Materialism the Tyrant

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There’s a lot of implications to the idea that we Christians, working at bringing about a new kingdom, have some things in common with revolutionairies everywhere working at bringing about freedom from tyranny.

There are places where this metaphor falls apart.   I don’t want to leave the implication that I’m arguing for a president who identifies himself as a Christian, or a political party which claims to represent Jesus.   The tyranny I’m thinking about is broader; it has it’s clutches on us internally, rather than externally.  This is a tyranny of materilism, fear, greed, and doubt.

This kingdom will not be fully manifest in this life.  Ironically, it will be ushered in it’s fullness by a benign dictator (who happens to be perfect and uncorruptible.)    I believe that we are called to work for this kingdom in this life, even though we won’t see it’s fruition yet.  This process appears to be a sanctifying one: it’s not that God needs us to make the world a certain way, in order to return.  Rather, engaging in the fight will prepare us for his return by growing us in patience, strength, and faith.

Last post I shared my growing affinity for a thinker named Gene Sharp.   I expressed the idea that it is critical that we not fight violently.   A different (probably better) way I could have expressed this comes from his book:

“Whatever the merits of the violent option, however, one point is clear.

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. The dictators are equipped to apply violence overwhelmingly. However long or briefly these democrats can continue, eventually the harsh military realities usually become inescapable. The dictators almost always have superiority in military hardware, ammunition, transportation, and the size of military forces.”

We have the further incentive that  engaging in violence renders us instant hypocrites.   When we engage in conflict as Jesus did, we model, even amidst conflict, even to our “enemies”, what the kingdom is all about.

We have lots to learn from the people rebelling against earthly tyrants.  People like Sharp, who are providing an intellectual blue print for what the revolutions are doing, have some relevance for us.

Most obviously and notably, of course, we can learn from thier dedication, determination, and single-mindedness.  

But another thing I was struck by is various aspects of their tactics.  Sharp speaks about how tyrants can’t rule by themselves, in a vacuum.   They rely on things like the military, popular consent, foreign aid, etc.

Sharp says succesful nonviolent revolutions identify these elements which prop up dictators and determine ways to knock these pillars down, often by bringing the institution over to their own side.

There’s a level on which it seems so obvious it’s silly.  But I’d never looked at it this way.

This all leads me to the question: What if we Christians did the same thing?  What if we looked at the hold of materialism in our lives.  What if we asked ourselves what are the elements propping up materialism?  What if we set about planning in this way?

I don’t know how to answer those questions.  I don’t know precisely which things in addition to materialism we ought to target, either.  But I think these are important questions to begin to ask.

Me, You and the Revolutions

I was watching this show on Gene Sharp,  a thinker who wrote a book called “From Dictatorship to Democracy.”  The show indicated that this Sharp has written this blue print for overthrowing tyrants nonviolently.  Apparently, several recent major revolutions have either read this gentleman’s works or consulted with him directly.

I guess this got me to thinking about some of the similarities we Christians have with these groups.  I’m not suggesting that we ought to overthrow the government.  Rather, I’m suggesting that we live in a world that is not what it should be, a world where many are enslaved and opressed, a world that we’re called to resist in favor of a whole new way of being.

Ironically, we’re actually working for a monarchy.  But this won’t be an Earthly monarchy anymore than Jesus acts like on an earthly king.

I don’t have any knowledge about the spirituality of the guy behind this whole book and movement.  But I do know that he’s engaged in a process that at least in broad strokes, Jesus would agree with.  Ghandi himself pointed to Jesus as an examplar of what civil disobedience looks like.

So often civil disobedience just looks like a bunch of hippies annoying those in power in the hopes that they’ll just give up and go home.  I love the idea that civil disobedience could be just as tactical as violent conflict.   The idea that we can be loving and strategic reminds me of Jesus telling his followers to be wise and innocent at the same time.

But the thing that most strikes me about this comparison is how lacking we are when compared to some of these revolutionary groups.   Occasionally we go about working for the kingdom in a way that looks like we’re aping traditional, violent conflict.  Though we don’t often use our fists, the over-arching idea is “How can I hurt them the most with the least damage to myself?”

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There all sorts of ways to hurt people.  It’s easy to recognize some forms of violent conflict because the combatants are going at each other physically.  Jesus recognized, though, that attacking the body is less vital than attacking the spirit.  And I don’t think he’d approve of us attacking the spirit.

Sometimes, it’s a mighty fine line between violent and nonviolent conflict.  Sometimes, it will look very similiar.

In America, we Christians often engage the culture in violent conflict.  And yet it is rarely physical.  At first blush, it might even appear non-violent.  Recently, there was this campaign against the show, “American Muslims.”  I believe that this was waged violently… and yet it was nonphysical.

I want to emphasize that I can’t say, in this, case, that I’m positive that this was violent.  Because I don’t know the heart-condition of those waging it.  From the outside, though, it appeared that the question was at the forefront of the combatants minds: “How can I hurt them the most while minimizing the potential for damage to myself?”

It’s not that they attacked them economically, by going after the commercial sponsors.   Economics is a valid arena for both types of conflict.  The things that make me suspect that this was waged violently is that there seemed no interest in creating a win-win situations, where both groups walk away from the conflict.   If this had been a nonviolent conflict, the focus would not have been “These moderate Muslims don’t deserve a forum.”  The focus would have been “We deserve a forum, too.”  (Just for the record, I think we Christians have had plenty of forums to espouse our views for centuries.  We have blown most of them.)

Furthermore, much of the criticism focused on the fact that the potrayal of the families was so moderate.  And yet these are exactly the same groups that would have complained so loudly if the potrayal had been more extremist at the dangers posed by them.  There is no room for the Muslims to exist in any form.  The ultimate goal isn’t co-existence but destruction.

There is lots of evidence in the way that Jesus engaged the authorities at his time; he provides numerous specific examples of the idea that we ought to be in nonviolent conflict.   It’s awfully hard to give equal weight and importance to those 2 words.  It’s easy to be nonviolent by not being in conflict with the world.  Similarly, it’s easy to find ourselves in conflict if we allow ourselves the option of violence.

In addition to the question of the condition of our hearts, the question of whether we are seeking to destroy our opponent, I think that there is another principle in operation.  In my own brain, I go back to the idea that we are fighting powers and principalities that are not of this world.

All the ethical questions aside, the practice of trying to anhilate the earthly pawns of these principalities is a fool’s errand.  It’s like Hercules going after that creature that kept popping up more and more heads.  (What was the name of that thing?!?)

I suspect I’ve barely scratched the surface of the topic.  I fear I’ve radically oversimplified some of the issues.  But I think there’s lots to be explored, about the idea of how we Christians are meant to engage and combat the world.  What do you think?

(Note: I meant to save this as a draft yesterday.  I accidentally published it in a quite incomplete form.  Sorry if you’re recieving this a second time in your email box.  I think this version is a good deal better than the original rough draft from yesterday.)

Allegory and Applicability

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Watching the Lord of the Rings movies has renewed my interest in a topic I ponder and flirt with, every few years.   The question is, “In what sense is Lord of the Rings an allegory?”

There is a huge debate on this topic.  People who get excited about these things tend to have pretty polarized answers to the question.

Knowing that he fought in World War I, and wrote much of the trilogy through World War II, who could deny that the author’s experience didn’t shape them:  War is central to the books.  It’s hard to imagine that these experiences wouldn’t shape the books.  But as I thought about this, the thing that occured to me is that niether side of the debate has any reason to deny that Tolkien’s experiences shaped the book.

The most famous quote from the author himself seems to fly in the face of those who want the series to be an allegory.  Tolkien said: 

But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

I think the whole debate is answered in these couple sentences.  It’s all about a wider question: What is allegory?

Tolkien views allegory as something intended by the author; a thorough and consistent way of understanding symbols through out a series with the intent of controlling how the reader understands the story.

If we use the strict, narrow definition of Tolkien, it seems tough to make the case that it is an allegory.

First off, the most obfious symbols seem to paint a picture of atleast 2 (maybe 3) different stories.  There are elements of the Christian story lurking in the books.  But there are also elements of World War I.  And then again, there is maybe even some World War II.

And even these three stories don’t mantain a lot of consistency.  For example: Who is the Christ figure in the books?  Is it Gandalf, who comes back from the dead to lead the heroes?  Is it Frodo, who takes on the sin of the world (i.e. the ring) to destroy it?  Is it Aragon, a king returning to his throne, blessed with healing powers?  Is it Sam, the silently suffering servant? 

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If one calls Lord of The Rings an allegory in the strictest sense, it’s a problem that there are multiple Jesus figures.  It’s also a problem that Frodo, Sam, Aragon, and Gandalf all make errors and sometimes behave in un-Christlike ways: Not only does LOTR contain multiple Christ figures, it also lacks a single figure who consistently acts as a Christ figure.

This is a marked contrast with, for example, the Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.  Aslan is consistently a Jesus figure.  And really, he’s the only Jesus figures.  The whole series seems designed to be a microcosm of the biblical account of the world.  

It doesn’t drift too far from what we often mean by allegory, though, to define an allegory as a work where nearly every element stands for something else, in some other account or story.  Understanding the historical details of an author’s life often helps to untangle what these things might be.

World War I, for example, was the first war ever fought on this scale.  It was the first to cause wide-spread environmental devestation.  It was the first with any meaningful air combat.  Knowing these things gives us reason to see the combat in the books differently.  In the book, the whole world is pulled in.  Massive environmental damage is wrought.  Death reigns down from the skies.

It seems to me the Elves often represent the United States: a distant country, possed of superior might, considering isolating itself for ever.   Even while Frodo and Sam might be at least two representations of Jesus, the Hobbits as a whole might represent the common person, whose importance in WWI and WWII was established by virtue of the need for such tremendous number of troops.

Tolkien, I think, is calling all these representations of other things applicability.  He doesn’t seem to care much about whether or not these were intended.   There is wisdom in that position.   How could Tolkien avoid writing, on some level, about World War I, whether he intended to be writing about it or not?

I think that the people who deny that the series is an allegory are responding to the idea that one consistent story quiet specifically intended by the author does not live underneath the story.  People who assert that the stories are allegorical are reacting to the idea that the books are crammed full with what Tolkien calls applicabalitiy.  Though they don’t form a single consistent narrative, the most obvious readings all fold nicely together into a fairly small number of stories. 

Both groups are right, I think; and in the end it all comes down to what we mean by allegory.

 

 

What the Nativity Scene Said.

 

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Nativity Scenes.  There are serious ones and silly ones.  There are hand-crafted ones and manufactured ones.  They are high-brow and low-brow, beautiful and kitschy, made of wood, and glass, and plastic, and metal, and just about every material you can think of.  There are Veggie Tale Nativity Scenes, Little People Nativity Scenes, Native American-looking Nativity Scenes, African-looking Nativity Scenes, life-sized, barbie-doll sized, finger-puppet sized.

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Despite all this, they have some things in common.  Just about always, they have a manger and barn.  Just about always they have a figure for Mary and Joseph.  They have a baby Joseph figure.  Usually animals.  Sometimes, they feature the Wise Men, too. 

I think that each of these features of nativity scenes has something to say about the way we celebrate Christmas today.  I think that if our nativity scenes could talk, they would have some criticism for us.  And so this is the next idea about reclaiming Christmas I want to explore.  Principle 7. 

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The Nativty Scene lies in stark contrast to the way we celebrate Christmas.

This could be expressed holistically.  The picture presented of Jesus’ birth in the bible could not possibly be more opposed to the picture of we crazy people, rushing, rushing, rushing, to grab, grab, grab, more food, more presents, more parties.

However, I think I’m going to explore this more thematacially.  Each of the elements of a traditional nativity scene has something to say.

Consider the structure itself.  Jesus was born in a barn.  This happened because the Roman Leader decided it was time to take a census.  He wielded the power to stop everybody from what they were doing, and force them back to thier ancestral homelands so that the book keeping was easy for the Romans.  They were opressed people in a world with out pity.   And the thing that Jesus’ setting makes me think of is the setting where many of our gifts are made.  Places where the opressed, just as Mary and Joseph were opressed, are forced to do things like work 14 hour days.  The unsanitary, unsafe conditions that Mary and Joseph faced are not so different from those workers’.

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And then there are the farm animals.  Let’s call that a picture of nature.  We do the environment such a disservice.  We tear down trees for wrapping paper (which doesn’t easily recycle.)  We squander fuels to ship raw materials and finished products all over the world.  We fill our landfills with useless packaging.  We waste electricity on our gaudy displays.  If it seems like I’m stretching the animals’ role here, then what about  going back to what most livestock is used for.  America’s meat-heavy diet is unhealthy for us and the world around us.  It is epitimozed during the gluttony of the holiday season. 

There are good reasons to think that the Wise Men were not at the manger, that they, in fact, showed up to Jesus’ home much later.  Nonetheless, they make an appearance in many manger scenes.  And whether or not they were at the real manger, they have something to say about our holiday practices.

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Some people trace the practice of gift-giving at Christmas to the wise men.  But there is such a difference between what the wise men gave and the sort-of gifts we give.

Much is made of the symbolism of the gifts the wise men bore.  These were not cheap gifts given thoughtlessly.  Yet the wise men– sometimes viewed as kings– seem to have been able to afford the giving of these gifts.  The original gifts did not serve some shallow, frivilous need.  It is my personal theory that these gifts bankrolled the flight of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph… but whether this is right or wrong, Jesus was not brought the latest pokemon game by the wisemen.

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When I think about the appearance of Mary and Joseph in nativity scenes, I am struck by the fact that they did what needed to be done.  They were brave and godly and they stood up to the forces that aligned against them.  There are forces that are still aligned against we parents at Christmas time.  And yet I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of standing up to these forces, teaching and modeling to our kids what it is really all about.

Above this scene floated an angel.  This angel bore them glad tidings.  It promised liberation and freedom.  Our Christmas practices are ones which enslave us financially.  This message brought celebraton to those who hadn’t known.  We who are meant to carry that message today (the word “angel” can actually be translated as “messenger”) are not communicating a message worth rejoicing in; we are not demonstrating that we are really much different than the rest of the world, in how we celebrate this.

And of course, in the middle of it all, there is Jesus.  The whole point of these last several posts has been that we are just so out of step, in our Christmas celebrations, with what Jesus is all about.  So I hardly know how to add more to that here.

The Good is the Enemy of the Great

Somebody (smarter than me) said, “The Good is the enemy of the Great.”

When we use our time, resources and energy on the fair-to-middling, by definition, we have stopped short of greatness.  When we settle for this, sometimes it’s worse than if we’d failed.  Because if we did so poorly that we’re motivated to try again, we might end up doing better than mediocre.

At this point, you’re maybe thinking two things.

#1)) What the crap does this have to do with your past 2 posts?  You mediocre blogger, Jeff, you have yet again promised a whole series of blogs and gotten bored half way through.

#2) Why in the world would you be babbling on about this Christmas morning.

Actually, I have a couple pretty good answers.  This actually does relate to the next principle I I’m contemplating on reclaiming Christmas.

Principle #6) On Christmas, we squander so many types of resources on the mediocre, that we have nothing left for the excellent.

And on Christmas, their are many excellent things we ought to spend our resources on.  The ideals beneath the day are magnificent.

Consider the idea of gift-giving.  If we did this right, it could be divine.  Gifts should be freely given.  They should come from somewhere deep within us.  There should be joy in the creation of them.  They should represent something of the giver, and perhaps potray something about the reciever, as well.

If someone else made the gift, we can hope that it bolsters the local economy.  That creates middle-income job, carries the flavor of the local area, and does not carry the burden of having added to our environmental problems by having been shipped from far away, and merchandised and wasteful packaging.

What do we do?  We purchase mass-produced items.  The cheapest and most mass-produced of these are bought on the blood and sweat or exploited workers (generally in 3rd world countries) and carry a carbon footprint that we ought to be ashamed of.  As if the packaging were not bad enough, we purchase beautiful papers for the expressed purpose of tearing the paper off and throwing it away.

Gift-giving is not bad inherently.  In fact it could be great.  But they way we execute it, is at best, mediocre.

We go about with a sense of duty: who will we buy presents for?  How much money should we spend on them?  The very process of putting such a price tag on our relationships is dehumanizing.  And the act of facing humanity at it’s worst, our in this fierce competetion for what we’ve been told are the most valuable presents… what a travesty.

Don’t ge wrong.  I like stuff.  Somebody spending some money on me is a legitimate way to sometimes express their love for me.  And ditto me for them.

But I think the reason that we buy generic, mass produced items is that it is safe.  When something comes from our own imagination, when it comes from our own hands, when it expresses that we’ve spent time and energy of our own in creation, we are risking ourselves.

The act of putting something of ourselves in what we give is geat… but it is also scary.  A rejection of the gift, a failure to achieve the right kind-of thank you and response from the recipient, becomes a rejection of ourselves.

It is no wonder that we are sorely tempted to purchase something.  A rejection of a bought gift is just a rejection of something not really connected to the giver at all.  It is sad, though, that we give in to this temptation, that we don’t man (and women) up, and take a risk.

We’re preporgrammed to think about how long this will take, and how hard it will be.  These are much less legitimate than the scariness of giving of ourselves.  Consider the time and expense we go to, running from store to store, fighting the crowds, waiting in line, dealing with finding items, dealing with out of stock items.   Some one might say, “But I can get half my stuff at store X”; I would respond that if we turn this same sort of resourcefulness inward, we might knock out half our stuff by creating several similiar things.

I suppose that somebody might say “I can’t make stuff.  I can’t think of creative stuff.”   To them I would say “What about a promise of a going out for coffee or beer or whatever it is you do with your friends.” 

Getting stuff is good.  But shared experiences are great.

And what about these holiday experiences?  The endless parade or parties, meals, and celebrations?

Don’t they all start to blur into one?  Why do we find it so necessary to make an appearance at all of them, if we’re going to be so run down and overwhelmed that they just run together in our minds anyway?

I think a lot of that is about our fears around offending the person who invites us.  And also the flattery at being invited.  There is a sort-of status in having a hundred different comitments through the holidays.  But most of all, I think we are terribly afraid of slowing down.

Showing up to everything we are invited to is good.  But picking and choosing deliberately would be great.  Always running in fourth gear is good (kind-of).  Being able to shift gears, and sometiems be in first gear and other times be in neutral, that would be great.

We’re halfway through a list of (hopefully) 12 principles around reclaiming the holidays.  Why don’t you chime in, and offer some in other principles in the comments below?

The Prophetic Voice of South Park on the Meaning of Christmas

 

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Sometimes, I think we get paralyzed because there are so many good reasons to change that we’re paralyzed and overwhelmed by them.  We just cruise along on auto-pilot, heading straight into the side of a mountain.

Every year around this time I come to terms with the idea that there must be something we can do differently.  The holidays, for so many of us, is such a mockery of what it should be… or, at best, there are so many good things about Christmas, so much emotional black mail around bucking the system, that we’re worried about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and missing out.

The interesting thing is that it’s not like I come back to the same reasons to change every year.  As I think about these things for longer, I actually continue to find more and more reasons to change the way I do things.  And yet… I don’t actually do much to change.

This year, I’m working on being explicit about what the problems and solutions are.  I hope I’m not coming across as a grouch.  The dilemna with things like this is that if I wait until after Christmas, while it’s true that I won’t look like a grump, I also will be lacking in urgency.  This urgency will be lacking #1) because I won’t at that point be feeling it, I won’t be writing from the middle of Holiday Crazy Town and #2) I will be further away from the memories of just how backwards things have become.

My goal, for reasons I still am going to defer explaining, is to list 12 issues, problems, and solutions.  In this post, I mentioned the first four.

With no further ado, here is one I would like to add today:

#5) Christmas has become an act of idolatry. 

I’m not complaining about how the Christmas Tree tradition started with the Druids, or about how the December 25th day comes from the Pagans.  I believe that there is an issue that runs much deeper than these things.

The Jesus that I follow and worship is a God of reversals, a God of change, a God of redemption at the deepest level of things.  He is a judo-master, in some metaphysical way.  He reverses things and turns them on their head.  He tears our preconceptions inside out.  He infiltrates the systems of the world and defeats them in a much more thorough way than anybody ever could have envisioned. 

The Christmas-Jesus has become a hood ornament for the world he lives in.  He’s been tamed, simplified, and stripped down.  I have this imag of robber-barons, like the monopoly guy, placing a bit in his mouth and a yoke across their shoulders, saddling him to a cart of material goods.  The robber-barons, metaphorically speaking, are not necesarily those with a lot of money.  They are those who do not recognize that they are poor in spirit because their love of money has blinded them.  (Contrary to the nearly omni-present misquoting, the bible doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil; it is the love of money that is the root of all evil.  And the robber-barons going after Jesus in my little image, some of them have lots of money, some of them have no money. What they have in common is their love of money.)

I know that Santa Claus has become the most obvious symbol of Christmas materialism.  But I don’t think the dualistic thing we’ve created helps much.

What we now have is really 2 Christmases to choose from.  Their is a secular Christmas featuring Santa Claus.  And a spiritual Christmas featuring Jesus.  With it’s characteristic insight, South Park has caputred this well with it’s frequent pitting of Santa Claus against Jesus in Christmas episodes.  I hope you won’t be too annoyed with me if I go so far as to call the sometimes-obscene show prophetic.

One of the more recent Christmas episodes features Santa Claus getting shot down over Iraq and Jesus going in to rescue him.  The two figures here are shown to be allies after all.  I won’t go so far as to suggest it was intentional.  But I do believe that this picture is instructive.

The Setting up of this dualistic Christmas might have been well intentioned.    But it isn’t good. Much in the same way that we save one day a week for acting holy, we save all of our Chrismas holiness for Jesus Christmas, and then go act on all our greedy desires through the secular Christmas.

I’m not saying that we should stop all the Santa Claus imagery.  I’m not saying that the Christians who run around and expect everone to start celebrating the holiday like them are right.

I am saying that we ought to turn our critical eyes inward.  Are we celebrating our Christmas in a manner consistent with God’s ways?  It’s not enough to put a “Happy Birthday, Jesus” sign in the window.  The question we really need to explore is the question: are we trying to have our cake and eat it too; are we trying to steal the best part of the secular holiday and just cover it all up with a gloss of Jesus?

Running around in all this, there is actually a sort-of perversion of the trinity.  The part of God The Father playbed by Santa; the part of the Holy Spirit played by the reindeer and the elves and the other magic that gets Santa all around the world, everywhere he wants to be.

If I hit my goal of 12 principles, I’ve got 7 more to go.  What do you think ought to guide our reclamation of Christmas?

The Real War on Christmas

Cover of What Would Jesus Buy?

I just got home from spending 24 hours in the hospital with breathing issues.  This all happened like 2 days before Christmas.  If you’ve got 3 kids, you can probably emphasize with the sort-of chaos that ensued from this.

Also, I’ve been watching the rather brilliant, “What would Jesus buy” a documentary(ish) film that follows the exploits of a guy who seems to be masquerading as a charismatic born again Christian.  He’s gathered a gospel choir and is spreading a message against the orgy of greed that the holidays have become.  It’s sort of like “The Apostle” meets “Super Size Me.”

Finally, I have just had this feeling, these last couple Christmases.  Something has just gone wrong.  We are lost, dazed, and confused.   The ultimate symbol of all this: We Christians are fighting over whether Jesus’ name is mentioned in the holiday, but we don’t seem to give a crap if the actual content of our holidays honor him.

So maybe that’s my reaction to all this: I’m only going to say ‘Happy Holidays’.   For get about other people putting the Christ in Christmas.   I know that if he were around today, he’d tell me that I first ought to put the Christ back in Christmas.  And so I’m not going to say “Merry Christmas” until I feel like I’ve earned the right to say this.

The principles I’m going to work on discussing, internalizing, sharing, and acting on, for the next year, are these:

#1) Christmas has become a time for us to glorify greed and materialism.  It’s not enough that we say, “It’s for the kids” and then give them all kinds of material stuff they don’t need.  We need to balance the giving of gifts with teaching kids about the value of living simply.

#2) Christmas is becoming more and more about the anxiety of getting everything down, the status of buying the right gifts, the despair created between the disconnect between our Christmas realities and Christmas fantasies… In short, we have become lemmings.  We have accepted a defective, unbalanced, unrealistic  set of beliefs about what December should be like.  This vision didn’t come from a prophet, leader, or wise men.  It came from CEO’s and the blind capitalistic market itself.

#3) Though Christ’s birth was proclaimed by good shephards, as a society our Christmases have been characterized by us acting as the worst kind of shephard.  We have become poor shephards of finance as we spend more than we have; we have become poor shepards of the environment as we fill more landfills with packaging and wrapping and squander natural resources by lighting our tacky displays; we have been poor shephards of our children as we teach them all the wrong things by giving them the things they think need but robbing them of the lessons they require. 

#4) Christmas’s darkest perversions of values have spread through out the year.  The very best that Christmas has to offer us gets an increasinly shrinking portion of our time, energy, effort, and consciousness.  We all groan together when the sales, decoration, and music start a week earlier than last year.  We should be equally passionate about the idea that love, peace, and goodwill gets an even shorter lifespan each year than it did the last.

More later.  I’m shooting for 12 (for reasons I’ll explain later.)  What do you think are some principles we ought to fight against that Christmas is coming to stand for?

The Thing We Expected, The Thing That Surprised Us.

 

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Things aren’t always easy.  In fact, there’s times when it feels like God goes out of his way to make things tough.  Some of this, I suppose, is related to the idea that it isn’t really faith if we have it in something we can see.  It only counts as faith if it’s something we have to trust, something we have to believe.

This isn’t easy.  In fact, some times it sucks.  But maybe this challenge is what it makes it all worth it.  We’re invited into an act of courage.  We’re given the oppurtunity to grow.  We’re offered a chance to show our willingness to risk it all.

Last post, I spent some time on the idea that Jesus, on some levels, seems like just the exact opposite of what the Hebrews would have been comfortable with.  In some ways, he seems almost specifically design to put the 1st-century Jews way outside of their comfort zones.

And yet…

And yet, in some deep way, Jesus so perfectally fits the pattern.  Numerous times, the bible tells these stories.  About how people waited.  and then waited some more.  They waited so long that they almost gave up hope.

And then God entered the world.  He does it, time and time again, in these mind-blowing ways.  Bigger, wilder, crazier than anybody would have expected.  He doesn’t just shoot off a couple miracles like Harry Potter trying out some new spell.  He enters into the world in ways that leave everybody’s jaw on the floor.  “God did what?  God did it how?”

Moses built and built at the Arc.  For hundreds of years.  Lots has been hypothesized about what it must have been like for him.  Bill Cosby even built a whole comedian around it, gazillions of years ago.  At the bare minimum, he lived in a desert and they had rarely seen much in the way of water.  Some go so far as to say that it had never rained before in all of history. 

And year in and year out. Moses builds the ark.  The rain begins to fall.  God himself closes the ark door.  He watches over Noah, and his family, and the animals.  He meets with Noah, promises him leadership over the Earth, and protection from future floods.

Then there are folks like Israel and Jacob.  And then their is Moses himself.  Moses pops up after the Israelis have been enslaved for hundreds of years.  They are victims to infanticide.  Mosses survives by only the strangest of circumstnaces.  God leads Moses, and his great power makes a mockery of the world’s preeminent empire of the time.  First all the Egyptian first born children and livestock are killed.  Then God pulls aside the waters of a great sea.  He waits for his chosen people to pass.  And then he allows the waters to rush back in, sending the Egyptians to their deaths.

David experiences waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then God cames in BAM!  leading him to leadership over his people.  To varying extents Elijah and Elishah wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and then God enters the world again, entering the world just as surely as he had before, and yet each time it is so very different.

Jesus’ time is not so different than Moses’.  God’s chosen people are enslaved to the world’s superpower.  Infanticide is practiced to bring the Jewish population down.  In both cases, the Jews have waited for deliverance for centuries.  In both cases, salvation comes from the most unlikely of places, from a man whose earthly parents are in many ways just so run of the mill.  

God enters the world of Jesus in a way mightier than ever before.  He isn’t just guiding the human… he is the human.   And yet, somehow, he is not, too.

If I were to write a symphony depicting the story of scripture, I would have this theme for God’s entery into the world.  It would be this progression of notes. 

Perhaps this theme would play on a few woodwinds for Noah.  Perhaps the same few notes on brass when it comes time for Moses.  Maybe it would be strings when Joseph, or Elishah came around.

But when Jesus comes?  When Jesus comes, I would have all the instruments rise up, together, in the same progression of notes.  I would invite all the musicians, all the players.  The little, fleeting moments before when we heard those notes, they would be nothing but a shadow before the real thing, nothing but a tiny little fore-echo.  And when Jesus comes, it would be like we hear this for the first time in the glory the notes were meant to carry; we hear it for the first time, and yet with out knowing it, we were waiting for it from the very beginning.

Entering into the world

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It’s so easy to let familiarity breed a laxadasical attitude.  People who live with gorgeous views tend to stop seeing them.  Those of us who know amazing people tend to take them for granted.  It seems to me that the very rich probably don’t notice the wealth around them.  And probably somewhere, there’s a person sitting in a third world country thinking that a guy like me doesn’t have a clue how amazing it is to always have a full belly, to live with antiobiotics and electrical lights, to recieve a free education, to experience freedom of religion and expression.  That person who doesn’t have any of those things, who might want to judge me for how much I don’t appreciate so many of those things… he’d be kind-of right to judge me for this.

There are truths about the world that should seem fundamentally wierd but we slowly stop noticing: apparently solid things are over 99% empty space; obects never actually touch eachother, they just interact with negative electrical charges of the elctrons; some trees are centuries old; light from stars that reach us at night left thier points of orgin milenia ago.

Similarly, there are things about my faith that should boggle my mind.  In a way, I become immune to their wierdness by thinking about them too much.  But in some other way, the real problem is that I stop thinking on them.  I kind process some information, I can’t wrap my brain around it, so I just give up and go about my daily existence.

The facts of Jesus’ birth certainly fit this.  The author of space-time and everything in it; the originator of peace and the source of all goodness, he somehow managed to squeeze all that he is into a little bitty flawed human, living in a fallen world.  This human was born the lowest of the low, in the world’s eyes.  Even though his mom was ready to give birth no one had enough mercy to even put her up with the other people.  This God was born in a nasty, smelly barn.

His mission on Earth was not to gather power in the world’s eyes.  His life is a testament to the fact that the world’s power is meaningless.  He died not through a show of force but a sacrifice of love.

It just doesn’t make any sense, when we look at this through the world’s eyes.

And through the eyes that Jesus’ contemporaries had?  Well, sometimes, I wonder if God didn’t set certain aspects of Judaism up just to mess with their heads.  Not in a malicious way, but I have to wonder if he didn’t have just a bit of a smile on his lips when he set the whole thing up.

God taught the people that he was so far above them.  To see his face would kill a person.   To interact with him for extended periods left Moses’ face glowing.   When he took up residence in the Arc of the Tabernacle, he visited only one person only once a year.   He was a distant God, far above them.

Yet God told them that they’d set apart.  He even gave them rituals for making themselves presentable to him through sacrifice of livestock that they otherwise would have enjoyed for themselves; it was only the best and healthiest that was worthy of putting themselves in a standing that they could come anywhere near approaching God.  There was an emphasis on man’s fallen nature, a history of even the Jews being unworthy, and a borderline obsession with purity-cleanliness.

Always the idea was that they might temporarily elevate themselves.  God was only visited on God’s terms.  The very idea that God might lower himself to their filthy level must have been nearly unthinkable.

And later, Jesus would go on to be equally scandelous.  People in general have an “ick factor” associated with dead bodies.  The Hebrews in particular had specific rules and expectations around avoiding contact with dead flesh and bodily fluids.

So I can only wonder what it must have been like when Jesus told them to remember him, to eat the bread as if it were his flesh, to drink the wine as if it were his blood.  But I digress.  My focus today is on God’s entry into the world in the shape of Jesus.

And the last thing I guess that I have to offer about this mind-blowing entry, is that in a way, it fits.

I realize that I’ve just babbled on and on about the manner in which Jesus didn’t fit.  And I stand by that.  But the thing is, in a different way, it fits very well.

God often enters the world in just this way: long after anybody would have expected, far mightier than we can fathom, and utterly backwards to what had been expected, turning the tables utterly on what had been the status quo.

More on that next post.

Lying and Telling the Truth

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Last post, I began to explore some questions about what it means to believe that the bible is inspired, especially when Paul says a few times that he is just speaking as himself.

This blogger had a really interesting response.  He put into words some of the things I was going to say in this follow-up.  A portion of his comment is below:

He may not have been positive that what he’d just written was inspired, but the consistent, continual witness of the church through the centuries has been that he was, indeed, inspired in all that he wrote in 1 Corinthians. The church didn’t make it scripture; the church merely recognized that it was scripture. In short, inspiration of the Bible means that the Lord guided those who wrote, so that they wrote from their own knowledge and from their own personalities, but wrote what the Lord wanted written.

I think he is ultimately on to something.  But taking this tract still has some problems for me that I’d like to think out loud about.

Because the thing is, based on the English translation, Paul doesn’t seem like he isn’t sure whether or not he’s speaking God‘s words.  He seems pretty confident that he is just speaking as himself.  This does not mean that these words are unimportant or untrue.   There are numerous books written by wise people.   And Paul was one of the wisest.  But no matter how wise a person is, it seems like we ought to grant a seperate, lower status to these books than the bible.  I’d like to believe that most people, even the authors themselves, would agree that CS Lewis, Max Lucado, or Rob Bell books ought to be secondary to scripture.

I actually believe that God is at work through those three authors.  In some limited sense they might be inspired.  But this is a far cry from the deep meaning that “inspired” should have for the bible.

And I don’t think it’ll work to suggest that Paul was wrong when he wrote that he was speaking for himself and not God.  Of course Paul was fallible in his every day life.  He was probably even capeable of making mistakes if he was doing something at the same time as he wrote scripture.  (For example, if he was writing the book of Romans at the same time he was making dinner, it would be quite possible for him to make mistakes on the dinner recipe.)  But what doesn’ t seem possible is for him to write something untrue at the very time he is inspired. It seems that if it means nothing else, being inspired should certainly mean that one is writing the truth.

It’s also a bit tricky to suggest that God was decieving Paul.   It doesn’t seem consistent with God’s nature.   Jesus is the truth; could the members of the trinity lie?

To some extent, the answer here is the one that almost always pops up in these discussions: our puny little brains simply aren’t able to comprehend God.

To whatever extent their is an humanly comprehensible explanation, I suspect it will revolve around just what we mean by truth.  I believe that a person it makes sense to suggest some events didn’t literally occur.  I think, in these cases, it makes more sense to focus on the idea that God was telling a very deep truth even if the events didn’t specifically happen.  The truth in the statement “The early bird catches the worm” isn’t invalidated by the lack of an actually, specific bird catching an actual, specific worm.   This statement is true in a more general way which is in some sense deeper than a mere retelling of a specific incident.

So maybe there is some deeper truth expressed by Paul, when he states that he is speaking for himself, not for God.  I’m not sure just how this argument would play out, or what it would mean. 

What do you think?