Tuesday, June 08, 2004

The Body and the Soul

The body and the soul--how often the two have been maligned. It seems it's been one-upsmanship for the better part of history. The body denigrated at the expense of the soul--the soul maligned at the expense of the body. In contemporary North American culture we have both happening at the same time. Conservative (or is it more accurate to say 'fundamentalist'?) religious communities speak almost exclusively of the nexus and priority of the soul. We worry about the soul of man--the soul of the country--the soul of the church--the soul of the corporation. It's good talk, good rhetoric that inflames passions. It just has no arms or legs. No real help for people, no real means of spiritual formation, no real Christology. It's hopeful talk, makes for good sermons, but amounts to little transformation or community. Any transformation or authentic community is only Pnuematic serendipity. In the midst of the rhetoric and proclamation, the body, so ironically central to the Christology of these same fundamentalist churches, is subtley (or forcibly) moved to irrelevance.

On the other hand, culture, having lost the soul entirely (except in formless sentimentalism about "heart") worships the body. Apparently, the body is the sum total of life, so in order be 'true to life,' a new cult has arisen around incarnation. Image, weight, musculature, hair styles, grooming are all billion dollar industries as a result. It makes for good marketing, good commerce, good economy, but it has no depth, no soul, no heart, and so no power to adequately energize me for anything beyond myself. Any selflessness is due to the subtle and inescapable influence of Divine glory.

But both extremes are misplaced and give me pause to ask difficult questions. Does this not mean that in addition to not trusting the themes and impulses of broader culture, we need to avoid trust in conservative evangelicalism's basic understanding of proclamation of the Christian message? Apparently, the religious community is no better a spiritual guide than broader culture.

Sunday, June 06, 2004

Elephant Jokes

Bad Elephant jokes
(should be attempted only by skilled humorists adept in the arts of timing and the exploitation of drunkenness/sheer exhaustion.)

#1 (must be told in 5 parts)
Q: How do you fit 4 elephants in a volkswagen?
A: Easy. Two in the front, two in the back.

Q: How do you know if an elephant has been in your fridge?
A: You find one set of elephant footprints in the butter.

Q: How do you know if two elephants have been in your fridge?
A: You find two sets of elephant footprints in the butter.

Q: How do you know if three elephants have been in your fridge?
A: (you guessed it) Three sets of elephant footprints in the butter.

Q: How do you know if four elephants have been in your fridge?
A: There's a volkswagen in the driveway.

#2 A genre of elephant joke employing the riotous "have you ever seen an elephant (there)?" ending.

Q: Why do elephants paint there toenails red?
A: So they can hide in cherry trees?

Q: Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree?
A: No
R: It works then, doesn't it?

Q: Why do elephants wear green capes?
A: So they can sneak across the tops of pool tables.
*Insert rioutous ending*

Q: Why do elephants wear sneakers?
A: So they jump from tree to tree between 2 & 4 in afternoon.

Q: Why are pygmies so short?
A: (variation on riotous ending) Because they went into the forest between 2 & 4 in the afternoon

#4
Q: What did the polite elephant say to the Zebra as he was trying to leave the forest?
A: Pardon me, but you're standing on my trunk.


The good humor man must now move on to greater things.
Shalom

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Evangelism Angst

So I'm standing outside after The Wild Zone - our weekly student service for Middle Schoolers. It's late, everyone's gone home but the janitors, me and three of the "bad" kids. They're outside skating (which is what bad kids do), and I go out to my car and I hear "It's Scott--keep skating." They then come over to me and say hi and what's up and hey man and all the usual Middle School greeting banter. A couple of slapped hands, some what's ups and with no prompting, I become the sarcedotal stand-in for their many unconfessed sins.

When I'm angry I drink--hey, it's better than going out and killing someone.
So you are angry enough to kill someone?
Yeah, but drinking is better I know it's bad, but I still do it.
So you're parents don't know about it?
Nah, there's so much alcohol in the fridge I could drink it down to the last one and they'd never know.

And so it went. One struggled with smoking, anger, drugs and was lamentful that he spent a month in juvey. He wasn't sure if he could say "piss", which pissed me off, didn't believe in God (or at least wasn't sure if he believed in anything. The devil he believed in "28" and God about "98", whatever that means. I told him that most people who don't believe in God don't not because of the fact of God's existence but because of the crap they'd been through in their lives. If my life sucks this bad, how can there be a God? A shrug of the shoulders, yup, that's me.
Then, hey, this feels good.
Me: What, talking about what's weighing on you?
Them: Yeah...

Which has given me pause on several issues. One, why did I feel this overwhelming urge to tell him/them that what he was experiencing was confession, and the history of the church and the teaching of Scripture all make clear that confession really is good for the soul? And why did I know that if I told them that, I would have immediately lost their vulnerability and trust?? Which gives me pause to ask where and why the idea that evangelism equals pounding Jesus/The Bible/The "TRUTH" into people germinated. Do we really have such a mechanistic view of people that they have become vending machines wanting our quarters of truth that will dispense the sinful product of their souls to be served up on the altar of evangelism?? Do we treat evangelism as nothing more than religious information, a sales presentation, memorized dogma to which we must get people to conform/buy/believe/accept/acknowledge/assent/ad nauseum??
And are we under the delusion that if we don't get them to this point, we have not properly "witnessed?" (And if I'm honest, the "we" is really my own internal struggle with my upbringing?)

Isn't evangelism helping people to encounter truth--or The truth (note: a person, not a proposition)? Isn't it a long process instead of an instantaneous decision? And why do so many persist in the "gospel presentation" mode--in effect filling our churches with people who are taught to believe that mental assent to propositions will somehow fix their lives and the lives of the people to whom they are obligated to witness--when the lived data is so plainly in the other direction?

I'm tired. Off to bed

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Shame, Shame, Shame

Okay, some thoughts about shame and it's possible implications for the Atonement:
Shame is an Eastern thing, an Eastern understanding of persons. Given that the majority of ancient literature still impacting Western society (Bible, Koran, etc.) was written in an Eastern cultural milieu, and that the majority of the world's population currently lives inan Eastern culture, it would behoove us sometime Western imperialists to understand it (and it would be good if we could start by admitting our imperialism).

Fundamentally shame is about who I am. I am bad. I am wrong. I am defective. To be shamed is to be "less than." To be honorable is to have status and value to both the self and the community. To be shamed is to be without honor. This is an Eastern understanding of persons. I either have shame or I have honor. I am either good or bad. I am either valuable or defective. I am either right or wrong. We are likely to quickly read a western understanding into these frameworks, but hang on. Shame goes to the core of who I am. Eastern societies still operate on the basis of shame as fundamental social capital. Consider Japan, or China, or an unsightly encounter with an Asian gang when one of them has "lost face." The power of shame is alive and well.

Western societies, America in particular, are organized around the idea of guilt. Guilt is our social capital. I did wrong. I did bad. I did something defective. Or, I did something well. I did something good. I did something valuable. I cheated on that test. I earned a bonus. On the surface, it seems a superior social capital. Enabling the dignity of persons while correcting and adjusting their imperfect performance. It certainly has been something of an enablement to capitalism--allowing for the "objective" improvement of performance. And capitalism is built on keen, efficient performance. But the reality that we all recognize in North America (at least, those of us with education and what I will call societal "tenure") is that our performance orientation has morphed into an obsession. Performance is the measure of value. And paradoxically, in it's effort to overcome the "inferior" shame-orientation, it becomes the new shame. I lose face when I fail to perform well. I become less than. But performance, despite our cultural disposition and unnoticed assumption of its superiority, is inadequate to a whole understanding of persons. To say that guilt is fundamental social capital is to assert that I am what I do. And if I am what I do, who am I if I can no longer do it? We have a cultural identity epidemic. It drives almost every sector of our society; business, education, religion. We are the sum total of our performances. Elegant defenses of this assumption exist, to be sure. A potential overgeneralization, but read almost any bestselling business book. Look at the titles of best-selling self-help books. They run around the issues of guilt/performance. How to perform better in relationships, on the job, in the family. How to do better. Best selling religious books aren't far behind (with notable exceptions). The Purpose-Driven Life, et al, press the issue that we are what we do. That the life of faith is the life of correct performance for the divine. Performance and guilt. Our performance orientation has done marvelous things for us as a culture. We are highly tuned and spectacularly empty.

Eastern wisdom would tell us that we are not what we perform. It crititques our addiction to performance. There is a core to us that goes beyond our performance, or lack thereof. It is a fundamental reality of what it means to be human. That's what that Eastern text, the Bible, refers to when it talks about "heart." The Western story does get it half right. We are guilty of things. We do things wrong. We fail each other in fundamental and basic ways. We do well by each other. We do well by our businesses. We do well by our religious communities. But this is not total. There is more to the human story. In order to do well by each other, we must be well internally and in our communities. Being is less measurable (and so somewhat detestable to Westerners)--it is written off as touchy feely, useless, of little value, of doing no good (notice the performance measurements). But unless I am well, unless I am good, unless I am valuable--I will not do well, do good, or do valuable things.

This may account for Jesus Christ's enduring appeal to Western society. Underlying our addiction to performance lies our created longing to be loved for love's sake. And Jesus' message, if it was anything, was one of the ultimate value of ultimate value over against the ultimate value of ultimate performance. Western theology (particularly theology of the evangelical stripe), it could be argued, has the propensity toward performance measurement and so has reduced Jesus to a religious figure who gave the perfect performance (in my place, because I couldn't). There is reality in this statement, but it is an Eastern reality. Of course I cannot--I am a human being with limitations and weaknesses, but I am a person with honor. Jesus honored my humanity by taking my form. He honored my life by living it. He honored my death by dying it. He honored my desires by feeling them. He was perfect--but this is what Divinity does, it expresses perfection. He was not man writ large, performing what man could not and thereby elevating performance. He was God writ man, filling and dignifying His own creation and elevating the goodness and value of his crowning creation. Jesus is God affirming our value and triumphing over our shame.

This sounds wrong to Western ears because we are so tied to performance. Jesus must DO SOMETHING. He did. He filled humanity with dignity and gave honor to us in place of our shame. His death, in addition to playing a part in his own conspiracy of redemption, is not a consumer good for people to "believe in" in order to go to heaven when they die. His death is "in our place" to be sure--because we are all bad enough, we are all shamed enough to deserve the humiliation of death.

More thoughts to come. The well is now dry.
Peace,
Scott