Protecting Culture, or Projecting Christ

 

                We all tend to go to seminary thinking that studying theology will bring us closer to God.  But seminary is much more about forcing a conformity of thinking on students than it is about exploring what it means to live in relationship with a God Who is at the heart of things a Mystery.  Almost all of us when I was there struggled with this disconnect—how can studying to be a pastor for Christ have so little to do with our relationship to Christ?

                The answer, I think, is that seminary is much more interested in our being pastors who protect the established culture of the church than it is in our being pastors who follow Jesus.  The Reformation was a reaction to the church’s worship of itself as opposed to its submission to the living God; five hundred years on now, we should be much more sympathetic to the mother church.  We have fallen in the same hole—we now worship our own accretion of culture more than we worship the Christ who calls us to follow Him in newness of life.

                We do this because culture is stable, rigid, and powerful.  If culture is on our side, we are guaranteed some security and some comfort.  But that safety comes at a price—the walls that we rely on to keep what we are afraid of OUT are also the same walls that imprison us.  Culture inevitably becomes a prison for the human spirit—Jesus set us free to be a nomadic, pilgrim people, not a new empire.

                We have surrendered to the wrong god.

                And once surrendered to that god, it is devilishly hard to escape that surrender.  The church that emerges from the travails of this current time, this current crisis, will have to become a more pilgrim church than the stone piles that we have created will allow us to be.  How do we become people who embrace a call to be fully human, rather than a call to success, goodness, or some other culturally determined form of success?

                We have to surrender to the right God.

                Surrender to the right God transforms us from centripetal beings, where everything is sucked into the vortex of our conscious and unconscious whims, desires, thoughts, and feelings into centrifugal beings, where every thought, desire, feeling, whim is transformed into love and pulled out of us and pushed in the direction of the other person.  Surrender to Christ can only really be accomplished by the death of that centripetal force within us—our will, our sense of our self at the center of all things.  When that dies, Christ raises a new self built not on what comes into us, but what comes out of us. 

                You cannot protect culture and project Christ, any more than you can love another person and simultaneously demand something from them.    The demand transforms love into another transaction.  Protecting culture reveals our deeper need for safety which makes our desire to escape self a shallower lie.  God is judging the church, setting it right, by removing the choice to retreat into a safe culture and find survival there.  Survival will only come by surrender to the God revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We pastors must lead God’s people there by example, and then by projecting the resurrection love of Jesus Christ into our congregations.  We must let culture go and embrace the dangerous and unnavigable journey of taking Christ’s hand and going where we do not wish to go.  Only then will the church cease to be a football, a weapon, a mascot in the control of any race, class, or group, and once again become the place where all those lesser allegiances bow at the feet of the Lord of the world, Jesus Christ.

The Dangers of Being Good, and Being Right

 

                We church people tend to be the folks who were too cautious or afraid to step too far out of the lines that authorities in our lives drew.  We leaned on those authorities for protection from our peers who dared to do what we did not dare to do, and came to rely on those authorities for our own validation.  We gloried in being right—having the right answer, getting the right grade, being praised by the authority figures in our lives. 

                Everyone of us hunts for this praise, this validation.  We look in different places for it, but most of us begin our adult lives thinking it is outside of us.  The danger for Christians, and especially for pastors, is to realize too slowly that this search outside of ourselves is not only fruitless, but destructive to Christ’s purposes in the world.  Authorities seek to reproduce themselves, and thus use their power to replicate in the next generation the power structures that they inherited.  It is why such authorities reward “right thinking” and behavior that reinforce those power structures and punish “wrong thinking” and its consequent behaviors.   It is a very short trip of aging from being one who pleases authorities to becoming an authority who demands that he/she needs to be pleased.

                Most of us pastors fall in love early in life with being good, and thus fall in line with the institutional authorities that teach us to be right, and to reward “good/right” and to seek to punish “bad/wrong”.  This is the basic structure of all worldly power.

                It is impossible to read this reward and punishment rhythm in the life of Jesus revealed in the New Testament.  Jesus teaches a way of love that has nothing to do with using external authorities to prop up one’s sense of self.  Jesus preaches and demonstrates in his life, death and resurrection that  fear, which lurks behind all forms of punishment, cannot guide us into Truth.  We wake too late to the fact that power cannot give us what we seek, and that spiritual authority is not power in any worldly sense. 

                The Church as it exists in the West, including the Presbyterian Church (USA), is dying—poisoned by its trust in worldly power, and its lack of trust in the path that the Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, lays out for us.  The younger generations’ anger behind the charge that we are hypocrites is not because we say one thing and do another—that is true of almost all people.  The rage our hypocrisy generates comes from our betrayal of Jesus through the violence, dehumanization and harm that we do in the name of a Lord and a God who we claim IS love.  They hate us because we trust the power of fear more than we trust the power of love.

                I am wrong.  I am bad, by any definition of that term.  I can confess this because my defense is in Christ, who knows how wrong I am, how bad I am, better than I do.  And Jesus Christ truly loves me.  But to fully receive that love, I have to let go of all the prideful lies that I use to hide my badness, my wrongness.  Expose my wrongness, my badness, and you have not shown Jesus anything He didn’t already know about me—and Jesus Christ loves me.  What punishment can hurt what Christ has healed?

                There are no good girls or boys in Jesus Christ’s presence.  No one standing behind the armor of argument or position or power is there.  We are defenseless before the world, because Love has not fought against the powers of death, it has swallowed them and rendered them of no consequence.  Death is not defeated by armor or weapons—Paul says purposely that death is taken into God’s own self-- it is swallowed up in victory.

                If I have to choose between loving another soul and being right, I will choose the soul every time, no matter what it costs.  It is what Jesus Christ has done for me.      Let go of being right and being good.

Nostalgia

                In his book, Quietly Courageous, Gil Rendle calls out the great temptation of this age that continues to trap us in fruitless conflict: nostalgia.  We are in love with who we were in that aberrant time that still skews the baseline of our expectations and hopes, the 1950’s.  Government, society, neighborhood enforced a communal uniformity that drove people in the doors of our congregations ready to serve on committees, commit to the common mission and ministry we had already articulated, and happily become “one of us.”

                That world is gone—and as Rendle points out, it is not the fault of the Progressive who has forsaken the Gospel or the Conservative who has twisted Christ’s love into fear/hate.  The scale and scope of the tsunami of change that is coming at us is many orders of magnitude greater than whatever divides us, and has nothing to do with the quarrels that have defined us for too long.

We silently crossed into a new world this year that will define us as a culture for decades to come: the average American now spends more time on her/his phone than watching TV.  The “smart phone” is systematically disassembling family life, and every form of communal life in our culture.  There is no more “us” to be a part of—and most people now are distrustful of any “us” that is suggested.  We  have transformed community into another consumer item by turning it into a “do it yourself” proposition, fostering an understanding of communal relationships as another personal comfort, rather than as a challenge/check to our own personalized reality. In our obsession to avoid pain and discomfort, we seem to be perfecting a way of life that has little or nothing to do with other people.  We shop alone; we recreate alone, online with chat buddies; we talk politics and religion alone with people who think like us; we even love alone.

                Malls and ballparks are dying as fast as churches—the reason they are dying has little to do with what goes on inside.  It has to do with the fact that they are uncontrolled space—one has no control over who one meets, one cannot simply cut off interactions that are painful or uncomfortable.   Uncontrolled space in this culture is increasingly seen as dangerous space.

                The wave that is hitting us doesn’t care whether we are Progressive or Evangelical, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, prophetic or pastoral.  We are all together part of a truly countercultural movement: come together, and love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.

                The most important value of Christians must become our unity—our togetherness.  We need one another!  Bigger barns won’t guarantee our survival.  Neither will uniformity of theology, culture, race, politics, or socio-economic status.  Christians are being pushed back into the one thing that should have defined us all along: Love. 

                When we submitted our report in 2010, now lost in the internet’s back forty acres of terabytes, the Moderator’s Special Committee on the Definition of Marriage and Civil Unions saw this as our true challenge.  Ten years ago this summer, I wrote this:

In his book, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer states:

        We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.  What does this mean?  It means, first, that a Christian needs others because of Jesus Christ.  It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ.  It means, third, that in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.

          We all come to Christ as sinners, as strangers, whether we are in worship the week we are born, or come to know Christ in our youth or old age.  But once in Christ, we are inextricably linked to one another—not by affinity, comfort, or culture, but first and foremost because we belong to Christ.  It is Christ who sets a place for us at the table; it is Christ alone who calls.

          With Christ’s call comes the forming of Christ’s mind in each believer. In Christ, no matter who we are, what condition we are, we come to understand our essential humanity, which Christ redeems from the shadows of sin.  Christ alone knows us—it is through the mind of Christ alone that we truly come to know others.

          Christ is the center of our life individually and of our life together.  From the moment we are called forth from nothing and formed in the womb, through the moment in time when we hear and, Lazarus-like, rise from sin and follow, to the moment when we are united with Christ in a death like His and a resurrection like His, Christ is calling us.  We are not our own.  We have been bought with a price.

              

            It is time for us in the Presbyterian Church (USA) to pick up our cross together and follow God into the land that God will show us by reclaiming the essential good of uncontrolled space created by Christ, where we do not all agree on all things, where we are not from the same cultures and the same schools.  We must start to live into the complicated blessing of each other, embracing the pain that comes with the stranger, the one who does not agree or think as we think, because it is Christ Who sends them to us.  We must learn to love one another as Christ has loved us.

                There are other ways to buy and sell clothing and electronics than the mall.  Professional sports can survive and even thrive on media revenue.  There is no other way to learn to be fully human than to learn to love and live in community with other people in spaces we cannot control.  As this tidal wave of change sweeps away our power and privilege, we must find a way to not succumb to the fear that metastasizes as each shrunken soul recoils from the work of loving.  We must find ways to reorganize our common life around the essential task of loving Christ and each other in space Christ alone controls.

What would happen if our presbytery meetings were organized around strengthening and encouraging congregations and pastors in this work?  What would happen if the people around our cities, around our presbyteries, around our congregations could look at us and say, “see how they love one another!”  This tide of change will forever alter the geography of our culture.  Blame and fault-finding will do nothing to change that fact.  We must put out into the deep, trust in Christ, learn to truly hold on to one another, and live out as best we can the Gospel we preach. 

Rebuilding the Ruins of These Generations

         In his article The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite, David Brooks points out the great failure of the "Me" generation: it isn't about me.  Focused on individual achievement, individual reward, "winning", and measuring others by our own attainments, my generation and the generations after it have fed a cancerous individual rapacity for more that has made our common life together poisonous.
         Maybe it's because we Presbyterians are mostly part of the new meritocratic elite that our life together so easily presents a microcosm of our society's ills.  We are terrible at loving one another, and we see little if any problem with that.
         "Why would I love someone who is so obviously wrong about ____?  Why would I associate with someone whose viewpoint I don't respect?  Why would I want to care for somebody whose very way of looking at the world makes me uncomfortable?  Let them go away."
         We have distorted every institution into a factory which creates, enables, and protects such a mindset.  Where those institutions were once places where each individual learned their true scale-- you are not THAT big, you are not THAT important--, now they are used to magnify the individual or group of individuals who hold the most power within them.
        It is why being a "loyal opposition" in any institution or community in our country has become an oxymoron.  If you were loyal, you wouldn't be opposed; if you're opposed, you can't possibly be loyal, because loyalty is to an individual point of view/mindset, not to a large community of people, much less a God who inhabits a whole universe.  Institutions have been bent and twisted to the work of ego magnification, along with every other good that was left to us by the generations who knew what an "us" really is.
        We Protestants have never been really good at the "us" thing.  The old joke that if you have three Baptists eventually you'll have five churches holds true for all of us.  But in Christ, none of this behavior makes sense.  Jesus Christ did not die on the cross to prove He was right.  He didn't walk into a Samaritan village and begin to talk to a Samaritan woman because she was the smartest person there, the one most like Himself.
         Jesus gives his meritocratic, best-life-yet away.  He gives His life away because He lives in community-- how can we think that hanging on to one another is wrong when we worship a God Who is Community incarnate-- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  Jesus gives His life away because He recognizes that the only way to teach love-- hanging on to one another-- is to do it.  Jesus doesn't look for return on His investment: no where do we hear of Jesus exulting with God in prayer over thousands saved, healed, present and listening.  Jesus is trying to create a new "us": the Kingdom of God, the beloved community that Isaiah said would one day cover not just Israel, but the world.
          And now, we can't hang on to one another across our disagreements.  I find it interesting in the PC(USA) to hear more and more self-congratulatory "we are becoming more inclusive!" statements that coincide without irony with statements that still echo a former GA moderator: "those damn evangelicals!  I wish they would go away!"
       So I attend Presbytery meetings, and do my best to give my best to my community even as so many make it clear to me that they would rather I went away.  To the best of my ability, I will love.  Whether it makes a difference or not is irrelevant.  I give myself away, so You, Lord Jesus, can use me.

Re-staking Out a Difficult Position

To be the Church of Jesus Christ is always to swim against the prevailing cultural tide of one’s time.  In this day and age, that cultural tsunami appears to me to be the self-isolating power of technology, and our slavish surrender of our humanity to the illusory self-comfort of our own noise.  We have been entertaining ourselves to death for fifty years, and we have now perfected the delivery devices for this powerful narcotic to the point that it is now painfully difficult to interact with other human beings.

Love is the first and greatest casualty of a life lived inside a techno-wall of defense, because love can only be known in real human contact, dangerous and painful as that contact can be.  We in our time have now labeled that pain as “aggression” or “evil”, when it is simply the encounter with the other.  Love always has brought pain with it—but now, by defining that pain as somehow wrong or evil, we have defined the whole enterprise of truly loving as off-limits.

The Church of Jesus Christ is struggling with issues of the nature of human sexuality.  There can be no denying this if we have even the most liminal connection to parts of the Body beyond our own.  One doesn’t have to wander far in the world of opinion to find a voice that disagrees with one’s own.

The striking thing is that the Church is cooperating with the self-isolating impulses of Western culture rather than trying to fight them.  It is easier to declare those who disagree with one “evil,” classify their disagreeing as “violence,” and then ask them to “apologize,” than it is to understand or love the one who is our neighbor and too often our enemy.  G. K. Chesterton reminded us long ago, “Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, and to love our neighbors, because so often they are the same people.”

I have lived my whole life in the Church in the midst of this struggle.  I have sought to understand those with whom I disagree.  Conversation has often brought me to be more nuanced in my interpretation of events; and while it has not always or often changed my sense of what is True, it has demonstrated to me over and over again that we are all in the same search for Truth.  The fact that in this shattered world of shattered people we have arrived at conclusions that cannot be harmonized is not new or surprising.

But the culture which teaches us that all pain is bad, that discomfort is the sign of the presence of evil, and that we are entitled to live in a world where each of us feels good about ourselves all the time, keeps on finding its inroads into the people who are called by their Lord to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow.

In this day and time, this cultural captivity of Christ’s people shows itself most powerfully in our demand for release from the discomfort of disagreement. Those who agree with me are playing the classic Protestant game of dividing—taking our marbles and going home.  Without judging their actions, I simply confess that I believe this is error.  Love is not about cutting connections. Those who disagree with me now want “justice,” or “truth and reconciliation,” which looks to me an awful lot like “vengeance:” comparing their pain and discomfort in the midst of disagreement to the torture and killing of people in South Africa, and other places.  To disagree with them now is to become a perpetrator of evil.

I will not leave the PC(USA).  I believe that Jesus Christ planted me here for a reason.  I am fully aware that my mere presence is now an insult to some, and my sense of what is true is now classified as “violence.”  But I will not divide the Body.  I will stand and seek to love even if no one will stand and love with me.  I stand against the culture of my birth, against those who see as I see, against those with whom I disagree.  I have no illusion that such a place to stand will not result in pain and violence toward me; in fact, I already experience this pain regularly.  But Love is stronger than death—stronger than pain.

So, I choose to seek to connect, and to love.  May Christ give growth to the seed of my faith in Love’s power to raise the dead, and raise the PC(USA) to new life again.  But if not, I still will not bow down and worship my own comforting self-generated noise.  I will die trying to love.