When a Goat becomes a Sheep: Staying Off the Throne of Judgment (eCrozier #241)

On November 21, 2014, in Christ the King, Community, faith, grace, love, by bishopbenhase

Our Gospel for this Sunday’s Feast of Christ the King is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. The parable presents us with a compelling vision of God’s final judgment on the creation. Jesus tells us there’ll be sheep and there’ll be goats. And that presents us with the challenge for how we’ll live with this truth in our lives until God’s final judgment. It’s tempting, of course, to get into the judgment business now by deciding on God’s behalf who the sheep are and who the goats are. The problem is that sheep and goats aren’t always easy to name clearly and without a doubt. Sometimes they are. We can all come up with examples of sheep-like or goat-like behavior in the extreme. But it’s those areas in between where we have difficulty clearly sorting them out.

Years ago I met a real goat, or so I thought. Most people looking at this man’s life would have quickly surmised he was just no good. He was in prison for multiple aggravated assaults and for selling illegal drugs. No one would’ve mistaken him for being in the Good Shepherd’s flock. In the great judgment, he’d be a sure bet to be with the goats. Yet, some of us believed in God’s power of redemption. We gathered at the prison where I baptized him in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After he was released from prison, I lost track of him. Many years later, I ran into him. To be honest, I was a bit anxious. But my anxiety quickly went away. He smiled, hugged me, and told me his life had changed. He was now a deacon in his Church, married, and working full time as an addiction recovery specialist. Was he a goat who became a sheep? Or, was he a sheep all along and no one saw that but God? Do you see how difficult it is when we get into the judgment business? It can lead us to behaviors that should rightly make us pause. It’s clear to me that our moral confusion around, for example, the torture of terrorism suspects comes from our readiness to judge all such suspects as goats before God.

A check on this temptation to be in the judgment business is found embedded in this parable. One of the least noticed aspects of the parable is also one of its most impor­tant. In the final judgment the sheep don’t even know they are sheep. When Jesus places them at his right hand and ushers them into eternal life, they are clueless as to why. They ask, “Lord, when did we do all these compassionate things to you?” Jesus responds to them, “When you did it to the least of these, then you did it to me.” That alone should make us think again when we’re tempted to place ourselves on the throne of judgment.

This parable then is about God’s faithfulness and love. Like with the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, it’s not the hard work of the la­borers that’s rewarded. Rather, it’s the faithfulness of the landowner who keeps his promise to all the labor­ers. Or, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, it isn’t the spiritual insight of the son that’s crucial. He just wanted to get out of the pig slop and back to life on his father’s farm. Rather, it’s his father’s gracious love that makes it possible for his son to be welcomed home, no strings attached. In this Parable of the Sheep and the Goats we find God’s faithfulness and God’s love combined in the King who is the Good Shepherd of our souls. Because of God’s faithfulness, God honors our human freedom to choose even to eter­nity. But also because of God’s love, God redeems us, and indeed the entire creation, through Jesus.

+Scott

 
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Bishop’s Address at 193rd Convention of the Diocese of Georgia November 2014

On November 7, 2014, in Body of Christ, capital campaign, congregational development, Convention, culture, Diocese of Georgia, Episcopal Church, Evangelistic Witness, gospel, grace, Laity, leadership, mission, by bishopbenhase

Some of you know I’m a huge fan of the singer-songwriter John Prine. And it’s a testament to my love and devotion to the Church and to this Diocese that I’ll be present at this evening’s Convention Eucharist because John Prine is performing tonight at the Savannah Civic Center. Prine’s lyrics are magical and almost always funny while also plumbing the depths of the human condition. A song he sings as a duet with Iris Dement evokes an affect that I want to share in my Bishop’s Address this year. The song is entitled “We’re not the Jet Set,” and part of it goes like this:

No, We’re not the jet set. We’re the old Chevro-let set
Our steak and martinis, Is draft beer with weenies
Our Bach and Tchaikovsky, Is Haggard and Husky
No, we’re not the jet set, We’re the old Chevro-let set. But ain’t we got love

In this Diocese, we’re not the jet set. Most of us are more comfortable with draft beer and weenies than we are with steak and martinis. Haggard and Husky are more likely to be on our play list than Bach and Tchaikovsky. Here in the Diocese we don’t have what a lot of dioceses have in terms of financial resources. We don’t have many large metropolitan areas that provide amenities that would draw people to move to them. With a few exceptions, the counties in our state that are projected to have significant growth are all in that certain diocese to the north, just above the gnat line.

So the demographics aren’t very favorable to us. Demographics, however, aren’t destiny and dwelling on them isn’t faithful. We trust in a providential destiny only God provides. Plus, as John Prine sings, “ain’t we got love.” We have God’s love for us incarnated in Jesus and we have our love for one another. And we have hope, hope that God is moving in our midst working out through us God’s plan of salvation.

Our call, then, isn’t to bemoan what we don’t have or what’s not favorable to us. It’s to celebrate and be thankful for what we do have and the favor God has shown us, and then to put all that we have and all that we are into the coming of God’s Kingdom on this earth, as it already is in heaven.

No, we’re not the jet set. We’re the old Chevro-let set. But this Chevy has many great miles to go and we’re fueled by the hope of what God will do through us to bring about the Kingdom.  And I want us to dwell on that sure and certain hope for these next few minutes. For as the Scriptures say: such hope will not disappoint us.

Now, we’re schooled by cable news and through social media to be afraid of just about everything from Ebola to the dirty ring around our bathtubs. If that were all the news we had, then it would be prudent to be afraid and to feel hopeless. Yet, if we have eyes to see, there are hopeful signs all around us.

1. While as a whole our diocesan Sunday attendance is basically flat, we now have more congregations that are significantly growing than are declining.

2. The core leadership training we’ve offered for clergy and laity through the Church Development Institute (CDI), Emotional Intelligence training, and peer coaching has now begun to bear fruit in many places. Clergy and lay leaders in many congregations are now better equipped to lead growing, vital congregations in the 21st century.

3. Our support for and focus on community ministries has led many congregations to reach out in real, concrete ways into their neighborhoods developing signature ministries that serve to transform people’s lives. We must remember that Jesus did not leave people stuck in their hunger or their sickness or their sin. He fed, He healed, and He liberated them. That’s what our community, signature ministries are all about. From Thomasville to Augusta, from Cordele to Darien, our congregations are embracing a vision of vitality through engagement with their communities.

4. Honey Creek, as you will see this afternoon, is being reborn into a more strategic missionary asset of the Diocese. In the last year, 70% of its ministry directly supported the mission of the Diocese. And 93% of its ministry was church-related. That didn’t happen by accident. We consciously renewed Honey Creek’s mission to be all about supporting God’s mission in and through this Diocese. And, I should add, we’re doing all this operating in the black for the 3rd straight year. When you see Honey Creek’s Director, Dade Brantley, this afternoon, please give him a big hug and a thank you.

So, there are many things we’re doing to help our congregations thrive. And thriving congregations must be our goal if we’re to accomplish God’s mission.

In this last year, while I was on retreat with the Sisters of St John the Baptist, I spent long periods of time praying for you. I did. I spent hours of time praying just for you and for each of our congregations.

There on retreat, thanks to Canon Logue, I brought with me the Field Guide to the Diocese. With that objective data and with my own direct experience with each of our congregations over the last four years, I placed each congregation in three, separate categories: Those that were thriving, those that were treading water, and those that were in decline.

I had some assumptions ahead of time about what congregations in each of those categories had in common that would tell me why they were in the category they were in. I discovered that my assumptions were mostly wrong (it’s good to have our assumptions challenged on a regular basis). It wasn’t the congregation’s location, or its size, or the amount of financial resources it had that defined whether it was thriving. The thriving congregations were of all sizes, in vastly different locations, and had widely differing resources.

There’s only one variable that all the thriving congregations have in common and it’s this: they’re all focused beyond their own doors and their own property lines. They’re concerned with that co-worker who had given up on God saying that if Jesus were real, then he must not love him. They’re focused on that hungry child down the street who won’t have enough to eat tomorrow. They’re alarmed to learn about that senior citizen who was all alone in the nursing home across town. Those are the topics dominating coffee hour conversations and discernment at vestry meetings. How might we reach them with the Good News of Jesus? How might we love them? How might we humbly serve them? Those are the questions being asked and discerned in our thriving congregations.

In contrast, what about the congregations in the two other categories? They’re anxious about their inward issues and talk mainly about surviving and protecting what they now have. Rather than be open to their community, they may feel that they have to struggle against it. While not always the case, this may lead to an unhealthy focus on things like the color of the new carpet in the narthex, or the rector’s recent haircut, or the choir’s lack of musical range. Or more dangerously, they may become focused on finding someone to blame for why their church isn’t thriving. And that blaming, often of the clergy, becomes what fuels the congregation’s life.

So my epiphany while I was on retreat is really quite simple: if we want thriving congregations and thus the transformation of our Diocese, then that’ll only happen when, as Bishop Lesslie Newbigin wrote, local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as a sign, an instrument, and a foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society. (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society)

Now, it would be wonderful if the Diocese had the financial resources to help congregations engage the Gospel in their communities. We’re trying to raise those financial resources. We’re working to get every ounce of mission out of the limited resources we have in the Diocese. We have one of the smallest diocesan staffs in the Episcopal Church for a diocese our size. Frank, Mary, Elizabeth, Rudy, Vicki, Gayle, and Libby, not only put up with me on a daily basis, they’re committed to help all our congregations thrive. I’m blessed to serve with these amazing people.

Yes, it would be wonderful if we had more money and as I said, through the Capital Campaign, we’re working on finding those financial resources.

But, you know, we don’t need money to love our neighbor. We don’t need deep pockets to care about what happens to kids in the school next door or the overwhelmed single mother across the street or the lonely man in the nursing home around the corner. Each of our congregations can make a Gospel difference in their communities without having a dime to do it. All we need is the will to set aside our inward focus and embrace our neighbors with the Good News of God’s redeeming grace in Jesus.

I see hopeful signs of this in so many of you and in our congregations. We must not lose heart or believe we’re incapable of changing our local mission strategy. As a church, we’re facing nothing short of an avalanche of social and cultural change. I don’t need to list all those changes for you. You’ve read about them and you see them every day in your community.

When I was first ordained in 1983 to serve Lake Wobegone Episcopal Church, all we needed for what we understood to be “success” back then was a nice church building in a semi-decent location with passable worship and acceptable music. It didn’t hurt if the priest’s sermons were mildly entertaining, but not too challenging. If we added a clean, safe Church school, then we had a congregation sizable enough to pay all the bills.

But those days are gone and they’re not coming back. Please hear me when I say this: Those days are gone and they’re not coming back. Nostalgia for the past is hindering us from embracing our present mission.

The old road maps for “success” in our congregations are no longer applicable. We can’t just show up anymore, say we’re the church, and people will pay attention. We must take the Gospel into the public life of our communities with a passion and a commitment we’ve not had before. The people of our society are suffering from a lack of grace and compassion in their lives. They’re living in the “mean time” in both senses of that term. Mercy and empathy for one another is in short supply. Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ has the power to renew and redeem us and our neighbors.

As Bishop Newbigin wrote: If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society…it will only be by movements that begin with the local congregation in which the reality of the new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life to claim it for Christ, to unmask the illusions which have remained hidden and to expose all areas of public life to the illumination of the gospel. (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society)

Many of you are realizing that. That’s why I see so many hopeful signs of God’s redeeming grace in our congregations. You and I need to see more of these hopeful signs from one another, so we can encourage each another to live into the changes we must make locally in order to grasp the new mission God is placing before us.

The congregations that recognize what time it is will be the congregations that will thrive in the future. Those congregations who don’t, who insist on making the church’s mission only about those who show up, or only about what’s good for me and mine, those congregations will die a slow and banal death. That’s simply the truth.

So, can we let go of our inward focus and embrace our neighbors with Jesus and his Gospel in new and creative ways? Can we take the Gospel out of our churches and into the public square, not to nag or cajole, not to finger point or to blame, but to love and to serve and to bring hope to those who, as St Paul so aptly described, are literally perishing without the Gospel?

Can we do this? I know we can.

It’s true. “We’re not the jet set. We’re the old Chevro-let set. But ain’t we got love.” We sure do have love. We have the love of Jesus for us and for this wonderful and beautiful, yet sinful and broken world in which we live. And the love of Jesus is all we truly need.

 
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Extreme Exercise and Self-Sanctification (eCrozier #236)

On October 17, 2014, in culture, grace, by bishopbenhase

“I don’t workout. If God had wanted us to bend over He’d put diamonds on the floor.”
Joan Rivers

“One time I felt like exercising. I sat down until the feeling passed.”
Jackie Gleason

This week the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Heather Havrilesky. The piece reflects on the current extreme fitness craze that’s gaining in popularity. These aren’t exercise programs to stay healthy. Rather these are programs that challenge participants to push themselves beyond their physical limitations. The goal seems to be something my old football coach used to yell out at us during summer training drills: “No pain, no gain!” In other words, if it’s not hurting, then you’re not working hard enough. It does sound more than a little masochistic.

According to Hevrilesky, most participants in these extreme exercise regimens are “well-to-do.” I find that telling. What is it about material and professional success that would lead someone to believe that he/she needed to engage in such extreme exercise? These folk aren’t “settling” for reasonable, healthy forms of exercise. They prefer “workouts grueling enough to resemble a kind of physical atonement. For the most privileged among us, freedom seems to feel oppressive, and oppression feels like freedom.”

When we see the word “atonement,” then we should pay attention. I think her analysis is acute. It’s about self-worth and maybe trying to prove that you’re better than others who can’t run five miles with fifty pounds of rocks in a backpack. This is self-atonement and self-sanctification, pure and simple. Making lots of money, having the good things in life, and achieving status in one’s profession aren’t enough. It doesn’t bring contentment or wholeness. There’s still an emptiness that needs filling up, so “no pain, no gain.” But my hunch is that this too will fail to fill these folks up.

Now, of course, as Christians we should be good stewards of our bodies. They are a gift God gives us in our creation. We shouldn’t treat our bodies like amusement parks or production units. Exercising and eating right are faithful ways to honor our bodies as the godly gift they are. But we maybe should, as the old Anglican saying goes, do “all things in moderation,” recognizing that such extreme exercise, like extreme work-aholism, isn’t good for the soul because they both lead to the sin of self-atonement and self-sanctification where we believe we have the power in ourselves to save ourselves.

It shouldn’t surprise us then that this trend is growing in our culture. As we grow further from lives grounded in God’s providential care and grace and toward lives centered on our own merit and abilities, these sorts of manifestations of “selfism” will only become more ubiquitous. Havrilesky ends her piece with this reflection: “When I run on Sunday mornings, I pass seven packed, bustling fitness boutiques, and five nearly empty churches.”  That says it all. We must reach these folks with the grace of Jesus.

+Scott

 
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“The Hanging Sermon” & The Social Gospel (eCrozier #235)

On October 10, 2014, in culture, gospel, grace, Justice, preaching, sin, by bishopbenhase

This week I attended two lectures by Dr. Charles Marsh at the Virginia Theological Seminary’s Alumni Convocation. Dr. Marsh is a professor of religion at the University of Virginia. His topic for the lectures was reclaiming “The Social Gospel for the 21st Century.” His lectures were magnificent. The Social Gospel historically came out of the Progressive Era in our country, a time when theologians were seeking a biblical response to the consequences of rapid industrialization. The Social Gospel provided the theological grounding for ending child labor, limiting the workweek, establishing health & safety laws for workplaces, etc. It was largely successful. It presented a positive, hopeful approach claiming, and this is a broad generalization, that if the church appealed to the populace’s sense of justice and fairness based on Jesus’ teaching, then our human community could get pretty darn close to utopia. As we know from history, what we now call World War I ended such positive expectations for human community.

So the so-called Social Gospel became discredited as being unrealistic. And there was good reason to question its claims. It did not, as Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued it, take into sufficient account the power of our sinfulness and our human propensity to mess even good things up. But the criticisms of the Social Gospel never denied the prophetic claims Jesus’ teachings had on society’s injustices. Nor did they deny that the results of ending things like child labor weren’t a good outcome. Skip ahead 100 years, as Dr. Marsh did in his lectures, and we find ourselves going through a similar economic shift when the Church’s social witness to social injustice is still much needed. What Marsh contends is that this time a Social Gospel must be based on a deep acknowledgement of human sin. In doing so, we all could have a stronger empathy for those who suffer on the margins.

Marsh’s insight is important. If we come to acknowledge our own sinfulness, our own propensity to mess even good things up, then we’ll be more understanding of those who have made bad choices in their lives (or had bad choices made for them) and are now unemployed, stuck in low wage jobs, or don’t have the education to climb the economic ladder. We’ll be less inclined to blame them exclusively because we know our own sin only too well. Marsh referred to what was known as “the hanging sermon.” In previous generations, the night before a criminal was hanged, the entire town turned out for a religious service with the condemned person in the front row. This wasn’t an occasion to focus on the one condemned, per se, but an opportunity for everyone to become more aware of their own real sin before God, realizing as they looked at the condemned man that “there but for the grace of God go I.”

That’s just the tonic our culture needs as we face present social ills like growing income inequality. These days we have the tendency to group people into “good guys” and “bad guys” (with “our tribe” always part of the good guys). This gives us de facto permission to ascribe our status to our goodness while concluding that those on the margins deserve their fate because they lack such goodness. That’s bad theology. A healthy awareness of all human sinfulness, ours especially, can correct such theology. I propose we bring back “the hanging sermon” (the lethal injection sermon?). But would anyone attend?

+Scott

 
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Seeing Others as Neighbors Instead of Competitors (eCrozier #234)

On October 3, 2014, in culture, gospel, grace, love, by bishopbenhase

Whether we enjoy it or not, technological and economic abundance surrounds those of us living in the U.S.  Our culture has many ways to stimulate our appetites for the many things we didn’t even know we needed. And it’s not just that we have an appetite for all this abundance, many people feel it’s their right to have it. Those who want lower taxes still demand their communities have high quality education, services, and cultural amenities. They just don’t want it to pay for it. In such a world, it’s a small step from claims to certain rights to the violent rhetoric of some groups, who claim, with a certain twisted logic, that in our materialistic society only the language of violence speaks loud enough to get the attention of those bent on the gratification of their desires as a “right.”

The vineyard tenants in Jesus’ parable this Sunday aren’t all that remote from us. Their acts of violence first against the owner’s servants and then the owner’s son are simply extreme examples of a demand that weaves its way through our society: “What’s mine?” The judgment proclaimed in the parable is easy for us to serve on others. We can say that their claims are too extreme, illogical, or greedy, while our claims are legitimate, reasonable, and just. We ask only our due, while they demand too much! It’s easy to see where such colliding claims lead. They lead to some form of mutual degradation. A current example of this is our broken national political culture.

So, the temptation is to choose the tenant’s solution, which is the choice for violence in some form, even if it’s not actual physical violence. The logic of oppression, which the rich and powerful use to denigrate the claims of the poor and powerless, and the logic of violence, which uses fear to gets its way, are really two sides of the same coin. Each believes that the only way to protect its claim is by denying the claim of the other.

The Gospel of Jesus is a clear alternative to this cycle of claim and counterclaim. At the heart of our lives, God has given us all we truly need. This doesn’t mean we all begin life equally or that there’s no need to mitigate the extremes of wealth and poverty, but it does mean that we’re freed from the blind claim of demanding rights or what we see as our due. We’re freed from this desire because God has given us all we truly need by his grace. If we see God as the source of all that we have and all that we are, then we can begin to see others as neighbors to love instead of opponents to overcome. We’ll begin to see them as people, like us, for whom Jesus died on the cross instead of only seeing them as competitors blocking us from getting more of what we desire.

The Gospel of Jesus confronts our sinful desires that get in the way of our ability to attend to each other in love. The Gospel is the necessary antidote for us so we’ll have the ability to see the world with the eyes of a love that doesn’t demand our rights and desires at the expense of others. The real abundance surrounding us isn’t the abundance of things that we blindly believe will fill the gaping void in our hearts. What actually surrounds us is God’s abundant grace, incarnate in Jesus, which heals our hearts and makes us whole. The Gospel of Jesus enables us to see first ourselves and then the world around us with a clearer vision and less grasping hands.

+Scott

 
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Loving our Enemies without Needing our Enemies (eCrozier #230)

On September 5, 2014, in grace, love, by bishopbenhase

Love your enemies – Jesus
Defeat your enemies – Most of Us

The reason Jesus commands us to love our enemies is because he presumes we’ll have them. Having enemies is an unavoidable part of human life. And it’s naive simply to assume that our enemies will become our friends. I’ve had that happen. It’s glorious when it does. But, more often than not, our enemies will remain our enemies. So, the question becomes not “how can I make friends out of my enemies?” But rather, “how can I love my enemies when they still remain my enemies?”

To get at that answer, I believe we have to focus on the “love” part of the command rather than “the enemies” part of it. Focusing on our enemies will only create a spiral of self-justification and claimed victimhood that leads us away from love. This spirals unabated as each offense by our enemy gets reacted to and internalized. It also leads us to define ourselves by who our enemy is rather than by who we are as Jesus’ disciples. When that happens, we create a symbiotic relationship with our enemy where our identity gets defined more by who we oppose rather than by Jesus’ command to love.

A vivid example that bears this out is the long-standing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Both have come to define themselves symbiotically by who their enemy is. Those in power on both sides have come to literally need the other to be their enemy because that provides self-justification for their own behavior. So Israeli leaders need Palestinians to continue to fire rockets at their cities and bomb crowded buses to justify their own actions, all the while providing cover for their continued settler expansion in the West Bank. And Palestinian leaders need Israelis to bomb civilians in Gaza and to keep the borders closed to commerce in order justify their indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians. Both sides can then point to their enemy as the one responsible for all the death and destruction. They’ve come to symbiotically need their enemies.

But what if they both chose to define themselves, not by who their enemy is, but by who they are when they are their best selves? Both peoples have long histories of compassion and generosity. I know. I’ve seen them first-hand when they are their best selves. Such movement would require both to let go of their claim to be solely in the right (self-justification) and the only true sufferers (claimed victimhood). Like in all cases, “love” can’t be lived out as a sentimental feeling toward the other. Such feelings may never be present. Rather, it must be an act of will to let go of self-justification and claimed victimhood and to embrace a visceral humility and an empathetic love for the other.

And this is true for you and me in our relationships to the enemies who are nigh to us (maybe in the next pew?). The act of love should never only be about our feelings. It must be grounded in our own humility and our empathy for the other, whoever that other is. After all, our actions are the only actions over which we have control. As Jesus stresses it: This is about his command for us to love. It’s not about our enemies.

+Scott

 
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“Choosy Moms Choose Jesus” (eCrozier #221)

On May 16, 2014, in culture, grace, by bishopbenhase

Late last Sunday evening as I was driving home, I came across the above message on a church sign somewhere in southeast Georgia. It was dark and late and I wasn’t sure what I had read, so I stopped my car, turned around, and went back to be sure. Yep. Now, my hunch is that the person who came up with this message, however unaware, was using an old marketing strategy: Be timely and draw on the comfortably familiar to promote your message. It was, after all, Mother’s Day and the message related emotionally to a successful ad campaign for a peanut butter brand a few years back. Those two ingredients make the message work. Except. It’s horrible theology.

The idea that you or I or anybody else chooses Jesus is arrogant and gives us way more credit than we deserve. Such a claim presumes that a person has done her market research. She has tested all the other possible saviors or lords or gods out there, weighed their strengths and weaknesses in providing the value she desired for her and her family, and then she chose Jesus, because, of course, she only wants the very best for herself and her family. Jesus then becomes the choice she makes to maximize her return as the choosy consumer of salvation that she is. Like I said, arrogance.

Jesus says in John 15:16 that we didn’t choose him, he chose us. It’s arrogant for us to surmise anything else. As a disciple, I did none of the market research described above. I didn’t survey the salvation-market landscape and then conclude Jesus was the highest value alternative among the choices. What actually occurred was quite different. Jesus worked his way past my pride, my arrogance, my presumption that I knew best about my life, and met me in the truthfulness of my pathetic, sinful weakness. His grace on the cross gave me something I had no power in myself to give myself, namely, forgiveness of my sins. I didn’t choose God’s forgiveness. God forgave me in spite of myself.

Martin Luther, the great western reformer of the Christian faith, told the story of a man he heard going around bragging that he had chosen to accept Jesus as his personal savior. Luther purportedly went up to the man and said: “If I gave you a bag of gold coins, would you go around telling everyone how smart and clever you were to accept such a gift? Of course, you wouldn’t. You would just be grateful. You didn’t deserve the gift of the gold coins. All you did was accept it. So, stop with the bragging.”

Now, you may think I’m making more of a church sign than I ought. That’s fair enough. The person who came up with that sign’s message, I presume, only desired to be clever for the sake of our faith. Yet, I think such a sign manifests a larger cultural distortion of the Christian faith that syncretizes Christianity with modern capitalist presumptions about human behavior. It reflects the commodification of Christianity as just another transactional choice we make. But the Christian faith isn’t my own construction. In ways I may never fully understand, God in Jesus has laid hold of my life and has compelled me into a story I had no hand in writing. Any other claim is clearly arrogant.

+Scott

 
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The Branch Davidians, Coercion, and our Evangelistic Witness (eCrozier #214)

On March 28, 2014, in culture, Evangelistic Witness, gospel, grace, Uncategorized, by bishopbenhase

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a significant piece in a recent New Yorker called Sacred and Profane: How Not To Negotiate with Believers. In it he describes how U.S. government negotiators totally botched ending the armed standoff with the Branch Davidian group nearly 21 years ago in Waco, Texas. You may remember that the Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, one that’s even more apocalyptic and millennialist in their theology than the parent church. The standoff ended in tragedy with over 70 people, including 25 children, consumed in a fire caused when 400 canisters of CS gas shot into the compound came into contact with oil lanterns.

I don’t wish debate the U.S. government’s actions or whether they were right to have laid siege to the Mt Carmel compound. That’s for another time. What I find most interesting here is how one group, in this case the FBI, can so completely misunderstand another group like the Branch Davidians. The FBI assumed they were dealing with a typical hostage negotiation, such as when a robber holds hostages in a failed bank heist. So, “we’ll send in some food if you let four of the hostages go,” was the script for how the FBI approached this case. But they were dealing with people who had strong religious beliefs. The Branch Davidians held convictions that made complete sense to them, but they could only be understood as rational within the context of their theology. The FBI had a different rationality and they profoundly and tragically misinterpreted the deep beliefs the Branch Davidians held.

The U.S. government has made similar repeated failures throughout recent history, especially in its dealings with Muslim religion and culture. U.S. government rationality assumes that all grievances, threats, or concerns are based solely on social, political, or economic desires and therefore can be negotiated. But people who hold deep religious beliefs won’t negotiate them away no matter what “deal” they’re offered.

As we enter even further into a post-Christian, polyreligious culture, we followers of Jesus would do well to learn this. This doesn’t mean that all religious beliefs are equally true. Everyone can have her/his own religious beliefs, but not everyone can have her/his own truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. We should never shrink back from that faith conviction. And yet, how we stand with that conviction in the midst of wildly different religious beliefs matters. It matters, and this may come as a surprise to some people, for how effective we will be in our evangelistic witness to other people.

We’ll never convince those who have different religious beliefs about the truth of our witness through the barrel of a gun, the coercion of political power, or by majority legislation mandating or forbidding certain behavior. Those won’t lead people to change their religious convictions. The Crusades of the Middle Ages, the Puritan’s coercive laws in early America, and the more recent efforts in some jurisdictions to ban Sharia Law all failed to change the target population’s beliefs. The truth we bear and are also called to share can only be conveyed through sacrificial love, grace, and mercy. After all, that’s how Jesus embodied eternal truth, so it ought to be how we do it as well.

+Scott

 
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Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, & Grace: Things to know and not know (eCrozier #213)

On March 21, 2014, in grace, by bishopbenhase

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took
– Sam Cooke

There are many things I need to know in order to be a disciple of Jesus, as well as a husband, a father, a friend, and, at least, a semi-decent bishop. You can imagine what those things are. Things such as forgiving unconditionally, showing mercy, living gracefully, being compassionate, listening attentively, empathizing with the other’s lot in life, etc. These are all virtues that one can learn with practice and experience over a lifetime. One might say, with a nod to T.S. Elliott, these are the “knowing” virtues that come with the acquisition of some wisdom and a humble reliance on the grace of God.

There are still other things one needs to know in order to be a competent adult. These are less a knowledge of being and more a knowledge of doing. For a J2A (Journey to Adulthood) Group 15 years ago, I put together a list of 100 adult competencies that teens should know how to do before they could call themselves adults. The premise of J2A is that manhood and womanhood come as a gift from God (if one lives long enough, one leaves childhood), but that adulthood isn’t a given. It’s rather based on achieving a level of mature competency (we’ve elected presidents of the U. S. who, in my semi-humble opinion, never achieved adulthood). My list of 100 things included: how to change a flat tire on a car, how to show respectable etiquette at a dinner table, how to paint a room (neatly), how to explain the second law of thermodynamics, etc. There are real things we need to know if we’re to be mature, competent adults in this world.

But there are things that we don’t need to know. And yet, we do. We do because we live in an age of useless knowledge. And we’re bombarded with this knowledge as we read or listen to what amounts to the news these days. We can’t avoid it. For example, I’m pretty sure I don’t need to know anything about Miley Cyrus’ body gyrations or Justin Bieber’s latest adolescent alcohol-induced escapades, except I do. This flood of needless knowledge presents us with a literal and figurative headache as we try to process all the things we now know and then try to discern the important from the immediate.

Lent is a season for the important where we purposely place the immediate aside. It’s a time when we ask ourselves hard questions about our lives and not run from the answers we discover. It’s a season for us to remember, and not forget, that we know the first, important things about life, and all the other things we know just because we know them, must take a distant back seat. Lent is a return then to our core knowledge about ourselves and about God; that it’s only by the merciful grace of God that we have life. All the useless, distractive, immediate knowledge we face each day means we’re swimming against a strong tide. But swim it we must lest we forget the important knowledge of our unmerited redemption in Jesus Christ.

+Scott

 
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Springsteen, The Lion Whisperer, & Grace Healing Fear (eCrozier #211)

On March 7, 2014, in grace, by bishopbenhase

Fear’s a powerful thing; it’ll turn your heart black you can trust
It’ll take your God-filled soul and fill it with devils and dust
– from Devils & Dust by Bruce Springsteen

Fear drives much of human behavior: Fear of failure, fear of being rejected, fear our sins will become known to others, fear we won’t have enough, etc. Our fears then drive us to mitigate these effects by accumulating defense mechanisms, like power, status, or money, usually at the expense of others. If it becomes our prime driver, then fear, as Springsteen notes, hardens our hearts, filling our souls with “devils & dust.”

St John wisely instructs us about fear, writing: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4:18). If our fears come from our ever striving to avoid rejection, truthful exposure, or being in want, then our fears are really about us running away from the “punishment” we believe those would cause us. Of course, it does us no good when well-meaning friends tell us not to live by our fears. That just confirms for us that we’re pretty sorry Christians leading us to more fear that we’ll be rejected, revealed, and ridiculed. The antidote actually comes, not from some courage inside ourselves, but from God’s grace outside ourselves. God’s grace is the “perfect love” that “casts out fear.” This doesn’t mean that by ourselves we can ever reach “perfection in love,” but rather it means that God’s “perfection in love,” AKA, Jesus, reaches us through his cross.

Kevin Richardson, a South African zoologist who literally plays with wild lions, is called the “Lion Whisperer.” If you’ve not seen the video of him playing and resting with wild lions, then by all means view them. They’re awe-inspiring and presage the Prophet Isaiah speaking of a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb (11:6). When asked about being called the “Lion Whisperer,” he responded: “If it’s a phrase people coin because of the relationships I have and the ability to interact with these animals without having to make them to submit through fear, then yes” (emphasis mine).

Animals can recognize grace when they receive it. Even human animals can, but less often because it’s not the normal practice of our lives. Since we so prevalently live by our fears, we dish it out to others as well. We make others “submit through fear;” fear that we won’t love them if we don’t get our way, fear that we’ll expose them to ridicule for their sins, fear that we won’t share with them what we’re blessed to have. And so it goes, spiraling ever downward. That’s why grace is such a counter-culturally dangerous way of living. It undermines the status quo as we wage our fear mongering wars.

What if we called a truce in our fear mongering war and invited others to do the same? What if we risked living gracefully by extending to one another compassion rather than judgment, mercy rather than ridicule, generosity rather than greed? If we lived in such a way, then we’d come to experience the very nature of God with one another. That’s the truth of God in Jesus. And, please pardon me: I’m not lion.

+Scott

 
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