Freedom from Want?

Migrant Mother (1936), photo by Dorothea Lange

The rich keep getting richer and everybody else keeps getting poorer according to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center. During the first two years of recovery after the Great Recession, the wealthiest 7% of Americans saw their average net worth increase 28% from 2009 to 2011 while the other 93% experienced a decline. The rising tide has not raised all boats; the vast majority of us are sinking while a tiny minority of the uber-wealthy are riding high.

The United States still has the world’s largest economy, but 46 million Americans don’t have enough healthy and nutritious food. An army of children go to bed hungry every night while we spend billions on our military. How can a nation founded on the principles of political and social equality tolerate such glaring economic inequality?

We justify the unequal outcomes of our free market system by promoting equal opportunity. But how can we talk about equal opportunity with a straight face when nearly 1 in 6 of Americans don’t have enough to eat or can only get enough calories by purchasing the least healthy foods which cause chronic illnesses associated with obesity, such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease? The late Harvard political philosopher John Rawls argued that unequal outcomes can only be considered fair when equal opportunity is combined with the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society. In other words, a robust social safety net for the poorest among us. Our safety net is so broken that it can’t provide an effective means of satisfying the most basic human need: food.

The great irony about hunger in America is that there’s plenty of food to go around. The problem isn’t a lack of supply. The problem is that too many people don’t have enough money to buy food or can only afford the worst kind. Poverty is the cause of food insecurity. However, instead of waging a war on poverty, our government has spent trillions fighting regional wars overseas, justified with the mantra of “freedom.” In doing so, we have made a fool’s bargain. We have traded freedom from want for freedom from fear. But we will not be truly free until all Americans have enough to eat.

Turning to Jesus: An Easter Message

Whirling Dervishes

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). (John 20:15-16)

In Turkey, Sufi mystics called whirling Dervishes, wearing white cassocks with immense skirts, perform a spinning dance to induce a trance-like state that will bring their souls into contact with the Divine. They base this practice on a line in their scriptures which says, “Everywhere you turn is the face of God.” They take a metaphor about God’s omnipresence and make it into a literal call to twirl. In the Easter passage in John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene turns to the resurrected Jesus. Her literal turning can be interpreted as a metaphor for conversion.

Martin E. Marty explains the meaning of conversion: “We recall that the Hebrew word for ‘convert’ is shub, meaning to ‘turn back’ to ‘return,’ or that the Greek is metanoia, which also implies a 180-degree turning. Both indicate the involvement of the heart and not just the head—though conversion includes a change of mind or intellectual dimension.”

When Mary came to the tomb that morning while darkness hung over Jerusalem like a thick fog, she was not expecting to meet Jesus alive. Mary was a devoted disciple of Jesus, but like The Twelve she had lost hope. And just when things couldn’t get any worse, they did. Seeing the empty tomb, Mary assumed someone had robbed Jesus’ grave; they had stolen the body. The thought of the resurrection hadn’t crossed her frantic mind.

Mary thinks the man she’s talking to is the gardener. She says to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” As if she all alone is going to carry the dead weight of a full grown man! Love motivates us to attempt the impossible. “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’” At that moment, John tells us, “she turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).” This turning was her conversion—her moment of faith. She turned from not-seeing to seeing, from confusion to recognition, from unbelief to belief, from despair to joy.

Mary was so overjoyed after she turned to Jesus that she had to tell others. So she went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” Turning to Jesus changes you and you want to tell others what you’ve experienced. It’s like falling in love. When I was in college I had a roommate from Cambodia named Bun. He was a quiet and humble man. He rarely spoke in class. When he fell in love with a Cambodian girl named Angela, all of that changed. I remember one day he brought a boom box to class and before the lecture began he asked everyone to listen as he played a tape of his girlfriend singing in Cambodian. It sounded awful to my Western ears but he was in heaven. His experience with Angela changed him and he wanted to tell everyone. It’s the same with conversion. When Jesus changes your heart, you want to tell everyone.

I’m glad that Mary and the disciples told others about seeing the resurrected Jesus. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t know about it. And I’m glad someone told me about what it means to turn to Jesus. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t know about it. Now I’ve told you, and it’s your turn.

Easter can be a new beginning for you, if you turn to Jesus today.

Physics and Faith

What the Higgs boson or “God Particle” might look like

Last week I took Gallup’s Strengths Finder and discovered that my dominant strength is Learner. I love to learn, whether it’s history, languages, art, mathematics, or fly fishing. That explains why I, although a non-scientist, was intrigued when I read in the newspaper this morning that European scientists at the CERN particle accelerator outside Geneva believe they have discovered the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God Particle.” The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that was first theorized by Peter Higgs in 1964. It explains how other particles have mass. If the discovery is verified, it will be one of the greatest physics finds in decades.

I remember when America’s Superconducting Super Collider project near Waxahachie, Texas was cancelled by Congress in 1993. That would have been the world’s largest particle accelerator—a 54-mile-long donut-shaped ring—far bigger than the 17-mile one in Switzerland where the Higgs boson was detected. The problem was rising costs for a project that most Americans couldn’t understand or see the benefit of. “It’s going to help us understand the origins of the universe,” scientists on TV boasted with excitement while normal Americans yawned and changed the channel to football. Scientists are still struggling to describe the importance of the Higgs boson to laymen with explanations like, “It will help to explain the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles.”

I want to suggest another reason why discoveries like the Higgs boson are important: they increase our sense of wonder and give us a small foretaste of what Catholic theologians call the Beatific Vision—the experience of complete knowledge when we see God face to face in Heaven. The Apostle Paul puts it like this: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). God has put inside every person a desire for knowledge but all our learning is at best partial and incomplete, because our minds have been tainted by sin. Only when we see God will all of our thirst for knowledge be satisfied. In the meantime, we can prepare ourselves by developing a sense of awe at the world God has created.

Questions for Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Lent is a forty-day period of repentance and reflection leading up to Easter. The length is symbolic of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness just before his temptation. I’ve previously blogged about Lent here and here. Now I want to share a thought-provoking passage about Lent from the book Whistling in the Darkby Frederick Buechner:

During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.
-If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?
-When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?
-If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?
-Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?
-Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?
-If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?
To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can me a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.

Righteous Anger

Ippolito Scarzella Scarsellino (1550-1620), The Cleansing of the Temple, Oil on Canvas, Musei Capitolini, Rome

“Be angry and sin not” (Eph. 4:26a). There’s such a thing as righteous anger, though most of the time our anger is of the less-than-righteous variety. When Jesus saw the moneychangers in the Temple, he became angry and started turning over the moneychangers’ tables and driving them out of the Temple (Matt. 21:12, John 2:14).

Sometimes we get angry when we hear about injustice. A child is abused. An elderly person is swindled out of her life savings. Someone cheats to get ahead. Last week my blood boiled and my cheeks flushed when I read an article by Frederick Kunkle in The Washington Post about forced sterilizations in the United States. E. Lewis Reynolds is 85 years old and lives alone in Lynchburg. He has no children or grandchildren. When he was a boy his cousin hit him in the head with a rock, triggering epileptic-like seizures. His condition caused him to be labeled as a “defective person” and he was sterilized as a result. Virginia and 32 other states had laws that allowed forced sterilizations. A 1927 Supreme Court decision (Buck v. Bell) upheld these laws and Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, said that such laws were necessary to keep society from being “swamped by incompetence.”

So what happened to Mr. E. Lewis Reynolds—the man our state considered to be too defective to be allowed to have children? He joined the Marine Corps and served our country in uniform proudly for 30 years. When he and his wife couldn’t have children, he consulted a military doctor. That’s when he first learned what had been done to him when he was a boy. His inability to have children contributed to his divorce and now he sits alone in Lynchburg with no family in his old age. Reynolds was one of an estimated 60,000 people who were legally sterilized against their will in the U.S. during the twenieth century. Virignia’s sterilization law wasn’t repealed until 1979.

Many people associate eugenics—the attempt to create a superior race by selective breeding—with Nazi Germany. But long before Adolf Hitler came to power, Americans were experimenting on other Americans to improve the gene pool. Sometimes we think what happened in Germany could never happen here in the United States. It already did.

Bibliolatry

The second commandment says, “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Ex. 20:4). It’s a prohibition against idolatry. An idol is anything that we worship other than God, or anything that takes God’s rightful place in our lives. In biblical times idols were mostly statues. Today they’re usually not. We can turn anything into an idol, even good things like theology or the Bible itself. When we are so committed to a doctrine, theory, or ideology that we judge everything else by it, then it has become an idol. Systems of thought can be guides to point us to the truth. They are not absolute truth themselves. Even the Bible, which I believe is the product of divine inspiration, is a guide to point us to the truth. As precious as the Bible is, it’s a means to an end. It’s not an end in itself. That’s why we worship God and not the Bible. Worshiping the Bible is a form of idolatry. It’s Bibliolatry.

The Bible is inspired by God, but do we know what that means? The word “inspire” means “to breathe into.” God breathed the “breath of life” into Adam’s nostrils (Gen. 2:7). God also breathes life into his Word and into us through it. We are mistaken when we try to reduce the Bible to a set of propositional truths or a theological system. When we do this, we risk missing the whole point. The Bible is like a raft to help us cross a river or a finger pointing to the moon. We shouldn’t mistake the finger for the moon or the boat for the shore. If we cling too tightly to the raft or fixate on the finger, we miss the greatest reality: God himself.

Better Than I Am

Several years ago I told my wife, “If you ever hear me start talking about going back to the pastorate, please shoot me!” Fortunately my wife did not follow my homicidal advice this year when I left active duty as a Navy chaplain and instructor of history at the Naval Academy to become first the interim, then the permanent pastor of Middleburg Baptist Church, a small congregation in a small town in Northern Virginia. The real point of decision came when the Army offered me a historian position in DC. The pay and benefits were good, including a guaranteed pension and job security. Still, I turned it down. Why?

After two years of full-time teaching at a small, Christian college I was close to burn out and financial ruin when the Navy offered me a chance to return to active duty. I jumped at it and spent the next ten months working for the Chief of Navy Chaplains, a two-star admiral, at the Pentagon. It was during this period that I decided to return to the pastorate and began blogging as a spiritual discipline. I also started reading more broadly, realizing that I had been so focused on my teaching and dissertation research that I was developing intellectual myopia. That was 2008 when the Great Recession was at its worst and no pastors were moving; therefore, no churches were hiring. I also applied for a three-year teaching position at the Naval Academy and got it. (I blogged about it here.) That was a huge boost to my morale and our family’s financial stability. But as much as I enjoyed teaching midshipmen there was something missing. I am passtionate about teaching but I missed doing practical, hands-on ministry. Six months after returning to the pastorate, I feel as if I’ve made more of a positive impact in human terms than I did in the previous six years.

At first I resisted the call to pastor a small, historic church, because it reminded me too much of my first pastorate when I was in seminary twenty years ago. Not only did I feel I deserved a bigger church, but I also didn’t want to deal with the problems of a small congregation (as if the problems of a larger congregation are any better!). Much to my surprise I’ve enjoyed my new field of ministry more than I ever thought I would. My blood pressure, elevated for the past 2-3 years, is back down in the normal range. I’m still doing academic research and writing. In fact, I just got my first book contract to publish my dissertation in a peer-reviewed academic series. And I’m planning a mission trip to teach at a seminary in India next summer. I’m having my cake and eating it too.

While I still have a lot to learn, I’m surprised by how much I’ve changed since I last served a church as pastor. I am less idealistic and more patient. I’ve also learned how to say thank you to my people a lot more than I used to. All of the years seem to have smoothed some of my rough edges, and serving in a pastoral role makes me more intentional and compassionate in how I treat people. I agree with Martin Copenhaver that “being a pastor has made me better than I am” (This Odd and Wondrous Calling, 58).