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March 6 - March 13, 2020
the German word kummerspeck, refers to excess weight gained from emotional eating—literally, “grief bacon.”
One study in the Journal of Positive Psychology analyzed fifty terms associated with moral virtue using Google Ngram data. They discovered that a whopping 74 percent were used less frequently over the course of the last century.
Regardless of their motivations, they are apathetic about religious language because religion itself is unimportant to them. And people don’t talk about what they don’t care about.
I have friends who say that the most “loving” thing they can do is tell their “lost” friends that they are going to hell. The use of their words defines a meaning I cannot accept. Love is drained of compassion and forged into a machete, and Lost no longer describes the inability of all humans to find our way forward on our own. Their words separate a lesser them from a better us.
If you have to sue the school to be able to speak about your faith, you can imagine how it might subtly form one’s perspective about God-speak. When sacred rhetoric feels socially risky, no wonder some people are afraid to do it at all.
When we lose our spiritual vocabulary, we lose much more than words. We lose the power of speaking grace, forgiveness, love, and justice over others.
If we fail to stoke the flames, they will snuff out. And if we misuse them, the flames rage and people run for their lives.
I was now the school leper. Unclean and untouchable.
Words are one of God’s holy gifts to humanity, and speaking them should be a sacred act. We drape our dreams in words; we paint murals of sorrows with them. They are humanity’s carrier pigeons of information, of meaning, of emotion. We struggle to live without them.
A quote often attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi goes something like this: “Preach the gospel at all times; if necessary use words.” Whoever said it, the phrase is meant to convey that Christianity is best seen as a lived practice and example, rather than a lecture. It means that Christianity is made credible by works of love, compassion, service. This is all true. Yet, words are far more necessary than this quote leads us to believe. The Christian faith would not exist—it cannot exist—without words. They are the way the religion produces progeny.14 Someone spoke and an interest was piqued.
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When we stop speaking God, we risk becoming like Saint Vincent de Paul Church in my neighborhood—a husk of a community with trees in the bell towers, struggling to recall the message we have to offer the world. We’ll have lost our vocabulary and the ancient wisdom it contains. In this ceasing, we sever our link to the past and are subsumed by the dominant culture.
The word for “love” (אהבה) in Deuteronomy was used broadly in the ancient Near East in political treaties to describe enforced loyalty to the dominant party. According to Baden, a king would tell a vassal, “You are obligated to love me, which is to say, to be obedient to me.” In this light, the verse comes across more like a threat than a thoughtful solicitation.
Prayer is simple, my Sunday school teacher once told me. Just remember four letters: ACTS. More than an acronym, these letters were a recipe simple enough to whip up in any life stage and in the face of any struggle. A stands for “adoration.” This is the opening act where you express your love for God and offer praise. C represents “confession.” This is where you put yourself in your place and talk about your terrible sins. T means “thanksgiving.” This swings the spotlight right back to God. You offer gratitude for the good gifts in your life—food, family, friends, and whatever else comes to
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This way of understanding prayer makes sense to those who live in capitalistic America, in part, because it’s transactional—all about giving and getting. The day I first engaged lectio divina, however, I encountered a new way of understanding the word prayer and those who use the tool for spiritual formation. The practice was relational, rather than transactional, which is how it becomes transformational.
“All I know is that pain is a teacher,” I said, “but I do not know where he was educated.”
Carl Jung once said, if you kill your pain before you answer its questions, you kill yourself along with it.
The palm branches signaled the crowd’s high expectations, a symbol largely lost on those of us who are separated from the culture and chronology of the story. Jewish history told of a man named Judas Maccabaeus, a freedom fighter who entered Jerusalem two hundred years prior to Jesus. As he approached, people waved palm branches and sang hymns. When Judas finally arrived, he defeated the Syrian king, recaptured the temple, expelled the pagans, and reigned for a century before the Romans recaptured the city.
The word hosanna means, “Lord, save now.”
The expectations you placed on God ferment into distrust, into disappointment. As author Anne Lamott says, “Expectations are resentments under construction.”
Perhaps the greatest threat to faith is not doubting God but being disappointed with God.
At the start, the crowds embrace Jesus with dopamine levels soaring and shouts of “Save us now!” As soon as Jesus turns out to be something other than the Savior they expect, their hosannas morph into “Crucify him!” Jesus is a king but not the kind they wanted. He will serve rather than be served. He will die and not be killed. He enters unarmed, waging peace. This makes a larger point, that God does not intend to meet our expectations. Instead, God intends to meet our needs.
Disillusionment is, well, the loss of an illusion. It is what happens when you take a lie—about the world, about yourself, about those you love, about God—and replace it with the truth. Disillusionment occurs when God shatters our fantasies, tears down our idols, dismantles our cardboard cutouts. It is the result of discovering that God does not conform to our expectations but rather exists as a mystery beyond those expectations.
in times of difficulty, God offers us presence, not a parachute.
I began to understand, as Thomas Aquinas once noted, that the highest knowledge of God is to know that we do not know God. In this framework, embracing the mystery of God is the high-water mark of faith.
A switch flipped when I spent time with Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, in the desert of New Mexico. “What about mystery? Why waste time trying to know something that is unknowable?” I asked him. The jovial seventy-four-year-old bald man smiled with a glimmer in his eye. “That’s a great question, Jonathan, but I think maybe you misunderstand what mystery is. A mystery is not something that is unknowable; it is something that is infinitely knowable.”
As twentieth-century pastor and author A. W. Tozer quipped, “What comes to mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
A sweeping survey by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion sorted people’s perceptions of God into four categories: Authoritarian God—High level of anger and high level of engagement Critical God—High level of anger and low level of engagement Distant God—Low level of anger and low level of engagement Benevolent God—Low level of anger and high level of engagement According to the study, the way people perceived God was a more reliable predictor of their values and behavior than any other measurement.
God is not a tattooed punk who sends tornados to kill innocents and dangles sinners over a fire à la Jonathan Edwards. Comprehending God isn’t easy, but we can at least say that God is an all-compassionate parent whose first name is Love. When you think of God in this way, don’t be surprised if you become more like God and less like Mike Tyson.
As the years passed, I dug deeper and began to understand that believers didn’t have to choose between faith and science. The two can coexist in harmony. The book I read in Union Square explained that one of the beliefs I had held since childhood was a genetic impossibility—that Adam and Eve, the first humans created by God and first to sin against God, could not have actually existed and was an allegorical story.
The story of the Fall is true, no matter what genetics claim, and reveals that: Humans often choose to cross boundaries that should not be crossed. Humans often partake of what is better left untouched. Humans resist notions of authority, desiring to seize control of our own destinies. Humans are prone to hiding our mistakes even when we know they are obvious to those closest to us. Humans’ dumb choices, destructive habits, and deceptions have consequences—often separating us from the people and places we most love. Humans’ shame is always met with God’s grace.
The earliest notions of sin in Judaism drew on the metaphor of a stain.
A different metaphor eventually dominated among early writers of the Jewish Bible: sin as a weight.
The notion of sin as a weight was replaced by the idea that sin is like a debt that is owed to a lender.
Some talk about sin primarily as a “problem.” It is an obstacle that we face, a puzzle that needs solving. Others speak of sin as a “sickness.” It’s an illness, a malady, a vexing condition. Still others speak of sin as “lawlessness.” Sin is, put simply, breaking God’s rules.10 Like all metaphors, these reveal a part of the truth but not the whole truth.
A theologian friend of mine provides a definition that I find helpful. She says that life itself is the only framework comprehensive enough to explain sin. After all, sin affects all of life. Since Jesus described himself as the One who came to give abundant life to all creation, we might think of sin as anything that robs us of the fullness of life—or something we’ve done that robs others of the fullness of life. Sin as a thief, if you will.
We might say that sin is whatever contributes to life being less than what God intends. 12
Any force that resists the abundant life is called “sin,” and this is a force to which God stands opposed.
You have been created and called to love those in need, whether nestled in the suburban cocoon across the street or languishing in a refugee camp a million miles away.
Saint Basil, born in 330, used all his personal wealth to aid the poor and became a monk. He sometimes enraged the religious aristocracy by throwing stones at the homes of the rich for ignoring the poor. He was called yurodivi or “holy fool,” though he was actually a great orator and accomplished statesman.
If you read an English translation of the Bible you might assume the Spirit, ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek, is masculine. Nope. Translators often attach the male pronoun he, but ruach is feminine, and pneuma is neuter. The word for “Spirit” in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) is feminine.
When we only speak of God in masculine language, we can only conceive of God in culturally masculine ways. Heavy, disciplined, authoritative. But when we open ourselves up to feminine imagery for God, our minds expand and we imagine God in new ways. Elegant, intricate, lovely.
Shows like Married with Children, Roseanne, and The Simpsons diverge from the Leave It to Beaver model by undermining the idea that a family must operate peacefully and smoothly at all times. Despite their controversial nature, audiences gravitated to these shows for more than a decade, perhaps because they saw familiar glimmers of their own families’ chaos. The Simpsons is America’s longest running sitcom.
Yet Modern Family doesn’t grandstand on controversial issues, and the characters are highly relatable to everyone. This combination—nontraditional elements presented in a nonthreatening way—has potential to reshape cultural opinions and attitudes in profound ways. Like many before it, Modern Family is a sitcom about a nontraditional family that really values family.
“The ‘traditional family’ is not a family lifted out of the Bible’s patriarchal period, its united kingdom period, its exilic and postexilic period, its early or late New Testament period, or any other period,” writes Rodney Clapp. “It is instead a family lifted out of nineteenth-century industrialized Europe and North America.”
My pastor friend thought and thought, but he couldn’t name a single model of a “biblical family” in the entire Bible. If the Bible is the basis of your notion of family, then an exclusively traditional understanding doesn’t work exactly. The Scriptures present a complicated picture of what families look like.
All families are complex and complicated, but none are beyond the reach of the Great Parent.
Jewish and New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine observes, “The shepherd did not expel the sheep for bleating a blasphemy or grazing on nonkosher grass. The sheep did not sin. Rather the shepherd lost the sheep. Similarly, the coin was not cast out; the woman was looking for her money, not divesting from it.”1 The lost-ness of these items is not the item’s fault.
The items are only lost because, well, someone lost them. And they do nothing to be found, either. They are passive objects in the affair. Particularly the coin. It just lies there.
Jesus seems to speak of being lost in a different way than do many who follow his teachings. Lost-ness is the state of being separated from the community and in need of reconciliation, but Jesus does not equate it here with evil or sinfulness. Instead, Jesus gives a sweeping picture of lost-ness that encompasses all who wonder and wander. Interestingly, Jesus insinuates that when people are “lost,” it may not be their fault.
We see this story through a Western lens that places a heavy emphasis on individual responsibility, so we naturally blame the departure on the son. But first-century Jews in a patriarchal, communal culture, would assume the son has been lost by the father. Just as the woman is responsible for keeping track of her money and the shepherd is responsible for his sheep, so too the head male was ultimately responsible for keeping the ancient household together.
