Visceral Grace

We live by bold statements. We try to take lessons from the mouth of Jesus and the pens of prophets, and graft them onto ourselves. Our grafts try to bring peace, they try to move in love, they try to speak words of truth. We make grand gestures with our arms and try to embrace those who have been cut by misplaced touch. But every once in a while, if we are keen to those tumultuous unspoken currents that pulse within us, they sometimes spill out and reveal that no matter how many branches and leaves we tape to our bodies, a slab of cold granite is incapable of accepting grafts. The fear that wells up from prejudices we deny, the anger that blinds from wrongs we have forgiven, the bitterness that should have gone with the times…we are no tree of life.

I believe visceral reactions often reveal truths we bury under layers of ideals we deceive ourselves into believing. Before those well-rehearsed truths are able to do damage control, our beating hearts and short breath betray another reality, one that says anger is lurking outside our door, that our fear merely wears masks, and that bitterness is no lover of God or men.

Years ago in high school, I listened to a speaker talk about “bitter root syndrome,” as he spoke out of Hebrews 12:14-15. The verses say, “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” He warned strongly about the potential for bitterness to dig its tendrils deep into our being, tainting our thoughts and actions, and warring against our call to be the new creations that we are. Living at peace is intrinsically connected to holiness, and holiness to seeing the Lord. This bitter root, this growing poison chokes not only our own love and holiness, but according to Hebrews, it threatens to cast its curse upon others as well.

I’m not certain what it means to possibly “fall short of the grace of God.” But I assume that it means somehow granting grace by living up to that same grace given to us, in line with, “Forgive us our trespasses AS WE forgive those who trespass against us.” The granting of grace or forgiveness does not require bilateral reciprocation, since we were redeemed unilaterally, while we were still sinners. Plastering ourselves with Christian truisms does not necessitate transformation. Somewhere deep inside, where tangled roots of bitterness innervate our visceral reactions, this is where grace weeds out anger and fear. What controls us is our idol. What dictates our steps, thoughts, words, who or what we avoid and embrace… this is what we worship.

I do not serve a god that succumbs to fear or bitterness. Anger has no permanent address here. I serve a Lord who prayed with grace, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

A Rejection of Focus on the Family's "Letter from 2012"

I recently started a Facebook group to protest Focus on the Family's "Letter from 2012." The link can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=30055124462&ref=mf

This is what the group info says:

Focus on the Family Action recently put out a hypothetical letter that outlined what America would look like from the perspective of a Christian looking back on an Obama presidency from 2012. The letter starts off by saying, “Many Christians voted for Obama – Younger evangelicals actually provided him with the needed margin to defeat John McCain – but they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far-Left policies that had marked his career. They were wrong.” Here are just some of their scenarios Focus on the Family paints for us:

- The Supreme court leans liberal, 6 to 3.
- Terrorist attacks have occurred in 4 US cities.
- Christian doctors, nurses, counselors, and teachers have either been fired or quit.
- Iran perpetrated a nuclear attack on Israel, drastically reducing the size of is borders.
- Pornography is freely displayed.
- Inner city violent crime has dramatically increased due to gun control.
- Russia has occupied 4 additional countries.
- Gas tops $7 a gallon.
- Euthanasia becomes commonplace.
- Blackouts occur throughout the country.
- Homosexual marriage becomes law in all 50 states.
- Campus ministries, Christian adoption agencies and Christian schools nearly cease to exist.
- Home school families emigrate to Australia and New Zealand by the thousands.
- Bush officials are jailed and bankrupt.
- Taliban oppression overtakes Iraq and death of American sympathizers reaches millions.
- Homosexuals are given a bonus to enlist in the military.

As you can see, Focus on the Family has abandoned all reasonable appeals and resorted to shameless tactics of fear mongering. They have abandoned the belief that voters can make informed decisions and have instead appealed to fear as their fundamental motivator.

As Christians, we stand appalled and ashamed at such tasteless demagoguery. We believe that civil, educated, and compassionate dialogue should and can occur with the active engagement of our faith, but believe that Focus on the Family Action has, in this letter, stepped far outside of reasonable boundaries into pure sensationalism. We believe that such thoughtless expressions coming from an organization that purports to represent Evangelicals continues to mar our legitimacy and voice in the public arena, and damages our basic Christian witness.

Please let Focus on the Family know your thoughts by contacting them through email at citizenlink@family.org.

The original letter can be found here:

http://focusfamaction.edgeboss.net/download/focusfamaction/pdfs/10-22-08_2012letter.pdf

Please encourage your friends to contact Focus on the Family and to join this group.

Release

When it is a prayer we speak to
grant reprieve, we are instead
granted sleep to ease the pull,
a constant stress upon the cords holding
what is
and what is not yet.
Grant instead
a distaste for opiates, cheapness, and
the quiet waiting that walks what is
toward the glaring silence of
what is not yet.

A Penny For Your Thoughts: Everything Must Change

I have just finished the book “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope” by Brian McLaren. I wish to hear thoughts from those of you who have read the book, but mostly challenges and critiques. However, before I do that, I want to state as honestly as I can the assumptions and biases from which I speak.

I do not function from a position of a socially conservative Evangelical. I fully affirm the ancient creeds about the Trinity, the work of Christ, and hold Scripture to be the word of God. However, I am unapologetically affected by post-modernity and its critiques of old dominating meta-narratives and its recognition of modernist arrogance. In the same vein, I hold loosely the exclusivity and absolutism of the specific strain of Protestantism of which I am a part. I want to recognize the development of theology and thinking in light of a given historical context. As cultural creations, I do not believe that people can view truth objectively, even though Truth exists in the person of Jesus Christ. We look through a glass darkly and await the day we will see clearly, face to face. Given such assumptions, I desire to view my own tradition with humility, knowing that it was not shaped in a vacuum nor bestowed in a pure untainted form from on high. In the same breath, I seek to listen to the voices of those from other Christian traditions with the belief that God is not a tribal God. I am inclined to give a hearing to women and non-Western traditions, because God is not a white Protestant male. I desire to listen to the voices of the poor and oppressed, to see how the Gospel manifests itself among those who do not have money and power behind their words, because these are people God favors. I believe that left unchecked, our cultural waters have and will continue to inform our understanding of our faith more than our faith will change us. I believe in listening to those of different faiths or non-faiths, because God can use whomever he chooses to give a clearer perspective of his realities.

With that said, “Everything Must Change” is built upon the work of post-modernity’s understanding of dominating meta-narratives, a la Foucault. McLaren first establishes and names the narratives that our culture lives by, and then proceeds to discuss why such narratives are fundamentally dysfunctional, referring to people as disparate as Rene Padilla, Jim Wallis, Philip Jenkins, Wendell Berry, Cornel West and our own Dr. Bruce Benson. He then appeals to the scholarship of people like N.T. Wright and Dominic Crossan in the understanding of a Historical Jesus and how the historical Jesus spoke to the dominant (and equally corrupt) narratives of his day. McLaren draws a parallel between what Jesus said and did in the 1st century and what we he says to our global context today. He uses people like MLK, Pope John Paul II, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela to illustrate the true power of what happens when Christians undermine faulty narratives with the [reconstructed] Christian one. He doesn’t hesitate to critique the religious structures in their perpetuation of the fallen narratives, and challenges the church to reform itself according to Jesus’ narrative, one that truly subverts the massive powers and principalities at work in the world.

I appreciate McLaren’s willingness to listen to many different voices. Undoubtedly, his association with liberation theologians, left-leaning Evangelicals, economists critical of globalization, Christian pacifists/tree hugging poets and the simple mention of "post-modernity" will turn off a more conservative reader. However, as I’ve stated from the outset, such things do not count against him in my eyes.

I ask for a critique because I am predisposed to accepting what McLaren says. This book was referred to me by a man I respect, its contents contain authors, theologians and philosophers that I tend to agree with, and even the book’s specific contents aren’t so much an exposure to new ideas as it is a clarification, connection, or reframing of certain ideas I’m already open to. I appreciate a good deconstruction and am interested to hear if anyone has other thoughts.

Ivy and Ivory Towers

Driving from Linwood, NJ to Princeton, NJ was like driving from the sprawling utilitarianism of suburban American wastelands into some transplanted European town in the midst of shedding its green and revealing its glory. Narrow streets intended for horses were paved over and forced to accommodate cars, but tall white columns in front of colonial homes still guard olde money. If it weren’t for the college students in Uggs, I would swear the campus ivy screamed London.

As I marveled at massive theological tomes housed in old European architecture, I joked with my friend who attends Princeton Theological Seminary that it felt far removed from the rest of the America, and his response was simply, “Just like the oasis of Wheaton.” It’s isolated quaintness, streets lined with gnarled trees in gold and red, and Asian families with cameras vicariously dreaming for their children belied the fact that it was a mere 10 miles from one of the most dangerous cities in the country (Trenton). Meandering its streets, I did not feel the dirty grit of reality.

I have no doubt about the importance of theological studies. If I were made of sterner stuff, I would have contemplated it as possible steppingstone in life. I pondered at certain moments what my Chinese grandmother would think walking through these streets, a women who has lived her entire life in the tumultuous country of her birth, from one historical desolation to another. She would have found it incomprehensible that such a beautiful and entirely different place existed on the same earth she knew. And yet, here it stands, buildings and streets that were built to facilitate theological and academic pursuits, intended from its foundation to be a place where those who knew God intimately would be sent out to shepherd flocks and lead the country.

Is theology, or the pursuit thereof grounded in reality? Perhaps I shouldn’t draw such a line. Some would undoubtedly say that pursuing theology *is* pursuing reality. I would like to hope that such a notion is true, that theology is indeed the attempt at understanding the workings of God in a world of brokenness. However, I can’t help but to think of the books housed in one of the greatest theological libraries outside of Oxford and wonder how this entire town, swarming at every coffee shop, bar and corner with intelligentsia, an antithesis of what the rest of the world experiences, can possibly say to suffering, hungry and struggling people in the midst of wars, disease, and death.

I wonder, though not in a condemnatory way, why the study of God and reality seems, by most appearances, so insulated from it.

In no way am I disparaging academic pursuits of God through theological studies. However, I am wary of the simple pursuit of theology. The former (as I understand it), is an attempt to better love the Lord. The countless hours and late nights of classes, readings and writings will multiply into true bread for the hungry. It seeks to better understand the heart of the Lord, and how to love what He loves. It is a means to His ends. He is the end. But the pursuit of theology for the sake of itself seems to be as useful to the world as an unread thesis gathering dust underneath the basement shelves of a converted anachronistic cathedral in a beautiful isolated town of New Jersey. I wonder how many brilliant minds throughout history have settled for the fiddling of words.

For my friends in various seminaries and ivory tower institutions around the country, I pray that all those days behind Greek and Hebrew books, systematic, philosophical and historical theology classes, all the homiletics and exegesis practices will indeed bring you to love the Lord more, and draw you to the ghettos of this earth like Trenton, 10 miles away from the insulated comforts of Princeton. And if I ever get there to join y’all, call me down to earth once in a while.

A Thought Exercise: Race and Evangelical Politics

I'm curious. I really am. I wonder what the conservatives (and especially Christian ones) would say if Obama was the one who had left his first wife after she got into a car accident and became handicapped, cheated with other women while still married, and then married a rich young heiress. I bet they wouldn't be silent about it, that's for sure.

I'm also curious what the conservatives would say if it was Obama who had a pregnant teenage daughter. I wouldn't be surprised to hear Focus on the Family talking about how he has no family morals and no control over his children, and why he has any right being president of the United States if he can't manage his own household.

Now, at the end of the day, we will never know for sure what would happen if that were the case. This is why it's a hypothetical exercise. However, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that somewhere in there, Obama would find himself having to defend his entire race for his actions (which McCain certainly doesn't have to do even if people pointed out the outrageous inconsistency of values voters supporting him). Somewhere in there, I wouldn't be surprised if the stereotype of promiscuous black women was subtly hinted at, or the unfaithful black male was conjured to attack him.

Sadly, I have a hard time believing that the voice-boxes of Evangelical righteousness would say, "Oh, everyone sins. Let's stop attacking his family and history! God has forgiven them. Who are we to cast the first stone?" I could be wrong, but my mind has a hard time imagining that as a possibility.