Author Archives: Neil

Starting Over Again…

I am restarting my efforts, and so I’ve redone the look of the blog and I’m going to go in a new direction, at least for a while. I really enjoyed some of the historical work I did in many of my previous posts, as well as the work with Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, but ultimately I reached a block…for the Place of Authority work the next logical step would be to look at the rise of Islam in the 600s, but that and the period that follows are areas that I need to do more reading in before I feel adequate to give a post that I feel could be fair. I still think it is important work and perhaps I’ll return to it but for now I need to start writing again.

Going forward I plan on working on a couple different things: much of my writing lately has been working with scriptural texts and trying to bring together a sense of the world of the text and our modern world. Blogging allows me to combine some of these things with my fascination with art and so my goal is to do two chapters a week over several posts and then supplement these with posts of other short topics and ideas that come to me as I read, listen and live. I may integrate some of the ideas I glean from fiction, things like TED talks, reading from other sources or reflection on some of the experiences I’ve had. In all of this I don’t claim to be the expert, but rather one person trying to engage my faith and the world in which I live. The scriptural work is not intended to be a running commentary, although it will have some elements that a commentary would and I will be engaging other’s work as I read, but rather it is more a meditation. I also may include sermons for the times when I do preach, but I am attempting to do this as a learning tool for me, not as some hard fast rule that I feel guilty for breaking. As a full time pastor and a single dad, my time is not always my own, so if I don’t maintain the pace I intend, I hope that I can come back to this and extend myself a little grace.

Before I started again I wanted to make sure I had some work ready to go, for times when I might fall behind, so as a preview we will start with some of the lesser encountered parts of scripture: first up will be the book of Haggai, one of the post-exilic prophets, then Esther a story set in the Jewish diaspora of the post-exilic time (if you didn’t understand post-exilic and diaspora don’t despair, I will explain that in each of those words and more as we engage the writings) and then the major prophet Jeremiah. I’ve got a fair amount done in each of the three, and how I did it evolved but rather than go back and rewrite Haggai or some of the early Jeremiah work I am simply going to allow it to show its evolution as I go.

If you have followed me before and waited for me to post since November, I hope you enjoy this. If you are encountering this for the first time welcome.

The Place of Authority 3-2:Byzantium, Triangles and the Quest for Stasis

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As a symbol and expression of the universal prestige of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Justinian built the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God, Hagia Sophia, which was completed in the short period of four and a half years (532–537).

One of the things I’ve been doing as I took an extended break from my more historical work on the place of authority within society and religion was to do some broader thinking about where this all might be heading and to try to bring in some other disciplines that could help me process the large historical stories in a way that both made sense and was as fair as possible to the historical narrative. I’m going to take you on a brief journey into the sometimes scary process of how my mind thinks through things (clearing away as much of the clutter as possible) and hopefully you will be able to see why I am drawing some of the conclusions I am at this point and as I move forward and then I will apply the scheme I develop to the period of the Byzantine empire (what remains of the former Roman empire after Rome collapses based out of Constantinople) and then we shall see how far I move forward in history before I feel the need to re-evaluate.

One thing that every society seeks is stability, instability is notoriously bad (at least in the short term) for the people in any society and people will endure a lot of things to avoid a drastic upheaval of what is considered normal. That got me thinking about Bowen System Theory and specifically his (and other’s who followed Murray Bowen’s work from the 1970s on) work on triangles:

“The theory states that the triangle, a three person emotional configuration, is the molecule or the basic building block of any emotional system, whether it is in the family or any other group. The triangle is the smallest stable relationship system. A two-person system may be stable as long as it is calm, but when anxiety increases, it immediately involves the most vulnerable other person to become a triangle. When tension in the triangle is too great for the threesome, it involves others to become a series of interlocking triangles”[i]

If any place in this time period could be talked about as stable and able to resist major changes it was the Byzantine empire and the Orthodox Church which was the dominant expression of religion within the empire. Thinking about what a triangular system might look like from the Byzantine perspective might look like took me back to another three fold characterization.

There is an ancient way of talking about Jesus which is called the three-fold office, which goes back into the ancient church, at least to the early church father Eusebius (263-339) and probably earlier than that. It breaks down the offices of Jesus as: prophet, priest and king- and as I mentioned in an earlier post for the early followers of Jesus he occupied the central defining role in forming their identity as Christians. Let me expand each of these roles briefly:

The kingly role is the role of political power, to those familiar with a Lutheran two kingdom way of thinking this is the left handed kingdom which deals with military power and security, taxes and wealth, roads and trade. Typically in every layer of society there is someone who occupies a place of political power and who guarantees safety, peace and security for the price of obedience and taxes. This is the role of the secular power, and it can be abusive or benevolent (although it more often trends towards abusive) and it often depends on the next office for it’s authorization in some manner.

The priestly role is the role of religious authority, this would be the right hand kingdom of Lutheran two kingdom typology, which deals with placing people in a right relationship with the sacred, whatever that may mean for a society. In almost every society that I am aware of the priestly function is carried out by those who are closely aligned with those in the kingly role. In a theocracy the priestly office will dominate the political office, this is less common but there are societies and times where the priestly office will hold sway. More commonly the political office will exercise greater power than the priestly office and the priestly office will give additional legitimacy to the political office. This may sound skeptical and there is give and take in the relationship, however for stability there is a mutual self interest involved since the political office protects the priestly office and the priestly office legitimizes the political office.

The prophetic role is that place, person or thing within a society which places a check on the political and the priestly offices when they are not acting in accordance to whichever divine source of authority , they are the mouthpiece of God that challenges the excesses, abuses, deceptions, oppression, idolatry or hubris of the other two offices. The prophetic role may be occupied by a person or persons or it may be an idea, book, etc…as we will see in some of the upcoming transitions. All three roles are necessary and linked together.

In the Byzantine empire the emperor remained the dominant political figure, and had a lot of authority within all realms of both political and religious authority. The bishops had and exercised their authority with the protection and in cooperation with the emperor, but for the Orthodox church and the Byzantine empire the prophetic role was occupied by tradition. Tradition was what the church had believed and confessed, hence orthodoxy, and anything that deviated from that tradition of the earlier church fathers and councils was considered heresy or at least unorthodox. After the reign of Theodosious I (379-395 CE) the eastern half of the empire based in Constantinople would remain in some form with the emperor reigning and the Orthodox church intact until Constantinople falls in 1453.

In Gruene, Texas there is a dancehall which proudly proclaims “Gently resisting change since 1872” and in many ways the Byzantine empire was able to gently resist significant changes for 1,000 years. The world around its borders changed and went through a number of upheavals and eventually it would find itself caught between the Catholics on one side and the Muslims on the other, and yet the emperor, orthodox priests and the tradition of the fathers provided stability while the world around them was filled with chaos.

[i] Murray Bowen, 1976 quoted in Roberta M. Gilbert, The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory: A New Way of Thinking About the Individual and The Group, Falls Church and Basye, Virginia: Leading Systems Press, 2004 and 2006, 47.

The Ballad of Ruth

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The Ballad of Ruth[i]

William Blake, Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah

There was no bread in the house of bread[ii] and so from the house of bread the breadless fled

To Moab went Elimelech and Naomi[iii] the sweet with two sons, departing hungry yet full

Foreigners in a foreign land they seek life but find only death and emptiness

A father dies, but leaves two sons behind to watch over the sweet one and to carry the name on

And yet the names of the sons, Mahlon and Chilion, tell a tale all their own and a short tale it is

For Ruth and Orpah marry men whose part in the story seems only to perish, and perish they do[iv]

So in Moab is left Naomi the sweet made bitter, no longer hungry but empty

And yet in the house of bread, bread has returned

In the land of Moab sweet has turned bitter, bitterness has filled Naomi from bone to bile

In a foreign land the blessing of God seems to have turned to a curse, fullness to emptiness

The joy of wedding and the blessing of hope into the dirge of mourning and sons buried too soon

There is no gift for the wives of her children except to send them home to their father’s house

No sons left to give or bear, only a wish for the Lord’s kindness and a new beginning

For with Naomi there is only death, what is left but to return home to die

Breadless, childless, loveless, hopeless and bitter

And yet to the house of bread, Naomi will return

In the land of Moab, Orpah returns home to her father’s home but Naomi will not return home empty

The love of God comes wrapped in an unexpected form, the Moabite wife of her son

She becomes not only the bearer of grace and mercy but as the agent of God’s love[v] for the wounded child

Ruth’s words that, ‘where you go I’ll go, where you live I’ll live, your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I’ll die and there I’ll be buried.’

You asked for the Lord’s blessing in my departure, but may the Lord judge me if I depart

For neither life nor death, nor things present nor things to come will be able to separate Naomi

From the love of God shown in the Moabitess

To the house of bread, Naomi returns with Ruth as her only harvest

To the house of bread came two women, one known and one unknown

The known is Naomi, gone for a decade or more, returning as Mara[vi]

Departed sweet and returned bitter

The other is the Moabitess, the daughter of former oppressors, the alien, the outsider

She is the immigrant, the unprotected, the dangerous defiler, and yet she is Ruth

The outsider bears God’s grace in a way the insiders do not

At harvest time they return to a home long abandoned with empty fields.

Will there be bread in house of bread for the breadless?

Is there a place for the alien, the outcast, the widow, the poor and the weak?

Will the leftovers be enough to fill their emptiness or will they die forgotten?

Will their bodies be sold or taken for free in the reaping fields?

Or will new life begin in the harvest, will life return to the lifeless and bread to the breadless?

What will be gleaned in the barley harvest? Blessing or curse, life or death?

The fields are ripe in the house of bread and the harvest begins

The worthy man extends the blessing of the Lord’s covering[vii] and offers the shelter of his protection

For he has taken notice of the Moabitess working in the fields and knows of the grace she has shown

The outsider is made equal of the servants out in the fields and return home with a bushel of grain

Bread had returned to the breadless, life to the lifeless

Boaz has spoken to the heart[viii] of Ruth, and his words have returned hope to the bitter one

Bless the one who has covered us, who has not forgotten the dead

Bless the one who grants bread from the house of bread

Harvests come and harvests go in the house of bread, and then comes the celebration

The eating and drinking, the festival and feasting for once again the work is done

On the field of the threshing floor lies the worthy man, the fruit has been separated from the chaff

On the floor, covered[ix] lies the man who provided a covering for Ruth and Naomi

Work done, mercy extended, blessing shared…

Yet in the mystery of midnight what will happen to what lies on the threshing floor?

For in the mystery of midnight Ruth comes, perfumed and prepared

On the threshing floor at midnight the man finds himself uncovered and a woman lying at his feet

“I am Ruth, spread your covering over me” Once you wished the Lord’s covering on me, now be that covering

Can you accept the foreigner as one of your own, can your family be my family and your home my home

Your God is already God, may I go where you go, may I die where you die

In the mystery of midnight are the worthy man and the foreigner

Two agents of grace, two who covered others

Will the mystery of midnight on the threshing floor of the house of bread be fruitful?[x]

The worthy man and the kinsman and the elders at the gate must make settlement

Land must be redeemed, a family saved, life will begin anew

A sandal is passed, the deal is done

The worthy man and the foreigner are now one

God’s covering came, life begins anew

A child named Obed in Naomi’s lap grew

And from Obed, Jesse, and from Jesse , David the King

And a foreigner showed grace, a worthy man covered her and life began anew

In the house of bread begins a line of kings

And in ages to come over the house of bread the angels will sing.

[i] This is taken from the book of Ruth, this is not a translation or paraphrase but I do stay fairly close to the story and try to capture some of it’s patterns

[ii] Ruth plays on the Hebrew word for bread which is lechem, Bethlehem is literally the house of bread

[iii] Naomi one of the meanings of Naomi is sweet one

[iv] Mahlon’s name is similar to one of the Hebrew words for disease while Chilion name is the Hebrew word ‘to perish’

[v] Another of the key words to Ruth is the Hebrew word ‘Hesed’ often translated kindness in Ruth, but most other places it refers to God’s actions of unmerited grace and mercy

[vi] Mara is the name she gives herself which means bitter, the opposite of her former self

[vii] Another of the keywords in Ruth, kanap which can mean wing, covering or garment and will be used playfully from this point on in the story

[viii] Another Hebraism which may mean speaking kindly to or may indicate sweet-talking

[ix] This is again Kanap, as the blessing of the Lord’s covering was wished on rush, now this covering will become that covering

[x] This scene is pregnant with images that can go either in an innocent or non-innocent way, it is like a movie where the door is closed and what goes on is based largely on assumptions.

Goodnight (Promised) Moon

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On the great big tube
There were blue states
And red ones too

And a picture of….
A politician who had promised the moon

And there were three derrieres sitting on chairs
And a donkey in blue and a red elephant too
And a divided house and a perplexed spouse
With a bunch of attack adds full of mush
And a quiet old lady who was whispering “hush”

Goodnight tube, goodnight moon
Goodnight politician who promised the moon
Goodnight blue states, goodnight red (the elections over it’s time for bed)
Goodnight derrieres and goodnight chairs
Goodnight polls, goodnight clocks
Goodnight divided house, goodnight perplexed spouse
Goodnight attacks, goodnight adds
Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush
Goodnight pundits, goodnight hot air
Goodnight noises everywhere

Adapted from Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon by Neil White in expectation of the close of the 2012 election cycle. Happy voting to all and to all a good night 🙂

Shame…on you

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Shame is a feeling that everyone struggles with, men and women of all ages, social status, education level and perceived levels of success. We all struggle with shame. “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” (Brown, 68) Shame is not guilt, where we realize we have done something wrong and can’t believe we did whatever we did. It is not humiliation where we feel like we are receiving treatment we don’t deserve. It is not embarrassment where we can see others having made the same embarrassing thing. Shame becomes a part of the story we tell about ourselves, we begin to believe that we are the issue. Shame moves beyond I have done something wrong to believing that I am something wrong.

Men and women experience shame differently. For women the primary trigger is how they look, followed by motherhood. It sounds like this:

Look perfect. Do perfect. Be perfect. Anything less is shaming.
Being judged by other mothers.
Being exposed—the flawed parts of yourself that you want to hide from everyone are revealed.
No matter what I achieve or how far I’ve come, where I come from and what I survived will always keep me from feeling like I’m good enough.
Even though everyone knows that there’s no way to do it all, everyone still expects it. Shame is when you can’t pull it off looking like it’s under control.
Never enough at home. Never enough at work. Never enough in bed. Never enough with my parents. Shame is never enough.
No seat at the cool table. The pretty girls are laughing (Brown, 85)

For men it is organized around the perception of being weak, and this comes from both men and women. If you haven’t watched the video, I know I can really resonate with the man who exclaims, “but when we reach out and share our stories, we get the emotional shit beat out of us.” And not just by other guys, women play into this as well. Men learn young how to pretend to be vulnerable.

Shame for men sounds like:

Shame is failure. At work. On the football field. In your marriage. In bed. With money. With your children. It doesn’t matter—shame is failure.
Shame is being wrong. Not doing it wrong, but being wrong.
Shame is a sense of being defective
Shame happens when people think you’re soft. It’s degrading and shaming to be seen as anything but tough.
Revealing weakness is shaming. Basically, shame is weakness.
Showing fear is shameful. You can’t show fear. You can’t be afraid—no matter what.
Shame is being seen as the “guy you can shove up against the lockers.”
Our worst fear is being criticized or ridiculed—either one of those is extremely shaming. (Brown, 92)

The experience of shame is the same but the way it is received is different between the sexes. We never become immune to shame, but we can learn to become resilient. Shame prevents us from risking and being creative. It tells us we are not good enough, not smart enough, not popular enough…you can fill in whatever possible fear you like. It keeps us out of the arena, keeps us from sharing things that are important to us and keeps us imprisoned in our own shame. It thrives in an environment of secrecy and judgment.

I know I haven’t done justice to Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, which is an incredible book-better even than the videos, but it is time for me to move on to something else. Enjoy the video and may you develop resilience to the power of shame.

Cultures of Scarcity

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Narcissism, you would think we are surrounded by it, that every person is self absorbed:politicians, movie stars, young people, athletes, police, parents, CEOs, and the list could go on and on, it is ‘those people’ who are self absorbed, but it is rarely me. “If only we could cut these people down to size, put them in their right place, make them realize that they need to work for a living” might be some people’s response to those people they dub as narcissists, but the reality is that narcissism is an outgrowth of shame. It is the fear of being ordinary, of not being noticed or being loveable, belonging, being cool. Often it grows from trying to cultivate a sense of purpose in what may seem to be the hollowness in their lives.

We live with scarcity, the never enough problem. Fill in the blank never _________enough:

Never good enough
Never perfect enough
Never thin enough
Never powerful enough
Never successful enough
Never smart enough
Never certain enough
Never safe enough
Never extraordinary enough (this list comes from Brown’s Daring Greatly, 24)

We get scarcity because we live in a world where we believe it and live it. And scarcity strives in a culture where you are hyper aware of what you lack, now the flip side is that scarcity can blind you to what you have. How big of a paycheck is big enough, how much money do you really need, and yet we live in a culture where we are measured by impossible standards and we have visions of perfection put before our eyes-visions of what we should have, what our family should be, how our marriages should be, how we should look and the list goes on and on. “Scarcity doesn’t take hold in a culture overnight. But the feeling of scarcity does thrive in a shame-prone cultures that are deeply steeped in comparison and fractured by disengagement” (Brown, 26) Wow, we eat, breathe and drink comparison-we measure ourselves against others and alienation or disengagement is one of the words that when you ask people about how they feel that often sums up there experience. We have much greater access to what is going on in the world, but that engagement often focuses heavily on the negative…school shootings, corporate scandals, wars, natural disasters, famines, unemployment-and even when we are not directly involved we feel that these events “out there” are stealing our sense of security “here.”

There are three components to a culture of scarcity:

Shame: is fear of ridicule and belittling used to manage people and/or keep people in line? Is self worth tied to achievement, productivity or compliance? Are blaming and finger pointing norms? Are name calling and finger pointing rampant? What about favoritism? Is perfectionism an issue?
Comparison: Healthy competition is beneficial, but is there constant overt or covert comparing and ranking? Has creativity been suffocated? Are people held to one narrow standard rather than acknowledged for their unique gifts and contributions? Is there an ideal way of being or one form of talent that is used as measurement of everyone else’s worth?
Disengagement: Are people afraid to take risks and try new things? Is it easier to stay quiet than to share stories, experiences, and ideas? Does it feel as if no one is really paying attention and listening? Is everyone struggling to be seen and heard? (Brown,27)

Scarcity is not cured by abundance. There are many people who are convinced that there is never enough money, never enough time, never enough sleep, never enough health, they will never be beautiful enough or smart enough or popular enough. If you live from a perspective of scarcity it is never enough, no matter what abundance you have. The opposite of scarcity is enough, it is a different way of looking at the world. Scarcity breeds shame and fear, but enough allows you to take the risks involved with being vulnerable. It is not easy to believe you have enough in a culture that thrives on scarcity, just like it is not easy to remain calm when everyone else may seem anxious.

I think we all seek a feeling of being worthy and nobody wants to live a life based on fear. Courage involves risk and perhaps the greatest risk is vulnerability.

Note: I’m doing this because I am trying to internalize some of what I have learned from Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly which is a phenomenal book and this is a part of a series of posts that pull very heavily from that work.

Daring Greatly

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Sometimes you read something that is just really cool and you need to share some of the ideas with others who may not have read it yet, that is what I feel like after reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. So I’m taking a little time away from where I was going with the authority questions and I’m going to turn inward a little bit and spend some time here…

If you haven’t encountered Brené Brown before this is one of her TED talks that if you can spare 20 minutes is well worth the time

I love psychology, I love to learn in general and so much of what she says rings true to me. At the core we are all seeking connection with others, we seek it out and yet

“…when asked to tell about their most important relationship and experiences of connection, (participants) kept telling me about heartbreak, betrayal and shame—the fear of not being worthy of real connection. We humans have a tendency to define things by what they are not. This is especially true of our emotional experiences” (Daring Greatly, 7)

Brené Brown comes at this from the perspective of a researcher and social worker, and I come at this from the perspective of a pastor where we come face to face with people who seem to be able to handle anything that comes their way and others who are miserable even in the best of circumstances. I’m going to talk about what she reveals about shame in my next post, but to begin with here are some of her basic statements in my paraphrase:

1. We are all seeking love and acceptance, we all want to be like, valued, cared for-it gives meaning to our lives and its absence leads us to question our worth, value and it leads to a great deal of suffering for us (this may be why rejection hurts so much)

2. If you divide people into groups that feel love and belonging and those who struggle with it the key difference is those who feel loveable, who love and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. There lives are not easier that people who struggle with it, they are just able to hold onto the belief that they are worthy of love, belonging and joy.

3. This belief of being worthy of love, belonging and happiness doesn’t just happen, it is cultivated (we can learn how to do this in our own lives)

4. Living in a whole-hearted way (Professor Brown’s way of talking about the people who believe they are worthy) leads to being courageous, compassionate and connected

5. The willingness to be vulnerable is the single value attributed to the people that feel loveable

(This is a paraphrase of Daring Greatly, 10)

I’m going to be working through this material to help myself integrate some of these things, but as a pastor there is so much to what she says that really rings true for me. Who we are as a people are people who are worthy of God’s love, we are enough, we are forgiven, loved, cared for, valued, use whatever word you want there, but at the core of our identity is the reality that before anything else we are valued and enough and from there we can begin to live in a way that is courageous, compassionate and connected. More to come…

Climbing Out of the Rabbit Hole: Walking Away from Post-Modernity

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I’ve probably been spending too much time with philosophy lately, and I know that many people don’t ask the same type of questions that I do, but I am curious-I like a good challenge. I am willing to take an intellectual journey intentionally wrestling with some of the deep questions that are asked by philosophers and historians and artists, but I’m also willing to, after taking seriously what they have to say, walk away unconvinced and disappointed that good questions often can lead to answers that are indeed poor and shallow. I was first made aware of post-modern thought around the turn of the millennia when I began studying at seminary, and I guess that it would be hard to study any liberal arts discipline without being exposed in significant, if not always obvious, ways to the questions of postmodern philosophy, and while I am thankful for many of the perspectives that these questions exposed me to, it is time to climb out of the rabbit hole and to begin to reconstruct a different way of looking at the world.

I am taking the climbing out of the rabbit hole comment from a series of movies that was quite intentionally shaped by a postmodern viewpoint, The Matrix.(The link will take you to one of the more famous and most representative scenes of the movie) If one can get past the huge amount of violence that is present in all three of the films they ask some very deep philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge, of truth, of authority and power, of free will and volition and in almost parabolic form the main character Neo become the one, a Christ-type figure that liberates a portion of humanity to their enslavement to a system of illusion and lies, but the reality that he has to offer is a brutal, ugly and equally ambiguous one…it may be the truth (or at least closer to it) but it is an uncomfortable one.

So first, what is this postmodernism I am talking about walking away from? It is a reaction to the optimistic worldview that eventually we would be able to fix all of our problems through science, society, technology and information. In the words of Morpheus from the video above they became aware that “there is something wrong with the world…like a splinter in their mind driving them mad.” Not a unified group, they began to question the progressive hope that humanity could and would continue to get better and better off, because despite the privileged status of many of the early postmodern thinkers and artists (most of these were members of the academic and artistic portions of society in the 1950s and later)they viewed the world critically and often felt betrayed by this optimistic worldview. Instead they viewed art, language, society, history, science and technology all serving the political ends of those in power, while those without power were victims of progress. Postmodern thought is certain in its uncertainty, in an information society it views most information needing to be distrusted because it is merely being utilized to create a narrative to benefit those in power, and in reality taken to extremes it borders on paranoia. For a postmodern person all meta-narratives (the big stories that help us make sense of our lives-whether Christianity or national identity or history) lost their authority and that truth, at least a universal truth, is impossible and some manner of relativism is what we are left with. Truth instead of being something that is true for everyone is instead dependent on one’s standpoint (i.e. am I viewing this question as a woman, as Hispanic, as poor, as an immigrant, as a person in the third world, etc.) and even language itself is a cultural construct. Ultimately we live in our constructions of reality, our world and our truth revolve around us. Everything from art and literature to science and technology became subject to an endless set of qualifications and limitations. If you go down the rabbit hole very far it can become very disabling, it is a type of cynicism that makes you question every foundation that you try to place something upon, it allows a person to be a great critic but denies the narratives and structure in which to create. Honestly, most postmodern artwork is ugly, much of its thought is highly depressing and in its quest to liberate people intellectually it managed to take away their tools to bring together people for societal change.

Many of the questions that postmodern thinkers asked needed to be asked, but it is one thing to be a critic and another to be a constructive critic which helps frame a way forward. The hermeneutic of suspicion, where everything is viewed with a sense that it might not be trustworthy, cannot be the system any sane person lives their lives out of. We need narratives, big stories that help us make sense of ourselves and our world. Do those narratives need to be trustworthy, absolutely and in particular some of the feminist and post-colonial critiques of biblical studies, theology and politics have helped me re-evaluate my own approach to these narratives, but I am also unwilling to collapse into a relativism that has no sense of truth that is universal. We need history and art and beauty, and perhaps a pre-modern sense of wonder and mystery. The world needs truth more than it needs facts and data, it needs a set of inter-related stories to help us make the tough ethical and economic decisions that we as individuals and society have to navigate. We need big stories of who we are as people, our past and our present and our hopes for the future as we engage in difficult decisions related to war and peace, crime and punishment, medical care and technological innovation as well as our everyday relationships with one another. So in my own way this is a walking away,a climbing out of the rabbit hole if you will, not unchanged by the experience and the questions, but rather in a sense that it is time to grow up, to put childish things aside, to realize that even in its imperfections that the we all need stories to make sense of our lives and that my story and the stories of those around me have more in common than I had been led to believe.

From Sermon to Text: Following Jesus in an ADD world-Sermon from July 22, 2012

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One thing I have learned is that for me a sermon is never complete in its evolution until the final time I give it. I don’t preach every week, but on the weeks I do I am going to try to go backwards from sermon to text to complete the cycle before moving on, so here is the sermon from July 22:

Psalm 23 (NRSV)

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

² He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;

³ he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil;

for you are with me; your rod and your staff– they comfort me.

⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.

Mark 6 (NRSV)

³⁰ The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. ³¹ He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. ³² And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.³³ Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. ³⁴ As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.

…

⁵³ When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. ⁵⁴ When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, ⁵⁵ and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. ⁵⁶ And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.

One thing I’ve learned in my eight years of ministry as a pastor is that God definitely has a sense of humor, and I quickly thought after reading these texts initially-‘great I’m going to preach on all the distractions that make it challenging to follow God’ to which God responded, ‘OK distractions, you want distractions I can give you distractions!’ And so in a week with a wedding and a funeral, where I spent more time in the hospital visiting people than at my desk trying to work on all the things that I felt like I needed to get done, and my first week back from vacation where I have both my kids with me I set off to write on set of ideas, but God and sitting with Psalm 23 and the 6^th chapter of Mark changed that.

Now I am a person who grew up with the rise of computer technology and so I am very comfortable with digital media. I don’t think for example that texting has made us unable to have face to face conversations or that most people have substituted friend on Facebook for real friendships, but I do know how many distractions there can be out there.

Richard Lischer, a Lutheran pastor who teaches at Duke, in his 2005 book the End of Words makes the statement that the average American is subjected to over 6,000 messages per day, which may sound like a lot, but when you take into account all the advertisements you hear and see on billboards, the computer, radio and television, the songs you listen to on whatever media you use, the websites you visit, the shows you watch on TV, movies you watch, conversations you have verbally or digitally, as well as all the emails, tweets, blogs, facebook posts, etc. you see in a typical day, and maybe that number is too low. Yet as a Christian we talk about a group of stories we call gospel and we hope that they can pierce all the noise and become a part of other people’s stories. We are still at the stage where we may know how to use all the technology that surrounds us in our daily lives, but we are still trying to figure out what it means—and yet this is not a new phenomena. In the 1960s Martin Luther King, Jr. could state that “we have allowed our technology to outpace our theology.” And we find ourselves in that continual struggle to make sense of ourselves and our relationship to God and others in a rapidly changing world. We try to make sense of our theology, but there are so many distractions, so much that has changed (even if not consciously) how we think about ourselves. Sometimes I think we have all these wonderful tools for information and communication, but we sometimes find ourselves addicted to them. I know I have certainly had times where I have looked at my smart phone wondering if there was a personal or work email I needed to check, something on facebook that someone had messaged me, some text I was waiting for, or (novel idea for a phone) whether I had missed any calls and I find myself checking it even on vacation even when I know that most of what will show up is not very important.

Another of Richard Lischer’s insightful statements was that the ‘first casualty of the information age was truth.’ We are surrounded my facts, opinions, data and yet we have lost much of the beauty, passion, experimentation and honestly the ability to accept failure in this world of data. Most of us have had the experience of trying to make a decision and then going back, even once we are pretty sure of what the course of action we are going to take is, and getting more data…but the reality is that beyond a point data does not help us make better decisions, it becomes a tool to postpone making a decision. Sometimes data also can be construed in a way that is deceptive or sensationalized in order to attract attention. In an earlier post I look at the data behind the article in the Omaha World-Herald “Are We Losing Faith in Religion?” but the reality when you look at the data there has been a loss of faith in everything they surveyed in recent years, even the military, police and small businesses which are the only three institutions that scored better than organized religion. Yet we live in a world where we like data, and Gallup is one of the many sources that help us gather data (in the hope that we can make better decision) but there has been a shift to where we are the decision makers, we are the center, the world revolves around us.

Psalm 23 is one of the most familiar passages of scripture, but also one of the most alien to most of us. The idea that God is our shepherd sounds nice, but ultimately we view ourselves as the decision makers. We are not worried about what we are going to eat, where we are going to sleep, our own protection and security: we build our lives around providing these things for ourselves. If you are like me you know where the next week’s worth of meals are coming from because you went to the grocery store and your freezer is stocked. In addition to this the rent is paid, so we know where we will sleep. It is only when something shakes up our life and we feel like we aren’t in control that we can understand what it means for the Lord to be our shepherd.

In a way it is like we’ve gone back in time. In the 1500s, it was a time of great change, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue so in the 1500s the new world was being explored. In Europe a monk named Martin Luther was stirring up what would become the reformation which would drastically change not only religion but education and the political structure of Europe. Finally there was this guy named Copernicus who had the audacity to suggest and demonstrate that instead of the sun and stars and planets revolving around the earth that instead the sun was at the center and the earth revolved around it. Most people of his time thought he was crazy, Luther included, but it is very rare to find an adult today that doesn’t understand the earth as a planet in rotation around the sun. Yet I think all the data we find ourselves surrounded by allows us to think we are the center and everything rotates around us and is held together by our own gravitational pull. But if the Lord is my shepherd, then God is at the center and we rotate around God and we are just one of the many who are caught up in the gravitational field that God exerts.

To spend a little more time with the agricultural image of Psalm 23, when I was on vacation with my family at their home in Bandera my sister Kelly has horses and goats and some other animals as well, but with animals if you have food you (or more precisely the food you hold) are the most critical things in the world. Well, Kelly and I had brought back some oats from the feed store for the horses and the horses were in another part of their property and we thought maybe we can sneak in and put the feed away without them noticing, so we drove my sisters truck onto the property all the way to the buildings where she stores the feed, begin unloading and then we are noticed. The horses realize the truck is here, they’re unloading something out of it, and they must have FOOD!!! And so the horses come at a gallop across the yard, desperate for some of the food we are unloading. Kelly manages to keep the horses away while we I finish unloading, but there is something to this…and this is where I think we come into the reading for Mark from today, because even though we may not become single minded for food like a horse or goat might, when we have a need if someone can provide that we will do anything to get there.

I think if we go back to the image of the planets rotating around the sun for a second we also need to understand that it isn’t just planets out there, there is a lot of other stuff, and not everything has a nice elliptical orbit where is stays at roughly the same distance from the earth. There are asteroids, comets and other bodies that get pulled close to the sun for a time and then draw away and they cross the orbits of the planets and sometimes there are collisions. Well if the Lord is our center of gravity, it would make sense that there are people who in times of need are drawn closer, they know they have a need for food, for healing, to make sense of something in their lives and so they are drawn close and sometimes they cross our path. Now among planets there is a collision, but among people they call this ministry.

As I approach Mark 6, the disciples have just returned from where Jesus sent them out to the surrounding towns and communities to proclaim the kingdom of God has drawn near, to heal their sick and cast out demons, and they stayed wherever they were welcomed. Now they have returned and they are tired, they want a break and yet people keep coming. They are drawn to Jesus, they have needs, they want to be around him, and they don’t even have time to eat because so many people have been drawn near, and you can almost hear in the text the disciples saying, “MAKE THEM GO AWAY!” and Jesus tries to break away but the need is so great and the people are looking for the Lord who is their shepherd.

Now I approach the disciples’ position based on my own experiences and when I hear they didn’t even have time to eat I am taken back to my time in the Army when I was a staff officer for 3^rd Squadron, 2^nd Cavalry and I was both one of the officers that ran then Tactical Operations Center (TOC) and I was one of the primary planning officers-which is a really bad combination. You see when you aren’t running operations you are planning and when you aren’t planning you are typically running an operation and if we went on a rotation to one of the training centers, you would typically spend 14 days actively involved in what is called ‘the box’ where you were fighting against another unit and it would be broken into a 9 day and 5 day portion. During the first 9 days there are numerous battles, and although I am sure I may have dosed off at times, I never laid down to go to sleep, and there were times when the meals were delivered but if I was planning I wouldn’t take a break, and by the end of the first nine days I was physically and mentally exhausted and they gave us a 14 hour break (because the next five days are live fire with real bullets, shells, and missiles) and I remember lying down and I remember someone shaking me to wake me up. Now I’m not saying the disciples are that tired, but they want a break, they want to get away.

All these people they are drawn to Jesus, and these are the distractions that God places in our way to pay attention to. I remember a story that Nate Frambach, my advisor from seminary told me where in his first call he felt he had to get a sermon completed, or a class ready or be ready for a meeting that night and then someone would come into the office and want to talk, of someone would call needing to pray, or someone would be in the hospital needing to be visited. Initially he thought of these to the ministry he was supposed to be doing but at some point he realized that these were his ministry. These were the place where he and Jesus and another person had been brought together and sometimes more than any sermon or class that was his ministry. Now I’m not going to say that I understood that coming out of seminary but I do now.

One thing I have learned is that for God people are more important than our border, boundaries, ideas, projects or anything else we may want to place in a higher position. This was reinforced for me back in 2009, I was at a synod assembly and it was one of those meetings where an issue that was important to the church I was serving was being debated and yet I also knew that Bill Johnston was back in Edmond, Oklahoma and his artificial heart was failing him. Bill had an artificial heart the entire time I served in Oklahoma up to that point, and he was a big man- a former basketball player and so the odds of an donor heart becoming available were slim and so I was caught between the debate (even an important debate) and Bill and his family. Now even though I agonized over this at this point, I’m more certain than even that I made the right choice to journey back from Tulsa to Edmond, to be there with Bill and Velta and his family in his last days and then to be with them and the congregation as they grieved. No matter what issue it is, people are more important.

One last story and then I’ll close (if you’ve read my blog before it is the story that is in Something Different a Farm without Fences). In Kendra Creasy Dean’s book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (which is an interesting book in its own right) she includes this story from an African Christian:

You Americans think of Christianity as a farm with a fence. Your question is, ‘Are you inside the fence or outside of it?’ We Africans think differently. We think of Christianity as a farm with no fence. Our question is, ‘Are you heading towards the farm or away from it?’ “The church’s identity is not defined primarily by its edges, but by its center: focused on Christ, the sole source of our identity, no intruder poses a threat. No alien hops the fence, because there is no fence.

I think there is something to this, and going back to the image of the solar system, if the center is Christ our orbits are probably not going to keep us the same distance away all the time, we will be drawn closer and drift farther away and in the midst of our journey we will encounter others. So I suppose the issue is not whether we are distracted or not, but what are the things we are allowing to distract us? Are they people that God has placed in our path? Or is it the unending noise and data that can distract us and make us think everything revolves around and depends upon us. In the last verse of Psalm 23 I think we find one more important note and it is a note that can get lost in translation: Surely the Lord’s goodness and mercy (this is the Hebrew word Hesed, the word that is used to talk about God’s compassion, love , mercy and grace) shall Pursue (this is one of those words that is more about actively seeking or pursuing rather than merely following) me all the days of my life. Flipping one more time to the sun and the solar system, the planets and comets and asteroids are all drawn inward by the force of the sun’s gravity, and even at point where we may be drifting away from the center God’s goodness and mercy continue to pursue us and draw us in.

Something Different: Are We Losing Faith in Religion?

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On the front page of yesterday’s Omaha World-Herald the central story was “Are We Losing Faith in Religion?” The article highlights Gallup’s 2012 survey on the Confidence of Institutions which has been taken annually since 1973. To me this is not surprising, honestly I am surprised that organized religion scored as well as it did, with the way in which the perception of authority is changing. In general people have become much more skeptical of the political process, the economic world, the medical system, news sources, and big business. Organized religion scored better than any institution other than the military, small business and the police.

Gallup does not report reasons, only breaks down responses into six categories of confidence in institutions:

Great Deal of Confidence

Quite a Lot

Some

Very Little

None

No Opinion

But since I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about authority lately here are some of my reflections:

This is a part of a broader cultural and philosophical trend to distrust authority, as Eileen Burke-Sullivan (who is quoted in the article) says there is “a general malaise in the United States about leadership of any kind.” There has always been some level of questioning of authority built into the type of governmental system that we have, but we live in a time of increasing polarization in many institutions. Television news, for comparison to organized religion’s 44%, only received a 21% great deal/quite a lot of confidence and newspapers only 25%. Even the people communicating the news to us are not to be trusted. Postmodernism’s hermeneutic of suspicion (the idea that every source of information needs to be evaluated suspiciously) is firmly imbedded in our sub consciousness. As the X-Files used to say, “Question everything.”

There are many ways in which each of these organizations have failed to live up to the standards they set for themselves. Probably the two most common examples are sexual and fiscal impropriety. In religion there are certainly numerous scandals across denominations, from the Catholic Church’s continued struggle with priests who sexually abused minors to the indiscretions of mega-church pastors. Financial mismanagement, fraud and theft are not new but it receives more news coverage and visibility than at other times in history. This is not merely a function of religious organizations; it applies in government, economic institutions, and medical. Ultimately the increased visibility of these very real moral failings continues to feed the perception that those in various positions of authority are not looking out for our best interest.

Even though authority of religious institutions has been affected by both of the above criteria, there is a broader set of re-evaluation going on as the church (along with society) enters into a period of re-examining what it believes in light of a rapidly changing world. This is not always an easy process and there will be conflict which sometimes elevates into combat. The way the church has dealt with controversial issues (and it has done this rather frequently since the 1960s) as well as trivial issues has often not been healthy and many have walked away from the conflict wounded and with a deep mistrust of the organization.

For me this is a challenging but exciting time to try to re-think what is means to be Church. I am convinced that at the center are the questions of authority-which ultimately has to do with the ability to narrate the stories in which we make sense of our world. There are a lot of stories out there, Richard Lischer in The End of Words makes the claim that the average American is exposed to 6,000 messages per day (conversations, advertisements, stories, songs, tweets, texts, etc…) and honestly that is one of the primary reason I am doing the work of relooking how the story was told across time and who got to tell it. I’m not convinced I have the answers yet, but I am convinced I am asking the right questions.

On a different note, why did the military, the police and small businesses score as well as they did? Here are my thoughts on that, which are by no means scientific. In contrast to the Vietnam War where the military was lumped in with people’s feelings about authority in general and the war in particular, since the 1980s, regardless of the public’s feelings about a war or a political leader, the perception of the military has remained high. Partially this may be guilt related; since people no longer have the threat of being drafted to serve there is a feeling that the military is making sacrifices that the rest of us are not. Even though the police have had times where they are viewed negatively, for the most part people have a fairly positive attitude towards police officers who they believe put their lives in danger for their protection. Small business has been trumpeted across the political spectrum as the group that will save us from recession and so who doesn’t like small business? Even each of these groups has seen some small declines in recent years, but they still enjoy broad confidence.

Sign of the Rose

Searchings: Sacred and Secular

Author Archives: Neil

Starting Over Again…

The Place of Authority 3-2:Byzantium, Triangles and the Quest for Stasis

The Ballad of Ruth

Goodnight (Promised) Moon

Shame…on you

Cultures of Scarcity

Daring Greatly

Climbing Out of the Rabbit Hole: Walking Away from Post-Modernity

From Sermon to Text: Following Jesus in an ADD world-Sermon from July 22, 2012

Something Different: Are We Losing Faith in Religion?