A few years back our oldest child wrote up a Christmas wish list. All he mentioned were Legos, a box of Altoids and a Star Wars action figure. As they say, the key to happiness is to want what you have and to have what you want. At Christmas, wishing for what is within the realm of possibility is one way to avoid holiday depression.
Now, lest you imagine that we somehow are raising children who have claimed the "live simply that others may simply live" perspective, that same child who was overjoyed to find a box of Legos, an action figure and some Altoids, wants a computer this year. I foresee a bit of holiday depression in his future.
On the other hand, wishing for the impossible is one way to transcendence.
I still want the impossible -- the beloved community, the household of God, the arc of justice bending toward our time and place. But I will not be disappointed when it doesn't show up in completeness next Saturday morning. The impossible will take a while.
The mark of faith is trusting in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change. May the evidence of brokenness, injustice, war and hate shift for you this season, if only just a little.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Progressive Evangelical?
I've been meeting with a group of folks this fall who are trying to sort out the future of the church -- not The Church, just our little church. We are a decidedly progressive lot and, much to our dismay, our conversations continue to return to a decidedly conservative word: evangelism. We feel a deep sense of calling to reach out into our community and tell people about the faith we share, to invite people to explore it with us, to expand the circle of our small community. And this scares the hell out of us.
The very word "evangelical" gets defined as "fundamentalist" and thus is automatically the field of conservatives. But like so much else in the language of Christianity, it has not always been so. The word now firmly associated in the American mind with conservatives, comes from a simple New Testament Greek word that means "one who brings good news."
Despite what Karl Rove might have us believe, progressives should be bearers of good news. According to Rove's worldview, anyone who criticizes the way things are is by definition a pessimist. The laundry list of situations that progressives must critique and condemn is too long for any blog. The challenge to progressives is not only to continue sharp and clear critiques of the status quo (of war without end, of stagnant economies, of deeper division between the affluent and the destitute), but also to say with conviction and imagination that another world is possible.
This ought to be precisely where progressive people of faith -- or, people of progressive faith -- should be reclaiming the mantle of evangelism. After all, we are the ones who have envisioned a world that makes decisions nonviolently, and we are the ones who have shown precisely how that works in the American South, in apartheid South Africa, in colonial India. We are the ones who have shown how people can come together across racial, ethnic, religious and economic divisions to build more just and equitable communities. We are the ones who point toward one who came preaching good news to the poor, release to the captives, new sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed and jubilee to those bound by an unfair economy. (And if you doubt that, go read Luke's gospel.)
Advent is a season of preparation and expectation. The word itself means "coming." So let this Advent be a time of hopeful expectation and faithful preparation for the coming of the good news. Now is the time for progressive evangelicals to be loud, insistent, joyous, imaginative, hopeful bearers of good news. Another world is possible.
CW
The very word "evangelical" gets defined as "fundamentalist" and thus is automatically the field of conservatives. But like so much else in the language of Christianity, it has not always been so. The word now firmly associated in the American mind with conservatives, comes from a simple New Testament Greek word that means "one who brings good news."
Despite what Karl Rove might have us believe, progressives should be bearers of good news. According to Rove's worldview, anyone who criticizes the way things are is by definition a pessimist. The laundry list of situations that progressives must critique and condemn is too long for any blog. The challenge to progressives is not only to continue sharp and clear critiques of the status quo (of war without end, of stagnant economies, of deeper division between the affluent and the destitute), but also to say with conviction and imagination that another world is possible.
This ought to be precisely where progressive people of faith -- or, people of progressive faith -- should be reclaiming the mantle of evangelism. After all, we are the ones who have envisioned a world that makes decisions nonviolently, and we are the ones who have shown precisely how that works in the American South, in apartheid South Africa, in colonial India. We are the ones who have shown how people can come together across racial, ethnic, religious and economic divisions to build more just and equitable communities. We are the ones who point toward one who came preaching good news to the poor, release to the captives, new sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed and jubilee to those bound by an unfair economy. (And if you doubt that, go read Luke's gospel.)
Advent is a season of preparation and expectation. The word itself means "coming." So let this Advent be a time of hopeful expectation and faithful preparation for the coming of the good news. Now is the time for progressive evangelicals to be loud, insistent, joyous, imaginative, hopeful bearers of good news. Another world is possible.
CW
Monday, December 06, 2004
Into the Breach
How can you be a repairer of the breach if you don't understand the breach? Red State/Blue State, progressive/conservative, Christian/Muslim, Israeli/Palistinian, rich/poor -- the divisions are so numerous that we grab onto any convenient shorthand because the work of truly understanding these differences is overwhelming.
The church I serve in Virginia is part of the More Light network of Presbyterian congregations. Indeed, we are the only More Light church in the commonwealth. More Light is one of those "inside baseball" phrases that only Presbyterians recognize. It simply means that we welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons into the full life of our congregation and work to pull down all of the barriers to their full participation in the life of the broader church.
That said, my congregation is a More Light church in need of more light -- literally. Our 1940s wired sanctuary is a dimly lit space. So we called an electrician who sent us to a lighting designer who came to visit last week.
In the course of conversation, he told me that he is a member of a Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation. Knowing a bit about that conservative denomination and its fundamentalist perspectives on interpreting scripture, I was eager to talk lights and not theology. It was not a day when I felt like letting someone try to hit me over the head with the Bible and its half dozen passages that are regularly used to deny the full humanity of GLBT folks.
But he kept asking questions about the church and I kept answering them, and eventually he had a pretty good picture of who we are. That's when the fun began.
We talked for at least an hour about the theological divide between us. It was more than civil. It was a first step into the breach taken by people who share a common confession of faith, but come at it from radically different perspectives.
He said several times, "I hope you don't feel like I'm badgering you, but this is the first time I've ever spoken with a progressive pastor who comes at these issues the way you do, and I'm just really interested in trying to understand how you got there."
There were no conversion experiences, but there was some small repairing of the breach. He saw a progressive who is not a monster (at least I hope!), and I encountered a conservative whose perspectives are grounded not in stereotypical bigotry, but in a well-understood theological perspective. The conversation was so much richer than any I have had with conservative Presbyterian lay people, who, on these particular issues have struck me over and over again as naive, misinformed and, well, just plain stupid much of the time. This guy is smart, thoughtful and knows his Bible.
Of course, he interprets scripture through a particular lens -- as we all do with any text we encounter. While I see the arc of the story of scripture as primarily about restoring relationships between and among human beings and between creation and its creator, he sees it as a story of God's call to human beings to be holy. Where I read through a lens of compassion, he reads through a lens of holiness. Where I understand justice as love in action, he understands justice a God's judgement on fallen humanity.
So, if this is the breach, how does one operative within it effectively? How do we go once more into this breach with any hope for mending, healing and wholeness?
The church I serve in Virginia is part of the More Light network of Presbyterian congregations. Indeed, we are the only More Light church in the commonwealth. More Light is one of those "inside baseball" phrases that only Presbyterians recognize. It simply means that we welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons into the full life of our congregation and work to pull down all of the barriers to their full participation in the life of the broader church.
That said, my congregation is a More Light church in need of more light -- literally. Our 1940s wired sanctuary is a dimly lit space. So we called an electrician who sent us to a lighting designer who came to visit last week.
In the course of conversation, he told me that he is a member of a Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation. Knowing a bit about that conservative denomination and its fundamentalist perspectives on interpreting scripture, I was eager to talk lights and not theology. It was not a day when I felt like letting someone try to hit me over the head with the Bible and its half dozen passages that are regularly used to deny the full humanity of GLBT folks.
But he kept asking questions about the church and I kept answering them, and eventually he had a pretty good picture of who we are. That's when the fun began.
We talked for at least an hour about the theological divide between us. It was more than civil. It was a first step into the breach taken by people who share a common confession of faith, but come at it from radically different perspectives.
He said several times, "I hope you don't feel like I'm badgering you, but this is the first time I've ever spoken with a progressive pastor who comes at these issues the way you do, and I'm just really interested in trying to understand how you got there."
There were no conversion experiences, but there was some small repairing of the breach. He saw a progressive who is not a monster (at least I hope!), and I encountered a conservative whose perspectives are grounded not in stereotypical bigotry, but in a well-understood theological perspective. The conversation was so much richer than any I have had with conservative Presbyterian lay people, who, on these particular issues have struck me over and over again as naive, misinformed and, well, just plain stupid much of the time. This guy is smart, thoughtful and knows his Bible.
Of course, he interprets scripture through a particular lens -- as we all do with any text we encounter. While I see the arc of the story of scripture as primarily about restoring relationships between and among human beings and between creation and its creator, he sees it as a story of God's call to human beings to be holy. Where I read through a lens of compassion, he reads through a lens of holiness. Where I understand justice as love in action, he understands justice a God's judgement on fallen humanity.
So, if this is the breach, how does one operative within it effectively? How do we go once more into this breach with any hope for mending, healing and wholeness?
Friday, December 03, 2004
Politics and Pulpits
A friend of mine told me the other day about her recent trip to Italy, and of a group in Naples asking what the American churches thought about the war and the present policies of the American government. My friend said she listened as one U.S. Presbyterian leader told the Italians that most American Protestant churches don’t talk too much about politics.
On the other hand, last summer ABC News did a poll about the church and politics and headlined its results as “Most Americans Think Church Should Steer Clear of Politics.” Their survey suggested that two-thirds of Americans believe the church should not try to influence political decisions.
Of course, the same Google search that found that factoid turned up more than six million hits under “church and politics” or “pulpits and politics.” Clearly, there’s a connection between the church, the pulpit and politics, and, just as clearly, that relationship is muddled.
One of the great gifts the progressive church could offer to the wider church and culture is some clarity on this relationship between church and politics, especially in this time of deep divisions in our nation’s political life. Perhaps we have something of value to offer in response to the questions that must press in on us given the church’s troubled history of disastrous romances with political power.
These pressing questions seem quite obvious: should the church be involved in politics at all and, if so, how? But in fact, the obvious questions call forth nothing short of rethinking both the church and politics.
We could simply turn away from the political arena altogether. There are some, particularly in more conservative evangelical congregations, who believe the church should focus exclusively on questions of salvation, and they define salvation in purely spiritual, largely individualistic terms.
Against that spirit, we have the image Karl Barth famously articulated of the faithful pastor being one who held the Bible in one hand and the morning paper in the other. Today, perhaps, one should blog with the Bible in hand!
But even if we remain informed and faithful citizens – guided by a Biblical tradition as we respond to the news of the day – we could limit our scope of work to worship, weddings, funerals, Bible study, blanket drives for the homeless, food drives for the poor and clothing drives for the destitute. These are surely important parts of who we are as church, and some feel that such work marks the extent of our calling as church.
Against that vision of church, I would ask, if we are to care for families in their times of joy and of mourning, should we not also care for their situations in the broader community? And if we are to care for the homeless, should we not also care for the medical and economic and social conditions that lead to homelessness? If we care enough to feed the hungry, do we not care enough to work for an end to hunger? If we are called to care for the destitute of the city, are we not also called to care for the ordering of the city itself when that ordering leaves so many struggling on the city’s margins? If we are to be minister of reconciliation, should we not also be engaged in resolving conflicts?
Obviously, if we do such work we will be deeply engaged in politics.
Now I have friends in the community organizing world who like to say that if you come to the bottom of a cliff and find a rising stack of broken bodies, you need to go to the top of the mountain, find out who is throwing people over the edge and put a stop to it. That’s the work of doing justice, they will argue, and it is the only faithful response to injustice.
Surely they are correct, although, just as surely, someone must stay at the base of the cliff and care for the wounded. That is the work of compassionate charity. Both jobs are crucial, and both are the work of the church.
Of course, one organizer told me last week about trying to invite an evangelical congregation into a faith-based community organization and being told by the pastor, “if you begin by talking about justice, you will lose the people.” Obviously, we’ve got some language barriers.
But we have some deeper barriers of vision. A church that works only on broad issues of justice lacks roots in the lives of suffering people in the community. But a vision of church that focuses only on the work of charity to the exclusion of the work of justice is deficient, for, as important as charitable work is, charity is an inadequate response to systemic injustice.
And the truth is, no matter how you slice these distinctions, every church is always already engaged in politics anyway. The question is, will we pretend to turn away from politics and thereby bless the status quo – itself a political gesture; or will we engage in a politics of compassion that seeks to change unjust systems themselves?
Churches tie themselves into knots over these questions in part, I am convinced, because most of us these days have an impoverished understanding of politics.
For most Americans, it seems, politics refers only to partisan elections and partisan bickering in Congress, statehouses and city halls. People of faith ought to understand politics in the terms the word originally reflected: the arrangement of the polis, or the ordering of the city.
Scripture refers to the city almost one thousand times, and to the public square dozens of times. Clearly, God is concerned with the welfare of the city, and God calls people of faith to witness to that same concern precisely in the midst of the public square.
When Isaiah says, “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter,” (Isa. 59:14) he is not calling on the people to sit idly by and accept an unjust status quo. Indeed, as soon as the judgment is announced, Isaiah pronounces this: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and God’s glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and rulers to the brightness of your dawn” (Isa. 60:1-3).
A faithful politics involves the working out of justice in the public square, and the church is called to be a faithful partner to that process. I am convinced that precisely such visible witness in the public square was what Jesus had in mind when he said, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house” (Matt. 5:14-15).
This is no easy task. As William Sloan Coffin said, “It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, ‘Let justice roll down like mighty waters,’ and quite another to work out the irrigation system. Clearly there is more certainty in the recognition of wrongs than there is in the prescription for their cure.”
Likewise, it is one thing to respond to Jesus’ call to be the light of the world, and it is another thing altogether to work out the wiring for a world that dwells in deep darkness.
It is an error – legally, strategically and theologically – for the church to tie itself to one irrigation contractor, to one electrician, to any partisan official, candidate or political party.
* It’s an error legally because the tax exemption churches enjoy under the United States tax code depends on the church not endorsing candidates, and the pastor not telling the congregation how to vote. I think many on the religious right overstepped those bounds by a long-shot in the run-up to last month’s presidential election. Jerry Falwell, whose ministry is always more lightening rod than light, has come in for particular criticism.
* It’s an error strategically because good irrigation plans for the waters of justice can arise from many partisan quarters, and sometimes you find more light coming from the least expected party. It does the church’s purpose no service to be bound to a single partisan perspective for then we begin to fight for power rather than for justice.
* It’s an error theologically because God calls us to bind ourselves to God’s purposes and never to the purposes of the powers and principalities even when they may, in any given moment, be working toward the same goals.
Binding the church to a political party is heresy, as the Barman Declaration suggests, and it is the heresy imbedded in Pat Robertson’s recent claims that President Bush is particularly blessed by God and called to be president at this moment in history. For although Robertson denies it, there is a clear and persistent subtext to his comments that suggests one cannot be a Christian without also being a Republican.
God is not a Republican … or a Democrat, and neither is the church of Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless, the church is called to speak boldly in the public square, and thus we are called in this highly partisan period of American history to reimagine politics, to cast a vision of the city that reflects the deepest values of our faith, and to develop new ways of working for that vision that also reflect those core values.
I would like to see people of faith explore a “politics of compassion.” James Carroll, in a recent Boston Globe essay, speaks of a “politics of love,”[1] saying, with W. H. Auden, “we must love one another or die.”
Of course, these are slogans or catch phrases and not anything like a fully realized politics, but they do point toward a foundational truth that the church has, at its best, proclaimed throughout its existence: that another world is possible.
When Isaiah said that truth had stumbled in the public square, he did so in order to proclaim that the Babylonian captivity was the present reality but it was not the only possible future. Isaiah used the prophetic pulpit as a “testimony to otherwise,”[2] and to call the people to a moment of decision.
It would be all too easy, the path of least resistance to be sure, for the captives to choose assimilation, to lose their culture and surrender their identity to the empire. Thus Isaiah offers words of consolation – “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1). But also words of challenge that come in the form of a call to witness, to offer testimony to the fact that the empire is not inevitable, that, indeed, another world is possible. This witness is crucial, argues Walter Brueggemann, for “where there is no speaking and hearing of an alternative world, there is no faith, no courage, no freedom to choose differently, no community of faith apart from and even against the empire.”[3] Which is to say, “where there is no vision, and no one to give voice to that vision, the people perish.” The vision the church is called to articulate to the world is one of an open future in which we can imagine that outcasts are welcomed, the poor are lifted up, the voiceless are heard.
Some call the church in North America in our time an exile community, and when we answer the believer’s calling to be peacemakers during a time of war, it can certainly feel that way. I know the sting of backlash from speaking out against the war – indeed, I was forced out of a church once for speaking out on the rights of gays and lesbians. But I believe our situation is less like that confronting Isaiah and more akin to the one Joshua faced.
When Joshua declares, “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord,” he speaks to an affluent, comfortable community that is in danger of sacrificing its identity to the idols of the surrounding culture.
That sounds so much like the church in North America in our time. The nation is remarkably affluent and powerful militarily and economically beyond all reason, and the church is too often complacently cozy with the powers that be in the American empire.
The people before Joshua faced a moment of decision: they could continue to participate in the Canaanite economy and allow it to “work unfettered so that the rich become richer,” or call themselves back to the Mosaic law of jubilee and debt relief. They could “let legitimate authority run loose in self-serving acquisitiveness,” or imagine politics otherwise with Moses’ instructions for a different kind of leadership based on covenant community. They could turn to hyper-individualism or imagine a politics and economy that gave flesh to Moses’ concern for the alien, the widow and the orphan.[4] At the moment of decision, Joshua declares, “choose this day whom you will serve.”
In that moment, God calls forth “a distinct community with an alternative identity rooted theologically and exhibited ethically,” as Brueggemann puts it.[5] We are called today, as the church – progressive, inclusive and diverse – to respond to that same declaration and to give voice to that same testimony: the church’s present captivity to the culture of consumption, of domination and of empire is every bit as threatening to the community of faith and to the purposes of God as was the Babylonian captivity. Another world is possible. The future is not cast in stone, and we are called, as church, to embody an alternative community of hope and belovedness and to articulate a clear vision of a broader politics grounded in this hope.
We will ground this vision in our understanding of the God who created the world, who loves us still, and calls us to a ministry of reconciliation amidst the brokenness of a world that has turned away from the God of love to worship other gods.
Where the culture worships material goods and succumbs to consumerism, we will offer compassion and cast a vision for a politics that focuses on care and concern for the least powerful citizens. Where the culture offers domination, our community of compassion will model cooperation and cast a vision for a politics that draws in more voices from across this community and that silences no one. Where the culture trembles in the face of an empire of fear, we will cast of vision of the kingdom of God, the household of belovedness in which we sing praises to the God of hope. We will cast on God all our fears, and fearlessly proclaim that yes, another world is possible.
Now there will never be ballot initiatives that offer you the option to “vote yes for the kingdom of God.” And there will never be a candidate on the ballot whose victory will usher in the beloved community. That does not mean “don’t vote.”
It means that voting is just the beginning. Now that the votes have been counted – at least most of them – it’s time for the work of real politics – the work of ordering the city – to begin. The political work of people of faith is more important today than it was before November 2.
Most progressives were deeply disappointed last month, but now we most hold the victors accountable to a vision of justice and a politics of love and hope.
Maybe next time my friend is in Italy and someone asks about the church and politics, she will be able to answer truthfully, “we don’t just talk about politics at my church, we do it and renew it every chance we get.”
On the other hand, last summer ABC News did a poll about the church and politics and headlined its results as “Most Americans Think Church Should Steer Clear of Politics.” Their survey suggested that two-thirds of Americans believe the church should not try to influence political decisions.
Of course, the same Google search that found that factoid turned up more than six million hits under “church and politics” or “pulpits and politics.” Clearly, there’s a connection between the church, the pulpit and politics, and, just as clearly, that relationship is muddled.
One of the great gifts the progressive church could offer to the wider church and culture is some clarity on this relationship between church and politics, especially in this time of deep divisions in our nation’s political life. Perhaps we have something of value to offer in response to the questions that must press in on us given the church’s troubled history of disastrous romances with political power.
These pressing questions seem quite obvious: should the church be involved in politics at all and, if so, how? But in fact, the obvious questions call forth nothing short of rethinking both the church and politics.
We could simply turn away from the political arena altogether. There are some, particularly in more conservative evangelical congregations, who believe the church should focus exclusively on questions of salvation, and they define salvation in purely spiritual, largely individualistic terms.
Against that spirit, we have the image Karl Barth famously articulated of the faithful pastor being one who held the Bible in one hand and the morning paper in the other. Today, perhaps, one should blog with the Bible in hand!
But even if we remain informed and faithful citizens – guided by a Biblical tradition as we respond to the news of the day – we could limit our scope of work to worship, weddings, funerals, Bible study, blanket drives for the homeless, food drives for the poor and clothing drives for the destitute. These are surely important parts of who we are as church, and some feel that such work marks the extent of our calling as church.
Against that vision of church, I would ask, if we are to care for families in their times of joy and of mourning, should we not also care for their situations in the broader community? And if we are to care for the homeless, should we not also care for the medical and economic and social conditions that lead to homelessness? If we care enough to feed the hungry, do we not care enough to work for an end to hunger? If we are called to care for the destitute of the city, are we not also called to care for the ordering of the city itself when that ordering leaves so many struggling on the city’s margins? If we are to be minister of reconciliation, should we not also be engaged in resolving conflicts?
Obviously, if we do such work we will be deeply engaged in politics.
Now I have friends in the community organizing world who like to say that if you come to the bottom of a cliff and find a rising stack of broken bodies, you need to go to the top of the mountain, find out who is throwing people over the edge and put a stop to it. That’s the work of doing justice, they will argue, and it is the only faithful response to injustice.
Surely they are correct, although, just as surely, someone must stay at the base of the cliff and care for the wounded. That is the work of compassionate charity. Both jobs are crucial, and both are the work of the church.
Of course, one organizer told me last week about trying to invite an evangelical congregation into a faith-based community organization and being told by the pastor, “if you begin by talking about justice, you will lose the people.” Obviously, we’ve got some language barriers.
But we have some deeper barriers of vision. A church that works only on broad issues of justice lacks roots in the lives of suffering people in the community. But a vision of church that focuses only on the work of charity to the exclusion of the work of justice is deficient, for, as important as charitable work is, charity is an inadequate response to systemic injustice.
And the truth is, no matter how you slice these distinctions, every church is always already engaged in politics anyway. The question is, will we pretend to turn away from politics and thereby bless the status quo – itself a political gesture; or will we engage in a politics of compassion that seeks to change unjust systems themselves?
Churches tie themselves into knots over these questions in part, I am convinced, because most of us these days have an impoverished understanding of politics.
For most Americans, it seems, politics refers only to partisan elections and partisan bickering in Congress, statehouses and city halls. People of faith ought to understand politics in the terms the word originally reflected: the arrangement of the polis, or the ordering of the city.
Scripture refers to the city almost one thousand times, and to the public square dozens of times. Clearly, God is concerned with the welfare of the city, and God calls people of faith to witness to that same concern precisely in the midst of the public square.
When Isaiah says, “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter,” (Isa. 59:14) he is not calling on the people to sit idly by and accept an unjust status quo. Indeed, as soon as the judgment is announced, Isaiah pronounces this: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and God’s glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and rulers to the brightness of your dawn” (Isa. 60:1-3).
A faithful politics involves the working out of justice in the public square, and the church is called to be a faithful partner to that process. I am convinced that precisely such visible witness in the public square was what Jesus had in mind when he said, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house” (Matt. 5:14-15).
This is no easy task. As William Sloan Coffin said, “It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, ‘Let justice roll down like mighty waters,’ and quite another to work out the irrigation system. Clearly there is more certainty in the recognition of wrongs than there is in the prescription for their cure.”
Likewise, it is one thing to respond to Jesus’ call to be the light of the world, and it is another thing altogether to work out the wiring for a world that dwells in deep darkness.
It is an error – legally, strategically and theologically – for the church to tie itself to one irrigation contractor, to one electrician, to any partisan official, candidate or political party.
* It’s an error legally because the tax exemption churches enjoy under the United States tax code depends on the church not endorsing candidates, and the pastor not telling the congregation how to vote. I think many on the religious right overstepped those bounds by a long-shot in the run-up to last month’s presidential election. Jerry Falwell, whose ministry is always more lightening rod than light, has come in for particular criticism.
* It’s an error strategically because good irrigation plans for the waters of justice can arise from many partisan quarters, and sometimes you find more light coming from the least expected party. It does the church’s purpose no service to be bound to a single partisan perspective for then we begin to fight for power rather than for justice.
* It’s an error theologically because God calls us to bind ourselves to God’s purposes and never to the purposes of the powers and principalities even when they may, in any given moment, be working toward the same goals.
Binding the church to a political party is heresy, as the Barman Declaration suggests, and it is the heresy imbedded in Pat Robertson’s recent claims that President Bush is particularly blessed by God and called to be president at this moment in history. For although Robertson denies it, there is a clear and persistent subtext to his comments that suggests one cannot be a Christian without also being a Republican.
God is not a Republican … or a Democrat, and neither is the church of Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless, the church is called to speak boldly in the public square, and thus we are called in this highly partisan period of American history to reimagine politics, to cast a vision of the city that reflects the deepest values of our faith, and to develop new ways of working for that vision that also reflect those core values.
I would like to see people of faith explore a “politics of compassion.” James Carroll, in a recent Boston Globe essay, speaks of a “politics of love,”[1] saying, with W. H. Auden, “we must love one another or die.”
Of course, these are slogans or catch phrases and not anything like a fully realized politics, but they do point toward a foundational truth that the church has, at its best, proclaimed throughout its existence: that another world is possible.
When Isaiah said that truth had stumbled in the public square, he did so in order to proclaim that the Babylonian captivity was the present reality but it was not the only possible future. Isaiah used the prophetic pulpit as a “testimony to otherwise,”[2] and to call the people to a moment of decision.
It would be all too easy, the path of least resistance to be sure, for the captives to choose assimilation, to lose their culture and surrender their identity to the empire. Thus Isaiah offers words of consolation – “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1). But also words of challenge that come in the form of a call to witness, to offer testimony to the fact that the empire is not inevitable, that, indeed, another world is possible. This witness is crucial, argues Walter Brueggemann, for “where there is no speaking and hearing of an alternative world, there is no faith, no courage, no freedom to choose differently, no community of faith apart from and even against the empire.”[3] Which is to say, “where there is no vision, and no one to give voice to that vision, the people perish.” The vision the church is called to articulate to the world is one of an open future in which we can imagine that outcasts are welcomed, the poor are lifted up, the voiceless are heard.
Some call the church in North America in our time an exile community, and when we answer the believer’s calling to be peacemakers during a time of war, it can certainly feel that way. I know the sting of backlash from speaking out against the war – indeed, I was forced out of a church once for speaking out on the rights of gays and lesbians. But I believe our situation is less like that confronting Isaiah and more akin to the one Joshua faced.
When Joshua declares, “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord,” he speaks to an affluent, comfortable community that is in danger of sacrificing its identity to the idols of the surrounding culture.
That sounds so much like the church in North America in our time. The nation is remarkably affluent and powerful militarily and economically beyond all reason, and the church is too often complacently cozy with the powers that be in the American empire.
The people before Joshua faced a moment of decision: they could continue to participate in the Canaanite economy and allow it to “work unfettered so that the rich become richer,” or call themselves back to the Mosaic law of jubilee and debt relief. They could “let legitimate authority run loose in self-serving acquisitiveness,” or imagine politics otherwise with Moses’ instructions for a different kind of leadership based on covenant community. They could turn to hyper-individualism or imagine a politics and economy that gave flesh to Moses’ concern for the alien, the widow and the orphan.[4] At the moment of decision, Joshua declares, “choose this day whom you will serve.”
In that moment, God calls forth “a distinct community with an alternative identity rooted theologically and exhibited ethically,” as Brueggemann puts it.[5] We are called today, as the church – progressive, inclusive and diverse – to respond to that same declaration and to give voice to that same testimony: the church’s present captivity to the culture of consumption, of domination and of empire is every bit as threatening to the community of faith and to the purposes of God as was the Babylonian captivity. Another world is possible. The future is not cast in stone, and we are called, as church, to embody an alternative community of hope and belovedness and to articulate a clear vision of a broader politics grounded in this hope.
We will ground this vision in our understanding of the God who created the world, who loves us still, and calls us to a ministry of reconciliation amidst the brokenness of a world that has turned away from the God of love to worship other gods.
Where the culture worships material goods and succumbs to consumerism, we will offer compassion and cast a vision for a politics that focuses on care and concern for the least powerful citizens. Where the culture offers domination, our community of compassion will model cooperation and cast a vision for a politics that draws in more voices from across this community and that silences no one. Where the culture trembles in the face of an empire of fear, we will cast of vision of the kingdom of God, the household of belovedness in which we sing praises to the God of hope. We will cast on God all our fears, and fearlessly proclaim that yes, another world is possible.
Now there will never be ballot initiatives that offer you the option to “vote yes for the kingdom of God.” And there will never be a candidate on the ballot whose victory will usher in the beloved community. That does not mean “don’t vote.”
It means that voting is just the beginning. Now that the votes have been counted – at least most of them – it’s time for the work of real politics – the work of ordering the city – to begin. The political work of people of faith is more important today than it was before November 2.
Most progressives were deeply disappointed last month, but now we most hold the victors accountable to a vision of justice and a politics of love and hope.
Maybe next time my friend is in Italy and someone asks about the church and politics, she will be able to answer truthfully, “we don’t just talk about politics at my church, we do it and renew it every chance we get.”
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
American Heresies
How’s this for a sensitive, caring approach to Advent? Preach on the all-but-ignored Marine murder of unarmed Iraqi prisoners. Perhaps one could tie that together with the now all-but-forgotten scandal of prisoner abuse in Iraq! Nothing says, “Merry Christmas” like images of helpless prisoners shot or nude prisoners abused.
But no matter how much we may want to look at shepherds and angels and virgins kneeling beside a manger, if we are going to respond faithfully to the call to embody a vision of progressive Christian faith, if we are going to engage with the concerns of this world and bring faith to bear on what most troubles our time, then, no matter how much we may want to, we cannot turn away from such images.
For the video images, photographs and the official responses to the ongoing catastrophe reveal what amounts to heresies at the heart of American foreign policy, and at the root of some of the responses to it in the Arab world. The disaster in Iraq is political, strategic, cultural and moral, and it is also theological.
The pictures themselves, of course, are more than appalling. I can only begin to imagine the suffering they represent, and the suffering they will cause. While much of our inside-the-beltway mindset in the part of the country where I live focuses on the political fallout – which has been almost nil – my first thought looking at the images is of the families of those pictured – both Arab and American families, and what those images must mean to them.
What those pictures may come to mean in a broader sense, and what broad meanings are already being ascribed to them is significant because such meaning will certainly impact policies in the near term. But I’m not sure any broad meaning assigned to the images will be particularly accurate.
For what strikes me most in these images is, to recall Hannah Arendt’s classic phrase about Adolf Eichmann and Nazi atrocities: the banality of evil. These pictures remind me of the pictures of Saddam Hussein crawling out of his rat hole. Hussein – a man accused and no doubt guilty of authorizing the killings of tens of thousands of people and held up for the world as the monstrous representation of evil – turns out to be just a scared old man cowering in a hole – the picture of banality.
And now, American soldiers – held up for the world as the picture of a nation’s virtue, “an army of God raised up for such a time as this,” in the words of one American general[1] – are captured on film in a series of actions that look much like Nazi executions and the horrors of sadistic hazing rituals. American soldiers off-handedly saying, “now he’s dead,” or hamming it up next to the bound, nude bodies of prisoners – again, the picture of banality.
The official response to the evil portrayed in these pictures is one that Arendt would quickly recognize, full, as it is, of stock phrases about American values. As she said so clearly, “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”[2]
In addition to that function, they have the further effect of leading us deep into heresy, for denying reality, denying this world is a classic heresy.
Being something of a heretical thinker myself, heresy is not a word I toss around lightly. But, as these stories played out in the news, I have been struck again and again by the heresy at the heart of much of the response to these images.
It is not the job of the church to correct the state’s political and military strategies, but it is most certainly our job to correct errors of theology.
And there are fundamental theological errors – indeed, heresies from the perspective of orthodox Christian theology – at the foundation of the response to these images from both the American and Arab perspectives.
Some in the Arab world, perhaps to further enflame violence against Americans, would have people believe that the images give a complete picture of America. They would reduce us all to the hateful actions of a few of us, and then demand an eye-for-an-eye retribution aimed at all Americans.
Unfortunately, that strategy works all too well, as we can hear in responses such as the the Jordanian businessman who said, “exterminating the Americans is the best way to fight international terrorism,”[3] the Syrian woman who said, “Americans are showing their true image,” the Arab editor who said, “the liberators are worse than the dictator,” and the Egyptian writer who said, “[now] the whole world sees them as they really are.”[4]
How are we, really? Radical anti-Americanism blinds some in the Arab world to the fundamental theological truth that we are all beloved children of the same God – created good in the image of a loving God according to Genesis. This is true of both Arab and American; both prisoner and prison guard. To deny that reality to Americans – as radical Muslim fundamentalists do when they refer to America as the great Satan – is heretical.
On the other hand, in the face of these pictures, President Bush said that “what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom.” Elsewhere, the President said, “our soldiers in uniform are honorable, decent, loving people.”
But just as some in the Arab world are wrong when they choose to believe only the very worst about America because of the actions of some Americans, the President is wrong when he paints a picture of this nation in such rosy terms. There is deep and profound danger in both of these errors, and both are flip sides of the same theological coin.
When President Bush takes the same broad brush used by those who hate America and dips it into rose-colored paint, he denies another fundamental theological truth that Paul expresses so clearly: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
The truth is, as the Biblical image of humanity makes clear, that each of us is some strange and volatile mixture of the angels of our better natures and our own profound brokenness. Two of the pictures from last spring in particular captured this truth for me. They were a pair of pictures of the same young American woman in Iraq. In one of them she is smiling as she hugs a young Iraqi child. In the other she is smiling as she stands behind a pile of bound, nude Iraqi men.
So, which is she: “an honorable, decent, loving” young woman or a “great Satan”?
Not knowing this young woman, I would not pretend to offer an answer about her individual nature. But about all of us, we do well to recall the words of the psalmist, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51: 3-5). While in the very same moment we must remember also that the psalmist says, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
The young American soldier in those two pictures, along with all of the rest of us, are both of these things: those who transgress, and those who are wonderfully made. And we live, all of us, somewhere east of Eden.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we must develop the capacity to forgive, for without that we cannot claim the power to love. Forgiveness begins, he said, when we recognize that the evil actions of our enemies do not express all that our enemies are. This simply means, he said, “within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good.”[5]
King’s vision, which seeks as its goal forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration, stands in stark contrast with the notion, given voice by the leader of our nation, that we are engaged in a war to “rid the world of evil.”[6] This vision, which animates current American policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world, seeks as its goal the imposition of American notions of virtue by force of American arms in the belief that America can rid the world of evil.
Alas, as James Carroll said, “evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history’s end, there is no ridding the self of it.”[7]
Indeed, the notion that this nation, or any nation – no matter how nobly conceived or dedicated – could of its own actions rid the world of evil is perhaps the fundamental heresy upon which so much of our current foreign policy rests.
We cannot rid the world of evil when we so clearly participate in it ourselves. We cannot; any more than we can bring justice to the world by means of an unjust war; any more than we can bring democracy to the world by means of a war that the vast majority of the world’s people oppose; any more than we can bring liberation to the world by means of a war that increasingly leaves the people of Iraq imprisoned by violence and chaos. And the further into the morass of this war we go, the more we become like the very thing we hate.
Some 35 years ago, Dr. King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”[8]
Lost amidst the news of photos and videos from Iraq last spring, and then all but absent from the presidential campaign through to election day, was any discussion of the request for the additional $25 billion to cover costs of the war through the end of the fiscal year.
Now, it may not be the job of the church to correct the state’s political and military strategies, but just as it is our job to correct errors of theology, it is also quite clearly our role to warn of the approach of spiritual death.
In the present case, the two are so closely related. We lie and deceive ourselves at peril to our souls. We follow the false gods of power and security, and develop theologies of nationalism to honor them, and we wonder how it is that we become the very thing that we hate.
Theology matters. Show me your image of God, and I will show you your image of humanity. From those images of God and humanity grow the strategies of nations. And when those images are skewed by heresies, and those strategies perverted by false premises, from them develop the images that now dominate our news.
The church’s complacency in the midst of this is shattered – or should be – as we realize that amidst the howls of anguish and anger rising in response to the horrors still coming forth from Saddam Hussein’s notorious old prison, nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). Nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “Be compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate” (Luke 6:36).
Much else lies shattered in these days of broken bodies and broken trust. Beyond pointing out the lies and deceptions of American heresies, let the church hear again its age-old calling to be repairers of the breach.
[1] The words are those of Army Lt. General William Boykin, President Bush’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence who said to a church group, “We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this.” That speech was quoted widely. I cite this from “Abuse Photos Undermine Bush’s Religious Rhetoric,” Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 2004.
[2] Hannah Arendt, The Life of Mind - Thinking - Willing (New York-London: Ed. Harvest/HJB Book, 1978), 4.
[3] See “Shooting of Injured Man Captures Arab Attention,” at http://www.click2houston.com/news/3926356/detail.html
[4] Quoted by Juan Cole, “Arab Reaction to Photos of Prison Abuse” juancole.com, May 1, 2004.
[5] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Nov. 17, 1957, posted as in the public domain on ipoet.com. As with many of Dr. King’s great phrases, he used this, or almost identical language in many speeches.Montgomery, Alabama, 17 November 1957. Strength to Love
[6] President Bush, speaking at prayer service at the National Cathedral on Sept. 13, 2001, said “Our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
[7] James Carroll, “Bush’s War Against Evil,” Boston Globe, July 8, 2003.
[8] Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” an address delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, included in A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 241.
But no matter how much we may want to look at shepherds and angels and virgins kneeling beside a manger, if we are going to respond faithfully to the call to embody a vision of progressive Christian faith, if we are going to engage with the concerns of this world and bring faith to bear on what most troubles our time, then, no matter how much we may want to, we cannot turn away from such images.
For the video images, photographs and the official responses to the ongoing catastrophe reveal what amounts to heresies at the heart of American foreign policy, and at the root of some of the responses to it in the Arab world. The disaster in Iraq is political, strategic, cultural and moral, and it is also theological.
The pictures themselves, of course, are more than appalling. I can only begin to imagine the suffering they represent, and the suffering they will cause. While much of our inside-the-beltway mindset in the part of the country where I live focuses on the political fallout – which has been almost nil – my first thought looking at the images is of the families of those pictured – both Arab and American families, and what those images must mean to them.
What those pictures may come to mean in a broader sense, and what broad meanings are already being ascribed to them is significant because such meaning will certainly impact policies in the near term. But I’m not sure any broad meaning assigned to the images will be particularly accurate.
For what strikes me most in these images is, to recall Hannah Arendt’s classic phrase about Adolf Eichmann and Nazi atrocities: the banality of evil. These pictures remind me of the pictures of Saddam Hussein crawling out of his rat hole. Hussein – a man accused and no doubt guilty of authorizing the killings of tens of thousands of people and held up for the world as the monstrous representation of evil – turns out to be just a scared old man cowering in a hole – the picture of banality.
And now, American soldiers – held up for the world as the picture of a nation’s virtue, “an army of God raised up for such a time as this,” in the words of one American general[1] – are captured on film in a series of actions that look much like Nazi executions and the horrors of sadistic hazing rituals. American soldiers off-handedly saying, “now he’s dead,” or hamming it up next to the bound, nude bodies of prisoners – again, the picture of banality.
The official response to the evil portrayed in these pictures is one that Arendt would quickly recognize, full, as it is, of stock phrases about American values. As she said so clearly, “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”[2]
In addition to that function, they have the further effect of leading us deep into heresy, for denying reality, denying this world is a classic heresy.
Being something of a heretical thinker myself, heresy is not a word I toss around lightly. But, as these stories played out in the news, I have been struck again and again by the heresy at the heart of much of the response to these images.
It is not the job of the church to correct the state’s political and military strategies, but it is most certainly our job to correct errors of theology.
And there are fundamental theological errors – indeed, heresies from the perspective of orthodox Christian theology – at the foundation of the response to these images from both the American and Arab perspectives.
Some in the Arab world, perhaps to further enflame violence against Americans, would have people believe that the images give a complete picture of America. They would reduce us all to the hateful actions of a few of us, and then demand an eye-for-an-eye retribution aimed at all Americans.
Unfortunately, that strategy works all too well, as we can hear in responses such as the the Jordanian businessman who said, “exterminating the Americans is the best way to fight international terrorism,”[3] the Syrian woman who said, “Americans are showing their true image,” the Arab editor who said, “the liberators are worse than the dictator,” and the Egyptian writer who said, “[now] the whole world sees them as they really are.”[4]
How are we, really? Radical anti-Americanism blinds some in the Arab world to the fundamental theological truth that we are all beloved children of the same God – created good in the image of a loving God according to Genesis. This is true of both Arab and American; both prisoner and prison guard. To deny that reality to Americans – as radical Muslim fundamentalists do when they refer to America as the great Satan – is heretical.
On the other hand, in the face of these pictures, President Bush said that “what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom.” Elsewhere, the President said, “our soldiers in uniform are honorable, decent, loving people.”
But just as some in the Arab world are wrong when they choose to believe only the very worst about America because of the actions of some Americans, the President is wrong when he paints a picture of this nation in such rosy terms. There is deep and profound danger in both of these errors, and both are flip sides of the same theological coin.
When President Bush takes the same broad brush used by those who hate America and dips it into rose-colored paint, he denies another fundamental theological truth that Paul expresses so clearly: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
The truth is, as the Biblical image of humanity makes clear, that each of us is some strange and volatile mixture of the angels of our better natures and our own profound brokenness. Two of the pictures from last spring in particular captured this truth for me. They were a pair of pictures of the same young American woman in Iraq. In one of them she is smiling as she hugs a young Iraqi child. In the other she is smiling as she stands behind a pile of bound, nude Iraqi men.
So, which is she: “an honorable, decent, loving” young woman or a “great Satan”?
Not knowing this young woman, I would not pretend to offer an answer about her individual nature. But about all of us, we do well to recall the words of the psalmist, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51: 3-5). While in the very same moment we must remember also that the psalmist says, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
The young American soldier in those two pictures, along with all of the rest of us, are both of these things: those who transgress, and those who are wonderfully made. And we live, all of us, somewhere east of Eden.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we must develop the capacity to forgive, for without that we cannot claim the power to love. Forgiveness begins, he said, when we recognize that the evil actions of our enemies do not express all that our enemies are. This simply means, he said, “within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good.”[5]
King’s vision, which seeks as its goal forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration, stands in stark contrast with the notion, given voice by the leader of our nation, that we are engaged in a war to “rid the world of evil.”[6] This vision, which animates current American policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world, seeks as its goal the imposition of American notions of virtue by force of American arms in the belief that America can rid the world of evil.
Alas, as James Carroll said, “evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history’s end, there is no ridding the self of it.”[7]
Indeed, the notion that this nation, or any nation – no matter how nobly conceived or dedicated – could of its own actions rid the world of evil is perhaps the fundamental heresy upon which so much of our current foreign policy rests.
We cannot rid the world of evil when we so clearly participate in it ourselves. We cannot; any more than we can bring justice to the world by means of an unjust war; any more than we can bring democracy to the world by means of a war that the vast majority of the world’s people oppose; any more than we can bring liberation to the world by means of a war that increasingly leaves the people of Iraq imprisoned by violence and chaos. And the further into the morass of this war we go, the more we become like the very thing we hate.
Some 35 years ago, Dr. King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”[8]
Lost amidst the news of photos and videos from Iraq last spring, and then all but absent from the presidential campaign through to election day, was any discussion of the request for the additional $25 billion to cover costs of the war through the end of the fiscal year.
Now, it may not be the job of the church to correct the state’s political and military strategies, but just as it is our job to correct errors of theology, it is also quite clearly our role to warn of the approach of spiritual death.
In the present case, the two are so closely related. We lie and deceive ourselves at peril to our souls. We follow the false gods of power and security, and develop theologies of nationalism to honor them, and we wonder how it is that we become the very thing that we hate.
Theology matters. Show me your image of God, and I will show you your image of humanity. From those images of God and humanity grow the strategies of nations. And when those images are skewed by heresies, and those strategies perverted by false premises, from them develop the images that now dominate our news.
The church’s complacency in the midst of this is shattered – or should be – as we realize that amidst the howls of anguish and anger rising in response to the horrors still coming forth from Saddam Hussein’s notorious old prison, nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). Nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “Be compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate” (Luke 6:36).
Much else lies shattered in these days of broken bodies and broken trust. Beyond pointing out the lies and deceptions of American heresies, let the church hear again its age-old calling to be repairers of the breach.
[1] The words are those of Army Lt. General William Boykin, President Bush’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence who said to a church group, “We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this.” That speech was quoted widely. I cite this from “Abuse Photos Undermine Bush’s Religious Rhetoric,” Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 2004.
[2] Hannah Arendt, The Life of Mind - Thinking - Willing (New York-London: Ed. Harvest/HJB Book, 1978), 4.
[3] See “Shooting of Injured Man Captures Arab Attention,” at http://www.click2houston.com/news/3926356/detail.html
[4] Quoted by Juan Cole, “Arab Reaction to Photos of Prison Abuse” juancole.com, May 1, 2004.
[5] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Nov. 17, 1957, posted as in the public domain on ipoet.com. As with many of Dr. King’s great phrases, he used this, or almost identical language in many speeches.Montgomery, Alabama, 17 November 1957. Strength to Love
[6] President Bush, speaking at prayer service at the National Cathedral on Sept. 13, 2001, said “Our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
[7] James Carroll, “Bush’s War Against Evil,” Boston Globe, July 8, 2003.
[8] Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” an address delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, included in A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 241.
Friday, November 26, 2004
Deja vu All Over Again -- Not Quite
I'm sure you've seen it by now -- the Marlboro Man of Iraq. Naomi Klein has written about it in The Nation. It's been in more than one hundred U.S. papers, and I'm sure hundreds of folks are blogging on it. I saw it first in the paper on Wednesday morning and thought, "that's a striking picture." As Klein suggests, I felt like I'd seen it before. I'm sure that my mother's The Best of Life has Vietnam and WW II pictures just like it. Of course, that book also has pictures from Normandy and the bodies on the beach, and pictures of flag-drapped caskets returning from Vietnam, and pictures of napalmed civilians running from burning villages. Those pictures seem remarkably absent from the coverage of this war -- at least in the print media. (I must confess to an aversion so strong to TV news that I never watch it, so if U.S. networks have been showing the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner or shots of dead civilians in the streets of Falluja I've missed it.) The tired Marine is certainly part of the story of America at war, but so are the dead. We seem to be getting only one trope this time. It's not quite deja vu.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Giving Thanks?
Henri Nouwen once wrote that "to be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives - the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections - that requires hard spiritual work."
That seems an appropriate thought for Thanksgiving, and for progressive Christians the election this month could easily be construed as a moment of failure and rejection. How are we to be thankful? Well, I am thankful that the elections focused more attention on progressive Christianity, even if the attention has been often negative. That, though, is too easy and facile, as the next part of Nouwen's reflection underscore: "Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Lets not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God."
The simplistic division of the entire country into "red" and "blue" makes it all the easier to continue dividing our lives into events and people we charish and ones we'd just as soon forget. I'll admit it, there are times when I'd just as soon forget Nov. 2, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and most of the present administration. I am not sure yet how to be sincerely grateful for them, except in negative ways: I'm glad they are here because they help me clarify my thinking in opposition to them.
The much more difficult question remains: how to find true gratitude for those whose public lives embody so much -- homophobia, a theology of empire, theological exclusion -- that I find so deeply troubling in the present time?
Last week at a worship service at Sojourners, we were challenged to adopt a stewardship of attitude. I know that Nouwen often said that gratitude is the fundamental attitude common to all genuine religious expression, still, on this Thanksgiving Day, I cannot find it within me to express more than this negative gratitude for the Religious Right. I'll rest with that confession for now and continue the difficult discipline of finding deeper thanksgiving.
In the meanwhile, the reelection of President Bush raises for me another central theological question: at what point does opposition to an elected public official take on a status confessionis? During the runup to the election, I was quite careful never to offer a word of endorsement of John Kerry nor a word of condemnation of President Bush. Such would, of course, place my congregation's tax exempt status at risk, but, more than that, I do not feel such endorsement would be appropriate theologically. All have sinned and fall short of the household of God -- including pastors and politicians. No platform, no politician is going to bring about the reign of God. Moreover, when the church gets too cozy to any politician it compromises its ability to exercise the critically important role of prophetic critique.
Jerry Falwell's suggestions that people who did not vote for President Bush's reelection could not call themselves evangelical Christians certainly call his ministry's tax exemption into question. That is between him and the IRS. But more than tax exemption is called into question by his coziness to power. When you get into bed with power it becomes profoundly difficult to ask the questions that prophets must ask -- questions of justice, of equity, of compassion, of war and peace.
Those concerns are enough to keep this progressive pastor out of the business of offering endorsements. On the other hand, thinking back to the experience of the Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s, I wonder what it might take for opposition to a public official to become the duty of Christians. Clearly those were the stakes of the Barman Declaration. I don't think we have reached that point in the United States. (A visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum the Saturday after election day certainly made that abundantly clear to me.) However, the push to empire, the policy of preemtive war, the economic agenda that clearly favors the affluent at the expense of the poor -- all of these issues press us to think seriously about what it would take to require of progressive Christians our own variations on Falwell's theme.
I am thankful today that I do not yet face this decision.
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Faithful Correspondence
I got this e-mail from a friend, and, with his permission, I'm posting his message and my response:
You know, it occurs to me (although you would have no way of knowing it) that our respective journeys of faith have taken us in decidedly opposite directions. If you'll forgive me for saying so, I distinctly remember a time when you were rather dismissive of religion in general and seemed to be questioning the whole notion of God. I, on the other hand, hadn't given my own faith a whole lot of thought, but took it on...well, faith...that God existed, that I was a Christian, and that religion was generally a force for good in this world. Now, 15+ years later, I find you doing the Lord's work in an official capacity and speaking freely in the language of faith, whereas I have had what I'm sure my mother (if she knew about it) would call "a crisis of faith." The thing is, it wasn't sudden, and it doesn't feel like a crisis to me. In fact, my dirty little secret is that it's been a rather liberating experience. It's not one that I will ever share with my own mother -- it would break her heart -- but it feels right to me, and I guess I can fess up to the right Rev. Ensign.
Anyway, while you've been making your way back toward the church and right up into the pulpit, I've been heading out the door, and I doubt seriously that I'll ever go back. For me, it's been a series of small steps motivated by a mixture of personal experiences, independent thoughts, insights gleaned from others and my own observations about the world around us. The sense of liberation comes from being more open than I once was to other perspectives about religion and faith (which I've never taken to be the same thing), but that willingness to question my own assumptions has made me extremely leery of those who don't. Adherence to the Holy Gospel of the Easy Answer, in whatever form, and from whatever religious tradition, baffles me, and I've just about concluded in my own life that the subordination of reason to faith that most religions require is a bad deal. I also find the injustices perpetrated in the name of religion and the intolerance bred by even the most moderate of protestant traditions to be deeply disturbing (as I'm sure you do). It's amazing to me, for example, that in our post 9/11 world so many Americans can so easily look down their Judao-Christian noses at the "backward" ways of Arab Muslims when what we so desperately need is more tolerance and more understanding. And then when I consider the alarming ascendancy of the fundamentalist Christian right in this country and I listen to the pious rhetoric of our "God-fearing" national leaders, I find that I can scarcely tell the difference between an Arab jihad and our own. I haven't given up on God, but I've just about thrown in the towel on religion (again, not the same thing). My journey has taken me from cocksure ignorance to what feels like an uncertain but freer place. On the other hand, given my upbringing in the Methodist church and my firm grounding in protestant Christian traditions, there's an unmistakable sense of loss too. I would really like to know, if you ever care to share it with me, how it was that your path took you in the opposite direction and how it is that your faith survives.
How's that for a conversation starter?
The questions you raise -- and with way more eloquence and poignancy than most e-mails, by the way -- are so profoundly important for the church today -- at least for the progressive part of it. Indeed, if we cannot respond to them well we don't deserve to be called church, nor do we deserve to live into the next generation.
It's funny, you describe a gradual series of small steps motivated by experience, encounters, thoughts and observations. I would describe my journey back to the church in almost the exact same way. Certainly there are some experiences, encounters, thoughts and observations that stand out as particularly significant, but mostly in retrospect as I try to figure out the answer to the Talking Heads question: how did I get here?!?
I had a fairly strong but inchoate sense of "call" to ministry from the time I was in high school, but I have had and still do have more than my fair share of deep doubts and serious questions about the church, about God, about the whole "Jesus" thing, about other paths and religions, and about my own gifts -- and my own desires to do other things with my life. At any given moment, I can be found in the midst of the same struggles and questions, but I have decided, for now, to carry on these struggles within the community of faith. In the midst of all that I do not know, there are a couple of things I am convinced of: first, we are created for community (that's one of those insights of Trinitarian theology, if we're created in the image of a God who is inherently communal, then we must share that essential trait); the flip side of that is that we cannot find our way to God -- whoever God is and however we conceive of God -- very well on our own; second, we share a common longing for meaning and connection with something larger than ourselves; third, the experiences I have had, while peculiar to my life, are not unique -- that a sense of connection to that which is of ultimate concern, a sense of being called in that connection out into the world in service, a sense that the figure of Jesus is decisive for me (although not exclusively so for everyone), that these things are infinitely repeatable.
There is much more to my wrestling with God, but those convictions keep me coming back to the mat, as it were. I suppose they all rest on a foundational trust that at the center of the cosmos there is a heart that beats for love of me and you. That simple affirmation -- that God is love -- is both enough theology to begin with, and also, I think, the single most important gift the church has to offer to a world that does not know itself to be beloved and does not understand at all how to live out of that truth.
Of course, as you so powerfully point out, the church has done a lousy job of fulfilling this singular calling. At its worst, the church has been a collection of ordinary people confusing doubt and heresy, faith and certainty, while disastrously pursuing their own imperial designs and masking them with pious liturgical blessings. At its best, the church has been a collection of ordinary people deeply engaged in the practice of faith seeking understanding while gathering around a common table tasting a profound joy in the shared experience of simple grace, of simply being beloved. There's not that much difference between the two, and, if we are honest, we'll confess that both the impulse to domination and the drive to connection are present in the same community.
In the past ten years I have seen both extremes of the church, been upheld by it and victimized by it. But the best of it keeps calling me back because there is something profoundly wonderful about a community gathering to pursue something as radical as reconciliation and peacemaking, something as simple as supporting one another in the struggles of everyday, something as challenging as justice, something as foundational as love. Besides, where else can I find a group of people who actually let me inflict my guitar playing, singing and song-writing on them? And still, I get paid.
How's that serve as an initial response? I really appreciate the depth of your questions and the way you've expressed them. I think you've touched on something shared by many of our generation and, even more so, by Gen X, and you put it all both clearly and personally. If any thing I've jotted down here strikes a chord, come back at me with more conversation.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Who Left Whom
I was at a forum of The Interfaith Alliance in DC this morning that gathered to talk about the religious left -- it doesn't yet get upper case letters like the so-called Religious Right -- and the 2004 elections. One of the forum speakers, perhaps Steven Waldman, editor of BeliefNet but don't hold me to that, asked if liberals have left the church or whether the church has left liberals?
As a self-confessed, practicing, unrepentant liberal who left the church only to find his way back, that question leapt out at me. Sure, millions of progressives who grew up in the church have walked away. However, contrary to what conservative evangelicals would have the country believe, most of those progressives did not leave to embrace some neofundamentalism or to become complete secularists. They left because the mainline church failed to articulate a compelling vision of faith that carries within it a powerful vision of social justice.
It seems ridiculous to even say that, both because it is so painfully obvious, but also because it condemns the mainline church of practicing a profoundly unbiblical faith. Sure, conservatives have said the same thing for years, and, perhaps in spite of themselves, they got one part of it right. But while the conservatives claim that support for liberal social causes is unbiblical, I am suggesting that it was the lack of passionate support for social justice that has been unbiblical. After all, the conservative church once claimed that support for such things as women's rights and the abolition of slavery were unbiblical.
In the present context, the lack of continuous outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq is the unbiblical reality in most mainline congregations. When Jesus said, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," I don't think he had in mind shock and awe bombardments, or prison abuse, or 15,000 victims of "collateral damage."
In the present context, the lack of moral outrage from mainline pulpits in the face of budgets that take from the poor and working class (in the form of decreased public support) and give to the rich (in the form of tax breaks) is the unbiblical reality of most of the church. Of course, in the wealthiest country in the world, it's not surprising that few of us want to hear how difficult it may be for the rich to find a place in the household of God.
In the present context, the lack of strong, outspoken, morally courageous support for the full inclusion of gays, lesbians, transgendered and bisexual people in the full life of the church and the broader culture, is the unbiblical reality that mocks the God who "so loved the world" that the Christ came and lived, worked, prayed, broke bread among the poor, the outcast and the marginalized.
These unbiblical positions of much of the mainline church drive thousands of progressives out its doors every day.
And in the face of that reality, the church tries new styles of worship, new strategies for growth, and new arrangements of the chairs on the deck of 1st Titanic Community Church. In the midst of the busy scurrying of church growth strategy, the mainline sits by too timid and too tepid to stand up tirelessly, to speak out powerfully and to struggle relentlessly until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.
Bringing to bear the language, the resources, and the power of our faith in response to the issues of our time is not a church growth strategy. It is, pure and simple, who we are called to be as the church.
Still, if it results in some of my progressive friends joining me for worship on Sunday mornings, I'll celebrate that and welcome them with joy and love.
As a self-confessed, practicing, unrepentant liberal who left the church only to find his way back, that question leapt out at me. Sure, millions of progressives who grew up in the church have walked away. However, contrary to what conservative evangelicals would have the country believe, most of those progressives did not leave to embrace some neofundamentalism or to become complete secularists. They left because the mainline church failed to articulate a compelling vision of faith that carries within it a powerful vision of social justice.
It seems ridiculous to even say that, both because it is so painfully obvious, but also because it condemns the mainline church of practicing a profoundly unbiblical faith. Sure, conservatives have said the same thing for years, and, perhaps in spite of themselves, they got one part of it right. But while the conservatives claim that support for liberal social causes is unbiblical, I am suggesting that it was the lack of passionate support for social justice that has been unbiblical. After all, the conservative church once claimed that support for such things as women's rights and the abolition of slavery were unbiblical.
In the present context, the lack of continuous outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq is the unbiblical reality in most mainline congregations. When Jesus said, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," I don't think he had in mind shock and awe bombardments, or prison abuse, or 15,000 victims of "collateral damage."
In the present context, the lack of moral outrage from mainline pulpits in the face of budgets that take from the poor and working class (in the form of decreased public support) and give to the rich (in the form of tax breaks) is the unbiblical reality of most of the church. Of course, in the wealthiest country in the world, it's not surprising that few of us want to hear how difficult it may be for the rich to find a place in the household of God.
In the present context, the lack of strong, outspoken, morally courageous support for the full inclusion of gays, lesbians, transgendered and bisexual people in the full life of the church and the broader culture, is the unbiblical reality that mocks the God who "so loved the world" that the Christ came and lived, worked, prayed, broke bread among the poor, the outcast and the marginalized.
These unbiblical positions of much of the mainline church drive thousands of progressives out its doors every day.
And in the face of that reality, the church tries new styles of worship, new strategies for growth, and new arrangements of the chairs on the deck of 1st Titanic Community Church. In the midst of the busy scurrying of church growth strategy, the mainline sits by too timid and too tepid to stand up tirelessly, to speak out powerfully and to struggle relentlessly until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.
Bringing to bear the language, the resources, and the power of our faith in response to the issues of our time is not a church growth strategy. It is, pure and simple, who we are called to be as the church.
Still, if it results in some of my progressive friends joining me for worship on Sunday mornings, I'll celebrate that and welcome them with joy and love.
Monday, November 08, 2004
No Mourning After
The time for mourning is over. By my calculations it ended last Wednesday at midnight. That seems a decent interval, for there is so much work to be done.
The beginning of that work must involve a renewed conversation about faith, culture and politics. When "religious faith" becomes the most important criteria in picking a president, but such faith is defined exclusively as conservative evangelical Christianity, it's way past time for progressive people of faith to reclaim the language of faith. When exit polls and election results paint progressives into a box of public immorality -- the clear implication of the "moral issues" voting patterns -- it's way past time to reframe the cultural debate over public morality. And when two consecutive national elections have raised more questions than they've answered about the fairness of the elections themselves, it's way past time to initiate a broad public conversation about the health of our democracy itself.
So let's begin, again, to define the terms from a perspective of progressive Christian faith.
The beginning of that work must involve a renewed conversation about faith, culture and politics. When "religious faith" becomes the most important criteria in picking a president, but such faith is defined exclusively as conservative evangelical Christianity, it's way past time for progressive people of faith to reclaim the language of faith. When exit polls and election results paint progressives into a box of public immorality -- the clear implication of the "moral issues" voting patterns -- it's way past time to reframe the cultural debate over public morality. And when two consecutive national elections have raised more questions than they've answered about the fairness of the elections themselves, it's way past time to initiate a broad public conversation about the health of our democracy itself.
So let's begin, again, to define the terms from a perspective of progressive Christian faith.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
