, how can we talk about “relevance” without our 75-year-old elder hearing that he isn’t. What’s more, we live in a culture that hates old age. While I don’t think it has been intentional, many of us have used cultural engagement as a clever disguise for hiding the elderly away where they can’t embarrass us.

One of the most critical things we must be doing as churches if figuring out ways to reconnect wise and mature saints with younger people, both Christian and not, who can benefit from their years of walking with the Spirit. In the biblical picture of the church it is the feeble 80-something who, having walked with Christ throughout life, occupies the place of honor. He is the man we should be looking to for wisdom, rather than our postmodern spiritual trendsetters with their soul patches and trendy glasses.

Of course those of us who are younger have something to offer, and as the church lives out the mission of God, it will be important to recognize this fact. I am far better equipped to talk with college students about how the movies and music they love shows forth the splendor of Christ than my parents. But the fact that they have never listened to Radiohead or Jay-Z is a paltry thing next to the lifetime of insight they can offer about living out Christ as a spouse, or an employee, or a parent. The fact that it is Radiohead rather than real spirituality that is at the center of our approach to Christianity shows just how desperately we need older generations.

I’ve been married for two years now. I have a number of friends around the same age who are also married, and we often discuss the experiences we’re sharing. However, I can honestly say that I have learned almost nothing about being a good spouse from these friends. They offer good support and sympathy, but have very little advice (and most of what they do have is bad). Every important lesson I keep returning to was taught by my parents, or a pastor, or one of the several older, godly men who has invested in me over the years.

Such is life in the world God has made. As long as Rehoboam takes counsel from those his own age, the kingdom will keep on dividing. We desperately need to get over ourselves. I am incredibly young. Thank God that he doesn’t wait for us to grow up and figure it all out to use us for His purposes. That said, you and I are fools if we take up this calling without also availing ourselves of the wise counsel of those who have gone before. And maybe as we seek these relationships, we’ll learn that it’s not just the 20-somethings for whom God has remarkable big plans.

It All Makes Sense Now…

HT: Scot McKnight

Not Just Over the Line – In Another Universe

The official blurb from Amazon:

“THE ONE BIBLE THAT SHOWS HOW ‘A LIGHT FROM ABOVE’ SHAPED OUR NATION. Never has a version of the Bible targeted the spiritual needs of those who love our country more than The American Patriot’s Bible. This extremely unique Bible shows how the history of the United States connects the people and events of the Bible to our lives in a modern world. The story of the United States is wonderfully woven into the teachings of the Bible and includes a beautiful full-color family record section, memorable images from our nation’s history and hundreds of enlightening articles which complement the New King James Version Bible text.”

This is just too much. I can’t take it anymore. This sort of patridolatry is inexcusable. If I try to comment on this nationalistic blasphemy, I’m going to have to delete this post, so I’ll just link to a review by Greg Boyd.

If you really want a taste of this baby, check out the promo video.

Like or As

Analogy: a little proof

that mystery still remains

breathing in between worlds like

motes of solar dust and civilization,

an empiricist’s dream of dark matter,

a starry world-serpent, slithering similes across the void

Truth and metaphor, my baby and me

Swinging around the crowded floor

To the tune of “Really Meaning It (This Time)”

An Essay on Nothing

What’s wrong?

Nothing.

Seriously, man, is there something…

No. Nothing.

Well, okay.

I’m convinced that this is one of those conversations that flits around the ephemeral world of forms and finds itself manifested in a million particular interchanges in the world. Or, at least, this would be my conviction if I believed in an ephemeral world of forms. But that’s another story, not this one.

What I am sure of is that nobody means “nothing” in such an interchange, no matter how much they insist on it. The proof is in the anger and frustration that accompanies such an assertion. While we often mistake it for anger at the inquirer, that’s not it. Instead, it is a frustration born of not knowing – of a sense of reasonlessness. It’s not that nothing’s wrong, it’s that nothing explains the wrongness we feel.

So then, nothing must be something. Indeed, it is one of the most significant somethings in life. When something is wrong, when I can point to it and name it, it is bearable. Even if I can’t fix it, naming it gives me power over it. I am freed from its terror because it has meaning.

But nothing, that is the monster that lurks in the dusty corners of my dreams. It chases me for no reason, and my legs move like syrup trying to escape because there is nowhere I can run. Nothing is the thing I can’t name, can’t explain, can’t see. Nothing is the beast that creeps into the space where meaning isn’t.

*****

The same this is true of other conversations. “What are you doing?” My wife asks me. “Oh, nothing.” I reply.

Of course this is nonsense. I’m doing a thousand things. My heart is thumping out its double-beat bass line. My lungs are cymbals sizzling with oxygen. A dozen thoughts, half-conceived melody lines, are dancing through my head. I am immersed in the music of life. It’s the music of being. But somehow, it’s all nothing because there is an unbridgeable gulf between that tune and the soaring symphony of doing something.

“Nothing” is like a sound check. It’s the snare drum testing the mike levels and the guitar strings twanging out little proofs that they are indeed in tune. They are there. But the mandolin licks and bass lines aren’t music, can’t be music. They exist, but they aren’t doing anything. They aren’t tickling my ears or tugging at me heart.

If all I get from a band is the sound check, I find myself once again angry and frustrated. If all I get from life is the harmony of my anatomy, I get restless and irritable. Nothing is something, but its nothing satisfying. That is the realm of music and meaning.

*****

So what is nothing? It is, for us, the word we use to describe what happens when there’s nothing behind us, nothing beneath us. It is reasonlessness, as in “nothing’s wrong.” It is also aimlessness, as in “I’m doing nothing.” But it can also mean something else as well, and it is this something else that really gives the word away.

When a friend tells me they believe nothing about religion or politics or ethics or whatever, they cannot mean that they really don’t have any beliefs or opinions in any of these spheres. At the very least, they do or don’t pray, do or don’t think the government should be able to make them do certain things, and do or don’t kill people for no apparent reason. All of this sounds suspiciously like something.

But most people don’t just stop there. They might meditate with crystals, pray to Buddha or wear a cross necklace. They have defined opinions about almost every political issue and vote regularly and with great gusto. They have a very defined sense of what’s right and wrong, particularly as it pertains to what people are doing to them. This isn’t just something, it is a cacophony of somethings all blaring out their horn parts at the same time and in different keys.

Yet people insist that this clatter of noise amounts to nothing. How can this be? I think the answer is simple. Its not that people believe nothing, its that there is nothing beyond them demanding their belief. If they believed in Jesus or Allah or G-d or Zeus, they would be acknowledging something beyond them – something behind them – which defines belief for them.

This is why the god of nothing is such a popular fellow. Oh, he might be there. But he’s a conveniently agnostic deity. I can say that he exists or that he doesn’t, or more likely that I don’t know and probably can’t. After all, why would he care about a tiny planet in the corner of some galaxy where some pretentious apes have started walking around with animal skins on and blowing each other up?

In a real sense, this is belief in nothing – belief in nothing important. Nothing is in fact any something stripped of significance. It might be something, but it doesn’t mean anything. And so we go about insisting that nothing is the One Great God, and we might or might not serve him however we see fit.

*****

I am told that my generation is characterized by suspicion of hypocrisy. Of course, I’m suspicious of any such sweeping generalization about “my generation.” After all, isn’t it hypocritical for people to paint others with a broader brush than they would themselves? And so I both disprove and prove the point.

The truth is, I think we are suspicious. My whole life is a line of people preaching something and failing to live up to it. Every politician is corrupt. Every life-changing product leaves me underwhelmed. Every religion ends in an explosion of power grabs and sex scandals. Something always seems to end in hypocrisy, and so we trust in nothing, insisting that nothing is really behind it all. Away with these somethings and the liars that teach them! Let my story be about nothing. Then at least it will be a true lie instead of a pretense.

But there is a hypocrisy of nothing as well. This is apparent in all of us. Nothing is like a vacuum. Something always seems to creep in. We try to tell our story about nothing, but it has a funny way of ending in Meaning and Significance. Nirvana is that place where true and false truly cease to exist. We don’t just fail to live up to the something that is nothing, we can’t even bring ourselves to admit our failure, because then a thousand somethings would come barreling in and wreck our party.

I once met a man who insisted he believed in nothing. He was, he asserted, simply a product of a certain culture, education and upbringing. Those factors were just thrown in a martini shaver with some lumps of genetics and a twist of luck, and out he came. Of course, his conviction and his analogy proved that he was indeed a product of a certain culture and upbringing, but that’s another story.

I met this man in Africa. He was a tourist there, and terribly excited to experience the local culture. After all, if he believed in nothing, what was there to get offended about? The first day he bought African shirts and ate African food and joked about being a Mzungu (white person). By the second day, however, something was wrong.

This man I met was, unfortunately for his trip, a hypocrite. He really did believe things. Lots of them. Culture, as it turns out, has little to do with what kinds of shirts you wear. He began trying to convince the Africans that they were wrong to be Christian, which almost all of them were. They should go back to their tribal religions. This confused most of them. This “open” and “tolerant” white man seemed to think he knew far more about their religious life than they did, simply because it was white men with the same attitude who had brought them Christianity in the first place. Then he encountered the other side of the equation, and started trying to convince tribesmen that they needed modern medicine instead of the charms and incantations of witch doctors. He left Africa frustrated and unhappy but still insisting that he believed nothing lay behind it all.

The hypocrisy of nothing exists because we all want life to sing. Nobody is content with the sound check. Some people are convinced there is something there behind it all, and that is the tune of their lives. Those of us who hear them miss notes and botch verses reject the hope of music and go on singing anyway. Who is the greater fool?

*****

I once had a very outspoken atheist point out to me that I was just as much an atheist as he was when it came to Zeus or Thor or Krishna. He was quite right as far as it goes. I don’t believe in the Greek or Norse gods, although I hope I’m not as angry at Zeus or Thor as he seemed to be at Jesus. Other than that lightning bolt wrecking my computer, they’ve never done wrong by me.

That said, his point escaped me. After all, I’m just as much not-an-atheist (in the way he meant it) as I am not-a-Hindu or not-a-Muslim. How was the fact that I happen to believe something in particular an argument for his position?

As I listened to the athiest for a while, I started to realize what was going on. He was trying to convince me that since I believed nothing in regards to Aphrodite and Allah, I should also believe nothing about Yahweh or Jesus. He seemed to think this was what he was doing. He was consistently believing nothing while I was only inconsistently doing so.

Yet this misses the point. I don’t believe nothing about Thor, but rather something – that he doesn’t exist. This isn’t inconsistent atheism, it’s consistent Christ-following. It might be presumptuous, but I’m pretty sure the same thing is true of my atheist friend. He believes all sorts of things, including a number of things about religion. He isn’t a Christian because he believes that the universe is nothing but matter and that God endangers his understanding of Science.

This doesn’t mean he’s wrong, and it doesn’t make me right. But what is wrong is to pretend like one of us is above the other. We both believe things, we both bring things to the table. That’s great; let’s sit there, have a beer and talk a while. It’s only when you pretend like you’re not at the table that things start to fall apart.

*****

All of this is just a long-winded way of lodging a simple plea: let’s thumb our noses at convention, shock the powers-that-be and have an unabashed, unadulterated conversation about something. We all have convictions. We all believe things.

The problem with nothing is that it’s the sort of tower we find in fairy tales. It protects us from the world out there, the world of bigots and fundamentalists, of ideologues and demagogues. All their flaming arrows are deflected by our insistence that we’re the ones without beliefs, without convictions.

Yet while we are safe, we are also prisoners. This tower has no doors. Instead we sit on our balconies and wish that some hero would come and break us free. It’s like when I tell a friend that “nothing’s wrong” while I’m a wreck inside. It protects me from baring my heart, from risking this other human being clumsily dropping it, or (as I truly fear) taking one look at it and walking the other way as quickly as is polite. But it never gets better. It never heals.

If I were a romantic and a chauvinist, I suppose I’d want to be the Prince Charming that throws rocks at our window and asks you to let down your hair. But that makes it sound like I’ve got it figured out, and that’s certainly not the case. Besides, I might break your golden tresses if I tried that particular climb. Instead, I’ll be the faerie that flutters through your window. Let’s talk a while, and maybe if you like the melody, we can try a bit of dancing as well. It’s a tune as old as the trees, and then some.