Florida State and not tolerating death

Were you able to find it?

It took some digging around, but buried away somewhere in your newspaper, there was a headline that read something like this one from the Washington Post, ‘Chaos’ at Florida State University: Gunman wounds 3, killed in shootout with police.

I can remember a time when a school shooting was front page news. When my sister’s high school was devastated in 1999 by two pipe bomb hurling students with semi-automatic rifles and sawed-off shotguns, my relatives in Texas were calling us in Colorado within an hour of the first 911 call. CNN, like every other national TV and radio station, had canned its entire daily programming so that it could follow the story around the clock. It would have been impossible for my relatives not to have heard about it.

Columbine was far from the first school shooting, but it struck a chord with the American public for its size. Perhaps the sheer amount of Columbine exposure exhausted or drained us. But whatever the reason, almost two dozen school shootings over the next several years went relatively unnoticed. By the time a 10 casualty shooting at Red Lake, Minnesota came around in 2005, it became clear that there was an unspoken body count threshold that needed to be broken through for significant media attention, and Columbine seemed to have slid that number upward. The Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 was the next major headline, having broken the deplorable record by a hideous margin. Sandy Hook got exposure not only because it was big but because of the age of the victims. But basically we have observed a steady waning of concern across more than 100 school shootings that have happened since Columbine.

It’s terrifying to contemplate a society which makes a big media circus of something like this a couple times a year but then, as the months go by, and the initial shock of it wears off, never moves on to a more substantial and long term conversation about how to address the problem. But that doesn’t even compare to the dark truth about a society that doesn’t even bother with the media circus—a culture for whom a mass shooting in a school or a movie theater every few months has become such an expected norm, hardly even an inconvenient pang of communal guilt as we scroll through our morning newsfeed, that we have all silently colluded to let it happen.

I’m not actually writing this to advocate the policy changes that I think should happen. It’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence to sit here and spell out what those changes need to be.  The issue has never been about knowing what ought to be done. The issue has always been about whether the darkness residing deep in our cultural soul will allow us to do it. And that issue can’t be addressed by a political conversation but only by a theological one.

The cross is a symbol our culture is so familiar with that we hardly know anything about it.  It has all but lost any significance in the secular mind and the popular religious mind has distorted its meaning so badly that, in some circles, it is almost irrecoverable. Familiarity doesn’t just breed contempt, it can also breed apathy and over-certainty, both of which can’t help but neutralize a symbol that is only eight feet wide but a million miles deep.

So let me have a go at a little primer on a truth about the cross that was obvious to everyone familiar with a particular event almost 20 centuries ago but which has since become cheapened and contorted beyond recognition.  

The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth was the moment when a society that had seemed to come to terms with its own demons finally overstepped itself. Crucifying hoards of violent insurrectionists and murderers was just par for the course, and it rarely gave pause to anyone outside of some close friends and family members of the accused. Beyond that, it accomplished many things that the society found needful. It provided a brilliant outlet for public grievance as the masses could transfer so many vague and undirected frustrations at the guilty party, and it relieved the Roman occupiers of any irritating upstarts that cost time and money to put away, all the while allowing them to flex some muscle and publicly demonstrate the price of insubordination. 

But there was something in the air that was different this time.  The Romans had shown just a little too much of their hand. There was a powerful if inarticulate sense in the back of every mind that things had gone just a little bit too far this time. Insurrectionists and murderers are one thing. But can anyone remember why wandering rabbi had to die?

So when a no name group of fisherman and widows, who, for all intents and purposes, should have been cowering away and grieving somewhere, began to announce in every tavern and street corner, ‘He is risen’, they were not just excited about an arbitrary magic trick that would give them another few decades with their friend.

They believed that God had numbered the days and started the clock ticking for death and the things that lead to death. They believed that the creator of the raging seas and the monsters that inhabit them, of the quaking lands and the thundering skies, of the sun the stars and whatever terrifying expanses lie beyond them, had made a statement about the way and life of the one who touched the boils of lepers, who blessed and ate dinner with the women of the night, who refused to retaliate against his enemies even if it would be his own downfall—they believed that The Almighty had looked back upon all of that and said, “Ah hah! This is the way that is eternal.”

At this point, some jabbering fool will point out that someone rising from the dead to eternal life seems a little implausible.

A little implausible? It was insane. What was sane was succumbing to a somber acceptance of death. Normal was a mass outbreak of violence that needed to be tolerated every few months or so. Reasonable was trading away any hope of true shalom for the uneasy peace that comes with a good weapon in hand.

So God had decided it was time for a little bit of crazy.

They insisted that God is crazy enough to believe that you can’t fix a culture of death with death. Smiting the whole violent, bloodthirsty lot of them was precisely what The Almighty was not going to do. If given another aeon to do it, they would not be able to wear God down into an easy truce with death. The early witnesses quickly interpreted the resurrection to mean that God has no tolerance for death. God will continue to come back with life, again, again, 7 times, 70 times 7 times, for all eternity, if that’s what it takes.

And so, they reasoned, if that’s how God is, then for the people who believed, themselves, it must no longer be possible to succumb to a quiet apathy toward death. Nor could they any longer tolerate the things that cause death.

In a world where people are constantly drawing false choices by saying, “You’re either for us or against us” the only all or nothing choice these witnesses believed in was this, “We can either be for life or against it. Our God is for it.”

‘Chaos’ at Florida State University: Gunman wounds 3, killed in shootout with police.

Everyone already knows what needs to be done. The question has never been about policy.

The question is, what is the next crucifixion going to reveal about us?

And more to the point, what god do we worship?

leaving your church for the right reasons

I don’t blame people for leaving the church. I would leave most churches too.

To many inside the churches that regularly get left, the prevailing assumption, almost never questioned, is that when a person has no interest in their church, it’s because she has no interest in God. It never occurs to them that to make such a judgment is to make the self-idolizing assertion that their church is synonymous with God.

But in fact, many times throughout history, and it’s no different in our time, people have had to leave the church precisely because of their deep and abiding interest in God. Or to say it a different way, the church stood for something that struck them as antithetical to the good, so they had to leave for the sake of the good. And to opt for the good, if it is genuinely good, is always to opt for God.

In the church’s darkest moments, this has often been the choice with the most integrity. But, obviously, if we always catch ourselves checking out the second a given community teaches something we don’t already believe, then it’s likely we’re not basing our choices on the good at all but, rather, on our own preferences, biases, apathies and probably just a plain, old fashioned inability to play nicely with others.  

So how do we determine when we need to take a stand of personal conscience against a certain depiction of the good and when we need to let a different depiction of the good go to work on us, even though it is strange at first, because it might be better than the one that we brought with us?

This creates a real difficulty for honest people who are simply trying to live faithfully. The existentialist philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich’s language for this conundrum was “autonomous” versus “heteronomous law.” Thank your lucky stars that I’m not as smart as he was. I’ll just use the words “internal values” (that which our conscience demands of us) versus “external values” (that which the strange new system in question demands of us).  

On the one hand, if we reject every idea of the good that comes from outside us (external values) because it simply doesn’t “feel right” at first, then we have no check on ourselves and any governing principles we might have are indistinguishable from our own self-serving biases and preferences.

This is typically the sin of new-agey cults of “personal fulfillment” or “self-actualization” (regardless of whether these develop inside the church, outside the church, under a “Christian” heading, à la Joel Osteen, or a “Buddhist” heading, or a “Scientologist” heading, or what have you). Self-actualization isn’t a bad thing. But if the whole problem in the first place is that we tend to want to be actualized on our own terms, then we invariably seek self-actualization by pursuing what “feels right,” those old, favorite methods, which, if they worked, would have actualized us already. This is similar to the alcoholic who realizes that he is depressed about his alcoholism and decides to fight the depression with alcohol. When “does it feel right” becomes the sole decision making factor as to whether something is of God or not, we have no external value system with enough backbone to jar us out of this circle of cheap gratification.

On the other hand, if we’re always opting for the moral code that feels alien and repressive simply because it’s that, then, aside from having mortgaged our own intellectual integrity, we have simply given the same arbitrary preference to some other depiction of the good rather than our own.

This is the sin of many conservative expressions of North American Christianity. They take the initially valuable insight that what is actually good and true might not immediately resonate with what we already prefer and that we need to be vigilant that the good isn’t simply being confused with our own personal druthers, but then blow this insight all out of proportion, assuming that God’s values should be positively offensive to our internal values. To suppose this is to suppose that humans were created as something of a non-sequitur. Far from creating us in God’s own image, God would have created something that comes virtually pre-programmed to contradict God’s character.   

In much of conservative Christianity, the decision making filter that determines whether something is of God or not becomes as simple as this: if it seems especially harsh toward human habits and desires, it must be from God. This is why, in each new generation, these circles will always fixate on one or two issues revolving around sexual morality and private living arrangements. The kernel of truth, of course, is that unrestrained sexuality is destructive. This kernel gets blown all out of proportion, though, when the knee jerk assessment is always that human desires must always be antithetical to God because they are desires. This circular logic only begs the question why God would create things with such desires.

Since God’s values are expected to be repressive, in these conservative circles, it is the ease itself with which social norms evolve to accommodate the ever changing circumstances of a culture that becomes the very proof that they are anti-God. This is also one reason why these groups so predictably tend toward biblical zealotry: because the bible is obviously heaping with historical contexts that are radically different than our own. So they are easy pickings for moral and social orders that are alien and unworkable in a new context. They get highlighted and plucked out specifically for that reason. It’s not surprising that these groups so routinely come up with moral dicta that are offensive if not downright abusive of their contemporary culture; that’s practically their mission statement. The closely guarded secret is that if everyone in the culture suddenly conformed to their moral decrees, then they would have to find something even more alien with which to assault our sensibilities.

For the sake of psychological integrity, we can’t abide long periods where external values are our only values. Eventually that initially strange and even offensive way of seeing the good needs to either be rejected, to replace or to be synthesized with the internal values that we initially brought with us. If the values we learn to assimilate are, in fact, good, the result of this synthesis is what Tillich called “theonomous law” or what I will call God’s values.

Note, that it would short circuit this synthesizing process to just point mindlessly to a given tradition, or institution, or the Bible (as if the teachings of the latter can be reduced to one monolithic thing) and call it God’s values as these each represent one among many external versions vying for that privilege.  These are each just one external code among many vying to have their say of what is God’s values.

We might privilege one and give it a special hearing for one reason or another. But this is a very different and much more complex process than binding ourselves to it slavishly and unquestioningly. In fact, to do the latter wouldn’t be actual synthesis. To bind ourselves to something alien simply because it’s alien doesn’t automatically bring us to God’s values. It is simply trading our arbitrary preferences for someone else’s arbitrary preferences.