It's a strange wrap-up to the Christmas season, news-wise. Sure, there's the usual report card from business people about whether we're spending enough, a whole project about which I'm growing increasingly dubious. Sure, there's the usual human interest stories that percolate this time of year: snow, stolen goods, charitable giving. Sure, there's the usual movie reviews, top 10 book lists, and general ranking of things that happened in the last twelve months.
But to end up, right before Christmas, hearing so much about lame ducks (a phrase that still brings me joy to hear), don't ask don't tell, and nuclear disarmament? Hm. What an interesting world.
Mostly, it reminds me of how complicated the world is. A lame duck congress is supposed to be good for nothing, and yet its very finitude (they're all going home, and some of them for good) spurs them on to try and work through difficult things rather that strategizing and manipulating. The very thing that makes it 'lame' (and, I suppose, a 'duck') is the very thing that finally let them dialogue and debate. Despite what the news media is saying today as it tries to sum up everything into big headlines, like "Christmas has come early (NPR)" or "Republicans back down (NYT)" or, "From Shellacking to Success (Washington Post)" or "Season of Progress" (Fox), I don't think any of it sums up well. The narrative here is not nearly so brief, punchy. It's complicated, a triumph of persistence in part, but also the only time of year no one is campaigning. I could make similar comments about Don't Ask Don't Tell--an ambiguous success on some level (really? Is our life so bad that we have to applaud ourselves for allowing gays to state their identity before we let them die for us? Really? And yet, it is progress for us), and I could say something similar about nuclear disarmament--a foot in the door is great, but it's also only a foot in the door.
As we run up to Christmas, I find myself grateful for all these things. Our faith informs and transforms our politics as Christians, and these are causes worth being involved in--the treatment of one another as human beings, the dialogue necessary to govern a nation, the tiny steps toward peace. And yet, as I reflect on the complexity of these stories, I find myself thinking again and again about the role of the church in the modern world. Specifically: what if our stories don't fit in bullet points? What if complexity is necessary to human life, to human community? How can media teach complexity?
I wonder if we could all give ourselves a Christmas present and turn off the media for a few days this year. Not because media is bad, not because staring at a screen is bad, not because learning is bad--but because maybe life is not as simple as what fits on my monitor, because life requires reflection and not only action. Because we need some time to reflect, and not only to move on to the next human interest story (alligators in the sewer!). And most of all, because God is surprisingly bigger than the talking points.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Not even fools
A thought or two on preaching the lectionary this Sunday, Advent 3.
From Isaiah:
What a simultaneously puzzling and hopeful passage. The idea that Israel would have public works projects, a kind of pre-Roman interstate, is interesting, and it's probably even more interesting if it's not a literal highway that runs to Tel Aviv. More particularly, a few words in it offer odd and fascinating windows on our faith.
What do we do with this mention of the unclean, those not allowed on it? This doesn't sound like a very Jesus-y claim, as he seemed rather fond of opening the holy to the unclean as well as recently showered. But of course this is Isaiah, not Jesus. He seems to be envisioning a road without traffic.
After all, imagine if we bumped all the unclean people off the road we commute on, whatever our means of commute. How wonderful it would be to have the road/train car/sidewalk to ourselves! To have all those whose driving we mock in popular jokes removed, which would include: low-riders, beat-up pickups with confederate flags, old people generally, young people generally, all soccer moms, business people on cell phones, and of course, women. Finally! A pure road, clean of bad driving! <--That's a fairly ambiguous picture, one that simultaneously shows us our petty intolerance and captures the feeling of free travel. We can imagine what that kind of driving would be like, but hopefully we might all recognize how it shows us our own bigoted selves, selves which come out almost exquisitely when we drive. Perhaps, in other words, Isaiah is exactly like us--and we should recognize the feeling Isaiah is speaking of, that of unencumbered travel, and also recognize the good old sinful humanity that, like us, imagines success at the expense of those who are different from us.
But more interesting to me is the passage closer to the end: no one, not even fools, shall go astray. I find this to be one of the most optimistic pictures of life offered in all of Scripture. How wide, exactly, would a road have to be so that no one would go astray? Exactly how large are the guard rails? And even more: 'fool' turns up in a few strategic places in the psalms, namely, where it reads: "The fool says in his heart that there is no god." Could this passage be speaking of that same fool? Can God craft a road so large that even the most foolish, those who don't believe in the road they're walking on, can still reach home?
Whether that sort of reference is a legitimate one here, I am uncertain, but I find it intriguing. I think a more helpful way to approach the verse is to notice that once someone has gotten on the way, no matter how foolish, they won't go astray. What this might mean for Christians engaging in radically different cultures, learning about other faiths, to me seems fairly obvious.
But more interesting to me would be if we could seriously ponder what this might mean for how we treat each other. In our own era, to disagree is to cut relationship. It happens with news channels, among families, and in friendships. A few stand the test of serious disagreement, but these days, most relationships ignore disagreement or break it off--witness, for example, the divorce rate, which is caused by many things (a confusion about what marriage is for, inter alia), but surely also by the confusion of agreement with relationship. In other words: when we think someone's acting like a fool, we stop being their friend.
But how might we look differently if we saw that not even fools can go astray? If nothing so foolish can happen that it severs relationship? How could we respond to others if we saw their foolishness as only one moment in a whole lifetime of walk along the Holy Way?
From Isaiah:
A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God's people;
no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
What a simultaneously puzzling and hopeful passage. The idea that Israel would have public works projects, a kind of pre-Roman interstate, is interesting, and it's probably even more interesting if it's not a literal highway that runs to Tel Aviv. More particularly, a few words in it offer odd and fascinating windows on our faith.
What do we do with this mention of the unclean, those not allowed on it? This doesn't sound like a very Jesus-y claim, as he seemed rather fond of opening the holy to the unclean as well as recently showered. But of course this is Isaiah, not Jesus. He seems to be envisioning a road without traffic.
After all, imagine if we bumped all the unclean people off the road we commute on, whatever our means of commute. How wonderful it would be to have the road/train car/sidewalk to ourselves! To have all those whose driving we mock in popular jokes removed, which would include: low-riders, beat-up pickups with confederate flags, old people generally, young people generally, all soccer moms, business people on cell phones, and of course, women. Finally! A pure road, clean of bad driving! <--That's a fairly ambiguous picture, one that simultaneously shows us our petty intolerance and captures the feeling of free travel. We can imagine what that kind of driving would be like, but hopefully we might all recognize how it shows us our own bigoted selves, selves which come out almost exquisitely when we drive. Perhaps, in other words, Isaiah is exactly like us--and we should recognize the feeling Isaiah is speaking of, that of unencumbered travel, and also recognize the good old sinful humanity that, like us, imagines success at the expense of those who are different from us.
But more interesting to me is the passage closer to the end: no one, not even fools, shall go astray. I find this to be one of the most optimistic pictures of life offered in all of Scripture. How wide, exactly, would a road have to be so that no one would go astray? Exactly how large are the guard rails? And even more: 'fool' turns up in a few strategic places in the psalms, namely, where it reads: "The fool says in his heart that there is no god." Could this passage be speaking of that same fool? Can God craft a road so large that even the most foolish, those who don't believe in the road they're walking on, can still reach home?
Whether that sort of reference is a legitimate one here, I am uncertain, but I find it intriguing. I think a more helpful way to approach the verse is to notice that once someone has gotten on the way, no matter how foolish, they won't go astray. What this might mean for Christians engaging in radically different cultures, learning about other faiths, to me seems fairly obvious.
But more interesting to me would be if we could seriously ponder what this might mean for how we treat each other. In our own era, to disagree is to cut relationship. It happens with news channels, among families, and in friendships. A few stand the test of serious disagreement, but these days, most relationships ignore disagreement or break it off--witness, for example, the divorce rate, which is caused by many things (a confusion about what marriage is for, inter alia), but surely also by the confusion of agreement with relationship. In other words: when we think someone's acting like a fool, we stop being their friend.
But how might we look differently if we saw that not even fools can go astray? If nothing so foolish can happen that it severs relationship? How could we respond to others if we saw their foolishness as only one moment in a whole lifetime of walk along the Holy Way?
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Change of life
This is not the first interesting technological crowd-sourced thing I've seen, but surely it strikes me as unique.
Its premise is delightful. Human beings are simply better at pattern recognition than computers. So, rather than having an enormous binary-based machine try out exponential numbers of possible combinations, make it fun. Give it a point system. Tell people how they score against their neighbors (I made the second highest score ever on one of the puzzles! No really!), and then help them to recognize that their 'gaming' is doing some research for various genetic disorders linked to various pathologies. It's a winning nexus, it seems, and I have nothing bad to say about it. Go play a game and save lives. Really. It's worth 15 minutes of your time to learn and play a few.
It does raise one question for me, though. Certainly, Phylo is ingenious. It's wonderful, sitting at a convergent human psychological spot of competition, success, altruism, and the raw desire everyone seems to have to match little glowy things in the right order. I think it deserves all kinds of kudos for that.
The itch it raises for me is that it tacitly plays into the sense that seems to hang around our culture that ingenuity and fun will solve all of our problems. I still guffaw when people comment that science will surely save us from global warming with an intriguing and easy solution, that off-shore oil drilling will have an easy, chemical-free cleanup with just a little elbow grease and human-know-how. I'm sure it's because I sometimes work with people who are dying and addicts, but not every problem has a fun solution. Sometimes, there is only endurance, forbearance, and sacrifice. Sometimes, we have to change, but the situation isn't going to.
That continues to be what strikes me as challenging in our world. It's not that our economic problems and ecological crises don't have solutions. They do, or at least they have actions that would terrifically ameliorate things. We could simply cut our standard of living by half. We could simply turn electricity off for 12 hours a day. We could change--we're like the morbidly obese, confusing "hard to change" with "impossible to change." It would cut into productivity, into our entertainment, and into our god-given-right-to-do-whatever-the-hell-we-please-at-any-cost, which seems to be the demonic way we understand 'freedom'. No one thinks sacrifice is possible, and we all point and laugh at the wackos who choose to live off the grid, set up solar panels, and cut the meat in their diet to a quarter of its previous level.
And yet: what if economic justice and ecological sustainability are not human ingenuity puzzles, but rather ascetic puzzles, or sacrificial conundrums? What if what we need is not a new idea, a brilliant way to make living ecologically more fun, but an actual change of life? Some repentance? A conversion?
Its premise is delightful. Human beings are simply better at pattern recognition than computers. So, rather than having an enormous binary-based machine try out exponential numbers of possible combinations, make it fun. Give it a point system. Tell people how they score against their neighbors (I made the second highest score ever on one of the puzzles! No really!), and then help them to recognize that their 'gaming' is doing some research for various genetic disorders linked to various pathologies. It's a winning nexus, it seems, and I have nothing bad to say about it. Go play a game and save lives. Really. It's worth 15 minutes of your time to learn and play a few.
It does raise one question for me, though. Certainly, Phylo is ingenious. It's wonderful, sitting at a convergent human psychological spot of competition, success, altruism, and the raw desire everyone seems to have to match little glowy things in the right order. I think it deserves all kinds of kudos for that.
The itch it raises for me is that it tacitly plays into the sense that seems to hang around our culture that ingenuity and fun will solve all of our problems. I still guffaw when people comment that science will surely save us from global warming with an intriguing and easy solution, that off-shore oil drilling will have an easy, chemical-free cleanup with just a little elbow grease and human-know-how. I'm sure it's because I sometimes work with people who are dying and addicts, but not every problem has a fun solution. Sometimes, there is only endurance, forbearance, and sacrifice. Sometimes, we have to change, but the situation isn't going to.
That continues to be what strikes me as challenging in our world. It's not that our economic problems and ecological crises don't have solutions. They do, or at least they have actions that would terrifically ameliorate things. We could simply cut our standard of living by half. We could simply turn electricity off for 12 hours a day. We could change--we're like the morbidly obese, confusing "hard to change" with "impossible to change." It would cut into productivity, into our entertainment, and into our god-given-right-to-do-whatever-the-hell-we-please-at-any-cost, which seems to be the demonic way we understand 'freedom'. No one thinks sacrifice is possible, and we all point and laugh at the wackos who choose to live off the grid, set up solar panels, and cut the meat in their diet to a quarter of its previous level.
And yet: what if economic justice and ecological sustainability are not human ingenuity puzzles, but rather ascetic puzzles, or sacrificial conundrums? What if what we need is not a new idea, a brilliant way to make living ecologically more fun, but an actual change of life? Some repentance? A conversion?
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