#firstworldproblems, they actually are killing us

Nice. An email from my Starbucks Rewards team – “Congratulations! The next one’s on us” – Let’s see, 6:28pm. If I leave now I can grab a drink and still make my meeting at 7 – “Welcome to Starbucks. What can we make for you with today?” – One…uh…iced grande…Sorry, iced half-caf grande one pump vanilla breve iced coffee with milk – “Alright, one iced half-caf grande one pump vanilla breve iced coffee with milk. And you wanted that one pump vanilla in addition to the classic syrup?” – Oh, sorry, I meant instead of – “Alright so…” – Oh, and I forgot to say, light ice. Really sorry – “Ohhh kaayyy, so, I have an iced half-caf grande one pump vanilla (instead of classic) breve light ice iced coffee with milk?” – That’s right – “Ok, sir, I’ll see you at the first window…Hi there. That’ll be $2.30” – K. My card is on my phone – “Alright. Here’s your receipt. Your drink will be right up” – Oh. Crap. I forgot I had a reward for a free drink – “Ohhh kaayyy. No problem. I can undo that, if I can just see your phone again.” – Aww. You know what? The app booted me for some reason. Just need to sign in – (Try the usual numeral and letter password) – “We’re sorry. Invalid username/password. Please try again. Forgot username? Forgot password?” – (Try the usual numeral and letter with one cap password) – “We’re sorry. Invalid username/password…” – (Try the usual numeral and letter with one cap and one symbol password) – “We’re sorry…” – You know what? I might just need to pull around and come inside. I don’t want to hold up the line – “Ok, sir” – (Pull around. Park. Click “Forgot password.” Open new tab. Open yahoo.com) – “Bieber’s Bad Hair Day.” “WWE SummerSlam 2014: What We Learned” – Man, I have got to switch to an new email provider (Try to click email icon on mobile app. Accidentally hit “Man Fakes Own Death to Avoid Upcoming Wedding.” Click back. Click email icon.) – “Would you like to upgrade your yahoo mobile app?” – (Click “later”) – “Username” – (Type email address) – “Password” – (Type usual numeral and letter with one cap and one symbol password) – “Is this a new device that you are using? Would you like us to send a verification code to the phone number ending in 4345? Or another email address?” – (Click “phone number ending in 4345.” Wait. Check emails. Refresh. Wait. Open new tab. Click bookmark: ESPNFC. Click story about Luis Saurez, “I Will Not Bite Again.” Chuckle. Share on Facebook.) – “Username” – (Type old Hotmail address) – “Password” – (Type usual numeral and letter with one symbol password. Open text messages.) – “Your verification code is 30510” – (Open yahoo tab. Type 30510. Open email from “Starbucks support team.” Click “Reset password” link) – “We’re sorry. This link has expired.” – (Open Starbucks App. Repeat process to resend password. Open Yahoo tab. Refresh…Refresh…Refresh. Open email from “Starbucks support team.” Click “Reset Password Link.” Type usual numeral and letter password.) – “We’re sorry. You cannot use a password that has already been associated with this account.” – Are you kidding me!? It was my username that was wrong! Whatever (walk inside). Hi I was just in the drive through. I ordered the iced coffee with the breve and the vanilla. I’ll just pay in cash if that’s alright. – “Ok. Sir. We’ll make you a new one.” – Actually. I’m on my way to a meeting, if you already have the other one sitting around. – “Ohhh kaayyy.” – Thank you. Sorry (Grab drink. Run out to car. Start to back up. See white Explorer in the way). Oh, C’mon! Who is this clown? MOVE! (Sigh) I’m gonna be so late…

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Yes. Very astute. Point taken. “First world problems” tend to be far less dire than those of other parts of the world.

Given our frequency of heart disease and expenditures on anti-anxiety and blood pressure medications, though, it wouldn't be strictly accurate to call them harmless.

And if you’ve actually engaged with the very poor in other parts of the world, you’ve probably started to have some unorthodox thoughts about this sort of thing. One of them is this: whatever else it may be to fight for your own and your kids’ survival on a daily basis, as so many people are forced to around the world, it is dignified. Yes, it’s brutally hard. No, it's not right. I wouldn’t wish that level of deprivation on anyone. But it’s also real. It’s noble.

I’m not calling a bad thing good. I’m saying that there is a certain dignity in actually being able to name the problem that oppresses you: hunger or disease, for instance.

How, on the other hand, do we name the “sickness unto death” that still seems to be feeding on addiction, tearing up marriages, increasing teen suicide rates and wreaking all kinds of havoc right hear in suburbia? What are we supposed to do with the daily indignities of living in a device driven technosphere where we’re all mostly comfortable and mildly annoyed? How do we even begin to address a situation where our collective blood pressure is through the roof and no one can really say why? Why so much road rage on our highways? Why so little civility? Why don’t we know the names of the people two houses down? Why do we find it so hard just being neighborly and kind with one another when there are no urgent creature concerns pressing on us?

Do we even have the categories to interpret that sort of slow death?

I want to suggest some ways that disciples of Jesus and the communities they form ought to be pioneers in providing an alternative to the terminal disease called suburbia:

1.     Take the problems of your middle class neighbor seriously, and don’t create a false choice between addressing their concerns and caring for the poor. If their stated concern doesn’t seem deadly serious (e.g. “The contractor is taking too long installing my granite countertops,” “Billy wants to quit band,” etc.), you can bet that the anxiety they’re deriving from it is plenty serious. Listen well enough to figure out what’s going on beneath the stated concern.

2.     Put the devices down and slowly back away. You would think that if Sally Smith had previously spent hours doing the laundry before the dawn of the washing machine, then she would have loads of free time now that most of the work is being done for her. But the decades have not been that good to Sally. The data is clear: she has far less time and satisfaction with a day’s work now than ever. Why? It’s time we began to lead a conversation about some values other than convenience.

3.     Quit worshipping “busy.” “Busy” is an idolatrous status symbol in our society. I heard a story of a student who studied abroad here for a semester. When she returned to her home country, a friend asked her how you would respond to the question “How are you doing?” in English. She replied, “Oh, busy.” The lilies of the field aren’t “busy” and yet God clothes them in a splendor unknown to Solomon himself. We’re one of the only organizations in the world where the memos we get from the top are always saying, “work less.” I believe that we and the Jewish faithful have the only worldview where a day of rest is seen as the pinnacle of creation. Unlearning the destructive cultural norm of busyness needs to begin with us.

4.     Begin conversations with strangers by saying, “Tell me about yourself” rather than “What do you do?” A society that measures people based on their rank and earning power is a stranger to the Gospel. We don’t mean to do this in the church. But it’s ingrained in our casual speech. Let’s rank people by their status in the kingdom of God and nothing else.

What other ways can you think of?

I'm glad we're not the 'cool church'

I’m glad we’re not the “cool church.”

Christian disciples are people who believe that in Jesus of Nazareth they have caught a glimpse of the world as it will someday be and let that glimpse inform how they live in the world as it is. Their commitment to the world as isn’t yet may frequently cause them to look senseless in the world as it currently is. This is does not give the Christian license to be ridiculous for ridiculousness sake as we’re so used to seeing in our context (especially where social politics are involved). It’s just to point out the obvious: adjusting oneself to the world as it should be implies some level of maladjustment to the world as it is.

Half a century ago a Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. referenced the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that all people are either hammers or anvils (shapers of history or shaped by history) to warn us about the dangers of being mere products of the “mass mind”—mere tools of the majority ethos of our time rather than acting subjects capable of making conscious decisions about the world around us.  Splitting the difference between their eras, an English journalist and Catholic apologist named G.K. Chesterton warned us that there is no more “humiliating slavery” than being a “child of this age.” Ten minutes of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” or “The Bachelor” will reveal the truth of his words readily enough.

The alternative to this kind of slavery, again in MLK Jr’s words, is to be a “transformed nonconformist”—someone who is so taken with a vision of what the world could be that they refuse to be fully adjusted to what it is. Again, one can just be a nonconformist willy-nilly and never get anywhere. Chesterton would add that being a transformed nonconformist requires some fixed point, a dogma even, to which the world is supposed to be transforming.

Here in this century, we’re not just in danger of succumbing to a mass mind but multiple mass minds in a constant ideological battle, which never ends and no one wins. The “culture wars” that our media speak of (and largely create) are as much generational wars, if voting records are any indication.   

This is what’s so unfortunate about churches that consciously cater to one particular age cohort (the same could be said of any other kinds of homogeneity, but the ageism implied in what goes by the name “Gen-X ministry” or “Boomer ministry” is my focus here). It makes no difference whether it be the stodgy old denominational bulwark with a hundred year old aesthetic that calls to the minds of its nostalic members (read: shareholders) a simpler time that never really existed or the “cool church” that conjures a trendy nightclub or a chic urban studio feel that enables its “seekers” to reconcile the incongruities of a lifestyle defined by deeply held convictions and yearnings on the one hand and “Double Rainbow” remixes on the other. A church where everyone basically shares the same outlook and a very similar set of life experiences will inevitably reflect a particular slavery of “this age” more than the kingdom of God.

The problem is that our vision for what God’s future should look like tends to closely resemble the prevailing mentality of our peer group.  When we surround ourselves with only one demographic, we eliminate the chance for constructive critique on our favorite thought and behavior patterns. Living in a too narrow peer group distorts our vision of what is authentically Christ in the world and what is only our hasty construction of “the good.” That future to which we are supposed to orient our lives becomes not Christ’s future but the future of my own favorite political ideology or lifestyle preference.

What results from this should be pretty obvious. Whoever opposes that ideology or lives a different lifestyle becomes to us the anti-Christ bent on holding the world back from that future. The solution is invariably to eliminate them on a scale of violence ranging from political victory, to character defamation, to out and out war. At this exact point, lacking enough self-awareness to catch the irony, we have just created what’s wrong with the world in our effort to take the side of what’s right with it—another way of stating “the Nazi paradox” noted in my previous blog.        

If we are to buck this human tendency, then gathering around the communion table with people who are different becomes not something we tolerate in order to receive our own personal sacrament but the very point of the sacrament itself—hence, the double meaning of Paul’s word “body” at the communion table. The different worldviews, life-experiences, and political leanings that we bring with us to the table, while not unimportant in the world as it is, take a backseat in our communion with the world as it will be.

This isn’t to say that we should just distract ourselves from the political challenges of the moment with some sort of transcendentalism, though Christians have been guilty of this often enough. But it does mean that the current division between you and me on whatever issue happens to be trending at the moment will not permanently divide us. If we celebrate sacramentally that our future is one of reconciliation beyond our current debate, then refusing to find constructive solutions now, on the ground, is a refusal of what’s ultimate for the sake of what’s penultimate (i.e. we’re straining a gnat while swallowing a camel).

At the congregation I serve, I’m thrilled by how many people we have showing up to worship because they “get it” as far as this goes. By that, I mean twenty something singles and DINKs (Duel Income, No Kids) who forgo the recreational opportunities, cooler music, and obvious lifestyle benefits of going to the hip church down the street because they get the importance of learning from people two or three times their age and mentoring people half their age; I mean Greatest Generation people showing up in protest to the “world is going to hell in a hand basket” narrative of the nightly news and staying open to the possibility that Millenials are not just acting backwards in order to irk them but might just be making necessary adaptations to a quickly changing world; I mean bleeding-heart liberals and dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who discover, in spite of the rhetorical games of TV attack adds, that we all mostly want the same things somewhere in the middle.

And in this strange hodge-podge of all ages and political stripes, the Gospel has an opportunity to reveal itself as more than the latest political outcry or the mores of a particular demographic.   

Christians are nothing other than people who believe, somewhat bizarrely, that they have seen the end to which the human project is moving, and it is good. Carrying this vision with us is what sustains us from slumping into the nihilism of the present, saying, “Que sera, sera”; “Eat drink and be merry”; “All is vanity”—so hangout only with those whom you find most agreeable. It’s our intentional engagement with people who don’t look and sound exactly like us that keeps us honest about the true vision.  

the cross between Israel and Gaza

I’m not writing this because I’m particularly well informed about the West Bank. I’m writing this because I feel pretty uninformed but continue to hear equally uninformed people, who strangely hold the strongest opinions about it. Who is the culprit? Who is the victim? Who is observing that lowest common denominator called wartime ethics? Who is in excess?

On the second day of what will hopefully be a prolonged ceasefire, it’s always a little bit jarring to me to hear someone confidently sum up decades of internecine conflict with a straight and simple pronouncement of guilt for one side and innocence for the other. I’m not well informed about the West Bank, but I am fairly well schooled in things like guilt and innocence. It never actually works out quite that neatly.

What’s become clear in the USA over the last week is that neither the real Israel nor the real Palestine are being discussed at all in our popular discourse. What’s really at issue are the ideological hobbyhorses of the speaker. The entities that we refer to as “Israel” and “Palestine” are just abstractions as Hegel used the term: they’re ideological props devoid of their own socio-historical content. We developed them a priori to satisfy the needs of our own self-images. They enable us to make clean and forceful political commentaries because, as abstractions, they lack any of the counter-evidence, the morally neutral red herrings, and the complicating baggage that tends to come along with real people and places.

And put aside the predictable hedge that we’re simply lacking enough real facts to see the inevitable grey areas involved and simply need to pull up a half dozen articles from respected sources. On the contrary, it may just be that we already have an overabundance of facts, which can, as often as not, become an impediment to real understanding. Knowing a recent list of important dates, the names of major players, and a handful of quotable statistics gives us the very dangerous illusion that we are therefore equipped to comment on the motivations, the fears, and finally the guilt or innocence of the opposing sides.

Coming from the right side of the Western, ideological jousting arena, one champion wants to present Hamas as a fair representative of all Muslims, because it helps him make the case (in the abstract) that Islam is the great boogeyman of our time (no doubt, providing a concrete explanation for his own sense of guilt and dis-ease with his comfortable socio-economic place in the world). Coming back at him from the left, we have a challenger who wants to act as if Hamas developed in a vacuum and shares no ideological moorings with Palestinian context outside itself (which all sounds very enlightened but which backfires when it renders arbitrary any real grievances of the society for which it speaks; this effectively ends up serving the same Western purposes as the right’s narrative). Coming back from the right, we hear (per usual, with any fighting that involves American interests) that the casualties would be much worse were it not for the benevolence of the bigger dog in the fight. From the left we hear the familiar cant (which no one actually believes when his or her own skin is in the game) that the smaller dog is morally exempt for the simple fact that it is small (a notion which may come from a sympathetic place but finally turns out to be the most dehumanizing of them all).

So how do I as a Christian begin to process these events when both the predictable liberal and conservative narratives are too constrictive and self-serving?

First and foremost the Christian reserves the right to take both sides.

Someone will object to this and say, “refusing to pick a side is to have made a choice.” I reject that tired bit of cynicism, outright. The Christian is always free to simply choose the side of humanity general. For centuries, Christians have been risking their lives to cross front lines and serve as medics for the enemies or have been court martialed for refusing to shoot at them. Apropos too are the group of hundreds of Israeli reservists who in early 2002 refused to serve in occupied lands saying that they could not “dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.”

The freedom to choose humanity is not an exclusively Christian freedom. However, it ought to be at least characteristically Christian. It ought to be rooted not only in Jesus' plain and simple teaching but in the heart of his story.

Part of the artfulness of the people who wrote the four gospels is that they finally leave it ambiguous who actually put Jesus to death. However much anti-Semitic ideologues have wanted to blame the Jews, and revolutionary ideologues have wanted to blame the government, and reforming ideologues have wanted to blame religious leaders general; the honest reader is still left with the vague but powerful impression that the culprit is really all of them—and, in a weird way, none of them. Or rather, each of those groups is simultaneously a victim and a culprit of an offense and punishment schema that has moved down through the generations since time immemorial. The reader starts to sense that we’re riding a wave of insecure and fearful aggression for which no one is fully responsible but of which no one’s hands are fully dry. The reader is left with the impression that if these particular groups and individuals hadn’t gotten rid of Jesus, someone else would have, if for no reason other than a deep-seated frustration and self-hatred in the soul of humanity.  

These may have been the sorts of meditations going through the gospel writer’s head when, in Mark, Jesus makes the mysterious decree, ”It is necessary” (8:31) that he be crucified, as if these events on the ground were being governed by some inexplicable fate that tends in this direction. Likewise, for John, in the presence of true light, we must choose between either confronting our darkness or snuffing out the light source as quickly as possible (see 1:9-11 or 3:19-20). If you were to read his gospel for the first time, you wouldn’t have to be a prophet, just a good student of humanity to predict which we will choose.  

That’s why, when we ask about which group crucified Jesus, the only answer that has stood the test of time is: all of them. Or more mystically, all of us.

So rather than immediately pick out one guilty and one innocent party in order to patch up the threatening rift in our moral universe, the Christian reserves the right to mourn, to pray, and to simply admit helplessness in the face of tragedy. This includes both the most recent tragedies that occupy our newsfeeds and the more sustaining tragedy that plagues humanity. Through the ages, the debacle of justice that is the cross yells from the top of Golgotha to an over-certain humanity, “Don’t just do something; stand there. Before your next counter-offensive, your next crusade against terror, your next witch-hunt—take a moment to really grieve the state of humanity. See how the situation looks after you’ve spent some time mystically communing with both culprit and the victim throughout history.”  

At first, this will sound very idle to a society much inclined to believe that for every problem we face there is a drone or a smart bomb to fix it. But just there is what I call the Nazi paradox: when we seek to forcibly remove what’s wrong with the world, we invariably become it.

In a world where “mission accomplished” signifies nothing more than the start of a decade long semantic debate on the definition of “accomplished” and “conflict” replaces “conflict” as if they were only filling spots on a calendar, is a little idle mourning and prayer really such a bad response? By refusing a knee-jerk call to action, are we creating the situation of helplessness or merely acknowledging the helplessness that is our current reality?

The Christian looks beyond the political pragmatism of the moment to a future where, for lack of any other use, swords will be beaten into plowshares and the boots of tramping warriors thrown into furnaces to heat our homes.  For millennia, societies have said, “We’ll get to peace…as soon as all our enemies are eliminated. We’ll get to peace, we just need one more ‘war to end all wars’. We’ll get to peace, just one more atom bomb should about do it. Hang on, shalom, we just need to take out one more terrorist leader, one more enemy cell, one more, one more, one more…”

The Christian is tired of saying, “One more.”