When I was in Thailand, I saw idols.  They were outside bakeries and 7-11s.  They would be sitting on shelves behind the cash register at restaurants.  Cab drivers glued them to their dashboards and placed pieces of their lunch in front of them.  I even saw them outside of brothels when a group of us did a prayer walk through the Red Light district in Bangkok.  I watched as women offered food to these small statues surrounded by incense before entering for her their night’s work.  They asked for forgiveness and sought protection in these idols, and they may have even hoped for salvation.

I’ve also read about idols.  In the Old Testament, idolatry is such a common practice that at times Israel is said to have an altar to some god on every high hill.  And in the New Testament, idols are similarly present in every day life.  They show up in restaurants, and just by going out to eat, some Christians apparently were complicit with idolatry.

But it seems to me that in our western society, idols just aren’t a part of every day life.  Apart from seeing them in Thailand and reading about them in the Bible, I don’t really have much experience with idols.  They seem foreign and culturally irrelevant.  I’ve never experienced the temptation to offer a sacrifice to an idol, and I’ve never had the urge to put my trust in an idol’s ability to help me.  But lately, I’ve been reading a book by Gerald May that has cast the issue of idolatry in a whole new light.  He argues that addiction is a form of idolatry.  Addiction is a form of devotion to an object that parallels religious ritual. It is western society’s version of idolatry.  He writes:

Spiritually, addiction is a deep-seated form of idolatry. The objects of our addictions become our false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love. Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and object of our deepest true desire. It is, as one modern spiritual writer has called it, a “counterfeit of religious presence.

Addiction is a state of compulsion, obsession, or preoccupation that enslaves a person’s will and desire. Addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest, truest desire for love and goodness. We succumb because the energy of our desire becomes attached, nailed, to specific behaviors, objects, or people.

He then goes on to talk about addiction as being far more commonplace than we might initially think.  Addiction isn’t limited to just those with chemical dependencies.  It’s not just the alcoholic or the homeless drug addict who struggles with addiction.  Addiction is pervasive and pernicious.  It infects our daily routines and sabotages our ability to love God and love others.

He tells a story from his personal life of a bout with depression he experienced.  As a professional psychiatrist, he become depressed when none of his patients were getting healed.  Another psychiatrist comforted him with the good news that his depression was a sign that he cared deeply for his clients.  He said, “you are depressed because you care deeply about their well-being.”  Upon further self-reflection, however, he discovered that it wasn’t his love for his clients that was causing him to feel depressed.  It was his addiction to professional success, and the utter absence of any signs of it that caused his depression.  He was suffering from withdrawal not compassion for his clients.

He says many of us are addicted to professional success and other seemingly innocuous intentions as well.  We can be addicted to feeling loved, getting praise from others, the comforts of TV, being thin, sex, or power to name just a few.  Some of these addictions are obviously more serious than others, but if we are forced to go without them, we will become depressed, irritable, angry, manipulative and much more.  Our addictions become intertwined with our deepest desires and even our identity, and in this sense they do function like idols in our lives.  They replace God as our source of hope, desire and love with life-draining patterns of behavior.

And just like sin and idolatry can only be overcome by the grace of God, so also the addict can only experience real healing through an encounter with grace.  As I recognize my addictions and try to stop engaging in them, I also know there is no way we can rid ourselves of idols and addictions by effort alone.  We are set free from our idolatrous inclinations and our addictive appetites only as we experience the unconditional love of God.

I experience the love and grace of God in the pages of a good book, the warmth of a loving friend, the prayers of a fellow church member, the sacrificial service of my spouse, and in the practice of spiritual disciplines like sabbath and meditation.  They are the pathways of God’s grace in my life.  They are the means by which Gods grace brings healing to my addictions and sets me on the road to recovery.

So, when an early twenty-first-century North American says, “What the church says may be OK for some people, but I think it is important to think for myself,” that person thinks that he or she is thinking for himself or herself.  No.  He is only espousing that self-centered, limited way of knowing that has been imposed upon him by his culture.  One could almost say that, because this is North America, because of the United States Constitution’s rendering of religion into a private matter, sealed off from everything important like economics, politics, and public matters, that person is not free to think anything more interesting than “I think it is important to think for myself.”  As Stanley Hauerwas has told us repeatedly, for a contemporary North American to say, “I think for myself,” is solid evidence of cultural formation, externally imposed social determination, since she did not think up the credo “I think for myself” all by herself. Pastor, pg. 211

Gary Anderson says sin has a history.  He’s not talking about the history of our personal sin — why we did it or what it’s enduring effects were.  He’s talking about the history of the way we talk about sin.  He says this is evident by the change of metaphors that are used to describe/define sin in the Old Testament.

He explains why this is significant by employing the philosophical thought of Riccouer, who argues that the meaning of words are derived from the metaphors we use when talking about them.  By way of example he takes the metaphors we use to describe the word argue.  The sorts of language we use when talking about arguing include:

• I destroyed his argument.
• I shared my perspective now you go.  Shoot!
• I dismantled her logic.
• I blew up her worldview.

All of the metaphors we use to describe the idea of arguing include war-like, violent imagery.  If instead we used dance metaphors to describe arguing, we would think of an argument much differently than we do.  If we said things like, “our argument last night was a waltz.”  Or, if we said, “we gracefully argued back and forth as a couple glides across the dance floor.”  Using this metaphor would change the way we understood arguing.  It would change the very definition of what it means to argue.  His point is that the metaphors we use in conjunction with a word imply the word’s inherent meaning.

Anderson applies this philosophical concept to sin in order to uncover what sin meant in the thought life of the Old Testament.  He says there is a history of the word sin because different metaphors were used at different during two different time periods.  The first is the pre-exilic time, and the second is the second-temple period, which included the time of Jesus.

Sin during the first period was associated with the metaphor of burden (e.g. on the day of Atonement the donkey was laden with a heavy burden, symbolically representing Israel’s sins, and sent away into the wilderness).  In the second period, the metaphors that are used include the imagery of debt.  When we sin, we go into debt to God.  By way of example he points to the language in Lev. 26ff about the debt the Israelites go into by not adhering to the law of every 7th year is a Sabbath for the land.  This was interpreted by Rabbis in the second temple period as talking about sin.  When they go into exile they have to pay back the debt to God by staying out of the land for 70 years.  The reason is that the land belongs to God, and by working the land on the seventh year they are stealing from God, which puts them into His debt.  He also points to Jesus use of debt language in the Lord’s prayer as the strongest evidence that Jesus thought of sin this way.

What I find really fascinating is the correlating definition of virtue associated with these two metaphors for sin.  For the burden metaphor, there isn’t really an associated opposite other than to unburden someone or something.  But if sin is thought of as a debt, then there is an opposite action that can be taken as a way to undo our debt.  You can pay back your debt.  If you are in God’s debt, virtue is a way to pay it down.

Anderson argues that this is primarily accomplished through almsgiving, giving money to the poor.  Throughout much of early church history, giving money to the poor was understood as a way of giving money to God himself, and therefore as a way to pay down our debt.  Interestingly, Jesus talks this way too.  In Matt. 25 he says that giving to the poor, the sick, and those who are hurting is equivalent with giving directly to Jesus.  He also says to multiple rich individuals that their path toward salvation and overcoming their sins was rooted in giving their money away to the poor.  This was so established in early Christianity that poor individuals would great their benefactors by saying: “Acquire merit in heaven through me!”

Our post-reformation inclinations violently revolt against the idea of paying down our debt of sin to God with anything that remotely represents “good works.”  We have been taught that Christ alone atones for our sins.  But Anderson points out that giving our money away is less about overcoming our debt and more an expression of faith.  When we give our money away we make a loan to God (Prov. 19:17), which means we become God’s creditors.  The root of the word creditor comes from the Latin word credere, which means to believe.  So, when you or I give our money to someone in need we loan our money to God.  Everyone who loans their money to someone believes in that person’s ability to pay it back.  Loaning our money to God is an act of faith in his ability to pay it back with the spiritual blessings of the kingdom of heaven, now and in the age to come.  That means giving our money away is less of a way to earn our salvation and more a way to express our faith in God.  It’s an investment in our heavenly treasuries that pay astronomically high rates of return.

I’ve known that this is unhealthy for a while.  There’s a compulsiveness in my doing that betrays my lack of security with who I am.  It drives me to constant productivity as a way to uphold my identity.  Over the last few months, I’ve finally gotten serious about working on changing that.  I’m learning how to be still, and it’s freeing me from the compulsion to accomplish.

I’ve read a few books recently that are helping me explore methods of this sort of personal growth.  The most powerful so far has been New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton.  I’ve read other things by Merton before and appreciated his insight, but this book has been revolutionary for me.  I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that has had such a profound impact on my spiritual life as this one.  It’s the only book I’ve ever finished reading and immediately flipped to the front of the book so I could start reading it again.  I’ll be sharing more about Merton’s thoughts and writing in the future.

I’ve also found Nouwen’s book, The Way of the Heart helpful.  He discusses some of the same concepts in Merton’s book I found most helpful — like the false self and the True Self.  But this book is simpler, more like a primer on the attitude and need for spiritual disciplines.    And most recently I’ve enjoyed Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart.  This book is sort of like a how-to guide to centering prayer.  I’ve found practicing meditation and centering prayer as he describes it very difficult and unnatural but also very enriching.  At first, it’s like re-joining swim practice after being away for months and feeling the pain of using muscles that have been dormant for too long.

In all of this, my hope is to become better acquainted with what it means to live in the spirit, or in Christ, as opposed to living in the flesh, which is my false self.  My compulsive doing is an activity rooted in a fleshly identity — one that is finds its worth, purpose, and hope in a false illusion of myself.  I hope that as I learn to be still in God’s presence, I can rest in my identity in Christ.  My doing will increasingly be born out of my being in an authentic way that is life-giving for others.

Beloved is a shocking book.  It transports the reader from contemporary society into the post-civil war era in America.  It is a novel about the worst of slavery told through the wounds and memories of its main character, Sethe, a woman in her 30s who dramatically escaped from it.  Beloved is a book that opens your eyes to the worst of slavery in a way that no history book could.

Morrison’s writing is precise and poignant.  I read this book slowly trying to drink in every word picture and discover the meaning in all her prose.  The book is mostly about love.  She explores questions about every human’s need to be loved, the power of love, the dangers of love, the ownership and possession love demands, our identity in love, freedom love brings and more.  She uses slavery as a backdrop in order to contrast, confuse, but mostly sharpen our definitions of love when seen how they are lived out in such an extreme environment.

Here’s an excerpt from the book that highlights Morrison’s insight into the human heart as well as the beauty of her writing:

Sethe opened the front door and sat down on the porch steps. The day had gone blue without its sun, but she could still make out the black silhouettes of trees in the meadow beyond. She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite?  … But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I’d love more – so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping … then there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love. pg 82-83

There has been no shortage of literary and philosophical articles written trying to digest and apply Beloved to life.  It’s not simple, so I won’t attempt to do that here.  I recommend the book as a something that will provide a graphic visual of the horrors of slavery (and humanity) while painting a challenging and powerful portrait of love.

One of the most exciting terms used to describe the church today is the word missional.  It correctly categorizes the people of God as a community on a mission — a people sent out by Jesus to extend and promote his ministry and message in the world.  But unfortunately, what it has devolved into is frequently little more than do-gooder volunteerism.

I believe the word missional ought to properly characterized the church (and I hope it does ours), but I lament the way the word has been redefined in popular Christian culture.  Many churches and Christians now think that being missional is about helping poor people have a better life.  It is expressed in worthy activities like helping homeless people find a job, feeding people in a soup kitchen, or engaging in activism to alleviate poverty.  But there is an attitude that Christians can carry with them into these activities that ends up undermining their acts of service.

In his book Disciples of All Nations, Lamin Sanneh (a naturalized U.S. citizen from Gambia and professor at Yale) explains how this same shift occurred in foreign missions to the ultimate detriment of the missionaries’ ministries.

“The distraction came about by way of split prorities as missionaries spoke variously of the gospel of enlightenment, the gospel of healing, the social gospel, and the gospel of sex equality…. Social uplift became the goal and rationale of the gospel.  The work of Christ was construed as lifting people out of poverty and backwardness…Yet, Paul Allen deliberately rejected any means of propagating the faith that might distract people from the truth that the Christian faith was founded not in human philosophy but in the power of God.  Missions had a thousand plans, but God had only one.  Salvation was not by the thousand capillaries of cultural assimilation.” pg. 226

“Allen recalled the Roman slaves who lived in social conditions deeply repugnant to what the West called the Christian life still converted to Christianity before any ameliorative social remedies were available to them.  The Christian life embraced slaves and concubines without bashfulness or reservation while they were slaves and concubines because the Christian life did not make social disadvantage a disqualification of membership.” pg. 229

Whenever being missional takes this sort of turn — when the church becomes simply an institution for helping people improve their lives and move out of poverty — the result is a compromised gospel.  It becomes harder and harder for Christians who have made it (in a socio-cultural sense) to rub shoulders with those who don’t.  It becomes difficult for us to accept the drug addict, homeless man, prostitute, or the alcoholic into our midst without seeing them as a project to improve.

But the truth is, the Christian faith is open and available to all.  Salvation is not hindered or encumbered by circumstances, and Christian communities are at their best when they reflect this.  They are at their best when people proclaim a message of new life, salvation and hope for a better future even for those living in the worst of situations.  This is the transformative truth of the gospel.  Our lives don’t have to be going well for God to be present in them.  We don’t have to be successful and we don’t have to be put together to know and experience God’s love.

This is a radical message, and it is the foundation for the right kind of missional activity.  When this is the foundation of our missional mindset, then we can interact with other similarly broken people and carry to them a message of love and acceptance.  We can serve the homeless man, alcoholic, or drug addict not out of a sense that we need to fix them to get them saved, but that God loves them even in their brokenness — just like you and me.  Unless we carry this attitude into our acts of service and into our missional ministry then we will undermine and sabotage the very good we seek to do.

Photo from flickr.

Abraham Lincoln is a legend.  He is known for being a wise, steadfast, and visionary leader who moved the United States through the Civil War and out of slavery.  But that is certainly not how he was known during his lifetime.  He was perceived by many as waffling, inexperienced, and a failure.

Lincoln faced repeated setbacks and discouragement.  He was dirt poor growing up and at times he had to forego even the most basic comforts.  He struggled to succeed in business early on, and then lost election after election in politics.  He lost more elections than he won before he became President, and he was largely unknown and unproven as a national politician.

He also made a lot of mistakes.  He was less of a visionary leader who pushed the country ahead into new territory and more of a reactor to the circumstances that were thrust upon him.  The Civil War happened to him.  It was a forgone conclusion before he was sworn into office.  The decision to free the slaves was an arduous and difficult one for him ultimately driven by a desire to recruit more men for battle than out of philosophical or visionary zeal.  His plan for solving the slavery problem was to colonize slaves in Central America.  He did not believe slaves were intellectually, morally, or culturally equal to their white masters.  He was a flawed president who was trying to do the best he could.  As Lincoln himself commented, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”  But isn’t that true of you and me too?

No one wins every battle and we all make lots of mistakes. The difference between Lincoln and most of us is that we give up.  What Abe had, and what we all need, was perseverance and integrity.  When life gets hard, really hard, we are tempted to give up or compromise our character to get ahead or get out of our struggle.  We quit on jobs, relationships, and God if things don’t go well for us.  We give up playing by the rules and rationalize cheating because we’ve got it hard.

Lincoln is remembered as a hero of American politics because he never compromised and he never gave up. He isn’t remembered for knowing everything or always doing things right.  He is remembered for being honest.  He is remembered for persevering and leading the country through tremendous hardship.  He is remembered as a legend because of how he responded to pain not because he avoided it.

We do not get to choose what difficulties befall us, but we can choose how we respond. We can choose to take shortcuts out of our difficulties by giving up or compromising our character, or we can persevere and become legends.  One doesn’t become great because life is easy and things go well.  We become great when we respond well to resistance and persevere through our problems.  If we avoid hardships, we miss out on our opportunity for greatness.  Maybe that’s why Merton said,

“Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

But I was wrong.  Alyosha appears powerless to save anyone.  At the end of the novel, everyone is left in a pitiful state (the details of which I will refrain from describing for anyone planning to read the book).  Alyosha may be the “hero of the story,” but he doesn’t save anyone from suffering.

I wonder if I would have felt the same way about Jesus?  If I were a first Century Jew suffering under the oppression of the Roman Empire and feeling rejected by God, I wonder if Jesus would have similarly felt like a heroic disappointment.  When he died on the cross, he too failed to actually save anyone from suffering.  The few miracles that he did accomplish were hardly exhaustive.  They merely pointed to a future that was still out of touch.  By and large he didn’t help people.  Those around him were left in their suffering, just as the Brothers Karamazov were.

In this way, Dostoevsky helped remind me how disappointing Jesus can be to us today.  He frequently doesn’t save us out of our difficult situations.  He’s not the type of hero who swoops in to save us from all our problems.  He doesn’t rescue me from my mortgage payments, from my illnesses or from those difficult people in my life.

But that doesn’t me he isn’t powerful.  Alsyosha, despite not literally saving anyone, did have a profound effect on everyone with whom he interacted.  He reformed some troublesome youths.  His presence with each of his brothers helped them persevere through great difficulty.  He offered a concrete example of moral rectitude in the face of deep depravity, and when he was assaulted violently (even to the point of almost having his finger bitten off) he responds peacefully and with forgiveness.  In his own way he did offer a saving presence to those around them.  He loved them purely and was a witness to truth and grace in their midst.  Everyone knew that he could be trusted, and he seemed to brighten the day of every person with whom he spoke.  Alyosha was light in the dark lives of all those around him.

Jesus does the same thing for us now.  His loving and constant presence with us is transformative even though it doesn’t change our circumstances.  He doesn’t remove the things that afflict us from our lives, but his presence, like Alyosha’s, helps us to do that which is right.  Jesus’ presence with us enables us to find meaning and joy in the midst of the mundane and painful.  Dostoevsky’s book did an excellent job of highlighting the power of Christ and the call of Christians to follow in his footsteps as light in a suffering world.

Have you ever been annoyed when a spiritual guru has told you to do some self-exploration?  I think that’s fair.  There’s enough self-absorption in our country that when another Christian pastor or spiritual leader tells people to “look inward” or to “know thyself” that it sounds like New Age Narcissism.  Often times, Christians object to this sort of counsel with quotes from Jesus about dying to self, Paul’s exhortation to sacrificial service and the like.  But in a book on the integrity of the soul, A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer adeptly highlights the importance of being self-aware.

I have traveled this country extensively and have met many people.  Rarely have I met people with the overweening sense of self the moralists say we have, people who put themselves first as if they possessed the divine right of kings.

Instead, I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self.  They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be — an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others.  We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves as superior but because we have no sense of self at all.  Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were.

Palmer, Parker, A Hidden Wholeness, pg. 38

He urges us to know our authentic self, and to live with integrity.  He says we often live a divided life swayed this way and that by the external pressures of our peers or the internal expectations we put on ourselves.  We do things that don’t fit with who we are out of obligation, guilt, or shame, and often time it is eating us up inside.  In this book, Palmer pushes us to live an undivided live.  He encourages us to live in such a way that we have a Hidden Wholeness.  I’m excited to get through it all!

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This, the opening line to Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, is packed full of meaning, and the rest of the book expounds in story form what he means.   We read of one miserable family owing its pain to the self-absorption of the husband.  In another, it’s because of the internal angst of a middle-aged wife that drives her into the arms of a young man.  In another, it’s the insatiable desire for success of the politician husband.  Each family is truly uniquely miserable in its own way.

But is it true that all happy families are alike?  Is it true that there is a model for how to be a family, and the degree to which a family resembles that model dictates the level of happiness the family will experience?

My hunch is that Tolstoy is correct.  I believe that God has created families to relate in a certain way.  Happy families relate to one another the way the Godhead relates to itself.  Happy families love one another the way God loves others.  They are full of sacrificial love and concern for the well being of the each other.  Their relationships are rooted in commitment, and the culture is one of honesty and grace.  In these systems, health, not perfection, is possible, and happiness can emerge.

The problem that Tolstoy so eloquently highlights through his story-telling is that the “happy-family” model is unnatural for us.  We don’t just fall into it.  We have to work at it.  Monogamy is a commitment we have to stick to, and it requires the disciplining of our passions.  Sacrificial service towards our spouses and our children is inconvenient and at times demands the delaying of our dreams.  Love often times looks more like death than it does like lust.  Following the “happy-family” model is hard work and it takes discipline.

But as I read through Anna Karenina and see the truth about families in its pages, it’s obvious that this hard work is well worth it.  Whenever we veer from God’s path of familial happiness, the pain is inevitable, if sometimes delayed.