Upset

Today the Kansas men's basketball team lost in the NCAA tournament to end their season.  It was an upset.  They lost to a team that perhaps they should have beat, a team who played well beyond their statistical capabilities, a team who almost didn't make it into the tournament and is now Final Four bound.  Perhaps if they played again, the outcome would be different, but that's the beauty of the tournament: Virginia Commonwealth can go on a run and play better than the body of their work.  Many congratulations to them.

In fact, that's the beauty of this game, for it reminds us that our potential is well beyond the ruts that tend to guide our common living.  It also reminds us that we can be worse then we usually are, and there, perhaps, is humanity in sum.  And that is the good thing with sports. 

I didn't watch the game.  I live on the west coast and the first half was during Sunday school and during the second half I took one of our precious teenagers out to lunch.  We talked college selection and art and music, and I didn't think much of missing the game.  When I got home I saw the score.  I talked to a couple of folks who watched the game, and I read some good analysis about three point shooting and personnel mismatches and the style of officiating.

Then I read some fan comments, folks who were incredibly supportive, and I was proud to be a Kansas fan.  People wrote about how hard the boys played and how much heart they had and how grateful they are for another successful season.  People encouraged these young Jayhawks to keep their heads up, to be proud of themselves.  These are the good things about the game. 

Then I read on, folks saying the boys choked again.  Folks calling into question the coaching ability of Bill Self, the talent of the Kansas guard play, the shooting ability, the heart.  A few conversations devolved into placing blame for the loss or into criticizing individual players or mocking the Kansas basketball program.  This is the problem with the game.  This is upsetting.

Maybe it seems like friendly banter, these criticisms that come with this kind of loss, all part of the game.  And no doubt these precious young men will bounce back.  After all, they are strong and resilient mentally, physically, and emotionally.  You have to be to do what they do, but this blaming is upsetting.

There's a fairly heartbreaking clip of Marcus Morris trying to respond to reporters in the locker room this afternoon.  He doesn't have a lot to say, except that he feels like he let everybody down.  And no wonder - he put his heart and soul into it.  Here we could say a lot about the consumerism of sports, the waste of money, recruiting violations, academic fraud, etc., and we are right to be critical about our participation in these unjust systems.

But Marcus Morris is twenty-one years old.  Some student-athletes aren't role models; some are.  But they are all young adults, growing and changing, seeking and learning while their lives are full of pressure imposed by self and others.  They and their programs should not be criticized or blamed or mocked.  They, like each student-athlete, should be celebrated for they gifts they have and the joy and heartache we have the privilege to share with them. 

The best advertisements of any tournament are the ones produced by the NCAA itself.  You know the tagline: "There are over 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and most of us will go pro in something other than sports."  Likely, Marcus Morris will go on to the NBA this year or next, but Tyrel Reed and Brady Morningstar and so many will be professionals in other ways.  Yet they've granted us the privilege of journeying with them, and it is indeed a privilege for which we owe them and their programs our gratitude.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk. 

The Laws of Violence

Today I was watching basketball and planting seeds in my kitchen when President Obama came on with a declarative statement in his role as Commander in Chief of the United States Military.  For me it was a symbolic interruption, activities of celebration, play, and new life interrupted with a message of power, a show of strength, and the threat of force.  I couldn't help the tears that began flowing. 

This Sunday (March 20) will be the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Then too, the new life of spring and the celebration of play and sport in the basketball tournament were foremost in my mind as my team was in Lubbock, Texas preparing to play Texas Tech in the first round of the women's NCAA tournament.  I sat there stunned in my hotel room at the La Quinta Inn when I heard about the invasion.  I sat there with my roommate for the trip, completely deflated, overwhelmed by the human capacity for violence and forceful terror, overtaken by this country's intimate and often unquestioned participation in systems of violence. 

Many have said and many will say that force is necessary and the manipulation of power by shows of military might are a natural part of international relations.  Military intervention against a terrorist or a dictator is a necessary evil.  It is "our" job to protect people who can't protect themselves.  There are many questions to raise in this common and seemingly innocuous logic, questions that followers of Jesus in particular must raise. 

To that end, the late French social critic and radical lay theologian Jacques Ellul has written with clarity and conviction about violence and peace, deconstructing the arguments and assumptions that prop up the logic of violence.  In his book Violence (1969), he asks Christians to take seriously these laws of violence (pp 93-108):

1. Continuity: once you start using violence, you cannot get away from it.
2. Reciprocity: there is no distinction between a good and bad use of violence; violence begets and procreates violence.
3. Sameness: it is impossible to distinguish between justified and unjustified violence, between violence that liberates and violence that enslaves.  Every violence is identical with every other violence.
4. Violence begets violence, nothing else. No government established by violence has given the people either liberty or justice - only a show of liberty (for those who supported the movement) and a show of justice. 
5. The [person] who uses violence always tries to justify both it and [her/himself].  

We don't need to trust ourselves to make some kind of change, to argue with the global empires that threaten creation and convince them of a better way.  Instead we go on planting seeds, trusting that with water and light, God will make them grow.   

Into the Wilderness

March 13, 2011
Seattle Mennonite Church
First Sunday in Lent
Matthew 4.1-11

This morning’s gospel lesson begins: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil…”  In the first three chapters of Matthew, Jesus has been conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.  He has been visited by wise men from the East and then fled to Egypt with his parents.  It hasn’t been a dull life.  A few years pass before he is baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan, anointed the Son of God… and now we can get started.  But to be led with Jesus to the desert, you can’t simply begin here in Matthew.  To know where you are, you have to know where you come from.

So our New Testament story for today doesn’t begin with Mathew chapter 4, verse 1.  It doesn’t even begin with those other stories in Matthew.

This gospel belonged to a mixed first century community, some of whom who grew up with Jewish stories and Jewish customs.  They believed that their Christian community of both Jews and Gentiles was a continuation of the people of God, another chapter in a story that began long ago – long ago, before time started flowing, long ago in that poetic, prelapsarian paradise.  There was Adam and there was Eve and one day in the garden there came the serpent, clothed in temptation.

You were confronted there with Adam and Eve, confronted by something that promised to make you different, another person besides the you God created you to be: smarter, prettier, stronger, wealthier, younger, skinnier, less human.

The trick is that we fell for it, there in paradise.  The tempter said, “For God knows that when you eat of the fruit your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The tempter’s taunting voice echoes today – you will be less like yourself and more like who you think you should be, smarter, prettier, stronger, wealthier, skinnier, less human.  And so they picked and ate.  No doubt when its first fresh drops of juice landed on their tongues it was tasty, but the aftertaste, oh the aftertaste.

We didn’t become more like God that day, not by a long shot.  If anything we became less – we saw our own ugliness, our tendency to blame others for our mistakes, our capacity for shame, guilt, and alienation.  The world began spinning, subject to the centrifugal force that propels us away from each other and away from ourselves into fragmented reality.  Out of the garden we fell, angels blocking the gates, thrust into a wilderness ruled by systemic forces of oppression and injustice and personal forces of insecurity and despair.

And that is where the story began, Eden, temptation, wilderness.

It’s no surprise that Matthew picks it up again, this wilderness.  In telling powerful truths about the human condition it was part of his story as it is part of ours.  So we arrive back at Matthew chapter four verse one.  “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”  There’s no Eden any more – we lost that back in Genesis chapter three and so the gospel finds us here.

“He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.”

These forty days of Lent that we just began recall Jesus’ fast in the wilderness.  Think what that would be like – alone with your thoughts for forty days.  Every mistake, every deficiency recalled, humanity stripped the core, bare, naked.  Those times you missed the mark coming up in your spirit again and again through the incessant rumblings of hunger.

Most of us run from this kind of confrontation with ourselves and our own limits.  The spiritual journey into the wilderness flies in the face of those formational American myths:

• you can do anything you put your mind to
• be all you can be
• just do it
• bigger is better

Success, security, achievement, and the pursuit of happiness mask the exposed humanity we encounter out here.  Oh to look deep into our addictions, to slow down and face who we really are – it’s tempting to avoid such a wilderness, to resist the Lenten journey.  It’s easier not to live down our fears, not to sit in mortality, or ponder that haunting line: Seattle Mennonite Church, you were created from dust and to dust you will return.

Jesus could have resisted the wilderness confrontation too.  He could have turned around, headed out of the wilderness and walked right back to Nazareth away from temptation. Temptation is a powerful part of the human condition,  after all, overlapping desire and satisfaction, pleasure and need, sacrifice and ease isolation … as we constantly seek something outside of ourselves to soothe the loneliness and find fulfillment.  It’s no coincidence that many of us pray every day the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation…”  The testing, pushing our very beings to the limits.  Who wants to go there?

But we know the story.  Instead of turning around, our Jesus stands right in the middle of it, dialoging with the devil.  For each temptation he has a response:

• Stones to bread?  I don’t think so, for God sustains us as much as any food.
• Jump down from the heights into the arms of angels?  I don’t think so, for God’s realm is beyond testing.
• Worship the devil in exchange for the power of the greatest king?  I don’t think so, for I worship the Lord God whose isn’t about power and dominion.

Our temptations may be the same or they may be different.  They may come through evil personified, a modern day devil on the shoulder or maybe they come through systems of domination that seem benign as we participate out of habit each day.  We are tempted to bypass suffering, to win the approval of others, to justify our mistakes by blaming others or fulfill our own longings without regard for the consequences.  We are tempted by individualism, self-sufficiency, wealth, popular culture.

We are tempted to put something besides God at the center of our lives.  To flee from that wilderness confrontation, and head the other way.

And sometimes we do hightail it out of the wilderness.  We take one look at Jesus on that journey to the cross and run the other way.

And sometimes by the grace of God we don’t.

The tempter was wrong back in Eden, you see, when he said you’ll become more like God and less like yourself.  The devil was wrong in the gospel when he says that bread or power can make you whole.

Saint Augustine famously wrote: “Our hearts are restless until they find our rest in thee.”  I think this is what Jesus knew there in the wilderness – that nothing can replace God at the center of our lives.  Maybe it was easier for him with that whole incarnation thing – he was God put on flesh, after all.  But maybe it wasn’t – he was human too.

Head into the wilderness and miraculously, through no effort of our own, we begin to become more human, sharing with Jesus the hunger and weakness, our pain and his mixing together.  Despite all appearances to the contrary, this is extraordinarily Good News, my friends.

No you are not defined by your addiction or your temptation or that mistake you made last year or yesterday.  No you don’t have to take on the world or fix it either.

The truth is to become more yourself is to become closer to God and to become closer to God is to become more yourself.  The authentic spiritual life is rooted in who we are as human beings, temptations and all.  Created in God’s image, the truth is, you are already worthy.  You are already enough.  You are already loved.

Thanks be to God.

Kansas Year

Kansas is no mere geographical expression, but a "state of mind," a religion, and a philosophy in one. 

-Carl Becker, 1910

As of January 29, we have entered the 150th year in the life of the great state of Kansas.  The more sophisticated among us call this the "Sesquicentennial Year."  There are all kinds of celebrations going on in the Sunflower State and facebook pages and blogs.  My favorite is this one: 150 poems for 150 years.  Every few days the Kansas poet laureate posts a new poem, something that captures Kansas somehow. 

I haven't found any celebrations here in Seattle, but I did celebrate Kansas Day the other month with a fellow Kansan, and I have a picture to prove it.  This is my celebratory baked good, a "sunflower swirl."   

You see the resemblance to our state flower also captured in more than one of the quilted wall hangings that I own.  

I'd also like to take this opportunity to celebrate our state mammal (buffalo), our state song (Home on the Range), our state bird (the Western Meadowlark), our state reptile (the Box Turtle), and our state motto (Ad Aspera per Aspera: "to the stars through difficulties").  These are the good things they teach us in the Kansas public schools, good things that stay with us and carry us through a lifetime even here in the wild west. 

So much of my reading and thinking is about place, and really it always has been.  I think that's why I love Wendell Berry so much and why deep down I have never been at home in my transient urban life.  It's because I grew up on a generations old farm and in a state where we connect to who we are by where we are: cardinal directions, weather, fields, big sky.  It's because I will always associate work ethic, community, and faith with the homeland.

I'm not in Kansas any more as many a northwesterner has quipped when I claim my place, but Kansas isn't just about geography.  So here from Seattle, Washington let it be proclaimed that I am a proud Kansan.  Happy Kansas year to all.  

On Money

"Money isn't real." 

The other month down at God's Lil' Acre those were the words that riled up my insides.  It happens more often there than anywhere, the prophetic word.  Yes, instead of reading Martin Luther King, Jr. or a radical blog of educated, mobile young adults, the razor sharp Word shows up at a drop-in populated by folks without jobs who wear their addictions on their bodies (unlike most of us who hide ours deeper down).  Every Thursday morning for four hours I sit in that little house, that little "rehumanization center" as one of our homeless friends has called it, and I listen and learn and notice what is happening to me in the process. 

Now more than once I've had to stand up for women's rights or treating others with respect and dignity, but that's no different from any old unfortunate conversation with an overly talkative seatmate on some plane ride to Denver.  (Yes, I speak from experience.)  The difference at GLA, though is that the profound mixes with the profane, and I have to pay attention and think, and wade through frustration to figure out the difference.

Of course money isn't real.  It's a socially constructed, material phenomenon, and every Thursday I sit with folks who live their lives without much of it.  What if we did everything through a barter system, eliminating the false middle idol of cash?  What if we didn't barter but gave of ourselves, our possessions, our time freely?  What if we walked the dusty road of life relying on hospitality and seeing from the margins things that those with power and privilege cannot?  What if we followed Jesus on that journey to the cross with the sacrifice and simplicity it requires?

Recently we held a memorial service for a community member who didn't seem to notice the boundaries between himself and other people.  I'd walk down the stairs into the yard and he'd say to me, "Boy I'd sure like to see you in a bikini!"  See?  No appropriate boundaries.  But he'd also get his check first of the month and start handing out money and he'd say, "They need it more than I do."

Money isn't real.  It takes someone on the very margins of this money-drive society to name such a profound truth.  So I'm thinking it's time to start listening to something besides televisions and engaging something besides mobile devices.  Or how else will we see what is real?