Avdat

Compromised

As a follow-up to my previous post, You wanna know how I spent my Independence Day?  A fellow Democrat and I carried the Rowan County Democratic Party banner in the Faith, NC 4th of July parade.  Immediately in front of us was a float sponsored by a local Baptist church, festooned in red, white and blue bunting, with massive speakers blaring an endless loop of Lee Greenwood's Proud to Be an American and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

My banner-carrying partner recently returned from a three week trip to Germany where overt displays of patiotism are still verboten, with the exception, perhaps, of national pride in their soccer team.  But in Germany, she explained, you pay taxes to support the Church.  You can check off either Roman Catholic or Evangelical (Lutheran).  There is provision for conscientious objection, but if you opt out you are forever barred from calling on the Church for any services.  No weddings.  No funerals.

So my question is, Stanley, Who's the most compromised Christian in the lot?  Me, the Baptists in front of me, or taciturn German taxpayers whose congregations are on the government dole?

My fellow banner carrier, by the way, is Jewish, so she can view both the Baptists and the Germans and indeed all Church-State issues with a detached but wary eye.

You will be hated by all on account of my name

I should be happy right?  Last month Barack Obama squirmed while his preacher shot his mouth off.  Now it's John McCain's turn to squirm, as one of his boosters gets caught anointing Hitler as the second coming of King Cyrus.  This tit-for-tat religious weirdness should limit the damage Rev. Wright has done to his parishioner, No?

But I'm not happy.  It means that the public face of Christianity in America just gets uglier and uglier. 

Jeremiah Wright.  John Hagee.  T.D. Jakes.  Joel Osteen.  Al Sharpton.  Pat Robertson.  Jesse Jackson.  Jerry Falwell.  Hacks.  Heretics.  Peddlers who falsify the gospel, they are motivated by selfish ambition, envy and rivalry.  They traffic in grievance.  They're shallow.  The increase the suffering of those who proclaim Christ out of love.

There may be more to Wright and Hagee than nutty statements about the government concocting AIDS to kill black people, or how today's Middle East conflict is all foretold in the scriptures.  But it's right to condemn these statements. 

And it's right to want something better. 1 Peter cautions its readers, "If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed... But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief... or even a mischief maker."  We haven't had a Christian in public life who's suffered for the right reasons in quite a while.  Maybe since MLK.  We've been cursed with a bunch of mischief makers who, outside their little personality cults and media empires are held beneath contempt, for entirely understandable reasons.

My prayer is for public Christian leadership that's hated for all the right reasons.

Mark Driscoll is a jerk

Avdat reader Bob W calls me out:

Mark Driscoll has preached hundreds of hours of sermons and it's a bit unfair to pin him down based on 2 or 3 sentences taken out of context. When you've listened to 7 or 8 complete sermons and then have a good feel of where he stands, come back and give an honest opinion. Until then, it seems like you may be scratching an itch.

Fair enough.  I begin by reading all of Driscoll's answers in the Relevant Magazine interview from which the "2 or 3 sentences" were lifted.  Judging from the first Q and A, I don't think I've taken anything out of context:

What trends in church and worship styles do you see? Are they positive or negative?

Mark Driscoll: I’ll be happy when we have more than just prom songs to Jesus sung by some effeminate guy on an acoustic guitar offered as mainstream worship music. Right now most worship music is still coming from the top down through such things as Christian radio and record labels. But the trend today in a lot of churches is writing your own music to reflect your culture and community, and I pray this trend of music from the bottom up continues.

This guy is a jerk.  A homophobic jerk.  Great--the guy who was giving swirlies in the locker room to the computer geeks and tuba players has grown up to run a megachurch in Seattle, and has defined sanctification as conformity to his own weird, hyper-masculine standards.

Does Driscoll know that 30% of teen suicides are attributable to young people struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity?  Does he care?  Such casual nastiness gives ecclesiastical sanction to acts of violence.  Whether that would give someone like Driscoll pause is a question I can't answer yet.  Maybe the study series on Ruth and Nehemiah will enlighten me.

In the meantime, Driscoll still seems like a whacked out guy at the center of a personality cult, who inspires his minions not with calls to take up a cross, but with calls to lift up the girly men of the world in a group wedgie. 

Again I say, put your money where your mouth is.  There are at least ten Army Recruiting offices in metro Seattle.  I hear they need chaplains in Iraq.

The Devil you know is better than the Daniel Johnston you don't know

I had a Daniel Johnston moment the other evening.  To remind you:  I laughed all the way through The Devil and Daniel Johnston until I learned that the movie wasn't a mockumentary, that the fawning critics who loved Johnston's hopelessly bad music weren't actors.  They really liked the stuff!  Then I was appalled and amazed as such pseudo-sophistication and sycophantic posturing.

So, the moment came while reading this quote on Halden's blog, Inhabitatio Dei:

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity. [Italics added]

And I'm laughing all the way through it.  Aren't you laughing?  I mean, this is so ridiculously over-the-top that it's got to be an Onion article, right?

And then it occurs to me:  No.  This Mark Driscoll guy is actually a minister of the gospel with some standing in some Christian quarters.  And suddenly I'm confused and appalled, as I always am when people slip into unconscious self-parody.

I suppose Mark Driscoll is one of those manly Christians, about whom I've already expressed my opinion.  But to briefly reiterate, if Driscoll wants to embody a more martial Christianity, then he should pay a visit to the local Army recruiter's office.  There is a war on, you know.  Paintball and tattoos don't give you a leg up on the product and decaf lads.

As I said in Halden's comment thread, nervousness over the feminization of Christianity is nothing new.  Driscoll's just scratching that itch with the crude language and explicit imagery of the 21st century. 

But hasn't the feminization of Christianity been a problem since the beginning?  I mean, doesn't it go back to the women's testimony of the resurrection, and how it fell on the male disciples' deaf ears? 

Maybe the problem isn't that the Church is too feminine.  Maybe the problem is with the men.

I'm a mainliner, born and bred.  And Evangelicalism still looks just as whacked to me as it's always looked.  There is no kind of petri dish for growing every Religious Bizarro World virus you can imagine like Evangelicalism.  Maybe the Russian Orthodox Church can hang with them in the idolatrous nationalism category, but combine that with the cults of personality, the shameless hucksterism, the horrible architecture that intentionally apes the worst aspects of American suburbia, the style over theological and liturgical substance--and you've got a Superbug.

But I'll have to grant that gay bishops and swapping out our traditional body and blood ritual for a mucus ritual must look equally bizarre from the other side.  I guess the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. 

Liturgical train wreck ahead

And now, let us bow our heads in a moment of silent prayer for the young, eager beaver, liturgically correct seminary graduate determined to celebrate Pentecost on this, of all Sundays.  For eager beaver seminary graduate has been called to a congregation of decidedly low church sensibilities, where there is no day higher or holier than Mother's Day.

Fix the foolishness

I reach into my "They'll know we are Christians by our love" drawer and pull out... a palm frond!

Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshippers exchanged blows at one of Christianity's holiest shrines on Orthodox Palm Sunday, and used palm fronds to pummel police who tried to break up the brawl.

The fight came amid growing rivalry over religious rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.

It erupted when Armenian clergy kicked out a Greek priest from their midst, pushed him to the ground and kicked him, according to witnesses.

When police intervened, some worshippers hit them with the palm fronds they were holding for the religious holiday. The Eastern Orthodox churches follow a different calendar from Western Christians and celebrate Easter next Sunday.

Two Armenian worshippers who attacked the Greek Orthodox clergy were briefly detained by Israeli police. Scores of Armenian supporters then protested outside the police station during the questioning of the two, beating drums and chanting.

The Holy Sepulcher is shared by several Christian denominations according to a centuries-old arrangement known as the "status quo."

Each denomination jealously guards its share of the basilica, and fights over rights at the church have intensified in recent years, particularly between the Armenians and Greeks.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of the Holy Sepulchre.  Our tour guide told us that in the mid-19th century, somebody put this ladder up to do some repair work, which was subsequently interrupted.  Then the Greeks, Copts, Armenians and other claimants to the church agreed that no part of the Church could be changed unless all agree to it.  So the ladder has remained there to this day, a small monument to Christian disunity. 

And perhaps it's the most valuable relic on the whole site!  After all, it is wooden.  How does a wooden ladder survive 150 years of exposure to the elements without some sort of divine intervention?

No monks exchanged body blows when we were there in May of 2006, but some in our group saw a fight between two tour guides.  Each was vying to get their respective groups closest to Station 12, the part of the Church which encloses Golgotha.  It was reported to me that one guide was shoving the old ladies in his group up to the railing. 

When I think about my visit to the Holy Sepulchre, and reads news stories like the one quoted above, I can't help but wonder if the cast of Clean House needs to make a road trip to Jerusalem.  Mark will probably want to start by getting rid of this chandelier.  It shouldn't be too much of a problem.  The Church boasts a rather roomy (by Old city standards) courtyard in which Trish can set up a Yard Sale.  Speaking of lighting, Matt will want to brighten up the dreary interior by installing some skylights in both domes.  Expensive? Yes.  But Trish will make a killing selling relics to the tourists.  And we'll leave it to Niecy to crack monks' heads together.

Wonder

Being a Christian, I cannot believe that the child born with two faces in an Indian town is the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga.  That said, I do deplore the reporter's chalking up this belief to the "superstitious" nature of rural Indians.  Maybe they're kind as well!  While it's gotta be hard living up to such outsized expectations, other disabled children enter this world to a far cooler welcome.  It's too bad we can't see more of the Imago Dei in the millions of babies born with Down's Syndrome, Cleft Palate, and other birth defects.

Natalie Merchant said it best:

Mixing politics and religion

Apparently, it's mandatory.  Reviewing the book Broken Churches Broken Nation, Ken Carder observes that the last time the churches steered clear of politics for the sake of church growth, what we got was the Civil War. 

This sort of tracks with the sideways look one gets at Billy Graham in Ron Ferguson's biography of George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community.  Ferguson writes that in the early 1950s,

It seemed as if the liberal evangelicals who had dominated the Kirk since the First World War, the social gospellers and the dialectical theologians (the disciples of Barth and Brunner...) had come together in a coalition, however shaky, based on the need and opportunity for mission in a Scotland which showed a renewed interest in the old faith.

Then the Billy Graham Crusade came to Scotland and shattered that fragile coalition.  MacLeod couldn't stand Graham's absolute refusal to engage social problems, and deeply distrusted mass evangelism, but was criticized for just being jealous of another gifted preacher.  Whether or not to support the Crusade became a deeply divisive issue among the Church's leadership.

Ferguson reports that the result of the Crusade was a wash.  20,000 people answered the altar call, but 62% of those were already regular church attenders.  He adds that the rolls of Church of Scotland began their long, inexorably decline in the mid-'50s, shortly after Graham had come and gone.

Christianity is an incarnational religion.  When we make an incarnational religion other-worldly, the Church is no longer being true to itself.  No preacher, no matter how skilled, and no evangelistic outreach, no matter how relevant or slickly packaged, can save a religion that's not true to itself.

It seems to be something of an inherent problem in institutional, American Christianity.  I don't know how you root it out.  Rooting it out begins by recognizing that Billy Graham, a very kind man, has been part of the problem, not the solution.  That's a rather counter-intuitive argument to make. 

Thirty days of sex

Linking to without comment, except to say to my elders who read my blog, If you want to put this on the Session agenda next month, knock yourself out.

UPDATE:  I can't help myself.  I must comment!  Although Mrs. Avdat has already put me on notice.

I went to the church's website, a congregation named (apparently without a trace of irony) Relevant Church.  People are not having enough sex, they flatly assert.  And couples are divorcing as a result. 

Au contraire, married people are having more sex than you'd imagine, and single people, less than you'd imagine.  Which makes complete sense, if for no other reason than "availability."  So this might be a solution in search of a problem.  Fer sure, Kip would disagree, but I have a suspicion that Kip and Joan's marriage, while hysterically stereotypical, is far from typical.

I do admit it's an intriguing idea.  It turns Lenten discipline on its head.  Indulge, don't renounce.  (Although the church does invite singles to abstain from sex for a month). 

And to tell the truth, saying that a great sex life takes "focus, determination and planning" tracks with what I tell couples in premarital counseling.  Again, contrary to pop culture stereotype, sex is rarely the result of a spontaneous fit of passion.  You do have to make time for it.

Why then am I not on board with this?  There's a fine line between addressing gender differences and engaging in gender stereotyping.  A promise to review "the obvious needs of him and the hidden needs of her" feels like it's crossing the line.  Not every marriage can be saved by the Preacher telling her, "You need to put out more," and telling him, "You need to unload the dishwasher more."  No sex may be a symptom, not a cause, of a troubled marriage.

It's terribly gimmicky, and flatfooted mainliners like myself are prone to grouse.  But if there's sound medical, biblical, theological and psychological teaching behind the gimmick, then fine.  Trouble is, I can't tell from this vantage point, from outside the tent, so to speak.

Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep

I keep getting email forwards warning me about Oprah's new course on a New Age Jesus.  So does Ben Witherington.  He copied and pasted the email into his blog, if you care to read it.

Some people have asked me what I think about this course.  Of course I think it's claptrap, but I'm not bristling with indignation about it the way that the author of the email is.  These heresies are best knocked down with laughter, not with anathemas.

For instance.  Just read this little lesson by Oprah's partner in this project, Marianne Robinson, about how you can loose yourself from the prison of the past.  Here's a woman who's thrown some of her vague recollections of college philosophy debates about universals in with TM jargon she picked up from, I don't know, the Free Expression Tunnel (?), to create a "lesson" that sounds like she's either mocking meditation or the stupid things you debate in philosophy class.  Except that it's entirely earnest.

This guru is ripe for a You Tube send up.  Any takers out there?  No?  Maybe an SNL sketch?