David Williams's Blog, page 60

Happy Stresster

I feel faintly embarrassed every year at this time of year, out of sync, and like I'm doing something wrong.

Here we are, just a stone's throw away from Holy Week, and I'm not even faintly stressed out at the prospect.  Oh, sure, it's a little busier.  I'm at church a little more.

We have a little meal on Maundy Thursday, one where we sing and pray, bread bread and share the cup.  And we share table together.  But it's not particularly complicated.   You pick up some loaves of tasty challah, and some Trader Joe's soup.  You sing a capella.  That's about that.

There's a wonderful lay-led event at my little church for Good Friday, as the story of the Passion is retold.  I show up, and I worship, and I let others lead because that's just what we do.

On Easter, I get up at 4 AM so I can get to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in time to join with other pastors to lead the multi-church sunrise service.  That's early, sure, but that's why the Good Lord made coffee plants.  It's beautiful, valuable, and significant.  And then there's a brunch, and kids scamper around.  Then we worship and it's awesome.

It's busier.  But it's entirely manageable.  I kind of look forward to it, theologically, personally, and spiritually.

That is not what I hear from my colleagues.  It's red alert panic mode for many, as sixty to seventy hour church weeks and overpacked family lives collide with a blinding flurry of additional Holy Week demands.  It's the liturgical perfect storm.

When I hear the war stories, I'm abashed.  I can't contribute.  I feel I can't even speak.  "Oh, yeah, I'm totally chill.  Looking forward to it!  Not a big deal."

It feels...invalidating.  A little subversive.  Perhaps a little annoying.

But then again, perhaps it's worth saying.   Because as much as work-stress might feel like you're being flogged, crucified, and dying, an organizational reenactment of the Passion, I'm reasonably certain that's not a healthy spiritual place for pastors.  Or for Beloved Communities.

Redivivus

As a Presbyterian pastor, I know the value of studying history.  We Presbyterians view ourselves as part of an intellectual lineage going back thousands of years, and as such, immerse ourselves in the stories and teachings of peoples and cultures that pre-date our own by hundreds of generations.
And as a student of history, I want to introduce you to this guy I know pretty well.
He was a child of power, born into wealth.  At no point in his life did he ever not have everything he ever wanted.   He went to all the best schools, knew all the most important people, had advantages and resources that put him among the elite of the elite.  He grew up near the heart of power, in a dog-eat-dog city where he was groomed from the get-go to be the top dog.
But for all of his grooming and social position, he was wildly unpredictable, in everything he did.  His family life was a complete mess, as he worked his way through wife after wife.  He was all ego, all libido and appetite and self-promotion.  He built a ton of things, lots of things.  They were the best things, big and shiny monuments to just how great he was.  He was surrounded by gold and glitter and shine.
This guy, he grew up to be kind of an entertainer, both a one-percenter and a big name brand.  He loved the adulation of the masses, loved to perform for them, to work them up into a wild frenzy.  He had a carny showman's way about him that resonated with the anger and anxiety of the poor and the hopeless, as he was sometimes clownish, sometimes violent, and willfully crude.  
His willingness to perform for the adulation of the hoi polloi was an embarrassment to the elites, who found him rough and brutal and undisciplined.  He violated everything they found noble and valuable, all of the higher principles of their culture.
But he didn't care.  He did whatever amused the throngs.  In particular, he played off of their fear and suspicion of a strange religion from the Middle East, blaming them and their faith for all kinds of horrible things.  He turned the anger of the mobs against them.
We all know who this guy was, we who know the story of my faith.
His name was Nero.
What, you thought I was talking about someone else?

Why Social Justice is Not Christian

Oh, I don't believe that title.  It's clickbait.  I admit it.  Mea culpa.

Justice matters, deeply and significantly, for anyone who cares about what Jesus taught or about the explicitly stated intent of Torah.

It's just that...well...social justice does not provide the teleological framework that integrates me existentially. Or to put that a less willfully obfuscatory way, it is not my purpose.  It is not my goal.  It just isn't.

As a Christian who grew up in a progressive, justice-oriented faith community...one that I still love, and that still does wonderful work in the world...that realization has come slowly and with difficulty.  I've resisted it, on many levels, because the injustices of our culture are so deep and insidious.
The lie of race and the ever deepening concentration of power in the hands of an isolated, privileged elite are very real and a blight on the soul of our culture.  Our willingness to trample on the disenfranchised and our abuse of creation is demonic, and must be resisted.  Oppression is not something to be tolerated.  The God who calls me is fiercely, terrifyingly, relentlessly just, and our failure to embrace that truth has...well...consequences.
And yet social justice as a governing purpose would misrepresent the primary commitment of my faith, if I am honest with myself.
This is Augustine's fault, of course.  I don't always agree with his anthropology or his lingering Manichean view of the cause of human brokenness, but The City of God left a mark.  And it's Reinhold Niebuhr's fault.  Moral Man and Immoral Society was just too formative, too rational, too dead on about the moral limitations of collectives and interest groups.  I blame Gandhi's satyagraha and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s soul force.  I blame Tolstoy.  
And I blame Jesus.  And Paul.  And James.

Because justice is the fruit of grace, not the other way around.  Social justice is about rights, both individual and collective, within a broader entity.  It is about the balance of competing interests in a society.  It's a matter of legality, of the application of coercive power towards the maintenance of social order.  Justice, meaning social, secular justice, rests on the sword.  Social justice is about power dynamics.

That doesn't mean, not for a moment, that both noting and resisting oppressive structures is wrong.

Because systemic injustice is fundamentally devoid of grace, the abnegation of grace, a repudiation of grace.  Grace recoils at hatred and oppression.  Grace shudders at our gleeful embrace of violence.  Grace finds wealth in the face of another's poverty an embarrassment.  Grace does not stand idly by.  Grace is the enemy of both individual and collective self-seeking.

As such, it is the both the ground of justice and the method by which justice is created.

And it goes deeper than that.  In the absence of a grounding orientation towards grace, the pursuit of justice will either shatter or calcify a soul.  It will shatter a soul because the competing demands of justice are too damnably complicated.  Pay for migrant laborers is The Issue.  #Blacklivesmatter is The Issue.  Transphobia is The Issue.  Environmental degradation is The Issue.  The impact of globalization is The Issue.  It's an endless series of fractally complex cries, each one calling for the fullness of your attention, a chaotic din, an ocean's roar of human suffering.

No normal human can take that in.

It creates popcorn soul, attention deficit justice disorder, as the well meaning warrior frets and chases after whatever buzzes loudest and most impatiently on their #twitterfeed that day.  And because everything must get done, and everything must be perfect, nothing gets done.

It calcifies a soul.  The anxiety that arises from the immensity of human brokenness creates within those who resist it a shadow of that brokenness.  The perpetrators of injustice become the Other.  We cease to see the soul blight that curses them as fully as it curses those who suffer.  They are Commies and Fascists, racists and mooching parasites.  It hardens us to them, and to the possibility of their being called and convicted to be part of the change.  We would rather fight and mock and attack.

Without a vision of grace to guide us, we would take up the sword.  We would wear that ring of power.

And when we do, we might imagine we are fighting the good fight.

But it is a fantasy.  Because without grace as both our intent and our method, all we're doing is fighting.

A Quick, Productive Labor

"It's all about the process," I hear, over and over again, from my oldline comrades.

This is a familiar refrain amongst we Presbyterians in particular, from pretty much every corner of the fading denominational churches.  We gather to discuss.  We meet to talk.  We convene and review and analyze and evaluate.  We make process our goal.  And we assume, as we take forever to do anything, that this is all well and good, because it's the process that counts.

This just ain't right.

Because process does not exist for the purposes of process.  It exists to serve a purpose.  And as such, endless process is a sign that something's wrong.

I offer into evidence the last meeting at my little church.  After conversation and prayer, one of our members had indicated she was ready to serve as an Elder, and we needed a formal Congregational Meeting to elect her.

The Session called the meeting, and we announced it well ahead of time.  There's a particular pattern to these things, specific protocols that must be pursued, and we diligently followed said protocols.  We began with prayer, held a vote to appoint a clerk for the meeting, and read the call of the meeting.  We declared an official quorum.  The agenda for the meeting was presented and approved.  We received a motion to elect, which was seconded and then voted on.  We received a second motion, this one to adjourn, which was approved by consensus.  And we closed with prayer.

The whole event took two minutes and twenty four seconds, badda boom, badda bing, which may or may not be a record for a Presbyterian Congregational Meeting.

Because most meetings are like labor.  They are a point of decision, a point of crisis, when something is decided and a new reality is born.  Sure, we could have drawn it out.  Most opening prayers last longer than that meeting.

But a long meeting was not necessary.

We oldliners often confuse our points of decision with gestation, the time during which a new thing is growing to fruition.  That happens in conversations, as new things grow from the seed of a dream or a vision.  That's the time to be patient, to attend to doing things in their own time.  Similarly, overcoming conflict or trauma requires time and sustained relationship.  Mutual change requires trust.  It is not procedural.  It is the long conversation, the prayerful study, the shared worship.

When we gather to decide, it must be when the decision-time is ready.

Because if you confuse the fierce immediacy of labor with the organic patience of gestation, and stretch out the process of birthing endlessly, you put both mother and child at risk.

Our Lovely, Lovely Violence

So here's a thought exercise, one that arises from my complete lack of interest in seeing the recent Marvel film Deadpool.
Deadpool has done rather well in theaters, bringing in well over $300 million.  Such a take pretty much guarantees that it will be added to the rotation of the Superhero Industrial Complex.  The schtick: your protagonist isn't just some hero, or even really a hero with emotional complexity or dark side.  He's a full throttle antihero, who thoroughly enjoys killing people in creative ways whilst making witty quips in an insouciant sort of way.  
I watched the five minute preview/trailer, and it was enough to convince me that I had no interest at all in seeing the movie.  The brutal not-really-a-hero thing's been done already, and I had no interest in seeing Kickass, either.   
But it got me to thinking a little about Deadpool.  I mean, here you've got a guy who's basically a nihilist, Alex DeLarge in spandex.  He thoroughly enjoys violence, which we allow ourselves to enjoy right along with him because we know the people he's killing--brutally, horrifically--are bad people.  
They deserve it, and so we roll along gleefully.
To which I found myself imagining that there's a clip left on the cutting room floor, or the Avid Media Composer equivalent.
Imagine, if you will, that amongst the many terrible human beings Deadpool kills there is a woman.  She is horrible, which we know because she's a dark mercenary ninja or something like that.  Hey, you saw the movie, not me.
Anyhoo, in the midst of the mayhem, as he's killing terrible people right and left, Deadpool gets into a fight with the aforementioned evil ninja mercenary.  He beats the crap out of her, joking as he goes, and then...because he's a nihilist...briefly rapes her.  And then shoots her in the head, with some off the cuff quip.
Why would that make the film any different ethically?  I mean, rape is entirely about violence, power, and control.  
And she'd be a bad person, not an innocent at all.  So she'd have it coming.  Given the moral calculus of the film she'd be an entirely legitimate target for violence, correct?  Why would sexual assault be worse than slowly grinding another human being to death with a zamboni?   Violence is violence is violence.
Given how much positive spin the pansexuality of our wisecracking brutalist was given, I suppose one could have him rape another man instead.  That'd be funnier, right, in the way that prison rape is just such a funny thing?
Sigh.

The Fire that Melts Us Together

Among the Christian progressives with whom I make fellowship, there's a common refrain:  America is not a melting pot.  I hear this online.  I heard it, again and again, in my very progressive seminary.

You remember the melting pot.  It was, in its day, a profoundly progressive vision, one set against the fixed and demonic boundaries of modern-era racism that had defined our life together for centuries.  Against that lie of segregationist racism was placed the image of the melting pot.  Here in America, every culture blends and merges and blurs.  The flavors all blend together, and from that comes a richer and more complex flavor.

We can, or so the Melting Pot image goes, have families and communities that are rich and fluid admixtures of culture and color and language.  The boundaries are meaningless and everchanging, as the culture changes and grows.  The flavors of salsa and sriracha are stronger now than they were when I was a kid, and that's really...yummy.

But now?  Now apparently that's a bad thing.

It is the enemy of diversity, we are told, and there is truth in that.  You can't be segregated out by category in a melting pot.

Better to have everything neatly separated out.  Like, say, as one earnest and well-meaning soul recently put it, in a salad.  In a salad, where the croutons and the spinach and the organic kale and the tofucheez and the vegetarian bacobits and the tomatoes and the carrot slivers are all neatly distinct from one another.  There, everything is together, but separate and clearly itself.

Of course, you can't put any dressing on that salad.  That would ruin the metaphor of separateness.  Nor can you eat it, because the chewing would blend the flavors.

But you can look at the salad, and talk about the salad, and contemplate how healthy it would be for you if you actually ate the salad, which you won't, because you can't.  It is the Platonic Recipe for Salad, whose purpose has nothing to do with nourishment.

I obviously have beef with the boho academic left socio-politically on this.

But I have a deeper beef spiritually.

Because love destroys categories.  Love shatters boundaries.  Love, the consuming fire love that every mystic of every faith tradition knows God to be?   Love is the fire that melts us all together.

If I love you, I am changed by that love.  The boundaries between you and I are blurred.   And if you love me, you are changed by that relation.  We are still separate, and still ourselves.  But the lines between us are not neat and clean and categorical.

That is the essence of the faith my Teacher taught, the fundamental nature of God, and the highest gift of the Way.

In love, our flavors blend.  They become fluid and alive in the warmth of love's transforming fire.

Either that, or we do not love.

The Bad Churches that We Love To Love

As my sweet little church joins me in a Lenten journey through the history, meaning, and purpose of evangelism, I found myself with a peculiar thought in my head.
Being a part of a church is a relationship, much like the kind of relationship you have with another soul.  A community has a strange sort of spirit to it, one that's not quite as clear and distinct as the personalities of the human beings that comprise it, but a spirit nonetheless.
The goal, for any community of the Way, is for that spirit to be fundamentally healthy.  That doesn't mean "big" and it doesn't mean "rich," any more than the message of our Teacher is about bigness or richness.  It means manifesting grace, service, mercy, and kindness.  It's not measured by organizational metrics and institutional measures and leadership dashboards.  It's qualitative, like a poem or a story or a song.  Like the Good itself, spiritual health is a quality, not a quantity.
Yet I wonder at this, because the goal of the church is not just to be healthy, but to be virally healthy.  Meaning, to be a place of strength and support and respite to those whose souls have been broken and fragmented.  Healthy churches aren't just healthy for themselves.  They're places of healing for those not yet within their bounds.

To be that healthy churches need to be attractional.  Or, to use a less-obnoxiously-made-up-word, folks have to want to be there.  There needs to be a draw.
Here's the rub, though.  Broken souls aren't typically drawn to healthy relationships.  They're drawn, more often than not, into relationships that reflect their brokenness.

Those who feel a lack of control, or who are threatened by change?  They're drawn to demagogues, who control them with that yearning for power, who turn their anger into the seething tribalism of the mob.

Those who suffer with shattered self-image and self-hatred?  They're drawn to the abusers and the manipulative, to the one who beats you down with fear, to the one who keeps you in your place.

Those who struggle with material poverty and the anxieties it creates?  They're drawn to the con artist and the charlatan and the huckster, pitching out prosperity while they sparkle and shine on your last dime.

Wounded souls are drawn to institutions whose broken souls plug into their own, like the protein nubbin on a virus plugs in to a cell.  This is not news.

Neither is it good.

Which means that while there are churches that grow like gangbusters, their growth has nothing to do with the Euaggelion of the Way.

They grow because our broken souls love things that are bad for us.

When Bernie Loses

Today is the day of reckoning for American progressives, because, hard as it is for me to say, it'll be the day that Bernie Sanders loses.

I'm going to get out there and vote in the Virginia primary, and Bernie Sanders has my vote.  Why?  Because his vision of the best possible future for America most closely aligns with my own.  His domestic agenda would make the United States a little more like our genial friends to the North, and that'd be a good thing, eh?  America could use a little less anger and anxiety, and a little more politeness and integrity.

His foreign policy agenda is remarkably measured and realistic, with positions that make him...ironically enough...the most authentic foreign policy conservative candidate running for office.

But he isn't going to win, and today will be the day that reality is driven home.

There's just no meaningful path to the nomination, not if you pay attention to the real.  The polling and metapolling shows a probabilistically insurmountable lead for Clinton.  She has the carefully cultivated support of her party leadership, those much maligned "superdelegates" that make it hard for a charismatic leader from outside the party to take it over.

 The GOP is wishing it had more superdelegates lately, I'll wager.

But Clinton is also winning on the ground, throughout the Southern states that will vote en mass today and in the big Democratic states that will follow.  Sanders does not have the brilliant Southern and caucus state ground game that Senator Obama used to wrest those delegates from Clinton.

No amount of idealism will change that reality now.  It just isn't going to happen.

None of that changes my commitment to vote my conscience.  None of that changes my profound respect for Sanders as both a person and a candidate.

But it means I'm looking past today, to the very real battle that will follow.

Approaching this constructively is going to be a challenge for the apocalyptic left.

Because within the echo chamber of the far left, the campaign demonization and Othering of Hillary Clinton has been intense.  She is despised as corrupt and calculating, a machine politician in the camp of the one percent, an agent of an oppressive establishment.  She is a creature of Davos and Aspen and Martha's Vineyard, of the networks of a liberal power elite whose failure to both serve and mobilize the used-to-be-working class is written in the Trumpian yarp of the abandoned masses.

Sure, some of that sticks.  But much of it is just good ol' fashioned political demonization, the sort of propaganda that motivates through anger and fear and resentment.  The left is just as prone to that as the right.

And it leads to a question: how much does ideological purity matter?  When the nomination is done, and the dust has settled, and it's a egomaniacal reality television charlatan demagogue versus Clinton?

"Maybe he should win," the thought whispers.  "Maybe that's what we need."

The temptation to let it all blow up, to smash and destroy so you can start afresh in the ruins is strong.  Let things go to heck in a handbasket, and then and only then will everyone realize just how right you were all along.

That is a Ralph Nader delusion, a hallucination born of an ideological isolation chamber, and it does damage.

Life in the ruins is far harder than our imaginings.  Just ask a Syrian, or a Libyan.

Absolutism and binary thinking never work in the real world  They just never do.  Neither do they transform reality for the better.  Because reality is non-binary.

And this is the only reality we get.

A Conversation With Hitler About Donald Trump

There's a great deal of anxiety out there among my fellow Americans about the rise of Donald Trump as a political force.  Sure, Trump's buffoonery was amusing for a while, and his ability to stir endless gossip and buzz with one outrage after another kept us all entertained.

But now it's getting more serious.  The Grand Old Party has courted it's "base" so long that it's become debased, a caricature of conservatism.  It's fertile ground for a demagogue, and Trump is that man.
 
His willingness to tap into the dark recesses of resentment and anger, his profanity, and his seeming obliviousness to common decency?  His teasing around the edges of violence?  They stir deep fears of the rise of fascism, of the beginning of a dark and monstrous chapter in American history.

"This is just what it must have been like in Germany when Hitler was on the rise," or so goes the refrain.

But is it?  How would we know?

Fortunately, as a level eight Presbyterian pastor with advanced training, I had a way to find out.  In addition to my classes in hermeneutics and exegesis and ecclesiology, my passing through the Crucible of Endless Process and my signing of the mystic Book of Obligation permits me to travel to Hell once a year to chat with one of the souls there.

I figured, why not just ask Hitler himself what he thinks of this whole mess?

So I performed the necessary rites and rituals, invoked the necessary seraphic protections, and, being Presbyterian, filled out my HT-7603b form in quadruplicate.  One copy to Presbytery, one to the General Assembly Office of Infernal Relations, one for Limbo customs, and one for my records.

Prepped and ready, I descended into hell.

I passed through customs in Limbo, which is run by the same folks who oversee Miami-Dade International Airport.  That finally accomplished, I transited to the lowest plane of Hell.  It had been a while since I'd been to the Pit, so I spent a few minutes chatting with the archdaemon overseeing Hitler's eternal fate and intertorment counseling sessions.  Gaelbog the Rectifier is actually pretty chill by demonic standards, and we talked shop and about our shared love of role playing games for a while.  After the requisite pleasantries, I was permitted to enter the interfolded pocket of multiversal reality where Hitler's soul resides.

I found myself by the side of a road, just outside of the Polish town of Lodz.  It was the fall of 1928, and the sun was bright in a cool afternoon sky.  Gaelbog had told me who to look for, and there she was:  Hala Goldberg, tall, slender, and birdy, with an easy laugh and big brown eyes.

She was in her twenties, and in less than a decade would die in a frozen ditch outside of Lodz, bleeding out from a gunshot with her dead daughter in her arms.  Once completed, it will be the sixteen thousand, four hundred and seventy fourth full life that the soul of Adolph Hitler will have been obligated to live out in its entirety.  It's what all of hell is like, actually.  None of this "fire and brimstone" stuff.  You just have to live every life you've directly touched, feeling and knowing everything that soul knew.   It's set up exactly the same way as heaven, truth be told.

Hitler has another sixty seven million, four hundred and ninety two thousand, six hundred and four full lives to go.

"Adolph," I said, loudly, and she looked momentarily startled as I spoke the Word of Unveiling.  The breeze stilled as time froze, and her face shifted, and there he was.  He was utterly exhausted, his soul worn and frayed with the suffering of thousands of lives.

"What," he said, the word a long juddering sigh.  "What do you want?"

"I'd like to ask you about Donald Trump," I said.

"Oh."  His eyes rolled in her head.  "HIM."

"So, well, is he like you?  I mean, we're getting worried up there."

There was a reluctant pause, and a deep inhalation of breath.  I could see him thinking.  "I suppose, yes, I suppose it would be good to have a moment."  He squatted down on her haunches, set down her basket, and motioned me closer.

"The answer is yes, and the answer is no."

"You're going to need to unpack that, Adoph," I said.

He gave me a glare, a flash of the old blind fury. Then it faded, and the weariness returned.  "Of course."

"Yes, because he taps much of the same darkness.  The fear and anger of a people who do not understand what is happening to them, and why they are struggling.  He gives them a story, a sweet lie that speaks in their voice, stirs them with his anger.  And then there is distorted pride in nation, a bright clear falseness of nation.  He talks of violence, encourages violence, teases violence.  He mocks and belittles, finds enemies everywhere.  He celebrates war, war as if it is a beautiful thing."  Hitler snorted.  "This from a man who has never known combat, who has no martial prowess, who imagines war is just a business deal."

"And he is only passion, just raw emotion, the purity of it."  He looked at me, a strange hunger still glimmering beneath the existential fatigue.  "I remember it.  It is so strong, the fire of a moment's passion.  So intoxicating.  So certain.  I...was deceived."  He looked away, and fell silent.

"You said, yes and no," I said.  "Why no?"

He laughed, or, rather, made a short sobbing bark that may have been a laugh.

"Because he's AMERICAN," Hitler spat.  The young woman's face twisted with his unhidden disgust.  "Pride in the Volk?  What pride can a mongrel, upstart, decadent culture have in their Volksgeist, when they have no such thing?"

"Well, we..."

"Silence!  You asked me a question.  Let me answer it, and get back to my...to my..."  He giggled, giddily, the brown eyes strangely bright.

"I WAS Germany.  I WAS Austria. I was the Father of the Fatherland.  Pure and noble and...I...I...let myself...become...."

The voice faltered, choking on the words.

"...all that was proud and wrong about those cultures. Their darkness.  Their shadow.  He is American.  The shadow you cast is not the same.  We had a vision, of the Thousand Year Reich.  He has a vision of his own ego.  He is nothing but bluster and ignorance, greed and devouring selfishness, the profane violence of sprawling appetite and unchecked libido."

She stood, slowly, until she was ramrod straight.  "We brought order and PURITY.  He?  He brings chaos and fragmentation.  Undisciplined, unfocused, his followers a RABBLE.  Can you imagine them, lined up in perfect order, banners perfectly aligned, every boot perfectly polished and moving as one?  They can't even spell.  They disgust me."

"So what's going to happen?  If, you know, he wins?"

"If he wins?"  The mask of the young woman's face contorted.  "I can't tell you that.  You know I can't tell you that.  It will not be the same.  It will be American.  Your story, not mine.  Perhaps you should ask Andy Jackson, as he forever walks the Trail of Tears."

"Can you tell me if..."

The woman's hand moved to my lips, silencing me.

"Please.  No more.  I have...I have so far to go.  So much to...endure."  Her eyes brimmed with his tears, and he placed her hand to her chest.  "I didn't know.  We want a daughter, so much, so much, she and I.  I can't believe...that...she will...I just didn't know how much this would hurt.  And it goes on and on and..."  He looked at me, one last time.

"And what happens in your time?  It isn't up to me, what happens."

She took up the basket, and the breeze rose again and played through her hair.

"It is up to you."   And he faded away, and the young woman walked on, wondering at the wetness on her face.

Hell is a hard place to visit.  It is worse still if you choose to live there.

Judge Me

There's a saying that's come to have popular acceptance in American faith discourse:  My faith is between me and God.

We've been hearing a bunch of that lately, particularly from those seeking power, who bristle at the idea that anyone has a right to call their assertions of faith into question.

What right does anyone have to judge the faith of anyone else?  Faith is spiritual, this one-on-one relationship between you and The Cosmic Kahuna, and no-one has a right to critique what is an entirely private matter.  Faith...and Christian faith in particular...is just a "personal relationship."  It is separate from every other relationship we have.

To which I say, as a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, [bovine excrement.]

My Teacher/Lord/Savior/Friend makes it abundantly, inescapably, inarguably clear.  If you're claiming to be a Christian, what matters is not a binary relationship between you and God.  That is not the whole of the One Law.  Neither is it dogmatic adherence to orthodoxy, or being rooted in your own beliefs about your worthiness/specialness.

There's only one measure of Christian faith:  Do you love God with all your heart, your mind, and your strength, and your neighbor as yourself?  If you do, then you're doing what Jesus asked.  If you don't?  Then you can't accurately call yourself a Christian.

Period.

Everything else is subordinate, because that is the fundamental ground of what Jesus taught.

Can you assess the first part of that relation?  No, because you are neither God nor are you me.

But if I claim to be a disciple of Jesus, you can and should judge me relative to the second part of that command, because you are my neighbor.

You are my neighbor.  If you're an immigrant or a lesbian or a tea-party activist, you are my neighbor.  If you are a meth addict or a prisoner, you are my neighbor.  If you're from Manhattan, NY or Manhattan, KS, you are my neighbor.  If you are an atheist, you are my neighbor.  If you are a Muslim, you are my neighbor.

If you are my enemy?  My duty remains unchanged.

Do I bully you?  Do I mock and belittle you?  Then you are permitted to judge me as failing against the heart of my professed faith.  Do I treat you as a means to an end, or as an object to be used for my own power or pleasure?  Then you have a right to judge me as a hypocrite, huckster, or charlatan.  Do I care only for my own greed, my own hunger, my own ego, to the point where you may as well not exist for me?  Then you can call me a liar.

Because you are my neighbor, and if I fail to show you grace, mercy, and love, then any talk of Jesus coming out of my mouth is just noise.