We are called to develop a trust system.

Like I was saying last night, relationships in the community, whether it is the church community or the city community take trust if they are to flourish. The proverb says:

One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. (18:24 NIV)

On the one hand, there is wickedness and superficial gunk that is messing up the togetherness we’d like to experience. There are friends who pretend to be friends. There are companions who do nothing but chatter; they fill up time but not your heart. There are acquaintances who remain superficial; they never attempt mutuality or sacrificially give. There are a lot of people who are fine for sharing a drink in a noisy bar, but they don’t bind themselves.

On the other hand, there is a friend who is worthy of the title — it is possible! There are people who will go deep, who will connect, who are real, who can be relied upon. Those are the kindred souls with whom we feel bound our whole lives. We want that.

Jesus is that kind of friend who sticks “closer than a brother.” And Jesus is moving into the world to make friends and make more friends like himself. We’re moving with him when we  dare to look at what the world is really like (and ourselves!) and try to figure out how to be like brothers and sisters in the world.

I think the Inquirer did an OK job of lamenting the state of relationships in the Philadelphia region last week. They made a graphic that served to highlight the level of mistrust in Philadelphia and Camden. It is at the left. Since 2003 in Philadelphia and Camden, the number of murders almost equaled the number of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq during the course of the war. That is a shocking comparison.

It is worth being shocked about, but I have to point out that it is a false comparison. We have enough self-esteem issues without the Inquirer making it worse with misleading graphics! The highest number of soldiers in Iraq was in 2008 when there were about 158,000. That is less than one-tenth the number of people in Philly/Camden. What’s more, the comparison is grossly misleading because upwards to 127,000 Iraqi civilians have been documented casualties of the war. In case you are bad at math, that’s nearly thirty-seven times the number of U.S. soldiers killed, and it is also just the number of documented casualties. So it was actually much, much safer to live in Philly during the Iraq war.

Nevertheless, such violence from your neighbor: a teenager or mentally unglued person with a gun no one will regulate, a drug dealer with an automatic weapon, a soldier or insurgent with bombs and weapons in your neighborhood, a super-rich country flying drones overhead, none of it makes for trusting relationships. The proverbs note this.

A violent person entices their neighbor
and leads them down a path that is not good. (16:29)

The Inquirer made us feel like we are terrible (again). I think it was important for them to tell the truth. They tried. They also pointed out the valiant people who have been trying to undo the violence every year since 2003 and beyond. Someone in the organization either procured or made a map of every homicide in the city. Here are the murders in the immediate area of our building at Broad and Washington since Circle of Hope began in 1997.

Many people have been “lead down a path that is not good.” We are called to be the antidote, along with good people who would painstakingly make a murder map so we can see what is going on. The proverbs invite us to trust those who can be seen to deserve it, because they are the cement of society. Jesus invites us to be the cement of society. We can start by being trustworthy and daring to trust another. We can build cells, teams, congregations, and a network that is devoted to building a trust system. The Circle of Hope proverb in the title says we are convicted to do just that.

Winning the Right to Be Heard

Gingrich is attacking Romney this week to try to get the upper hand in the South Carolina primary. He calls Romney the “King of Bain” who eliminated thousands of jobs as the leader of a management consulting firm. Gingrich has managed to make people feel sorry for Romney, which is not that easy. The front-runner’s new defenders say he was just a practitioner of “creative destruction” or in nicer terms “innovation,” which is the essence of capitalism.

Not interested? I’m not surprised. Although if you are reading blogs, you might be interested in things normal people turned off long ago. Today, I am thinking that people are getting less interested in the rantings of our politicians all the time because the thin veil of their manipulative mendacity is worn very thin. Even in Iowa, which, to hear the media tell it, has become a big tea party, the registered Republican turnout for the caucus declined from the 2008 number to 19.9%. This happened after the candidates spent over 51 million dollars campaigning, about $420 for each Republican who showed up.

The reality show Republican debates did not inspire you? The expensive ads by campaigns and superpacs did not move you? I am not surprised. It makes me wonder about whether anything can move us. In light of that wonder, I am again relying on incarnation.

What the politicians epitomize (apart from creative destruction, of course) is the same kind of speechifying that churches have practiced for generations. The politicians get up in a pulpit and relate ideas in hopes of convincing people to share their point of view and vote them into power. Their point of view does not necessarily need to have any relation to who they are or even what they actually do. Gingrich can talk about protecting marriage while being a serial adulterer. Obama can talk like a populist while being funded by the banks he bails out. Professional ministers are regularly exposed as not much different. They don’t win the right to be heard by actually relating as humans. They win the battle for power by appearing to be beyond normal discourse.

The phrase I am trying to get at is “winning the right to be heard.” All week we have been talking about “incarnational mission” around here. “Incarnational” is a buzz word among Christians these days, but incarnation has been God’s missional methodology from the moment Jesus was born of a woman. A purposeful life that is, by nature, incarnational is not difficult to imagine, if one is looking at what Jesus does and not just what he says. God got a hearing by becoming one of us, and continues to guide us as one who “comes alongside” in the Holy Spirit.

I learned about winning the right to be heard as a freshman in college. I kind of bumped in to God humbly working to be heard by me as I was unwittingly practicing winning the right to be heard by my new friends. I had basically deserted my pulpit-centered Baptist church as a senior in high school as I wandered around in the wilderness of depression and doubt. I came out on the other side having met God in significant ways. I was so motivated that I decided to introduce myself to my dorm hall as a Christian. I did this in ways that make me cringe a bit now, but they turned out to be strangely effective methods. People became Christians. I was not a good missionary, but the fact that I existed was weird enough to get some attention. I had no method but to be who I was; that was all I really knew how to do.

I had no pulpit, and what I did say was not particularly impressive. But I did exist. I did not hide who I was. I was an incarnation, which is the essence of evangelism. This experience at an impressionable age solidified a truth in me that has stuck with me my whole life: God can use anyone. It also helped me understand that being relatively normal is the best way to deliver the extraordinary. God became a regular human in Jesus, born of a wonderful, but relatively typical woman and the impact was extraordinary.

Unlike how the politicians and others vying for power work out their incessant warfare, demanding and buying the right to be heard, conquering us with old ideas masquerading as the latest thing, I think Christians should win the right to be heard by being regular people who come up alongside others and persistently exist. We enter the conversation as ourselves in Christ, not as a proponent of some ideology beyond us. We have the relationship with God we have as who we are and we reveal that just like we tell any other story that allows someone who cares to understand us. If we ever gain a sympathetic ear for who we are and Who we have come to know, it will probably be less about how powerfully we communicate or manipulate than it will be because we are real.

Our faith does not need $51 million dollars behind it to make it real. Jesus’ life, and Martin Luther King’s for that matter, were powerful because of who they were and what they did, not merely because of what they said. So I am convicted in 2012 to have a year of incarnational mission. It is a new era full of a new variation of people who seem to have turned off the powerful manipulators beaming down on them, for the most part. I think a lot of people think Jesus is beaming down on them in a similar coercive way. But he isn’t doing that. He’s still like the baby, now crucified and risen. Like Jesus, I want to win the right to be heard, so people can see that I am not some ideological parott and so they can better see Jesus. Whether I am effective at that mission or not is important to me. But I think Jesus will manage to be real, regardless of my ability, as I have always experienced him to be.

Us Cowboys and Alien Technology

To begin with, smart people expressing the zeitgeist:

“You’re playing God.”
“Somebody has to!”
Steve Martin, The Man with Two Brains.

And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra II 12

I watched the best movie I never heard of in 2011 on pay-per-view in the Poconos Saturday. Did you know that Cowboys and Aliens cost $163 million dollars to make? As we watched it, the women in the room laughed out loud when one came to the realization that, “This movie is an extended study of Daniel Craig’s behind!” I had missed that feature, but they were essentially right.

What I was not missing was the thinking behind the comic book. We have an ongoing ambivalence about technology and an ongoing hope that “us cowboys” can save humanity from being taken over by it. In case you haven’t seen the movie, Daniel Craig is a cowboy. (He plays the part straight, but Harrison Ford is winking conspiratorially at us through most of the picture). Craig is abducted by aliens but escapes with one of their powerful devices on his left arm. He is a cowboy who learns quickly how to fight like an alien. I’d say it was a hoot to watch this, but that would not be enough. It elicited many hoots on many levels. Netflix it for sure — watch the cowboys save humanity.

Thank God some Jesus-followers are also considering what becoming posthuman might mean (not just Steven Spielberg and Steve Martin)! Circle of Hope leaders have been trying to come up with our own “theology of technology” for the past couple of years and we can’t do it. Nevertheless, we sort of have alien devices attached to us. We need to answer the ultimate questions attached to the attachments, “Why not renounce our human limits and accept transcendence? Why talk about God when we are as good as gods?”

The questionable activities that demand answers are proliferating. The Enlightenment and the humanist perspective convinced everyone that progress was inevitable, that life is a grand adventure, and that reason, science, and good will would free us from the confines of the past. People are taking that logic to its predictable extreme and saying that we can attain higher peaks by applying our intelligence, determination, and optimism to break out of the human chrysalis. They argue that evolution, despite our efforts, has channeled our behavior in particular directions built into our neurology. Our bodies and brains restrain our capacities. Supposedly, our creativity is struggling within the boundaries of human intelligence, imagination, and concentration. People think we can beat that.

It is easy to see that brilliant people are certainly trying hard to break out of the chrysalis. The technology they are creating is the dominant force shaping the emerging postmodern world. I know I am dependent on various information, communication, and transportation technologies. With advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, that dependence will increase. But my dependence (and the movie-maker’s dependence) is accompanied by a deep ambivalence. For many, technology symbolizes the faith of the postmodern world, but it is an ambivalent faith encapsulating both hopes for and fears of the future.

I don’t underestimate people who call themselves extropist or transhumanist. I appreciate that they are being philosophical rather than advancing the cause of chrysalis-breaking under the banner of improving technology. I had an argument last week about whether our church should adopt a technology merely because it was faster, when I thought the adoption had a lot of other ramifications that were unexplored. I met with a few blank stares. At least the philosophers are having an argument rather than just buying an ap.

The philosophers are justifying how we have already taken our first steps along the road to posthumanity. We have begun to directly alter our genetic structure to remedy “nature’s failures.” We use drugs to modify our psychology, enhance our concentration, and slow brain aging. Research into more specific and powerful neurochemical modifiers is going to speed up  how we apply new tools from molecular biology, computer-assisted molecular design, and brain imaging.

The merging of human and machine is advancing. Machines are becoming more organic, self-modifying, and intelligent. At the same time, we are beginning to incorporate our technology into our selves. We began with pacemakers, artificial joints, and contact lenses. We’re far beyond that, now. The government is developing artificial retinas. Microelectrodes can be electrochemically coupled to our brains. Computers and their interfaces rapidly evolve to fit us: from mainframes and text-based interfaces to PCs, hand-held devices and voice-recognition. Even I played Fruit Ninja on voice-recognition Kinect last Friday! (Big weekend, people!) Surely we’ll be called to implant a computer in the name of buying a new product, soon.

Things are advancing rapidly. People hold off on medical treatment because a new technology will save them better, next month. We will use engineered viruses to alter the genetic structure of any cell, even adult, differentiated cells. Molecular nanotechnology may give us control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build things atom-by-atom — we might be able to program the construction of physical objects (including our bodies) just as we now do with software. This has already played out in other movies, but people are honestly working on the ability to “upload” ourselves (our psychology, memories, emotional responses, values, feelings) from our biological brains into synthetic brains that run a million times faster and allow more extensive modification than allowed by our natural brains.

There are certainly no simple answers in response to all the questions that are being raised. I am excited when technology does such good things for my friends (like the robot that managed Dave’s surgery!).

But I can’t help thinking that wanting to break out of the chrysalis of humanity is a human-hating aspiration. I am working out what it all means. Today’s bullet points:

• Transcendence is not a new desire, even if it has new technology to back it up. Revisit the apple again.
• The desire to break out of humanity it surely fundamental to the reason God broke into humanity in Jesus. How we save ourselves never works right, Spielburg notwithstanding.
• Being human is good. Being connected to God forever as our true selves in our own bodies is a gift that is even better. Thank you, Jesus.

A Psalm for 2012

When Gwen and I spent a couple of days on Kent Island in December, I imagined what it must have been like to be the first English settlers there. Even now it is something of a “nowhere.”

When we crossed the big bridge into Annapolis and told a sales clerk we were staying on Kent Island, he said, “Kent Island! What are you doing over there?” He made me a bit ashamed to be on my eroding bit of the Eastern Shore.

Ever since, those images have stuck with me. I sometimes feel like a pioneer in inhospitable territory. Maybe you do, too, as a Jesus follower. So I share my psalm of hope for me and you in 2012.

I confess that my hope was eroded.
The debilities took bites out of my enthusiasm
like Chesapeake Bay taking chunks
out of sandy islands
held together loosely
by scrawny trees and waving grass.

I possess that small hope you created.
But impossibilities blunt it and weaken any resolve,
like English settlers planting rye
on burned-over plots
waiting for hurricanes
to level their homes and carve new shores.

I cannot protect it.
The winds and waves obey You.
I am an island inhabited
by bad farmers.
I am a bad farmer inhabiting
an impossible island.

In this year
I do not expect to move elsewhere.
I do expect waves on my sandy shore
and ploughs sending dust into the wind.
Please guard my hope.
Please husband my plans.
Be my boat when the island is gone.
Be my home when the hurricane hits.

Did We Make the Advent Journey Body and Soul? Not Sure.

Our theme for Advent at BW was “Becoming Fully Human – the Inward and Outward Journey.” I have to admit, I don’t think we got the point across too well. This is about making a point, not about making cookies or music or firends, or what we usually do well at Christmastime.

For the sake of comparison, Kanye would have stayed up all night making art out of the whole process to make  a point. He would have made the video about making the art that made the theme album, would have provided matching merch that allowed people to get in touch in the ways people get in touch these days. We, in comparison, are still using words with a little visual. Our music randomly attaches. Our art is somewhat last-minute. If we don’t have the relationships and the relating is not consistent, it is hard for us to get anywhere, content-wise.

For the people who get into the relationships, what we do is great. For the rest of you, I apologize. We don’t know how to get the most important thing in the world across to you very well, I fear. I’m sure quite a few people got the whole thing, but I am also sure it is important to fear that they won’t.

The book upon which much of what we were trying to do during Advent is even more remote than what we presented: Soulful Spirituality, by David Benner. I won’t even recommend the last half of the book. Most of my friends don’t have a lot of time for books, anyway, so I don’t have to worry. That’s not meant to be an insult. But it is true. I got into the book because he talks about two main problems that Advent should help people solve. I used it to inform our theme because it responds so well to the main problems people have with being a full-on Jesus follower:

1) I think people who are having problems following Jesus are often disidentified with most religion and they have good reasons to be so. The Boko Haram bombings on Christmas Day are just more examples of appalling things done in the name of religion. Benner says, “Too often religion seems to produce or support dogmatic rigidity, prejudice and small mindedness, intolerance and chronic – even if religiously disguised—levels of anger and hatred. Too often religion seems to contribute to the problems rather than being part of the solution.” Too true.

2) Even more, the people I care about have the main problem Benner wants to address in the book, and for which Advent should be an antidote. They have a disembodied Christianity. Benner says that “spirituality” teachers often describe us as “human beings on a spiritual journey…But I think it is equally true that we are spiritual beings on a human journey. Both journeys are crucial and each should complement the other…Humanity is not a disease that needs to be cured or a state of deficiency from which we need to escape. The spiritual journey is not intended to make us into angels, cherubim, seraphim, gods, or some other form of spiritual beings. It is intended to help us become all that we, as humans, can be. How tragic, therefore, that some suggest that the spiritual journey should head in precisely the opposite direction. Spiritual paths and practices that distance us from what it means to be a human are not good for humans.” Also true.

We tried. We even had a weekly heartbeat meditation to get us into our bodies. We never got it turned up loud enough to make its full impact (yes, we have an art attention deficit disorder), but we tried. Some people really got it. But I’ve got a feeling they were the most properly identified and already appropriately embodied. The disidentified were not there, of course. And the disembodied spent a lot of time feeling a bit suspicious and uncomfortable. I am not sure how much we convinced either needy group.

I read books like Soulful Spirituality so I was into the whole thing. But, like I said, I’m not sure how much impact we made on the rest. One incident that gives me hope, however, was Christmas Eve. Of all the songs we sang, two songs were sung with the most comfort and enthusiasm. The first one was the first one: “Let It Snow.” Who knew everyone even knew that song so well? I turned it into a song about yearning for what all humans yearn for: just being held tight in the warmth. Our bodies and souls are all set up for God to be with us. The second one was “O Holy Night.” Who knew the hardest-to-sing Christmas song is the favorite? For me the most moving line in that song was “He knows our need. Our weakness is no stranger. Behold your king.” Our bodies and souls are moved in the direction of being saved by holy nights. I honestly think Kanye would agree, even if he was snubbed for best album in 2011.

While I am very challenged by the present day and what people think and what they are becoming. Advent has renewed my convictions and has somehow been a filling station for new energy to do what I can do to tell the story of Jesus in a way people can hear it and become part of it. I’m looking forward to 2012.

“Identity” and What the Idea is Doing to Sexuality

This may not be my most “entertaining” blog post, but I think it is important to write it.  I hope you will work with me on something I’ve been thinking about a lot for the past couple of months. I don’t think Christians have a cogent, loving response to prevailing ideology about identity, especially sexual identity. We need to find one.

In a volume dedicated to seeking a new “language of liberation,” Linda Martin and Satya Mohanty acknowledge that the critics of the old language make sense: “Theoretical critics of identity politics claim that identities are social constructions rather than natural kinds, that they are indelibly marked by the oppressive conditions that created them in the first place, and therefore should not be given so much weight or importance. They point out, with some justification, that racial categories are specious ways to categorize human beings, that gender differences are overblown, that sexuality should be thought of as a practice rather than an identity, and that disability itself is often a product of social arrangements rather than a natural kind. These and other sorts of arguments are used to suggest that identities are ideological fictions, imposed from above, and used to divide and control populations. Both political and theoretical critics claim that we should be working to eliminate the salience of identity in everyday life, not institutionalize it.” ¹ I have been among those critics.

It is nice to see academic types coming back around, as they sometimes do. In this case they sound a lot like they are challenging prevailing thinking using the same basic wisdom Paul used when he pleaded with the church in Galatia to stop dividing themselves up according to the “wisdom” of their latest teachers. He said, “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26-28)

I think the identity straitjackets imposed by many of society’s latest teachers have been especially damaging to how we think about our sexuality. There is a sexual “script” that gives us all a part to play. If we do not learn our lines, there are social consequences. It goes something like this:

• One’s sexual attractions signal a naturally occurring or “intended by God” distinction between homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality.
• Discovering one’s sexual attractions is elemental to knowing who you “really are” as a person.
• Sexual attractions are at the core of who one is as a person.
• One’s sexual behavior is an extension of that core.
• Behavior that matches who you “really are” sexually is crucial for your self-actualization and fulfillment.

This script is a compelling invention. Almost everyone who will read this knows it intuitively by now. But it was invented in the 20^th century and may already be losing steam in the 21^st. Jonathan Katz wrote about how it all got started: “Between the 1890s and the 1960s the terms heterosexual and homosexual moved into American popular culture, constructing in time a sexual solid citizen and a perverted unstable alien, a sensual insider and a lascivious outlaw, a hetero center and a homo margin, a hetero majority and a homo minority. The new, strict boundaries made the new gendered, erotic world less polymorphous. The term heterosexual manufactured a new sex-differentiated ideal of the erotically correct, a norm that worked to affirm the superiority of men over women and heterosexuals over homosexuals.” ² Now Hilary Clinton is spreading that thinking worldwide. I’m happy for no discrimination. I’m not so happy about the thinking that created the discrimination.

I think Paul rejected the arbitrary divisions between persons in his day according to what we now call “identity” in favor of one basic division according to allegiance to Jesus Christ. The division between Jews and Gentiles is sorted out when they all become children of God by faithing Jesus. Economic or gender divides are relevant to our relationships, but those elements are integrated into our primary allegiance to God. We are not stuck with who we are as defined by society according to our birth place or biology, we have an “identity” that is more basic than those which is given by God and actualized by Jesus.

As far as sexuality goes, followers of Jesus have an alternative script to the prevailing oppression:

• Sexual attraction does not signal a categorical distinction among types of persons, but is one of many human experiences.
• Who one is as a person begins with a restored relationship with God, which is the basis for sorting out the intricacies of desire and sexual expression.
• Attraction does not require orientation which does not demand identity. Note a similar discussion Paul has about slavery — though you might be born a slave that does not mean you are not God’s freedperson which means you should think of yourself as free and become socially free, if possible.

The sexuality script has been popularized by the media until we are swimming in a sea of sexual messages that preoccupy how we think about ourselves. To even entertain an alternative to the prevailing script is a fear-filled thing to do, since it will generally be seen as unaccepting, unhealthy, unloving and maybe even illegal. I think the prevailing sexuality script is oppressive and leads people to excessive behavior: we are tempted to artificially label ourselves and we are pushed to exaggerate our behavior in a search for self-actualization (which all-too-often leads to various forms of sexual addiction). Most detrimental, we can be deprived of a Christ-centered approach that is more generous about our present sexual condition and more likely to provide a lifelong way to sort out our behavior.

I think Christians should follow the example of Paul as we relate to people consumed by the present-day subjugation to the ideas surrounding the word “identity.” The world is likely to keep labeling people for political or social reasons and the media is likely to promote the categories and advertise to them. And people are likely to emphasize personal characteristics that they consider socially important and relatively unchangeable. As Christians, we will be labeled and we may be tempted to see our faith as just another identity in the pluralistic pot that gives us self-respect or dignity. We may even be tempted to trade our “religious identity” for a more compelling “sexual” one that functions according to the prevailing script.

I am going to keep meditating about this. Being one with Christ may be an identity in the world. But it can’t be reduced to that definition. My relationship with God and his people in Christ includes all my sexual attractions and informs all the ways I enjoy them or struggle with them.

A couple of references:

¹ This is from Reconsidering Identity Politics. Intro is online

² Excerpted on the PBS website.

We’ve Got to Keep Building

I’ve been reading a book about the Byzantine Empire. I’m afraid the people to whom I have been talking about it are ready to have me finish it! I keep learning lessons from it that I keep sharing. For a leader, meditating on the history gives some great cautionary tales; not least among them is: humankind is adept at lying, not least of all to themselves.

I saw this remant in Istanbul last summer

As I have been reading this pared-down history, which focuses on the emperors, I’ve been interested to see that one way I can categorize them is as builders and spenders. Some emperors built up the territory, built up the treasury, built up the walls, built alliances and trade and then their successors lived off what they did. Their successors let the navy deteriorate and lost territory, they spent the treasury on luxury and useless living, they neglected the walls and roads and insulted the allies. Often a new emperor who was a builder would arrive just in time to stave off total disaster and rebuild the place.

Building something is hard. You can see how hard it is when you live in the United States. In our lifetimes, the United States is the Byzantine Empire on steroids. I had one of those “aha” moments about how wealthy we are when I was driving up 95 by the airport (after seeing one of the weirdest “Christian” musicals I’ve ever seen) and I realized what an amazing road I was on, next to this huge airport! We are rich. We are screaming because unemployment is at 9% and making it uncomfortable for the 1% who are adept at gathering their huge share of the spoils. Maybe the whole empire is dying. But we are rich. It will take a long time to squander everything the country has created and stolen.

I think it is hard to build in the United States because it has become customary to train people to assume there is going to be a lot of wealth for them to manage. We train people to perform Christian musicals, but we don’t train them to build practical things (and you know I like my musicals!). I run into this as the leader of the church all the time. People come to Jesus like he is another emperor and they are going to manage the wealth he provides. They are trained for that. Jesus is, to them, like the founder of the empire and they are the successors, living behind the walls he built, protected from enemies, privileged to have the glory and riches of his kingdom. On one hand that metaphor works.  On the other hand, it can be a disaster, since the attitude often means that no one is building anything. And the land is not fat enough for everyone to just live off it.

We’ve got to build something. We usually need to rebuild what has been torn down or gone to ruin. But most of all, we need to build something new with the ever-fresh inspiration of God as Jesus becomes incarnate in us in our era. For instance, as Circle of Hope we have built, by God’s grace, something I am happy to live in. I could probably travel happily on one alley of Circle of Hope — and here we have a freeway (maybe no airport, yet). Even if none of us ever did another creative thing, it might take years to kill us. We’ve been that creative and diligent. But, of course, we need to build something now. Unlike bad Byzantine emperors, we need to scan the horizon, see what’s coming, seize opportunities, care for the big picture, and make the most of what we’ve been given.

There are many practical ways to build something. Today, five:

1)     Be a friend. Probably foremost and the most everyday discipline of being a builder: Build a new relationship and be yourself in Christ in it. This is the crucial building activity that makes or breaks the kingdom. If you already have enough love, enough friends behind your walls, the walls of the kingdom are crumbling.

2)     Start the project. Build the next church, don’t just make cosmetic changes and tell yourself you’ll get to the real project when the rest of life settles down. For some reason, practically serving Jesus is easy to put off. He often takes second place to the latest lover or the newest employer.

3)     Pitch in. Add your capacity to the work. Don’t assume someone else is going to do it, just because someone else has provided what you presently enjoy. Yes, that means all of us, not just the leaders. It is not the leaders’ church; Jesus resides in each and all of us.

I am certainly not saying we never do anything, of course. At 19G, everyone is involved in building something new and are doing it well. At MC we are building a new location and building up a congregation to fill it with action. At FN we are rebuilding and using our advantageous location to relate to hundreds of new people every month (and don’t forget that FN is the motherland of Circle Thrift!). At BW we are in the most danger of not building because we have been around the longest and often feel the most secure (or maybe “settled” is more accurate). But BW is awash in new ideas, not least among them is incarnational evangelism and building the church from the ground up again.

As far as attitudes that ground the action go:

4)     Own the whole thing. You may be a barista in someone else’s store, but in the church, you are an owner. Don’t let the subjugation you experience in the world leak over into the church. Don’t be a mere spender of what someone else has collected.

5)     Spend on the future. The walls are not just the “government’s” responsibility. I’m talking metaphorically, here, not because we should build walls or we care what the government does. The walls were symbolic of Byzantium’s strength. When they were in good order it was because a builder cared and spent time and money to repair them. Jesus does not do the work of the church by himself. If we are living off whatever is there, the walls are crumbling. The church is an expression of whatever life in Christ we have; it is not a hobby we enjoy when “life” isn’t too busy. What is worth our lives right now and tomorrow?

Five lessons are enough for now. But I hope there is some small inspiration here to build the church with Jesus. I think most of the leaders in the government and elsewhere have been living off the spoils of the empire and don’t care much about building the future. The attitude has trickled down to us regular Joes and Janes until a lot of us never even think of building something. We just get ours and assume there will be more to get later. That doesn’t work in the church, either.

Six Things I Did in My 20’s that Made All the Difference

When I was on retreat last week I had a moment of wonder as my memory wandered back to my twenties. Some days I remember myself as the world’s dumbest 21-year old! So many of my present twentysomething friends seem so much better off than I was! As far as my soul is concerned I think it was like I was a spiritual refugee in my twenties who was dumped onto the shores of Christianity. I made some big mistakes as I haltingly made my way into the strange new land of Jesus. But the good thing is that I also did not know that I shouldn’t adopt what appeared to be the best things about the culture. I just kind of did things without a lot of insight or direction as I settled in. I “somehow” happened upon things that proved to be astoundingly important. Here are six things I did that have shaped my life for the better ever since.

I learned to live simply on purpose.

I was very poor. But I decided to stay that way on purpose. My cause was world hunger, apart from the mission of the church. Every extra penny I could get was designed to go to people who were starving. I became committed to not eating up other people’s resources in general. I ended up learning about the historic Christian discipline and even spiritual gift of voluntary poverty. It seemed strange then and it does now. But I managed to miss ever being tempted to live off fast food or to waste money on things that were meaningless. My resources have been purposefully used and that feels good.

I received the Spirit

I was also poor in Spirit. “Receiving the Spirit” is what Pentecostals tell you to do to have a REALLY personal relationship with Jesus. I kept shooting for that no matter how uncool it seemed (and it did). A lot of Pentecostals are weird. But the best of them are radicals. If the Apostle Paul says “Be filled with the Spirit,” they are going to go for that. As I look back on it, some of their theology is so wrong that I’m glad I wasn’t paying very good attention! What I got was that I could and should have some experience of God’s Spirit in my life. I opened up to that and I met God personally. I thought it was thrilling then. I did not realize just how much more experience there was.

I conformed my lifestyle to the Bible

“My lifestyle” is a pernicious phrase, it is so egocentric. But I was very egocentric in my twenties. I was forming my “lifestyle.” I was determined to be the best Christian possible and my teachers were all about the Bible. Thank God for my teachers who got me to study the Bible! I’m not sure how they did it, but I sure thought knowing the Bible was crucial. I spent something like seven years doing 2PROAPT (which I still recommend to people) as my daily act of devotion. I got the basic material down. I must have pondered almost every line in the New Testament and tried to “apply” each of them “to my life,” as we said. I did not understand everything I should do about the Bible. But I filled my mind with the raw material of transformation that I have been using ever since. What’s more, I had a life-forming dialogue with the Bible writers about what is important and how I should live that formed my ability to keep having that dialogue.

I got married and had children, in that order.

These days, people are either wiser or more controlling, I can’t tell for sure. They wait a lot longer to get married. I did not wait. At age twenty, if I was dumb or dumbstruck about anything, it was the blessing of Gwen. And, I must admit, I became her very dumb husband at twenty-one. I knew very little about sex, myself, relationships, intimacy – name anything that would make me a decent partner. But being married improved me when I was available to be improved. Love shaped me instead of my career or my personal desires. Add the children on to that (I had four by the time I was 29) and that just deepened the requirement for me to learn how to love someone and to be responsible for something other than what moved me or pleased me. I don’t think I was too conscious of the benefits of my choice, but, as it turns out, it was nice to get a head start on being a grown up.

I lived communally

In my late twenties we formed an intentional community that lasted for eight years and often had upwards to twenty people in it. Within that group of dear people I did some of my deepest formation and some of my stupidest things. It was a wonderful, irreplaceable experience. Even the people I lived with who are now distant still feel like relatives. I think that is how the church should be. We took Acts 2 (see “I conformed my lifestyle to the Bible,” above) and decided to do it. Our “household” was a great environment in which to practice simplicity, too. Looking back, I think it was best for doing theology. We sat with each others for hours figuring out what God wanted us to do. Each year we would re-write our “statement of formation;” they are one-page works of theological art. When I was getting my first license with the BIC, I sat down with my household and asked them, “Here are the questions they are asking. What do I believe?” They could tell me. Christians don’t do much that is more countercultural than submitting themselves to love. Doing that with intention in my twenties shaped me.

I protested things

It might be that if you never get over the edge to become a protester in your twenties, you lose the capability. Living simply in community was something of a protest in itself. Being Pentecostal was a statement, too. But I am talking about coming up against political philosophies and government actions that steer people toward destruction. I wanted to do something about hunger. I got (symbolically) arrested for trespassing on the weapons testing site in Nevada a few times. We picketed a new abortion clinic. We complained about Ronald Reagan. I evangelized, which, in itself, is a direct confrontation with the powers that be. I am glad I “got over the edge.” Getting over my fear of being vocal about my faith needed to get an early start. I think it helped to develop the habit of pushing against my fears before my brain hardened into the  habit of not doing faith that way.

There are probably more things that could be noted, of course. You are probably doing other things that you will note later. These are just the things that came to mind last week. I offer them as encouragement to my many 20something friends, many of whom are so much more mature than I was. I hope you don’t give up. If you are doing something that seems crazy for Jesus, now, it might be the very thing that will have made all the difference in thirty years. Do the best, most spiritual, most Christ-following thing you can think of doing with the capacity you have. You are equipping yourself to develop as a believer for the rest of your life. If you’re not twentysomething anymore, at least we’re not dead yet – neither is Jesus. Maybe some wild of difficult thing we are doing for love or truth right now will be very memorable in a few years!

I Like Dogs, but Let’s Get Real

Not to be too insulting, but we remind me of a dog I once saw on the way back from Home Depot (I was replacing the faulty tree stand that caused my tree to tumble). It was a very nice-looking dog. But it was running around in the street causing a traffic jam. As I waited for the dog to figure out what it wanted to do, its master ran up. The master looked flustered and afraid. I watched him try to catch his self-destructive pet, which clearly liked him, but which kept playing, and managing to keep out of his reach and keep clogging traffic.

Is there any connection here between us and this dog? — us running around, figuring out what to do, sometimes playfully, usually self-destructively, and God coming to us in Jesus and wondering how to connect before we get run over? I think so.

It’s like Psalm 107:

They rebelled against God’s sayings,
The Most High’s counsel they despised.
And he brought their heart low in troubles.
They stumbled with none to help.
And they cried out to the Lord from their straits,
From their distress He rescued them.
He brought them out from the dark and death’s shadow
And their bonds He sundered.
Let them acclaim to the Lord His kindness
And His wonders to humankind. Psalm 107:11-15

I suppose if I had run into the dog, it might have cried out to its “Lord” from its “straits” and then would have been rescued. But it was still playing when his master caught up to him. I am not sure the dog ever figured out that it might have died. I think we might be in similar denial.

I’m thinking about this because yesterday I felt a bit like a dog master who had just found my pet playing chicken with sedans on Washington Ave.  It is Advent, so I was trying to work with the call to live with the reality of the incarnation, which means: We don’t need to keep organizing our lives according to what amounts to dog-logic. We see our master, who is with us, for who he really is; it is time to stop playing in the middle of the traffic as if that is normal. OK, enough with the dog thing for a minute. The incarnation means that instead of normalizing my craziness or avoiding my problems and suffering, I can welcome a new reality. I can even enter into my depression, failure, illness, betrayal, doubt, and death like Jesus entered into them, and go through it all like Jesus went through it all.

I have been a little hard on dogs, haven’t I? Actually, they know a lot about being themselves, even in the midst of traffic, don’t they? A dog is good at being a dog. I am the being who has to consider how to become fully myself. Advent is a discipline of becoming fully human, even though I already am a human – at least prospectively. We actually have a tougher time than dogs when it comes to being ourselves because we know we are knowing about things. As a result, we create elaborate psychological defense systems to protect us from the horrible reality in which we live. We are so afraid of reality that we think we might die if we allowed it to be real!

Psalm 107 makes our rejection of being real with God appropriately personal, I think. We have “rebelled against what God says” it accuses. In the case of Israel, there was an actual written law that “said” things so “what God says” was hard to miss. So God “brought our hearts low in troubles.” People regularly get mad at God for supposedly doing mean things to them like “bringing them low.” But I often point out that it is not so much that God is finding ways to punish us, He is the Creator, our Father, the author of reality — have a little feeling about what that is like for God! The Lord doesn’t need to punish us; just being God gives us something to run away from. We “stumble with no one to help,” like a dog in traffic, because we were designed to relate to God and we don’t relate.

All these doses of reality have been leading up to those last two lines of the stanza:

He brought them out from the dark and death’s shadow
And their bonds He sundered.
Let them acclaim to the Lord His kindness
And His wonders to humankind.

We may feel locked up, especially in the mental and physical security zones we make for ourselves. But we have a future. Even though I am a very difficult creature to figure out, God’s kindness has a way of opening up my eyes to take in the wonderful reality in which I live, and, even more the reality into which I am called as Jesus brings it near.

Advent welcomes the Lord to come into our world during the darkest days of the year. I never like that darkness, but I do like remembering how the Lord is reaching into my dark reality with light and love. I still do a little dog-and-master dance with God, sometimes. But mostly I long to experience the wonders of the new reality into which I am invited when Jesus shows up looking for me.

Existence Is Resistance

My new favorite phrase.

I don’t want to use the phrase “existence is resistance” as if I just invented it. I learned it from Palestinians, like those from Stop the Wall, and from the Christian Peacemaker Teams in At-Tuwani, south of Hebron.

From top left clockwise: the village, surveying settlement takeovers, the villager tells his story, lunch with CPT

In At-Tuwani our MCC Learning Tour delegation met a woman from Switzerland who had been living in the village for six years as part of CPT’s work of support. She was about ready to return to Europe. The villagers are now organized enough to do without the protection of witnesses from the U.S. or Europe.

At-Tuwani is in “area C” of the apartheid system Israel is perfecting in its occupied territories. That means the village is under direct military control. Living in area C means that almost anything can happen to a Palestinian for “security” reasons. It means that one’s rights are adjudicated by military justice. Practically, it means that one’s land is subject to seizure and that the housing developments being planted on your grazing and farm land can supplant your long-held practices – and will be protected by the military (which, by the way, is protected by the United States). The village is something of a showcase for people devoted to nonviolent resistance. They have been dedicated to the proposition that existence is resistance.

We listened to one of the village’s activists talk about the awakening that caused him to be a leader in direct nonviolent action. When the nearby Israeli settlement was built nearby, it disrupted all the village’s ways. The “settlers” commandeered farmland and claimed grazing areas for their use. One day they beat the man’s mother when she dared to graze sheep in land they were trying to control. As we looked over the village (see the pic) he described how he had participated in securing its ongoing existence against the constant pressure and harassment of the Israeli settlers, military and bureaucracy. Their existence is resistance.

That phrase made a lot of sense to me yesterday when we were meeting as the Shalom House Guidance Team. We have had a notable lack of success this year in keeping the house full. The Guidance Team, Listening Tour Team and House have done remarkable things, anyway. But we have a dream of nurturing a vibrant intentional community that makes peace and gives peacemaking a solid footing in Circle of Hope and the east coast megalopolis. We’re having trouble getting people to move across town to be a part of it. Much more do we have trouble getting people to move across the country! We think it is going to work out, but it has been discouraging. As we sat around the table yesterday, I could not help thinking that having such a community in the world is our version, in the United States, of “existence is resistance.” Someone needs to care about ending the reliance on military oppression to guarantee what passes for the “freedom” of United States citizens! I don’t think that someone is a big charity or some aberrant charitable corporation; that someone is me (and maybe you!).

The phrase applies to Circle of Hope, in general, as well. To be the vibrant, growing network we are in the Northeast megalopolis, existence is resistance. We live in a place that is famously the “most godless” part of the United States. We won the tag from the northwest a few years ago. Traditional Christians are lamenting the loss of market share. Pundits are noting the end of Christian America. To be honest, I don’t think I will miss whatever “Christian America’ was. But it is worth noting that it can be hard to be a Christian these days around here. People don’t mind bashing you; they feel the tide moving away from Christian dominance. Mere existence is resistance to the new domination of nothingness.

The hopeful thing about existence being resistance is that everyone can do it. Live in your village. If you are just that much of a thorn in the Israeli military’s flesh, that is noble. Be a part of Shalom House. Even if you don’t accomplish as much as you think needs to be done, the fact that you exist with the convictions you carry makes a difference. Be a living part of your living church. Even if your social circles think that is odd, at least they know a Christian who is not in a museum.

I think At-Tuwani, Shalom House and Circle of Hope are doing a lot more than existing –  they are creating! But I find it encouraging to think that if I just hang on and don’t cease to exist before my time, that is a good thing.