Repenting in the Wake of Tragedy

One week has past since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the aftermath of such an unspeakable tragedy, what is a faithful response by those of us who aspire to be Christians? Surely the church is called to a more prophetic witness than merely muttering, "God is still in control," or "God is still on the throne." Personally, I do not fund such platitudes helpful. In fact, they may cause more theological problems than they resolve. I understand the desire to say something, to try to make sense out of chaos and destruction, and to cope. But we must be careful not to use language that of hollow sentimentality that functions only to help us return to a comfortable slumber. Neither is it helpful to make the ridiculous claim that the shooting is somehow indicative of God's judgment on America for turning its back on Him, specifically by disallowing public prayer in schools. We must not forget that during the time that teachers were leading school children in public prayers, African-Americans were being lynched, often by alleged God-fearing Christians. We must not be naive to the fact that America was not founded on Christian principles. Any faithful telling of the story of America's beginnings must acknowledge the centrality of the twin evils of genocide and slavery to the development of the plot. America was never a Christian nation, and the tragedy in Newtown should not be understood as some sort of divine wake-up call to secular humanists to turn back to God. Rather than search for ways to make ourselves feel better or to cast blame for this tragedy on others who do not share our faith, people who would wear the name of Christ must look deeply into the reality of these events and wrestle in faith with what they may tell us about our society, our own hearts, and our desperate need for repentance. I would add at this point that more is needed from the church than calls for gun control legislation, although I do not think there is any serious question that such a conversation is far overdue. But the politicians, lobbyists, and concerned citizens are up to the task of debating gun control laws. The church, as the body of Christ, has more prophetic work to do than propose new laws, however badly they may be needed. First, in contemplating the deaths of twenty children in Connecticut, it is important for the church to remember that this was not a unique or isolated event. Earlier in December, a mortar hit a school in Syria, killing twenty-nine young people and their teacher. This horrible event, however, was hardly a blip on the radar of the American media. Why the disparity in the attention given to these two terrible occurrences? Why are we so devastated by the loss of twenty children in Connecticut, while the deaths of twenty-nine Syrian children garners no time of mourning? Is it because the Connecticut children were Americans like us? Do we care more about what happens on certain dirt, or to people of a certain skin color, than we do about others others? If so, we should pause and consider how we have failed to grasp the gospel imperative that there is no longer Jew, Greek, slave, free, male or female. These human distinctions and categories are irrelevant in light of the reconciling work God accomplished through Jesus on the cross. This is a time to repent of our nationalism and tribalism in order to show more love, compassion, and concern for the suffering and death that occur every day in all parts of our world. Or perhaps the deaths of young people in Syria did not jar us awake because we have become so acclimated to war, and we have learned that modern warfare entails the deaths of innocent people, even children. If this is the case, that our hearts have become so hardened that we no longer notice when schoolchildren die during times of war, that we are not disturbed, that we do not mourn, then we must repent of our callousness and recall that we are to be peacemakers, lovers of peace, for whom the inhumanity of war is never taken for granted as simply the way things have to be. Death must never be business as usual for the people of God, no matter where or to whom it happens. Second, the church must resist the temptation to blame the media for sensationalizing the tragedy in Connecticut. While it is true that the media have been circling like vultures over Newtown, making it possible for us to gawk at all the suffering from the comfort of our own living rooms, we must remember that the media is simply a mirror in which we are able to see our own perversions. I would not blame a mirror for my own unkempt appearance. A mirror simply shows me what I look like, for good or bad. To the extent that the media is exploiting this tragedy, it is because we as a society want it to. If we did not consume the non-stop coverage, the media would not keep producing it. The media simply supplies what we demand. We must repent of our fascination with suffering and Death. Third, we as aspiring Christians must be able to discern in all of these facets of our society the power of Death at work, often beneath the surface, in the shadows. From time to time, however, the power of Death manifests itself so clearly that we cannot ignore its work in our midst, such as when a person takes a gun and kills people at a school or a mall or a movie theater. At all times, the church must be vigilant so as to never forget that Death is the enemy, a false god that would have our allegiance and even worship at all costs, and which is, in fact, worshipped by our culture. We are complicit in this idolatrous cultural worship of Death in the movies we go see, the television shows we watch, the video games we play, by cheering when instruments of war fly over football stadiums prior to a game, and by unquestioningly supporting a justice system based entirely on vengeful retribution to the point that our government routinely kills its own citizens. We worship Death by consuming it over and over and over again. We must also boldly and honestly recognize this same fascination and obsession with Death in our love of firearms. Firearms are perhaps the most tangible symbol of Death in our society. The person who is in possession of a firearm wields the power of Death. Relying on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, we claim that we have a right to possess the power of Death and use it against anyone who poses a threat to us or our property. We claim that this right to wield the power of Death shall not be infringed because a group of wealthy white men characterized it as such many years ago in a context far different from our own. This right is precious to us, and we defend it with our voices, our votes, and the dollars we contribute to lobbying groups. We are loyal to our right to bear arms, and we give it our allegiance because guns make us feel powerful and safe and less afraid. Therefore, we celebrate and worship our guns and the violence they are able to inflict. The celebration and worship of Death inherent in our love of weapons does not come without a price. Tragically, we have repeatedly accepted this high cost and sacrificed valuable human lives to the power of Death. The horrible attack on the lives of children in Newtown was not unforseeable or unprecedented. It has happened before. Absent deep repentance, it will happen again. And in the days that follow such tragedies, we always wring our hands in sorrow and grief. But after a brief period of sadness, we will conclude that the cost of twenty lives was acceptable, noting again how important it is for us to remain empowered to grasp our own weapons. We do not abandon our worship of Death; our allegiance is undisturbed. We hope in vain that we can serve two masters. We would like to think that we are simply free to own guns, watch violent shows, applaud when the State executes one of its citizens, etc., when in fact we are enslaved to the power of Death. We know from the saints and martyrs that the road of discipleship is not easy, and the demands it makes of us can be frightening. It is a narrow road that leads to a cross. It is not for everyone. There is no Christian spin to the American Dream, to use David Platt's language. To pledge allegiance to Lord Jesus is to resist the power of Death at every turn, because it is ubiquitous in our society. As the church, we must be faithful to the One who taught us to love even our enemies. Anyone can love their friends! You don't need courageous faith for that. But to love, really love, an enemy? That is the demanding, all-or-nothing call of discipleship. Likewise, the church must remember that Jesus taught us to not resist an evil person. Anyone can strike down an evil person! You don't need to claim Jesus as Lord for that. It comes naturally; it is a reflex. But to defiantly turn the other cheek, risking the harm that may well come, trusting that all will be well despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? That is the hard work of discipleship. And I cannot heed these commands when I am clinging to an instrument of Death, ready to deal violently with anyone who poses a threat to my safety or my possessions. I cannot hear the wise voice of One who would tell me that all who live with weapons die by weapons, when I refuse to lay aside the weapons that give me a false sense of safety and artificially make me feel less afraid. It is so easy to be led astray by fear, without which Death is all but impotent. What if someone broke into my house? What if someone tried to rob me? Do I have any alternative but to look to the power of Death for comfort and security? When I am afraid, how do I resist the temptation to put my faith in lesser things, things I can hold in my own hands? The great William Stringfellow taught us that the essence of the Christian life is to discern Death where others see progress and freedom, and to resist it with all of our might. The church must heed Stringfellow's wisdom by recognizing the seductive power of Death in our midst, naming it for what it is, and incarnating a life-giving alternative based on unconditional love, and the assurance that love, when it is perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect, casts out all fear.

Contemplating the CFSY Conference

Last week, I attended the annual convening of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a political action group focused upon the abolition of sentences of life without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. Members of the organization are convinced that it is unjust to sentence children, no matter what they have done, to die in prison. Children, they argue, have great potential to change, are better than the worst thing they have done, and should not be given up on. We must always leave room for redemption. I was invited to participate based on my status as a "recovering prosecutor," as one attendee put it. I am always glad to share my story of how and why I abandoned my career as a cog in a retributive system in order to advocate for a restorative, as opposed to a purely punitive approach to criminal justice. The whole conference was excellent. I met many wonderful people who care deeply about incarcerated children. So much good work is being done. Many of the attendees had incarcerated children who had been serving time for decades. Others were parents of victims, people struggling to move forward in forgiveness. I learned a lot from those people who were so close to the issue. One moment at the conference was especially noteworthy. It occurred during a session on crafting your message to suit your specific audience. The communications lady who was leading the session, who was not part of CFSY, put up a slide depicting a devil, an angel, and a guy with a question mark over his head. She said that we don't need to spend our time talking to angels because they're already on our side. Conversely, we don't need to waste time trying to sway the devils because they're too antagonistic to our position and will never see things our way. Instead, we focus on people who haven't made up their minds. She then asked who the devils were, and the crowd responded, "prosecutors, judges, victims' rights advocates." I was a tad uncomfortable, as you might imagine, having served as an appellate prosecutor for several years. When I spoke at a later session, I remarked how natural it is for us to demonize people who don't see things our way, particularly when we are emotionally invested in a cause. The image of the devil with the red horns reinforced that natural tendency. But the temptation to demonize must be resisted. If we are unwilling to resist the temptation ourselves, why would we expect our adversaries to not demonize us or the people for whom we are advocating? Rather than labeling our adversaries as something less than human and writing them off, I contended that we should be especially concerned with reaching out to them. They are the ones with whom we most need to experience reconciliation. "They" are not the enemy. Unjust laws and an unjust system are the enemies. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us this much. Prosecutors, in my experience, are generally not bad folks. They care about public safety. They want to protect victims. They want to do justice, although they may have a different concept of justice, which might be good conversation fodder. What is "justice?" How can we best achieve justice? What and whom are our current system neglecting? Might it be exacerbating some of the harm it seeks to prevent or remedy? It is too easy to slap a label on our adversaries and disregard them. The issue before us, however, is more subtle and sinister than a group of mean prosecutors. This is how the fallen principalities and powers tend to operate. Systems, institutions, and authorities thrive when people are labelled, dehumanized, stripped of their humanity. It is a convenient, efficient way of managing and even dismissing people. When we succumb to the temptation to label individuals and groups of people, we diminish their humanity and frustrate the holy work of reconciliation. To be sure, the law needs to be changed so that children are no longer sentenced to die in prison. But the way we work toward that goal is as important as the goal itself. In struggling to improve an unjust system, we must not unwittingly employ the same dehumanizing attitudes towards our adversaries as have been shown toward juvenile offenders. Instead, we must honor their humanity and extend to them love and understanding. Then we can bear faithful witness to grace triumphing over law.

The First Part of My Journey

Recently, someone asked me to talk a little about myself, my faith, and how it has evolved. It was a very worthwhile exercise. Here is what I came up with. I am a product of churches of Christ. I was born into the Antioch Church of Christ. When I started the third grade, my family transitioned to the Rural Hill Church of Christ. It was at Rural Hill that I was baptized when I was 12 years old. I stated that I believed that Jesus was the Son of God, and was baptized for the forgiveness of my sins and that I might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. All this at age 12. These matters are mysterious to me even now. I strongly suspect that at 12, I had not a clue what I was claiming to believe and be committing myself to. I certainly was not ready to be married when I was 12, and committing your life to following Jesus seems every bit as significant as taking a spouse. However, I had been taught that unless one was baptized, he would go to hell. Fear of eternal torment, I have learned, can be a powerful motivator, and to avoid the thought that one might actually go to hell, a person might claim to believe all sorts of things, and might actually believe that they believe those things, when in fact they deep down do not. I will reflect more on this later. I should add that in the time around my baptism, not once did anyone advise me and not once did it dawn on me of my own accord that by being baptized, I was pledging allegiance to a king and a kingdom that oppose the kings and kingdoms of the world. Not once did I think that I was committing myself to nonviolence, to love of enemies, to radical hospitality, to generosity, to care for the hungry, the sick, the unhoused, the orphan, the imprisoned, the immigrant. It did not dawn on me that by being baptized, I was saying no to the values and priorities of the world, where greed and lust and celebrated on Wall Street and in Hollywood, where retribution and revenge masquerade as justice, and where racism and sexism are excused as simply the way the world works. Not once was I informed or did I think that the way of Jesus constitutes an alternative ethic, an alternative politic, an alternative community that not only stands alongside the oppressed, the marginalized, the minorities who suffer violence and injustice at the hands of the power brokers, the institutions, the domination systems, but also actively stands against the systems that promote and perpetuate such injustices, the principalities and powers that enslave humanity. And not once did I think that baptism is the beginning of a life of unconditional love and service to others, indiscriminate compassion so counter-cultural, so contrary to conventional wisdom, tradition, and the status quo, so scandalous, that false accusation, even persecution and suffering are the likely result. No, my baptism was essentially based on people telling me what I needed to say I believed in order to obtain a get-out-of-hell-free card. I wonder how many other church folks, in their honest moments, might have a similar story to tell. While I was in high school, my family started attending the Donelson Church of Christ. It was somewhat less legalistic, and had far better preaching, but it was still pretty conservative. My parents switched back to Rural Hill several years ago, where my Dad now serves as an elder. While I was in law school, my wife and I attended the Laurel Church of Christ in Knoxville. When we returned to Nashville, we started attending the Otter Creek Church of Christ, where we’ve been from 2002 until this past spring. Not only have I always attended churches of Christ, I was educated by church of Christ schools. From kindergarten through second grade, I was at David Lipscomb campus school. From third grade all the way through high school, I was at Ezell-Harding Christian School. When I graduated from Ezell, I went to college at Lipscomb University in Nashville, a church of Christ-affiliated institution. My family goes way back with Lipscomb. My grandmother was the secretary in the History Department for years and years. My mom, two aunts, uncle, sister, cousins, and countless friends all went there. I met my wife there. I majored in American Studies and minored in Political Science, Literature, and Speech Communication. Now I teach law-related classes there as an adjunct professor in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy. All this time in church and church schools had a pretty profound effect on me. I was in daily Bible classes and chapel services from the time I was 5 until I was 22. I was a Bible Bowl champ. I memorized stuff and knew the Bible stories and characters from an early age. In college in particular, I studied under some very well-respected theologians. The classes I took on Job and Ecclesiastes, Biblical Ethics, and Systematic Theology were particularly outstanding. I learned answers to questions I had not really even thought of asking. If they weren’t already, my doctrinal ducks were in a neat row. I was very happy with my understanding of God, faith, the Bible, etc. I had a firm grip on it all, had a chapter and verse to support my assertions, and had no qualms about instructing others regarding their doctrinal errors and theological missteps. It felt good and safe to be so right about the big stuff, such as penal substitutionary atonement theory, trinitarianism, and the proper understanding of the function of baptism, as well as the smaller stuff, such as instrumental worship and women’s roles in the church. About the time I graduated from law school at age 25, my mind began to change about a few things. First, I began to notice that there were good-hearted, well-intentioned, and very intelligent people who thought differently about God, Jesus, the Bible, and faith than I did. Second, I began to notice that Christians generally, and I specifically, looked no different from the world. The parking lot of a church building looks exactly like the parking lot of a nice mall. We wear the same clothes, work the same jobs, take the same vacations, use the same language, have the same ideals and goals, watch most of the same television shows and movies, etc. Surely the Christian faith isn’t just about believing the right things. There has to be some tangible, objectively observable difference, some fruit, for lack of a better word, that distinguishes the Christian from someone who has not pledged to follow Jesus. The fact that I saw so little outward manifestations of people who claimed to be following Jesus, myself included, really ate away at me. Third, I began paying closer attention to the teachings of Jesus. Up to that point, I had been taught mostly to pay attention to Paul. Paul’s letters formed the basis of more of the preaching I had heard than did Jesus’ own teachings. I think there are several reasons for this. Jesus’ teachings are just harder and more demanding. Not that Paul doesn’t have some difficult teachings, but Jesus blows him away in this regard. Also, Jesus’ teachings are more difficult to understand. He used those mystical parables to describe the kingdom of God, whereas Paul often just makes lists of people who won’t be enjoying the kingdom. Additionally, Jesus doesn’t teach much doctrine, if you notice. As the great renegade Baptist preacher Will Campbell once quipped, you can’t build a steeple on top of Jesus. He was a prophet who harshly critiqued organized religion and its leaders. Paul, on the other hand, was a product of organized religion. It was what he knew and was comfortable with. Related to that point is that Jesus reserved his most severe condemnation for religious people, people like me who thought they had it all figured out doctrinally and theologically, who looked down their noses at people who were not as “holy,” “orthodox,” or “enlightened.” But as one of my college Bible instructors is fond of saying, even demons have excellent theology. They knew precisely who Jesus was way before anybody else got it. The problem was no matter how sound their theology, the hearts of the religious people were far from God. And God desires not merely good theology, not merely atoning “sacrifice,” but a life of mercy. So Jesus takes religious people to task, but if you’ll notice, he does not speak the same way to “sinners,” whom he says are entering the kingdom of God ahead of all the doctrinally-sound church folks. Preachers don’t want to tell their congregations that Jesus welcomed prostitutes, while calling right-believing church people sons of hell. It’s easier to preach Paul, from whom we learn how to do church right, so to speak, as well as who we can properly exclude from our cozy little fold. Anyway, the realization that Jesus speaks more harshly to religious people than he does “sinners” knocked me down a peg, which was much needed. When you start taking the harsh criticism Jesus directed toward the religious folks of his day and see how it might apply to the modern church in America, things get kind of troublesome. In fact, I’d argue that in virtually every respect, the American church has missed the mark at least as badly, and in many cases, far worse than the Pharisees and teachers of the law that Jesus railed against. I started seeing how un-Christ-like a lot of Christians, myself included, tended to be. For people who were following the prince of peace, Christians seemed very angry, particularly with anyone who saw things differently from them. Why are Christians so intolerant, so unwilling to listen, so quick to judge, so reluctant to try to understand the “other?” Why do we perceive so many other groups of people as a threat? And whereas Jesus instructed people to sell their possessions and give to the poor, American Christians seemed awfully greedy, materialistic, and anxious to drive a new gas-guzzling luxury SUV, live in houses that would be reserved for royalty in other parts of the world, and use the latest mind-numbing technological gadgets that serve to keep us perpetually entertained/distracted. Jesus taught his followers not to worry, but Christians seemed anxious about everything. Jesus was so welcoming and hospitable to the outcasts of society, but the vast majority of American Christians have little to no regard for the poor, the dying, the imprisoned, the immigrant, the orphan, and the modern equivalent of an unclean leper for the modern church, the homosexual. Jesus preached and practiced non-violence to the point of death, but conservative Christians are statistically some of the most violent people around, supporting war, torture, and the death penalty in numbers significantly higher than their secular counterparts. It seems to me that the modern American church worships not Lord Jesus, but the unholy trinity of nationalism, militarism, and capitalism. Thus, the church is guilty of widespread idolatry. Perhaps most significant of all, Jesus’ most frequent command is to not be afraid. Yet modern American Christians are afraid of just about everything and everyone, and our fear causes us to be irrational, thinking for example that somehow we are serving God by waiting in line for an hour to buy a fried chicken sandwich at Chick-Fil-A. Lord, have mercy. Our fear has caused us to be illogical, angry, hateful, judgmental, and in the end, violent. Belief and fear are juxtaposed against each other in the Bible. As belief increases, fear decreases, thus we see Jesus instructing Jairus to not fear but believe just prior to raising his daughter from the dead. As I alluded to above, I am convinced that many modern Christians have no real, true, deep-down-in-the-gut, this-is-what-I’m-staking-my-life-on belief. They would say they do, of course, because to acknowledge that they did not believe would place them at risk for an eternity in hell. Thus, even their “belief” is a product of their fear. If you threaten me with eternal pain, I will claim to believe in Santa Claus or unicorns. And I will believe that I believe it. My mind is sophisticated enough to consciously think that I believe in Santa, to be convinced that I believe, when I in fact do not. And my unconscious mind plays this trick on my conscious mind because the consequence of unbelief, hell, is too terrifying a possibility to even consider. I will not acknowledge any doubt, even if it’s there, because doubt places my eternal well-being at risk. No, I must believe that I believe because the alternative, eternal suffering, is too awful to contemplate. Obviously, such a “belief,” which is based entirely on fear, is utterly useless, and is in fact pretty much the opposite of true belief. False belief is about playing a mind game to avoid hell, and as such, is pretty unrelated to the way I spend my money, my politics, etc. True belief, on the other hand, has a lot less to do with the hereafter and a lot more to do with the here and now. And it is to this kind of transforming belief that Jesus calls us. After all, the kingdom of God, as explained by Jesus, is not about where your soul goes when you die. The kingdom of God, he said, is at hand, here, now, in our midst, if we only have eyes to see it, the will and courage to live it. This kind of belief is marked by a different way of being in the world, a different politic as I said earlier. This kind of belief informs a politic of love, which casts out fear. So, in the place of fear of Islam, there is love of Muslims. Out of that love springs a desire to understand them. In order to understand them, I must listen to them. Listening, after all, is the most fundamental act of hospitality in which we can engage. I should do the same for other groups of people with whom I do not feel reconciled, whether they are homosexuals, people of different races and cultures, people from different socio-economic backgrounds, or just people who generally see the world differently from me. After all, many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. I have found a great deal of freedom in letting go of my desire to be right about everything and my tendency to try and make other people think I’m right about everything. I am pretty confident now that I don’t have everything figured out and probably never will, certainly not everything about God. I sure haven’t cornered the market on truth, and I am highly suspicious of any individual or group of people who claims that they have. Consequently, I no longer live in fear that if I do not believe everything correctly and have all my doctrinal ducks in a row, that I might pay for it eternally. The love and grace of God are bigger than that. There is a sacredness to questioning everything, to use the title of a book written by my friend David Dark. I also feel that being humble about my understanding about such things as the nature of the divine is a more faithful posture than to act like I have interpreted everything correctly. Pride, as we know, is not well-regarded by God, and I tend to be a very prideful person, convinced that my viewpoint is sound. But when I stop to consider why I see things the way I do, even that is humbling. I am a Christian because my parents raised me that way, as their parents had raised them. This was cultural Christianity, where pretty much everybody in the community, even non-church-goers, held Christian beliefs. Had I been born in Iran, however, I would be a Muslim, my holy book would be the Quran, and I would hold to my belief in Islam just as tenaciously as I have held to Christianity. Had I been born in India, I would be a Hindu, and had I been born in Bhutan, I would be a Buddhist. Not only would I practice a different faith than I do as a result of being born in Nashville, Tennessee, I would be just as convinced of the rightness of my beliefs as I was as a Christian. I would believe in the inspiration of a different book, place my trust in the wisdom of a different teacher, and assume that anyone who believed differently from me was wrong, and possibly in danger of eternal suffering. It seems strange and arbitrary that these faith convictions are fundamentally a matter of geography. I tend to think that a follower of Jesus, by definition, has to be humble and maintain an open mind. Anything less is putting new wine in old wineskins. He has a habit of breaking apart my forms, assumptions, prejudices, and suppositions. If I hold something too tightly in a clinched fist, I may not be ready to let it go if He asks me to, and I may not be able to receive anything new when He wants to give it to me. And the tighter I hold on, the more fearful and less free I tend to become. Grasping and attachment, our Buddhist friends teach us, are the root of suffering. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.” – Leo Tolstoy. Along the way, I have been exposed to serious scholarship regarding the origin of the Bible, who wrote it, how the collection was formed, etc. It’s too much to recount here, but that is a huge topic that most Christians neglect. The church is prone to abusing scripture because they do not understand who wrote it, the historical context, or the purpose of the writing. It’s easier to claim that the Bible is infallible and inerrant, which it simply is not. Sometimes, I’m afraid the church worships the Bible rather than the God to whom it points. I guess this is only natural, as people would rather worship something that they can master, hold in their hands, and use to manipulate and judge other people with, than a God who tends to be wild, unpredictable, and downright offensive and scandalous in His great love, in His acceptance of sinful people, and in His methods of reconciling the world unto Himself. But this failure to understand scripture has serious consequences. Take for example the creation account in Genesis, which is wonderful, mythological literature. In church, people abuse it by trying to make it a scientific explanation for the origin of the world, and in so doing miss out on the deeper truths of the tale, such as how God has provided us with many things to enjoy, but only within certain parameters. When we ignore those parameters, when we try to live as though we need no limits, when we forget that we are finite, when we try to experience everything outside of covenant, when our pride, our desire for power, our greed gets the best of us, we often lose the good that God entrusted to us in the first place. This is the predicament in which humanity finds itself; this is the brilliance of the garden story. But this is not how we talk about it in church. Talk about adventures in completely missing the point. Anyway, as of 6 or 7 years ago, my understanding and appreciation of Jesus, faith, and the Bible had been somewhat deconstructed. Fortunately, I was not alone on this journey, and had a valuable spiritual friend who listened, gave advice, and steered me in new, helpful directions. Through this friend I was exposed to the wonderful body of contemplative Christian thought and literature, from the desert fathers of the third and fourth centuries, to men like Thomas Kempis in the Middle Ages to Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Thomas Keating of the 20th century. These people understood that God remains a mystery, that when we speak of God we have only metaphor, that we cannot own or tame God, and that we most honestly encounter God in times of deep silence and solitude. The life of faith consists of more than formulas. Instead, it is about learning to see as God sees. It is about discovering my true self, the me that God created me to be, the image of God in me. Seeing myself as I truly am, I am able to see others as they truly are, also bearing the divine image. And I am able to see all of creation as it truly is. No longer subject to meaningless distractions like celebrity worship, non-stop televised sports, etc., we are able to focus on the work we have been given to do. Faith and life with God is mysterious in many ways. God’s Spirit blows where it pleases and answers to no man. We see its fruits – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control – in many different and often unexpected places. And anyone who is led by the Spirit of God is a child of God. He who loves is born of God. This mysterious life of faith requires that we be born again to a new way of being and of seeing. It requires that we unlearn what we have learned. Faith is not simply a matter of intellectual hoolahoops. It is a matter of our lives being hidden with God in Christ, my true self is Christ living in me, a union that I cannot possibly fully comprehend. I’m afraid that our best formulas, doctrines, and theologies simply are inadequate. The contemplatives know this well, that often knowing God is a matter of un-knowing. I do not know what would have become of my faith had I not found something old, which was to me new. Through another friend, who was a History professor of mine in college, I began to see more clearly where contemplative faith intersects with meaningful social and political engagement. In contemplation and prayer, we are liberated from the greedy, lustful, selfish, power-hungry false self. We put away the old man, so to speak. By the same token, we are called to be agents of liberation from the power of injustice, oppression, greed, lust, and violence at work in the world. My professor pointed me to the thinking of Will Campbell, William Stringfellow, and Howard Thurman. These men understand that the gospel is political, but not in the Republican/Democrat sense. No, those are mere principalities that stand in opposition to the kingdom of God. The politic of the gospel is about God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, which will never come about through an election, a war, or a strong economy. The kingdom of God is based on something that all institutions, political parties, and nation-states roundly reject: love that suffers. So, my belief is that Love does in fact win. I have not read Rob Bell’s book, but my wife has, and she holds it in high regard. I believe that Love wins because that is the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, through whom we have been reconciled to God and to each other. We do not need to accomplish this reconciliation; it is a finished work. In Christ, Love triumphed over death. Even death, the great enemy of humanity, has been destroyed. Now that is the kind of good news that the world so desperately needs to hear. The things I learned as a boy, the judgmental doctrines and fear-based pseudo-beliefs, I count as rubbish compared to the knowledge of the overwhelming, death-defeating Love that is God. This Love is good news indeed to the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the hungry. God is Love, so of course Love wins. What other possible outcome could there be? And it makes sense that we are then called to love as Jesus loved us. Love is the currency of God’s economy. Consider this quote from the great Thomas Merton: “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” So that’s my only job, to love. I should love everybody. And because justice is what Love looks like in public, to quote Cornell West, part of my loving vocation is to work for justice for the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the people who are discriminated against based on their skin color, socio-economic status, criminal history, or sexual orientation. What else would I do, as a follower of the whore-loving, Temple-clearing, truth-telling Nazarene? Jesus said to love. His closest friend John likewise said to love. The story that I am trying to stake my life on begins and ends with Love. Love, not all of the other trash you see when you look at the institutional church in America, is the mark of a Christian. By our love, and only by our love, will they know who we are. I have no time for anything but Love. “Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Reflection on the Christian Scholars' Conference

At the “Tokens: Tales of Reconciliation” show on June 7, Attorney Fred Gray, who represented Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., discussed how the civil rights movement had been successful in tearing down the legal structures that sanctioned racial segregation. However, he also noted that despite the substantial strides made during the civil rights era, much work in the arena of racial reconciliation remains to be done almost half a century later. Gray challenged the audience, which, from my seat in the balcony, appeared to be mostly white and upper middle class, saying that as long as the people around us in our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools, and our places of business look like we do, there is much reconciliation left to be realized. It is one thing to read and talk about reconciliation, as we did for three days at the Christian Scholars’ Conference. It is quite another to be ambassadors or ministers of reconciliation, no longer regarding anyone from a human point of view, and making no distinction between people based on race, gender, nationality, socio-economic status, criminal history, educational level, sexual orientation, etc. After all, the worldly categories by which people discriminate against each other do not pass away lightly. Mr. Gray was essentially challenging the church to repent and start being the church, rather than a social (or country) club with religious language appended. I was also reminded over dinner just before the Tokens show that when people from a dominant culture speak of reconciliation, they often mean, perhaps unconsciously, that people from the minority culture should integrate themselves or even allow themselves to be assimilated into the dominant culture. For example, Christians from the dominant group might assume that to effect racial reconciliation, they need to devise a scheme whereby members of the minority will start attending and conform to the practices of the church of the dominant group. This approach to reconciliation, which smacks of paternalism and colonialism, is doomed to fail because it does not result in a new creation in which old things are gone and everything becomes new. Reconciliation requires a deeper expression of repentance than simply asking the victim of racial oppression to take a subordinate seat at the table hosted, overseen, and controlled by the dominant group. Years ago, my friend David Woodard taught me that this kind of deep repentance, or turning, is often more of a process, as opposed to a one-time event. Folks who are traveling in one direction have a hard time all of a sudden spinning on their heels to head in the opposite direction. But when it becomes clear that we are heading in the wrong direction, as it should have for the Tokens audience upon hearing the prophetic words of Mr. Gray, we must change, even if we can only muster the courage to make one small degree of change at a time. Therefore, on the Saturday morning of the Christian Scholars’ Conference, Richard Goode led a small group of people in an attempt to make one degree of change. He convened a session entitled “A Community of Reconciliation: Hope in a Retributive Context” at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. There, Richard and friends have for years been seeking to incarnate reconciliation among people who live on different sides of prison walls, people who are separated not only by razor-wire fences but by the labels the world attaches to them, such as “convicted felon,” “Lipscomb student,” “ murderer,” “professor,” “sex offender,” and “chaplain.” Richard caught a vision of an experiment in gospel that he is working hard to share with others. During the session at Riverbend, we heard different tales of reconciliation. We heard how people who had grown accustomed to being despised and forsaken among men have been raised to new life through concrete acts of love, acceptance, and authentic communal practices. Like weeds that are capable of growing through asphalt, we saw how grace had sprung forth in a culture stripped of grace, to quote the subtitle of one of Miroslav Volf’s books. We were reminded that it is good news indeed to proclaim freedom to captives and to make no distinctions as to bond and free. We caught a glimpse of a token of reconciliation. We should not expect such tokens to come without cost, however. Like a treasure hidden in a field or a pearl of great value, we must be willing to sacrifice lesser things to lay hold of true reconciliation. If we are unwilling to leave the luxury of our suburban homes; if we are too fearful to enter a prison; if we refuse to interact with people who think and act differently; if we persist in our attempt to serve both God and money; if we would rather criminalize sleeping in public than look into the eyes of a homeless individual; if we insist on insulating ourselves inside extravagant church buildings that resemble resorts where everyone is of the same race and class week after week after week; and if we stubbornly resist the gospel call to lay aside human categories and instead continue to define ourselves over and against others and marginalize people that do not look, act, or believe like we do, then we may never experience the holy reality of being reconciled to God and each other. Lee’s interview of Fred Gray served as a reminder that the church of today is failing as did the church of yesterday. Although the law may be different, our congregations and our very hearts remain racially segregated. As Ched Meyers has said, the divine reality of reconciliation is waiting to be realized in our lives. This is a difficult task that will require intentional acts that move us outside of our comfort zones. But God forgive us if the church values its own comfort more than the beloved community of the kingdom of God.