A Labyrinthine Journey

Yesterday as a prelude to the sermon (on the healing of Jairus’ daughter and the healing of the women with the 12 year old bleeding disorder, which was the real focus of the service and message) I had a few words to say on the upcoming July 4th Independence Day celebration us Yanks in the USA use as a good excuse to grill, play outside and shoot off fireworks.

I reflected a little on our 230 year old experiment in independence, an experiment in freedom. It is still an experiment because we have to keep relearning what living in a free society is all about, reaffirming the principles of true democracy, and recommitting ourselves to being citizens in a just society with each new generation and with the continuous changes in our history and our world. Some times in our history we have done better and some times in our history we have done worse. I will leave it to the historians to later filter out when those times are because it is hard to really see everything when we are in it. Though I will confess that I am more than a little bit worried lately.

I considered the example of freedom of speech and expression. It is easy for us to promote this when it is our own speech and the expression of a point of view which we like, but it is more difficult to trumpet freedom of speech when the views expressed are ones we do not agree with or the means used to relay the message are hard for us to understand.

As another example, I reflected on freedom of worship. For us it is very important when we feel threatened that we cannot worship in the ways appropriate for our faith and belief (for us now in Protestant USA the threat is much less than we might feel) and we are grateful for the opportunity to live out our heart’s choice of faith. Yet it becomes difficult to also honor the choices of others with different beliefs to be true to their own hearts and souls in faith and to live out their own manner of worship and spiritual expression.

There is a lot of tension in the challenge these and other situations present to us in living and continuing to build a society that upholds freedom as its cornerstone. Yet, as we celebrate this Independence Day with picnics and fireworks and time at home or wherever we are (I have a cousin in Baghdad who has more interesting context for this day) we should be thankful for what we have so far, but we must also know that the greater challenges to living out our freedom might come from simply living with our neighbors in our own towns and cities who also desire freedom and who by virtue of being different than how we see ourselves find it harder if not impossible to find. That will be the true acid test for our affirmation of being part of a society based on freedom.

Happy Independence Day USA. May the experiment we are an active part of continue to be truly lived out for many years to come.

Enough preaching for tonight.

For those who are celebrating, have a fun and safe day.

“…and it is Us.” – Pogo

It is hard enough for Christians to live out Jesus’ words “Blessed are the Peacemakers” in our society today with many leaders linking uncritical support of war with the message of the church. It is difficult enough for us to practice forgiveness and respect (not to mention love) for all of our neighbors when we struggle with our own interpersonal hurt and pain. We even find it more of a challenge when we and our children are desensitized to violence through news, television, movies and secular video games. Now we have to try to preach the Prince of Peace with the name of Christ being used to justify a fantasy world based on the old Inquisition idea of convert or die. I found many references to the following story in my blog-reading today.

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game… Talk To Action | The Purpose Driven Life Takers (Updated)

Frankly, this is pretty sick. There is a part of me that is hoping this isn’t true, but there is another part of me that is afraid it is.

I am ashamed that there are people who created and who will promote this in the name of Christ and will mess up many people’s view of what the rest of us in the church are trying to do to bring the transforming and healing grace of Jesus to a hurting world.

The tragic irony of the premise of this game is that the very kind of religious based hate and persecution that is promoted in the game is what is condemned in every other part of the world by non-Christians. We see it in Iraq with the sectarian civil war there. We see it in Israel and Palestine. We hear about it in Indonesia or Chad or Sudan or anyone of dozens of places in the world. As long as it is against Christians we cry out in anguish. But by embracing the idea of this game the world sees Christians as having no integrity and no righteousness.

And they will not believe anything we now say because some have usurped the name of Christ for personal and political power and gain.

I am angry and deeply saddened. God weeps for the Church that thinks this is gospel, good news. It isn’t.

Here are some other blogs I have seen who have commented on this. I can see how the true message of Christ is being lost.

• Crooks and Liars
• The Moderate Voice
• Pandagon and Pam’s House Blend
• Independent Christian Voice
• Dependable Renegade

Stewardship is one of those issues that we tend to want to limit. If we limit our attitude toward stewardship to just include the money we give to the church then we can make a choice based on how we feel about the church and feel good about what we have done and then try not to think about it anymore.

But stewardship is a question of how we live our entire lives. This is harder to accept because then there is no limit to what in our lives comes under the realm of God. Yet isn’t that what a disciple is about? Living our entire lives under the transforming grace of God?

One of my weaknesses is television (the other big one is the computer). This little article got me thinking about stewardship of time and life.

ReligioNews: You’re watching too much TV if…

I ran across this wonderful quote from the late Rev. William Sloan Coffin:

If you love the good, you must hate evil; or else you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love the good, you become a damn good hater! And the world has enough of that kind of activist.

(hat tip to both David Schaub and Professor Bainbridge)

That is so very important for all of us to remember in almost any context or endeavor that we find ourselves passionately involved with. There is a fine line between love and hate many times that we can cross over the line without thinking about it. I think it is because both emotional responses to the world involve our choosing something as very important to us. If we focus on the benefits of this wonderfully important thing then we choose to live out of our passion. If we focus on the emptiness and the lack of the thing that is missed and important we can be lost in our anger and hate.

Too many people find it much easier to be motivated by hate and lack. It is too easy to see what is Not and to feel empty and lost and hurt. It is much easier to complain about something and to be filled with the fires of anger. Fear and pain sell. The person yelling in the street about the wrong is more easily noticed than the person working to change for the good. They both can be on the same side of things but can miss each other completely.

We must choose to remember what it is we love more than focusing on the emptiness and sense of lack of not having our love. We must do the hard work sometimes of digging behind our anger and pain and discover and then hold onto the good we love that spawns the fire.

Our lives are served much better by fulfilling the fires of our passions and our loves rather than just being satisfied with the dying ember of something lost which we can’t quite remember. And how much more good is done in our world when we are energized by our love of the good instead of simply dropping the bombs of our hate around us. Sadly, I don’t think I have to work hard to point out where the literal, metaphorical, and the rhetorical bombs have left lives, families, churches, synagogues, mosques, communities and nations in ruins.

For the good of our worlds (of all sizes) our focus needs to move away from simply looking at what must be torn down and needs to return to what must be built in place of the ruins.

I hate to write about Pat Robertson again, but he sets himself up so easily. And I guess what gets me about him is that he purports to be a Minister of the Church and Gospel of Jesus Christ. Here is what caught me this weekend.

Parade Magazine, Sunday, March 26, 2006, Walter Scott’s Personality Parade

Q. Pat Robertson, host of the 700 Club, just published Miracles Can Be Yours Today. What miracle does he pray for?

A. “I have prayed that somehow, thanks to the goodness of the Lord, we would have a change in the composition of the Supreme Court,” Robertson, 76, tells us, “We’ve had two new justices already, and I’m sure one more is coming. That’s miracle enough for me.”

Come on, Pat! Where is the focus of your being? Who or what are you truly serving in this world? My reading of the Bible would lead me to pray for so many more wonderful miracles than something dealing with political ambition and government bureaucracy.

How about a few of these ideas:

• A true and lasting peace in the Middle East where all sides work together to improve the situation of each person and people group living in the region?
• Leaders in every nation setting aside their arrogance and self-serving to work out ways to help the people they are supposedly serving to be able to receive the health care they need, to find a satisfying way of living that truly supports their family, and that reduces people’s fears and compulsion to resort to violence just to get what they need.
• How about some cures and ends to AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, abuse, cancer, malnutrition, and other handicapping disease. How about clean water and safe shelter for everyone. How about every child growing up knowing that they are loved and enabled to explore and fulfill the potential God created them with.
• Or to get personal. How about freedom from fear and freedom for true intimacy with my wife, my family and my God? That would be a pretty big miracle for me.
• One more. The miracle of not thinking of myself first whenever I think of miracles, but not denying the blessing with which God created each of us (even myself).

How about you? Go ahead and add some more ideas for miracles that you would pray for that would be better than Pat’s. in the comments.

There have been times when I have been in discussion with people and be berated for trying to steer a middle course. The topic of discussion extended from theology, religion, philosophy, psychology, and even politics. I will hear phrases like “You know what you find in the middle of the road, don’t you? Dead skunks.” Or if that isn’t graphic enough, “It isn’t safe to straddle a fence, you know, especially if it is a barbed wire one.”

Unfortunately, what that has usually done for me is to lead me to avoid discussion on those issues with those people because they have made it clear that they won’t even begin to give my viewpoint (or any viewpoint other than their own) a hearing.
Which makes me sort of wish that I was from New York state and had Rep. Boehlert as my representative in the House. I would have been proud to vote for him. Yet, it is only as he retires that I hear about him. I found this reference to his retirement in The Moderate Voice.

“My manner of representation and voting record of more than two decades has earned for me the label of moderate.

I’m proud of the label, fervently believing that the overwhelming majority of thinking people reject the extremes of the left and right.”

(Read the rest of the report at The Moderate Voice – Rep. Boehlert to Retire)

The rest of the report talks about the importance in his mind (and I would wholeheartedly agree) for someone to not be lost in the extremes. I’m sorry to say that I think a large part of our overwhelming societal anxiety is fed by and even nurtured by the extremes. Yet, the extremes of any genre of thought (from theology, to psychology, to politics, etc) are stuck in a fused dance of opposites.

That doesn’t lend itself to independent thought or even creative ideas. We are fed a steady diet of the same old stories and arguments that have been around for a long time. I am glad to be a part of the center where we strive to hold to the idea of seeking creative solutions to problems and to find fresh approaches to the ever changing vagaries of life.

Sherwood Boehlert, I wish I had known you, but I am glad you have been there. Now I just hope others can come to be the bridges we need not just on the Hill, but in our council chambers and statehouses and coffeeshops and vestries.

I’ve been noticing the ongoing brouhaha amongst the blogosphere about many stores using Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas in their advertising and corporate phraseology during this shopping season. As I reflect on the issue, I am not sure it is that bad an idea.

But not for the common reason of political correctness that many cite, but from my faith in the Savior of Christmas.

One of the objections is that it commercializes Christmas. I hate to say it, incase you haven’t noticed, Christmas has been commercialized for a long time. The whole season now is devoted to encouraging greed, avarice, pride, vain-glory and a host of other vices and soul-traps. This is reason number one why I support the move in the corporate world to make it Happy Holidays.

I can’t find anything in my Bible or in my faith that tells me that Jesus would be overly pleased with the outrageousness we have grafted onto the season that began as an act of faith devotion. I believe that Jesus died so that I might have abundant life not so I could get a really good discount on a self cleaning razor and some really warm slippers (my beard doesn’t want the first, but my cold toes would really like the second). I think we believers should be glad to make some separation between the holiday orgy of spending and advertising so we can be clearer about leading people to find their true hope not in the latest gadget but in the child/boy/man/savior we proclaim.

Let the marketers have the Holiday, we will better love the Christ without the extra.

Which raises my other thought about Happy Holidays versus Merry Christmas. Just who is to proclaim the birth of Christ anyway?

Why are we as Christians concerned that non-Christians say the name of Christ? Wasn’t one of emphases in the early church that only one who believes in Christ can/should utter the name of Christ? Isn’t it a bit hypocritical of us asking people in the larger society who don’t believe to invoke the Sacred Name in such a heretical way? And what about corporations? Last time I checked they didn’t have souls. They have soul-filled folks in them, but a corporation cannot be Christian. Why should we insist that a soul-less organization take over our responsibility for telling the story of Christ.

And therein lies my point. We are the ones who should be telling the story. If it is getting lost in the shuffle and the crowd, it isn’t the fault of the company or the clerk who is trying to earn a living for their family. The fault is ours.

Sadly, for some the controversy becomes a smokescreen. I want to lift the veil a bit and say that we are the ones that are failing to be true to the season. We want to stuff and the gadgets and we don’t want to show the compassion or faith.

We can’t do anything to stop the out of control nature of what our society is doing to the holiday season. But we can within our own lives and families and communities reclaim the sacred story with our love and hope in the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.

That said, I think I will get that robe and slipper set for my wife and I saw these other things for my daughters. But then I will also make sure to put more than a few pennies in the Salvation Army pot and will make another contribution to hurricane and disaster relief. For me they will all be Christmas gifts, and I think that is where the celebration of Christmas belongs, in our hearts and homes, not in the profane world of commerce.

Another entry in a series of reflections from Ed Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix [1999 The Edwin Friedman Estate, Bethesda, MD].

One of the interesting things about Ed Friedman is that before his death he advised clergy of all kinds as a Rabbi, he challenged the thinking of family systems therapists as one who trained with Dr Murray Bowen, he also advised leaders in corporate America as well as government and military. I can’t help but wonder about his thoughts in the current state of things in the Beltway and our society today. But his book gives some help in that direction. Today’s reflection quote comes from a series of concerns he has as he looked at American society on page 10 of his Introduction.

A regressive counter-evolutionary trend in which the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas, where adaptation is constantly toward weakness rather than strength, thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of an institution rather than toward the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the most creatively motivated.

This isn’t really about evolution it is about maturity. I think he captures the important value of being in the process of growing and maturing and taking more responsibility in our life.

I confess that I am generally a supporter of the ACLU and while a centrist and independent politically, I do tend to drift to the left on issues while trying to stay out of the muddy waters of the extremes. Yet, if I have any quarrel with the ACLU and with the litigiousness of our society it is related to Ed’s point about being oriented toward weakness. The cases we usually hear about in the media are the ones where people are easily offended and think that is injury. Offence is not really being hurt. True oppression can sometimes masquerade in that way, but if we let the weaker members of our systems call the shots we truly stop growing only at the level of the weakest link. In another part of his book he has a problem with empathy. However, challenge and strength does not truly hurt and destroy people (torture and abuse is ALWAYS wrong). There comes a point where standing up for one’s self will “offend” some people, but we have to live our lives, not someone else’s.

As I read that, I find it hard as a preacher of the Gospel of grace that calls Christians to be bringers of hope and healing to people who are poor in body and spirit to write that, but I think there is a difference between being compassionate for people who are lost and being pulled into their wilderness with them.

The image I like to use is one where you have fallen into a deep hole. Who would you need to help you? Someone who empathizes with your situation and crawls into the pit with you to feel your pain, or someone who sees your need and goes to get a rope which they then use to pull you out of the pit.

Being oriented to the weakest in our families, churches, communities, societies (or even the weakest part of my own spiritual life) allows them to determine the agenda. In every church I have served it is a struggle to keep focused on helping people grow toward their strength, which always involves responding to challenge and struggle. It is far too easy to let the pain (real and perceived) determine what we do.

When I worked out, the fitness center I used shared space with the physical therapy department of the hospital. In talking with the therapists, we shared a commonality: without the therapist (preacher/spiritual director/counselor) there to push people beyond their pain point, people will not get better and will not grow.

Maturity is about raising our threshold for pain and going just a little bit further then we went before. That is the challenge of the creative visionary: to go further in our thoughts and living then we have gone before (or at least for a while). And that is why it is so hard to seek to be one: it is just so hard to keep on pushing people beyond where they are comfortable.

The only way I find to be able to do that (and at the moment I am in a low tide part of the cycle for this) is to be very focused on the living relationship with the Creator who is seeking to grow ME. As God works in my life (through meditation on the Word and a growing contemplative life in prayer) I will be stretched and supported so I can continue to invite others to be a part of what God is stretching us all toward doing. For our good, and for the good of all the levels of community we find ourselves to live in.

Got back from a short vacation and found this story in The Moderate Voice. Follow it to a very interesting couple stories bringing some cogent criticism on some of the more media-covered religious right lately.

The Moderate Voice – Jewish Leader Condemns Religious Right (UPDATED) A prominent Jewish leader has blasted the religious right in a very public way.

What has been validly brought out in the commentary in those stories is that this is true of the religious right in any religion. However, I would want to go further and say that the process is true in any extreme movement, religious or not, right or left, north or south, or west or east. The difficulty comes from the gridlock of imagination that comes from the polarities.

This is not my original idea, though I whole-heartedly believe it. (Be patient, I need to set this up) For a few days, I am going to dig out some quotes from Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman (Bethesda, Maryland) who before is death in 1996 was a major interpreter of the Bowen Theory of Family Emotional Process through a well-known book, Generation to Generation. At his death he was in process of writing another book, and it is from that book I will be quoting. The books title says a lot, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Upon his death, his publisher dropped him, but his wife and estate published his unfinished manuscript in 1999. These quotes are copyright the Edwin Friedman Estate.

Now back to polarized thinking. Ed Friedman believed that we were a society that has been imaginatively stuck in gridlock and needed to be unstuck. Hear Rabbi Friedman on polarized thought, then I will be back with a couple more comments.

The Third characteristic of imaginatively gridlocked relationship systems is polarized either/or, black/white, all-or-nothing thinking, and eventually, similar forms of relating that restrict the options of the mind [emphasis mine] Paradigms that might begin simply as theoretical differences become hardened into intense, oppositional, emotional commitments over even the most unemotional subject matter. [p. 45, A Failure of Nerve]

This is where I expand the view of Rabbi Yoffie from just applying to the religious right to the religious left as well. In the United Methodist Church we have our share of both and it is always painful to watch them battle on the floor of conference (or in the media of the church). It is obvious that they not only cannot listen to each other, but they will not. And it is the choice to restrict the options of their minds that causes the most damage to whatever system they are in whether it is the church the synagogue, the society, the house, the senate, the home, the work, the blogosphere or even the world stage.

For any of our systems to survive the vagaries of life we must listen to all the options available to us and we must be ever looking for the one that responds best to the challenges before us. Otherwise the storms and the struggles will win.

A little more from Ed that points a bit toward the way out.

Whether one is baking a cake of examining an institutional mix, the interaction of ingredients is almost always a function of the temperature and pressure of the environment. When troubled couples, for example, make a breakthrough, often the issues that they have differed over have not gone away but the two sides have become less reactive to one another. [p. 46, A Failure of Nerve]

That is one of the key reasons I find myself an independent moderate. I don’t have to play the reactive role. I don’t have to stick to the script of my polarity. If I can stay unscorched from the fires of the edges and listen to the points of view, somewhere in all that noise of words is a composition of the truth that will lead us through our current situation.

Unfortunately what often has to happen is that the polar ice-scripts have to experience melt-down before they will begin to see that maybe they don’t have the only answer (the arrogance that Rabbi Yoffie refers to in his comments) and that somewhere in the mix of ideas and ingredients and relationships comes inspiration.

I always hope we don’t have to experience that, but we usually do.

This concern related to the secret CIA prisons and Mr. Frist’s greater concern for the leaks rather than the continued (yet denied) existence of torture in our intelligence gathering community led me to find this link from David Schraub (another blog I find myself looking to often lately.)

The Debate Link: Well I am a Twitch Concerned

Well I am a bit concerned. Because I think that abandoning core American values is not something we should turn away from. As Sullivan puts it elsewhere:

We can win this war without destroying the very civilization we are fighting for. We can win without losing our soul. Any other kind of victory is a euphemism for defeat.

That’s why I care. Because we aren’t winning the war on terror, a war against global extremism, if we ourselves are terrorizing, if we become the extremists. Torture is an extreme position. It should and must be beyond the pale.

It also parallels my reaction against Pat Robertson and his peculiar brand of religious politics. It goes against life in all its forms.

Last summer I was at a retreat and heard Dr. Elaine Robinson talk about the gospel of Jesus calling us to a life-centered way of being. In her book
These Three she writes these words:

The humble response of love. When our loves and lives are reoriented by God’s love, then the principle of life becomes central. The gospel, the good news of God’s love for humanity in Christ and the Holy Spirit is a life-centered discourse, promoting the well-being of the whole of creation. Humanity has a particular responsibility for promoting restoration because we bear the lion’s share of culpability. (page 155)

I like that term life-centered because it says something more than being pro-life (a word that unfortunately has been co-opted by some extreme groups so much that it has almost lost its meaning. To be truly life-centered in my understanding is not only to care for life in others, but to care for the life within us as well.

What do you gain by becoming a dragon to combat a dragon? When the battle is over you still have a dragon left over, even if you win.