Rest in Peace, John Lennon

Thirty years ago, John Lennon was shot dead. Forty-one years ago he wrote the following, with Yoko Ono (and during the time that he shared all writing credits with Paul McCartney).

Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, that-ism,
ism ism ism
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Minister, Sinister, Banisters and Canisters,
Bishops, Fishops, Rabbis, and Pop Eyes,
Bye bye, Bye byes
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Revolution, Evolution, Masturbation, Flagellation, Regulation,
Integrations, mediations, United Nations, congratulations
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary,
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper,
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg, Hare Krishna
Hare Hare Krishna
All we are saying is give peace a chance

The song goes through occasional reiterations, reflecting on new passing fads and controversies, always retaining the intro of "everybody's talkin' 'bout" and ending with the chorus of "all we are saying." So today, on the thirtieth anniversary of John's death, why not take a stab at your own verse. Here's mine:

Everybody's talkin' 'bout
fashion glasses
lads and lasses
fumbled passes
greenhouse gasses
death and taxes
Latin masses
veni, vidi, vici.
All we are saying is give peace a chance.

The Gospel According to Bob Dylan

For the second Sunday of Advent, the lectionary calls for a reading from the Gospel of Matthew. Here Matthew designates John the Baptist as "a voice" foretold by the prophet Isaiah, "calling out in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord.'" If I were to make a musical out of Advent, I think my pick for the role of John would be Bob Dylan.

Dylan has in recent years been cast as many things, from the unseen prophet of the Cylon apocalypse in Battlestar Galactica, to the minstrel accompanying Victoria's Secret models as they prance around in their underwear. This year an album was released that imagines Dylan's music as the score of the African American experience in the United States. And yet as well-executed as those castings have been, I think John the Baptist is much less of a leap.

Picture a wild-haired, wild-eyed man on the edge of a river, who despite his utter lack of self-regard (and even self-care) and profoundly counter-cultural appearance and demeanor, can't help but attract a diverse crowd. Picture them looking warily at one another until a gravely, nasaly voice penetrates the ambient noise and lays into one and all with this prophecy:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.

If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.

For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.

It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

There's a little of nothing and a lot of something in the phrase "the times, they are a-changin'"--enough, I suppose, to unsettle those of us who need unsettling; enough to encourage those of us who need encouraging. But you can't just say it, because change that merits this kind of anthem doesn't just happen. You can't point to seasons changing or micro- or macro-evolution and get off on a technicality. This isn't a song of chronos, in which every tick of the second hand is, for the record, a change. This is a song of kairos, a ripeness of moment in which change is as profound as it is necessary--a curse to some, perhaps, but an overdue blessing to the minds of many.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

This is what I imagine John the Baptist singing about, out there in the wilderness. This is what straightening paths for the Lord sounds like. The changes John baptized people into got him killed--got Jesus killed, even--and yet the changes themselves vindicated the suffering of those who suffered then, just as they vindicate the suffering of those who suffer now. To the intransigent on the shores of his river John the Baptist pleaded "start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone!" But to those whose suffering had reached its fullness of time, I picture John anticipating the words of Julian of Norwich, whispering into the ears of the poor and suffering as he dipped them into the water:

All will be well,
And all will be well,
And every manner of thing will be well . . .
For the times, they are a-changin'.

Dangerbooks! Living Mission

Let me first make a commitment: not every "dangerbook" I review will be one that I edited. I'm not so naive as to think I, who live in relative comfort and who rarely venture outside my home, let alone into discomfort of any kind, might be thought of as a "dangereditor." But I have found particular gratification in the editorial process on those books that challenge me, and so I freely admit that I sometimes seek them out. Hence my first "dangerbook" review, found here, was a book that I edited.

The nature of challenging books is such that, in the current reading climate, they're often strategically overlooked in favor of books that are "safe for the whole family" or some other category of innocuousness. Don't cry for these dangerbooks, of course: they're doing fine, and they're not so naive as to think writing books that threaten to change people is a viable retirement strategy anyway. Nevertheless, I like to do my part to showcase these books, as much out of appreciation for their impact on me, as out of my conviction that the responsibility of publishing is to push and stretch and confront and afflict, even as it encourages and empowers and even comforts. With that in mind, I bring you Living Mission, today's book o' danger.

Living Mission is a followup of sorts. Its editor (and author of chapter one) is Scott Bessenecker, associate director of missions for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and author of the book The New Friars. That book profiled five contemporary mission organizations that defy the caricature of missions and instead live among people in extreme poverty, advocating for justice and developing self-sustaining communities undergirded by faith. In Living Mission Scott hands the microphone to representatives of each of these movements to give further definition to how they came about and what they're all about. (Full disclosure, I've also edited books by two of the contributors.) As they see it, mission that is living and not hollow has essentially five traits:

* First and foremost, mission is incarnational--which is to say, emulating Jesus by living among and like those they serve (even though they don't have to).
* Next, mission is missional--which may elicit a "duh" from the audience but needs to be said anyway. It chases after the things God chases after--kingdom values--which often grate against the overarching values of the status quo.
* Next, mission is marginal, seeking out the places and people being neglected (and often actively suppressed or simply sacrificed) by the powers that be.
* Then mission is devotional, striving to keep its savior and lord and source of strength in view. This type of mission attracts a lot of activists, after all, and such people can often lose sight of their "why" as they chase hard after a particular "what."
* Finally, this living mission is communal. Those who engage in this type of mission are making a home for themselves, with new neighbors and an expansive and diverse family. Outsiders cannot swoop in and save a community; this isn't a comic book. No, communities are saved when they discover Christ and one another together, and when they step out in search of God's kingdom come, God's will done, in their neighborhoods and cities as it is in heaven.

As foreword writers Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove rightly observe, in a world where as many as two billion people live in megacity slums, "is the good news . . . really the promise of Disneyland and a trust fund?" We don't need to read this book just out of appreciation for the people who take such a difficult challenge for themselves; we need desperately to read it because the world so many of us occupy--the world of Christian publishing and suburban living--is not the whole world in God's hands. Whatever normal is, it's not us; whatever God's doing in the world, it's not leading to a utopia of shopping malls and worship CDs.

Some of the contributors to Living Mission live in Cambodia or Mexico or other harsh urban environments, but some of them live in San Francisco, London, Omaha, where they also regularly confront the underbelly of economic idolatry. We need to read Living Mission because it offers a map through the world where we find ourselves to the place where God is leading all of us together.

The Successful, Short, Sinner/Saint Son of Abraham

Bless me, Blogger, for I have sinned. It has been sixteen days since my last blog post. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to come up with stuff to write about on a consistent basis. That's a problem for me, since I desperately want to be known as a writer.

I think I figured that out about myself pretty early on. My first creative writing assignment (at least the one I canonize as first in my memory) was a short story, a wildly meta fantasy in which the protagonist (whose name was, most likely, "Dave"--or perhaps "Danny," which as a kid I considered an objectively better name than "Dave" and thus a better name for myself) was soooo much smarter than his peers that he kept being advanced into later grades. Eventually his precociousness took him to high school where he could no longer reach the handle to his locker, and he returned to school among the hoi polloi of his age-appropriate class. Poor Dave/Daniel: the one thing he lacked on his rocket to success was a growth spurt.

I was as proud of that story as I was of my presumed advanced intelligence. I wrote songs, short stories, book reviews--you name it--all before adolescence. Even as I shifted my self-concept to "musician," I kept writing. I was proud of the essays I wrote for my college applications, proud of the essays I wrote in my literature class to stave off failure, proud of the one-liners I'd come up with on the fly to defy my teacher and entertain my French class. I bragged about my wit and mastery of language during a parent-teacher conference, to which my eighth-grade Basic English teacher responded, "Well, I suppose you have to be clever when you're small."

Ouch. In the narrative arc of the hero's journey, this moment might be considered my passage through the first threshold, "which is crossed in such a way that it appears to be death."

That's really the way it works, though, isn't it? Our fantasies about ourselves (which likely have some base in reality) clash with the more common perceptions of us among our peers: "I am smart," despite the fact that I had not qualified for advanced English and was stuck in a remedial English course with an insensitive teacher; "I am known as witty," despite the more immediately obvious designator for me as "small."

Today, for the purposes of feeding this blog and my own ego, I find myself identifying with another short but otherwise impressive fellow, Zacchaeus. A tax collector in first-century Palestine, he gets nine verses in Luke's Gospel--not enough to really know him; just enough to get a sense of him. But we get quite a sense of him, because in meeting Zacchaeus we once again encounter Jesus.

Jesus always drew a crowd, and Luke 19 is no different. Everyone in Jericho wanted to get a good look at him, including Zacchaeus. We learn two things about Zac right off the bat:

1. He's the chief tax collector.
2. He's rich.

So in matters of wealth and accomplishment, he's a big deal. Bully for him. But we very quickly learn one more detail:

3. He's short--so short "he could not see over the crowd."

I imagine the citizens of Jericho begrudgingly paying their taxes to Zac and then consoling themselves by ridiculing him for being tiny. Zac has, conceivably, a Napoleon complex, aggressively and myopically chasing success as a way of compensating for being small. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that Napoleon had a Zacchaeus complex. Maybe I have a Zacchaeus complex. Maybe all of us "fun-size" (to borrow a term from my friends the Heuertzes) humor the taller among us with reaches that exceed our grasp.

Anyway, Zac didn't get rich and accomplished by giving up, so he climbs a tree, at which point Jesus sees him and invites himself over to Zac's house for dinner. This audacious act by Jericho's newest big thing must frustrate the townspeople. Wee Zac comes out on top again. To quote the band Midnight Oil: "The rich get richer, the poor get the picture. The bombs never hit you when you're down so low." So for the sake of posterity Zac's neighbors give us another description of who Zac is:

4. He's a lowdown sinner.

But Jesus knows there's more to Zac than what his neighbors think; there's even more to Zac than what Zac thinks. In a move that nobody saw coming, Zac offers restitution for his unjust (though not illegal) practices in collecting taxes, in keeping with the commands of Torah. Beyond that, he publicly pledges half his wealth to the poor folks in Jericho, again honoring the spirit of Torah. This is so out of keeping with who Zac knows himself to be, who the townspeople know Zac to be, that it can only be thought of as a miracle. But in the eyes of Jesus, this miraculous Zac has simply returned to normal, because Jesus knows a fifth thing about Zac:

5. He's a child of Abraham.

Zac is a child of Abraham just like all his neighbors, which means he is a beneficiary of the promises of God, a member of a covenant community that, according to God its head, takes care of the poor and treats one another justly. The children of Abraham, the scriptures tell us, love God and love their neighbors as themselves. Jesus tells us that these two rules sum up all of Torah. So this is who Zac is, who his neighbors are--or, more accurately, who they would be if they lived like they were born to live.

Jesus doesn't demand that we be something other than what we are--he didn't lay hands on Zac and make him tall; he didn't take his ill-gotten gains from him by force or expel him from the covenant community for violating usury laws in Torah. Jesus called it as he saw it, and he saw more clearly than anyone what needed to happen and indeed what had happened for Zac:

6. He's saved.

Today, then, as Advent begins, let us wait together with joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who will deliver us from the prisons of our reputations and the cells of our self-concepts, and restore us to our original identity as children of a loving God--with all that entails for us, and all that demands of us.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

On the Death of a Flower

I never see it coming.
I'm always surprised
To look down and see petals,
To look up and see death.
This thing of beauty, now necrotic--
I'm always surprised, but
It shouldn't surprise me, for
Such is the end of all the living.

And not only that:
I should have seen it coming
Because the flowers I see most readily
Are the flowers that die by my own hand—
In what I have done,
And what I have failed to do.
My hand which neglected to nourish
My hand which cut off and cut away.
I have not celebrated beauty,
Nor have I cultivated it.
I have killed it, I have consumed it.

I ask the angels and saints—
and you, my brothers and sisters—
When my hour of need comes,
When my cry for deliverance goes out,
Treat me not as I have treated
The least of these,
But as a thing of beauty,
To be celebrated, cultivated—
Not to be consumed, but to be seen.

The Folly of Permanence

Instead of adding chairs to the table of permanent UN Security Council members, I’d like to offer what I think is a more efficient proposal: end the era of permanent seats.

This will never happen, by the way. Having only two people in my semi-sovereign household and having only negligible geopolitical value to the five governments that hold veto power over any UN action, I don’t get a say. Nevertheless, I think the era of permanent seats at the UN probably should have ended in 1946, right after the Security Council first met; or if not then, then as soon as France and England and other has-been-ocracies got kicked out of their colonial territories. They had ceased to fit the profile; they were no longer major players on the global scene.

And what about Russia? Once Eastern Europe decided they were better dead than red, didn’t Russia cease to be a major concern? Or if Russia was still a concern, wasn’t it mainly that they’d have a fire sale on nuclear weapons and otherwise drag the global economy down with them? Is Russia still a logical choice to be able to control the agenda for global action?

Permanent seats on anything are generally eschewed, aren’t they? The only people who really champion permanence are the already permanent—the tenured professionals who can get away with anything; the multinational corporations that are "too big to fail" but not so big that they can't regularly fail their shareholders, employees and economic dependents; the “Washington establishment” whose incumbency is fuel to the fire of the candidates seeking their office. We just wrapped up a “kick the bums out” campaign season; President Obama seems to want to fill the UN with more bums.

No disrespect to the president or to India; I generally agree that they belong on the Security Council more than, say, France. (I can’t quite bring myself to say they belong there more than the United States, but I’m biased. I can admit that much at least.) The fact that India is now more globally relevant than France to me confirms not the right of permanence for India but the folly of permanence for anyone. Almost nothing changes as inevitably as the distribution of geopolitical power, and almost no one can be trusted less to wield permanent influence in the world than individual nation-states. Seriously, what move has any government made recently that displayed total objectivity about the needs of the world compared against the needs of that government?

If not the abolition of the permanent seats at the UN Security Council, perhaps the powers that be would accept a slightly more modest proposal: two tables—one based on GDP or total number of weapons of mass destruction or ethnicity or however they came up with the original list, and the other based on population.

That’s how the US Congress does it, right? The Senate was created to protect the interests of the powerful, and the House of Representatives was designed to give the populace a voice. I suppose India and China would probably have seats at both tables under this scenario, but really, whose fault would that be?

Still, I think getting rid of the permanent seats is the better option. Populations change, economies and empires rise and fall, but the needs of the world remain relatively constant. Whatever sovereign states serve temporary terms leading the UN, they won't generally be surprised when they take their seats. They might even take some action, if there weren't five countries hanging veto power over their heads. Maybe the world would have slightly fewer than a billion people living on dungheaps, subsisting on $1.25 a day, if the governments charged with their care got a little more respect from the table of nations.

Just a thought. In any case, USA all the way!

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.