Dear Focus On The Family

Here's a letter I'm getting into an envelope to send off to Focus on the Family:

Dear Focus on the Family:
As a fellow evangelical, I’ve been amazed at the impact you’ve had on potential and actual Supreme Court nominations. You and your more right leaning friends even managed to get Harriet Miers’ name pulled from the running. Even though I might not always agree with you, it’s good to see people of faith trying to exercise their responsibility to be the salt of the earth in our culture.

That’s why your silence regarding the Federal budget has been deafening. Poverty and cost of living are rising and programs like Temporary Aid For Needy Families, Food Stamps, and Medicare are being cut. I wonder with great concern why you don’t focus on those families.

Tens of millions of families are in serious need in America. The precise numbers are obscured by differing means of data collection. But whatever the exact number, that’s a lot of kids. I wonder why you haven’t said anything about them. It wouldn’t take much: a blurb in one of your many newsletters, five minutes of a radio broadcast, a press release, anything that would let people know about the catastrophe of hunger in our country. You already have the mechanisms in place to help people contact their congressional representatives and demand action. You’ve used it in the past. It wouldn’t cost much. In the save to save and improve lives, such measures could be very effective.

You’ve spent a lot of money and political clout over the nominees for the Supreme Court, mostly, it seems, in the vague hope of a court that might someday possibly have a slim chance to maybe rule on something that could potentially have an impact on abortion in our country. Today there are millions of people who are directly threatened by cuts to social services. Their lives must be worth something to God.

Maybe you hold the biblically dubious opinion that government has no place in public welfare. Maybe you believe that compassion can’t be legislated. You might be right. So, with the cracks through which the poor slide growing ever wider, why not ask churches and followers of Christ to step up, to open food pantries and feeding programs, to adopt unwanted children, to open their homes or churches to families in need? It seems the least you could do.

I know what it’s like to be stuck with a label of “liberal” or “conservative”. Maybe, in the best scenario, you could do both: encourage you listeners to demand action from Congress and to act on their own in behalf of the poor.

I hope the answer to these questions is that you simply didn’t know, that these things haven’t been part of your horizon. Jesus has a lot to say regarding our treatment of and advocacy for those he calls, “the very least.”

Your Friend,

DEVASTATING HUMILITY

This year, more than ever before, I’ve been wished “Happy Holidays”, instead of “Merry Christmas”. Sometimes it seems kind of silly. You don’t have to have a Merry Christmas, just because I wish you one. On the other hand, maybe it’s the ultimate Christian thing to wish someone “Happy Holidays”, because, like Jesus, that greeting is for everyone.

Secretly, I like the secular side of Christmas. I like Santa and candy and mistletoe and snowflake sweaters and Bing Crosby and Burl Ives (well, I could live without Bing). But while my sleigh bells are jinglin’, some of my religious friends are worrying about the secularization if Christmas. They get worked into a lather wanting Christmas trees and crèches on courthouse lawns. They break out the signs and march around; they threaten to sue and demand their rights. Secularists get exercised, too, waving their own signs and hiring with their own lawyers. In protests, loud equals right.

I’m all for a good protest, but what a contrast to the tale we tell at Christmas! It’s a story about lost rights, the noise is birth and over all, the hush of sleep. J. B. Phillips wrote of the “devastating humility” of the Christmas God’s actions.

Christmas is that humility devastating our power and our pretense and our pride. Jesus was born into a world that believed power comes in the ability to overwhelm with superior force, or in a beautiful body, or in witty popularity, or in possessions. It sounds like a familiar world. The angels’ words were, “This is the Savior, the Christ, the Lord,” and to anyone hearing the tale, those words would have been laughable. “Savior,” and “Christ,” and “Lord” were titles for emperors, not babies born in sheds. Brimming with irony, the angels didn’t just say it. They sang it.

The Baby Jesus Story changes everything. The incarnation of the Son of God is an underground stream eating away at the illusion of power from above. It’s very weakness sweeps out the foundations of the world-as-it-is and creates the world we used to dream of in fairy tales. War, disease, stress, fear, multinational corporations: none of these have the final say. These are phantoms with no real power. Devastating humility gets the last word.

I think we know that, implicitly. That (along with the tax deductions) is why we give to charities, why we believe we should be nice this time of year, why we send people we hardly know cards; it’s Christmas, for God’s sake. Invariably somebody says we need to keep the Christmas spirit all year long.
I won’t say that. I will ask you, regardless of your faith practice or your doubts, to allow the Story to sink into you. It’s a story bigger than all our religion and fear. Imagine a world where God’s wish of “Peace on Earth, good will to all,” is more than an empty slogan but a physical and spiritual reality.

Happy Holidays: Good Kwanza, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Solstice. And Merry Christmas.

pure mind

A few years ago I saw a commercial for some internet service provider that showed a huge variety of people using their computers: an elderly black man, an urban white kid, as Asian woman, you know. It reminded me at first of that chapter in Revelation where there’s an uncountable throng of people from every tribe and nation and language and nation (really, it did. I’m not just trying to sound religious). But then the tag line came. It was something like, “Imagine a world of pure mind.” I guess they meant that in such a world race and age and gender wouldn’t be barriers, but I wasn’t interested. No thank you. I’m pretty content with the corporeal world, thanks very much. I like having a body. I like seeing black and red and brown and white people. I really do. I like men and women and children. I’m a big fan of the sun. What would the world of pure mind be, anyway? No beer, bread, wife, kids, long distance runs, skiing, sage, fresh cut grass, lilac, rain, television, cars, oak trees in autumn? I have no idea of the religious or spiritual background the people who wrote the copy for that commercial, but for a Christian, wishing for such a world borders on heresy.
I know, St. Paul said that in Christ all those things like position, ethnicity, gender are wiped out. But he also said, “Christ is all and is in all.” In Christ, our differences are blessings, not curses.
It seems like a lot of us who claim Christ and his faith want to be so “spiritual” that we despise the material world. We hope to float off into the ether of that world of the mind. Despite the assertions of the so-called creationists, the two creation stories in Genesis aren’t trying to teach us science; they’re trying to tell us something about God. God creates. God loves what God creates. And, when God’s creation begins the spiral into non-being, God redeems. Even the stories where things get broken, God is actively redeeming. As C. S. Lewis said, God loves matter; he created it!
Jesus, according to Christians, is God enfleshed. Jesus didn’t seem to be human; he was human. He ate and drank and slept and went to the bathroom. When he prayed, the gospels say, he, “lifted his eyes up to heaven.” He healed with words, with touch, and even with spit. In Jesus, God got physical. Faith is physical.
In the early centuries of the Church, people just assumed that faith was to be acted out. That’s not because their Greco-Roman culture encouraged it. A lot of their contemporaries were looking for a religion of pure mind, a future of disembodied bliss. It’s actually understandable. If you live in a world where every day is a struggle for survival – where bread and water don’t come pre-packaged, where things like diarrhea can kill you, where fleas are a given – why would you imagine this life can go on and be a good thing? The choice is between two hopes. First, maybe you hope to enjoy this life as much as possible, then die quickly. O, you might hope to tough it out through this veil of tears, this land of walking corpses, then (maybe, depending on a lot of factors beyond your control) you could float off into the ether of disembodied spirit. Christians broke that mold, much to the amusement of their neighbors.
There’s an interesting story from before the time of the Greco-Roman Church. In the story Jesus met some lepers in the territory between Samaria and Judea. These lepers were a colony of rejects from both communities, living in the no-man’s land. Some were Jews, some were Samaritans, but all were lepers. I’ve read that sometimes lepers wore bells to warn unsuspecting passersby that they were in danger, not only of contracting an ugly and debilitating disease, but, more importantly, of becoming ritually unclean, which really puts a damper on the old social life.
When they saw Jesus coming along, they recognized him as the teacher-healer-prophet-holy man he was coming to be known as (I’m not sure where they got their information, since no one would go near them). They yelled at him, “Jesus! Bar-David (Son of David)! Have mercy!” They either wanted some money and food, or to be healed. Jesus sent them off to “a priest” (he didn’t say which kind – Samaritan or Jewish, two very different types), without touching them. As they went, the found themselves whole, healthy, and cured. One came running back, threw himself at the feet of Jesus, and thanked God. Jesus said, “Get up. Your faith has saved (or healed, or restored – the Greek means all three) you.” His faith was not just believing in Jesus; it was demonstrated physically. His faith was physical.
In the same way James (probably the brother of Jesus. If you read his book, he sounds a lot like Jesus, which makes sense if they’re related, if James grew up in the same house as Jesus) says good actions (like feeding and clothing the poor, welcoming strangers, or not showing favoritism) are the soul in the body of faith. Isn’t that interesting? Faith, which seems so intangible and spiritual to me, is the body in James’ analogy.
In our church in CB South, we are very aware of our bodies. Part of it might have something to do with living in the mountains, where even the average person is something of an athlete, but there’s more to it than just that. We take the theme of creation and re-creation seriously. Jesus came not to “save our souls”, but to redeem creation.
That informs our corporate prayer. When we gather, we light candles for each continent on a world map. Sometimes we pause in worship for silent prayer for the needs of the world, but sometimes we just leave the candles burning on the map. Sometimes the candles burn all the way down and the wax runs like mercy over Asia or North America or Africa. We set up a station for lighting candles and praying for friends, neighbors, family. We burn incense as a reminder that prayer burns and pleases God. We have used sand and rocks and paper as media for prayer because faith is physical.
Occasionally we gather only to pray. We sit in silence, listening like the Quakers do for the voice of the Light. We stand with our arms stretched out, cross-shaped, as we pray for our community. We lay face down on the floor in submission to the One True God. We anoint people with oil and lay hands on the sick.
Too much Christian practice moves toward shutting the body down, ignoring it and hoping it will go away. Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for our desires, it won’t. These dry bones are destined to rise again. These throats are called to sing to God. The Christian hope is “hope of resurrection to meet with reward” (St. Patrick), and it’s only in light of that hope that Christian self-discipline makes any sense. We deny ourselves now, not because the body is bad and the soul good, but because everything now is subject to corruption, and we are living into the new age. Fasting and other disciplines anticipate, in their own way, the kingdom feast at the resurrection of the dead.
My friend Judy was called by God to walk across the country as a prayer and witness. So she did. She told me that once she felt impelled to raise her hands out like a cross. She argued with God, since she was in plain view of the highway. She was afraid of being embarrassed. God insisted and Judy relented. Faith is physical.
I was asked once to participate in the leadership of a “prayer meeting” for a group getting ready for an evangelistic effort. It was a typical “prayer meeting” in the modern evangelical sense of the word. In a two-and-a-half-hour meeting there were three speakers and a video presentation, lots of singing, and then the two other pray-ers and I had fifteen minutes to split.
I asked the assembled to form into several groups. Each group had a specific prayer focus for the upcoming event. To give shape to their prayers, I asked one group to kneel in humility, one to hold their hands up asking for help, one group to stand with their palms out toward the walls to pray for the community, one group to hold their wallets to promise and ask for financial help, one to stand cross-shaped. About a third of the people followed the directions. For the rest, prayer was evidently mental (or verbal at best).
When we allow our selves to become integrated, holistic beings we come closer to being what God has designed us for. We are not alone, but are part of communities. Communal prayer brings us to that. We are not spirits trapped in “soul cages”, but physical beings, in the image of God. Physical prayer reminds us of that. I think we need to expand our understanding of what prayer is in order to encompass our words and actions, our relationships and our work, our thoughts and our desires. As we do so, surrendering to God each part of ourselves, we’ll grow in grace, not shrink. And isn’t that the whole point of the Christ journey?

christmas and creation

In various parts of the country people are arguing about what they call creationism and evolution. There’s a new movement called Intelligent Design which is interpreted by some (hard-core scientific evolutionists) as old school creationism and by others (old school creationists) as theistic evolution. The truth, as usual, is probably in neither camp.
The Intelligent Design guys, as far as I can tell, are not really proposing a theory of origins per se. Instead, they’re pointing to holes in the theory of evolution, holes like the irreducible complexity certain organic systems. It’s an interesting problem, and one that should obviously be presented to school kids who are able to grasp the complexities. Michael Behe, a biochemist, described irreducible complexity like this:

“a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (michael behe, molecular machines: experimental support for the design inference).

Intelligent Design proponents say they’re not making any attempt to identify a designer or to prove anything found in the Hebrew Scriptures (OK. They’re definitely inferring a creative source, one they likely privately identify as the God of the Bible). I can only see two problems with their ideas. First, they might feed the desire among certain kinds of Christians to “prove” the existence of God, as though God needs that kind of help. I’m also nervous about the demand for equal time in the classroom, since the conclusions drawn by intelligent design proponents are well outside the purview of science, and begin to creep into supernaturalism. That, I think, is asking intelligent design to do more than it can.
People sometimes ask me if our church is “really hard core” or “serious” or “do you take the Bible literally?” After we talk for a while, what they’re asking is a) “are you judgmental?” b) “are you boring?” and c) “do you fit into a small camp of people who claim to take the Bible literally, except when it doesn’t serve their purposes?”
I usually answer these questions by saying no, we try not to judge, and, yes, we are boring, but so are you. I tell them that we do indeed take the Bible literally. When it says there is indeed a God, we believe it. When it says we need to love that God, we believe it. When it says Jesus is the Son of God, divine and human, that he died-died-died and was resurrected, we believe it. When it says that we need to love our neighbors like we love ourselves and would like to be loved, we believe it. When it says repeatedly that God is a God of justice for each person, we believe it.
Then I confess that I’m a creationist. I say I believe God created the entire cosmos (that’s my new term. I like it better than universe. It has a fullness and a warm power you just don’t get with the cold universe). They ask me about the “literal six days of creation” and I say I didn’t know the Bible taught anything about a literal six days. I didn’t know that believing in such a thing was a prerequisite for following Jesus. They say, “You know, the thing in Genesis.” Then I tell them that there are two very different accounts of creation in Genesis, and that such differences (some of which cannot be reconciled even by the most limber mental gymnast) seem to imply that those who assembled the scriptures were comfortable with the differences and obviously thought there was another point to the stories. Why shouldn’t we be as generous with these texts? Genesis seems to have a very different agenda that that of so-called creation scientists. Genesis cares nothing for epochs, periods, timelines, Big Bangs, or anything else modern science is so fascinated with.
I don’t mean to imply that there is no value in the work of geologists, biologists, paleontologists, or cosmologists (I myself studied anthropology in college). I just wonder why the discussion of God as creator has been reduced to questions God doesn’t seem to care to answer. For instance, someone once asked me why there were no dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible. Giraffes don’t score a mention, either, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.
As a creationist, I take seriously (even literally!) the command given the man and the woman to “have dominion” over the creatures of the earth and their habitats. To have dominion does not mean, as was once supposed, to ride roughshod over plants, animals, and geologic formations that stand in the way of a modern Western ideas of human progress. It means instead to exercise the kind of authority God exercises over us: to take responsibility for, to be merciful toward, and to surrender our own rights for the sake of God’s creation.
In this way, I think of myself as a true creationist. To believe in an intelligent designer means to believe that intelligence is beyond my own and is not random. Whatever means the Creator used to get the results we now see and argue over, those results must matter to the Creator. But I never heard creationists asking us to strengthen pollution laws, or to recycle, or to use more renewable energy.
Some of that is changing. Both the National Council of Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals routinely put environmental concerns near the top of their agendas. Such wisdom.
So, what does any of this have to do with Christmas, you’re probably asking. Just this: the Creator spoke the cosmos into being through the Logos, the Word (proverbs 8:17 and following speaks of wisdom in very similar ways). That “Word became flesh and set his tent in the midst of us, full of truth and grace.” Jesus, the Word of God, spoken into the void on nothingness, creating the cosmos, was spoken into the cosmos. His presence in the world of decaying matter transformed the material world. Now, in St Paul’s words, “with eager hope” (sounds almost alive, doesn’t it? Maybe it is) the entire creation groans for redemption. Nothing can be the same. The cosmos, infused with glory and purpose by its mere creation, is now infused with even more. We are not moving to ultimate destruction (as some “creationists” and all evolutionists believe) but toward glory, Glory, GLORY.
All this because of the little baby and Mary and Joseph and the animals and the shepherds and the wise men and the water and the disciples and the bread and the wind and the Romans and the cross and the nails and the last breath and the spices and the stone and the empty tomb. But especially the baby.