The Other Jesus

Check out “Hope Yet for Mainline Denominations”

Part of the Patheos series on the Future of the Church. Great contributions on Mainline Protestantism from my friends Brian McLaren, David Lamotte, and David Wallace are there now. Thoughts on the future of Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and other religions also on Patheos now or forthcoming. If you aren’t familiar with this site, do visit–thoughtful discussions from varied perspectives.

Photo courtesy The Mirror. 

To commemorate the anniversary of the 7/7  terrorist attacks and celebrate my friends in the UK, another piece of the Terror book, in progress. (And yes, I already hear voices saying, if you think England’s so much better than the U S of A, why don’t you stay there. Not what I’m saying). This is from the early chapter on fear:

In a major policy speech on the approaching war with Iraq, President George W. Bush echoed previous statements by his national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice (and ideas we find in the television show 24) by arguing “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” These slightly mixed metaphors (Bush was originally responding to criticisms that we had no proof Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction) collapse into a single frightening martial threat to the United States. “Through its inaction,” the president said, “the United States would resign itself to a future of fear. That is not the America I know. That is not the America I serve. We refuse to live in fear.” [1]

What Bush was offering, simultaneously, was the fearful spectre of nuclear attack, and the hope that someday, by taking the actions he wanted to pursue, we might live without fear. It is a horrible thing to live in fear. Nothing in human existence is worse, Thomas Hobbes affirmed. So, in a very real sense, our fear of fear may drive us to any extremes in hopes of escaping a future of fear. That is why fear is our opening point in examining the culture and political climate following 9/11. The illogically-named War on Terror, is, on further reflection, perfectly-named; our battle is not, perhaps, first with mere humans who might attack us, but with the fear that, as President Bush said, would enslave us. Every action taken in the War on Terror—preventative war, torture, rendition, civil rights violations, stereotyping Muslims—grows out of the fear that sprouted from those fireballs on September 11.

It should be instructive that while the government of Britain acquiesced to many of the requests of the Bush administration related to war and the conduct of it, the people (if not necessarily the leaders) of Britain, a nation which has lived longer with the spectre of terror than the United States, can show us some different responses to the call of fear. On the morning of July 7, 2005, a group of Islamic extremists attacked the London transit system during rush hour, killing 52, injuring hundreds, and pushing hundreds of thousands into the city streets; “7/7” is as identifiable a date in Britain as 9/11 in the States. Although this event had obvious similarities to the 9/11 attacks, it was the latest in a serious of British bombings over the years from a series of terror groups, and the most serious on British soil.

Where terror attacks are concerned, people in the United Kingdom would seem to have more of which to be frightened than people in the United States, yet, paradoxically, they do not seem to manifest this fear. A few weeks ago, I stayed at the Hilton Metropole London, where victims of the 7/7 bombings had been carried for treatment; I walked past the St. Mary’s Hospital down the street, where more badly wounded had been rushed; I boarded the Underground at the Edgeware Road Station, site of one of the deadly explosions. And as I looked at the faces of my fellow commuters, I did not sense the sort of fear and irritation I sometimes find among my traveling counterparts in the States. “Why don’t we treat it the way the British deal with IRA bomb threats in London?” writer and professor Jay Parini asked. “It’s just become part of their lives, like bad weather.” [2]

This advice might serve us well. While George Bush’s grim response to the attacks of 7/7 was “the war on terror goes on,” not all British politicians seem to have pushed the terror aspect in the same way as their US counterparts have done (a factor, by the way, that may explain why US citizens were at first more compliant with their government’s policies than British citizens have been); in fact, although he later called for more draconian measures to prevent future attacks, Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a statement on the evening of the 7/7 bombings in which he encouraged his fellow Britons to refuse to give in to fear:

I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed.

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.

When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.

We will show by our spirit and dignity and by a quiet and true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs.

The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people and we will not be terrorised. [3]

            British friends, in fact, have told me that it simply is not in the British makeup to be terrorized; they survived bombing raids in World War Two, have lived with the possibility (and actuality) of IRA attacks for decades, have been menaced for being the United States’ closest ally in the War on Terror, and are thus unlikely to succumb to fear-mongering. For me, this attitude is best illustrated by a ubiquitous popular poster originally designed in case of German invasion in World War Two and now to be found everywhere, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” which has been described by the BBC as “the very model of British restraint and stiff upper lip.” [4] The design, rediscovered in 2000, has been widely reprinted and used on merchandise ranging from postcards to mugs to baby clothes to doormats. A slightly-altered version of the poster (“Keep Calm and Read On”) is an ad-campaign currently plastered throughout the Underground, reminding people in the very places where terrorists have attacked to go on about their business. Ironically, in language familiar from the speeches of George W. Bush, a Cambridge-educated clergyman told me, “If we let them throw us off our routines, then indeed the terrorists have won.” What the British demonstrate in this instance is how one can live in the face of fear without giving in to it. [5]

[1] “Bush: Don’t Wait for Mushroom Cloud,” CNN, October 8, 2002. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/bush.transcript/

[2] James Atlas, “The Fear this Time,” New York May 21, 2005.  Accessed at http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/9605/

[3] “London Rocked by Terror Attacks,” BBC News, 7 July 2005. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659093.stm; “In Full: Blair on Bomb Blasts,” BBC News, 7 July 2005. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659953.stm

[4] Stuart Hughes, “The best propaganda poster ever?” BBC News, 4 Feb. 2009. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7869458.stm

[5] Whether British institutions have used other issues as candidates for fear mongering may be up for discussion; my point is that the response to the terrorist threat seems to have been handled differently by the British government, and attempts to convince Britons of the threat of Saddam Hussein were largely ignored or disregarded, leading at last to the fall of the Blair government.

(Photo courtesy Detroit News)

I’ve been thinking this week about brokenness, about being chosen and set apart–and being rejected and cast aside–and the value we place on those things in church settings, where those who are chosen lead in a faith centered on healing all who have been left out. More particularly, I have been talking with a new friend who has been studying theology at Oxford, thinking about the possibility of ordination, and recognizing that there might be no place for him in the Church, despite sterling qualities and vast sincerity. And several old friends have learned recently that the positions in the Church to which they aspired will not be offered to them, despite sterling qualities and vast sincerity, and I am feeling sad and a bit pensive about all those told by the Church that they are not to be ordained or called to preach, all those who are not chosen for committees and commissions, all those who are told that they are not needed at this time, all God’s people whose sterling qualities and vast sincerity are not rewarded with the thing they sought and to which they felt called.

I know a bit about this, as some of you know, since a year back the Church told me at last that it did not want me either. After being removed from the ordination process by a past Bishop of Texas, I was encouraged by clergy and by a church that valued me to approach our new bishop, and after a long wait during which both of us thought and prayed, the new bishop and I sat down for a talk last fall which was difficult for both of us. And at the end, he had–with gentleness and considerable wisdom–told me that he did not believe I was called to ordination.

In church life–and in several other spheres of life, unfortunately–I fall into the easy to cast off category that might be headed Badly Mangled Personal Life. When someone like me has made mistakes or been profoundly unlucky in the past, it’s easy to suppose that she or he might experience the same in the future. It’s past performance by which we judge race horses, dairy cows, and, unfortunately, people. I know I proved a failure in marriage and at most of my personal life in past decades–and I think it unfair but not unexpected that people might continue to judge me based on those events of ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Past performance: I know of several priests and pastors who have self-destructed badly in recent years, and whose self-immolation took forms that should have been familiar to any who knew them and their history.

So I understand past performance as a measure of future possibility. But what this fails to take into account are the deeply Christian concepts of grace, redemption, and rebirth. Christians are said to believe that, in the presence of forgiving love, failures of the past may be left in the past. If we have expressed remorse for the things we have done, learned from them, demonstrated that who we are now is not who we were then, then it seems uncharitable to exclude people because of who they have been, what they believed, what they have done.

Today is the feast day of Irenaeus, a second-century bishop who was one of the first theologians of the Christian Church; he is perhaps best known for his work “Adversus Haereses” (”Against Heresies”), a book in which he singled out the Gnostics of his day (deservedly, I suppose) as heretics, thus arguing that some are in, and some are out. But it is also Irenaeus (ironically) who first argued that although most people and faith communities of his day employed a single gospel witness, we actually required four distinct gospels to understand the nature of Jesus and God’s saving work through him. This insistence ultimately led to the inclusion of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John when the New or Christian Testament of the Bible was compiled, and Irenaeus had it right–if any of these narratives of God’s faithfulness had been excluded, the Church–and our knowledge of God–would be lessened.

So when someone is told by someone with authority to say so, “The Church does not want you for this thing at this time,” perhaps we could remember Irenaeus’ argument of diversity: each of us is necessary, and each of us has a story of God’s good news moving in our lives. In remembering this, perhaps we might also remember that God loves all, that even hurt and rejected as we may feel, God has great things for us, and that the Church is composed of imperfect human beings seeking the will of God the best they can.

I sit today in a residential library in Wales where I have been invited to read, think, and write, a fellowship that would not have been possible had I been accepted into parish ministry. The books I write and talks and teaching I do likewise would not be possible in a vocation where daily care for God’s people was my first responsibility. When my bishop Andy Doyle told me last fall that he would not return me to the ordination process, he told me two things that have been of lasting value. One, he said, he felt confident that this was all for the best, and that God had big plans for me regardless of whether the Church stamped me as its own and put a priestly collar around my neck.

And second–and perhaps most important when one is disappointed and rejected–he told me, “God calls people, not the Church. The Church tries to understand that call and what it means. Sometimes we get it wrong.”

And in my experience, sometimes that call is to something different, something that doesn’t fit into easy categories, something that messes with the heads of bureaucracies or gatekeepers, something that God will bless even if the Church doesn’t seem to.

So for all those who have been told “No” or “Not yet,” for all those who have been hurt by the Church, for all those wondering what’s next, I pray that the peace of God that passes all understanding might cover those hurts, the love of Christ Jesus bind those wounds, and the joy of the Spirit fill and move through you into a world that desperately needs healing and wholeness.

The Church may not choose you–but God has.

And, as always, there is work to do.

An early look at the book I’m writing in Wales on 9/11, religion, and culture:

“Terrible thing, to live in fear.  . . . All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t have to be afraid all the time.”

Red (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption

“I wish I  wasn’t afraid all the time. But I am.”

Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), V for Vendetta

            They flew into lower Manhattan out of a brilliant blue sunlit sky, two jetliners, glinting in the sunlight. It was incongruous—and remains so, in the videos we still sometimes see—how something so familiar could cause so much damage, could become the source of so much terror. Before September 11, 2001, Americans had felt largely immune to the acts of terror that have afflicted other nations around the world. But after the fiery collapse of the Twin Towers and attack on the Pentagon, after the deaths of office workers and first responders, our shock and anger were also accompanied by—and perhaps, prompted by—a deeper, darker emotion: fear.

We live in the world’s lone remaining superpower, we told ourselves. We spend more on defense than all other nations—friends and rivals—combined. And yet we had been hurt. Humbled.

In a world where planes piloted by blade-wielding terrorists could fly into buildings, Americans asked ourselves, what else is now possible? What is to prevent future attacks? How can we keep ourselves, our families, our nation, safe?

We came to the sad if perhaps long overdue realization that perhaps, for all our military power and economic might, we could not protect ourselves from all harm.

And we were afraid.

In the Oscar-winning movie Crash, Jean (Sandra Bullock), the wife of the Los Angeles District Attorney, stands in for many of us. If anyone should be safe from attack, she should. And yet, when she and her husband are carjacked, she is startled to discover that her wealth and privilege do not protect her from even the most basic assault. They return home, Daniel, a Hispanic locksmith (Michael Peña), comes to change all the locks, but Jean now sees threat everywhere. She takes one look at Daniel and tells her husband they will need to change the locks again, because “your amigo in there is gonna sell our key to one of his homies.” And although Daniel is one of the movie’s moral centers, a gentle and generous man, Jean’s world has been knocked off its axis; although she is safe, what she sees is danger. What she sees is the need for better, more secure locks.

In that, she would not be so different from other Americans. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans were told our entire way of life would change. A major new agency, Homeland Security, was created; time-consuming screenings changed our travel habits; danger charts set (permanently, it seems) on Orange reminded us that the danger of another terrorist attack was always high; at occasional moments, officials would announce intelligence of a possible terrorist attack–or the foiling of one–and our fear would roil again.

Historian Ruth Rosen noted a year after 9/11 how the attack was a shattering of illusions of safety, and how, in the wake of it, we desperately wanted to trust our president and our government to keep us safe from further attacks. What happened, she said, was that “our leaders have taken advantage of our fear. The Bush administration has planted the seeds of a security state that can, without judicial oversight, congressional opposition, and popular resistance, grow into a repressive government.” Rosen quantified the possibilities in this way:

In the name of preventing terrorism, the Bush administration has employed a politics of fear to create the most extensive national security apparatus in our nation’s history.

Military tribunals. Mandatory registration. Mass detentions. Electronic surveillance. Government secrecy. Executive privilege. Office of Total Awareness. Perpetual war.” [1]

And fear had put all of these elements in the mix back in 2002 before we even knew of Abu Ghraib, renditions, spying on Americans, and squads of assassins.

Importantly, however, we should note that these are not partisan charges. Many of them continue under the Obama adminstration. Dan Gillmor is one of many commentators who notes that some of the most egregious examples of expanded presidential power from the Bush era are still in use by the Obama White House, and that civil libertarians continue to fear that we could slip into a police state. “Most depressing of all,” he writes, “the majority of the American people would probably welcome such a government. Our preference for the illusion of safety over the recognition and acceptance of risk has only grown. We are a society too afraid of our own shadows to confront reality.” [2]

Although encouraging a terror of terrorism was begun in the Bush White House, promotion of fear has not been limited to strictly official channels. What Corey Robin has called “Fear, American Style” demonstrates that once American elites have settled on the source or sources of fear they wish to foreground, that emotion can and will spread through both state power and through every institutional and incidental avenue. [3] Some examples of the pervasiveness of fear are instructive: though violent crime actually has fallen nationwide (it actually fell throughout the 1990s, and except for slight ticks in 2005 and 2006, continues to show declines), many Americans believe the opposite is true. [4] Public perceptions of crime, as the Wall Street Journal notes, have yet to square themselves with the facts. [5]

But the common media elements of our contemporary life militates against our putting fear in its proper place; around the clock news and local TV both inform us first about atrocities committed anywhere around the globe (as you may have heard, “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the credo of local TV journalism). If a child is snatched in another city or a bloody murder is committed in another state, it is committed to memory. If a bomb goes off in a square in Baghdad; if a terrorist group claims credit for an attack in Jakarta; even if some fundamentalist bonehead fails to blow up a plane with the bomb in his pants, it dominates news cycles and the diatribes of talking heads, and the grim sum of all of this is that we believe the world is a dangerous place, even as, for most of us, the chances of our being the victim of violent crime or terrorist attack are slim.

[1] Ruth Rosen, “Politics of Fear,” San Francisco Chronicle Dec. 30, 2002.  Accessed at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/30/ED192178.DTL&hw=Ruth+Rosen&sn=020&sc=240

[2] Dan Gillmor, “Dear Mr. President: Please abuse your powers,” Salon June 22, 2010. Accessed at http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/06/22/obama_abuse_civil_liberties

[3] Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),  163.

[4] Jerry Markon, “Violent crime in the US on the decline,” Washington Post May 25 2010. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/24/AR2010052402210.html

[5] Evan Perez, “Violent Crime Falls Sharply,” Wall Street Journal May 25, 2010. Accessed at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704113504575264432463469618.html 

I was environmental before environmental was cool. Seriously. I mean, I wasn’t at the first Earth Day, but I was into Reduce, Reuse, Recycle back in the days when you had to take your recyclables somewhere—and when a lot of things couldn’t be recycled.

Now it feels as though there’s been a sea-change in the way we think about trash and recycling. In Austin, where I live, recycling is a way of life, with bins that let us toss in virtually everything. In Waco, where I work, recycling bins on the Baylor campus invite contributions of paper, plastics, aluminum cans.

Exxon, the corporation I made a villain in my first novel, Free Bird, and have been boycotting for two decades over their Alaskan oil spill, has become one of the safest and most-responsible oil companies around. When you compare their number of major fines in recent years with BP, we should have realized something bad was looming. (I know for some calling an oil company safe is like saying someone is the most humanitarian Nazi concentration camp guard; but seriously—check the numbers: 760 OSHA fines for BP, 1 for Exxon).

 Most people have reached a point of accepting that the environment matters. And that’s what makes the BP oil spill and the damage to the Gulf that much more heartbreaking. Whatever your political persuasion, whether you’re drill, baby, drill, or tree-hugging Prius driver, it’s clear from the emerging facts that we should have known disaster was coming. The Houston Chronicle reports that “In the five years before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, federal investigators documented nearly 200 safety and environmental violations in accidents on platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, describing a stunning array of hazards that resulted in few penalties.”

 Despite their green branding and attempts to paint themselves as more than a petroleum company, BP was, is, and will be a company that drills for oil. And facts show they they’ve done so with little regard for their employees, consumers, or the environment.

Set aside all they did wrong and could have done differently before the spill; after, they’ve consistently tried to minimize the damage and their own culpability. The Guardian notes that BP originally told us that 1000 barrels a day were entering the Gulf; then they upped their estimate to 5000 barrels a day. Now we understand that it’s at least five times that, with some scientists estimating higher still.

All of this could have been prevented. Tragic.

But there was profit in drilling deep wells in the Gulf for oil, and BP was pursuing it.

And that profit is where our responsibility enters in.

Yesterday my friend Ken was telling me about the electric car he hopes to buy. It has a range of 100 miles between charges and a top speed of 90 mph. Someday, perhaps all of us will drive vehicles or ride trains powered by alternative sources of energy.

But in the meantime, the political, ethical, and even spiritual choices remain: Do we use fossil fuels? How do we use them? What costs are we willing to pay to use them?

And what kind of commitments should we make to the paradigm shift it will take to move from exploiting this one-time only gift of dirty energy the planet gave us to other forms of energy that won’t pollute our air and water, won’t fill our atmosphere with greenhouse gases?

Part of my environmentalism is theological. Like many of my opinions, my environmental ideas are informed by my belief that God loved the world enough to create, enter, and die for it. They’re also informed by my recognition that many of the choices we make about energy have a direct impact on “the least of these”—the poor around the world who are most likely to suffer asthma and respiratory distress, to use polluted water, to suffer from our choices.

I was environmental back in the days when it didn’t really matter, since no one else was environmental. Nothing I said or did would matter, because alone I was only reducing my own footprint on the earth.

But times have changed. People have learned. Coalitions have formed that once would have seemed impossible between conservatives and progressives, between evangelicals, Catholics, and Protestants.

And now it’s time for all of us who love the earth—and earth’s people—to learn that business as usual leads to disasters like the one in the Gulf.

We must do better, and I believe we can.

Let’s start talking.

Photo: ABC TV

A nice break from talking about U2: I’ve been giving interviews on the finale of Lost, which I frankly think is one of the greatest things ever on TV. Lost has engaged us with big stories, and taken us seriously as people capable of reading, thinking, and discussing. It’s wrestled with the post 9-11 world, with issues like torture and rendition and the use of violence to protect yourself and your tribe. It’s given us wonderful characters from a wide world of cultures and races to follow, boo, and cheer.

And Sunday, it’s over. Boo. Cheer.

My predictions for a California journalist this morning about the last show were fun. I love being an entertainment pundit. Here’s what I said:

Everything I’ve read suggests the ending is going to be hard for anyone to figure out beforehand, but I’d guess in broad terms the show will be true to its core–people who were lost will have the chance to become found, in space and in their own lives. I suspect that there may be redemption extended even to the villain, Smokey, and that Jack may do something sacrificial, although that’s not much of a stretch. It might be nice, in fact, to not have him be a martyr.

We’ll know more, of course, shortly. But in the interest of explaining Lost to folks who haven’t got it, or who have let it slide–or perhaps to open some more discussion, I want to offer two things: First, check out my buddy Chris Seay’s The Gospel according to Lost, a spiritual reading of the show’s first five seasons that will help you understand its sixth and final season.

And second, you might want to check out the lesson I did on Lost for The Thoughtful Christian, an excerpt of which I provide below: great possibility for group discussion, church lessons, what have you. A wonderful Father’s Day gift as well, I’m sure. (Disclosure: I was paid to write this lesson. But I don’t get paid any more if you buy it.)

Happy viewing to all my fellow Losties! And a few thoughts on the show:

Lost has been called (by the London Times) “the most maddening show on television” and (by TIME magazine) “the future of television,” but however you think about the show, this big-budget, high-concept series has changed the way we experience television—and has also, perhaps, changed some of those who experienced it. When we watch television or go to the movies, often we are seeking the opportunity to escape into a story—to laugh, to be frightened, to have our feelings engaged in some powerful and diverting way. But because they come to us in the shape of stories, even the most enthralling of dramatic entertainments will often connect us to real-world moral issues, to realistic ethical dilemmas, and to new ways of understanding our beliefs, since story is always how we make sense of our experiences and those of others.

Great television shows are powerful in this respect, because in serial drama we gain ongoing opportunities to observe the lives of characters. Diane Winston notes how in a long-running television series, viewers interact with the characters over an extended period of time, and “the experience of watching, and responding to, TV characters’ moral dilemmas, crises of faith, bouts of depression, and fits of exhilaration gives expression—as well as insight and resolution—to viewers’ own spiritual odysseys and ethical predicaments.”^[1] Thus, a show like Lost, which deals with both existential and topical issues over the course of its six seasons, offers us a prime opportunity to begin a journey of exploration alongside its characters.

Lost, created by J.J. Abrams (Alias, Star Trek), Jeffrey Lieber, and Damon Lindelof is one of the most honored—and discussed—television shows of recent memory. Since its premiere on September 22, 2004, Lost has attracted a huge and devoted fan community who watch episodes, debate questions and hints, and seek out additional information and interaction online. The show has won Emmy, Golden Globe, and many other awards, and been named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best shows in TV history. TIME media critic James Poniewozik has called the show “a moving, literate popcorn thriller that weaves dozens of characters lives into a story of interconnection, redemption, and grace,” and certainly this mixture of entertainment, a large and multi-cultural cast, and powerful themes has led to huge viewing audiences, and to followers in new media such as online viewing, the iTunes store, and on DVD, where Lost’s first seasons were bestsellers. [2] Lost’s popularity has also been international; Lost-watching became a phenomenon in Britain after its introduction there, and in a recent worldwide study of television popularity in twenty countries, Lost was named the second most watched television show around the world. [3] 

Although Lost employs traditional narrative patterns (the stuck on a desert island motif, for example, has been used by shows as varied as Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, and Survivor), Lost goes well beyond the usual treatment in showing us the lives of people making a place and a community for themselves; it also suggests so many parallels with our everyday lives—and with the recent experiences of those of us in the post 9-11 world—that it is both fantastic wish-fulfillment and gritty chronicle of the world as it is.

Given the relevance of its topics, Lost can prompt powerful discussion about good and evil, conflict, faith, free will, and the importance—and difficulty—of doing the right thing. In this class session, we’ll be introduced to the characters and concerns of the series, watch scenes from the series, and discuss questions closely related to them. In the process, we’ll explore theological and ethical questions as well as social and political ones: What should be done to create a just and secure society? What is the nature of evil? What is the relationship between faith and free will? Can we ever be irretrievably lost? What does it mean to be righteous?

Lost is a great entertainment, offering powerful performances from attractive and engaging actors, beautiful sets and production values, mysteries to ponder, easter eggs to find. Still, to focus only on the entertainment and ignore the challenging questions would be to lose much of Lost’s appeal; as with other great dramatic works that discuss issues of faith and conscience, our own faith—and our consciences—should be engaged as we consider this show and the issues it raises.

[1] Diane Winston. “Introduction.” Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion. Ed. Diane Winston (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2009), 6.

[2] James Poniewozik. “Why the Future of Television Is Lost.” TIME, Sept. 24, 2006.  Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1538635-2,00.html

[3] “CSI show “most popular in world.’” BBC News, July 31, 2006. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5231334.stm

I’m just off a weekend retreat and U2charist with the wonderful Trinity United Methodist Church, Austin, and this spring I’ve been talking about how we might find God moving in the music of U2, in movies, and in the Harry Potter story, among other things. We read Psalm 19 before my sermon yesterday, which talks about the heavens showing forth the glory of God, and I feel strongly that we can discern God in creation–which includes us, since we are part of creation–a creating part.

I’ll always have things to say about this, but it struck me that although religious people have sometimes worried that the culture tells stories that detract from the Christian message, and secular people have sometimes worried that trying to read culture through a Christian filter imposes Christian ideas upon it, the truth seems to me to be this: While not every piece of culture radiates obvious spiritual value, when we read with discernment, we can find spiritual value in movies, music, films, TV, and elsewhere.And that most people don’t need out permission to do this, since they already consciously or unconsciously draw their spiritual understandings from culture, not from organized religion.

This is both exciting–and daunting.

It’s exciting, because I know that in my own journey, culture was a big part of what kept me going even though I had no formal community of faith to fall back on for sustenance and meaning.

And it’s daunting, because while I knew when something was life-giving or soul-sucking for me, I couldn’t usually have told you why, so I think a great challenge for people of faith now is to help people read culture well, to let them know why these stories matter for good or ill, and that’s been a big part of my writing, speaking, and preaching work in recent years.

As I’m thinking about being the guest this week at Sunday Forum at the National Cathedral, I was revisiting one of the best things I’ve written about this, from the introduction to The Gospel according to Hollywood, and I want to share it with you now:        

    The first time I saw Pulp Fiction in the fall of 1994, I had the feeling that I was watching something miraculous. It wasn’t just that I was watching an entertaining and inventive work of art, which the movie certainly was, but as I sat there in the darkened theater, I had a strange and paradoxical thought: I felt that I was in the presence of something holy.    

       As I watched Quentin Tarantino’s violent and often vile film about gangsters, junkies, crooked boxers, armed robbers, and other folks who make up the unpleasant underbelly of the world, I was amazed to discover in each of the film’s major stories the light of something I could only call grace, and I was spiritually moved in a way I hadn’t been in a church since—well, maybe ever.      

     When the movie was over, I sat quietly through the closing credits, as is my practice, and then remained seated thinking long after the lights came up, which isn’t.            To paraphrase Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the film’s gangsters: In the words, images, and action of Pulp Fiction, I felt the touch of God.God got involved.      

     Although the movie made its name in the world as a cleverly-written film about gunplay, drug use, profanity, and forced sodomy, what I took away from Pulp Fiction was not the violent action, dark humor, and crudity, but embedded themes of grace and redemption and the belief that God was real and powerful. For me, Pulp Fiction was a deeply spiritual film, and its use of theological language made it, despite its troublesome content, deeply religious as well.            About two thirds of the way through the film, for example, when Jules and his colleague Vincent (John Travolta) survive an attack at point-blank gunpoint, he rejects Vincent’s judgment that they were simply lucky. No, he says:

JULESThat was . . . divine intervention. You know what divine intervention is?

VINCENTYeah, I think so.  That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.

JULESYeah, man, that’s what it means. That’s exactly what it means!  God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets. [1]

Whether Quentin Tarantino the writer and director of this scene believes that God came down and stopped the bullets is irrelevant. Despite Vincent’s skepticism, Jules does believe it, and the filmed scene creates an undeniable effect of awe and mystery. Jules is a character we like and respect, and his belief in the miraculous ultimately spills over onto the audience. Whatever Tarantino’s own take on the action, this is one of many spots in Pulp Fiction that offers us what Connie Neal, author of The Gospel According to Harry Potter, likes to call “glimmers of the gospel,” moments in popular culture narratives where we can find inspiration and spiritual illumination. [2]

Pulp Fiction is crammed full of these moments that illuminate Judeo-Christian teachings, whether in its story of Jules’ redemption, its account of Vincent first receiving the wages of sin and then experiencing a miraculous second birth, its depiction of people behaving with uncharacteristic kindness and generosity in difficult situations, or its use of an actual vehicle called “Grace” to convey some of its characters to a new life.

The first time I saw Pulp Fiction, I noticed some of these things, but I had no idea then that the movie would be discussed in books on the Bible and film, film and spirituality, or even film and prayer. I didn’t know that people were going to spend thousands of hours on the Internet and in coffee shops debating such topics as whether the briefcase Jules and Vincent had rescued contained the soul of Marcellus Wallace, the gang boss played by Ving Rhames. I didn’t know that I’d actually be opening my dust-covered King James Bible for the first time in years to examine Ezekiel 25:17 and see how much of that verse Jules was actually quoting to the people he was getting ready to ventilate. I didn’t know that the venerable American Academy of Religion, this country’s foremost organization of theologians, would devote a special session of their next annual conference to the discussion of Pulp Fiction.

All I knew was that when I left the theater, it was as a slightly different person than I went in—slightly more hopeful, slightly more open to the possibility that there might be a God (and to the possibility that he, she, or it might be moving in my life), and more than a little anxious to have that kind of experience with the holy again.

When Jules discusses the miracle they witnessed (“You witnessed,” the skeptical Vince says; “I witnessed a freak occurrence”), he uses those words I mentioned earlier, words I’ve co-opted over and over in the intervening years to explain the feeling I have gotten from Pulp Fiction, and from other works of popular culture that didn’t set out to witness to the Gospel but do so anyway: “What is significant is I felt God’s touch.”

I ultimately saw Pulp Fiction in the theater seven times, six times in the States, once in London. I bought the movie, first on videocassette and then on DVD, read and re-read the screenplay. Pulp Fiction became a touchstone in my growing faith, more meaningful than most sermons I’d heard and most church services I’d sat through.

Like many in church and even more outside it, I have found that God can speak to me as powerfully sometimes through elements of the culture as through a formal religious service or in a religious setting.I’ve learned lessons about my faith and about my life through the depiction of joy and beauty in musicals like Top Hat and Singin’ in the Rain, by witnessing a selfless messiah figure and a redeemed Barabbas in Casablanca, in the complicated interplay of guilt and justice in Rear Window, by following the chilling progress of a man losing his soul in The Godfather, in the paradigm of irrational and unshakable faith put into action in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, through the meditations on sin and violence in Unforgiven, in the sacrificial love displayed in Titanic, and in the scenes of divine intervention and inspired forgiveness that animate Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

My spiritual journey has been marked by many cinematic rest stops, and I’m hardly alone in this.

When Chris Seay and I wrote The Gospel Reloaded about the religious elements in the Matrix films, we were partly inspired to do so because of 1000 websites and who knows how many people on the web discussing faith and philosophy in the original Matrix, a phenomenon unseen, perhaps, since the first Star Wars films. Many of those people so interested in learning what kind of savior Neo (Keanu Reeves) was and how the Biblical references helped explain the film’s conflict were “irreligious” or “unchurched.” But every human being is a spiritual being, and we all thirst for something beyond ourselves, however and wherever we can find it, and that book and others like it served a real and growing need.

These days, almost every mainline Protestant church with sufficient resources seems to do “popcorn theology” nights and teach classes on faith and film. In the past five years, secular and religious publishers alike have sent forth books examining the relationship between movies and faith, and popular websites like Hollywood Jesus and media sources like the radio shows hosted by Dick Staub and Bill Hogg likewise focus on the intersection of popular culture and Christianity. And in what would have seemed amazing twenty years ago, leaders in many churches now show Hollywood films during sermons and use them in video installations, and universities and seminaries alike offer wildly popular courses on film and theology.Not everyone is jumping on board this fast-accelerating bandwagon, of course.

While Pulp Fiction is a movie that was an essential part of the faith journey for me and for many others, it’s important to note that a vast number of Americans consider this movie not only un-Christian but sinful, both in itself and as the potential occasion of sin in others. The Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which rates films for the millions of American Catholics, actually condemned Pulp Fiction when it came out in 1994, rating it as “morally offensive,” thus making it off-limits for Catholics to view.

In fact, the Office for Film and Broadcasting has given their condemnatory rating of “morally offensive” to a number of films that I’ve discussed with audiences in churches, universities, youth camps, and seminaries for their moral and religious content, among them American Beauty, Dogma, Kill Bill, and the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, which I have taught fruitfully for its main character’s active engagement with God, but which the OFB condemns as a “somber meditation on assisted suicide with a morally problematic ending.” [3]

This review points out a central distinction between what a spiritual reading of culture attempts and what many Christians seem to expect from Hollywood: while every year Hollywood releases movies than can fruitfully illuminate the life of faith and draw us closer to the divine, very very few commercial movies are ever intended as some sort of religious experience. They’re stories, some better told than others, and many of them are going to lack an easy moral or be “morally problematic.” That’s why they require interpretation and our own engagement in the problems they present if we’re to gain some sort of enlightenment.

Hollywood films, even in whatever Golden Age people imagine they remember, have always been an uneasy combination of art and commerce, of personal vision and corporate product, and while they can tell mythical stories that touch us deeply, with rare exceptions (like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), our experience of the sacred in a film doesn’t come because the filmmakers have consciously devoted themselves to that proposition.Instead, as my Baylor colleague Ralph Wood writes in The Gospel According to Tolkien, a popular culture narrative approaches the sacred—if indeed it approaches it at all—through “its plot and characters, its images and tone, its landscape and point of view—not from any heavy-handed moralizing or preachifying.” [4]

That makes for good art but bad evangelism, which is why if you go to the movies looking for evangelism, you’re almost certain to be disappointed.Because of the tension between the surface content of a film and its possible deeper spiritual meanings, many movies that for me have strong moral and even religious content are off the shelf for many Christians, one of the things I hope to remedy; we Christians do ourselves few favors by refusing to engage the culture, especially when it regards culture that could help lead a broken world in the direction of faith and wholeness.

I’ll gladly admit that discernment is a necessary element in approaching popular culture for its sacred content, and movies like Starship Troopers or Pootie Tang may in fact have little or no value as anything but DVD Frisbees. But if we truly believe in incarnation—that is, the Judeo/Christian belief that God both created the world and willingly entered into creation as a human being—then the world is indeed, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “charged with the grandeur of God,” and with wisdom, prayer, and persistence we can discern God both in the works of God’s creation and in our creations as well.

[1] Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, London: Faber & Faber, 1994, p. 139.

[2] Connie Neal, The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World’s Most Famous Seeker, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002, p. xi.

[3] Accessed at http://www.usccb.org/movies

 [4] Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003, p. 4.

(I first thought of titling this “Abusing the Sheep,” which probably would have led to more Google hits, but I think you can see why I decided against that.)

I know that many people would rather not talk about sexual abuse in the Church–or rather I not talk about it.

And I would rather not talk about it, so we are all in agreement.

And that, it seems to me, must be part of the problem.

The other day at the Seminary of the Southwest, I was having a chat out at one of the picnic tables with two juniors when they sighed, stood up, and made their apologies. They were off to do the Episcopal Church’s “Safeguarding God’s Children” class, our training for preventing sexual abuse of those we serve. I did my training enough years ago that I’d probably be due for a refresher course if I were doing parish work, but I remember it well. Basically “Safeguarding” grows out of our awareness of the potential for abuse–and by making it a topic of conversation instead of trying to pretend it never happens, we try to make it less likely.

Sexual abuse is not exclusive to the Catholic Church, and so I hope what I write will not be seen as simply calling my Catholic sisters and brothers to account; although I am certainly doing that, I would do the same if a Methodist hierarchy were moving a pederast pastor from church to church, or if Assembly of God deacons were covering up their pastor’s sexual indiscretions because it is bad for the church. Studies show that far too many clergy of whatever stripe have sex with people in their congregations, but it is Catholic priests in the news at the moment, and it is Catholic bishops and archbishops decrying media coverage of these events.

A reprehensible human truth: people in power, or some version of power, take advantage of those over whom they have power. Professors, politicians, pastors–the news is always full of people who have had sex with those over whom they hold some form of authority, and you and I may also have personal stories about such people.

Like others in positions of authority, clergy and church workers sometimes take advantage of the power differential between them and those they serve, a difference that can incorporate both spiritual and emotional power. Some people–infants, children, teens–are clearly not capable of choosing to have sex, and we think of this abuse as particularly heinous because it is. But even those who we might think are old enough to choose affairs may be making choices influenced by transference, guilt, and other powerful factors; whatever her other wisdom, an 80 year old woman may not be competent to choose to have sex with someone who has charge of her soul.

And so the rule, simply, is this: leaders of the Church should not abuse those under their care, they should not enter into consensual relations with those under their care, and they should not imagine that their positions in the Church protect them from wrong-doing or ethical mishaps.

The firestorm of scandal swamping the Catholic Church just now is sad and infuriating, because not only did it happen, which breaks my heart, but it has continuously been mishandled by the Church itself, and that affects all of us who call ourselves Christian. The Catholic Church is our parent, and when our father or mother is getting its booking picture broadcast on the nightly news, it reflects badly on us as well.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said publicly this week that the Catholic Church in Ireland had lost its credibility because of sex scandals there. Some people might think this a statement comparable to, I don’t know, “Dogs eat vomit,” something we all recognize but we don’t talk about because it’s unpleasant and repugnant. But the Archbishop’s comment unleashed a wave of resentment like you would not believe: outrage, calls for apologies. Check out the British papers.

Martin Marty had written last week, just prior to the Archbishop’s statement, that perhaps Protestants have not called for more forthrightness from the Catholic Church for positive reasons: ecumenism, sympathy, a sense that this is something for Catholics to condemn. But, he said, it may also be a matter of professional embarrassment, an “old boys club” in which people who wear clerical collars protect other people who wear clerical collars.

So when someone who wears a clerical collar–and an archbishop’s cope and mitre, for good measure–points out that not only is the Catholic abuse scandal morally repugnant to all people, but it harms the Church itself–well, that is, judging by the outrage, taken as a betrayal of the “old boys club.” An editorial in The Guardian Monday notes with droll British humor that the perception that the Catholic Church has lost credibility in Ireland is “so widely shared, and so close to the truth, that to say it out loud has produced an enormous row.”

It’s true.

But we don’t talk about it.

Only here’s the problem: when we don’t talk about it, as the record shows, then people get away with victimizing others.

When we don’t talk about it, people outside the Church get to point their fingers at our hypocrisy, at our desire to protect our institution whatever the cost.

When we don’t talk about it, those who have been hurt by church leaders may imagine that they are the aberrations, or, worse still, somehow to blame for what happened to them.

I wrote in a recent blog post about health insurance that I think a big part of what Christianity is about is protecting the least of these, and I stand by that, but I’ll go global with this: When any religious leader–Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Shaolin monk–abuses or takes advantage of a person under his or her (although, God help us, it is almost always a him, isn’t it?) care, there should be consequences.

And those consequences should not merely be movement to another place where the offense can happen again.

I love the Catholic Church as a parent, but my heart does not break for any perceived offense to the Church.

It breaks for those innocents harmed by it.

God, forgive us for the wrong we have done. For those things we have left undone. And help your Church, we pray, to be an instrument of healing for those who are hurt, suffering, and alone. In the name of the one who suffered that we might know abundant life, our Savior Jesus Christ, who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, One God, Now and Forever. Amen. 

Yesterday at Baylor I saw something almost unheard of in Baylor’s storied history—a campus protest.

Admittedly it was one guy with a megaphone and a couple of his friends handing out flyers about “Obamacare,” but it was something. I’m happy to see people at Baylor get political, even if too often, they have been on what turns out to be the wrong side of things. Baylorites know that during the campus unrest of the 1960s, Baylor’s sole protest seems to have been for the Vietnam War, and when I spoke at a peace rally before the Second Gulf War to suggest that Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction and nothing at all to do with the attacks of 9-11, I was drowned out by the anti-protest protestors across the street.

But it’s, as they say, a free country, and I welcome people’s participation in the political process and the polite expressions of their opinions. Here’s mine:

I am in favor of the health reform package, as imperfect as it is, because I believe I have a Christian duty to take care of the least of these.

The young man’s broadcast arguments at Baylor yesterday were about how much the plan cost, about how it was taking money out of his pockets. I got the impression of a lot of “me” and “my.”

Now I work hard for the money, as the immortal Donna Summer sang. I try hard to provide for my boys and myself. I want stuff, and things, and all that.

But I’m also fortunate enough to have health care, as I’m sure yesterday’s Baylor protestors are.

As a hospital chaplain, I saw emergency rooms used as primary care facilities by those who can’t afford insurance—and the horrific complications caused by those who can’t afford the most basic primary care.

And I am here to say that “me” and “my” are less important than “us” and “our” in Christian understanding, and if health care reform should actually end up costing me some money, than so be it.

In the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus announces what it is he’s come to do, he first announces it in the synagogue—where fellow Jews had gathered to learn about the scriptures—and he announces it by reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah:

He came to Nazara, where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did. He stood up to read, and they handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll he found the place where it is written:The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord.He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the assistant and sat down. And all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even while you are listening.’ (Luke 4: 16-21, NJB)

What Jesus was saying was that the good news he had come to bring—the teaching and the healing that he was doing—had their basis in God’s ongoing messages of justice and righteousness. What he had come to fulfill were messages of good news for those who suffered, for the poor, for the downtrodden.

And they were messages that were now beginning to come true.

This week 28 million Americans who could not afford health care got the chance to take care of themselves and their families, to make sure that an illness would not bankrupt their family–or unnecessarily kill them.

And we got the opportunity to help make that happen.

And  so, respectfully, I say, “Thank God.”

Lent 2C

St. David’s, Austin

Feb. 28, 2010

Luke 13:31-35

³¹At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” ³²He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. ³³Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ ³⁴Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! ³⁵See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

            I’ve gotten so used to the drive up to Waco on the days I teach at Baylor that I don’t tend to be very reflective about it any more. I roll out of bed, shower and shave, grab a Clif Bar, dress, and before I know it I’m halfway to work. It’s a journey that has become so familiar that often I’m well into it before I realize what I’m doing. Was that Salado I just passed? Belton? Troy?

            This past Tuesday morning, though, with sleet pelting my windows here and 4 to 6 inches of snow expected in Waco, I did something a little different. When I rolled out of bed, I sat on the edge for a moment, listening. Looking out the window. Thinking. Was continuing on my usual way what I ought to be doing on Tuesday? Was there a wiser choice—a better decision—that I might come to by sitting and weighing the evidence? Was it possible that rushing off as I usually did might even lead to disaster?

            I was thinking about Tuesday morning because it represents for me all of those occasions in our lives when we pause for a moment and try to reflect on what we’re doing—or what we should be doing—and these occasions are worth noting because, if your life is anything like mine, they are all too rare.

Many of us are off at the crack of dawn, fueled by caffeine or panic at falling behind. We rush through our days, exits whizzing by outside our figurative or literal windows, and we seem to have passed the exit some time back where simply doing one thing at a time was sufficient. Moms and dads feed their kids breakfast while they check their voice and e-mail messages; kids eat that breakfast while they work on their homework, text, listen to their iPods. We fill every waking moment of our lives with input after input, layer on task after task.

            Which brings me to the importance of a morning like Tuesday, when I stopped, looked, and listened, and of a season like Lent, when we, as the People of God, are supposed to do the same. We decide to let go of something, or to take on a spiritual discipline that encourages us to reflect on who we are as people on a journey toward God. “Why so seeming fast?” Henry David Thoreau asked the 19^th Century, and what he asked has even more relevance for us today: In our own too-busy, multi-tasking lives, I fear that paradoxically we are missing out on a lot, maybe even on the things that matter most.

When people ask me why I go away to write, I tell them that my daily life makes it hard to listen, hard to pay attention, hard to concentrate, but I am nothing special. Everyone’s daily life makes it hard. Our desire to do many things at once, to always be in touch or available, interferes with our ability to do anything well—including, perhaps most notably for our purposes this morning, some spiritual tasks, particularly the task of reflecting on what it is God wants from us and where God wants us to be. It’s not for nothing that those spiritual adventurers of the Fourth Century, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, fled the sumptuous society of the Empire for the silence of the desert. When asked for a word of wisdom, one brother, Evagrius, advised “Cut the desire for many things out of your heart and so prevent your mind being dispersed and your stillness lost.” And more famously, Moses of Scetis called for people seeking insight to turn away from scatter and toward solitude: “Go, sit in your cell,” he said. “And your cell will teach you everything.”

Your cell will teach you everything. Not a cell phone, as I’m sure you figured out—that would be totally counterproductive—but a place or a condition where you can be alone, be quiet, listen, think, allow God to move in your life, although those can be hard for us to find—and hard for us to permit in our lives. Another spiritual adventurer, Henri Nouwen, wrote that “Emptiness requires a willingness not to be in control, a willingness to let something new and unexpected happen. It requires trust, surrender, and openness to guidance. God wants to dwell in our emptiness. But as long as we are afraid of God and God’s actions in our lives, it is unlikely that we will offer our emptiness to God. Let’s pray that we can let go of our fear of God and embrace God as the source of all love.”

            That wisdom is one of the reasons I love the season of Lent, when we are invited to reflect, and why I love our gospel reading for today, which comes about halfway through the ten-chapter section of the Gospel of Luke that scholars call the Journey to Jerusalem. Although Jesus knows where he’s headed—and although the Pharisees’ warning that Herod wants to kill him would certainly give me some urgency to be moving on at a high rate of speed—this lesson instead shows Jesus reflecting. It shows him demonstrating trust, surrender, and openness to guidance.

When Jesus is told that Herod wants him dead, he pauses to consider the work he’s been doing. “Today and tomorrow,” he says, “I’m casting out demons and healing people.” This is part of the Kingdom work he does throughout the Gospel of Luke, where God is moving in Jesus’s life through his teaching and works of power. But Jesus is not just considering where he is; he’s considering where he’s going.

Jesus has been teaching and performing miracles, but he recognizes that his commute is about to change, that he is almost finished with business as usual. “On the third day,” Jesus says, in a deliberate foreshadowing of the resurrection story, “I finish my work.” Our translation is serviceable, but it doesn’t really capture the transcendent nature of what he’s claiming for the third day; Jesus is actually saying that the third day’s work fulfills the other work, brings all he has been doing to fruition.

            So in response to the Pharisees’ message that maybe he should do something else, go somewhere else, Jesus pauses to affirm what he is doing. But the lesson doesn’t show us Jesus then rushing back to his work, although I’m sure that, like all of us, he had plenty to do. Instead, he takes a little longer, draws on wisdom from his faith tradition, gives himself to God’s plan and his place in it, and confirms for himself and for those with ears to hear that he is on the right path, that this journey he is making to Jerusalem is the one that matters.

            In the last verses from our lesson, Jesus recalls a piece of wisdom from the Book of Second Esdras about how Jerusalem always kills or rejects the messengers God sends it in love—a prediction, he knows, that will refer to himself. This is not, at first glance, a happy fate, but it is buffered by Jesus’s claim to a line from Psalm 118 that we still recite in the Sanctus in our Eucharistic liturgy, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” The tradition teaches him that challenge—and blessing—are his fate if he does what God has in store for him.

            Well, to paraphrase the immortal words of Lynn Anderson, God never promised us a rose garden; in fact, if we’re doing the work God calls us to, it’s likely to be a Garden of Gethsemane. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that when Jesus calls someone, he bids them come and die; that’s what Jesus himself is modeling for us here in this moment of calm reflection, of listening to the voices of God from the tradition: a willingness to do God’s purpose, wherever it leads.

So in the midst of the daily work—“I am casting out demons and healing people”—and in the face of a looming deadline—“Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you”—Jesus models for us presence of mind, oneness of purpose; willingness to let God speak and act in and through him. It’s a lesson for Lent: Be here. Be aware. Reflect on where you’re headed, and on what you’re doing along the way.

On Ash Wednesday, I watched as our Rev. Beth Magill imposed ashes on the worshippers at the 5:30 service in Bethel Hall; she placed a firm smudge on each of our foreheads, looked each of us in the eye, told each of us, “Know that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” It was, she told me later, one of the most intense experiences of her priesthood to date, and Ash Wednesday should be an intense experience for us as well. At that first moment in our Lenten journey, we discover or are reminded that, like Jesus, we too are on a journey with a definite ending, and that awareness should shape us in positive ways.

My creative writing students at Baylor are always wanting to end the stories they write with suicides, with explosions, with long tragic wasting diseases that make Carmen look like a situation comedy. And I am always telling them that, people, death is just not that interesting. It’s where every story ends, if you tell it long enough. “What people do on the way to death—”, I remind them, “that’s what matters,”

The paradox is this: Yes, we are called to be at work for the Kingdom of God, and, like Jesus, we must be about our Father’s business. But we ought to pause in the midst of this short earthly life to listen, because that silence can teach us everything.

The invitation to a holy Lent is our invitation to slow down, to look around, to invite God to move in our lives and in our world.

Take a deep breath.

Let it go.

AMEN.