You can explore there, maybe help out, and be excited with us for the next phase in our adventure.
You'll also see I added some other pages to make this look a little more like a real website (someday I'll figure out the right url and buy it, I promise). But I also wanted to highlight my writing and speaking. I want to do more of both, so having a way to invite connection makes sense.
If you've got a congregation, camp, gathering, or group that might benefit from engaging with me, let me know. I'm always excited to connect with people.
If you want to talk more about The Nest and the new ministry we'll be doing in our new house, you can check out the Facebook page. This what we've been dreaming about and trying for the whole seven years we've lived in Middletown and we're excited for the possibilities.
Max Lucado, if you don't know, is a pastor from Texas, but one of the more prolific evangelical authors of recent times. He's published 40 some books and the jacket of this one boasts 130 million total books in print. His writing is basically a Christian version of self-help, with lots of bible verses and basic affirmations. It's not terrible. I don't always (or often) agree with his theology, but I have found his writing helpful from time to time (especially when I was younger and less confident in my own beliefs).
I don't want to trash it, but it's not my thing.
As I read through the book, some chapters seem really good - like they'd be incredible helpful to people who need a dose of hope. Others (far fewer) seem problematic, like they're going to provide a short term fix, but make things worse in the long run. These tend to be over-spiritualized chapters. It's not surprising; one of the hallmarks of evangelical theology is a tendency to downplay or ignore humanity. Modern evangelicalism was birthed out of a theological divide that, in shorthand, led to liberals being associated with social justice and real-world problems, while conservatives became associated with eternal destiny and spiritual health. These are just stereotypes, but they're important.
In one chapter, Lucado talks about how the Devil is the embodiment of evil and selfishness and those people who deny the real, personal existence of a devil are just playing into his schemes for damning our souls. This is very typical evangelical fodder (although a bit dated) perfectly appropriate for someone Lucado's age and for his core audience. I'd argue this kind of talk ends up letting us, as people, off the hook. We blame the devil for our sin and it creates a layer of separation from responsibility. Evangelicals have been trained to take the shame and guilt of sin on ourselves (sometimes too much), but we struggle accepting responsibility, which, in my view, is a real key to overcoming and redeeming our faults and failures.
The most recent chapter I read started and ended with the powerful story of a college softball player who injured her knee rounding first base on a game-winning home run. The rules prevented her teammates from helping her to reach home plate, so the opposing team decided to do it, even though it meant them losing the game. It's a profound story of compassion and selflessness - the kind of thing that can bring a tear to the eye and stir the soul.
Lucado uses it in an interesting way, though. The softball story is bookended around an extended explanation of Jesus' humanity. (Lucado's real talent is somehow extending what should be a paragraph of information into a chapter; that's how you write forty books while working full-time as a pastor.) He talks about how Jesus experienced life as we do, understands our suffering, and offers a solution.
All of that is great. He ends the chapter, though, after revealing the conclusion of the story, by saying what that opposing team did for the injured player in what Jesus wants to do for us. We're stuck in the failure and inadequacy of life, incapable of doing what we need to do and God makes up the difference. That's all true, but it missed the actual, practical point: that we're called to do for others what those players did for their opponent. We're called to be the difference for each other.
Now, I grew up hearing that kind of argument refuted as humanistic. God does for us; we don't do for ourselves. Ultimately that comes back to the Calvinist idea of total depravity - that sin completely removed the image of God from humanity and we're incapable of doing good without God.
That's not the foundational argument for over-spiritualizing, but it is a contributing factor. Many evangelicals want to be careful not to attribute anything good to humanity.
I don't think that's a real worry, because I don't believe in total depravity. I certainly affirm that people are incapable of being good on their own, but I wholeheartedly believe God has always intended to make us partners in the redemption of the universe. God works with us and in us - sometimes before we're even aware of it - to bring good to the world. It doesn't diminish the power of God to say that we can be agents of grace and salvation to one another - so long as we recognize the work of God underneath and within it all.
The real issue evangelicals struggle with - at least in this instance - is the notion that this life doesn't matter. We get so focused on being "in the right place" when we die that our lives become a means to an end. I don't know whether Lucado himself would say it (I don't like putting words in someone's mouth), but many evangelicals would say that grand gesture in the softball game doesn't mean squat if the people involved haven't prayed the right prayer and committed their lives to Jesus Christ.
That's far too dichotomous for me. It's a simplistic separation between the physical and spiritual - something the New Testament and the earliest Christians fought tooth and nail against. Jesus profoundly merged the physical and spiritual; the Jewish tradition (of which Jesus was deeply a part) says we are not us without both elements. The Lord's Supper, the center of our faith, makes it very clear how these two things are completely intertwined.
Yes, Jesus wants to do for us spiritually what those players did so graciously and self-sacrificially for their opponent. We can be lifted up, made whole, healed, and redeemed by the love of Jesus Christ. But that love was manifested in a physical act: suffering and dying out of love for the world. That love continues to be manifested in physical acts, like the one in question and a billion others around the world every day.
In fact, Jesus tells his disciples they will do even greater things than him. Maybe, just maybe, some of those things are fallible, sinful, dysfunctional human beings responding to the love of God by being agents of salvation to each other in the midst of the world. I don't believe eternity is some far off place. I don't believe "afterlife" is the best way to talk about heaven. Eternity begins here and now. God's redemption is happening as we speak. Our call is to be part of it as God calls an enables.
I believe strongly the condition of your soul has far more to do with the condition of your hands and heart than most evangelicals have been led to believe. I suppose there's some danger out there that we could focus so much on humanity that we forget God. I don't think it's likely, though. After all, no one has put more faith in humanity than has God. We'd do well to follow that example.
Way back last fall I purchased an online course from the great Peter Rollins. He did a "pay what you can" offer for his teaching on Paul Hessert's book Christ and the End of Meaning. There's nine videos (with Q & A, since the course was originally taught live online), plus a PDF copy of the book, which is out of print. I got the course as professional development. I need 20 hours of continuing education as part of my ordination and it's so wonderful to have such great online resources available.
I didn't intend, necessarily, to write or report on what I was learning, but after viewing the first video and reading the first chapter of the book, I'm pretty excited about the kinds of thoughts in triggers in my mind. The following is an extended quote from Chapter 1, that I felt most compelling:
In order for Christianity to be "meaningful" in the culture, it must validate the culture's demands for meaning and power and try to fulfill them. It does this by accepting the cultural structure as the basis of its own understanding — that is, the imperfect present linked to, but separated from, the ideal by time and guilt. The variant forms of Christian thought and practice — conservative, liberal, evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, orthodox — are but various forms of this one cultural orientation. In spite of the specific features by which each distinguishes itself from the others, or those features by which the others characterize it, there is a remarkable structural unanimity.
For example, all are one in the condemnation of the present as deficient to the ideal or even a betrayal of it. One stresses contemporary "immorality" in terms of promiscuous and deviant sex, drug and alcohol addiction, and preoccupation with "materialistic concerns." Another attacks "secular humanism." Another stresses systemic poverty and indifference to human values. Still another points to obsession with ideology that feeds the arms race and the peculiar economy attending it. Another concentrates on the neglect of traditional religious and patriotic practices.
It is the circle of reality as a whole that is legitimated by religion, and the condemnation of the present, in whatever form this may take, is one of the most important ways this circle is supported. Condemnation of the present is not an attack on the culture but a reinforcement of its structure.
Hessert's main argument is that western society has one "circle of reality" through which it approaches life. Generally this is the distance between what is and what might be. We see ourselves as we are and the distance between now and some ideal future as the purpose of life. We want something different than what we have - whether it's a job, money, a relationship, happiness, peace, freedom, weight loss, whatever - and we work towards achieving it.
His argument is essentially that most of Christianity has generally participated in this same western "circle of reality." Typically, though, various Christian denominations find an alternative goal. They replace whatever "worldly" thing we're searching for with Jesus or fulfillment or social justice or whatever, calling it a different perspective or worldview, but really just reinforcing the very same "circle of reality" centered in pursuit.
It's only chapter one, so I don't have a lot, yet, to say about the alternative, but I'm fascinated by the religious implications of Hessert's idea that there is an alternative - an alternative that is perhaps much closer to Christ and Christ's teaching than what we've come to know as Christianity.
Established religion, at least in this western "circle of reality," tells us there's something wrong with the world. It highlights the difference between what is and what could be, focusing on all the problems that prevent the now from being the ideal. What if a better understanding of Christianity says there's nothing wrong with the world, just our perception of it?
Rollins used the analogy of fish in the water. They're not conscious of the water itself, it is just part of the fabric of a fish's reality. Our "circle of reality" is not something we inherently see, but the structure by which we experience the world. Jesus called us to notice the water, to see our "circle of reality," and then Jesus challenged us to adopt a different one. The critique of Christianity is not about the substance of our beliefs, but about the very frame around which we build them.
Jesus provides a fundamentally different way of seeing and understanding existence. "Blessed are the poor" makes no sense in our culture, neither does "love your enemies," or "give without asking anything in return." These ideas fundamentally contradict how we understand the world. Our "circle of reality" is built around acquisition and improvement, but Jesus calls us to look at things differently.
What if the Kingdom of God is not something in the future (the ideal), but it's just a different way of seeing what's already here? Again, it's only chapter one, but I'm excited to see how Hessert (and Rollins) explores this argument more thoroughly. What if the culmination of all things is not some far off resolution to a current problem, but the result of people seeing the world as it is?
I love the optimism of this idea: that there's nothing wrong with the world, just something profoundly wrong with how we look at it (and thus how we live in it).*
*I found out this is, apparently, a Henry Miller quote. Who knew? (Not me. I promise.)
