What would Jesus do?

What would Jesus do?

WWJD?

A friend pointed out that the question is incredibly important, even if it’s seen as passe.

I’d go so far as to say it might be the most important question.

And yet… Can you ask it outloud?  Can you ask it with a straight face?  Can you ask it with out shuddering and feeling like the worst kind of cheese?  (Which might be cheddar.)

I can’t.

Perhaps I’m rationalizing here, but I want to say that I’m not ashamed of my faith or Jesus.   And as my friends observation,  implies, I’m not alone in this aversion to the question.

Satan is smart.  This would be terrifying if it weren’t for the fact that God’s a gazillion times smarter.

There’s a brilliance in how Satan worked all this out.   He recognized that there was a powerful question: What would Jesus do?  And he did his best to castrate it.

He began with the people who popularized the question.  He turned it into an omnipresent slogan.  We saw it everywhere.  He oversaturated the world with it; on books, C.D.’s, bracelets, billboards, necklaces, notebooks, pencils, stuffed animals…

This first step did two things: Firstly, it triggered all the defenses we normally employ against marketing that has reached the saturation point.  We naturally just filter things out that we see over and over again.  Did you ever notice how you stop noticing strong smells when you’ve been around them long enough?  It’s like that.  You’re so close to it you don’t see it anymore.

Perhaps more damagingly, people made profits, tremendous profits,  off of those four little letters.  It called thier motivation into question.

And then there are the people who asked it.   Rightly or wrongly, a perception popped up about the sort-of people who regularly asked this question.  (Like many stereotypes, there probably is a root of truth in this perception. )

This perception is that WWJD became WWMSLPJD: What would my silly little preconcieved Jesus do?

People began with a rigid, innacurate, tiny picture of who Jesus was.  And they basically used the question to reaffirm the things they wanted to believe.   The marketing didn’t help.  It allowed this to become a fashion show.  It created a possibility to be pharisitic, to show off our holiness with wristbands and t-shirt, rather than internalize our holiness.

And now, the question, “What Would Jesus Do?” Doesn’t actually mean “What Would Jesus do?”  Grabbing on to the letters “WWJD” means aligning oneself with this whole history of a certain group who answered that question in a quite specific way, which was arguably not the way that Jesus himself would have answered it.

It’s a bit like the whole “Christian” thing.  People who reject the label generally recognize that it doesn’t matter what the dictionary says, in this case.   They grab terms like Christ-follower, because the term “Christian” has picked up this whole connotation as a result of the history of the people who chose this term.

So there’s a disconnect between what a word (or question) should mean and what a word (or question) does mean.  “WWJD” began it’s life like the term “Christian”.   They had these meanings, based merely on what made them up.

It’s a bit like a person: when we’re born, all we really are is the things that make us up.  (Genetics, soul, call it what you want.)

As these words begin to have an independent life, things happen to them.  They gather a reputation, they are changed.  Just like a growing person, who might choose to hang out with drug users or heroes, who might choose to live healthily or live destructively.

Of course, we should never give up on people.  But I think it’s a valid question: At what point do we give up on redeeming words and phrases?  The perversion of the question “WWJD” confronts us with this decision.  And that’s a sad thing.

Camoflauge or White Wash?

We had the privilige of getting away over Memorial Day.  We stayed at this amazing little place called Big Bear Lodge.  There’s lots of stuff I could write about this little get away.  But the thing that’s on my mind right now is architecture.

I took a little hike early Monday morning.  And I stood at a place that I could see two buildings.  These two buildings stood in contrast to each other.  I looked at them and I thought there was a difference bigger than aesthetics.  If they weren’t represenations of utterly different world views, they were atleast symbolic of different world views.

The first building was this quaint little tourist-town/shopping center thing.  It was a C-shaped two story building.  It was white.  I don’t know exactly what “White Wash” is, but somehow this place brought Tom Sawyer’s White Washing to mind.

Their was this balcony-catwalk kind of thing that ran infront of the buildings on the second floor.  Each of the corners of the place had these spiral stair case which were home to countless orioles and cardinals.  (I think they were orioles and cardinals, any way.  I’m not so great at bird identification.)  There was candy shops and bike rental places, a pizza place around, an ice skating rink, a coffee shop, and most fittingly, a gallery dedicated to the writer/artist of the curious George books.   This was so perfect.  It was exactly the sort-of place that curious George seemed to belong, leaping on the balconies and tormenting the poor guy in the yellow hat.

The whole place overlooked a presumably man made lake.  Of course, paddle boats were available for rent there.

This whole thing was only slightly bigger than the structure which stood perhaps 100 yards away.  This place was solid, rectangular, and closed off.  It was a hotel, I guess.  But it’s intended use wasn’t what made it so different.

This place was painted all the colors of the forest.  Dark greens and browns and greys.  The multi-colored roof shingles blurred together like those high-tech mosiacs; it created a camaflauging effect.  The place was somber, almost castle-like.  It wouldn’t have taken much in the way of alterations to turn it into a good setting for a Gothic novel, home to a brooding, haunted rich dude who just need the new nanny to break through his bestial side.

It occured to me that when we build anything, maybe even when we do anything, we have an important question to answer.  That question is:

“Will I harmonize with what is around me?  Or will I build something which stands wide and apart from the natural order?”

I think formulating the question this way kind-of begs the question.  In fact, in this case, I much preferred the white, unnatural little tourist trap.   There is a different way of asking the same question.  I think it tends to prejudice us in the opposite direction:

“Will I work at being uniquely human?  Or will I accept the premise that we can’t escape the way things have always been?”

This question gets to the heart of so many of our stories, particularly ones out of the Gothic and Romantic traditions.  Beauty and The Beast is a sort-of modernized, dumbed down version… I’m not saying that all this is good, but in some way, it seems like even the modern cheesy romance novels, even Soap Operas, they are still grappling with this question.

The subtext is that men are somehow in the grasp of their animalistic nature.  Men are like the dark, brooding hotel: they are a part of the nature, left to their own devices they can not rise above it.  I don’t know why this is.  Perhaps it’s because we’re seen as more sexualized than women.  Perhaps men have perpetrated the myth because it allows us to justify abusive behavior.  Perhaps women, who have been historically powerless in many ways, grab on to the idea naturally that they have this ultimate power of redemption.

Wherever this idea comes from, over and over again, the motif  of the Belle character (is it an accident that her name means beauty?) comes in to save the man from his own darkness.  This darkness inevitably is the form of being animalistic, wild, natural.  (Is it an accident that his name is The Beast.)

There is danger here.  There is danger in thinking that we can save each other under our own power.  There is danger in thinking we ought to embrace the way things naturally are in this world.  There is danger in thinking that a white coat of paint and an open-air courtyard are enough to overcome the way things naturally are, too.

Hey, that’s not very nice

O.K.  So somebody found this blog by putting the phrase “Jeff Campbell is an idiot” into a search engine.

Oh yeah?

Well, uhm.  I think you’re a poopie-head.  So there.

Making things seem dirty or deep

My good friend Billy observed that if you make those little quote marks with your fingers, it instantly makes whatever your saying seem dirty, like a euphanism for sex.

Try this: in the middle of a conversation, do the quote mark thing around the most harmless and innocent words you can imagine.  It instantly makes it seem like you’ve got an extremely R-rated something you’re alluding to.

Consider: “I’m going to (quote marks) drink some lemonade”

or “Let’s go (quote marks) to the yard sale.”

or “I like (quote marks) mushrooms on my pizza”

I had a paralell, though less funny realization.  We were at the top of an actual mountain.  And no matter what we said, about it, it seemed like we were making some sort of deeply symbolic commentary on the nature of reality.

“Did you ever notice how tiring it, right before you get to the top of the mountain?”

“There sure aren’t many leaves on the path up the mountain.”

“It’s easier going down the mountain than up it.”

They were all meant quite literally.  I’m not even sure what they’d mean symbolically.  Of course there are countless more.  So that’s all I’ve got tonight.  No theological insights.  No praise of community.  No intense moments of self-realization or attempts to share mystical experiences.  Just how to make things seem dirty or deep.

Moses’ Baptism

I read a description today of Moses’ crossing of the Red Sea as a baptism.

Perhaps it would be better put differently.  Perhaps a better way to say it is that baptism is a re-enactment of the crossing of the sea.

I’m struck by this idea: that we go beneath the water, like the Egyptians, but we are raised up and out of the water like an Isrealite.  It strikes me as a powerful picture of the transformation we experience through Jesus: going from a member of the empire to one of God’s people; going from a part of the problem to a part of the solution.

Pollution

Numbers 35 says:

³³ ” ‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. ³⁴ Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.’ “

Lots of interesting stuff here.  I’d always been intruiged by the passage where Cain slew Able, and God talks about how the ground cries out with the blood.    I’d never notice this passage.  And while I suppose somebody could claim it’s all metaphorical, I think there’s something quite literally true and fascinating about the idea that our moral decisions somehow poison the physical world itself.

It’s tempting to veer into an NT Wright-inspired diversion about the physicality of the afterlife, and about the idea that our afterlife seems like it’ll be a redemption of this world, rather than a journey to some other one.  But I think I’ll take a pass on that and instead go back to the Cain and Abel thing.

According to the passage in Numbers, The slaying of Abel was never atoned for.   Unless there’s some tremendous story we’re never told, where somebody ignores the mark of Cain and kills him, then Cain’s blood never atones for the land.

I suppose somebody might suggest that this is some new rule for Israel.  But there’s nothing that I can see in the text to imply this.

The question this leads to is “What does this pollution mean?  Why is it bad?”

I’m not sure I’ve got an answer to that question.

And I’ve got this whole other thought.

Jesus tells us, ultimately, that wanting a thing isn’t morally different than doing it.  Lust is the same as adultery.  Hatred is the same as murder.  Therefore, really, we’re all murderers.

And therefore, the land is polluted.

And it can only be atoned for through our blood.

We’re familiar with the general concept, that Jesus  blood pays a price that we owe.  I’d submit the same general formula is at work here.  Jesus’ sacrifice cleared us of this debt, if we’ve allowed him to.

Yet we haven’t all let him.  So the ground is polluted, still.  Because all of us haven’t atoned.

And perhaps this is a part of the meaning of the kingdom of God.  When every knee bows, when every tongue confesses, thorough atonement will finally have been achieved.   The pollution will be cleaned away.

I’m a 10 working for a bunch of 3’s.

This morning I’ll be sharing some thoughts from Bill Hybel’s excellent “Axioms.” with our volunteers.

Today’s chapter is called “Hire Tens.”  When I read the title I had this Sesame Street image.  A humanized number 10 would be greeting people when I walked through the door.  Another one would be serving coffee at the cafe.  A bunch of 10s on the stage leading worship.  You get the idea.

What it means is that there are people who are excellent in every thing we do.  For simplicity’s sake, let’s call that person, who is excellent, a 10.  From one perspective, we would want people who are “10’s” in positions everywhere in our lives.

The problem is that if we ourselves are not 10’s, we won’t tend to attract and keep 10’s.  We won’t attract 10’s mostly through our own insecurities.  Who wants somebody beneath them to do better than them?  Deep down, most of us fear that we are frauds in everything that we do.  Who wants to expose that?

Somebody whose number is lower than us is easy on the ego.  They are easy to manage.  They are easy to control.   For me, I feel a little bit like I’m a little league player asking a pro to play ball with me, when I’m contemplating these decisions.

And even if we overcome this, even if we invite this outstanding specimen to partner with us, it can be hard to keep this person around.   Being the person who is a “10″ is hard, when the other people aren’t.  It’s easy to feel limited.  Hemmed in.

Insitutionally, there is a very scary result of all this.

If the person at the top of any group is a “10″ and he will only attract people lower than him, the best he’s going to get is 8s or 9s.  If the 8s or 9s only attract people lower than them, all that’s going to be filling those mid-levels in are 6s amd 7s.  If these mid-level folks won’t attract and keep above them, they end up with 4s and 5s.  These 4s and 5s are really the public face of an organization.  Collectively, they have more impact than the 10s and 9s at the top.  This is a bad thing.

There are several things that we have to do to buck this trend.

The first is to always do our best to excel.  One of the ways we do this is by being transparent.  By being open about learning from those who are “under” us.

We have to have the courage to invite people on to our team who might make us feel uncomfortable.  Who might be more difficult to manage.  Who might have better ideas than us. 

Secondly, in whatever position we are in, it’s vital that we serve with humility.   If we’re part of an organization that excels, there will be times that we’re actually better at aspects of what we do than our leader.

In these cases, it’s a tremendous art form to handle ourselves.   There are many things which are so important, it’s down right painful to watch them mishandled.   It’s hard to know that things could be done better.

In my experience, there are numerous ways to do most everything.   In my experience, a team that tries to do things in all these ways at once gets nothing accomplished.  It might be that there is a more efficient way than the way it’s actually being done.  Often times, though, the inferior way is better than everybody doing it their way, even if some of those ways are better.

Sometimes, a leader needs a trusted advisor.  Sometimes, a leader needs a flock of worker bees.  If you’re really a 10, if you’re really great at what you do, you’ll know the difference.  And the way we’re built, most of us, we want to be advisors more than worker bees.  So it’s worth checking our motivations, all the time.

If the leader cares about what we’re doing she’ll seek us out, eventually, if we’re as good as we think we are.  Eventually, we’ll become that leader, if we’re as good as we think we are.

In my experience, nothing reminds of us of our inadequacies as quickly as leadership.  Perhaps it’s just me.  But I can name numerous times that I’ve thought “if only I ran the show, things would be different.”  And when I do run the show… I find out quickly, why things are the way they are.

One of the things that’s central to all this is recognizing who it all belongs to.  It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a secular job, a ministry, our finances, family, or friends.  It all belongs to God.

God could perform all of these things better than the best 10 out there.  If God was only interested in perfect results, He’d simply do all these things himself. 

But he’s interested in growing and shaping us.  He’s interested in partnering with us.  He’s accepted the idea that our performance will never meet what he could do.

If this isn’t an inspiration to get better at what we do, I don’t know what is.  And if this isn’t a model for how we should behave when we’re a 10 and our leader is not, I don’t know what would be.

How do we make time?

It’s a wierd thing, the phrase “making time.”

We say “I’ll make time for you.”  Or “I’ll make time for that.”

The first thing I realized as I reflected on it, is that we don’t make time.  It’s not like we go to some cosmis cook book and find a recipe.  We don’t begin with the ingredients for time, mix them into the batter of time, and then cook them up, so that we’ve made time.

My point is that we don’t make time.

But my second realization is that really, we don’t make anything.

We transform things, (according rules set by God) but we don’t create them.

And so the term “making time” isn’t as silly as it appears.  We don’t create time ex nihilo (out of nothing.)  But we don’t make anything out of nothing.

It’s probably informative, in fact, to recognize that making time isn’t altogether different than making pancakes.

Making pancakes, or time, results from a choice.  But the choice must then lead to actions.

I don’t make pancakes by thinking about them.  I can’t expect pancakes to simply occur, either.  I have to recognize that some people have an easy time making pancakes: they are naturally skilled at it. (Perhaps they’re a short order cook.)   Other people have an easy time because lots of good pancake-making resources are at their fingertips.  (They have access to a well-stocked kitchen.)

But when push comes to shove, their’s a way in which it doesn’t matter.  No matter how hard or easy it is, either I made pancakes or I didn’t make pancakes.

I can’t make time for something by merely  wanting it.  And I can’t expect that time is just going to appear.  It might be easier for others to make time.  It might be more difficult.

I have to arrange things, I have to do work, if I want to have made the time.    And I can expect to reap the result of this decision.

Making Time

I can be such a jerk.

I was tying up some loose ends in my classroom yesterday and was  looking foreward to my weekend.  School had only let out half an hour before, but it was on its way to being pretty quiet.  It was  a Friday.  And one of the many dirty little secrets of education is that teachers are generally as eager as students for week ends and holidays.

At any rate, it was quiet.  And I do love the quiet.

It a precious commodity, an endangered species when you work with behaviorally challenged adolescents.   Whatyever field you work in, you know that when the world outside you gets too loud, the loudness can penetrate.  It can make you unstill.

I was drinking the quiet moments  in.

And then he came to my doorway.  He is an instructional aide.  A nice guy.

I’ve had less than a half dozen conversations with him.   But he always says “hello” when we pass in the hallway.  He even gave me a little gift last year, a little toy that he felt some of my more AD/HD students might use to keep their over-active fingers busy.

As he burst my little bubble of quiet mellowness, my initial reaction– on the inside– was “Go away.”

(A fascinating typo when I wrote that last sentence.  My fingers threw a “D” in after the “O”.  Before I fixed it, it said “God away.”  Which is what we do, I think, when we wish people alike that: Christ is in those people, that we banish, too.  When we think to them “Go away” we send “God away.)

The school district I work for is highly political.  At best, I’m a pretty controversail figure in my department.  At worst,  a bunch of them hate me.  But things have been slowly getting better.  Because the  thing is, I’m learning top play the game a little bit.  And it disgusts me.

Because if it had been any of the other teachers standing in the doorway, I would have felt quite differently.

I suck.

I realized it, in the middle of the conversation.  And I tuned into what he has to say.  And I learned that sometimes we create these self-fufilling prophecies.

If I’d expected him to be boring, he would have been.  When I slow down and stop and tune into what he said, though, he was quite interesting.

But that’s not really the point.  If he was the most boring person ever born I’m still expected to make time in my life and in my heart for him.  When I’m feeling busy or stressed out, I have to find time and energy from somewhere else.  I can’t do this at the expense of people.

It’s hard, doing the right thing.

Mis-takes and Ms. California

If there’s something I’m not seeing in all this, I’ve missed some important point, I hope my (4) readers will let me know.  But until I’m corrected this is my stance:

The whole beauty pagenat debate is crap.  It seems to me a non-issue because the whole idea of a beauty pageant is so morally bankrupt, they don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of condemming the morality of contestants.

At some point, maybe I’ll blog about why I think the attention Ms. California drew by opposing same sex marriage was silly.  Take a look on the blog roll for my outnumbered by 5’s thoughts on this topic if you’re interested.  Today, what I’m more focused on is  the fact that semi-nude photos of Ms. California  turned up.

At it’s core, the pageant is an exercise in turning God’s creations into objects.  It creates a menu of the most appealing slabs of meat.

I recognize that there are aspects not related to appearance.  There is the whole talent thing.  And the question-and-answer thing, which went so well for “Ms. California.”

But a woman who didn’t meet society’s expectations for what counts as beautiful would never make it anywhere in those things.  If Ugly Betty possessed some amazing talent or rhetorical skill, nobody would ever know.  She wouldn’t make it beyond the first level of competetion.

Perhaps there is some other message that can be inferred from this state of affairs.   But there’s only two justifications that I can see for all this:

A) If you’re beautiful, you should also be talented and able to have a discussion.  (But first, it’s important that you be beautiful.)

B) If you are both beautiful and talented, you deserve some special form of attention and praise.

The thing that boggles my mind in all this is that a competetion that would have everybody traipse around a stage in bikinis would have the nerve to suggest that women shouldn’t engage in behavior which objectifies themselves. 

I don’t think anybody should be treated like an object.  But how can it be o.k. for them to be an object in terms of the competetion but not in the rest of thier lives?  Is their really much difference between the semi-nude photos and the show they put on?

I remember a mad magazine from when I was a kid.  This one girl borrowed a bathin suit from another girl.  The borrow-er walks out all calm.  The bathing suit owner says “I don’t have a bathing suit like that, what drawer did you get that from?”  The other girl says “Your top drawer.”   The other girl says “My top drawer is my underwear drawer.” The borrower, realizing that she’s in clothing that is called under clothes, not a bathing suit, freaks out and runs away.

At the age of 10, I was able to see that humor.  It’s not exactly intellectuals writing Mad Magazine.  Yet they were able to point out the absurdity of the situation: the drawer we store our clothes in doesn’t really change what those clothes are.   It seems to me there is little difference between the semi-nude pictures I have seen and a swim suit competetion.

But even if there was, even if the pageant was all evening gowns, and even if the pictures were fully nude… Either  objectification is right or it’s wrong.  If gawking at women shouldn’t be done then it really doesn’t matter what they are wearing.

Just to be clear: I don’t think beauty pageants are good things.  I don’t think semi-nude photos on the internet are good either.  And I haven’t stated an opinion here about whether or not same-sex marriage is a good idea; I did state that focusing on what Ms. California thinks of same-sex marriage is silly.