Digging the Whole

I came across this piece on fragmentation on NPR the other day. Then I was encouraged at Facebook-point for a blog post on it. Then, I was told I needed to do more intentional blog posts for class, as well.

Here's where I stand on all of this. I don't like putting myself out here that much. Seriously, I don't. It's the same reason I feel awkward making chess videos for chessvideos.tv in spite of the overwhelmingly positive feedback I've received. It just doesn't suit me to be the center of attention. I know that sounds odd for somebody in my position--about to graduate from seminary and get ordained--but here's the distinction I want to make: when I'm leading in worship or in any church setting it is not my show but God's. It can certainly be that way on the internet as well, but it's harder--there's more in the way. The information overload--see the NPR article--means that you are reading this as a tidbit of info on your way to something else. You might already be gone. There's no time, no silence, no meditation.

All of that is a problem. Clay Shirky's conception of "publish, then filter" is simply not how I blog. It will never be. I can't just post for the sake of posting. I'm not a linker--I'm a thinker. That is how I function. I'm a bit of a Luddite in this way, and frankly, I'm unapologetic for it. Wendell Berry offers better words than I can to this in his essay on "Feminism, Body and the Machine." He writes,

A computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can't get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier and more. For a while, it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then, want to write faster, easier and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine.

People of Dirt

Published in the Concord, 16 March 2011

If the theme behind this issue is confusing the blame is mine but I’m not going to apologize. We are a people who don’t understand what ‘place’ means, and the only way I can imagine talking about it is holistically. Rural and urban, district and state, domain and environment are all words that try to describe where we are at and the area around us, but none of them gives meaning to that place. None of them speaks the reality of relationship between its constituent parts.

This starts with the term ‘environment’—perhaps the stupidest word in common practice in the English language. ‘Environment’ is defined commonly as one’s surroundings or something along similarly simplistic lines. This leads politicians and activists to talk about ‘using’ it or ‘saving’ it, as if the environment were something outside of us to be exploited or protected. Smoke in the air enters our lungs; wildflowers, deer, pine trees, and every other living thing inevitably come back to us in calories, whether directly or indirectly through the digestion of plants and animals along the way. The idea that we are completely distinct from the creatures around us is not only nonsense, it is border-line heretical. Paul says in Romans 8 that creation is “subjected to futility” but awaits redemption—just like us, because it is us.

            This isn’t some smarmy, spiritual piece on the theology of nature, but—I believe—a deeply practical one. Most people—myself included—are as much aliens where we are now as any new immigrant to this country. We mostly don’t know the hands that produce our food. We buy things in the store made in China, Indonesia or Mexico because they are cheap. “Free market” economics treats the earth as a resource rather than a place where we live, benefitting corporations who produce more and cheaper products over local businesses who understand the features and limitations of a place. These days, family farmers are some of the few who understand the inestimable value of caring for the land. For them the land is not a political cause but a necessity for the continuation of livelihoods and life itself.

As the family farm dies before our eyes, the rest of us are only a degree of separation away from the same fate. This is more a religious issue than a political one. Politics will always seek to justify itself, but Christianity is grounded quite literally in the ground. ‘Adam’ is from the Hebrew for ground or dirt or plot of land, and when he and Eve are sent from the Garden of Eden it is with the directive to cultivate the ground from which he was taken (Gen 3:23). As we have distanced ourselves from toiling in the soil we have lost our identity as people of the dirt. So when we pass the Mississippi River we might remark on its muddy water as an aesthetic deficiency, but we rarely consider the top soil erosion that gives the water that tint or our implicit guilt in it. To fail to acknowledge the dirt is to forget who we are.

This is also as much an urban issue as it is rural. Not everybody can work directly with the earth, but just because our vocations now take us to places quite distant from the land does not mean we are excused from knowing our origins. Cities, in spite of their confluence of people, often lack essential elements of community. Instead of being self-sustaining, their people rely on external services. Cities are places with specialists instead of generalists, places that expect and indeed require a level of specificity to an individual’s vocation that separates us from one another. To be a specialist (for example, a pastor) is to rely on a chain of individuals, stretching back to the farmer who grows her food, the craftsman who builds her home, the automaker, mechanic, and gas station owner who build, tune and fuel her car, the stylist who cuts her hair, etc. These dependencies are largely without deep connection because each individual vocation, though dependent on one another, is involved only in a small part of life, which is more and more disconnected from the place where she lives.

I can state my belief no more clearly than this: the specialist way of life is insufficient for deeper meaning. Young people are leaving the mainline churches not because we are too traditional or too modern. We are leaving because we see what our parents and grandparents do not—that we are no longer grounded. We are leaving for churches with little theological depth, churches that cater to specialists. Instead of building community these churches offer entertainment; they are more like a sports team than a religious institution. And this is happening in settings big and small; urban, suburban, and rural.

It is a strong word of judgment against mainline churches that we offer less community than an evangelical tradition focused on individual salvation. Nonetheless, we have the opportunity now to reaffirm the centrality of place, and only in this way recreate the possibility for a healthy community. If we stop caring about our place—which is to say the people, the land, and all living things therein—we might as well give up on theological depth.

To value place means to take back the word ‘salvation’ from the evangelical traditions and expose its narrow view of individualism as a lie. Salvation is about health—both in the present and future—and health is never an individual state.  As Wendell Berry writes, “Community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction of terms.” The smallest unit of salvation is not individual salvation; the smallest (and only) unit of salvation is Jesus Christ (I am indebted Adam Morton for this insight). It’s time for our churches to say that Jesus Christ came for ‘you’, in the knowledge that ‘you’ are not just an individual—you are a part of a community embedded in a location. You are a person of the dirt. Stop pretending like you’re not.

Silence?

I just finished reading my buddy, Eric Clapp's, blog post on "Japan and the Silence of God" and it got me thinking about the topic--well, not exactly the topic he is talking about. It got me thinking about how we can hear God in the silence. I'm worried, in the wake of what happened, to say that God is present, but I want to. I really want to--not because I think a loving God likes seeing people crushed, not even because I think God tolerates it. I have to believe that God hates it, more than we do, and that's why God is there--comforting, holding the people of Japan. Even as they are suffering--dying; God is there promising that it is not the end. Creation is groaning, as Paul writes in Romans 8.

Are we listening? This isn't an environmental piece (that comes with the Concord on Wednesday). This is a piece about listening. How do we think about silence when we have a headphone in our ears every free moment? I want to believe that God is present in the midst of unanswered prayers more than anywhere else. I don't have any data to back that up, just a hunch, because if the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is powerful enough to save all of creation surely God knows enough to see the despair and loss and say, "There. There I am."

That's a people bearing their cross. That's what discipleship looks like.

Is this going to make sense on the other side of the silence--the stillness and repose of death? Perhaps. I hope so... and I also think so. Maybe silence is where God spends God's time... maybe silence is the only place where such a thing as "God's time" exists.

God didn't come to Sinai in the wind or the fire or the quake...

Techno-crazy

The hour leading up to the Variety Show last night was one of the most stressful in my life. This morning I woke up happy at how it all went down and extremely glad it is all over. As I no longer have the burden of mics and CDs and videos and bands and organs (man, that's a lot of stuff to coordinate) I feel suddenly free from obligation. Now there's only school, and work, and chess, and the call process... simple enough :-)

Auction and Variety Home

Quite a reflection from the inside of media. I haven't exactly processed it all, but given a little time, and some naps, I will. Thanks to all who helped out!

More Than Conquerors: A Sermon on Twilight

Romans 8:31-37

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us…^* Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Sermon

In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

Paul gives us a brilliant, fantastic, completely veiled, impossible to discern turn of phrase that continues to resonate now nearly two millennia later. You are more than conquerors; not because of yourselves but thanks to Christ, who loved us and died for us. And thanks to that, nothing will separate us from the love of God, not the whole litany of separating forces. That is love—pure and unbridled. When we say “God loves you” it has its absolute genesis in passages like this. God loves you, in spite of everything you do and everything done to you. That’s where I want to start, because this is a sermon about love, but it’s not going to be only warm or fuzzy. So I want to get the warm and fuzzy out of the way at the beginning.

Now let’s talk about what that means.

I’ve been reading Twilight for the last week or so. Some of you are now wondering if such a thing is appropriate for a pastor to do and others don't know what that means, so I had better explain a little. Twilight is a book, turned series, turned movie saga centered around a girl who moves to the rainy Olympic Peninsula of Washington, meets a boy named Edward and falls in love. Things get slightly more complicated as Bella quickly realizes that Edward is, in fact, a vampire, who is torn between his human feelings for her and his vampiric desire to drink her blood. If you think this all sounds silly you may be right, but let me paint you a quick picture of the scope that Twilight has.

Currently, there are almost 20 million people who are fans of Twilight on Facebook—more than both Harry Potter and Barack Obama. The latest Twilight film made $140 million at the box office—on opening weekend. And the novels and films have won countless teen and young adult awards. It’s a phenomenon, and one that more than a few people find befuddling.

The books are, quite simply, a love story. Told from the perspective of Bella, a teenage girl, we are carried along by her emotions, particularly the strong desire she has for Edward as the first book progresses. This is Twilight’s version of the big love; the love that matters. Edward must control the desires that come along with being a vampire, and Bella has to quell the fears she has over Edward’s strength and speed. He could quite easily kill her at any moment if he were to let his desires take over.

I said that this would be a sermon about love, and Twilight is about love. It’s about searching for something lasting, eternal, something that will give meaning, an attachment more important than anything—even life itself. And Bella finds that embodied in Edward. Please allow me to briefly run through the checklist of Edward’s qualities: immortal, beautiful, dangerous, capable of great love and great destruction…

Isn’t it interesting that the person who Bella deeply longs for has many of the same characteristics of God? 

Don’t misunderstand me. Edward isn’t God. God certainly isn’t interested in drinking your blood, but even more importantly God’s love looks a lot different. We are to fear and love God—as Luther reminds us in his Small Catechism—not because getting close to God means that we run the risk of being destroyed, but because God is worthy of those feelings. God has created you to be more than conquerors, but only because of his love.

At one point in Twilight, Bella asks Edward how he can resist being what he is—in short how he, the lion, can resist her, the lamb. He answers that “just because we’ve been…dealt a certain hand…it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above—to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted.” Edward is a conqueror, but that’s where the fulfillment ends. Love between two people is wonderful, it’s splendid, and it’s also hard. Few things tell a bigger lie than the wedding industry when it suggests that the wedding night must be perfect for the marriage to set off on the right foot. Any couple that’s been married more than a few months realizes that marriage is never easy, love is never simple; it is built on disagreements, give-and-take, and the realization of each other’s imperfections.

Edward conquers his innate tendencies, but as Paul reminds us in Romans we are not mere conquerors of desire; we are more than conquerors, not by resisting some urge to do bad things, but only through Christ. My fear for Twilight is this: The love that Bella is looking for will never be fulfilled, because death is coming. This is why there is tension throughout the series as Bella and Edward struggle to come to terms with her mortality; this is why she wants to become a vampire like him, because in the end death is coming for her, whether by a vampire or the slow decay of time. My fear is that Twilight makes the escape too easy, and so seeks a way around the fleetingness of human love.

Death is a reality. Love knows this. In fact, love between human beings requires this. When you make marriage vows it is not to live forever without trials; instead, it is to stand with each other in sickness as well as health, to hold each other’s hands in the midst of disappointments and struggles, and to see beyond each other’s faults to the creation that God made behind the veil of flesh that each of us wears. The proof of love is not joy but grief borne out of loss. To be more than conquerors means that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That is the love that conquers our meager imaginations. Twilight is searching for it, just as we all are. But in the end, we aren’t looking for a vampire… or even another person to make us complete. Love is deeper, wider, and stronger than all that. Love for one another is a reflection finally of God’s love for us. Any other genesis of the L-word is ultimately going to leave us wanting, as Twilight left me.

A friend of mine told me about her youth group girls who loved the Twilight books and were extremely excited for the first movie to come out. They went on opening night.

When my friend saw them on Sunday she asked, excitedly, “So how was it?”

The girls answered with a shrug, “It was alright.”

“Alright?” my friend asked incredulously, “You were all so excited about it. What happened?”

One of the girls responded, “It’s just that he was so much hotter in our minds.”

When love is made real it doesn’t always look pretty. In fact it often looks like a cross.

The bane of my mornings

Most mornings I get up to go the gym at 6 a.m. Yes, it sucks the first day but by the end of the first week it's a rhythm and it does me well. My main problem with the gym isn't the earliness of it at all, actually. It's that there's someone who's always there who bothers me. I'm sorry to that person--who I'm sure doesn't read this blog or even know I exist despite our frequent encounters. It's not really her personality or anything that bothers me; I don't know her at all. It's just that she always does one thing the moment she comes in: turn on the television.

I have gradually moved away from television. I still watch occasionally, mostly with friends or when I really need to decompress, but there are times I just don't want to watch it. In the gym is one of those times, especially if it's not on something with movement. Soccer, ok. Food Network? Not ok. MTV? I will turn up the treadmill to 10 mph and just go until I'm done, because it's more painful to watch than to run.

As I'm reading in the book on Communicative Theology for Ministry in a Media Culture, I came across an idea that I think also came up recently when I was reading Madeleine L'Engle. It might not have actually been her, but I'll give her the credit because she would likely have thought this too. This is the idea of transmitter and receiver. The problem with flicking on the tv the moment we enter the room is that there is a wall between us and the images we see. They communicate to us; we don't communicate to them. That's why I'm not sure that Scharer and Hildebarth are right when they say that the "human person cannot not communicate."

Silence is blessed. Not communicating consciously allows the opportunity for the spirit to enter into me in a conscious way. That is something I do strive for. So please don't turn on the tv. I just want to run.

The Twilight of my Seminary Career

In my last semester, this is officially now the twilight of my seminary career. And so, in the midst of too many classes already, not to mention time with friends and the occasional chess tournament or frisbee game, I decided to fit in my own version of a capstone: Preaching and Pop Culture. The idea is to take pop culture topics that seem un-preachable and make them a focus of the text; i.e. read the text through their respective lenses. The goal isn't to preach an anti-pop culture message but to actually engage the framework out of which these symbols arise and ask the Luther-esque question, "What does this mean?"

It's a fascinating time for me to think about this. I'm reading and hearing about ministry in a media culture in one class and, in a very different way, applying it to ministry in another. I have to admit I don't know what to do with Twilight--the pun on which this blog post is premised. It is my first subject and challenge. I'm reading this book and thinking, "What is preachable here?" How do I, as a 24-year-old male, find what it is that draws in so many girls--women--and then direct it to Christ?

I can't tell you how many people have come up to me recently, with a book on my lap or lying next to me, and said something along the lines of, "You're not reading that, are you?" Yes. Yes, I am.

And I'm learning. I'm not sure what exactly. There are themes in this book that worry me, that make me downright scared for young people to read it. And yet, there's something behind it. I don't think girls' self-worth should be wrapped up in attractive guys (or vampires), but I do think there is a longing for something tangible, something that lasts--an eternal love that reaches through our fears. Is that what Twilight is about? Not on the surface. Not in the author's mind. Not in the minds of its readers.  And yet, is that what Twilight is about? Perhaps.

In a crazy way, my seminary twilight isn't so different. I haven't been bitten by any vampires (that I'm aware of), but as a pastor I am going to be a singularity, an outsider in many ways, but the subject of unwanted attention in others. I'm going to be mostly goodhearted but with the possibility of doing great damage. I'm going to be sparkly--ok, not exactly, but the pastoral bling is pretty sweet, no?  And most of all, I am going to be powerful beyond measure; not by my own abilities but through Christ who lives in me.