WHY DOES IT TAKE A TRAGEDY?

The powers-that-be in South Carolina absolutely puzzle me. I’ve tried to listen carefully to the people who revere the stars-and-bars flag as honoring their past, but for the life of me I can’t understand the inability to see the confederate flag as anything other than a symbol for white supremacy. The cancer of slavery has left scar tissue that still causes pain, structural inequalities and a festering racial divide—it was only a mere fifty years ago that Jim Crow laws were repealed by federal mandate.

Legitimate historians have never been able to support the revisionist stance that the civil war was primarily about states’ rights rather than slavery; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant article in the Atlantic Monthly clearly outlines that history. And if it was all about states rights, why did only slaveholding states secede? What’s more, slave-holding states pushed for federal involvement with the Fugitive Slave Act when northern states passed state laws granting sanctuary for fugitive slaves and their refusal to return them to their “owners”. So much for states rights.

Former governor and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney tweeted “take down the #ConfederateFlag” last week, creating a media firestorm: Huckabee, Cruz, Rubio, Fiorina, Carson, Santorum all said it was an issue for South Carolina to resolve, apparently sidestepping the real issue for fear of upsetting potential support. And it’s not just politicians who have punted this issue. Only today did Walmart agree to stop selling merch with the confederate flag on it (come on, Amazon…).

The justification of slavery was an economically-driven choice that oddly enough only condemned dark-skinned people as property. The leaders of the confederacy clearly viewed blacks as an inferior race; South Carolina Senator James Hammond declared before the U.S. Senate in 1858 that “We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race.” The rallying symbol of the rebellion against the federal government was the Confederate flag; even at the very least it should be considered a symbol of treason.

Can you imagine Germany allowing one of its state governments to fly a swastika? Regardless of the German soldiers who had no knowledge of Auschwitz or were forced by conscription to serve and fought selflessly for their country, it still offers no grounds to fly the symbol of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The politicians there have worked hard to neither expunge that painful part of their history or deny it. But they certainly don’t want to honor it in any way.

The gazillion times I’ve driven I-71 north toward Columbus, it never fails to sadden me when I pass the old barn on the east side with the huge confederate flag painted on the roof. I always wonder why: why would someone want to take the time to reproduce an image of suffering and that causes so much pain to such a huge segment of humanity? What causes such a glaring lack of empathy?

As I Christian, I would say sin.

DAVID LETTERMAN GOES TO CHURCH...

Last night I watched the final episode of David Letterman’s thirty-three year run on the Late Show. Comedians have been paying homage for the last several weeks, sometimes tearfully. Jimmy Kimmel’s article in Time magazine about the impact Letterman had on comedy and the talk show format is worth a year’s subscription. As Kimmel summed up, “None of us who discovered Dave on our own and claimed him as our own will ever be able to satisfactorily explain to younger people what he did, what he meant and what he means.” Talk shows had become the Vegas-slick status-quo; Letterman was the garage band turned up to eleven.

It’s hard to put into context in this current millennium how revolutionary and seditious Letterman’s comedy was. His slyly snarky delivery was underscored by a midwestern self-deprecating persona that subversively upended the corporate protocol. He let everyone in on his obvious dysfunctions while remaining intensely private. Monday through Friday his feigned gap-toothed smile let his audience in on the most cerebral jokes. And who else would throw stuff off buildings to see what would happen, drive a steamroller over anything, dip himself in an Alka-Seltzer suit, make a Velcro leap, cut through Hollywood phoniness while calling his studio a dump? It was as if the inmates had taken over.

Baby boomers knew they had a rebel coup on the airwaves at 12:30am each night after Johnny Carson’s menthol-smooth delivery but tired format. Then he moved to the coveted 11:30 time slot on CBS opposite Jay Leno’s Tonight Show…who was given the show over Carson’s wishes. After his retirement, Carson would secretly send jokes to Letterman.

And during that same era, Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati was birthed. We knew that humor was critical for tearing down the walls between churched and unchurched people. We knew that if people who were far from God would trust us to deliver the dangerous message of Jesus, it would take some cultural touch-points…poking fun at ourselves and laughing together. As C. S. Lewis penned in The Four Loves, “Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself.’”  When people laugh together, a unique bond is created. We knew that the Church, as it was, seemed hopelessly locked in a culture war that created a barrier before a conversation could even begin.

But there was more to it. Vineyards had a mantra: Everyone gets to play. That meant that ministry was not relegated to professional ministers…and that God wanted everyone to extend the Kingdom with the unique gifts He had given. The line between clergy and laity had to be blurred if we were to be effective with a “priesthood of all believers” approach. We took advantage of that by poking fun at our pastors and letting people see that pastors were just regular people with their own dysfunctions. We felt it was necessary to pull pastors down from pedestals. It was a tricky wire to walk; and as I told our “crack staff” of volunteers who shaped our celebrations, “Theology is easy. Comedy is hard.” But we knew it was important.

And so we cribbed from Letterman mercilessly. We winked our eye and brought everyone in on the joke that church people can be pretty ridiculous. We referenced “The World’s Most Dangerous Worship Band.” We created our own Top Ten lists with titles like:

Top 10 Ways You Know You’re In A Bad Church (#8 “The church bus has gun racks”. . .  #6 “Services are B.Y.O.S.—”Bring Your Own Snake” . . . #3 “Doctrine includes story of Xenu, a galactic ruler who brought billions of people to earth 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs…oh wait, that’s Scientology.”)

Top 10 New Year’s Eve Predictions for 1997 that included: “Rapture happens. Vineyard cuts back to three services.”

Or on Mother’s Day, the Top Ten Worst Mother’s Day Gifts included “Clairol Unibrow Waxer”.

And sometimes we got shut down and had a Top 10 pulled after a Saturday night celebration, as in Top 10 Things The Disciples Said After The Resurrection (#7 “Hey Pete, cock-a-doodle-do!”. . . #1 “Jesus Christ!”). There was uncomfortable laughter after that last one. I thought it was theologically perfect...pretty much what Thomas said. Oh well.

We followed our list of Favorite Christian Guys’ Pick-Up Lines (“Before tonight, I never believed in predestination...”) with Favorite Lines Christian Women Use To Break Up With Jerks Who Talk Like That (“God loves me and must have a better plan for my life.”)

Or the time we had two guys dressed up as Wayne & Garth on the heels of their popularity on SNL with the Top 10 Christian Babes…with Amy Grant on it twice. Poking fun at the American religious subculture seemed healthy to us.

We launched into videos in the early ‘90’s when all we had were VHS tapes in an “editing suite” of two VCRs. Letterman took his audience out on the streets with him; so would we. We regularly had a running video sketch where Steve Sjogren—our senior pastor—didn’t come up to speak after the announcements. While there was a minute of uncomfortable silence, I would run frantically out the side door to find him while a pre-recorded video picked up the outside action. In the very first one we taped, I ran all the way to a Burger King up the street to find him cleaning the toilets. That was a two-fer: we lifted up the value of servant evangelism while making ourselves look a bit remedial. As a matter of fact, when we filmed it earlier we failed to get permission and simply went in the bathroom with a camera to do some guerrilla filming. Suddenly the manager flung open the restroom door and found three of us jammed in a stall: Steve with yellow rubber gloves, myself and a guy with a video camera. Right. The shocked manager yelled, “What the hell are you guys doing in here?”…and threw us out. It was difficult to explain. And when we really got into trouble, we would tell people we were from nearby Landmark Baptist Church. I’m pretty sure my friend Matt Holman who pastors there has forgiven us.

From there the bits got stranger and more outrageous while our people relaxed, laughed more and more, and church became a not-so-scary-place to invite your unbelieving friends.

One Easter in the ‘90’s we produced a video (we had bought our first digital non-linear over-priced editing program) with Steve inserted into actual scenes from the perennial “Ten Commandments” movie with Charlton Heston. Walking with the Israelites between the walls of water in the Red Sea were some of us holding “Free Car Wash” signs with snorkels. An older religious couple reamed me out afterwards for doing something so disrespectful and irreverent…even though I attempted to explain we were poking fun at a movie, not the actual ten commandments. A movie with Edward G. Robinson as the rebelling Israelite Dathan. Seriously. They were unappeased.

Or the weekend we held our services at the Convention Center downtown and couldn’t find Steve. I ran out the side door to discover him at Cincinnati Gardens (where we had met the previous year for Easter). Steve was practicing figure skating (we had a double doing spins) while waiting for the service to start. When I told him we were at a different arena, we hopped into the PastorCopter (primitive CGI), flew him downtown where he promptly jumped out of the copter and through some fake open bay doors in the ceiling of the Convention Center…where we simultaneously dropped a dummy dressed up as Steve from the catwalks of the room that landed with a dull thud behind some equipment. Steve popped up from behind the equipment smiling amid cheers. Except for a small child crying who thought it was real.

When Steve almost died from a medical procedure gone horribly wrong, there was a heaviness over the church for weeks. On the weekend he finally returned to speak from a wheelchair, we knew we needed to lighten things up. We produced a video where he admits he’s tired of nothing exciting to do in a wheelchair, so we take him out for some “stunt riding”, substituting him again with a dummy dressed as him and holding on to a rope tied to a pickup truck that “accidentally” takes off in reverse and slams into him while Steve yells “Woohoo!”…followed by a series of Jackass-type stunts (before Jackass!). At one point, we attached a bunch of bungie cords to his wheelchair and throw “him” off a bridge to disastrous results. Laughter filled the room. When Steve was wheeled live into the auditorium, people were thrilled. During the service I noticed a young boy in a wheelchair in the last row with his mom. I was mortified when she approached me after the service, held my breath to expect the worse, when she said, “My son hasn’t walked since birth…and that was the funniest thing we’ve seen! He laughed and laughed!”

Whew. I felt like I dodged a bullet.

Even as tame as all those seem now, it was ridiculously radical in those days. And created an environment that screamed, “We don’t take ourselves very seriously. But we are very serious about introducing you to the Kingdom of God.”

And though he’ll never know it, Letterman helped us create a context where church would no longer look like your dad’s church, that stuffy, self-righteous, boring, religious, powerless, judgmental stereotype that most unchurched and dechurched people had jettisoned for all the right and wrong reasons. His anti-establishment comedy seemed mildly reflective of the attitude Jesus expressed when He was warned not to go to Jerusalem because the religious establishment of that day—the phony religious leader Herod—was out to kill Him. Jesus simply responded, “Go and tell that fox I’m coming anyway…” and went on about His business of healing and setting folks free.

We owe a debt of gratitude to a clever comedian whom I hope one day finds his true value and worth in a Father who loves him deeply despite his idiosyncrasies and brokenness...just like ours.

Thank you, Mr. Letterman. It was a good run.

 

FIFTY SHADES OF MODESTY...

The challenge for western Christians who are genuinely outward-focused and wanting to function missionally in their communities is how to navigate the shifting mores of culture without alienating the ability to reach into that same culture while retaining core Biblical values. But at the risk of sounding pendantic, what are those “core Biblical values”?

Let’s try something simple: modesty.

Yeah, right. Simple?

When the New Testament was written, Peter’s admonition of modesty would look very different than today. The Church has shifted with traditional mores often without a lot of thought…for better or worse.

One hundred years ago, society in general would have been horrified at what is now considered a tame bathing suit. On the other hand, archeologists in Sicily have unearthed mosaics of fourth century Roman women competing in sports with ancient versions of bikinis. Beach volleyball, anyone?

A friend of mine surrendered his life to Christ at age fifteen in the context of a legalistic fundamentalist church culture. Passionate and excited, he became a young traveling evangelist of sorts. But at a youth retreat, a middle school girl asked with tearful sincerity if her friends in gym class were condemned to hell for wearing shorts. His button-downed theology was undone that day and caused him to question the congregational standard. Today most of us would go, “Huh?”

Most of the Biblical verses attempting to define modesty are aimed at women (that alone presents an exegetical challenge) and are more about materialism and ornamentation than cleavage. As a writer, I have to admit my favorite is: Like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman without discretion (Proverbs 11:22). What a, uh, picturesque metaphor.

In the famous Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, Louis Malle’s film, The Lovers, was on trial to determine whether it was obscene or not, since the county judge in Cleveland Heights deemed it so and fined a local theater owner for showing it. Ohio’s Supreme Court upheld the decision as well, but eventually it landed with the big guys. The Supreme Court reversed the decision, but there was no real consensus as to why. Two of the justices believed that the first amendment covers everything and nothing should be censored. Two of the dissenting judges felt there was precedent and that states had the right to determine what is obscene. The word prurient was tossed around a lot.

But in the end, it was Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion that made the news. He agreed with the majority opinion that the The Lovers was not obscene, but had a difficult time trying to define why and in particular what hardcore pornography was, since he believed the Constitution protected obscenity but not hardcore pornography. He said nebulously, “But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

So how do we define morality Biblically? Not as easy as it sounds.

Under Pope Benedict XVI (the conservative former-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger), an impressive Pontifical Biblical Commission tried tackling the unenviable job of how the Bible defines our ethics and morality, with current global issues as complex as “violence, terrorism, war, immigration, distribution of wealth, respect for natural resources, life, work, sexuality, genetic research, the family and community life.”

They completed their nearly sixty-thousand word missive with these wise challenges:

“Rather than to give clear and precise directives, which are in many cases beyond our competence as exegetes, the purpose of our reflections is to commend an approach to morality in a different spirit, a breath of fresh air, derived from Scripture itself. Christian morality will thus be seen in all the richness of its various features:

·      it is concerned first of all with the fundamental dignity of the human being (in line with the biblical vision of humanity);

·      it seeks its ideal model in God and in Christ (following the example of Jesus);

·      it respects the wisdom of various civilizations and cultures, and is therefore capable of listening and establishing a dialogue (convergence);

·      it has the courage to denounce and curb moral options incompatible with the faith (contrast);

·      it is stimulated by the evolution of moral positions within the Bible itself, and in subsequent history, to educate consciences to an ever greater refinement, inspired by the new ‘righteousness’ of the kingdom (advance);

·      it is capable of reconciling the rights and longings of the human person, so strongly asserted in our days, with the demands and imperatives of collective living, expressed in Scripture as ‘love’ (community dimension);

·      it has a capacity to present a moral horizon which, stimulated by the hope of an absolute future, transcends a short-sightedness limited to earthly realities (finality);

·      it concerns itself with a prudent approach to difficult problems, making use of the triple recourse to exegesis, to the insights of ecclesial authorities and to the formation of a right conscience in the Holy Spirit to avoid creating ‘short circuits’ in the delicate process of moral judgment (discernment).”

That's pretty good, I'd say.

On the Q Ideas website, Rachel Held Evans adds: “…biblical modesty isn’t about managing the sexual impulses of other people; it’s about cultivating humility, propriety and deference within ourselves.” I agree. Men have to own up to their response to stimuli and be responsible for objectification. Otherwise, fundamentalist tendencies will rule and demand burkas for all. Jesus called men to own their lust and deal with it, even in the most secret, private recesses of the heart. And at the center of this is simple respect.

She then lists an extremist danger: “We turn modesty into objectification when we hold women responsible for the thoughts and actions of men.” I agree…but with this caveat: in the Kingdom we are learning/processing how to prefer others above ourselves and practice the incarnational Christianity Paul describes in Philippians 2. Women must have some consideration for their brothers in regarding their freedom to express themselves attire-wise.

The degree is debatable. A thong at an Amish barnraising is not smart. The boardwalk at Venice Beach is an entirely different animal. Good luck with that one. But a desire to honor God within the context of community and culture has to be considered.

In the end, motivation is critical. And not superficially. Jesus always went for the jugular and forced his listeners to look at the deepest personal heart issues. And so in a complex world, perhaps the simplest way to think about this is to ask, What am I wanting to achieve by wearing what I put on today?

 

File under: Whaaaat?