The Ugly Party vs. the Grown-Up Party

Michael Gerson has written a wonderful op-ed for the Washington Post which he begins with:

My political friendships and sympathies are increasingly determined not by ideology but by methodology. One of the most significant divisions in American public life is not between the Democrats and the Republicans; it is between the Ugly Party and the Grown-Up Party.

The rest is here.

It is wisdom we would do well to practice - both in civil and ecclesial politics. Too much of our discourse (and "any" would be too much) is a "type of discourse [that] is an odd combination between the snideness of the cool, mean kids in high school and the pettiness of Richard Nixon rambling on his tapes."

"If you only take offense when the president of your party is compared to Hitler, then you're part of the problem." The same is true when it comes to the leader(s) of your faction in church debates.

The only work that matters

I'm going on vacation and will probably not be posting anything here again until some time in July. The Feast Day of St. Barnabas is this Friday, June 11. In Acts 4:36, we are told that Barnabas means "Son of encouragement". In honor of my parish's patron saint's nickname, I am sharing a bit from Frederick Buechner's novel, Brendan. I recommend the novel if you're looking for a good summer read.

Toward the end of the novel, Brendan, an old Irish saint, has been talking with another saintly man named Gildas. At the end of the conversation, Gildas begins to stand. Then, Buechner has the narrator, Finn, recount:

Pushing down hard with his fists on the tabletop, [Gildas] heaved himself up to where he was standing. For the first time we saw he wanted one leg. It was gone from the knee joint down. He was hopping sideways to reach for his stick in the corner when he lost his balance. He would have fallen in a heap if Brendan hadn’t leaped forward and caught him.

“I’m crippled as the dark world,” Gildas said.

“If it comes to that, which one of us isn’t, my dear?” Brendan said.

Gildas with his but one leg, Brendan sure he’d misspent his whole life entirely. Me that had left my wife to follow him and buried our only boy. The truth of what Brendan said stopped all our mouths. We was cripples all of us. For a moment or two there was no sound but the bees.

“To lend each other a hand when we’re falling,” Brendan said, “Perhaps that’s the only work that matters in the end.” p. 217

Little Floaty Things That Say "No"

"Dad, do you ever have little floaty things in your head that say, 'No'?" My daughter, Becca, was in second grade when she asked this question one night as I was putting her to bed. Taken a bit aback, I asked her what she meant. She said, "Well, like when I say to myself there is a God and the floaty things say, 'No, there isn't.' Or I say God loves me and they say, 'No, he doesn't.'"

It dawned on me that the "little floaty things that say No" were my daughter’s second grade way of describing her early experiences with doubt. I assured her that I was also familiar with the little floaty things and had been since I was about her age.*

I suspect that most of us have had some experience with the little floaty things that say No - with doubts. At one time or another, most of us have wondered about the existence of God, or God’s goodness, or God’s love for us personally. And doubt is not limited to the theoretical. On a more practical level, it includes questioning whether the way of life revealed in Jesus Christ is really the way to our fullest life and deepest joy. Is the way of gentleness, love, and forgiveness really the way? Whether they are theoretical or practical, the questions are bound to arise. What do we do with the little floaty things that say “No”? Here are some suggestions:

1. Do not be ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid of your doubts. They come with the territory and actually act as a spur to spiritual growth. Frederick Buechner calls doubts, "The ants in the pants of faith."

2. On the other hand, beware the snare of pride. It is easy to become self-satisfied for being so clever and sophisticated as to see all the difficulties with faith for "thinking" people.

3. Don't be surprised by doubt. It is part of the conversion process. The gospel is, after all, foolishness and a stumbling block. When the values and biases of the gospel conflict with the values and biases into which we have been enculturated, there will be tension. That is true whether the prejudices are intellectual, moral, or theological. That tension leads to doubt. It also leads to a choice. Which biases am I going to live by?

4. Talk to God about your doubts - even if it means starting your prayer with, "I'm not even sure I believe you are there . . ." God is not afraid of your doubts or offended by your questions. After all, Jesus invited Thomas to examine and touch his wounds. He has promised his love to you - no matter what. God would much rather have you spend time with him asking hard questions than have you not spend time with him at all.

5. Continue with the discipline of regular prayer and worship. Taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps. 34:8). An intimate realization of God's presence and love puts to rest a lot of the questions. Such a realization does not usually happen without some discipline and time on our part. We need to be trained to pay attention spiritually. As with physical discipline, it usually takes time to see the effects of spiritual discipline.

6. Be skeptical of your own skepticism. We live in a skeptical age. It is quite easy to be a complacent skeptic. But, the bases of many doubts are also subject to doubt. In the areas of science and history, for example, many are realizing that the methods used are not as objective or certain as was once claimed. They are themselves based on assumptions that cannot be proven and their results are shaped by the biases of the researcher. And they are unable to answer every question. Nothing that matters can be proven beyond a shadow of doubt. Truth can only be demonstrated by the living of it. This is no more or less the case with the truth of faith.

7. It is helpful to recognize that while faith has its difficulties, so do its opposites, unbelief and apathy. For example, the persistence of evil and suffering has been a perennial problem for those who believe in a loving God who desires our good. The problem is not solved, however, by removing God from the equation. The question is only changed to "If we are no more than the most recent byproduct of a cosmic accident, why do we care so much about the suffering of others?" Or, even more problematic, "Why should we care?" Some people are starving. Others are tortured. If there is no God, and life is accidental anyway, why do I care so much? Why should I?

8. Do not use doubt as an excuse not to follow Christ or respond to the Spirit's call. If I neglect to apply for a job because I doubt I will get it, I surely won't. I can remain unchallenged and comfortable right where I am. Hans Denk, a seventeenth century Anabaptist, asserted this basic axiom of faith: "You cannot truly know Christ without following him in life.” Jesus calls us to follow just as he called the first disciples. We are left to choose whether we will or not. Thomas exemplifies this in chapter eleven of John’s gospel. When Jesus heads back toward Jerusalem to raise Lazarus, the disciples counsel him not to go because those who want to kill him are there. Jesus starts walking toward Jerusalem anyway. Thomas says to the others, "Let us also go, that we may die with him." He had come to believe that following Jesus was the way to his deepest joy and was committed to following him and sharing his fate. The knowing often comes in the following.

9. Remember that you are part of a community of faith. You are not the first person to ask questions about the faith. It is helpful to find out, through reading or conversation, how others have answered or learned to live with particular questions.

10. Recognize that there is mystery at the heart of it all. As Christians, we believe that God has spoken and acted definitively through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. But God has not seen fit to provide answers to our every question. And even the answers we've been given contain mystery. At some point, we can only rest with humility in the presence of the Mystery at the heart of it all.

Following these suggestions will not silence all the little floaty things once and for all. They are natural companions of faith. But, they can take away some of the power of the floaty things. And even when our questions are unanswered, the struggle with them leads us deeper into the mystery of God where the little floaty things that say, “No” are countered by God's resounding "Yes!"

* This story is shared with Becca's permission.

The Threefold all-kindly

My walk this day with God,
My walk this day with Christ,
My walk this day with Spirit,
The Threefold all-kindly
Hō! Hō! Hō! The Threefold all-kindly

My shielding this day from ill,
My shielding this night from harm,
Hō! Hō! Both my soul and my body,
Be by Father, by Son, by Holy Spirit:
By Father, by Son, by Holy Spirit.

Be the Father shielding me,
Be the Son shielding me,
Be the Spirit shielding me,
As Three and as One:
Hō! Hō! Hō! as Three and as One.

From The Celtic Vision by Esther De Waal, page 145

The Friendship Dance (of the Trinity)

As Trinity Sunday approaches, here is something I wrote for The Living Church a few years ago (June 11, '06):


Have you ever wondered what God was up to before getting around to creating the universe and us in it? Meditating, like Rodin’s “Thinker”? Contemplating, like some great cosmic mystic, the beatific vision of himself? On one hand, attempting to answer such a question seems presumptuous. On the other hand, what we imagine God to be like in eternity affects how we imagine God to be present in our own lives and in all creation.

All metaphors are inexact, but I suggest answering the question by imagining God dancing. More than dancing – before and beyond and within all creation God is a dance, God is a friendship dance. From all eternity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit dance the dance of love and truth and joy. God is a dynamic dance of mutual giving and receiving and delighting. As they sought language to point toward an understanding of God as Trinity, the early Christian theologians used the Greek word, perichoresis, which means something like “they dance around together.”

Out of this Trinitarian friendship dance, God creates. All of creation (and each of us in it) is an expression of God’s love and truth and exuberant joy. We are created to participate in the dance of God’s own life.

Jesus came dancing. He is the perfect image of God – the perfect image, if you will, of the dance. Jesus proclaimed God’s love and truth and joy. But he didn’t just proclaim it, he embodied it. Wherever Jesus was, there was the friendship dance. Jesus comes to us as God’s personal invitation to the dance, inviting us to participate in the dance at the very heart of it all. In his death and resurrection Jesus broke the power of sin and death, making it possible for us to dance again.

If Jesus is the invitation to the dance, the Holy Spirit is the power of God moving in us to RSVP. The Holy Spirit choreographs our participation in the dance. Wherever the Spirit of Jesus is, there is the friendship dance.

The triune nature of God is one of the central mysteries of Christianity. But mystery is not the same as conundrum. Nor is it the result of a presumptuous desire to explain more than can be explained. Quite the opposite. Historically, the impetus to clarify some understanding arose in reaction to those who, like Eunomius, claimed to define the essence of God. Theologians like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa (Basil and the latter Gregory, under the influence of their sister, Macrina) reacted against such presumption. Collectively known as the Cappadocians, they argued that all we can really know of God is what God has revealed in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. What God is beyond that is unknowable. We do not use trinitarian language for God out of presumption. It is just that, as Rowan Williams has said, “It is the least worst language for God we have.”

The doctrine of the Trinity is the result of Christians living and praying with the reality of Jesus Christ breaking in on their lives, inviting them to participate in God’s life. It is the result of Christians experiencing the reality of the Holy Spirit empowering and enabling their participation in God’s life. The doctrine of the Trinity springs from the experience of Christians who knew from the history of Israel that God was one, but who, in the invitation of Jesus Christ and the experience of the power of the Spirit, came to understand that it was not that simple. God turns out to be more complex. God is love, dynamic love within God’s self – a friendship dance.

This is good news because it means that who God is cannot be separated from what God does. God has done something in the sending of the Son, Jesus Christ. God does something in the giving of the Holy Spirit. In that sending and giving we know God. But we are not just given some information about God. Rather, in sending the Son and giving the Spirit, God sends and gives God’s very self. No doubt there is more to God than we can hope to understand. But what Christians claim is that when God reveals himself, God reveals himself truly. Whatever more there is to God, it will not contradict what we know of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the Trinity means that at the heart of it all is relationship. Descartes got it wrong when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” It is truer to say, “I am related, therefore I am.” Or, better yet, “I am loved, therefore I am.” When Jesus summarized the law as loving God and loving neighbor, he was simply saying that this is the way it is at the heart of it all. Love – mutual giving, sharing and receiving – is at the heart of it all. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist through relationship with each other. Because that relationship is at the heart of it all, the quality of our relationships matters. Love matters. Relatedness matters. Community and communion matter. Connectedness is woven into the very fabric of things.

The doctrine of the Trinity is also good news because it means there is room for otherness. If there is “space” within God for the Son to be other than the Father, and the Spirit to be other than the Father and the Son, then there is space for us to be other than God. God makes space for creation and for us in it. Understanding God as Trinity means understanding God as involved in, but not overwhelming, everything. There is room for real freedom. We can celebrate our unity and diversity, not as a contemporary cliché, but as a reflection of what it means to be created in the image of God. God is one, but one in whom there is intimate otherness.

Jesus Christ is the invitation to the triune friendship dance at the heart of it all. The Holy Spirit, moving in us, enables our RSVP. Responding to that invitation, we begin to participate more fully in the life, love, and joy of God. It is a mystery. But it is a mystery that is the gift of God’s self into which we can enter. God is a friendship dance, so let us dance together.

Charged with the Holy Spirit

As the Feast of Pentecost approaches, here is something I wrote for The Living Church last year (May 31, '09):

When I was growing up on the farm we had an electric fence. Being curious, or foolish, or both, my brothers and I would play games with the electric fence. You could hear the click, click as the electric charge pulsed through the fence. So, one game was to see if we could pinch the wire between the clicks. If you timed it right, you could pinch and let go of the wire and never get shocked. Of course, if you didn’t time it right, you got a bit of a jolt. We also experimented to see what would conduct electricity. If you place an old section of rubber hose on the electric fence, nothing happens. If you place a dry stick or an old dry bone on the wire, nothing much happens. If you do the same with a loose piece of wire . . . electricity gets conducted!

The Holy Spirit is like divine electricity given to energize, empower, transform, and sometimes jolt the Church into action. Disoriented and disillusioned, fearful and uncertain, the followers of Jesus who gathered in the upper room on Pentecost were bereft of the life, energy, and power they had known in his presence. Then the Holy Spirit charged – shocked is not too strong a word – them with new life and power.

That first generation of the Church was not energized by some new religious insight. Nor were they energized by some new ethical ideal. They were energized by the power of Spirit of God – the same Spirit that had descended upon Jesus and that he had promised to pass on to his followers. The current of that Spirit electrified them with the love, peace, joy, and hope of Jesus. Empowered by his Holy Spirit, Peter and the others were transformed and became transformers who shocked the world, turning it upside down with the power of the good news of what God had done and was doing through Jesus the Christ.

The Church is like an electric grid, charged through with the Holy Spirit. It is an ever-expanding grid that extends through out the world and back through time to the original Pentecost. As one definition has it, the Church is an ever-widening sphere of an ever-deepening reconciliation. The Holy Spirit is given to the Church to empower and energize that reconciliation which is a sign of the promised “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21).

Pentecost is a reminder that the divine-human drama centers not on the individual but on the community. While not strictly a matter of either/or, it does matter where we put the emphasis. By the Holy Spirit, God calls us into community where we learn to love one another as God loves us. In, with and under that community, the Holy Spirit moves like an electric current empowering the Church to make our “life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.” (BCP 429).

While the Spirit is free to blow where it chooses, the normal way its presence and power are accessed is by being connected to the community that it animates and energizes. When we are baptized we are connected to the grid and electrified by the Holy Spirit. Or, to use the more organic language of the New Testament, in baptism we are grafted into the vineyard of the Church. There we are able to abide in Christ by the power of his Spirit and bear fruit.

The Holy Spirit is given to us personally primarily through that connection. So connected, individuals are energized and empowered by the love and joy of Jesus. As we learn to love in community, participate in worship and sacraments, pray, study scripture and serve we are continually energized and recharged by that same Spirit. Like the Apostles before us, we too are charged with the spiritual electricity of new life, new creation. And, unlike my crude experiments on the farm, whatever in us that resists conducting that Spirit – the rubber, dead wood, and dry bone of our sinfulness and brokenness – will be transformed into live wire.

Now it’s Your Turn

We watched Bullhorn, one of Rob Bell's Nooma videos, in our Adult Christian Training class yesterday morning. It reminded me of an experience I had when I was a student at Indiana University in the late 1970's:

There were a couple of sidewalk evangelists who regularly stationed themselves along a main campus thoroughfare and harangued students on their way to and from classes. They carried big floppy King James Bibles and dressed like Secret Service agents, complete with sunglasses. They would shout at the students, accusing them of all sorts of sins, threatening them with hell, and calling them to repent – real hell fire and brimstone stuff. Often, a group of students formed to harangue them back. The students would heckle them and call out challenging questions. It was quite a show.

There did not seem to be any real engagement. None of the students seemed to be genuinely interested in, let alone attracted to, the message the evangelists were presenting. As a young Christian, I mostly found it embarrassing. I usually walked pass the spectacle with my head down, hoping not to be associated with either side.

Once, though, as I sat under a tree within earshot of the debate, one of the evangelists said something that I could not ignore. He made the claim that, since he had become a Christian, he no longer sinned. This idea can be found the “holiness” tradition, mainly among some Pentecostal groups. But, having listened to this guy for some time, I didn’t believe it. Embarrassed or not, I was fool enough to rush in where angels fear to tread. I got up, walked through the ring of students and said, “Wait a minute.” I pointed out that in 1 John it says that if we say we are without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. The evangelist countered with another text. For a few minutes, with a crowd of students watching on, we played dueling Bible verses.

Suddenly, the evangelist looked at his watch, said it was time to go, packed up, and left. Most of the students began dispersing and I turned to go on my way. But, a voice behind me said, “Wait.” I turned around and saw a small group of students remaining. One of them said, “Now it’s your turn.” They began to ask me questions about my faith. I attempted to answer as best I could and offer a different understanding of Jesus from what they had been getting. I was struck with the genuineness of their interest. These were some of the same students who had been heckling the evangelist just moments ago. But, like the Greeks who came to Philip in John 12, they wanted to see Jesus. They just couldn’t see him through the presentation of the evangelist.

That experience has stuck with me through the years. I know from experience that people are hungry for the good news of Jesus. I also know that many people inside and outside the church have been presented with versions of Jesus that have not sounded or looked like good news. If we want to share that good news we need to live and talk in ways that demonstrate that it really is good and that it really is news. If we want to make a defense of the hope that is in us we need to do so with gentleness and reverence toward those to whom we are making that defense.

Among other things, that means loving people as they are and engaging them respectfully, taking genuine interest in their own stories, their own hopes and fears, their own wisdom and understanding. Unless we do that people are unlikely to care what we have to say anyway. And until we do that, any challenge we might present to their personal beliefs or morals will ring hollow. The same is likely true for whatever critiques we offer of social and political issues. That’s what the evangelists all those years ago did not understand. But, if we understand that and live it, there are people who want to see Jesus.

Now it’s your turn.