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.

 

Why I believe in Social Justice – Part II

Yesterday (see http://hnkconnect.com/viewpoint-why-i-believe-in-social-justice--part-i) I started my response to Glenn Beck, who has encouraged, nay, insisted that all Christians leave any church that preaches “social justice,” claiming that such teaching has the sinister influence of communism and socialism. Actually my concern is not about Glenn Beck. After all he has a right to his opinions and this is a free country. My concern is that all my Christian friends who swear by him (even those who don’t swear) will believe him on this point.

Beck can pontificate all he wants on politics, this being a democracy and all. But the minute he starts talking theological, well, then he is moving into my turf. Furthermore, he is a Mormon. I really don’t have too much concern about that, generally. I know some of my friends would be aghast if a Mormon won the Presidency, but as most of our presidents in the past century have been nominal Christians at best (the most obvious exceptions being Bush Junior and Carter), then I suppose a good Mormon is not a problem. But what does a Mormon TV personality understand about the preaching of Jesus and his Church?

I understand what he is saying. He’s saying that what he and others consider liberal social justice is not the kind of Bible the average church goer reads or wants to have preached from. Passages like, well, we’ll wait on that. And his biggest concern is that, even though the Bible is filled with passages about justice written long before Beck and Communism appeared, somehow the whole concept is wrong because supposedly the Communists have taken over the justice neighborhood.

For months now, I’ve had one of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis on the home page of my website, http://hnkconnect.com. In case, you haven’t seen it, the quote comes from The Problem of Pain (1940): “The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.”

Does the fact that Lewis says he agrees with Marxists on at least this significant point mean that he also is a Marxist? Hardly. As I wrote a few weeks ago in another blog posting, just because Communists brush their teeth does not mean that brushing your teeth is wrong. Even the bad guys (Communist and otherwise) have some great ideas and do wonderfully good things. And the good deeds that bad people do are still good.

I, for one, am not going to stop preaching a social gospel and I hope the rest of the Church doesn’t either. For far too long in the twentieth century, the Church avoided or twisted strange meanings out of timeless biblical passages as they avoided people of different skin color and waited for the Federal government to do what the Church should have done long before in integrating this society. The fact is that if the Church had not supported slavery and segregation, neither would have survived long in this “Christian” America.

Then after the government broke the back of segregation, the Church awoke to the disgrace of abortion – and found its social justice voice once again. I say, once again, because in the nineteenth century, the American church, especially the evangelical church, yea, verily the evangelistic and missions church of Charles G. Finney and others that followed him were on the forefront of movements such as the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, child labor laws and the crushing monopolies of big business. Finney’s converts (and rabid atheists) were the ones who fueled the anti-slavery movement. And those kinds of movements, my friend – anti-slavery and anti-abortion – are social justice.

What does “social justice” mean? We’ll take a look tomorrow in the next posting at some of those subversive passages Beck doesn’t want us preaching. [You can find it tomorrow at 2GC@PDX or on Facebook.] But for now, let me state it in plain English: Justice is central to God’s vision for His earthly creation. Check out Isaiah 42:1-9, where the prophet says that God will put His Spirit on His servant and that servant will bring justice to the nations. Then Jesus came fulfilling that very prophecy. Justice means doing the right thing in restoring righteousness to all individuals and human systems. The systems part is where the “social” comes in. Some people don’t mind the “individuals” part of that preaching, but tell me where in Scripture does God abdicate judging what groups of individuals and nations do?

To be continued…

From "Night Shift"

As I’m still on a break from blogging to finish a couple of major writing projects, here is another excerpt from Night Shift: On a Mission Crossing Borders in the Night, to be published in a few months:

There is another important distinction to be made about Daniel and his three friends as Babylonian Incarnationals. While we tend to emphasize their line drawing, what is forgotten is how much these four guys had really embraced the host culture. They had been taken as slaves to this alien world to serve in an anti-Yahweh government and they willingly did so with much devotion and faithfulness to their own God – all with the goal of blessing that godless nation.

During the Clinton administration in the 1990s, many in the American Religious Right were deeply opposed to the president du jour on the basis of spiritual allegiance. In that decade I loved to pose the question to my fellow American Believers, “Could a Christian serve in Clinton’s administration?” When I got the anticipated reaction (“Are you kidding?”), I asked them, “Could a Christian serve in a communist government?” (“Of course not”) The coup de grace to this line of thinking came when I would point out that Daniel and company served in Babylon’s government and at very high levels.

If anything is representative in Scripture of an anti-godly earthly rule, it is Babylon. In the New Testament book of Revelation, Babylon is synonymous with the “Great Whore.” You can’t get more unsavory than that when it comes to governments and rulers. More than any other geopolitical entity referred to in Scripture, Babylon has come to represent the epitome of human rebellion against God.

And what was the end result of such “compromising” on the part of these four Hebrew men? The unthinkable happened – King Nebuchadnezzar, the ruler of this very same Babylon, came to embrace and exalt the God of Israel!

In the early 1990s, my wife and I were in language study in Taichung, Taiwan…. We were enrolled in what was called a bushiban, a private non-accredited school, for learning Mandarin….

Most of these Westerners, generally much older than their youthful teachers, were Christians come to save Taiwan. Each tiny classroom was barely large enough for two people – a comparatively diminutive Chinese teacher and a hulking Western student – separated by a narrow desk, awkward and embarrassed knees almost touching. In the middle of this scattering of classes was a lounge where students could rest their exhausted brains and let loose with pent-up mother tongues.

In one of these frequent English gab sessions, a very concerned student brought up the danger to be faced in eating local produce. Taiwan, because of its warm climate, has a crop rotation of two to three times a year, enabling farmers to take advantage of the precious little arable land. This student was concerned that the intensive use of the soil robbed the crops of any nutritional value.

Like the story of Chicken Little, the discussion grew in intensity with each passing break. By the time everyone left for lunch, people were in distress that their bodies were being deprived of essential nourishment and their children were in danger of developing mental disabilities.

Back in the serenity of our own home, my wife and I pondered this rampant anxiety and decided that there must be more facts than we had heard with this rumor because while the natives might look thinner than us, few appeared overly malnourished or mentally disabled. The rumor proved unfounded and we went on eating the local fare, much to our benefit.

In the book that bears his name, Jeremiah addresses similar concerns among exiles that have been carried off to Babylon. The letter, found in Jeremiah 29 and probably written eight to ten years after Daniel’s removal to Babylon, is directed toward these displaced Hebrews. Whether or not Jeremiah and Daniel were acquaintances and regardless of whether Daniel even knew of the letter, we see in Jeremiah’s instructions the very principles that informed Daniel’s incarnational approach.

In his letter, Jeremiah lays down three basic principles and follows up with some promises and warnings. First he tells the exiles: Settle down. Unpack your cultural baggage. And don’t spend your time thinking about going back home. This foreign land is now your home….

From "Night Shift"

I'm taking a break from blogging for a couple days as I work to meet a deadline in getting my book, Night Shift, to my editor this weekend. The current posting series, "The Truth Shall Set You Free," will return next week, but for now, here is an excerpt from Night Shift, to be published later this year:

There is a state of being to be valued more highly than becoming "Native." That is the state of being Real, and as the Velveteen Rabbit discovered, through which there is immense power to accomplish much good.

Written by Margery Williams nearly a century ago, "The Velveteen Rabbit" is a children's story about a stuffed toy that is loved by a boy and eventually comes to life. The rabbit becomes real only after he has lost his newness and has been reduced to a tattered state of wornness through much use.

If we are to become real to those among whom we serve, we will have to sacrifice our newness and our polish. We will have to become Real, not native. But this process is something that happens to us – like the Velveteen Rabbit, we do not seek after it. To become real means to become at once useful and expendable and extremely desired and valuable to others who are quite different from us. As the skin horse in the story says, "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

Again, the initial period of language and culture learning is valuable in making friends, of presenting yourself as a learner to others eager to be master teacher to the newcomer. That means being willing to make mistakes and being curious about the way others think. I remember well the amazement I felt when Dr. Robert Bolton, a scholar of Chinese languages and culture as well as of missiology, began asking for my observations on Chinese language and culture within weeks after I arrived in Taiwan. Here was a man who never lost his youthful desire and curiosity to grow, even from neophytes like me, who went on to earn his doctorate after retirement more for the growth than for the pedigree.

No matter at what stage we find ourselves in the assimilation process, humility and openness always make room for us in any new culture. Being real means getting out of your own skin, so to speak, and not worrying about what you look like. A child learns quickly because a child is less inhibited to look and act like a child, apparently a prerequisite for spiritual and personal growth. Once Jesus likened the door into the Kingdom of God as being as small as the "eye of a needle," a hyperbolic reference to the preposterous notion of the rich getting into God's culture apart from the power of God. (Mark 10:25) As Matthew quotes Jesus, "Unless we become like little children, we will never enter the culture we know as God's Kingdom." (Matthew 18:3)

Whether my neighbor Frank in Taichung or my co-worker Bill in Waco or Scott, the manager of my postal box in PDX, there are ready and willing mentors everywhere. And it is that very openness and humility in us as learners that makes us more effective communicators of the Gospel culture. For when our deliberate intent is to absorb for a higher purpose, the absorption becomes a two-way street because a spirit of absorption, engagement really, is contagious.

Real, not native, is the goal of incarnation.

The Truth Shall Set You Free - Part III

Yesterday, I wrote on Facebook that people often wonder where I'm going when I pose a thought or question. Sometimes I know where I am headed and just want to see what others are thinking about it before I say what I am thinking. As soon as I speak, I change the color on the "canvass" (the listener's understanding) and I lose the ability to know what the canvass looked like before I spoke. [Other times I pose a question to see how open people might be to my answer.]

Communication has three parts – one, me as communicator; two, the thing I am communicating, three, the reader or listener and what that person is really hearing from me. People do not hear what others say as much as they take what others say and process it through their own intricate web of personality, personal history, and perceived understanding. So sometimes it is helpful to understand our audience before we say too much, and honest questions are a good way to do that.

Or, sometimes, I may not know where my question is leading and I am wondering why it has not already been asked. I often start a blog posting in the same way: here is a thought, now where does it lead? I am intrigued by where the thought takes me. Start with a presumed truth (by me at least) that "God is love." Now how does that statement affect my relationships, my politics, my schedule for the week, my spending, and so on? Turn it into a question as in, "If God is love, then what does that mean for … (this situation or that issue or this person)?" You open all kinds of possibilities you never considered before. Doesn't hurt to challenge the assumption either: "Is God really love?" – and allow for the possibility that the answer is "No" and then pursue the idea, "What IF God isn't love?"

Leave it a statement ("God is love") and people are inclined to say "Amen" and keep on hating their neighbor or abusing their kids or ignoring the needy. Turn that statement into a question in some form and we cannot ignore it with a simple "Amen."

I am also intrigued by where a thought goes, because people often assume the trail. Just as often their assumptions are wrong. We'd still be reading this blog on parchment by candlelight if Edison had assumed the usual trail of thought in regards to electricity – after all, thousands of years of human understanding can't be all wrong, can it?

Take the maxim, "Charity begins at home." To make that statement doesn't necessarily make it true, does it? I might be inclined to ask things like: "If charity begins at home, what does that mean for me sending money to help in Haiti?" Or, "Is it really true that charity begins at home?" "Is that saying really in the Bible?" (a commonly held assumption) "Could it mean that we have to start learning charity right in our own familiar world first before we can express it elsewhere?" The list is endless and opens up all kinds of further questions that can lead to whole new understandings about life and about myself.

One of my favorite lines over the years has been that "Communists brush their teeth."

Now out of context, all kinds of responses can come to mind. Before you read on, say that phrase ("Communists brush their teeth") and then complete the sentence or give a response. Be honest and write it down, because as soon as I say what I am about to say, you will alter what you were going to say and maybe not even admit to yourself what originally came to mind.

I have used that phrase, "Communists brush their teeth," because in most circles, Communists are seen as the personification of Evil itself. Among the friends I have who are actually members of Communist parties, you'd be hard pressed to prove that point. But there are people who would stop brushing their teeth today if I equated teeth-brushing with something that is Communist. The point being that A + B does not always equal C. A: Communists are evil. B: Communists brush their teeth. C: Brushing your teeth is evil. Sounds ludicrous doesn't it. At least one of these assumptions is wrong or the equation doesn't work.

I have often used that statement, "Communists brush their teeth," to show that just because someone is a Communist does not mean that everything they think or do is wrong. You could as easily use it to show that just because someone does something right doesn't mean everything they do is right. In either case, we have just opened up a whole new set of windows in our thinking processes. And that is good because light shines in and light leads us to truth and truth sets us free. Or maybe we should question those assumptions, too. Did Jesus really say that? And if he did, what did he mean by that? Amen.