We both know
they are weeds.

“Maybe the weeds at his house
are only in the backyard?”
I smile, push up my hat, wipe the sweat off my brow with my short sleeve
and turn back to my shovel.

These weeds are like backyard plants.
They need a shovel.

Or an ax.
(If only I had one)

Dear yardwork, there should be a (not so) silent letter ‘h’ after the ‘y’ in your name.

“I’ve got a guy”
my neighbour says
“who mows the lawn and
trims the trees
for 30 bucks a month.”

“I’ll keep the 30 bucks,” I think.
There’s something about this yhardwork that I need.
It’s a spiritual yearning, isn’t it?
This is not dystrophy, but desire:

It reminds me
of the dirt from which I’m formed.
And it connects me
to the Ground of my Being.

And with the 10 year old horticulturalists in my neighborhood.

Sociologists have generally concluded that people who are very religiously active tend to be less engaged with the secular world, opting to stay sequestered in their faith communities. But in a comprehensive survey, the Pew Research Center found that the 40 percent of Americans who are religiously active are more engaged in all kinds of community organizations and activities than their non-religious neighbors.

The findings are fascinating. And, as a “religious American”, I’ll admit, somewhat surprising. While 40% of surveyed Americans are most active in “churches or religious organizations”, apparently these folks don’t live their lives hiding behind their stained glass windows. Of this 40%, 35% are also involved in sports or recreation leagues, 34% in charitable or volunteer organizations and 30% in community groups or neighborhood associations, each for at least two hours a week. Their involvement ranges from two to three times that of their non-religious neighbors!

What’s even more surprising are religious Americans internet, e-mail, cell phone and broadband use, which outnumbers that of others. Religious and non-religious groups tie in their use of text messaging, while the religious folks are outnumbered in social networking usage.

Lastly, when religious folks are part of groups, they’re all in: 41% are heavily engaged, compared to non-religious citizens’ 28%.

I can certainly see this at work in the congregation I serve. There are folks I have the privilege of knowing that are crazy busy doing all kinds of great things not only at church but in their neighborhoods, too. It’s incredible. They offer not a what, but a how, as Caputo states:

When love calls for action, we had better be ready with something more than a well-formed proposition even if it has been approved by a council. We had better be ready with a deed, not a what but a how, ready to respond and do the truth, to make it happen here and now, for love and justice are required now. (On Religion, 130)

It makes me wonder – especially in light of these findings – why we continue to reuse the old and outdated “sacred versus secular” dialogue. In fact, to clarify, most of us don’t speak this language anymore. Even the seminary I attend(ed) doesn’t! Why does this study!?

I’m also thinking of Gianni Vattimo, who argues that Christianity actually announces the end of the sacred! That’s another post for another day, though.

(From another perspective, I’d love to hear Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Better Together: Restoring the American Community and American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, comment on this research).

Christians in the U.S. who labeled themselves politically liberal or conservative told researchers Jesus wouldn’t necessarily agree with their social views if he were alive today… The conservatives said Jesus would probably be more against abortion and same-sex marriage than they are, and less opposed to helping illegal immigrants obtain citizenship. Liberals believe Jesus would be tougher than them on morality and more open on questions concerning fellowship.

The online study, conducted by Stanford University’s Lee Ross, addressed how rationalizing is easier in a group than alone (which sounds a bit like Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity, no?). He notes,

Liberals are conceding that they’re deviating from Jesus on their views on moral issues and conservatives are conceding that they are deviating from Jesus on fellowship issues… They differed almost as much in Jesus’s views as their own.’

This study reveals different findings that Scot McKnight, who surveys North Park students during the first day of class on Jesus of Nazareth. He writes,

The first part is about Jesus. It asks students to imagine Jesus’ personality, with questions such as, ‘Does he prefer to go his own way rather than act by the rules?’ and ‘Is he a worrier?’ The second part asks the same questions of the students, but instead of ‘Is he a worrier?’ it asks, ‘Are you a worrier?’ The test is not about right or wrong answers, nor is it designed to help students understand Jesus. Instead, if given to enough people, the test will reveal that we all think Jesus is like us. Introverts think Jesus is introverted, for example, and, on the basis of the same questions, extroverts think Jesus is extroverted.

Spiritual formation experts would love to hear that students in my Jesus class are becoming like Jesus, but the test actually reveals the reverse: Students are fashioning Jesus to be more like themselves. If the test were given to a random sample of adults, the results would be measurably similar. To one degree or another, we all conform Jesus to our own image.

Where’s the difference, then? In asking specific questions regarding political allegiance? Or age? Are college students unable to look at things outside of their particular allegiances?

[Hat tip: The Gospel Coalition]

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today – loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul – then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshipping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly from the good land that the Lord is giving you.

You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.

The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God.

Jones concludes,

It can be said that these verses, this prayer, compose the very heart of Judaism, and what became Christianity. While the orders to add fringes to clothing as a reminder seem odd to those of us who aren’t Jewish, we surely recognize the statements about God’s oneness, about the love and honor that is due to God, and about God’s steadfast love to Israel in bringing them out of bondage. (57)

For whatever reason, I was struck by the part Jones seems to do away with. Before reading his immediate remarks that follow the prayer, I underlined this sentence:

You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes.

There’s something really profound here that I’m not sure I can pinpoint or explain. It takes into account both righteousness and the reality of our fallenness. I’m thinking of Peter Rollins’ assertion (following Caputo) that the Kingdom is rather materialistic endeavor; that the “working out” of Christian faith provides food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, welcoming for the stranger, clothing for the naked, care for the sick and time visiting the prisoner [see Matthew 25.31-46]. David Bazan seems to be saying something similar in his song “Bearing Witness”, though he may dislike my saying so.

The use of fringes as a reminder to be holy seems to be for the same reason but pointing in the opposite direction. A material thing pointing back to a spiritual dimension. Are not God’s commandments so often forgotten because of the desires of our hearts?

Anyway, I’m off to the sewing machine.

The second part of the comment sent me to Pete Rollins’ latest book, Insurrection: To Believe is Human, To Doubt, Divine. While I quite like the book (and most everything Pete writes), I can’t quite give it a full endorsement. It’s essentially a meditation on Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, where the Slovenian philosopher argues (a la Chesterton) that Jesus’ cry on the cross reveals a sort of atheism, or, in Lacanian terms, that there is no big Other “out there” to save us. It’s an interesting interpretation, which, frankly, I don’t find particularly fair to the text, but that’s another blog post for another day.

Anyway, after the comment on this morning’s post, I flipped to Rollins’ section on (The) Facebook, entitled “I Wear A Mask That Looks Like Me”, which I find rather insightful:

The question then is whether the story we tell ourselves about ourselves functions in much the same way. In order to answer that, let us consider the growing phenomenon of online social networking sites.

These sites can be described as offering the world an idealized reflection of ourselves. They express an image of ourselves that we would like other people to believe reflects who we are. Indeed, more fundamentally, they enable us to construct an image of ourselves we would like to believe that we are. On our profiles we list all the films that we want people to think that we like while failing to mention some of the more embarrassing ones, or we post the books that help solidify a certain image while avoiding our guilty pleasures. More than this we will often only post pictures that make us look good and remove tags from photos that put us in a bad light. For instance, I remember being at MoMA in New York City and overhearing a young girl asking someone to take a picture of her looking at a particular piece of art for her Facebook profile. It was quite obvious that the girl had little interest in the art as such (moving on as soon as the picture had been taken), but she was interested in creating an image of herself as the type of person who would be interested in that particular painting. One could say that she desired to be the type of person who would like that piece of art or, what amounts to almost the same thing, that she would like other people to think that she was the type of person who would like that piece of art.

It would be a mistake, however, to limit our reflections to the rather mundane claim that Facebook tends to reflect an idealized version of our conscious self. We must go deeper and approach Facebook as itself derivative of a more basic psychic structure – the reality that our conscious self is an idealized expression of who we are. Our conscious self is the idealized version of ourselves that we present to the world, and our Facebook profile simply reflects that. The significant gap does not then lie between our Facebook profile and our conscious self; rather it rests in the difference between our conscious self (reflected in social networking sites like Facebook) and the truth of who we are.

We hide every day behind a mask that is a Photoshopped version of ourselves. (93-94)

The Daily Mail’s Tom Leonard writes,

After allowing for gender, religiosity and whether people were single or attached, the study found that ‘the more hours people spent on Facebook, the stronger was their agreement that others were happier’… Those who had used Facebook for longer were also ‘significantly’ likely to agree with the statement that ‘life is unfair’.

Chou sees this as a “common psychological process” known as correspondence bias, where false conclusions about others are based on limited knowledge. Conversely,

people who spent more time actually socialising with friends in the flesh were less likely to feel they had been handed life’s short straw.

This reminds me of Pete Rollins’ poignant reminder that Facebook (and other web 2.0 type things) give us the opportunity to create socially constructed selves which are, ultimately, merely projections of how we want to be seen by others:

…it is obvious that my twitter, facebook, and website, are mere propaganda machines that pretend to offer you an insight into me while ensuring I remain hidden behind an idealized image. I hide myself in my public profile…

Chou and Edge are merely revealing the destruction regarding how such idealized profiles negatively affect others.

[Hat Tip: John Drane for posting this article on - get this - Facebook! He's much better connected than me.]

It seems Tebow’s run may be coming to an end, but not before Focus on the Family took his playoff opportunity to share the gospel message.

Though not mentioned, according to Focus’ president and CEO, Jim Daly, has noted that Tebow is “the cultural phenomenon that inspired it”. He goes on to note:

We will hear about shoving religion down people’s throats, but if it’s OK to shove Doritos down people’s throats, and cars and everything else, we have the right to advertise, too.

And, of course, it’s already begun. On one message board, “dzerres” refers to the commercial as brainwashing child abuse:

Just think how much better this world would be if kids couldn’t be brainwashed with all of this religious nonsense. There would be no girls in burka’s, no silly turbans, no nonsensical felt stove pipe hats, no bans on dancing or music, no horse buggies, no polygamy, no condemnation, intolerance or the morality police. Ah, I can dream. This commercial shows you exactly what child abuse looks like.

No matter how you slice it, what a bummer when the promise of everlasting life – not to mention the many other insensitive allusions to religious life – is interpreted this way.

To be fair, the leaders of the Fellowship would bristle at the characterization of it as a “denomination”, considering their desire for a flat leadership structure.

Their website explicates their story:

The Fellowship of Presbyterians began in January 2011 as a conversation between seven PC(USA) pastors who wanted to find new ways to encourage each other in common faith, ministry, and mission. These pastors were concerned about the health of the PC(USA) as a denomination, where membership has dropped steadily over 40 years and ongoing disputes over theology and bureaucracy create a culture of contention more than vitality. They talked of reclaiming a covenanted biblical community, where unity is derived from a shared mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ, not from structural affiliation, and where young leaders are nurtured to speak the gospel into a rapidly-changing world. The pastors issued a nationwide call to others of like mind who envisioned a new future for congregations to connect and grow while sharing a Presbyterian, Reformed, Evangelical heritage.

Initially, I had very little interest in the Fellowship, especially considering it’s name. I couldn’t help thinking about it outside of the right wing Christian political group, known also as “The Family”, as infiltrated by Jeff Sharlet.

Once I got over that, however, I simply thought of the Fellowship as a reaction to 10-A, a recent national vote which allows ordaining bodies (churchy lingo for churches and groups of church in a given locale) to ordain openly gay and lesbian pastors, elders and deacons.

And frankly, though I’m more or less in agreement with the Fellowship’s stance, I couldn’t get excited about the time, energy, effort and money to trade one institutional framework for another, simply to communicate something I’m against. Throughout history, churches have divided over cultural and theological issues over and over and over – and I had no interest in being a part of another split.

Luckily, however, a friend, mentor and former supervisor of mine has stayed on top of the inner workings of the Fellowship, and is now serving on the board. He’s kept me updated on the ways in which the Fellowship is actually moving the conversation on what it means to be church forward, by decreasing the space between clergy and laity, emphasizing church planting and rethinking levels of education for ordination (where were they five years ago?!). In short, the Fellowship isn’t just a reaction to what’s happened in the past, it’s a movement for the future.

All that to say, I’m heading out to Orlando on Tuesday, as a sort of representative of our pastoral staff and church board. While I’m still a bit cautious of the idea that we need to spend time, energy, effort and money to earn God’s blessing to move forward, I am thankful to be a part of the conversation.

Indeed, there are two sides to every story. Or, in this case, YouTube video.

Chances are you’re one of the 9,487,981 (and counting) who’s seen the spoken word video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” by Jefferson Bethke (aka bball1989).

His YouTube Channel features videos of Mark Driscoll and Acts 29 buddy Matt Chandler as well as a video response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins promo (wherein he steals most of Bell’s material but inserts his own theological perspective here and there, ultimately making his response less than coherent).

I first saw “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” on Wednesday, I think, when a number of my friends and coworkers shared it on The Facebook, praising it for it’s deconstruction of institutional Christianity, that, as bball1989 states, would rather build churches than feed the hungry. From this perspective, I can agree. And I’m convinced that John Caputo would be proud. Really.

So, yes, in Bethke’s formulation:

Jesus > Religion

Jesus is better than institutional faith. Or, as I recall it from elementary school math, the alligator mouth likes Jesus more than religion, which is a little weird now that I write it down. But you know what I mean, right?

On the other hand, however, Bethke ends up undermining his anti-religion project by arguing for a life lived wholeheartedly after Jesus. To offer an oversimplified response: That is religion. It’s how life is lived. This is why there was no word for religion until the 13th century, when life began to be fragmented between different spheres and a word had to be created to refer to one’s beliefs and pattern of life.

In this sense (which Bethke seems to misunderstand):

Jesus > Religion

“Wait,” you’re thinking, “that’s the same as above.” Yes, but this time, the greater than symbol is not only that, it’s an arrow. Jesus points to a better religion. Recall Jesus’ response to the religious scholars of his day, when asked about the greatest commandment:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. (Matthew 22.37-40 NIV)

Yes, the religious scholars of Jesus’ day had some things wrong. But that doesn’t make Jesus’ response anti-religious. Quite the opposite.

Tony Jones hits the nail on the head (albeit in a rather snarky manner – but hey, I guess he’s earned it with a PhD from Princeton):

Religion is simply the social and psychological framework by which human beings organize their experience of the Divine…

It’s naïve to think that billions of people will experience the Divine, but they won’t try to organize and categorize that experience. We do, and we find that our experience overlaps with the experience of others. We join with those others, and we find patterns of speech, symbols, and behavior that help us articulate our experiences.

And it’s not bad that we do this. It is, Mr. Bethke, inevitable.

I’ve been thinking about it in light of Slavoj Žižek’s thoughts in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, where he posits that what’s needed in our world is not less violence, but more. By “violence” though, he does not mean physical brutality. On the contrary, Žižek states that we must do violence to our inherited ideologies in order to engage the underlying systemic causes of physical brutality.

Is this not the “violence” needed when high ranking military and governmental officials are shocked that Marines would urinate on the dead bodies of their enemies (or are they shocked that someone videotaped it!) but have no problem with the reality of the dead bodies themselves?

To be clear: It is terrible that United States Marines urinated on the bodies of others. Isn’t it worse, however, that they’d just killed these men?

Jefferson’s summation puts it into perspective:

More American troops now kill themselves than die in combat, and female soldiers are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a colleague than to be killed by the enemy. In short, the kids aren’t all right, and it’s time for everyone to stop being shocked when they behave in abnormal, terrifying ways. War is an awful thing that irrevocably changes and destroys people, and it yields horrific, destructive behavior. If you’d like to live in a world in which soldiers don’t pee on their dead enemies, then it’s your duty to fight for a world in which soldiers aren’t killing people in the first place.

Thankfully, even such a terrible atrocity hasn’t disrupted the ongoing peace talks.