Author: jkwest44

Vulnerability and mistakes

I’ve never been comfortable with the catchphrase “God makes no mistakes.” It’s not that I think God makes lots of mistakes, but that I find the phrase to be fairly useful for defending pretty much anything and entirely useless for changing anyone else’s mind. The phrase is not meant to open up possibility as much as it is meant to end conversation. For those who have been harmed by the words and actions of others, especially by hateful religious rhetoric, I can easily see why this kind of statement is a valuable and perhaps even necessary shield. But it never felt quite right to me.

I recently listened to a talk by Brené Brown called Listening to shame that gave language to the uneasiness I felt. Guilt, Brown says, means I’m sorry I made a mistake. Shame, on the other hand, means I’m sorry I am a mistake.

We all fail. We all fall short. We all make mistakes. The reality of guilt is at the heart of the Christian faith. But the only place shame is possible in a life of faith is in those moments when we make the mistake of thinking that we could or should be anything more than exactly the imperfect children of God that we already are. And in those moments when we are guilty of thinking that we ought to be God instead of love and submit to God, forgiveness is there to wash away the feeling of shame.

Spoken from a position of weakness, to proclaim that God makes no mistakes is to hide the reality that I feel like I am a mistake. Heard from a position of power, to proclaim that God makes no mistakes is a meaningless truism.

In either case, the statement acts like an impenetrable wall to keep a deeply felt shame out of the conversation. If you’ve been harmed into wondering if you are a mistake, why would you expose that deep wound? If you don’t understand what it’s like to be so deeply marginalized, how could you respond with the care and empathy necessary for healing?

I say all this not to place blame or suggest the phrase must be dropped, but to remember that when we talk, we’re quite often not having the conversation we think we’re having. Most of the words we use hide as much as they reveal. We have to hear the words behind the words to create the space for healing and relationship. And to hear that message requires vulnerability.

The cross is God’s creative act of vulnerability. Through the cross, God creates the space in which the source of all life and power becomes vulnerable to the point of death. And in doing so we are invited to experience the love and grace that reside underneath every word and form of religion. That God would commit such an act is the definitive response to guilt and shame. That God invites us into the life made possible on the cross means that vulnerability is the definitive shape of God’s mission to love and transform the world.

Church is the invitation to participate in God’s mission. Church is the name of God’s vulnerability brought to life in the ordering of human community. Church is the shape of life in the pursuit of vulnerability. Church is the vulnerable space wherein we seek to expose the heart of God to the world. Church, therefore, cannot be about right beliefs or perfect morality or theological precision.

More often than not (and especially in the public facing world of social media) it is much easier and much more safe to speak from behind the shield of a catchy slogan rather than expose the woundedness we feel. If you hear such a slogan and it ignites a deeply felt outrage inside of you, that is a message worth hearing.

If it ignites outrage in agreement, ask yourself what is deep within you that needs to hear and believe these words. If you cannot name the source of shame that compels you to use that slogan as a shield, the shame of what’s inside may never release its grip over you. I pray that you would find someone in your life who is willing to sit in vulnerability and help you find the means to let go of the lie that shame is speaking.

If it ignites outrage in opposition, ask yourself what that slogan might be hiding. If you are not creating the space in which someone feels safe and loved enough to express the vulnerable words beneath the words, you are likely making the problem worse. Don’t allow your guilt to fester into shame. I pray that you would learn to embody the vulnerability of God that enables you to hear another child of God.

As long as our words are a means of asserting power rather than embodying vulnerability, we will never create the space wherein we experience the cruciform shape of God’s love and in which healing takes place. We will make mistakes, but we are not mistakes. To speak this reality is to remember that at the heart of the Christian faith is the vulnerability of our God. By the cross of Christ, God creates the vulnerable space in which we are invited to give up the illusion of perfection and embrace the new life God is and makes possible.

Sin Stitches

The world of human morality is a tapestry of various and sometimes competing values and interests and ideals. To isolate a moral decision from the life in which it exists is like isolating a single strand of fabric in a quilt in order to argue whether it is blue or red. You can come to a conclusion, perhaps a very right and truthful answer, but you haven’t said anything meaningful until you have located that strand within the tapestry of life. We do violence to the gospel when we allow ourselves to pretend that moral issues and decisions are more important at the level of the individual strand than they are at the level of creation’s intricate tapestry of life.

At best, the way moral issues are discussed in today’s world is like trying to study a quilt by focusing in on a single square of stitches. You can question all you want whether the interwoven strands are blue or red, but there is no way to ensure that everyone else even agrees that you are looking at the right part of the quilt. To take a step back from your focal point, you may find that the tapestry of life is far more beautiful and complex than anything that could be gleaned from a single square.

Your argument over that square may very well be truthful and accurate, but at some point you have to ask if you have said anything meaningful by focusing so intently on just one square. And there is always the chance, if not likelihood, that everyone around you is focusing just one square to the right and coming to the opposite conclusion as you. Moral arguments, to get anywhere, have to involve first agreeing upon the level of focus at which the argument will take place and only then can we meaningfully discuss what we are seeing.

Magical Science

There are two interrelated but equally fascinating points being made in the two quotes below by David Bentley Hart.

  1. Magic and science are both attempts to manipulate the physical world
  2. Modernism takes can as the equivalent of should

Before reading his argument I had never thought too much about whether the former point was a reasonable one to make. We, after all, take magic to be, at its most tame, an illusion meant for entertainment and, at its most dangerous, a way to tap into dark and unseen forces in a supernatural realm. What is most interesting about Hart’s descriptions of magic is the notion that it is actually us, in the modern world, that has invented the supernatural and relegated magic to that realm, whether by minimizing it as mere fanciful tricks or elevating it into a realm in which we who are not magicians have no understanding. Before the modern/empiricist/rationalist mindset took hold, what we call the supernatural was not viewed as different in kind from the material world – the ‘supernatural’ was just as real and a part of reality as the air we breathe or the ground upon which we stand – the distinction was born more out of intuition (something is happening beyond what I can obviously perceive) than logic (a strict categorization into one type as opposed to another).

What made the magical unique was its station as the part of reality that is not seen in everyday experience, but can be manipulated by and as a source of power. (It is, perhaps, telling that the “wise men” who visited Jesus were called Magi in their native tongue – knowledge of the world and the ability to manipulate the unseen forces was a specific kind of wisdom, not a fanciful trick.) How much of modern science is predicated on the obvious perceptions that are available to the naked eye and how much requires understanding power and particles that are hidden until the mysteries of knowledge are unlocked? I would argue almost every useful bit of science and technology relies on at least some part of the natural world that we cannot perceive directly, but can assume exists, is manipulable, and will cause a desired outcome (whether we’re talking microprocessors, radio waves, electricity, etc.).

The part of this view of magic and science that is most terrifying and beneficial to humanity at the same time is that our magic actually works; which is a means of coming to the second point. Can as the equivalent of should is the presupposition of modernity. With no moral tie ins or underlying assumptions, we may be ever increasingly drawn toward the reality that knowledge of the world is power over the world is the highest justification for any act of power. I would argue that our ability to consistently manipulate the physical world requires us to think more, not less, about what we believe life is and where it is headed. Without some form of teleology or purpose, it will increasingly become the case that the power we are able to assert over nature will become its own justification for the assertion of that power, no matter the consequences on nature or others.

I have no idea how much Hart’s argument and historical analysis would hold up to serious scrutiny, but it seems pretty compelling to me that a) viewing the historical church (at least before the 1800s) as supporting magic in opposition to science is a misunderstanding of what science is and how it developed; and b) the humility we should have toward scientific discovery should probably remain greater than the shame we try to put on the men and women who created the world in which our views of science became possible. Who knows what the next generations might discover.

 

“In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it invokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural-in the theological sense of “transcendent”-but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modern science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence, there was not really any late modern triumph of science over magic, so much as there was a natural dissolution of the latter into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, “magic” and “science” in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according to relative degrees of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to a single continuum.” (from Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart, p. 82)

 

“Even the late medieval and early modern panics over witches did not generally involve actual belief in magic; the fear, rather, was of diabolism, murder, and demonic illusion. It seems perfectly obvious to me, though, that in the post-Christian era something more like real magical thinking has come back into vogue, albeit with a modern inflection. I am not speaking of popular interest in astrology, Wicca, runes, mystical crystals, or any other New Age twaddle of that sort; these things are always with us, in one form or another. I am speaking rather of the way in which, in modern society, technology and science (both practical and theoretical) are often treated as exercises of special knowledge and special power that should be isolated from too confining an association with any of the old habitual pieties regarding human nature or moral truth (these being, after all, mere matters of personal preference). That is, we often approach modern science as if it were magic, with the sort of moral credulity that takes it as given that power is evidence of permissibility. Of course, our magic-unlike that of our ancestors-actually works. But it is no less superstitious of us than it was of them to think that the power to do something is equivalent to the knowledge of what it is one is doing, or of whether one should do it, or of whether there are other, more comprehensive truths to which power ought to be willing to yield primacy. We seem on occasion, at least a good number of us, to have embraced (often with a shocking dogmatism) the sterile superstition that mastery over the hidden causes of things is the whole of truth, while at the same time pursuing that mastery by purely material means. Knowledge as power-unmoored from the rule of love or simply a discipline of prudent moral tentativeness-may be the final truth toward which a post-Christian culture necessarily gravitates.” (from Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart, p. 233)

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To prioritize scripture above all else doesn’t guarantee relationship with God any more than studying every baby photo of a prospective spouse. But to get rid of scripture would no more change who God is than throwing away said photos. Relationship happens through the convoluted process of learning past, embracing present, and committing to the future.

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To authentically share the gospel is to give away a piece of our deepest self. We cannot go unchallenged or unchanged in the process of evangelism. To attempt to share the gospel is, therefore, one of the most dangerous things we can do – not because the world might respond with violence, but because the vulnerability required to authentically share necessarily entails giving up control of who we become in the process.

Canonicity

Why is the canon of scripture the way that it is and can a book ever be added to it? I don’t really care for the ‘standard’ spectrums, which tend to offer things like either “God set the canon” or “people arbitrarily decided.” This leads to the follow up options regarding whether adding is possible which vary between “Add a word and God will strike you down” and “the bible is one book among others that all have something to share.”

I find the distinctions unsatisfying primarily because they take such a static view of writing and faith. The kind of answers I tend to hear assume writing and story are things that exist and we can choose whether or not to think the Bible is the complete and final set of written God stories. Even asking the question in that manner makes God’s current and future presence and action irrelevant. Offering either answer as though it were complete is like doing physics problems about a uniform object on a frictionless plane in a vacuum – no matter how right the theoretical answer, the problem you’re solving doesn’t actually exist.

Wherever I might be labeled on those spectrums about scripture, I don’t believe we have access to the words that give life without the constant presence and action of God that shapes our minds and hearts. I’d rather try to understand the dynamic way scripture and faith have been passed on in order to ask how that process enables us to now experience the presence and action of God. To do that is to study, embody, and then transform the traditions through which the faith has come to us.

Membership Classes as Radical Hospitality #4 – Hospitality Meals

I don’t think it’s accidental that one of our two most central acts of worship in the UMC involves the sharing of a meal. The meal of communion may not provide enough nutrition to get you through a whole day, but it is a concrete, physical reminder of our God’s presence in our midst. The grace of God is what sustains our very lives and the fact that we celebrate God’s grace through bread and juice is a reminder God’s grace is not just a spiritual force apart from the realities of nutrition and eating. God permeates everything that we do and all that we are.

It should come as no surprise that I am a big fan of the potluck (or any other food occasion for that matter). I’ll admit I do like to eat, but more than that every meal, by its very nature, in some way points us back to the sacrament of Holy Communion. There is both something uniting and at the same time disturbing that should happen at every meal. On the one hand everybody’s gotta eat. Meals have a way of taking pressure off of social interaction because you don’t have to fill every second with something interesting or unique to do. The act of eating alone is enough to unite a room full of strangers in a common endeavor. Every meal, like communion, should enable us to experience some small part of our lives as part of God’s united family.

On the other hand, not everybody gets to eat. There are some who cannot afford food, some who cannot find it, some who are not invited or for whatever reason are not present to share at the table with others. Being consciously aware that we all need to eat is not sufficient to teach us the practices and priorities it would take to ensure that no child of God ever goes hungry and that no child of God ever feels alone. Every meal, like communion, should at some level be a disturbing reminder that our fellowship around God’s table is not yet perfected and we must always seek to be more faithful to what God is doing in our lives and throughout all creation.

What is one thing we can do as a church to better exhibit hospitality in the sharing of meals?

[Also see #1 – Excommunication, #2 – Hospitality Required, and #3 – Hospitality In-vitation]

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There is no point in striving to be the church where people give their life to Jesus; salvation is an act of God and not human striving or strength. What matters is becoming the kind of church that gives its life for the sake of its neighbor; by submitting our lives to one another through the grace of God, we create the space in which God’s children are embraced and find new life.