Savior complex

I've been watching a trend this year. A trend of the Well-off church to want to save the Hurting church. It often means the Western church wanting to save the Eastern church. It feels to us like a generous thing to do.

I noticed it with Meryem. She was, of course, from Sudan. She was going to be killed. We couldn't let that happen. Heaven forbid the persecuted church be persecuted. A pastor in Iran is in jail. We should get him out of jail. We should pressure, cajole, advocate for government interference (our government interfering with theirs that is). We should get him out of jail. Understand, please. I don't want anyone to die. I don't want anyone in jail.

It's just this. Our tendency to rescue people assumes a weakness on their part. They suffer (we think) because they are weak. We can help them (we think) because we are strong. We extend our strength on their behalf. We rescue them. It's true. We do. Often very successfully.

When the American's evacuated Iraq in the 90s, they took most of the Kurdish church leadership with them. Heaven forbid the church should be left behind to suffer. Jesus wouldn't have wanted the church to be persecuted, would he? He would have wanted the church to be strong, to be wealthy, to be free, to be part of the world's ruling super-power government system. We rescued the church right out of there. There was hardly a church left behind at all.

We would often, as good American Christians, have our government use drones against persecuting organizations, then we would to let the church lose a few drops of her own precious blood.

Without the shedding of blood, there is no atonement. Jesus chose to die.

Why is it that we cannot see that some of his followers might choose the same? And that we should not make it harder on them to do so. There are those who love their nation and their land and do not wish to be whisked out of it to safety with UN/ US protection. Christianity was not designed to be a risk free religion. It was meant to be undertaken at great personal sacrifice. Sometimes, we have to let others make the sacrifice. Not for our sake, certainly, but for their own.

I know it hurts. I have had friends choose to die. My parents lived their lives, intentionally, in harms way. I questioned the ethics of their doing so. I know. I worry for the people I know. It is friends of whom I say, we should let them take a risk.

Because often they know better than we do. In their churches, prayer meetings are heavily attended. In my church, Dave Ramsey's finances class is heavily attended. We know success, but the success we know is a worldly success. We have power--power of the purse, power of the gun. They have power on their knees and power in their hearts. The danger they face, they have the power to face. Even if it means death, or prison.

There is, of course, the other side. The justice seeking side. We are Christians and should seek justice. We should not let our brothers suffer unnecessarily. This is the side we come to automatically. It is our enraged, loving, possessive side. It is our "us vs them" side. We are the Kingdom of God and we have a sword side.

Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Would you have it in you to die in a prayer meeting for revival in the Middle East? Would you die on the chance that the land might be saved? That the blood of martyrs would be the seed of peace? I have known church leaders to pray for persecution where it might mean their death. Should we always be so quick to rescue?

Our need of fantasy

I consumed about 800 pages of fantasy in the last...week? I think it was just in one week. It was mostly written on a young adult level, though one book was from the grown-up section of the library. When it comes to fantasy, I am a voracious reader. I am not such a voracious reader of theology. I don't read Bible studies for fun. Nor history either. Nor philosophy. Nor the classics. Though I did major in all those subjects (a Humanities major) and get my Masters in Theology, I never really read those for fun.

Why? Because they are dry and dull? Not really. Neither would I say that history or philosophy are inapplicable to life. They are probably more applicable to life than almost anything else. And I don't have trouble understanding any of those subjects. I am an expert in them. I was literally trained in them since I can first remember. The first time I said I wanted to be a theologian was in elementary school. Right along with wanting to be a scientist and a ballerina, I wanted to be a theologian. It is the only one of my childhood dreams which I have currently fulfilled. Yet I read very little theology these days.

I read fantasy. Why?

Some days because I need the world to be solvable. Things like the Syrian civil war eat holes in my heart and I want to go and fight the bad guy. So I read stories of worlds in which that would be possible. Worlds in which all the evil comes from one villain and if you kill him, then the evil goes away. I want the world to be like that. Desperately.

Ultimately, I read fantasy for more a heroic fix. I read it because I believe it shows something about the world that we have lost. In fantasy, people's beliefs change their world so directly that the impact is immediately evident. In our real world belief's matter too. It just takes so much time for their impact to be evident that we lose the connection.

In fantasy word has power. You can tell something to fly--and it does. Characters have a voice. And their voice with their conviction determines their reality. I want my voice to determine my reality. In the big real and ugly world, it usually just gets drowned to one insignificant whisper in a crowd. People toss hurtful words around and laugh your hurt like it was an accident--when they were the ones who generated the words. The power of words, of voice, has been lost in reality. We remember it only in the realm of imagination.

Fantastical worlds work on the premise of spirituality. Something lives in people that can trump the mundane material cause and effect chain. Some people have more of it that others, and some objects are more easily imbued with it that others. But it is there. The spiritual is alive and interactive. Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it is evil. It is present and dynamic. If you talk about things that way in the real world, people roll eyes at you for being religiously fanatical. Perhaps it is just an alternate way of explaining reality.

Because that brings me down to the reason I think fantasy has been such a big hit with my generation. Our lives are becoming fantastical. We live with every day realities that used to be the stuff of science fiction. And stuff that used to be described in spiritual or fantastical terms has been explained away in relentless marches of dull fact. Our lives have been stripped of wonder. We read fantasy to remember how incredible the world actually is. We read it to recover our sense of inexplicable beauty. Our sense of impossibility. Our sense of morality.

And fantasy offers opportunity. We live in a phantasmagorical world. The situations we face in our lives have never been faced before. Our world is filled with wonders and horrors greater than the ancient magicians could possibly have known. Nuclear disasters. Flights to space. Hollogram projections. Google glass. Self-driving cars. Automated houses. Genetic engineering. How do you make sense of it all? How do you hold a sense of right and wrong when there is no historical precedent? No clear commandment? There is no religion that can tell you what to do from day to day in the modern world. If we are to explore the consequence of actions, the ethics of our new world, we have to do it in stories that look detached from reality. Fantasy creates a realm that looks historical, that looks ancient. In doing so, it gives us a safe space to examine possibilities for the future. If this was magic instead of science, would it be black magic? Or would it be something the White Wizard did? Or perhaps the neutral ground shared by both, magic neither good nor bad?

Confirmed to grace

I was confirmed this spring into the universal church, by a bishop with the ecclesiastical authority to do so.

It wasn't strictly necessary. I was baptized with "believer's baptism" at the age of ten, which is the age when most kids would be beginning the confirmation process. Of course, since I was baptized in a Plymouth Brethren congregation, there wasn't any bishop there to confirm me. And the baptism ceremony was unsatisfactorily informal. Nobody in the congregation believed it to be a means of grace. Quite a few people thought of it as a public sign in which I bound myself to a discipleship of obedience, largely defined as renouncing those things I had a natural inclination and gifting towards in order to prove my loyalty to God. And though on the day of my baptism, I felt it to be a means of grace, I also felt somewhat out of order in describing it.

There were also certain words that were not said at my baptism which in the years since I have heard said at others baptisms.
Question: Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces

                of wickedness that rebel against God?
Answer        I renounce them.

Question     Do you renounce the evil powers of this world
                which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
Answer        I renounce them.

Question     Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you
                from the love of God?
Answer        I renounce them.

An oddly different set of renunciations, none of which I ever had publicly made. All of which are of deep spiritual, perhaps even cosmological, significance. Followed by affirmations phrased quite differently than my personal testimony was at the age of 10.
Question     Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your 

                Savior?
Answer        I do.

Question     Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?
Answer        I do.

Trust in grace and love. Now, that. A) Trust. B) Grace. C) The belief that I am loved. D) The complete faith that I am relying on that love and grace instead of my ability to understand doctrine accurately or live a righteous life. As I recall, my ten year old testimony had a great deal to do with how I knew I was saved because I obeyed my parents better now. Perhaps an OK level of revelation for a ten year old. Hardly enough to sustain an adult faith journey.

Then the Bishop or Priest places a hand on the person's head, marking
on the forehead the sign of the cross [using Chrism if desired] and saying to
each one

N., you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked
as Christ's own for ever. Amen.

Assurance. Belonging. The laying on of hands for the confirmation in the Holy Spirit. Anointing. Blessing. Something that can actually give you both direction and strength to walk in it.

Needless to say every baptism I watched at my present (Anglican) church, I was jealous. And that just wasn't a good way to live my life. So my priest suggested the (technically unnecessary) rite of confirmation, to fill in some gaping holes and replace some negative associations. It was truly a blessing. I recommend it.

The Co-Inherence: a meditation

This stinks God. Your people have betrayed me. Why didn't you stop them? This hurts. I trusted them. They were supposed to be your presence here. Your temple. Your church. I can barely stand to look at it anymore.

I know. It did stink when that happened. I had poured so much into them. I couldn't stop them. The gang mentality--I hadn't experienced it like that before. It all came from the temple. I couldn't stand it anymore, knowing what was coming. I tried to purge it, send them all away. I couldn't be in that temple anymore. I destroyed it. My soul ripped, it was torn right with the curtain. It hurts. It still hurts.

My family thinks I am crazy. They don't understand. They think I made up memories. But I didn't. They think I shouldn't have the gifts I have, the love I have, the friends I have. They don't see the visions. They don't understand the storms in my mind, the pressure forcing me forward. They don't think I should be this far from home. They think I don't love them. They don't understand. The only way I can honor them is to see them as they are, as all of what they are. They tell me they love me, but they are stressing me out.

My mom came to get me once. Said I was mad. My brothers always thought I was the little, cracked, spoiled, crazy one. Magic, or trickery. Maybe demons. They never said the last one out loud to mom. I was the rape child of a Roman guard--they told me all the time. Virgin birth was crazy. It couldn't have happened. Mom must have been making stories for a boy to soft to know the truth. They didn't catch on very fast. Family. Supposed to love and trust you aren't they? Supposed to launch you out into the world. Mine had trouble with that too. It wasn't the human life I would have imagined for myself. Disappointing.

I love my country, God, my people. But they think I am an outsider. Wherever I go, I am never taken in, not really. Always at arms length. I could help, if they would just count me as one of them. If they would listen. This is torture, to watch them ruining themselves.

Oh, Jerusalem. Oh that they had let me take them under my wing. Like a mother I would have guarded them, but they would not have me. I was one of them, but they rejected me. They would not take me--their heir, their king. They would not listen. For four thousand years I have watched them suffer. They will not hear me. If they would, I could end this all for them. I could heal all their pain. This is torture. It's worse than anything they could do on the cross to me.

My back hurts. My wrists hurt. My head hurts. It's been aching for a month. I can barely move. My muscles are cramping. My face hurts. My toes and fingers want to curl in. I can't walk without being dizzy. What is this? Why am I in so much pain?

My back hurt. They kept whipping it. My head stings with thorns, but my hands are tied behind my back. I can't do anything. I'm dizzy. I've lost so much blood. I just have to get up this road. The nails. Why can't I open my hands? How have I lost control of my body? This body. I made bodies. I didn't make them to feel this much pain. Why am I in so much pain?

Where is God? Is he even around in this darkness? Can he live in this anger? Or does this come because he doesn't care? Have you abandoned the world? Have you abandoned me? You aren't rescuing me. You aren't stopping this. You know this isn't just. You know it isn't right. Will not the Judge of the world do right? Why should I trust you! Where are you now?

My God. My God. Why have you forsaken me? Where are you? Why is this world so dark? You are meant to be its light. I am it's light. I'm going out. I can't find you. It is all death. All empty. Can I give you my spirit if I can not find you? Is this the faith you are asking of your people? Do you know how hard this is? This is the last temptation. There can be nothing worse than this. It is finished.

Who can you trust?

The South is full of nice pastors and nice churches. It surprised me when I first came here. There was a nice church that I went to my first Sunday in college. The ladies there offered to give me a ride from campus every week if I wanted it, then passed my name over to a church where they thought I would fit better. I wore a head-covering and they were kind of over that at their church. The new church called, sent someone to pick me up, doted on me during the service and treated me to lunch at a members home that afternoon. The nice old ladies also told me to be safe when I went home for Christmas because I wouldn't want any of the Arab terrorists getting me. It was my last Sunday there.

Then there was a nice church that I went to for over a year. There were nice young couples who were leading the small group--until the pastors found out their marriage was in serious trouble. Then one of the pastors took over the small group with his wife in their nice and very big house. I was pretty happy with the church until the day that one pastor mentioned in passing that many women consider themselves abused when they really haven't been and it shouldn't be a cause of divorce among Christians. He said it nicely. He was also nice enough to sit down with me and talk about my concerns with his statement afterwards. He explained that it was verbal abuse he had been referring to. Physical abuse would be cause for separation. I never quite trusted him afterward. Yet surprisingly it was the same pastor who gave me the measure by which I have evaluated others since. "Never follow a man's teaching until you can see into his life." He was talking about the danger of idolizing television preachers and such not.

I turned it around on him instead. I couldn't see into his life at all. It was, as many leaders lives are, opaque. You have to take the man at his image and his word. You receive charisma. You are persuaded. His wife is perfect. His kids are good. They are always dressed for the cameras. And you never get to know them at all. Pastors often perfect a combination of hospitality and isolation. Everyone comes over and no one sees them as they are. Our family managed it. I know the job from the inside. It's why I can spot it every time.

The next time I picked a church, I picked the one I am in now. It leaders are....not perfect. One of them would be more at home as the head of a construction crew. It's what he did for years and he acts like it. He's brusque, not nice. If you go to him crying, he'll probably tell an awkward joke with a little hopeful half laugh and grin. Like salt, very salty. But he'll help you out with anything you need too: a pick up truck, a couch to sleep on for the night, a visit to the hospital. You can count on him, just don't count on him for soft words. Another pastor when I started attending was the head of an outdoor leadership program. If there is ever a pastor I have butted heads with, it was him. But he was a pastor I could have a fair fight with. There aren't many of those. He moved on to Kentucky and it made me sad. We had another pastor who was an avid Rolling Stones fan and would quote some piece of classic rock, something from 80s TV and some quircky piece of pop psychotherapy in every sermon. Not to criticize it--no, he believed in it. He really believed in old rock, 80s pop, and Freudian psychotherapy, and the Bible and Luther. Though we are an Anglican church. A church in Texas snagged him up, and we are the poorer and he the richer for it.

The biggest question mark for me though was our head pastor, or as we say in the Anglican tradition, our priest and rector. He was a great preacher, of quiet and short sermons (compared to the great expositional works of my father that is). But I couldn't figure out who his wife was for the first few Sundays. I was so used to wives being on display--the great pastor props. It kind of surprised me when I figured out that he had a wife and many children, all of whom were at the church. None of whom were poster kids. He would actually pay the kids a dollar if he used their lives as examples without their permission. They had privacy.

But what was behind the privacy? It turned out he was just a plain man. His wife is a beautiful and stylish woman who has things to do besides being a second, unpaid staff member. She runs one prayer meeting a month. As far as I know-that's it. His kids go to public school and have gymnastic competitions. Two of them are adopted. All of them are loved. His oldest daughter hates sitting alone during the sermon. His wife doesn't cross herself when she prays. One of his sons has now grown up and is somewhat involved with the youth group. All of them are allowed to be themselves. And our priest is himself too. Plain and simple and incredibly nerdy. He has encyclopedias on prayer books. He consulted them when I came to the office with a pastoral question. Then he told me he wasn't sure, but his best guess would be... And that he made a C in Pastoral Counseling and it was an accurate reflection of how good he was at it. Which is true, by the way. But he is a good pastor. He is the best pastor I have had yet because he doesn't try to be any bigger than, or any different than what he is. He doesn't veneer his family either. It's the first time I have trusted a pastor as a person. Also, he has two bishops he has to answer to. I don't have to be the one who would have to correct him. It's incredibly freeing. It's why, with all the faults of my church, I haven't left. I feel that it would be hard to find that kind of leader again. I am learning a lot from watching him. And I do watch.

Jeremiah's disappointment

What do you do when you grow up in a godly, pastoral community with good friends and relatives as mentors and it turns out that everything they were doing, saying, and teaching was dead wrong? They were predicting the results of political actions--wrong. They were teaching the importance of rituals--wrong. They were teaching you the nature of God--wrong. They were giving you great promises for prosperity in your life--and their promises were lies. And they were all so very wrong.

The churches they were in were dry and the Holy Spirit had given up and left decades ago. The pastors were abusing their wives and kids. The missionaries had mental health issues that would terrify your average psychiatrist. The salvation they were preaching turned out to be a water-baptized version of hypocrisy: a nice whitewash to hide all their junk behind. A pretense at a changed life had been erected only so that no one would question the insular, rotten existence they really lived.

When you found this, you would question God. You would doubt his existence, you would doubt his word, you would doubt any inspiration and calling you had ever felt. You would doubt his goodness, you would doubt his power. You would doubt his love. You would doubt his gift. You would doubt his church. You would question any sense of obligation you might have felt to this negligent Being and his screwed up people. And you would yell. A lot. And cry. Buckets worth. And sometime down the road you would find yourself in shriveled little heap on the floor, curled in a fetal ball, saying, "I don't know, God. I don't know you, and I don't know how to pray. I can't read the Bible and I don't know what it means. And I want to give up. This is too hard to believe. But if...If you might be something different than all this that I've seen... then maybe...."

How do I know that process? I know it because I lived it. Not just my life with my messy family, but a half dozen or more Missionary Kid friends with their families deserting them, abusing them, neglecting their basic medical needs then blaming them for their broken bodies. Divorces, sex addictions, alcohol addictions, domestic violence--all within the missionary community that I was supposed to revere. We were the priestly cast. This was the priestly cast. The role models of the church. This. Mess.

Jeremiah was a priest. A priest from a small town who had always looked forward to going to Jerusalem and serving in the temple. That is a priest's life goal. He was given the gift of prophecy and felt honored. He was going to join the ranks of prophet-priests. He had listened to them all his life. They gave the people of Israel such comfort, such good guidance. They lied.

Jeremiah discovers this and explodes! He states that no one, not a single person can be trusted (9:4-6). He asks God to punish people (12:1-4). He mourns the "heritage" which he has had to turn against (12:7-13). He tries to alter God's word by reminding him that the other prophets promised God would save Israel and not destroy it (14:13). He prays for people even though God had commanded him not to (14:19-22). He pleads with God when his prophecy dries up (15:15-18). And finally, after years of telling everyone the truth only to have them all go about their lives and make him look a fool, Jeremiah shouts to God: "O Lord, you have deceived me and I was deceived!" (20:7). There is no possible stronger way to call God a liar. The word of the Lord has become for Jeremiah "a reproach and derision all day long." He thinks "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," and then finds that he cannot avoid this. He has to speak what he has learned.

Jeremiah's is a priest who loves the priesthood, who loves the word of God, who loves the worship of God and who loved God himself. Yet he has been betrayed. He is betrayed by the priest hood. He is tricked as a young man thinking things to be the word of God that are not. The worship of God has been twisted out of reasoning yet kept enough like the original to be a parody. And who is God? How can a young man who has been so disappointed by his mentors and religious leaders possibly know? Yet whoever this God is, Jeremiah is his prophet. And he is driven by a love too strong to give up on his people, his message, his God. A betrayed and disappointed love that holds on.

What do you do when you have to speak against the community you grew up in love with? The people you were so proud to be a part of? The nation you were honored to be from? When they are wrong. When they punish you for speaking the truth. When you are expected to keep secrets and keep silence. When you want so much for your anger not be just anger but to bring someone healing somewhere. To build something. But everything around you is built so badly that you have to tear it down.

I hate it. I hate every time I have to speak out against it. I give up too easily. I lose my voice. I walk away from the conversations. I dream about joining a different community and abandoning my original one altogether. How can I prove to someone that their economics are ungodly? That their "calling" is ruining the basic structure of piety required of their lives? That the Bible they believe they "know" is not the same as the Bible the way it was meant to be read? How can I sound sane in the madness when I am so mad at them? How can I possibly communicate that my "heresy", my "disloyalty" comes from my love of this very community? That I am unwilling to let it go stubbornly down the drain. That I will love God--even if I have to totally relearn who he is. And all this is about as pleasant as having a tooth pulled. The same tooth pulled over and over again.

I guess that is why I try to hide sometimes. It's why I prefer not to be introduced as a missionary kid. Why I have definitely stopped using the term evangelical to describe myself. Why I go for months without reading the Bible because I am so wounded by its interpretation. Yet its words echo around and around, gaining new meaning with greater distance--a big picture.

I am grateful for Jeremiah's moody and depressed Scriptures. Without them, I wouldn't have the narrative I need to know what to do with the betrayal of this thing called the church. I'm not sure that I do know entirely even with Jeremiah. His story isn't hopeful. It just provides one avenue that I can live. One life in which I can see a bit of my own and grasp onto a tiny bit of something like hope, or at least like determination.

I'm not sure what irritates me more, but let me give you a few scenarios.

1) That brilliant evangelical professor who managed to avoid all liberal, feminist, Catholic and Orthodox sources--and looks at you like they would be totally and obviously irrelevant to his topic.

2) That brilliant and liberated seminary graduate who assumes that since you are a woman you obviously have the highest respect for and agree with all the feminist authors he has ever read--though all those authors disagree with each other.

3) That well meaning church person who takes care to make sure you understand that the gospel is the main message of the Bible--without asking you any questions and therefore missing the fact that you just spent the whole last year teaching this.

 I am still struggling with the feelings that I got all last year though this summer. The looks and comments that people would give me suggested that my teaching Bible was either somehow a cute and sweet little thing, or a dangerous liberal feminist experiment, or else that my views were horribly old fashioned and I wasn't nearly daring enough. And though the last is closest to the truth, what I'm wondering is, How the hell did I manage to get accused of all three at once? I love theology, but my experience in the world of Bible scholars so far has not been very encouraging. I'm torn between wanting to move to more daring communities where I would be more welcome or moving on to a different discipline all together. I have several other fields I enjoy just as much that don't result in nearly the same level of personal attack. But then I think, wouldn't that just be giving in? Isn't that exactly what all those nay-sayers want? I will have lost the right to be on the field if I take my ball and leave now. And yes, I do want to play on the same field as the men, in the same sport as the men, and be as good as the men. Theology isn't dependent on body mass or the circumference of your biceps. So I think I ought to be allowed.