The eCrozier

I never always do that – Anonymous

We’re too quick to reach conclusions about just how we’d act in particular situations or when we’re faced with certain challenges. So, we hear about something someone did and we’ll conclude we’d never do that or react like that person. Problem is…we might…given the circumstances in the heat of the moment. When we say “I’d never do that” or “I always do this” we’re really not being honest with ourselves or with those to which we might be tempted to pontificate. Years ago, I remember hearing about a guy who ran when a big dog came out of nowhere and barked menacingly at him. I recall shaking my head and thinking “what a scaredy-cat. I’d never do that. I stand up to unleashed dogs. They need to know who’s boss!” Not too long after, the same thing happened to me. I jumped and ran just like that guy did. So much for my bravado around vicious dogs.

Social scientists call this the “hot-cold empathy gap.” In our “cold” mode we can rationally surmise a situation, place our best self in the situation, and hold forth on how we’d coolly do the right thing. And yet, when we’re in our “hot” mode, we don’t always follow our cool, rational self. It’s important to realize the “empathy gap” in question is with ourselves. We tend to judge ourselves harshly in this “gap,” believing that we’re moral failures, cowards, or simply behaving stupidly when fail to live up to the standards of our cool, rational persona when we’re in the heat of the moment.

In a recent episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain, they presented stories of people, both male and female, reflecting on past sexual experiences. In each case, the person knew ahead of time that engaging in unprotected sex was highly risky behavior. They’d been taught by parents and teachers about the dangers of contracting diseases or the difficult consequences of unplanned pregnancies. Yet, in the heat of the moment, as it were, these same knowledgeable, rational people went ahead with such risky behavior, complete with brutal self-recriminations the next day. But later, they did again.

As a young man working in Kentucky for a church home-repair project, I bragged about how I could drive an 18-wheeler. The next day my boss asked me to drive an 18-wheeler, fully loaded with sheetrock, 50 miles to our new storage facility. You guessed it, I’d never driven an 18-wheeler. I should’ve confessed my braggadocio, but in the heat of the moment, my foolish pride was greater than any good sense. How I made that trip without killing myself and/or others still baffles me. I do recall getting out of the truck cab upon arriving at the facility and discovering my legs wouldn’t stop shaking.

Such heated moments expose our moral failings or, at least, our stupidity. But during times of such “heat,” it’s highly human to fail to live up to the standards we know are right and true. And dwelling in shame at such times won’t make us better human beings. Hopefully, our experience makes us wiser, but my hunch is we all find ourselves still doing stupid things in the heated moments in which we find ourselves. God’s mercy and the forgiveness of others is all we can really cling to.

+Scott

Nothing is enough for the one to whom enough is too little. – Epicurus

When my son John was still an only child of about two and half years, Kelly was away for a few days and it was just us two. I remember making pancakes for supper one night (because I could) and John and I feasted until we couldn’t eat anymore. It was then bath time, but before a book at bedtime, he asked for a snack. I decided to run a small social science experiment (because I could). At our kitchen table there were two chairs. At one place I set a stack of ten fig newtons. At the other, I placed only two. I told John he could sit at either place for his snack. You guessed it. He sat in the chair in front of the ten fig newtons, of which he could only manage to eat two (after all he and I had just wolfed down tons of pancakes). Even at that early age, he had already concluded that more was better than less. He’s wasn’t and isn’t alone. We all believe it. We’re suckers.

There’s a powerful scene in the film, “The Hurt Locker,” where an Iraqi War veteran returns home and accompanies his wife and baby to the grocery store. His wife asks him to go to the cereal aisle to choose a box for the family. He gets there, stares at the choices and freezes. Not a word is spoken. The camera slowly draws back as he is paralyzed by the hundreds of cereal choices. Soon he re-enlists in the army to go back to the war because the choices there are simple and binary: life or death.

Our culture leads us to believe that having more choice is better than having less. But social science research has repeatedly shown (see Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less) that having more choice doesn’t equate to more happiness or life satisfaction. In fact, repeated research shows that an abundance of choice actually exhausts us. And yet, even knowing that reality, we still think more choice equals more happiness. Our brains lie to us and we think that we’ll be different than everyone else. Having more choice won’t exhaust us. We think it’ll make us happy, but it won’t.

Does having over ten varieties of Coca Cola rather than just two bring us more contentment? I think not. This truth is a subset of a larger question about “enoughness.” How much is enough? One wag responded to that question by saying: “just a little bit more than the next person!” In our culture, having more than the next person is the way we keep a diabolical score.

Back to the social science research: It consistently shows that while having more choices doesn’t bring us happiness, gratitude for what we have and for who we have in our life does bring us happiness. Put simply, grateful people are happier people. So, rather than worrying whether we have enough (or more than the next person), maybe we should be wondering: Do we have enough gratitude in our lives? Can we be content with our lives as they are now knowing they will always be messy and imperfect? Are we doing enough to nurture our relationships with others? Are we giving enough love or are we rather always demanding more than enough from others? Can we simply be thankful that enough is truly enough?

+Scott

It’s always just been better to keep your head away from that kind of stuff.
– Sean Clifford, Penn State Quarterback

Penn State’s football team was undefeated until recently. On November 9, the Nittany Lions travelled to Minnesota to play the Golden Gophers (an outstanding nickname, by the way) who were also undefeated at the time. In a hard-fought game, Penn State came up short, losing 31-26 to Minnesota. It wasn’t Penn State Quarterback Sean Clifford’s best game. While completing over 20 passes for over 300 yards, he still threw three interceptions. That’s the nature of sport. You’ll have your good days and you’ll have your bad days, just like in the rest of one’s life. Clifford had a bad game. It happens. He’s 20-years old after all. He’s still growing up.

While Clifford is barely an adult (his baby face makes him look younger), after the loss to Minnesota he had to learn some hard, adult lessons in our mean-spirited, caustic culture. Clifford needed to delete all his social media accounts on the day after the loss, because he received death threats and nasty messages from, of all people, Penn State fans. He said: “I usually delete it closer to games, but I completely deleted it after the Minnesota game. It’s kind of sad to say, but you know how fans sometimes get … it gets a little crazy. I was kind of, I guess, sick and tired of getting death threats, and some pretty explicit and pretty tough-to-read messages.”

Clifford showed remarkable restraint in his comments when he said: “You know how fans sometimes get…it gets a little crazy.” Really? With all due respect that’s more than “a little crazy.” When did we decide in our culture it was acceptable to make death threats to a 20-year old young man for his part in losing a football game? From the top down in our culture we’re normalizing name-calling and the threatening behavior that often follows it. These crude, twittered pejoratives give permission for others to join in and act similarly. For example, once someone has been labeled “human scum” on Twitter, it’s a logical step to conclude such a person doesn’t even deserve to live. After all, they’re mere “human scum.” Such behavior further erodes our social fabric.

Penn State Head Coach, James Franklin, also noted it wasn’t just Penn State fans engaging in such behavior. He said: “You hate to see it, but the sad thing [is] it’s a part of our reality of our society right now. You see that in a lot of areas; the last thing I want to do is get into other things besides football right now, but you see a lot of things that are behaviors in our society now that we accept that I don’t know why we’re accepting. You see some things from a violence perspective, you see some things that people in positions how they’re conducting themselves, just a lot of things that we’re accepting in our society that we would never have accepted before.” Thanks, Coach Franklin.

As a people, we become what we tolerate and accept. Sometime in the future (and I hate to even write this down), a college athlete will be murdered because he had a bad game. We’re reaping what we’ve allowed to grow.

“The idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian.” – Wendell Berry

We’re all guilty of the sin of baptizing what we say or do as “Christian” so we can call whatever we say or do as “faithful.” We come by this sin honestly. We’ve been schooled in the celebration of the self all our lives, so it makes sense we’d understand that whatever we do must be what Christians do (or believe). After all, the great American poem is Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, the great American essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, and the great American novel is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, all of which insist on the self as the main source for truth and righteousness. Such selfism stands in clear contrast to Jesus’s plain teaching in the Gospel, so all we have to do is ignore Jesus, do what we want, and call it “Christian.” See how simple that is?

This tendency to baptize our beliefs, prejudices, and actions as “Christian” becomes especially embarrassing since by repeated research (e.g., PPRI’s American Values Atlas, Pew, Gallup, etc.), people who identify themselves as faithful Christians don’t seem to show any different behavior than the population as a whole (“different” = “look and sound a bit more like Jesus”). The traditional markers many have often used to name what they call “immoral” (e.g., premarital sex, adultery, greed, gambling, etc.) show that self-declared “Christians” aren’t any more “moral” than the general population. And when one looks at self-described “Evangelical Christians,” they are in cases like spousal abuse, actually worse than the overall U.S. population (See Ron Sider’s research in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World?).

The above news ought to prompt us to spend less time finding the speck in any other person’s eye (Christian or non-Christian) and spend more time dealing with the beam in our own. PPRI’s American Values Atlas also finds a significant number of white Christians are still holding onto long-ago, debunked racial stereotypes of African-Americans while also denying that the growing white nationalist movement is at all in conflict with their Christian faith. Really? And we continue to wonder why young people in this country aren’t attracted to the Christian Church. White Christian racism is a good place to start our wondering. And then we can also wonder why the denial of climate change science by many Christians creates problems for young people when, at the same time, we assure them that we really do stand for the truth.

In my church growing up, the way we lived our lives was called our “testimony.” Our life, whether we want it to or not, is always an unspoken sermon that’s constantly preaching to others. None of us will ever be free from wanting Jesus to agree with us and for him to see things our way, but humility and honesty demands we admit how our unrepentant selfism continuously hamstrings our witness to the Good News of God in Jesus.

+Scott

By and large, Christians understand brokenness in our culture from two different vantage points. More liberal Christians tend to see brokenness as primarily caused by social justice failures prevalent throughout our culture. More conservative Christians usually focus on individual brokenness (sinfulness) as the problem arguing we need to call people to repent of their personal character flaws so we can get things right in the culture. Both are correct, although neither side rarely acknowledges the truth the other side holds. The social and personal are so intertwined that trying to separate them is more confusing than helpful. Does social injustice lead to personal brokenness? I think history bears that out. Does personal sinfulness set in motion social injustices? Again, I think history proves it does. We create a false dilemma when we try to disconnect these rather than see them both as woven together in a complex whole.

As an example, let’s consider the issue of (dis)honesty. Laws help make dishonest folk behave better than their personal characters. Even crooks don’t want to be robbed by other crooks. So within limits, honesty can be enforced by having crooks watch each other. But as we learned from Prohibition, laws alone do little good unless they reflect community standards. For laws against corruption to work, most individuals must have an honest character. So how do we get honest persons unless we have an honest society to produce them? Likewise, how do we get an honest society unless we have honest persons to produce it? Which comes first the chicken or the egg? Society produces corrupt individuals. But it’s also true that corrupt individuals produce a corrupt society.

Jesus saw the personal and the social as a seamless whole. Some people might say to Jesus about the current president: “Jesus, tell him to repent of his lying.” Jesus, I believe, would reply as he did in Luke 12 where a man comes to him and says: “Teacher, bid my brother to divide our inheritance with me.” But Jesus replies: “Who made me a divider or judge over you? Life does not consist in the abundance of money and power; repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus went way beyond our focus on the personal or the social, about souls or laws. He called people into something later called “the church” so they could daily repent and thus become just, compassionate, and merciful people. Jesus called people into community for repentance and discipleship.

It’s odd how different Jesus’s approach is from how we seem to go about it. We want to change society for the better (and we should), but we try to do it almost entirely through voting, lobbying, or a rant on social media. Thus, we’ve given up on changing people and we’ve settled for trying to change the government. How odd? We want to convert the government instead of the people. We’re probably the first people ever who hope to have virtues like mercy, compassion, and justice expressed in our government without having virtuous people who embody them. How could anyone imagine that corrupt people could produce honest government? No, the reality is that corrupt people produce corrupt governments, just as corrupt governments produce corrupt people. Our present circumstance bears out that truth. It’s time to follow Jesus and call ourselves and others to repentance and discipleship.

+Scott

Some humans ain’t human, some humans ain’t kind
You open up their hearts and here’s what you find
A few frozen pizzas, some ice cubes with hair
A broken Popsicle, you don’t wanna go there
– John Prine

I’ll leave the debate about the humanity of some humans to another time. I’m more concerned here with what the legendary John Prine believes we’ll discover inside some human hearts: “frozen pizzas, ice cubes with hair,” and “a broken popsicle.” As always with his anthropological observations, Mr. Prine is amazingly insightful.

In terms of connecting food to our hearts, I think it’s safe to say the relationship is complicated. In the developed world, particularly in western culture, we’ve never before had such a wide variety of food options available to us, at least to those who have the discretionary income to make those choices. We’re capable of appreciating wholesome, delicious food one minute and then wolf down a bag of potato chips the next. We can delight in the freshest of oysters and then ruin that delight by washing them down with a Budweiser (yes, I’m a beer snob…among my other sins). Take the potato, for example. It’s one of God’s greatest creations. It’s full of nutrients. If history is accurate, it kept the Irish alive for a generation or two. But what do we do with the potato? We slice it up, cover it with salt and grease, deep fry it so there’s absolutely nothing nutritious left in it, and then sell it to churches for their youth group meetings. If you don’t believe there’s a Devil, then that alone should convince you.

But even our irregular taste in food isn’t my primary concern. I’m more concerned with what happens when food becomes a type of religious devotion for us. This occurs in two ways. First, we can become obsessed with eating the most admirable foods (kale salad anyone?) thinking it’ll show others just how righteous we are. Or second, we can treat eating “right” with a misplaced religious zeal. Doctors even have coined a term for this. It’s called “orthorexia nervosa,” a psychological obsession that causes a person to restrict their food intake to particular foods, believing doing so will be the only way they’ll be healthy and happy. But like its twin disorder, anorexia, orthorexia leads to depression and death, if it isn’t addressed. These are both forms of self-sanctification. Both hold that if we just get our food choices right, then we’ll be happy and fulfilled.

Such efforts disorder our lives because they believe a necessity (in this case food) will do something it can’t possibly accomplish (make us whole). Now I’m not suggesting for a minute food is unimportant. We have a significant hunger problem in this country, particularly among children. Plus, eating a healthy diet is a way for us to be good stewards of God’s gift of our bodies (OK, even having some potato chips on occasion). But we should be really wary of what food can become for us. Like with so many other things, we can ascribe a worth to it beyond due measure. If that happens, then we’ll be sorely disappointed when it can’t deliver what we hoped for.

+Scott