Disengaging From Debate

I had a great conversation with a friend today. She had been upset earlier that day, and she explained that she had just come from a tough encounter with another person at our campus green. The Free Thought Society on campus had written some rather harsh words regarding religion with chalk on the campus sidewalks today, which sparked my friend to start erasing some of it, which then sparked some other guy to confront her about said erasure.

Now, there are two things that should be known about this story before I go any further. First, The Free Thought Society is a group of people on campus whose chief goal outside of opposing religion I am unsure of. I don't want to make any assumptions on the group, but that is the only message I've heard (if a member reads this and believes I am representing them falsely, I invite you to correct me). My friend, on the other hand, is very passionate about her faith, and it is obvious all the time. You can see where there might be an issue.

The result of my friend's encounter was not an uncommon one. She was upset, and from her account of the situation, the guy was pretty abrasive about his distaste for religious beliefs. What was interesting was what my friend was still upset about later. She wasn't mad at the guy any more. She was mad at herself for being defensive rather than gracious.

When we debate people about our beliefs, we lose. I can't think of anyone I know who has been argued into believing in something they had been fundamentally opposed to. That could just be my experience, so if you are one of those people, please share your story with me. When we are argumentative about what the truth is, the truth takes second place to our egos. Everyone loses.

What about grace though? We talk about it all the time in an intellectual way, but do we practice grace as if it is a gift we have received? I do not, at least not as often as I would like. When I do experience those moments where I can be gracious enough to just love people and try to hear where they are coming from, I feel closer to who I was created to be. When we can stop trying to argue through a conflict of views and live in the tension for a moment, perhaps we can start seeing the wounds in one another's lives. Perhaps we can see how we can love one another. God wins, and we get the spoils.

I want to get better at encountering people. Like my friend, I want to be gracious instead of feeling right. My suspicion is that a good portion of the venom that Christians get comes from our failure to put loving them in front of winning an argument that isn't worth trying to win.

How do we become these people who love and do not hate, who embrace rather than debate? Shane Claiborne, who is part of the new ascetic movement and an incredible advocate for the oppressed, has shown at least one way. He experienced the pain and the struggles of those who he had judged as wrong, and it has made a difference far beyond his own life. I found this video while I was thinking about this post, and it seemed appropriate. Read, watch, and converse.



Peace.

Something Practical?

I like to wax philosophical with enormous frequency. Part of this is due to pure interest in the big questions and subjects, and part of it is due to fear of getting real.

Today I wanted to discuss a few practical things I've been thinking about/ starting to try and do to live more spiritually. These are not prescriptives, just some things that one person has found to be helpful in his own journey. Take what you will, leave what you find useless.

1) Sharing meals with people is a great way to feel connected to community. I've had a few potluck dinners with some other young people from my school community (and beyond) and it is seriously a highlight during my week. I love cooking for others and accepting the gift of food from others, and there is something intensely spiritual about such actions. It gives new meaning to the word "communion." I wonder sometimes if Jesus was keenly aware of the community building nature of mealtime when he began speaking at the last supper, and indeed imbued the food and drink with the quality of holiness, such that every time we eat together, we are sharing in something greater than us. The word solidarity comes to mind.

2) Writing letters admitting your mistakes and affirming love for others can relieve enormous burdens. I have been repenting for mistakes I made with my relationships with many people for a long time, and while I have begun learning the hard lessons I needed to and turning down a different road, I still felt a weight inside. The act of repenting to God is great, but there is something humbling about honestly and actively taking responsibility for the things you've done and said that helps make it real to me. The response of the other may be positive, negative, or non-existent, but the act of laying down my pride has been changing my mindset towards others, and it's provided a strange kind of release to be a truly different person that wasn't there before.

Those are what I've got so far. This week I watched something that was really helpful in moving me away from the self-hating guilty thoughts and actions I used to revel in, so I wanted to share that to. Here's Rob Bell. If I ever meet him, I'll thank him for sharing such profound encouragement in such a simple way.



You don't have to live this way....

Or in the words of the late John Lennon

"War is over, if you want it"

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning?

The subject of my prior post has been on my mind a lot over the last few weeks, and as the title implies, I have been wrestling with the question of where to go from here.

Then I watched a very interesting short video, which I think I might be smart enough to embed here...



What I want to focus on is the part where Brian gets down and start drawing in the dirt. Regardless of your opinion of the kind of theology a person subscribes to (lots of folks are freaked out by Brian McLaren) he does point out something we have been prone to do. We tend to look backwards through the lenses of our experience with certain types of theology and interpretations of the biblical Jesus, which can have the effect of turning him into a figure we try to plug into whatever structure we happen to find ourselves attached to. The problem is that this can end up making Jesus an object that we project our own ideologies, agendas, and politics (both the nationalistic and church varieties) upon.

We do need to look at how Jesus came about. We spend about eight months of the year in church discussing stuff that happened after the resurrection, and really only look at the story of why Jesus came on the scene during advent. I believe that if we look deeper into the why of Jesus, and less on the "how to do [your denomination] successfully, we'll find some interesting things.

So why Jesus? What made him so necessary and important? The most common answer might be that we are depraved and Jesus was the sacrifice necessary, but I think this sells Jesus/God short. If Jesus was just the ultimate sacrificial lamb, why bother with all the preaching, teaching, and showing of new weird and wacky ways? So why all that?

When I look at the story of the Old Testament, a few things stand out. First, their view of God was pretty inconsistent. If you look at all the different acccounts of God and man before Christ, there are times when God is looked upon as a genie, when God is a bringer of wrath, and when God is just someone we aren't talking to because he doesn't make our crops grow like the Baal worshippers crops grow. With a few exceptions, the people of the old testament had little or no clue who God was as a personality. I think Jesus is a vital character for showing the truest nature of God. As John puts it, he is the "word" of God (word being translated from logos, which not only means word but knowledge, reason, and account). So in Jesus, perhaps we are presented with some knowledge of God.

The other thing I see when I look at the old testament is the failure of systems to help people get better at dealing with God and one another. Sure, there are some bright spots, but all in all, what ends up happening in the old testament is that people get more attached to the system (a temple, rulebook, a country) than they are to one another and God. It's not that the nation of Israel were a bad people, they just did what come naturally when presented with uncertainty. They clung to whatever structure they had. You see the golden calf in the wilderness. You see the outcry for a king just like everyone else. I think you get the point. Jesus changes that substantially. His mindset and attitudes guide everything he does, and as pointed out in the text itself (I'll try to find the exact passage later), the law is fulfilled when we act from that mindset. Not because we know our doctrine backwards and forwards, but because we adopt a different mindset. This is incredible to me. People think that by claiming Christ, I'm looking for some hocus pocus to stave off a fear of mortality, and that's probably somewhere in the back of my head. But what is most appealing about Christ to me is that his life offers hope we can be different. We can live without a concrete rulebook that tells us all the answers (which doesn't exist, because the world is evershifting) because we can claim Christ and by doing so, exchange an attitude of competition, exploitation, and power pursuit for one that actually helps us live better lives with one another.

Now where do we go from here? I'm not really sure, but I think moving from contemplation to action sounds like it has to be involved. If we're really interested in becoming Christlike as people, then to the best of my understanding, we have to move from a hypothetical understanding of God, love, and all that to a manifestation through action. We need to actively cultivate community, live towards justice, and become practitioners of grace.

To my colleagues in Limbo, it's time. Dual meaning intended.

Peace

Here Lies the Church

So the theme in our Sunday School/Discussion Group/Still figuring it out the last few weeks has revolved around the idea that Christianity has been losing relevancy in the last few decades. The thing is, I think that the "mainstream church" has been losing relevancy for much longer. In fact, like many others, I would say that the church has been losing relevancy since Constantine made it a state religion. What followed, I would argue, has been for the most part a series of church manifestations which have served more to maintain power in the hands of some and to keep others oppressed.

The thing about Christianity is that it has been fundamentally incompatible with the pursuit of power since its foundations. To make it work as a tool for personal or social gain, it has to be subverted to the point of unrecognizability. For almost 2000 years, the populace at large was unaware of this, as most were too illiterate to read scripture for themselves, and those who did question what the state/church was telling them were persecuted by an institution whose founders were themselves the victims of persecution.

During the 20th century, a lot of things happened. A lot of thinking type fellows describe what happened during the past hundred years as a movement from the modern world to the postmodern world. Describing postmodernism would take forever, since it is not fully defined itself, but there are a lot of ideas that have come out of postmodern thinkers and writers that presented a deep threat to church elites. The main threat was the idea that absolute truth was in the eye of the beholder. In otherwords, what is actually the real truth about anything cannot be known with 100 percent certainty. Fundamentalists have been dismissing this idea as immoral for the better part of fifty years. What hasn't been done as much is to ask why such an idea would threaten the church. I think the biggest problem for many within the church is that they are in danger of losing the power to tell others what is right and wrong, true and untrue, without some kind of perspective or reason. When people question you, it is hard to control them. You have to engage with them on equal ground.

So we updated our rituals and made things look like the culture at large, but continued to tell people the same thing once they got in the doors. Obviously it hasn't worked. The answers the church is used to giving people do not answer the life questions they are asking. People want meaning in there lives, to know how they can love and be loved, and we tell them to accept Jesus Christ as their savior.

Things are changing, however. There are a lot of thinking and feeling Christians out there engaging in ancient ways. By ancient ways what I mean is that there were certain ideals and ways of engaging with people the Jesus discussed in the Bible exemplified that, on their own merit, drew people to him to the point of accepting persecution. Heaven wasn't a goal, it was a state of mind for these people. They adopted the attitude of Christ, as much as they could, and it became their way. Before there was a Bible, or church doctrine, or 5 steps to being a Christian.

My friend Kevin asked us if we (the church) were hibernating or awakening, and I think the question is complex. The church as it had been is dying. It just is, and it's time to accept that. I don't think the church will always be a dominant religious or political force forever. But I do think people will start to re-engage with the character of Christ. There are a lot of people struggling through the questions of faith, but with a desire to have the kind of love in action that they see in Christ, and it is beautiful. Christianity has always done best as a voice in the wilderness, offering an alternative to a system of dominance and subserviance in the form of mutual servanthood in love.

I have been in hibernation long enough. I've put my spirituality aside to get myself back together, but I'm waking up now. The Church proper may be increasingly irrelevant, but I think the spirit and character of Christ is as relevant as ever. It is a difficult way, with little in the way of obvious rewards, but it should be obvious that the way of success by any means is killing us as a society. We need different ways, and there is something in what was once called "The Way" that seems to present an awful lot of good ideas.

I will point out that I've breezed through an awful lot of material here, so this discussion is far from being properly contextualized. Hopefully I'll be discussing these things more in depth over time, but for now I just hope you'll join the conversation, regardless of your own viewpoint.

~Phil