Doing It Well

My day starts at 5:40.

Five forty is a brutal time in Winter in New England.  It’s cold.  and dark.  And did I mention it’s cold?  Frickin’ cold.  Tundra cold.  Brutal cold.  (And did I mention it’s dark?…)  And I’m tired…

But contrary to appearances, I’m not writing this post to whine.

I commute with my aide.  We take the turnpike to work.  You may know that on a turn pike, you get the ticket marked with where you enter and pay based on how far you take it.

Most mornings, there is this woman who gives us a ticket.  Since I’m the passenger (and usually tired) I’m not positioned to actually see her.  And her voice sounds a tiny bit like Marge Simpsons sisters. 

But every morning she offers us the most hearty and friendly hello.  It’s the first happy and good thing that happens almost every day of my life.  (Perhaps there would be other things early but I’m too asleep to notice…)  It’s rather stupid, it’s a small thing, but I almost look foreward to hearing her greeting each day.

Sometimes I struggle with the idea that we ought to do everything we can for God.  Intellectually, I understand that it doesn’t matter if we’re cleaning toilets or operating on somebody’s brain; we ought to bring enthusiasm to whatever it is.   On a practical level, I struggle with living this out.

I don’t know anything about that ticket-passing-out woman.  I don’t know if she knows God.  I don’t know if she’s able to be that friendly for her whole shift.  I don’t know her name.

But I know that it would be easy for her to grunt as we drive up.  I know that it’s not easy to be cheerful in the cold.  I know that she is a living, breathing embodiment of doing everything, no matter what it is, with excellence.

Some of the most outstanding people I know bring joy and excellence to everything they do.  I imagine that they sometimes wonder if it is worth it.  I bet they wonder if it is noticed.

Who ever you are reading this, if you are one of these people, thank you.   These “little” things can impact people, people who you never know.  They are worth it.  They do change things.

A good friend shared the book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us” after seeing the author, Seth Godin, at the catalyst conference.

It’s rather interting assortment, the book.  I had some thoughts (I know, I know, what a surprise.)  Maybe these thoughts will be worth while even if you haven’t read the book. 

A raised an eyebrow at the subtitle: “We need You to Lead Us.”  It reminded me a bit of that radio commercial.  It’s basically some sort of scam to put computers on a payment plan.  The commercial is full of statements like “You deserve a new computer” and “it’s not you’re fault you have bad credit.”

Just for the record, my credit is epically horrible.  So I’m not casting stones here.  But I get it that I deserve those things I can honestly pay for.  If my bad credit isn’t my fault, I’m curious just who’s fault it is.  And really?  Does the world need me to lead them?

Perhaps yes, perhaps no.  But the subtitle says the same words to everyone.  And I’m not just taking the subtitle out of context.  There is a basic assumption that everyone should be a leader of a tribe.  How he defines a tribe isn’t terribly important to my point here.  But the idea that everybody should be a leader is a little questionable.

Pages 8-9 say, “everyone now is a leader.  The explosion in tribes, groups, covens, and circles of interest means that anyone who wants to make a difference can.  Without leaders, there are no followers.  You’re a leader.  We need you.”

To be fair, he says a lot about leaders stepping back and not stealing the lime light and not being control freaks.  But it doesn’t seem like a tribe could have more than a few leaders, at most.  It makes me wonder where all the followers are supposed to come from.

He hails mavericks and rule-breakers and people who think outside the box.   “Suddenly, heretics, troublemakers, and change agents aren’t merely thorns in our side- they are the keys to our success. ” (11)

I’m not the most conservative, rule-crazy, egineerish guy that’s ever been born.  But I recognize that we need conservative rule-following, egineerish people in the world.  If everybody was like me the world would be fun, and random, and unpredictable, and chaotic, and surprising, and scary and inconsistent.  I think if the author got his way that this is what we’d end up with: a world much less reliable in both the best and worst senses of the word.

Even more on “The Worst Story Ever Told”

Marty has been leading us through a sermon series on Judges 19.   I have been thinking about the middle portion of the story, where the Levite cuts the concubine up into 12 pieces and sends them to all the tribes of Israel. 

First off, I have been thinking about power dynamics, rape, and homosexuality.  Stories like this one are often used to demonstrate the “abonimation” of homosexuality.   Like many rapes, this is not really about gender, homosexuality, and heterosexuality at all.  It’s about the Benjamites demonstrating total domination over the visitors. 

If it was a sexual thing we’d expect a gender preference to be expressed.  The Benjamites ask for the man at first, and they initially refuse the women.  I’d suggest that this refusal occurs because the women are considered to be of lower status than the men.  Ultimately, the bandits “settle” for the concubine.

We’re not told why they end up settling on the concubine when they initially refused that idea from the owner of the home.  One possibility which I admit there is only a smidgen of evidence for:

Perhaps they somehow barricaded themselves in after throwing the concubine out. 

My smidgen of evidence: the concubine is on the door step at dawn and they do not come out until then, though it seems that she has been lying there for some time.   This image is even more horrible: the idea that the cowards inside would not let her in out of fear that the bandits would follow her in.

At any rate, my next question about all this:

Was the concubine dead at that point?  I have a few small pieces of evidence in this direction, as well:

#1) Scripture doesn’t say that she was dead.

#2) It says that he put her on the donkey.  “Put”, at least in English, doesn’t imply that it was much work to get her to stay there.

#3) As a Jewish guy, presumably informed on the scriptures, would he have touched a corpse at this point?

The Jewish people had quite script expectations around not touching dead flesh.

Of course, he had to touch her dead body at some point, as he chopped her up.  But I wonder if she died on the journey home and that this pushed him over the edge into madness.  It’s one thing to suppose that he had possession of his faculties if he’d only sent the corpse to the 11 other tribes.  Strangely, scripture states that he sent pieces of her to all 12 tribes.  If he was rational, what would be the point of sending it to the Benjamites?

It’s interesting that the whole dead-flesh thing never even comes up.  By our standards today, I’d feel pretty gross and manipulated if somebody sent me a chunk of a human body.  It was a much bigger deal for them to have touched a dead body.  Yet nobody gripes to the Levite about this.  I wonder why?

Would readers at the time take this is as yet another sign of how decadent that society as a whole had become?  Did they believe the Benjamites sent the pieces of the concubine?  Were they manipulated into such a rage that they never stopped to realize what they had done?

I don’t know.  I don’t even have a teeny-weeny piece of evidence in this direction.

My last thought on all this:

Fast foreward a bunch of centuries.   Jesus sits having dinner with his disciples.  They were versed in the scriptures.  When Jesus says “This is my flesh” Do the disciples think about the Levite?

It’s an startling comparison between the new covenant and the old.  In the first story, the man chops up the woman whom he didn’t marry.  The pieces of her flesh lead to the 12 tribes focusing on each other, going to war.

In the new version, the man is offering his flesh to the people who will come to be described as his bride.  (The church)  This flesh is not meant to antagonize us into making war with each other.  Rather, we’re supposed to eat it.  And in eating it, we realize that we are the enemy, or atleast we were before we took him into us.  (I’m not suggesting that the literal act of taking communion saves us.  I’m suggesting that communion is a representation of taking Jesus into our hearts, and that this saves us.)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I just wrote and posted a poem which is an homage to this one.  I thought it was worth while to post the original. 

Wallace Stevens

---

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Thirteen ways of Remembering the burning of The Christmas Trees on Indian Lake

After Stevens

I.

In this Winter’s silence

Our feet crunch and the tree swishes

As we drag it across the deep frozen lake.

 

II. 

In my memory it is many different things rooted in the same event.

Flames each have this independent life

Rooted in the same burning.

 

III. 

We dragged discarded dried brown Christmas Trees

Onto Indian Lake to burn them

At the end of every Christmas Vacation.

 

IV.

If I stayed out of his way

I did not feel like a tag along kid brother

We weren’t two separate people but just brothers.

 

V.

I do not know what the most profound part of the event was

The alchemy of fire and ice and cold?

The symbolism of the years end?

The burning bush instantiated before us?

The simple danger of fire and what it could do to the very ground beneath our feet?

 

VI.

Smoke casts a shadow

On ice frosted with snow

By my boot clad feet.

I do not have the words

To say that everything is so insubstantial.

 

VII.

I think of television warnings

As I watch it go up.

These potential infernos

Sit in our living rooms throughout December

Smoldering invisibly

Waiting for my brother and I to manifest them.

 

VIII.

I know other secrets.

Like the two inches of water that will lay beneath

The smoldering snake like ruined remnants.

And the crackle whistle

Of burning and wind coming down over that frozen place.

It is all bigger than the tree.

But it is not.

 

IX.

As I look back I see suddenly that I might divide my life along this event.

There was Time before the burning of the Christmas trees.

And time after the burning of the Christmas trees.

 

X

I wonder if the people in the houses

Overlooking the place where we stood

Waking up with all manner of holiday hang over

Wondered what was going on as the flames reached up and up.

XI

 Did it bring them back to Autumn leave burnings

Childhood campfires

Ancestral cave man memories

Or just crystallize the things we’re not supposed to say about the holidays?

 

XII.

Those very same Christmas Trees are still burning on Indian Lake

Even when it is not iced over

Even across the decades.

 

XIII.

It was not a good time

Or bad.

Adjectives demean it.

That time was what it was.

We burned Christmas trees on Indian Lake.

Zombies, vampires, aliens, and self-satisfaction

At heart, there is something that cuts across many zombie, vampire, and science fiction movies.

There is a certain genre.  Let’s call it “paranoid fiction” where, at the heart of things, everybody or nearly everybody has some secret thing that is spreading.  Some times people are vampires.  Sometimes they are being turned into zombies.  Sometimes aliens are replacing everybody.

I’ve been reflecting on the idea that people who suffer from this disease often times claim to enjoy it.  And that however the disease travels, it’s always super contagious.  And usually there is some nasty side to it all.  (At the end you find out the aliens are gross and icky; the vampires or zombies in some sense eat others to survive, etc.)

I think that these three facts speak to the heart of the appeal of these stories.  We suspect that there is some symbolic truth in them.  We don’t believe that their are physical zombies, hopefully.  We know that the real problem is not actual aliens.

But we fear that we’ll turn into zombies of the soul.  We fear that we’ll become alien to all that is good in the world.  There is even a sub-genre built around monsters trying to reclaim their souls.  (Consider, for example, Spike or Angel from the awesome “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series.)

In the end, it’s about our own recognition that we have something special.  It’s about our recognition that life has this tendency to crush the specialness out of us.  And we know that once we’ve had that special-ness crushed out of us, we will only be half alive.  We will only live by crushing the life out of others.

I fear that maybe I do this already.  How often do we tell people to “grow up” when we really mean “Let go of your special-ness”?  Whenever I judge somebody for living in a way that holds on to his dreams, what I’m really doing is trying to eat them like a zombie, trying to suck thier blood like a vampire, trying to replace them like an alien.

In these movies and stories and books redemption is almost always found in a like-minded community.  The last few survivors find each other and band together.  They take a stand.

And this is so true.  We need God to save us from the Zombies, but God knows that we need each other, like minded individuals.  He leads us to each other when we’re brave enough to let Him.

How is your battle against the zombies going?  Who are the vampires in your life?  To what extent have you already succumbed to the aliens?  How will you get your special-ness back?

Is it better to burn to death or to drown?

My good friend Garret responded to a post below.  In that post, one of the things I was noticing was that several non-Christian groups have done a better job of causing people to behave morally than several Christian groups.

More specifically, I was thinking about straight-edged punk rockers among stereo typical white suburbanites and groups like The Black Panthers among African Americans.

One of Garret’s intresting contributions to the topic was the idea of legalism.  He implied that these groups tend to be legalistic.  He was intellecutally honest enough to observe that Christianity is often also legalistic.

As I pondered this point, I spent a while on a silly question.

That question is “Which is better: to be somebody who happens to behave in a way that Christ approves of but who does not do it for Jesus, or is it better to be somebody who knows what they are supposed to do, somebody who knows what Jesus did, but often messes it all up?”

Here’s a practical example of what I’m talking about: we could imagine an atheist who was a straight-edged punk rocker.  He never has any sexual contact.  He doesn’t indulge in inpure thoughts.  He’s seen the destruction that sexual contact outside of marriage can bring.  This is why he’s made the comittments he’s made.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, he does a good job at this.

Now consider a seminary student.  He’s memorized half the bible.  His interpretations are accurate.  He knows what is expected.  And he keeps messing things up.  He has a problem with his sexuality.  He continually engages in sexual sin.

The silly question I pondered was:

Is it better to to be the first person or the second person?

It occurs to me that both of them have a tremendous problem.  I think scripture agrees.  Paul says in a variety of places that Jesus didn’t free us from sin so that we can go on sinning.  It’s clearly important that the seminary student not abuse his freedom in Christ.  But James, on the other hand, seems to be saying that if the seminary student doesn’t act out his faith, if it doesn’t make a difference in terms of his behavior, then he doesn’t have a real, living faith.

And it seems like a real, living faith in Jesus makes the difference for our eternity.

To ask the question: Is it better to be the straight-edge or the seminary student is still for a number of reasons.  One of them is that the term “better” is so vague.  But more importantly, they both have a tremendous problem.  We recognize the inherent absurdity in questions like “Would you rather burn to death or drown.”  Or “Would you rather chop off your little pinky or lose your right ear?” This is a similiar thing.  Niether of them is better.  We ought to try to do better than both.

(I realize that there are atleast three cans of worms hovering around this question that I haven’t even opened yet.  One is the reality that we all sin.  There’s some level that we’re all like the seminary student.  Another is the question of whether or not we can lose our salvation.)

Wrecked for the Ordinary

The outstanding “Wrecked for the Ordinary” was kind enough to print something I wrote this week.

You should read it every week– it’s very good stuff.

Click here to go to “Wrecked for the Ordinary”

Straight edged

I just finished the book “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Play List.”  It was outstanding, if a bit provacative. 

The title characters are “straight edge.”  A straight edge is a member of the punk/punk rock/hard core/loud, annoying music scene who publicly take a stand against drugs and alchohol.  They often commit to abstaining from sexual contact, eating meat, and consuming nicotine or even cafienne.  It’s not a particularly new or obscure movement.  They are pretty well known and take these comittments very seriously.

While I was aware of the whole straight edge thing, I’d never given it much thought.  One of the things that occured to me, while reading the book, was “Finally!  People at ground zero of all the destruction caused by drugs and extra-maritial sex are responding to this destruction!  We can use this to do some good.”

I’ve tried to explain the second thought I had about four times now and I keep deleting it because it doesn’t sound right.  I’m going to give up on trying to be delicate here.  I hope that folks who know me know my heart and will be able to hear this the way I mean it. 

My second thought was that it’s unfortunate that the whole straight edge thing is mostly a white thing.

This is probably because the larger world of punk rock (or whatever we’re supposed to call it now) is mostly a white thing.  And I’m all for people regardless of skin color staying away from drugs, sex, etc.  It’s not a bad thing that millions of white kids are making a public stance against these things.

But I wish that it could spread into the neighborhoods of other ethnicities.  The problems that straight edges resist are at least as large in African-American communities, Latino communities, even some South east Asian communities.

I found myself wondering: Is there an equivalent to the whole straight edge thing in other communities?  A  resounding, tough, and cool “No” to things like drugs?

The two closest equivalents I could come up with are going to annoy people.  Get ready, if you’re the sort who is easily annoyed.

The closest I can come to the straight edge experience in minority communities is The Black Panthers and the Fruits of Islam of Malcolm X fame.

Both of these groups have done and said terrible things.  But these terrible things have been distorted, over generalized, and taken out of context.   The Black Panthers, particularly, have done some remarkable things that get conveniently forgotten.

And so this makes me wonder: Do we set these groups up?  Out of one side of our mouths, do we wish for more ”moral” behavior out of minority groups, but when minority groups actually behave this way, do we fear them and beat them down?  (The “we” here is a collective “we.”  All of us.  Society, the press, the whole thing.)

There is another important question here: Why can’t we, as followers of Christ, create something with the persuasive power of the straight edges?  That dude on the MTV music awards was an idiot.  But he went after promise rings, not straight edges.  Why are Christian morality stances such easy targets?  Is it simply because a straight edge doesn’t necessarily take a stance against violence?  Do they mantain an heir of cool and toughness because they’ll still stomp you with their combat boots, even if they are sober? 

I know that I’ve taken a sabbatical from politics lately and this might seem a violation of my self-imposed exile, to some people.  Clearly my reflections here have political overtones.  But I’m o.k. with that.  I’ve still got lots to work out around the whole Christian/political thing.  (And please know that it was so tempting, this week, to post quite explicitly about the goings on recently in politics)

One realization that is crystal clear, through this sabbatical is that in some sense Jesus didn’t at all care about the political ramifications of his actions.  He never tried to be political, I think, anymore than he tried to be apolitical.  He just was.  And if people saw that as political, or if they saw it as apolitical, it seemed to not matter at all to him.

And that’s how I feel about this topic a bit: I think that I’m speaking the truth as best as I can, here.  It’s quite irrelevant to me if we label this as a politically charged truth.

Jesus, the full-time foot washer?

This morning, I participated in a work day at the church I attend.   We were getting some areas ready to be demolished.

Before asthma chased me away, I spent most of my time taking off the outside covering of fluerescent light fixtures and unscrewing flueroscent light bulbs.  Wisely, I was trusted with a job that required little coordination, tool use, or individual judgement.  Rather robotically, I went through this whole process.

Somebody much better at “guy stuff” followed closely behind me.  He removed the actual fixtures from the cielings.  He had a tool belt and cool noisy tools and experience with these things.  I was glad to have him there.

Each fixture took me probably about five minutes to do.  He was moving at about the same rate. 

If I hadn’t been there, he probably could have done my part of the job in half the time it took me.  Despite this, it still made sense to have me there.   He was able to spend a smaller amount of time on the whole task of removing light fixtures and was able to move on to other tasks where he was equally needed.  In this case I wasn’t as valuable a commodity as him.  Pretty much anybody was capeable of doing what I did.   However, even though it took me twice as long as him to do my part of the job, it all ended making sense to do it this way. 

 As I was doing this, it got me to be reflecting on efficiency, and servant leadership, and that story in Acts, where the group complains to the disciples that their widows aren’t being taken care of. 

In life, there are these two extremes we fall into.

At one extreme, we rigidly categorize what we will and won’t do.  We consider ourselves above certain tasks.  If we think that there are people out there who aren’t above those same taks, we are effectively saying that we are better than certain people.

At  the other extreme, we learn the wrong things from Jesus.  When I first wrestled with what it was to lead and to follow Christ, I thought that this meant I couldn’t act in an efficient manner, that I shouldn’t have people do what I was capeable of doing.

If the other guy had said to me today “Jesus washed people’s feet, therefore you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing, I’m quite capeable of removing the fixtures and taking out the bulbs” several things would have resulted.  None of them would have been good:

#1) I would have felt more useless, not less useless.

#2) He would have taken about 8 minutes for each fixture, not five.

#3) He would have not been available to use his skills elsewhere as quickly.

Jesus demonstrated that he was willing to wash his disciples feet.  And that is the point, I guess: that he was willing to.  He didn’t go on to then do nothing but wash people’s feet.  There were other people who could do that, too.

And the disciples did not drop teaching and preaching and studying and writing to tend the widows.  This is not because the widows were unimportant.  It’s because other people could also serve the widows, but there was a limited number of people who could preach and teach, because there was a limited number of people that Jesus had poured his life into.

Servant leadership can’t mean that the leader does all the jobs of the leader and the servant.  It has to mean that the leader is willing to do all the jobs of the servant.  It’s not humble to act otherwise, it’s actually insulting to the ways in which God has gifted us.