Lack and Plenty

I grew up in the American South but was born in the plain states, near the Yanktoni reservation in South Dakota. We visited our grandparents every summer, giving us a respite from the Memphis heat and providing us a small dive into the world of crop farming and small town rural life. Post retirement, my grandparents were leaning into being farmers and I learned a lot about how important things like soil quality and water access could be key for survival.

The thing is that the American South is fertile land and flush with water. I had never before considered what it was like for the LACK of water to be the problem. Floods and rising waters like creeks that washed out roads and bridges were the dangers around water at home. Well, that and the Cottonmouths, sneaky river snakes.

Now I live in the American Mountain West, and our relationship here with water is much different from both the agricultural plains or the river rich South. Here, fire can consume 150,000 acres in an afternoon and there isn’t enough water anywhere to put it out. On the edge  of the Continental Divide, we are very conscious of water. We know that what falls on our western slope flows into the Pacific, and is “owned” by many communities along that route. Water that falls on our Eastern side feeds into the plains rivers and eventually reaches the Atlantic.

And so water reclamation is the name of the game. How can we capture and re-use water? How can we stop its use by the extraction industries? How can we close some of our water systems and not be so wasteful? How do we shift our relationship with water from one of commodification and control to one of respect and asset-based building?

As long as our stance is one of lack, we will choose poorly. Lack is blinding, and creates looping dark holes in our minds that fulfill all their own expectations. There are also dangers to being in a context of plenty without awareness, as this leads to complacency and an assumption of abundance when in fact, control is being seeped away. This very nearly happened recently in Memphis, TN, when the now canceled Byhalia Pipeline threatened the integrity of the Memphis Sands, a huge aquifer that supplies clean water to the region.

We don’t balance lack and plenty well. We tend to live wholly in one or the other. This isn’t a simple matter of whether one sees a glass with water in it as half full or half empty. This isn’t about pessimism or optimism, although their shadows of cynicism and naïveté do reflect this conflict between lack and plenty, this tension.

This week I am preparing for a Seminar Series I am doing on Scarcity & Abundance. And I’m wrestling with the various ways in which we smack right into both these things. The more subtle bits will make themselves known.

And so water again bubbles up. It’s fundamental, as we ourselves are mostly made of it, the planet is mostly water, and we require it to remain alive. And yet for much of our lives, many of us have never considered water -where it comes from, how it gets to us, where it all goes. We turn the tap and it flows. Usually. But even if you live in Flint, MI, or along one of the compromised fracking field routes, your toilet flushes and your laundry works. You can get water FREE at most restaurants. (Remember that one. It won’t last if we don’t change.)

One of the many ironies of this situation is that right now, very few of us actually drink enough water. I know I don’t and I even like water! (I’m told by many friends the reason they don’t drink enough water is that they hate the taste. I don’t get that. Even hard water is interesting.)

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.” -Joni Mitchell

We bounce between lack and plenty, and it may be true that we often don’t realize it. I used to be a youth minister and had a special affinity for Middle Schoolers. One of my favorite games to play with them is something called “I Want, I Need, I Have” -swiped 100% in name, if not totally in content, from The Journey to Adulthood curriculum, a progressive Protestant course that attempts to equip young people with what they need to be functional adults.

This game invites a deep inventories not only of items but of attitudes. We catalogue belongings each young person may ‘own’ or have access to, what they don’t or can’t get, what they believe they need to be certain things or claim certain identities. The game invites an exploration of the balance between want and need, something I wish more adults had a handle on.

For all of our own human issues with this tension, and we have wrestled with lack and plenty for a great deal of our history, the last 100 years have had the added layer of mass media advertising. And that industry has been all about perverted images of both Lack and Plenty. Perhaps a piece of the whole conversation must include some deconstruction of messaging techniques themselves.

Fear is also deeply entwined with Lack and Plenty. I can hear blues notes behind me as I think on this, and am struck by how familiar a story it is, the embracing of the fear and then its alchemy into empowerment and fuel for action. And I wish I couldn’t, but I also hear the screeching riffs of angry mutterings as fear hardens hearts and closes borders.

We live in a time of Plenty. We have all we need, yet all we see around us is Lack. And Lack is there -a lack of justice, a dearth of compassion, an abyss of accountability. But within each of these struggles is also Plenty, for when they are based out of love, our actions are generative.

“I have come that you might have life more abundant.” -Jesus

Heresy of a Christian Nation 2020

July 4, 2020

We’ve recently passed the sixth anniversary of the Hobby Lobby decision, which has evolved as having marked anti-worker and anti-rights effects. It has codified as acceptable a deeply perverted stance of holding morality and purity thresholds as barriers to full employment benefits and healthcare. This is the sermon I preached immediately after the decision was announced in June of 2014. Because this was a preached sermon, the post is a little bit longer than usual.

From Citizen Christian: A Book of Sermons (2016), a collection of sermons I’d preached over the previous decade.

The Heresy of a Christian Nation

Original delivery: July 6, 2014, at First Baptist Church of Denver

Opening note: A few days before this Fourth of July holiday weekend, the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision that Hobby Lobby had a right to deny insurance coverage for certain types of medical care to its employees based on religious grounds. “Closely-held corporations” would be given the right to deny certain benefits to particular employees. This decision changed our legal landscape on many levels, and I am not a lawyer. But it also changed the moral landscape, and that very much is my realm.

The notion that America is a Christian nation is a bad historical interpretation of the facts of our country’s founding. The idea itself is unconstitutional; it also doesn’t hold up to biblical or theological scrutiny. I don’t know why Paul’s jeremiad against a dependence on the Law isn’t heeded by more Paul-quoting Christians.

The heresy of a Christian Nation stands against the Gospel of Jesus, and its message of liberation. I imagine here what an epistle to America could sound like now. This must be include allegiance to a different Kingdom, the Kingdom of God.

Romans 7:13-25 (The Message)

I tend to surprise people with my love for Paul. Paul is often misunderstood in who he was and what he was saying.  Many churches seem to give their interpretations of Paul the weight of the Gospel. Sometimes I wonder whether these folks are following Christ or Paul, a question that would horrify Paul himself.

One of the things I love about Paul is how willing he is to let his humanity show. His letters are often full of confusion, pain, and struggle. Shortly after the passage we just heard in Romans, Paul encourages us with the knowledge that God’s Spirit dwells within us. But Paul also talks openly about our inner sin, our human capacity for evil and apathy, anger and judgment, as he does here. And through it all, Paul reminds us to lean on one another as we learn to turn toward God, as we are continually remade as Christians.

It’s easy to assume that Paul is talking to the individual Christian. So much of it sounds personal. I do this all of the time, taking guidance and inspiration from Paul’s words personally. 

But nearly always, and certainly here, Paul is talking to communities, to the new church, to small groups struggling with how to live as a newly made people. The letter he wrote to the new Christians in Rome is different from his other letters because this was not a community he had founded, visited, or knew well at all. Some scholars surmise, in fact, that Romans is the most ‘essay-esque’ of the Pauline books, the least personal and most corporate.*1

Paul is speaking to a mixed community of new Christians. Some are Jews, some Gentiles, some Hebrew, some Greek, and always there is the foreign Other, as you find in any major city. And even 2,000 years ago, Rome was a significant urban space. 

So out of these disparate backgrounds, what has bound them together as Romans? The law. Who you were as a Roman citizen, or as a resident alien, was codified, laid out, known, and understood. Jews, and still some Jewish Christians, had their own religious laws, but if they were Roman citizens, that was the shared law, ensuring the common good.

Rules abounded in the world of Paul’s context. Rome had its own law. Greek culture and Jewish culture had values, expectations, and rules. Keeping the law was how one lived both as a unique people and as a member of a pluralistic society.  

What Paul isn’t saying is something simple like: The old way was sinful. Or: The secular world, or the worlds of previous faith systems, are bad or evil and have now been replaced by Jesus. 

No. What Paul is saying in our passage today and throughout the letter to the Romans is that sin insidiously uses what is good and holy to its own selfish and perverting ends. Did you catch that in our reading? 

Sin simply did what sin is so famous for doing: using the good as a cover to tempt me to do what would finally destroy me. (Romans 7:13)

And that’s what I kept finding myself saying in myriad ways this week in hundreds of conversations, both face-to-face and throughout social media. Today, being Christian means using secular and civic law as a weapon, as a means of control. It is now deemed legal to punish employees if their behavior is not within an arbitrary set of religious rules. Our common and civic law itself should be used to ensure a public good, but it is instead providing the means to harm and control others.

This is not new, of course. Our own Baptist forefather Roger Williams was expelled from Massachusetts in the 17th century because he would not conform to the laws requiring a puritanical Christianity. Williams believed that his faith required him to nurture a place where not only could he worship in his Baptist ways, but also where others could meet God how they would or would not. Freedom of religion. Freedom of worship.

Paul obviously thought it important to emphasize the point about our relationship with the law being a breeding ground for sin. He brings it up again and again in various ways, and I believe it’s a needed message for our churches today.

What might a new epistle to the Christians of America say? It might say that the law has created space for sin to eat away at our identity as followers of Christ. It has become a wedge into our hearts so that sin slips in and flourishes. Self-righteousness, judgment, anger, exclusion, revenge, punishment, and greed pass as Christian action in this, our sin-sick soul.

The community behavior that stands against the reign of God, the fruitful soil for sin here is the notion that America is a Christian nation. 

Oh, how I wish we acted as Christian nation in our civic policies. The U.S. Constitution states that we will have no establishment of a national religion. But what if we took that notion of Christian nationhood seriously as an ethical guide? What if we determined that for those of us who call ourselves Christians, we would behave as though this were a Christian nation?

We would have treated the native peoples we found when we arrived with respect and honor, and we would continually be moving to honor treaties forged with tribal leaders. We would never have enslaved fellow human beings to fuel our national appetites and growth, and we would reconcile this horror in all ways possible. We would feed all of the hungry without exception. Prisons, if needed at all, would be places of reconciliation and healing. 

No one would go without safety and shelter. All would be fed in the many ways that we are starving. 

Clearly, we fall short of this Gospel call. We also fall short of any Hebrew traditions of debt forgiveness, caring for the stranger, the alien, the widow and orphan. So banish any belief that we as American people adhere to broad Judeo-Christian ethics.  

A nation based on Judeo-Christian ethics seems like a pretty good idea. I mean, even Jesus said that He has sheep we know nothing about (John 10:16) so I guess this Christian nation would need to be religiously tolerant, as well. 

Seems like a great idea. To a point. 

As Paul would say, it’s not following the law that is the root of sin. It’s when the law enables sinful actions that we must repent and turn back toward God. We’re in trouble when adhering to any law or set of rules becomes more important than acting out of love. The law itself is not the problem. It’s what we let the law do to our hearts that nurtures sin.

I used to consider Hobby Lobby to be an ethical option if I needed craft supplies and the overtly gay-friendly Michael’s was closed or not nearby. Hobby Lobby may close on Sundays, taking a corporate Christian Sabbath, but it was at least unofficial policy that any Jewish employees could be exempt from Saturday shifts. We all need more Sabbath time in our lives, and to me that policy felt like a healthy manifestation of faith lived out in a corporate way. Hobby Lobby paid its employees a living wage and offered a generous benefits package. This kind of just labor practice is another way our faith can reach into the public sphere.  

But when the law is used as a weapon to exclude and to name people in or out of anyone’s definition of Christian righteousness, law has become an idol and a tool of sin. Christians who work for any of the other recent court plaintiffs or ANY business or organization and who want to follow their own version of Christian law and righteousness should feel free to do so. Yet while technically now legal via Supreme Court decision, threatening or harming another person in the name of that freedom is wrong.

I might disagree with their biblical interpretations of those who don’t want to pay for select medical treatment or procedures, and probably do, but I know we all reach God in different ways. But this recent debacle in our common civic life is a timely example of what Paul called sin doing what sin does, using the good to do its own destructive mischief.

Examples of sin hiding within the law are all around us. For example, it seems perfectly righteous to deny services to those who do not pay for them – in the eyes of the law, anyway. But when hundreds of impoverished households in one of the most economically depressed cities in our country have had their water shut off, as is happening this very moment in Detroit, we have strayed far from the core of our call as Christians. When children fleeing violence and persecution in their native countries are corralled and jailed like livestock, we have strayed far.

Christ is the only remedy for this, Paul would say. Something new now binds us as a people, something new guides our hearts and our actions. Paul would remind us that this struggle for Christian identity is ongoing. 

We so desperately want the law to save us. We so desperately want to do what is right and to have a set list of behaviors to follow in order to be aligned with God. But when this struggle is our overwhelming goal and mission, we have been misled. 

A new letter to the Christians of America would assert that many of us are doing the wrong work in an attempt to fulfill what we believe is God’s law. Our real work is to live out Christ’s commandments to love God and one another with all that we are. Our real work is to throw open our arms and our doors and our hearts in celebration of the abundance around us, in gratitude for the example of Christ’s faith and devotion to this deeper law. 

This is much more difficult than following set rules, than being led by law. Christ knows that’s true. Paul knows that’s true. You and I know that’s true.

Let us pray.

1) Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J., Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 33, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 77.

The Heresy of Alignment

I have been doing community development work and political advocacy all my adult life. I have advanced degrees in the topics, and have lived and worked in several American cities. But I have settled in Denver, CO, and notice some trends here that amplify an issue I’ve been mulling for a while, the heresy of alignment.

Where I live is an unusual place, socio-politically. Very different types of coalitions and tables exist here. Alliances shift and new circles are drawn. Some councils and such have expectations of permanency or requirements of confidentiality, but these are fewer in number than I’ve encountered in other places. Essentially, I have found it to be a place where if you can show up in any of a variety of ways, it’s noticed and appreciated. Showing up matters, actions speak, and first impressions are regularly adapted.  It’s possible that these characteristics be appropriately claimed for more of the state as well; I suspect this to be true. I just don’t know yet for sure. #ComingSoon.

But one of the as of yet unchallenged realities of political life here can be a dizzying array of authenticity tests and purity warrants. These proscriptions are especially strong in the social media realms. I think one reason coalitions and communities are formed here more easily than in other places is that schism is also a matter of course.

We know that a significant obstacle to quality broad conversation in current American culture is our siloing, our thought-segregation, our echo chambers. A major engine of this inward movement is our desire to find for others who think like us, and who agree with our basic sense of ethics. There’s nothing wrong with this, not really.  But alone, it’s dangerous. Drawn lines -which may or may not ever be put aside- are often present but invisible and unspoken until transgressed. Sometimes, a desire for conformity and alignment supersedes the need to act. 

Even the “search for common ground” can become fuel for growing and nurturing only like minded conversations when common belief dominates common action in whom we ask to the next table, in who is deemed worthy. Our larger works would benefit if we sought out differentiation among stakeholders, if this were an ethic for all collaborative work, if we formed coalitions with a high value on difference instead of an insistence on alignment. What if we sought out varying assets, skills, mindsets in an attempt to build something new from the intersections of where these things meet?

It’s not that finding like-minded allies is a bad thing. In fact, doing this is necessary for any movement or endeavor. We each need peers and colleagues and our organizations and programs need a wider community. But even within a themed or wholly aligned circle, different bodies do different things, have varying specialities and opinions. Clearly, there is no collaboration where all parties can have completely the same function, nor any group of people wherein all members believe precisely the same thing. 

We also seek like-minded groups because they make us more comfortable. And again, nothing wrong with comfort in and of itself -we all need it at times. Yet an underlying tension to comfortableness as a goal is always the reality that growth, development, and change only happen when we are at least slightly uncomfortable, where there is conflict of some kind.

We also seek ‘alignment’ when at some level, we honestly believe we know best, have the best solutions, or the most appropriate resources. When we believe these things, we confuse understanding with agreement. When alignment or agreement are not immediately forthcoming, we reiterate our facts (or process, or model, or rationale) again and again, ensuring even further the inability to hear each other. There is also a fundamentally toxic miasma of paternalism, colonialism, privilege, and hubris enshrouding arguments for alignment. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to assume YOU are the one with whom others must align.

It is also incredibly frustrating to be the one who believes you yourself have failed to communicate well or thoroughly or in just the right way. This is happens easily when agreement from others is your goal. Understanding is deeper, requires acceptance, and doesn’t always lead to consensus. You can truly understand a thing you don’t agree with, and may never align with. On the basis of understanding and acceptance can come respect, and an increased capacity for common work.

Behaving like any heresy, alignment taken too far perverts the concepts of solidarity themselves. If the betrayal of an idea -a heresy- be, as my first spiritual director proposed, simply a good idea taken too far, I would agree and add an important second. Presence of perversion. I know a heresy for truly dangerous when this twisting of a core concept or tenet happens. The search for alignment is pushing all my buttons pressed by other deadly heretics of our age: Joel Osteen and the Heresy of the Prosperity Gospel, Franklin Graham and the Heresy of Male Exceptionalism. We know them, these figures who preach such abominations. I don’t have a primary heretic on whom to hang this obsession with alignment.

Instead of establishing impossible vows of alignment, we must establish undeniable areas of common good, common work, and common appreciation. A friend recently told me a story of playing in a long established orchestra in the only urban area within a large consevative section of the state. These musicians have been playing together for decades, and know each other well. They are also all over the political and religious spectrum -Trump voters, Green party advocates, the apolitical, churchgoers, and atheists all sharing scores, rehearsing and performing. These orchestra players have done the common work of showing up and making something transformative and generative. They are aligned only by purpose and intent and not belief or opinion. They make music. 

We undermine the Heresy of Alignment by leaning into a theology of difference, a celebration of the wild diversity of Creation. We must adopt those unlike us into our ranks, seek out divergent models that overlap ours but aren’t contiguous, find entities and voices far too long left out or dismissed. We must put aside the seduction of being “right” or “better” in any competition and instead focus on what can be built. This does not mean abandoning any principles of justice or discernment. Not everyone will be able to be a part of every collaboration; not every entity can sit down with every other. Sometimes, the divide might be too wide, damage done too deep. Not only is this alright but it is to be honored and heeded.

But like any orchestra, we all have voice, and we can never really tell how our voices will blend with an instrument completely foreign to our usual repertoire. The Heresy of Alignment crowds out the difficult and uncomfortable, and sabotages the deep and sustainable change our world requires.