When we think about the "love like family" line (as a way Christians should treat each other, by the way), we tend to go towards one idealistic extreme - a sort of utopia, where stress and anger and dissent are absent, replaced with nothing but warm fuzzies and lots of affection. That's not how real families function, though, is it - people who have actual family relationships understand that things aren't always easy or rosy or particularly fun. We commit to them precisely because there's something about family that means something to us. Even when you don't have any real relationship with your relatives, we tend to form families anyway - people we treat the same way, people we're committed to despite whatever roadblocks or disagreements might arise. While those are powerful and meaningful, they're not perfect either.
As I was thinking about this analogy of "loving like family," I'm wondering if the idealistic extreme that comes to mind oughtn't (that's a real word, I promise) be more like Game of Thrones. I'll admit some bias here - my wife decided to start watching the show very recently, so I've seen something like 40 episodes is three weeks - it's on my mind a bit." The show is full of regal families, reminiscent of the nobility of European past - people whose family name means something - something valuable that they're trying to protect.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we should be callously marrying off children to fulfill social or economic purposes, and, obviously, secretly plotting to kill each other whilst publicly displaying loyalty and honor seems a far cry from anything remotely Christian, I wonder if the concept of family that underlies the dysfunction isn't a more apt analogy for what Paul's trying to convey.
There is a duty present that overwrites any personal emotion; a communal consideration that outweighs individual preference. This is important. I don't want you to hate your fellow Christians - far from it - but I think Paul's calling us to respond to them with the same kind of Christ-like selfless love, even if you do.
We're certainly not going to feel ecstatic love for one another all the time - real relationships exist within the entire gamut of emotions - and we obviously disagree about all sorts of things. Love like family should trump all of that, though. In Game of Thrones, everything is a means to an end (the characters for whom it's not almost always find themselves unceremoniously dead) and if you've read just about anything I've written, you know I don't look kindly on that way of viewing the world. This is why it's an extreme - it's one thing to sublimate your own happiness for the greater good; it's quite another to force those whom you purport to love to do the same (often against their will).
Our preferred extreme isn't any better, though. Envisioning a world in which everyone loves each other so much there's never any conflict denies people their humanity in the same way. It respects no individuality or choice - it's also only imaginable in a world where our preferences are everyone else's. We've essentially composed our ideal in our image and just image everyone else in total agreement. That's as arrogant and selfish as anything done on TV.
As with most things we'd prefer to be black and white, we have to find our way in the murky middle. Obviously either extreme is problematic, neither one is "right" or desirable or something to aim for - one of them, however, is others focused. If we see family as the move towards kumbaya serenity, any disruption is going to feel personal - we're all supposed to be happy; why am I not happy? If we see it as duty, as an obligation we have to others above and beyond our own happiness, disruptions become externally focused - why is she not happy; how can I make his life better?
I suppose the gospel answer to all of this is that we find whatever "fulfillment" we need by not seeking it. We are satisfied by forgetting satisfaction. The real ideal is, in fact, an oxymoron. There's no guarantee we will be rewarded for loving others above ourselves, but there's some beauty in the logic of everyone doing it; it just seems like that would create the kind of family that both reflects reality AND our desires.
We all fall short of that, of course, but in doing so, let's remember that "loving like family" is most certainly not about our happiness -
and let's try real hard not to chop off anybody's head.
We live in a world where the dragon is long dead. We've prioritized individual determinism over authoritarian rule. It's all but inevitable (and probably good, in most respects). People are individuals, after all, and our recognition and respect for that reality is important to the flourishing of humanity.
I think Nietzsche's point was that society will keep hacking away at the dragon until it's dead. We'll go after institutions and authority until none remain. Nietzsche saw the problem from a long way off - if we kill authority, from whence does authority come?
That is ultimately our contemporary question.
From a Christian perspective, our tendency has been to reinforce the dragon, saying that killing it is wrong and those who try are evil. This isn't entirely consistent, though, since much of the Christian story is that of championing the underdog and standing with the oppressed - so being anti-anti-authority is not something we can sell out for with integrity.
At the same time, though, we're believers in community - believers that the individual is not the end all and be all of existence. We believe we're all connected in our shared existence and what each of us does affects every other.
There has to be some means of recognizing the individual, but not as ultimate authority. In other words, we've got to stand with the dragonslayer, but also stick around after the beast is dead to work together to pick up the scales that make sense for community. We are not our own; we're part of something bigger. We shouldn't be denied our independence, but we must also not be content with our independence and in doing so, deny our interdependence.
We must fight tooth and nail for individual rights and freedom, but we must then call these free individuals to sacrifice some measure of that hard-won individualism for the sake of community. We can say, "authority resides in free individuals," but existence is bigger than that. The dragon is doomed, if its not already dead, stop guarding the body and help us pick up the pieces. Authority comes in relationship - the very relationships we all need to be truly human. We have to be together, to work together - not to tell each other what to do, but to help each other do what we exist to do.
The dragon might be a terrible idea, but not every scale is worthless. Authority must take on a different shape, especially as it pertains to the Church. The age of institutionalism is over; authority works in new and different ways. Although, just maybe, we've had those ideas all along. Whatever the new shape of the Church, it must not be a dragon.
Perhaps we should try a slaughtered lamb?
Last week sometime, there was an email from David Busic, one of our General Superintendents I knew and interacted with before his election to the office. I appreciated what he had to say and I agree with much of it. I think congregations would do well to discover what leads young people to leave regular participation with a congregation or faith altogether upon reaching adulthood; it's an important issue of which to be aware.
I'm not sure, though, that discovering and replicating the reasons young people continue with congregational involvement is the right approach. In fact, I suspect this is precisely what we've been doing all along. I tend to think that the things we do that keep some young people involved are the same things that make it easy for others to leave. I'm not sure its healthy for anyone.
Within pastoral circles, Moral Therapeutic Deism isn't even a buzzword anymore, it's a cliche. It's very much a description of our civil or cultural religion - God wants you to be happy and behave, if you do, you'll go to heaven. It's a faith, as Scott Daniels likes to say, that's like Parmesan on the pasta of life, rather than the meal itself.
This is the faith we have largely passed on to our young people. Not to keep quoting Scott Daniels, but it changed my life when I heard him preach one Sunday, "Our children are desperate for us to give them something worth dying for and we refuse to do it." I think this is the issue with young people leaving congregational life AND those who stay.
We've set up a system of rules, boxes to check to confirm morality and goodness and salvation. If people follow the rules, they get the reward. This segregates faith from a lot of areas of life that aren't specifically covered in the rules; sometimes it lets those outside influences create the rules. But the bottom line is the rules: this is how you're supposed to live and if you do, you're in God's good graces.
Many of the young people who move seemlessly from adolescence to adulthood in congregational life are doing so because the rules work for them. Those who leave often do so because they have questions about the rules or the lack of depth and meaning contained therein; sometimes, those young people study the scriptures and question why some of the rules even exist at all, given those things we claim to believe.
I'm not saying every person who stays or goes does so because of this, but it's a significant influence and simply packaging the rules more attractively or selling them better is not actually going to address the problem. In the end, Christianity is essentially counter-cultural, even if that culture is one that labels everything "Christian." The notion of "fitting in" or "following the rules" works against the personal formation to which Christ calls each of us to undertake - even if those are "good" rules.
The best thing you can do to encourage all your people, young or old, to participate in the ongoing body of Christ, is to be comfortable with challenge and questions and uncertainty and doubt. People leave because they don't feel welcome, because they don't "fit in." The gospel of Christ calls us to welcome all, to not have any standard but love. The bar for entry in the Church of Jesus Christ is inconceivably low.
I know that makes running an institution difficult, which in turn makes our General Superintendents lives difficult (you know, since they run an institution), but maybe each of us needs to hear that perhaps the ongoing functioning of our religious institutions shouldn't be the goal. I'm not saying we should work against it, but perhaps the best way to keep these religious organizations working in sustaining and healthy ways is to be a little less worried about their sustained success and a little more focused on embodying the counter-cultural love modeled for us by Christ.
The idea of Resident Aliens is primarily that the Church is a "colony of heaven," in the way that conquerors (they might call themselves explorers or liberators) develop colonies in new lands, which are reflective of the home culture, so the Church is called to be a colony of a different world in the midst of this world. A Greek colony in Egypt would've maintained the Greek attitudes towards education, commerce, and social relations, despite those things being at odds with the larger world they find themselves living in.
Christians are called to live differently - not to make the world in which they live more Christian, but to present an alternative means of living - one reflective of God's intentions for the world as revealed in Christ. Christ then becomes the key to all this. The book says that when Christians look a the world, we see something that cannot be seen without Christ - the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection provides a lens by which we see the whole concept of life differently.
I was reminded of a song we sung in worship a few weeks back. It's entitled "Hold to God's Unchanging Hand," and contains a line that really caught my attention: "Build your hopes on things eternal," which I imagine has traditionally been looked upon as escapist. There's a long modern Christian tradition of viewing the world as imperfect and temporary, thus the common advice when things go poorly is "don't worry, there's another world out there somewhere; think about eternity."
I see this line more in terms of what Hauerwas and Willimon are trying to say: that there is an entirely different way of looking at this world, an eternal view, a "heavenly" view, something more reflective of what God has in mind, as revealed in Christ.
This difference shows up in the second challenge of Resident Aliens' first chapter: to ask the right theological questions. The authors argue that we typically engage the politics of the world on their own terms - this stretches all the way back to Constantine, the Roman Emperor who first embraced Christianity as a unifying force. Since then we've largely asked "how can we run this world in Christian ways?" It's become a political preoccupation that's gotten us nothing but trouble. Instead, what Willimon and Hauerwas propose is that we ask "What would the world look like if it reflected the gospel?"
This is what I think of when I hear, "Build your hopes on things eternal." We don't have to take the systems and structures we have as inevitable. God calls us to build our lives on a different set of principles and realities, to be a true alternative to the way things seem to work in the world around us. This is the colony concept; the Church's purpose is to be something different, not take the world around us and make it different.
I know the immediate "but" in this is "but if you succeed in building an alternative, won't that just attract 'the world' to join, thereby changing the world into something Christian?" In a sense, yes, of course that leads into conversations about HOW precisely that is done - through an actual attempt to change or through a faithful representation of an alternative - but even that is getting ahead of ourselves, right? We're assuming that living faithfully into an alternative is easy - that establishing and maintain this colony of heaven is a given. It's hard work.
The book goes on to talk specifically about how our politics (in whatever way we've worked them out) have failed us and challenging the Church to a new kind of politics, one that operate on its own system, rather than trying to co-opt the systems around us. There's plenty to delve into there, and I'd love to have those conversations if you want to dialogue about them, but I think this first notion is a really important start.
Build your life on things eternal is not about spiritualizing everything, but it's also not about digging in to physical-ize everything either. We've had quite enough of activist Christianity already. I think rather the call is to have our foundational understandings shaped and formed by the gospel rather than by the world in which we live. We have to stop taking for granted the "realities" we're presented with and imagine our realities in light of God's revelation in Christ.
Well, just some random thoughts on a Thursday. Cheerio.
It was the 2008 election that finally drove me to stop voting. It was a bit of a strange election for me; I'd written in John McCain for President the two previous times I'd been old enough to vote. Now he was on the ballot for real and I was not a fan. It was a "change" election, right? I'm not sure people had the same sense of change in 2000; I know they didn't have it in 2004 because they re-elected the same guy.
2008, though, people wanted something different. Change was in the air. Which, I guess, made that election ripe for a messiah complex. Oh nearly every politician has it; it would be near impossible to put one's self through a modern American campaign without really believing you were the one to change everything, to get it right. I'm not sure the candidates ever have it as bad as their voters have it for them. When they do, that's when you get autocrats and dictators. But the narrative is bigger than the man.
In 2008 I saw myself too easily subsumed with that mentality - that one person could be the one to change everything. About four months before the election, I checked out. I was reading Jesus for President at the time. It's a compelling argument. Oh, I was still excited about the election - it was historic, after all - but it was the start of a different perspective.
Barack Obama, like every other President, didn't really give us change. He certainly did some of the same things in different ways (there are uniquenesses to everybody), but he did things the same way. Who, was it, who said: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
That doesn't stop us from hoping, though. We're seeing it again this time around. People want change; they're desperate for something different. So they gravitate to a candidate who's real good about setting himself apart. To look different, in our mind - in our society, is to be different. That's the narrative anyway. So we find someone, this someone just comes right out and says it, who's "the only one" that can make things right.
That's got messiah written all over it.
If you're looking for a new way to achieve an old goal, Donald Trump can seem like a good option. There ain't nothing traditional about him. It's hard to imagine anything but change from a President Trump, however you want to slice it. But, of course, it's not really change. It can't be, because we're still all playing the same game. It's the real danger of nationalism, of patriotism - the system becomes so ingrained in us, over generations, that we can't imagine anything different - we are incapable of seeing any alternative to playing the same game by different rules.
That's what people were hoping for from Obama and it's what people (almost assuredly a 100% completely different group of people) are hoping for from Trump. New rules - or at least a reset - a chance to right what once went wrong. What we're missing, though, is a real alternative.
This is the subversive gospel of Jesus. People were expecting a change, and looking to messiah to bring it. There had been a lot of messiah's in Jesus' time and before. Years and years of dead guys who ran on hope, incapable of bringing real change. Because they were playing the same game, just hoping that new rules would change things. They never do.
It's ironic that the one guy who perhaps deserved to have the messiah complex didn't. Jesus looked at the expectations of messiah and said, "no thank you." The people wanted him to play the game, to march into Jerusalem and then, maybe Rome, at the front of a righteous army and fight power with power, grab the throne, change the rules, and make things good and just and right for all those who'd been wronged.
Sound familiar? I know; it's enough to make you sick.
Jesus gets to be messiah because he refused to play the messiah game. No change. No marching into the eye of the political machine and taking the world by storm. He just checked out. Said, "you can play all your crazy power games, I'll be here with the hopeless and the helpless; give us a call when you get tired and want to really live."
You can see a bit of this in those 60's radicals - the hippies. They lived in a tumultuous time, one in which most people couldn't help but beg for change. They tried, they really tried to get outside the game. They checked out, too. Let's all go live on a farm in upstate New York and grow our own food and love each other. It sounds great; it is great. The problem is they expected to change the game by not playing.
It's a subtle difference.
Your brother is cheating at monopoly, so you thrown down your wad of colorful cash and stomp off to the other room. You're reading a book with a frown on your face, but also with a constant glance over the top of the pages, just waiting for him to give in. "Oh come on," he'll say, "I promise I'll play fair, just come back." You might refuse a time or two, but ultimately you'll return, because you really do love playing the game. It's the only one in town.
Jesus didn't look back, though. It's the one thing his followers miss the most when they try to imitate him today. We're always expecting our alternative lifestyle to change the mainstream. Christianity has become an avenue of change. We're walking away with our neck craned over our shoulder, unaware that it's just going to turn us into a pillar of salt.
The way of Christ is not a new and improved way to change the game. It really means leaving the game for good. Giving up. Not because you're a sore loser, but because you really recognize that the game's not worth playing. It doesn't actually have the meaning and importance we've always been told it possesses.
I still love the political game. It's entertaining and unpredictable; it's fun. It's even more fun when you ascribe to it no power whatsoever. It's like a game of solitaire. Have you ever got to a point where the board is so hopelessly messed up it's more frustrating than fun? Do you keep going because it's a game and there are rules and you need to see it through? Or do you remember it's just a game, what's more, a game with no opponent. There's nothing wrong with just piling up the cards and putting them back in the box.
It's so easy for us to press on, to seek out real change from the messiahs that so readily offer themselves up to us. It's far more difficult to give up our notions of right and wrong and power and privilege and just live, outside the game. The Matrix started out as some great gospel allegory. People saw Neo's escape from fantasy into a larger world as akin to a Christian conversion - from something fake to something real. As the movies went along, though, we came to realize that the game never ends. When he thinks he's escaped, Neo has just reached a different level. Yes, maybe the rules are different and things look new, but the game is always the same.
Those movies end up depressing and nihilistic. The message is that we're always caught in the game; there is no escape. You know what? Maybe that's true. Maybe even the messianic way of Jesus, of checking out without checking back, is just another layer in a game that is both vitally important and epically meaningless. I mean, there's no real way to be sure, right? At least not until we've explored the whole thing - not until we've journeyed through Zion and found the architect wanting.
I just know I'm not about to play the game the way it's always been played, and especially not with the meaning and importance it's always been given. I'd prefer to have my messiahs in denial, refusing the power others so desperately crave. It seems like the only way to make a real life in this world. It's just so easy to succumb to the siren's spell, to fall in line with the chorus of those who see no other way.
What piques my interest, what makes this non-messiah messiah worth following is how he challenges this power game. By refusing to play, Jesus rejects power as powerful. By choosing to die he somehow finds life. It is this self-sacrificial love, as improbable and unfathomable as it may be, that just seems to fit.
In the end, maybe those hippies were right - they just didn't have the patience to see it through. Perhaps all you really do need is love?
*For an in-depth analysis about how The Matrix really says this same thing, check out this piece I didn't discover until after I wrote mine - it's way cooler than the last movie itself.
