God's disrespect for walls, borders, and boundaries

Look closely at the painting below. Few paintings in Christian history have sparked as much of a dialogue as this one, attributed to the early renaissance artist and architect, Giotto di Bondone.

Legend has it that when Francis traveled to Rome to convince Pope Innocent III to give official approval to his new monastic community, the Pope, who had just launched a crusade to end another group of upstarts called the Albigensians, was wholly unimpressed with young enthusiast. Later that night, though, the Pope dreamed that the church in Rome (and seat of the papacy) began to shake and would have come tumbling down except that a brave Francis stepped in to prop it up.

Giotto’s brilliance is his ability to interpret the still very relevant ironies and incongruities implied in this story. While a plump pontiff, the most resourced man in the known world, sleeps in a well-adorned room attended by two servants, the richness of his church becomes its weakness as its weight threatens to crush him in his sleep. Only a shoeless beggar, who notoriously had no love for ostentatious buildings, stands between the Pope and his death, and presumably the death of authentic Christianity, by his own opulence.

Beyond the more obvious critique of clerical hypocrisy, which has pretty much been a given at any point in Christian history, the painting cautions the viewer against defining what the church is too rigidly. Francis probably had no intention that his monks would show up regularly to a cathedral, practice mass, or give alms in any way that the Pope might recognize as real church.  But the viewer knows (about a century after the fact) that what one person hastily writes off as another naïve attempt at “religionless Christianity” becomes another person’s sainthood in hindsight. Yet it’s not as simple as just saying that Francis’ informal band of mendicants is the real church over against the hypocritical establishment. That would be to rest the legitimacy of the church on our piety, which is a recipe for that very same hypocrisy. To muse on the painting further is to realize that Francis himself must see some value in the hoary, old institution, at least enough to justify propping it up. In fact, historically, it's not clear at all that the faith could have survived very long on charisma alone without at some point embracing the necessary evil of bureaucracy. And to say, as many in our time want to, that the Spirit can only work through the former and not the latter is a fairly prejudiced reduction of the Spirit.

The painting is arguably more relevant for us in our own pluralistic context than it was for that in which it was painted. Any church that will have any vitality in our own pluralistic context will be able to nimbly bind and loose the boundaries that define legitimate church participation. Any leader worth his or her salt intuitively knows this. We’ve all learned to negotiate strong working relationships with the aging hippie who is always game to serve at the soup kitchen but who hasn’t been to worship in forty years or the spouse of a key leader who is kind-of-a-little-Catholic-but-mostly-kind-of-agnostic. On the flipside, we’ve all dealt with the pew curmudgeon who couldn’t embody a pittance of God’s love to stave off his own execution but who, God bless him, has shown up to worship 52 weekends a year since Shem came off the boat. The proper Lutheran answer to the question of which of these represents the real church has always been neither…and also both.

We are all hypocritical rubbish. And we are all indispensable witnesses to the good news. The deciding factor, actually, the only factor, is whether it pleases God to use us as agents of grace and hope in the world (and a faithful disciple doesn’t care if he or she is the reason that grace and hope happen, only that they happen).

This really eases all the pressure about deciding who’s one of us and who isn’t.

Q: Is so and so still a part of the church even though she’s been experimenting with that Barnes & Noble, new age-y nonsense?

A: Yes, if God decides to utilize her in that way.

Q: What about so and so who hasn’t gone through new membership?

A: Yes, if God decides that that’s his call.

Q: What if he hasn’t been baptized?

A: No. Impossible…Just kidding, the creator of the universe might be able to work that one out too.

Questions about membership and commitment don’t become unimportant. But the edge is taken off of them when salvation is defined as something that happens to the world, not to church members. Everything else becomes a functional question (like any business or non for prof might ask) about how we as church can better serve our institution’s purpose—in our case, to deliver the good news to the world. Why baptize? Not because it “saves” you, but because we as people require some tangible sign of God’s claim upon our lives. Why gather around the communion table? Not because it “saves” you, but because we as people require some way to embody God’s clear future in the ambiguous present. Why become a member? Not because it makes you somehow more official as God’s instrument of grace but because a team functions better when it knows who its own players are. The primary question, then, is never “who’s in the church” but “what is the church for, and how are we doing at that?”

As my friend and ministry partner Nathan Swenson-Reinhold likes to say, "The Gospel is non-negotiable. Everything else is research and development."

why soccer? why now? because millennials.

There is a brilliant scene in the Mel Brooks’ western spoof, “Blazing Saddles” that, I believe, helps explain the cultural shift that the United States is experiencing right now. Couldn’t explain the context if I wanted to, but the long and short is that the viewer initially thinks the scene is set in the dusty main street of a typical western town, until, as only Mel Brooks can do, the camera zooms out to reveal that we are actually seeing a movie within a movie. What appeared to be a dusty town in the wild west was actually a soundstage lined with cheap, two-dimensional facades that only look like buildings on the face.

This is what has happened to the myth of American exceptionalism in the time it has taken the millennial generation to come of age. People from all generations but, I suggest, especially Millennials have walked around to the backside of the exceptionalism façade and seen that there is nothing there. If we have seen behind the façade and put the lie to the myth that America is innately more faultless, more inventive, more industrious, and in all ways superior to the rest of the world, it should not be credited to us as some profoundly clever insight. Anyone could have seen it all along. Many chose not to.

Whether one is disposed to believe in American exceptionalism or not has little to do with his or her own talent for critical thought and everything to do with how much he or she stands to gain from believing in it. It is a claim so sweeping and unjustified that it almost begs to be deconstructed with little mental exertion, but one is far more likely to deconstruct it if one is sixty thousand dollars in student debt, has worked two or three unpaid internships to even be considered for a job with a livable salary, and has too much life-expectancy to pretend with the rest of one’s society that ecological choices don’t have consequences.

So it’s not  that Millennials are particularly gifted at seeing through facades. They have simply run out of time to believe that which, deep down, we all knew was a lie but which was too convenient of a lie to reject.

This is why I believe it’s not mere happenstance that America has suddenly embraced soccer. This world cup has drawn more American viewers than either the concurrent NBA finals or the 2013 World Series. And, contrary to the view of naysayers who claim that this spike in popularity is only a quadrennial phase that we go through and that it means nothing, the MLS has grown from 10 to 19 teams in just 18 years with plans to grow to 24 by 2020. That is lightning fast in the world of professional sports. Yet, rather than seeing its talent pool diluted by this expansion, the league continues to lure big name players across the pond closer and closer to their prime while, conversely, seeing it’s own home growns have increasing success in Europe. And I’d venture that far more Americans are familiar with the Ronaldo of Real Madrid in Spain than were familiar with the former Brazilian top player of the same name not ten years ago.

That this seemingly neutral change in entertainment preferences points to a cultural shift that is much larger than itself is attested to not just by those who have joined the global party but by the almost violent reaction of those, like Ann Coulter, who haven’t. Undaunted by the danger of parodying herself, she calls the embrace of soccer a “sign of the nation’s moral decay.”

Few but Ms. Coulter, mind you, would suggest that a sport can carry a certain low moral value that’s not based on its inherent violence, its gratuitous use of resources, and its potential for injury—all things that she considers soundly moral and American. But here is my point: the things that the exceptionalist mindset finds most repulsive have become some of the deepest yearnings for those who have allowed themselves to walk behind the façade—maybe the majority of Millennials.

To the exceptionalist who continues to purposely believe the lie told in the street between wild western facades, it’s a mark of superiority to speak only one language to which the rest of the globalizing world must adapt. But to the one standing in the emptiness behind the façade, being monolingual is a cause for embarrassment.

To the exceptionalist, embracing a game that was first embraced elsewhere would be a capitulation of America’s presumed uniqueness. But behind the façade, it seems more likely that the other seven billion people who love futbol are onto something.

To the exceptionalist, a new sex-symbol for men who is as clean-cut, skinny, and immaculately dressed as your average European footballer is an offense to a commercially crafted image of manliness that is supposed to be drawn to bacon cheeseburgers that require you to "man up" and gas-guzzling trucks that are “built Ford tough.” But behind the façade, one sees the deep insecurities sitting just beneath that type of obsessive masculinity.

For the same reason, to the exceptionalist, a game described as “beautiful” should not be a draw for a purposely misogynistic worldview that is deeply troubled when males show any hint of effeminacy. But behind the façade, one wonders if it’s really our effeminacy that has caused so many problems in the world.

To the exceptionalist, Americans, by definition, cannot and should not learn from or adopt anything that first developed elsewhere. But behind the façade, one wonders if a little more humility and worldliness is such a bad thing.

It’s not accidental that soccer has found its moment in the states. I sense in our culture not just the love of a good party but a deep yearning to not be so exceptional anymore, if it should continue to isolate us from the world community.

That, and I love soccer.