Moore, Oklahoma

I was thinking a lot last night about this most recent tragedy to befall the innocent. We had Sandy Hook, and Boston, and West, and now Moore. And those of us “winter Christians,” who tend to struggle with the problems we see in the world around us – this is our time. The summer Christians who perhaps tend to downplay suffering and tragedy must sit up and take notice, and for once, everyone is on the same page. Our page.

But I’m also a person who in the past year has learned that not only do I love the physical world around me, but that it’s OK for me to love it. And not only that, God loves it, too. He loved it so much, he took on flesh and allowed himself to experience the physical world for himself – or at least as much as he could. He even suffered and died so that he could restore it to himself. For whatever reason, God loves the world and the people in it that much.

So I recoiled a bit as I heard some of the same old reactions to the Moore tornado that we hear after every tragedy – reactions that sound uncomfortably close to the lyrics from some classic hymns: “Just a few more weary days, and then I’ll fly away.” Or, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passing through.”

Jed Bartlet’s Job Moment

One of the themes on this blog lately has been the propriety – or not – of railing against God in times of distress. I tend to (surprise!) take a liberal view on this topic, that God not only can handle our complaints and frustrations but wants us to bring them to him. He made us to be emotional beings, and stifling our emotions is neither healthy nor productive.

Many Christians disagree, and I confess it’s difficult to listen when someone truly “goes off” on God – as happens in the Season 2 finale of The West Wing, which my wife and I are working through on Netflix.

Below the jump, I’ll post the speech in its entirety; most Christians, I suspect, will wince multiple times. You might even be offended. But the question we need to ask is this: Are we offended because God is, or are we offended because we have been taught to be?

[This paragraph contains spoilers] The speech occurs in the National Cathedral, after a funeral for President Jeb Bartlet’s longtime assistant, Mrs. Landingham, who had died in a car wreck. The death occurred after a string of crises and tragedies – including an assassination attempt that nearly killed his deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman – that, let’s be honest, serve to make the show interesting, but would lead a normal person to consider whether she had been singled out to play Job in some sort of modern-day heavenly remake. [End spoilers]

Bartlett asks the Secret Service to close the cathedral so he can spend some time alone, and after some unnecessarily loud and echoey door slamming to let us know the cathedral has been closed, Bartlett begins walking up the aisle toward the vestibule.

Every Day Is Saturday

A friend of mine has been going through some tough times, and as he was telling me about them, he mentioned being angry at God, then being embarrassed for being angry at God. Embarrassment strikes me as wholly unnecessary – but a natural and understandable outgrowth of our American culture, which moralizes success and makes failure in any sense a matter of character rather than circumstance or dumb luck.

It so happened that I had finished reading the counter-testimony section in Theology of the Old Testament where Walter Brueggemann discusses the counter-testimony of Israel. And much of what Brueggemann had to say about the difficult passages that make up that counter-testimony seemed appropriate for my friend’s feelings – and I suspect the feelings of many of this blog’s readers, who seem to be questioning, doubting types. So here’s what I said, and I hope it blesses you today:

Evil: Always the Problem

My wife pointed out a hole in the eschatology outlined last week in my review of N.T. Wright’s How God Became King. Namely, if Christians are called to make things better, to prepare the world for the arrival of the kingdom of God, which was inaugurated by the ministry and death of Jesus and proven by his resurrection – in other words, if God is currently king of the world to which he will return and physically rule at the end of time as we know it – then why does the world suck so much?

In other words, theodicy. Evil is the problem with this system.

But here’s the thing: Evil is the problem with every system.

Believe God is an all-powerful judge, waiting to destroy the world with fire and brimstone after rapturing his true followers to heaven? Believe God is the sympathizer-in-chief, stooping to identify personally with the grieving, the wounded, the outcast? Believe God is radically loving and gracious, to the extent that each and every person eventually will be welcomed into his presence?

Good for you. None of it explains the existence of evil.

Telling God’s Story, Not the Old Testament’s

You might recall that way back, at the beginning of this blog, I compared the Old Testament to an embarrassing family member for whom one must frequently apologize. While I don’t feel that’s the case anymore, there remains a problem: How to teach it to children.

My wife and I have gone around this issue a few times since we had our first daughter more than four years ago, and our struggles have led us to Peter Enns, a biblical scholar we both respect for his willingness to both love the Bible and present it as it was intended to be read – as opposed to how modern-day Christians might like it to be read.

The problem as I see it with presenting the Old Testament stories to children is three-fold:

What Does it Mean to Celebrate Immanuel?

Tony Jones has issued another call for progressive theological bloggers to join in a conversation about the nature of God. He’s calling it #progGod, and last time I talked a little bit about the human inability to fully grasp who God is – including but certainly not limited to those humans who recorded their thoughts about God in the texts that now are called the Bible.

This time I want to revisit a post I wrote almost exactly one year ago. Liam, the son of some friends of mine and the focus of several posts on this blog, had just died, and it led to a lot of questioning. The post references a coworker whose son had brain cancer. That was Rex, who just died last month. He and Liam were diagnosed at nearly the same time, and died within a year of each other – despite countless prayers lifted up by thousands of people, many of them children.

That post from last year seems just as relevant today as it did back then, as we celebrate the miracle of God-with-us, the incarnation.

Ten Months Later, the Same Psalm

Another funeral today, another with a casket too short, another that comes after years of prayers seemingly unanswered. The sense of this psalm, written by Glenn Pemberton for Liam almost a year ago, applies equally now to Rex; his parents, Lance and Jill; and the rest of their family:

Violence for Jesus (or: How the Church Went Rogue), Part 1

Once upon a time, Christianity was very exclusive. How exclusive?

Well, enough that a third-century document, the Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytus (though no one actually knows for sure who wrote it), listed out who could not be baptized.

The text consists of various guidelines for how Christians are to conduct themselves in church – how to do baptisms, ordain bishops, perform liturgies, etc. – and, as you can tell from the title, it claims that these rules date all the way back to the practice of the apostles (though, of course, they don’t). Chapter 16 is a fascinating paragraph that opens referring to the church leadership: “They will inquire concerning the works and occupations of those are who are brought forward for instruction.”

What follows is a series of sentences in the structure, “If someone is a … he shall cease or be rejected.” Some of the professions that fill in the ellipsis are as follows:

• Pimp
• Sculptor or painter
• Actor
• Charioteer, participant or attendee of “the games”
• Gladiator or otherwise affiliated with gladiator or wild-beast shows
• Priest or attendant of idols
• Enchanter, astrologer, diviner, interpreter of dreams, charlatan or maker of amulets

The Betrayal of God’s Silence

Seemingly since the moment we’ve moved back to town, our faith community has been deep in prayer for two little boys fighting against cancer for their lives.

Liam and Rex. Their names were tied together for month after month. One with leukemia, the other with a brain tumor. Their stories moved people from across the city to organize vigils and cover them with thousands upon thousands of hours of prayer.

Until Liam died. We’ve talked about that.

In the months since, Rex’s battle has taken center stage. It looked like he had beaten it, thanks to surgery, radiation and chemo, but after several cancer-free months, the tumor returned, this time in a place where surgery would do more harm than good. And yesterday, an MRI showed that the last-ditch experimental treatment Rex had been taking has failed to check the tumor’s growth.

After 10 years of life, Rex has four to six months of it left.

P.O.D., Christians and the F-Word

What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them shit, that I may gain Christ. – Philippians 3:8

Translators are clearly uncomfortable with the fact that the Apostle Paul uses a word in Philippians 3:8 whose most accurate translation in modern English is a four-letter word. The closest I’ve seen any translation get is “dung” (KJV) or “sewer trash” (CEB). But, in fact, Paul is using a first-century cuss word, and if we were going to accurately bring his context forward to our own language, we’d say “shit.”

Alex Heath has a good explanation for why Paul would do this:

I believe Paul uses the word “shit” in this passage because he is trying to create an incredibly stark and extreme contrast between the the “things” of the world, and the pursuit of Christ. It’s serious business.

This is the same Paul (well, potentially) who in Ephesians says, “Don’t let any foul words come out of your mouth.” But Ephesians is a boilerplate epistle, written as general encouragement and instruction to any churches who might need it (the oldest versions of the letter have a blank where the addressees should be), and so Paul is speaking generally there, whereas in a specific letter to a specific church, he uses extremely strong language because he’s making an extremely strong point.

So the lesson seems to be: Generally we should avoid trafficking in the crude language of the culture around us, but occasionally the situation might call for a well-placed profanity to get people’s attention.

I’ve been thinking about this because the rock group P.O.D. has stirred up a kerfuffle on their latest album, Murdered Love.