Category Archives: Doing Theology

Which industry enslaves you best?: 1 Cor. 7:21-23

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, , , , , , , , , ,

Were you a slave when you were called?
Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so.
For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person;
similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave.
You were bought at a price;
do not become slaves of human beings.
1 Cor. 7:21-23

What did your family or friendship circle talk about over the holidays? At our Christmas brunch, for a few minutes the conversation turned to slavery.

The education industry

I have a grandson ready to enter college (and highly qualified to do so!). The biggest question is: how much is it going to cost and how much debt is going to be accrued? I asked, in an apocalyptic tone in line with our times, “Can you avoid becoming a debt slave?” After all, Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”

President Biden tried to give borrowers some relief by plugging some holes in the leaky federal student loan system, like the  one leaking out the loan forgiveness built in for public service. He was not too successful, with the Congress and Courts as they are. Here’s a story about it from The Hill:

Lisa Ansell, an educator from California, was one of the people who got their loans cancelled in 2021 when Biden made those changes, after she was denied eight times.

“I should have been eligible for public service loan forgiveness in 2017, which would have been the first cohort, because public service loan forgiveness was signed into law in 2007. I applied in 2017 and, of course, I was denied, no valid reason. We know that the Department of Education likes to invent reasons to prevent people from receiving their lawful cancelation,” said Ansell, the California chapter president for Student Loan Justice.

Ansell said she was relieved, but “what I felt was anger and resentment because I had been kept in indentured servitude to the Department of Education for close to five extra years, and because of that, I was never able to save up any money.”

While Biden forgave the most student debt of any president, his efforts affected only a small portion of the 45 million borrowers.  (The Hill)

These stories are so painful for us Boomer college grads! My excellent college education in California was completed before the state stopped considering it an investment in the future. The school debt slavery so many experience now all started with Governor Ronald Reagan.

When Reagan assumed office in 1966, he changed the course of the state’s higher education system. In his eight years, he cut state funding for college and universities and laid the foundation for the tuition-based system there is today. Once he became president, he continued his quest. {Great article describing in in the UC Irvine Campus Newspaper from 2023]. The “intellectual curiosity” to which the university was devoted created protesting Berkeley “brats” he said. He preferred a campus-as-business model working to create more profiteers — at least the few who could make the cut.

Since Reagan, college has gotten more and more expensive. It is amazing, really. Just think, the average American saved $5,011 in 2022. That means it would take them about 75 years to save up enough cash to send one child to a top-rated U.S. university. If your child wants to go, you’ll either need to get very rich or sell her to the debtors. (CNN 2023)

The average tuition at U.S. private colleges grew by about 4% last year to just under $40,000 per year, according to data collected by US News & World Report. For a public in-state schools, the rise was less, about 1%. But it always goes up. Another take on the stats sees that small rise as a glass half full, since 20 years ago it climbed 68%!

At highly rated or selective schools, which are most likely to get you the lucrative job or your chance to be part of the 1%, the price tag increases substantially. Harvard University charges about $58,000 in tuition and fees, per year, for undergraduate students. When you add in housing, food, books and other cost of living expenses, Harvard says you should expect to pay over $95,000.

We’re used to being rolled over by the “anti-socialists” who believe the rich deserve to rule (just like Proverbs lamented above, perhaps with a picture of Elon Musk in mind),  so we  kind of think it is common sense for slavery to debt to be part of getting an education. This guy explains how it happened to us:

While we were at it (Merry Christmas!), we enumerated other systems that have gone through the same kind of process until what was once a sphere of the “common good” has ended up in the hands of people skilled in making profit/slaves. I just want to touch on them.

Healthcare / insurance industry

There are many reasons healthcare is so costly (link). But the big ones in my mind are mergers and insurance. Big health systems have eaten up smaller rivals until they can basically charge what they want.

Worked into the fees they charge are paying off insurance companies for fear of malpractice claims. So insurance companies have their hands out all along the way, as Luigi Mangione pointed out. On average, a single person will pay $12-25 a day to the insurance slaver or they will be personally liable for the astronomical cost of a hospital visit or procedure, which will be allowed by the master, or not.

Like with universities, healthcare is a good investment for profiteers, since everyone needs it. An investor can be assured that profits are available since the cost for drugs and medical care can go up to whatever can be tolerated by raising the cost of insurance. My insurance toll goes up every year.  A recent stay in the hospital for a family member for a one-night surgery cost over $100,000.

Porn industry

The average age reported for first viewing pornography is 12. Almost half of the reporters (44%) went looking for it, while slightly more than half (58%) encountered it accidentally. It is hard to miss. The total adult entertainment revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate  of 5.3% from 2024 to 2030, reaching nearly $248.18 billion by 2030.

There are legal arguments about what is obscene and so regulatable. But from listening to my twentysomething clients, the porn industry is not a discussion about personal choice, it is a slaver. Like any other addiction, there is an introductory path on the way to enslavement and profit engineered by an industry. Monetizing sexual desire is a growth industry. Under the spell of profit, people tend to think that is self-evidently appropriate.

Phones/gaming/social media industries

I got an ad for Royal Match on Bible Gateway (!) as I wrote this. That seemed about right.  We’re all getting squished or drowned no matter where we look and we have to complete some crazy puzzle (and fast!!) or someone is going to die. Our movies, games, and notifications are all full of this anxiety. That anxiety is not our fault, no matter what the powers that be tell us.

It is profitable, somehow, to produce endless ads for this game and loop us into it. The ads are incessant lures to get me hooked so I play the game on the subway instead of relating. Then the phone can report how much time I’ve spent with it every week and I can worry about that. There is nothing benign in our “economy.” No tools are provided for mere creation, we are the host for giant corporations to drain. The phone is like Neo connected to the Matrix.

The prophets made that movie in 1999! Lots of people listened to them, but they got rolled over anyway (maybe the medium is the message). Besides, even by 2011, only 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. But by 2024, 91% of them did. Now we are enslaved to it. I can’t leave the house without it, I might need to satisfy a 2-step verification to get to my money or need Siri to tell me where the nearest Chipotle is.

Sorry

I’m kinda sorry I want you to be ramped up with me.

I will look for something more uplifting to talk about next time. I know most of us are upended by Santa Ana winds in January spreading fire in L.A. Trump is setting Canada and Denmark on edge for some reason. And Jimmy Carter is dead. Anxiety is in the air and we need some relief.

But seeing what we are up against at least gives us some juice to move with the ever-rebellious Paul, and not bend the knee to the norms of a sin-fueled world. “You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings.”

Ronald Reagan opened the door to the American henhouse and the foxes are finally in charge of it, now — in Paul’s time, it was Rome eating up the world. But as Paul and Jimmy Carter exemplified, you don’t need to offer yourself up to be breakfast. You might even change the world, as a result.

Spiritual Bypass — a new resource article

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction,

In John 8 Jesus proclaims he is the light of the world. His presence is a challenge to all who listen to Him. John records he said to the “Jews who had believed him . . . ‘the truth will set you free’” (John 8:31-32). But there were many others who were not set free. Many very religious people had a difficult time unseeing what they saw was obvious: they were already free. They responded to Jesus, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” (John 8:33).

Often the truth about ourselves is the hardest truth to see, particularly when our view of the self is consciously and unconsciously tied to our religious practice and belief. The Jewish leaders saw themselves as descendants of Abraham. With this firm understanding of who they were in the world intricately intertwined with their religious practice and belief, they could not consciously imagine that they were not already where they ought to be. Nevertheless, Jesus insists each of them is “a slave to sin” (John 8:34).

They were caught in spiritual bypass. When religion is used as a defense, it is twisted to help us avoid a deeper truth. As a result, it might cause us to miss seeing reality facing us in our own backyard. Jesus presents a new way.

That should get you started.

I reduced an academic paper Dr. Gwen White wrote in 2005 for my many clients who are facing the interesting and challenging reality that they use their faith as a defense against facing their psychological needs and, surprisingly, entering their next stage of spiritual growth. In the article I’ve provided a link to the original paper housed at CircleCounseling.com where you can find the referenced work, an extensive bibliography ,and a case conceptualization. 

To continue reading, please select the “Spiritual Bypass” link from the right column or follow this link.

 

Listening in the era of lies

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

We were all a little confused about lying before Trump came on the scene — if you can remember a time when he did not dominate the air. Even when we were lying, then and last week, most of us wondered if it was the right thing to do. But we also had our reasons to do it.

Psychology will back us up; there are many reasons humans lie. There is bound to be an evolutionary psychologist out there who has “proven” we survived as a species because we are so good at deception. We’re still conflicted about it, however.

Science implies there are facts and there are unproven hypotheses — and we should be on the side of facts, since they are real. But all us humans, if we think about it, know it is difficult to tell one straight truth about ourselves, we are all so complex. At least once a week, I dispute what my wife claims to have said to me — and she may claim it was just an hour ago!

But she, and the rest of us, can’t really prove much of what we assert, even when it comes from the depths of us. And when we look around, it is difficult to have a sure grasp on what is true about almost everything else, the universe feels so mysterious and beyond our complete understanding.

Now we have Trump, ready to impose a reality of his own making – science, common sense, and morality be damned. Some people are gleefully adopting a life of lying and have become, with him, a relentless wave against the common institutions and assumptions Americans hold.  Punditry dashed to their computers to explain how Trump won, even though he is a proven, unrepentant prevaricator. How could anyone elect a proven liar? F.D. Flam wrote in Bloomberg:

Trump won with surprising decisiveness, despite his evasiveness and failure to justify his extraordinary claims. It’s tempting to conclude that we live in some kind of post-truth society. Perhaps, instead, we live in a society obsessed the truth, but we’ve lost our appreciation for explanatory depth and different perspectives. At the same time, we’re just as persuaded by a speaker’s confidence as ever.

Most of what passes for “telling it like it is” comes down to Trump making completely subjective judgments with a tone of certainty — that some of his enemies are “losers” or “morons” or “low IQ” or that one of his rivals somehow has a face that’s not fit for office. Some might call this brutal honesty, but there’s nothing honest about it. The Week Magazine calls it “maniacal overconfidence” which “sounds to some people like forthrightness.” In that sense, he is telling it like it is — in his own self-serving head.

In my territory, I can’t ride down the elevator or go to a party without hearing how hard it is to be one of those morons and losers. “Maniacal overconfidence” seems like an overly sweet way to characterize what Trump is full of.

The voice of Jesus

I’m not a pundit, of any merit, at least. But I had to make a few contributions to what people were saying on Facebook and such after Trump won. I was mainly concerned that we all confront the lying before we all conform to it, since it is alarming how quickly the media adapted to “Mr. President” as if he were introducing a new normal. For Christians, I think not conforming comes down to pondering John 8 again if we want to hang on to truth and love, as I do. I still believe in the promise from Ephesians 4: 14-16:

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Paul obviously couldn’t care less about what society finds normal. I think he is channeling Jesus, as we all aspire to do if we follow Christ. That’s Jesus, who says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

In John 8, Jesus is having an amazing dialogue with religious opponents who are absolutely sure they are living out the truth as best as anyone can. They are just as sure they are speaking God’s truth as Donald Trump is sure he was spared the assassin’s bullet so he could personally make America great again. Most of us are so unsure about the truth and too sure alternative facts cause conflict, we don’t get into it with people on elevators or at  parties, even though Jesus apparently would. He tells his opponents:

You don’t even understand what I’m saying. Do you? Why not? It is because You cannot stand to hear My voice. You are just like your true father, the devil; and you spend your time pursuing the things your father loves. He started out as a killer, and he cannot tolerate truth because he is void of anything true. At the core of his character, he is a liar; everything he speaks originates in these lies because he is the father of lies. So when I speak truth, you don’t believe Me. —  John 8:43-45

If your first thought after reading this was, “Do I even believe there is a devil?” that’s OK. There is so much theologizing generated by John 8, we might never get done with it. Stick to what Jesus is asserting, don’t stick with your own defensive response. I think the point is, “You need to hear my voice or you will never hear the truth.” Negatively, that is, “If you pursue the things the father of lies loves, everything you say will come from that core.” We’ve got to ponder that before lie-lovers control us inside and out.

Listening in the day of lies

I don’t think Donald Trump is new. He is just the terrible bloom of a society adapting to the media and providing false-self images for it to feed on.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won every electoral vote except for Minnesota’s, the home state of Walter Mondale. For his first term, he had handily beaten an actual Christian trying to be president with the Iran hostage deal. He later did one of his masterful jobs of lying when he explained the Iran-Contra mess. Reagan was the beginning of all sorts of evils, but his main legacy is using the screen so well. We used to watch him speaking and say, “He is lying, but people forgive him because he looks like he believes it. I’m tempted to believe him myself.”

I did not believe him. He galvanized my faith to stick with The Way The Truth And The Life no matter how effectively the father of lies carpet-bombs my consciousness.

Fortunately, people in my feed were trying to keep me listening last week. I appreciated how Bryan McLaren summed up the process of listening to the Truth and hanging on to it in the middle of anxiety. He really takes himself seriously, as we probably should too.

@brianmclaren

If you’re afraid, anxious, tired … election. #terrified #tired #trump #harris

♬ original sound – Brian D. McLaren

I don’t think we can listen to the voice of God unless we can learn to hear what is in the silence. So this is one thing I posted. I love how this little tune is usually repeated, second verse same as the first. It makes us wait, slow down, and enter the peace that passes understanding. That is where we are most likely to hear from God.

I also don’t think we can hear the voice of God unless we talk back to, or shout back at, the voices that compete for God’s place in our thoughts and feelings. If we don’t step up, we could be “blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.” Then Jesus might say, “So when I speak truth, you don’t believe Me.”

Fortunately, several of my friends were not having it. Their minds turned to a defiant song we used to sing in our old church. I dug out a recording from Internet Archive.

Click the picture to go to the song

That song is good shouting back. Sometimes we sang it in a group of 100 or more. It was a good way to reroute some neural pathways.

I am not sure there has ever been a day of lies like this one, since there has never been the kind of media which surrounds us and trains us. But maybe I’m taking myself too seriously, too. After all, Jesus was talking about people who were in such unwitting collusion with the father of lies, they could not recognize the Son of God, for whom they were purportedly waiting, even when he was talking to them face to face!

I feel sorry for those guys. And I feel sorry for us, too, since were are inevitably a lot like them and lying is still extremely typical of human beings. Our media has made it a worldwide industry. But if McLaren is right, and I believe he is, from all the lying the Truth is born again and again.

*************************************

Today is Lucretia Mott Day!

Speaking of someone who was “not having it!” She is a premier example of standing up for truth and justice.

Visit her at The Transhistorical Body.

In Christ, I am not defined by “the land”

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The boundary between Palestine and Israel is thick, but ever-changing. Our first stop, after we crossed it was at a hotel facing the huge, concrete border wall, festooned with artful graffiti. It was overwhelming. Going outside and feeling the wall’s shadow was terrifying – even though I knew I would soon move beyond it, with a quick flash of my good-as-gold U.S. passport!

Then we stayed with some Palestinian Christians (please let the fact they exist sink in). We visited the factory where they make creches from Holy Land olive wood for export. Then we visited people who had their olive groves chopped down and sheep herds destroyed by Israeli “settlers” reclaiming “their” land, often with the whole-hearted support of American Evangelicals.

My Palestinian hosts felt invisible to the Christians of the world. They reminded me of the refugees I visited in El Salvador who squatted in unwanted land called “marginalized territory.” There they received no services and were not contacted or counted by the government – they were officially invisible. The “undocumented” in the U.S. try to stay invisible.

Knowing we belong and where we belong is such a deep human desire. Being displaced and feeling displaced is such a deep wound! So the world’s constant violence about the land is overwhelming. I listen to people who do not feel seen quite often, so I know many of us  carry the trauma of being left out or cast out deep inside. If that’s you, last week’s post might help.

Competing for land

Even though we all put our feet on the same land called Earth and raise our arms to heaven in the same air, we still lay claim to pieces of it; we put up walls around it and exclude others. Some people say Eve was did just that when she was offered a deed to the Garden of Eden by some ever-present snake/property developer. I think the Evangelicals (who are these people, actually?) are still eating that apple when they overwhelmingly support Trump/Vance in their cause to deport people who don’t belong in “our” land, the United States, the kingdom where God rules — alongside Israel, the latter being a sliver of land where a great deal of U.S. weaponry resides.

Russia wants Ukraine, and Putin says his Imperial designs come in the name of the Church. The leader of Iran, who visited Putin last week, wants Palestine back in the name of Allah. China provides Russia with the electronics it needs to do drone warfare; it wants Taiwan and put barbed wire on the border with Nepal in the name of the Communist Party. The Europeans and North Americans were settled behind their thick borderlines long ago, having filled their coffers with the spoils of colonialism and having created a world order that kept them in charge of distributing the goods. It is all about the land

One of the deepest heresies the church has promoted, since Constantine made it fully visible, has to do with the Promised Land. When the 17th century Europeans turned the Bible into a collection of factoids to probe and test, much like they would during one of their revolutionary new science experiments, Protestants took on a this-worldly sense of the land. They collected all notions of “kingdom” in the Bible, mixed and matched them, until they ended up with a land-based religion infused with an otherworldly exceptionalism.

In their new, modern theology, God distributed land to those he chose and empowered, and that meant others had no rights to it or rights in it. If you violated that mandate, God would punish you as surely as he destroyed Jericho. The big lie of 1948 was that the new nation of Israel, granted by the British, was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The new, secular democracy of Israel was equated with the Promised Land of the Bible [1960 mythmaking]. Now, if you speak for the Palestinians Christians you are antisemitic at best and anti-God at worst.

Citizens of heaven

I won’t go into all of that — even though it was jarring to see the ruins of Palestinian homes in Canada Park, 7000 acres devoted to the re-greening of “the land” not far from the valley of Armageddon. I am mostly wondering how Christians gave up the New Testament for a reductionistic view of the Old?

Heider Abu Ghosh at the ruins of his childhood home in Imwas, now Canada Park, built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1967.

When my children were in elementary school they were folded into our new church with its radical Anabaptist flavor. It was the Reagan era, after all, and something needed to be done! So we planted a church. I had all boys, so I decided they needed a club we called “Boystown.” It was short lived, but a lot of fun. I think I may have learned more about life from it than they did.

The guiding verse for Boystown is from Philippians 3, in bold below. We recited it every week.

For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.  But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,  who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Philippians 3:20 is one of the Bible verses I wish had become popular. Instead, I got, “Nothing is impossible with God.” This is more relevant: Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.

As Reagan was defeating the “evil empire” (followed by Bush’s Axis of Evil and now just the Putin-Trump hotline), I wanted my kids to learn the basic worldview of a Christian: You don’t get your identity from the world, or from the land, or from some jingoistic manipulator on a screen, you get it from God. You are a perpetual “illegal alien” or you are not following Jesus — that’s the Jesus who rises from the land transformed, not trapped in it, not subject to it, not defined by it.

I deeply care about the disputes of the world and the people who are rolled over by the powerful men, primarily, who tell you they are defending you when they are just making empires for their legacy, raising their “flag,” so to speak. Otherwise, I would not be able to drop the place names I’ve already dropped. But being against all the warmongers and land-stealers is not good enough. I have no intention of keeping quiet about the evils of the world, but my sense of self is not as someone who is merely against evil or for just land distribution.

What Paul was teaching the elementary boys — who no doubt had just been competing with their brother for a place on a bean bag or who had lost a competition for their own room, was, “Who you are is named in relationship with God. Where you belong is in the transcendent kingdom of heaven, any place where Jesus reigns. Your country is no longer defined by powerful humans, you are free to be your true self in Christ, no matter what they say or do.” You follow Jesus:

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. — Colossians 1:15-17

I wanted them to practice some radical acceptance of that reality.

Pledge the appropriate allegiance to the flag if everyone is standing up, but you know who you are. If you need to take a king’s ex while the Star Spangled Banner is playing, go ahead. Just remember that Jesus did not even bother, he knew who he was, and still does. You are a citizen of heaven just like He is and one day your body will be just like his is. Believing that Gospel will likely get you in trouble when someone wants you to die to to preserve their land, but it is what it is.

The seed: An earthy story from Jesus (2016)

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction

In 2016 I was an itinerant, moving among our congregations with basic teaching about developing a life in Christ. This one is about the “earth” stage when faith first takes root.

Dates harvested from Hannah, pollinated by Methuselah at the Arava Institute. Photo by Marcos Schonholz

First, let’s talk about the seed that grew this date palm in Israel. This is a Judean date palm that you would have seen everywhere in the time of Jesus. But there was so much war in Palestine during the Roman era that date palm groves were destroyed and this species became extinct by the year 500.

But an amazing thing happened. During excavations at the site of Herod the Great’s palace near Jericho in the 1960’s, archeologists unearthed a small stockpile of seeds stowed in a 2000-year-old clay jar. For the next forty years, these very old seeds were kept in a drawer at a university in Tel Aviv. But then, in 2005, a botanical researcher decided to plant one of the seeds and see what, if anything, would sprout.

She said, “I assumed the food in the seed would be no good after all that time. How could it be?”  She was soon proven wrong. The old seed from an extinct palm sprouted! The resulting tree has been named Methuselah. It has been eleven years, now, and the tree is not only thriving, it has produced pollen, which has been used to germinate seeds on a wild date palm. It is producing more seed.

Jesus probably loves that story — and not only because he was in Jericho many times and had to pass Herod’s palace on the way up the hill to Jerusalem. I think he loves it because God loves seed stories. God is very earthy. For instance, just before Jesus was crucified, he pictured himself as a seed. Everyone read it: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:14)

That’s a great way to see a seed – as something that dies to its former way of being as a single, encased seed and transforms into a plant and a seed bearer. God is very connected to how the earth lives. Like you heard a couple of weeks ago, our rendition of the Way of Jesus begins with Earth because God begins with the earth. The creator is earthy, God even became one of us – God got buried in us, got buried in the earth, God has experienced all the longing and loving of being a spiritual being in a body like ours as part of the Earth.

Talking about seed

I hope I can get you comfortable with how Jesus is talking about seeds. In the earth, in your body, in your spirit and not just in your mind. I am going to talk about a word, but if you just hear it like it is a word “seed” on a page, I will fail. The word will be truly extinct. I am talking about Jesus talking about a word like a seed, a Spirit-empowered, miraculous transformative seed.

Jesus and the Bible writers are very comfortable with talking about seed. Like I said, He probably loves that story about an ancient seed in a scientist’s drawer that miraculously comes to life. And he has some favorite stories he made up himself. Jesus tells a very basic parable about the sower and the seed he sows. You might remember it: A sower goes out to sow and the seed finds all sorts of soil with which to interact. Some seeds don’t sprout well. Some are eaten by birds. Some sprout and are choked by weeds. And some find fertile, watered ground and thrive.

  • I suppose Jesus told that story because he like seed stories. But more so he was talking about himself, the seed, the word of God. It is kind of a Trinitarian-like story, isn’t it? – God the farmer, Jesus the seed, the Spirit charged environment as the soil.
  • By extension, the Bible writers who quoted Jesus telling the parable, did that because they were talking about their word, their seed of Jesus they cast by writing it down.
  • There is a lot being taught in that little story. But it all goes back to: The story of Jesus is like a seed that grows in a fertile spirit and an open mind.

One time I experienced a seed of the word lying dormant in one of my oldest friends. When I was in the fifth grade I was awarded the title of “best couple” with my childhood friend, Kim. We were not even embarrassed to be best couple since we had been like brother and sister since first grade. After I left town to go to college I became a full-on evangelistic Christian, sowing seeds like crazy. One time I came back to town and ran into Kim. As she told me the story later, I was totally obnoxious. My side of the story was that I was totally, somewhat blindly, into being a newly “out” Christian. At some point in the conversation I said, “Why aren’t you a Christian yet?” Not exactly the best seed sowing. She told me much later that she swore at that moment never to be a Christian.

I did not remember this event at all until she wrote me a letter about it fifteen years later. Usually it was just Christmas cards between us, but this time I was surprised to get a letter.

She started off with, “I hate to tell you this, but I am a Christian.” She went on to say, essentially, “I vowed I would never become a Christian since you were so obnoxious about it that day. But I was so depressed and my family was such a mess, I guess I did not know what to do. At one point I was feeling especially down and desperate and to my dismay, you came to mind saying, “Why aren’t you a Christian?” And I did not have a good answer. I went to the nearest church the next Sunday and to my surprise, I became a Christian. Thanks.”

The spiritual seed I had planted, a very tiny, compromised seed, had laid dormant for a long time! One would suppose it was extinct. But, to even Kim’s surprise, it sprouted!

  • Amazing isn’t it? How did that happen? How did the seed germinate in you?
  • And if the seed of faith has never effectively sprouted in you, what do you think is happening right now?

The germination process

The Bible writers are fascinated with this spiritual germination process. The whole New Testament is kind of a long telling, in all sorts of variations, of how the seed of God is planted in people and how it grows a new, eternal life in them.

If you dig in to what they are saying, the Bible writers might be more comfortable with seed than we are. For instance, the word for the seed sown in the field in the Lord’s story is the same word for human seed: sperma, shortened to sperm in English.

Paul teaches: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” – (Galatians 3:29). That’s a nice argument about how Abraham’s faith is the deeper way to know God than Moses’ law. Don’t worry if you don’t know about all that yet. Paul’s basic intention is to talk about being re-seeded by faith through following Jesus. He does not mean we magically become offspring of the father of Judaism, Abraham. He means we are seeded with new life in the Spirit and end up having a remarkable family resemblance to Jesus.

John says, No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. (1 John 3:9). This is even more explicit. Being born of God is like you were an ovum and the spiritual sperm of God wriggled its way into you and started an incredible spiritual cell multiplication. The seed remains in us John says – it is like God’s spiritual genes combined with ours and are creating a new being who can justifiably be called a child of God.

It is all very earthy and organic, isn’t it? So I get upset when people try to fit this word of God Jesus is and which Jesus sows into the tiny, head-bound, rational philosophy that runs the world. God is the sower and Jesus is the seed. Jesus is the sower and his words are like seeds. The disciples are sowers and the Lord’s words are like living seeds, the Bible is like their seed chest.

  • It is so troubling when the word of God, that seed which lasts when everything else is extinct, gets reduced to whatever phrases a person can remember from reading the Bible.
  • Then the Bible gets subsumed under a scientific idea of a word, in which words all become data, and the Bible becomes a book among all the books, in the category “Great religious books.”
  • By now, the whole idea of faith can be reduced to an emoticon. Way too tiny.

All that stuff I just said is a LOT less than what Jesus is and what Jesus, Paul and John are talking about in the parts of the Bible I have shown you or told you. But a lot of Christians I have known, and even more I have heard about, think the seed Jesus is talking about is the Bible, or some factoid from the Bible or some principle drawn from the Bible. And they can reduce the idea down to clip art.

It is not just a seed thought

The seed is often seen as a thought. And Luke 8:11 quotes Jesus saying about his parable of the sower: This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. It sounds very rational. Here is the logic if you think Jesus is being merely rational:

  • If the seed is a word, that means a thought, we read words with our mind.
  • And if we are reading words about God, they are in the Bible.
  • So Jesus is talking about finding the seed in the Bible, since that’s where the parable is anyway.

That kind of thinking works if you are committed to a world that is rational. If you think truth is thought-derived or science-and-math-derived, then you might be thinking right now, “What else could that line possibly say?”  If that is what you are thinking then you are probably having an argument in your head most of the time because you believed  Descartes and everyone who built on his dictum that, “I think, therefore I am.” When it comes to faith, you probably think “I believe certain things to be true, so I act on them.”

But there is more. When Jesus is done telling his parable of the sower to the crowds, he says, “If anyone has ears to hear, let her hear.”

He is not just making an argument by telling his story, he expects the listeners to be impregnated, to be planted with the seed through relating to the Son of God and hearing the word.

  • The seed in the story is not just about some thing.
  • The word of God is not the “concept of Jesus” from somewhere else where thoughts come from. It is not a thought that can happen without a body as Descartes thinks truths must be.
  • Jesus is not talking about the word reduced to a book or reduced to someone’s limited understanding.

God doesn’t exist, like Descartes said, because we couldn’t imagine him if he didn’t. God exists in another plane of existence altogether that is beyond one’s mind, beyond what we can fully imagine — like God is doing in the person of Jesus and like Jesus is doing as he tells his story of the sower. The whole process of God sowing the seed of grace and truth is about a person in their environment struggling to receive the life being born in their world, like you and I are doing. At some point we are like the seed, like the soil, like the sower. It all goes together in this ecosystem of love Jesus is revealing.

The seed growing in you

A sower goes out to sow. The seeds sown find all sorts of soil with which to interact.

  • Some seeds don’t sprout, or have such shallow roots in rocky soil they wither in the sun.
  • Some are eaten by birds right off the hard path.
  • Some sprout and are choked by weeds.
  • Some find fertile, watered ground and thrive.

The seed is the word of God, the one who is telling the story about himself is enacting the story as he tells it. Jesus was talking about himself, the living Word of God, and his words are seeds for those with fertile ears. The Bible talks about Jesus telling about himself. The whole book, Old and New Testaments, looks to Jesus, quotes and admires Jesus, and applies the resurrection life of Jesus. The story of Jesus coming, present, working, and coming again is like a seed that grows in a receptive spirit and an open mind.

When Jesus says something to you, he doesn’t want to change your mind, he wants to change your life. If God’s seed sprouts in you, you are going to reproduce life like Jesus lives. If God’s seed remains in you, you are going to feel like living whether all your thinking is in line with your faith or not.

The point of faith is not just thinking correct thoughts and carefully fulfilling conscious behaviors. The seed is planted deeper in us. I say that most of what we do is not all that conscious, anyway. Most of our reactions are pretty automatic. They are mainly trained by who and what we love, not what we think. Starting with our parents, our loves lay out the track for what we do. Our reactions are directed toward what is ultimate to us.

During this speech we have been doing a lot of thinking together. But more important to our faith is how you have been training our loves to live in love. Being in this environment, and exercising the habits of it train our loves for living — this behavior directs your desire back to God. It is where the seed of new life is planted and nurtured.

If you bought the alternative view that you think therefore you are, then you probably have had a constant debate with what I have been saying. You’d have to in order not to lose your sense of self. Descartes taught that doubting is the basis of truth-seeking. You can’t be rational if your mind doesn’t dominate all your other functions.

But Jesus comes along and insists that who and what you love determines who you become and how you live. I suppose it is, “I love, therefore I am.” Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commands.” (John 14:15).

  • When he says that, is he saying “Figure out the commandment and do it right, think it through and act — believe and so behave?”
  • Or is he saying, “My sheep hear my voice and come when I call, they love me and I love them, and I care for them like a shepherd.” I am with them as they seek me in the street and they will find me.

I say, and I think the New Testament writers back me up, that it is the latter. The seed doesn’t just change your thinking, it revolutionizes your loves. Like the Psalmist says, talking about the Law of Moses that Paul says is a weak precursor to the Word of Jesus: I shall run the way of Your commandments, For You will enlarge my heart. (Psalm 119:32). The seed of God is at work in us to train our loves so we love God again and receive the love that all our other pursuits seek in vain.

If you want to be fertile ground for the seed of God, if you want your soul to be a fertile womb for God’s life to be born, stay immersed in the activities and environments that train your loves. Do them, run in them, never merely think them. Have a life, give into the living places.

I think we have organized a healthy environment for you. For instance, we are trying to put together a track that can augment what happens in our cells on the Way of Jesus website that is filled with Gifts for Growing. It begins with Earth for people who are good soil and for those who may not even have the seed planted yet. Stay in it. If you don’t know Jesus yet, or don’t know if you want to trade in your rationalism, that’s OK. We made this environment for you. It can train your loves while your mind catches up.

  • I won’t go much further except to say run in the way like someone who wants their desires trained for intimacy with God and reconciliation with others.
  • Engage in the rituals: Daily Prayer, Communion, This meeting.
  • Be in the cell. It happens every week to train our loves.
  • Study the Bible like a site map not a text book.
  • Be baptized and join in the covenant.
  • Make the church’s map and move with us as we ratify it on the 25th.

These are exercises for a spiritual being in a body. They help us get started again and again, especially when what we think proves to be outmoded and becomes extinct.

A few tweaks to improve “Draw Me Close To You.”

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Music, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

I was walking in the woods listening to music, which I love to do when I am not walking with my wife — I like her even more than my music!

I realized something about my music as I walked. I have three versions of one song on my playlists — one by the artist who made it popular, Michael W. Smith (Kelly Carpenter wrote it), one by Marvin Winans, and one by me! I guess I like “Draw Me Close To You!”

But now, after further meditation, I want a rewrite. I will record mine again with improved words, once I am done writing this.

The original song was written because Kelly Carpenter was tired. He was doing church hard and losing the reason he was doing it. He saw himself getting in the way of God’s work. He wanted to get out of the way, to get back to his first love and do things the right way, regardless of the cost.

That’s OK until it goes too far. His lovely little mantra has inspired renewal all over the globe by now (i.e. – a Malagasy version). But I think people may take away some unfortunate messages from it.

A few lines of “Draw Me Close” need a re-write

Draw me close to you
Never let me go
I lay it all down again,
to hear you say that I’m your friend

There is a problem here. I think underneath the lines, he is saying, “I don’t believe you love me unless I lay down my life.” Some people miss the whole point of the gospel because when they hear Jesus saying, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” they think Jesus is teaching them a lesson rather than giving them a gift! They think Jesus is putting the sacrifice on them instead of himself!

You are my desire
No one else will do
Cause nothing else can take your place
[I wanna] feel the warmth of your embrace

No rewrite needed here. It is so true. “All my loves are reflections of yours, Lord.” But let’s go on.

Help me find the way
bring me back to you.

I think there is an emphasis in this song, and in most of Evangelicalism, that reinforces, “I need to find the way.” I suppose if you’re not sure you are God’s friend, you probably feel lost most of the time. Several of my Christian clients just can’t be found. Being a lost seeker is their identity. If they stopped being one, they would betray who they are, be false to themselves, lose control.

[Cause] You’re all I want

This might be the worst line. I don’t think it  is true. This song is full of a lot of other wants. He wants to feel better. He wants to live the right way. He wants to stop wasting his energy on foolishness. He wants to look good in the eyes of others. He wants to write a good song. (He wants credit for writing it, even if Michael W. Smith got all the money and fame). He wants God’s approval. He wants security that he is close to God. He wants to feel things.

Some of his wants are needs. Some of them are desires. Most of it is mixed up and that is just how it is with us.

You’re all I’ve ever needed

This might be the best line. So true. At the bottom, top and all around our needs is our need to live securely with God in the love of Christ and the nurturing of the Spirit.

You’re all I want
Help me know you are near.

When I sing this, this is what I mean: “Ultimately, you’re all I want. In the meantime, help me.” Because I don’t always know what I want or know you are all around me. What’s more, I don’t respect my desires, which often makes me feel like I ought to be in control of myself and what going on around me, when I obviously am not.

Maybe we just don’t know what we want

When it comes to desire, Christians, especially, are not too conversant. They think things like, “I need to lay down my own desires so I can get in line with what God desires for me.” Philip Sheldrake wrote a whole book about getting over that error in his thinking. Here is a bit.

On the other hand, desires undoubtedly overlap with our needs and neediness, although it is still possible to distinguish between them. Both may be conscious or unconscious. In fact, it is not unusual to experience a conflict between the conscious and unconscious levels of ourselves. As we reflect on our lives, we can come to understand more clearly how unconscious needs had the capacity to drive us to behave in ways that we actually disliked or that failed to express our truest self. For example, we may be driven by a deeply buried need to succeed, and to be seen to succeed, while on a conscious level we say to ourselves and to others how much we desire to operate differently!

When we choose to talk of befriending desires rather than simply responding to needs we are implying that desires involve a positive and active reaching out to something or someone. Such a movement goes beyond our temporary reactions to immediate circumstances and actually touches upon deeper questions of our identity and our ideals. — Befriending our Desires Philip Sheldrake

Rather than laying down our desires and pretending we know what we want, we should respect our God-given capacity to desire and work out our desires in love.

Strangely enough, David Brooks touched on the same subject last week as he lamented the state of the U.S. culture, dominated, as it is, with micro moments of dopamine jolts which keep us from realizing our deeper meaning. He says:

The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but the miniaturization of desire, settling for these small, short-term hits. Our culture used to be full of institutions that sought to arouse people’s higher desires — the love of God, the love of country, the love of learning, the love of being excellent at a craft. Sermons, teachers, mentors and the whole apparatus of moral formation were there to elongate people’s time horizons and arouse the highest desires.

The culture of consumerism, of secularism, of hedonism has undermined those institutions and that important work. The culture has changed. As Philip Rieff noticed all the way back in his 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”  — “The Junkification of American Life” by David Brooks (NYT Sep 5)

“Draw Me Close to You” is probably another little dopamine hit for a lot of worshipers. When they heard the first few piano chords the night the video was made, they got a chill of recognition and anticipation. The next song after the video was another little hit with little content but lots of feeling that left them wanting more.

When the “psychological man” (it was 1966, sorry women) gets to the words, looking to be pleased, I think they are more likely to be displeased, essentially unpleasable and perpetually looking for the next thing that might satisfy their unbridled hunger.

Maybe Rieff should have also said the “psychological beings” are born to be pleasing and never quite achieving the necessary splendor — TikTokkers getting abs to get clicks, Christians getting passion worthy of their ideal self and God’s approval.

Let’s make a few adjustments

Draw me close to you
Never let me go

Let’s keep these lines. Just think of them another way. Don’t sing them like you’re a wild bronco resisting  and needing to be broken. Sing it like a  distraught child who needs to be wrapped in security and comfort. Try it. See if you can be drawn in close to God right now. God is close to you.

Instead of  “I lay it all down again, “ try

I tune my ear for grace again

Instead of “to hear you say that I’m your friend,” try being more present, less aspirational,

I hear you say that I’m your friend

Or have you never heard that, personally, even though Jesus says it in John 15?

Let’s keep this part:

You are my desire
No one else will do
Cause nothing else can take your place

Just a small edit, below. Because it is so true: all my loves are reflections of yours, Lord.  Let’s lean into that. I don’t just “want to” feel your embrace; I welcome it right now.

I feel the warmth of your embrace

Instead of “Help me find the way
bring me back to you” try:

Guide me on the way
Through the dark to you.

I general, I think this song could use more mystery and less transaction. Regardless, let’s not be perpetual prodigal children, wandering in our individual wilderness. We are not in or out of salvation, we are in it all the time. I think this song was always about being in it with God, even when I feel a bit in the dark.

Instead of “[Cause] You’re all I want,” try

You’re who I want

Let’s keep it personal. God is not merely a better desire than the other desires I can choose. Besides, she chose us, according to John 15, we did not choose her.

Let’s keep this:

You’re all I’ve ever needed

It is so true. At the bottom, top and all around our needs is our need to live securely with God in the love of Christ and the nurturing of the Spirit.

You’re all I want
Help me know you are near.

Let’s just keep in mind, we’re saying, “Ultimately, you’re all I want. In the meantime, help me.” Because I can’t even keep myself in the reality of your nearness.

With just a few simple tweaks

Is it OK to tweak a very popular song? I obviously think so. So does Michael W. Smith, since he changed the words to the original (which actually made more sense than his). I think my tweaks help us in three important ways:

  • They help us get out of our power struggle with God.
  • They acknowledge we are full of needs and full of desires. Our needs are not always aligned with our desires. Our needs matter to God. Our desires lead us to experience God. There is a tension between them, but not a dichotomy. We need to be aware of the tension and not think our needs are desires and vice versa.
  • They help us not to lie to ourselves and God. Saying, “You’re all I’ve ever needed,” acknowledges our sense of never being satisfied.

Let’s amplify that last bullet to close and acknowledge we are all needy right now. Even as I sing “You’re all I’ve ever needed,” in the back of my mind I am worried I am spending too much time writing this post and wondering if anyone even cares if I did. What’s more, I responded late to someone’s email and I think they’ll think poorly of me. I also ate too much for lunch at a smorgasbord yesterday and feel like I need to get up and get some exercise.

Singing “You’re who/all I want,” also acknowledges the largeness of our desire. Desire is what I worship with. It is what gives me hope of something better. It is place in me where I decide to do something that is from my best and meets God’s best like a kiss. “You are my desire” answers back to God’s desire for me and the burning passion of Jesus to see me come to fullness of life.

Simple songs make a difference. I can sing Kelly Carpenter’s song and let it mean what I want. But I can also sing it with him and relate to the strain he felt when he wrote it. He felt a bit bad about himself and how he was blowing it. He wanted help to get on the right path. Not so bad.

But I just want to note, his desire for God had apparently already put him on the right path. After he had his epiphany, he went home and wrote a song God was drawing him close to write. All over the world, people use it to express their deepest desire.

Most of our worship should acknowledge how much we want to be close to God, not just how much we would like to be close if were weren’t so terrible. Because God has drawn close to us and is close to us right now.

AI resurrection: Questions for a “neutral” technology

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Film/TV, , ,

My son had questions about the vagaries of his student loan. I suggested, “You could just type your question into Google and the new AI pop-up will probably give you a good answer. I’m amazed at what it comes up with.”

“I hate A.I.,” he said.

Meanwhile a colleague just a bit younger than me, I think, is in an AI class. She comes up with the most remarkable things. I asked her to feed documents I want to reconfigure into AI and good things came back. She’s a bit frustrated that our other co-workers are not nearly as interested in the time-saving and money saving possibilities. “Why hire a consultant?” she says. “We have AI! Half those people will be obsolete in 5 years.”

Is AI inevitably evil?

As with every emergent technology, evil people will use AI for evil purposes. Some past innovations, like the atomic bomb, are self-evidently an evil use of a new technology. But most new things are relatively neutral, like your smartphone.

When we were at the theater on Saturday afternoon (Yes. I did get Funny Girl for my birthday.), we were in an upper tier. It was interesting to note that at least a third of the orchestra seats had phones lit up as we waited. When the lady voice from off stage said to turn them off, it took a while for people to comply. I suppose they had to tear themselves away from the phone to see real people who need people (Fanny great, Nicky not so much). I admit, I forgot to take my phone when I went out by myself. I felt a bit anxious, since I couldn’t imagine what I would do if there were a misconnection. Should the phone have us hogtied like that?

NY Times, July 9, 2024

The problem I see with the direction AI is headed is that it may become more personal.  There are a LOT of new TV shows exploring this subject! We started watching one called “Sunny” on Apple. They call a “dramedy,” although I did not find it funny at all, just creepy.  But it is stylish. Rashida Jones has a robot delivered, purportedly made by her husband; it knows everything about her, and she can’t keep it turned off.  Here we go.

Maybe, if it can “resurrect” someone

The main reason I am thinking about AI is not “Sunny.” It is the several articles I saw about a Chinese company called Super Brain who “resurrects” dead loved ones from the massive load of pictures and data we have about them, so you can converse with their replication – so far, just on screen. It did not take AI long to monetize our deepest fear and deepest longing: death and resurrection. AI vs. Jesus right off the bat.

by Hector RETAMAL / AFP

News outlets around the world ran with this new resurrection gospel story during the past month. France 24 found Seakoo Wu who visits the graveside of his son and puts his phone on the headstone and listens to his son speak from beyond the grave. The article said:

They are words that the late student never spoke, but brought into being with artificial intelligence. “I know you’re in great pain every day because of me, and feel guilty and helpless,” intones Xuanmo [his son] in a slightly robotic voice. “Even though I can’t be by your side ever again, my soul is still in this world, accompanying you through life.”

Stricken by grief, Wu and his wife have joined a growing number of Chinese people turning to AI technology to create lifelike avatars of their departed. Ultimately Wu wants to build a fully realistic replica that behaves just like his dead son but dwells in virtual reality. “Once we synchronise reality and the metaverse, I’ll have my son with me again,” Wu said. “I can train him… so that when he sees me, he knows I’m his father.”

Super Brain charges $1400-$2800 to create a basic avatar of a deceased loved one in about twenty days. Some Chinese firms claim to have created thousands of “digital people” from as little as 30 seconds of audiovisual material of the deceased.

For Super Brain’s leader, all new technology is “a double-edged sword.” He says, “As long as we’re helping those who need it, I see no problem.” Bereaved father Wu said Xuanmo, “probably would have been willing” to be digitally revived. He told Xuanmo, as France 24 looked on, “One day, son, we will all reunite in the metaverse.” His wife dissolved into tears. “The technology is getting better every day… it’s just a matter of time.”

Assurances of neutrality

NPR had a small story about tech executive Sun Kai who works for Silicon Intelligence. He said (through an interpreter), “I thought, if I’m modeling voices, why not model my mom’s likeness as well? I raised this question with the company chairman.”

After weeks of fine-tuning, they managed to create an AI rendering of his mother, which Sun says he now talks to every day. “I don’t see her as a digital avatar but as my real mother. When work pressure ramps up, I just want to talk to her. There are some things you can only tell your mother.”

NPR also quoted Michel Puech, a philosophy professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, like CNN bringing on an expert to interpret what we’ve just witnessed. Puech cautions against over-hyping the ability of current AI technology to go beyond what existing technology already does. For example, looking at a photograph or hearing a recording of a dead loved one’s voice evokes memories, just as AI clones aim to do. “So it’s just a better technology to deal with something we already do.”

I’m not so sure it is that neutral. It could also be another technological “apple” we eat to  delude ourselves into feeling the power of knowing and conquering everything, even life and death. I doubt my mother would approve of that, and I am pretty sure she would not consent to being resurrected by AI.

I hope I get a chance to ask her if I was right about that last thought. If I want to take the risk that she might be just fine with being an avatar, all my pictures and old home movies of her are already digitized. I could resurrect her, if I feel like it. Who wouldn’t like that? Super Brain has already bet we will buy it — it is only a matter of time.

Disentangling from perfectionism — 2013

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Film/TV, Spiritual direction, , , ,

Our teaching for Lent in 2013 had to do with “getting disentangled from the world.” Here is one of the first speeches I offered on that theme.

The movie Enchanted (from 2007) had Dr. McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy as an unlikely prince charming from New York to Amy Adams playing a princess from fairy tale land. (This is the same Ms. Adams who was nominated this year for an Oscar for the wretched film The Master. “Wretched” is not peer-reviewed.). In France they named the movie “Once Upon a Time” and made the better-looking Adams the main face.

The movie Enchanted, (or Il Etait Une Fois) is a sweet-ish fable that deconstructs the old sweetness of being a princess in your imagination and gets you to face the new overwhelming reality of postmodern, urban life and messy, noncommittal relationships. It asks the question, “Can I get some enchantment into the megalopolis?” And, as in many Disney movies, the answer is “Yes, there is a Prince Charming or Princess Giselle for you — probably not the one you are looking for, but you will miraculously find them and everything will be perfect, just as it should be in your own private fairy tale.”

This piece of fluff  is a surprisingly philosophical movi for being a little fairy tale. I think you will see that fact as you watch one of my favorite scenes from it. Amy Adams, Princess Giselle, has just arrived in gritty New York from happily-ever-after land. She wants to make her environment tidy, like at home, where everything is as it should be, so she calls on animal friends to help her like she used to do back in her native land. You’ll see the homage to Snow White. It’s a fun way to get started on our subject.

The song is being ironic instead of seriously asking the question, which is how we keep from addressing the real questions that bother us. But it presents the dilemma we feel about our very messy environments and our need for special powers to make it all perfect. Amy teaches us that:

You could do a lot when you’ve got such a happy working tune to hum
While you’re sponging up the soapy scum.
We adore each filthy chore that we determine.
So friends, even though you’re vermin, we’re a happy working throng.

Our dilemma: we are supposed to make things neat, tidy, working things out together, ultimately loving and never getting your white gown dirty, happy and talented, filmable, effortless, quick, efficient and you win best song for your ditty.

But, it is a big mess, and often feels like it is getting bigger, the only friends we have to help us are pigeons and rats, we have a lot of filthy chores and we are in charge of them, and we don’t get paid enough to do them, and the big one: we are vermin — not happy and can’t sing.

The world’s answer to our dilemma

I think the world’s answer, including Disney’s most of the time, which is the #14 corporation on Forbes 500, is to “make it work” as they say on Project Runway. You can do it; it’s up to you, it’s a DIY world and you have the tools. Dream like an American, just get educated, assert your rights, make all the right choices — consumer choices and otherwise, especially in a mate, and it can all be made well.

The moral to Enchanted, if I recall, is that if you just stick with it, you can make it all work in reality and not just in the movies. If you just believe in the real you instead of the make-believe you, love will find a way and it will be beautiful.

I suppose there are worse things that could be said, but I think the whole premise ends up making us very tangled up, not only tangled up in our responsibility to make everything tidied up, but tangled up in the need to do it with the right attitude, and right psychology, not tripped up with any of the mess from the past, and being pretty much prescient about how we might be messing up the future, AND with the just right person, or church, for that matter.

The alternative way of Jesus

Jesus has a better way. In a huge contrast, in the face of his impending disaster, not just a dirty apartment, when Jesus knows the true frailty of his disciples is going to be fully revealed and evil is going show itself without disguise, when all the facades of the self-sufficient world are going to be shown up for their true self-destructive purpose, he says:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33

In Disney’s hands, the way is: “Let’s be honest, you are vermin, but you’ve got to make this work or there is no hope.”

In Jesus’ hands, the way is: “There is hope because I have overcome the world. Take heart, because it is not all up to you. Perfection is not the goal, anyway. The goal is a heart at peace in the kingdom of God.”

This might seem like it is an obvious thing a Christian might say. But I am not sure we even hear Jesus talking to us in the middle of our normal pursuits. We even get hung up on whether we are performing Christianity perfectly enough! Christians argue all the time about how badly the other Christians are doing. We do that, even though Paul clearly wants us to imitate him when he says,

“Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not? — 1 Corinthians 4:7-8

There were some overachievers in the Corinthian church who not only thought they could make it work, they thought they were making it work — and better than Paul! Paul says, “Who in the world do you think you are, all puffed up and competing for the highest rank, thinking you need to be number one and, in fact, are number one? You think you are kings in the kingdom of God, while we apostles are still having trouble in the world and rely on Jesus every minute to give us joy in our very difficult circumstances. I’m talking about Jesus who gives us whatever life we have.”

Why don’t you talk back to the Disney faction in Corinth with Paul by reading the rest of this scripture as if you were saying it to someone yourself:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign—and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!  For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored! — 1 Corinthians 4:8-10

You would think we would all be on Paul’s side, but even the first believers were already taking things into their own hands and doing Paul better than Paul and telling him so! — becoming perfect, thinking that was what Jesus had in mind all along, and getting there without Jesus!

Perfectionism has always been tempting

This perfectionism is very tempting for us, which is why we are bringing it up during Lent.

Last week I experienced us in the middle of the dilemma in two ways. And I’ll close by talking about them. I feel bad, if all I am getting you to do so far is wondering if you understand what Paul is talking about well enough, or whether you trust Jesus well enough, or whether you are good enough to be in the church, or whether you can take on one more big idea because you already have so much on your plate to handle, or whether you can be responsible for following Jesus and get spread so thin, you are already so responsible. But if I am getting you to wonder these things, you are not alone. In the world we have trouble. But Jesus has overcome it and brings us peace. I’m shooting for helping you receive that.

Fall 2012
  • Internal perfection police

We were at the prospective cell leader training last Monday and great people were learning all about the ambitious mission we have been given as part of God’s redemption project. At the end of the evening people were invited to express some of the fears they had as they imagined themselves eventually being cell leaders. I think some of their answers reflected the perfectionism we are all saddled with: the need to do it right, to be unjudgable, to not mess up.  I don’t think anyone was unaware that this wasn’t where they wanted to be, they were just being honest.

Someone said, “If I become a cell leader, I want to do it 100%.”
Whatever that means. I think it usually means “the extra effort I am not able to give.” It does not always mean, “Doing the best I can” or “Acting with passion and abandon.” It often means matching up to the best effort I can imagine myself doing with the best outcome.

I am afraid I will alienate someone if I say “Christian.”
And you will. We started out our day at Childs Elementary yesterday with worship and two ladies from the neighborhood walked out and waited until we were done. I felt like I had offended them. As it turns out, I hadn’t, they were just kind of dismissive and sort of rude and self-consumed. But I felt I was supposed to be better than that, better than Jesus, and not be alienating. That perfectionism might lead us to only mention being a Christian in the most controlled of circumstances, when I could be sure I was doing the right thing. Whenever that is.

I am afraid I won’t have the right words.
Cell leaders are know-it-alls, after all.

I am afraid of looking flaky or uncommitted.
I am anxious about making it happen, because I have to make things happen right.

I am afraid to represent Jesus or the church.
I am not wise enough. I don’t match up to what’s in the book. I am not good enough. So I have to wait until I am perfect before I put myself out there and am judged by the perfection police.

And just who are these perfection police? Paul doesn’t even judge himself. And Jesus who will judge the living and dead at the end of time, says  “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

  • Perfectionism is beaming at us

I just talked about an internal process that keeps us tangled up in trying to be perfect, but there are a huge external forces, too! One of our pastors sent out a very interesting article that adds sociological reasoning for why we are so perfectionistic. The powers-that-be totally convince us to disbelieve the trouble we are in for their vision of a perfectible future.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin shows off Google Glass

As far as the Forbes 500 know, everything is getting better. The iPhone 6 will dispense with the annoying home button and feature a 4.8-inch screen and quad-core processor. Google is developing Google Glass, which will allow users to text, take pictures and videos, perform Google searches, by talking in a normal voice to a smart lens. The Dow Jones average just reached an all-time high last week, corporate profits are enjoying “a golden age.” Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned to the point where experts now confidently predict a state of near-complete perfection. We are a happy working throng.

But in other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total.  The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced all over the world. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent. Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. We are vermin.

The author of the article said this: When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes presents a dilemma, we can take refuge in the virtual world, where we can solve problems like – how do I make a video of my skydiving adventure while keeping my hands free? Problems most people in the world don’t even know exist! Futurist Ayesha Khanna, from her think tank in London, which funds research into human-technology co-evolution and its implications, described smart contact lenses that could make homeless people disappear from view, “enhancing our basic sense” and, undoubtedly, making our lives so much more enjoyable. In a way, this does solve the problem of homelessness—unless, of course, you happen to be a homeless person.

We need to stay disentangled from all the forces that would lead us to believe human ingenuity will lead to perfection and evolution is inevitably making progress. Human ingenuity — great. Evolution — whatever. The reality of what is going on in our troubling world was striking us in the face at Childs Elementary yesterday. We made ourselves look again at how the powers keep asking people (like teachers) to make bricks without straw. We can’t make things work well enough. Even though we are smart and caring, we are not changing things fast enough to get where we think we ought to go and it makes us angry, depressed, frustrated and self-hating. Part of our anguish is caused by what is bearing down on us from the weird world that technology is creating. But most of our guilt is just that same old sin that leads us to believe that all we have us what we are and we are who we are without God giving us life.

“Take heart,” Jesus says “I have overcome the world.” When you become silent or you move into your worship connection in a few minutes, when you pray as you pray next week, take heart. Let’s receive the gift that Jesus is giving by overcoming the world and reopening the door to true, everlasting life.

God loves the world and we love it with him. But we can’t receive peace from the dying world or our false selves. We take heart, Jesus has overcome and we will too.

When we feel like we have to get it all right, we let that perfectionism lie pass right by and receive our goodness and strength from the Giver of Life.

When we think we have to do it by ourselves in the face of all the huge forces or even judge our community by how good we are, we need to recognize the seeds of a graceless future and let that impulse, that temptation, pass by and be restored and be restoring in relationship to the Lord of all. Jesus is disentangling us from the temptation to be perfect. He’s good right now, right where you’re at.

Reflection is facing up to your new face

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , , , ,

My wife does not turn her phone off at night because we have been listening for children calling in the dark for over forty years, so why stop now? Some unknown person called at 3:30 the other night and then called again a short time later. I hear they called again after I had left in a daze.

I started my day in the dark because I could not get back to sleep and got all sorts of things accomplished. I have many new duties these days. Then I saw clients and oversaw the installation of our long-overdue window in the façade of our counseling offices. After I came home and tried to fix the TV, which had lost its sound, I was, again, a bit dazed. I asked, “Was it just last night those phone calls came?”

As I sat down to reflect and pray the next morning, one of my favorite verses came to mind. I had just said to God, “I am not sure who I am right now.” It turns out, that was a good move, since turning to look into the face of “the perfect law, the law of liberty” immediately reassured me that I was still in the presence of the One who loves me. And then I remembered James.

Be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing. — James 1:22-4

Reflection

I’m in a season when I often wake up and say, as I am reflecting, “I need more reflection.” I will eventually take some extended time or take a retreat, which I need to do. But I also need to remember that the day-to-day discipline of taking as much time as possible to deliberately turn toward God has transformed my life.

I think it was the same for James, too. And he is not shy about taking a dig at us in his book of wisdom for lagging in transformation. He basically says, “If you don’t do something deliberate about the new reality you have entered, you’ll still be like a person who doesn’t seem to know what they look like. You’ll still be checking yourself out in every mirror you pass, or in store windows and phone screens. You will never quite know what you’re doing because you’re still looking at your old self in the mirror instead of the transformed self Jesus has made you.”

Why do we love to look in the mirror? — well, at least most of us love it, or at least can’t help doing it. We have a magnifying mirror in our bathroom for advanced plucking, but I also use it to eliminate those stray hairs old men grow. I admit a bit of fascination about how different I look over time. The reflection of my face tells my history, collects my criticism, and always reminds me I reached my peak beauty decades ago. It is easy to forget, day by day, just who we are for all we have been and all we are not. We’re fascinated by our own story, and there it is looking at us.

James is trying to change our usual mirror experience. He comes right out and says it, “That old law you lived by was a pack of lies.” We deceived ourselves so much, we got trapped in checking ourselves out all the time to see if we were performing well, to see if things were all under control. The old law ended up being about regretting who we were and fearing who we need to become. Very few of us looked in the mirror and said, “Yes. You’re crushing it.”

The new law, which is really the oldest law from which the world was created, the law of love, is not like the endless self-criticism and defensiveness that saddled us to fear. It is a law of liberty, a lens through which we see ourselves as God gives us to become.

Facing up to your new face

The other day I said something impolitic in a private meeting and I offended someone. They wrote a letter to me and my board members, publicly shaming me and demanding an apology. I apologized, since I should watch what I say (James has something to say about our tongues right after today’s quote!). Someone called me and wondered if my apology had just given an adversary something to weaponize! Trump has taught us all to deceive and deceive ourselves, to be perpetually defensive. But I wondered if my friend was not right. We’ll see.

With my apology, I was trying to “face up to my new face.” I am in new situations these days. I often wonder “Who am I?” I keep learning who I am by turning away from the mirror of merely me and looking into the mirror where God is looking back at me. How does one do that?

1) Looking is also doing.

Most people see James’ teaching as, “You need to take care of some widows, not just sit there like a saved lump!” I think that’s a fair interpretation.

But James did not get to his teaching about doing the word just by visiting widows. I think he first looked deeply into the new law as part of his rhythm. Being a doer of the word means looking into the law of liberty. That is a basic “doing” that creates a “doer.”

2) Resisting deception is also doing.

I’ve heard many (and may have preached a few) sermons about people who merely listen to sermons (podcasts, videos, lectures, etc.) and think that is the essence of being a Christian. It is not, even if most Protestant churches have a big fat pulpit in the center of the meeting. Merely-hearers are taking in info to advance their project — they are “getting it right.” They are getting justified, over and over, which feels good as long as they are in the echo chamber. And they are creating an image that looks justified;  they are a principle they can articulately justify (or just loudly defend). They are proving themselves, so when they check the mirror to see if they are still there, they will feel OK and maybe even feel like they deserve to represent Jesus.

James wants us to prove ourselves by doing what our true selves should do, not just get more material to shore up our weak sense of self. We’ve got enough material! But before James got to that conclusion, I think he had to go through the hard process of not deceiving himself. He, like all of us, had a story he lived by before he heard the story of Jesus. It is hard to say it, but we were deceiving ourselves, living a lie, and were desperate to get that lie justified. Facing up to our new face means looking at ourselves in new ways. When you look in the mirror and see “the Beloved of God” and not just “a wrinkly old man” or “a fat woman” or “the one who must not be seen,” or “a lot of work left to do,” we’re getting somewhere.

3) Receiving is also doing  

In this era we tend to manualize everything. A co-worker is mastering A.I. at a ripe old age. They ask A.I. everything and it is amazing what gets produced. It is easy for us (or A.I., I guess) to take James and spit out best practices — reduce him to “Don’t just sit there, do something!” Since the world is warming at an alarming rate, that might be great advice. But he’s deeper than that.

James did not get to his advice about doing the word because he had a good idea or a revelation. He probably would not go to A.I. to find out who he is. He appears to have some personal experience. When he says, “If you persevere and keep acting for good with the freedom you have received from your past ways, you will be blessed,” I think he knew about being blessed that way. I don’t think he was channeling a theory.

If you cannot receive God’s blessing of new life and love in Jesus, you probably won’t keep acting. Receiving new life is the first thing we do. If you only feel “blessed” because you succeed as a Christian in the ways you thought of success in your old narrative, you’ll probably give up the whole Christian enterprise. Maybe you should, since you’re following yourself instead of Jesus.

The reality of being blessed is also an experience of being blessed. I turn to God because I am alive, not just trying to be alive. I am blessed because I live under God’s watchful eye, listening for me like a mother in the night, not just because, “I did the right thing and I ought to get something for it.” I reflect because I am a reflection, not just because I need to improve myself and figure out how to survive this day.

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Yesterday was Columba Day! He is one of my favorites of the apostles of the earliest Celtic church. He is larger-than-life, flawed, artistic, ambitious and leaves a legacy many still admire. Click his name and get to know him at The Transhistorical Body.