Category Archives: life in the world

What If It’s Not about the Rules?

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bibleIt’s like that car crash that we can’t not look at. We all want it to go away, yet we keep looking.

That county clerk in Rowan County in northeastern Kentucky has now become the poster child for what some are calling a courageous stand for religious freedom. Her supporters are cheering for her version of Christianity, citing biblical support for her defiance, claiming that she is a righteous woman who is properly obeying God in the face of a law that would require her to sin were she to follow it. Her cause has been picked up by at least two Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz; they appear ready to canonize her as an icon for what they would like this country to be.

Here I sit. An adherent of the same religion, at least in name. A leader in the church. I see her defiance very differently, not as something that brings honor to her faith, but distorts and diminishes the heart of Christianity. She willfully is disregarding the oath that she took when elected as County Recorder. I don’t have so much an issue with that fact that she disagrees with the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. That is her constitutional right. But if her conscience dictates that she can’t do what her job and her oath of office require, then she should resign. Instead she has chosen to grandstand and drag the whole country into this fake debate about religious freedom and a drama that is mostly irrelevant.

It is so striking to me how adherents of the same nominal Christian faith can come to such polar opposite conclusions about her actions, and more fundamentally, about the issue that prompted her grandstanding. Mike Huckabee is an ordained Baptist pastor and was the pastor of a large, successful Baptist church before going into politics. Ted Cruz grew up in the church; his father was the pastor of a large, successful fundamentalist-leaning church. Cruz is graduate of Princeton first, and then Harvard Law School. These are not stupid people.

While I don’t carry the educational credentials of Cruz, I am a leader in the church and called on almost daily to articulate the Christian faith. I come to vastly different conclusions about Davis’s actions, about gay marriage, and I suppose about nearly every other aspect of Christian teaching and Christian life. How can that be?

Earlier this summer, I read The Righteous Mind, a fascinating book by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt is a moral psychologist and the book sets out to describe how persons shape their moral universe. The common understanding is that people find their fundamental moral principles — often in their faith and their own sacred texts — and then arrive at actions and beliefs that are reasoned from their fundamental moral principles. So, for instance, if we are adherents of Christianity, we look at what the bible has to say about moral issues, the voice of the bible leads us to our moral principles, and then we determine our actions based on those principles.

But Haidt suggests that this isn’t the way it works. Using a wide array of theories, research and experimentation, he describes how people intuit moral positions and then go in search of a moral framework to support their position. So, for instance, if I have an intuitive disdain for homosexuality, that decision is made “in my gut” as Haidt describes it, and then I go in search of support for my position. Did you get that? Let me say it another way: we go looking for divine support for positions that we have taken intuitively.

I’m no expert on psychology, and so I can’t evaluate Haidt’s thesis as an expert. But he does make a compelling case. It strikes me as a cogent argument for, among other perplexing questions, why adherents of the same religion come to such different moral conclusions.

But it also shakes religious foundations to the very core. What could it mean if we do not, in fact, base our moral principles on our sacred scriptures, but on our intuitions that have been shaped by our upbringing, our culture, and even our personality? What then, could Christianity possibly be about, if not a moral code for righteous living?

As far as I can tell, Christianity has never been a moral code. it’s always been about a relationship and a calling. It’s about a recognition of our brokenness, a transformation that comes through Jesus and results in a dying to self and a rising to a new relationship with God, and then a calling to be in the world in such a way that you love God and love your neighbor. Morality? That’s something different.

That fundamental core of Christianity is so easy to forget. We want to be the good people. To be the good people requires knowing the rules. Knowing the rules means you have to make the rules. Then you can tell everyone else what the rules are. And if you don’t like the rules, then you make a different set of rules. And then we get to the kind of saga that is getting played out on our television screens and Facebook feeds, such a distortion of Christianity that I can’t even recognize it.

Here’s to believing it’s not about the rules.

My Shiva Is Over

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blackYesterday, there was this line in the sermon that I heard: The memory of one shooting isn’t even distant before we hear reports of another.

That’s the thing that has occupied my mind and brought such a heaviness of heart for the past weeks.

Things have been pretty silent on this blog since early June. On June 1, I left for vacation in the Colorado Rockies. I had intended to keep up at least a posting a week.

Then Charleston happened. At first, I experienced simple disbelief, almost like my initial reaction on September 11, 2001.  As more details were reported, the tragedy became more and more shocking and horrifying. It numbed me.

The ink was not even dry on the first reports when the opinions started coming out about what caused it and what we should do about it. How quickly we turned to explanations and solutions. In those days following Charleston, because seemingly everyone was saying something, I felt compelled to say something. But I had nothing to say.

Maybe we say too much too soon, especially when these kinds of deep tragedies happen. In our collective problem-solving mentality, in our 24 hour news cycle that requires many words and images to fill the space, and when everyone is a pundit with an opinion, we seem to think that offering explanations and solutions will make everything come clean in the end. What happens is that nothing comes clean, but we numb ourselves into believing that it won’t happen again and nothing really changes very much.

In the Jewish tradition, when someone dies, there is a ritualized period of mourning. Here’s how it’s been described to me: first, there’s aninut, the death and the burial. It’s an all-consuming few days as the body is prepared for burial, funeral plans are made, and then the funeral and burial happen. Then there’s the shiva, a period of seven days after the burial. The mourners return home and sit on low chairs, taking a cue from Job’s mourning for his family when his friends sat down with him towards the ground for seven days and seven nights and no one spoke a word to him.  During this time, mirrors are draped in black and the mourner lights a memorial candle. The mourner wears no make-up, no perfume, engages in no sexual activity, listens to no music, and wears no shoes. During this time, family and friends call at the house. The mourning becomes a communal mourning with distractions stripped away. For this time, there are no explanations and there is no push to move on. The mourners sit in their lament, surrounded by family and friends. Lauren Winner writes that “what has struck me about a shiva call is the sheer crush of people.” (Mudhouse Sabbath) On the last day of shiva, friends come and take the mourner by hand, lead him out of the house and down the street for a walk around the block. It’s both the literal and figurative reentry into society.

I wish we could have a national shiva when something like Charleston happens. I wish we could shut off our televisions, ban anyone from writing anything about what has happened for a week or so, and just sit in collective lament. At least in the Christian tradition, we don’t do lament very well. We do funerals, but not lament.

It feels like we have a cultural diarrhea of words about why these things happen and what we should do; we get all riled up for a few weeks and then everything goes back to normal. When the Newtown shootings happened over two and a half years ago, we all thought that would be the game-changer in forming a society in which we would make sure that such mass shootings would be a matter of history. When Michael Brown was shot and Ferguson erupted, we pledged that things would change.

As far as I can tell, not much has changed.

I don’t know what to do. Big things like racism and violence in America are complex challenges and solutions are perplexing. My heaviness of heart and mind about both issues are close to despair, feeling in some moments like we will never get past this; this is our destiny; racism and violence are so embedded in our national DNA that the best we can hope for is to keep the beasts at bay.

Yet my faith is based on hope for what is not seen and even for what does not seem possible. My trust in God’s covenantal promises tells me that even in the midst of these societal Gordian knots, God is at work. Somehow I need to be part of that work, even though I haven’t wanted to say anything or do anything.

Last week, I went to our denomination’s national youth gathering — 30,000 high school youth descending on the beleaguered city of Detroit, bring their faith, their witness, their dollars, and their willingness to get into the trenches and work. It was exhilarating. And it was hopeful.

Apparently, that was my walk around the block. It’s time.

Heading Towards Haiti

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HaitiThe view from the air as you fly into Port au Prince, Haiti, is starkly dramatic. If the skies are clear, you can catch a glimpse of the dramatic difference between the eastern half of the island — The Dominican Republic — and the western half of the island which comprises Haiti. While green to a degree, it’s a lighter color green than the dark, forested eastern half. Much of Haiti has been deforested.

As you descend into Port au Prince, you also notice the starkly different color of Port-au-Prince Bay.  While the water surrounding the island is a deep, beautiful, tropical blue, the water in the bay is brown, more like the Mississippi River than the Caribbean Sea.

In the aftermath of the European colonization of the Caribbean, Haiti became a French colony, heavily populated by slaves from Africa who worked the fields, especially sugar cane fields for the production rum. In the late 18th century, a slave rebellion kicked the French off the island, and the former slaves became the rulers. At the risk of a bit of oversimplification, the past 200 plus years of Haiti’s history has been the oppressed revolting oppressors who were formerly the oppressed.

The political history has been intertwined with an devastating environmental history.  From early on, charcoal has been the go-to fuel for cooking. Trees are necessary for the production of charcoal. Producing enough charcoal to keep up with the demand of an every growing population meant that over the years, more and more trees were necessary. Eventually, large swaths of the country were deforested, especially the hills and mountains directly east of Port au Prince. Haiti is a mountainous country; so, the disappearance of the trees stole the land of the anchor that held the topsoil in place, and eventually, the top soil eroded away. Hence, the brown color of Port-au-Prince Bay.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. Often left out of the explanation of such poverty is the historic destruction of the environment. In the 90s, when the church I was serving partnered with a school and orphanage in the rural area east of Port au Prince, we found villages of people trying to grow subsistence crops on land that had no topsoil and little nutrients for plants. One of our volunteers was a retired official from the US Soil Conservation Service and began a process of using compost and other organic matter to try to rebuild the soil. It was a process that at best would take years; and the villagers were not keen on changing the farming methods that they had been using for generations, even with the promise of more and better food. Haiti supports human life; but it’s not good life. It’s difficult life with dim prospects for much improvement.

Turns out Haiti isn’t the first place such disregard for the land itself has led to such devastating effect for the people who live there. In Earth-Honoring Faith, Larry Rasmussen tells the story of  how in 1942, Walter Lowdermilk wrote a report for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service documenting how the land of Lebanon, the Sinai Peninsula, Jordan, Syria, Cyprus, North Africa, and Greece had been seriously damaged leaving behind washed-off soils, silted canals, meager flora and fauna, and the ruins of dead cities.

The rapid degradation of the environment around the world — our gluttonous thirst for oil and dependence on internal combustion engines, our hunger for meat and vegetables produced by corporate agriculture, the mind-boggling consumption by consumers in first-world nations, and the list goes on and on — is repeating on a global scale the mistakes that were made in Haiti over a couple of hundred years, not to mentions mistakes that have been made in particular locations throughout history. We are unwittingly, and for short-term convenience wrecking the environment for the sake of the lifestyle we have become accustomed to. And we are unable or unwilling to recognize the cliff we are heading towards and do anything about it.

This week the Chicago Tribune ran a story about tiny Earlville, Illinois abut 70 miles southwest of Chicago in the midst of a controversy over whether to allow the construction of a transportation center for the trucking of mined sand for fracking.  Those in favor cite the jobs that will be created. They also look to the experience of a small Texas town that allowed the construction of such a transportation center; in exchange, the company built the town a football field. That sounds like a lousy trade-off. And the very definition of myopic vision about the precious planet we call home. 

For a person of faith, it’s a matter of wise stewardship of the planet we call home, of the faithful care of God’s good creation. For all of us, it’s an increasingly urgent matter of survival. Just look at Haiti.

At What Price?

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tsarnaevBob and Marty had lived next door to each other for years. They had raised families, talked at the driveway, even borrowed each other’s rakes and shovels occasionally over the years. They weren’t friends, but there was at least casual good will between them.

One day, for no apparent reason, Bob throws a rock through Marty’s living room window. There’s no question. Bob did it. Marty saw it. Fritz across the street saw it, too. Bob was guilty.

So, what does Marty do next?  A) Nothing? Hope it doesn’t happen again?

B) Call the police? Press charges? Wait for the case to wind its way through court, hoping that at some point, Bob will be fined, forced to make restitution, and maybe even do community service?

C) Wait for an opportune moment to take not one, but two rocks, and throw them through Bob’s living room window, but also the dining room window, just to make sure he gets the message?

One might well ask the question, “What’s the point?”  What does Marty hope to accomplish in holding Bob accountable for his crime?  If the answer is to make sure Bob knows how egregious his crime was, then maybe C) is the best. If he wants the whole community to know how angry he was, how upset he was, and what kind of terrible impact the rock through his window had, then option C) might be the best. It’s It fulfills the emotional requirement. It’s makes the perpetrator pay. It fulfills that tit for tat, mathematical formula for crime and punishment.

If Marty were to throw the retributional rocks through Bob’s windows, he might feel an adrenaline rush, some satisfaction that now Bob knows what it feels like; he may even feel a bit of twisted pride that he went one better, breaking not one window, but two. But in the long run, Marty has done nothing positive for anyone. The retribution doesn’t take away the anger, it doesn’t bring back his window; it doesn’t erase the trauma of that original sound of breaking glass. In fact, it may even make things worse because now Marty lives in the fear that Bob may try to do him one better, and God only knows what that might be.

Really, none of the three options recognize the human relationship that is at stake regardless of what Marty chooses to do. Another way to say it is that Bob and Marty will be living next to each other regardless; they will be in community regardless. At some point, if there is to be any peace in either of their lives, they will have to face the breach in the relationship and reconcile. They will have to talk to each other. Making Bob accountable for his actions is only the very first and very minimal step in repairing the breach that a violent act causes between people.

The criminal justice system in the U.S. seems to be aimed overwhelmingly at one aspect of the equation, making criminals pay for their crime. Mostly, the payment is in time; you commit a crime, and we will take years away from your productive life. The worse the crime, the more years we will exact from you. We will make you pay. And if the crime is really bad or violent, then we will make you pay the ultimate price. We will take your life from you. It’s the ultimate expression of Marty throwing those rocks of retribution through Bob’s windows.

But taking years away from people’s lives does nothing to repair the breach. It doesn’t bring back the car that was stolen and turned into parts, it doesn’t restore the trauma that the bank clerk experienced at the holdup, and it doesn’t bring back the murdered victim. The only thing it does is somehow give us the impression that we have done something good and satisfying by making the perpetrator pay for his or her crime.

What I fear is that this obsession with payment — another word for vengeance — is rotting our national soul. We never have to pay any attention to the more important things, like healing breaches, like restoring community, like recognizing the inherent value of human life, even the life of the person who has committed acts of great violence that have led to great loss of life. There is still value in that human life.  In our push to make sure we punish criminals, to make sure the punishment fits the crime, to make sure the bad guy pays for his wrongs, we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to what vengeance is doing to us. How it’s making us collectively callous to the value of a human life. And how it lets us off the hook, brushing aside the hard, painful, but ultimately valuable work of reconciliation.

And I think that’s true, even for such egregious crimes as that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He should not get the death penalty. No one should. Regardless of what he has done, he is human, and his life has value.

And there’s a bigger issue, a much more significant issue, an issue that affects all of us regardless of how many degrees we are removed from the Boston Marathon bombing. Our human community is much more valuable than the internal eating away of our soul that happens when vengeance is the only thing on our agenda.  Vengeance is not worth what it’s doing to us.

Have you ever heard this story?  A prayer was left beside the body of a dead child by a prisoner at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.  “O, Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us:  remember the fruits we have brought, thanks to this suffering — our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this, and when they come to judgment, let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”