Jesus Shows the Way

Jesus was a good man but he was not such a good god (according to Barbara Brown Taylor) if you compare him to all the gods that came before him. He was not big and strong and demanding that his followers feed his ego. He was like no other god before him - a suffering one.

So let's make a note of that right off the top: we have freedom which gives us liberty but it does not give us license to do whatever feels good. We have the freedom to choose but our choices are boundaried ones. And they cause suffering.

Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean that it's spiritually appropriate. If I went around doing whatever I thought I could get by with, I'd be a slave to my whims.

1 Corinthians 6:12 The Message

Here's why: we are conditioned to think, feel and act in ways that are contrary to what John the Baptist came preaching and Jesus modeled. John the Baptist preached repentance - not out of guilt or shame, but his was a liberation theology - you can be saved from your old life and receive a new one. This assumes of course that our old lives are unsatisfactory. And I see no reason to think that has changed much.

Our survival instincts, long bred within us cry out for the same characteristics ancient mankind attributed to their gods - strength and power and domination. But Jesus did not come to appeal to our lowest instincts, he came to call us to our highest potential - a whole brain experience. He came to transform the world by loving it, not controlling it. Which, interestingly enough, models the same thing God modeled. Here's the thing I will never understand about God. He chose to enter into a partnership with humanity by inviting us to be part of running the world. He did not make us start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up into a position of worthiness. Straight after creating Adam and Eve, he says - "Here, run the place." (Genesis 1 - 3 gives us a good look at God's big idea and the rocky launch his concept endured.)

Most of the time it seems that it is more natural for us to run the world based on preferences, on finding a pattern that our brain can accept - us and them. This is our survival instinct - and it looks different for different people. At our house we play team game tag, which basically means Pops and Christian and Norah against Meme. Pops has a great self-preservation instinct, he's always ahead of the kids. Others among us think our survival depends on finding our one true love - who completes us - or finding a group we can belong to who will keep us safe. However our instincts define survival, we are well practiced at it; this has unintended consequences.

What happens when our fears and insecurities cause us to over-react in a frenzy for survival? What happens when we see danger lurking around every corner? Stay tuned.

Giving Up and Starting Over

I only know one way to keep the faith - and that is to find a way to understand my life through the lens of scripture. I have a ton of favorite authors; I practice various spiritual disciplines with about as much regularity as I imagine you do; I have thousands of quotes (many inspirational) that I love and store religiously in notebooks that my children will discard over my dead body. These things are helpful. But for me, and I know I'm a weirdo, but it's the way it is - the scriptures are the thing that usually turn my desperation into a decision to carry on. I blame John the Baptist for this.

While Jesus was living in the Galilean hills, John, called “the Baptizer,” was preaching in the desert country of Judea. His message was simple and austere, like his desert surroundings: “Change your life. God’s kingdom is here.” Matthew 3:1-2 The Message

In a previous blog I shared Barbara Brown Taylor's perspective on John's call to repentance. She believes that John's followers heard hope for a new beginning in his call to repent. She suggested that more of us need to repent of our despair than our arrogance. (Can we have both?). This reminds me of my experience with the 12 steps. Both the steps and the gospels invite us to move away from our compulsion to stare into mirrors and bemoan our fate.

From John's perspective, this other way of viewing repentance is healing, not shaming. It asks us to turn from needless recrimination and see the intentions of God's heart - to work with what we give him - even our worst mistakes.

Taylor says it like this, "Those of us who have committed ourselves to a life of repentance and return will not give up on ourselves, no matter how many times we have to repeat the process." (p. 25, Teaching Sermons on Suffering, God in Pain). Why do we not give up? Because we believe in a God who will not give up on us.

The Dynamic Duo

The first baptism I ever performed was in a church. It totally freaked out those who came to be baptized. We were meeting in a school but walked across the street to a church for the baptism. I lacked imagination for what a jolt that would be to the system of our community. The church had graciously allowed us to use their baptismal font after their traditional 11 am service. Perfect. They would leave and we would arrive - no problem. Except that my friend freaked out. She was intimidated by the steeple, its people, and the formality of the environment. We survived the trauma. Barely.

Her shame attack was associated with past experiences in a church that sounded more like John the Baptist than Jesus. Remember? John was all about repentance. He went around in grunge attire shouting, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." People traveled great distances to take him up on his offer to wash away their past and start fresh.

To us, John the Baptist sounds like he is issuing some sort of threat. Why can blame us? That is how it is presented in many churches. To the people who followed John this was a promise. My friend had years of triggered messaging from a church that preached a message of fire and brimstone to her, a young woman who feared she was dancing very close to the flames. Her experience resulted in shame and guilt but their experience, those who heard the message of John, was one of pardon. My friend heard her pastor demanding that she own up to her depravity, ego and pride. But this message was ineffective because these were not her core issues!

My friend's core issue was hopelessness. John the Baptist preached the message of repentance BEFORE Jesus stepped up and taught us the concept of grace. This was not a haphazard or mixed message from God to us. God gets us. God is not focused on us as miserable sinners; he is well aware that what we need is faith in HIS commitment and power to renew and restore what humanity breaks. Soon the weather will be warm and our community will return to the water for another opportunity to wash away the past and start fresh. Our usual spot is the James River. The bottom is rocky, the water often brown with swirling mud; I usually see a snake or two observing our ritual. I'm always glad when it is over and we all manage to safely return to shore. It seems more fitting, somehow, to enter into those rocky rapids with a little fear and trembling.

Scapegoating and Forgiveness: Part III

We're carrying on a conversation from the past few days, feel free to get caught up before reading this one.

Empathy for offenders (when and where it's possible) begins with seeing ourselves as we truly are: people who are just as capable of creating offense as receiving it. Unfortunately, this is not something that can be taught and learned, it can only be discovered. Sadly, we tend to discover this truth only when we find ourselves on the outside of a group, banished, with no false group identity to protect us from seeing ourselves as we really are (this is, again, Girard's thought).

When we recognize the truth about ourselves, then we recognize that there is no great divide between ourselves and other people who cause harm (even, perhaps, our offenders). Now, again, I'm not suggesting there is no moral distinction between a victim of rape and a rapist but, I am suggesting that, over the course of a lifetime, all of us cause harm and are capable of much more. If we discover this about ourselves, then we don't see ourselves as people above wrongdoing.

The goal in viewing ourselves as wrongdoers is not to shame ourselves for being wrongdoers but to simply see ourselves accurately and to discover exactly how much grace and love we receive from God (and, hopefully, community). We do not need to see ourselves only as wrongdoers but as people who miss the mark, people who struggle to live out our certain way of seeing. This is what allows us to empathize with others. We recognize our struggle, and that means we can recognize that others struggle as well. Most people do not get up in the morning with the intention of ruining people's lives. There are, of course, exceptions, but most people cause harm because they are struggling. This means they are not so different from ourselves.

Side note: Of course we’re not going to empathize with every offender and we do not need to empathize with every offender. However, it never hurts to learn to view ourselves accurately and to find a more nuanced perspective on the world in the process. In this case, we discover that we are not only victims of our offenders. Our identity can be much larger, if we can see ourselves accurately. Learning to see that offenders have an identity beyond their offenses is a tangential benefit.

Scapegoating and Forgiveness

Rene Girard developed a very popular theory for societal behavior, generally referred to as Mimetic Theory. It goes like this. People learn through imitation. We learn to imitate behaviors (obvious), but we also learn to imitate desire. I learn to want what you want. Think about keeping up with the Jones’: My neighbor wants a Porsche, all of a sudden I want a Porsche. That is mimetic desire- it is wanting what other people want- not just doing what other people do. Because we all learn to desire what everyone else wants, humans are inevitably in competition with one another. This causes conflict and chaos. The only way we’ve found to deal with the conflict and chaos is to find someone to blame and to remove this person from the society (or group). This is called the Scapegoat Mechanism.

So, in an addicted family system, it’s easy to blame the substance use disordered person for all of the family’s problems and to banish this person from the family. On a societal level, it’s easy to blame immigrants for economic problems if we aren’t doing well financially, and banish them from the country.

You get the idea. It's a way of thinking about complex problems as if they were simple so that we don't need to find a complex solution. Simple solutions are always preferable. The problem is, they are only solutions if they actually solve the problem they are meant to solve.

When it comes to forgiveness and resentment, we may look for simple solutions when complex solutions are the only ones that will address the heart of the matter.

More on this tomorrow.