The Danger of the Myth of Exceptionalism

We all grew up dreaming we could be President one day, "we all" meaning white American males, of course. It was a harmless myth (at least for boys of northern European stock), set as a goal before the nation's (white, male) children to get them to aspire to greatness. The reality, however, was that only one in how many millions would actually become President. Much like the mythology of achieving movie stardom or becoming an NBA player, such dreams are beyond reach for all but a handful.

In my high school graduating class, the Class of '73, Brian Wheaton was voted most likely to succeed. Brian was a likeable guy, but the reason we all knew he won that vote was because his family was the richest in our small town, having dominated the industrial output of our community for generations. Brian's timing was off and by the time he came of age, the family business was losing its grip. I don't know if he even aspired to be an industrialist – he was gracious and shy about the honor and I understand his present vocation is pastor – but that particular village myth had dissipated before the century ended.

Even more harmful myths come in the form of sainthood for the cream of prior crops. We live in an increasingly cynical age with antiheroism the new norm. And yet the supposed superhuman achievements of those who have gone before only further fuels our cynicism. In a brilliant piece, "Getting Their Guns Off," in the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic, Jon Zobenica takes to task both the iconoclasm of generational exceptionalism and its opposition. A friend of mine and I, looking for a light evening in the 70s and arriving too late for Jim Henson's "The Muppets," took in "The Deer Hunter" by accident. That, in one title, is my definition of "its opposition."

Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation was not the first attempt at sainthood manufacturing and it won't be the last. We Americans do it with our Founding Fathers. The Roman Church has been doing it for centuries. And we less saintly Protestants have our own versions as well, particularly with our impossible missionary tales. I remember reading Courtney Anderson's To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson years ago and thinking it the first such biographical work that didn't place a full halo on the protagonist. Judson's efforts were remarkable, but here was a hero who was also approachable with truly human feelings.

Therein is the danger in the myth of exceptionalism. It is only useful if it inspires. Instead it places greatness beyond reach of mere mortals – what can any generation achieve after "The Greatest Generation" title has already been handed out? To be truly useful, a myth has to approach reality. The Greek pantheon of deities is a sordid bunch that occasionally aspires to greatness, but even in their humanness, they give a measure of direction to humans. Yet we don't need our gods to be so debased to inspire, only approachable, and debased gods are uninspiring as less than human.

In the Judeo-Christian pantheon, the heroes start off human but, in becoming locked up in unexamined Scripture and tradition, don halos and float above the earthly plain of humanity. In actually, the Bible does not gloss over their humanness and gives us lots of passages to stutter over when having devotions with our young children. In the end, saints of yore like Sarah and Jacob and David and Martha are just, well, folks like us. And these saints were not human only until they encountered God, they remained human ever after, even greats like Peter and Paul and Barnabas, who draw punches across the pages of the New Testament long after the power of Pentecost has descended on them all.

But what of the God of these saints of yore? Here is perfection, is it not? What then of my theory of approachability? I cannot speak for the "Judeo" part of that hyphen, but I can say that in Jesus we have the ultimate in approachability. In Jesus, God is both transcendent and immanent, soaring higher than we will ever reach and can ever dream of approaching and yet bending so low as to become, like Lewis' Aslan, a mere kitten in touchability. That bending low is less a pat on the head than a connecting side-by-side as "brother."

I see in Jesus what I can find in no one else – a human being who brings God's elevator down to my level so that I can step on and ascend with him who became like me so I could become like him. And yet we all need equally approachable human saints who bring Jesus to us.

Why then do we bury the saints in our lives under a pile of useless halos? Why are we so quick to compost their yuck, lest anyone see and be tainted by it? Are we so insecure of God's power that somehow without perfect heroes we will not ourselves aspire to greatness?

We do not need examples who have gone where we can never hope to go, for then they are not models for us to follow as much as they are floodlights of cynicism-producing glare on our own fallenness. In exposing the sheer humanity of all these human greats both in biblical and historical times as well as our own time, we do not debase our own future achievements, we simply make greatness all that more achievable.

 

 

Stupak, Presbyters and Coming Clean

Bart Stupak has provided us all a timeless lesson. A high-profile political victim in the battle over health care, the Congressman is avowedly pro-life, a principled commitment that led him to support universal health care and oppose the House bill until it had better guarantees of prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion. In the final bill, he accepted an executive order, what many on both sides of the debate see as lacking teeth on banning abortions. In other words he caved in to expedient compromise.

A friend of mine, George Paul Wood, dismisses one responder's notion that Stupak was a champ, saying that Stupak's decision to vote for the final health care bill with fewer teeth makes him either a cynic or a chump. "If the former, it's hard to consider him a man of pro-life principle. I prefer to think of him as a man of genuine principle, which forces the conclusion that he's a chump."

This raises a troubling point about living a life of principles, dropping champ and shrinking the options to cynic and chump. Are these our only choices when we face such overwhelming disappointments in those who could have taken things one step further and instead chose to ignore the pain of making tough choices? Is there not another name for those who fall short?

Lots of us were disappointed all around on the health care issue, but then politics is rarely "undisappointing," isn't it, no matter where it plays out. Change the venue and see if it reads the same way. It's the decade of the 1950s. Evangelical church leaders everywhere are meeting behind closed doors, wrestling with a changing society and wondering what to do with the "Negro problem." I happen to know much detail on one such august body, the General Presbytery of the American Assemblies of God, but the same scenario played out all over the ecclesiastical landscape. While white theological "liberals" marched, white evangelicals hid or, worse, fought back.

The all-white, all male Presbyters voted against (actually hemmed and hawed for years over) ordaining blacks for fear of alienating whites. In the end the "feeling" was that it was a choice between reaching blacks or reaching whites, a choice they refused to tolerate anywhere else on God's good earth. Various proposals were considered, tabled, rejected, approved and left to gather dust until finally history itself forced the issue – history and Billy Graham, but that is another story.

Leaders inevitably disappoint. Stupak caves in when he might have held out for a more thorough pro-life victory (but why were there only a dozen other such principled legislators by his side?). Instead of being prophetic champs like their Azusa Street forebears [a reference to the "against-the-grain" interracial fervor of the earlier Pentecostal revival], the Presbyters chose compromising inaction. You can see such chumpiness in the ongoing church and Boy Scout lawsuits over child sex abuse, as is playing out once again in the Pope's back yard and in my own Portland. Or in countless corporate scandals that litter the week's headlines, especially those that pit the bottom line against people or God's creation. Nothing stinks more than good people making stupid choices.

Do such stark choices leave us with "cynic" or "chump" as the only options? Seems that in either case all we are left with then is cynicism, if not for us to swallow, then at least for those who follow. Does not the way in which our elders handled America's coming of age and fulfilling the "all are created equal" vision of its Founders account in part for the tidal wave of cynicism of the past half century? As the existentialists readily illustrate, cynicism is a very bleak view on life.

I look again at that word, "chump." It can mean either a stupid or foolish person or a thick, heavy block of wood – in other words, a blockhead. It means a person who lets himself get duped into caving on his principles. So either these heretofore named didn't really have solid principles or they let themselves get caught in "lesser of evils" compromises. I can understand how this works. You are in a tight situation, pressures mounting on every side. You try to hang onto your core values, but in the heat things start looking overly complicated. So you go for what you think is the best way out, only to realize in the end that "out" gets you nowhere good.

As is generally the case, the way looks much clearer from a distance. You know it. The world knows it. But why don't we ever admit it, instead heaping fuel onto the fires of cynicism by hiding history. I am struck by the writer of I John who says that "if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from every sin" (1:17). Bold transparency leads to community and purity, but it can also lead to death – political or physical. Taking that risk is what makes a real champ, though in this life champs don't always survive to see their colors raised and to hear the crowd cheer. But the risk is one definitely worth taking. So, leaders, let's make a fresh commitment to come clean – always.

 

Back to the Basics

People put a lot of stock in significance. To thoroughly mix metaphors, we like to jump on the bandwagon of someone's rising star and go out in our own blaze of glory. We hunger to be connected with an important event or some famous person.

The value we crave in that event or person is in what worth has been added to them by the esteem of others. After all, it is only when others think something or someone famous that that someone or something then becomes important to everyone else. And so goes the chase through life as we all look for our own meaning in what significance others bring to us.

That pursuit of placing value on others by how they place value on us, however, sends us in the wrong direction. Instead of lifting us – and others – up, it brings us all crashing down, dehumanizes us and turns us into objects that are little more than step ladders for others to use to get to the top.

Jesus came and started at the bottom, resisted the impulse to climb and finally climbed on a donkey and then a cross in order to go even lower. And he called others to join him in his pursuit of the bottom. Not a race to tear one another down. Not a dash to dehumanize each other. But a steady downward move – from a human perspective, at least – to become the servant of all. To be a washer of others' feet.

Doesn't sound like much of a promo campaign – come join me and wash other people's stinking feet. I've had some low level jobs in my life, but I think the one that might have felt the lowest as a college student was as a shoe store clerk. Cleaning public bathrooms as a teenage church janitor might sound worse, but at least no one saw you do it. Taking off and putting on shoes for other people while they looked down on you could be a nasty job indeed – and it seemed those thirty-some years ago that the dirtier and smellier the feet, the more likely they were to let you shoe them.

Dutch-born author, Henri J. M. Nouwen, penned forty books in all, and his writings on spiritual life have inspired many. After years of teaching at such renowned schools as Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, the Catholic priest closed out his illustrious career sharing his life with people with developmental disabilities at the L'Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Canada.

Many saw that move as a step down from where he had been. I rather think he was simply moving forward on his journey to be at peace with God in heaven and his own place on earth. He wrote: "As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their 'right' place."

I think about the urge to put people in their "right" place, we who aren't ever certain of our own. Jesus was amazingly comfortable in his own skin. Sure he was God, so why wouldn't it be easy? But the writer of Hebrews (2:18; 4:15) made it very clear that it was no easy thing for Jesus to take on that "skin" and become one of us. And yet as he learned obedience to his Father in heaven – and Hebrews 5:8 does say he learned that obedience – he came to find his peace with his place on earth.

I watched the DVD, "The Passion," with my wife and daughters Saturday evening as part of our Passion Week focus. I've seen it often enough that this time I noted things I hadn't before. One observation that struck me towards the end was that as Jesus hung dying in his last moments on that cross, he came to a point of willful resignation to all the agonizing tensions that had been building for who knows how long. It even seemed as though Father God Himself had turned His back on Jesus, the Son, and there was nowhere else to turn. Then and only then did he declare the effort over, and with his last breath whispered, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46). Total vulnerability. Total submission.

I wonder as I write and post these thoughts why I am doing so after Easter. It seems like something we should have finished with three days ago. And yet that is the truth that lives on past the Resurrection – that only in dying to self, do we really begin to live.