There is no leverage in loss. . .

For a very long time we have lived with the false idea that in order to raise up someone, another must be torn down.  That surely shows in the bitter political and social divide which is not merely the competition of ideas but the terrible idea that trashing our opponent automatically makes us look better.  It has also shown itself in the battle of the sexes where it is almost universally assumed that we must tear men down in order to lift women up.  That is not the path to respect or appreciation of difference nor is it any road to the equality that so many say they want.  But it will be the path to the destruction of whatever might be good that remains among us.  

I am not at all saying that we should refrain from calling a sin a sin or condemning wrong.  Of course not. But the goal of calling a sin out or even calling out a sin is not as a means to gain leverage over them.  It is, as Matthew 18 reminds us, to gain back our brother or sister.  As good as that sounds, the reality is that too often we will settle for putting someone else down in the hopes that it will lift our boat as a result.  How has that been working?  To demonize our enemies or those with whom we disagree will seem to make us and ours a righteous cause but it cannot mask the selfish desire that is at the root of it all. 

In education as well as in the job market, we have lived for a while with the shaming of men and their characteristic traits of providing, protecting, and working.  Ambition has become a bad word in our vocabulary where everyone shares in everything no matter what they do or do not contribute.  We say we want to float all boats but the reality is that we are simply emptying the stream until there is nothing left to float any boat.  Then we call that progress.  What does winning look like?  Apparently it looks like men abandoning the fight so that women alone are left in it.  Look at the graduation rates and who wears the gold cords of achievement in high school and college graduations.  It is a sea of feminism.  But in that sea, have all the boats been raised to float or have we settled for merely some?  Is it wise or even accurate to frame every male success as a female loss?  Or, the other way around?

Oddly enough, there was a time when women and children were more regularly in worship -- bemoaning the men who were at work, asleep, or on the golf course.  I have a famous Norman Rockwell print of the family heading to church while the husband and dad in pjs is reading the paper while smoking a cigarette.  Now it seems that we are headed the other way around as more young men are heading to worship while their female counterparts are existing.  Of course, it is about faith but there is also a cultural move here.  As young women pull away from institutional authority, traditional marriage and family, historic values, and clear morality, young men seem to draw closer to the same things.  Sadly, it is as if one part of the equation must lose in order for the other to win. 

AI and the promise of machines to replace us not simply from the menial jobs we do not want to do but from the nobility of work in general seems a dream but is it?  Is it good for humanity to be rich in leisure and poor in labor?   Ambition is not a problem to be solved but an energy to be directed.  We have many needs but chief among them is purpose.  Ambition does not need to be replaced by a dream of a mechanized egalitarian society in which machines do our work and we are left with the jobs that AI and technology cannot do?  Ambition within the cause of God and for His purpose is always directed away from self and for the sake of others.

Jesus does not choose sides, elevating one over another but dies for all that all who live should not live for themselves but for Him.  That is both the gift of this Gospel and its call to shape us and our lives by that Gospel.  Our Lord made man for woman and woman for man, having in His creative love His own selfless love as source and example.  The future for us all will not be built by choosing one over another but by the love that loves as Christ has loved us -- at least until that love finishes its work and delivers us unto the Father.  But until then if Christians are to be a leaven in this competitive world in which you succeed at the cost of others, then we need to honor and respect the differences of male and female not as better or worse but as God's own creative will and purpose -- a goodness grace teaches us to sin where sin sees only a race.  There is no leverage to be won by choosing men over women or women over men.  Each is itself a false choice that would deprive us of the essential values of home and family that God meant us to know and enjoy from the beginning.  Diverse roles, to be sure.  Different characteristics, of course.  But together more than apart.  At least when it comes to men and women, boys and girls, neither will gain at the cost of the other. 

Greater sin. . .

While catching up on things, a reader of this blog sent me what Pope Leo, on a flight back from Africa.  In response to a question, he told reporters that “we tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue”.  Some of Leo's greater sins might be described as institutional, societal, and humanity's failings and they have, indeed, been labeled in this way.  But sexual sin is largely personal and individual.  I suppose one might charitably suggest that he was merely drawing the attention of people away from pointing the finger at one or several people and reminding them that nations and societies have been complicit in the ills that afflict us as well.  That is probably not what he was doing, however, and I think he was trying to put out a Francis fire by deflecting attention from the absurdity of blessing proposed by the then pope and now everyone wishes the furor would go away.  It will not go away by doing what Leo proposes.

It was sexual sin that was the first poisoned fruits of Adam and Eve's rebellion in Eden and it has been pretty high on the list of wrongs with which we are continually tempted and complicit.  To try and put sexual sin down the list of errors and failings of a sinful humanity is to forget the Biblical record.  Our culture is not enamored with sexual sins as side hustles to bigger wrongs.  It is precisely sexual sin that has taken hold of our hearts and minds and led to the destruction of marriage and family, to the casual way we treat life in general and the child in the womb specifically, and to the use of sex as an entertainment avenue most of all.  The Bible speaks eloquently of this sexual sin and gives any number of examples of sexual sinners whose individual sin brought down a nation (David) and bring Jesus into what is profane (Paul).  For this pope to try to deflect attention away from sexual sin is to miss exactly what Scripture tells us about it and its terrible consequences through the ages (from the sexualization of children to the abuse of women to the infanticide that have remained even as technology makes it more rampant and much easier).

No less that St Augustine, reflecting upon his own wayward life, said that in liberty a man has as many masters as he has vices.  It is not the pursuit of this liberty that we are ennobled but in refusing to succumb to what might be possible but is surely not beneficial that we are sanctified.  To put it bluntly, self-control and God's grace to rescue the fallen and weak are the means to freedom from the entrapment of self-desire and the domination of prurient interest.  We do not find release from this sin by indulging in it nor does the focus on other sins put this demon its its place.  It reminds you of those who would insist that the greater sin is self-denial of this passion and desire rather than self-control.  Be true to yourself no matter what it costs you or how it hurts others is the convenient lie we tell ourselves when we want to justify the feelings we know are wrong.  No, Leo, the sins we need to hear about are not the bigger plagues upon our humanity that are called isms but the secret sins of the heart and the darkness of the mind that leads us into the path of temptation where we willingly surrender to that desire.  I am not saying we Christians should be silent on those other things but we were sent to preach primarily to people and not to the halls of political power or the ballot box.  The cause of Christ is not the redemption of humanity but the saving of one sinner.  It is over this repentance which heaven rejoices.  The Good Shepherd continues to seek the lost one sheep at a time and continues to stand watch over the horizon for the prodigal son and daughter to come home broken and dead inside.  We preach Christ and Him crucified and in that preaching is the call to repentance and faith in the God whose mercy cannot be bought and whose grace is sufficient for our every need. 

 

Too much information. . .

We live in an information world -- a world driven by information.  We have so much information at our fingertips.  As a child I was thrilled when we got a set of Grolliers Encyclopedias.  I never even tapped the wealth of information in those books.  Sure, I used them for curiosity, school, proof, and to win arguments but there were too many words for me to absorb.  Now we have so much more at our beck and call in this thing called the internet.  We hear news from across the world, browse through catalogs of things to buy and choices to make, and learn the names and affectations of people around the planet in social media.  

It is too much information too absorb and it teaches us to be rather passive about the things we learn.  In days gone by people learned what they need to know and used that information for their jobs or families or purchases or the like.  Now we simply accumulate information as if it was what made us wise.  Plus, we live in a time when it is almost impossible to know if what you see or read or hear is actually true or a fabrication or a complete invention of non-human so-called intelligence.  We guess at what we see, hear, and read and hope that what we like is true and what we don't like or what feeds our fears is false.  I wish there was an easy way to figure it all out.

Information is just information.  It is too easy to mistake knowing something as important and good in and of itself and forget why knowing that information is important.  We treat life as as a time to accumulate information and it has become the digital equivalent of all the stuff our grandparents collected in their lives and we donated to a thrift store.  It has become a wildly successful industry.  Think of how little Facebook contributes to our world and how valuable it is as a company and how rich you or I might be if we had invested in it early on.  This is not simply true for the world.  Spiritual information has become  something of a cottage industry and it has not escaped notice of the marketers who are leaving the churches in the dust as they speed ahead to become the source of spiritual information for the masses.

Wisdom and experience were once the province of the old.  In our youth culture, it is not exactly a highly valued commodity -- age and experience, I mean.  Where the Biblical landscape had an honored place for the gray haired, now they are largely seen as liabilities or problems the younger folks wish would either shut up or go away.  Was I too harsh?  There are always brilliant young minds in every discipline but they are largely less knowledgeable and smart about life.  That is the premise of how many TV comedies? It is not hard to know what you do not know but it is not so easy to know what you don't.  I do not claim to be gifted in much and my expertise is usually less than my ambition.  If we only spoke about what we really knew, the rooms of our lives would be rather silent.  The passive information we suck up as if it were something real and valuable often leads us to the false conclusion that we know whereof we speak.  That is realm of age and experience and it is what contributes to the wisdom in so much short supply today.

It is probably good advice to tell ourselves and others not to speak as if we knew everything but it is advice seldom taken.  As evidence of that, I point to the increasing intolerance of diverging views on the unsocial social media and the violence that too often becomes the first response rather than the last.  We would do well to learn a little patience.  I am particularly speaking about those who insist that it is their job to inform the stupid masses of all the things they have gotten wrong without at all considering that they might be included among them.

Stick to what you know is good advice.  Stick to what God says is better.  Oddly enough, the plethora of information that surrounds us has led us to listen less to the voice of God and more to the gut feelings we have in the moment.  That is a particular danger we have fallen into in this world today.  We know something about everything but just enough Scripture to make us dangerous.  Lutherans were once prone to advise people to read the catechism.  It sounds like a put down.  It is probably one of those voices of wisdom we no longer pay much attention to anymore.  There is a great temptation to believe that you can know everything but in so doing you end up knowing not much and even less about the very important things of this life.  I fear that this has contributed to our quest to redefine gender, marriage, family, etc, and it has left us with a definite void in our education.  When the most basic things to our lives are largely strangers to us, it is typically the moment when we replace them with unsuitable substitutes.    

Interesting. . .

By now anyone and everyone knows the name Ryan Burge who is the guy with charts, stats, and commentary on religion in America.  It is worth noting when he offers stats that would explain some of the things we see when we watch Christianity in America.  How interesting in this data that shows that over time clergy within the Roman Catholic Church have grow increasingly more conservative while clergy in the mainline (so called seven sisters) have done just the opposite!

In this chart, he tracks the perspective of Roman Catholic priests by year of ordination and notes the dramatic shift since the early 1970s -- almost a complete reversal!  While it might be easy to notice and speak of this anecdotally, Burge has given us real data to show that this is real.  It might explain some of the drama and conflicts within American Roman Catholicism but it is worth noting.  I suspect that it is also true across the world but that is only my opinion.  Rome may be wrestling with a hierarchy that is rooted in another perspective while the future lies in a different direction.  What might that suppose for the next 5-10 years as some of those older folks age out of influence?

On the other hand, the mainline denominations in America have done the complete opposite.  Long ago we noted that their clergy were far ahead of the folks in the pews -- not exactly surprising -- but here it is documented that the conservative voices in pulpits across America in these seven sisters have turned around and headed in a very different direction from those in the pews.  Look at the stats:

Finally, in the following graph is revealed the increasing theological liberalism within those same mainline churches.

It is no wonder that the pews are emptying, that there is no longer instinctive trust between the folks in the pews and those in the pulpits, and that the shape of the future for these churches is more and more defined along ideology that transcends both theological and political views.

The last good war. . .

My father entered the US Army near the end of World War II.  I never served though my draft status for Vietnam was close to being called up.  There was an almost reverence toward the things of war in my small town growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  We played army and had army toys, including legions of little green plastic soldiers we arranged in battles great and small.  We watched the post-WWII movies that continued to esteem and honor the sacrifices of those who fought against tyranny, fascism, and evil.  It almost did not occur to me that I was half-German or that one of my ancestors was the keeper of the Kaiser's horse.  There was no doubt about who was the evil and who was the good in the wake of WWII.  Korea and Vietnam did not have the impact you might have thought.  I would put it that these were tolerated wars but not accepted — wars which began with nobility but whose virtue was tarnished as the years dragged on.  This was especially true of Vietnam.  But when our town honored the dead on Memorial Day, everyone was included.  We lined up as children with our white crosses adorned with poppies to be loaded in cars and head to every local cemetery to pay tribute to the fallen of every conflict.  But the cannon in the public park was from WWII and most of the soldiers who pulled out their old uniforms and managed to button them up for the Memorial Day festivities had on WWII fatigues or dress blues.  It was the last good war.

At some point, we stopped having good wars.  It was not for lack of evil men and empires trying to steal away democracy and freedom.  We have always had those.  Maybe not on the scale of the Kaiser or der Fuhrer but enemies of all America stands for have always existed.  I wish I knew why wars against tyrants and dictators and terrorists stopped being good.  At some point we were worn down from a Cold War in which there was no battle to speak of but still the cost of it all in children huddling beneath desks in case of nuclear war or fall out shelter signs all over schools and community buildings or a thousand other small arenas in which the conflict was fought.  Then it all ended without a bang—more like a ballot box and a collapse from internal pressure and the wall came down and we even had hope for Russia.  The old evil empire seemed to be gone but not evil itself.  In my lifetime I have counted so many different armed conflicts or peacekeeping missions or whatever you want to call them that I have lost track of the number.  Some of them seemed good.  Desert Storm seemed noble enough until it didn't.  Then in Iraq and Afghanistan we seemed to be the good guys but they were not real wars.  We did not win as much as we got tired of it all, the political costs became too great, and an exit strategy was sought to save face.  Now we have had another fight with Iran—a commonly accepted bad player in a region of bad players doing bad things.  But it did not take long for the shine to be tarnished on this as well.

Americans have always honored those in uniform—well, except for those who came home from Vietnam and were treated as if they were the cause of that problem.  We have and should feel nothing but gratitude for men (and women) who sacrificed everything for God, country, apple pie, and our way of life.  But somewhere I think we gave up on the whole idea of a good war.  It seems that none of us can agree on an enemy or a cause anymore.  We are even second guessing the Great War and the last Good War.  We got over Germany, Korea, and Vietnam and they became partners with us in supplying our economic thirst for goods.  We forgot the atrocities of the past—mostly.  But we still cannot swallow the idea that any war for any cause can be good.  Even theologians argue over what wars were or are just and what are or were unjust.  It is not as easy as it once was.  The wartime presidents have been shown to have their own dark sides or they have been blamed for the decisions they made then that some might not make now.  The postwar presidents have thought that a conflict might unite support for them and their policies but it has not worked that way.  Trump said he would get us out of wars but has blood on his hands.  We do not have the stomach for war anymore.  We decry civilian casualties and live in the illusion that wars can be fought in a sanitized way in which there are no grieving mothers or fathers or parents or children—but there always are.  We live in an age of angst about every war and struggle to conceive of any reason why anyone would fight.  Have we lost the fight or simply lost the causes to fight for or to fight against?  In less than a month Memorial Day will happen again.  Has it become simply another day off that is filled with distractions to keep us from thinking about wars, bad wars, great wars, good wars, and those who fought in them and gave up everything for that fight?  I hope it is not true.  Please tell me it is not.