My Problem With Suburban White Jesus

Before I took my first ministry job Sami and I briefly attended a large, wealthy, "status" church in the suburbs of Louisville. We honestly loved it there. They had programs for just about every group imaginable, while avoiding the almost frighteningly impersonal size of a mega-church. With not-too-tightly polished rock and roll "contemporary" worship, a wide variety of small groups and other ministry opportunities, and an open and welcoming warmth, this church was the opposite of the small country church we had been married in. And, after the disappointing end to our time there, it seemed just about perfect for us.

We even started going through the process of transferring our membership there, meeting with the pastor and attending new member classes. Then I saw an ad in the paper. A local church - where a friend of mine served as pastor - was looking for a new youth minister. And I was looking for a new career. It was a perfect fit. So we left our suburban paradise, after worshipping there for only a couple of months.

I hadn't thought much about that church, or the distance between my understanding of a good and healthy church then and my understanding now, until the other day when I was flipping through the channels on my TV, lying on the couch, sick and bored. To my surprise and delight, one of the local access channels was showing their weekly worship service.

While much of the staff had changed over the last seven years, the service was just as I'd remembered it. Clean, neat, and polished. But not too polished. A technical masterpiece, but not so precise that it felt stale or stiff. The pastor was clearly well educated, as evidenced by the many subtle literary and theological references in his sermon. But he was also at least as charismatic, with a passionate yet eloquent delivery.

The message itself would have been at least mildly challenging to the congregation. A meditation on the incarnation, it focused on Jesus' standing on the margins of his society. In noting that Jesus was a poor Jewish peasant, probably not formally educated, neither politically, economically, nor religiously powerful. He used this to argue for God's concern for those on the margins. And I was totally with him.

But then I started paying attention to the specific phrases he was using. He alluded to ideas from liberation theologies, but his specific language was considerably less radical, less challenging. Then, as he was summing up, he said this, in the context of the incarnation as evidence of God's concern for all persons, especially those on the margins:

Jesus came for the rich, and for those who will never become rich.

Of course, this statement (assuming that one can say that Jesus "came," which rests on a particular understanding of Jesus and the incarnation) is true. It speaks both to God's concern for all persons without regard to their economic status, and to the fact that some (MOST) of us will never become rich. But said as it was to a wealthy suburban church, I had a real problem with it.

First, it didn't name the poor as poor. There were only two kinds of people: the rich, and everyone else. This, to me, defeated the intended focus of the message. While the pastor was imploring his congregation to be aware of a whole host of humanity that usually escapes their attention, he could not bring himself to use a designator for them. Of course, he could argue that he avoided dehumanizing the poor by labeling them purely by their economic status. He could even have said that by labeling them as poor he would be affixing to them a negative term. But in the context it reminded me too much of a story a friend of mine tells of preaching to a congregation about the needs of a particularly impoverished community, only to have members from that congregation say to him, "The people you're talking about don't really exist."

Beyond that concern, however, is a much deeper concern: In stressing Jesus' concern for the rich (presented here first) and "those who will never become rich," the pastor is attempting to speak to God's concern for those on the margins without ever addressing their material needs, the unjust economic system that has placed them on the margins, or the fact that many, many members of his congregation have benefited greatly from that unjust economic system.

Thus God's concern - and, in turn, the proper concern of the congregation - is spiritualized. God cares about those who will never become rich, so he sent them Jesus. The congregation should care about those who will never become rich, and thus they should share Jesus with them. But this neuters the Gospel, offering neither a challenge to the wealthy nor comfort to the impoverished. Everything remains as it has always been and shall always be. There are some who are rich, others who are not. God cares about them both, and wants them all to be saved and go to heaven.

But honestly, I'm afraid that the pastor went just as far as he could go in that congregation. To say more, to say what I would have wanted him to say, to offer a prophetic critique of economic injustice, to offer a no doubt highly political articulation of the Gospel, would have threatened his job. Possibly even his career. And that's my problem with the suburban white Jesus I grew up worshipping. Held captive to the upper-middle class American values of the dominant culture, he looks so little like the Jesus I read about in the Gospels.

Celebrating Diversity on Pentecost

Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day that we Christians celebrate for the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church.

Today we are reminded that the Spirit of God is a wind that blows where it will, breathing life into moribund institutions, buildings and congregations. We experience this Spirit, this Divine Breath, as a refining fire, that both purifies and fuels us.

This morning in churches all over the world, we Christians read the famous story from the second chapter Acts, in which the Spirit blew through the meeting house where those early Christian had gathered, like a mighty wind. We read of strange images, like tongues of fire resting on heads. We read of the miracle that allowed each person gathered to hear each speaker as though that speaker were speaking in their native language, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers.

This is a strange story, and a vital story. Because it tells of the origins of the church, it communicates to the disparate churches of today something of an ideal. Something like what it means to be church.

Of course, this story - a myth rooted in our history - cannot be limited to a single interpretation any more than the God to whom it points can be limited to a single description, a single set of propositions. Good interpretations of meaningful stories do not seek so much to place interpretive limits on the story, as though it could have only one meaning. Rather, they seek to draw one of many possible meanings out of the story, and hold that meaning up to light, without denying the many other possible meanings.

That is my aim here: to see what this story might have to say to Christian churches in a pluralistic, multi-cultural context, wrestling with the challenge of plurality while trying to remain faithful to their own distinctive identity. This by no means exhausts the many possible interpretations of the stories considered here. It simply draws on those stories to speak to a particular issue.

I've written before that the Bible isn't a single book, but rather a collection of "many separate books which often overlap but sometimes contradict," written by many different authors in different locations over a vast expanse of time. As such, making connections between books in the Bible can be a sometimes problematic activity. That said, I think that it is safe to say that the story of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts can be seen at least in part as a book-end to the story of Babel in Genesis 11. In fact, many Christians teach that at Pentecost God undid this disunifying work of Babel. So, as we look to the Pentecost story to see how we might respond to plurality and diversity, it is useful to look also to the story of Babel.

Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, "Cone, let us make bricks and burn them hard." - Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. - And they said, "Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world." The LORD came down to look at the city and tower that [hu]man[ity] had built, and the LORD said, "If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be beyond their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another's speech." Thus the LORD scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because the LORD confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

- Genesis 11:1-9 (JPS)

Lest anyone take this story as literal history in some sequential order, it should be noted that in the description of post flood humanity found in the previous chapter (Genesis 10), humanity has already been divided into separate nations, each with its own language. See, for instance, Genesis 10:5:

From these the maritime nations branched out. [These are the descendants of Japheth] by their lands - each with its language - their clans and their nations.

So, if you try to see the whole of Genesis as a single text describing literal history in a linear way, you have real problems trying to reconcile the fact that in Genesis 10:5 humanity has already been divided into different nations "each with its own language," while in Genesis 11:1 "[e]veryone on earth had the same language and the same words."

Rather being seen, then, as part of a divinely inspired history text, this story is best seen as a myth, a myth that explains the origins of the dreaded enemy of ancient Israel, Babylon.

But, what is the sin of Babel (Babylon), which forces God to scatter all of the people around the earth, and to confound human language? What, in other words, has gone wrong here? This is an especially important question if you see the story of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts as a book-end or companion story to this one, in which God (at least to a certain extent) undoes what was done at Babel.

The most conventional (in Christian circles) interpretation of the sin of Babel is that it was pride. Intoxicated by their own power, these people built a great city, and in that city a tower that reached up to the sky, into the very heavens. The text even says, in the JPS translation, that they did this "to make a name for" themselves. That, coupled with the visual image of encroaching on the very space of God, sounds haughty indeed.

And pride has rightly been seen as a sin, and a very special kind of sin from which many other sins emerge. Pride has even been seen as a kind of root sin, the sin that lies underneath all other sins. But is this the sin of Babel?

In Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice, Johanna W.H. van Wijk-Bos notes that pride is the sin that is traditionally attributed to Babel; and, she argues, there is some textual evidence for this view. She writes:

The people depicted in this story are presumptuous in wanting to make for themselves a name, and God punished them accordingly. On a certain level, it is probably true that pride and arrogance, specifically as personified in Babylon, are here thwarted by divine intervention... Human pride and overreaching, especially as it was witnessed at the time shortly before, during, and after the Babylonian exile, are taken down a few notched in this story.

But there are also some problem with the view that pride - or, at least, pride alone - is the sin of Babel. It doesn't seem obvious what harm the pride of Babel caused here. It is certainly the case that the kind of pride that causes some humans to be blind to the needs of other humans, or that causes humans as a group to be blind to the needs of non-human animals and the natural environment, is quite harmful. But a flat reading of this story reveals only a kind of unifying pride that drives a community to excel. Where's the harm in building a great city or a great tower? Is God so thin-skinned that all human achievements are seen as affronts to divine dignity, in need of being smacked down?

In culling contemporary scholarship, Johanna W.H. van Wijk-Bos offers an alternative view of the sin of Babel:

Some commentators conclude that the issue with which the passage is most concerned is the earth. The tower, seen as so central by many interpreters, actually disappears in the story to be replaced by the city. There is a problem depicted here and it is perhaps not the problem of human pride, but that of remaining in one place and building/making constructions that do not directly benefit the earth...

In our day this interpretation is quite compelling. We who live in cities that belch smog into the heavens can certainly see that construction projects that are blind to the divine command to tend to creation are inherently sinful. And we may be both frightened and comforted by the notion that God may intervene to bring such projects to ruin.

But, while that is a compelling view that offers a very meaningful contemporary interpretation of the text, that interpretation doesn't have much to say when placed in dialogue with the Pentecost story. While we could argue that God's restoration of communication has real value in our collective human effort to restore the natural environment, such an argument would fail to account for the fact that God confounded human speech in response to Babel. The interpretation, then, in that respect, fails to properly interact with the text. It might well be useful - and I'm all in favor of teaching anything in church that makes us more mindful of the environmental impact of our actions - but it might not be the most faithful interpretation of the text.

Recently I heard another interpretation of the Babel story; an interpretation, I might add, that is in Johanna's wonderful book, though I failed to properly take note of it. On Babel, my friend and teacher Rabbi David Ariel-Joel says that while Christians often interpret the story with an emphasis on pride, Jews look at the story quite differently. For them, he argues, Babel is not so much about pride as it is about forced conformity. It is about the sin of holding a single expression of humanity as the normative one, forcing all humans to look, dress, act, think, and speak alike. Babel, he claims, tells us that God favors a diversity of human expression.

This echoes an argument made by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his Grawemeyer Award winning The Dignity of Difference. Of Babel he writes:

It is the attempt to impose an artificial unity on divinely created diversity. That is what is wrong with universalism.

Babel - the first global project - is the turning point in the biblical narrative. It ends with the division of [hu]mankind into a multiplicity of languages, cultures, nations and civilizations.

In this view, then, the sin of Babel is also a very contemporary sin: making a single expression of the plurality of humanity normative, the expression of humanity. In the face of this sin, God emphasizes diversity, the plurality of human expression. In the Babel story this means confounding language and scattering people. In doing so the artificial unity of Babel is smashed, and from it many different cultures and many different languages emerge.

This brings us to Pentecost. The Pentecost story tells us:

... suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.

Acts 2:2-6 (NRSV)

In Babel a single people from a single place were scattered across the face of the earth, their speech confounded and divided into a multitude of languages. At Pentecost, a multitude of people from every nation is brought together, and while they each speak different languages, they are able to understand each other.

It is important to note, however, that while each can understand each, there is no single unifying language or culture. No expression is made normative, forcing the plurality to become an artificial unity. Rather, the unity is brought about by God's affirming of difference. How does God affirm difference here? Each person hears each other person in their own native language. No language is lost. No group forced to deny the authenticity and validity of their expression of humanity. Rather, in the face of difference, the Spirit makes comprehension possible.

The story of Pentecost then affirms and celebrates diversity. While such diversity may pose a problem for us mere mortals, God is able to translate us to each other. God, in other words, is not threatened by plurality, but instead found in the midst of it, revealing to each the insights of the other.

This Pentecost, then, as we celebrate the birth of the church and the coming of the Holy Spirit, let us also celebrate the diversity that has been present since the very beginning of the Christian experience.

What Bugs Me

A new friend - who stumbled onto my blog after doing a Google search for Marcus Borg - emailed me this week to ask me what bugs me about Christianity. Here is a part of my response to him. This response is plagued somewhat by the problems of turning a piece of personal correspondence into a more pubic communication, but I hope you enjoy it anyway:

One of the few things that keeps me connected to the church is my congregation's investment in community ministry - working with local social organizations to meet the concrete needs of our marginal, urban community. In fact, we are hoping to move from the suburbs back into the city to be a part of that marginal community around our church, hoping that our position of relative privilege will amplify the voice of the community, allowing the city to notice that real people with serious concerns that need to get noticed live there.

That brings me to the first thing that bothers me about some popular expressions of our religion: too often, we Christian are blind to real social problems. The more time I spend in predominantly white suburbs, the more I realize that we middle class, white Christians have created safe enclaves far removed from the problems of the poor, the problems of those on the margins. We are blind to our participation in a brutal system of economic exploitation, and are blind to the legacy of residual racism that keeps certain people trapped in grinding poverty.

As one pastor put it, we are so fixated on heaven that we're of no earthly good.

That isn't to say that many Christians don't share some good social concerns. Even and especially evangelical groups have organizations designed to help the global poor. But many who gladly give to Compassion International or World Vision are blind to the extent to which their daily economic activity exploits those whom their charity is designed to help. And, the focus on the global poor, while certainly honorable, is still too often blind to the problems of the local poor.

I'm also often bugged by the strange mixture of conservative politics with conservative religion, as I don't see what the two have in common. Supply side economics (as least as it is understood today) has little in common with a literal reading of the Gospels. Neither Jesus nor the apostolic church would approve of waging war for any reason, much less the flimsy reasons offered for our current endless conflict - reasons which are not only false, but which also fail to meet the barest standard for a Just War.

I'm bugged by the scriptural illiteracy of those who claim to venerate the Bible without ever actually reading it. It seems to me that if you claim that something is a direct communication from God, and the ultimate authority on all issues, you should at least dust it off from time to time to see what it says.

I'm bugged by the rigid dogmatism that tries to fix the divine mystery to a single set of comprehensible propositions. And, I'm bugged by the attempt to define faith as intellectually agreeing with that narrow set of propositions. As I understand it, faith is a matter of one's entire being, not just what goes on between one's ears.

I'm bugged by a narrow concept of what it means to be pro-life. As my Dad likes to say, life may or may not begin at conception, but it sure as hell doesn't end at birth.

Like you, I too am bugged by exclusivism, a position so odious that I won't even bother to try to explain why it bothers me.

I am also bugged by the notion that God is a white male who lives just outside the natural universe, looking down on us. There are, of course, many other attributes of this God, whom I often call Whack-a-Mole. But even the most charitable construction of this God, without the brutal desire to smash those of us who stray out of line, still denies too many people full participation in the Imago Dei.

All of these amount to a kind of arrogance that seems so foreign to my understanding of our faith; a faith that teaches me that God is God, and that I am not God. To reduce that God to a manageable mystery - and to a person who just so happens to agree with me all of the time. My God is a mystery, and a mystery that challenges my most basic assumptions. If I think I understand it, it isn't God.

My Faith Tells Me...

Melissa's visitation and funeral were this weekend, and we were blessed to be able to go to both. The funeral was in the church I grew up in, where I met both Aaron and Melissa. Many of my childhood friends were there. While, of course, we were in shock and grief over the reason for our brief reunion, thinking of once again seeing these people who were so instrumental in shaping the course of my life - even if I haven't ended up anywhere near where most of them would have liked for me to - made me smile and think of a line from a Lyle Lovett song:

I went to a funeral,
and Lord, it made me happy
seein' all those people
that I ain't seen since
the last time somebody died

Morbid, sure. But there's a comforting truth to it. Death provides you with some space to take stock of your life. It also provides you with a community. A community that helped shape you, then turned you loose. It was great to see how my friends had grown up. To see new spouces, new children.

Life goes on.

The funeral was a celebration of a life lived boldly and lovingly. And, while I don't always believe in a literal bodily resurrection, I can say that in church this weekend we could all feel the enduring presence of Melissa, a presence that gives powerful testimony to the resurrection. And that's what Melissa wanted: to be in death as she was in life a witness to her faith. Even from the grave she ministered to me.

We got back home last night, and went to church this morning. For our worship today, several "leaders" in the congregation were asked to bring water from home and to pour it, ceremonially, into the baptismal fount. Wonder of wonders, I was asked to participate in that. Along with pouring our water, we were each also asked to compose a single sentense to read to the congregation, starting with, "My faith tells me..." With life and death, faith and doubt, swirling around in my psyche, this is the sentence I chose to share with the church:

My faith tells me that we are found in and surrounded by the love of God; and that we are called to love as passionately and extravagantly as that divine love that is our very life.