Give me …
A pure heart – that I may see you
A humble heart – that I may hear you
A heart of love – that I may serve you
A heart of faith – that I may abide in you
2
Undefeated: Oscar Winner Headlines True/False Film Festival
Posted: March 5, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: True/False Film Festival, Undefeated
As usual, the True/False Film Festival drew thousands to Columbia, Missouri to view forty documentary films over the three day event. The array is always intriguing and sometimes downright baffling. But the festival has risen to the ranks of top drawer documentary film festivals in the world. One sign is the 25,000 people who attend, many of whom travel great distances to do so.
Timing may not be everything, but it is something. Just a few days before True/False, the film, Undefeated, took an Oscar. The producers brought it with them just to prove it. What really mattered, however, was the project itself, one that shined a bright light on the power of leadership and team to transcend circumstance.
Coaching, like many other endeavors, is far more than the sport at hand. It is really about building individuals and communities, releasing hidden potential waiting to let itself loose into the world. This is a film about that, real people struggling to find themselves and excavate pride from the dumpsters of backwater society. North Memphis isn’t the only place on the planet to benefit, though it has. The real story is the way hope is born on one field and then spreads to every other one where vision and love triumph. That’s what Undefeated does.
It’s finally out! My new collection of writings entitled, Wonder and Wholeness, draws together some of the “best of” columns and blog posts under one cover. The magnificent cover art is from Jenny McGee with subject and materials from El Salvador. And most importantly, all proceeds are designated to our partnership with ENLACE in El Salvador.
You may purchase a copy at the church for $10 (add $1.00 if we mail to you). If you would like to order this online just go to the Broadway Christian Church web page, click on the link beside the book cover and follow the instructions. Thanks for supporting our work with brothers and sisters in El Salvador. And enjoy the stories and poems you find inside!
Moral Models Exist Beneath the Surface
Posted: February 26, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: George Lakoff, Moral Politics:How Liberals and Conservatives Think
Often behind the pack, I have just now completed George Lakoff’s Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (University of Chicago Press, 1996). A friend suggested it to me, no, gave me a copy. It was well worth the read. And Lakoff’s strong, balanced and scholarly analysis provided a real legitimacy to his project: Identifying the moral models and metaphors that underlie particular political thought.
At the center of his work is the identification of family moral systems that are projected into the public sphere. These moral systems, with their accompanying worldviews, explain why persons and parties believe and act in the ways they do. In many respects the moral systems are incompatible with one another. And when a system is understood to be absolute by its advocate, any other system can only be described as mistaken or, in the worst case, immoral.
The two family models, with variants, are these: Strict Father Morality and Nurturing Parent Morality.
Strict Father Morality is an authoritarian system of hierarchy, with a strict father figure at the top establishing rules and discipline to conform to the system. Women have domestic responsibility as well as making sure the father’s rules are followed. Children must obey parents and never rebel. The goal is for children to become self-reliant and responsible. Good parents do not meddle in their lives later in adulthood. Being good is becoming self-disciplined, succeeding, and prospering. Weakness is immoral. Protection is manifested in protection of the family from all outside threats.
Nurturing Parent Morality is a model of caring for and caring about, living with mutually beneficial relationships. Children are shaped through understanding, respect and reasonable freedom, all of which creates a caring and responsive member of society. Children become obedient through respect of parents, not fear of punishment. The goal is to create self-fulfilled children who help others to become the same.Therefore the most important characteristics to learn are empathy, the capacity to nurture others, and freedom to explore many thoughts and ways of understanding the world.
Both of these moral models hold certain worldviews and they are instrumental in political life. They also manifest themselves in different forms of Christian churches. If you are operating primarily out of one or the other then your conclusions about social policy, the role and place of government, and operative values are a reflection of those worldviews.
This explains the radically different conclusions that emerge when it comes to political or social choices. They are distinct ideologies based in a moral outlook. And unless we understand the underlying moral code by which people operate we will never understand why they would come to the conclusions they do. They are often not reconcilable. The reasons that people make the decisions they do are often not for the stereotyped reasons their opponents present. Rather, they are motivated by a paradigm, a model, and principles that are accepted as the way the world should be. You can like that outlook, hate it, or want to argue about it. But to ignore the moral underpinnings of each system is to entirely misunderstand why they are the way they are.
It’s the morning after, but there is no Ash Wednesday hangover. Some things do, however, hang over.
In the midst of ashes and observations of mortality, babies were with us in their own mysterious way. And as one friend mentioned while cooing over a a little one after the service, there is something right and good about the newness of life, the freshness of life, helping the rest of us who are not so new and not so fresh.
It’s like babies at funerals. There the story is told, the great turning, emerging and passing, from beginning to end, the whole span. And it’s not that we need a distraction, though we probably do, but that one part of the story is put in its whole context.
When my father was near his death, riding his hospital bed toward eternity, my step-brother brought in his newly born son for a visit. And there the old one struggled to the edge of the bed in order to hold the new one. There was a wholeness in that snapshot, the moment captured, that somehow told the truth.
Perhaps one of the requisite quorums at every Ash Wednesday service should include the presence of at least one baby. “Do we have a baby yet? You know we can’t proceed until we do.” Ok, maybe not a requirement. But surely we’ll be the better for it.
I saw my first one this morning near the mall. She came out of Target and crossed the street, cross on her forehead. Obviously the young woman had come from a morning Ash Wednesday service. I assumed she would sport the ashes for the rest of her day, displaying the dust from whence she came and to which she would return.
Then there was our own Ash Wednesday service with lots of people listening intently to words about mortality, brokenness, and that which separates us from God. They came forward in a line, like prisoners waiting to receive a sentence on their foreheads. Afterwards our choir director conducted rehearsal with a plus sign on his forehead; none of us thought it strange. I expected to see us wearing the ashes just like I expected to see someone, somewhere doing the same at the mall.
What I did not expect was to watch the Colbert Report tonight and spot a an ashen cross on Stephen’s forehead, right there in the middle of his usual tongue-in-cheek commentary. I stopped and remembered that he is a practicing Catholic. And he wears his faith right there in front of a national audience doing what he always does without a self-conscious bone in his believing body.
If Colbert can do that on television, neither seeking special recognition nor fearing ridicule, what might I risk?
Perhaps I shall give up cowardice for Lent.
I Don’t Believe a Word of It
Posted: February 17, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: Cross, David Platt, Nature of Christ, Nature of God, Radical, Reconciliation, salvation
So I’m reading along in a pretty good book about commitment to God, going the distance, a true discipleship that is more than going through the motions (Radical, David Platt). The author talks about how very much we in the church have it wrong, that we confuse our culture and its values with the call of the Gospel that is really something altogether different. I’m nodding in agreement. And then he tips his hand to reveal his underlying theology, Christology and dominant model of atonement. I stopped nodding. I began shaking my head. It’s a familiar construct, what he describes, and it’s dead wrong.
A few quotes:
“Why was he (Jesus) trembling in that garden, weeping and full of anguish? We can rest assured that he was not a coward about to face Roman soldiers. Instead he was a Savior about to endure divine wrath…All God’s holy wrath and hatred toward sin and sinners, stored up since the beginning of the world, is about to be poured out on him … wrath due your sin and my sin being thrust upon his soul. In that holy moment, all the righteous wrath and justice of God due us came rushing down like a torrent on Christ himself…at the cross, Christ drank the full cup of the wrath of God…This is the gospel. The just and loving creator of the universe has looked upon hopelessly sinful people and sent his Son, God in the flesh, to bear his wrath against sin on the cross and to show his power over sin in the Resurrection so that all who trust in him will be reconciled to God forever.”(34-36)
Nah.
First, wrong God. Wrath isn’t what defines God and justice isn’t all about wrath. There are many attributes of God, many taken from our human grab bag as we attempt to describe the ineffable in our tiny ways. Basically this is a strict/punitive father model, the cosmic disciplinarian who is going to discipline the children for their own good, in his own way. Insisting on this model of God continues to alienate and send people away from any engagement with the faith, not because they are cowardly or lost, but because it is untenable. It is untenable for me. Wrong God.
Second, wrong God punishes his own son to placate his rage: Bad Dad, cosmic child abuse. Hope he feels better afterwards. Somebody has to pay, says strict Dad, so I’ll send son to suffer because the perpetual sin of humanity enrages me. How dare them. After I’ve been their strict father for all these centuries and I get what? Ok, kick the dog, the scapegoat, mmm, my son. Ok, now we’re good. He’s taken a beating for you, and don’t forget it. Jesus isn’t afraid of suffering, no, he’s afraid of Dad’s wrath.
This is substitutionary atonement, very popular in some Christian circles, the backbone of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. The more blood spilled, the more strict father god is satisfied, the more we are now OK. It’s an absolute failure.
Third, this is far from the only way to understand God, the saving work of Christ and how we are reconciled and made one with God and one another. For example:
The loving God who created and is creating the whole world and all humanity always desires that we be in faithful, loving, committed relationship. But we are separated from that love, by our own designs and the ways of circumstances, and our lives are often in bondage, enslaved to everything but God. The creator of the universe never gives up on the beloved and always reaches to restore relationship through love, sacrificial love, love such as took his faithful son all the way to the cross – not to endure God’s wrath, but to express the boundless love that suffers for the beloved. God’s truth spoken is punished by the world that does not want to be known for what it is. When you see that sacrificial love it breaks your heart and turns you back to the divine lover who never gives up. Until we do turn, our souls are withered, small and pale, lifeless when cutoff from our source. We experience that separation every day. But through the mercy and grace of God, through Jesus, God’s wisdom become flesh, we are given a new way, a new path and life in Christ. And as he is lifted up on the cross all humanity is drawn to the love that will not let us go.
Like that, for instance.
A friend recently opened a meeting with this evocative prayer from the Unitarian tradition:
Let us pray to the One who holds us in the hollow of His hands,
To the One who holds us in the curve of Her arms,
To the One whose flesh is the flesh of hills and hummingbirds and angleworms,
Whose skin is the color of an old Black woman and a young white man
and the color of the leopard and the grizzly bear and the green grass snake,
Whose hair is like the aurora borealis, rainbows, nebulae, waterfalls, and a spider’s web,
Whose eyes sometime shine like the Evening Star, and then like fireflies, and then again like an open wound,
Whose touch is both the touch of life and the touch of death,
And whose name is everyone’s, but mostly mine.
And what shall we pray?
Let us say
Thank you
Mo, the great horned owl
I’ve always been enamored with raptors in general, the whole world of birds of prey, our eagles, hawks, owls and more. And I’ve always wondered how I might actually be able to work with them in a kind of rescue setting. Since they are federally protected birds there are stringent standards for their care in captivity.
I happily discovered our very own Raptor Center at the Veterinary school at the University of Missouri. So I’m a volunteer in training. There is much, much to learn. But I like it already. In fact, I find myself in raptor attention.
vitalwholeness 