For starters, I’m about 87% sure that I’m voting for Obama, should he get the nomination. I like his nuancing of health care; I like that he’s been a community organizer and pro-bono lawyer; I like that he’s a confessed churchman for the last twenty years; I like that his family, until recently, has relatively been out of the spotlight. I even like that he’s not polished: he’s a great speechmaker, but he gets tired and shows it.
But I’m not voting in the primaries, for a few reasons:
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First, it’s raining, and I have five chapters of Augustine to outline this morning. Priorities. Then lunch with Garcia. Priorities. And then, more reading followed by more reading. Priorities.
Secondly, I’m not convinced that a change in the president will really make much difference. If I believed that superstructures really generated that much on the local level in this country, then sure, but everyone knows that the states retain a great deal of authority apart from federal income taxes and the like. I will say this: I hope that whoever gets elected has the good sense to repeal No Child Left Behind, and initiate some sort of withdrawal from Iraq, but either Barack or Hillary will do that, so I’m not that worried. But the major decisions of human life: love, death, sex, eating–these are made in localities, not in municipalities.
Third, I don’t really trust democracy that much. By that I mean the kind of reasoning that excludes religious reasoning a priori from political decisions. On the local level, again, when people really make decisions, it’s a joke to say that they bracket off their specifically religious concerns. If I’m a Christian, then to say that I’m advocating for a homeless shelter because I think it’s “morally the right thing to do” is a joke: I’m advocating for it because I believe that Jesus wants us to care for the poor. Sure, it makes long-term fiscal sense to get people off the streets, but that’s not why I argue for it.
All this to say, vote your conscience: may we submit our reasoning to the Spirit, and follow the movement of God, which is always for the reconciliation of the world with itself and with God, which is always for the return of the children to the Father, and always for the fulfilling of the commandments. I’ll enjoy leftovers and coffee: tell me how it goes out there.
Maybe I just hear about these things because I’m doing a PhD in religion, and my radar is already tuned into those kinds of issues and stories, though I suspect this one was really hard to miss. By way of recap:
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of the fastest-growing church in the U.S., has been accused of soliciting a male prostitute and using meth. By way of further irony, his church in Colorado has been especially vocal about condemning gay marriage proposals.
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When the accusations first came out, the response was flat denial. Then, the response shifted, that he had called the prostitute, and bought the meth, but used neither. Frankly, this conjured up someone else’s 1992 response to the question if they’d ever smoked pot. I didn’t buy it then either; I’m much more cynical and less inclined to buy this explanation today, as soothing as it might be to accept this whole thing as an enormous misunderstanding.
There have been a run of prominent conservative leaders whose sexual foibles have come to light in the last month, beginning with the revelation that Mark Foley had inappropriate contact with pages, continuing when it came out that Don Sherwood was beating his mistress, followed by the undoing of Ted Haggard. I’m not going to draw any conclusions, aside from the obvious: they were human, male, and subject to the passions of all creation.
In the last year, I’ve known more than one person in these circumstances, living a secret life that came out to the public, and each time, it’s staggering to hear about. Looking back….yeah, looking back, sometimes you can’t even tell. Sometimes, it comes as a massive shock to the system, like throwing a hairdryer in ice water. And in the wake, everybody gets fried: friends, families, admirers, careers, hopes, futures. I daresay you won’t see Ted Haggard in the spotlight. Anyone seen Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker anytime lately?
It’s easy to damn him as a conservative or a hypocrite, except for the fact that I’ll go ahead and say that every man I know under the age of 40–hell, every man I know–struggles with lust in some form or fashion. What, you were surprised at this one, that somehow marriage or Jesus doesn’t keep us from wanting to stick our hands on the hot stove?
I’m reminded of the scene in Super Troopers when Rabbit takes the stolen car out, and Farva busts him, and while being cuffed, Rabbit yells out, “Same team, Farva! Same team!” Same team, Ted. We’re all in this together.
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Aquinas deals with these desires in an extremely potent way in the Summa, which I won’t delve into here. In a nutshell, we have intellect and passions, both of which are created by God as good. The passions, those things we share with animals, are, like the intellect, designed to serve and enjoy God, but are subject a lot more sway than the mind. In Luther, there’s a massive conflict, that we will to do one thing and desire to do another, and so, doing good is always a struggle. For Aquinas, the two are designed to go together: we never do other than we truly desire to do. Thus, when I give in to lust, it’s only because I wanted to–if the intellect is the higher part of us, and desire the lower, then it follows thus.
What’s important to recall here is that the passions–fear, anger, desire, and all the rest–are part of our God-given faculties, and when harnassed by a vision of the Good–God, fall into line, and start craving that which is good. You ever felt in your bones that if you didn’t get loved that you were going to collapse? That’s kinda what he’s talking about. When trained towards God, the passions become not an enemy, but one’s greatest ally. Instead of wanting to do one thing and choosing another, we choose that which we desire the most, and find our joy in it fully.
So, on this Sunday, here’s to following our desires, and praying that God makes our desires and the will to the good one and the same.
Same team.
I had lunch with Shane Claiborne today, one of the founders of The Simple Way in Philadelphia. By way of brief introduction, Shane’s group in Philadelphia is one of hundreds of intentional communities scattered throughout the country which believe that the Gospel gives us the great gift of living with other people, in community and mission. When Celina was getting ready to leave for Reba Place last month, I started toying with the idea of possibly systematically visiting various communities all over the nation, to see how different places do this thing called community. I’ll keep you posted on that, but after visiting with Shane, I was reminded that yes, this indeed is something I want: intentional community.
Not roommates, not people to share bills with: community, which helps us all actualize the great gift of having our chests pulled open and our lives transformed by encounter with one another, in prayer and in reality.
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The varieties of Christian community are as wide as the coastlines, and let me hear none of that crap about them all having to look the same. I’ve been in dialogue with some folks as of late who are convinced of the absolute validity of a particular form of church, and I’ll have none of that here. For the church to be church, it must be responsive to the transformative Word, which enters a situation from within and blows off the doors as to what it can be in response, incarnating the Gospel in new and stupefying ways. I dare them to live among the Bruderhof, the Catholic Worker, the Mennonite communities, the peace churches, and to tell them that their encounter with Christ in the world is insufficient.
In our lunch, I was surprised that for the first time in a long time, I was not inspired.
I was not stirred in my soul as to the possibilities.
I was not vaulted into the third heaven with mystical dreams of what could be.
Partly, I wasn’t inspired because I’ve heard this all before. Hell, I’ve even done some of this before. The issue is not with being given creative reorganization of my existing world, nor with needing a kick in the pants to restart the engine.
Because, frankly, I’m tired of being inspired. I am ready to be transformed.
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Whereas inspiration resides primarily in the reorganization of existing furniture, transformation means that a new moving van is coming in, one that you recognize, but importing new furniture that fits the house more appropriately than you could have ever concieved. It is, in the language of Jurgen Moltmann, the gift of the future, the gift of that life which is coming to meet us from beyond ourselves. I’ve had enough of being inspired to clean up the house, to wash the dishes, and to straighten up the shelves. I’m ready for the house to be gutted and outfitted with new pipes, new wiring, stripped floors and ceilings–functional, sturdy, able.
Inspiration is the lighting of a soul for a moment; transformation is the creation of a new soul altogether, one which we could not dreamed of before seeing. What Shane and those like him present the world with is not inspiration, and let us not cheapen their example by calling them shuffled cards; what they present us with are transformations: new things which were not, new ways which could not have been, brought into being by faithful response to the God who is always beginning and forever renewing.
Now that the season finale of LOST is done, I can get back to what I need to be doing, like figuring out how I’m going to read this stack of books before I head to the farm in a week.
I’ve been reading Dupuis’ Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, an emminently readable introduction to how Christian theology might play nice with world religions. I’m only in the first few chapters, but thus far, it takes the problem a whole lot more seriously than either of the classical options of a) saying that Christianity and other religions are really just saying the same thing or b) saying that there is nothing compatible between Christian faith and other faiths. To be fair, there’s actually a good bit that can be had between, say, Islam and Christianity. Both came from the same region of the world; both claim Abraham’s bosom; both confess monotheism. This is not to say that Jesus and who he was doesn’t create a chasm between them at this point, but in terms of what Scripture has to say about righteous pagans, there’s no reason, Dupuis argues, to write off other religions in toto just because they are another religion.
What he offers as one possible solution to inter-faith cooperation is a little less helpful: the old “we’re doing common work for the good of humankind” option. While I completely believe that part of the Gospel work is one of enacting humanity’s benefit on its behalf, I’m a little less certain that the correlary to this is that if one does the work of the Gospel, then one must be committed to the Gospel. The argument that, because in the life of the Christian, belief and action are inseparably connected, that one may appear prior to the other in either order, hasn’t totally convinced me yet. For one, if you allow what a visible work is to take priority over how one arrives at this work, it makes religious commitment ultimately unnecessary, and thus, the whole question of inter-religious dialogue unneccesary. Second, what one faith hopes to accomplish in a work may be different than what I hope for it. As Christians, we profess that while we are called to be witness in the world, what we witness to is hope, not finality of the present. No work in and of itself may ever be rightly called a finished product if we hope that what is coming will ultimately outstrip it.
Objections aside, Dupuis argues, and I agree, that God is at work providentially in world religions, that there is a place for them, and that there is always more than meets the eye. This is not to say that I would encourage a Muslim to be a better Muslim or a pagan to be a better pagan, but to say that everything’s not lost, and that the faith of Abraham was ultimately in God and the promises of God. So, though we might find ourselves committed to different ends by the same means, Christians should find those common means and continue to witness to that hope which has found us. Open your hands to whatever God brings and receive it with thanks, as a partner in the sharing of the new life.
“God’s own household rule, God’s oikonomia, becomes specifically embodied through doctrine and particular core practices, and these two are inherently related…They identify, or mark, the church as the space of God’s oikonomia.”
–Reinhard Hutter, from Bound to Be Free
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With this opening quote, let’s begin, before we start thinking about how Jesus relates to politics, about the church which is Christ’s body in the world today. First things first: too often, the temptation to rush as individuals to accomplish the work of God forgets that all that we do, we do as part of this body of Christ, the church. We are scattered to the four winds, but all that we do, we do as one body. Thus, our individual acts, in all realms, bear great importance for how the church is. If we are all “in Christ”, it follows that what we do cannot help but affect all the others there as well.
What kind of body is the church? Is it a gathering of social beings, a country club, a group of choice? Rather, the church is that body which is the body of Jesus Christ, according to Paul. And as such, it lives in two worlds and watches and acts as the Spirit draws these two worlds together. In the church, a new way of life emerges; in the church, a new vision of reality dawns and breaks forth, and with it, a new understanding of how people relate to one another. No longer do we listen to John Locke or Adam Smith and say that when everyone seeks their own good, somehow the good for everyone magically bubbles up. Rather, we say that everyone seeks the good of their neighbor, and in that, the law of love is fulfilled.
This life, the new life of God’s economy, spills out over all of our dealings and in all of our decisions, including the political. It has to. How is a much more complicated question.
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1) If the church is indeed a harbinger of God’s new world,
2) and if the life of the church is the foretaste of the “ought to be”
3) and if the life of the church is so hopelessly screwed up that it doesn’t look any different than the Senate floor,
4) we are in a whole lot of trouble.
I talked with a friend who just started a church job last night, and listened to multiple stories of ridiculous arguments that were going on. To give one example, they voted on whether or not it was appropriate to join hands in prayer. I wish I was kidding. Is this the new life of the church from which any hope or new vision of the world should radiate forth? I look at the work done by Habitat for Humanity and World Hunger Relief International and proclaim with glad voice that this is what the church looks like when it knows who it is: believing, acting, driven by a vision of the world that embraces the world through the Spirit and enacts the good of the world on its behalf. Before any kind of action can take place, the church must be concious of who it is–that it is a people who are in some sense starting over, free to follow their Lord in the work of recreating what can be, not propping up what is already dead.
I’m starting a new series. FYI.
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Today, I took a respite from my normal community and went over to University Baptist Church, partly for a change of pace, and partly to see Rob Bell speak. He’s kinda the next big voice in the college scene. When I was in college, it was the Passion stuff, with Louie Giglio at the helm. Since then, the Emerging Church has come onto the scene in a big way, with a lot of college students trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian in a world where so much of the Christian vocabulary has really lost its distinctiveness. But that’s a whole other conversation.
Today, Rob talked about the pre-crucifixion week, narrating why exactly Jesus found himself on the cross. On one level, confessionally, I look at Jesus and say that he was mediating a way to God the Father for me. One another level, this is really a political mess, which is what he was talking about. I’ll summarize the main points of the argument:
1) The time of Jesus was a tense one for Jews, with the Romans occupying the land, famine decimating the population, a small powerful minority controlling the region, and a religious hierarchy stifling the people.
2) Jesus, preaching a message of another kingdom, sounds for all the world to the Romans like a Zealot, and to the Pharisees like a prophet. Anyone who comes in talking about the kingdom of God, after all, is going to find himself right in line with the prophets of Israel, challenging the nation to turn again to its true king.
3) Passover, the celebration of the children of Israel being liberated from a foreign oppressor, becomes a politically volatile time, especially when you consider that less than 20 years earlier, a revolt in Jerusalem during Passover left 2,000 Jews dead. As such, when Jesus approaches Jerusalem on a donkey, behaving like a liberator, he’s challenging the existing system which has tyrannized the people, kept them in spiritual oppression, and led them astray.
4) Jesus is thus executed for being a political/religious troublemaker. Over 2,000 speaking of God’s concern for the poor and oppressed highlight this as God’s ultimate suffering with the least of the world.
Variations on this basic story differ from point to point, but that’s the gist of it. On one level, this is correct: Jesus was a political threat in a very real way. But here’s where the story gets a little tricky: when you start talking about salvation in only relational terms, that Jesus was a religious/ political leader who sought to free the people to worship and to restore right political and economic relations, it’s really easy to create too close a correspondence between our world and Jesus. If the cross is God’s demonstration of the preference for the poor, two things happen: 1) Economic condition becomes linked with favor, only in reverse. It’s a really bad connection to say that wealth is God’s favor; it’s equally bad to say that little money equals God’s favor. 2) We never consider the awful possibility that we are on the side of the oppressor, the rich, the powerful of the world.
Where we stand in the matrix of oppressor/oppressed, rich/poor is such a relative stance. In all of our life, we participate in both systems; we unwittingly step on others, and are outrageously stepped on. But to absolutize one position or the other is to say that there is only what we see to the story. It’s real easy for me to want to kick Bernie Evers in the face, but this ignores the fact that I spend way too much money every summer cooling off my room, thus participating in the oppression of Nigerians or Venezuelans. To say that the Gospel message is about right economics only is to say that we can extract ourselves from the economic situation and be able to ever stand in a place of right action.
This is not to say that the Gospel has nothing to do with economics. I’m betting my life on the fact that it very much does: it impacts the kinds of practices we support with our dollar. The Gospel says that my resources are not my own, and that those in need should get what they need. The Gospel tells me that the argument that welfare is a bad idea is a total load, if for no other reason than there are some who don’t get the chance to earn their bread. A society which refuses to take responsibility for the factors it creates that cripple people is a society which has become so atomized that it will eventually splinter into a million self-interests.
But to reduce the Gospel to only economicscannot be the end. To be quite clear, this is not where Bell ends–his sermon ended with a call to a revolutionary way of life, to follow Jesus in a broader way that embraces more than just one’s spirit. And to preach to a crowd of private-college kids that the Gospel demands a different lifestyle–one of service, sacrifice, and social activism–is a great start. But first things first. In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at some of the facets of this. Stay tuned.
