If Barack Obama asked me to endorse him, I’d have to excommunicate him for his own good.

That’s my conclusion after the messy consequences of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s association with Obama, and of Pastor John Hagee’s proclaimed support for John McCain.  The gonzological utterances of these pastors have given all of us Christian clergy a bad rap, to say nothing of the harm they’ve done to the candidates they aimed to support.  The best thing that religious leaders can do for their favored candidates, and for our profession, is to avoid the entanglement that comes with endorsement.

That won’t stop me, nor should it stop spiritual communities, from taking action on issues that figure significantly in the upcoming presidential election.  Issues like the overwhelming need for comprehensive health care reform, so that Americans finally get universal, single-payer medical coverage that is enjoyed by citizens of most other industrialized nations.  Issues like America’s occupation of Iraq, which needs to end swiftly.  Issues like how to deal with Iran and Syria and Palestine/Israel - it is time for our nation to show its true strength by talking directly with their leaders, working hard to deal with the root causes of conflict wherever possible, instead of stonewalling and saber-rattling.  Issues like ending America’s disastrous “war on drugs” and adopting a more humane and pragmatic “harm-reduction” approach instead.   Issues like breaking up our prison-industrial complex, giving judges more flexibility in sentencing and giving inmates more opportunities for education and rehabilitation.  Issues like marriage equality:  giving support for the California court decision making gay and lesbian marriages possible.  (Anybody out there whose straight marriage is falling apart because gay marriage is now allowed?) 

Strongly as I feel about these issues, the Christ inspires me to a humility that avoids claiming that my opinion is God’s, a humility that admits that I don’t have the last word on how society best should be ordered.  The Christian faith calls us to care deeply about all the great issues of our day, and take action in response.  But it doesn’t unequivocally explain how these questions should be answered. 

So I’ll stick with Jesus’ gospel of kindness and love that impels me to care about matters political, and also reminds me to stay open to the perspectives of people who disagree with me.  I’ll avoid the pitfalls of mixing my pastoral role with partisanship: I’d never vote for a politician who would advertise my endorsement!

This is the third blog in a series I’ve called “Being church”. In this series I’ve tried to describe how church is actually a verb. When Christians gather together, we are not ‘church’ because we call ourselves a church or because we belong to a congregation or because we built a nice building with a steeple. We become church when we gather and live together in Christ-likeness. We become church as we bear-forth or incarnate the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ.

I’ll have more to say about what it means to be church in the next blog, but now I would like to move on to a description of a community in whom I experienced Christ and the Christian life more intensely, more intentionally, than anywhere else. Note especially how the Bishram community is made up of oppressed people who are reaching out to others who are oppressed. They sustain their communal life through fellowship, sharing whatever they have in common, giving to those who have need, reaching out to those beyond their community, and also through much prayer and study.

My encounter with Bishram Ministries in Nepal began vicariously a few years ago. My sister Patti had visited Nepal on a mission trip, worked with Sister Asangla and Pastor Dan of Bishram Ministries. She returned aglow with the radiant enthusiasm of a new convert. As she told me of their evangelistic ministry in Nepal, I tried to be an attentive brother to her, but truth be known I was rather dismissive of the whole thing. For one thing, Nepal is pretty far away from my daily concerns in Kansas City. And another, Patti and I are on different ends of the theological spectrum, and I was not too interested in her “brand” of evangelism. Proselytizing Hindus and Buddhists and converting them to Christianity is out of my spiritual comfort zone. Over the years, as she repeatedly asked me to travel with her to see Bishram ministry for myself, I politely but resolutely refused. After a while, however, my excuses were running out (especially since I was going to be on sabbatical for a year) and I finally said to her that I would need to hear about the ministry from someone more…well…more academically legitimate. Immediately, she replied that “Billy” “who taught somewhere in Dallas” could tell me about it. Well, the name “Billy” did not strike me as very authoritative, but I reluctantly agreed. Shortly, I received an email from Patti that was in effect a virtual handshake between “Billy” and myself. When I inspected the name on the email, it was none other than the respected theologian, William Abraham. Now, she had my attention.

Soon, Billy and I had a conversation about Bishram, and he convinced me that for many reasons I needed to go. So, I did in January 2008. And the rest of this story is about my experience of an amazing community that is the closest approximation of the early church in Acts chapter 2 that I have ever encountered. Do I now sound like a convert?

If I was going to go halfway around the world, I didn’t want to be just a spectator, so I offered to teach and preach as it would be useful to them. It was arranged for me to teach students in their school of ministry, to teach church leaders in a village, and then to preach whenever needed. I would arrive on Saturday, have Sunday to relax and recover from travel, then start teaching in the school of ministry on Monday. Patti would join us the following Thursday. Then we would travel to western Nepal so that Patti and I could teach in a 2 day conference.

Nepal is a study in stark contrasts. Fertile valleys and rich, biodiverse jungles stretch out  between majestic peaks of the Himalayan range. Nepal is an ancient civilization and slowly making its way into the 21st Century. With 80% of Nepali people being Hindu, Nepal is the only official Hindu state in the world. 10% are Buddhist; 4% are Muslim; and Christians are lumped in the “other” category with less than 1%.

Nepali culture is as beautiful and attractive as the awe-inspiring natural environment. The people are gentle, friendly, and family-oriented. Everywhere you see people walking arm in arm, talking freely, smiling and laughing easily. Their hospitality is legendary; as a culture, they give freely of whatever they have.

However, Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world that faces seemingly intractable obstacles. Their government is nearly incapacitated by incompetence, political infighting, insurgencies, and corruption. Fuel is scarce and only intermittently available. Electricity is on for a maximum of 16 hours a day. Maoist and Tarai factions extort money from people and businesses on a regular basis, and their political rallies can shut down whole sectors of the country. Nepali culture is highly stratified by a complicated and rigid caste system and an absolute hierarchy of men over women.

Sister Asangla, her family, and everyone in Bishram ministry were the Christian incarnation of that Nepali graciousness, attending to my every need. Without exaggeration, without hyperbole, the community of Bishram ministry is a communion that challenges what we have come to call “church” here in the US. Their faith is born and sustained in struggle, in lack, in suffering. They experience and witness to God’s miraculous and transformative power in very real and tangible ways. To be with them – even for a short while – is to be convicted of my (our) idolatrous need for material goods and financial security. They give sacrificially; whereas, for the most part we give out of our surplus. The grace by which they live day to day amidst hardship exposes the materialistic poverty of our faith. As I returned to the US, I left convicted of my many spiritual limitations.

What exactly is Bishram Ministries? I must confess it took me a while to understand it, to get the whole picture. Structurally, Bishram is centered in Kathmandu, the capitol city of about 800,000, and is founded and led by Sister Asangla and Pastor Dan, both of whom were working in different churches prior to founding Bishram in 2001. Their mission was to form disciples in a transformative community that is always in mission. As I have said, Nepali society is highly stratified between classes and genders. Sister Asangla and Pastor Dan (of Brahmin lineage) joined together to create a biblical community where there is no division in Christ, and that is exactly what they are doing. As I experienced their communal life in the school of ministry and during the conference, I saw men serving and women leading, and people from all castes joined together in a common life. What the Spirit has done through them is to transform small bits of Nepali society into egalitarian communions that aim to accept, nurture, and disciple each person in the community. It is truly humbling and inspiring to experience such a transformative communion, in which people’s lives are radically changed and through which the community becomes a ‘city on a hill’ that itself proclaims the gospel by the sacrificial love of one for another (John 17:21).

Right now, the central community in which Sister Asangla and Pastor Dan are the leaders is the mother church of a loosely structured Bishram organization. There are other smaller congregations in the Kathmandu area, and still more church communities that have been founded in villages and towns across Nepal. Over the few years since the founding of Bishram, the Bishram mother church has prepared and sent ministers to start new Christian communities, and these become ‘daughter’ churches. These daughter churches range from very small in number to 150 or so believers. Each of the congregations are unique, for each is a manifestation of the indigenous culture of their specific context. This is to say that Bishram does not try to duplicate itself; it doesn’t franchise itself. Rather, their intention is for the gospel to be planted within a particular community and for the church to emerge organically as a Christian incarnation of that culture.

The Bishram mother church is the hub of several important ministries. First, there is the school for ministry that Brother Temjen, Asangla’s very capable brother, directs. This is primarily a residential school that trains people to be leaders in existing churches or to start church communities in other areas. People who have the potential and the drive to serve the church in leadership are sent to live in the school for 2 – 3 years. Of course, these students are poor and have no livelihood while they are in school, so they must depend upon Bishram ministries to support them for all of their needs.

The school has an academic curriculum that itself is challenging and transformative for the students, many of whom have only minimum education when they arrive and very little if any theological training. But the school is a community in and of itself in which the students learn a very different, and more communal, way of life. They live together and share just about everything in common. They unlearn the oppressive divisions of caste and gender. They practice spiritual disciplines of study, prayer, and mission. Words fail to convey the intensity and transformative power of the school of ministry. I’ve seen the lives that have been radically changed: a drug addict who writes and performs Christian music that is used in many of the churches, an untouchable woman (the lowest caste) who has become a leader and teacher in a church. These are only two of many whose lives have been radically reoriented and redeemed, whose gifts and talents are now contributing to the church’s life and mission.

The school for ministry is like the heart of the Bishram organization for it takes in those whose lives seem to be depleted and used up. The school involves them in a redemptive community in which they discover their gifts and are given the skills to use their gifts effectively. They are equipped and sent out into the body of Christ to build it up, to edify it, to renew it.

A second focus of Bishram ministries is to administrate and develop the network of churches. Sister Asangla and Pastor Dan are in regular communication with the pastors and leaders of their daughter churches, in order to train them and to support them in any way they can. Bishram has developed a creative network of teachers who travel among Bishram churches and other churches to teach and encourage the people in their faith and daily life. Most of these pastors need supplemental income to survive, and the mother church supports them as much as possible. However, funds are very tight as you might imagine, so pastors and church planters have to be self-reliant as well.

Bishram has always been concerned with not only the spiritual but the material needs of people. The third aspect of their ministry is to cultivate external relations (e.g., other ministry organizations) to bring in medical missions and job training, for example.

These three forms of ministry are all evangelistic and missional; they are means of spreading and incarnating the Word of God. Because it is illegal to proselytize and to evangelize through mass media, the primary way that people hear the Word of God is for Christians to witness to them, personally, by word of mouth. So, the believers in Bishram churches share their faith, they share their experiences of God’s transforming power, they talk about the new way of life they find in Christ, and they invite others to experience it for themselves in worship services and bible studies. In this respect, each believer is cultivated to become an evangelist.

Bishram churches are like congregations, but I hesitate to call them congregations because to American ears that word may give a wrong impression. In America we have so compartmentalized our lives that we tend to think of congregations as institutions that exist side-by-side with other institutions and to which we dedicate part of our time. Because daily life is very difficult in Nepal, and Christianity is a very small minority, I cannot stress enough the life-giving nature of their Christian community, a communion in which they share a common life and share one another’s burdens, and lift each other up in love. Of course, there are degrees of involvement among the ‘believers’ and others who attend (they emphasize belief and discipleship rather than ‘membership’).

But it is important to get a sense for the intense and sustained life these people share with each other throughout the week. Obtaining basic necessities is a daily struggle, and most people endure great hardship and suffering. Because of grossly inadequate sanitary conditions, many are quite ill. There is an interdependence in the Bishram community that most Americans can scarcely imagine: they depend upon one another for their very lives. They are in small groups together and talking to one another throughout the week. In many respects, the Bishram churches are their life. For those who have converted from other religions and have been shunned by their families, the Bishram community has become their closest family and provides a life-line of survival.

Ok, I am a convert. This is the real deal. I have never encountered a Christian community that so closely approximates Acts chapter 2, in which an oppressed community gathers daily to break bread, shares their possessions, studies and prays, ministers in the marketplace, and rejoices in the gracious love of God who does great and awesome things among them. My experience with Bishram has profoundly affected me; I have returned a better disciple of Christ.

In the next blog, I will try to draw these three examples together and come up with some principles for what the church is and how we can be more fully the church.

For a few days earlier this month I divided my time between my official job in Decatur,  Georgia and the New Baptist Covenant celebration in Atlanta.  The celebration had been planned by President Jimmy Carter and several other distinguished Baptists as an attempt to bring many Baptists together across the usual lines of our “Conventions.”  (These are not really “conventions” but alliances of churches that have conventions, very much like what other people call “denominations.”)

It was clear both from the attendees and from the agenda that the meetings attracted a certain kind of Baptist—those who found much that was persuasive in the traditional Social Gospel that was rooted in the theology of the Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch and flowered most powerfully in the action of the Baptist Martin Luther King, Jr.

We discovered that we were quite good at singing and praying together, and even at thinking about issues like poverty and AIDS, as long as we did not have to engage in arguments about scriptural inerrancy or local church autonomy.

I was particularly impressed by the speakers I heard or heard about.  President Jimmy Carter and President Bill Clinton I heard; Vice President Al Gore and Senator Charles Grassley I heard about.

What I noticed was this:  at home, with other Baptists, these political leaders were perfectly comfortable talking about their faith.  They did not talk about faith as a kind superficial add-on to their prior political commitments.  They did not use their faith to try to con us into voting for them or their preferred candidates.  It was clear that their social convictions were deeply grounded in their faith, and they could talk about that without shame, embarrassment, or guile.

I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state, and I do not think we want the kind of public religious discourse that suggests that believers make better officials than unbelievers, or, God knows, that Baptists have a corner on public virtue.

But I do wish that the media and the public had some clue to the fact that for these people, of different political persuasions, who might or might not like each other very much,  and for many other leaders, faith is a fundamental part of who they are.

I think many Americans don’t get that, to our loss.

The continuing relevance of the great blues song, Stormy Monday, popularized by T. Bone Walker and re-popularized by the Allman Brothers and—on any given weekend—by various bar bands across the country, is self-evident.  But what might it mean?  One listens to the narrator’s voice work through the (fatalistic?) week, declaring Tuesday “just as bad” as that Monday which gives the song it’s title.  What about the weekend—does it provide a welcome and renewing respite from the difficulties and challenges of the week, or simply a mundane, if perhaps a bit more playful, recasting of the same?  And Sunday—are those Church prayers which are referred to hopeful, thankful, confessional, desperate or some combination thereof? 
 
The brief period of time bookended by Super Bowl and Transfiguration Sunday, on one side, and Ash Wednesday, on the other, punctuated by Super-, or as some would have it, Super-Duper -, Tuesday and concurrently Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras, provide  us with quite an extraordinary, and arguably quite a stormy, set of days.  Political races, whether despite themselves or due to the possibilities they suggest, tend to provide some degree of hopeful, even inspirational, rhetoric; at the same time, they inevitably descend into, or even actively court, mudslinging and contemptuous rhetoric.   Transfiguration Sunday, for those who care—and dare— to engage it, provides some pretty heady, and very gutsy, stuff for our own, and our churches’, journeys.  The Super Bowl—well, is it even about football anymore?  I guess we do see some between the “dot.com,” junk food, and car commercials. Mardi Gras, by its very name, suggests— and by testimony of those involved includes—various “rich” offerings of (at least fleeting) delight.  And Shrove Tuesday, bless it’s quaint and foreign (to most Americans) sounding name, interestingly and insightfully suggests not a one-sided, solemn, guilt-ridden confession, but genuine relationship, consideration, sharing, and even dialogue on the way towards, one hopes and prays, forgiveness and recommitment to, and from, the community. 

Indeed one important and missing (from the lives of all too many in our world) ingredient which might tie together these seemingly disparate days and activities is related to the “shriving” and “shrift” from which Shrove Tuesday takes its name.  Too many individuals and organizations in our “communication age”—now there’s an irony!—give each other only “short shrift.”  That is, we—as a society, as a set of individuals, as consumers and as providers, as competitors on the gridiron or in the (far more ruthless) marketplace, and  even (sadly) as coworkers, team-members,  lovers, family members, etc— simply don’t listen to and engage one another as God intended and intends.  The full phrase in which “short shrift” is found in the old English saying is telling: “short shrift and a long rope.”  That is, as we might translate it into our vernacular, “don’t deal with him/her, let him/her hang.”  We’re good at that!

The Transfiguration Story, in marvelous fashion, joins the glorified Jesus on the mountaintop while he is “in conversation” with that deep and rich tradition of the law and the prophets which provides his religious identity and impulse (Luke 8:30).  And what was the conversation about?  Jesus’ “exodus” (the word is clear in the Greek , if not in most translations).  Peter wants to bottle the moment (v. 33)—not a bad impulse, arguably.  But, God knows, there’s work to be done “down” there (v. 37).  And so Jesus takes his followers there, to encounter and engage others. 

Returning to our song—Tuesday is indeed “bad” in that course of things in which “short shrift and a long rope” rules the day.  But insofar as it may offer some real playfulness along the way, and some real engagement and encounter for the journey, Shrove Tuesday offers a suggestion of God’s will and God’s way for God’s people and for the world.  In every exodus there is the high point of liberation and the low points of wilderness wandering.  Fellow travelers, let us be there for each other along the way in order to point the way to fuller and truer engagement of each other and of God!  Now that’s rich.  And super.

It used to be conventional wisdom to avoid religion and politics at gatherings of friends and family. Nowadays, it’s nearly impossible not to talk about them. I think that’s a good thing; after all, for people of faith their religious convictions, if they mean anything at all, certainly inform their political opinions. It’s true for all traditions. When Benazir Bhutto was murdered, I offered condolences to my close neighbor, who a Muslim from Pakistan, and then we spoke about the religious politics of his former country.

For Jews and Christians listening week after week to the teachings of Torah, the Prophets and the New Testament, it is impossible not to have an convictions about the pressing social problems of our time. For instance, I believe caring for God’s people who are hungry, poor, without homes; destitute, sick, in prison and even unborn is a Biblical calling. It is not optional. Neither is it optional to be a good steward of one’s resources while caring for the resources of the earth in a manner that preserves it for future generations. Patterns of consumption that leads to eradication of species and threaten death to the creation, is an offense to God according to the scriptures of both Jews and Christians. Repentance is basic.

How can I teach and preach without these scriptures having some influence on my own political decisions about social policies that will more closely adhere to my religious convictions? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

The current political discussions are focused on the very matters that our scriptures address: care for creation, hospitality to sojourners in the land, fair and equitable economic policy, health care for the sick, lifting up the poor, restraining greed, ending war while preserving peace, protecting the innocent and sustaining human freedom. These subjects are not unfamiliar to people of faith who read the Bible. I don’t expect people to agree on the precise way to address these problems, but I do believe it’s important for Christians to be fully engaged in the process by offering a vision rooted in scripture that corresponds to the hope offered there for all God’s people.

Speaking of people not agreeing, my guess is that not everyone in our congregations agree on every matter of politics, theology or church practices any more than we agree on books, movies or restaurants. People in our congregations, like our larger Church bodies have differences of opinions. That is no surprise and I don’t expect anything else. The real challenge for congregations is the same for our denominations, and our country. Treating one another with respect while disagreeing is the great challenge. At heart, it is a spiritual opportunity to learn how to care truly for another with respect while disagreeing on matters of real substance. The challenge is the same as that facing the country: living respectfully with different people and different opinions. People of faith have a narrative that calls us to such a life. Whether the country does right now is up for serious debate.

I hate to admit it, but I just turned 53 years old.  I was born smack-dab in the middle of the Baby Boom.  On my birthday a few days ago, my wife and I were headed to a worship service out of town and stopped at McDonalds for a cup of coffee.  Two cups cost $1.07.  I was surprised and commented on the price.  The sweet young woman at the cash register smiled and said, “It’s the price for seniors.”  Ouch.  After church we went to a restaurant that had a buffet.  The waiter who came to ask about drinks also asked, “Is either of you a senior?”  Now, this is cruel and unusual punishment for an aging Baby Boomer on his birthday. 

Those of you old enough to remember, do you remember the 1968 movie, “Wild in the Streets?”  Among other au-dacious happenings, a 24-year-old gets elected President of the United States.  The tagline of this film was, “If you’re 30, you’re through!”  Although I was a young teenager and did not ever see the film (my parents probably wouldn’t let me, so my memories come from previews), I remember thinking how racy it all seemed.  We thought we were shattering all the rules. 

We Boomers tend to hold on to this image of being young, even though we, too, are going the way of all flesh.  Jean Twenge, in Generation Me, has argued persuasively that Baby Boomers, who think of our generation as having re-defined popular culture (I’m amazed at how many of us believe that Woodstock [1969 version] really did change the world), do not even hold a candle to the young people of today on pushing aside traditional expectations.  I work with college students and love the job.  That said, I’m feeling increasingly “geezerish” on an almost daily basis.  This generation of emerging adults (an actual sociological term nowadays) is mystifyingly paradoxical to me.  They are brazenly self-assertive, even “in your face.”  At the same time they are surprisingly passive and vulnerable, in some ways really fragile.  They are very opinionated, yet when challenged (even gently and respectfully), they tend to wilt.  They have opinions, they just don‘t know how to support them.  Now, I know these observations are, for the most part, my own anecdotal, very unscientific, observations.  But some of them seem to go along with what I’m reading.

One of the most paradoxical qualities that I see in young people is their passion and hunger for God (coupled with a deep desire for community) and their detachment from organized Christianity.  It is increasingly the case that I en-counter students on the campus where I teach who think of themselves as deeply committed Christians, who do not participate, who do not engage, a local church at all.  In other words, they never or rarely go to church on Sunday.  They may consider chapel their “church” for the week or it may be a small group or some sort of “Bible study” with friends.  In keeping with the brazen, opinionated quality I just mentioned, I overheard one student (a self-identified Christian) describe church as “boring as hell.”  He doesn’t go.

What do we make of this picture?  I honestly don’t know.  As Christian Smith has recently written (see “Getting a Life,” christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/006/2.10), the one thing we don’t do is lurch between anxiously grasping at “relevance” or rigidly demanding that young people do church the way we oldsters think it ought to be done.  One thing that is still critically important – relationships.  But relationships with young people will likely be more off-putting in certain ways and bumpier than we’d like.  We’re going to need a huge dose of humility and pa-tience…and love.  In a word, the American church needs to repent for ignoring its young.  I’m working on this kind of penitence every day.  I admit, these young ‘uns do make me scratch my head.           

CAIRO – I wore a headscarf for 9 years. I was 16 when I chose to start wearing hijab – a form of clothing that covers up the body with the exception of the face and hands. At the time I believed it was a requirement from God of all Muslim women.

Because it was a decision I’d made myself, I never thought of the hijab as something men forced women to do. In fact, I became a feminist three years after I began wearing hijab and I never felt that being a headscarved feminist was a contradiction in terms. The way I saw it was that I chose which parts of my body to reveal and which parts to conceal. Just as a woman could choose to wear a mini skirt and still call herself a feminist, I could wear a headscarf and still be one.

But as I grew older, I felt more uncomfortable wearing a headscarf. The best way to describe that discomfort was a growing distance between the internal me and the external me. It troubled me greatly that I felt that way about the hijab but the harder I tried to fight the realization that I wanted to take my headscarf off, the harder the compulsion to remove it.

I found salvation in the writings of Muslim women scholars whose work helped me to realize that I could remain a good Muslim woman without a headscarf. Writers like Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist, and the Egyptian-American Leila Ahmed, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, were like a window thrown open to allow in the breeze of grace and mercy that I needed to gather up the courage to take off my headscarf.

I eventually did in 1993 at the age of 25.

I stopped wearing hijab at the time when many women in Egypt began to wear it. The reasons behind the increasing numbers of headscarves in Egypt are as varied and as diverse as the women on whose heads they sit. Some women wear it out of religious conviction – just as I used to. They include my mother, a physician with a Ph.D in medicine and my sister, who just graduated with a degree in English and comparative Literature. And believe me, they don’t come more feminist than those two fabulous women!

For others though, social and peer pressure are the reasons they took up the hijab.

Despite my difficult experience with the hijab, I’ve always defended a woman’s right to choose to wear it. What’s the point of feminism if it’s the kind that supports only the choice I would make?

But as social and peer pressure have increased in Egypt due to a growing conservatism in the country, it distresses me to think of all the young women who feel they have no choice but to cover their hair just so that they can be left alone and free of disapproving looks or conservative preachers who reject the plurality of views on the hijab. Many scholars believe it is a requirement, others leave it up to the individual woman or say it isn’t an obligation.

You notice things only when you’ve been away for a while and so it took my move from Egypt to the U.S. in 2000 to make me realize how widespread hijab had become. I’ve been returning to Egypt two or three times a year and this last trip brought me back for two weeks to train journalists and to give lectures.

Every morning and evening as I rode the Cairo metro to the American University in Cairo – my alma mater and the host of my training and lectures – it was clear that up to 80 percent of Muslim Egyptian women wore hijab. During the past few years of return, the increasing numbers of women donning the hijab would distress me because I knew of the strong social and peer pressure they’d faced.

But during this trip, my thinking switched. It happened one day as I was riding the metro and my eyes bounced from one brightly-colored headscarf to the next. Young women were wearing headscarves and clothes of every conceivable color and design. These weren’t the austere blacks of Iranian chadors or Saudi Arabian cloaks known as abayas that all women must wear in public there.

As I admired the meticulous care that each young woman had put into her outfit I thanked God for the human drive for self-expression and beauty. These young women might’ve felt pressured to cover their hair and bodies but nothing was going to quash their individuality.

They inspired me to remember that people always find a way to fight back.

I learned something that impressed me when I visited Wichita a few weeks ago.  As a passenger in a car driving over the river that bisects the city, I said, “Oh, there’s the Arkansas (ARkansaw)!”  It brought back memories of a cross-country road trip I took many years ago, following the river down from the foothills of the Rockies.  At Canon City, Colorado, the river tumbled through a gorge lined with mica-laden rock that shimmered in the sunlight.  Then it flowed placidly across the endless plain of Kansas.  It’s one of America’s longest and most important waterways.

The driver of the car corrected me immediately in my pronunciation.  “No.  Here we call it the Arkansas (OurKANsas) River!”

I was enchanted by the idea that this river could be the Arkansas (ARkansaw) in Colorado, the Arkansas (OurKANsas) in Kansas, and once again the Arkansas (ARkansaw) in Oklahoma and Arkansas (ARkansaw). 

It’s a lingustic misunderstanding, I suppose.  The best-known version of the river’s name came from an Indian word transliterated by the French, who aren’t in the habit of pronouncing the last “s”.  But not all Americans bought everything that came with the Louisiana Purchase.

The pronunciation of the river’s name says much more.  Not just about the French.  Not just about Kansas.  Not just about America.  It says something about the human and divine condition.

What, or whom, I call God is a river that flows through many, many souls. Some call the river Watanka.  Others call it Allah.  Others name it Brahman.  Others pray it Yahweh.  Some sing it Nature.  Others refuse, on grounds of religious principle, to name it at all.  Meanwhile, the water is the same.  The river flows on, without apparent concern for what it is called or how it is defined.  Fish happily swim up and down its current, oblivious to theological attempts to constrain it.  Some people stand by its banks and declaim its intentions and directions, without bothering to follow it.  Without taking the trouble to jump into it and go with its flow.  Without honoring how others might experience it, elsewhere along its path.  Some people have adamant opinions about it, instead of just enjoying it and letting it exist on its own terms.  Some people call the river “Our God”, as if they could control or own it, or as if it had chosen them to be its exclusive spokespersons.

Meanwhile, the river runs its long and steady course through every heart and soul, bringing life to all, regardless of what any might think of it, regardless of the names we give it.

Perhaps the highest praise we can give to God is to appreciate how very many ways we describe and name the transcendent dimension.  Honoring the fact that there is no one way to say God’s name is itself a profound act of worship.

So, more power to the people of Kansas for their special way of saying the name of the great river that defines their landscape.  Thanks to them for their addition to the cacaphonic poetry of America’s language about itself.  With a wink and a chuckle, let us thank them for reminding us of the infinite possibilities for naming the river that flows through us all.

Is the Church becoming nothing more than a beautiful place to get married?  This question comes as one among many questions being asked about the future of the Church and its place in the social fabric of America.  As a Pastor of Young Adult ministry, I hear many such questions from that faithful generation of Christian saints who lived through the golden age of Mainline Protestantism.  Think what you will about the authenticity of mainline Protestant churches and the approach to ministry they represent, but these are the institutions that were established, yes by the will of Jesus Christ, but also by the blood and sweat of our venerable elders.  When I hear these people ask questions about the youth and young adults, when I hear them worry aloud about “whether we’re losing the next generation of Presbyterians,” in my case, what I hear is a deep-seated anxiety that all for which this generation labored will be for naught.
 

This is not a reflection about the shortcomings of mainline Protestantism, nor is it a lecture in human finitude to point out the impossibility for human kind to ever know what is good, right or God’s will for the Church.  Rather, this brief reflection will examine the various responses to that deep-seated anxiety running rampant through the Presbyterian denomination, if nowhere else. 

After looking up the on-line July/August issue of The Presbyterian Layman, I saw a series of articles with titles like “46,544 Members lost” or “Church Exodus Continues.”  Clearly, this anxiety is not limited to a small minority of Church-goers…this anxiety lies at the heart of much of our ecclesial conflict.  I certainly do not wish to turn a blind eye to the problems of my denomination, to the sliding membership and loss of vitality, but I must confess that I am much more uncomfortable with the idea of using our membership roles as a litmus test for faithfulness.  In chapter 3 of the Gospel of Luke, the devil assails Jesus with three temptations - three temptations that seek to mislead Jesus concerning his identity as the Son of God.  The third and final of these temptations is that he should position himself on the very top of the Temple and throw himself down, confident that God would rescue him from certain death.  Jesus rebuffs this temptation, and this interpretation of his Son-ship as meaning that he never has to die.  Further into his ministry, Jesus does set his sights on Jerusalem, and he does position himself up on a high place…not the Temple, but rather on a hillside called the Skull, where he willingly embraces death.  The Temptation narrative ends with a foreboding warning that the devil “departed from him until an opportune time.”

That opportune time is now, and it is the Church that is tempted.  When we measure our health and faithfulness by the numbers of people filling our pews we, too, will be tempted to believe that being the Church of Jesus Christ means that we never have to risk death.  It will be as if Christ never uttered the words “…those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will lose it.” 

Yes the sliding numbers in my denomination concern me, and I would be fooling myself to pretend that they don’t, but I am equally concerned with the willingness with which my brothers and sisters sacrifice what is right and faithful for what is successful and popular.  The entire Reformation was never meant to create an institution…it began as a movement to reform the Church; to call it back to this self-sacrificing foundation laid by Christ himself.  Why don’t we continue this tradition of being a voice that calls the Church to that which is most faithful and loving and kind, even if it means putting our life at risk.
 
But what of the next generation?  What about the future of this reforming Church?  Instead of focusing on the sliding membership, I choose to focus on Sam and Tanya.  Sam and Tanya are a young couple who did get married at the Church where I serve.  My wife and I attended both the wedding and reception. During their toast to one another, Tanya thanked her family and friends for driving all the way from Sioux City where she grew up, to her wedding here in Kansas City.  She explained that it was important to her and Sam that they take their wedding vows in the Church where THEY have chosen to lodge their membership and their service…it is THEIR Church.  You see, it’s not just a place to get married, not for everybody…and that’s where I find my hope!

Raise your hand if you think the Church is obsessed with sex, and especially homosexuality. If you read the news reports with any regularity you might think there is absolutely nothing else worth discussing in the minds of church folks. Okay. I admit that’s a bit over the top; but not by far. Every other day there is a news report about some church fight over what to do with gay and lesbians Christians who might actually desire to serve the people of God in leadership. Last week it was the struggles of the Episcopal Church to carefully avoid a schism that would further the current bizarre situation of having a Nigerian bishop providing pastoral guidance for a congregation in the marshlands of South Carolina.
 
During the same week the Presbyterians were scrupulously interrogating candidates for ordinations to ensure compliance with ordination standards barring homosexual candidates. We are not alone – all the churches seem obsessed with the same subject – and last week the international community got involved when one of the world’s more despicable leaders spoke at Columbia. Of all the outrageous things he said, the one that seemed to create the most buzz had to do with … guess what … homosexuality, or the absence thereof.
 
What is the deal? Okay, I admit, it was a laughable moment but I wish the buzz were about some of his other not-so laughable moments that seriously threaten the planet, not to mention Israel and Jews everywhere.
 
While I respect the desire for high moral standards among clergy and hear the vigorous disagreement over what that means with regard to sexual orientation, I am certain there are more pressing matters that the people of God might attend to if we weren’t otherwise distracted by such scrupulously narrow attention to gay and lesbian Christians. Perhaps it is our unfailing ability to be distracted that allows us to avoid the disturbing realities of the world’s poor that are at our doorstep. Endless discussions over who to bar from serving the Church, quibbling over obscure biblical passages, demanding a righteousness among some that no one, other than Jesus could match, distracts serious attention to the fact that 6 million people are dying each year from preventable diseases malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. 
 
I think we should focus our attention on that fact alone just long enough for it to make us seriously uncomfortable. Do not reach for the remote control, don’t fast forward to the celebrity news or switch to the game. Let us simply sit with the fact that according to the best estimates of medical experts 6 million people, many of them children, will die from lack of vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. Why? Because good vaccines to treat these diseases don’t even exist.
 
Do you think just maybe God would even be pleased  if we paid more attention to that problem than figuring out how many ways we can distract ourselves over sex?

I’m from Cairo, a city that during the day is home to an estimated 18 million people. Driving through the city – I should say megapolis – is the nightmare you would imagine and crossing the streets requires a strong heart, some would say a death wish.

Which is why what happens every evening during the month of Ramadan is nothing short of a miracle. To say the city turns into a ghost town wouldn’t even begin to describe the transformation.

Ramadan is the month when Muslims fast from sunrise till sunset, which these days is around 6:15 pm. It is customary to break the fast with your family or with a group of friends because Muslims are taught that you gain extra blessings for feeding a fasting person and so invitations crisscross as relatives tug at you to join them for the iftaar – the meal that breaks the fast.

So about an hour or so before iftaar – if you are lucky enough to get away from work that early – you could easily get caught in a nasty traffic jam that feels as if someone had thrown you into the middle of those 18 million people who fill the city during the day.

But as sunset approaches, it is as if someone has taken an eraser and wiped clear the huge city squares of their people. The streets seem to get wider as they empty of cars and pedestrians and the cacophony of horns and conversations conducted at three times their normal volume level just so that you can be heard, all of it dissipates. It is as if every building in the city sends out a collective hush in eager anticipation of one sound: the call to prayer, or adhan, announcing the evening prayer and the go ahead to break the fast.

The stillness, the silence and the emptiness of those sunset moments during Ramadan in Cairo are incredibly moving. Hungry and thirsty at the end of the day-long fast, you feel you could hear the angels whispering and the slightest act of kindness encapsulates for me the lessons of Ramadan: self-control and generosity.

Sometimes, in a mad rush to get home in time to eat with my family, I’d jump into a cab that was miraculously available and whose driver was eager to push the speed limit to get home quickly as well. We didn’t always make it in time and as we sped through the empty streets of Cairo we’d hear a dozen adhans – Cairo is after all the City of a Thousand Minarets. The driver would reach into a bag of dates he’d brought with him just in case he was out driving when it was time to break his fast and he would turn around and offer me the first one. It was hard to fight the tears of gratitude and connection as I gladly accepted one.

Looking around the city, I could see bus drivers whose vehicles were long ago empty of their loads, parking their buses and getting out to eat at the Tables of the Merciful, tables full of food that wealthy families in each neighborhood provided for the poor and those who needed to break their fast while still out.

I live in New York City now, another crowded, cacophonous metropolis. And as the setting sun turns the sky into a palette of lilac and rosy pink, I look out the window and remember those sunset moments of kindness and generosity from half a world away.

We believe that everyone—political figure or commentator, citizen or alien, man or woman, black or white, conservative or radical—who at this particular time says that this people and this nation are in deep, perhaps irremediable political trouble, speaks the truth.
~ ~ Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway.

Some words come back with haunting relevance.  Back in the 1960s, these two southern churchmen, Will Campbell and James Y. Holloway, co-edited  the journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, called Katallegete Be Reconciled.  A collection of their essays from that journal was published in 1970 under the title, Up To Our Steeples in Politics (Paulist Press).  The words above led the essay from which the title of the book was drawn.  Wipf and Stock Publishers has recently re-released this book.  It’s eerily timely, but not for reasons a quick reading of this lead might have you believe.  For these writers go on to unsettle an easy take on their political assessment.

Stated simply, we believe that the fundamental crises in our land rise from the obsession with politics, the faith that the political order is the only source and authority from which we can and ought to seek relief from what ails us as a community and as individuals.  Because there is in our land no real challenge to these obsessions, we believe that our crises will deepen, perhaps even beyond a point of no return . . . (111)

In 1970, they were calling into question the “political messianism” of Christian liberals.  Nearly forty years later, it would seem that the Christian Right took the bait and have been for two decades the more successful purveyors of this apostasy—the belief that we are called to create via political action what the New Testament claims God has already accomplished for us in Christ:  reconciliation.  Liberals haven’t left it far behind, however, we’ve just been outflanked.  So Campbell’s and Holloway’s message goes both ways, trying to identify a error we share when we trust Ceasar over Christ, and confuse politics—a means for an end, which is justice—with the end itself.  Despite flowery theological or biblical rhetoric accompanying the political action of the church, to the extent that the church, conservative or liberal, trusts Ceasar to do its bidding it falls inside Caesar’s yoke.  “Surely our calling as Christians is not summed up by a vapid, pathetic and generally ineffective effort to inject morality and high-mindedness into political activity” (117).  Ouch.

And they go on:  “Is obedience to Christ exhausted by immersing oneself in Caesar’s definition of politics?  Is witness to Christ’s victory uniting all men [sic] best made by service to what Caesar judges as the urgent issues of our times?  Might it not be that Caesar himself is confused, or is lying?  There is evidence in the history of Western civilization to support both affirmations” (118).  1970 or today?

What if we worked as hard to change the subject as we work to sway opinion within the subjects we are handed by powers that use us more than hear us?  Now I realize that in asking that question I’m stretching credulity, for one of our most difficult challenges in the American church is deciding who, at the beginning and end of all of this, is us?  Are we Americans, Christians, Christian Americans, or American Christians?  Must we begin to think again about the difference, all the while admitting the confusion?  I believe so.  And Campbell and Holloway have a word worth remembering.

These two write in a great and too often ignored tradition of Christian anarchy, refusing to acknowledge any monopoly of means (economics, politics, schooling, development, relentless pursuit of happiness) over holy ends (commonwealth, peace, knowledge, justice, joy).  They would remind us that trusting techniques of human invention as primary vehicles for the divine will amounts to idolatry, and should be treated as such.

Are Campbell and Holloway calling for retreat?  Are we to hold ourselves up in Christian enclaves, depending on what the world can give us but not making any contribution toward the common good of those who don’t live with us in our enclave?  Not at all.  We are to engage, to wish peace upon the city and to work for it as best we can.  But we are not to trust it too much, or like it too much, or confine our desires to its standards too much, lest we begin to confuse it with our home. 

Campbell and Holloway are working within the kind of distinction Stanley Hauerwas so aptly described a few years later, the distinction between the church as a peculiar politics that gives witness by whatever means necessary to the justice that God has already accomplished in Christ (beyond and more powerful than economics and politics, and nonviolent all the down to its core in Christ), and a political church that seeks to produce something like justice within a polity gone wildly off kilter and irretrievably distant to the ways of God (bound to economics and politics as the primary tools of human freedom).  We are called to give witness to what we begin to see, that God has reconciled the world in Christ—that reconciled, we need no longer kill each other because we are afraid, or angry, or belittling, or prejudice.  We can live reconciled, even before our politics catch up, even before we agree, even before we approve of each other.  And by so doing, we will humble the political for the sake of new politics (God’s politics).

Within echoes of the New Testament, the church need not be chaplain to a reigning order—be it military/industrial, commercial, religious, political or economic; be it conservative, liberal, radical or moderate.  It may live within the reigning order wisely, using its goods for holy purpose, but it need not accept the empire’s logic.  It may sow seeds of a more fundamental dissent.  And it may both experience and put on display an alternative order, with changed subjects and holier objects. 

Have any churches tried?  Yes, indeed, in their own broken ways.  And those broken ways sow seeds of this Christian anarchy—humbling wealth, power, race, gender, ideologies, and other distinctions we hold so dear.  Imagining a new reality, already here.

This is a story about neighbors.

Marduk is my neighbor. We share a fence in the suburbs of Maryland near Washington, DC. “In my country” or “in my village” is how Marduk begins many sentences, having lived in Iran until seven years ago when he moved to Maryland with his wife and two children. He moved next door two years ago. When his wife’s mother became too riddled with Alzheimer’s disease to live alone, she moved in with them. Occasionally she would leave the house, as is common for Alzheimer’s without very close supervision, and wander aimlessly. Now she lives in a more secure environment.

Marduk drives a bus. He leaves for work at 4 AM. He speaks like many others who have learned English on their own. For instance, subject and verb occasionally disagree and words are sometimes left out. “I like, I like!” is one of his favorite phrases. When I asked how he learned English he explained that after the revolution English was no longer taught in any schools and rarely spoken. (The revolution is code for the fall of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent reign of Iranian fundamentalists and political allies.)  When I first met him he was quick to share that he is not a practicing Muslim. “We like Christmas!”  I laughed at his candor and noted how much he wanted to assure me of his background.  Was he afraid I would treat him with suspicion if he were devout? I wonder. Our other neighbors who are modern practicing Muslims have no such worries. But that is after many conversations.  Marduk’s wife sells perfume at the local Mall and she speaks in English all day. “Every day she is learning more and more words. Me? I don’t have to have English. People get on the bus and tell me where they want off.  That’s all. But I am trying.  That’s why I like to talk to you!”

I listen with curiosity. The other day I asked him about his home in the south of Iran. “In my village it is always hot, very hot. Makes Florida seems frigid in summer. We never went out of the house before eight at night. Still hot.” His comment came at the end of a very hot day and the joyous completion of a project I didn’t think was possible.

Early in the summer I began negotiations with a contractor to rebuild the twenty-year old sagging wood fence that we share. The price came in much too high. Marduk said, “let’s do it together! We can. We can.” I hemmed and hawed, unsure of this budding construction partnership. But my wife agreed, “That’s a great idea. You can do it.” When she said that I sighed, knowing I was defeated, bracing for the heat and humidity, and knowing how “easy projects” are rarely easy.

Marduk (the name is the same as the ancient Babylonian god) suggested we go to Lowe’s and pick up the fence posts. I had some spare fence rails that we had salvaged from another project but we still needed several posts.  It is quite a helpful learning experience, culturally and personally, to shop at Lowe’s with an Iranian immigrant who speaks English with his own distinct grammar. But we did it and to my growing surprise I began to relish this opportunity to work together. But not always. I didn’t on the day that I discovered my tools locked in Marduk’s garage when I wanted to put in some work alone of the project. I bounded over to his house. “Why are my tools locked up?” I asked impatiently. He smiled impishly. “We will work together! Not alone. I like us to work together.” What could I say to this neighbor taking such happiness in working together?  “Okay.” So there we were men, both Americans one from South of Atlanta, the other from the South of Tehran, sweating and grunting in the hot sun. It took us several days and several conversations, but we did it. Now Marduk stands on this deck and I on mine admiring our work. “I like, I like,” he says, “we do it together!”

Jesus once said love your neighbor as yourself.  This is a story about two men, from vastly different backgrounds, becoming neighbors, and building a neighborhood once fence at a time.

I was well into my two-eggs-sunny-side-up brunch last Saturday morning at the local café when I found a copy of that day’s New York Times opened at the opinion section. I browsed it as I munched on my toast and then turned to the front page of the paper where a picture I saw stopped me dead in my tracks – and in my eating.

It was of lawyers in Pakistan celebrating the reinstatement of a chief justice who has been suspended by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in March. Joyous abandonment was the only phrase that came to mind when I saw those men, some with their heads thrown back as they punched the air in victory.

I could not take my eyes off those happy men. I scoured their faces, one by one, vicariously celebrating with them their breathtaking joy. And then it hit me why the sight of these men was moving me to tears.

Here were happy Muslim men. How often do we see happy Muslim men?

It’s quite convenient that they were Pakistani because I’ve developed a theory about the Muslims we see on our television screens and whose images usually take up the front pages and they are usually from Pakistan.

Here’s how it goes:

Angry Bearded Muslim Man is the most favored of all. Whenever the Muslim world is supposed to be upset or offended, invariably that story is illustrated by images of Angry Bearded Muslim man marching – usually in Pakistan – shouting, fists raised in the air in righteous anger never joy, and burning something: an American flag, an Israeli flag, an effigy of President Bush. Preferably all three!

Angry Bearded Muslim Man’s female equivalent is Covered in Black Muslim Woman. She’s seen, never heard. Visible only in her invisibility under that black chador, burqa, face veil, etc.

So there you have it – in those images you have conveyed all you want to say about Muslims: the men are angry, dangerous and want to hurt us; the women are just covered in black.

While there are indeed some Muslim men and women who fit both such descriptions they are by no means the majority and they are utterly insufficient in describing the diversity of views, appearances and attitudes among Muslims. But they make for sexy TV and front page photos. And they are my biggest competitors when I give lectures or appear on television.

My first U.S. TV appearance was on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor”. Talk about trial by fire! After the usual back-and-forth yelling, some viewers sent me email asking “Are you sure you’re a Muslim? Where’s the headgear?” Others wanted to know why I spoke English so well. Clearly, I did not deliver on the Covered in Black Muslim Woman that central casting usually offers to viewers. I was confusing them.

Which brings me back to the happy Pakistani lawyers on the front page of the New York Times.

I am a huge fan of confusion. I am the last person to deny the danger of radicals in the Muslim world. Much of my time and effort goes into denouncing violence in the name of religion. But just as importantly I wave the flag for those of us who call ourselves liberal, secular Muslims. In other words, I live to confuse you by subverting the stereotype of Muslims that you always see and hear from. By breaking the false equation between conservatism and authenticity we end the monopoly over religious thought by radicals and their supporters.

When we stop equating conservative with authentic, we recognize our diversity and refuse to allow one voice to speak for us all. Only then can we be recognized as human beings, in all our differences.

For Muslims, that will become possible when you see more Happy Muslim Men and Women Who Confuse You.
 

I teach at a seminary where we try very hard to be sensitive to the diversity of the whole body of Christ.  While most of the community is of Euro-American descent and the overwhelming majority of the student body consist of anglo Presbyterians, we are delighted that the faculty is becoming more and more diverse ethnically and denominationally and we have hopes that the student body will slowly but surely follow.

Nonetheless two events in the late spring reminded us that while good intentions do not always pave the way to hell they often don’t pave the way to koinōnia either.

The first was our own seminary commencement, held in the sanctuary of a local church.  The person presiding over the event reminded us all before the degrees were awarded that this was a worship context and that, therefore, we would be expected to comport ourselves worshipfully.   What he meant by that was, no cheering and no clapping.

The problem was that the definition of a worship context was decidedly shaped by the white, middle class,  Presbyterian history both of the presider and of the seminary.  Many in the congregation came from African American Baptist or AME churches and some from Hispanic Pentecostal churches.  They, too, intended to comport themselves worshipfully, so they did what they often do at other services when they want to praise the goodness of God and to rejoice when another member of the body rejoices: they cheered and clapped.

I hope that next year we will think about “worship” more broadly.

The other event was sadder and more serious.  After it was discovered that the person who shot a number of students at Virginia Tech was Korean American,  the president of our Korean student association wrote to the whole community.  The Korean students, he wrote, were not only saddened they were ashamed at the behavior of this person of Korean descent.

The e-mail letters came pouring back.  Appropriately many pointed out that the student shooter had been a deeply disturbed young man.  Less appropriately, many of us tried to persuade our Korean brothers and sisters that they needed to take a more Western view of the world.  If only they had read more Locke or Jefferson (we implied) they would know that responsibility is always an individual and never a communal affair.

Instead of seeking to understand their perspective in order to be helpful, we urged them to adopt our perspective and then take comfort.  We did not take much time to think about what convictions might lie behind their sense of shame, and we certainly did not reflect on the fact that their sense of community identity was probably a good deal closer to the self-understanding of New Testament churches than our Kantian individualism.  When Paul reminded the Corinthians that they were the Body of Christ he was reminding them precisely that their belonging was at least as important as their individuality.

The tough thing about trying to be a genuinely diverse and multicultural church is this: it takes a good deal of research and a great deal of thought. 
 

A few years ago a member of the church I then served asked me to preach a sermon addressing the question, “How the Bible Says it is Okay to be Gay.” I was stumped. The Bible says things are beautiful or idolatrous, sinful or wondrous, evil or holy.  Terrible is a biblical category.  So is wonderful.  But “okay” isn’t a biblical category. Fair-to-middling doesn’t make an appearance in scripture.

The common assumption is that in the debate over homosexuality, the Christian Right have the rules on their side, a Bible that says homosexuality violates God’s will.  And liberal America has a political philosophy which holds that the autonomous, self sufficient, free person is able to do whatever he or she pleases.  Okay is a liberal word.  It refuses to pass judgment.  I’m okay and you’re okay. It is okay to be gay.   It is okay to be straight.  You do your thing and I’ll do mine and so long as no one gets hurt, what’s the difference?

The theologians I love have taught me to be suspicious of this kind of liberalism.  Not because I am conservative, but because I am a Christian.  And any ideology whose bedrock assumption is that people should be free to do as they please flies directly in the face of the Christian doctrine of sin.  A doctrine which holds that we are flawed creatures who, when set free to do as we please, will do the selfish thing, subjecting ourselves to what Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School calls the “tyranny of our own desires.1”

But you’re not reading this blog for a civics lesson or to agree or disagree with my politics.  You are here, I hope, to listen for God’s word.

Which speaks a wonderful truth to my parishioner’s question.  For while liberalism makes a good argument for the fact that homosexuality is acceptable, the Bible goes one step further to say quite clearly that gay people are good.  Not all right, but beautiful.  Not tolerable, passable, okay.  But wonderful, beloved, glorious.

This might sound absurd, even to those who wish it were true.  For despite the fact that Jesus mentions homosexuality as often as he mentions frequent flier miles, organic food and diesel engines (which is to say, not once) if conservative Christianity has taught America anything it is this: the Bible opposes gay people.

Let’s move quickly to prove them wrong.  Unlike a previous generation’s psychology which followed Freud to believe that homosexuality was some sort of disorder (and in a toxic combination of both misogyny and homophobia often blamed it on a gay person’s mother) today’s thought accepts that a person’s sexual orientation is an essential, ingrained dimension of who you are.  Homosexuality is no more a choice than is heterosexuality.  If you’re a straight man, ask yourself, “when did I first decide I would be attracted to women?” It is a ridiculous question.

But in the Bible’s most infamous comment on same-sex activity, Paul presumes that those who engage in gay sex engage in isolated acts of deviation from a universally shared heterosexual norm.  “Women,” Paul says in the first chapter of Romans “giving up natural intercourse exchanged it for unnatural .  .  .  And men, giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another”. In this understanding, homosexual activity is a choice heterosexuals make.  Like a truth-teller deviating from honesty in order to tell a lie, a person engaged in same sex activity momentarily departs from the morally preferable universal standard.

This was Paul’s first-century Jewish worldview, and it is one adopted by contemporary Christians who label homosexuality a “lifestyle” and try to convert gays and lesbians “back” into heterosexuality (as if they ever left in the first place).  To my mind, subscribing to a first-century sexual anthropology that modern understandings of human sexuality have refuted makes as much sense as believing the earth is flat because the ancient Hebrew cosmology assumed it so.  The earth is round.  You don’t learn to be gay.  You’re created that way.  Neither of these realizations diminish our appreciation for the Bible.  In fact, both can enhance it.

I like this metaphor.  Life is a long road trip.  You don’t have your CD collection or your i-pod.  Just a broken radio.  The only station you can find is playing the most amazing piece of music you have ever heard.  It soars, it ebbs, it reaches crescendos that make you want to floor the pedal and race through the beauty, it affirms you, it convicts you, it makes sense of existence.

But your radio is broken.  And while the music is occasionally clear, there are interludes of pure, unlistenable static.  Much of the time you hear both at once, this wonderful song, slightly obscured by the hiss and the fuzz of a broken receiver.

The stories of Israel and Jesus are this piece of music.  A piece that God composed.  And the authors of the Bible are our broken radio. Sometimes they give us the story in its pure form.  Other times God’s beauty is hidden in the static of ancient politics or prejudice.  And sometimes as is the case with this unfortunate reading from Romans, the signal is lost altogether – all we get is an ugly hiss.

The question before us is this: Are we going to listen to the Bible carefully, straining to hear the gorgeous melody of a nonviolent lamb who conquers by giving his life for ALL people, or are we going to listen indiscriminately, confusing the static for the symphony itself?

Let me take a brief detour here.  If blog entries had footnotes this would be one.  The approach I just suggested opens itself to the charge of “selective literalism” whereby we accept those aspects of scripture that we agree with as the word of God, and reject the rest.

Now, on some level I think everyone reads the Bible this way.  Neither Ralph Reed nor James Dobson has taken a public vow swearing that never again will they eat shrimp scampi.

But, I don’t think the accusation applies in this instance.  There are Biblical themes that I don’t like.  The second coming for instance. The claim that God will conclude history totally violates my modern perspective.  But, this belief is shot right through the New Testament.  Jesus mentions it frequently and it pervades Paul’s thought.  So, I place my questions and my doubt and my dislike underneath the doctrine’s pressure.  I try to believe it, or at least accept it.  I hope it shapes me.  I don’t ignore it.

Homophobia is not one of the Bible’s major themes.  Sure, it makes the occasional appearance.  But so does the justification of slavery.  So does the demand that women wear hats to church.  Even on 100 degree days! Most every Christian in America has rejected these latter two teachings as absolutely opposed to scripture’s primary theme: the truth of God revealed in Christ.

Back to my main point: we need to be clear in stating that our belief that homosexuality is natural, is not primarily a negative response to the Christian right.  Instead, first and foremost, it is a positive theological conviction.  God creates some people gay, and because God declares creation good, homosexual people must therefore be good.
Genesis doesn’t say that God made straight people on the sixth day and gay people two weeks later.  We are all children of the same creation, same creator.

Paul picks up this theme from Genesis in First Timothy when he says, “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected.” The true meaning of the Greek word used in this context is “beautiful.” The meaning here, Karl Barth argues, “is that everything created by God is good, [in that it] is right, is well-ordered and therefore is beneficial.”

Barth suggests that when Paul says humanity is “beautiful” he means something other than the Genesis claim that we reflect the image of God in its pure power.  For of course Paul believes that we need to be saved, and we need to be saved because we have fallen, and in the fall, Paul thinks, the image of God was wiped from us.  We are broken and imperfect creatures, not God-like, but human – in desperate need of salvation.

So, how can we say that we are beautiful, beneficial even? Creation is the most important act in the Bible.  But after creation, comes the Fall and our ensuing radical distance from God.  This makes the redemption of creation, the salvation of creation, the work of Jesus Christ, the most beautiful act in the Bible.

Barth wants to argue, and I love this argument, that while we no longer reflect God’s perfection, we are called to reflect the work of the one through whom we were created.  We are beautiful not because we reflect God’s power, but because we reflect God’s mercy. We were all born through Christ to do the work of Christ: to love God, and to save each other.  And we all have a role to play in salvation.

This means then, that by rejecting gay men and lesbian women the church has stymied the work of Christ.  For if Paul is right, and all are a part of God’s salvation drama, gay people must have a unique role to play in that story.  What could that role be?

Well on one level (the most important level) the answers to that question are countless.  For every gay individual brings a distinct and personal self to the church.  The next time you’re in church ask yourself, who here has helped save me? Who helped me move? Who held me up? Who has modeled good parenting, committed love, joyful singing, a commitment to peace, an active faith? Who helped save me? My guess is the answer has almost nothing to do with that person’s sexual orientation.  Before we fall into any category, we are individuals crafted and created by God with individual gifts that no one else has.

But, of course we also fall into categories.  And if you worship in a church  faithful enough to fly directly in the face of dominant Christianity, a church Christ-like enough to unapologetically welcome gay and lesbian people, you are blessed to be saved by the beautiful category of homosexuality.

How?

Well, we all have doubt.  We all have reasons (good reasons!) to stay away from church, to abandon our childhood faith.  To write the church off as a disappointing institution, and Christianity off as an ancient and confusing myth.  We all have hurdles to clear in order to worship on a Sunday morning.  But, not all of us have heard the Church say “you are not welcome here.” Not all of us need to ask their pastor to preach a sermon in order to challenge two-thousand years of liars who twist the truth and smile as they tell us we are not “okay.” Not all of us have been told we are beyond the pale of salvation.

It is only gay and lesbian Christians who have to clear those hurdles in order to sing a hymn, teach Sunday School, feed the hungry at a Christian soup kitchen, share a cup of coffee in the church basement and praise the God who made them.  And in leaping into God’s embrace over the obstacles our religion has placed in their path, our gay sisters and brothers teach the rest of us how petty our excuses are, and just what it means to be faithful.  In their brave response to grace, we see faith that has the power to save.  And so we learn to be faithful.  And in our faith we are saved.  And so I thank God for my gay brothers and lesbian sisters in the church.

1. This is a paraphrase of a quote from the book Exilic Preaching reviewed in the magazine Christianity Today, March 2004 2. Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

Soon Americans in the United States will engage in the annual celebration of the founding of the nation. There will be patriotic speeches, parades and flag waving along with family picnics. All of which presents an annual dilemma for Christians; or at least it could if we raised certain questions at our pot luck dinners and in our Fourth of July sermons. For instance, what is the relation of the Church to the State? If Christians are to give their sole allegiance to God, then what does it mean for them to pledge allegiance to the flag? If there are limits to my allegiance to the flag, and the republic for which it stands, then how can I offer an unqualified pledge? Are those Christians most truthful who refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag and if so, what does it mean to be truthful and patriotic? How can a Christian be patriotic and truthful?

What am I to make of the comment by one parishioner to his pastor, “if you take the flag out of the sanctuary, then I will be walking out with it.”? What does that mean? Is his allegiance more to his country than to the Church of Jesus Christ? Or, perhaps, like most American Christians living in the United States, he has never even considered the question of Christian discipleship and citizenship. On Sundays we pledge our allegiance to Jesus Christ but how does that allegiance inform our practice of responsible citizenship in a world of war, torture, genocide, predatory economics and more?

Christians living in the United States – or in any country, for that matter – are called to be a “contrast society”, displaying God’s purpose for the world. Yet, there is massive confusion about the role of the Church in society as evidenced by the simple practices of pledging allegiance to the flag and fighting over there presence in sanctuaries, as if questioning our allegiance to the flag were blasphemy. Isn’t this the way civil religion has blurred the church’s witness? An immigrant might reasonably ask, based upon the evidence, whether vast numbers of Christians in the United States love their country more than they God. If that is true, why is it so and what challenge does that present to pastors and congregational leaders?

I think it would valuable for congregations to have open and serious conversations about our calling to be a what Gerhard Lohfink calls, “a contrast society” for the sake of God’s transforming purpose in the world. If Christian congregations are identical with the society then how can we present any contrast? Or as Jesus said, “if salt has lost it savor than what good is it?”

I suggest we have some good conversation about what it actually means to give our sole allegiance to God on the one hand, while on the other pledging allegiance to the flag and the nation for which it stands. That is the tension in which we live. The clearer we are about our roles as citizens of the realm of God and citizens of the United States, the better off we will be and the clearer will be the witness of the Church in our time.

What do you think?