Barney Wiget's Blog, page 33

Encounter or Explanation?

Job’s book concludes with a surprise visit from God, but instead of comforting the sufferer, he interrogates him about his whereabouts while he (God) was busy creating. He doesn’t refer to Job’s suffering. He doesn’t answer any of Job’s questions or defend himself against any of Job’s accusations. He doesn’t explain why he was silent for so long or say anything about Satan’s role in Job’s story. He doesn’t give Job any action steps or advice about how to live his life in the future. Instead he just shows up—and then the story ends.

Job gets an encounter with God instead of an explanation. For my money, I’ll take one encounter over a thousand explanations. I may not wind up with tidy answers to all my queries, but I’ll encounter God. Faith doesn’t mean that I have God all figured out, but that I’m learning to live with him without having him figured out. I can desire answers and even ask for them, but I no longer assume that I deserve them—nor will I presume to demand them.

If I’m to have “Jobish” difficulties, I hope for more “Jobian” encounters with God—and it has been my good fortune to have many such encounters while slogging through the dark.

– Originally published in The Other End of the Dark: A Memoir About Divorce, Cancer, and Things God Does Anyway

What is “Moral Injury” and What is to be Done For It? (Part 2 of 2)

 Last time I introduced a newish psychological phrase, “Moral Injury,” which sociologists and psychologists are using to describe, “the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses or fails to prevent acts that transgress their own moral and ethical values and codes of conduct.”

It was originally coined in reference to soldiers returning from combat, but is now being used in broader contexts. I believe it can be used to describe a phenomenon that occurs among people who, in spite of his obvious amoral way of looking at the world and his performance as president continue support the ideology, lies, and policies of Donald J. Trump.

Everywhere we turn we’re exposed to assaults on basic human values––let alone biblical standards––not the least of which pours out of the White House through Twitter, press conferences, and campaign stump speeches. Overlooking or vindicating such assaults inevitably damages one’s moral mechanism. Mindlessly accepting a naked emperor’s delusion of being fully clothed takes a toll on one’s ethical sensibility. Left unchecked, our moral compass loses its bearings and will no longer point to true North.

In the absence of viable alternatives at the polls many people held their noses at Mr. Trump’s odorous absence of character and dearth of any tiny evidence of wisdom back then. I’m willing to give them a mulligan and trust that their decision in the last the election didn’t concuss their conscience beyond repair. But in my view to persist in the fantasy that he is “God’s man” for the job and will make America great again puts them at risk of losing their bearings altogether! “There’s no shame in admitting you were conned,” says Brian McLaren. “The shame is in refusing to see it so the con continues.”

This is a man who said on public television, “If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor… you all need me! I am the center of it, I keep it all together.” Brothers and sisters, this is not just faulty reasoning, it’s delusional! Turning a blind eye to the delusion is more than culpable; it’s dangerous to one’s own psyche!

They say that soldiers who enter combat with a working moral gyroscope may well come out with such dysphoria they can no longer function in society. I’m afraid that Christians and all people of conscience who insist on giving our president mulligan after mulligan for his unremitting display of narcissistic and unprincipled behavior will similarly, if not permanently disable their moral reasoning.

Paul warned of a “polluted conscience” (Titus 1:15) that becomes contaminated to the point of faulty operating through toxic sludge. He also said that in matters of conscience he didn’t trust his own judgment. Instead he deferred to the Lord to take regular inventory and alert him if and when he fell short. (1 Corinthians 4:3-4)

So, my advice is to make daily appointments with Dr. God for heart check ups. Ask him to, “Search and try [you] and see if there be any wicked way within.” (Psalm 139:23-24) He’ll tell you whether or not your heart beats in sync with his, if you need an artery honed out, or a pace-making device installed.

I believe we have a morally injurious national leader, worse than any in my lifetime. My assessment is neither rooted in a predisposition to a political party nor in an expectation that he act like a man of God. But everyday this man proposes and executes decisions that are so unprincipled and off the rails that, in my opinion, to ride his train jeopardizes our own mental and spiritual fitness, to say nothing of the injury done to our credibility as a Jesus following community.

“Too many of its leaders (and their followers) have traded their Christian witness for a mess of political pottage and a few federal judges,” claims John Fea. “It should not surprise us that people are leaving evangelicalism or no longer associating themselves with that label—or, in some cases, leaving the church altogether.”

Brothers and sisters, I plead with you:

“Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don’t drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it. I hope the test won’t show that we have failed. But if it comes to that, we’d rather the test showed our failure than yours. We’re rooting for the truth to win out in you. We couldn’t possibly do otherwise.” (2 Corinthians 13:5-9 – The Message)

For further reflection:

Can Donald Trump Be Trusted and Does It Matter? (Part 1 of 3)
Evangelical Leaders Speak Out On the President’s Sexual Mores and Lies
The Moral Governor (Part 1 of 2)
A Comic, a Candidate, and a Few Bad Cops

As always I welcome your civilly put rebuttals, affirmations, and further thoughts…

 

What is “Moral Injury” and What is to be Done About It? (Part 1 of 2)

“Moral injury” is a phrase being bantered about these days. The banterers define it as “the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses or fails to prevent acts that transgress their own moral and ethical values and codes of conduct.”

This is how Veteran’s Affairs hospitals refer to those who believed they were giving their lives to military service and end up facing terrible moral choices and decisions to obey commands of which they cannot make any sense of it in their moral compass.

Returning veterans returning from a tour of duty and those who care for them are struggling to understand and respond effectively when experiences of war result in levels of anguish, anger, and alienation. They say moral injury includes but is larger than what we have traditionally called “PTSD.”

We all know stories of service men and women who have returned from war with horrendous mental health issues. Even with the plethora of resources available for them, many will carry the damage done to their bodies and minds to the grave. “War is hell!” and the smoke stench stays with people for a long time.

That said, without underestimating the suffering of our soldiers and their families, I’d like to propose a different category of “moral injury,” the potential harm to people of conscience and their credibility who feel compelled to support and defend a morally, socially, and spiritually unhinged U.S. president.

If you think I’m exaggerating hear me out. The clinical definition again:

“Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses or fails to prevent acts that transgress their own moral and ethical values and codes of conduct.”

While I have no desire to judge or psychoanalyze anyone, I do wish to warn those who continue to look the other way every time this president makes up his own “alternative facts.” (By most accounts the number of his publicly spewed balderdashes has now exceeded the 10,000 mark. Those are Hall of Shame numbers!) Though Mr. Trump’s nonstop lying is just one of many ways to calculate his amoral character, it is high on the list of the things he does that potentially damage the psyches of his fawning fans.

I assume that most of my readers have a moral compass in fair working order, especially those whose conscience is informed by Scripture and daily conversations with its Author. I can’t imagine how anyone with a conscience who persists in unabashed alignment with Donald Trump can escape moral injury.

Both Solomon and Paul offer sage advice about such an alignment:

“Bad company corrupts good character. Come back to your senses.” (1 Corinthians 15:33)

“Become wise by walking with the wise; hang out with fools and watch your life fall to pieces.” (Proverbs 13:20 – The Message)

If confined to a boardroom or a reality television set, Mr. Trump’s antics could be viewed as relatively harmless, even entertaining. (Though I’ve never been entertained by it myself.) But transfer those same antics to the highest level of world leadership and they are repulsive and deeply damaging to the collective psyche of those who call for shame and violence to his opponents. Michael Gerson went so far as to say that “Trump’s stump speeches are not a call to arms against want; they are a call to oppose his enemies. This is not the agenda of a movement; it is the agenda of a cult.”

Then there’s the indefensible reality that though most evangelicals are not racists, his supporters have decided that “White Nationalism” is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States. That’s something more than a compromise for party’s sake. It’s symptom of moral injury and should be treated immediately if not sooner!

“My main problem,” said author and the director of Eternal Perspective Ministries, Randy Alcorn, “is not that Donald Trump says what he thinks. . . . My problem is with what he actually thinks: especially his obsession with outward appearance, sexiness, superficiality, wealth, his own status and accomplishments, and his quickness to berate and insult people and seek revenge on his critics.” Ted Koppel calls Mr. Trump a “national Rorschach test.”

Yet according to Jerry Falwell Jr., we Christians have found our “dream president,” which says something about the current quality of Christian morality on a stage as large as Mr. Flawell’s. Moral injury has begun and continues to spread like a contagion in our country and I plead for anyone with even the slightest symptom of infection to take daily truth injections from God’s Word and get into “Redeemer’s Rehab” immediately.

We’ll leave it at that for now. In preparation for next time read these passages.

 

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. I’m not just writing to improve on my typing speed! (Although it does help.) What are your thoughts, stated in “civil terms,” of course?

Faith: Paradox or Packaged?

I don’t like living with mystery and paradox any more than the next person. I prefer maps over mystery. I like to know where I am and where I’m going.

But life is ambiguous. It unspools in cycles in no predictable order—and for people of faith, there are a lot of loose ends. It’s easy to say that God is “wonder-ful,” but I’m not always comfortable with the “wonder” of his ways, especially when I wonder what the %*#@ he’s doing!

If I had my way, everything would fit a predictable pattern and be nailed down with precise definitions. Yet we can’t fit God into our patterns or definitions, and so it takes spiritual maturity to live with the ambiguity and the chaos, the absurdity and the untidiness. Accepting the ambiguity of God’s ways is a huge part of living by faith—especially when pain and suffering are part of the mix.

As Oswald Chambers writes: “On the human side the only thing to do for a man who is up against these deeper problems is to remain kindly agnostic.” (That is, admit you don’t know). I also agree with Anne Lamott’s assessment of a neatly packaged Christianity when she says, “Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horses**t.”

– Originally published in The Other End of the Dark: A Memoir About Divorce, Cancer, and Things God Does Anyway

The Blessing of Loneliness

A few short months before the lights went out, life had been good – not easy or by any means perfect – but reasonably good. I was healthy, married, pastoring, and gardening on my days off in the backyard of our dream house. It was as if I had gone to sleep one night and when I awoke in the morning the sun was in total eclipse and remained behind its lunar shroud for much longer than was astronomically possible.

If there’s one thing I’ve been learning it’s that a life of faith may be lived in the light but it’s discovered in the dark.

God arranges some times of loneliness so he can be alone with you. When you’re lonely, sit down and say, “So, Lord, what do you want to talk about?” Ron Mehl

– Originally published in The Other End of the Dark: A Memoir About Divorce, Cancer, and Things God Does Anyway

Non-Christians in Need of a Christian Friend

When Richard Nixon resigned and held up in isolation no one visited him for fear of sullying their reputation, no one except Chuck Colson who risked the trip many times. When asked about it later he said, “To let Mr. Nixon know that someone loved him.”

The way I read it Jesus was the sinner’s friend even before the sinner converted to sainthood. That is, while his goal was to gain full access to sinners’ hearts, he befriended them before they turned over the keys. Though, to fully enjoy the benefits of his friendship (i.e. to be saved) people must repent, he didn’t wait for them to convert in order to be their friend. I think the same goes for us on our quest with him. People shouldn’t have to come to faith before they can be our friends.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

The Inescapable Web of Mutuality

Friendship is by definition a mutual arrangement, a two-way street. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of us all being bound up in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” They called Jesus a “friend of sinners,” which, for my money, implies more than that he was nice to bad people.

He valued their friendship as much as they did his. Even those individuals that some people considered the dregs of his day must have, in some way, brought something of value to the relationship.

From a Rahab-like woman of notorious reputation Jesus asked, “Will you give me a drink?” He was the least “needy” person who ever lived, and yet he opens the conversation with admitting a need. At face value, the woman had nothing to offer the Son of God, and yet he humbled himself and asked for her help. He was ready to dispense unlimited “living water,” yet he approached her with his own need for the kind of water she had at her disposal. That’s mutuality.

If that’s the case with the eternal Son of God, how much more should we expect to benefit from calibrating how we befriend people outside our comfort zones of commonality and risk getting near people who are unlike us?

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

“Moral Distress” Is that even a thing?

 I read an article called: “Are We Morally Distressed by What is Taking Place on Our Border?” written by a woefully uninformed hack who happens to be a Postdoctoral Fellow-Scholar at Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. He is a church planter and recipient of the Lifelong Learning Fellowship at Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Medicine. So?

So, this Dr. Sam Kim published his piece in the lily livered leftist secular rag called “Christianity Today.” You’ve probably heard of it.

[Can you say “satire”? It rhymes with bonfire.]

Anyway, here are some excerpts from what Dr. Sam wrote on the topic of Christians and asylum seekers, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

“How we treat the powerless compared with the way we treat the most powerful reflects both our present collective moral consciousness, and our future moral trajectory.”

I think I might’ve noticed a mention or two of such things in the Bible. It’s hardly worth mentioning since we have dismissed it as “social gospel.” “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done.” (Proverbs 19:17) What did Solomon know anyway?

“In 1948, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), guaranteeing everyone’s right to seek and enjoy asylum in all countries… offering asylum to those at risk of violence is not magnanimity. It is simply meeting one of the human rights’ obligations required by international law.”

I guess it could be thought of as a little embarrassing that we Christians need the UN to tell us how to be moral. On the other hand, it is always nice to have corroborating data from the outside.

“In Deuteronomy 10:18-19, God commands Israel not only to provide basic necessities for all aliens in need, but also to love them, for the Israelites were themselves once aliens in Egypt.”

No worries, that’s just the Old Testament. Jesus got rid of all that at the cross.

“Jesus’ commands us to go the extra mile and be magnanimous in heart. But we are not. He tells us to love our neighbor without regard for ideological and geographical boundaries. But we do not.”

I suppose it’s possible that it makes him feel bad when we don’t do what he says. But there’s always grace.

“A recent study by Lifeway Research reveals that the Bible only influences one in ten evangelicals on immigration (10 percent), and at 0.2 percent the local church’s influence in the matter is five times less than that. The study concludes that the secular media, at 16 percent, has more influence on evangelicals on the issue of immigration than the Bible and the local church combined! American evangelicals appear to be more heavily influenced by a cultural and pagan view of immigration than one that is biblical.”

Now that’s just not fair. I have friends who have at least six Bibles on a shelf at home! They even believe most of it. The news (that is, that which is not “fake”) is current, compelling, and relevant. The Bible can be pretty boring sometimes. No worries, the pastor will read it to us and tell us what it means. That’s what we pay him for after all.

“The church in the United States is strong numerically, but weak spiritually, because it is worldly. Churches in America are both in the world and of the world; and, as a result, is in a condition of profound cultural captivity.”

He’s gone and done it now! Just look at all the mega churches we have in America. Isn’t that evidence that all is well? At least it’s “well with our soul,” which is pretty much all that matters.

“This cultural captivity is evident in the failure of evangelicals to see that funding for a wall is the moral equivalent of those on the left who are advocating Planned Parenthood. Both policies are catalysts for the loss of life that Scripture commands us to protect. The unborn and those seeking asylum have an equal right to life. What is the moral difference between killing and letting die, when the ultimate outcome is the same?”

Yeah, well. Hmmm. At least we’re pro-birth! What happens after that is on them.

“…the ruling handed down by the Department of Justice, claiming that fleeing domestic or gang violence isn’t reason enough to qualify someone to receive asylum here in the U.S. is tantamount to holding a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger… For example, if an adolescent girl refuses a gang’s request that she become a sex slave for the gang, she will be killed.”

Well, we do have a lot of our own problems to address. You know, like “religious liberty,” not to mention our daily kerfuffle with the godless horde of liberal elite!

“As English Congregational ministers Andrew Reed and James Matheson observed when they visited American churches almost 200 years ago: ‘America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.’”

What audacity! Of course we’re good. In fact, we’re “exceptionally” good! After all, America is “the city on a hill.”

And I close with Kim’s audacious accusation:

“The world has an excuse for its blindness, for the world is lost. But the church has no such excuse.”

If you want to brave reading the article for yourself, click here. 

And for less satirical posts of my own, see these:

More on the POTUS Wall
The Law is the Law! Or is it?
Christians at the Border

Applaud the Laudable

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8

This is the final quality of the eight that Paul suggests for meditation. If you haven’t already, scroll down for previous ones including the introductory post.

Have you ever been part of a crowd someplace––a religious gathering or a political rally––and when it was time to applaud you joined in the ovation even though what had just been presented didn’t square with what you know to be true? Going along with the majority seemed like the polite thing to do at the time. You didn’t want the people near you to notice you were not joining in on the undeserved adulation of the crowd, so rather than go against the grain you were carried along with groupthink and cheered on cue.

Is what you applaud actually worthy of your praise or are you just cheering shallow ½ true crescendos in sermons, chanting bumper sticker slogans at rallies, or reposting unworthy Facebook memes?

Notice Paul doesn’t say, “You should think whatever the majority of your Christian friends think,” or “Whenever or whatever your favorite preacher shouts, shout back an ‘Amen!’” If anything, instead of just taking the word of the most demonstrative person in the room, he advocates for Christians to practice critical thinking. The Lord would have us think on what is genuinely worthy of praise, not what bounces around in the echo chamber we have chosen to inhabit.

I confess to my tendency toward being a half-empty glass guy. I’m more inclined to notice what’s wrong with something than to appreciate the good, so I have to work a little harder at applauding the laudable things in this world. I’m no harder on others than I am on myself, but that’s no excuse for overlooking and failing to praise the praiseworthy.

Some things are easier to applaud––random acts of kindness, justice won for a vulnerable person, an umpire’s call that goes in favor of the San Francisco Giants. Then there are the outstanding and noticeable contributions of certain people––Lincoln, Einstein, Mandela, Tim Fraser. (Tim kept an older kid from beating me up in the 2nd Grade. Tim, if you’re listening, thanks again!)

So, take a few minutes right now and soak in the praiseworthy, people and their contributions to the world that are genuinely worthy of adulation. If you can’t think of any offhand, anything and everything about Jesus will do.

Sinners Befriending Sinners

Rahabs are untouchables who have been pushed out to the margins of society and been refused citizenship in the center with the rest and the “best” of us. Remember, it’s a “friendship” quest into which God has invited us. Neil Cole said, “The Gospel flies best on the wings of relationships.”

Friendship is by definition a mutual arrangement, a two-way street. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of us all being bound up in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” They called Jesus a “friend of sinners,” which, for my money, implies more than that he was nice to bad people. He valued their friendship as much as they did his. Even those individuals that some people considered the dregs of his day must have, in some way, brought something of value to the relationship.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends