Tim Stafford's Blog, page 33

In Buenos Aires

I am in Buenos Aires this week for open ended discussions on God’s Justice, the Bible I am working on. Today I had an unusually interesting conversation with the pastor of a very large charismatic Baptist church. He said that Latin American pastors are reaching the limits of their church model, which is based on fast numerical growth and intense spiritual growth. The problem is that that there is no room for justice in their thinking. “The average evangelical thinks of salvation from justice, wherein really salvation is a restoration of justice. Salvation and justice are inseparable.”

Pastors, he said, are beginning to think about transformation–and about training and equipping a new leadership that can fight against injustice at every level–at home, in society, and of course in themselves.

He mentioned the cautionary example of Guatemala, where 50 percent of the population consider themselves evangelical, but 80 percent are poor; and Nigeria, where 50 percent of the population may be born again but corruption is among the worst in the world. Pastors in his extensive network are realizing the inadequacy of their ministry to transform such realities.

Is such reflection common? I don’t know. I do however have a hopeful sense that some serious rethinking is going on, in places you might not expect it.

Why Abortion Won’t Go Away

Ross Douthat has an outstanding short essay on the media response to Kermit Gosnell, the doctor who killed newborns. He quotes, at length, from abortion rights advocates, and gives them their due. They are right in saying that doctors like this would be a lot less likely to exist if there were easy, convenient access to professional abortion clinics. In a perverse way, restrictions on access actually enable devils like Gosnell.

Where such abortion rights advocates never go, however, is the bloody and physical reality of late-term abortions. They don’t focus on the actual fetuses/babies –one different from the other only by the matter of whether a doctor is operating on them inside the womb or outside. And that, Douthat points out, is what is so awful and compelling about Gosnell’s case.

One might have expected abortion controversies to have dried up long ago. The reason they persist–the reason why abortion is not really accepted after forty years of legal practice–is simply those fetuses/babies. It is very difficult to focus on them and remain free and easy about abortion.

Clearly, we live in a time when people want to go about their sexual business without minding anybody’s moral scruples. Most would rather live and let live and not think about it. Given that strong current of sexual individualism, I can’t see abortion rights really becoming threatened in the foreseeable future. But at the same time, I don’t see the issue quite disappearing, either. We don’t have to think about those fetuses/babies most days. But cases will surface to remind us of them.

Attacks at Home

This afternoon I overheard a reporter (on “Fresh Air”) who has covered terrorist attacks all around the world. Now he is reporting one in his hometown of Boston. He said it seemed very strange to be covering a terrorist attack in which the victims had Boston accents. It made him think he needed renewed dedication to remembering that every terrorist attack is in somebody’s home town.

We get inured to attacks in strange places. In the same newspaper in which I read of Monday’s attack, another report in the back pages told of a car bomb (in Iraq, I think) that killed 50 people. I imagine that people in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Somalia are not overwhelmed by the deaths of three in Boston.

Naturally, domestic crises always seem most significant to us. An accident in which my brother got killed inevitably would strike deeper than an accident in which eight people I have never met lost their lives. We care more about those closest to us. I don’t think we can or should help that.

We can, however, try seriously to grasp the nature of other people’s losses.

I haven’t quite forgiven the Spanish professor who, on 9/11, lectured his American students in Barcelona (including my daughter) to the effect that America had it coming. Even in the more moderate form of British intellectualism, I don’t like reading that America overreacted in a vengeful manner. In other words, I feel strong distaste for heartlessness when it’s directed my way.

Maybe, though, I should rethink the way I react when I read stories from Afghanistan.

Book Club Questions for Birmingham

I was so pleased when I heard from an old friend, Joy Fargo, that she had read Birmingham and was introducing it to her book club. May her tribe increase! Having searched the internet for book club questions, she wrote her own and passed them on to me.

Here they are, in case you are interested:

Where were you in 1963 and how aware were you of what was happening in the Civil Rights movement?
How does the opening scene in the bus set the tone of the book?
The author uses alternating narrators to tell the story.  How does this affect your understanding of the events of the book?
How would you describe Chris, the main character?  Was he believable to you (taking into account the year this happened)?
What qualities do you see in Dorcas?  How did you respond to this character?
What is the significance of the names the author chooses for the main characters:  Chris Wright, Dorcas Jones, Rev. R.I. Wriggleshott, Charley (the guy from the bus)?
Dorcas keeps asking Chris why he is there.  Why was he there?  What role does her questioning play in the development of the story?
What was accomplished by Chris’ trip to Birmingham (both in regard to the Civil Rights movement and in his personal life)?
Chris’ wife Linda wanted him to stay in Berkeley and just fight injustices there.  Do you think that would have been a better choice?  What role does Chris’ wife play in this story?
Does the book describe a different “black sexuality” and “white sexuality”?
How do you feel about the portrayal of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement?  According to what you know, were they honorable?  Do you think the portrayal was fair?
How would you describe the intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the Christian faith?
Birmingham describes a black community that had varied responses to the Civil Rights movement. Which do you think was most idealistic? Realistic?
If you had been in Birmingham in 1963, how do you think you would have responded?
What injustice today might move you to action?

Daring Question

I’ve been struck by Genesis 18, where Abraham engages God (who stops by for a meal) on his plans to judge Sodom. Abraham is not exercised on his own behalf, but for all the innocent people who will suffer in Sodom’s downfall.

Most of us fret about justice for ourselves, not other people.

Abraham asks God perhaps the most impertinent question in the Bible. “Far be it from you to do such a thing–to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”  (18:25)

That’s quite a question to ask God.

And here’s a question I have to ask myself: When did I last complain to God about the suffering of innocent people?

Eugene and Jan Peterson

It’s always a pleasure to hear from appreciative readers, but it’s a very special joy to get a letter from those I deeply admire. Eugene Peterson and his wife Jan gave me permission to quote this response to Birmingham:

We read this book together over the past two months and feel we have been immersed in a distant world that we had only known previously through the public media.

Jan was born in Birmingham and grew up with a few black playmates. Eugene grew up in an almost completely white world. He only knew one black person, who later became the best man in their wedding. Our only experience with Martin Luther King was listening to his “I Have a Dream” address at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Which is to say that the world of racial discrimination and violence was almost entirely “black and white.” Tim’s novel introduced us to the enormous complexity introduced by the “movement”–moderate whites, moderate blacks, militant whites, militant blacks, the KKK, fearful blacks, naive idealistic whites. Narrated through the alternating first-person voices of a young black woman, Dorcas, and a young white man, Chris, the tension builds page by page.

We both feel that for two months we experienced the closest thing to being there without being there.

Gay Marriage is Conservative Victory?

A very interesting column from David Brooks. He salutes gay marriage as a lone modern indicator of people voluntarily seeking to bind their freedom in commitments.

“Once, gay culture was erroneously associated with bathhouses and nightclubs. Now, the gay and lesbian rights movement is associated with marriage and military service. Once the movement was associated with self-sacrifice, it was bound to become popular.”

Gay marriage is thus a conservative victory, in his telling, and he wonders whether it will lead to a trend. ” Maybe we’ll see other spheres in life where restraints are placed on maximum personal choice.”

Attacks on Christians in Sri Lanka

You may know that I have a long-time interest in Sri Lanka. Today I got the following report from a friend there:

The attacks on Christians doing evangelism has really intensified. Many house prayer groups in homes of believers have been asked to stop. There are attacks on churches. A group has arisen which has taken it upon themselves even using force to protect Sri Lanka which they are saying belongs to a certain ethnic group and a certain religion. They have published a document on the so-called threat to Sri Lanka and listing dangerous organisations. We are in that list. Much wisdom is needed. Pastors are living with much fear. They are also hitting Muslim targets.

Please pray for us.

 

Gay Marriage Is a Done Deal

Gay marriage is a done deal. It will soon be legally sanctioned nearly everywhere in America, regardless of what the courts say. Public opinion has swung decisively.

It’s certainly surprised me. I remember reading Andrew Sullivan advocating gay marriage (in 1995?) and thinking he was far out on the edge.

How could America change its mind so quickly? Here are some reasons:

–Gays comprise a very small percentage of the population, indivisible from the rest of us (i.e. not identified with any ethnicity or income level or gender). It’s hard to imagine such a tiny minority making much difference in society. Thus it’s not that threatening. And it’s hard to stigmatize gays as belonging to “them” once you know a few. The brave homosexuals who came out of the closet and demonstrated that they were ordinary folks have driven a lot of this change.

–As David Brooks wrote yesterday, gay marriage is socially conservative. It values family stability and lasting love. In contemporary America gays seem to be virtually the only people thoroughly excited about marriage. How can you be horrified? Plus they make their appeal on the basis of fairness, a hard claim for any American to deny.

The really odd thing is that while gays rush toward marriage, marriage is in trouble among non-elite Americans. If you didn’t finish college your chances of getting married and staying married are small. The odds are good that a child in non-elite America will grow up without two parents.

The acceptance of gay marriage is closely related to a deeper, longer-running trend toward defining marriage by love alone. Through most of history marriage was also an economic partnership and an arrangement for producing offspring. (Reading Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now impressed this on me once again.) Many also saw marriage as religiously holy, a window into God’s relationship to his people. Such factors operate on a longer timeline than merely human love, which is famously volatile. (Consider Shakespeare’s sonnets.)

What will marriage look like a generation from now? Gay marriage will certainly be part of the mix. But marriage may be a temporary, shifting affinity significant to only a minority of people. Because what is the point, if all you need is love? You don’t need marriage to love. And when love dies, is anything left?

While gay marriage is here to stay, it’s not clear how great a prize it will prove to be.

Why Baseball

Tomorrow I’m heading to Phoenix to indulge my new favorite springtime ritual, spring training. I did it last year with my son Chase, to great effect, so am doing it again with sons Chase and Silas. If two of us could boost the A’s into first place in the AL East last year, what will happen with the power of three?

But it raises in my mind a perennial question: what is this about? Why does baseball mean so much to me?

Partly, it’s just sports, any sports–equally mysterious. But I do have a special feeling for baseball, so I’ll focus on that.

Baseball is a daily ritual. For six months of the year, six days a week, I follow it as a kind of second life. It’s something like reading a really engrossing novel, with characters you come to know and care about, with the future unknown. The dailyness is important.

It’s a spacious, outdoor sport, its visuals dominated by grass, merely dotted with players. Timewise it’s spacious too, with pauses between pitches, with 17 between-innings, each offering almost enough time to get something to eat. You can talk at a baseball game. You can let your eyes wander.

Baseball is human sized. Its players look normal. You can almost imagine yourself doing what they do.

Baseball is linear, which lends itself to storytelling and recapitulation. Most sports, a dozen people are moving at once; or the action is essentially repetitive (think tennis). It’s hard to tell the story of such games, at least in any detail. But I can recap the story of a baseball game pitch by pitch, inning by inning, with the rise and fall of drama as runners reach and score and the action see-saws. The linear nature of baseball also explains why it’s the most statistical of sports: it can be broken down to individual pieces in a way that basketball or football never can. As a result it can be savored, turned over, historicized.

Probably most of all, though, baseball (like all the other sports) connects the generations. My dad loved baseball and took me to my first games (in Yankee Stadium). I coached both my sons in Little League, which I believe they cared about nearly as much as I did. Baseball reminds me of days playing catch and hitting fly balls. It’s timeless, just the same now as it was when I was a child. So when I watch a baseball game, I haven’t aged at all.