No Way Out But Democracy

Ongoing events in Thailand point to one incontrovertible fact concerning modern societies around the world: the best way, often the only way, to achieve a measure of social peace and justice in any given nation is through a democratic political process.  This is proving to be true in the nations of northern Africa and western Asia, however painful the process itself is.  In the United States, the influence of tea party movement is apparently receding because it is losing its power at the ballot box.  However one might view the tea party's agenda, it has been important in getting past its influence to give that movement all of the voice it could muster in the public arena.  Whenever a military takeover silences popular voices, it only postpones the democratic resolution of political divisions; winners at the ballot box must be allowed to rule, so long as the rights of the losers to keep talking and keep trying to turn things in their direction is protected.

It has become commonplace to quote Winston Churchill's famous observation in 1947 that,"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."  The fact that his epigram is commonplace, however, does not make it wrong.  Democracy is a sloppy way to do things.  It is always open to manipulation and corruption.  The return of big-money politics in the U.S. is but one example of how apparently fragile the process can be at times.  Even so, it remains the one way we have to ensure long-term political and social stability however chaotic it can seem at times.  Whether it was Abraham Lincoln or someone else who first voiced the thought, it does remain true that politicians can fool us all some times and fool some of us all the time, but they are hard-pressed to fool all of us all the time.

Each time the military intervenes in Thailand, the nation is denied the chance to work out its differences in the only way that will ultimately resolve them—open public debate leading to free and fair democratic elections.  Here is one more epigram: you can't win if you aren't willing to lose.  As in all competitive sports, so in politics losing is in fact an important part of winning.  Losing is a teacher.  It is a test.  It is a foundation, usually indispensable, to eventually coming out on top.  Until the yellow shirts in Thailand learn this lesson, they cannot win however often they are able to frustrate the will of the majority.  Winning by forcing the other team off the playing field is not winning.  Amen.

The Meanings of Biblical Authority

In a Religious News Service (NRS) posting entitled, "Conservative United Methodists say split over sexuality is ‘irreconcilable’," the author makes passing reference to the fact that one of the issues being debated between among Methodists is "the authority of Scripture."  The fundamental issue, of course, is the place of the LGBT community in the denomination, but the nature and message of the Bible is certainly intimately involved.  That is not incorrect, but we need to be precise in the nature of the debate.  Mainline progressives will generally acknowledge that the Bible is authoritative, but they also will insist that the issue is that the Bible can be read in a variety of ways from a variety of perspectives.

Thus, for progressives the fact that a wing of the church reads certain passages in the Bible as supporting the idea that homosexuality in all of its forms is a sin does not bind us to read them in that same way.  Read in historical context, they are open to interpretation, and we choose not to interpret them in a way that contradicts the God in Christ revealed otherwise in scripture.  The point is that the one side generally holds that there is only one way to interpret the Bible while the other believes that the Bible is open to a variety of interpretations.  It is for both, however, authoritative.  As seems to be almost invariably the case, both sides in this sad, sad debate can utter the same words while meaning very different things by them.

Historically Reliable?

As reported in the Washington Post (here) and elsewhere online, Mr. Steve Green has developed a high school course for the study of the Bible, which will be tested next school year at a high school in Oklahoma.  In an editorial entitled, "Is the Hobby Lobby Bible elective objective?" commentator Stephen Prothero raises two objections to the curriculum.  First, he argues, it betrays a Christian bias; it is not secular and objective.  Second, in various, subtle ways the authors uncritically promote the idea that the Bible provides reliable historical data.  He particularly points to a summary box in the text that reads, “We can conclude that the Bible, especially when viewed alongside other historical information, is a reliable historical source.”

Understanding the point Prothero is making, still one can argue that the assertion in the summary box is a correct one if properly understood.  The condition that the Bible is a reliable historical source when viewed along other historical information is crucial depending on how we understand the meaning of "other historical information."  If it includes the mountains of research and commentary devoted to the Bible by reputable biblical scholars then I would have to agree that the Bible, read critically, is indeed a reliable historical sources.  This does not mean that every event asserted in its text happened as described in its pages.  It does mean that the text of the Bible opens important doors for our understanding of the past.  It beautifully describes an ancient cosmology.  It hints at the emergence of monotheism from polytheism.  It describes among other things political developments in Western Asia over many centuries.  It provides insights into the person of Jesus and of Paul as well as data useful for understanding the emergence of the Jesus Movement in the first century AD (or CE, take your pick).

One has to read the text critically, consult other sources, and immerse oneself in the relevant scholarly literature.  And one has to be circumspect in claiming what information is available through careful readings of the text.  Still, given these conditions, the Bible is a reliable historical source—recognizing that some biblical texts are more reliable than others.

Before I returned to pastoral ministry, I devoted 16 years to the study of church history in Thailand.  I have spent a good deal of time with Protestant missionary sources.  There are scholars who refuse to use those sources for the study of Thai history generally "because they are biased."  My response is, "Yes, of course, they are biased.  But they also contain a wealth of information on subjects other than Protestantism in Thailand if one read them critically and knowledgeably."  The bias is generally clear, indeed so obviously apparent that it is not that difficult to sift it out just as if one were panning for gold.

By the same token the biblical texts are important sources for the study of the ancient world.  Yes, the authors of the curriculum mean something different by the phrase "reliable historical source," but they are still right that it is reliable—even if for the wrong reason.

Bliss Point & Worship

As far back as the post-World War II years, food researchers have experimented with what is now called the "bliss point." Stated simply, the bliss point is that point where a consumer is most happy with a product.  In the food industry, it is the point at which a particular food item is most desirable in terms of taste—assuming cost is not an issue.  For an insightful, fascinating, if trouble article on the concept of the bliss point and its relationship to junk food, see the New York Times article by Michael Moss entitled, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food."

The consequence of mountains of data accumulated in the study of the bliss point of a wide variety of foods is that the food industry has learned how much salt, sugar, and fat in combination with each other to inject into foods to make them attractive to consumers.  Look no further for a primary cause of the obesity epidemic sweeping the nation.  We're human.  We like salt, sugar, and fat.  So we eat foods that optimize these ingredients, the key word being "optimize".  Too much of them in a given food is as undesirable as too little.

I suspect that we could very easily apply the concept of the bliss point (which turns out to be a range rather an a single point) to Christian worship.  A key pillar of the megachurch movement is the lively, upbeat tempo of megachurch worship, which often is conducted by virtually professional musicians, choreographers, and planners.  People are less and less willing to go to worship just because it is worship.  They seek stimulation.  They want a certain level of entertainment, although we never use the word with worship.  They want a return on their investment in time and effort.  Most churchgoers these days consume worship, and if that truly is the case then the concept of a liturgical bliss point is one worth considering.

On the one hand, apply the concept of a bliss point to worship sounds theologically crude, wrong somehow.  Worship should not be about entertainment.  Seeking to discover its "bliss point" feels sacrilegious, irreverent, or whatever other word we might apply.  On the other hand, if we are going to reach audiences in a consumer oriented capitalist culture we had better consider what it is that attracts them.  The answer in the food industry is, "Bliss attracts them."  What then about worship?  Is bliss also what worshippers are seeking on a Sunday morning?  It seems very likely that the answer is, "Yes."

More Opportunities, More Distractions

It has become commonplace to observe that life today, even in a small town like Lowville, NY, is different in various ways from the way it was even two or three decades ago.  It is faster paced, more connected to the "outside" world, and brimming with opportunities and distractions.  We are constantly on the move, and the direction of society at large seems to be toward multitasking, a society where being engaged, engaged, and engaged is what is most highly valued.  One can almost feel the internal pressures that come as a part of modern living.

All of this is having a major negative impact on the place that people allow faith to have in their lives.  Faith, at heart, is about slowing down, listening, and to an extent disengaging.  It offers and invites us to live in a different reality from that of our hurry up, engaged, multi-tasking, do, do, do world.  We sit hunched over life, but faith calls on us to loosen up and to even get up and gently walk away for a bit from the hurry and get-it-done lifestyle we live.

Our interconnected world offers us more opportunities to discover such things as meditation, but we are so distracted by "reality" that we feel we don't take the time for those things.  More opportunities, but less time.  The paradox in it all is that giving a bit of our lives over to the things of faith actually does not rob us of time but allows us to live a little less frenetically, which means that we have more quality time not less.

The challenge we face in the early 21st century, then, is to "take time to be holy."  That challenge is an age-old one, but today it is filled with greater opportunities than ever yet frustrated by more distractions than ever.  We live, in sum, in a tense and distracted age, which age keeps us from embracing the spiritual opportunities more available to us than ever.

Searching for Christian Meditation in the Age of Thich Nhat Hanh

In the West, we associate meditation with the East generally and Buddhism in particular even while church historians assure us that we have a rich meditation heritage of our own.  We Protestants are especially ignorant of that heritage because it is associated with monastic Catholicism, something we "put aside" long ago—to our loss, to be sure.  The face of meditation for us is Thich Nhat Hanh, the medium is his impressive literature on its methods and spirituality.

As helpful as he is, there is for us a piece of the spiritual life that is missing, which is a connection with God—the source, the direction, and the inspiration of our personal spirituality.  Christian spirituality is a reaching Out and Up with longing as well as a reaching down in peace, rest, and quiet.  Hence an adjustment is for us helpful in meditation:

The mantra:

Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in;
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

Becomes:

Breathing in, Lord, I know that I am breathing in;
Breathing out, Lord, I know that I am breathing out.

And the mantra:

Breathing in, I embrace being peaceful, calm, and at rest;
Breathing out, I embrace being peaceful, calm, and at rest.

Becomes:

Breathing in, Lord, you inspire me to be peaceful, calm, and at rest;
Breathing out, Lord, I welcome being peaceful, calm, and at rest.

Buddhist insight meditation is an invitation to dialogue with oneself in order to come to rest in the non-self that is the true self.  Christian insight meditation is a divine invitation to dialogue with oneself in the Presence of God in order to come to rest in the Beyond-self that is the true self.  Amen.

Mark's Resurrection

As we enter Holy Week again, the Gospel of Mark's version of the events surrounding Jesus' resurrection is worth lingering over.  That version, recorded in Mark 16, raises serious questions about the way in which Jesus' followers received the news of his resurrection.  In particular, when the three women who went to the tomb to anoint the corpse heard from a "young man dressed in a white robe" that Jesus was raised from the dead, they, "fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." (Mark 16:8)

If we follow the rule concerning historical documents that a thing is more likely to be true if it is inconvenient to the larger purpose of the author, this account  seems quite credible.  The women didn't see Jesus.  They weren't inspired or fell at his knees.  This was no Pentecost with flames of holy fire.  The empty tomb and the young man scared them out of their wits.  They fled an evident display of God's holy power, and unlike Moses at the burning bush they did not bow down in worship.  They ran.  And in their terror, they told no one.

According to scholars, Mark 16:8 is the end of the original version of the gospel, so far as we know.  If that is the case, it means that Jesus' followers initially greeted his resurrection with fear and silence.  The accounts of the resurrection in the other gospels are much more inspiring, but this one seems more likely.  It is consistent with a tendency found in the gospels to highlight the spiritual ignorance of Jesus' followers—an inconvenient truth that rings true down through the long years since.  It is also consistent with how people of a time when there was a holy terror of things divine would react.  It is also consistent with how three women might react in a male dominated society where they were used to being treated as "just women."  Why risk ridicule?  Finally, the reaction of the three women as Mark describes it is just plain typically human.  Most of us most of the time prefer the known to the unknown, the safe way to the dangerous one; and it makes perfect sense that we do.

This is not the resurrection that the Easter crowd wants to hear about.  It is not the resurrection preached from pulpits on that "glorious and wonderful morn."  This is an account shorn of piety.  In that sense, it may be taken as a call to a faith shorn of piety and the pretensions of religiosity.  We run, we tremble, we keep quiet, but eventually we stop to catch our breath, calm down, and find our voice—eventually.  Amen.

Sabbath Rest

The decline of the church in the U.S., has any number of ramifications, some obvious and others less so.  One of the "less so" ramifications is the continuing loss of the biblical understanding of the Sabbath as time off from the cares of daily life, time for refocusing on the deeper things underlying the grind.  In times gone by in our nation, the rhythm of life was six days of labor and a seventh day for putting aside that labor, dressing up, going to worship (which was a source of entertainment and intellectual stimulation), and slowing down.  Today, committed church folks don't slow down on the weekend; they cram in, rather, an alternative set of hectic activities.  On retirement, they get busier with as much or more busy-ness as beforehand.  It is not just that there is less space for church even among the committed.  There is less time for rest.  And more than that, our modern, multitasking society is losing its capacity for rest, esp. for Sabbath rest.

Sabbath rest is partly time for prayer, reading "spiritual literature" unhurriedly, and reflection.  It is time for meditation.  It is partly time for sitting quietly, taking a walk, sharing an unhurried meal with a friend, and smelling the roses.  It is a time for not doing, not accomplishing.  It is not goal oriented time but rather time for being lazy.  It is, as one happy example, time spent sitting around a fire in the evening with the forest gone quiet, watching the dancing flames, seeing the shadows they cast on the surrounding trees, hearing the long trilling call of a loon, and simply being at rest.  A cup of hot chocolate or coffee or tea—or not. Sabbath rest is the stillness of the night forest discovered in other places in our lives where for a moment we hear the echoes of peace quieting for that moment the busyness of our busyness.

The decline of the church and the decline of Sabbath rest are not unrelated.  Renewal of the latter is not unrelated to the renewal of the former, if by the church we mean the community of faith rather than the religious institution.  Amen.

Thoughts on Noah, the Movie

So, Friday afternoon we went to see the movie, Noah, at a movie complex in Watertown, NY.  There is a ton of reviews of the movie, many of which can be read at Rotten Tomatoes, so let me simply share some thoughts rather than do a full critical analysis.

However the critics may feel about the various aspects of Noah, from a theological perspective the movie embodies a fascinating contemporary dialogue between the biblical story found in Genesis 6-9 and modern culture.  Both the original tale and the modern remake are mythic descriptions of God's struggle with destructive, prideful humanity, the modern movie version being a remythologizing of the story in a contemporary context. There are both similarities and differences, but it is the differences that are most interesting and instructive.

 In the original, God is very clearly present, while in the movie "the Creator" is hidden and speaks through visions that are open to interpretation.  In Genesis, Noah is the very prototype of the faithful man, but in the movie he is constantly conflicted and apparently misinterprets God's will concerning the survival of the human race.  He also comes across as something of a more up to date zealot.  And where the emphasis in Genesis is on the destruction of wicked humanity, a key theme in the movie is the environmental salvation of Planet Earth and its non-human life.  In the movie's version of the epic, Earth was undergoing a massive environmental crisis that was impoverishing humanity as well as destroying the rest of life on the planet.

While reviewers note a number of striking parallels with The Lord of the Rings trilogy (the rock encrusted, over-sized "Watchers" of this movie, for example, look suspiciously like stony versions of Peter Jackson's visualization of Tolkien's Ents), there is an important difference.  The boundaries between good and evil are generally clearly drawn in Tolkien's trilogy; good guys are good and bad guys are bad.  That is less the case in Noah; Noah himself acts unwisely at times and comes across as only relatively good.  His son, Ham, is a flawed figure who for a time allies himself with the evil protagonist of the film, Tubal-cain (who is rotten to the core).  Noah himself feels the inherent evil in himself and those he loves, which is why he believed that they must not become the seed of a renewed human race—a fear not shared by the Creator, apparently.  This is to say that the biblical story is highly dualistic while this contemporary rendering is much less so.  Just as the movie's optics tend to be darkish grays, so does Noah and his family live in a world that is more gray than black or white.

In a moment of theological boldness, the move contains a rendering of Genesis 1 and the seven days of creation that clearly leaves room for evolution.  That too brings the story of Noah into the 21st century and aptly illustrates the manner in which the movie is a remythologizing of the biblical original.  Our larger society is trending haphazardly away from absolutist dualism with its hard and fast boundaries to a more realist, less dualistic postmodern worldview that is also less bounded by the agendas of organized, institutional Christianity.  This movie version of the biblical story is a fascinating rendering of the old, old stories for our time.  It is not scripture.  It is a comment and even a meditation on scripture that puts the story in a contemporary idiom for our reflection.  It invites us to engage in our own dialogue with the story of the flood, and in fact encourages us to actually go back and open our Bibles and read the original script again.

There are a couple of nice touches in the movie.  It solves the problem of how to feed and care for all the animals in the ark by having Noah's family mix a potion that when burned as incense puts them all to sleep for the duration (a kind of sci-fi suspended animation apparently).  The movie also conveniently has Noah plant a magic seed that grows a huge forest, which solves the problem of where he got all the lumber for the ark; and it has the Watchers assist in building it, which solves the problem of how Noah and his family could build such a huge craft.  In short, if there is science  fiction, which provides imaginative, even playful commentary on science, then Noah is might be considered as biblical fiction in an almost sci-fi mode: an imaginative, even playful commentary on the Bible.

Reviewers pan some of the acting in the movie; they criticize it from an artistic, cinematic perspective.  But, I found it interesting and instructive from a theological and biblical point of view.  If you haven't seen it and are concerned for such things as faith, scripture, and theological reflection, I highly recommend it.  It is fun.

Boundaries, Imagined and Real

In his outstanding book, Siam Mapped (Hawaii, 1997), Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul observes that traditionally boundaries between nation-states in Southeast Asia were ill-defined regions between power centers that melded into each other at their outer peripheries.  One did not cross a boundary but rather travelled through it, gradually leaving one power sphere and just as gradually entering another.  At the peripheries, local rulers and people often gave shifting allegiance to two or more centers of power.  When the Europeans showed began to take control of most of the region in the 19th century, however, they introduced carefully surveyed, sharply drawn boundaries.  They wanted to know the precise extent of their authority for purposes of control and taxation.  The "mapping of Siam," thus, was not just about cartography.  It was about power.

We in the West continue to think of boundaries in this sharp-edged, almost rigid way.  A recent posting entitled, "Facebook Data Creates Incredible MLB Fan Map That Proves That Yankees Fans Are Everywhere," provides a striking example of how such mapping of realty is both useful and deceiving at the same time.  Illustrating the posting is this map:

The point of the posting is that Yankee fans are everywhere.  Its assumption is that sports cartographers are able to draw fine-lined boundaries between geographical areas "occupied" by each major league baseball team.  Thus, Minnesota Twins support all but ends at the Minnesota-Wisconsin state line and the Milwaukee Brewers take over.

In truth, it isn't like that.  The boundaries of support for each team are far more porous, less well-defined, and more like traditional Southeast Asia than the above map suggests.  The actual point of the article, that there are Yankee fans in large numbers all across the nation, itself suggests that sports boundaries are more amorphous that the map suggests.  The map evidently uses counties for its basic unit, so that a county that has a bare plurality of Yankee fans is colored Yankee black, while another one that almost has a plurality of support is not Yankee black.  Twins support does not abruptly end one county into Wisconsin or Iowa, but it does dribble off so that there are more Brewers fans or Cubs fans east or south of the state line.

The point here is that people who habitually draw maps with sharp-edged boundaries tend to perceive such boundaries in other areas of life.  Such boundaries promote rigid identities in all facets of life, and those who think in terms of pencil-thin boundaries tend to draw them when it comes to religion as well.  One must be either a believer or an unbeliever, an atheist or a religionist.  In reality, even in our hearts the boundaries between faith and unfaith are just not that clear.  We have, in fact, a word for those who eschew amorphous shifting boundaries of the heart: "fanatics".