Dangerbooks: The Story of God, the Story of Us

I got two problems. Problem a: I keep running out of ideas to post. Problem 2: I got books to promote.

I work for a publisher, and I edit a lot of people who over the course of the publishing process become friends. Selling your own book can be tough; you need all the help you can get. So I have these friends in need, and I have this blog in need, and I think they can help each other.

So, without further ado, the first in an occasional series of reviews of books that make my work worthwhile. I call them dangerbooks.

***

Today's dangerbook is The Story of God, the Story of Us, by Sean Gladding. Sean is British, but he's spent most of his adulthood in either Lexington, Kentucky, or Houston, Texas. He's back in Lexington these days with his wife, Rebecca, and two kids. Sean and Rebecca serve in pastoral roles for Communality, a new monastic community active in urban agriculture and other community development efforts. Before this most recent stint at Communality, Sean was copastoring Mercy Street in Houston, a church made up largely of people in the recovery movement. I met Sean five years ago at a retreat in New Mexico, where he told me about a teaching tool he and Rebecca had developed to help people understand the "grand narrative" of Scripture. Sounded wicked awesome to me.

I developed a bit of a man-crush on Sean during that retreat, and I made it something of a personal mission to get that teaching tool into book form. Five years later, it's now in print. It still sounds like Sean, but it covers the whole terrain of the Bible--and not only that, it manages to transport the reader into the story itself. Eight chapters are set around a common fire lighting and warming an exilic Jewish community in Babylon. The Jews gather in the evening to sing songs of defiance and recall the glory days of the kingdom of Israel, but invariably their praise and memory gives way to bitterness: How did we, the people of God, wind up here--slaves again, exiled from the land of God's promise?

The community turns to a wise elder, one who recalls the days of temple worship in Jerusalem. This elder is himself chastened by his time in exile, and he embraces this call to confront and encourage his people: they have arrived in this place for a reason, but they have reason to hope. He retells the story of God--which, he reminds them (and us), is our story as well. from creation, where we are reminded that God is creative and good, to conceit, where we are reminded that we all too easily lose sight of God's goodness and banish ourselves from God's presence.

We leave the Old Testament with hope that God will once again deliver his people. After a brief interlude, when a student of the elder--now fully grown--tells of her return to the land of promise and her people's wait for a fuller deliverance, we are introduced to a new scene, this one an ekklesia in a major city. A visiting merchant learns what motivates such joy in his host and the people gathered in her home: the promised one of God who taught the Law, performed miracles, died and was resurrected. Now, the host tells her guest, everything is different. We see Jesus as the fulfillment of the messianic promise and his story as a continuation of the story that begins in Genesis. That merchant provides the link to the final chapter--he is now the leader of another ekklesia, this one meeting secretly to avoid persecution. He tells the end of the story, with the Roman empire (and all empires) subverted by the kingdom of God, the Roman tyrant (and all tyrants) supplanted by the Prince of Peace.

I loved this book; it's remarkably creative, pastorally sensitive, prophetically provocative. It rewards private reading but is intended to be read out loud in community. You can get the book at ivpress.com or at fine booksellers wherever.

Just for kicks, Sean teamed up with the folks at The Work of the People to supplement his book with a six-session video series. The videos run eight minutes each and cover six core themes in the Scriptures. Here he's not telling stories; here he's raising questions and suggesting ways of living more in sync with the love of God. The videos sell for $15 each, but you can get all six, along with a discussion guide, for $30. Trust me, they'll provoke plenty of discussion and reward regular viewing--I've found myself moved every time I've watched "Reconciliation," to say nothing of everything else.

This was a great book to edit; it was also an adventure, since we rushed the book so it could be made available at a conference called, fittingly, "Story." That meant multiple conversations every week with Sean over the course of several months. I miss those regular conversations, honestly. So I'm hoping a ton of people will buy the book so we can acquire another one from him. Do Sean and me--and yourself--a favor, and pick up a copy of The Story of God, the Story of Us. Then pick up another one and give it to someone you enjoy spending time with. You'll be doing them a favor too.

***

That's it for episode one of "Dangerbooks." Hope you enjoyed it. Look for the next installment whenever I run out of other material to report.

Snubbed by the Homeless

This past Sunday at worship I bumped into a guy I've met a number of times. I said "Hi." He said, "Do I know you?"

Apparently he didn't know me, but I knew him. I recognized him even though he was wearing a bloody hockey mask and carrying a bloody machete. (I'm assuming it was a Halloween costume, but in all honesty I don't know him very well.) I, on the other hand, was dressed in almost exactly the same way that I am every time I see this guy. It's worth noting that he recognized at least a couple of women, but me--nope. Nothing.

I'll be honest with you, I felt a little snubbed. I see this guy three out of every four Wednesday mornings. I make him breakfast, I fold his blanket and collect his dirty linens to be laundered. I let him sleep as much as a half hour longer than everybody else. He's a guest at an overnight shelter; apparently I'm his servant.

His name's Dave too, I found out. The women called him that. It's been a frustration of mine at the shelter, actually, that nobody ever uses anyone else's name; I never learn what to call people. I suppose I could ask, and I'm pretty sure I have asked once or twice, but I can't retain people's names to save my life, apparently.

I like to think that I'm not a particularly vain person, but when I get snubbed by a homeless guy, my vanity gets poked at. I like to be recognized, thanked, celebrated even. Noblesse oblige is traditionally thought to be the responsibility of the well off, but generally it's also their privilege, and when that privilege is withheld, it stings a bit. Especially when on most days the well off (e.g., me) don't feel particularly well off.

Then again, obligation never really motivates us. More compelling motivators are personal: self-preservation, personal gain, relationships, that sort of thing. And what really stings, I guess, is not that this poor homeless guy isn't adequately deferential to the middle-class guy schlepping eggs for him; it's that this guy I've gotten friendly with at weekly gatherings is friendly but not, apparently, a friend.

That's my fault as much as anyone's. I haven't remembered his name, I haven't gotten to know him. Instead of finding out about his life, I found myself surprised to run into him in the church building where both of us worship.

Jesus once told his followers, "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends" (John 15:15). That's what I want for me and Dave, I guess: in this scenario he's Jesus and I'm one of the guys who are about to abandon, betray or deny him. But Jesus called them friends nevertheless. I'm hopeful that, sooner or later, Dave will call me friend as well.

Sympathy for the Evangelical

We’ve hit that point in the election cycle where I’ve become sorely tired of campaign commercials. Most of my voting decisions are, I’ll admit, this year being made based on superficial factors: no to the guy who had his own theme song written, no to the guy who does a bad Obama impression, yes to the guy who doesn’t stand a chance. (Apparently women in my district don’t run for political office.) But one thing I’ve come to appreciate this year is that people seem to be laying off the evangelicals.

In Chicago, church affiliation is not a disqualifier for public office; a prominent pastor is a serious contender for Chicago mayor, for example, and every Sunday I hear a sound bite or two from sermons by gubernatorial candidates and aspirants to the state senate. These church appearances tend to be on the liberal side of the divide, but it’s telling that no one is raising significant protest against what, in other days, might have been considered a serious breach of the division of church and state.

Meanwhile, on the right, candidates who in previous years might have pandered to the conservative church seem to be leaving it alone: no loud professions of faith, no “Jesus is my favorite philosopher” blindsides, no voter’s guide tucked under my windshield wiper during worship (yet). There’s been private pandering, I’m sure, at fundraisers and the like. And once or twice candidates have been set up to admit, however awkwardly, that they would separate their faith from their politics a little less than their opponent. But by and large, it seems that in this election, we’ve forgotten that personal faith exists: in this cycle, it’s the issues, stupid.

Maybe we should credit President Obama, who two years ago successfully negotiated a controversy involving his home church pastor and helped the country put personal faith in a new political context. Maybe we should credit Don Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, who stumped for then-candidate Obama and changed public perceptions about the monolithic political nature of evangelical faith. Maybe we should credit political activist James Dobson for stepping down as president of Focus on the Family (or credit the Focus board for giving him a little push). Maybe Jimmy Carter, whose Our Endangered Values is unabashedly Baptist and unapologetically progressive. Or maybe we should credit the Tea Party, whose sympathies clearly lie with conservative evangelicals but who have found better traction by identifying with the economically frustrated.

In any case, I’m relieved. Evangelical has been far too weighted an identifier for me to be comfortable with for, really, most of my adulthood, so the less press it gets, I suppose, the better. And yet it’s still an identifier, and in other parts of the world being evangelical can still get you into trouble, as Chinese delegates to the recent Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Capetown, South Africa, recently discovered. So particularly when it doesn’t hurt me but does hurt others, I find it helpful to revisit the term: what does it mean to be evangelical?

For some, evangelicals are equated with “Bible-banging homophobes,” as a friend of mine puts it. For others, evangelicals are driven by family values like gun rights and low taxes. For still others evangelicals believe the world is flat and was created, like, a thousand years ago for human beings to trash. For many, quite frankly, evangelicals are better bearers than Muslims of the term jihad.

There are more technical definitions of evangelicalism; Wikipedia assigns it four distinctives, based on the analytical work of David Bebbington:

• The need for personal conversion (or being "born again")
• Actively expressing and sharing the gospel
• A high regard for biblical authority, especially biblical inerrancy
• An emphasis on teachings that proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus

I’d like to return to this idea of jihad, however, because I think it’s helpful for defining the starting point of evangelicalism (its “genesis”—ha ha) and what might be considered its guiding ethic. Jihad, according again to Wikipedia, translates as “struggle” or “striving in the way of Allah.” The idea of faith and piety of any kind, Islamic or otherwise, as a struggle is as compelling as it is self-evident: the rational mind, the self-interested mind, the passions, the primal urges all might pull us in any number of directions; the mind of jihad stubbornly declares “But wait.” This internal jihad often extrapolates culturally, even politically and militarily, as the stubborn jihadist seeks strength in numbers to offset the power of the passions, the cool reasonableness of rationalism, the clarion cry of “collective self-interest.” But at its heart, jihad is primal, an impulse of the person (and by extension, the people) aiding the complicated process of making our way through the world. We stifle this interior struggle at our peril.

Evangelical jihad, however, adds a wrinkle to the term. The evangelical, I’d like to submit, doesn’t merely wrestle “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12—pretty sexy verse, eh?); the evangelical wrestles against him- or herself, all the while wrestling with none other than the God of the universe.

We see it throughout the Scriptures, from Adam and Eve protesting their innocence, to Abraham negotiating for the salvation of a city, to Moses pleading for his people, to David on a hunger strike for the life of his child, to Job lamenting his sad condition, to Jesus crying from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). We see it carry through the formative years of the church, where Peter resisted the instructions of God before finally giving in and “actively expressing and sharing the gospel” to non-Jews, where Paul hears the voice of Jesus remind him that to fight the will of God is as effective as “to kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14). Personal conversion, submission to the authority of Scripture, belief in and proclamation of Jesus’ unbelievable saving actions on the cross and at the resurrection—these are preceded by, supported by, and indeed sustained by, struggle.

Three things keep the struggle alive for evangelicals (there are probably others):

• God is with us. We don’t struggle in a void or suffer in silence.
• God always wins. God is sovereign over all creation, after all.
• God is love. However bitter the struggle, however abandoned we feel in it, we are told that the author and perfecter of our faith, our jihad, is whatever love is.

That love, it’s worth noting, extends beyond ourselves, so that our interior struggle is not just our own private experience but our part to play on behalf of the whole. Paul helpfully reminds us in Ephesians 6 that, for all that our struggle is, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood.” Our neighbor—next door or far off—is not our enemy. If God is love, then, part of our jihad is to become love ourselves. That’s no walk in the park, but it’s God’s desire for us, and God always wins.

What Would You Tear? A Meditation

Has anyone else noticed this? Saturday Night Live has adapted its thirty-plus year tradition of host photographs as segues from commercial to sketch. Instead of one static image, the viewer is now treated to flip animation: Amy Poehler turns slowly to the right and breaks out a staccato smile; Jane Lynch runs a gamut of facial expressions. What once seemed to be a delaying of the inevitable—the commercials are over, the show is back on—is now something of a show of its own.

I’m a word guy. I edit words for a living; I even edit words that other people have already written for my own entertainment. I write three blogs for kicks; I write books whenever a publisher will agree to publish them; I write, word for word, whatever I’m preparing to say in public. So when a static picture shows up on a screen, I tend to tap my feet and wait for something to be said, for something to be written. And yet, there’s something about a moving image—even something so simple as a flowing sequence of photo stills—that can be moving in ways that words strung linearly together simply can’t.

I hesitate to admit that. After all, I make my living off stringing words linearly together. Besides that, my faith—the ground of my being, the lifter of my eyes—is intimately associated with words strung together. To be a Christian is to claim, among other things, a special relationship with at least sixty-six distinct books, bundled together to tell the story of God as well as our own human story. To describe people of Christian faith as “people of the Book” makes sense; “people of the moving image” would seem to be some other communion entirely.

And yet we find these strung-together words in the Bible taking shape in our imagination; we hear the Bible and we see not sentences parsed but sentences carried out; not subject-verb agreement but bloody conflict and merciful reconciliation; not words made into paragraphs but the Word made flesh. So as much as the Bible is a set of words, it’s also kindling for our imagination. And so as much as Christian faith is a matter of words, it’s also undeniably a matter of power.

That, I suppose, is the idea behind Spencer Burke’s “monotations,” in which he combines one word with one image and invites people to reflect on what God might be communicating through the experience. We grow when we’re stretched, I think, and part of the stretching experience is to interact with our environment, allowing our environment to shape us even as we reshape our environment.

I write this and two scenes from the Scriptures come to mind. Both involve sovereign powers interacting with holy writing. Both involve acts of violence (not against human beings, though neither story is far removed from such violence, but rather violent reactions to holy words). One is a cautionary tale, the other is a high-water mark in the history of God’s people.

Imagine a room filled with a handful of men, one sitting, the rest standing. A fire pit heats the room on an otherwise frigid day. Those who are standing are anxious, not sure what to expect in the scene that unfolds. The one sitting is the king, and whatever he says, goes.

The king bids Jehudi to read from a scroll. Jehudi begins to read. And “whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe's knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire.” What was written on the scroll? An appeal from the prophet Jeremiah to the people of Judah to repent of their wickedness and return to the Lord, and a warning of disaster planned by God for the unrepentant. “The king,” it’s worth noting, “and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes.”

Now imagine another room filled with a handful of men, one sitting, the rest standing. Perhaps a fire pit heats this room as well, as one man reads from the long-lost and recently rediscovered Book of the Law to the sitting king.

“When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes.” These were the words of God, and the implications were obvious: having not kept faith with God’s commands, God’s people stood condemned. The king repented of his own wickedness, and with it the wickedness of his people, and committed as a nation to return to the Lord. As a result, the king heard more words from God: “Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the LORD when you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people, . . . I will gather you to your fathers, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place.' "

Two scenes, two kings, two acts of violence. One ripped up the words of God and burned them in the fire; the other tore his own robes and wept.

Now imagine your own scene. Whatever you say, goes. Then, all of a sudden, God says something. So . . . what would you tear?

Such Is Life in the Age of Ephemera

I'm embarrassed at the length of time I've gone without posting anything--not only to Loud Time but to my corporate blog, Strangely Dim (good thing I have colleagues who also post there), and my column on Burnside Writers Collective, "Becoming the Great Us" (good thing nobody reads it). Such is, I'm afraid, the state of my life right now. I've actually been doing a lot of stuff which would normally generate posts--trips to conferences, retreats, workshops, author meetups, family get-togethers, you name it--but the pace has been such that I couldn't collect my thoughts long enough to form a coherent sentence. I've been either on my feet or out of gas.

A fellow I admire, Andy Crouch, tweeted not too long ago (is there a verb that represents updating your Facebook status?) a comment that sticks with me like that popcorn husk firmly nestled somewhere between your molar and your canine:

Who is the most effective person in your sphere of culture? Chances are they exercise outdoors more and watch TV less than you do. And in ten years we will add, they take more regular technology sabbaths. (The comparative advantage of technobusyness is disappearing.)

I found it frustrating, mostly because I don't regularly exercise outdoors and I typically watch TV to wind down and I don't take tech sabbaths. Ergo, per Andy Crouch, I could be more effective (whatever that means). But I suppose necessary messages often come across as nuisance, because as much as I've resented the poke, I've found myself looking for opportunities to get outdoors more, and I've tried to resist the urge to turn the TV on at the end of the day (to limited effect, I freely confess). The tech sabbath is a different thing, because in the rush of the last month, the moments of contemplation have been those stolen moments when I've scrolled through my twitter feed; my moments of confession or self-expression have been when I've updated my status or posted a picture. My maintenance of community has been dependent on my access to phone and e-mail and other social media. Such is life in the age of ephemera: we live and move and have our being at a brisk pace--forgetting what is behind us as we press on toward some nebulous goal.

I'll get some breathing space soon. Barring any last-minute urgencies, Monday begins my first full week in the office in six weeks or so. But if I've learned anything in this marathon month, it's that I can subsist but not exist on my own, in my own strength; it's only to the extent that I tether myself to a place and some particular people that I maintain a healthy sense of self, and a rightly ordered relationship with the world around me.

Honoring the Dead and the Living

My niece is studying algebra in school, she tells me. I'm telling myself that it's because she's precocious, not because she's getting older. I guess I'm not quite ready to accept that.

My niece is precocious, that's for sure. Give her an audience and she's in heaven, raining down drama and hilarity on the just and unjust among us. She likes to put on grand demonstrations--a dance here, a wedding there, a five-act play everywhere--but I think her best work is off the cuff, one-liners that cement themselves in the memory of the hearer and will define her in the minds of her loved ones until only an even better line displaces it. I take credit for that, if I do say so myself: as her godfather and official crazy uncle, I designated her very first catch-phrase ("That's what I'm talking about!") and formally acknowledge each new zinger as soon as I hear it. Last night's entry? "What the heck, lady?" directed at her grandmother.

Precociousness is power, and power always has the capacity to cause pain. Last night my niece discovered a collection of written tributes to my late grandmother (her great-grandmother). She had died before my niece was born, and as the matriarch of a large, precocious family, her death had generated a fair amount of circumspection among her kids and grandkids. At the time I was mailing out a monthly newsletter, of which I devoted an issue to her; my uncles and aunts wrote eulogies and childhood memories; my mother wrote a poem. All these had been collected and curated by my mother and distributed to the whole family, some of whom were gathered last night at my brother's house.

Enter my niece, stage left. Hopped up on ice-cream cake and extroversion, she grabbed the booklet and flipped through it, arriving eventually at my newsletter. "My grandmother was . . ." she began to read, then interrupted herself: "Boooorrrrinnnng!" She then proceeded to "edit" the newsletter entry, which for a child her age amounts to embellishment along the lines of the Amplified Bible ("She lived the bulk of her life on a farm--with chickens, and cows, and hay, and mud . . .") and demonstrative body language: stepping dramatically to the left, then to the right, her hands all along flapping in the air like a penguin ready to take flight.

It was funny at first. As someone who admires moxie, I found it entertaining and rewarded her with laughs. But then she turned to my mom's poem and started up again. My mother, the poet who for years taught the love and power of poetry to kids only a little older now than my niece. My mother, who as a sister of seven can recall a lifetime of the inevitable injuries that come from being always around precocious people. My mother, the daughter who wrote this poem on the occasion of her own mother's death.

My niece never met my grandmother. I wonder how they would have related to one another; both of them witty and sly and lovers of laughter, I can see traces of my grandmother's gleam in the irritated sideways glances my niece occasionally throws my way. And yet their particular precociousness took shape in very different eras, in very different settings. My grandmother, attending to dying relatives on her century farm in an era before computers and cable television and the Sixties' civil disobedience, an era in which people lived closer to death and experienced more fully the cycle of life. My niece, coming into her own during an age of dramatic and rapid change, when every minute of every day has a soundtrack, when every person is a brand to be managed, when new information overwhelms tradition, when the bonds between memory and creativity are frayed and nearly severed. They would have liked each other, I'm sure, but my niece and my grandmother would have struggled to understand each other.

They also would have had very different responsibilities to one another. My grandmother's, to change my niece's diapers and to tell her right from wrong till she could figure it out for herself. My niece's, to listen to my grandmother's stories and remind her that she's not forgotten simply because she's old, to remember her after her death and to respect the legacy that my niece and her siblings and her parents and my mother and I are living out day after day after day just by living. Responsibility is not something that comes naturally, I think; it's something we commit ourselves to, something we have to remember to pass on to those who come after us.

Last night my niece and I danced. A lot. I hate dancing, but I'll do it for her because it's funny and it's a thing that I can share with her, a memory I can keep of her. Her mother shouted from the sidelines, "Someday you'll dance with your uncle Dave at your wedding." That made me sad; I'm not ready to acknowledge that she, like me and my mother and everyone, is getting older. But it also made me happy, because it foreshadows a future in which our lives remain knitted together. There's responsibility embedded in that observation from my sister-in-law, but it's commingled with a promise.

Every year on the anniversary of my niece's baptism I write her a little note. Like my note about my grandmother, it's reflective and circumspect. In it I try to draw lines between my niece's life and the grand story being written by God, and I try to make it easier for her to grow up and accept the challenges and responsibility that are foisted on her as each year passes. Last night I imagined her--no, her children, actually--coming across these letters long after I'm dead, reading the first line, throwing up their arms and shouting "Boooorrrrinnnng!" The thought was a little sad at first, I admit, but I got over it. They'll just be kids, after all, and I think it's their privilege as kids to play with whatever they lay their hands on. Any unintended injury that leads out of it won't have robbed me of anything, won't have undone any of the work the letters were intended to do. It'll be a little sad, but it'll undoubtedly be funny.

Between Churches: A World Without Dee

Dee wasn't what you'd call a friend--although she was infinitely friendly herself, and our interactions were always friendly, and even after I left her church, we remained friends on Facebook. I was in her home twice; as well as I can remember, she was never in mine. We never ate together except during church events. We didn't do the things that you might reasonably expect friends to do together. We didn't have much in common, to be honest. So friend doesn't seem the right word for her.

Dee wasn't what you'd call an elder--at least not in the technical, churchy sense of the word, or at least not during the time that we were involved in the same church. She served on plenty of committees, I'm sure, but she didn't attend meetings of the church's session (I did), and so she didn't have a vote on the issues that were moved and seconded and discussed and resolved there (I did). She was older than me, I guess, but I don't suppose I can, with ecclesial precision, refer to her as my elder.

And yet Dee, it seemed, was always around, mostly because we were both always around the church. We acted in plays together (she got the bigger laughs); we attended the same Sunday school classes; we participated in the same children's ministry; whenever the choir sang, my eye went to her--partly because she was the only woman singing the men's part, partly because she swayed and smiled and emoted more than most. I knew Dee's opinions about most everything, and there were times I was sure I could predict what she would say before she raised her hand and said it.

I've been at a retreat this weekend of people in my industry, and one of the women there reminds me a bit of Dee. And as she shared in a circle what's going on in her personal-professional-spiritual life she gave us language that I think best describes Dee for me: "I'm not an elder in my church," she said; "I guess you'd call me a fixture."

That's what Dee was: a fixture. Larger than life, impossible to ignore, technically on the periphery of power but powerful nonetheless, she was her own thing with her own rules. I've met a lot of fixtures over the years; some of them I refer to always by their full name, as though a less formal attribution wouldn't carry enough weight. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, C________ H________, K________ C________--I would never think of the latter two (I know them; you probably don't) alongside the former three, but when they come up I treat them the same. Fixtures of world history and fixtures of my history--they are rewarded with the same gravitas. But then there are the one-word fixtures--the Napoleons, the Stings, the Bonos, and Dee. More than one word would be gilding the lily, I suppose.

What would the world be like without its fixtures? That's a pointless exercise if I've ever heard one. The world would continue to turn; maybe others with their own expansive personalities would step in from the margins to take their place; maybe civilization would collapse. Who can say? It's enough to acknowledge that they were fixtures and move on. But the question is different when it's not the world but your world. It's our fixtures that are holding things together for us; without them, things fall apart. Not necessarily big things, and not necessarily things that needed desperately to be held together. But they do fall apart, break down, and so consequently we don't often discover how much we depended on the fixtures until after the fact.

Dee ceased to be a regular part of my life nine months ago, when I left the church we attended together. Yesterday I found out that she had died, after a long and painful struggle with all sorts of health problems. How do you say goodbye to a fixture? Who knows. This is how I'm doing it. I'm also praying for her husband, who already knew how much he depended on her, and who will undoubtedly discover things he never noticed that anchored him to her. I'm also praying for her church, which I once called my church; it has lost one of its fixtures, and while it will surely go on, it will not be the same without her.

The Gospel According to Biff

I've been reading a satirical novel about the life of Jesus--Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. I like it; it's randy and funny and syncretistic and oddly reverent. Joshua--the given Hebrew name Biff uses for Jesus--can do little or no wrong, he performs all the miracles attributed to him in the Bible, and he demonstrates superiority to competing theologies of the day, from Judaism to the great religions of the East.

Nevertheless, Moore's Gospel reflects more the moralistic therapeutic deism detailed by sociologist Christian Smith in his book Soul Searching than the Gospel as recorded in the Scriptures. Here's a passage from chapter twenty-eight, where Biff helps Joshua write the Sermon on the Mount:

Here's the gist of almost every sermon I ever heard Joshua give.
You should be nice to people, even creeps.
And if you:
a) believed that Joshua was the Son of God (and)
b) he had come to save you from sin (and)
c) acknowledged the Holy Spirit within you (became as a little child,
he would say) (and)
d) didn't blaspheme the Holy Ghost (see c),
then you would:
e) live forever
f) someplace nice
g) probably heaven.
However, if you:
h) sinned (and/or)
i) were a hypocrite (and/or)
j) valued things over people (and)
k) didn't do a, b, c, and d,
then you were:
l) f***ed.

I'm not necessarily saying this stuff isn't accurate, but it is sterile, and vanilla, and nondescript. Moralistic therapeutic deists, as Smith describes them, worship a grandfather-god who likes people who are nice and enjoys being nice to children, but who otherwise generally stays out of the way; Jesus the Son of the MTDeity did what he did and his relevance ended there. The Holy Spirit is our own spirits super-sized. Heaven is, if nothing else, "someplace nice."

Smith's research was on the religiosity of American adolescents; his book was published five years ago, which means the first official MTDs are now entering the workplace; some of them are considering marriage; some of them are having children, telling those children stories about Jesus the Son of MTD, and dreaming of living happily ever after in someplace nice. It's a nice story, but it's sterile, and vanilla, and nondescript.

Ah well. At least Christopher Moore makes it funny.

Blog a Qur'an Day

I've not read the Qur'an--technically, I'm told, it can only be read in Arabic, although there are English-language commentaries with translated text--but I thought I'd dip my toe in the water today as an act of solidarity with the billion people around the world whose faith is being mocked somewhere in Florida by fifty people with a match. Andrew Jones, I believe, organized this response, which I thought was a good idea. Creating is nearly always better than destroying, I think.

I'm struck by how foolhardy some people can be, actually--how lost they can get in their own conflation of faith and national identity, how senselessly they equate acts of violence with acts of piety. The impulse to burn a Qur'an is similar to the impulse to burn non-KJV Bibles, to bomb abortion clinics, to fly planes into buildings: to hurt people as a supposed act of discipleship.

What follows is found early in the Qur'an, the English translation of which I'm here quoting from Maulana Muhammad Ali's commentary, found here. I thought it seemed germane to the day, and the events inspiring this post. Please note that I'm quoting out of context, not out of disrespect or in an attempt to distort the meaning of the text, but rather to provide a framework for measuring the actions of "Dove World Outreach," and everyone like them who think faith is a matter of righteous violence:

In their hearts is a disease. . . . And when it is said to them, Make not mischief in the land, they say: We are but peacemakers. Now surely they are the mischief-makers, but they perceive not. . . . These are they who buy error for guidance, so their bargain brings no gain, nor are they guided. . . . Their parable is as the parable of one who kindles a fire, but when it illumines all around him, Allåh takes away their light, and leaves them in darkness--they cannot see. Deaf, dumb, (and) blind, so they return not.

The Real Meaning of Relativity

As a willing participant in the sins of the book publishing industry, I feel compelled to warn you: the people who have recently released Stephen Hawking's new book (The Grand Design) are trying to sell you something.

By saying this I mean no disrespect whatsoever for Dr. Hawking. That dude is a straight-up genius, I'm sure. Plus, he's been a leading scientist and cultural icon for decades, and should be given the respect due such a public treasure. Nevertheless, the "big idea" being culled from his new book is, I respectfully submit, no big idea at all. As publishing events go, this emperor has no clothes.

The central idea being promulgated is that, according to Hawking, there's no need to presume that God had anything to do with the origins of the universe. By saying that, Hawking is discounting the people putting forth "intelligent design" as a counterproposal to evolution. And by doing that, Hawking is joining the chorus of any number of his peers who have already sung the same song. An astrophysicist disputing the role of a divine force in the origins of the universe is not news, people; it would be only slightly more newsworthy to report that an astrophysicist had allowed for the possibility of a God bringing the universe into being.

I feel reasonably confident in how the debate will proceed from here--including, no doubt, the release of a handful of books along the lines of The Case for the Grand Designer or Debunking "The Grand Design." That's because this perennial argument across the divide of faith and science sells books. For the next several weeks, every time you see Stephen Hawking showing up in your Twitter trending topics or on your Yahoo breaking news board, it would be helpful to imagine a room full of publishing professionals brainstorming how they're going to move product. Consider that your grain of salt; don't say I never gave you anything.

Meanwhile, I've taken to reading the late great G. K. Chesterton's The Well and the Shallows, a relatively late entry in his corpus, contending with the controversies of his day (which, in case you're unfamiliar, was the first half of the twentieth century). Today's reading took me through a handful of reasons he offers for being inclined to convert to Catholicism--if only he weren't already a Catholic. Tucked in among the follies of state churches in the Protestant tradition and other musings of the modern era is a rant against materialist critiques of theism--the new scientists, taking on old-time religion.

Many scientists contemporary to Chesterton were particularly dismissive of religion, which they saw as an outdated artifact of a less sophisticated era. Chesterton prefaces his critique of such dismissiveness with the provocative phrase "In order theorise, it is sometimes useful to think." The presenting problem for Chesterton was a paper delivered by Dr. David Forsyth, whose "thesis" regarding what eventually came to be called the "non-overlapping magisteria" of science and faith

was essentially this; that science and religion, so far from being reconciled or even reconcilable, were divided by the vital contradiction that science belongs to what he called "reality-thinking," or we call objective truth; while religion belonged to what he called "pleasure-thinking," or what most people call imagination.

But this imagined divide between science and faith has a different source, according to Chesterton: not the intransigence of the Catholic but the "the very common combination of a superiority complex with arrested development."

Scores and hundreds of times I have heard . . . the repetition of that ultimatum: "You must accept the conclusions of science." The new scientists themselves do not ask us to accept the conclusions of science. The new scientists themselves do not accept the conclusions of science. . . . The finest intellects among them repeat, again and again, that science is inconclusive. . . .

The Victorian agnostics waited hopefully for science to give them a working certainty about life. The new physicist philosophers are in no way different, except that they wait hopelessly instead of hopefully. For they know very well the real meaning of relativity; that their own views may pass from being relatively right to being relatively wrong. And meanwhile, as I say, there is such a thing as wanting a working rule as to whether we should pay our debts or murder our enemies. . . . If we want a guide to life, it seems that we must look elsewhere.

Again, no disrespect to Stephen Hawking or any of the other great minds who have developed our understanding of the way the universe works. But regardless of the role of gravity in causing the universe to come into being, or the nagging question of where the law of gravity came from, meanwhile we ourselves are but dust--and to dust we shall return, and we must one day give an account for all we've done and left undone, and fall on the mercy of whoever calls us to account.

Between Churches: The Dance of the Christ-Culture

One of the tricks of looking for a new church is the presumption that this new place will not suffer the shortcomings of the old place, that "different" is somehow inherently equal to "better"--although "too different" is more often thought to be "worse."

Presbyterians with a highly developed sense of personal space, for example, might chafe at the hugging and laying on of hands at a Pentecostal service down the road. Meanwhile megachurchfolk wince at the smells and bells (and scarcity of jumbotrons) at an Anglican communion. "Different" is the order of the day for those of us who find ourselves between churches, but it has to be the right kind of different.

The "right kind of different" has, in fact, been a question plaguing the church for the duration of modernity at least, and maybe, in a sense, for the length of the church's existence. In his 1951 book Christ and Culture Richard Niebuhr identified five postures the church takes toward the culture surrounding it. Examples of all five could be immediately called to mind by Niebuhr's contemporaries, and can still be easily found sixty years later. Is Christ against, of, above, paradoxically related to, or transforming culture? The answer to the question is necessarily historical, because whatever their relation, Christ and culture are the central organizing motifs of history: What has God done in the world, and what has the human race made of the world?

That's what makes the search for a church home so tricky: it's not just a question of where and how a person fits; it's a question of how this potential church home completes, even fulfills, the history of the world--even the history of God. To declare a church "home" is, at least in a sense, to declare to the whole world (even to God) "This is where you belong; what are you doing out there?"

I'm serious: there's an undeniable ego in the mix when you go hunting for a church. It's not entirely conscious, and it's ultimately not as heartfelt as I made it sound above (this is far too vulnerable a quest for sustained pomposity). But to the person on such a quest, the dance of Christ and culture starts to look like a slow song at homecoming, where in the shadows the dance partners look less like two separate beings and more like one indecipherable thing--too close for the onlooker's comfort. A church, to the church-hopper-shopper, looks like a "Christ-culture"--whatever that is.

That's not a bad way to describe a church, I suppose. But whatever a Christ-culture is, we need to remember, it's a bunch of people gathered in one place. Your mind will play tricks on you, trying to convince you that you're looking for the holy grail, the fulfillment of history, the ladder to heaven. You'll be faced with the optical illusion that these people are Jesus, that the Holy Spirit is in the planks and drywall of that building, that God looks like this pastor and likes those ushers best. In reality, however, you're looking at a bunch of people gathered in one place--in good, albeit fickle and faulty faith. Every Christ-culture is like a kid at a school dance, trying not to look ridiculous, trying to remember the steps. Our faith is lived out in such stumbling, but such stumbling is not the object of our faith. The perfect love of God is where our stumbling Christ-cultures are headed, and where we should be headed as well. As theologian Donald Bloesch reminds us in his Crisis of Piety:

God's kingdom is to be associated with a new heaven and a new earth. Moreover it will be manifested in God's time and in His own way. . . . We cannot build the eternal kingdom, but we can pray and hope for its realization. . . .

Since the kingdom of God ultimately lies beyond history the Christian life is one of pilgrimage. We can anticipate and approximate the goal of perfect love, but we can never finally arrive in this life. Ours is a theology of wayfarers.