Today's ride (courtesy of Google Earth)

Mapmyride has teamed with Google Earth, so you can create 3D videos of your bike routes. How sweet is that? NOTE: The coolest part, in my opinion, is that you can manipulate the screen by clicking while the video's paused (or even while it's playing, though it tries to constantly reset then. Enjoy! So given, the quality isn't exactly spectacular and sometimes it decides to move really fast and other times really slow, but still! So cool.

Trayvon Martin and my fear

A month ago a young man died. Today, it seems everybody knows about it. Beyond that, the reverberations have begun, like a gong sounding far off the distance.

I have to admit: I'm afraid.

I'm afraid because I don't know what happened... and neither do you.

I'm afraid because I hear the opinions, I read the statements; I listen to people of many backgrounds, and political and religious affiliations making of this single moment in history a symbol.

I fear that we are not listening to one another in our rush to make sense of things. I fear that simplifying the issue means we are drawing lines in the sand, not connecting the thoughts and feelings of others with our own. I fear because I don't know what happened. But most of all I am afraid because two different--though related--things are being conflated. Suddenly, what happened to Trayvon Martin has become synonymous with racism in America. If it happened one way we have a race problem, if it didn't we do not. That scares me.

None of us knows what happened. So we fill in the blanks to support our view. This is why I'm afraid.

You see, I know we have a race problem in America, but I have no idea if this case supports it. I know we have a man in George Zimmerman who is the product of myriad racial biases... and I know I am, too. Is his racism worse than mine? More overt, it seems, but worse? I don't know. There's so much I don't know.

But I do know one thing: we have a race problem. It's a problem that can be demonstrated easily enough by taking the Project Implicit Race Assessment where so quickly our inner convictions are laid bare for what they are. I suppose this is nothing new, but that is also no excuse for it. So easily we dehumanize other people, something it seems to me that Jesus warns against, something I feel called to preach against. But it's become about something else; it's become about proving a single case. I can't preach that; I don't know how.

I mourn for my black brothers and sisters who live in legitimate fear of the power of the majority. To you I offer my service to help lend credence to your pains and frustrations. I mourn for the loss of humanity you endure in so many ways that we in the majority do not understand. I am sorry for my implicit guilt; for the fact that I can rarely pass the Race IAT, and against my better judgment I show preference against you. I ask for your forgiveness.

And I mourn for my white brothers and sisters who are paralyzed by hate, and more often than that by stereotypes that live--mostly unconsciously--in that place in their minds where all ours fears reside. I mourn for the tendency to seek out those who are like ourselves. I mourn for everything that we are that is beyond our own control, and I hope for that which can be bettered.

I wish I weren't afraid. I wish this were simple, but it's not. Our problem it seems is that we still see. As Jesus once told the Pharisees who had a similar problem, 'If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see", your sin remains' (John 9:41).

Unfortunately, our sight is alive and well. Maybe acknowledging that sight is a first step, confession and forgiveness a second, and from there who knows. I wait for it fearfully, and in the meantime I pray.

Glory and the Hunger Games

Glory is a funny word. Or maybe it’s a word we don’t know how to use anymore—one of those antiquated Old English things that has fallen out of common use. Sportscasters still sometimes talk about glory, especially British soccer commentators, but for most of us we can hardly imagine a context where the word would come up in normal dialogue. It fits in this whole category of Christian words that nobody else uses, though they remain germane to our worship experience. But “glory” is special even in that category, because it’s not the kind of word—like Covenant, Eucharist, Kyrie, or Salvation—that seems uniquely churchy.

Glory seems like it might be something that anybody can achieve, that is until we think of the glory that Jesus is after. Jesus’ glory is self-sacrificial; in fact, it is complete submission, humbling himself to the point of death. Christ’s glory shows itself on a cross. You see, glory may only be five letters but it is a big word. But enough word study; the real question is why should we care? Why does it matter that Christ is glorified, and what does it mean for us?

            Let’s start with this: glory involves death and resurrection. The image Jesus uses is a grain of wheat—something that sheds its seed in death in order to rise again in the spring. Life requires death, whether it’s grassland, a forest or a farm, whether it’s the life cycle of predator and prey or the chemical gifts associated with organic decay. All life benefits from the death of others. You have benefited from death in your life, both from the things that you have eaten and the people who have gone before. Jesus’ glory is that death taken to an extreme—in dying, he feeds all of creation from the bread of life. He rewrites the rules; death is not just death but a precursor to resurrection.

            Still, our dominant experience of death is hardly glorious. You see this in all areas of life. This weekend was the opening of The Hunger Games movie, taking in record movie receipts across the country. Many of you are probably familiar with the plot, but for those that aren’t: the Hunger Games is a trilogy of books set in a future, post-apocalyptic America called Panem. In Panem, there is a central Capitol which rules over 12 outlying districts, which were crushed in a long-ago war and were now little more than tools of the Capitol. As penance for their insurrection, each district is responsible for providing a single girl and boy between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate in the annual Hunger Games. The Hunger Games consist of these 24 children battling to the death in a nationally televised event with only one emerging as victor.

            This really is a horrific premise. The one certainty of each Hunger Games is that there will be a lot of death—that, and it won’t be pretty. I bring this up today in part because it is so timely, and in part because this is the kind of glory the world is most often interested in. The victor of the Hunger Games does achieve a kind of glory, but it is glory that changes them for the worse. The world of Panem is a mess because their leaders have conflated what is horrific with what is glorious. There is no room for self-sacrifice; nothing like Jesus’ glory on the cross.

            The Hunger Games are a good illustration of our misconceptions of glory. We make our champions—in any field—into figures deserving of praise. Maybe we are civilized enough that we honestly believe we would never glorify a killer, but given the opportunity I would guess we aren’t so different from those people in the Capitol. Our idea of glory is being the best at what we do, being exceptional, surpassing the lot we were given in life. Our glory has become about fame and wealth.

            This is our “glory” problem. Death doesn’t seem glorious; it seems like weakness. All those kids who die in the Hunger Games are the unfortunate losers, none of whom could be described as glorious in the Panem world. Panem is a rough place; actually quite a godless place. This is what life looks like without the cross. It is people rising up against each other over and over again; it is dictators and their subjects each vying for a larger slice of the pie. It is politics of a horrid sort. Politics does not understand death and resurrection; instead it considers death to be something to be avoided at all costs. Jesus is above such games. The reason he came, he says in today’s Gospel, is to glorify himself not by becoming a powerful ruler but by laying down his life on the cross. That is real glory. It is why he tells us to pick up our crosses and follow.

            Glory is dying to yourself. It is saying that my little plans aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. It is quite the opposite of being a victor; it is letting go of your need to be important. Whether it’s giving up an argument that isn’t worth it, or spending your time as a service to others, or maybe electing not to respond to that aggravating comment by a person you despise, dying to yourself is often not a particularly popular thing to do. But in Jesus’ glory we get a glimpse of how best to live our lives. Sure, we can take advantage of every little thing and everybody. We could live as if life is our own personal Hunger Games. But that’s also the kind of life that is going to leave us cold.

            The reason we struggle with glory is because it is not the kind of thing we experience in this life. It is an adjective ascribed to God alone, and that is because when we reach for it we often do it in spite of others rather than as a service to our neighbors. True glory accepts no substitutes. It decries the attitude that suggests “Every man for himself” is an adequate motto for living life, and it laughs at the hope—as the motto for The Hunger Games goes—that the odds are always in your favor. Jesus smirks at the idea that we our fortunes are determined by the roll of the dice. He came for glory. A cross. A strange thing for those of us on this side of the veil of what true glory looks like. And he’s heading there not so that the odds will ever be in your favor, but in order to give you a promise: that you are find glory through him. Now and forever.

Amen.

A Tale of Two Kingdoms: The Hunger Games and Harry Potter

"God has ordained the two governments: the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people; and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they are obliged to keep the peace outwardly." -Martin Luther, On Secular Authority

"God rules the earthly or left-hand kingdom through secular...government, by means of law (i.e., the sword or compulsion) and in the heavenly or righthand kingdom (his spiritual kingdom, that is, Christians insofar as they are a new creation who spontaneously and voluntarily obey) through the gospel or grace." -"Doctrine of the two kingdoms, Wikipedia.

I was at the theater last night at midnight along with one hundred people younger than myself and one or two older for The Hunger Games spectacle. At this point I should probably spout the usual necessary background info: I read the books, enjoyed them thoroughly and was looking forward to the movies, and I also didn't particularly care how closely they followed the books because it is a different medium--and if you continue to pout because directors don't make movies word-for-word out of books (especially 30 seconds after getting out of the theater) I might just punch you in the face... but I digress. The HG trilogy is a story that grabs you with characters that make you care whether they live or die. Many tales don't ever reach that point, so it's obvious enough that Suzanne Collins tapped into something... but what?

I struggled with this. For all their entertainment value, I wondered all through my reading where to find the moral center of the Hunger Games universe. An author can craft any story, theoretically, when she first puts pen to paper (or fingers to keys), so why this one? There are a few simple readings: this is an underdog story, a political warning, and a cautionary tale of the forces outside of ourselves that consciously or unconsciously rule our lives. I think all of that is true, but it doesn't exactly answer the question of ethos. I mean, Collins could have sent any final message in such a story. She could have utterly decimated the villains; she could have made the symbols of purity and helplessness (Prim and Rue) win the day instead of the symbols of defiance (Katniss and Peeta). One could say--and I think they do--that Rue wins vicariously through Katniss and through the revolution. That is the underlying message, isn't it? And therein lies the ethos. The Hunger Games is tied to a kingdom of this world philosophy where secular authorities wage war with and often against their own people. The kingdom of the left-hand is ruled by laws that humans can so easily manipulate for their own political agendas. So we have the reaping.

With this insight in mind, let me be clear about one thing: I don't think it is a bad thing for this story to be one of the left-handed kingdom. There's a reason it resonates and I'd be willing to bet it's because we experience that kingdom and its laws and rules (principalities and powers, says Robert Farrar Capon) everyday of our lives. It's not impossible to imagine a reaping, or a corrupt dictator--we know intuitively that our leaders may very well show those same colors in a different political environment. This is the left-handed kingdom; a place where force rules and we can only wonder, as Peeta does, if there's any way to show them they don't own us.

A wand over a bow

There is, Peeta, but in your universe it will only be a shadow of a promise. This is why I cling to Harry Potter over against Katniss Everdeen. You could say it's because she is a female protagonist, but I think that's an unfair out. In the Chronicles of Narnia I am drawn in by Lucy over the many boys in the story because hers is the vision I want to dream. Katniss is a strong female character and should be applauded for it; she is everything she can be in such a time and place. My own favoritism has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with the resolution of the stories and the ethos of the authors. While Suzanne Collins was out to tell a story of the kingdom of the left, J.K. Rowling offered us a portrait of the right-handed kingdom that dwarfs politics. She made death into a calling, an invitation home, and claimed all the while that ultimate victory does not come through the ethos of Voldemort ("flees from death" in French) but Harry who walks willingly to his demise and so becomes "master of death." She changed the rules of the game.

Katniss has no choice but to escape death; it is the haunting specter over everything that she does. And rightly so, since her most immediate need is to come home to her mother and her sister, Prim. The fact that she is able to achieve that end speaks volumes about the human spirit, the power of love and the triumph of good over evil. But I need to make a weighty distinction here: Katniss' love is not as powerful as Harry's. I realize that might sound borderline blasphemous; after all, she is willing to die for her sister. What greater love is there than that? I think Jesus would say, "Not much!" However, the answer lies again not in Katniss' motivation (in truth she is as strong a character as Harry and probably by necessity stronger given the circumstances she faces) but instead in the universe in which she was planted. Collins created a world lacking what C.S. Lewis described as the "Deeper Magic."

In the left-handed kingdom love is still king, but it is a kind of love marked by grief. As Wendell Berry wrote, "The world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it. The world of efficiency is defeated by death; at death, all its instruments and procedures stop. The world of love continues, and of this grief is the proof" (from Health is Membership). Katniss tries with all her might to inject the world of efficiency with love, but ultimately the only reason that love wins is her indomitable will. But wills do not last and the specter of death never hovers from her life--not through three books of immense loss.

I applaud The Hunger Games for their honest portrayal of ourselves as who we are. It is never sugar-coated or served up with useless platitudes. Every one of us can see ourselves in Katniss or Gale, Peeta or Rue. Yet, I ultimately want more than what we see ourselves to be in this little life. I want a story that gives weight to the mystery that is our purpose; a story that overthrows the tyrants of this world--yes--but that doesn't stop there; a story where romantic love conquers not just because it is love but because it is a symbol of a deeper something that points beyond our meager feelings. I want not just an underdog story but resurrection.

And so, Katniss Everdeen, I applaud you for being one of the greatest heroes of fiction I have ever come across, but if I ran into you in this world I would find you a preacher... and his name is Harry Potter.

John 3:16 for the Twitter Generation

John 3:16… Like many things that live strongly in the public conscience, we almost hear this verse too much. It has become one of those things—like a commercial jingle—that gets in our heads. As such, I want to pause and leave room for the weight of the verse. Let’s see if we can get there...

            There are five very big verbs in this verse: God loved, he gave, everyone who believes, may not perish, have eternal life. Love, give, believe, not perish, have eternal life. It’s a well-known adage that bad writers use lots of adjectives while great writers know how to use a verb. This is a passage chock full of verbs. But the fact that there are five also confuses the focus. Consciously or subconsciously we resonate with one action over others. To illustrate this point, I asked the members of the ELCA clergy Facebook group what verb they find most important in John 3:16, and as of this morning, 12 pastors voted for love, 9 for gave, 2 for believe, 1 for not perish, and 1 for have eternal life. I want you to take a minute and realize why this is important. 25 pastors from the same denomination did not come to a consensus on what is the most important thing that God does in John 3:16. It’s one verse, but they all emphasize something different.

            This is important for a couple of reasons. When the guy standing behind the goalposts at a football game holds up a sign that reads John 3:16 he has a clear idea of what that means, and he is expecting you will open your Bible, read it and come to the same conclusion. But each of us brings our own experience, bias and considerable influence, and each of us reads that verse differently. We do this every time we interpret and we interpret every time that we read or listen. This is why dwelling in scripture is challenging; texts don’t have one, universal clear meaning devoid of culture, time and context. Scripture is always deep enough to support a multitude of opinions. Faithful reading, therefore, requires taking the whole mess that we have made of God’s word and pulling at the threads to better see what is underneath.

            This is a tough thing to do, because it is much easier to quote little snippets in favor of our various positions. But even John 3:16 is preceded by John 3:15, recalling a passage from Exodus where Moses lifts up the snake. If you don’t know about that passage then you’re missing the context. In order to ground John 3:16 we need John 3:15, and in order to ground John 3:15 we need Numbers 21. All of scripture is a nexus of connections. One brush stroke may make a greater impact on the final portrait, but every stroke was necessary to get there.

            John 3:16 is nice; it is concise, the kind of thing that fits on a bumper sticker. And we are bumper sticker people, or, better yet, we are Twitter people. The motto of the Twitter generation is to keep everything to 140 characters or less. But the Bible refuses to be tweeted. Anything worth believing is both simple and complex, but most of all it is worthy of slow and careful reflection.

            We quote John 3:16 so much because it is that nice little summation of scripture. We use it to tell people about the gift of salvation through Jesus, which is a pretty good thing to share. Keeping it simple is a good start, as long as the simplicity underlies the gravity of the message. God so loved the world. The Greek word for world is cosmos. God loves the cosmos, the whole big picture. And so he sent Jesus. The movement is from God to the world to Jesus, and only then to us as individuals. We can only see from our point of view as individuals, but as Madeleine l’Engle once wrote, “We have point of view, but God has view.”

            We focus on little things. God sees the whole big picture—the cosmos. We want to talk about salvation, but we don’t know what salvation looks like, so we fall back on an individualized concept where it all works out for us in the end. Salvation is not just about the end, but also about the beginning and primarily, for us, the present.

            God loved the world so much that he gave Jesus so that you who believe in him shall experience what it means to be truly saved. To be truly saved is about being well. Salvation is the completion of the law, which is to love God back and to love your neighbor as yourself. True salvation is big, it’s difficult—nay, impossible—to see from our point of view. John 3:16 does not compel us to understand, but it promises salvation nonetheless. We are part of a creation that quakes, that burns, that groans (as Paul says in Romans); all of which is to say that creation is visibly unhealthy. The whole world is in need of Jesus lifted up on the cross.

            Science talks about the groaning of creation in terms of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, for those of who may vaguely remember something of chemistry or physics classes, tells us that the entropy, or the total instability in the universe, is always increasing. Things are getting more and more chaotic, they break down much easier than they are built up. Jesus came not because we are the only messed up creatures on this planet but because God loved the world.

We have this brilliant illustration of chaos that we experience everyday called the internet. The internet brings us together across impossibly large distances, but it also magnifies all the little things that separate us. Suddenly, thrust together over the vastness and virtual anonymity that the internet provides, people are willing to say things they would never say face-to-face. Things are messy. And they continue to get messier still. It’s why it is easy to isolate ourselves from the outside world. We face a huge temptation to turn in on ourselves and avoid the banalities of what goes on out there.

This is why we need John 3:16. “God so loved the world.” The world is complicated; it’s big; there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world. It would be much easier if my only concern was God’s love of myself. We read our life experiences into John 3:16—just look at the response of those ELCA pastors. But nevertheless, the big picture matters. Just as an ecosystem suffers when a single species is diseased, so we suffer when others do not know salvation through Christ. Salvation is wellness for the entire body of Christ, and the body of Christ is much bigger than we most often imagine it.

This is why I’m going to make a radical claim, which is this: there is no such thing as individual salvation. Salvation involves the whole picture, so to think of oneself as saved in spite of creation is a strange thought. We are not singular units worthy or unworthy of Christ’s redemption. Salvation is about making everything new; our bodies, yes, but not just our bodies; our family, yes, but not just our family; our natural world, yes, but not just our natural world. Only when everything is returned to health can there be salvation.

We know this intuitively. It is why the internet divides as much as it connects; it is why all of nature is becoming more and more chaotic; it is why the snake was lifted up by Moses and Jesus was lifted up by us; not on a throne but on a cross. That is what salvation looks like. It is a promise that refuses to be tweeted. It is a promise bigger than anything our little points of view can imagine. It is the big view.

Amen.

Evolution in Confirmation

Last week at the close of Confirmation I played a game with the kids called "Evolution" that I didn't think much about until, upon hearing the name of the game, a couple of the students said "Oh... we don't believe in that," which kind of stunned me. So, this week we began Confirmation talking about--what else?--evolution, particularly regarding how we might treat science and religion. The conversation was enlightening for me--if perhaps no one else.

It's not that I didn't know there were plenty of people in the church that mistrust science and the theory of evolution specifically, but I just didn't know how widespread it was among these kids. These are children of generally very well-educated parents, who fall (again generally) left of center politically. And these are people who have elected, for one reason or another, to be part of a church with a strong Lutheran theology that values, among other things, education and service of the neighbor. These are not your stereotypical backwards country folk--not at all. And yet, I would guess the majority of the fourteen Confirmation students came in with the impression that you could not trust evolution because of their Christian faith.

The most enlightening comment of all came when one boy said, "I don't believe in evolution." I turned over the giant flip pad on which I was writing and wrote "Believe" in big letters and underlined it. What do you mean by saying you don't believe in evolution? I asked. Is science something in which we have faith? I'm not even certain how one could have faith in a systematic means of experimentation. Science doesn't work off of faith; it bases itself on the scientific method. It is indifferent to matters of belief or opinion. Prove something to be true under closed and repeated experimentation then we can talk, science says.

Our conversation veered eventually to the place where these conversations tend to go--Genesis 1. Although, perhaps the insight that got the most reaction from the group was when I told them that there are in fact two creation accounts--the one we all know in Genesis 1 and then a second in Genesis 2. This information, more than anything else, seemed to get the students to think, and I hope that they thought something like this, "If there are two creation stories, then maybe the purpose of both isn't to tell us the particulars of how God created the world. Maybe instead the purpose was to tell us why life came to be."

For all their bickering, science and faith need each other. I realize that might sound a bit of an overstatement, but I don't think so. We live in a world where you can't get away from technological advancement, where new and better things rule the markets, and where the markets determine in very concrete ways how we live our lives. However, markets are volatile partners with both science and faith. Scientific discovery is valued only when it produces something of economic gain to the system (hence the reason why NASA is on the verge of disappearing from relevancy). Faith is valued only when it provides social service and order to the universe of its constituents. Social stability is key to furthering the economy.

And so, both science and faith are increasingly marginalized. I understand that it often does not feel this way, especially to the scientists among us who see the church as a force constantly opposed to their cause. However, I think we need to draw an important distinction here between faith and church leadership, which is so often led astray by political and personal motivations. God is invoked in the public sphere far more often to give credence to political standing than as an article of faith, and so, advocates for a scientific worldview are forced into a position of arguing against large personalities with opinions that are often obviously wrong. So, scientific and religious leadership trade barbs over issues that are on the surface about protecting their respective causes--scientists seeking to demonstrate the absurdity in the church's rejection of very obvious theories to any observant human being, and religious leaders seeking to hold on to the hardline interpretations of the faith since giving an inch looks like giving up the game entirely--but in reality both have left their respective fields of expertise beyond to enter the fray.

The scientific method, as I understand it, exists to prove prevailing theories wrong. When science talks about theories it is not in the sense that most of us use the word in daily life. A scientific theory is the dominant epistemological result of myriad experiments that have tried to prove it wrong. You can't prove a thing right, but you can prove it wrong. For example, a scientific theory is that the earth orbits around the sun. Is this also a fact? Definitely. But science doesn't work by calling it fact, because that would preclude the possibility for further experimentation. In this way, science remains constantly open-minded. Perhaps we don't correctly understand the particulars of gravity and that orbit, or perhaps (stranger yet) we have everything backwards and the sun does revolve around the earth and all the experimentation has been based on faulty perspective (OK, unlikely, but I'm just saying...). So when scientists get caught up in arguments about faith, they turn to evolution, creation and the miraculous and explain that these demonstrate the absurdity of religious beliefs. But in doing so they've made a logical leap that is not at all in line with scientific reasoning. They can demonstrate rather convincingly the idea of natural selection, and so they can then extrapolate evolution and discount a seven-day creation. This is all well and good, but then the politics take over and too often from those experiments the subject becomes the falsity of faith. Science can faithfully (pun intended) take no such leap.

Faith, on the other hand, has no business rejecting concrete means of explaining the "how" of the world's creation or evolution. Religious leaders, again playing the political game under the guise of protecting their flocks from worldly interpretations, have tied faith into very particular, historical understandings of Biblical texts. Instead of reading Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 and wondering if perhaps scripture itself is telling us that it has no one historical purpose in mind with telling us about creation, too many religious leaders want to hold on to the historicity to the cost of their general credibility. In these moments, they fail at doing theology. The slippery slope to faithlessness and godlessness is a falsity that too many leaders cling to on both sides of the science-faith divide.

So here's the problem, people of faith and people of science, you have created a divide that tells my Confirmation kids that they have to choose sides. They need to believe in God or the scientific method. They need to reject their science teachers or their pastors out of hand. They need to defend every inch of their territory against any possibility that incredibility seeps in. And in doing so, they have partitioned their lives into black and white, right and wrong, true and false, faithful and unfaithful--lines that do nobody any good.

Congrats. You have done this.

Now, let's start untangling this mess.

Nightwoods: Book Review

3 Crows Corporation, 2011

 Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

Review

It took me a long time to get into this book. For a couple of weeks I dawdled through the opening chapters, reading five or ten pages at a time. I didn't think much of Frazier's writing style or the general arc of the plot, but then I started to get the characters. I started to see that things were connecting and I started to engage in it. The second half of the book I read in about a day. From the author of Cold Mountain, this really is a nice piece of fiction. It takes some getting used to the flow, but then you get into it everything moves along quite nicely to a finish worthy of the story.

Recommendation

This is a solid piece of fiction, well worth a read. Frazier is crass but purposeful and unique in his writing style.The plot is slow at first, but most good fiction is. It's not the kind of book you should expect to pick up and find yourself engrossed in immediately, but it is the kind of book that will tug at you and does not disappoint.

Grade:

4 stars out of 5

The Dark Church Rises: A sermon on Jesus and the temple

A sermon preached today on John 2:13-22

We make a series of assumptions when we read the story of Jesus throwing the moneychangers and the other merchants out of the temple. #1) we assume that Jesus must hate the market. That’s not exactly true. He just didn’t want it in the temple. #2) we assume that the modern-day equivalent of the temple is our church building, which leads to #3, which is that we moralize the story and make it into rules about what can and cannot happen in the church building. Our big assumptions are built on the premise that our church building is the temple. In this way we make the same assumption as the Jewish temple leaders. However, the temple, as Jesus tries to tell the temple leaders, is Jesus himself. He is going to die and rise in three days; not the temple building.

The moral of the story is not to keep the building holy. The moral of the story is get rid of the impediments to seeing Jesus in the building! Yes, if you are putting monetary gain before God then you have things backwards, but not because the church building is somehow more worthy of reverence; we don’t worship the building, we worship Jesus Christ.

The question this text is begging is “Do our buildings and history matter more to us than Jesus.”

I’m a history person. I minored in it in undergrad, and American history is one of my favorite subjects to read. So, naturally, I understand it is critical that we learn from the past in order that we might build upon the work of those who have gone before. This is what the church should do. But somewhere along the line we began to value our history and tradition with far more reverence than we should. We began to think that the most important thing for the church was to leave a legacy, so that in 100 or 200 years somebody would read our names in a book. Our mission became about legacy rather than proclamation.

A bishop I know once visited a church that was struggling to survive financially and he asked what they would like people to say about their church. A lady stood up and said, “We want people to say that we were good and that we were here a long time.” That’s not a mission statement, the bishop said, that’s an epitaph.

This is a challenge facing every church in every mainline denomination. We have a history that is so important to us that—like the Jews in the temple—we risk losing the centrality of Jesus Christ. It’s not that we’re selling trinkets out in the halls; instead, we are living out traditions that matter more to us than our mission to spread the gospel.

The metaphor for the church that keeps coming back to me is that of a forest. A healthy forest has some old growth and some new growth; it has portions that have burned recently and other portions that have not seen fire in as long as anybody can remember. A healthy forest is rich in diversity and embraces the death of some of its parts because death is the only way to bring about new life.

Like churches, forests are also chronically mismanaged. For example, it was the standing position of the US Forest Service up through around the time of World War II to fight all wildfires that affected forest land. This was a policy borne out of the notion that fire threatened life; first the forests, then the animals and plants, and finally us. The forest service was ruthlessly efficient at putting out fires, because few people stopped to ask the question, “Could fire be a good thing?”

As it turns out, fire can be good. Forests had survived for millions of years without humans keeping them from burning, and in fact most forests depend on burning every once in a while for new growth to appear. Fire destroys but then it brings new life. It’s not simply the case that life will triumph one way or another. The US Forest Service discovered in the 50’s and 60’s that forests filled with old trees were effectively dying because there was no vitality to the life of the forest. Moreover, when there was a fire all those old stands of trees and deadfall created blazes of a size previously unfathomable. The old trees were gorgeous and impressive things, but when the old trees were all that there was the whole forest burned.

Christianity in America is filled with old trees. If we’re not careful, we are going to reach a point where the whole framework of American Christianity is going to be so saturated with our culture of self-sufficiency and greed that the traditions as we know them are going to burn to the ground. Now, when I say old trees please don’t hear old people. What I mean by old trees are churches that are always looking inward and backward—churches where you hear more about traditions than about faith. It’s a great thing to value history, just as it’s a great thing to value a tree. But there comes a point when we are no longer capable of doing anything presently because we are so handicapped by our past. When that happens, we risk letting it all burn: the past, the present and ultimately the future. If there’s no vitality in the church today; then there will be nobody tomorrow to remember how it had been.

Forests teach us that vitality requires death. And as Lutherans, we should already know this, because it is the same thing we hear in our baptism. We are drowned in the waters before we rise again. But—now here’s the challenging part—your baptism is not just a piece of history. It is a living promise made to you every day of your life. When the Holy Spirit was given to you in baptism you were put to death before you ever could rise. We live in an extreme makeover culture that wants to make every imperfection better. Baptism is the opposite of an extreme makeover; it is death and resurrection.  We need to remember that every day of our lives. We need to throw off the pretension of self-importance we carry with us, and that requires experiencing our baptism every day—dying to ourselves so that we can live with Christ.

This week somebody told me that death is hard. But I think that’s wrong. Death is easy; dying is hard. Because dying is holding out the hope for an extreme makeover; death is accepting that all we have left is resurrection.

Dying is holding on when the usefulness of a thing has passed. So many of our little desires in life are dying and we put them on ventilators, as if hoping to wring every little last bit of life out of them, when we should be putting them to death. You can’t remember—you can’t honor—a thing until it’s gone. It’s why Alzheimer’s is perhaps the cruelest disease. It delays death and in its place we have dying. Many of you know that my grandma recently died after a long progression of Alzheimer’s, and while I am incredibly thankful for all the cards, thoughts and prayers I want you to know this. Death is easy. The dying was hard. Whether it’s a church, your body, your money, your grandma, or a forest, death is not something to fear. Death is a precursor to resurrection. Nothing more.

And if we are afraid to say that, then there’s nothing more to do. Then we’re dying. We’re the old growth, standing tall in the forest, proudly showing for all the world the history embedded in every ring in our trunk. But nobody cares. They’re all old trees, slowly dying; they’re all turned in on themselves. And the fire is coming—one way or another. Eventually, everything turns to dust.

So what do we do? Do we hold on harder to our history and traditions? Do we go the other direction and try to assimilate to the dominant cultural messages of our day?

Neither! Instead we do the most countercultural thing of all. We stare down death; and say, “Is that all you’ve got? Because I have a promise bigger than death; a promise, in fact, that I have experienced when my sinful self was drowned in baptism. It’s done. I have died to sin, and it is with Christ that I rise again.”

To be faithful, every day we must die to ourselves, not as some melancholy ritual but because it is the only thing that will not disappoint us. We will fall short of the glory of God on our own; so it is time that the church of all places stops trying to reach that glory. This is countercultural, and being countercultural is the only hope that our church has.

You see, when a healthy forest burns it just a little death; at the end of our lives when we take our last breath it is just a little death; and when our church looks different than it once had it is just a little death.

And then we rise.

Amen.

The Tipping Point: 2012 Reading Challenge Review (#10)

This year the goal is to read 60 books on a variety of subject matter--fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, theology, the environment, pop culture, science, etc.

To see my progress or check my other reviews click the page link above entitled, "2012 Reading Challenge"

2000, Little Brown Publishing

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

Review

OK, I think I've had enough Malcolm Gladwell. I like the way he writes, but it gets to be a little too much after awhile. Three books is most definitely awhile. That said, I find myself thinking like him and using his ideas for much of what I do in church. This is a book about ideas and what makes them stick, but it's also about the market and all of the little things that can make something really big... or not. It's quasi-scientific, though its findings are largely anecdotal. Gladwell tends to make some sweeping generalizations in part because of this, but I think the ideas behind them remain largely true. In the end he's attempting to explain a meta-process in radically specific terminology and taxonomy. For that I applaud him. It is a difficult task.

Recommendation

Don't read all three of Gladwell's major works in quick succession. It's too much. But read one of them. They are good, and they make you think. That is, after all, the goal.

Rating

3.5 stars (out of 5)