Christmas Lights In The New Year

Across many years and miles, John Miller, a good and wise friend who teaches philosophy in Florida, has been gently challenging me to think straighter and more inclusively about religious beliefs. John takes not only my own religion, but all the world's religions very seriously, and so it did not surprise me how he closed his Christmas letter this year, with a beautiful paragraph on the Fourth Gospel's reference to the Light "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Included in the paragraph was a gentle reminder that this light is not unknown in the East, along with a quotation from Hinduism's Upanisads: "And the light that shines above the heavenly vault, the support of all creation, the support of the universe, in the supreme and highest realms, is none other than the light that dwells in the human body."

This time of the year, one of my favorite Old Testament passages is always from Isaiah: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those who lived in a land as dark as death a light has dawned." (9:2) On one level, the "light" in this passage is a newly born king who will deliver Israel from the Assyrians; on another, it is the hope for the deliverance itself. The distinction is important. It opens out on the continuing reinterpretation of what God's promise of liberation must mean in the context of seemingly endless delays in its fulfillment, all the way to the present day. For Judaism, the "who" of the light gradually gave way to the "what" of the hope. Everywhere, the darkness of the land on which human beings live is a darkness unto death, and yet, light still shines. This darkness cannot overcome the light of hope that dwells in even the most savaged human bodies.

St. Matthew's light was indeed a light also known in the East. As was so for Isaiah, for Matthew, too, its meaning unfolds on two levels. On the first and literal level, the light is the star that guided astrologers from the east all the way to Jerusalem, and then to the house in Bethlehem where the baby Jesus lay waiting to receive their homage. On the second and much richer level, the light represents a trust in God that does depends not upon particular Messianic expectations of a particular oppressed people, but rather upon both the fear of God and an openness to God's grace that dwells in Gentile hearts at all times and everywhere. This same, two-level unfolding is evident in St. Luke's image of the glory that "shone round" all the shepherds in the fields the night of the angel's visit to them. The image expressed both an opening of the vault of heaven to an angelic chorus of light, and a brightly burning faith conquering fear from within.

Whether Christmas messages about light derive from Isaiah, or Matthew, or Luke, or from any number of other scriptural passages in many other books of the Bible, at least one thing can be said with certainty about all of them. They speak as much about quiet transformations of the human heart within us as they do about spectacular reconfigurations of natural and historical processes beyond us. It is the former that kept the Jewish people going when the longer and longer anticipated Messiah did not appear, and that keeps Christians and Muslims going when the kingdoms of this world conform less and less to the long promised dawning of the kingdom of heaven.

At first glance, the light about which St. John wrote may seem to have little if anything to do with whatever light it is that "dwells in the human body." In the Fourth Gospel, "the true light which gives light to everyone" is none other than the Word of God, who was with God and one in being with God from the beginning, and whose life alone is humankind's light. That light shining in the darkness is the eternal Logos, from beyond all worlds. Further on in the Prologue to this Gospel, however, we come face to face all over again with that second level of meaning that permeates all of the Scriptures' many witnesses to the light. There does remain the light of the eternal Logos, shining out-there, beyond us. But there is also the light of the eternal Logos shining in the flesh it has become, in order that we in our altogether human bodies might become altogether more like God.

The Upanisads had it right. With the very light of God having become the light of our very bodies, there can be no doubt about the capacity of finite humanity to bear the very essence of God to the world. Glory to God in the highest, and in our lowliness as well.

The Bible, The Quran, and The Congress

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, staging individual swearing-in ceremonies for newly-elected members of the House of Representatives, with their hands held piously atop favorite family Bibles. After all, why should the President get all the photo-ops? When you are finally elected to Congress, why should all your religious supporters back home settle merely for your standing on the House floor alongside everybody else getting into the place for the first time, with nary a Bible or any other Good Book in sight? No matter that this has always been the only installation ceremony that really counts.

An in-House ceremony, though, lumping all the new kids on the aisles together, is still the one that makes the most sense, Constitution-wise. Article Six, which contains the original document’s only explicit reference to religion at all --- we had to wait for the First Amendment for the all-important principle of religious freedom to be laid down --- prohibits making any “religious Test” a requirement for public office anywhere in the country. Running to grab your Bible before you get sworn in to any position of “public Trust” looks an awful lot like submitting to at least some sort of a test, even if you go out of your way to tell your constituents and your critics that it isn’t.

A case in point is the controversy generated by one newly elected Congressman who announced that he would take his oath of office not on the Bible, but on the Quran. He seemed to have a pretty good reason for wanting to do it this way: he is a practicing Muslim. Apparently, this was not a good enough reason for a number of influential, this-land-is-Christian-land-only types. To them, not using the Bible as an outward sign of loyalty to the country in the name of all that is holy amounts to an unprecedented break with tradition all the way back to George Washington and to a frightening harbinger of what our country will come to if good Christians don’t stand up and fight. The fight they envision is to get a law passed requiring that the Bible be the one and only book used in swearing-in ceremonies of Representatives and Senators.

There are at least four things wrong with this would-be clarion call to Christian conscience. The first is that it falsely depicts the American “tradition” of swearings-in to public office. In point of fact, some have been without the presence of a Bible at all, and others have substituted the Jewish Bible for a Christian one. The second is that an even more frightening harbinger of what our country may be coming to is the very fact of anti-minority sentiment itself in the religious sphere. Ironically, not even in Iran are members of religious minorities required to swear oaths on scriptures not of their own faith. Third, any attempt to purge non-Biblical books from swearing-in ceremonies would seem to be (obviously, only the Courts can finally decide this) as blatant a violation of Article Six of the Constitution as we are likely to come up with, at least in the next few days or so.

Finally, the pick-up-either-your Bible-or-your plane-ticket-home approach to religion in government reflects a profoundly disturbing misunderstanding of everything that really is sacrosanct about the First Amendment to the Constitution, the freedom of every citizen, in Congress and everywhere else, to follow the dictates of his and her conscience in all matters having to do with religion. Insisting that a representative of the people and the public good be forced to participate in a religious ritual inimical to his or her own deepest religious convictions, such as swearing an oath on the sacred writings of a faith not one’s own, would be just the kind of coercive act that the Founding Fathers were especially passionate about preventing.

Taking an oath of office on the Quran is hardly going to be what some fellow bloggers are calling “the first step toward the Islamization of America.” It is another kind of step altogether, merely the latest taken on the long, winding, and admittedly risky pathway toward building a human community capable of embracing and becoming enriched by the great diversities that human beings exhibit across the globe. Muhammad called that community ummah. Jesus named it the Kingdom of God. By either name, it is what the creator of all humankind has obviously been envisioning from heaven for a very long time.

Wal-Mart and the Kingdom

If stores that sell things to the public get better to the extent that they get bigger, then Wal-Mart has not only been going on to perfection --- it has almost arrived. The number of its employees roughly approximates the number of uniformed personnel in the U.S. military. The chain's economic clout has been characterized as greater than that of the Federal Reserve. We are talking big here, really and not just symbolically big.

In the long run, though, it is Wal-Mart's symbolic rather than economic power that will be the better remembered, just as the symbolism is also receiving huge attention in the here and now. From the standpoint of current political debate, Wal-Mart has become a symbol both of consumer sovereignty at its best and of corporate greed at its worst. It is a prodigious creator of jobs and a profligate exploiter of those who struggle to stay in them, a sterling paradigm for free enterprise and an insatiable devourer of local government subsidies, a cure for the woes of declining neighborhoods and a destroyer of the small businesses that helped make them neighborly in the first place.

Across the country, there is a large cadre of business and political leaders who have shared, sometimes eagerly and other times reluctantly and painfully, the experience of setting up the auctions that play towns, cities, parts of both, and unincorporated areas as well, off against one another to compete for a new Wal-Mart store of which their constituencies can then strive to make themselves worthy. Most of these leaders discover quickly that they are up against a powerful new kingdom in its own right, with a distinctive message of hope, a call to obedience and service, a system of rewards and punishments, a royal hierarchy, and the power to alter drastically the landscapes of whole communities geographically, demographically, emotionally, and economically.

From the standpoint of Christian social ethics, the kingdom of Wal-Mart poses a number of questions that even a greater number of its citizens seem loathe to pursue or even to ask. Here, just like in sermons, are three of them: First, does a community's need for an economic jump start justify --- morally and not only pragmatically, that is --- its political leaders' bartering away in the form of subsidies future tax revenues that should be going to meet other community needs? This same question can be asked in contexts far beyond that of building a new road to get customers from the highway to a new or an old Wal-Mart's front door. For instance, it's a good one to ask of sports club owners and investors in their negotiations to put up new arenas. (Isn't it galling to contemplate that these places may not be generating any net income for their host cities after all?)

A second question: how can we determine --- again, on the basis of moral considerations --- the extent to which workers who help generate an enterprise's profits should subsidize their companies' owners and investors by accepting lower wages, salaries, and benefits? The best way to avoid dealing with this particular question is the way business has chosen during most of the decades of all of our lives: by appealing to what it takes for profit-making organizations to survive in rapidly changing economic processes and systems. This economic version of Darwinianism rarely fails to scare off efforts at raising the minimum wage. Its most recent scare word is "globalization," now being hurled in the faces of their too expensive, left behind employees by executives charged with getting their companies out of town, country, and the continent at first light. One would think that a question with global ramifications, addressed at a global level, should in fact open up new possibilities of achieving global answers rather than keep us stuck with proclaiming parochially that the question is unanswerable.

Finally --- and here the preacher gets down to some really big meddling --- how, as professed citizens of the Kingdom of God, can we justify our never-abating, craven demands for anything and everything we want under one roof, whenever we want it, for whatever we want to pay for it, at whatever cost to our fellow citizens who make it, ship it, stock it, rack and shelve it, and check it out for us? As well as to those who deliver it, along with the cars and trucks with which we can choose haul it away ourselves. No wonder we have allowed Wal-Mart to become such a powerful symbol of corporate greed. It takes the pressure off of dealing with an even more malignant kind, the greed that is in our own hearts.

A New Right To Life Issue

A New Right to Life Issue

When the rules for human relationships became too complicated, Jesus cut through the casuistry with a startlingly simple way of expressing what God wants from us. In the words of his second commandment (of only two), we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Later, the philosopher Immanuel Kant would put it this way: treat every human being as an end in himself or herself, and not as a means to our own ends.

Jody Picoult's widely read novel, My Sister's Keeper, got Jesus and Kant right up in our faces with her soul-searing portrait of Anna, conceived for the purpose of helping reverse her older sister's leukemia. In telling us about Anna, and the impact that her artful creation eventually had on all of her family members, Ms. Poucault clearly hopes to leave us mired in moral uncertainty about a decision that recent technology is making available for an increasingly wide variety of purposes. Her strategy seems to be one of enveloping us in an emotional force field that threatens to de-magnetize our moral compass altogether.

What made the conception of Anna worth entertaining at all by her parents was a new medical procedure, "pre-implantation genetic diagnosis" (PGD), a procedure that screens embryos produced by in vitro fertilization for genetic defects. Technologically, the procedure has a lot going for it. It can detect genes that make for inevitably fatal childhood diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, and help parents come to a responsible decision about not implanting an embryo carrying those genes, in favor of implanting one that is free of them. Morally, however, there is something scary about PGD: it aids and abets parental selection of only the very healthiest of their petri-dish embryos for implantation. The troublesome question here is: "healthiest" on what and whose terms?

Currently, PGD is expanding to screen for genes that contribute only to adult diseases, not to childhood ones. And according to medical experts, some of these adult diseases are not certain to develop and are highly treatable even if they do. Further, most couples who seek PGD are doing so for the primary purpose of sex selection, not of screening for sex-related disorders. So just how moral is it to discard embryos not selected for implantation because some of their genes happen not to measure up fully to the sometimes disproportionately self-centered standards of their owners?

Most problematic is the use of PGD described wrenchingly in the novel, to facilitate the creation of babies whose umbilical cord stem cells can be harvested to treat siblings with disorders of which the newborns' originally implanted embryos were found to be free. However advantageous one child's stem cells, or bone marrow, or transplantable organs could be to the health and well-being of an older sibling, conceiving that child primarily for the purpose of rendering its body useful to the other is a morally questionable act from the moment its very possibility is entertained, and not only on the basis of the kinds of consequences Jody Picoult surveys powerfully.

From a medical perspective, of course, there are no ethical objections relevant to the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnoses, just as there are none with respect to practicing contraception in the first place, or by preventing implantation in the second (e.g., by use of the so-called "morning-after" pill). Why? Because medical science holds that a conceptus becomes a human embryo only after implantation. From a moral perspective, however, PGD performed on the cells of fertilized ova can only be described in life and death terms, because the results of these procedures influence and even determine decisions to create a certain kind of human being and to prevent the creation of other kinds (viz.: disease-free and diseased, or worse still, male and female respectively).

One by-product of PGD makes this perspective even more germane to parental decisions about employing the procedure. In specific, a cell that PGD requires from an embryo for testing can be allowed to divide. Then, that original cell can be used for the tests, and the others for establishing a new stem cell line, with which to carry on further research. In vitro fertilization for the purpose of conceiving offspring is one thing. When this sacred purpose is contaminated by preoccupation with creating stem cell lines, the ethics of desirable consequences (e.g., of treating otherwise intractible diseases by injecting umbilical cord stem cells) come into conflict with the ethics of intentionality (e.g., of assessing the moral validity of an act in terms of the purpose(s) for which it was performed.)

Kate, in Jodi Picoult's story, is the victim of a disease that she did not deserve and that seemed to justify almost any kind of aggressive response of the part of her stricken family members. That she survived and that her donor sister eventually did not is as inexplicable metaphysically as the disease was in the first place. Picoult absolves Kate from any blame for the claims she made on her donor sister, and we should too. Faced with a similar situation, many if not most of us might have embarked on the same course that Kate's parents did. But we would have no more moral justification for doing so than they had.

The Pulpit and the IRS

Bless 'em, those California Episcopalians are sinking deeper and deeper into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, whose minions now are threatening to yank their church's tax-exempt status. It was a sermon that got the whole rangle going, by bringing up issues like the war in Iraq and abortion in what the IRS worried was too "partisan" a way. The tax officials could have a point, but if and only if the rector's preaching included support for a particular political candidate or party. This is the only kind of fire to which the IRS can legitimately hold church leaders' feet.

Or arms and hands, as in throwing yours around a politician invited into your pulpit to the exclusion of his or her opponent. Preachers who take this low political road deserve the chastising they should get for it. But it is their parishioners and not the IRS who should be calling them to account, by making it unmistakably clear that partisanship gets in the way of promoting serious discussion on important issues that cannot help but generate more than one point of view.

All Saints Episcopal's rector at the time of his allegedly incendiary sermon must have been a pretty shrewd fellow. He framed what he preached as an imaginary debate between President Bush, Senator John Kerry, and Jesus. How about that for wrapping yourself up in the First Amendment? If, however, what this preacher intended by the strategy was to sneak around the clear intent of the tax laws, then his use of the pulpit was hardly heroic. (It's puzzling that the IRS seems to have no concern with Jerry Falwell's far more blatant misuse of his own religious authority to shore up the flagging zeal of partisan conservatives everywhere.)

Currently, the Pasadena, California case is only one of many IRS efforts at intensifying the enforcement of its rules governing tax exemptions for non-profit organizations. They include warnings --- e.g., to religious leaders in South Dakota not to campaign against a challenge to a law banning abortions in the state --- along with complaints, e.g., against a Boston church in which the pastor introduced Senator John Kerry as the next President of the United States, and an Ohio church that invited only one party's gubernatorial candidate to speak, on the ground that his opponent opposed a ban on same-sex marriage. The IRS also hears complaints from others, such as one against a priests' group committed to campaigning for pro-life candidates in the next election. Hopefully, the IRS will continue to see its work with complaints as important while it backs away from some of its over the top warnings.

With respect to ensuring religious believers' right to seek and speak the truth about social issues, I have grave doubts that the IRS' pastoral insights will ever be as sound as its accounting procedures. Distinguishing social action undertaken in service to God's Kingdom from partisan political enterprises is not something that should be left to the discretion of governmental agencies already gasping for air in an atmosphere polluted by over-surveillance, over-control, and all-around paranoia. Properly to enforce its regulations on tax exemptions for churches, the IRS needs the help of the very organizations it must monitor, and those organizations need to be ready to provide it.

One way that church leaders can help is to show better insight themselves into the pastoral consequences of their political involvements. A pastor's marching in one candidate's parade can only leave parishioners who do not see eye to eye with that candidate out in the cold with respect to seeking sound pastoral counsel on the broader aspects of social issues. Worse still, it will undermine the credibility of other church leaders with the very tax folks who are the most confused about how Christian thinking can have inescapably partisan aspects without becoming captive to partisan ideology.

For instance, in today's political climate, inclining toward either a pro-life or a pro-choice position on abortion cannot fail to have partisan implications. But it is the politicians as much as the churches that have seen to that, providing one very good reason for decrying what both of the major political parties have come to in recent decades. But this does not mean we cannot, whether inside or outside our churches, encourage discussion of these options in a more than merely partisan way. If church leaders can keep this straight, the IRS will not have to try do it for them. Both church and country will be better off having tax guys chase real scofflaws rather than tell religious leaders what they can and cannot say from their pulpits and in their e-mails.

A Lesson In Faith From The Amish

It was excruciating to read some of the words that Charles Carl Roberts left behind, along with lubricating gel, following his execution of innocent Amish schoolgirls. He wrote of hating himself and God, of "unimaginable emptiness," of molestation, and of getting even, as if somehow his widow and children, along with the rest of us, should find in these phrases a credible explanation for acts so despicable as to defy even the best of our theologies.

Immersed in unspeakable loss, and further accosted by people for whom God's absence and impotence seem more palpable than God's presence and power, the Amish families most impacted by the horrors that Roberts perpetrated on their loved ones seem also to be the ones least affected by them, spiritually. What we have been hearing from these gentle people, from the very first hours following the murders and the suicide, centers on a single word: forgiveness. One Amish grandfather was overheard putting it this way: "We must not think evil of this man." I can only hope that I would be that kind of grandfather in terrible circumstances like those that he and his own family had to face.

But right now, I am failing this test of faith, and I think that others may be also, while feeling rotten about not measuring up. To put it bluntly, there is nothing in my most charitable imaginings about this contemptible human being's deficient genes, up-bringing, bad breaks, or personal losses that in any way mitigates the unfathomably evil nature of what he chose to do in that Amish schoolhouse. Boiled down to the spiritual essentials, I can't seem to get past it. I know I should get past it. And I truly believe that by the grace of God I will get past it. But at this moment, Satan is winning.

Off-center as my faith may be, however, it is not yet so contaminated by disgust and moral outrage that I cannot keep clearly in mind just whose hour it has been for the past few days. The Satan who has been winning is not an omnipotent, malignant force that took possession of Charles Carl Roberts, but only the great deceiver, who kept whispering in his ear --- and in ours--- the most monstrous lie of all, that there is something, finally, that can separate any of us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. That there are people who do not bear the image of God in their souls. That all things are not working for good after all. That in the final analysis, the Amish are merely sweet, naïve, wrong-headed people who give the lie to any hope that the meek truly will inherit the earth.

Well, Lord of the Flies, I know that you are taking great delight in my having been knocked off my pins over the suffering of these families. But here is something that you may not know about me, because you clearly do not get it about the Amish. I hear them, and I hear them well, when they tell me, and all of the rest of us --- you, too --- to love every enemy, to do well by those who stalk us, to leave judgment in the hands of the Creator alone, to counter evil with good, and in every way and at all times, above all, to forgive.

Your problem, Beelzebub, is that you never got over being a creature rather than being the Creator yourself. And you have never given God a break since. He's only one God, you know. Not even He can make another one, no matter how much you and the Charles Roberts of the world keep complaining about it, and taking it out especially on the truly innocent among us who know their place before God, accept and like it, and are grateful to occupy it even for just a little while.

It used to give me trouble trying to understand how Jesus could ever have considered his burden in life to be light, especially light enough so that he could carry everyone else's. Then, I finally began to figure out that it had everything to do with his message and his life of forgiveness. He never seemed to be burdened with resentments and demands, or with the melancholy that so often comes from holding them in. Given the relatively high incidence of depression in many Amish communities, it is probably fair to say that they are a people willing to risk being forgiving toward those who hurt them even before they can get all of their own anger out. Some have tried to call this a psychiatric disorder. To me, it is courage.

The Pope Flap

Getting our mouths washed out with soap was a threat my buddies and I heard countless times during our childhood, all across the neighborhood. We worried some about it, but never saw any of our elders actually carry it out. Maybe the time finally has come to translate these off-putting words into action, especially among religious leaders, as a counterpart to getting our feet washed by some of them.

Somehow, Pope Benedict recently got it into his head that the interests of Christian-Muslim dialogue would be served by quoting in a lecture an almost never read medieval passage that characterized some of the prophet Muhammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman." Even 24 hours later, the Pontiff's brain still had some waking up to do. He was declared surprised and upset that Muslims took offense at what he said. Then he apologized, but only for the effect his words had, not for quoting them in the first place.

The trouble was that by the time the Pope finally began clarifying what he did and did not intend his lecture to say, the rallies and the official condemnations, along with the usual shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupid remarks --- for one, comparing the Pope with Hitler and Mussolini --- had reached the level of mindless frenzy. Is there anybody out there still interested in conversations about Christianity and Islam that make sense?

Ok, guys, put a sock in it for a minute, and let those who are suffering the consequences of your insensitivity and rage get a few words in edge-wise. In the first place, your Holiness, you of all people should have known better than to try to get a discussion going on jihad by sticking a blowtorch in Muslims' faces as your opening move. And your "extremely upset" reaction of surprise was pretty lame, don't you think? Now, secondly, Muslim friends, take a step back out of the blowtorch's range --- it really isn't the kind of flame that can inflict damage, except to false pride --- count to ten, read the Pope's act of quotation for what it really was, ill-considered and irrelevant, and join the rest of us again in working out how to thank the Almighty for our lives together.

It is tedious to keep reading and hearing ill-informed and even malicious caricatures of fellow human beings' deepest religious sentiments and convictions --- sorry, The Prophet was not an off-with-your-head kind of a guy --- and the condescending attitude that lies behind them. And it is no easier to deal with the ready-fire-aim reactions of religious fanatics whose sense of outrage may be appropriate once in a while, but whose fuses are too short to allow them ever to express it constructively. Arrest the Pope when he touches down in Turkey? Come on.

Both the defaming of others' faith, and the assaulting of the defamers, have long since become very dangerous enterprises that all too readily sweep up innocent bystanders, whether in churches, mosques, or on the street, in their fury. I know of no better way to prevent the assaults than to cut out the defamations that provoke them. But I also know of no better way to prevent the escalation of religious violence than to get a handle on the narcissism that takes the slightest criticism as an occasion for wanton destructiveness. Effigy-burning touchiness, with all of the humorlessness that leads up to it, is no more attractive in a religious rally than it is in a gang-related street brawl. Muslims certainly have cause for irritation when The Prophet is insulted. But Muhammad knew well that insults go with the territory, and he handled them far better in his own day than many of his followers are handling them in ours.

Holding provocativeness in check, though, along with scaling down our reactions to it, does not mean avoiding the hard issues that keep otherwise sincerely motivated religious people from experiencing, together, that all-surpassing love from the Divine Lover who is called by different names but who is, by any name, Love-itself. The Pope is right, and profoundly so, to stand his ground in calling for dialogue on the violent manifestations of religion, and Muslims need to come to terms with the deeply misleading pronouncements of some of their most revered clergy who love swords more than ploughshares, and weapons of mass destruction most of all. But the Holy Father also needs to be more straightforward about the Christian tradition itself, which included Holy War stuff long before The Prophet ever had the grace to be be born among us.

Two Sexual Roads Less Traveled

One Catholic writer I try to keep up with is Donald Cozzens, lately of John Carroll University. He is out with a new book, Freeing Celibacy, that is simply stunning in its eloquence and integrity. The thesis of the book is an old one: the right kind of decision to live out one's life without sexual experience, for the greater good of the gospel, is the outward expression of an inward, spiritual gift from God. Fr. Cozzen’s exposition of the thesis, though, is anything but something from a distant past.

Cozzens stays clear of the intellectualization about celibacy as the sexual ideal that has dominated Roman Catholic pastoral theology in the past, and instead focuses on the present experience of a very small number of very real, humble, and quietly inspired men and women for whom only "a mysterious pull of grace" toward singleness can fit their personal spiritual journeys. Movingly, Cozzens allows these beautiful people to tell us on their own terms why they cannot be the people they sense God wants them to be without relinquishing their yearning for sexual intimacy, and why the commitment to celibacy involves, seemingly paradoxically, a lifetime of struggle as well as graced ministry, performance, and achievement.

The idea of celibacy as a charism is especially relevant to a whole lot of really bad things still going on in the Catholic Church. Trying to be celibate when you are not called or enabled by God for the task is one way to end up as the quirky, cranky, manipulative, abusive, or downright dangerous kind of human being that all too many priests have ended up being. ( I am well aware that there are other ways to wind up like this.)

But trying to be a marriage partner, as Protestants are pressured to be, is not much of an alternative when you are neither called nor equipped for that task. The particular brand of Protestantism that I still represent, United Methodism, itself has a long way to go on this issue. Officially, the denomination supports what sounds like a credible, dual sexual standard of fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness. In actuality, though, the latter serves not as a cajoling of the unmarried to hold off on sex, but as a cover for an irrational opposition to homosexual relationships, and for a hypocritical attitude toward celibacy itself.

Both celibacy and the marriage relationship are divinely bestowed opportunities for expressing our sexual nature to God's glory. But, and contrary to a thousand years of misguided Christian teaching, celibacy is not the ideal for everyone. And neither is offspring-begetting marriage, contrary to even more years of de-forming Genesis 1:22 into yet another spirit-killing law. Some married couples cannot produce offspring, others choose not to, and neither the inability nor the choice invalidates the sacredness of their sexual activity together.

God invites couples to "be fruitful and multiply." God invites individuals to make a life-long commitment to chastity. And God's prevenient grace equips some, but not all couples, and some, but not all individuals to accept and live out these invitations. Neither invitation is a demand, even when it is experienced as a calling from God Godself. (The biblical word is even stronger: summons.) God's great gift of freedom is never overridden by God's enthusiasm for getting some of his people onto a different track.

As I finished my reading of Fr. Cozzen's book, I found myself following a different line of thought from his own: the winsome descriptions that some celibate priests and nuns share about their commitment to chastity are strikingly similar to those of more than just a few men and women who understand their being gay and lesbian also to be a living out of God's grace, gifts, and will. They, too, have found their deepest humanity and service to God through struggle, prayer, commitment, and through grace-filled, life-giving friendships with both men and women. For gays and lesbians, there is also the transforming quality of an intimate, same-sex relationship bound by a commitment to permanence and fidelity. Self-assured critics who proclaim such a relationship an "abomination unto the Lord" know neither gays, lesbians, nor the Lord very well.

Like celibacy, gay and lesbian sexuality isn't for everyone, in spite of the fanatical fulminating going on these days about the dangers the latter pose to keeping the world safe for straightness. The evidence suggests that it, like the road to celibacy, will always be a less traveled road. But it is hardly a road that leads to perdition. That road is the more traveled road of people unwilling to look deeply enough into their own sexuality to want to make its expression, in whatever form, a fit offering to God.

Race, Gender, and So-Called Normal Sex

On a recent walk through our neighborhood park, what especially caught my eye were the more than usual skin colors of the families enjoying themselves in spite of blistering summer heat and blazing outdoor grills. Among the Moms and Dads, there was a lot of hand holding and even some smooching going on, in between delivering hot dogs at the pace of a ball park vendor. On my way home, I waved to another neighbor, who was hosting a party for his church friends --- his gay church friends. The happy laughter, the splashes from the backyard pool, and the cold cut trays being carried gingerly across the lawn added up to just as delightful a scene as the one that captivated me at the park.

It is painful to acknowledge that scenes like these would not have been deemed delightful where I grew up. The word my childhood neighbors would have used to describe them is: frightful. More members of our own communities than I care to think about are still uttering this same kind of condemnation. One I know sums up his take on scenes like these this way: They are just not NORMAL! When I push him a little, he will admit that he has reluctantly come to terms with what he calls mixed relationships. But gay and lesbian ones are another story. And so it goes in society and in churches: almost normalized hetero-racial relationships, and almost demonized homosexual ones.

The fact that racism is under siege in a lot of places should count for more than it does in the current thinking of many church folk about what so-called normal people do when they behave as the sexual beings God created all of us to be. It took a long time for people to figure out how to sustain civilization without enslaving large numbers of people on its periphery. But when they did finally get it figured out (unfortunately, not everywhere), the church no longer needed to distort its own gospel message for the sake of legitimizing racial discrimination. It also took a long time for people to figure out how to sustain civilization without co-opting every woman thirteen years and older for the purpose of replenishing the population. But they got this figured out, too (again, not everywhere), and the church no longer needs to distort that same gospel message for the sake of a wholly constricted and constricting theology of sexuality.

Even a casual look at the history of Christian thinking about sex makes plain how accommodating the church has been through the centuries to societal change, in its willingness to adjust its teachings --- radically, at times --- to altered circumstances. Consider, by way of example, the foundational affirmation of both Judaism and Christianity that in having been created male and female, human beings are invited to be fruitful and multiply. It must not have been easy for the first Christians to resist pressures to deform the invitation into a command. Struggling to survive in an Empire that needed every woman of childbearing age to give birth many times over just to keep the population constant, the church nevertheless stood firm against the challenge.

But not by sticking to principle. Rather, it repudiated principle altogether, and changed its view of normal sex drastically. Sexuality expressed ideally through intercourse aimed at both enjoyment and conceiving offspring quickly gave way to a new notion of sexuality expressed ideally through a celibate life of renunciation. Marriage, once considered the fulfillment of human nature, came to be viewed instead as a reluctant compromise conceded to those who could not control their lustful urges. The celibate life came to be taught as the far superior life, and by the fourth century people who doubted this new teaching were considered to be verging on heresy.

By the time of the Protestant Reformation, celibacy over marriage as the sexual ideal began fading away, the demise aided by both the profundity of Martin Luther and the licentiousness of Henry VIII. But almost as if frightened by its new (biblical) liberality, the church saw fit once again to dampen sexual enthusiasm, this time not by clinging to celibacy, but by binding the sex act to the intention to reproduce. This repressive view of normal sex has persisted, even though its natural consequence would stretch already shrinking resources around the globe to the breaking point.

Neither celibacy nor a no-sex-without-conception mentality remotely resembles what so-called sex is. As ideals imposed oppressively on everyone, both need serious re-visiting, just as the defense of slavery needed and is getting serious re-visiting. What we might re-envision normal sex to be, concretely, is the subject of the next column. I promise it will not be an R-rated one.

The Strange Debate About "Christianists"

A peculiar kind of name-calling has broken out among some of Jesus'’ present-day attackers, and even worse, among some of his followers. Their fooling around is with the word "“Christianist."” You are supposed to hurl this epithet when you want to stick it to someone that he or she is not really Christian --- at least in your own eyes. It'’s the "“ist"” that does the trick. The suffix suggests the kind of extremism that infects all ideologies. It also gets your voice in a proper hissing mode. Stand before a mirror and try it on yourself. Hopefully, by doing so you will come to hate it, as genuinely faithful Muslims hate the "“Islamist"” label.

In the current debate, "“Christianist"” refers to certain forms of conservative Christian belief and practice that strongly oppose abortion (and possibly contraception as well), gay and lesbian relationships, ordaining women as pastors or priests, questioning established doctrines and dogmas, and keeping the realms of church and state clearly distinguished. Christian-ism also strongly supports looking to personal experience of Christ as the defining norm for faith, demanding obedience to familial, political, and religious authority, bringing the world to Christ and Christ alone, and preparing for the imminent end of the world. The Christianist label is coming from believers and non-believers alike who, for many different reasons, are negative about all of the above.

If I am following the bouncing ball accurately, the fights between those who call these conservative Christians ChristianISTS and those who want the conservative Christian label but without the "“ist"” tacked on root especially in divergent attitudes toward questioning established doctrines and dogmas. Unhappily for the well-being of the church as a whole, these attitudes are hardening before our very eyes. If the participants in this singularly annoying debate are any indication, you can opt either to question nothing and become as ornery a Christianist as dogmatic Muslims become when they turn into Islamists, or to question everything and wind up another of those liberals (let your voice tremble as you say it) leading the world'’s peoples to profligate lives of libertinism. Across this great divide --- within both Christian and Muslim communities --- the few swaying rope bridges still functioning are also rapidly unraveling.

It is hard to imagine the followers of Jesus at Antioch, who were the first to get tagged with the name "Christian,"” floundering for very long in a debate as inane as this one is. When Barnabas arrived in Antioch on behalf of the Jerusalem church, to see whether any bad things were happening as a result of sharing God'’s message with Gentiles as well as Jews, he wasted no time getting Saul into the action, and together, Luke went on to write, they lived there in fellowship with the church for a year, instructing large numbers. The fruit of their instruction took the form not of a piling on of "“isms"” in one name-calling brawl after another, but of working up a contribution for the relief of fellow Christians in Judea during a famine. (Acts 11:28)

I wish Luke had said more about why Jesus'’ disciples were first called "“Christians"” in Antioch. Was it the disciples themselves who were responsible for the attribution? Was it a designation coined by others? What were its attributors trying to say by means of it? Why did it first arise at Antioch rather than somewhere else? Why did it even arise at all? What little explanation Luke did offer for the attribution has to be pieced together from the surrounding context, and it is anything but complete or satisfying. One thing that Acts does suggest, though, is that the disciples' getting called by that name was a good thing, at least to most of those who heard about it. Apparently it had something to do with their being seen as "“having the power of the Lord with them"” and not about holding the right doctrines and seeing to it that others do, too.

It is still something of a mystery how people who can differ with one another so completely and so angrily over what and how the church should be teaching can also be deserving of the same attribution, "“Christian."” The Antiochenes must have confronted this same mystery more than once, for the Jewish and Gentile versions of the gospel among them were surely as difficult to reconcile as the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant ones among us are today. But reconciliation there was, and "“the power of the Lord"” seemed to have played the principal role in bringing it about. With power like that, who needed ideology anyway?

Infallibility

Among the many contributors to Christians' getting cross-wise with each other, one of the most annoying is the claim of absolute certainty about how the core beliefs of the faith should be expressed in diverse social, cultural, and religious contexts. That there are such beliefs, "the marrow of Christian truth," as John Wesley put it, is beyond dispute. But what these beliefs meant in their original settings and what they can mean in the here and now is not.

For instance, it is hard to figure out how to answer Islam's challenge that the doctrine of the Trinity contradicts the spirit of monotheism, when the categories in which this doctrine came to full expression in the fourth century are understood by hardly anyone in the twenty-first. Closer to home are the many challenges to spelling out a definitive understanding of human sexuality in a tradition springing from, in all probability, never-married, celibate founders (St. Paul figures prominently in this discussion) who thought nothing of demanding that their followers leave hearth and home, at whatever consequence to the family members left behind, to be remembered only for their fecundity.

When facing challenges like these, relying on people who must have absolute certainty at all costs is not wise; they are too anxious within themselves to be trustworthy guides for anyone else. What some of them are willing to sacrifice for their (false) sense of assurance is simply too costly --- truth itself. And yet, the sacrifices go on, often to great acclaim.

One especially insidious way that this proclivity expresses itself is in the insistence upon an infallible foundation for Christian teaching, on the basis of which core Christian beliefs can be promulgated as not only without error, but as incapable of ever being in error, period. You have to stop and think about this a little, for its full force to set in. God, we have believed, does not and cannot make mistakes. But human beings who do neither? Or a Book that does neither? Or interpreters of both who cannot be wrong in what they say about the teachers and the books that have gone before them? Only very, very insecure people, or at least very, very spiritual people in isolated moments of panic, would consider even the possibility of setting up any human creature on earth as bearing in his or her own finite nature the infallibility of God.

As if to offset at the outset the outrageousness of the infallibilist hypothesis, infallibilists themselves put on a good show of reminding us that important distinctions are to be made between eternal truths and temporal ones, and that they claim infallibility only for the former. Some truths, in other words, are true for some times and situations and not necessarily true for others. Earlier prohibitions against women speaking in church illustrate well this second kind of truth. As should denials of their authority over men --- or should they? And now we get a glimpse into how the trouble begins.

Non-infallible along with infallible teaching? A nice try, but rarely a successful one. For one reason, already suggested, we never seem to be able to agree for very long on exactly which truths belong to which category. Coptic Christians still balk at trinitarianism, Protestant Christians still balk at transubstantiation, and thoughtful Christians still balk at taking the Book of Revelation literally. A much more important reason for resisting this dubious distinction is that it rarely stays in place anyway. Like the nose of a desert camel, once a theologian slips one infallible doctrine under the tent under the cover of darkness, there soon follow many others in the full light of day, until there is room neither to move nor to breathe.

Recent practice of the Roman Catholic teaching hierarchy illustrates this danger well. "Non-infallible" teaching, particularly in the area of human sexuality and social ethics, has come to assume the force even if not the name of infallible dogma which is not to be questioned, under the threat of being silenced and ostracized within the church. Some of the most profound and influential Roman Catholic theologians of the past three decades have already suffered these ignominies --- Hans Kung, Tissa Balisuriya, Leonardo Boff, and Charles Curran, to name just a few --- and there will be more in years to come. The leader of this new Inquisition has been none other than the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. I learned of this new Pope's selection from a dental assistant who was hearing it on the radio at just the moment my dentist had started drilling out a cavity. There's a sermon in there somewhere.

Odium Theologicum

Acrimonious theological debate, which many decry as the principal impediment to the mission of the church today, is no new thing. Aflame with zeal for loving good works as the earliest Christian communities were, those communities also housed more than a fair share of what we now refer to as our-way-or-the-highway types. And they did so in spite of their Lord's passionate hope that all of his followers would remain one in Him.

Before Paul could even get his first letter written, Jewish and Gentile Christians were duking it out over circumcision and dietary practices. Then, there was that strange band of spiritual cavaliers, the "pneumatikoi", whose sense of oneness in Christ was so individualized as to leave almost no place for communal faith at all. And before too much longer, full blown paranoia began setting in among newly persecuted Christians, whose afflicted seemed to have had nothing better to do than peer around corners in search of an anti-Christ among them. What is especially distressing about all these aberrations is how early they arose in Christian history.

From one perspective, there should be nothing surprising about the fact that conscientious and otherwise mutually respectful Christians are capable of losing it when some cherished opinion, tradition, or practice is suddenly confronted by questions and doubts, not to mention ridicule. After all, the church is the people of God, and as such, it is sometimes bound to act just like most other people do at their most defensive. That this "pilgrim people" believed itself to be about God's mission in the world counted for very little through the centuries in warding off both potential and actual fratricidal conflicts over what in the grand scheme of things ought to have been counted, in Paul's phrasing, as dross. (His Greek word was a little more pointed.)

But it is just this grand scheme of things that has proved so difficult to keep in view. How much grander can a scheme get than one according to which the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, is even now at work reconciling all of them and making them new? Just as families can settle too soon for too little of all that God envisions for them, God-loving communities ---Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike --- can and do remain hunkered down for too long in tight enclaves of arrogant believers bewitched by the notion that overwhelming hordes of infidels are threatening them from the four corners of a fallen world. Their cups of salvation are soon replaced by bowls of wrath.

The disturbing fact that lovers of God so easily become hateful of one another --- then, now, and perhaps into the distant future as well --- is as difficult to explain at an emotional level as it is painful to acknowledge. Even the faintest sense of God's magnificence, bountifulness, and mercies should be enough to cast out hostility toward oneself and others permanently. But it did not always work this way among those closest to Jesus in the flesh, and it does not always work this way for those who have to be content with knowing Jesus only in the spirit.

Emotionality aside, from a theological perspective, it is not difficult to see how a wrathful spirit can overtake a loving one in our churches. Two kinds of misunderstanding are especially pernicious contributors to the problem. The first comes from conflating essential, core teachings with time-bound, topical ones; it wrongly insists that the latter carry the same authority as the former. The second comes from disrespecting the fallibility of the human capacity to express divine things in finite words and images; it just as wrongly insists that there is a quality of infallibility about at least some church pronouncements whose denial inevitably jeopardizes salvation (someone else's salvation, that is --- never one's own.) Just how these misunderstandings are making current theological debates as acrimonious as they are will be the subjects of columns to come.

We have it on Jesus' own authority that the divisions which beset even his most conscientious followers both should and can be overcome. By God's design, the kingdom he announced is a social order within which there is to prevail a unity of spirit in bonds of peace. The moral imperative contained in this vision has been overlooked all too frequently in the troubled history of Christianity: toward those who do not understand the Word of God in Christ as we do, we are to act charitably, not wrathfully, and with an open mind instead of a vengeful heart.

Being Born At The Wrong Time

A central conviction of evangelical Christians is that an experience of Jesus Christ as one's personal Savior and Lord, definable both in content and time of occurrence, is essential for salvation. A major assumption behind the conviction is that in the experience, the saved know who their experience is of, because they have already heard about, and therefore know, who Jesus Christ is. I have less of a problem with the conviction than I do with the assumption.

Although evangelicals tip their helmets of salvation conspicuously when they lay on the importance of encountering Jesus personally, their idea itself actually has merit. Salvation is not merely something conferred from a cross a long time ago on the basis of a transaction involving only Jesus and his Father. Unless in some way one experiences the work of the cross through the changes it makes possible in one's own life, there is little worth celebrating about it. As Isaac Watts once put it, we need to see for ourselves the mingled sorrow and love flowing down.

About the evangelical conviction, then: so far so good. But now what has to be faced is the evangelical assumption, and on this terrain the going is not as easy. The assumption is that salvation is for those who know Jesus. Not just his background, or his teachings, or his followers, with their own teachings and doctrines. And not just good people in all times and places who have struggled to lead good lives to the best of their own knowledge of things. Only Jesus, and knowledgeable experience of him, finally counts.

One difficulty with this assumption is that it makes salvation impossible for people who were born after Jesus died, but who failed and fail to get the word about their divinely imposed obligations to him. Many evangelicals overcome this difficulty by insisting that the "word" was out there for the hearing and the taking, and therefore that people who did not avail themselves of it are without excuse. Perhaps.

But surely this reasoning cannot apply to that other segment of humanity whose members were born before the coming of Christ. These folks comprise quite a multitude, whether they range back only six thousand years or so, per Archbishop Ussher and not a whole lot of remaining followers, or seven million years or so, per Jared Diamond and more followers than we can count. The problem for people born too early is not that they failed to pay attention to what they should readily have known, in some form, about what the later-arriving Jesus would stand for. Rather, it is that they hadn't been born when anybody else knew anything about it either. Denying them salvation on the grounds of untimely birth is something no God I know anything about would even consider doing.

To this problem, evangelical Christians offer three basic solutions. The first is an humble acknowledgement of the problem as a problem, accompanied by a winsome expression of trust that, somehow, God will make things right with the people who happened to have been born at the wrong time. This version of evangelical Christianity is a keeper.

Two other versions are not. One espouses a kind of Malthusian spirituality that seems to relish the efforts of the Powers-That-Be to keep the population behind the pearly gates down. "No chance to hear about Jesus? Well, life is tough all over, but that's just the way it is. What do you expect any of the rest of us to do about it anyway?" From this perspective, the Father's house must have more empty rooms than anybody ought to feel comfortable with.

Another, equally frightening response to the issue of being born too soon to be saved typically gets expressed not in words but in a blank stare. The look on the faces of some evangelical Christians when I raise this issue with them makes plain that it simply has not occurred to them, ghettoized as they are in cults of their own making, that the reconciling ministry in God's name had to be going on in some form in all the worlds that preceded Jesus Christ on earth, precisely because all of those worlds represent just as much God's world as Jesus' world and our own do.

A transforming experience of Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord? Go for it. On the far side of your salvation, however, particularly in the Kingdom that is not of this world, there may be more than just a few surprises awaiting you, when you discover who is, and is not, there already.

Getting Off The Family Merry-Go-Round

A number of readers like to tease me about my June-time preoccupation with marriage and family issues. I plead guilty. It comes from doing a lot of June weddings back in the days when churches had a lot of them, and when more of them lasted. So, ready or not, here we go again:

One frequently used image for life today is the image of a merry-go-round that never stops. The rides look like so much fun at the beginning, but quickly prove tedious and tiring, opening out on a frightening vista of frustration, repetitiveness, and hopelessness. Better that your life should be a cabaret, old chum.

The feeling that life is just a big merry-go-round can be like the feeling of getting somewhere and then discovering that you have only been moving relentlessly back to your initial starting point. Many people who feel like this want desperately to break out of the habits and routines that make all of their experiences déjà vu all over again, but lack both the hope and the confidence to bring it off. They keep getting attached to something that seems attractive initially but that turns out leaving them stuck in the “same old, same old.” A bad career choice, or a destructive relationship, or alcohol and drugs, or unaffordable vacations, not to mention the frantic pursuit of wealth and fame, will do it almost every time.

The merry-go-round is an especially powerful image of what many family relationships and family systems are like: a disparate bunch of people, holding on to their precarious sense of self-identity for dear life, bringing old ways of doing things to new challenges, while blaming each other that nothing ever seems to get better for them. At the center of this unhealthy process is the failure of family members to acknowledge and cherish the uniqueness of their respective personalities, values, and interests as sources of power, renewal, and excitement for each other. Instead, they become increasingly inflexible and defensive about the necessity of everyone else’s being more like they are and doing things more like they do.These family members work harder and harder to accomplish less and less, and wind up back at the same place faster and faster.

There are many contributors to dysfunctional relationships --- whether among family members, in the work force, or between friends and acquaintances in general --- than just the failure to respect peoples’ individual differences. Insecurity, self-centeredness, skill deficits, poor role models, and just plain stubbornness represent only a few. But one of the biggest contributors still is allowing differences of style, functioning, and values to work against rather than for the quality of all relationships. To illustrate:

Liz, a future-oriented, highly imaginative “dreamer”settles down with Arnie, a no-nonsense, practical, just-the-facts, here-and-now kind of guy. Both wonder why their relationship, when it is going anywhere at all, only seems to be heading “south.”

Brad seems never to know what he thinks and feels about something unless he talks it out in the company of others. By contrast, Brenda thinks everything out in her head before she offers even a first word to anyone else on the subject at hand. When they are thrown together on company business, Brad criticizes Brenda mercilessly for her coldness and aloofness, and Brenda retaliates by humiliating Brad for his invasiveness and boorishness.

Jack, a conflict avoider, becomes joined at the hip emotionally with Joan, a conflict confronter. Joan eventually bails out of the relationship with Jack, only to go on to forge a new one with Jerry, whose approach to dealing with conflict is neither that of avoidance nor confrontation, but of mediation and negotiation. Jack, Joan, and Jerry continue to insist that his and her own respective approach is the only right one, and wonder why they have so much difficulty getting anything settled for very long.

The basic form that all collisions like these take is --- you guessed it --- going around and around and not getting anywhere. The primary reason that the collisions keep turning out this way is that each party to them is convinced that when the other party becomes more like he or she is, all the problems will go away. The marriage relationship is an especially apt illustration: many people marry their opposites, personality-wise, and then put untold time and energy into re-making their spouses in their own own image. How God images each is never factored into the equation at all. And that’s a pity, because finding out is the single best way to stop family merry-go-rounds long enough for everybody to get off, and discover together a ride that everyone can really enjoy.

About Howe

With over forty years in my profession and in my marriage, and still counting, I am a happily involved minister in the United Methodist Church who cherishes the variety of opportunities I have been given to serve, especially as a pastor, as a University chaplain, as a counselor, and as a college and seminary professor. Along the way, I have written some books and articles, and more recently, twice-monthly columns on faith, theology, and everyday living. About all of them I typically receive more gracious comments than they probably deserve, along with an ungracious comment or two more on the mark than I like to admit. My eighth book, Explorations in Faith and Belief, is posted for the taking on its own blogsite.

My wife and best friend, Nancy, and I have two daughters, Jennifer and Allison, and two grandchildren, Reiss and McKenna. If you are hesitant about telling me what you think of the postings on this site, be assured that none of these five loved ones is.

About the Blog

"Howe About" began in June, 2002, as a contribution to the outreach ministries of First United Methodist Church, Richardson, Texas. The bi-monhtly columns formed a basis for Sunday School classes and private exchanges not only at FUMCR, but across the country and overseas as well.

In 2006, Leroy changed the platform for his columns and became a full-fledged blogger. I am the technical assistant. I look forward to reading many more thought-provoking posts about the ways in which one can think Christianly about what is happening near and far today.

Chris Guldi

Navigating the Slippery Slopes

A favorite argument of rule-oriented legislators, jurists, and arm-chair moralists is that waiving disapproval, condemnation, or punishment of those who for any reason violate accepted codes of conduct will lead to a break-down of social values on a massive scale. Allowing our hearts or our conscience to interfere with meeting our obligations to do the right thing by following the right rules, without exception, is to begin a long, slippery, unstoppable slide into libertinism and godlessness, with only perdition at the end. A caricature of their position? Perhaps a more pragmatic --- actually, bureaucratic --- version of it would be fairer: “if we make an exception for you, we will have to make it for everyone.”

Recently, I had occasion to participate in a Memorial Service for a woman who committed suicide, to the shock and dismay of everyone who knew her. It was my task to deliver some “Words of Faith” and it was made extremely difficult by the celebratory tone of everything in the service to that point, except the final words of a beautifully rendered song offered just before I spoke: “There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” The words helped me get out other ones that simply had to be heard, too: that our friend betrayed our love and God’s by not reaching out to us as friendship demands. But the service ended as it began, rightly, by reassuring all of us that not even suicide can finally separate people from God’s love. There is no slippery slope here toward the countenancing of suicide.

About the time that this friend committed suicide, many of us were reading about an 83 year old man, dying from cancer, who fatally shot his wife out of fear that following his death, she would not receive adequate care in the aftermath of debilitating strokes. Before he died three weeks later, we were told, the man received compassion, understanding, and love from friends, neighbors, and even strangers, along with his priest’s assurance of God’s forgiveness and promise of a funeral in the church for himself and his wife together. Apparently, what trumped the act of murder in the eyes of those who knew him was the uncomplaining care he had lovingly given his stricken wife over many years. There is no slippery slope here either, this time toward the countenancing of homicide.

Both of these troubling cases suggest an important principle, not rule, of religious ethics: forgiveness is not permission, and it is not exoneration. It is grace and mercy tendered in the face of horrific culpability and destructive self-blame. It proceeds from a love that is respectful of the rules even as it reveres the persons whose struggles to obey them are sometimes agonizingly unsuccessful. It acknowledges that the basis of truly moral acts is more a purity of heart than it is a conformity of mind. To say all this in no way implies that rules are unimportant, or that church and society should sit loose on their enforcement, either in the legal or the moral sphere. The implication is only that there is more to law-abidingness and morality than knowing and mindlessly obeying the rules.

The truth about slippery slope arguments is that there really are such slopes to navigate in legal and moral decision-making. But most slip./slop. arguments misdirect attention from the single most dangerous argument of all, the “no exceptions” approach itself. This is a slope that confronts at every turn, and people can careen all the way down it before recalling how they slipped on it in the first place. All over the place these days there is a lot of such slipping and sliding going on, provoked by the-rules-period way of looking at things. While they whirl and twirl, legalists cry loudly to send all the “illegals” back where they came from, to deny access to the morning after pill for rape victims, to condemn jury nullification, to make doctrinal allegiance a condition for church membership (and in the Muslim world even citizenship), to allow hate speech to flourish in the name of freedom of expression, to preclude adoptions by gay and lesbian couples, to…

At the bottom of the no exceptions slippery slope is a legalistic mind-set that contemplates adoringly rules for the ages that bear only slightly, if at all, on the present circumstances of real people facing issues and decisions of unprecedented complexity. Jesus seemed to going after this way of thinking when he tossed in the idea that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. No wonder he got tossed out for breaking the rules.

The Gospel of Judas

The National Geographic Society has put a lot of time, money, and effort into the restoration and translation of a (3rd? 4th? century) Coptic manuscript of The Gospel of Judas. The original (Greek?) document ran afoul of church officials by the 180’s and its newfound successor may irritate even more of them in the 2000’s. I am glad the Society is involved in this, and wish its leaders well in recouping their costs, even if they have to continue pandering to the media in order to make it happen. Early Christianity was more diverse than many today are comfortable acknowledging, and anything that brings out both the diversity and the discomfort can be to the good.

The story of the document’s discovery is itself an exciting one and worth the price of the several books now coming out that include it. One of its implications is just the kind of thing that has been making people salivate over The Da Vinci Code: Big Dude church leaders from the late first century on have engaged in massive cover-ups of the real truth about Jesus to consolidate their power over rank and file believers everywhere. You can’t ask for a better story line than this. But it is well to remember, as Dan Brown usually but not always does, that we are talking about intriguing, captivating, exciting, not-to-be-taken-literally --- fiction. 

One cover-up alleged to have been exposed by the Judas Gospel is Gentile complicity in Jesus’ death. Making Judas, in name and in demeanor, the quintessential expression of how the Jews reacted to their own Messiah got everybody else off the hook and gave Christians just the scapegoat they needed to get a lot of things off their backs for millennia to come. Supposedly, this new gospel undermines the stereotyping completely. This would be a good thing --- anti-Semitism is blasphemy --- if it had not amounted to  substituting one set of falsehoods for another.

In the gospel, Judas hands Jesus over to the authorities at Jesus’ own request, a request Jesus made of him because he knew, contra everything else that is believed about Jesus’ life, that Judas was the only disciple who truly understood what he was about. In a strange kind of logic, the general agreement of all four of the canonical gospels --- none of whose authors knew any of the other three in person --- about Judas’ act of betrayal is now supposed to count against their reliability and for their participation in a massive cover-up. Could you run that by us again, please?

A second alleged cover-up is of the true nature of Jesus as divine, and as only divine. Those really in the know, in contrast with those who merely allow themselves to be told what to believe, know that Jesus’ so-called humanity is just that, outward appearance, for show purposes only, like an easily discarded and disposed of garment. Tucked into a neat phrase depicting Judas as exceeding all of the other disciples is a good illustration of this kind of reconstruction of Jesus’ identity: “For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me.” Just as clothes cover the body, Jesus’ manhood covers a divine nature that is  indestructible and incapable of really experiencing pain. Upon this view, the crucifixion was just play-acting on Jesus’ part.

One thing that must have turned on second-century Christians about this document is the support it gave for the newly emerging view that the divine nature proclaimed to co-exist with human nature in only one human being is actually in all of us, too, rendering our own physical existence inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The second century bishop, Irenaeus, now taking a lot of heat for failing to give this peculiar view its due, actually saw very clearly why the view will not do at all. Physicality is a wondrous gift from God, to Jesus and to everyone else besides. Whatever else Jesus’ resurrection implies for our own future with God, it also and emphatically implies that whatever is to come will come in at least some kind of bodily form. 

Comparing the truth “exposed” by the documents upon which Dan Brown drew for The Da Vinci Code with the document which is The Gospel of Judas should make us all just a little more reticent to glom onto the latest “revelations” about so-called long-suppressed ideas and conspiracies from earlier Christian times. What continues to bend people out of shape about the former is the idea of a Jesus so human that he married and had children. Now, the Judas thing comes along to enlist support for just the opposite view, a view which denies his humanity altogether. That’s diversity for you. Any discomfort yet?

Strangers, Sojourners, and Aliens In Our Midst

My all-time favorite unintended satire on lousy thinking is still the in-your-face bumper sticker proclamation, “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” Moving rapidly up to second place on my list, though, is the widely disseminating coup de grace conversation-stopper on our country’s struggles to formulate a fair and workable immigration policy:    “Illegal is illegal.” All well-formed tautologies are true, but not all are helpful.

Yes, “illegals” are people who are within our borders ill-legal-ly. Perhaps if they had been raised right and had come to possess a more law-abiding character, they wouldn’t have been so mean-spirited as to take advantage of porous borders and employers all too willing to hide and exploit them. How awful of these “aliens.” Well, now we will just have to take things into our own not-so-porous hands, and give these people the backs of them. Perhaps we could bring in consultants from Israel to show us how to replicate a wall that will keep our own version of the West Bank from overrunning God-given land. We could call it the Great Wall of the Rio Grande.

It is always an interesting question, and one that is never easy to decide, just how many immigants any one nation can welcome and assimilate without compromising its own future. Since the State of Israel has already been dragged into this discussion in a facile way, it might be appropriate to use another facet of her current condition to make a more serious point. During my several visits to that country over the past thirty years, I have noted with mounting anxiety two especially telling signs of population overload. One is declining water levels in the Sea of Galilee to the North as the water flowing into it from Mount Hermon is siphoned off to meet ever-expanding human needs elsewhere. The second is a further degradation of the Dead Sea to the south as the Jordan River is diverted away from it for more and more agricultural projects. Israel now has an altogether unwanted problem: she can no longer continue welcoming Jews from everywhere else with open arms, and survive.

It may very well be that our country, too, is rapidly reaching the point beyond which we can no longer absorb many more newcomers.Whether we are at that point or not, it certainly makes sense in the here and now to work on protecting our borders more effectively. I have to wonder, though, just how to pull off what the illegals-are-illegal-ists insist is the necessary first step. Sending eleven million unwanted people into Exile in one swoop will make the Exodus and the Babylonian Captivity seem like moving a wedding party from the Sanctuary to the Fellowship Hall.

It also makes sense to work on bringing the employment of immigrant workers under more effective law enforcement. 1200 illegal workers for a single company getting arrested across 26 states in one series of raids deserves the front page headline that this particular story got. More than likely, though, their employers will suffer far less than these workers will, to our collective shame. As raids like these continue, we can only hope that others from whose labors we benefit are equitably compensated, including being afforded all of the benefits due them. There is nothing in either of these imperatives that requires for its validation any principle other than that of applying the law fairly.

Biblical faith, though, makes all of these issues more complicated. Strangers, sojurners, and aliens --- not to mention slaves --- have always been of special concern to Jews and Christians alike, because they have been so evidently of special concern to God. God’s guidelines for dealing with them could hardly be clearer: hospitality, not rejection; respect, not exploitation; inclusion, not exclusion; love, not suspicion. What got the new settlers of the Promised Land to give even slaves a day off from work was the remembrance of their own enslavement in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15); what got them to be welcolming toward strangers was the remembrance of Abraham’s hospitality to men who turned out to be angels in his midst (Genesis 18:2-5). The author of I Peter addresses his readers as “aliens in a foreign land” (2:11) just after he has reminded them that they are now God’s people, not the “no people” they once were, and that they will never be outside God’s mercy again.

This land is your land; this land is my land. If it is ever to be “their” land, then “they” are going to have to work for it, and not have it just handed to “them.” Right? Or, as one Canaanite said to another…

Even Unto the Cross: an Eastertide Meditation

It never should have happened, but it did. The Messiah for the Jews, the Son of God to the Gentiles --- crucified, dead, buried, and with him the hopes of all the years. It took and takes a lot of explaining for Jesus’ followers to get people past this. That God raised him from the dead certainly helps the cause. In some ways, though, the Easter story just makes things worse. The enfleshed Logos a sacrificial lamb? Suffering a fate meted out under the requirements of a tribal mentality whose ethic of blood sacrifice was supposed to have been annulled long before the cross was even raised?

Not long after I first surveyed “the wondrous cross” for myself, I decided to give up on the kind of question that the early church kept asking, wrongly, about this ghastly event. Its question was: what made the manner of Jesus’death a necessary part of a divinely foreordained plan? My question increasingly became: how could I have expected anything else? People just like me --- self-centered, loving reluctantly and grudgingly if at all, looking for rules by which to judge others but never themselves, longing for a Paradise of their own making, contemptuous of trouble-makers --- all of a sudden had to confront a self-emptying, grace-filled, kingdom-proclaiming stonemason’s son audicious only in the confidence he had in their, and my, ability to live just like he did. Hey! Give us Barabbas, too!

The cross, then, was predictable, but never necessary. God could not have failed to anticipate the very strong possibility, probability perhaps, that his best effort to regain humankind’s loyalty would be rejected. But just as certainly, God could not have worked out the arrangement in such a way as to make rejection impossible. Not, at least, without destroying a part of God’s own nature in us, our freedom. Freedom only to say “Yes” to Christ is not freedom at all. If the price tag of getting right with God is giving back the right to stay alienated from him, then things are still not all right in the created order.

The mystery of Jesus’ suffering is not a mystery forever out of reach at the bottom of a great abyss of necessity, inevitability, or fatedness. Nor is it a prime time drama aimed at knocking off “The Ten Commandments” about a God whose hands were tied by a deal made in haste with a Denizen of the deep who once upon a time climbed down from heaven to lay in wait for a humanity created for nobler purposes. If all that Christianity can come up with by way of explaining the Cross is throwing together really dumb ideas about a divine placating of Satan and about setting the account books right on human sinfulness, then it is little wonder that its churches resort to believe-it-or-else arm-waving in order to get a hearing for it. No one in his right mind would go for it on her own.

Satan has no claims upon God to be placating. We are he (to clear up the indefinite antecedent, we delude ourselves by thinking we are the latter to avoid dealing with the reality that we are the former), and we lost the right to make demands on God long before our ancestors reached the base of Mount Sinai. God keeps no account books on obligations owed; his staff is too busy trying to track us down in our flight from him, so that he can still reach out to us, in love.

Unless handling snakes and drinking poisons and watching exorcisms still turn you on, you can probably get along at least reasonably well without a “ransom to the devil” theory of the crucifixion as an Atonement. But it still may be hard to give up the idea of his suffering and dying to make there “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world.” Certainly it is better to think in terms of our obligations to God than of God’s obligations to Satan. But having said that, it is even better to think of God’s mercies to both. Jesus’ crucifixion is an offer of grace; it is not a collection of debt.

And this is why surveying the “wondrous” cross can be and often is so painful. The greatest invitation anybody ever gave and ever will give to a suffering humanity --- and they missed it, and we miss it still. Grace, mercy, forgiveness, love, new life, singing, rejoicing, reuniting: that’s the real deal of a lifetime --- and beyond.

Staying In The Neighborhood

There we were, processing every which way out of old church buildings to brand new ones up the street, bumper to bumper in cars or shivering on foot in the wind and rain, but with smiles on our faces, eyes and hopes glistening, grateful to share an experience of a lifetime. Short as it was, the journey nevertheless yielded time enough to conjure a few thoughts about what it took to get this journey in faith on the road at all.

Start-up churches aspiring to become large, and large churches aspiring to become even larger, typically follow the advice of church-growth consultants who believe that moving up always necessitates moving out, moving on, and most especially, moving away. And so, way out on mega-acres, paved over with mega-parking spaces, mega-churches continue to draw to themselves mega-numbers of newly prosperous city flee-ers content to leave the spiritual problems of the not so fortunate to be taken care of  by the smaller, struggling churches that they either avoid in the first place or eventually leave behind.

To be fair, most mega-churches have mega-budgets for outreach and mission. What they do not have, however, is physical presence with their left-behind fellow believers who need their presence the most. Inviting the remaining city and inner-city dwellers to “come see us, y’all” isn’t much of a gesture to those among them who have no cars and have yet to learn how many bus transfers it will take to get to their would-be hosts’ front doors.

By the time my umbrella threatened to fail me on my walk up Custer Road Sunday, what I was most appreciating was how short the trek itself was. And this realization led me to a more important one: as mega-church moves go, “Moving in Faith” looms up as a quite different kind of project than the First United Methodist Church of Richardson, Texas, could and might have entertained. Yes, the church has moved, and to a truly beautiful and inspiring new setting. But it has not moved far, and it is has not left behind those who over the years have found in this church a spiritual home close-by. This, as some like to put it these days, is a good thing --- a very good thing.

The heart of Richardson, its inner-city heart at least, is changing dramatically, and it will continue to change dramatically in the years to come. Its economy, at long last, seems to be turning around, which means that there could be a little more money to be thrown around. Some of it might even find its way into FUMCR’s coffers, to alleviate at least a little of the strain of paying for the new digs, and to help keep alive the church’s long-standing tradition of minding the ministries as much as it minds the store.
 
The really big changes taking place in Richardson, though, have less to do with the economic and more to do with the ethnic, less to do with prosperity and more with pluralism, less to do with achieving oneness and more with celebrating diversity. For this new church on the city’s central artery, the really big change worth contemplating, a change unusual for mega-churches, is its commitment not to hoard its fancy new buildings for the sake of the upwardly-aspiring and the privileged, but to make the beauty of and the community within the place an inspiration to people whose lives are constantly threatened with ugliness and hopelessness, and menace thrown in for extra measure. I’m glad, really glad, that the church has chosen not to move away from this challenge.

The positioning of the new complex itself makes for a powerful symbol of embracing the challenge. With so many of its stunning windows opening out on a major highway, it deliberately makes the traffic flow visible rather than hidden, and a constant reminder of the church’s mission to be in this part of God’s world a welcoming and centering place for all kinds of people passing by, moving in, and staying on, who can rightly expect to be renewed from the experience of having dwelled in it even for a short while.

In the decades to come, it will be good to remember that in 2006, this church moved on in faith by also staying close by, by bringing into even clearer view the increasingly diverse people who will both pass by and settle in, and by celebrating the fact that the congregation remained who it most essentially is by staying right in the neighborhood, to be with and for them.

A Global Spiritual Awakening

One of the last century’s most respected existentialist philosophers, Karl Jaspers, once put forward the idea of an "axial age" in world history. He described it as a period of simultaneous spiritual break-throughs at widely separated points on the planet that together have transformed human existence in the world forever. Jaspers’ captivating idea provided the substance of one of his most readable and enthralling books, in English translation The Origin and Goal of History.

Recently, I took what must have been my sixth or seventh look at Jaspers' idea and discussion of it. And once again, I was overcome with appreciation for the breadth and depth of this philosopher's deep spiritual insights, of a sort difficult to come by in the reading of modern philosophy. This time, though, my appreciation assumed a slightly different form. If I may beat up the English language just a bit, Jaspers got it "righter" than even he was aware at the time he wrote. In specific, he defined the temporal parameters of the axial age in terms of a couple of centuries, when he could have worked within a framework of mere decades.

The decades I have in mind are roughly those between 590 and 530, B.C.E. Making allowances for the approximations and educated guesses ingredient in all historical reconstruction, the records suggest that across those years, the following spiritual leaders attained the height of their powers and influence: Zoroaster in Persia, Lao Tzu and Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, and the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah, exiled in Babylonia. And to make Jaspers’ notion of an axial age even more interesting, while these men were making their monumental contributions in these diverse regions on the globe, a new philosophical spirit was emerging in Southern Italy (e.g., in Xenophanes and Pythagoras) and Asia Minor (in Anaximander), sweeping away the worst in ancient Greek polytheism and replacing it with ideas of a God truly worthy of human worship.

Astonished by the coincidences among these massive spiritual break-throughs in such a brief span of historical time, Jaspers invited his readers to dwell with him on the mystery of such an overwhelming release of mental and spiritual energy into human consciousness without succumbing to the temptation to reduce it to some pretentiously articulated "explanation." For Jaspers, the break-throughs are in the final analysis inexplicable. But their import for subsequent generations is not.

One remarkable element in the teaching of all the sages and philosophers of this remarkable age was the ease with which each subjected "established" religious traditions to scrutiny and assessment on logical and moral grounds. Anything that would not yield to logical scrutiny --- for example, Hindu Brahmins' claims that only they had the capacity fully to understand the divine-human relationship --- these leaders quickly relegated to the status of mythology and superstition.

And anything that would not yield to examination and criticism on moral grounds, these same leaders just as quickly relegated to a contemptible status beneath human repect and loyalty. For example, practices designed to appease the spirits of departed and yet overly-involved ancestors failed to hold up under moral criticism, as did devotion to gods and goddesses whose character failed to reach the level of even mediocre human beings. Hebrew tribalism wilted under its exiled prophets' emerging universalist outlook, and not much later, Sophia --- "wisdom" personified --- began to take up her own rightful place in the affairs of all humankind.

Two things about this axial period in human history especially interested Karl Jaspers as a philosopher. The first was the liberation of the human spirit from bondage to religious authorities who demand unquestioning loyalty and demean all but themselves as bearers of the same divine image and "spark." The second was the discovery of rational thought as a means of approaching and giving expression to ultimate, sacred realities. For Jaspers, ever the existentialist, the realization of freedom and the exercise of the capacity for thought are what make human beings truly human. Thus, for him, the time of the axial age is quintessentially the time in which the human race began to attain its distinctiveness as a human race, as homo sapiens.

Jaspers' idea of a turning point in human history that is fundamentally spiritual in nature is especially relevant to the struggle that believers all over the world are facing these days, with fellow believers who are absolutely certain that nothing is really worth noting in the spiritual sphere until, for some, Jesus, and for others, Muhammed, made their appearance in human history. Placed alongside a grander sweep view of humankind's spiritual history, certitude of this sort ought to be called to account for just what it is, silly. Unfortunately, it is also dangerously silly.

Defaming the Prophet

Of all the world’s believers, there are equals to but none better than Christians at denigrating the people and leaders of the faiths closest to their own. Through the centuries, anti-Semitic stereotypes, tyrades, caricatures, and blasphemies have coursed their way through the discourse of even the most revered Christian leaders, and just when it seemed time for the faithful to move on, Islam took their next rounds of pillorying, to what should have been the shame of the rest of Christendom. Especially noxious and nauseous has been the Christian stereotype of Muhammed as a sexually promiscuous purveyor of aggression and destruction in the name of a manically violent Allah hell-bent on pursuing infidels to their everlasting damnation.

Perhaps this is why there has been so little serious Christian discussion to date about those  thoroughly disgusting cartoons depicting The Prophet as a ludicrous buffoon, and his religion as a debasement of every truly worthy idea of what is genuinely holy. Thus far, Westerners have shown more interest in defending freedom of the press in the abstract than in chastising this patently and mindlessly offensive behavior in very concrete terms. And while they wile away precious opportunities to promote healing by calling the cartoons and the cartoonists to task, their Muslim counterparts continue to put out newpapers that regularly degrade Jews.

Some of the most patience-challenged in Muslim countries are getting themselves killed in riots self-righteously dedicated to defending The Prophet’s honor, as if The Prophet needed their help at all and as if any of them were worthy enough to offer it in the first place. And Islamic terrorists --- some clergy included --- continue to fan the conflagrations’ flames for personal gain, abrogating all responsibility for keeping the faithful safe from their own impulses. What makes it all even worse is the unlikely prospect that the producers of this dangerous farce can learn anything constructive from the experience.

But maybe we can, most especially about the theological issue that is at stake in the controversy. It is the issue of representing sacred realities visually. From its beginning, Islam has taken with utmost seriousness the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” and has applied it not only to Allah, but to his Prophet as well. Words about both are acceptable; pictures of either are not. In the sacred sphere, Islam teaches, pictorial images can lead to idolatry, to identifying a humanly created picture with the divine reality it is created to represent. And as the Danish cartoons made plain, pictorial images can also inflame unhelpful passions. Soliciting and printing the cartoons were consummately disrespectful acts of woefully ignorant people.  

If we are going to continue to keep our own counsel about this very public controversy, we probably ought to take a second look at our our own proclivity to slander and defamation when it comes to acknowledging the place that Islam has won for itself and will continue to hold in world history. For instance, in the aftermath of 9/11, Franklin Graham, Billy’s son and successor, gave us a hint of Christianity’s own dark side when he unctiously referred to Islam as an evil religion. He, of course, thinks we need to be concerned primarily about terrorists. I think we need to be even more concerned about him, and about the people who share his toxic view of how God is working in the world. For the sad fact is, he and they can go just as nuts as their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts can and sometimes do.

One thing that gets Christians so bent out of shape toward their Muslim brothers and sisters is surely Islam’s superior track record at conquering people for the cause of their own religion. Three centuries before Muhammed appeared on the scene, Constantine and his successors were running full stop at bringing people to Christ by means of the sword, but the barbarians’ swords too often proved stronger, and in the end just holding back the darkness was about all that Holy Church could manage. It must have really grated on Christian leaders that the Muslim conquests of the eighth century far outstripped anything that their predecessors could even dream about in the fifth.

And then there was that lack of darkness at all in the lands conquered in the name of Allah. For centuries after Christianity packed its own failed efforts in, Islam kept high civilization alive and well, and eventually gave it back to the very Western world that declared its custodians scourges of the earth. It must have really grated on Christian leaders that the light shining in the Dark Ages was anything but the light that their predecessors expected it would be.

The Prophet deserves a better press.