why watching the Broncos lose makes me a better disciple

So after nearly breaking my toe on the coffee table in a fit of rage, twice letting out a string of words that my one-year old dog should never have had to hear, and waking up at 4am in a cold sweat wondering if Super Bowl XLVIII was just some terrible nightmare; my physical and marital health requires that I ask myself the question, Why do I care so much?

I don’t ask the question negatively. Yes, sports have been overblown to idolatrous proportions in most every culture that I know of around the world. I don’t deny that. But this isn’t a blog about overpaid players, family-destroying gambling debts and drunken brawls in the parking lot. That exists. It’s true. It’s sad.

But in the final minutes of what is being called one of the worst Super Bowl performances ever, I couldn’t shake the thought, “I would be thrilled to one day have a son or daughter commit themselves to the Broncos (their choice, I won’t pressure them, although the Raiders are off limits) so that they too can experience this kind of agony.”

I really mean that for a reason that bandwagoners and football dilettantes who only show up to a Super Bowl party for the beer and wings will never understand. Committing yourself to a team and being in it for the long haul, come rain or shine, is an excellent way to build what turns out to be one of the most important discipleship qualities we can actually effect:

Character

In our pseudo-Christian culture, emotionalism and intellectual certainty are the signatures of having “faith.” But a serious disciple is more concerned with cultivating what Eugene Peterson calls “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” Mature disciples look at things like spiritual euphoria and intellectual certainty as gifts or happy accidents when they come along but not the main thing. What they’re more interested in is what they can actually build through time and intentionality, and that’s character. 

If kept in perspective and understood rightly, football allegiance can be an excellent modern analogy of what I believe Jesus is illustrating in the “Parable of the Sower,” which is essentially about the character that receives faith and practices discipleship.

When the word of the kingdom is sown, some of it falls on the path. These are the party-hoppers whose love of football was discovered the week before the Super Bowl in direct proportion to their dread of being left out of whatever is current in pop culture. They’re the ones at the party who, lacking more sophisticated football jargon, are constantly annoying everyone with commentary that’s accurate but just a pinch too obvious: “Boy, they really scored the football in the end zone on that one.”

As for the seed that was sown on rocky ground, these are the bandwagoners. They’ve watched enough football that they can comment intelligently on whether a receiver got both feet down or a pass interference call was ticky-tack, but by the time the third quarter comes along they’re suddenly uncovering all these revelations about how they’re only wearing the losing running back’s jersey because they were such big fans of his during his college days and they really don’t care who wins as long as it’s a good game. Part of you despises them and part of you wants to be extra nice because, like any traitor or mercenary, deep down they don’t even respect themselves.

Some seed is sown among thorns. These are like the photographic negatives of the bandwagoners. They’re not interested in identifying with the winners. They’re merely interested in twisting the knife in the side of the losers. These people have all the principle and integrity of the Lexus driver who purposely switches lanes so he can splash the shivering dog on the side of the road. I don’t know what type of individual takes pleasure in this kind of arbitrary sadism, but these are worse than the tax collectors or the heathen.

Still, there is the seed that is sown in good soil.

All other things being equal, I will bet on the loyalty, the resilience, the graciousness in life’s victories and defeats, and, yes, even the sense of perspective of a Cleveland Browns fan or Chicago Cubs fan to one of these other soil types any day.

This kind of faithfulness over the long haul is self-evidently valuable. My father and his father suffered through some of the most depressing football teams ever fielded when the Broncos began their franchise with 13 seasons without a winning record. It was never a question of whether they might just decide one day to root for the ’67 Packers or ’72 Dolphins. To seek instant gratification by jumping ship would be to give up any chance at a real victory ever. Abandoning their team for a winner could only happen at the expense of the integrity of the game as a whole.

If I should be so blessed, I want my kids to learn these qualities. I want them to learn that there is great value in waving the flag of a loser decade after decade and that the joy of cheering for a winner is hollow if you didn’t have to earn your stripes to get there. I want them to wear their Broncos shirt to school not just before a big game but after a devastating loss.  

There is something just plain dignified—something that the path, the rocky ground and the thorns will never comprehend—when my Dad (who makes me look like a casual fan) swallows the lump of defeat and texts me at the end of yesterdays game:

“Sometimes things just don’t go right…Don’t forget, a lot of teams don’t make it this far…I’ll still be their most loyal fan.”

Sports can be trivial. They can suck up way too many resources that would be better spent elsewhere.  The relationships many of us have to our teams are full on idolatrous.

But if I were given the chance to select a group of people who likely have the right character for discipleship, all other things being equal, give me the Broncos nation on Feb. 3^rd. Not the one on Feb. 1^st.

GO BRONCOS!

why fundamentalism is an atheistic response to pain (part III)

If some silly thing like a job, or a family, or Netflix kept you from lapping up the sweet wellspring of wisdom that was parts I and II, I’ve been trying to make the case that art—writing a novel, directing a movie or singing a song—is more helpful and truer to the biblical methods of dealing with pain than, say, writing a fundamentalist Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

In many ways, these are opposite strategies. The handbook is written to help us distance ourselves from our pain and look at it analytically. Art pulls us in deeper so we can experience the pain at a more conscious level.

A handbook writer starts out with the intellectual assumptions that God must be a certain way, that pain exists, and that the one needs to be justified in light of the other.

A painter just expresses his pain and assumes that God will provide the defense—that is, of course, if God is God. A musician that’s worth even half the liver in her belly doesn’t talk about God. She talks to God. Poets feel no pressure to speak reasonably in their moment of need. In fact, they’re liable to air all kinds of short-sided, irrational, even unfair grievances because they're only responsible for what’s honest, not what’s true.

Here’s an analogy from our bodies (if you’re medically trained, don’t correct any inaccuracies or it won’t work). I understand there are certain types of back injuries where our body’s first impulse is to engage the muscles around the injury to protect us from feeling the pain fully. But eventually this becomes counterproductive as the tightening and inflammation becomes the source of a more enduring pain long after the original injury would have healed.  What we really need to do at that point is learn to relax those muscles so that we can really feel the pain and let the healing process work more directly. 

I say the artist's method is more true to the Bible because, anywhere other than a handbook writer’s desk, the Bible pretty obviously isn’t a collection of logical assertions about God but of family myths, and petty songs of tribal vengeance, and morally questionable parables, and seemingly off topic sidebars, and poems. Lots of poems.

And just as good art isn’t a random hodge-podge of colors or sounds but a creative use of the rules and boundaries of a particular medium, the Hebrew culture that generated our Bible developed structures and forms for their poems that helped them deal with their pain more effectively.

For instance, the poems of the book of Lamentations, written shortly after everything the Israelites knew was demolished, killed or shipped off to exile, are written in acrostic. With the first word of each line corresponding to one of 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the lamenter was free to make whatever raw and sometimes venomous grievance he or she would like to make toward God. But just as the alphabet comes to an end, so too must the lament.

We’ve all known the mourner who refuses to go on whatever other love and blessings are poured into her. Or the former jock who insists on not showing gratitude for his stable job and beautiful family at present because sometime in the past he “could’a been a contender.” We can be just as narcissistic about using our pain to gather attention around ourselves as we can about hoarding blessings. The lamenter isn’t encouraged to deny her pain, but she isn't allowed to identify with it indefinitely, either. This structure provided a lamenter a means of addressing her pain without becoming unhealthily co-dependent on it.

The Psalms of lament often end with a line of praise and thanksgiving that always looks a little out of place in an otherwise ugly string of complaints and accusations (E.g. Ps. 13:5-6).  These lines are more than just token happy endings. They provide a way for the Psalmist to acknowledge, “However raw my feelings are right now, I will still acknowledge that this lament takes place within a relationship that is more enduring than my current emotional state. So I will end with a word of praise even when I don’t feel like it, because I know there will be other times when I do feel like it.” 

This kind of directness is only possible if, beneath the pain of the moment, the poet has a deeper trust in the integrity of the relationship surrounding the words.

My wife has committed to me for better or worse. I wear evidence of that commitment around my finger and keep paperwork for it safely filed away. So around her, I might spout out all kinds of hair-brained nonsense in a moment of frustration, nonsense that I might think to filter out in the context of a lesser relationship. The more secure our relationship, the more she is able to suspend any judgment on my temporary irrationality or any fear that this might be a permanent threat to our relationship.

It goes both ways, of course. I have a responsibility not to let frustration and accusation become my normal modes of relating to her, and surely I’ll need to become the more mature and rational one at some other point when she is having a moment.

The covenant secured relationship that we’ve made becomes the kind of container for unedited speech that a shaky, superficial relationship can never be.

So people are arguably at their most faithful when they're comfortably expressing their frustration and doubt to God. 

For all this, you’ll notice that the handbook writer will usually sell more books than the poet. Logically Why-ing away pain will always be a sexier alternative to engaging it head on.

But you’ll notice that at the end of the day, when the handbook writer has dried his final sheet and closed up his ink well, when all arguments have been exhausted, questions settled, the victim stripped of any reason to gripe, no one actually comes away from the ordeal with the responsibility to actually do something about the pain.

The fundamentalist handbook writer is similar to the atheist. He either believes that (1) God does not exist or that (2) God is not capable of doing stuff. Otherwise, he would not feel such enormous pressure to make God's case.

By way of contrast, the Psalmist, by not providing any explanation or justification, has put the ball in God’s court to actually do something about the pain. No questions have been answered and no grievances settled, so it’s incumbent solely upon God to come through on the back end.

The Psalmist doesn’t seek answers for pain but healing.

suffering like an artist (Part II)

In the first part of this blog series, I talked about how intellectual or rational responses to the problem of pain, even if they’re good responses, are ultimately unsatisfying because we are more than just intellectual creatures. That’s not to imply that there is a satisfying alternative. But what other resources should our faith give us to push through suffering?

As I write, I’m fixated on the song, Silence, by Matisyahu. To feel the full gravity, you really have to listen to it, but I’ll provide some pertinent lines for the time-challenged.

True to the Hebrew tradition of candid, unedited prayer, the singer lifts up words that are at once indicting of himself and of God. Authenticity before the Holy One is valued over religious propriety. Closed, intellectual answers to the problem of suffering are neither offered, nor are they pursued.

 If it should turn out that he was really just praying at the ceiling, this effort to “shine a warmth into eternity” is doomed to fail in a world where “all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2) and a universe where the cold, chaotic laws of thermodynamics are unrelenting. He risks the prayer anyways. It’s on God to prove that it was not in vain.

This is not a rational way of dealing with pain. But what cancer patient or grieving mother could give two damns about what’s rational?

To stubbornly “shine warmth” into a universe that tends toward cold is not a levelheaded action prompted by a calm assessment of possible outcomes. It is an act of defiance against chaos. It’s a mortal cry that if there does not exist a bridge between a future where “we’ll dance like flames” and a present where “I’m just a candle trying to stay lit in this windy night,” then I will insist on building such a bridge. I will begin to build even if my own love is the only cabling and my faith the only anchorage. I will leave it up to God whether hope should prove a worthy deck to get us across.

He is pitting love against entropy to see who wins. I don’t have to offer a defense for you, God. If you are God, prove it.  “[I] bring my heart to an invisible king with a hope one day you might answer me, so I pray, ‘Don’t you abandon me.’”

The song offers no explanation for the “problem of pain,” because, in fact, the song is not about suffering. The song is his suffering. It is his suffering not talked about at a distance but completely felt with music as the medium that allows him to access it fully.

Explanations, on the other hand, are like opiates for the soul. We dab the topical anesthetic, Explainitall, onto our hearts and escape into our heads in hopes that the pain will have gone away by the time our chest comes to. But it’s a deceptive solution. We’re numbed to the pain, but its root cause hasn’t been dealt with at all.

The art method is very much opposite that of philosophy. An artist assumes that if pain is going to happen, then we can’t get out of it but only through it.

This is hard to understand in our therapeutic culture where rosy praise songs and happy-ending apologetics are written by Christians who seem to want to act as veritable publicists for God, and we might be confused by the biblical faithful who are typically the ones lamenting the loudest; but avoidance of pain is a sign of unfaith. Faith is what gives us the courage to drink that foul cup without a chaser.  

Nevertheless, an honest artist is hard pressed to lay all responsibility for suffering in the lap of God and leave it at that. Can one ever honestly level such a charge at God without simultaneously indicting oneself?

“Your silence kills me…”

Matisyahu says. True enough. But he knows himself well enough to know,

“…I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Do I actually want to know what God thinks about things? Do I actually want God to offer an evaluation of my own silence toward the poor and oppressed? toward my own apathy in the face of injustice? toward my own negligence of the orphan and the stranger? Do I actually want to allow God that level of intrusiveness upon my own aims and motives?

No. If I’m truly honest with myself, all things being equal, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is, of course, a heavy price to pay for this silence. Not just for us. For God. What does a parent do, when she can’t bear the sight of her child’s suffering nor can she coerce the child’s affairs enough to avoid it? That parent dies.

More on that in Part III of this blog.

suffering and why answering 'Why' is not enough (Part I)

If God is both powerful and good, why do bad things still happen?

This is such an unrelenting question in the life of faith, theologians have given it its own name: theodicy.

In 1994 an Evangelical publishing company released the Handbook of Christian Apologetics, a book which advertises itself as having “concise” and “witty” answers to all the big questions, does God exist? providence versus free will? and of course, the mother of all big questions given above. Not unlike a telemarketer’s script, this marvel of peaceful, easy certitude provides a user-friendly flowchart for each section (E.g. If your opponent mentions the randomness of the evolutionary process, talk about the complexity, pointing to intentionality, behind of human cell structure; if they argue that such a structure could randomly develop, given enough chances, here is the statistical improbability of this, even if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, etc.).

It’s in handbook form, I presume, so that we can quickly reference it and beat back the accusing inquiries of those conniving “secularists,” but still thick enough that, verbal argument notwithstanding, it can be used to beat them back in a different sort of way.  I humbly confess that there was a time, when I was first figuring out the extent to which I would own my faith as an adult, where I remember finding it convenient that someone had finally laid out these answers in such an easy-to-use format, such that my then fragile theological system should never have to be troubled by unpleasant outliers—questions unanswered and data that doesn’t fit. It was fantastic! Simple, untroubled certitude for only $16.75 on Amazon.  

So why, then, did I still struggle with my faith? It would not have been so deflating if the “answers” that this handbook gave me eventually proved to be bad. I could always just find better answers. The real problem was not that the “handbook” gave all invalid arguments. It was that it gave many valid answers, and I still wasn’t satisfied. The logic of it worked out, so why was my faith life still such a struggle?

I still felt used and unlovable when a girlfriend would break up with me. I still spiraled into existential crisis when it became unavoidably clear that my hairline was, in fact, receding. I was still bothered by the amount of poverty and violence in the world.

Perhaps the problem is not finding an answer to the Why question but the expectation that an answer to the Why question will be enough.

The first thing that both “believer” and skeptic have in common when they bring up theodicy, is they both anticipate (albeit, one more optimistic than the other) that this is primarily an intellectual question, so an adequate intellectual answer would satisfy it.

The second thing they have in common is that, having found a rational answer to the Why question, neither will be completely satisfied, because…

…the third thing, they are both likely searching for far more than an intellectual answer to an intellectual question.

Here is what I mean. We all already know the standard, prosaic answers to the theodicy question. E.g.

- God creates free will, and where free will exists, so does the opportunity for evil.

- Love can’t exist where hate is not an option, nor beauty without ugliness, nor pleasure without pain, blah, blah, blah... 

These calm, analytical responses, usually offered from comfortably upholstered armchairs in climate-controlled offices, continue to be as reasonable today as ever.  The problem is not that very rationale answers to the Why question don’t exist. The problem is that they do exist, but so long as there is much more to the human creature that experiences suffering than just the rational self, these answers remain unsatisfying in our actual moment of pain and crisis. 

If I can try to fit into a blog paragraph the subject of entire tenured careers, the problem of “theodicy” can’t really be addressed in the modern Western world until we recognize how we’ve unwittingly restricted ourselves to valuing one aspect of our humanness—reason—over against any other. When the Enlightenment swept across Euro-America a few centuries ago, it was unofficially decided that the life of the rational intellect was the only part of life worth paying attention to. “Human” was defined as that creature which could reason. Filtered out of this definition was any concern for the aesthetic self, the emotional self, the intuitive self, the poetic self, the story-telling self, and most importantly, the loving self (if you assume, as I do, that love isn’t love if it is strictly rational).

That puts us in a strange position now—just starting to come off the enlightenment buzz but still grasping for a more adequate understanding of what makes us human—when we set the theodicy question in terms of reason and logic.  It’s not that reasonable, logical answers don’t exist. It’s that they do exist, and it hasn't proven to be enough. We’ve heard those answers. Yet, here we are, still asking the question.

If this is the central question, it’s remarkable that in the entirety of the scriptures, never is there offered up an “apology” or rational defense for how a loving God can allow suffering to go on in the world in the vein of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics. But no one in any of our scriptures ever claims to have any such answer.

I take that back. The four “friends” of Job have all kinds of answers, the very fact of which makes them stock characters whose words come out cheap and forgettable. Trivial people saying trivial things. However well-reasoned their defense, however well their system fits together, it will be forgotten as hastily as it was devised, not because their logic doesn’t work but because logic doesn’t work. We don’t have bad answers that have been proven bad. We have good answers that have been proven insufficient. We have reasonable answers but reasonable answers hardly matter one iota in the face of real suffering.

So, in the second part of this blog coming next week, I will try to grapple with the problem of pain in a way that is not irrational, hopefully, but that does not fixate on rational answers at the expense of all other facets of what it means to be human. I’ll try to stay truer to the method of Jesus and his Jewish roots which prefers stories to arguments, open-ended parables to closed logic, includes poetry as well as prose and, most of all, seeks a Who more than a why.

See you there.

praying for courage instead of comfort

If our prayers so often don’t get answered, why do we continue to pray?

Since most of us can cite those instances that seemed to indicate that prayers don’t get answered and those that convinced us that they do, is it just a numbers game?  Do we just toss up a high volume of pitches in hopes that God might bat about .300? Are “believers” just people conditioned to interpret the occasional fluky fielding error as a line drive to the gap?

The problem is that the question itself—“Do prayers get answered?”—limits our imagination for how God might be at work. Whatever the response (and there are only two choices), God can only come off as a ‘cosmic butler’ who can solve a few, but not all, of our problems with good-willed, if bumbling, incompetence or a disinterested sovereign who will occasionally deign to be our benefactor if it reflects well on the crown. The question assumes that requests often don’t get answered because God is either incompetent or indifferent but doesn’t question whether getting requests answered is the primary value of prayer.  

But in our better thinking, we know that the primary image of God does not come to us from a bellhop’s luggage rack or a sovereign’s crown but a convict’s cross. The cross represents God’s refusal to coerce events, for better or for worse, with a snap of the divine fingers.

The creator likely has the ability to micromanage the spin of particles and the dance of galaxies, but the cost of doing so would be that creation would no longer have independent existence so much as it would be an extension of God. And our God isn’t narcissistic like that. If God’s intention for creating in the first place was that there be an arena where spontaneous, reciprocal love of the other could exist, then it’s not that God simply can’t answer prayers that request such dictatorial intervention; it’s that God can’t. To concede even the smallest request—to take over the wheel and redirect a car or suspend an avalanche—would be to give up the project of creation altogether.

While this often makes creation a risky and unpredictable enterprise, we should think long and hard as to whether we would prefer the alternative. Hitler experimented with that, attempting to solve the problems of creation by much more expedient means, progressing us along by force and eliminating that which he believed shouldn’t be.

The cross evidences nothing if not God’s ultimate refusal to solve all potential problems with this sort of force. It’s the result of God’s fierce commitment to creation, all of it, without remainder. But also, it’s God’s insistence that no one should suffer the consequences of an unpredictable creation by themselves.

And this is where prayer comes in.

Completing creation nonviolently and non-coercively is by far the longer route. Jesus has the scars to prove that (resorting to a military legion of angels must be a constant temptation in the divine life).

We, on the other hand, are a power-hungry people with grand visions of how we would have it could we muster the power to ‘fix’ creation through forceful means.

Prayer is where we give up these visions and re-align ourselves with God’s chosen means.

Prayer is both saying to God and hearing back from God, “I recognize that we have chosen the more difficult path, so I trust that we are in this thing together whatever stones may be thrown our way by a world that doesn’t yet get it.”

We pray, then, because those who walk the harder path need to lean on each other. Beneath the cross, it makes no more sense to speak of whether a prayer was “answered” than to speak of whether a step or a breath was answered. Perhaps any decent response to this kind of question should be evaluated not in whether it is “right” or “satisfying” but in whether it gives one the courage to go on walking the path and praying.

This answer may sound unsatisfying at first blush because we humans don’t often think to ask for courage. What we really want are answers. We don’t desire that our mettle be tested or that an unsettled world challenge us to act with more valor, more compassion, more life than we’d previously thought ourselves capable. We want settled stability and ease of mind. Unanswered questions imply that something is unsettled and unstable, that there are loose ends that haven’t been tied off, unspeakable entropies spiraling into oblivion.

So it’s true that aligning ourselves with God’s means of making creation fruitful is unlikely to result in a life that is comfortable and assured. But there is more at stake here. We’ll still certainly want to avoid suffering and won’t seek it out arbitrarily, but how differently we might be able to interpret the grief, and suffering and ultimately death that we face if we have spent our time praying:

Lord, give me a lifetime not of assurance but of yearning,

not of ease in my mind but of fire in my bones,

not of comfort in myself but of joy in my neighbor

And if you will reassure me,

Reassure me that I’ve fought the good fight for something that matters.

If you will put me at ease,

Ease my fear of a lukewarm life devoid of passion and purpose.

If you will comfort me,

Comfort me that I will not find my repose while my neighbor still suffers.

Give me courage to live out the desire deeper than my desires—

the desire of my deepest self—

that would be with you on a cross before it would be alone in comfort…

until there are no more crosses.